God might not be any smarter than his blonde aide, but he sure as hell wasn’t naive. “Yeah, all right,” Farrell said. “Let’s do it.”
He seated himself beside the quiescent prisoner and fitted the leads from the control box into the socket in his helmet. Kristal had already attached the induction pads to the Kalender’s bare scalp. Al-Ibrahimi plugged another set of induction leads into the panel’s second output jack and placed the pads at the base of his own skull. Farrell had expected the manager to hook the box to his headset or just to use the control panel’s holographic projection.
Farrell closed his eyes and focused on a bead glowing against an azure field; it was the way he always prepared for an interrogation. “Go,” he said. Al-Ibrahimi rolled him into the prisoner’s mind.
Interrogation by any method is an art. As with all arts, the successful artist has to both know what he wants and be ready to exploit unexpected opportunities.
Some interrogators liked to drug themselves for closer rapport with the subject. That technique provided clearer images, but it increased the danger that the subject’s attitudes and perceptions would bleed into the interrogator’s unconscious and affect his judgment when he evaluated the data. Even without the risk, Art Farrell wasn’t about to be another person for the sake of detail he didn’t need.
Farrell started with the landing. His will guided the AI in the control box as it furrowed the Kalender’s memory the way a plow does a field. The dirt is in no way changed or damaged, but its alignment shifts in accordance with the plowman’s desires.
Images appeared in Farrell’s mind, flashes of memory:
The Kalendru had made a normal landing, and they’d been fully prepared for trouble. The prisoner had been an officer with the party of eighty troops who set up perimeter defenses while the main body unloaded aircars. There were three or four hundred Spooks all told; the precise number was deeper in the subject’s memory and of no immediate concern to Farrell.
They’d had casualties immediately. The troops hadn’t worn body armor even at the beginning. Injuries were more frequent and more serious than those the strikers received from similar dangers. Though the shooting trees were only waist high—they’d sprouted after the asteroid hit to form the landing site—their inch-long spikes punctured limbs and body cavities, killing and maiming.
Memories cascaded into Farrell’s awareness faster and more clearly than he had expected. It was more like a training exercise with recorded images than the real interrogation of a non-human subject. The surface of Farrell’s mind was aware of Manager al-Ibrahimi seated across from him, smiling like a hatchet-faced Buddha.
“I could be of service on the control panel,” he’d said, and that was true with no mistake. Maybe he really was God.
The prisoner watched as troops filed from the ship into the eight large aircars. Farrell caught the subject’s unease and regret even though at this stage the interrogation was primarily after data, not reactions to them. The prisoner was very angry at being given the dangerous job of guarding the landing site while others flew to the goal in armored safety.
The cars flipped on their backs and dived into the ground, all of them within a half-second of one another. The subject’s eyes stared at a plume of smoke rising from the distant jungle and felt a relief as enormous as the fear and anger of a moment before.
The fear returned at once. It overlaid every perception from that point on, though al-Ibrahimi’s hands on the controls shifted it into a thing Farrell was aware of rather than something he felt personally.
Farrell moved forward, telescoping time:
The perimeter guards and others from the ship set out on foot toward their goal. The Kalendru hadn’t brought land-clearing equipment, but they were armed soldiers without a mass of civilians to protect.
Casualties were constant and horrible, though the Spooks learned the way the strikers had. The rate of loss slowed. Some of the troops who’d taken off their helmets ran amok; the unaffected seared swollen insects off the brain stems of the survivors, but the victims died immediately in convulsions.