“Let’s go check the perimeter,” Abbado said, rising to his feet and snapping his equipment belt around his waist. “About time I did that anyway.”
“You’re aware that a little girl, a Mirica Laubenthal, was injured in the attack this morning,” Ciler said as they picked their way among sleepers to the camp’s open border near the berm.
“Yeah, poor kid,” Abbado agreed. “Saw it happen. Shot right through the head, right?”
“A through wound, yes,” Ciler said. “Not to mince words, Guilio, the child is dead. There’s no possibility that she’ll ever regain brain function. Eighty percent of the tissue has been destroyed by the trauma.”
“Poor kid,” Abbado repeated. “Well, that lot won’t kill any more. Blohm took care of the ones that broke away and that wasn’t very damned many, I promise you.”
This close to the berm you could hear the vines move. It was like the sound a cat makes at birds it can’t reach through a window: a rapid ticking, not very loud, but thick with frustrated rage.
“It’s Striker Blohm who concerns me,” the doctor said. “He apparently doesn’t realize that the child’s condition is irreversible.”
Abbado looked at Ciler. “Well, Doc,” he said, “A lot of times what a guy knows and what he lets himself know aren’t the same thing. Methie’ll swear to you that his wife back on Organpipe’s got cobwebs growing on her pussy, waiting for him to finish his tour. Don’t worry about Blohm.”
“Guilio,” Ciler said, “we are operating on a shoestring for medical support here. You know how many sick, how many wounded we have. The child is on our only full life-support system, and it’s of no use to her. You see that, don’t you?”
“Ah,” said Abbado. “Ah.”
He put his hand on Ciler’s shoulder and squeezed it. “Look, Doc, sure I see. But I think you’d better keep the kid hooked up anyhow. Like you say, we’re short of medical resources.”
“I don’t understand,” Ciler said.
Abbado grimaced. “Doc,” he said. “I know Blohm. Now, don’t mistake what I’m saying—he may be crazy as a bedbug, but he’s okay mostly, you know?”
“Of course I don’t want to increase the stress on Striker Blohm,” Ciler began. “But—”
“That’s not what I mean, Doc,” Abbado said. “The thing is, if Blohm ever gets the notion you, you know, finished off his little buddy, he’ll wax your ass as sure as I’m standing here. And we can’t afford to lose so good a medic, you see?”
“Ah,” said Dr. Ciler. “Yes, I suppose I do.”
Farrell watched the images al-Ibrahimi and Lundie together had forced from the Kalender in the last instants before the subject died. Jungle lay crushed to either side of a ragged boulevard; then blankness and a kaleidoscope of images—none of them frightening though obviously the cause of the subject’s terror.
And death, when the interrogator and controller continued to force the subject’s mind toward what it refused to recall.
“It doesn’t mean anything to me,” Farrell said.
“The last portion isn’t really memory,” Lundie said. “They’re icons for what he wouldn’t remember.”
Farrell wished that he hadn’t been in the Spook’s mind himself. These recorded images of the final interrogation were harmless in themselves, but Farrell recalled the fear that suffused the cursory glance he’d had of the same memories. Kalendru psychology differed enough from the human variety that you normally couldn’t empathize with the other species; but if you’d been one, this one . . .
“Poor bastard,” Farrell muttered. He looked at al-Ibrahimi and said, “We’ve got the bulldozers. We can maybe undercut the side of the cliff and make a ramp up.”
There were no campfires because of the recent rain. A group of civilians sat around a minilight eating gruel. The pair of strikers with them sang a verse of a cadence song: “I gotta guy, his hair is red . . .”
“It appears probable that as soon as a tractor comes within range,” Lundie said, “a boulder of size sufficient to destroy the vehicle will drop from the top of the cliff. The only way we can test the theory is to venture a bulldozer, of course.”