Dr. Ciler looked toward the crowd around the prisoner, then grimaced and gave up the obvious thought. Abbado could have watched the interrogation by echoing the image from one of the officers, but Ciler didn’t have that option.
“Let’s see what’s happening, doc,” Abbado said, putting his arm through the crook of Ciler’s. “Let us through, please!”
Civilians made way without complaint. C41 didn’t know diddly squat about what was going on, but the strikers were used to being in life-and-death situations with no picture bigger than that of their gunsight images. For the colonists, being dropped into the shit without a clue must be terrifying. They were ready to defer to anybody who acted like he knew what he was doing.
Which Abbado did. Abbado knew he was leading Ciler to a place where the doctor could watch a Spook being interrogated.
The prisoner was now bound and gagged with lengths of the tape used to lock pallets into a starship’s hold. 3-3 didn’t have anything suitable for immobilizing captives, so they’d tied the Spook’s wrists with a sleeve of the same tunic they’d used for a hood.
Abbado’s back itched from ash and debris clinging to his sweaty skin. Insects kept lighting on him too. He needed to get another tunic from the ship. He looked up at 10-1442, wondering if the sucker was ever going to fall the rest of the way.
The prisoner thrashed his head from side to side and tried to kick. Methie sat on the Spook’s bound ankles; Daye immobilized the head so that the major could fit the electrodes to the smooth scalp.
“What’s this?” Farrell said. “Turn him face down. What the hell is this?”
The strikers flipped the Kalender on his belly. The big boss, al-Ibrahimi, and his aide watched with no more expression than a pair of lizards. Other civilians pressed closer by a process as gradual as a glacier sagging downslope.
There was a sac or cyst the size of a walnut at the base of the prisoner’s skull. It was a darker, purplish gray than the skin around it. It looked obvious enough now, but Abbado and his strikers hadn’t noticed anything when they were struggling with the Spook.
“Let me see that,” said Dr. Ciler in a tone of sharp command. “Give me space, if you please!”
Ciler flopped his kit open and withdrew a probe. He held the sac steady with one hand and inserted the point with the other.
The doctor wasn’t wearing gloves. Abbado felt himself twitch. There were more kinds of unthinking courage than what it took to unass an assault boat on a hot landing zone.
Ciler withdrew the probe and slid it into the analysis port. The prisoner’s muscles tensed like the springs of a strain gauge. Abbado distinctly heard ribs crack in the instant before the spasm ended in death. The Spook’s slim body relaxed like a slit bladder.
The kit chimed. Ciler frowned at the result; everyone who could see him waited. “It’s Kalender nerve tissue,” the doctor said. “But so thin an intrusion into the cyst shouldn’t have caused such a reaction.”
“Whatever it is, doc,” the major said, “it’s not a cyst.”
He pointed. The lump had fallen away from the Kalender’s flaccid corpse. The skin it had clung to was pale, almost white, but unmarked except for a puncture over the brain stem.
The lump lay on its back. Abbado saw eight tiny legs and, he supposed, a proboscis sticking from a body as swollen as the skin of a grape.
“Everyone check the back of your necks,” Manager al-Ibrahimi said. “Immediately.” His voice rang like wood blocks clapping.
Abbado patted his neck. The overhang of his helmet covered and protected him, the way it was intended to do against shrapnel from air bursts.
Dr. Ciler reached back with blunt, sensitive fingertips. “Oh God, the great and the merciful!” he cried in a despairing voice.
Abbado, acting with the killer’s reflex that speed is life, brushed the doctor’s hand aside. He caught the insect, for the moment no bigger than a rice grain, between his thumbnail and the callused pad of his trigger finger.
He squeezed. The insect burst with a spray of amber juice.