Their prisoner was a sergeant whose skin was startlingly white beneath a mat of black chest hair. His wrists were tied in front of him and a pole was thrust between his elbows and his back. Barnes and Dasi held opposite ends of the pole, forcing the sergeant to walk sideways, crab fashion, along the trail.
“Well, I hope you’re wrong,” Adele said in her usual coolly astringent tone. “The two soldiers we tried this on first didn’t talk, and I’m getting tired of tramping through the mud.”
“I got nothing to say,” the prisoner repeated. His foot caught in a trailing vine, tripping him so that his weight fell on the pole. He gasped at a pain so severe that he staggered again.
Barnes and Dasi paused; they’d have to carry him if he blacked out completely. “Daniel,” Adele murmured, halting the lieutenant. Sailors had improved the trail from the first time she and Daniel scouted it, but whoever was in the lead still had to force fresh growth aside.
A fungus beetle had bitten the prisoner on the right shoulder. His arm and the whole side of his chest were still lividly swollen. Pus oozing from the wound trailed a yellow crust as far as his elbow.
“Well, I tell you, Sarge,” Dasi said with bantering menace, “I’d just as soon you didn’t talk. I’d just as soon none of you talked. I was back at the other camp, you see, when you bastards had your fun shooting it up. I got blisters on my butt from that, and I guess I was still luckier than you planned me to be.”
Barnes leaned over and pinched the sergeant’s cheek. “You be just as tough as you want, boy,” he said. “I really like to hear you fellows scream.”
The prisoner didn’t speak. He had his feet under him again. Dasi twitched the pole.
The party plodded the short remaining distance to the inlet where soap bubble fungus grew. Daniel and Adele stood to the side so that the sailors could bring the prisoner up to where he had a good view.
“Now, Sergeant,” Daniel said with slightly patronizing formality, “this is the situation. We’re going to tie you to one of those trees there—”
He gestured to the grove twenty feet away. Two naked commandoes were there already, seated on the ground with their hands tied around the trunks of the trees behind them.
They were dead and their bodies were swollen horribly. A red, two-inch beetle sat motionless on the protruding tongue of one of the corpses. Above each body were the tattered remains of a soap bubble fungus, its core everted from the yellow rind like trails of cotton batting.
“The fungus is quite tasty,” Daniel said. He smiled. “Not that you’ll have time to appreciate it, I’m afraid. As I said, we’re going to tie you near your friends and walk a good distance away before we start asking you questions. If you answer all the questions completely, then we’ll untie you and take you back to camp. But it has to be a `full and frank disclosure,’ as they say.”
“You can’t do this,” the sergeant whispered hoarsely.
“That’s a remarkably silly thing to say,” Adele commented. “Given that you can see we already have done it.”
“He’s woozy from the sting he got last night,” Daniel said soothingly. “Poor man, I’ve heard that a bite from a fungus beetle hurts worse than being stuffed into a hot furnace.”
He smiled at the prisoner. “But you see,” he went on, “that’s just one bite. If you’re sitting under a nest when my friend here blows it open—”
Adele raised the pistol high enough from her pocket for the prisoner to see it, then let the weapon slide back.
“—you’ll be bitten many times. And I’m afraid that’s invariably fatal.”
Daniel walked toward the grove. He moved as though he were stepping on eggs.
“Be careful, for God’s sake,” Adele snapped. The concern in her voice was real enough. She knew that Daniel didn’t take risks he thought were excessive, but she wasn’t willing to trust his judgment of “excessive.”
With thumb and forefinger, Daniel picked the beetle off the corpse’s tongue. He strode back to the others, moving much more quickly.