With the Lightnings (35 page)

The plasma cannon twitched, aiming at Lamsoe's head. "You two with guns!" the Alliance voice shouted, this time through a conformal speaker somewhere on the vehicle's hull. "Throw them in the water now! And the six of you who have knives, you too! Now! We can see you!"

Daniel stood a half step in front of his sailors, waggling his raised hands and smirking in apparent terror. At the command he clawed into his pocket and came out with the little knife he'd used to peel nuts.

Lamsoe and Sun spun their submachine guns toward the inlet. Sun's splattered mud on the bank, but Lamsoe got rid of his with the enthusiasm owed a live grenade. It took longer for sailors to fumble folding knives out of their pockets, but they flew toward the water too.

Though Hogg threw his knife, Adele heard it
thunk
into a tree bole in the near distance. If the Alliance officer noticed the slight disobedience, he passed over it for now.

A hatch opened in the vehicle's side, just back of the cupola. The man who got out was barely taller than Adele but strongly built. He held the central grip of a submachine gun, a weapon both more compact and more deadly than the Kostroman equivalents the sailors had just thrown away.

"Now listen up!" the officer said. He spoke in an upper-class Pleasaunce accent.

The officer waved the submachine gun as though it were a conductor's baton. The hatch behind him was a pale rectangle; the vehicle's interior lights were faint, but they were brighter than the jungle now that the fire was dead.

"You wogs will go back under restraint," he continued, "or you'll stay here till you rot. And you can count yourselves lucky that my colonel has a softer heart than I do, or there'd be another burned patch of jungle and we'd be heading home without the trouble of tying you, do you understand?"

"But master—" Daniel whined. He sounded so much like a crying child that Adele felt her jaw clench.

The officer thrust his gun an inch from Daniel's face. "Shut up or I'll do it my way!" he said.

Daniel whimpered and bent away. Adele tossed her ripe soap-bubble fungus through the open hatch. The officer's eyes flicked sideways at the movement and Daniel caught his gun-wrist in his left hand.

Sailors dived for cover as they'd been warned to do. Screaming chaos broke out within the APC. A submachine gun raked the night.

Adele ignored the shots—they weren't aimed at her or, most likely, aimed at anything at all. She bent to tip over the bucket she'd used as a seat. Her pistol was beneath, concealed from sensors by the galvanized iron bucket.

She straightened with the gun in her hand. There wasn't anything she needed to shoot.

The plasma cannon pointed at a crazy angle as the howling gunner tried to free himself from his harness. A commando emptied a submachine gun through a port on the opposite side of the APC; pellets lit the jungle like a stream of fireflies, clipping foliage and sending up puffs of splintered wood. Other troops hammered the sides of their vehicle, but even a crash-bar hatch release required a little more coordination than these retained in their present puling agony.

Daniel held the Alliance officer between him and the APC. He had both his wrists, now. The Alliance officer twisted with a grace suggesting he was expert in unarmed combat, but the Cinnabar lieutenant was stronger and very angry.

"The men you squirted over on the other island, master?" Daniel said in a hard, precise voice.

The Alliance officer tried to bite him; Daniel had the leverage and kept the teeth away from his shoulder as his hand continued to grind together the bones of the officer's gun-wrist. "They were really warm stones wrapped in blankets to give the right heat signatures. I had two of my ratings tending the fire there, though, and I hope—"

The commando's wrist failed with a sound like that of stones rubbing. His eyes rolled up and he fainted in Daniel's arms.

"I really hope they heard you coming in time to cover up in their dugouts," Daniel concluded, his voice softer. He straightened—he'd spread his legs to brace himself during the struggle—and surveyed the situation, still using the Alliance officer's body as a shield.

"It seems to have worked," Adele said. She stood with her pistol at her left side. Two submachine guns still protruded from gunports, but their muzzles were tilted up. Their owners had dropped the weapons as they tried to fight off an enemy more insidious than poison gas.

A gun fired
inside
the vehicle. Sparks, pellets or metal spalled from the inner face of the armor, spun through the hatch.

A commando finally managed to release the latch that dropped the whole side of the troop compartment. Soldiers tumbled out, twisting and moaning. One commando shambled blindly into the undergrowth, clawing the air with her hands. The sailors let her go.

The soap bubble fungus had ruptured into fluffy tendrils on the compartment's deck. A single insect the size of Adele's thumb glittered in the lights, then settled on the neck of a commando.

Daniel took the submachine gun from the officer he held, then laid him on the ground and stepped back. There'd been sixteen troops aboard the APC. None of them were upright now. Some thrashed, but Adele could see at least half a dozen others were as still as death.

"I think we'd better get back a little farther," Daniel said in a voice wheezy with recent exertion. "They're not supposed to fly farther than a couple meters from the nest, but I don't want to be the one to prove that was as wrong as the data on how big sweeps get."

Adele put her pistol in her pocket. Together they walked slowly toward the sailors now appearing from the jungle. Hogg joined them.

"The beetles aren't supposed to live longer than ten minutes from when they leave the fungus, either," Daniel added. "But we're going to stay on the safe side there, too."

Behind them, tough Alliance soldiers moaned in mindless pain.

"Couldn't we come by boat?" Adele complained. She was acting for the benefit of the prisoner the two sailors were dragging through the jungle behind her and Daniel, but the peevish tone wasn't entirely put on. Feet had worn the trail to a narrow creek with muddy banks.

"Our Alliance friend might try to escape," Daniel explained. His voice was breathy with exertion. "Or drown himself, anyway, especially if he figures out what's waiting for him. Besides, it was your idea to get the information this way."

It actually had been Adele's idea, offered diffidently when Daniel wondered aloud how best to interrogate the prisoners about the
Aglaia
and her crew. Daniel and Hogg were enthusiastically sure that the plan would work, at least after they'd refined it. Adele found that hard to imagine; but her knowledge of what went on in other people's minds was not, she knew, to be trusted.

"I don't know anything," the commando said muzzily. "And if I did, I wouldn't tell you fuckers."

The Alliance prisoners had been stripped—Daniel wanted their uniforms, but Adele knew the psychological effect would be useful as well—tied, and held separately in nooks in the jungle. Any of them who tried to speak had been gagged as well. The interrogation had to wait till daybreak.

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.

He offered the insect to the prisoner. Adele looked closely as well; she hadn't seen the creatures by good light before. The bright red wing cases were edged with cream. It was quite attractive in its way.

"They only live a few minutes after they come out of the nest," Daniel said in a friendly, informational tone. "Striking colors, don't you think? These aren't fangs, exactly, they're really modified antennae, but they certainly carry poison the way fangs do. I guess you know that better than me."

Daniel grinned. He wiggled the insect in the direction of the prisoner's swollen shoulder. The prisoner screamed and tried to twist away. Barnes cuffed him back; he screamed again and slumped.

Daniel tossed the insect into the lagoon. "Tie him to the tree between those other two," he ordered. He spit at the floating bug and spun it over in a swirl of bubbles. "And don't bump the fungus yourself, all right?"

"What do you want to know?" mumbled the sergeant. "I swear to God, I'm just a soldier, but I'll tell you what I know."

"Let him sit," Daniel said to Barnes, "but keep hold of the pole."

He looked at the prisoner and said, "Where's the crew of the
Aglaia
being held? The Cinnabar naval vessel that was in harbor when you landed, the
Aglaia
."

The prisoner's eyes were closed. "All those guys are locked up in the ship," he said through thick lips. "Not the officers, though. I think they're in the palace but I don't know, I never had that duty myself. They'll be taken off-planet as soon as the rest of the squadron lands, I heard."

Adele withdrew her data unit and seated herself cross-legged in the mud. She got out the wands and began to enter the sergeant's information.

"When do you expect the rest of the squadron?" Daniel was asking.

Kostroman birds and insects buzzed warmly in the grove, devouring the luscious fungus which Adele had shot open earlier in the morning. For the most part, the local creatures ignored the human corpses.

The Alliance soldiers were among the six who had been killed by multiple bites inside the APC, unable to escape when Adele flung the nest through the hatchway the night before.

Gambier and Barnes had endorsements on their paybooks indicating the RCN thought they could fly ducted-fan vehicles. Half a dozen other ratings had experience as well, either in civilian life or less officially in the service. Daniel didn't have to worry about who could fly the armored personnel carrier.

There was plenty else to worry about, of course, but right at the moment Daniel Leary was feeling pretty good. Pretty damned good.

The APC revved, then lifted. Gambier was at the controls. The sides were folded down as if for a quick insertion, so the ratings in the troop compartment were clearly visible. They and their fellows on the ground cheered as the big vehicle slid along the inlet. It rose slowly until the downdraft no longer exploded the water away to either side.

"Isn't it dangerous to have passengers aboard when you're testing the equipment?" Adele asked as she watched the APC at his side.