Redliners(101)
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.
Thus far everything the subject had experienced was familiar to Farrell at least in outline. The subject's hope began to mount; the column was near its goal. Then—
The image failed in horror so complete that the subject's mind could not fix the cause in memory. Farrell viewed a confused montage of hills, of broad boulevards cut through the landscape, of running in blind terror.
Humans couldn't have survived the panicked dash through half a mile of this jungle; a surprising number of the Kalendru did. Their quickness saved them where the strikers wouldn't have been able to bring their firepower to bear.
The subject didn't see the starship lift off and immediately crash, though he was aware of the event when it happened. Farrell couldn't be sure whether the vessel fled in response to whatever had happened to the ground expedition or if the crew was reacting to threats against themselves. It was the wrong decision, but perhaps there was no right one.
The column's forty survivors set off to hike out of the crater. Their only goal now was personal survival. The jungle killed them, but only a few. They were crack troops, experienced in the dangers of their environment and driven by desperate need.
Again Farrell coursed forward in time:
The subject's first sight of the crater's wall brought a glow of elation that forced aside fear's crushing miasma like a bubble forming as water boils. Farrell felt personal joy: the sheer rock wall was the human expedition's goal, too, and this was the first time he'd seen it.
The ground twenty feet back from the edge of the cliffs was almost clear. Vines or roots, yellow-gray and whip thin, ran up the rock at frequent intervals. They had no foliage, but their suckers invaded minute cracks.
Three Kalendru took off their boots and all equipment except a coil of fine cord each. They began to climb while their fellows kept guard on the ground. The climbers studiously avoided the vines. Instead, they found hand and footholds in the slight cracks and knobs present even on a smooth rock face. The Spooks' long limbs were an advantage in a task like this.
The subject stood with his back to the stone, looking up the green wall of jungle rising nearly as high as the cliffs did. He—and Farrell—expected something to come from the trees to attack the climbers.
When the climbers were halfway to the top the rocks supporting their weight crumbled.
The Kalendru plunged a hundred feet straight down in a spattering of gravel. Two died instantly. The third lay with his eyes open and his lips moving slowly while blood spread in a brown pool beneath the body.
The subject's slender fingers appeared in memory, lifting one of the pebbles that had dropped with the climbers. Hair-fine rootlets still clung to what had been its inner surface. The roots' hydrostatic expansion had wedged the rock loose; the victim fell with it, unharmed until impact crushed him against the stone beneath.
The subject's memory stared at the cliffs, then covered his face with his hands. His skin puckered and was turning blotchy green in the Kalendru equivalent of weeping. He and his fellows would never be able to climb the rock. To attempt to use the wood of this jungle as building material would be a slower, surer form of suicide.