Something iridescent and sun-bright gleamed in the high sky. A ship was landing in the crater. An enemy ship, but still a vessel which could be captured or at least might supply the weapons and equipment the remnants of the Kalendru expedition lacked.
It was their only chance to escape this crater.
Major Arthur Farrell's body writhed as he came out of the interrogation trance. Kristal and Nessman grabbed him. Even without drugs, the similarity of his situation to that of the subject was so close that he'd been dragged in deeper than he'd expected.
"There's no way out!" Farrell shouted. "There's no way out!"
"They move pretty good," said Caius Blohm. "Now, a lot of it's the way they're built, sure, legs and arms sticking way out like some kind of spider."
The patients lay under the trailers against the likelihood of rain, but a clear tarpaulin sheltered the life support system itself. The lighted control panel gleamed, slightly distorted by folds in the fabric. Dr. Ciler sat sideways to it as he stolidly ate spoonfuls of his dinner. His back was to Blohm.
"It's not just that, though," Blohm said. His left hand cradled Mirica; his right gestured, miming Kalendru limbs. "They really see, sense, things better than we do. Sure, they got great electronics, but that wouldn't do them any good if they couldn't see differences that fine, you see?"
The membrane covering Mirica's mouth and nose wicked oxygen in one direction and carbon dioxide in the other. It wasn't quite as efficient as a pressure tent, but it was readily portable. Thin control wires connected the child's upper chest and several sections of her skull to the support system.
"So they should've been able to grease me, right?" Blohm said. "There's six of them besides. But they don't have the instinct for it. Talent, sure, but they don't feel the forest. That was the difference, and that was all the difference in the world."
Mirica's face was waxen. Her chest rose and fell with mechanical efficiency.
"Now, I wanted to get around behind them right at the start," Blohm said with a flick of his free hand. "They ran too fast when we laid fire on them, so that meant I was in for a chase."
Dr. Ciler chewed a gruel that was supposed to taste like chicken and rice. He had no expression at all.
The brain function column on the monitor beside him was as flat as the surface of a pond.
Even without the panoramic display Meyer would have recognized the careful footsteps approaching her from behind. "Go on and lie down, Matt," she said softly. She knew he couldn't get much sleep when he had to keep his arms around her all night or she'd wake up shouting again. "I'm off guard in forty minutes."
"I'm all right," Lock said. He stood close but without touching. Meyer continued to look toward the jungle.
The attorney had lost twenty pounds since the landing; sweated it off, worked it off, worried it off. Like all the rest of them. This operation had been a bitch.
"Esther," Lock said. "Manager al-Ibrahimi and his aide are Category Fours. I watched them with the interrogation equipment. They have to be Category Fours to use it the way they did. Do you think your major knows that?"
Meyer frowned as she tried to assign the words a context from her own experience. "Rejects, you mean?" she asked.
"No, no," the civilian said. By the time the second syllable left his mouth, he'd purged his tone of irritation. "Civil Service Category Four. That's the highest classification there is. They have implanted computers wired to their brains."
Meyer nodded, thinking that she understood. "Oh," she said. "Well, I guess we need all the help we can get, right?"
"Esther," Lock said, frustrated that the only person in the camp he was ready to confide in didn't have the background to understand what he was saying. "I don't think there's a hundred Category Fours in the entire Unity. What are two of them doing here?"
Meyer raised her visor and rubbed her eyes, then lowered it again. The exercise gave her a moment to think.
"I don't know," she said. "Finding us a way out of the worst ratfuck I've ever been dropped into, maybe."
Lock cleared his throat but didn't speak.
Meyer patted his thigh with her free left hand. "Look, Matt," she said, "go get some sleep, okay. And let's not bug the major. He's got enough on his plate with stuff that's likely to get people killed."
Abbado snapped alert when he felt the plastic flex under the weight of someone kneeling beside him. "Hey, Doc," he said to Ciler. "I'd been meaning to look you up."
"I didn't mean to wake you, Guilio," Ciler said. "I had to wait until Dr. Weisshampl took over from me at the medical facility."