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.
Ciler turned, his eyes full of wonder and relief. The striker grinned. "Favor for favor, doc," he said. "Get them quick before they grow."
More insects buzzed nearby. Abbado snatched another out of the air one-handed and crushed it, still smiling.
Simple Problems
The woman was in her sixties, though you had to look into her eyes to be sure. A lot of money had been spent to hide the fact. Her hair was a lustrous black which by its very perfection proved that science had augmented nature.
"Now just bend over and throw your hair forward, ma'am," Abbado said. "And hold still. Before we can put the patch on, I got to shave you with this."
He gestured with his 8-inch powerknife. The blade was dull gray except for the wickedly sparkling edges of synthetic diamond. When the knife was switched live, the paired edges sawed their microserrations against one another. The half-millimeter oscillations occurred hundreds of times a second and would slice through just about anything.
"Omigod, no," the woman said, shrinking back against the man standing next in line. She covered her face with her hands.
Abbado opened his mouth to snarl a curse. "Hey, ma'am," Glasebrook said. "Look here at me. It's no sweat, right?"
He lifted his helmet and rotated so that all the nearby civilians could see the patch of cargo tape he, like the rest of the strikers, wore where their spine entered the skull's foramen magnum. The helmets kept the bugs from lighting, but it'd be a bitch having to sleep with your helmet on. The major wasn't taking chances.
"Let the sarge shave you and you can look as pretty as me," Flea added, turning again and giving the woman a smile so broad he looked like a finback whale.
The aircar fifty feet away ran up its fans, lifted, and settled back in place. Abbado didn't try to shout over the induction howl. When it ceased, he said, "We need to shave the hair so the tape seals right, is the thing. You don't want to be like that Spook we caught, believe me."