WITH THE LIGHTNINGS(100)

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.