Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [86]
The mobile unit moved sideways, traveling along the street, emotionlessly following its programming. When it found a scene that would trip something within its set of internal commands, it would stop and focus, then move on again. Twice Mallory lost the image; both times frantic manipulation of the lifeboat’s outdated but still functional instrumentation brought it back. As he worked at the controls something large and powerful screamed past overhead, loud enough to be heard within the lifeboat that was inside the shed. Transfixed by the images he was seeing on the tridee, he ignored the sonorous echo of the object’s passing.
Drifting aimlessly in a fallback news search pattern, the mobile reached Weald’s central plaza. Carefully and lovingly laid out to resemble a series of concentric gardens, the square had been planted with blossoming plants and exotic growths gathered from all over Treetrunk. Many of these careful transplants were dead or dying now, incinerated or blasted from their planters. The square’s central fountain, a gift from the populace of the enormously successful colony of New Riviera, was a shapeless lump of ceramic and composite slag. Water from broken source pipes ran in a steady, aimless stream into surrounding drains.
Several air repulsion-type vehicles were clustered together near the center of the square, hard by the demolished fountain. All boasted protrusions that, while not immediately identifiable, were easily recognized as weapons. More of the armored body shapes were moving about nearby. In addition, there were a large number of figures engaged in other activities.
The mobile moved in closer. For some reason it was not immediately noticed by the invaders. Or perhaps, having already destroyed all known communications facilities, they felt no urgency to eliminate a single mobile device of obviously mechanical origins. The tridee image in the lifeboat flickered and danced. Cursing, hammering on the console, Mallory fought to stabilize it.
A small vehicle arrived and halted. Several of the more lightly clad figures moved to its side and helped those aboard to unload. Mallory leaned forward slightly, expecting to see valuable electronic components or containers full of informational recordings. The objects the aliens disbursed were somewhat larger, though equally recognizable.
Bodies.
Whether they were dead or simply paralyzed Mallory could not tell. In any event, none of the dozen or so exhibited any visible signs of damage. They were all, insofar as he could tell from the unsteady, intermittent image, female. Ranging in approximate age from fourteen to forty, they were carefully laid out on a prepared portable platform.
Other figures came forward. They carried small devices that Mallory at first thought were sidearms. They were not. Three of the figures immediately set to work on the nearest of the neatly laid out torsos. Silently, stolidly, having no one to lament with, Mallory watched as the aliens carefully and efficiently sliced into the abdomen and removed, insofar as he was able to tell, the complete set of female reproductive organs: uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, everything. Wet and glistening, these were smoothly transferred to a waiting container from which smoke/mist drifted, indicating that its interior was either very hot or very cold.
Their excision completed, they moved on to the next body in line, that of a girl who looked to be close to but not quite twenty. Whether the woman they left behind was still alive or not Mallory could not tell. It did not matter to the aliens, who made no attempt to close the gaping wound they left behind, and he found that he did not want to know.
He wanted to look away, to stare at something else, to put what he was seeing out of his mind, but he could not. The mobile unit, following its programming, continued to focus on the grisly biopsies, following the horribly inevitable course of one after another. So stunned was Mallory’s system by what he was witnessing that the shock was sufficient to suppress even his nausea