Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [80]
He hesitated and then his squat face half-filled up with a sour, wary smile. ‘You think so?’
‘I do now,’ she said. ‘A straight denial would have been better. Were you assigned to me, or to this place?’
The smile did not waver. ‘You want to talk to this Taren Capel character?’ he suggested.
‘I expect Company spies are very popular in the Sewerpits,’
Toos said. ‘As a dietary supplement, I mean.’
‘Who do you think they’d believe? Someone who was born and grew up in the ’pits, or you?’
‘Me.’ Toos smiled sweetly. ‘People are always ready to doubt.’
Tani moved closer to her and put a rough-palmed hand gently on her cheek. ‘I can terminate my assignment,’ he said quietly. ‘If I have doubts about it.’
Yes, Toos thought, that was stupid of me. ‘Just because you’re not a robot doesn’t mean you’re not a killer?’
‘Just because I like your arse doesn’t mean I prefer it to my own.’
Toos leaned away from his hand. ‘So what is it you want me to do before I leave?’
‘It would be useful to know if this man is really Taren Capel.
You’re one of the few people who would know for certain.’
‘I am one of the few people who do know for certain that Taren Capel is dead for certain.’
Tani nodded and sighed. ‘So am I, according to the Company database.’
‘Who do you work for, Mor - if that is your name?’
‘I report to Kiy Uvanov.’
Toos almost laughed. It was almost funny. ‘Small, mad Captain Kiy Uvanov,’ she said. ‘I was thinking of looking him up to talk about old times. He obviously had the same idea.’ Then she did laugh. ‘What a miserable piece of scum.’
Chapter Eleven
The significance of the early kills was missed entirely. A very exclusive refreshment arcade had been trashed by a drunken storm mine crew celebrating their return to civilisation in a typically uncivilised fashion. The manager and a sex worker had been killed in the fracas and the storm mine captain and the pilot had both disappeared. The rest of the crew members, most of whom professed to remember nothing, had been taken into custody. Sooner or later someone would confess.
An unstable security supervisor, with affiliations to an anti-robot group calling themselves the Tarenists, had gone on a killing spree at the storm mine docking bays and had then disappeared.
Three bodies turned up in a back street behind a clothing manufactory. They were not linked in any way other than that they all seemed to have been killed where they were found at more or less the same time.
In a refreshment arcade four people were killed. There was no apparent motive and there were no witnesses but by now a pattern was beginning to emerge and at least one news organisation picked up on it and started making the links. It seemed all the victims in these cases had suffered from multiple fractures and had died from broken necks or broken spines.
When four more victims, two of them children, were found in the lobby of an apartment block the breaking news was that the Tarenists, a gang of degenerates from the Sewerpits, was killing for its own perverted reasons. It only took one more incident, three people in a food dispensary, for a citywide panic to threaten. In a heavily publicised move to head this off, robot security surveillance was stepped up everywhere but particularly in the general area of the Sewerpits.
The humans that were brought to Taren Capel were a disappointment to him. Physically they looked the same as the humans that had stopped being. As close as was possible they were a match by size, age, sex, and colouring to the first ones. As robots were the same as each other, so they were the same as each other. But unlike robots they did not respond consistently, they did not react in the same way as the ones they replaced. A man that did not scream at once now did and a woman that did scream now did not. Some stopped being sooner than before, others stayed being much longer. The data did not confirm the first results.
Taren Capel knew where to find the pain and fear in the humans