Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [6]
She nodded. ‘Appreciate it,’ she said. ‘I’m Anna Taverjl, by the way. I’m ElleryCorp’s representative for this sector of the Empire.’
‘Pleasure.’ He extended his hand, and Taverjl shook it.
‘No problem. You’ve arrived during feeding time, though. Mind if I get on with it?’
Glebe shook his head, and Taverjl fed commands into her control unit. As Glebe watched, jointed mechanical arms descended from the clouds, trailing cables and pipes behind them. They oriented themselves to face the animeats.
Simultaneously, sprays of liquid gushed from nozzles on each arm, soaking into the cliffs of flesh and vanishing almost immediately.
‘The “food” is just a hydrocarbon mix,’ Taverjl said, and started walking towards the animeats. ‘We use waste products from refineries and sewage stations. Cheap, and the animeats just lap it up.’
‘You don’t slaughter the things outright and cut them up?’ Glebe said as they walked.
‘No, of course not. Terribly wasteful. We harvest them on a continual basis.
The vast majority of their flesh is completely useless to them, of course; they’ve been engineered that way. We can remove the excess with impunity. Keep watching.’
Glebe glanced up at the approaching wall of animeat. The feeding arms had withdrawn into the ceiling, and were being replaced with others. Only the colour of the cables was different. A sudden flare of light made Glebe avert his eyes. He looked back, more carefully. The arms were travelling across the surface of the animeat, slicing off fragments of flesh with knives of laser light. Other arms came after them, scavenging the scraps through some kind of vacuum hose.
‘Very neat,’ was all Glebe could think of to say.
They reached the base of the nearest animeat, and Glebe reached out a hand to touch its skin. The surface was cool to the touch, spongy, with nodules the size of his head distorting the surface.
Scraps of flesh were falling all around them as the robot butchers did their work high above. Taverjl reached down and picked up a piece. She offered it to Glebe. He waved it away.
11
‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘but no thanks.’
‘Your loss,’ she said, biting a chunk out of it and swallowing. The exposed flesh of the fragment was greenish, and seeped a pale fluid. Threadlike vessels hung from it, twitching. Glebe looked up again at the harvesting.
‘Doesn’t it hurt?’ he asked.
Taverjl looked confused for a moment, then realized what he was asking.
‘No,’ she said. ‘They don’t feel any pain.’
One of the mechanical waldoes appeared from around the side of the animeat, sucking raw meat up from the floor into its maw. A deactivated laser cutter was attached to the jointed arm. Glebe hadn’t realized quite how big they were. The vacuum pipe itself was as thick as his entire body.
The arm paused in front of Glebe. Some sort of optical sensor scanned his face.
‘I hope the safeguards work,’ he said, laughing nervously.
‘So long as nobody interferes with the software,’ Taverjl said, with a tone in her voice that Glebe didn’t like. He turned to face her. She was inputting commands into her control unit whilst watching him with a level, cool gaze.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked, very aware of the arm stationary behind him.
‘I mean,’ she suddenly snarled, ‘that interfering minor officials who have nothing better to do than recycle paperwork aren’t covered by the safeguards.’
She pressed a button, and something went fizz in Glebe’s mind. Pins and needles shot through his nerves. An impossibly thin line of bright green light seemed to be emerging from a hot spot in the centre of his forehead and plunging into the distance. It looked like one of the laser beams that the cutters had used to harvest the animeats, but it couldn’t have been. He would have been dead if it was. Wouldn’t he?
He turned, trying to see where the light was coming from, but he only succeeded in cutting the top of his head neatly off.
As he fell limply to the floor, the last thing he saw was Taverjl’s previously impassive face.
Smiling.
Adjudicator Roz Forrester left her apartment and went down twenty levels