Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [76]
Terg McConnel had to close his eyes and to replay the words in his head before he understood their true significance. Guilty? Yes, of course he was guilty. He could still feel the metal of the knife dig into the heel of his hand as it ground against the back of Lymaner’s skull. He could still hear the ripples of shocked silence spread out around the Undertown restaurant. He could still 129
see the blood well up like tears in Lymaner’s eye, just before the student fell forward into his plate of food. Guilty, but – but blameless. He didn’t know why he’d done it. He could remember everything except the reason for his actions.
How could he put that into words? Would it change anything? He knew he was guilty.
He took a deep breath, and gazed into the judicial cyborg’s face. Beneath the burnished metal dome of the cyborg’s head – receptacle for the billions of laws, bylaws, precedents, rules and regulations that governed the Empire, as well as every single judgement ever made by a judicial cyborg or an Adjudicator, on Earth or off, pertinent or not – a wizened face stared compassionately down at him. The soft, fleshy cog in the legal machine. The conscience. The remnants of an Adjudicator, too old now to impose justice by force, content to sit and add a pinch of humanity to cold, unyielding logic.
‘No,’ he said firmly, ‘no, I have nothing to say.’
The judicial cyborg nodded, and took a sheet of plastic from the pile, as it had done throughout the hearing, referring to details of the case for and against McConnel. Judicial cyborgs couldn’t download their data from centcomp. No external links were allowed – the risk of undue influence, computer viruses and hacking were too high. All data had to be fed to them as hardcopy.
‘Under normal circumstances,’ the cyborg said, ‘the penalty for your crime is mandatory brainwipe and indenture to a corporation for ten years. However –
’ It looked up at McConnel with something approaching pity. ‘– as a result of an increasing number of apparently motiveless crimes of violence, the Adjudicator In Extremis has introduced a new penalty, specifically for cases such as yours.’
It waved the piece of paper at him. Even before the words were spoken, McConnel felt his heart turn to ice.
‘I withdraw your humanity,’ the cyborg intoned, ‘and reclassify you as alien.
And, as alien, I sentence you to vivisection within the laboratories of the Surgeon Imperialis, so that your last moments may aid our understanding of this scourge of violence.’ The wizened face beneath the metal grimaced. ‘And may the Goddess have mercy upon your soul.’
As soon as they had landed, the Doctor and Provost-Major Beltempest had been escorted from their ship to a reception office whose walls were shielded with matt-white ceramic tiles.
Refrigeration units were humming at full capacity just to keep the room at a temperature where the Doctor could have fried an egg on the desk. A uniformed captain named Rhodd, whose dull, uncaring eyes looked over the authorizations that Beltempest had filled in before they left Purgatory, seemed 130
to waver in the heat haze like a mirage. After checking the documents against the security clearances that Beltempest had also forwarded from Purgatory he stamped the authorizations and gestured them towards a null-grav shaft in a corner of the office. All of this was accomplished without a word being said.
The shaft – also lined with tiles and dripping with condensation – took them down into the bowels of the planet, down to a point where the reduced heat from the sun balanced out the increasing heat from the planet’s core. The corridors sloshed with a thin layer of liquid, and grey, patchy fungus clung to the ceramic tiles.
Even thirty levels below the surface of Dis, the appalling heat was like a weight pressing the Doctor down. The stench of rot, mould and body odour was nauseating. Beltempest’s blue skin had turned a dirty grey colour, and his ears flapped incessantly. The faces of the guards