Part 21 (1/2)

'How does your mother feel about long distance calls?' she asked.

'Terg Albert McConnel,' intoned the sombre voice of the judicial cyborg, 'I find you guilty of the murder of Anil Lymaner.'

The room was empty but for the two of them McConnel standing at one end and the cyborg suspended in a null-grav harness at the other. A statue-like security bot stood between them, it's heavy weaponry directed towards McConnel. A desk, piled high with flimsy sheets of plastic, was set behind the hovering cyborg. The walls were a neutral grey.

'This judgement, in full accordance with Imperial Law, is at a confidence level of point nine nine eight three six, to five decimal places,' the cyborg continued. 'Do you have anything to say in mitigation before I pa.s.s sentence?'

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 129see 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 compa.s.sionately 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 circ.u.mstances,' 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 recla.s.sify 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 G.o.ddess have mercy upon your soul.'

As soon as they had landed, the Doctor and Provost-Major Beltempest had been escorted from their s.h.i.+p to a reception office whose walls were s.h.i.+elded 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 130to waver in the heat haze like a mirage. After checking the doc.u.ments 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 that accompanied them along the corridor, past the infinity of numbered metal doors, were glossy with sweat, probably because they were forced by regulations to wear their full uniforms at all times. And, of course, they were all human. Typical Imperial thinking, the Doctor mused. He knew that there were ten or eleven alien races subsumed within the Empire to whom this sort of environment was like a cold spring morning, but would it even occur to the Empire to use them as guards?

Certainly not: aliens couldn't be trusted, so humans had to wreck their health doing the job.

'What sort of people are held here?' the Doctor asked as they walked past yet another heavy metal door.

'Two groups,' Beltempest said. The Doctor could hear the strain in his voice.

With his bulk, it was amazing that he had made it this far without collapsing.

Military training, no doubt. It left you perfectly equipped to carry out all sorts of tasks you wouldn't dream of doing if you were in your right mind.

'Firstly there are the criminals who can't be brainwiped and recharactered.

Some races just don't respond to wipes, for instance, and genetic criminals will reoffend no matter how many times you erase their personalities. Then there's the beings who have gone through a couple of wipes already, but still commit crimes due to circ.u.mstance. There's a limit to how many times personalities can be erased, and if another one would leave them mindless, they get sent here instead. And then there's Professor Pryce, who has managed to tie the legal system up for years in semantic and philosophical discussions.'

'There's no such thing as a genetic criminal,' the Doctor growled, but Beltempest had fallen silent, brooding. 'And what about the second group?' he asked, trying to break through Beltempest's depression.

'Sorry? Oh, well there's those criminals who would be figureheads and foci for discontent if we let them back out into their own societies. Terrorists, primarily, although there's a fair number of discontented despots of one sort 131of another in here.' He mopped at his brow with his trunk. 'As you can appreciate, if the Empire takes over a planet against the wishes of the populace and after resistance from the rulers, we can't leave those rulers as a focus for bad feeling against us. Even if we wipe their minds and set them to work as street cleaners on Earth, they'll still be symbols of rebellion. No, the best thing to do is to incarcerate them here for the rest of their lives.'

The Doctor was speechless for a moment at the sheer inhumanity of the solution. 'Why not just kill them and get it over with?' he said eventually.

'We can't do that,' Beltempest said, missing the irony entirely. 'We're not barbarians, you know.'

The Doctor was still searching around for a reply when the guards stopped beside a metal door, no different from the rest apart from the number. One of them tapped out a security code on a keypad while another placed his forearm in the cavity of a biochip reader.

Beltempest took a deep, shuddering breath. 'There have been fifty-eight deaths here since Pryce arrived,' he said, his voice unsteady. 'Even though he's locked in a high security cell. They're listed as suicides in the official records, but n.o.body can explain how suicides could eat their own hearts.'

'Don't worry,' the Doctor said. 'We'll be safe.'

Beltempest nodded. 'And yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,' he quoted softly, 'I shall fear no evil.'

'That's all very well, but I doubt that Rhodd and his staff will do much comforting,' the Doctor said doubtfully, as the door slid slowly up into the ceiling.

The guards indicated that Beltempest and the Doctor should enter the shadowed doorway. They did so, and the door dropped behind them so fast that the floor shook with the impact.

A cold, harsh light burst into life, illuminating a small room lined with the omnipresent damp white ceramic tiles and containing a bunk without a mattress and a rudimentary toilet.

And a naked man.

He stood a few feet from them, his eyes closed against the sudden glare. He was over seven feet tall, and painfully thin. His skull was hairless, his fingers long and thin. He looked like an animated skeleton.

Beltempest took an involuntary step back. The Doctor wondered whether he should join him, but there was something about the tiles on the walls that made him pause.

Of course. There was a barrier a few feet into the room. It was invisible, but there was a dry line on the tiles that marked its edges. Physical or energy?

Almost certainly physical: probably transparicrete. The radiation from the 132sun even this far underground would mess up a force field to the point of uselessness.

One of the tiles on their side projected slightly from the wall, and the Doctor guessed the controls for the barrier were beneath it.

The Doctor looked back at the man, and this time he did take a step back.

The man's eyelids were open, revealing matt-black eyes with no distinguish-able pupil. An effect of the icaron radiation, or another example of genetic meddling? Whatever the reason, it was as if Pryce's eyes were just pits in his face, windows into the heart of a black hole. There was no feeling, no emotion, no character at all.

'Professor Zebulon Pryce?' asked the Doctor.

'I've been waiting for you,' Pryce said. His voice was oddly warm and comforting, like a favourite uncle.

'You knew we were coming?' the Doctor said.

'Of course. News filters through, even here. Even this far from grace. When I heard your s.h.i.+p land, I knew it was you.'

The Doctor raised his eyebrows sceptically. There was no way a human could have heard the s.h.i.+p, not that far beneath the surface.

'Then you know why we're here,' he said.

The Professor slowly extended his hand towards the Doctor's face. His nails were almost as long as the fingers themselves.

'You want my help,' he said simply. 'You want my knowledge.'