[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
creatures swam to the barrier and goggled at him.
"Anyway," Quinn went on to the tech, "I thought if you were about due for the
culling this shift you might spare me a few, to freeze and take back with me.
Assuming you're not short, of course."
"We are never," he groaned, "short of newts. Help yourself. Take a hundred
kilos. Take two. Three."
"A hundred would be plenty. All I can afford to ship. Make it a treat for
officers only, eh?"
He chuckled, and led her up a ladder to an access port. Ethan skittishly
followed her come-along gesture, bringing up the float pallet.
The tech picked his way delicately across a mesh catwalk. Beneath them the
waters hissed and rushed in little eddies; a fresh draft from below cooled
Ethan's skin and cleared his aching head. He kept one hand on the safety
railing. Some of the whirlpools below suggested powerful suction pumpers at
work somewhere in the silver-green. Another water chamber was visible beyond
this one, and beyond that another, retreating out of sight.
The catwalk widened to a platform. The hiss became a roar as the tech pulled
back a cover above an underwater cage. The cage roiled with black and scarlet
shapes, slipping and splashing over each other.
"Oh, lord yes," yelled the tech. "Full house. Sure you don't want to feed your
whole army?"
"Would if I could," called Quinn back. "Tell you what, though. I'll trot the
excess down to Disposal for you, once I pick out my choice. Does Transients'
Lounge need any?"
"No orders this shift. Help yourself."
Page 160
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
He opened a housing over a control box, did something; the newt trap rose
slowly, draining water, compressing the wriggling black and scarlet mass.
Another motion at the controls, a buzz, a blue light. Ethan could feel the
nimbus of a powerful stun beam even where he stood. The mass stopped writhing
and lay still and shining.
The tech heaved a large green plastic carton from a stack of identical ones
and positioned it on a digital scale under a trap door in the bottom of the
cage. He aligned a chute and opened the trap. Dozens of limp newts slithered
down into the carton. As the digital readout approached 100 kilograms he
slowed the flow, tossing a last black body in by hand. He then removed the
carton with a hand-tractor, replaced it with another, and repeated the
process. A third carton did not quite make it to full capacity. The tech
entered the exact biomass removed from the system into his computer log.
"Want me to help you pack your canister?" he offered.
Ethan blanched, but the mercenary woman said lightly, "Naw, go on back down to
your monitors. I'm going to sort through these by hand a bit, I think no point
in shipping any but the best."
The tech grinned, and started back across the catwalk. "Find 'em some nice
juicy ones," he called. Quinn gave him a friendly wave as he vanished back
through the access port.
"Now," she turned back to Ethan, her face gone intent, "let's make these
numbers match. Help me get that dirt-sucker up on this scale."
It wasn't easy; Okita had stiffened, wedged in the canister. The mercenary
woman stripped him of clothes and a variety of lethal weapons and made them
into a compact bundle.
Ethan shook off the paralysis of his confusion to attempt a task he at last
felt sure of, and weighed the corpse. Whatever this madness was he had fallen
into, it threatened Athos. His original impulse to escape the mercenary woman
was becoming, in his gradually clearing head, an equally strenuous desire not
to let her out of his sight until he could discover, somehow, everything she
knew about it.
"Eight-one-point-four-five kilograms," he reported in his best clipped
scientific tone, the one he used for visiting VIPs back at Sevarin. "Now
what?"
"Now get him into one of these cartons and fill it to, ah, 100.62 kilos with
newts," she instructed with a glance at the first carton's readout. When this
was done the last fraction of a kilo was accomplished by her pulling a
vibra-knife from her jacket and adding slightly less than half a newt she
switched data discs and sealed the carton.
"Now 81.45 kilos of newts into that shipping canister," she instructed. It
came out even, leaving them with three cartons and a canister as before.
"Will you please tell me what we're doing?" Ethan begged.
"Turning a rather difficult problem into a much simpler one. Now instead of an
extremely incriminating drum full of dead downsider, all we have to get rid of
is 80 or so kilos of stunned newts."
"But we haven't got rid of the body," Ethan pointed out. He stared down into
the bright waters. "Are you going to dump the newts back in?" he asked
hopefully. "Can they swim all right, stunned?"
"No, no, no!" said Quinn, looking quite shocked. "That would unbalance the
system! It's very finely tuned. The whole point of this exercise is to keep
the computer records straight. As for the body you'll see."
* * *
"All set?" called the tech as they floated out of the access port, canister,
cartons and all stacked on the pallet.
"No, darn it," said Quinn. "I realized when I was about halfway through that
I'd grabbed the wrong size shipping canister. I'll have to come back later.
Look, give me the receipt and I'll still run this load down to Disposal for
you. I want to look up Teki there anyway."
"Oh, sure, all right," said the tech, brightening. "Thanks." He punched up the
records, put them on a data disk, and handed it over. Commander Quinn
Page 161
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
retreated with all seemly haste.
"Good." She slumped as the airseal doors slid shut behind them, the first hint
of weariness Ethan had seen in her. "I'll get to oversee the final act
myself." She added to Ethan's bewildered look, "We could have just left them
to go down to Disposal on the regular schedule, but I kept having this
horrible vision of a last-minute order arriving from Transients' Lounge and
Dale opening a carton to fill it. . . ."
"An order for newts?" Ethan floundered.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]