My escort was watching me as we walked past the cleaning tanks, the dissection tables, bone removal, blood filtering and storage, organ packaging, the flensing stations, the chop-and slurry vats, and the final destination of the boilers and processors that reclaimed the water and reduced the rest down to either blocks or strips of soylent for use by the food corps.
I burst out laughing early on, pointing. "I recognize that one! He's a ganger borg I offed yesterday. Don't feel bad that I cost you a cardio, his heart was mechanical anyways."
The Stiff looked down where I was pointing, his neck-plug Trodes pulsed. "Yes, the cadaver had clear signs of implant replacements and organ stress from suppression treatments. Low value return." He shook his head, as if not dying with all his parts was a cardinal sin, and every person alive was just walking returnables made from someone else... or going to be made into someone else.
"I'm surprised you keep such close track of processing."
"We have to replace workers in events of emergencies," was the slow, plodding reply. "Knowledge of systems is required."
"Ah," I nodded sagely. "If it's not private knowledge, what's the average processing time for a single corpse, and how many a day do you process?"
His plugs crackled as he cleared that. "The full processing of a cadaver from reception to shipping as soylent takes approximately 2.3 hours, varying dependent on sanitation and salvage possible. We process approximately seventeen thousand cadavers a day at this station."
I eyed the tubes around me, where new corpses were being dumped in, and old ones removed dripping for processing. Random limbs and body parts arriving untidily that had been screened were being sent directly into a fast-processing tank over there, skipping salvage and going directly to slurry.
Seventeen thousand a day, just at this station. All these corpses I was seeing would be gone and replaced by new ones within three hours.
Y'know, it took a LOT of people to generate that kind of death rate... even if the life expectancy rate was shit down here. I wondered how the birth rate kept up, and just shook my head.
There were ten Soylent stations in the city...
Health problems mostly came from abusive habits and environments. Genetic afflictions had largely been purged from the genome, and people were vaccinated against a slew of diseases, whether they wanted to be or not. If it saved them money, the government did it. Cut down on the number of medicae needed. Medicae and treating sicknesses was expensive.
"In the event of an inundation, what's the maximum processing capability of this station?"
He didn't have to think about it long. "If cadaver salvage is relegated only to the most optimal subjects, this station can process two hundred and fifty thousand subjects completely per day."
Talk about your battlefield clean-up! Of course, this was a mega-city, population in the billions...
"Do you sell gold, or better yet, platinum?"
He did glance at me then, weighing what to say. Naturally, the reason they sold them is because they recovered them from cybernetic implants, jewelry, or dental work. Waste nothing, after all.
"Most is traded under contract."
"At sub-market rates, no doubt. If I was willing to pay market?"
His Trodes fizzled and sparked as he went searching for an answer. "There are allotments for personal use available. How much do you require?"
"How much platinum do you have?"
The negotiation was quick and clean, used up a lot of my creds, but the not-so-precious-here metal was soon being shipped to me in Habberblok.
The people here had no experience with magic, so they were unaware of Investing objects by burning precious metals. Normally, this wasn't even possible, as the mechanical, multi-step process of smelting ore without human interaction would remove all spirituality from the metal, and it would be useless for such things.
However, metal that was right there when a person died would regain its spirituality, and given the saturation of the environment, retain it even if simply smelted down and recast into bars or coins.
I hummed thoughtfully to myself. This was likely one of the very few sources of magically viable metal in the whole city. I was going to have to take over their contract for it, once I got enough money flowing through.
"Do you use our product?" he asked in a stiff voice.
It seemed like an innocuous question, but it wasn't.
"Bladebelle." He blinked. "The answer to your question is-?"
"No."
There were... implications for a psi-user using soylent. Scrub it all they liked, it was still cannibalism, and there were psychic ramifications for eating the stuff. I could pick out something with soylent in it at a glance. Spiritless processing just didn't have the transformative power of nature. Ki sensitivity basically squared that.
Psis either didn't eat any soylent... or they preferred it. Those kinds that did generally got a bullet in their heads sooner rather than later. It was one of the danger signs to watch out for.
The Steiners, like most of the Undermobs, vat-grew most of their people. It skipped the whole time and money thing of raising kids and educating them. Program in the basic knowledge, assign them a name from a list, send them out to die or eventually earn a Designation and become a Frank.
It was also rumored that Steiners were only grown from nutrients distilled from soylent... and so were their own biggest customers. Naturally they brooked no threats to their soylent supply whatsoever.
Most of the Undermobs used vat-grown for their main bloodline, and were proud of it. Sure, they'd recruit gifted outsiders here and there, to add something to the bloodline, but they looked down on natural birth's randomness, exulting in their own naturally superior physiques and fighting ability, honed over many generations of conflict and the donated genes of the survivors.
That such monolinear artificial breeding both cut them off from the human akasha and led to definite personality disorders among them was not a factor at all. The lack of support from the akasha meant their spiritual potential was locked at Six, and they basically only became psis due to mutation... and generally went batshit crazy when they did, as their little artificially-formed minds didn't have the foundation to deal with the akasha or the Warp.
All of which resulted in more chances to shoot things on all sides, so a win-win for all concerned.
I would not be at all surprised if some of those soylent-addicted psis were working for the Steiners, nor if they were trying to blend that bloodline into their own people, trying to control and harness it for their future. Innate genetic superiority was alive and well, after all...
Bladeboys/belles were on the lowest tier of psionic potential, as far as most experts were concerned. With so much of their power wrapped up in their mindblade, they were often incapable of using anything other than Nimbus effects unless they were very strong. Ergo, I wasn't really a potential catch in their eyes. Being a high-G Nymphal was pretty exotic, but they didn't look like the kind to want nymphals among them...
------
Huh.
The stiffs were getting... antsy.
I was heading for the edge of their Node, on the trail of my target, Milder Cogran, who had actually gone this same way on an intercept course with the missing Mekkers. That crew had come down from another section, doing maintenance work or surveys as they did so.
I noted with rather grave interest that the work order for the Mekkers had come down from Upspire, not from any of the Undermobs, who usually caught problems and kicked any real problems over to the Mekkers that they couldn't handle.
While the Mekkers had overarching responsibility and control of the infrastructure and the technology that maintained the city, they usually relied on the Undermobs to locate problems... or for disasters to happen to the folks down below, instead of their valuable Tekkies, and then they swooped in and fixed things up again.
So, a random work crew was dispatched from Upspire to down near The Hole. Riiiight, that wasn't odd at all...
This guard station had three times the normal number of guards, including four Franks in power armor and heavy gear. Steiners are stone-faced at the best of times, but I could smell the fear in the air. They were all too happy to let me walk on out of the gantry there and past them, and their sunken eyes said they didn't expect to see me again.
Well, no wonder they never signed off on a resolution to the missing Termite. Or the Mekkers, for that matter, although the Trikes over there should actually have been the ones to do so. They supplied the Steiners with a lot of their basic chemicals...
Still, here's fearless me, going off into the maze of pipes and conduits, following the outdated mental map, charting and pathing everything around me as I did so.
There were creatures here, hiding in the shadows. Spider-things, bug-things, rat-things, and lizard-things, all preying on one another, all not very big, and all easily cleared out with regular sonic sweeps and gasses, fodder for the algae tanks. None of them got close to me, and their numbers began to dwindle sharply as I closed in on The Hole.
My path shouldn't actually take me more than a few tunnels close to it, and the area being clear didn't surprise me at all.
I stopped as my tremblesense painted a lot of blood spatter around me, and the contusions of soft energy beams and bouncing slugs.
Something had fought here, and had died...
I glided over to a softly thumping pipeline of durasteel, and ran my finger over a very shallow cut in the metal, almost invisible.
Durasteel was the name for Earth-energized iron alloy, the single most common Energized material known. It had a Hardness base of 20, was far stronger and more ductile then any natural metal, and was basically used for anything that needed to endure, last, and withstand high pressures. It didn't corrode naturally, and lasting ten thousand years was nothing if it was not subjected to outside forces.
Mega-city foundations and starship hulls were all built out of durasteel. But something had cut through this like it was air.
Adamant couldn't do it, as durasteel was too hard, and it would have left a gouge, not a slice. Nope, this had simply been 'parted', the bonds between atoms opened up, flowering away from the impact with impossible smoothness.
So, an Impact Sword, a fractal blade, or a psi slicing matter using a Spatial Edge.
The cut was five feet off the ground, and angled down. So, took off someone's head... from higher up.
Very tall, then, or flying.
The place had been cleaned up pretty good, but there were a few shell casings from slugthrowers in the corners, out of sight or of reach, not bothered with. They matched the ammunition in the models I'd seen the stiffs back there toting.
Jumpy, indeed. They'd lost a crew in here, and probably in a bloody manner. The Steiners would naturally bring the gear and bodies back for recycling, but I had the distinct impression they hadn't caught whoever had done this.
And it probably hadn't been the first time...
I tinged a tube full of something viscous, and read the sounds and vibrations through my hair, hands, and feet.
They'd set up cameras, I could see the scuff marks in a couple spots, but they were no longer there. Since that made no sense, something had casually spotted them and cleared them off.
So, there was something around here butchering stuff, and really good at it. Why hadn't the dumbshits sent for some help?
Hrm. They probably thought it was a challenge from another Undermob?...