Chapter 167 Chapter 167. Processing the Dead

The stainless steel autopsy table gleamed with a cold, matte sheen beneath the blinding halogen lamps. Structurally, the slab more closely resembled a gigantic industrial kitchen sink. A wide drainage hole gaped dead center, covered by a perforated steel grate designed to catch internal organs, entrails, and large clots of bodily fluids. Surgical instruments lay in a deep, recessed compartment along the right edge. I had studied an extensive range of publicly available medical courses in my lifetime, but none of the reference materials had ever included blueprints for devices like these. Serrated clamps with laser targeting systems, ultrasonic scalpels with adjustable wave frequencies, and pneumatic bone spreaders. These were clearly advanced, classified Corps developments built around captured extraterrestrial technology. It was even possible that Selina herself had helped design them.

The instruments were as fascinating as they were repulsive. Drops of alien blue blood and traces of xenomorph bodily fluids glistened on their ridged metal handles with an oily sheen. The local staff clearly couldn't be bothered to sterilize their equipment after every shift. The only thing that made the situation bearable was the thick neoprene gloves that kept my skin completely isolated from the alien slime.

"Quit gawking at the toys, rookie. You'll be spending so many hours with these things that pretty soon, just looking at the damn metal will make you sick," my mentor said gruffly, offering a bit of professional wisdom as he adjusted his slipping respirator. "Grab a transport cart and go get the chicken. Your target's in Section 3B."

I tightened my grip on the slippery handle of the heavy metal cart. The frame was caked in dried biological filth, and the front left wheel kept jamming in its track, making the cart veer constantly to one side. I had to engage additional muscle power to keep it moving in a straight line across the slick tile floor.

Section 3B was sealed behind a massive insulated door that kept the cold inside from escaping into the main hall. Beyond it lay an enormous refrigerated chamber maintained at a moderate temperature. This wasn't deep freeze. The idea was simply to slow tissue necrosis.

The Loz'an corpses lay in a chaotic heap across the floor. No identification tags on their ankles, no military dog tags. Just a pile of dead, gray-green flesh. Anyone who'd ever visited a wholesale fish market on a Friday morning would have recognized the scene. It looked exactly like a heap of dead tuna dumped carelessly onto crushed ice. The realization that I was looking at members of a technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilization, one whose strategic intelligence was fully comparable to humanity's, triggered a fleeting sense of cognitive dissonance. Something about this entire system was fundamentally wrong.

Fortunately, even under normal operating conditions, without activating hyperfocus, my modified brain structures processed incoming information at an abnormal rate. The entire existential crisis lasted exactly one second. Outside, my mentor had barely managed to suck in an irritated breath through his nose, apparently assuming I'd frozen in shock. His personal earnings depended directly on meeting the daily autopsy quota, and he had no intention of losing precious cents because a trainee couldn't get moving.

I quickly surveyed the pile of corpses, scanning it like an experienced buyer checking warehouse inventory. Almost every body had suffered catastrophic mechanical damage. Some were missing their entire upper limbs, others had lost sections of their heads, and a few had been literally flattened by a blast wave. Still, none had been reduced to the useless chunks of flesh that Danny typically left behind after his thermal attacks or Ted after his plasma discharges. The Corps' Trophy Logistics Department ran a tight, pragmatic operation. Rear support personnel carried out a strict initial sort right there in the Portal, leaving smaller fragments of flesh to be annihilated along with the collapsing spatial anomaly. Only material with commercial or scientific value made it back to the base.

My gaze settled on the most promising specimen in the left corner of the heap. Its body was in better shape than the others. The only major damage was a ragged, through-and-through wound the size of a soccer ball, right in the center of the sternum. The edges showed no signs of thermal burns from directed plasma, fire, or electrical discharge. They were dry and torn. Kinetic impact from an S-Gun round. The shot had been fired with absolute sniper precision, destroying the central neural node instantly and shutting down the organism's vital functions.

I recognized the pattern. I'd fired that shot myself almost a month earlier, during the sweep of the training Portal. My flawless memory let me identify the ballistic signature of my own weapon immediately.

I grabbed the heavy carcass by the forearm and hauled it onto the metal cart. The Loz'an were giants compared with ordinary humans. Even on our oversized platform, the creature's long arms and legs dangled all the way to the floor, dragging through gray lymph and traces of blue blood on the tiles as I pushed the cart back toward the operating area. It would've been more practical to choose a smaller specimen, one whose limbs had already been amputated in combat. The refrigerator was full of those. But I'd deliberately chosen the most intact body available, and it had nothing to do with sentimentality toward my own trophy. My mentor had made the terms perfectly clear: he'd demonstrate the autopsy procedure exactly once. That meant I needed him to walk me through the entire process on a specimen with a complete anatomical structure. It would eliminate the risk of encountering unfamiliar areas later and wasting time asking stupid questions about removing the head or clearing the tendons in the legs.

The Loz'an weighed around two hundred and forty pounds. The facility's regular pathologists, despite their imposing builds, struggled to lift bodies that heavy. They grunted with the effort, straining their lower backs as if attempting a one-rep max deadlift. For my evolved muscle fibers, the weight was negligible. Without breaking a sweat or taking a single unnecessary breath, I slid my arms beneath the giant's armpits, lifted it in one smooth motion, and tossed it into the deep steel trough of the dissection table as easily as if I were picking up a house cat.

"You're a strong one, aren't you, soldier?" My mentor whistled in surprise beneath his mask, clearly impressed by how effortlessly I'd handled the body, but he didn't elaborate or waste any more breath on praise.

I conducted a preliminary examination of the specimen I was about to work on. A large humanoid lay on the stainless steel table. Its skin had an unnatural, sickly green hue, like the rotting sludge of a stagnant swamp. Its bald, perfectly smooth skull lacked every familiar human anatomical feature. No protruding nose, no external ears, no eye slits. The creature had no discernible sex characteristics and looked as though it had been mass-produced on a factory assembly line from some dense, high-tech bioplastic. The most grotesque feature was the front of its skull. Where human sensory organs should have been, a deep, concentric, coal-black depression gaped in the flesh, its shape uncannily similar to the diffuser of a high-powered loudspeaker.

"All right, soldier, watch closely and memorize the sequence," the senior technician said, stepping up to the table and taking hold of an instrument. "The first priority when processing a Loz'an is to drain all the neural material. And don't even think about looking for it in the skull. These things have a decentralized nervous system. Their brains are made of a highly concentrated liquid substance that circulates through deep venous channels along with the lymph."

I was already familiar with this theory from Selina's classified lecture course, but career pragmatism dictated that I simply nod in silence and pretend to appreciate the instruction. Unnecessary arguments with the staff only hurt overall efficiency.

"The liquid neural substrate is vital to the guys in the upper labs. Don't ask me what kind of serums they cook up with it. I don't know, and I don't give a damn about their scientific games. Take my advice and stay out of state secrets if you want to live long enough to collect a pension."

I nodded along with this latest pearl of wisdom.

"To drain the maximum amount of liquid brain matter as quickly as possible, you need to make one precise, penetrating strike right through the center of the thoracic plexus. Unfortunately, some lucky bastard on the front lines already did the job for us, so we've lost the bonus for the volume." The technician jabbed a rubberized finger at the hole in the alien's sternum, his expression souring.

I merely curled the corners of my mouth beneath my respirator. The irony was that I was the lucky bastard in question.

"Still, there's some value left in this carcass," the technician continued with a scowl. "We'll collect the rest from the deep popliteal veins."

He took a specialized medical instrument from the rack. It looked like a cross between a surgical scalpel and an ultrasonic eyebrow trimmer.

"This high-frequency cutter can slice through diamond like it's paper." The technician flipped a switch, and the device responded with a faint, high-pitched hum and a subtle vibration. "Handle it carefully. And for God's sake, don't break it. This little toy costs more than your entire life is worth, insurance included."

Seriously? With a net income of half a million dollars a month, I could have bought the entire laboratory, inventory and all, and signed the check without batting an eye. But revealing my financial status to a rank-and-file morgue employee would have served no purpose, so I kept quiet and let him finish the demonstration.

The technician made two quick, decisive incisions along the inner sides of the Loz'an's legs. Thin, oily streams of viscous gray fluid poured from the severed vessels and rushed into the deep drain, flowing noisily through the grate into a plastic bucket positioned beneath the table.

"Once the container reaches the fill line, swap it out for an empty one." He pointed to a rack lined with spare containers. "While the lymph drains on its own, we'll move on to the items on the scientists' list. This specimen still has its head intact. That's a mixed blessing in our line of work. More work for us, but the scientists upstairs will be happy. We need to retrieve the communication organ."

With a precise, practiced motion, as though peeling a ripe apple, the technician sliced away the outer layer of the diffuser on the front of the skull. Then, without the slightest hesitation, he plunged his gloved hand into the cranial cavity nearly up to his elbow. With a wet, squelching sound, he pulled out three slippery organic structures coated in thick mucus, each roughly the size and shape of a tennis ball. They landed with dull thuds at the bottom of a plastic basin.

"That's it for the dissection. There's nothing else in these things that science cares about. The rest is classified as biological waste. Just chop it up for disposal."

With the cold efficiency of a butcher working the docks, the technician switched on a circular saw and began breaking down the carcass. He severed the limbs, divided the torso into three even sections, and detached the hairless head. Gray lymph continued to drain away. Gathering the severed pieces of flesh like an armload of firewood, he tossed them onto the cart's cargo platform.

"Take this junk straight to the thermal reactor." He gestured toward the gaping entrance of a massive pressure-sealed door at the far end of the hall, where waves of dry, oppressive heat rolled out. "But don't touch the control panels. The system's complicated and expensive, and its electronics are programmed to follow a strict daily disposal cycle. Just dump the meat into the intake."

I grabbed the handle, wheeled the cart to the designated spot, and tipped the platform. The remains of the Loz'an dropped with a dull thud into the dark depths of the disposal bunker, where a substantial pile of biological waste had already accumulated. It was a gruesome place, but ruthlessly practical. Every detail made it clear that the Corps regarded the extraterrestrial threat as little more than a source of raw materials.

"That's the end of the basic training, soldier," the technician said with a grunt when I returned to the worktable. "Now let's see what you can do. I'll stick around and keep an eye on you. Get to work."

I methodically reconstructed the entire surgical cycle in my mind, breaking it down into a sequence of simple, repeatable operations.

Head to Section 3B, select an anatomically complete corpse with an intact diffuser, and transfer it to the steel basin of the table. Pick up the ultrasonic cutter, set the optimal blade angle, and drive it deep into the chest near the heart in a single, penetrating stroke while opening the popliteal veins to maximize lymph drainage. Then make a precise circular incision around the face, extract the three communication nodes without damaging their mucous membranes, cut the remaining flesh into manageable sections, load them onto the platform, and dump everything into the thermal collector.

Thanks to my exceptional motor coordination, perfect depth perception, and my body's ability to adapt instantly to new physical demands, the entire cycle, from selecting the carcass to cleaning the table, took exactly three minutes and thirty seconds. I performed the procedure more cleanly, more precisely, and faster than the staff technician himself, despite his years of experience.

"Hell, you're a natural, rookie." The technician shook his head in disbelief. "All right, I'll leave you to it. Looks like you know how to keep your fingers attached. See if you can gut at least a dozen chickens before the end of the shift."

I merely smiled beneath my mask, deciding not to ruin the man's good mood. Twelve carcasses in two hours? My internal accountant had already timed the procedure and calculated the maximum throughput of my upgraded body. If I maintained my current pace and kept refining my movements, I could process and incinerate several hundred xenomorphs before the shift ended, single-handedly meeting the entire underground level's monthly quota.

I reached for the handle of the empty cart. It was time to show this laboratory what real production efficiency looked like.