The Abyss of Time

Chapter Eight

Jack Miller examined the weapons the guard had reluctantly handed him; a taser and a simple pistol carrying a clip of twelve bullets. He'd already stuffed two spare clips into his trouser pockets. "You don't have anything larger?" he asked.

"This is a colony ship," Grey told him. "Not a warship. We're heading for a planet totally devoid of life except for twenty four scientists."

"Yes, all right," said Jack impatiently. "I'm getting back to my family."

He turned to leave, but Grey grabbed his arm to stop him. "We'll be helping them more if we stay together as a group," he said. "Together, we're an effective force that can put up a good defence if the cyborgs attack."

"Defend what?" said Jack, though. "My family's back there with no-one to defend them."

"If we all split up, how long will you be able to defend them by yourself?"

"You might be surprised. I gave a pretty good account of myself in Texas."

"The Texans weren't cyborgs. I was in the war. The only way to take down a cyborg with a handgun is a shot to the throat. That's a small target, and it's moving. Defending itself. Are you that good a shot?"

"You hit it with the taser first..."

"And if there's more than one of them? Look, I get it. You're worried for your family. We all are, but we won't be helping them if we all split up and get ourselves killed one at a time."

Around them, the other civilians who'd been given weapons seemed to be dividing into two camps. Those who agreed with the guard and those who, like Jack, wanted to protect their families. Arguments were beginning to break out among them, while those who'd been left weaponless watched enviously. Jack knew the guard was right, but the need to get back and see that his family was safe was almost too strong to ignore.

"Oh shit!" said a man wearing the overalls of a maintenance technician. "Look!"

He was pointing to an air vent from which fresh air blew when the ship's life support systems were working normally. Frightened mutterings rose from the crowd when they saw that the strips of cloth that had been tied to the vent, which fluttered in the breeze when air was blowing, were now hanging limply.

"They've turned off life support," someone said. "We'll suffocate unless we surrender."

"Karalis would have said something," Grey pointed out. "He would have bragged about it, threatened us with suffocation. No, this is something else. He threatened to..." He fell silent as his face went white with fear.

"He threatened to blow up the three rooms they held if the guards attacked them," said Jack. "Oh God, that's what's happened. He's blown up life support."

"The individual life support subsystems will be operating independently, won't they?" said a shuttle pilot. "It's a decentralised system. There's no single critical system that'll shut the whole thing down."

"Back in the war, they used computer viruses to hit enemy computers," Grey told him. "They could have taken down the whole network."

"That's right," said the maintenance tech, looking scared. "The algae that convert CO2 to oxygen need constant computer oversight to keep growing conditions just right. Disrupt the computers just for a couple of minutes, and the algae dies."

"The phones aren't working," someone said. Other people immediately tried their own phones to see for themselves.

Fearful conversations broke out in the crowd. "So what do we do?" someone demanded.