The Abyss of Time

Chapter Ten

     Two days later, Miller called the senior officers together in the committee room in which many of them had been held hostage during the cyborg attack.

     The door to the Operations room had been sealed off, and Miller paused to give it a thoughtful look as he passed it. Although some of the workstations and instruments in there still worked, there weren't enough of them to make it worthwhile trying to repair the room. A temporary, makeshift Operations room was being set up in the Captain's office, therefore, which had its own door into the corridor. It was rather cramped for the eight people who would be working there, but all the most important data buses went right past it on their way to the old Operations room, making it a lot easier to re-route them there than to a larger room further away. It would do, Miller thought. They would be leaving the ship anyway within another few days, never to return.

     Everyone else was already there, he saw as he entered the committee room. All sitting around the sides of the long table that ran along its centre. All the remaining members of the Operations staff, plus his son Jack, who'd been assigned to the newly created post of crew liaison officer. Beside him was Kevin Dundee, the new Head of security, and sitting opposite him were some of the most senior scientists. In the middle of the table was a makeshift telephone, connected by the copper cables of the WPAC network to what had been the Phonon Interface Room where Linda Magpie, the wife of one of the lander pilots, was working as the switchboard operator.

     "So," he said as he took his seat at the head of the table. "What's our situation?" He directed the question at Dundee, who leaned forward in his seat to answer.

     "We've searched the ship from bow to stern," he said. "Every room, every alcove. Every maintenance passage. I'm confident that there are no more cyborgs aboard the ship. They must all have been aboard the lander that left."

     Miller nodded. Dundee had recruited hundreds of crew members for the search, all of whom had known what the consequences to themselves and their families would be if the cyborgs somehow gained the upper hand again. He didn't doubt that they'd searched as thoroughly as they'd known how to do.

     "And they've gone down to the planet?" he asked, turning to Professor Alan Felgin; an elderly botanist whose secondary speciality was in astronomy.

     "We watched them for as long as we could," the scientist replied. "They were definitely on a course that would have taken them down for a landing but they passed behind the planet before they actually touched down. Theoretically they could have climbed back up, cutting their engines before they came back out from behind the planet so we wouldn't see the exhaust. If they'd done that they would have just enough fuel to return to the Lucina, but the lander isn't camouflaged. It's very radar reflective and it would take the cyborgs weeks to change that, even if they had the equipment. If they try to come back, I'm confident we'll see them."

     "So we can forget about them for the time being," said Miller.

     "Until we're forced to go down to the planet ourselves." said Felgin, nodding confidently.

     "Good," said Miller. "One thing less to worry about." He turned to Samantha Jawad. "So how long can we stay up here?" he asked.

      "Life support is a total write off," she replied. "The cyborgs reprogrammed the computer to deliver a fatal overdose of fertiliser at the same moment the bombs went off. The algae must have died almost immediately. The backup algal feed stocks were in the Enviroment room and were destroyed in the explosion. There may be a few spores we can salvage, but it would take months to breed them back up to the numbers we'd need to recycle the air. We've got about a week before the air becomes unbreathable."