The Abyss of Time

Chapter Thirty Eight

     Miller's mind worked quickly as the cyborgs raced towards them. The cyborgs knew that the men from the lander would have suicide chips and couldn't be converted. Also, the men from the lander would have been ordered to kill the Orchid crew if they couldn't rescue them. The priority of the cyborgs, therefore, would be to simply kill the men from the lander as quickly as possible.

     The five cyborgs running towards them couldn't be the main attack, though. They wouldn't arrive soon enough. Their job would be to kill anyone that survived the main attack. The main attack would be...

     Miller glanced around, squinting into the darkness. The lander had already stopped burning with no oxygen in the atmosphere but the overhead storm was still raging, as it had been all across the planet for untold aeons. A flash of lightning illuminated a seventh cyborg, Karalis himself, standing beside the huge tank cyborg. The tank was turning its turret towards the camp, which made no sense to Miller at first. The shells that had destroyed the lander would kill every baseline human, leaving the cyborgs with no-one to convert, unless...

     Idiot! Miller swore to himself. There was no reason the weapon could only fire one kind of shell. Stun grenades! Every baseliner, Orchid crew and newly arrived soldiers alike, would be rendered unconscious, whereupon the suicide implants of the lander crew would kill them. The cyborgs would then be able to simply walk in to collect the Orchid crew.

     Fowler saw it as well, but to Miller's surprise he didn't look alarmed. Nevertheless he yelled a warning to his men. "Concussion alert!" The men from the lander dropped the their knees and wrapped their arms around their heads as the tank fired and a projectile soared into the sky above them. Miller copied the defensive pose adopted by the soldiers around him, while having no idea what it would do to protect him without the armoured helmets worn by the new arrivals. He knew, though, that this was almost certainly his last moment of free, conscious thought and all he could think about were his children. Jack and Lucy. He was their father. He should have been able to protect them...

     There was an explosion somewhere in front of him, but it was nothing like the deafening thunderclap that a stun grenade would have made. He looked up to see that the tank cyborg's weapon had exploded, reduced to shards of burning metal flying away from the massive creature's shoulders. The cyborg staggered sideways, the tiny head on the front of its chest looking stunned and surprised, while Karalis had been blown from his feet. He picked himself up and stared around, searching for the source of the new attack. Meanwhile the grenade, not receiving the detonation code from its launcher, flew harmlessly overhead and landed in the sand somewhere behind them.

     There was a flash of light in the clouds and the huge cyborg was rocked by a second explosion, this one blowing off one of its legs. Then the other five cyborgs paused as they received new orders from their commander. After a moment they turned and began running away from the camp.

     "Up and att'em, men!" shouted Fowler. "Don't let 'em get away."

     He ran back to his quad, which Miller now saw had a pair of 12mm cannons mounted on the sides. He spun the vehicle around and fired a burst at the nearest cyborg. The high explosive rounds threw the cyborg forward as they detonated, but then it recovered its balance, seemingly unharmed. It bent its arms backwards as it ran, though, and its palm guns spat bolts of plasma back at Fowler. Fowler ducked instinctively and the plasma splashed against the quad's armaglaze windshield.

     Miller watched as the quad riders chased the cyborgs into the darkness surrounding the camp, before remembering the weapon in the sky that had attacked the tank cyborg. He looked and saw it descending. A dirigible. A balloon with a cannon mounted on its underside, driven by propellers mounted on booms on either side. Something that might have graced the skies of Earth back in the nineteenth century. He almost laughed at the sight of it. Genius! No electronics that the cyborgs would have sensed from miles away. No rocket engines to light up the skies. The lander must have deployed it while it was still hidden in the clouds and its very primitiveness had allowed it to approach undetected. The need to keep its wieght as low as possible was costing it now, though, as Karalis fired at it, punching holes in its balloon to let the gas out, but it had served its purpose; destroying the cyborgs' most powerful weapon.