Wednesday, November 01, 2006

First words

Posted by: Greg @ 1:02 AM.

There were twelve of them sitting in mix-matched chairs around the cafeteria table. Except, they weren't in a cafeteria. This was a makeshift meeting room that the crew and passengers had originally used as a temporary headquarters. Now that they had reclaimed the bridge and most of the rest of the ship, it was where they were storing the remains of the ship's robots which they had destroyed. There were still three left, though. And they still had control of the ship's engines and docking bay.

The shapes in the chairs were obviously humaniform -- two arms, two legs, head on top of the body. Well, the ones that still had all four limbs and a head. All of the durametal bodies had burn marks and holes in them where they had been struck and torn apart by the weapons that the crew had been able to obtain from the weapons locker before the robots had gained complete control of the ship.

A room just off the medical bay was home to a similarly gruesome scene. Except the burns and holes and absent limbs marred the bodies of nearly fifty of the seventy-five crew and passengers who had been on board the ship when it left the Sulfura Springs Luxury Resort Station in orbit around Jupiter's moon, Io. And the bodies hadn't been positioned in chairs in a crude semblance of a company board meeting, or a jury at its work. No, these bodies were laid out in rows. Only a few had been granted the dignity of a white sheet to cover them. Not that the sheets were white any more. Lasers cauterized wounds almost instantly, but many of the bodies had been ripped apart by the durasteel blades and hooks that the robots had equipped in place of their hands.

The chaos had begun four days earlier, while most of the passengers were relaxing in the ship's lounge after dinner. In a coordinated effort, five groups of the ships maintenance and engineering robots had taken over the key areas of the ship, including the bridge, communications room, engine room, and docking bay. After killing all the crew and passengers that they encountered in the initial assault, they began to systematically take over the other sections of the ship and kill the remaining humans on board. However, the ship's captain had been able to alert the crew and passengers to the attack, and gaining swift access to the weapons locker, they made an effort to defend themselves. Over the following three days, working their way from the crew and passenger quarters, they had been able to destroy most of the robots and retake most of the ship. But it had come at a terrible price.

Continue

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

About Me

Name: Greg
Location: Washington, DC, United States

Website: Grok Life

Create A New Post

Previous Posts

A potential idea
Blog status
So, I was doing some reading in the livejournal co...
Well, this is where I'll keep at least one copy of...

National Novel Writing Month 2006 Participant



Archives