The Depths of Time by Roger MacBride Allen Page B

Voices—shouts, cries, calm, professional reporting—filled the darkness.
    Nothing. There was nothing at all he could do. Not until there was light, and power. Nothing until—
    The nexus control panel lit back up, a message already on it. nexus control system receives and accepts confirmation of instruction to deactivate portal nexus “d” permanently. nexus control system advises that this will be the last chance to countermand the instruction, send second confirmation within sixty seconds, any other action or lack of action will result in cancellation of instruction.
    The screen flickered once and then died again.
    How long had that message been there before he could see it? How long had the display been blank, unable to show him the words? Five seconds? Twenty? Koffield fumbled for the control system keyboard in the all-but-complete darkness. Working blind, he laboriously keyed in the second confirmation. He could not see the words he was keying in. At last he had the command keyed in as best he could, but then he held back. He had no way of knowing if he had indeed keyed the command in properly. What if he had typed it in wrong, and the Artlnt refused to accept the scrambled message? How long did he have before the sixty-second countdown was over and the Artlnt canceled the deactivation sequence? Had the keyboard even taken his keystrokes, or had the power failure cut the keyboard as well? If the main lights would only come on, he could check the command and resend it. But if he waited too long for the lights, the system would cancel the sequence anyway.
    How long to wait? Koffield decided to give it twenty seconds, and counted it out to himself, doing his best to guess how long a second was. He hit the send key.
    A few seconds, or a few years, later, somewhere deep in the bowels of the ship, a power relay reset, and the bridge bloomed back into existence as the emergency lights came on, turning utter darkness to a compartment half-lit, half-shrouded in gloom. Koffield blinked as his eyes adjusted, and then saw what he had sent on the screen.
    ANTON KOFFIELD COMMANDING UPHOLDER SENDS SECOND CONFROMATIUON OF INSTRUCTION TO NEXUS CONTRL SYSTEM TO DEACTIVATE PORTAL NEXUS “ d ” PERMANENTLY.
    The indicators showed the system had received the instruction, but they had just gone through a major power crisis. Koffield could imagine a half dozen kinds of power failures, trips, and flares that could have caused the message-send to get scrambled or lost, or caused the system to show a false positive. The Artlnt system ought to be able to parse through and interpret the command in spite of the miskeyed words, but there was no way to know for sure. Typing in the command again would either reassure the Artlnt—or make it suspicious of a trick and cause it to abort.
    There was, in short, nothing he could do that would not just as likely make things worse instead of better.
    Leave it. Leave it alone. Nothing he could do.
    There was no telling precisely how long the Artlnt would take to work its way through the complexities of the situation, but Koffield had no doubt this step, this last, irrevocable step, would take longer than any other. Every other decision the Artlnt had made included the possibility of stopping, of backing off from a full shutdown. So long as one nexus remained, the system could be rebuilt. But with the last nexus gone, there was no way back. The Artlnt would think longer and harder before launching over that precipice.
    “ Damage status? ” he asked.
    “ Five small debris strikes to bow of the ship, ” the ship systems officer reported. “ Laser cannon off-line but possibly repairable. Railgun system badly damaged. Detection system highly questionable but marginally functional for the moment. Main power system appears to be fully functional but is still recovering from power surges. No other damage reported. ”
    “ Very well, ” Koffield said. His displays finished rebuilding themselves as he