Did their OMCs run wild? Did their umbilicus crews fail, when it was kill or be killed?

A tear began sliding down Timberlake's left cheek. To Bickel, that was the final blow. Some of his anger returned. He faced Timberlake: "What do we do now, Captain?"

The title's irony was not lost on either of Bickel's companions. Flattery started to reply, thought better of it. If the starship Earthling could be said to have a captain (discounting an in-service Organic Mental Core), then unspoken agreement gave that title to an umbilicus crew's life-systems engineer. None of them, though, had ever used the word officially.

At last Timberlake met Bickel's stare, but all he said was: "You know why I couldn't bring myself to do it."

Bickel continued to study Timberlake. What shabby conceit had given them this excuse for a life-systems engineer? Once the umbilicus crew had numbered six - the three here plus Ship Nurse Maida Lon Blaine, Tool Specialist Oscar Lon Anderson, and Biochemist Sam Lon Scheler. Now, Blaine, Anderson, and Scheler were dead - Scheler's exploded corpse jamming an access tube on the aft perimeter, Anderson strangled by a rogue sphincter lock, and lovely Maida mangled by runaway cargo.

Bickel blamed most of the tragedy on Timberlake. If the damn fool had only taken the ruthless but obvious step at the first sign of trouble! There had been plenty of warning - with the first two of the ship's three OMCs going catatonic. The seat of trouble had been obvious. And the symptoms - exactly the same symptoms that had preceded the breakdown of the old Artificial Consciousness project back on earth - insane destruction of people and materiel. But Tim had refused to see it. Tim had blathered about the sanctity of all life.

Life, hah! Bickel thought. They were all of them - even the colonists down in the hyb tanks - expendable biopsy material, Doppelgangers grown in gnotobiotic sterility in the Moonbase.