Blighted Star

by Tom Parkinson

  Best of all, she had a boyfriend now who said he liked the soldier girl look. She slogged on through the grass behind the others thinking about what she would do to him just as soon as she found an excuse to slip away for twenty minutes…

  It would have been nice to have had Anti-Gravity packs, they could have just floated their way to Crescent Waters, dangling their boots through the grass, hovering straight out and across the little lakes they were forced to detour round now. But this was such a cheapskate mission. They had fuck all, absolutely nothing. Just miserable Scavenger Tech Targe guns with a range of a few hundred metres, and one lousy twenty mil, which was also Scavenger Tech. It was a damn good job they weren’t expecting any trouble because they could not have done much about it if they had found it. Other than put up just enough of a fight to get themselves killed, rather than just throwing their arms up in the traditional sign of surrender. At least the lack of equipment meant that marches like the one they were on now were relatively easy, with light packs, and the whisker less gravity was still giving them an extra few centimetres on each stride.

  Behind them the sun sank towards the horizon behind which Cassini had long been lost. Williams wondered what Macintyre was doing, and wished that she could comm. him for a chat, but knew how that would go down with Jackass. Even Raoul would have sat down hard on her for that one. At least there’d been time to let Mack know that she was on her way. He’d commed back an image of herself seen from his point of view from one of their previous encounters which had made her blush all the way to the red roots of her red hair.

  The very end of the crescent shaped lake which gave the town its name finally came into view through some low bushes, the water reflecting what was rapidly becoming a night sky, and Williams fell to her favourite pattern of thought: how to convince Sergeant Raoul that it would be a good idea to maintain a permanent military presence in Crescent Waters… She guessed that in a way she should count herself lucky; on the long journey here many relationships had been formed by members of the platoon with people from the settler community. By some unlucky chance, most of the other soldiers who had found romance had paired up with people who’d ended up in Heart Lake, another whole day’s trek further on, and they were only going to see their loved ones in the flesh when decent amounts of leave coincided with an available shuttle ride. Oh well, she supposed things would get easier as the colony established itself more fully. A rail link was planned once the Olerite mine could supply the metal, and then the three settlements would be mere minutes apart. She guessed then she would live in Crescent with Mack and commute in most of the time. Weird, they came all the way across the galaxy only to create somewhere which was just like everywhere else. Still, what did she care, she’d signed up for this to get in at the first bite of what promised to be some prime real estate . ”Like everywhere else” was desirable in terms of property. ” Picturesque and awe-inspiring” were great on holiday, but they didn’t beat safe and familiar when it came to property prices…

  The soldiers skirted the edge of the great lake, moving through the dark landscape to where, in the distance, the little town’s lights sparkled in welcome.

  Chapter 3

  Gunnar strolled on at a gentle pace through the landscape. The grass, wet from a recent downpour, soaked the bottoms of his trousers unheeded. The pack on his back had long since stopped chafing his shoulders and he felt a sense of buoyancy which had been welling up in him for days. The feeling was indeed so unfamiliar that it had taken him a while to realise that the strange fluttering in his chest wasn’t an incipient heart condition. Gunnar realised with astonishment that he was, in fact, happy.

  Dwellers in asteroid colonies were kept on a very tight leash of mood suppressing drugs. Among other humans they gained in consequence the reputation of being laconic and low-key. They in turn tended to find visitors rather unstable and even borderline hysterical. Here on this alien world, far from the shafts, tunnels and caverns of his birth, Gunnar was feeling so free that he expected at any moment that his feet would lose their connection with the ground and that he would simply float away into the cavernous blue shot with fluffs of white so far above him.

  Once he had experienced a lightshow in the main cavern of the asteroid he had been born in, he must have been about five years old and had been taken to a special evening’s entertainment by one of his mothers and two of his fathers. The rest of the communal family had elected to stay away, and looking up at the reactions of his fathers to the show he had wondered why they had come themselves. In fact, when he had looked around at the rest of the sparse audience, it had been clear that most people had found something else to do with their off shift, and the few who were there looked bored, uncomfortable, or actually irritated.

  Quite simply, the show had been a projection onto the high smooth rock ceiling of a series of planetary skyscapes: scudding clouds of various hues from the different inhabited planets throughout the human diaspora. All the strange and beautiful sunsets and moonrises that three centuries of spacefaring had brought to mankind’s wondering eyes, right back to dust spectres on Mars and sulphuric monsoons on Venus. There was even a special section on the blue sky of old Earth with its billowing clouds of water vapour. Gunnar had been utterly spellbound.

  Looking up at the ceiling he had glanced at his mother’s face, and had been transfixed; she was by far his prettiest mother, though that wasn’t supposed to matter, and she was his favourite, though you weren’t supposed to have favourites. Now as she stood there, the blue light caused her to look ethereal, like a tunnel fairy. She had a rapt expression on her face, and then he noticed droplets of water running down her cheeks and even down her neck and over her delicate collar bones and into her clothing. He wondered if the droplets came in some way from the images of the clouds of water vapour, not having ever seen a human being cry before.

  The two fathers broke the spell by an exchange of bored looks and some impatient, dismissive joke. But before she turned a bright mask to them, his mother had turned her face to his and they had shared a look of deep profundity. It was the only time they were ever to be so close. Back in their quarters she affected to agree with the fathers that the show had been a waste of time. Gunnar had never forgiven her the betrayal. In fact, the moment in the cavern was to be the only time during his whole life in the asteroids when he had felt truly touched by another human. As he grew older, he joined various clusters, but they never worked out for him, and he had always moved on, spending increasingly long periods on his own. Throughout it all, he had never doubted even for a moment that he would end up under a sky like the one he had seen in the show. Yet for one reason or another, it had never happened for him. The mood drugs had kept his depression at bay, and he had functioned efficiently as a worker, digging he supposed, hundreds of kilometres of tunnel. Each night, though, he had gone to sleep dreaming of stepping out of a spacecraft onto the ground of some open planet.

  In the end, he had seen a cast of the probe work on Saunders, and the moment he had seen the blue sky he had been sold. As soon as he had been accepted onto the program he had told his current cluster of his decision, and they had taken his departure, man woman and child, with the usual lack of feeling, one way or another.

  <><><>

  Johan looked around him with an intense pleasure. Their camp was fully established. The animals had suffered no ill effects from the long trek out here and were already putting on condition in the fruitful pastures with which they were surrounded. He gave a long and silent prayer of thanks. Above him the beacon ridge glowed softly in the late afternoon sunlight. The soft evening breeze brought with it a delicious smell of pancakes cooking on the fire of compacted straw. Petre came and stood quietly beside him waiting respectfully. Johan finished his prayer and turned to his little son.

  “Ja, jong. What is it?”

  “Papa. I have a present for you.” the child held out a tightly grasped fist.

  “Oh ho! A present for me? What can it be? I’
m sure I don’t deserve a present.” He bent his knees and lowered his tall frame so that he and his son were face to face.

  “You do deserve a present because you are the best Papa anywhere in the whole…” Petre sought the right word “Galaxy!”

  “That’s very kind of you. You are the best son in the whole Universe.” He cupped his hand and Petre dropped something into it. It was a golden berry the size of a gooseberry. Johan looked at it very carefully. It was one of the few types of fruit indigenous to the planet, and had a smoky, sweet flavour. The children had gone wild for it, running ahead of the wagons on the way here to harvest each bush they had seen.

  “Eat it Papa!” Petre accompanied the instruction with appropriate gestures as if teaching a baby “Eat it!”

  “Eat it? Certainly not. I’m going to treasure it forever.” Johan pretended to put it in his top pocket.

  “No Papa! It’s for eating, not treasuring!” Petre was beginning to look concerned.

  “Oh, is it? Well perhaps we should eat it together. How would that be? You bite it first then I’ll have the rest. We’ll eat it on the way back to camp.” He held out his hand.

  <><><>

  Christel’s back was turned to him. She was driving him crazy. There was definitely something going on and Jackson didn’t like it. She had been weird since he got back from Crescent Waters. If he had done something wrong he had no idea what it might be and she would do a lot better by telling him. Ever since they had got together in the first year of the voyage she had known exactly how to play him. He had no resistance to her, that was the trouble. He had never had trouble like this with anyone else he had been with. But then no one else had made him feel like she did. He reached out his hand and pushed her gently, she turned her head slightly making a small angry noise, and carried on munching her food. In front of them the corner of the room flickered with movement and light as a 3D spooled out its banality. Someone was confronting someone else about lies they had been telling. It was a long running real-time show from Milano Prime and she followed the latest developments whenever she could. The show had followed them out through space on their journey along with all the latest news, gossip, sport and culture from across Humandom. Well, not the latest, by now the communications they received had a two year delay.

  He reached out his foot this time and pushed her quite hard. She shrugged roughly and threw “Don’t.” over her shoulder. She didn’t even look round. Jackson felt like smashing the back of her skull in.

  <><><>

  With the widening distance between him and the nearest other people, the overwhelming need to break away from his own kind had at last diminished. The self-inflicted wound on his arm still throbbed a little, though the nanos had long ago closed the wound and made a small mound of soft scar tissue where he had cut into the flesh. Now he could accept the towns for what they were, a handy source of future resupply. He also didn’t think he would ever miss human company again, but on the other hand it was useful to know it was there if he ever needed it. He pushed on through the knee high grass, still keeping parallel to the track the Amish had taken. When the sun began its slow descent towards the horizon, Gunnar began to look forward to the evening camp. Perhaps at the next water he came to, or the one after that. This world had so many beautiful lakes and ponds all reflecting the immensity of the blue sky, and any one would be heaven to camp beside. He stopped and looked around him. In the distance a low rocky ridge broke the flatness of the horizon. He decided to make for that.

  <><><>

  The organism that moved with the worm’s body was being pulled strongly, much more strongly than it had been for millennia. It ignored the tiny pulses of the invertebrates in the soil and turned instead towards the massive beacons of life which had now appeared on its horizon. Without consciousness, blindly, like a plant turning towards the sun, it turned towards the nearest of the life - sources and began to inch its way through the soil.

  <><><>

  The lab bench was cool under his left hand and warm under his right. This was because the golden sunlight fell across part of it while his own body cast the shadow which made the left -hand side cool. He must have been standing there for quite a while, lost in thought. He walked over to the window and looked out at the busy quarry. In one sense the trouble was that they had encountered no trouble. Maybe if they had some engineering problems he wouldn’t have time for palaeontology. Yet he couldn’t help feeling that there was something important he was missing. He sucked his teeth.

  Outside two quarrymen had finished attaching Anti - Gravity units to the four corners of a large platform pallet. The pallet was piled high with iron sheeting ready for dispatch to one of the settlements. The morning had started with a slight chill from the rain which had fallen in the night, and both quarrymen had taken off their jackets as the day had warmed up. Now on trying to pick his up, one of them found that it was caught by its corner under the immense weight of the day’s production on the pallet. His workmate turned back to see the quarryman’s futile attempts to free the jacket and both laughed. In the window Jim grinned and shook his head. The workers switched on the A/G and the twelve tonne pallet bobbed up to the pre-set three feet. The jacket was whisked out and the two men, still laughing, moved to switch off the A/G units. The next few moments unfolded with a dreadful slowness as Jim watched, powerless.

  One of the men obviously thought of a new witticism on the subject of the jacket and popped round the pallet to tell his friend. At that moment a Heavy Loader was coming too fast the other way. The driver saw in time to swerve and the man jumped the other way. Cursing, the driver stamped on the brakes. The Loader’s tyres skidded on a puddle left over from the morning’s rain and the big vehicle crunched into the floating pallet, crushing its front loading gear. The pallet lurched, one corner coming slightly up, and it set off across the quarry at a running pace, spinning slowly as it went. The spin sent the top few sheets sliding and one of these bore a worker to the ground before slicing him neatly across the chest, separating upper torso from the rest of his body. One arm was chopped above the elbow, the other flapped against the metal for a moment then was still.

  With, due to the anti-gravity units, in effect no friction, the gigantic load continued on its way while Jim watched appalled. He realised with a crippling jolt of fear that it was heading for the Plasma Sphere. The men in the quarry must have realised the same thing because they sprinted away yelling warnings. Jim burst out of the lab and ran down the steps, he took half a dozen steps towards the pallet, if they could only switch off one of the A/G units it would destabilise the pallet… It was hopeless; the pallet was out of range and spinning too quickly anyway, shedding lethal sheets of iron as it went. He turned and began to run the other way, knowing that running away was hopeless too. Behind him the pallet must be nearing its target. When it broke the sphere, which it surely must, the plasma breach would vaporise everything in the quarry. He was glad he hadn’t let Amy come with him to work today. He hoped Athena would look after her, knew that she would. He stopped running; there was no point. He looked up at the sky; it really was very beautiful. He wished he had spent more time looking at it. Off to the east there was a metallic glint in the sunshine. It was racing towards the quarry. He waved frantically; the shuttle must turn back. It wouldn’t stand a chance.

  <><><>

  “Help! This is the quarry! We have a full emergency!” the squawk on the radio startled Grad out of his reverie, already en route, he pushed the throttle lever full forward.

  “Quarry, this is the shuttle. I am inbound and about six klicks out. What can I do?” There was no reply from the comms, and Grad cursed under his breath. The abject panic in the man’s voice had been plain enough. The quarry was now ahead and Grad arced down without slowing until the final second, flashing over the heads of the people still running away from the lip of the quarry’s deep bowl. Down below someone was waving. Grad cut the power and let the shuttle drop like a brick directly down to the figur
e. At four metres the motors cut back in on their own and the shuttle stopped, hovering just above the ground.

  Jim was frantically pointing across the quarry to where a massive object was just covering the last few metres between it and a large white ball. The Plasma Sphere! Grad reached across and taking Jim by the front of his overalls, hauled him in through the open passenger window, At the same time feeding full power into the A/G and throwing the throttle full forward. Jim, not strapped in or wearing G-cancellation, screamed as a bone broke, then mercifully passed out, a thin stream of blood starting from his nose.

  <><><>

  Lana started out of her afternoon nap, a deep feeling of unease deadening her heart. Something had happened to Grad. She just knew it. She tried calling him on his internal comms but there was nothing. It was more than just being out of range. It was like the sensation of trying to contact an infant who had no implants. She dressed hurriedly and ran down the corridors to the Comms Centre. As she entered she could see everyone looking at her. Athena Johnson came forward and took her hands. Her legs almost gave way.

  “What’s happened? Is he dead?”

  “We don’t know yet, reports are still coming in. There is still hope but I want you to be ready.” Athena guided her gently to a chair. “There has been a plasma burst at the quarry. Witnesses say that Grad flew in just before it happened and no one saw him fly out. But things are very confused. We won’t know for sure until a proper search has been done. We’ve sent out probes to look for life traces.”

  Lana sat in the chair, waves of misery washing over her. Christel came over and put her arm round her. Lt Jackson looked up from the Probe monitors and smiled thinly. Time seemed to slow down.