Blighted Star

by Tom Parkinson

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  Gunnar flattened down the grass as best he could so that when he lay down he felt both sheltered and cushioned. Although it was open to the sky it was in every other way a perfect camping spot. The lake glowed in the last light from the day, and reflected the studding of thousands of stars with the vortex of the Skagorack just beginning to rise in the east.

  He looked into his pack and found the lamp. Placing it on the ground in front of him he set it for both heat and light, and then he took out his pan. Finding that he wasn’t really hungry he decided to leave dinner for a short while and just to lie contemplating the stars for a while. If he dozed off, well that was all right too. He stretched out his long form and allowed his eyelids to droop. He wondered idly if there would be a thunderstorm later. Occasionally they occurred, were bound to, he supposed, in a planet where there was so much moisture. There had been a flicker of light in the sky behind him earlier on which had seemed like it might be lightning. Oh well, if there was a storm he would just have to turn the heater up and tough it out.

  He awoke, startled. Something had bitten or stung him on the hand. That was impossible; there were no aggressive insects on Saunder’s World. Yet down on the ground lay a tiny spasming worm. He looked at his hand from which came an excruciating pain. A blotch of grey discoloration was spreading unbelievably fast. Now the entire back of his hand was covered and the blotches were spreading up his wrist. He clutched his right arm with his left hand, and the pain started in that too. Both hands infected, he stood up and began to run. Now his arms were covered in pussing black and white boils from hand to armpit and still the infection raged on unchecked, down across his chest, up the veins of his neck. It raced across his face, bursting his eyeballs and drawing back his lips in a vile rictus of a scream. In his last second of consciousness before the organism, spreading up his spinal cord, burst into his brain, Gunnar was aware only of exploding lights and crashing noise. Then he fell.

  The organism completed its conquest. There had been no resistance, none at all. The ancient parasite had complete possession of its new host but it needed to spread further; it needed new hosts to survive.

  Gradually it located each of the nerves needed for locomotion. The corpse of Gunnar Olafson began to twitch. Stiffly it levered itself to its feet and stood, the pus which had been its brain drooling from the twisted lips. The wrecked and ruined internal organs were allowed to slough out through the corpse’s anus. The organism directed the dead muscles to move, and the corpse staggered away from the light of the lamp and towards the distant beacons of life.

  Chapter 4

  Athena bit her finger ends with worry. Worry not only for the missing men and the colony’s only shuttle, but also for the long-term prospects of the colony itself. The loss of the quarry was a blow from which they might not be able to recover. Not only had the equipment been vaporised with literally no trace of it left, but the very shaft they had bored into the ground had collapsed in on itself. All that was left at the site was a smouldering crater the bottom of which was still glowing with residual heat. The only mercy had been the small number of casualties. Of the quarrymen only three had been unaccounted for, with witnesses pretty clear what had happened to them. The last of the survivors had just been brought into Cassini’s mess, now converted into a makeshift hospital. They all showed signs of shock, and extreme fatigue from the fifteen kilometre evacuation from the site of the disaster under Sgt Raoul’s care.

  When she had been a young girl, Athena had taken part in a class end of term project in which they were all supposed to contribute to a tableau vivant. The theme had been “Moments in History” and they had debated long and hard before deciding to portray the death of Julius Caesar. Each member of the class was assigned a character from the moment to create a hologram of: Brutus and the other conspirators, passing Roman citizens and so on. These were to be made complete not only in surface detail, but also with an interior monologue which observers could access as they wandered through the scene. Athena had had a couple of good years academically, so her peers entrusted her with the centrepiece of the tableau, Caesar himself, just at the moment of being stabbed. What none of her school fellows had really noticed was that Athena’s grades had been in free-fall for a few months and that she had been resting on what had been considerable laurels.

  It was hard to say what had led to this decline in academic prowess; she had really just lost interest in the whole process of education and had begun to drift. Her teacher had picked up on the tiny cues which her body language gave off as she attended, there in body but not in mind, the classes the robot gave. Her slightly dilated pupils, the angle at which she tilted her head, the sleepy rhythm of her breathing. It read the signs and went through the usual routines to focus her attention, pleading, exhorting, nagging, until finally it backed away from her, sensing that nothing it could do would reawaken the interest she had once felt, that any such academic renaissance would have to come from within herself.

  Which was all well and good, but it unfortunately left her with the problem of a piece of work vital not only to her but to a dozen other kids, which was due in the next day and which she had not even started. She began the work, constructing as clear a mental picture as she could of the Roman leader, projecting it into an imager, tweaking it, revising it, working on every aspect of its appearance and its mannerisms. At about one o’clock in the morning, it became clear that there was no chance of her finishing, no chance at all.

  Waves of anguished despair swept through her, and a profound feeling of shame and defeat. It was her first public humiliation and the memory of it made her blush until her ears burned, years later. And now the same feelings were beginning to form within her once again. Half a lifetime away, and half the cosmos away from the planet where she grew up.

  With the loss of the mining equipment went all their ability to create iron sheeting and girders. The initial buildings of each town were in place, roughly constructed from carbolite panels harvested from Cassini, but that was all. At least the people would have some kind of shelter, but they would have to get their deep core supplies going again, and they couldn’t wait two years for the next colony ship. Saunders World had precious few other resources, no forests they could chop down for timber, even the rocks beneath their feet would be incredibly difficult to quarry for building materials without the right equipment. Their only option other than mining olerite was to cannibalise the rest of Cassini itself for the materials to finish their towns, and Athena just wasn’t going to let that happen. The ship was already stripped down to the bare hull, and anything further would compromise its space worthiness on a permanent basis. They needed Jim, badly.

  With the thought of Jim came to her with total clarity the mental image of him taking her through the blueprints of the mining machine. He was showing her how to jury-rig a replacement which would not be as fine-tuned, would only turn out sheeting and girders, rather than the limitless variety of objects the original had been able to conjure out of the molten metal, but it would make their stay on the planet possible. The vision was the strangest sensation because she could hear every word he was saying as if he was in the room with her and yet she felt sure that this wasn’t a memory of a conversation they had actually had. Athena had a photographic memory; that was one of the reasons she had been picked for this mission. Yet here was a clear image which was both a memory and not a memory at the same time. She was perplexed. However, now wasn’t the time for musing on where the information was coming from, now was the time for acting upon it. They would need to take major components from the main gravity drive of the Cassini including the ship’s plasma sphere. This would mean they would lose the ability to take off from the planet’s surface. But if that became necessary they could quickly put the components back…

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  Lana paced backwards and forwards outside the control room. Movement seemed to do some good to her frayed nerves. As she paced she willed Grad to be safe. The corrid
or led out onto the main access passage of the ship in one direction, and she always turned before she got to that, the soles of her shoes squeaking gently on the metal surface. Padding back the other way she could go forty-five paces before she reached the turning where the corridor took a left down to the power room. Before she got to that, though, she passed the open doorway to the control room where Jackson still sat hunched in the green glow from the console from which the drones were controlled. Each time she passed the doorway she forced herself not to look in directly. They would tell her when there was news. Looking in would just jinx it. She could look through the corner of her eye, that was O.K. and she would see well enough if there were any change…

  The problem was that there was no trace at all of the tracking pellets. This might mean that the shuttle, and everything in it had been plasmarised in the blast at the quarry. Or it could mean that the pellets had been knocked out by the electro-magnetic pulse from the bursting plasma sphere. Eyewitnesses thought they had seen the shuttle disappearing after the explosion but at the time everyone’s eyes had been seared by the blue flash. Lana kept her eyes straight ahead and kept pacing. Grad would be O.K. He always was.

  The long night dragged on. At about three o’clock Athena passed on her way to the main A.G. As she passed she patted Lana on the arm. She didn’t suggest that Lana got some sleep and for that the pilot was grateful.

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  Gunnar’s corpse staggered on through the night, heading east. As it went, skin, hair and even clumps of flesh rotted off as the voracious organism devoured the body it had colonised. Yet the decaying muscles still possessed enough consistency to obey the commands of the dead nerves. On the horizon, the cluster of life signals exerted their irresistible pull. One step at a time the corpse closed the distance.

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  Jackson rubbed his dry eyes and cursed softly. The drones had just finished another search pattern with no results. He had sent them out on the “best guess” direction, the one the most reliable seeming witness had said he thought he had seen the shuttle flung in after the plasma blast, but the man’s streaming eyes and reddened face bore testimony to the intensity of the flash of heat and light the plasma breach had released. And the man had said himself that the next moment his vision had gone for some minutes, and that even now everything he looked at had a greenish tinge as if he had looked at the sun. One other person who had been curled up in a protective ball at the time of the flash had reported seeing something glinting in the sky to the north in the immediate aftermath, and two people were pretty sure they had seen a trail of smoke dispersing a short time afterwards.

  Personally he couldn’t really give a damn about the two missing men. He had hardly ever spoken to Chan and suspected that the engineer didn’t think all that highly of him. Grad made him feel uncomfortable, the pilot was friendly enough but was too cocksure for Jackson’s taste. He wanted to get them back, obviously, but he had to admit to himself that this was because he wanted the kudos of rescuing them, rather than because either of them was any more important to him than he was to them. It would be good to see them humbled just a little, to see them huddled in blankets while he and his troops delivered them from danger…

  The shuttle was another matter. The shuttle was an invaluable piece of equipment. Without it everything on the planet would have to be lifted and carried and he could guess who that task would fall to. The colonial marines always got stuck with the shitty end of the stick. Outside in the corridor that damned woman was still pacing up and down. Every time she went passed the doorway he felt she was staring right at his back. And that was getting really unnerving. He wondered if he was missing under similar circumstances what Christel would be doing. Probably getting a good night’s sleep, he thought bitterly. He tapped out a few instructions on the keyboard and the drones began set off from the quarry site on another quadrant.

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  When the plasma sphere had burst, the shuttle had been right on the periphery of the resulting explosion. The rear of the craft had been instantly vaporised leaving the exposed ends of the bulkheads, walls and floor glowing with heat fading from white hot down through orange. The cabin filled for a moment with the smoke from the burned metal, then the smoke had been whisked away by the screaming gale from the gaping hole where the back had been bitten off.

  Grad’s head had been smacked into the back of the seat by the jolt, and it took him a moment or two for his blurred vision to clear. When he did so, the console before him was utterly dead. He realised the pulse of electricity and magnetism must have tripped all the safeguards. Looking out of his cracked side window he could see that they were still going upwards, carried by their own momentum and by the push from the blast, but they would soon be arcing down again. He had to get the controls on line. His hands danced across the control pad, tapping in instructions urgently. Nothing responded. The shuttle, guided and powered entirely by electronic systems, was now nothing more than a three tonne alloy building a mile above the planet, with nothing to hold it in the sky.

  Their momentum was slowing and as it did so the aerodynamic forces on the hull shifted, pushing the nose down and initiating a sickening tumbling motion. In the passenger side footwell Jim’s unconscious form flopped from side to side. They began to fall, tumbling erratically. Grad continued to run through all the sequences of his training, struggling to regain control. They dropped through a layer of wispy cloud. He felt like punching the console with his fist but forced himself to caress the keys normally, even as the cracked screen before him showed him the ground, then the sky, then the ground again. It was hard to get a good estimate of the rate of descent but he knew it must be great because each time the ground was in front of him it was closer. A lot closer. Now he could make out details quite clearly; an outcrop of rock, a series of small ponds and a larger body of water. It looked as if they might be going to crash into the lake rather than smash into the ground. At this speed it would make no difference…

  It was an effort to concentrate now; all he wanted to do was to spend his last few moments thinking about Lana. He dragged his mind back to the task in hand, feeling strangely detached. Not long now. The lake filled the entire windscreen then slipped from view as the craft flipped into another rotation.

  Suddenly, with a panicky sounding series of bleeps, the entire control panel blinked back to life. Grad took a fraction of a second to register this and a fraction longer to realise that it was too late, they were going to impact anyway. But perhaps he could lessen the angle of that impact and turn their steep dive into a shallow one. If he could make it shallow enough then they might just skip like a stone off the surface of the lake…

  Cursing, he realised that the rear A/Gs were gone, literally gone, vapourised by the plasma rupture. He would have to wait until the craft rotated round again before firing maximum thrust into the remaining two front and single central main units. If he did this too soon then he would merely reverse their spin and they would stand no better chance. The rotation, which had seemed so unbearably fast now seemed to be taking an agonisingly long time. The sky inched out of the top of the screen and the lake crept up from the bottom, shadows and beams of light moved crazily round the cabin, and a screaming roar came and went as the torn rear of the craft swung forward into the airstream, then rotated out of it again. They were about a hundred and fifty metres up and going in at an angle of forty degrees at four hundred kilometres per hour. He gauged his moment, then hit full emergency boost on the main central A/G, a second later bringing in the front units as well.

  The shuttle tried valiantly to comply, as if aware of the peril it was in. The dive angle lessened through thirty to twenty degrees. The speed came right down to two hundred and sixty km/h. When the front A/Gs came on the nose sprang right back as if the craft were rearing away from the danger. Ruined tail first, she struck the still water, and with a shriek of ripping metal panels, bounced back into the sky by thirty metres.

  In the cockpit Grad fe
lt as if every muscle in his body had been pulled, and every bone end had been bashed against every other. It took him a second to realise that he should really feel very grateful to be in all this pain, for it meant that he was still alive. The next thing he noticed was that the lake was once again coming up to meet them and that the nose of the craft was way too low. The windscreen had at last given up the struggle and had shattered in the impact, letting in a gale of wind which was hard to keep his eyes open against. He fired the front units again and brought the shuttle upright ready for the next impact.

  Once again they struck and bounced, and again the craft shrieked as if in agony. The elasticity of the water threw them back into the sky, shedding large areas of the airframe as they ascended. In the cockpit Grad was suddenly in the open air as the roof, shaken loose by the tremendous jolts, bulged in the blast of air from the broken windscreen and was peeled back and then off.

  They fell again and slammed into the lake, this time sliding across the surface like a hydrofoil. Grad’s door dangled in their wake and then was plucked off by the water. Grad had a sudden vision of himself being left with only his chair, sinking into the lake at the head of a trail of broken parts. Glancing up from the now useless panel he watched the approach of the shoreline. They grounded in the shallows and the wrecked shuttle slid to a halt and settled gently into the mud. The lights on the control panel went out from right to left as if a large hand was wiping them away. The beeping died with a strangled note.

  Grad sat for a moment blinking in the sunlight then woke up and briskly undid his straps. he reached for the handle of his door, then remembered and stepped out through the side and lowered his boot into the cool water. The bottom had an ankle deep layer of oozing mud over a firm layer of gravel. He sloshed round to Jim’s side and grasped the handle of the passenger door. He pulled open the door and it broke away in his hand. He let it fall into the water and reached into the wrecked cockpit. He put a hand on Jim’s neck and was reassured to find a strong pulse. He gently drew Chan out from the footwell and collected him in his arms. He waded to the shore and laid the unconscious man on the sand of a narrow beach. Feeling the strain in every limb, he lowered himself down into a sitting position and began the long wait.