Blighted Star

by Tom Parkinson

  Chapter 5

  Johan got up in the pre-dawn paleness. In many ways this was his favourite time of day; he liked the coolness and the stillness. He liked being the only one awake out of his little household, he was providing for them while they slept on, peaceful and safe. Trying as he always did to be as quiet as possible, he pulled on his trousers and white shirt and lifted the flap of the wagon cover. Glancing back at the bed he saw Katinka watching him through one open eye, smiling. She’d been awake all along, as she always was. He strode down to the pond, collecting a bucket on the way, and was soon yawning as the clear water filled the bucket with a swoosh. He stretched his back and hefted the weight. By now Katinka would be coaxing alight the blocks of compacted grass in their little stove. He walked back towards the wagon, enjoying the way the soft warm light from within cast shadows on the white cloth of the cover, disliking the wet feel of the bucket bumping against his leg. This first bucket was for the humans, the next six would be for the animals; that was a lot of carrying, and he would have to do it all again four more times today. Ach well, it was worth it not to have the kine wreck the pond by stirring it all up. Soon he would finish the diverting of the little stream and they would have fresh water right to their door. Then the animals could help themselves to the pond while the humans drank beautiful clear water which bubbled out of a spring at the foot of the outcrop of rocks. Today he would dig the new stream channel until lunch, rest for an hour, then plant the last of the apple trees until dark. Tomorrow morning he would dig again, then in the afternoon he would put together the plough and try it out on the big flat area below the ridge.

  Looking up at the distant rocks he was startled to see the figure of a man silhouetted against the lightening sky. The impression lasted only a moment then the figure was gone into the gloom below the summit. Johan blinked. His eyes, like everything else, were getting old. After all, who would be about this far out at this time of day? He must have been mistaken…

  <><><>

  Athena passed back all the components carefully as she came to them. The two engineers with her took each part from her and packed them. Some for storage, some for the building of the new mining machine. Hopefully the stored ones wouldn’t be needed for a few years until the colony was in a position to begin exports. If they didn’t get the mine going again they never would be in that position, and the second wave of settlement would take on the character of a rescue mission.

  The engineers had looked at each other with open scepticism when Athena had first told them what she intended to do, and had obviously been ready to try to dissuade her. She suspected that if they had had stronger personalities she might have had to emphasise her position to get her way but as it was, in the end they had glanced at each other, then meekly followed her down to the engine room, past the poor girl who was still waiting for news about the missing pilot. Athena thought grimly that a replacement for the shuttle would be next on the list. They had enough spare anti-grav units to power a flyable craft, but they would first need to mine the raw metal from which to make the airframe as all the readily usable spars had already been cannibalised in the harvesting of Cassini for building materials. In interstellar haulage, the margins were extremely fine, and they had carried no spare material on their one way trip. Once the shaft was sunk and the mine in operation, creating the parts they needed should only take another two days, even with the limited metal shaping capabilities of the machine she was about to create. Say five days all together. Athena wondered if Grad and Jim were out there waiting for help. In her heart of hearts she doubted that they were, But she supposed it was possible that the life tracing pellets would have been knocked out by the electro – magnetic pulse, after all, the same E.M.P. had destroyed all the life - tracers of the miners who had been near the blast. The process of replacing the pellets was luckily a simple and painless one, and they had of course pellets by the tens of thousands in storage for the unborn generations yet to come. Dr Clarke had given each of the quarrymen a new pellet as part of the first aid process when they had first been walked in by Sergeant Raoul’s rescue party. A more serious problem was that each of them had lost internal comms.

  The engineers had quickly dropped their guarded stance when, within moments, Athena had taken off the panel of the main drive and had correctly sequenced the shutdown and isolation procedure. Both of them would have had to comm detailed instructions on how to carry this out, but Athena’s hands had seemed to know what to do on their own. In under an hour she was looking at a silver ball the size of a human head in which the raging power of a plasma field was contained. This one was state of the art, and though it might be smaller than the one they had lost at the quarry, it was a great deal more powerful. She reached in, and as if taking up a holy relic, lifted the ball gently.

  <><><>

  Grad had dozed fitfully through the night, lying on the sand of the shoreline. He had grown up on Patel 5, one of a series of Earth like planets discovered by the legendary astronomer who had given them her name. There, sleeping out was one of the rituals of childhood, despite the many minor hazards of stinging moss and itchy bugs. He’d always thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Here, though, it was a little different and it was during the night that Grad realised why: it was too quiet. Sure there was the odd sound of wind through the grass, but that was all. No birds, no nocturnal animals, not even any trees being blown about. Grad looked forward to when a hundred years or so had passed and the planet had been stocked with the best of the galaxy’s wildlife. Trout from earth in the ponds and rivers. Strobos from Uxalla flitting through the trees, maybe even a few top predators, suitably conditioned not to attack humans of course, like Lion-Apes or Dracos. Imagine that, he thought, you’re in your tent and there’s a crashing in the bushes. You roll out of your sleeping bag, open the tent flaps a tiny crack, trying not to breathe too noisily. And a full grown female Draco goes streaming past, starlight glinting off her silver scales, back crest and mane throbbing and pulsing with inner fires. You’d be scared, but you would be exhilarated. Course, he’d be an old, old man by then, but he made a date with himself to come back here and camp. This very spot. In two hundred years’ time. It would be easy to find, he realised; it would be a national historic spot. “Here, in the year 2532, Grad Ranahoff crashed the colony’s one and only shuttle, thereby earning the name “Grad the Failure”, and dooming the colony to the backwater status it suffers to this day.” He ground his teeth. Like all pilots in all times he resented the ground man’s readiness to blame “Pilot Error”.

  Grad must have dozed off again because when he opened his eyes the very first light of dawn was washing out the stars. He sat up and looked over to check on Jim, and Chan groaned a little and opened his eyes. His pupils were wide with shock and pain. Grad bustled around him, piling up the sand into a kind of bolster behind Jim’s head. There wasn’t really anything else he could do. He cupped his hands and gathered a little water which Jim sucked down greedily, nodding his thanks. Grad went back for more, going onto one knee in the cool soft sand at the lake’s edge.

  Then he saw it. Two glowing red eyes were rushing across the beach towards him. For a second he thought he must be dreaming, then he knew that he was not. The eyes were set into a large flattish head, and the head trailed what looked like a length of spinal cord. It floated about six feet above the ground. Glaring balefully, the head rushed along the beach and came to a halt, hovering just in front of him. Looking closer, Grad laughed out loud with relief. They were rescued.

  <><><>

  Jackson poked his head out of the control room door and coughed. Lana stopped three paces from the bend in the corridor and turned, barely daring to look. Jackson was grinning smugly.

  “I’ve got him for you. Do you want to talk to him?”

  In the room there was a projected image of Grad. He was standing next to a lake in the pale pre-dawn light, on the ground next to him lay the prone form of Jim Chan, the missing Chief Engineer. He was grinning weakly a
nd holding his arm in a funny way.

  Grad must have seen her on the Probe’s projection because he broke into a massive grin.

  “Hey kiddo! Guess what? I broke my aeroplane…!”

  <><><>

  The organism sensed the coming of day and instinct drove it to seek shelter. The ultra violet rays of the sun would destroy its structure and kill it in moments, even in the deepest parts of the body it had taken possession of there would be no safety and so it reverted to an ancient pattern of behaviour, the one with which it had met the coming of hundreds of thousands of years as it had evolved amongst the creatures the planet had once supported. It turned its host away from the pursuit of new vessels to infect, and sought the shelter of a lake’s deepest mud.

  Gunnar’s corpse sloshed through the shallows, wading deeper and deeper until the water rose past the empty sockets and closed over the skull and only oily traces were left on the gently rocking surface.

  <><><>

  Jackson’s next move was to run down the corridor to tell Athena of his success locating the missing men. As he approached her cabin he slowed his pace and sucked in lungfuls of air, trying to slow his breathing. It had suddenly struck him that he would cut a ridiculous figure, bursting in red and out of breath, and at that very thought he felt his face redden even more with embarrassment. He wished he had stayed in the plotting room and had contacted Athena through internal comms instead; he could have projected any image he had wanted, or none at all. Now he was going to look foolish, running down here like a child…

  Athena was delighted with the news, but even in the heady rush of relief she knew that they would still have to keep to the schedule she had set. The two men would have to be supplied with what they needed by small packages carried by probes until they could be extracted by air when the new shuttle was ready. She could see that this wasn’t a popular decision, Jackson had wanted to lead a rescue party of marines. “Two days out, two days back” he had claimed. But really it wasn’t worth the trouble to save Jim and Grad from one extra night’s camping. When she had consulted Jim he had concurred, and the greyness of his face showed that he could at any rate, in no way have managed a two day journey bouncing on a stretcher.

  In the end it was decided that a probe would have to be taken off the emergency role they had assumed, flying a sort of skeleton shuttle service of small packages of supplies. One shuttle would keep a daily link between the downed men and Cassini. Medical supplies would go out on the first trip, and when they reached the crash site in four hours’ time, Dr Clark would talk Grad through scanning himself and his companion for internal injuries and setting Jim’s broken arm. If the scan did not show up anything complicated, then the next probe would take out food supplies, and a final flight would take out shelter for the night. If one of them had sustained life threatening internal injuries then Jackson might get his little cross-country march after all, and Dr Clark would have to go out with them.

  Before Athena could get back to work on the new mining machine, though, she had one little job to do which she didn’t mind at all. Knocking softly on the door she entered Amy’s room. The child lifted its sleepy head from the pillow.

  “Is it about Daddy?”

  “Yes, dear, we’ve found him. he’s all right but he’s broken his arm. He can’t get back to see you just yet but he should be here at the end of the week.” She tussled the child’s unkempt hair, then stroked it flat. Amy solemnly considered what she had been told.

  “Daddy’s arm, is it broken off?”

  <><><>

  The morning was now well under way, and everyone was up, even Hannah’s lazy husband Daniel who slept in every day until nearly half past seven. They were digging now at the trench which would fetch the stream closer to their camp site. They had finished a whole section yesterday, and today they would finish the next. The channel would have a very slow flow, for, like almost everywhere on the planet the ground for miles around was pretty flat, but there would be enough movement to ensure clean water all the time. Of course Daniel had been in favour of moving the wagons closer to the stream and setting up camp there, but Johan had managed to overcome his friend’s lazy inclinations by pointing out to him the signs of occasional flooding around the stream’s present banks, and the muddy shallow pool it flowed into so quickly. Bringing the stream to the lager would also bring it nice and close to the fields they would soon create. After that they would dig another channel to return it to the pond.

  The digging had a rhythm which kept Johan going even when he was tired, with the spade jabbing in, cutting through the turf and into the rich clay underneath when given the weight of a man’s foot. A tug on the handle and the clod would come away in a lump which then would be thrown up onto the bank, leaving a hole which advanced the trench just a little bit. His rhythm and that of Daniel were slightly different so that for most of the time they were not digging in at the same moment. Indeed, it had become obvious that Daniel dug at a slightly faster rate, making up for his lay-a-bed ways by harder work during the day.

  At the end of the morning, one of the children would be allowed to cut the turf they had left as a baulk between today’s efforts and those of yesterday. As the children whooped and squealed they would run alongside the newly freed water as it chuckled down the new course to the end of the trench, a mere one last day’s digging from their camp.

  Again, Johan felt a deep connection with his pioneering ancestors. They too must have done work like this, and it was amazing to think of the way in which, after centuries of history ending in the tragedy of the loss of Earth, after billions of miles of travel amongst the stars, after so many compromises, big and little on the use of technology. It still all came down to a man with a spade, digging through God’s good soil, providing for his family.

  The thought of his ancestors gave Johan the familiar feeling of discomfort which, he knew, most of the New Amish had. They had made too big a compromise when they agreed to leave the doomed Earth, even though they all knew what had befallen the zealots who stayed until the seas boiled. They too could hardly have been said to have been living in the traditional way under their domes, until they perished.

  Johanna’s Great, Great, Grandfather had done what his Pastor had told him to do; had passively resisted “The Expulsion” (or “The Intervention” as the English called it). He had been loaded, stunned into unconsciousness, on a giant freighter, and had woken up well outside the Solar System on an automated flight to the distant stars. In the end their Pastors had told them to accept it as the will of God, but even so they had had to put on one side a great deal of Biblical Cosmology just to explain their being here in the heavens, and this threatened to erode the very basis of their faith.

  But surely this world, with its climate so perfect for mankind, had to be the gift of a kind God, the English called it “Goldilocks”, but to Johan it was a second Eden. The decision to spread themselves further had cost the faithful dearly; many amongst them had argued that the forced expulsion from Earth had been one thing, after all, they had done all they could to resist that. But in taking further steps to other planets they were not only complying with their exile, but actually travelling further from the Earth and, some argued, further from Grace. In the end a vote had been taken and a narrow majority had voted for the right of a man to settle where he liked, at least until such time as it was possible to return to Earth. As often happens when a movement of deep and sincerely held beliefs comes to a crossroads and such a vote is taken, the losing side elected to schism from the main body of the Amish, they were still on the relatively hostile desert world they were first landed on, while the authorities sought either to induce them to move or at least let them terra form the dry planet into somewhere more conducive to life. Last Johan had heard, his brothers were still refusing point blank to farm the sand and dust in anything but the hard way. He couldn’t help but admire their firmness of will and feel a little jealous of their strength of faith, even in the face of a dreadful mor
tality rate.

  Johan loved to work in this way, with Daniel toiling beside him, giving him the comfort of a companion but the space to think his own big thoughts. And now here were the children, using the break in their lessons to run over and see the progress the channel was making.

  Chapter 6

  Athena looked up from the circuit she was assembling, Lana was standing before her and Athena could tell that she had a request to make.

  “Hello, dear. Have you managed to get some sleep yet?”

  Lana smiled a washed-out smile. “Yes thanks Athena, I got about five hours after the guys had been found. I just lay down and went out like a light.” Lana held up something the size of a dinner plate. It was matt black and had one smooth surface and one covered in indentations which looked random but were, Athena knew, laid down in an extremely specific order. “Athena, I know we need every one of these to help with the lifting now the shuttle’s gone, but I was wondering, could we spare two? It would be in a very good cause I promise.”

  Athena felt very dubious. “We arrived with how many? A hundred or so?”