Blighted Star

by Tom Parkinson

  A small breeze blew up and the grass around her moved in slow waves. It put her in mind of the two big seas on their new world, far away to the north and the south, across the immensity of the grass plain. Both “seas” were really rings of melt water around the frozen polar regions. They were only a handful of kilometres wide, but were thousands of kilometres long. From space the planet had a strange, almost manufactured look, with the glaring white poles giving way to the bands of intense blue of the high latitude seas. These in turn giving way to glowing green shot with tiny dots of lakes. The whole had a sense of regularity which most planets, like Earth with its restless plate tectonics, lacked. Both seas were the only places of extreme weather on the tranquil planet, where polar winds clashed with those of the temperate zone, whipping up immense waves which circled and re - circled the poles until they were almost like the tides the moonless seas lacked. On the polar shores the seas had polished the dripping ice until the surface shone like a mirror, on the landward side they had gauged a deep channel along the side of which they had deposited enormous embankments of drying silt. Every few hours the katabatic waves would thunder through, and the level of the water would rise through a dozen metres or more, before dropping in moments to far below what it had been, briefly exposing the scoured seabed One day she would like to see those waves for herself, and she was sure it would, in the fullness of time, be somewhere people went to on holiday. No doubt the likes of Lana would come up with some extreme sport which she would have to restrict…Athena smiled at the thought of a future with room for such frivolities. It would come, she was sure. As if to confirm her optimism the counter wound down past eight hundred metres.

  <><><>

  Grad stared dolefully at the chessboard they had made in the sand. Once again he felt a desire to reach down and rub the whole thing out, possibly gathering up two of the white pieces to shove up Jim’s nose. He wasn’t a good enough player to see any way out of the elegant trap he had blundered into, but he was good enough to see clearly how it would unfold no matter what he did.

  “Aww. Shit.”

  “What?” Jim was trying to look innocent, but the smirk lurking behind his deadpan expression was struggling to escape.

  “Fuckit. I declare.” Grad pushed over his King. It, like all the other pieces had been made out of mud by Chan while Grad was out on a walk. The fiendish intricacy and sheer attention to detail Jim had put into the set of chessmen had been in themselves a warning of the engineer’s love of the game. They had played six times, and now it was nearly midnight. Grad had won the first one, but had the disquieting feeling that his opponent had been more interested in observing how he had played, rather than in an initial victory. Certainly, Chan had won every game since then with ease, seeming to anticipate all Grad’s moves. Grad’s suggestion that a game of Draughts might make a nice change of pace had been met with nothing more than a raised eyebrow as Jim had set up the pieces for their fifth game. Now with alarm he saw the pieces being lined up again in the glow of the lamp/oven.

  “Well, I’m bushed,” he lied, stretching ostentatiously, “…time to get some Z’s.” Tomorrow would probably be their last full day together, and the routine would be broken up by a visit from Lana in that death-trap she had built, assuming she didn’t drop out of the sky on the way here. Before that he could make a big deal out of his exercise programme, with a long swim followed by a dozen jogged circuits of the lake. If he was lucky, and he stretched things out as much as possible, that would only leave time for three or four games of chess…

  <><><>

  The people of Heart Lake stood on the common and stared. The horse had recovered from its terror and placidly munched on the grass. No one was quite sure what to do, how to approach what was after all a really large animal. Obviously it had come from the Amish settlement to the east, it had probably run away or just wandered off and got itself lost. But now someone would have to let the Amish know where their beast had ended up, and because the Amish had no telecommunications devices, someone would have go and do this face to face. All the sitting around and waiting for supplies to restart had left the town in a strange limbo where doing nothing had developed its own inertia. Though they had nothing better to do, nobody wanted to undertake the thirty-kilometre trek. Staring glumly at the horse, Gerard connected to Jackson for the second time that day. Jackson’s projected image stood perfectly still, with unreadable body language, but Gerard was well aware that he was regarded as a troublemaker by the Lieutenant.

  “Monsieur Pitot.”

  “Lieutenant, are you aware that there is a horse on the green behind me?”

  “Yes Monsieur Pitot, we have received several calls already about the stray animal.”

  “Very good. And what are you going to do about it? Has anyone contacted the Amish?”

  “The Amish don’t have telecoms, Monsieur, but we have taken steps to notify them.”

  “And what steps are those, Lieutenant Jackson? Surely you don’t think the Amish will be very happy talking to a probe. And what if something has gone wrong out there? I don’t think the Amish would have just let the horse go, do you?” Gerard warmed to his theme. “Has anything been done to contact them yet? Has a probe been sent out?”

  “Monsieur Pitot. We have only just learned about the stray animal ourselves down here. We have sent out an airborne mission to assess the situation Not that we even think there is a situation. So far there’s just a stray horse. It is a manned airborne mission…”

  “Ah! So the new shuttle is ready!”

  “…the craft used is not the new shuttle which will be ready very soon according to schedule. The craft we are using was constructed out of spares by one of the pilots. It has limited capacity but does give us back some element of air mobility. In fact she set off from here ten minutes ago so she should be crossing over you within the hour.”

  Gerard nodded curtly and cut the link. Really these people were beyond incompetence, and it was a waste of breath to engage them in argument. Sending out a mere girl on what could, for all they knew, be a dangerous mission on her own. The Amish were a bunch of weirdoes from ancient Earth history, who knew what they might do to an unescorted female. It would serve them right if she was raped or even killed.

  <><><>

  Jackson was worried himself. It had, he had always thought, been a mistake to let the Amish have their way over ID tracers. The agency had been keen to have the Amish on board to give a little local colour. Every planet they settled seemed to have a component of one minority group or another. The NeoMarxists on Tgao 4, the Silent Order of Penitents on Felixia and many more. The policy had worked well, and had added to the variety of ways of life being tried out by humanity, which was generally considered to be a good thing.

  But good thing or not, it left Jackson with four adults and two children unaccounted for who he couldn’t trace. Shit, no. Five adults, there was still that first guy, Gunnar Olafson. There was still no sign of him. Jackson connected to Lana.

  “Lana. How are you getting on?” In the background he could faintly hear what she was hearing, the rush of wind.

  “Hi Jackson. Doing fine, just been over Crescent Waters, Heart Lake in about forty minutes. The horse still there?”

  “Yes, it’s still there. Listen, do me a favour. Could you keep an eye open for a solitary walker? I meant to track him down a few days ago but a lot has happened since then…”

  “Oh yes, is this that Norwegian Asteroid guy?”

  “Yes, that’s him. Don’t deviate from the course, but if you see him let me know.”

  “Will do. Speak to you soon.”

  “Thanks Lana.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  <><><>

  Lana trimmed the canoe to lose a little height, she had just remembered a trick her brother had invented and she wanted to try it out. You left the A/Gs on the setting they were on, trying to hold you at a certain height, then you forced the canoe down against their resistance by leaning fo
rward, putting the nose down and using the fan propulsion and the aerodynamic forces on the hull to force you down in a nose dive. In the end you reached a point where the A/G’s won out and you wouldn’t sink any further. Then you leaned back and shot into the sky like a catapulted stone! With a whoop Lana shot upwards, completing the stunt, her stomach full of fluttering wings and her sight greying just a little at the edges.

  Lana got her breath back and started the manoeuvre again. Ahead she could see the settlement of Crescent Waters with its big open green on which the tiny rash of a crowd was gathered. She adjusted her course a touch to the left so that she would pass near one edge of the crowd. By now, the A/G’s were grumbling and the canoe was just about at the bottom of the dive. She held it just a little longer, passing over the houses at a hundred metres. She could see the crowd turning to look at her, suddenly turning lighter as upturned faces replaced darker hair. She caught a glimpse of the horse in the middle of the crowd, now being ignored.

  She leaned back, hard, and the canoe stood on its stern. The A/Gs’ grumble rose to a whine as the load on them was suddenly reduced. The canoe shot forward and up, pinning her into the rear of the cockpit. Her toes felt tingly and were being pulled back towards her away from the footrest by the Gs.

  Her velocity began to decrease and she pulled gently on the stick, steepening her angle while she still had momentum, maintaining the pressure of centrifugal force pushing her into her seat. The canoe went through the vertical and tilted backward, more and more until she lost centrifugal force and after a second’s weightlessness, hung from her straps, looking down from a thousand metres to the gasping crowd below her.

  She leaned hard forward, her stomach muscles straining with the effort, and the nose came down through the horizon and began to point ever more directly at the ground below until she was hurtling straight down, height peeling away in the screaming wind. Her hair, in its pony tail, flapped and banged in the turbulence behind her, tugging pleasurably at her scalp. Her eyes streamed with tears which were flicked away as soon as they formed, and her cheeks bulged wide as the wind blasted into her open mouth, making her teeth throb a little as if she had drunk icy water. She tugged the stick again, leaning back to help the nose up, and the town below slid out of view beneath her. Though her cheeks were frozen, she was streaming with sweat inside her flight suit. Wearing a lopsided grin, she left the settlement behind and cruised nonchalantly east, where the last of the sun’s rays were reflecting on the silver - grey rocks of an outcrop set like an island in the sea of grass.

  Chapter 9

  Athena felt she had to be here even though she knew that everything was done automatically. Such a great deal depended on success that it seemed wrong to let the occasion pass without some acknowledgement. Besides, she had about twenty more minutes to kill before Lana reached the Amish, and this was one way of using them productively. She also wanted, at this critical moment, to be alone with her thoughts and away from the bustle of the control room. Out here the evening was still and calm, and the eastern horizon, as it darkened, was shot with the tiniest glimmers which would soon become the awesome display of the Skagorack.

  As she crossed the final few steps to her machine she could see no visible change in its status, no change in the pitch of the gentle thrumming of the focussed power within. The only outward sign was the ticking down of the gauge. She watched the countdown reached zero and the mining machine went seamlessly, without even a click to show a change in its function, over to “Extraction”. Far below her, magnetic force beams reached into the core of the planet and drew out the metallic elements from the olerite. The elements were pulled into the shaft, and on being released from the tremendous pressure they had been under, sprang out of the liquid metal state and into the gaseous one. From this the problem wasn’t so much drawing the metal up the shaft as holding back the excess. Athena had once seen a histortainment visual about an olerite mining disaster from the late twenty-second century; it had been excruciating, with chronological errors which even an amateur fan of early space like herself had had trouble ignoring. It had been famous really for its near – life special effects, and those had been pretty spectacular. A volcano of molten metal had grown up before her, and she had seemed to smell the burning of her own hair as the planetary atmosphere had cooked. When the volcano had grown to full size, and had bulged out of the side of the dying planet like a ghastly beak, its own weight had driven it back towards the core and she had seen, from space, the whole planet turn itself inside out; pieces of crust tens of kilometres wide upending in seas of glowing magma, cracks spreading round the entire surface of the planet as seas turned to steam, hiding the pandemonium below beneath a white death shroud of cloud. In the real events the vid portrayed, ten billion people had been killed, only sixty million had escaped.

  That was long ago of course, and techniques had completely changed. Still, it was a sobering thought that just below her feet; planet killing forces were being held in check by a machine that she had built. She checked the time, she still had about five minutes she could spare before she had to get back to witness Lana’s meeting with the Amish, that should be just enough time…

  As she watched, from the far end of the machine, a cloud of super – heated metal steam jetted out of the long chimney. The heat glowed on her skin as she smelled again the smell of ozone which was an integral part of an olerite mine. Personally she quite liked the smell, but she knew that many people hated it, and she could understand why. Though harmless, it did leave a somewhat cloying taste in the back of your mouth.

  Now came the moment of truth; incredibly powerful magnetic forces took hold of the cloud of molten metal particles and drew them together, shaping them at the same time into a two metre square sheet of metal, if she had made the slightest error in the building of the machine, then here was another bottle neck in the process where such mistakes would show. The particles gelled together with a final pulse of heat and light, and there, hovering high in the air, was a perfect sheet of glowing metal, already being lowered onto a waiting pallet. As it cooled, it twisted out of true with a deep “Bong”, but Athena knew that this was normal, olerite mines were almost musical places… Already another cloud of gas was jetting out into the sky and Athena allowed herself a brief moment to watch. They were back in business. She turned and jogged back towards Cassini.

  <><><>

  Seeing the girl fly over and perform her perfect loop had an enormous effect on the crowd. Their minds, for so long now preoccupied with the serious business of the present crisis, in an instant had a new focus and smiles replaced the worried frowns. On top of that, the horse, which really needed an enzyme supplement to get the best out of the planetary grass analogue, let out a prolonged fart which seemed timed as a fanfare to the aerobatics. Even Gerard couldn’t help a grin spreading across his features. Perhaps their troubles were after all, no more than temporary setbacks.

  <><><>

  The sun was casting long deep shadows when Lana cut the power and settled the canoe on the grass in the compound. She noticed it had been nibbled short by the animals. The next thing to get her attention was the fact that the wire fence on one side of the enclosure she had landed in had been broken down. Of the animals there was no sign. She beamed the image back to Cassini.

  “Are you guys getting this?” Lana wondered if they could hear the rapid pounding of her heart through the comms implant as well as her voice and the images her eyes picked up.

  “Yes, we’re getting a good clear picture, Lana. Just hang on a second.” Athena’s usually reassuring voice sounded full of fear, as if the condition was contagious, even at long distance. “Listen, we both think it’s pretty clear something bad has happened up there, and we don’t want you to take any more risks. Don’t investigate further, we’ll send a team up there in two days.”

  “Okay, if you’re sure. I hate to admit it, but I really am scared. And there’s this weird smell, like really rotting meat. I feel like I’m going
to gag.” She had once found a Prolach washed up on a beach on her home world and the large decaying fish had given off a similarly ghastly odour.

  “Just come right back. We know enough to know there’s a problem.”

  Still Lana hesitated. Fighting her instinct to escape, she steeled herself for one task and took a step towards the nearest wagon.

  “Listen, I’m just going to look inside the wagon, they might be inside.”

  “All right, if you think you can, but don’t go inside.”

  The stench was now overpowering and Lana had to force one foot in front of the other by conscious act of will. On the flap of the wagon were smears of some unidentifiable substance. Lana checked her hand which was about to touch the filth, and she looked round in the gathering gloom until she found a long whip hanging on a peg on the shaft of the wagon. Using its handle she opened the flap and peered inside. She leaned a little closer, and as her eyes became accustomed to the gloom she could see the signs of a violent struggle. There was a sudden squawk from her comms and she leapt back from the opening.

  “Jeez!”

  “Sorry Lana, didn’t mean to startle you. Listen. Get back. Or at least get up in the air. I don’t know about you but we’re both freaking out.”

  “I’m on my way, what do you think happened?”

  “It’s too soon to make assumptions. We’ll send in probes and get samples tomorrow. See you back here. And Lana, well done.”

  “Thanks Athena, see you shortly.”

  She climbed back over the broken fence, feeling as if eyes were boring into the back of her neck. The light was fading fast. She felt a sudden sharp pain in the palm of her hand and glanced down. A red pearl of blood had formed where she’d cut herself slightly on a sharp, broken edge. She walked to the canoe, sucking at the blood. She couldn’t wait to get airborne and away from this stench. On reaching the canoe, she realised she would have to sit down and strap herself in, and again she had to fight against instinct. Before giving up the ability to run away, she looked around very carefully. The whole place was still deserted. She sat down and quickly fastened the buckles. She gave the A/G’s full power and the canoe bobbed straight up to a hundred metres. Lana’s stomach took a second or to catch up, and when it did, she felt an overwhelming urge to throw up. This she did, rocking the small craft in time with her heaves. Damn that stench!