Blighted Star

by Tom Parkinson

  The two dots were moving through the landscape between two bodies of water, behind them by about one hundred and fifty metres, the elongated figure of the pursuing animal showed clearly in the regular flashes of lightning. From this height, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with it other than the slow pace with it progressed. The two men still hadn’t seen them, and Lana commed through to Grad.

  “Hey! I’m up here! Get ready, I’m coming down for you.” Below, one of the dots, then the other, lightened as the two looked up. Lana repressed the urge to wave, and concentrated on making her turn. As she did so, the dark sky was ripped right open by a blinding stream of light. Patel had seen his opportunity and had shot at the horse. Lana could see nothing for a moment, and was further disorientated by the incredible double boom of the zapped air expanding out along a two hundred metre column, then the same air rushing back into the created vacuum. Lana let go of all the controls, knowing that the craft would right itself without further inputs. Even so, they wobbled dramatically, and when she got her sight back it was to see Patel scrambling back onto the strut his feet had skidded off when they swerved. He looked over to her and mouthed the word “Sorry”.

  They both looked through the rain to the horse. It was down. The head was gone, utterly vapourised by the powerful energy beam. Patel grinned and patted the cannon, giving her the thumbs up. Lana grinned back, all forgiven, and the swooped down to where the figures were waiting.

  Grad strode up beside her and they kissed through the airframe. Lana felt as if they had been separated for years. She bit his lip and wrapped her arm around his neck, pulling him back when, with a yelp, he tried to pull away. In the end, he tapped her back, twice, and she let him go.

  “Easy, easy.” he said with a grin, “Listen, what was that you hit the horse with? The ‘Twenty’?”

  “Sure was.” the trooper swung the barrel in a small circle. “Made a real mess. What was wrong with the damn animal anyway?”

  “That’s what we need to find out, right Jim? We’ll need to take a sample. We need some kind of sealable container or bag. You got anything?” Lana shook her head, the soldier held up a hand, then dug into a pouch on his belt. He held up a first aid box, from which he removed the contents, then he passed the empty container across.

  “Thanks, perfect. Stay here Jim, you look beat, I’ll go.” With that Grad sprinted off in the direction of the fallen beast.

  The bottom of his trousers were completely soaked through, and with every step the water squelched out of his shoes. He couldn’t wait to get into a warm shower, then into a soft warm bed. “Must be getting old.” he thought. Up ahead the sky was finally beginning to get lighter as the storm heads peeled away from the horizon. Soon the unnatural dark would be gone and the evening twilight would return before giving way to a night bright with stars. He slowed his pace. Here, surely, was where the beam had struck down? He searched around a little, and there, slightly to one side of where he’d expected it to be, was a blast mark. He caught a whiff of the burned ground which would extend downward for maybe a metre. There was also another smell, one of vile decay like rancid meat. Looking at the grass around him he could see small fragments of brittle looking bone, and gobbets of discoloured flesh. There was surprisingly little. The trooper hadn’t been joking, the cannon certainly had made quite a mess. The whole horse had been blasted away!

  Very carefully, Grad bent down and scooped up a specimen of the flesh, using the lid to guide the substance in without touching it with his hands. Straightening up, he turned and jogged purposefully back to the others. Over to his right, the surface of the nearby lake swirled slightly and a few bubbles rose to the surface as the muddy bed was disturbed.

  They rose into the air, through the last drops of rain, and turned back towards Crescent Waters. Grad and Jim found what comfort they could on the open cargo deck, their clothing working its hardest to combat the chilling of the wind after their soaking. Lana, glanced back every now and then to check they were okay. In the end, she glanced back, and they had both nodded off in exhausted sleep, the First Aid box making a lump under Grad’s tightly closed jacket.

  <><><>

  The news that the two missing men were safe was not nearly as welcome to Jackson as the news that the cannon was on its way back to them. They had by now left the town behind them and were jogging along the unfinished road towards the lake where the rest of the traces were clustered. Jackson had no idea what to expect from the cluster. Perhaps they would be in a similar condition to the Frenchman. Perhaps worse. From the traces there was no way to tell what state the bodies were in, the only thing he knew was that they were by now certainly looking for bodies, not some sort of malfunction in the surveying system. He glanced at the sky, Lana would be back in about forty minutes… That would give them about fifteen minutes at the lakeside. He hoped that would be enough. One of his men suddenly stopped and lifted up his arm, a moment later the troopers voice came over the comms.

  “Sir, think you should see this.” The trooper turned, found him, and pointed with the targe gun to something on the ground near his feet. Jackson jogged up.

  The object on the ground was about a third of a metre long, and ten centimetres high at its highest point. it was roughly lozenge shaped, and coloured a dark grey like ash. Jackson hunkered down and looked more closely. It was hollow, and the inside could be seen through many rents in lines down each side. At each end, there were solid lumps with two thin stick like projections at angles in the grass. Slowly, the shape resolved itself and Jackson realised he was looking at the cadaver of a dog. He reached out with his hand and touched the ribcage. At this merest of touches, the whole carcass crumbled away to dust. He looked up in puzzlement to the men gathered around him. He straightened up, dusting the black smudge from his finger on his combat fatigues.

  “Herschel, get a sample, then follow us.” he led them on down to the lake.

  Chapter 13

  While she waited for the next report to come in from Jackson, Athena continued composing the message she would have to beam out to the next settlement ship, already well on its way to Saunder’s World. She scrolled through the reports she had sent since their arrival, charting their early success, followed so swiftly by the catalogue of failures and disasters which had left nearly a third of the colony dead to some unknown cause, and the rest of them living in fear. She wondered if, when the oncoming ship received the signal, any of them would be left alive. She allowed herself the brief luxury of despair, then with an effort, drew her reserves together. It would not do any of them any good to give up now…

  Athena‘s thoughts went back to the final weeks before embarkation. She had had a final meeting with Saunders himself, a sprightly two hundred year old, and very much a legend within the Diaspora movement. He had been every bit the charismatic visionary she had been expecting. When she had walked into the room he had been looking at a hologram of a blue green planet circling in the air before him. It was a huge representation about a metre across, and Athena had wondered for a moment why Saunders didn’t simply have the image projected onto his internal comms, then she remembered that it was one of his eccentricities not to have any such devices implanted.

  The hologram was of a planet she did not at first recognise. It looked beautiful and diverse, with nearly half its surface covered by one immense blue ocean over which swirls of white showed the presence of many different weather systems. As the planet rotated, the other side came into view with land masses richly banded in the green of verdant forests and farmland, the browns and yellows of deserts, and the stark white of polar regions.

  “Earth.” Saunders gestured at the hologram. “Earth as it was back in the Pre – Plastic ages. Beautiful, wasn’t it?” He turned his brown eyes to hers, two still ponds of vast depth. “We threw all that away. Ever since, we’ve been trying to find the same thing again, but we never quite find a perfect match.” He watched the globe again for a few moments, and Athena watched with him as four hu
ndred years of history were condensed graphically. She watched processes which had taken decades happen before her eyes as the atmosphere became opaque, and the dark green bands of the forests were eroded, first into the light green of farmland, then into the brown of desert. Everywhere grey cities formed like scabs across the continents, even into the seas. Several times, numbers of these cities were blackened by wars, but each time they re-erupted, usually in the same place. Meanwhile, the white zones at the top and the bottom of the globe were retreating, and the sea, now grey and lifeless looking, expanded , travelling far into the continents. In the last phases, the earth lost all of its colours except browns, blacks and greys as the atmosphere exceeded the temperature and the toxicity at which life could exist. Athena had had a paint set when she was a little girl. Sometimes she would mix the paints too much in the search for new colours, and the picture she was working on would end up like the hologram before her, a mass of vile mud tones. She would know then that her labour had been lost, that it was easier to start again than to try to retrieve her work. She would cry hot tears of anger at the wasted paint, the wasted paper, and the wasted effort.

  Saunders had searched her eyes, but what he was looking for she had no idea.

  “Even with all the advances we’ve made we still basically do the same thing. Do you know what the Cherubim call us? They call us “The Plunderers”.”

  The Diaspora movement was not without critics, both human and other sentients; many were of the opinion that mankind’s record on many planets, not least of its home world, was to say the least questionable. That, in fact, mankind did not deserve the stars and as a species allowed itself to exist through expansion and not through the careful gardening of its resources as other species did. It was a fortunate thing indeed that the three other space – faring species that mankind had encountered so far had evolved way past the use of violence. It was the Cherubim who had given man scavenger technology, at one stroke taking away the struggle for sources of energy. The gift had worked to some extent; since the advent of scavenger tech, only two interplanetary wars had been fought. Mankind had one less pressing need to fight over. But the sad truth was that scavenger technology had been used to create weapons of true hideousness. The Cherubim, seeing this, had broken off contact and now were only ever glimpsed when their projected selves moved like ghosts through some human area. The projections never replied to the beseeched enquiries put to them.

  Saunders and other second generation Diasporists argued that humankind needed to expand because of its fragility; that spreading the stars offered a refuge from the extinction that humans so readily courted.

  What it boiled down to was the philosophical question. Was mankind worthy of life? Athena had asked herself this on many occasions. She had an interest in history, and she was all too familiar with the catalogue of atrocities, genocides and holocausts. the wars, the drivings to extinction, the destruction of habitat on a planetary scale. In all, the sheer blindness to their own best interests that humans had consistently shown. But in the end, she had to take the wager that mankind had a chance to be great. It was an act of faith, but it was one she was willing to perform.

  Whatever it was that Saunders had been looking for in her eyes, his manner suddenly changed. he waved his hand at the globe and it faded rapidly and was gone. In its place, a planet she was more familiar with appeared, the one they were about to travel to, Saunder’s World.

  <><><>

  Jackson’s squad was within a kilometre of the lakeside when they came across the first burned out body of a child. Gently, reverently, the man detailed took the sample while the others slogged on, all of them only too aware of the sun falling below the horizon. Another small pile of blackened remains, then another, and soon after another. In the end they barely checked their pace. Each time, Jackson merely called out a name, and the trooper nominated would fall behind for a few seconds. Though they displayed no emotion at each site, the anger which had been building in their hearts against their unknown enemy began to solidify into a cold longing for revenge. Jackson glanced round at the set faces, and knew that when the time came, not one soldier would hold back.

  They drew up a little short of the edge of the lake, keeping to the roughly carbonised surface of the unfinished road. Then Sanchez, covered by two others, ran forward and placed the Aqua – probe in the shallows. As he ran back, a ripple spread out from the fist-sized object, distorting the reds and yellows of the reflected sunset. Sanchez re-joined them and took control of the device. Jackson patched in to the remote probe’s visuals.

  The water shelved away quickly before the small craft, and Sanchez guided it forward, hugging the bottom. The probe moved quickly and didn’t have far to go; all the traces were registering in a closely packed group about twenty metres out, in about five metres of water. The probe was equipped with the ability to see in a wide range of the spectrum, but with no body heat registering on infra – red, Sanchez elected for normal visual range, and switched on the probe’s powerful lights.

  The lakebed before them was made up of loosely packed mud and slime, and at first, there was no sign of the missing three hundred people. Sanchez nosed in closer; right where they knew there to be a trace. Still nothing, just the uneven bed of the lake, Sanchez looked across at Jackson, shrugging. He put the probe into reverse, and the gentle jets from the forward thrusters caused twin puffs to rise from the loose sediment. As the visual angle changed, Jackson caught sight of something in the tail of his eye.

  “Hold on, go back, but go in slowly, try not to stir things up too much.”

  The probe nudged forward again, and as the sediment dispersed, the men could see clearly the face of a woman, but a ravaged face like one from a hundred-year tomb. Sanchez switched to Sonics, and the sound signals cut straight through the mud to reveal the full horror of the scene. depicted in black and white, the bodies of three hundred people lay in dreadful community beneath the silt of the lake. They lay in piles like fallen branches, Limbs twisted, stomachs ruptured. All of the dead faces had suffered the same decay as the woman. Jackson restrained the urge to gag and turned to Sanchez.

  “Keep looking; see if you can find the creatures that did this. Look for movement.”

  He straightened up, longing to take off the respirator and to draw in a deep breath, but knowing that to do so would give him only the stench of corruption. The HUD in the corner of the screen was telling him that the air was not deadly, but was still fairly noxious.

  “Ma’am, did you get all that?”

  “Yes. Thank you Lieutenant.” Athena’s voice was subdued, though it wasn’t obvious, he could tell the she was crying. “Are you going on to the blocking point now?”

  “Just as soon as transport arrives.”

  “Be careful Lieutenant.”

  Hernandez tapped him on the arm and pointed to the sky, the shuttle was dropping rapidly towards them. In moments it was nestling onto the grass beside them and Jackson was accepting Grad’s arm as he clambered in. The pilot and the engineer were both gagging and coughing in the foul air. Sanchez was still on the grass.

  “You want me to get the probe back, sir?” Jackson could imagine what that would be like, running back over on your own to the side of the lake…

  “Leave it. We’ll get it some other time.” he held out his hand and hauled in a grateful Sanchez.

  “Yeah, let’s get the fuck out of Dodge.” said one of the men, his voice hard to identify through the respirator. Jackson, scowling for form’s sake at the lack of discipline, inwardly wholeheartedly agreed. The shuttle, heavily loaded now, rose high into the air and turned to head for a point halfway down the road to nearby Heartlake.

  Behind them, beneath the still waters, the probe switched itself off and inflated its swim bladder, it rose inertly to the surface. Its cameras blind to the stirrings of the bodies in the depths below, it floated under the brightening stars.

  <><><>

  The men formed a line across the road and knelt
at the ready in the rapidly cooling night air. Every man strained his sight, looking for movement of any kind in the dark. With no idea of what they faced, each had his own nightmare version of their foe.

  The shuttle left them for a few moments, whisking back to the town to organise the townsfolk should an evacuation be necessary. Jackson fervently hoped that it would not be. Moving three hundred people safely through a night time landscape without anyone getting lost or hurt would be a hell of a task at the best of times. Add the panic and the haste, and you had a real recipe for disaster. Besides, if they couldn’t hold the enemy here or at the crossroads, then holding attacks off in open country while at the same time shepherding civilians on a twenty klick hike? Well, he just couldn’t see it working. They might not have much choice though, the gas the creatures gave off could easily kill the whole populace.

  “Lieutenant, please check your readout on the traces.” Athena’s voice had an urgency which made him lose no time in studying the visual. There, behind the tiny cluster of green dots which reported his own and his men’s position, was the large gathering of the townspeople’s life traces. Moving swiftly towards him from there was a group of four green traces which were the blips from the shuttle. But what drew his astonished attention was the large blotch of red clusters to the east where the lake with the bodies was. He looked, and looked again, but there was no way to deny what his eyes were telling him, the red dots were moving, and they were moving in his direction.

  What could it mean? Were the dead being brought along by the creatures? Were they a movable food supply? It seemed to mean that there were enough of the creatures to carry three hundred bodies, albeit slowly. They would need to know, and Jackson contacted the shuttle whose dark shadow blotted out a handful of stars above them