Blighted Star

by Tom Parkinson

  For several centuries the impasse held: the fish in their little lake contained within its fortress of rock, lived out their long lives oblivious to the doom which patiently circled them. Outside the organism clung to life, never obtaining more than a dozen hosts at one time, never succeeding in breaching the wall of rock.

  It is in the nature of life that different years bring gluts of different species. And so it was that an unusually wet season in the area around the crater gave rise to a superabundant flourishing of the small bushes which grew among the rocks. The heavy harvest of berries, with no grazers to eat them, piled on the ground, and the worms moved in, themselves enjoying a glut. Every rotting pile of fruit covered a wriggling mass of little worms. The organism moved in and possessed the tiny corpses, recruiting a veritable army. The worms moved up the slope throughout the night, and the dawn saw a few hundred at the top. The coming of day eradicated those who could find no shelter from the sun’s rays, but a handful persisted beneath a flat rock. When night time came once more they moved down the inside slope towards the lake shore, the arid dust and sand taking a further toll on the bodies, drying them out so that their movements became slower and slower. More burned out on the flat crater floor.

  If the same rain which had caused the harvest of berries had not also swollen the lake in the crater bed to nearly twice its normal size, the fish would have remained safe and the assault would have come to an end in the dry dust as the sun slowly rose. But the last surviving worms inched into the shallows just as the light struck the lip of the crater above them. The wrecked bodies revived a little in the brine. They sought refuge in the soft mud of the lake bed to wait out the long day. Above them the fish moved through the water, each one a giant beacon of life after the tiny sparks the worms had represented.

  When night came, the worms rose out of the mud, and wriggling through the water like so many serpents harvested the flesh of the fish, a total weight of nearly two tonnes, ample to fuel the latent phase in the organism’s makeup. After its long wait here in this arid corner of the planet, the organism got the chance to make the final cast of the dice which would ensure its survival down the ages.

  Chapter 15

  Christel was surprised at her own coolness. Everyone around her was panicking, but though she felt concerned at the danger, part of her was thrilling to the adrenalin in her bloodstream. She had joined the expansion program in the hope of excitement, and her profiling must have shown that she was a seeker after novelty and sensation. Yet so far she had spent two boring years sealed up in a space ship, and then had made a landing on what had to be the galaxy’s most boring planet. At least, it had been ‘til now. Even the emergencies before this one had been boring, restrictive Saunder’s World emergencies. The plasma breach at the quarry had been a perfect example of this; it hadn’t meant any exciting, desperate adventures, or even any pulling together of the colony in a spirit of camaraderie. it had just meant that the supply of raw materials had been interrupted, and that she had lost her lover for a week. Even contacting him had been too risky, the comm link they had given him had been a public one, far too easy to monitor. Especially if your ex was chief of security.

  Now of course, there was this “Lake Monster” crisis, and everyone was running around acting like some slimy green crittur was about to grab them.

  Huh, Goldilocks? Not “Just Right” anymore, was it?

  She decided to go out to the landing field to see what was going on. The soldiers had been pretty freaked out earlier, and had been going to check on the suspected tracer malfunction over at Heart Lake. Maybe there’d be some news about Grad…

  Outside, the shuttle had just landed and the second squad, led by Sgt Raoul, were clambering aboard. A small, silent crowd was escorting three stretchers in the direction of the access to the sickbay. as she approached, a uniformed hand lifted up a respirator, and Jackson’s voice, sounding weak croaked out the wish that it should be put on the shuttle, because someone might need it. Willing hands took the respirator away. She couldn’t make out who was on the other stretchers, so she pushed through the crowd, just in time to see Grad’s pale features above the cover as he was taken inside. He looked dead.

  <><><>

  Lana was bone tired; she had never been as tired as this in her life, yet she knew that she had a long night ahead as they lifted off from Cassini and headed out once more. She steeled herself, she was after all relatively safe up here in the air. Down there on the ground being pursued by those things… She lifted up the respirator, drawing in lungfuls of cool night air to waken herself. During the flight back she’d forgotten about the mask and had worn it all the way. In fact, it had only been when a young man had handed in Jackson’s breathing aid that she had remembered she’d been wearing one. Now she caught a whiff of the vile odour which had made her so sick, and she realised that it must be clinging to the clothes she was wearing.

  Watching Grad being carried off the shuttle had been the worst moment of her life, but now she had to find the strength to carry on, at least until her task was done and the people of Crescent Waters were safe. Grad would be alright. He had to be. The alternative was not a prospect she could contemplate for more than a few seconds before the universe seemed to empty all around her, leaving her life pointless. She shut her mind to the possibility of Grad dying and concentrated instead on the job of flying the shuttle.

  Above five hundred metres, The night sky was full of fluky air, sudden gusts and swirls as the storm system to the north exerted its pull. The stars above were intermittently obscured by the racing wisps of cloud, purple - grey in the starlight. The standing water below them was disturbed by cats – paws of wind.

  Behind her the troops were checking their equipment, readying themselves for the battle ahead. Sgt Raoul, in contact with the squad already on the ground, was quietly but firmly giving orders. They flew over the new mining site. Evacuating the skeleton crew there was going to be just one of the tasks she would have to perform later, when day broke. For now the panicking miners would just have to hold tight

  Not far ahead now, the flickers from the targe guns of the first squad could be seen, zapping out like the intermittent lightning. She aimed for them and lost height, dropping into stiller, warmer air.

  <><><>

  The shuttle’s silent passage through the night sky allowed them to hear every sound. They descended until they were coasting in twenty metres above the ground. Shrieks and cries of warning rang out from every direction, confirming what Raoul’s HUD was showing him, the two masses of dots were becoming enmeshed. A small patch of blues showed where his men were keeping classic arrow head formation, and the red dots seemed to be on the whole keeping back from them. The enemy had become aware that there were easier pickings elsewhere in the sodden landscape.

  As they dropped in, he formed a plan which he transmitted to the troops, they would form into three groups, and would stage a fighting withdrawal. So far as possible they would stay at the back of the retreating civilians, forming a barrier between them and the advancing foe. He would control the battle from the centre group, and the shuttle would zigzag overhead, providing heavy support where it was needed with the remounted twenty. It was the best he could do with no armour, no prepared fortifications, nothing bur twenty swinging dicks and some very basic equipment. One decent piece of armour and this whole thing would have been over in minutes.

  They arrived in the relatively open space near the troops on the ground, the darkness all around them was full of stumbling figures. As soon as the twenty was reattached, and Patel back on his mount, Lana dragged the shuttle back into the air, this time keeping at the hover about ten metres up. Patel, his pupils wide behind the respirator’s window, commenced firing immediately, pacing his double shots so that the gun’s charge stayed midway between zero and full. The white sears of light sliced through the darkness leaving green scars on the vision, and the bang of the air burning each time he fired threatened to disorientate her. Her taught n
erves felt like at any moment they might snap, and each fresh brace of shots made her flinch. Inside the hot respirator, a bead of sweat ran down into her left eye, exacerbating the twitch which had just begun there. She blinked and blinked, trying to stimulate tears to wash it clean.

  The three squads broke apart and walked into the darkness. Under Raoul’s skilful direction they targeted the areas where the civilians were under the most pressure, and their mere presence gave the panicking people a focus, like the standards on an ancient battlefield. Slowly the groups of dots separated as the living ran free from the pursuing dead. But the visual picture that the tagging system put together gave no clue to the conditions on the ground. Here, semi isolated groups of frightened refugees, old and young, were wading through the tussocky grass, falling to their knees, being pulled upright and staggering on through the chilling air. Children were sobbing as they clung to the hands of grim faced adults, and every new form which appeared out of the gloom was a potential deadly threat.

  For Lana it was a night of pandemonium. She flew backwards and forwards along the line of battle, with Patel pumping columns of flickering fire into the masses below. With each pass, the dead could be distinguished from the living even in the dark because they did not raise despairing hands towards her, or hold their crying children out for a rescue she had no time to give. She felt a deep sense of guilt and shame, here out of reach of the monsters while below her the vulnerable fled for their lives. Often, when they came to the hover over a knot of advancing corpses, the pulsing of the twenty millimetre seemed to flash out her own hatred of the vile enemy who had brought about all this misery. Then they would drift away into the night, leaving the dead shattered and broken behind them and the feeling of guilt would descend upon her once more, this time compounded by the realisation that those they had destroyed were, until very recently, people themselves. Looking down on the ravaged, blind faces, with their empty sockets, she recognised many that she had known from her flights in the shuttle, yet there was something in the way these creatures moved, the way their rotting fingers grasped at the sky as you flew past them, which left you in no doubt that they were beyond the name of human. From the depth of the superstitious past came a word which Lana only half knew, but one which made her flesh crawl, zombie.

  Over to the east a small group of green dots were being cut off from the rest of the retreat, and Lana had canted the craft round and fed in a handful of boost even before Raoul’s crisp commands had directed her that way. They slanted through the air at eighty kilometres, Lana torn between the need to get there quickly and the fear of overshooting in the dark. Patel saw them first and the twenty spoke. knocking down the first three of the advancing enemy, and those directly behind them. The green traces turned out to belong to a family group, whose progress was being slowed by the father, who was struggling along with a twisted ankle. Even from above Lana could see that he was exhorting his wife to go, and take their two girls with her. More dead lurched in from the left, and Patel had to fire repeatedly to keep them at bay. Now, with the gun’s energy depleted, Patel was forced to take down only the very closest of the attackers, and still the woman refused to leave her man.

  Suddenly, Lana had a clear memory of where she had seen these people before. Two weeks ago they had ridden into Cassini to visit relatives. The two girls were called Jay and Marthy. Lana got the craft in closer, hoping for a chance to pick them up, knowing that she was being criminally foolish in risking the shuttle in this way, but not caring. At that moment, one of the creatures stepped forward out of the gloom, and even as the barrel of the gun swung round onto it, a fan shaped spray of black vomit erupted from its cracked lips, splattering the family. A shot from Patel knocked it back into the darkness. The children, then their parents, began to writhe, clawing at the exposed parts of their skin where the matter had touched them. One by one they went down. Lana started to turn away, then Patel spoke. “Wait.” It was the first thing he had said for many hours, Lana brought the craft back to the hover, hardly bearing to look to where the four figures were just beginning to twitch and rise. Patel fired four times. then without exchanging another word, they turned away. Four hundred metres to the south another small group were in danger of trapping themselves in a narrow gap between two ponds.

  Through it all, Raoul’s calm voice kept terror at bay as the implacable enemy followed the frightened civilians further into a plain of lakes and deep ponds. Somehow, in the broken landscape, Raoul retained some control as the battle moved through more than four hours of night until the dawn streaked the sky to the East.

  Then suddenly the enemy was gone. The exhausted civilians collapsed where they stood, and Lana, circling higher to where the sun’s rays already shone, could see how vastly depleted their numbers were. From her vantage point, they were not just green dots, but badly frightened, miserable people. Despite all their efforts, nearly another hundred people had been taken. She dropped back down to where Raoul, still on his feet, still giving short clear orders, was gathering the first shuttle load of children together.

  <><><>

  Jim awoke in the sickbay, his throat felt as if he had been breathing in flames, and his throbbing head span with the slightest movement. But he was alive, and that in itself seemed like a miracle. Of the night before he had little recollection other than a nightmare series of images, However, beneath the pain in his head there was one clear idea. He lifted his hand as Dr Clarke went by, and the doctor came over.

  “Sss, ssamples…” he managed to croak.

  “Just a moment Mr Chan.” the doctor lifted a glass to Jim’s lips, and Jim took it himself, drinking deeply. The doctor waited.

  “The samples of the material. Did they remember the samples?” the doctor’s face lost its puzzled look.

  “Ah yes, Mr Chan. I’ve got them isolated in my laboratory. When you feel a little stronger we can look at them together if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Last night…was it bad?”

  “We lost a hundred people from the Heart Lake settlement. But by all accounts it could have been worse.” the doctor patted his arm and stood to go.

  “Amy? Is she okay?”

  “Oh yes indeed. Your daughter’s been in to see you while you slept. Mrs Johnson will be bringing her back at four. Try to get some rest ‘til then.”

  Jim lay back on the pillows. He had been looking forward for so long to sleeping on a proper bed, but now his ideas about what it was that they faced were keeping him awake. He really needed to see those samples… The doctor had gone over to see Jackson at the other end of the sickbay. If he could just get to his feet, the doctor would be faced with a fait accompli, he would scold, but he wasn’t likely to perform a flying tackle to get his patient back in bed was he? Jim made an effort and hauled himself to his elbows. Coloured lights flashed before his eyes, and he flopped back, vision greying. Perhaps he would lie here for a short while after all.

  <><><>

  Jackson floated in a pleasant haze through which he was dimly aware of the doctor’s voice calling his name. He retreated further into unconsciousness, though not before he sensed the stump of his arm being manipulated.

  Dr Clarke took the necessary readings from the nano – scabbed flesh at the end of Jackson’s arm, and banked them in the medical recorder. After checking on Grad’s stasis, he would program the details into the vat and grow Jackson a new forearm. The procedure was a straightforward one, even if it was one which most medical practitioners did not get to try out, not at any rate in times of galactic peace. If no complications arose, Jackson would have his new arm by the afternoon, if no complications arose, the Doctor thought. He had been aware throughout the night of the catastrophic turn events had taken, and had stayed awake throughout, monitoring the crisis on the general channel. The expected injured casualties had not arisen, and it was increasingly obvious that the enemy they faced did not take prisoners. You either escaped, or were destroyed by them. Clarke still found it hard to believe that it was
their own people who were in some way responsible. He itched to get to work on the samples that he had been given, but first he had more work to do with the patients.

  Chan was already coming out of any danger, and the nano supplement that he had been given was helping to knit the torn tissue and the broken bone from the week old injury. Another few hours would see the resilient Chan up and at work. Cogniscent of the engineer’s strong grounding in biology, the doctor was eager to get his help, and keyed the nanos to administer a stimulant as soon as the arm was ready.

  Grad was stable, but stable at low rate. Little could be done for him other than keeping him comfortable until his nanos could do their work. In the end, Grad had youth on his side, he would be okay. Dr Clarke felt a little more concern at the continued stress that Lana would be under, but about that too, he could do very little.

  <><><>

  Athena looked gloomily at the readout from the tracers. In the swampy landscape where the action of the night before had broken off there were scores of lakes and ponds. Many of these now held a cluster of red dots. The greens and the blues had, at least, managed to vacate the immediate area, but their progress towards the relative safety of Cassini was painfully slow, even with the shuttle flights going to and fro.

  Their best estimate was that they would be able to get all but twenty or so of the civilians out by nightfall. That should be good enough if the soldiers could keep up a steady retreat ahead of the enemy until their turn for extraction came.

  They had no effective way at present of hitting back at the monsters in the shelter of the lakes. They had come here with the equipment to colonise an empty planet, not to fight a war. Perhaps, given time they could manufacture the weapons to defend themselves, but right now they had too little.