Blighted Star

  Another problem they would soon face was the one of what to do with the refugees; over six hundred people were going to need accommodation. That in itself would not have been a problem, they had after all, been accommodated in far greater numbers on Cassini all the way here. People could pretty much have had their old cabins back, except that in the first weeks of the colony’s life, much of the interior had been harvested for building materials. This was standard practice, and all colony ships were designed with it in mind. The problem they now had was one of ventilation; stripping the air down and re-circulating it clean and breathable took tremendous amounts of power, as did all the other elements of life support. They no longer had access to that power since she had, with her own hands taken the plasma sphere out of Cassini to use in the mining operation. Even this would not have been critical under normal circumstances; there were ways of arranging the doors and hatches to promote a through – flow of air which would leave a few cabins stuffy but the majority of areas liveable. Now though, if they did this, and they managed to keep the creatures outside, they would still face the gas that came with their attacks.

  They would have to get the sphere back from the mine and reconnected to Cassini before the creatures arrived. She knew, deep down, that this wasn’t going to be possible, but what other course of action could they take? She looked out towards the east where the night was beginning to gather on the horizon once more. The air would be still tonight, and the stars would shine with their full brightness. The night sky of Saunders was one of its attractions, or at least it had been until now, with the incredible swirl of the Skagorack like a whirlpool on a leaf-strewn lake. Now the thought of the stars tumbling so inevitably towards extinction in that ravening blackhole filled her with a foreboding sense of their own doom. She shivered and turned away from the window, opening a link to the general channel, but keeping quietly in the background, though without holding back her identity. As usual, the babble of voices in her head gave her a feeling of comfort, of belonging, even if the voices were murmuring in fear and in mourning for lost friends and loved ones as they were now. She wondered what she could say to these frightened people, and realised that she had nothing concrete to offer them, that words of reassurance would have to be backed up with something practical, and she logged back out, feeling like a coward for doing so.

  Chapter 16

  Dr Clarke placed the last of the surgical instruments on the tray with a series of small, precise clinks. The operation had gone extremely well, but then he had not expected trouble. He lifted Lieutenant Jackson’s arm and looked at it closely, there would always be a raised band where the new flesh had been grafted on to the old, but with time, the weal would lose this angry puffiness and the arm would be to all intents as good as new. All in all, he was quite pleased with his work. He briefly considered giving Jackson a stimulant to wake him up, but then thought better of the idea. A sleep would do the man good.

  He straightened up carefully, feeling the strain in his back muscles, and pushed through the door into the small lab attached to the sickbay. Chan was already there, as the door gently closed he stepped away from the work bench and gestured towards 3D visual which slowly revolved on the brushed metal surface.

  “What do you make of this?”

  The Dr looked carefully at the sculpted light.

  “Well, it’s definitely organic. This is the agent, I take it?”

  “This is the agent. I extrapolated this representation from the sample Grad brought back from the horse. The other samples were badly degraded, but they all showed the same thing. Mammalian cells were converted into this.”

  Clarke watched the construct revolve a few more times, there was something familiar about the shape, but he couldn’t quite work it out. It looked more like something from the world of plants or of bacteria.

  “I give up. I know I’ve seen something like it before, I just don’t recall where. What is it?”

  “The closest thing we have encountered in the past is slime mould.”

  Dr Clark looked disbelieving for a moment or two, peering closely at the revolving construct. “Oh yes, I see it, the organism is essentially a form of parasitic mould, albeit one which spreads with unprecedented ferocity. It infects a host, uses that host to spread itself further, and consumes that host.”

  “I’m looking at it but I can scarcely believe my eyes. Where did it come from? Did we bring it with us? If it’s a parasite, where are all the hosts? There was nothing here when we arrived for it to be a parasite of, was there?”

  “That we don’t know yet. Perhaps it lay dormant in the soil as spores. It seems to have some association with the lakes, though they were looked at very closely indeed at the survey stage.” Both men looked gloomily at the rotating image.

  “Are you familiar with the work of Duprey?”

  “You mean “The Evolutionary Bar fight Theory” I haven’t studied it but I am aware of it. Yes.”

  “Well, I think Saunder’s World might well be an example of that. When we mined we turned up hundreds of fossils. Saunder’s once teemed with life, and for a long time too. It had its own carboniferous period, for example. And it wasn’t just plant life, there were animals analogous to most earth forms, some really big, all struggling for dominance in the “Bar Fight” . Then, suddenly they all went to the wall. At first I thought they’d been killed by a gamma pulse, but I guess that now we know different. A biological agent came to the fore that the other forms could not compete with…”

  “The Sheriff evolved…”

  “The Sheriff evolved. The organism that is the biggest and the baddest. The “Sheriff” steps in and the bar fight comes to a bloody end. On Earth, we were the Sheriff. When we evolved, ninety nine percent of all other things died out. On Saunder’s I’m guessing, this little beast is the Sheriff.”

  Both men stared at the representation in silence for a while. In the end it was the engineer who spoke first.

  “When the infection takes place, the organism takes over the host completely. I mean completely. Other parasites draw sustenance from the bodies they attack, this one destroys the host in its first assault. It wipes out the nervous system, the brain, all the various organs and so on. It seems to have no interest in keeping the host alive at all. And yet the hosts not only remain mobile, but actually hunt down new victims.”

  “They don’t only hunt down new hosts, they do so in a coordinated pack. Did you see the visuals from last night? It looks like sentience and communication.”

  Chan looked at his companion for a long time. “Listen,” he said in a low voice, “I want to perform an experiment to explore that very aspect. But the method I want to use is, to say the least, questionable.” without another word he reached into a cupboard and brought out a small cage in which there were three mice. He put them down on the counter. “I vatted these while you were operating on Jackson.” He reached back into the cupboard and brought out the container which Grad had brought back. He handled it, the doctor noted, with a great deal of care.

  Clarke watched in fascination as Chan placed the mice in a tray with a clear sheet of glassteen as a sealable cover. Next he took a pair of tongs, and with a gloved hand lifted a piece of the rancid flesh. The room filled with stench. He lifted the cover slightly, and there was a short pause while he inelegantly trapped one of the mice against a corner of the tray. He touched it lightly with the putrid flesh and at once stood back, leaving the tongs and the flesh in the box and sealing the lid. Both men watched as the mouse went through its ghastly transformation, and began to hunt the other mice.

  The hunt took a great deal of time, but in the end the infected mouse succeeded in lunging at one of the others as it scurried past.

  “Now watch…” Chan drew closer to the tray, and almost against his will, so did the doctor. This time the hunt took very little time at all, the first mouse went very still in a corner, and the other one drove the healthy mouse before it into what was unmistakeably, even on this small sca
le, an ambush. In the end, all three mice were blundering repeatedly into the wall of the container at a spot closest to the nearest human. The doctor stepped back a little. The two men looked at each other.

  “I’m sorry you had to see that but I think you’ll agree that we had to know. Definite evidence of coordination. Question is, how the hell are they communicating?”

  <><><>

  Lana landed as near as she dared in her fatigued state to where the sergeant had marshalled another shuttle load. The runs out had got significantly shorter each time she made them as the column of refugees had moved closer to Cassini during the day. Now they were in sight of the new olerite mine, and Lana guessed, when she did her next run later in the evening they would be on the western side of the facility.

  Sergeant Raoul looked just the same as he had throughout the action, except that his boots had gathered a little mud. As he directed the small group of male civilians onto the shuttle, his eyes met Lana’s and he nodded slightly.

  She was worried about Grad, even though Dr Clarke was increasingly sanguine about him. Her mind drifted back to the first time she had seen him, and she couldn’t help but smile despite her concern.

  He had been riding on a surfboard in six metre surf. As she watched, he disappeared from view in the tunnel formed when the top of one of the giant breakers had fallen forward. She had been in the middle of a conversation with one of the mission designers, whose name now completely eluded her though at the time they had been growing increasingly aware of each other over a period of a few weeks in the run up to the launch day. Her companion had just asked her a question, but Lana’s attention was transfixed by the man on the board. The designer had followed her gaze and had seen Grad burst free from the tunnel of water, whooping in the light from the solar satellites. They had both turned away from the sea, but the ground had shifted beneath them and both of them had known it.

  Not that what they stood on was quite ground anyway; the sand in which their feet were leaving crisp prints was laid over the deck of a huge vessel which had flown to this world through space, and the sea itself was, only a few decades before, solid ice. They were on Tethys 4, a giant ice ball which had been selected to house the extinct species of the Earth’s oceans. The necessary engineering had been carried out to create a world made completely of water round which three light and heat emitting satellites supplied the role of warming suns, while dozens of floating islands, starcraft built to land in the water and fulfil this one purpose, pumped warmth into the depths below.

  All the marine species from the data files were vatted and released into their new boundless home and the entire planet was designated a wildlife park. Mankind had recreated to some extent that which he had destroyed. At the same time he had created a vacation paradise.

  Lana stole another glance at Grad. He was back out at the surf line, and a wall of green blue water was rising high up behind him. He was lying face down on the board, paddling furiously forward with his hands to gain speed. In the vertical surface behind him a huge grey shape moved, a shark, attracted to the commotion of the beach party. Lana knew there was no danger, the shark would have been conditioned out of any possibility of attacking a human, yet she couldn’t help but shudder a little as her flesh crept in atavistic fear.

  Later, when the overhead satellite had dimmed to approximate moonlight she had shaken free of the mission designer and had sought out Grad where he sat laughing with some friends. she had found him easy to approach and they had made a date to go surfing the next day. He would teach her the ancient art. As the conversation developed, they realised that they were the two pilots of the mission to Saunder’s World, and the knowledge seemed to add a rightness to the already strong attraction that was so obvious between them. They had spent the rest of the night together, and the following day, and had hardly ever been apart since.

  <><><>

  Jackson floated upwards out of the darkness towards the white light of the sickbay. He opened his eyes a little and tried to move his head. It would not move. As his senses flooded back he realised it was the poison coursing through his blood. Gathering all his strength, he lifted his arm before his eyes and sobbed with terror. The infected limb was back. How long it had been attached to him he did not know, but it had been long enough. He knew that in his veins his blood had turned black.

  The diseased limb formed a claw before his face. Strive as he might he could not force the fingers to relax even though waves of cramping pain ran up the back of the hand. The ligaments stood out starkly under the taught skin and he managed only, with an effort which left his vision greying, to force the hand to pulse like some obscene arachnid building a web.

  The hand began to take control of his mind, and he threw his head from side to side in a vain effort to escape the evil thoughts which came whispering in.

  It was her. She was the root of all the evil that had befallen them. This world had been a paradise before she had brought contagion to it with her sin. She had fornicated and that had been the beginning of all their woe. Jackson sat up, his bare feet cold on the floor by his bed. His strength was returning with every pulse of the dark blood though his contaminated heart. His fists clenched and unclenched and his breath rasped through his teeth.

  She had denied it but he knew. His mind gave him the picture of her with the pilot, naked bodies twisting together as she seduced her victim. She had offered herself on her hands and knees like a beast to him, arching her back and pulling open her clothes, and he had moved towards her, covering her, his hands gripping her waist, then sliding forward over her sweating skin to grasp her breasts…

  Jackson’s own prick was swollen hard now, and the infected hand reached down to grasp it, the burning heat throbbing against his palm. With the other hand he reached out to the tray of instruments and, fumbling a little, picked up a scalpel. With deft strokes he severed the erect member and the dangling testicles. Still grasping them hard so that the blood would be trapped inside them he held them aloft. He stood up, blood pissing down his leg from the gaping wound at his crotch, and he staggered over to where Grad still slept.

  Chapter 17

  Christel looked up at her door. The knocking came again. Puzzled, she rolled her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. She crossed the room, frowning, and put her ear to the door.

  “Who is it?”

  No answer came, and she opened the door a little, keeping her foot behind it. The door burst inward and she was thrown staggering back across her quarters until she tripped and fell onto the bed. Jackson strode towards her, and she struggled up indignantly. Pushing hard with her hands and struggling up so that she was on her feet as he came close..

  “Hey! What do you thi…”

  Jackson’s fist thumped into her, and she doubled over, not so much from the pain, which took a moment or two to register, as from the shock of the assault. She looked up at his contorted face, reading in it the hatred and rage he felt for her. She opened her mouth to gasp, but her teeth were immediately smashed together by an uppercut to her jaw. She dropped to the floor unconscious. Jackson stooped and pulled the flesh of her arms, bruising them at the wrist, then with a grunt he gathered her over his shoulder and left the room.

  <><><>

  Yet another group of refugees were being marshalled in the direction of the shuttle by Williams. As they approached, Lana could feel their accusing eyes on her, and knew that from their point of view her actions of the night before must have seemed inhuman. She wished that somehow she could tell them that she had acted in the only way she could have, that for the good of all she had overflown them in their misery. Here in the midday sunshine it seemed beyond belief that these same open plains had contained such menace in the dark of the early hours before the sun’s return, Now the grass waved in the light breeze, showing its darker and lighter sides in billowing waves. Yet she knew that in the grass, visible from the air, were patches which had been trampled down, and sloughed out piles of human offal.


  The settlers who were not looking at her were keeping a wary eye on the nearby pond, where there was known to be traces of the dead. If only there was some way of attacking them where they lay, in the ooze at the bottom, or perhaps by igniting some flammable liquid on the surface… But Lana knew that in order to create sufficient alcohol or similar they would need days and days of vat time. Time they did not have.

  Williams kept them moving, impersonal, professional. She kept her mask on throughout, as did Lana. Many of the refugees were suffering from the effects of the corpse – gas, but there was, once again, nothing that could be done about that out here in the field. Lana wondered how many had been overcome by the miasma in the night, and had been easier prey because of it.

  Williams was working mechanically. Throughout the night’s engagement she had kept an eye on Mack’s trace, and she had watched, helpless, as he had fallen, nearly a full kilometre beyond her position. Even after his trace had turned red she had followed it, watching it take part in attacks, some successful, some not. She had wanted him to come within her range one time, she needed to see him, to understand what he had become. She would have pulled the trigger if she had had to, in fact, she wanted to be the one, didn’t want anyone else to do the job. In the morning, when the civilians were being rounded up, she had put herself forward to be the one in this area to get the people together. In the large pond nearby was the trace which marked where Mack’s body lay.

  The last of the civilians climbed onto the cargo deck and Williams waved them off. Lana lifted the craft gently into the sky, she had not been able to help her passengers last night through their ordeal, but she wanted now to give them as comfortable a ride as she could. she whispered in the power and headed the overloaded craft back towards Cassini.