Blighted Star

  Behind her, Williams strode towards the silent pond, stripping off her bulky combat gear.

  <><><>

  Grad’s racking cough woke him, and for a moment he wondered where he was. He had never been in the sickbay before, and could get no clue from the white ceiling with its soft hidden lighting. He sat up and looked around him. The room was white apart from a trail of red which lead from one of the other beds to his own. There were bare footprints in the trail of blood, and smears across the sheets of his bed. On the covers, over his own lap, lay a blanched - out bloodless object like a large white maggot. He stared at it for some moments, unable to believe what his eyes were seeing, then he struggled out of the bed and shrank away from the vile thing. He filled his lungs and yelled.

  On his third yell the doctor and Chan rushed in through an adjoining door. Still speechless, Grad pointed at the bed. The smears of blood spelt out the words:

  “Leave the whore alone.”

  “Wha….What does it mean?” Chan looked at Grad in horrified mystification.

  “Where is Lieutenant Jackson? Did he do this to himself?” the Doctor’s grip on Grad’s arm was painful, but helped to bring him back from the edge a little.

  “J – Jackson? He was here?”

  “Yes, yes! That was his bed. Did you not see anything?”

  “No, no. Where is Christel? We have to make sure she’s okay…” he stumbled towards the door of the sickbay, fear making his heart race.

  “Grad, wait. What’s going on?”

  “Christel’s in danger, he knows about us. We have to find her before he does.” Grad tried frantically again to open a link to Christel’s comms, but she was still not answering. With the others trailing behind him he set off down the corridor.

  <><><>

  Climbing the access hatch to the outer deck of Cassini was difficult, And without the added power he had gained from the infection of evil, Jackson knew he could not have done it. No one had come this way, even after they had landed, and so Jackson had no fear that the flat area outside where the purification must take place would be empty. Clambering out into the bright world outside, he dumped Christel’s senseless form on the sun warmed outer hull of the colossal spacecraft. He slammed the hatch shut behind him and drew out from his pocket one of the scavenger grenades. He dragged Christel clear and returned, placing the grenade on the hatch and activating it. He backed away quickly, feeling the growing cold in the area around the grenade as it absorbed all the energy in its vicinity. The silver surface of the hull grew a perfect circle of frost around the grenade and the hatch. The white fur of ice looked pure, unsullied, unpolluted. The sight of it confirmed for Jackson the course he must take. Purification through ice and fire! After ten seconds the device released the energy it had sucked in from its surroundings. There was a flash as all the air particles in a two metre radius were ignited, and the resulting blast wave knocked Jackson off his feet, his head rang with the noise. He looked at the hatch, the tough composites of which it was constructed had shrugged off the explosion which in the mud of a battlefield would have left a two metre deep gauge in the ground. It had never been his intention to destroy the hatch, merely to activate the safety lockdown mechanism, which it would take any pursuers many minutes to bypass. The hatch was now sealed as tightly as if Cassini was in deep space. Jackson turned, looking out at the distant horizon. He had always hated heights, but now he felt invincible. He wondered abstractly whether the upper hull of Cassini was the highest point on the planet.

  Christel was now groaning and rolling her head, he took a handful of dark hair and hauled her to her feet. Her eyes opened, but she was finding it hard to focus. Putting his arm around her waist, he half dragged, half carried her to the distant edge of the upper hull, close to where it curved in a giant hump to accommodate the drive engines. He looked down on the crowd far below in triumph.

  “Look! Look! I’ve got her! You’re all going to be saved!” faces were turning towards his bellowing voice. He had never before felt so powerful.

  “She is the one! She caused all our troubles! She’s evil, but don’t worry! I have the cure for evil!” he brandished the second grenade. “I’m going to burn the witch!” He beamed down on them, his people, in his charge. He was going to give them back their pristine world. His only regret was that he could not share in it with them. The thought brought tears to his eyes. But they were pure tears, without the sully of self-aggrandisement. This sacrifice he would make for the good of his fellow men, and he would not see it demeaned by the hope of a reward, even if that reward was no more than the good opinion of those people so far below him, down upon whom he now smiled a kindly blessing.

  “I must leave you, I must burn with the witch. But I do this gladly, for you! Goodbye, my friends!” He threw up his free hand in a final gesture of farewell, and activated the grenade. Christel came to life, kicking and screaming, scratching and clawing at him as she wriggled, trying to break his hold on her. Her hair in his fist tore slightly, and he could feel both where the strands of hair were cutting into his palm and where the broken tufts were coming loose. With the back of the hand which held the grenade he smashed her across the face, her teeth cutting his knuckles. He drew back his hand to deliver a blow using its heel, aiming for a point on the bridge of her nose, anticipating the crunch of the thin bones that would come. At his feet a large shadow flicked across the hull’s surface, but there was no time to react.

  Something caught him in the side with numbing force and a cracking of ribs. Gasping, he was thrown to one side, still clutching the activated grenade.

  “Take my hand!” Grad leaned far out of the skyak, and drove the fragile craft down until it scraped along the hull next to where Christel had sprawled. She held up a weak hand, and Grad clasped it, the canoe’s momentum drew her over the edge into thin air, and she dangled in Grad’s grip. The canoe staggered downwards, struggling with the weight of two people, motors whining.

  Groggily, his side burning with pain, Jackson got to his knees, his hand was beginning to freeze solid gripping the rapidly heating grenade, and he clutched at it with the other one. In seconds this adhered too in a mockery of prayer, skin cracking and blistering with the speed with which the heat was exiting his body. The frost was travelling up his arms as he shook the grenade before him, holding it up to the sky, even the light from the sun was being sucked into it at this range as it reached the climax of its acquisition phase. There was a flash, and Jackson was gone.

  <><><>

  The canoe fluttered down to the ground in the middle of the crowd. Christel’s legs touched first, and she settled on the grass like a puppet coming to rest. She sat in the space left by the crowd, rubbing her arm and sobbing like a child. Grad levered himself out of the cockpit and sat down next to her. He enfolded her in his arms and whispered to her over and over that it would be all right. She turned her face towards him and her lips sought his with a ferocious hunger. Grad held her tighter and kissed her back. The sun was blocked out for a moment as the shuttle glided down to land close to the canoe. Lana’s face was puzzled, frightened.

  <><><>

  Sergeant Raoul took the news of Jackson’s death, and his own promotion to head of a planet’s military forces in his stride. The urgency of the work which faced them left no room for reflection, and he simply took the news as battlefield developments. Right now he had the familiar problem of dissuading a civilian authority from ordering a course of action which would get them all killed.

  “We simply haven’t got the firepower to mount that kind of operation, ma’am. The enemy is just too strong, we couldn’t hold him back.”

  Athena nodded, the sergeant was only confirming what she feared already.

  “But we have to get a move on if we’re going to get the sphere back. If we have to leave it until daylight to retrieve it then the infected will be at Cassini before we can install it and take off. We couldn’t survive a siege of even one night with the gas from those things.”


  Raoul looked across the landscape, back in the direction they had come from, back towards where he knew the next attack would come from. If only they had just a few more resources at their disposal. With some decent ordnance he could turn this whole thing round on the next engagement. They knew where the enemy was in precise detail, in fact they quite literally had tabs on him. All they would have to do was to bomb each of the lakes which had a red cluster of life traces in it. But they had nothing from which to make even a single bomb. Even twenty first century warriors would have had endless supplies of gasoline, or hydrogen, or any one of a dozen different dangerous explosives just lying around. But modern technology was just not built on making things go “bang” anymore. On this treeless planet they didn’t even have wood to pile up and burn.

  “Ma’am, just how intelligent are these creatures anyway, do you think? My view is that they have a crude intelligence but they are single minded, like a shark or something.”

  “Go on Sergeant Raoul.”

  “Well if they have no overall plan, and are just reactive, then maybe we can use that against them, decoy them away while you work on the plasma sphere.”

  Athena thought for a few moments, looking at the screen which showed Raoul’s position and towards the extreme right, the still stationary clusters of red dots. With less than an hour until sundown, the green dots had all been evacuated back to Cassini.

  “Sergeant, are you and your men up to this? You’ve all been going for forty – eight hours now, don’t you need rest?”

  The soldier held a small packet before his eyes and transmitted the image to Cassini. “Combat rations ma’am. Rum. Passing them round now.”

  Athena looked to the trooper at the other monitor for clarification.

  “It’s a strong stimulant ma’am, we call it “Rum” or “Dutch Courage” for a joke. It keeps you going for twenty four hours. Then you drop no matter what you’re doing.”

  Athena nodded her thanks. Realising as she did so that Raoul must think that after the next twenty – four hours it might no longer matter if the drug wore off…

  <><><>

  Chan looked at the samples with a growing sense of despair. Under the microscope he could see that they had the same cellular structure as the samples of living alien tissue, but these ones were not just dead, they looked as if they had been burned to ash. The distraction of Jackson’s death had put back the work by hours as well, and also at the back of his mind was a growing fear for the safety of his daughter as the crisis deepened. He had only managed a few moments with her since he awoke, and now that he was back, he found the lack of her presence at his side more acute than he had when he had been nearly fifty kilometres away. He paused for a moment to send her a gentle “Hi” through her comms, the equivalent of a pat on the back, After a second or so she sent a “Hi” back, with a visual flash of what she was looking at. Mr Simmons was working with a small group of the bigger kids at the front of the classroom while Amy and the younger children were working on individual projects at their own tables.

  Could the organisms be using a natural form of the telepathy that humans had had to develop all this technology for? The dead mice had not stopped their nudging of the side of the container even when he had pushed the tub right across the bench away from the window. He could just about make out the tiny noises they made from here, three metres away. But what were they thinking? When they coordinated their attacks, were they able to sense what each other was thinking? The infection hadn’t given them the ability to communicate in some way had it? It had taken away the power of speech from the human victims, but they too had shown coordinated behaviour in their assaults.

  Maybe this was a distraction, maybe they needed to work out a way of killing the creatures first, then worry about their communication techniques afterwards…

  Chan rubbed his eyes, he was bone tired still from the events of the last week. The damage to his arm was still painful, even if the Doctor had set things right while he was unconscious from the gas. He felt sure he wasn’t doing his best work, but he had often found in the past that his mind contained solutions to problems which he could not force to the surface but which drifted up into his conscience when left alone. He allowed his mind to empty, watching the sunlight drifting across the back wall of the lab.

  Chapter 18

  The water was cooler than she had expected, and Williams dreaded the sapping cold which she knew would be in the layers below her, down where the brown water filtered out the rays of sunlight. She wanted desperately to get out of the pond entirely, failing that she wanted to stay here on the surface, with her pale limbs no deeper than half a metre into the stained water. The pond water was full of particles which stuck against her arms, tiny black dots of filth. Each time the windows of her breathing apparatus dipped into the water she could see the same black dots across her vision, before the next dip washed them away and new ones took their place.

  The respirator was straining already, and she knew that she would have only a few minutes of underwater use before it would pack in altogether. She checked her visuals, she was above the place where Mack’s body was.

  It was hard to drive herself downwards against her own buoyancy, and she had to kick hard with her legs, angling down towards the darkening depth. She stretched her arms out before her with the targe gun in her right and a powerful light ring on her left index finger. She activated the light ring and a beam of light stabbed into the murk. Even so, visibility wasn’t much more than a metre. she forced herself on, checking her readout, Mack was still below her, only a short distance away and she strained her eyes to pick out any recognisable shape in the silt laden water. The pond, she knew, was only six metres deep. Yet the pressure seemed far more, as if a cold hand was clutching her in its evil embrace. Her clothing reacted to the drop in her skin temperature by heating itself, but it did not feel like enough, and her stomach felt as if she had swallowed a large cold stone. Her bare legs and arms too, felt as if the water they were thrashing in had recently been ice.

  In the few seconds it took Williams to swim down she felt like turning back a dozen times, yet something pushed her on despite the rising dread in her soul. And then, abruptly, she was there and the torch beam was pooling through the particle clouded water on the black silt of the bed of the pond. For a few seconds, Williams hung there, her feet kicking strongly to stop her floating up, her eyes searching for any sign of the lover she knew lay beneath the shrouding mud. Then she saw the tip of a shoe. It was a light blue sports shoe Mack had worn when he went running, and the sight made her gasp with the pain of her loss. From the position of the shoe she knew where the rest of his body must lie and she aimed the targe gun at the mud where the head would join the body. She fired, the beam from the gun boiled a narrow pipe of water into bubbles of superheated steam which billowed up scalding her bare skin. As she rose to the surface she fired again and again at the same spot, through the obscuring disturbed silt. On the second shot the red marker on her tracer readout had blinked off, but she continued to fire even as she broached the surface in a flail of legs.

  She swam towards the shore, checking her readout more carefully. The remaining three dots had begun to move towards her. She swam as fast as she could with panicky, jerking movements. The mask over her face was beginning to falter, and the flexible sides sucked in a little as she drew in breaths. It was hard to resist the urge to tear the damn thing off her face and breathe normally, yet she knew the air around the pond would choke her.

  Something touched her leg, and she stifled a scream. The nearest of the red dots was still ten metres away, and well below her in the dark, but she dreaded feeling a hand close on her naked foot. She swam on, and again the touch came, this time on her fingers as her arm powered into its down stroke. Sobbing, she realised that it was the soft mud of the pond’s shore that she was bumping, and she staggered up, her feet sinking deeply in as she waded clumsily through the shallows, her vision greying with anoxia.

>   She collapsed, gulping for air against the mask’s decreasing resistance. As it found new power outside the blanketing effect of the water, the mask was able to meet the rising demand by pumping in fresh clean air and William’s breathing gradually slowed, leaving only the memory of the near stifling her aching lungs had gone through. She checked the readout. The red dots had returned to their original positions. Behind the image of the readout, Williams saw the ground in front of her. On that ground was a pair of boots. She followed the legs up from the boots and there was Raoul. He looked down at her from the pond which he had been scrutinizing.

  “Been swimming, Huh?” He dropped her discarded equipment beside her and turned away.

  <><><>

  Raoul felt the power of the stimulant coursing through his veins as his boots slogged through the long grass near the water’s edge. Each particular droplet which flicked up off the grass caught the dying sun’s rays in a prismatic flash which captured the eye. Raoul had only taken Rum a few times but each time he had been struck by the great beauty of the world and a feeling in his soul of being at peace. Even the rhythmic clumping of his and the men’s boots seemed somehow fitting and right. No wonder they ration this stuff out so thin, he thought.

  Right now they were in the centre of the system of lakes into which the dead had disappeared that morning, and looking on his display he could see what a military nightmare their deployment was. He sure as hell hoped he was right about the enemy acting on instinct, because if they ignored the bait, and went straight for Cassini, there would be little he could do about it. The breeze died with the falling of the sun, and Raoul cursed inwardly. With no wind, there would be a good likelihood of mist He knew the enemy would not be hidden from his readout, and the there was no risk of being ambushed, but all the same he knew his men could do without the spooky atmospherics.