Blighted Star

  Through the filters he could still catch the weird smell, and it burned the back of his throat producing a cloying taste and a strong urge to spit. The other thing it did was put him in the mood for battle. Raoul had fought on two other campaigns, one against humans, one against a troublesome semi sentient insectiodal life - form. Each time he had felt the same tightening of his balls, the same building of rage deep within him. A rage he could direct against the fuckers whose actions had meant he had to be here, risking those same clenching nuts…

  The last rays of light washed out the sky and the swirling mass of the Skagorack emerged from the blackening immensity of space over their heads. Raoul called up his display and at once the stars were overlaid by a small patch of blue dots surrounded by many groups of red ones. As he watched, the red ones began to move.

  <><><>

  Grad grabbed Lana’s arm and she span round to face him, her eyes flaring. He let go immediately.

  “Don’t.” she said. Where he had touched her felt bizarre, like the feeling of an amputated limb, he had held her arm on a thousand occasions but now? Surely he would never touch her again. Both were aware of the uncrossable gulf between what existed between them now and what had existed just a short time ago.

  “Lana, listen. You’re exhausted. I’ll go.” he searched her eyes, “Lana, whatever I’ve done, you still shouldn’t fly when you’re so tired…” he tailed off into coughing.

  Lana’s shoulders drooped. After all she had been through, she no longer had the strength to resist anymore. She hung her head and shrugged.

  “I’ll go.” he made to pat her arm but held back.

  It felt good to be back behind the controls. Simple. The stream of air flowing back through the open structure seemed for a moment to strip away his troubles and he was glad to be flying through the night sky towards the possibility of oblivion. Athena had made no comment when she had seen who her pilot was to be. She and the whole colony were aware of the scene which had taken place earlier and its background, not that anyone gave a damn about such things in the present circumstances.

  The dreadfulness of the situation between him and Lana could wait for the dawn, if there was one. He concentrated instead on the simple act of flying the pared down shuttle, the greatly increased drag doing weird things to its flight characteristics, the nose was forever drifting up, and he kept adjusting the trim to fetch it back down again. Still, he thought, better to have it tend upwards than to wanting to point at the ground all the time.

  From this height, they saw the sun sink a little after everyone else, and so the Sergeant’s whispered report of movement came a little before they expected, However, they were reached a point in the twilit sky above the mine site when the dead began once more to stir. Grad put the craft into a long lazy circle while they waited to see whether the bait would be taken. They went full circle six times, and each time the sun on the horizon pierced their vision a little less. On the final circuit, its orange glow was gone.

  “Okay, looks like we’re “it”.” Raoul’s voice was calm, yet beneath the stillness lay an edge of exhilaration. They both looked again at the readout from the life tags. The blue dots were surrounded and were making a break for the western side of the encirclement.

  “Be careful Sergeant Raoul, They’re reinforcing” Athena was right, to the west the containing line of the red dots was thickening rapidly. The blues got close, the rest of the surrounding traces drawing in hard behind them, then suddenly there was a triple flicker on the horizon. A dozen of the red dots blinked out, and the blue dots moved through the temporary gap.

  “What was that Sergeant?”

  “Last of the scavenger grenades ma’am, couldn’t use them last night, too many civilians around.” Raoul’s voice was now ragged; the man had obviously been running hard. “Tonight it’s just us and them”

  “Okay, Sergeant. Be careful. We’re going down to the mine site now.” Athena tapped Grad on the shoulder, though he had of course, followed the exchange on his own comms and had inputted the necessary commands. As they dropped into the dark below them, Athena looked again at the display. The red dots had once more opened up on the sides, like two arms reaching out to take the soldiers in a deadly embrace. The men, free now of the initial trap, backed away in the direction of Crescent Waters. The dead followed.

  <><><>

  Athena found herself standing once again before the mining machine they had built using the plasma sphere from Cassini. The shiny top surface was beaded with droplets from the cooling evening air, and these sparkled lightly under a sky flecked with stars. Athena took one more look at the visual display of the distant action. The blues had outstripped the pursuing reds and had stopped, hanging themselves out as bait to the groping tentacles of the red dots. The display also showed the topography of the area, with six small bodies of water blocking the way to the near corner of the big lake from which Crescent Waters got its name. the water was shown in a lighter green against the olive background, with the distant town shown in blocks of brown. Athena could see a dozen different ways in which the soldiers could get trapped and killed, but she guessed that there was little she could do to help. She had her own job to do, and something about Raoul inspired her with confidence. She shutdown the visual and opened a protected link to Chan back at Cassini.

  “Jim? Are you able to talk?”

  “Athena. You’re at the mine site?”

  “Yeah, I’m just about to begin. Have you made any progress with the organism?”

  “Some; it can be killed, though it’s extremely resistant to all our toxins. Fire damages it, but that’s only really effective when the organism is exposed. To kill it when it’s embedded in a host you have to basically cook it out by roasting the host’s flesh. Only real answer at the moment is to destroy the host’s mobility. The dead ash samples are still a mystery. Mostly the organism had eaten away all the useful tissue, but what turned it into burned powder we don’t as yet know.”

  “Keep trying.” Athena closed the link and knelt down next to the mining machine.

  <><><>

  A figure came out of the dark to the left and three of the soldiers fired at once. The figure broke apart and fell into the rising mist. Raoul scanned the read - out again; three more were getting close to their right. He had noticed during the action that the dead were now moving better, they still staggered a little, but they were a lot faster. The three came in and were chopped down and that was the last for a few minutes. On his visuals he could see that the ones they had dropped were still moving, albeit slowly. The rest of the red traces were reaching around them again in a pincer formation. He ordered another withdrawal eastwards. Soon their boots were crunching again on the road, and the manmade surface, grey in the starlight reminded them of what they were fighting for; they had made progress on this planet before the enemy appeared. It was more than just a question of survival, they had achievements to defend and ground to take back. These feelings increased as they entered the first buildings of the town.

  A short series of hand signals had the troops deploying to either side of the road, crouching at the corners of buildings as if expecting incoming fire. This time the dead held back, forming a long line like a barrier between the squad and the distant refuge of Cassini. Raoul broadened out his readout and picked up the two green civilian traces of Athena, stationary at the mine site, and Grad, circling slowly above her. The hard breathing of the soldiers eased and Raoul told them to take a drink from their flasks. In pairs they lifted the respirators, took a swig or two, then dropped down the gas masks again. A series of soft hisses sighed out as the breathing devises purged themselves. When the others had drunk, Raoul took a last lungful, then holding his breath and keeping his eyes tight shut he pushed the respirator up with the heel of his hand. He put the nozzle of his flask between his lips and took a long, sweet pull on the liquid inside. He grabbed the beak of his gear and dragged it back down again. The purge brought a blast of good clean air across his
face, but even after that he could smell and even taste the stench from the rotting corpses. He opened his eyes and looked down the road to where it disappeared into the mist. Nothing. He overlaid it with the trace readout and there was the line of the enemy. as he watched it began to move in on them.

  The first figures appeared, stepping forward out of the fog around the lake. Raoul nodded and again his squad opened fire. By now they all knew not to try for kill shots, but to aim for disabling points such as the legs or hips or the base of the spine. even so, nearly all of the targets took more than one hit to stop them, and even then Raoul could see from his readout that the enemy’s numbers were not reducing by more than a few red dots which littered the ground back through the way they had come.

  He raised his targe gun and fired three shots into the oncoming cadaver of a young woman he had noticed more than once in the social areas of Cassini during the voyage here. He had a sudden vivid memory of her, about a year ago, at a party given for her birthday by her friends. She had been with some dumb looking young guy with a stupid haircut, all shaved off at the back leaving a floppy mop which ended at his ears. Raoul had watched them together, thinking about his own youth and girls he had known back on Stella Mexico. What a fucking waste he thought as she fell, cut through the middle by his shots and was lost in the mist.

  He dropped two more then called to the others. They fell back in good order to the other side of town. This time, however, something was wrong. The dead had stopped their pursuit of the living and were turning back the way they had come. Had they realised that they were in a race they could never win? Raoul quickly went through some mental calculations, there was no way the enemy could do more than make back the ground they had wasted hunting the squad. They had done enough. They would move in behind and try to pick a few off, if the dead turned back round and attacked again, then all well and good, they would draw them further east. If they didn’t take the bait then Raoul would follow at their heels, killing those he could.

  “Mrs Johnson, Raoul here. They’re heading your way, but unless they suddenly grow wings, you don’t have much to worry about. We led them all the way to Crescent Waters before they gave up on us.”

  “Well done Sergeant, I’m not far off being finished here too. about another hour will do it.” Athena was lying on her back with her whole upper body inside the machine. Her legs felt cold and vulnerable.

  Raoul turned to the squad.

  “Right then. We’re the hunters now, let’s get after them!”

  Chapter 19

  Circling round was beginning to get on Grad’s nerves, but he felt it established a better perimeter, than simply hovering over Athena’s position would have done. He covered a lot more ground and performed a six kilometre patrol with each sweep. But after twenty minutes it was starting to get dizzying Looking up to rest his eyes and regain his equilibrium he saw the same swirl of stars endlessly moving above the nose of the shuttle. They were quite bright, due he supposed to the absolutely pollution free nature of Saunder’s World’s atmosphere. They cast a fairly powerful light on the ground below too, giving the motionless grass in its ankle deep fog a silvery blue sheen. Out of this eerie carpet the occasional bushes stood out in stark contrast. All in all the effect was quite beautiful, and it was hard to reconcile such loveliness with the deadly events they were living through. Beneath the fog’s soft blanket Grad could see patches of bright lights. It took him several seconds of quizzical viewing to work out that the lights were on the surface of the mist - hidden ponds, where the still waters reflected the stars in perfect precision. To Grad’s tired mind, it looked as if the fog below were merely a thin skin beneath which another sky fell away, and the lakes and ponds were holes in that covering skin. He felt as if he could point the nose down and fly through into that other sky. The urge left him feeling deeply sad at the way things had turned out between him and Lana. Right now he wanted desperately to protect her from the doom which hung over them, but he knew Lana, and had seen the look in her eyes. Perhaps, in that other world down there beyond the water’s mirror, another Lana and another Grad were finding a way to make things work differently…

  He continued the turn, heading briefly north, and looked again at a group of lakes which seemed to form a pattern not unlike the clover on the club suit of cards. This time he noticed a large looking bush which he could have sworn hadn’t been there before. The impression was a fleeting one as the bush passed out of view beneath the craft. He twisted his head to try and see as the small group of ponds slid beneath the metal sheet which gave the craft its cargo floor. Oh well, he thought, eyes playing tricks maybe…He decided to look carefully on his next turn in another minute’s time. He was already disorientated enough, if he started throwing the shuttle around the sky he would probably lose his bearings completely and end up never seeing the damn bush again. Far better to continue the manoeuvre and see if the thing was still there on the next time round. He headed south, and the Skagorack was directly in front of him, seeming to loom over him. He had the disconcerting feeling that the vortex was about to spiral forward and down out of the sky like a water spout touching the ocean’s surface. Sucking him up like a frail piece of flotsam and whirling him off into oblivion.

  As he came round again onto the northerly heading there was no sign of the bush, and he decided that it was probably just a random patch of dark in the grass that had fooled his tired eyes. Even so he owed it to Athena to be thorough, so he tightened the turn and dropped quickly from two hundred metres to fifty, zeroing in on the mining machine and its surrounding stacks of sheet metal. He hovered scanning the ground below in every direction. There, close to the side of the mining apparatus which Athena lay working on, was a shadow moving in the starlight. At first he had difficulty in making out what it was. The wildlife on his home planet had evolved without a central spine, and with more legs than four. Even so, like kids across the galaxy he had been brought up with images of old earth farmyard animals and he recognised a horse, even without its head.

  “Athena! Watch out! It’s right on top of you! Move!”

  Athena did not have to be told twice, her nerves, down there in the lonely dark had been stretched taut, and she started to wriggle free from the mining machine’s innards at once. The problem was that the connections she had been working on were located right at the back of the machine and she had burrowed deep into it until only her legs protruded. She backed out as fast as she could, catching her sleeve and losing valuable seconds on the way. Bumping her head painfully on the hatch, she scrambled up from her knees and turned, just in time to see the broken, smashed front of the horse as it staggered the last metre and collapsed into her.

  The horse was surprisingly light, even though it drove her back against the machine and pinned her there for a moment. She put her bare hands against the shards of bone and rancid meat and pushed with all her strength. The horse fell backwards and to one side, legs splaying and snapping under it. She ran past the carcass.

  Already the palms of her hands were burning and blistering and she held them up before her face, eyes opening wide in terror as the contagion raced up her arms. Her flesh was peeling and splitting, revealing the glistening sheen of metal within. The pain became unbearable, and with a final burst of whiteness, Athena fell into kindly oblivion.

  Powerless, Grad watched the whole thing, saw Athena stagger a few feet away from the carcass of the horse and fall to her knees, hands stretched out before her dying face. He saw her fall forward into the grass and lie there, body arching and contorting briefly, then lying still with an awful finality. He was stupefied by the sight. He sat in his chair unable to move a muscle as the shuttle drifted in closer and closer to where Athena lay next to the horse, whose limbs were windmilling slowly, pointlessly. With a start he realised that the sight was drawing him in, that he would have to move, to direct his flight or risk crashing slowly into the ground beside her. With a terrible effort of will he forced his hands to go through the necessary
motions and the shuttle rose swiftly into the air. He could not believe it. He felt an overwhelming urge to drop back down and confirm the dreadful truth. Athena was gone. Athena had been for so long so much more than just a head administrator. There was not a person in the colony who had not felt their lives enriched by her kindly presence. She was like a mother to them all, and now she was gone. He felt a deep and personal sense of loss. What were they going to do now? What would become of them? Athena was their soul. Feeling shaky, he opened a private link to Chan, meanwhile wrenching the shuttle high up into the sky.

  “Athena ‘s gone, Chan. That fucking horse came out of nowhere. It got her. There was no warning.”

  “Oh shit. Of course, the horse had no tracer. None of the animals do.” Chan sounded remarkably calm, Grad himself was close to tears. “Listen, come and get me. Don’t tell anyone else just for now. Okay?”

  Grad broke the link, feeling anger welling up below the sorrow. Fucking Chan. He’d been closer to Athena than anyone, yet he’d sounded so damn cool about it. Grad drove the shuttle through the sky so fast that the air screamed through the exposed spars, and his tears were whipped away in the night.

  <><><>

  Lana woke up crying. She’d never done that before, and for a moment the sheer surprise dried her tears, then the pain in her heart crashed in again. She had had no idea of the feeling of bereavement she would face once the initial anger had worn off, Perhaps that was one of the reasons it had happened. Perhaps she had in some way taken for granted what they had had together. She had been like a child, blithely going along, not knowing what was round the corner. Had everyone else seen it coming before she did?