Blighted Star

  It was exactly as if someone had died, and that someone was her old self. She felt as if she had suddenly advanced about twenty years in age, and now she was alone in the cold world. Was this how poor mad Jackson had felt? Certainly she could see herself getting hold of a grenade and…

  No. The real problem was that even after he had killed her old self, she still couldn’t bring herself to truly hate him, not yet. And that in itself was a further source of humiliation. She was just going to have to let time pass. Lots of it. Hopefully in the end she would hate Grad and not herself. One person she could hate already was Christel, but even then the feeling was hollow, insubstantial. Christel was almost irrelevant in the spacewreck of all her dreams. Grad had betrayed her with Christel, but the pain was that he was capable of betraying her at all. He couldn’t have felt the way she had over the last couple of years, or he wouldn’t have done what he had. That too was humiliating because it meant that while she was mooning around thinking that she was so deeply in love and loved, he had been feeling something totally different. She had been ascribing to him feelings he just hadn’t had. Even her despair now was a foolish, weak thing because he was no doubt out there feeling…What? What was he feeling? Maybe he was feeling stupid for having been caught. Maybe he was wishing he hadn’t done it. He looked full of regret when he had gone off earlier. Perhaps he had even been surprised himself at the ease with which he had broken their unspoken vows. Maybe he too was looking back on the time they had had together in a new light.

  Plenty of couples had open relationships. On some worlds it was close to being the norm. But they had never even discussed it seriously. There had never been room, or so she thought for anyone else in their lives. She wondered about Jackson and Christel, had they been open? It wouldn’t have surprised her. They had always seemed a bit weird as a couple…But then, she had thought that Grad and her were strong.

  She had to pull herself together. This was the only chance she was likely to get for some time to get some sleep and she was wasting it lying here being miserable. There were more important things to worry about right now than her love life. There was the small matter of survival on a planet which had suddenly become ultra-hostile. Here was she, moping because her boyfriend had two – timed her, when she was surrounded by people whose loved ones had been killed in the vilest way possible. They were all in the greatest of peril and it was quite possible that in a few days she wouldn’t be worried about Grad because she too would be dead. There, did that make her feel better?

  Strangely enough she did feel a little stiffening of her resolve. Fuck Grad. She would sort out all her feelings properly when this planet was a tiny dot on the scope. The voyage back would take two years after all, plenty of time for wallowing in self-pity then. Plenty of time too, to decide what should be done about the baby. Right now she wished with all her aching heart that the child had nothing of Grad in it. She wished in some way that her DNA could be separated out from Grad’s and that she could have a child all of her own. Again. that was something she would face in a few days if she stayed alive. She turned over her pillow so that the side she rested her cheek on was dry. The thoughts continued to revolve around in her head for a little longer, then she fell asleep.

  <><><>

  The Rum was still coursing through their bloodstreams and his men were straining to get into the fight, but Raoul was all too aware that the foe they faced was a cunning one. Right now he kept a close watch on a large grouping of red which had broken away to the north. It posed no immediate threat, but if he let his squad go running into the gap it had created, then the shore of Crescent lake could become a wall against which they could be trapped. Instead, he turned to face that grouping and left the main body of the enemy to make its way east without harassment while he eliminated the northerly patch. He had a feeling that the enemy was sacrificing this group to distract him, but he was prepared to play along, they had already achieved their goal of delaying the enemy advance for one day, now a nice victory against the northern pocket would give his troops a good morale boost. After all, even a withdrawal to achieve the strategic goal of drawing the enemy away still felt like a retreat if you were the one with your boots in the mud.

  They moved north with extreme caution. The life tracers were located in loose skin near the elbow of the left arm, but in all the firing several limbs had been struck off the dead, leaving their owners traceless. This had caused one or two nasty surprises during the course of the night. Sometimes limbs had lain like snakes in the long grass and had twitched as they went past. They were fairly harmless, but were demoralising to the squad.

  Williams had come good, and he felt some satisfaction with how that one had played out. He’d been scoping her during the whole swimming party she’d given herself. He’d been aware of whose red trace was at the bottom of the lake, and had thought it best to let her get it out of her system. The night before she’d not pulled her weight, and he’d had a good idea at the time that it was the presence of her boyfriend on the battlefield which had divided her attention so badly. He’d had to call her back into focus several times. Towards the end of the battle there had been a moment when she had suddenly cried out, and he’d watched her like a hawk in case she went to pieces on him. She hadn’t, but her heart had not really been in the fight anymore. He’d known what she was doing when she’d angled things so that she was near that pond, and he had considered getting her the hell out. In the end he’d wanted her to either to work it through her system, or if necessary to get herself killed somewhere where it didn’t put the rest of the squad in danger. Tonight she had fought like he did himself. Like it was only him. Like there was no one to worry about back at home. Like a true warrior. Looking in her eyes he had seen the same guarded emptiness that he wanted to see in the eyes of all his men.

  The continued silence of Athena, and then the cryptic message from Chan that she was out of action was food for thought. The way Raoul saw it that put him in charge. The strong ethic that the military gave way to civilian authority only went so far. Chan was Chief Engineer, but that made him, in Raoul’s eyes, Chief of the engineers. The way Raoul saw it; there was no longer any civilian authority to give way to. Now it was time for a firm hand to take charge. Besides, the Chinese guy had only been back for five minutes from his week - long camping expedition. He’d been out of the loop. Raoul, or any one of his soldiers, had a better grasp of the enemy they were facing, and how to deal with it. Unclouded military thought was what the situation was calling for now. Not civilian emotional bullshit. But if he was going to be making the decisions from now on, Raoul could see that there was probably going to be some initial resistance. Civilians hated being ordered about by someone in a uniform… But hey! Fuck’em. They’d had their shot, and they’d got the whole mission into deep shit. They might not like being under martial law, but he wasn’t asking them to like it. His main problem might be getting the squad to go along with him…

  Movement in the fog a little ahead brought Raoul’s attention back to the present. Another untraced threat. It had been a pair of legs, no upper body, just a pair of legs. It had walked towards them with weird comical movements in which its knees were bent really far and the rear swayed far out to the right as a counterbalance as the left foot came forward, then to the left as the right slid out. It was slow, but it was moving in toward them for ages while they all, even Raoul, stood mesmerised by it. Only when a stumble broke the rhythm did they snap out of the spell and they all opened up at once. The sudden fire from the targe guns blew it into vapour. After a moment someone laughed, then laughter swept through them, dropping the tension. Raoul let it run, even joining in a little with his own bass chuckle.

  <><><>

  Chapter 20

  Raoul rubbed the back of his neck and stretched both of his arms out wide. A bad fall he had once had had stretched the ligaments in one shoulder and now prolonged activity made the joint throb deep in the meat. Part of him was tired, the rest was still wired by
the drug. The last of the northern pocket were now falling to his squad’s fire. In all about forty bodies were lying in a rough circle about twenty metres wide. The soldiers stood near the edge of this circle, but knew better than to walk among the still twitching corpses .Even chopped down to torsos with stumps, and with smashed limbs scattered around the trampled grass, the dead were still potentially lethal. Raoul looked round at the eyes of the troops, and read in them no pleasure at the grim task of mopping up. When the pocket had first been engaged and it had become clear that here at last was an easy victory, they had cheered and whooped as they had mown down the opposition. There had been just enough threat in the group of cadavers to give the sense of triumph, especially when they came on in a wave that took a little containing. For several minutes now though, the thing had become more of a massacre, and it was time to get the troops away from the pitiful sight.

  The brightening east gave Raoul even more reason to get away; the light was beginning to reveal the residual humanity of the creatures they had destroyed, and soon it might be possible to identify individuals who they had destroyed. In the dim twilight, a red dress looked little different from a blue one or a green one, but give it another few minutes and details of clothing would become clearer as the light grew stronger. People might be recognised, and that could not be good…

  He gave the order, and they marched away from the site. Raoul noted that the enemy main force had gone to earth again in the same lakes and ponds it had sheltered in yesterday. He marched his unit in that direction, calling Grad in with the shuttle as they went.

  <><><>

  Grad got Raoul’s message as he and Chan neared the partially dismantled mining machine. Already the sky was filling with light as a new day dawned, and of the dead there was now no sign. Except that, greatly to Grad’s surprise, the body of Athena still lay where it had fallen. Grad called up the trace readout, there was Athena’s trace, now glowing red.

  “Set me down right next to her.” Chan was shouting in his ear, rather than using the internal comms. Grad had to check himself in order to do the same, turning his head slightly and yelling through a still hoarse throat.

  “Are you sure? Isn’t that a bit dangerous? What if she reanimates on you?”

  Chan shook his head. “Don’t worry. Look, Grad, can you keep a secret? I’m going to show you something that I think it’s best if nobody else on the planet knows. Set us down next to her, there won’t be any danger.”

  The skids sank through the long grass, finding the firm ground, and Grad reluctantly followed Chan over to the prone figure. The now familiar stench arose from the corpse and he stepped back a few metres. Chan pressed on and knelt beside Athena, drawing on thick gloves. As Grad looked on in horror, he took hold of the collar of Athena’s shirt and wrenched the perished cloth. It gave along the seams and tore away exposing the dead flesh underneath. Now Chan took hold of the loose skin at the top of Athena’s shoulders and again wrenched away. The stench intensified as, with a wet tearing sound, the decaying skin and flesh came away in a long strip. Chan threw this as far away as he could. Underneath was not the bony ribcage Grad had expected to see, but instead a skeleton of shiny alloy with a long vertebrae made up of chunky pieces of metal like a glittering centipede. The skeleton was overlaid by sheets and strands of a transparent gel which mimicked muscle tissue both in shape, and no doubt in function too. The parts of Athena which had rotted away were the layers of subcutaneous fat and skin which had hidden her true identity from them all. Chan was locating a small control panel with which he fiddled for a moment, then he sat back on his heels.

  “Protocol Seven.” He said clearly, and for a moment Grad thought he was talking to him. Then the corpse of Athena turned over and sat up. Grad cried out and fell backwards. Checking his tracer he noted that Athena’s blip had turned back from red to green.

  “It’s okay,” Chan made a calming gesture with his hand, and looked intently into the Athena’s eye sockets, two glowing blue lights lay deep inside them. “Hi Athena, you had to shut yourself down for a while, deep trauma to your soft tissue I’m afraid. How are you feeling?”

  “Awful. Listen, I’d better get rid of this dead flesh.” She got to her feet, a little unsteadily and went over to the nearest pond. With swift motions which revealed the tremendous power in her limbs, she struggled out of the suit of rotting flesh and started systematically washing her metallic skeleton and plastic gel muscle structure.

  Grad, shaking a little with the shock of all he had seen, leaned close to Chan. “What the fuck is going on?”

  “It’s okay Grad, Athena’s a partly artificial human. Most colonies have one even if they aren’t usually revealed. They are always senior personnel. Athena just happens to be in overall command. We always keep them secret simply because they are more effective that way.”

  “But why…?”

  “Listen, first, this really shouldn’t go any further. The Agency wants one person in each colony to act as a failsafe. If the colony runs into a real disaster, say, everyone gets killed, the partly artificial staff should survive to tell the story of what went wrong, and to hopefully set the situation on the ground straight for when the next ship arrives. So far that has never happened, and all the P/A staff have done their tours of duty without anyone being the wiser. The feeling at the Agency is that it would be a bad thing if it became general knowledge that in every colony there is one person whose main purpose is to record the deaths of all their companions in as great detail as possible, and to outlive them. The least it would do is demoralise the other colonists. It might cause all sorts of trouble in terms of chains of command. There’s still an awful lot of hostility to artificial and partly artificial people, and a lot of people wouldn’t take an order off a lifeform they consider to be less than human. Besides, many of the pioneer types attracted to colony life have religious or ideological scruples to working with high technology anyway.”

  Grad thought for a moment “What about now? Are you still going to try to keep this a secret? With everything else that’s going on?”

  “We’d like to Grad.” Athena had come back from the pond, all the pieces of decay had been washed from her and she gleamed in the pre – dawn light. “It would only be for a short while until Jim can grow me a new outer body, probably just two days. Then I could make my big comeback”

  “How will you manage? I mean, where will you hide?”

  “Athena needs to be in one of the vats, Grad. we’ll need to fetch it out here, or somewhere nearby. That’s all you’ll have to do, that and keep the secret of what you saw here. Can you do that?”

  Grad looked at them both steadily. The whole thing seemed pretty pointless to him, after all they all faced the probability of death within the next couple of days. Against that background their secret seemed almost trivial. However, if it seemed important to them, then what did he care? He’d had a good relationship with Athena. The fact that she was artificial would take some getting used to, but he had to admit, he was glad she was back.

  “I’ll do my best.” he said.

  <><><>

  In the lab Clarke looked for the thousandth time at the sample under the microscope. The structure of the cells seemed stable until the slightest touch revealed them to be nothing more than burned out husks. He compared it again with a sample taken from one of the mice. In this one the process of putrefaction was well underway, but even so, there was not the catastrophic loss of vitality to be found in the sample from the dead child which Jackson had collected. In the one sample the matter was rotting away rapidly, with most of the soft tissue consumed, and the bone close to dissolving. In the other sample the processes of morbidity had advanced really far, but then some new catastrophe had befallen, the tissue looked as if it had been consumed into charcoal by a vast temperature increase.

  He cupped his chin in his hands and stared glumly into space. The child’s body had been lying on the grass in the open, there had been no sign of fire, and it presumabl
y had fallen where it had died, because when they had tried to move it the structure had finally failed completely and the whole thing had blown away, there was little chance that it could have been moved to that position in that state.

  He needed to think, but the whole thing was too confusing. He had come here thinking that he would be practising simple medicine, with once every few years an interesting case. But this? He just didn’t have the skills…

  He had signed up with the Agency in a fit of youthful adventurousness which had long passed before they finally came calling, wanting a return on their long sponsorship of him through medical training. He had felt trapped by his obligations, even though they had given him every opportunity to back out. In the end, he had used the call from the agency to precipitate a crisis in an affair of the heart which had never really got started. He could still see the look of dismay on the face of the man he had loved for so long in secret. Apparently his unrequited love was not the secret he had thought it was, and the object of his affections had been seeking a way to reduce the contact they had had over the last few months, but had held him in too high esteem as a friend to confront him directly. Within days of this painful scene Clarke had been fully signed up to the mission to Saunder’s World. He had hoped that the immensity of the distance he had travelled would soothe his aching heart, but the memories were still painful, especially when they were mixed with humiliation as they were. Little matter that every human has to, at some point in their life, to experience the pain of a love which isn’t returned. Each person’s pain has a particular poignancy to him.

  He shook his head, Time to concentrate on the crisis at hand. The morning sun was slanting in through the window once again and it was hurting his eyes, bruised from their night of straining at the microscope and the computer representations. Over the last two years the view from the window had changed so much; stars gradually stretching from points of light to smears distorted by the speed of Cassini’s travel through the cosmos. Then the smearing reducing over another period of months as they decelerated on their final approach until the stars had once more been points of light. Then the spectacular swirl of the Skagorack creeping further and further into the centre of the window. Everyone else had been glued to the windows on the front of the ship, where Saunder’s World had been daily growing brighter, but he had been happier looking at the chaotic swirl round the distant blackhole. The Skagorack seemed somehow to fit the mood of melancholy he found himself in so often. Now of course the window gave him a splendid view of the goings on in the landing ground. Every night there had been some sort of entertainment out there, and Clarke had watched, content to observe from a distance, feeling a connection with his fellow colonists, and yet a comfortable distance from them.