It was hard looking out through the window at this time of day. Hot sunlight poured in, turning the metallic surface of the bench into a blinding beacon, falling directly on the container with the zombie mice. Clarke’s instinct was to move them along the bench into the shade; even if they were vile undead things, they were in his care. He shuffled his legs round on the stool, freeing them from the bench, and as he did so he noticed that the mice were no longer making the soft clunks and thuds they had been making all night in their efforts to break through the side of the container. They must have finally rotted away, he reasoned. Not much meat on a mouse.
Inside the container a thin layer of smoke obscured the little forms beneath, but even so, Clarke could see at a glance that the mice were nothing more than grey ash. He looked from them to the window, following the track of the yellow morning sunlight. Then back at the sample of the burned child. A flash of realisation went off in his mind almost as blinding as the stream of sunlight. Of course! That was why the organism was so completely nocturnal! It was destroyed by sunlight, probably by the ultra violet component in the light. Man had been using ultra violet to kill pathogens for centuries, and now here it was come to his aid again. The targe guns they used could surely be easily adapted to fire beams of ultra violet light…
Clarke suddenly felt a little humble. It wasn’t given to many men to save an entire world. When the history books of Saunder’s World came to be written, his name would be one of the ones which people would know as long as there were people on the planet. Hell, they would probably name schools and hospitals after him, even towns!
Chuckling at his own flights of fancy, he dimmed the window, turning up the tinting to maximum until the light was excluded completely. Then he set about creating a few new samples of zombie flesh. First they must know how much sunlight was needed to neutralise the pathogen…
<><><>
Sitting in the back of the shuttle on the cold cargo deck, Raoul pulled the mask off and gripped it in his big left fist, enjoying the give of the gel as his fingers absently stretched and crushed the soft material.
The news of the breakthrough seemed unbelievably fortuitous to Raoul. So much so that he was inclined to take it with a pinch of salt, following the old maxim that if something seems too good to be true, it probably isn’t true. Even so, it was something he would have to check out, and that meant putting his investigation into the whole Athena thing onto hold for the moment. Something was going on there, he knew it. He’d dealt with enough bullshit from superiors as well as soldiers under his care to know a snow job when he was given one. Only thing was, what was the angle they were working? It must have something to do with the sphere, that was after all what Athena was working on. What he couldn’t get, though, was why they might be delaying the retrieval of the plasma sphere. They’d all wanted to cut and run before now. Here they were causing a delay, assuming of course that there wasn’t really a complication with the sphere. Raoul sighed and yawned a little. Rum, he knew, could make you a little paranoid. The whole world seemed to slow down a little so that it seemed to take an age to cross a room. This was a great advantage in combat because your reaction time was unbelievably fast. Trouble was, when the shit stopped flying your brain tended to still be looking for something to react to. Maybe that was all it was.
They had done well, as well as could possibly be expected. They’d contained the threat for another night. They hadn’t lost any more people, either civilian or military. If things stayed as they were there was a good chance that they could defeat this enemy on the ground, especially if he didn’t pull some unexpected moves. The reappearance of the civilian command was a real pain. With Athena gone the whole thing had fallen into place for him. He was honest enough with himself to acknowledge that when she came back on the scene he’d felt disappointed. No, that was the wrong word. He hadn’t wanted to take over control for himself, so disappointment didn’t really come into it. What he felt was more frustration. Athena was a potential barrier between him and the right thing for the colony. If she still wanted to cut and run, to abandon the planet, then he was going to have to deal with her. It hadn’t escaped his notice that at the end of the day, he and his men had all the guns.
But still. It would not come to that. Athena wasn’t going to get the Sphere out of the mining machine until after nightfall, and then she would take the rest of the night and all the next morning to reconnect it to Cassini’s drive. By that time, he and his men would have cleared the field of the major opposition, especially if those modifications the Doc was talking about actually worked.
<><><>
The organism was getting ready for its final change deep in the warm salt rich water of the crater lake. All the fish had died, and it had piloted their dead bodies down into the mud and silt, far away from the piercing rays of the sun. Now however, as another night began, it drove them to rise to the surface and to wriggle out into the shallows. There was just enough flesh on them for it to make its final desperate cast of the dice. The fish piled one twitching corpse on another and the flesh on them began to break down and to bubble. Some heat was given off in the reaction which took place, and wisps of steam rose into the cooling night air.
Throughout the night the change continued until the biomass of the fish was utterly converted into a great dark globe, the stretched outer skin of which waited only for the kiss of the sun to burst, releasing the millions of tiny spores packed within to the morning breeze. Each spore could survive the deadly ultra violet due to a tough shell of keratin, a coating which could keep it alive though dormant for a thousand years. These spores would disperse throughout the planet, ensuring the organism’s continued existence wherever the depleted remnants of life could be found throughout the millennia.
The sun’s first beams caught the rim of the crater high above the globe, and the pale rocks seemed to catch with fire against the soft blue of the sky. As the morning light strengthened, the stars of the Skagorack were outshone, seeming to fade into oblivion until even the brightest of them was gone.
Chapter 21
As Raoul walked down the corridor, a dark shape stepped out of the Tracer Room door and partially blocked his way. It was Orlov, one of the Slavonicans.
“Sergeant, you’d better take look at this.” The trooper led the way into the room and indicated a seat in front of the display screen. Raoul sat down, looking at the patterns of red and blue dots, recognising after a few seconds the situation as it stood of the night before, close to dawn. There to the North was the cluster of red dots he had thought of as the “Northern Pocket” contained by his skirmish line, and about to be wiped out. south and west of it patches of red dots were drifting towards Cassini. With this new perspective, he wondered if he hadn’t taken too much of a risk, and allowed too much ground to the enemy in his pursuit of a small victory in the north. But none of this was what Orlov had brought him to see.
“Please look down at this life trace.” Orlov indicated a green dot at the mine site which was being slowly circled by Grad’s airborne trace. It was that of Athena. Raoul straightened up and looked more closely. as he did so, Athena’s trace turned from green to red, and that of Grad moved erratically. Raoul nodded grimly.
“Please keep looking. The life trace clearly shows she is dead, No? But later, Orlov tapped in some instructions and the display changed to half an hour later. Now Athena’s trace had been joined by that of Grad and Chan. As Raoul watched, the trace turned green again. He looked at the Russian.
“So? Chan fixed her trace. So what?”
“Yes I think so too. At first I think, but then I think, “Better run Diagnostic on trace, don’t want it going on blink. No?” Raoul smiled at the archaism, and nodded. Both of the Russians had reputations for exactness in all their actions A reputation which was only reinforced by the fact that even here in the heart of Cassini the trooper had full kit with him including weapons and respirator.
“Diagnostic show something very curious. I show you
.” Another alteration of the controls and Athena’s trace showed not only her name and salient details, but also another line of code underneath. Raoul could not make any sense of it, he did have the feeling that he had seen something like it before.
“What is that?”
“Is code for equipment. Look, these have same.” Orlov was indicating the traces attached to the farmbots still toiling quietly in the area around the abandoned settlements of Crescent Waters and Heart Lake. Raoul was mystified. Why would Athena have a code? he and the Russian looked at each other.
“What does it mean?” The question escaped Raoul’s lips. He was getting a really nasty feeling about that snow job they’d been trying to pull on him.
“I’m now thinking “Why is this? Is Senior Administrator a robot? I run another check. I get Cassini to send out general systems status report. All autonomous mechanisms on planet, from probe to mining machine to farmbot have to reply whether they are okay or not so good. This happens.”
From Athena’s trace a stream of data came in. there were lines and lines of information, none of which meant anything to Raoul except one line, flashing repeatedly it said; “System Failure. Offline. Resetting”
<><><>
Raoul looked at the assembled troops, scrutinising each face in turn. one or two had some inkling of what he was about to say and met his gaze with coolness, but in each case they looked away first. Nonetheless, Raoul made note of Jones, Hernandez and Peters as possible further sources of trouble, the others looked too tired and too scared to argue.
“Authority has broken down here. Anyone see it different?” Jones moved uncomfortably, Peters and Hernandez exchanged glances but neither of them said anything. “We’re the authority now. You and me, boys. The civilians had their turn and they got half of themselves killed. We are going to make sure none of them gets themselves killed from now on.”
Raoul had been a private fresh from training when he had been in his first real fight. A group of third generation settlers on a fetid jungle world had broken away from the planetary authorities and had set off on their own into the jungle. That wasn’t exactly fine, but there was little that could be done about what was in the end, their choice. The group however had become increasingly cultish in their behaviour, and when reports of child sacrifice had started to come in, investigation in force was deemed to be the only answer. The feeling was that the mission would be a good one on which to break in new troops, what with the rebel faction being lightly armed and poorly led.
The jungle stank. From the trees which towered overhead, with their trunks ascending high into the gloom, a constant rain of tiny droplets fell, and most of the troops felt more comfortable in gas-tight condition within their suits, even though this cut down on the senses they could bring to bear. Even at twenty-five Raoul had seen the peril of divorcing himself from his surroundings in this way, and had drifted on through the drizzle with his face open to the elements, feeling the gritty drops rolling down his cheeks and hearing the weird cries of alien life scuttling through the trees, most of which was analogous to insects, though grown to a far larger scale in the oxygen rich atmosphere.
It was him who first sensed the ambush, and gave the warning in time to save many of his fellow soldiers. What alerted him was the sudden silence. The insectoids were all around them, chirping, squeaking and buzzing one moment, the next they had gone and the column of troops floated on through the gloom A.G. backpacks keeping their dangling boots a few feet from the deep leaf litter. The others, even the trooper on point, were oblivious to the change, but somehow Raoul just knew it was bad, and he raised his fist, willing his A.G. to neutral and sinking to the ground. After a moment, the troops behind him did the same. Those ahead drifted on until suddenly from the canopy above a torrent of flailing tentacles poured down, snatching people from left and right. In seconds twelve men and women were taken by the giant tree-octopus leaving only trails of blood on the trunks and branches. The immense creature blended back into the canopy in the face of blistering fire from the surviving thirty troops, its very skin mimicking the texture of the trees it travelled through.
The other soldiers were terrified by the incident, but Raoul had felt exhilarated. He had met his first live fire engagement and had not only survived but had proved himself as a warrior. He could sense that the creature would not return, it had been testing the humans, and would have found them too formidable a prey. It had reacted with cowardice when they had fought back and had fled. Raoul could not understand how the others, particularly the Captain, could not perceive this. The panic in those around him filled him with contempt, as did their lack of vision about their real enemy. He knew that out there in the trees the rebels would have detected the fire and would have pinpointed their position. Would they attack? The next few hours would determine the calibre of enemy they faced. With night coming the rebels would either seize what cover and psychological advantage that darkness would give them, or if they didn’t they would concede defeat.
The night wore on, and despite the jumpiness of the sentries, they were left in peace. In the small hours he realised with total clarity that they would not face serious opposition from the rebels, and the next day, this turned out to be so.
They rose up out of the jungle, gliding across the face of a red sandstone cliff, rent with clefts caused by the numerous outpouring torrents, which were feathering away into mist as they dropped toward the treetops. As the soldiers drifted closer to the edge of the plateau, they came near a tree whose roots overhung the edge like the tresses of a gigantic female Deity. Amongst the twining roots were dozens of small white boulders which glistened in the water which coursed through and over them. As they got closer, the men realised that what they were looking at were the skulls of children. As they looked harder, unable to break away their gaze, they saw that the roots also held several more recent rotting severed heads whose eyeless sockets were turned out to face the dawn coming up over the jungle. Someone must have clambered down and placed the heads one by one into gaps in the roots.
They grouped into attack formation, then crested the edge of the plateau and were met with a hail of rocks. They replied with strong fire which decimated the enemy ranks. It was only as they enemy turned to run that they realised that their attackers were juveniles; that the adults were hiding elsewhere, and that they had just killed ten kids.
In amongst the bodies were five injured, mostly with limbs shot away, one hopeless case who had a clean hole the size of a fist through her stomach and spine. Raoul looked down upon her with a detached curiosity over the back of the medic. He felt nothing as he looked into the eyes of the dying girl, and saw nothing reflected there; no hatred, no fear, only a faint shock and above all, a recognition of something elemental, which decayed into stillness.
They left the scene of the skirmish. A.G.’s switched to minimum, just enough to knock ten kilos off the weight of the packs they were carrying. They slogged along a footpath to a large village where they were met with vacant stares from the people who lined the path on both sides. This time there were no missiles thrown at them. They secured the village and searched every hut, there were no signs of children’s bodies; later analysis of the excrement of the villagers would confirm the initial fears. All had partaken of the feast. There were a surprising number of other children running round, all healthy, and with fresh, open, beguiling faces.
The village was the largest on the plateau, which was itself about thirty kilometres wide and stood like an island out of the sea of forest a hundred metres below. When they went to the other villages they found the same situation: scores of happy kids running round, hostility in the eyes of the adults, but no hand raised against them. Yet each village had a shrine of skulls. In one a head so fresh that the eyes still glistened: the child must have died within twenty-four hours of their patrol to that village, long after they had arrived on the plateau. The villagers had come perilously close to being massacred by the troops, and had the six man patrol b
een made up of different individuals, that was probably what would have happened. But two of the men disliked each other, and Raoul was new and so an unknown quantity. The team could not trust there would be silence within its own ranks and the fear of discovery and punishment overcame their desire for revenge. In the end faecal matter was collected and traced through D.N.A. back to each of the villagers who dropped it. The whole village was once again involved, and the villagers’ crap was full of their own children.
What had caused the strange cult to arise was not clear. The jungle at the base of the plateau was full of game and edible vegetation which the people collected. The notion had somehow taken hold that the child sacrifices appeased the forest itself. That the flesh of the children nourished and strengthened the whole clan. Crucially that only happened if everyone ate the flesh, and any objectors were dealt with early on. The children were not gone anyway; the forest received the digested flesh, the souls stayed within the minds of the villagers, who truly believed that the children were immortal, playing behind the eyes of the clan as long as the clan existed.
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