Blighted Star

by Tom Parkinson

  The platoon settled down for six months. The planetary authorities sent in law enforcement officials and began inconclusive trials in which the cult members kept to a strict code of silence. The clan’s children were dispersed, many off the planet entirely. A permanent security presence was established to prevent further atrocities. In the end, three individuals were identified as the main organisers, two women and one man, and they were the first to be re-educated. Punishment was not considered to be an appropriate response.

  Raoul had been profoundly affected by the whole experience. A contempt for civilian authorities grew in him, though he was aware that such views were anathema to most people, even those in the military. More importantly he realised certain truths about himself: deep in his soul he craved to be once more in that moment that only violent action brings, when each second calls for the correct response and the penalty for the wrong response is personal extinction. Able to read danger signals so clearly in the heat of combat, he had no gift for the subtleties of peace time at all. He manoeuvred constantly to be assigned to the rare trouble spots around the Diaspora. In the long years of peace, when no trouble was to be had, he created it where he was. This was noted by his superiors and was what kept such a gifted soldier at such low rank. In the end he had learned to keep down his urges, to sublimate them into the pursuit of extreme sports, in particular the various near combat games and sports that the human systems had to offer. At times his activities blurred the distinction between what was and what wasn’t legal. In his relationships he found himself drawn as if magnetically to extreme women. His posting on the present mission was in some ways a punishment for his last amorous indiscretion, with a female superior (though it was couched in terms which presented it as an opportunity to re-evaluate his life). Either way, he knew that he had pissed off some serious people and that it was time to take any assignment which could put a few light years between him and the trouble he’d stirred up.

  Leverage had been used to get him onto the mission to Saunders; his name had been put to the top of the pile of prospective candidates, while the full history of his clashes with authority had been down played and his prowess in the field had been emphasised. The Agency had bought it, seeing the vast number of worlds he had travelled to, and no doubt seeing in him a maverick counterpoint to Jackson and his adherence to procedures.

  Raoul felt now the strangeness of being in control. All these years of successful soldiering he had, he realised, been carrying out the orders of others. Sometimes he had not liked those orders, but they had always been there. The times of crisis had come when he had been at rest: that was when he had gone seeking trouble. He supposed that made him immature or something, needing guidance, but that was what a lifetime in the services did for you.

  The situation as he saw it now was one of the absence of any designated authority. There was no way he was about to take orders from an Engineer or a Doctor. At the end of the day, he had more combat experience. And if they didn’t like it, he had the guns as well. Raoul wondered briefly if he was up to the challenge, then drove the thought far down to the back of his mind. He would just have to be.

  The shuttle was dropping down towards them from the pale blue sky. As it settled in the grass he and his men slogged forward. Raoul could feel the Rum wearing off and let the others get ahead, he put a hand up to adjust his mask and slipped a tablet through a gap he forced with his fingers between the gel and his stubbled cheek. By the time he reached the shuttle the drug was driving back all traces of tiredness and he felt sharp and alert.

  <><><>

  Athena looked down at the metal skeleton of her hand. How was it possible she had not known? She searched her mind for all the memories she thought she had had but not one of them came to her in the old familiar way. All of them now seemed like the memories of 3D shows or even of stories other people had told her. Suddenly the memory of the meeting she had had with Saunders came back to her, and she looked once more into those pale eyes. Now she understood fully the mystery behind them, and what they had been communicating to her as he had gazed so searchingly into her eyes. She sensed the immensity of the secret they held; of worlds, even entire systems secretly governed by the mechanical offspring of mankind for mankind’s own good. She felt the rightness of the arrangement, a conspiracy of benevolence, and she saw the desperate importance of the maintaining of the great secret.

  She felt a slight sadness at the loss of her old self, but the knowledge that had been unlocked far outstripped in importance the concerns of her own life. She had to concede as well that her new incarnation gave her a certain degree of usefulness which her vulnerable human self had not had. It would be easier for her to combat the dead now that she could, if she wished, walk amongst them. On the other hand she could see that there would be difficulties with her position amongst the settlers. Humans were happy to work alongside constructed people, but nowhere was there a society which knowingly put itself under the control of a machine. Quite probably, the settlers would lynch her if they knew her true nature, yet she wanted still to help them in any way that she could. This, she realised, must be down to programming, and not to her character as she had felt it to be in the past. She wondered why the devastating news of her true nature had left her so calm, and realised that that too was down to some subroutine or other which deflected her emotions away from what would have been a human response. Once again she reflected on the way in which knowledge had come unbidden to her when she needed to remove the ship’s plasma sphere. She realised more clearly the relationship between herself and Chan. He was one of her creators.

  She watched the clouds above her moving to the South and saw them as conglomerations of droplets of moisture suspended in the air. She knew now that they were at three thousand metres, moving at two kilometres per hour. The processes of cooling at work within them would cause aggregation and precipitation to occur in approximately three and a quarter hours. Next she looked at the grass at her feet, she could see every detail of each blade, the tiny delicate fringe of hairs at the edges, the sap slowly rising through each cell, the shifting ripples of light from the system’s sun refracting through micro densities in the atmosphere like the focussed light on the floor of a swimming pool right down to a miniature scale.

  She scanned the internal comms and found, not surprisingly that her absence was one of the main topics of conversation. There was an increased level of fear and a feeling in the hearts of all the settlers that she had in some obscure way let them down when they needed her most. Athena longed to reveal herself to them, but knew that she wouldn’t while there was any chance of maintaining the secret. She went back to work, adopting again the posture in which she had been trapped, with her head and trunk deep in the bowels of the mining machine.

  <><><>

  Grad pushed the vat across the hangar and pulled it to a halt beside the shuttle. Here in the hangar it was possible to load the bulky piece of equipment without prying eyes, and Grad worked quickly to secure the vat and to disguise it with a cargo sheet. He had just finished when the light from the hangar door was briefly eclipsed. Grad looked up and found himself meeting Raoul’s hard stare. They locked gazes for a few moments, then the soldiers eyes slid away to the shuttle. He looked at that for a moment or two, seeming slightly distracted, then his eyes swivelled back to Grad’s.

  “Got a little job for you. You feeling fit?”

  Grad felt sick with tiredness, and still quite poisoned from toxic air he had breathed two nights ago, but he nodded, and Raoul seemed satisfied.

  “We still got farm creatures roaming around untagged. Maybe they’re okay, maybe they’re dead. Either way, we’ve got to get rid of them. I’m sending out the probes. When they find them, we’ll go out and blast them. Okay?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Grad felt grey inside, he had been hoping for at least a little rest. How quickly the surfeit of sleep and enforced idleness from the week before had drained away.

  “Listen, forget it. You need s
ome rest, you look wasted. I’ll get Lana to fly this one. Get some rest.” Raoul turned on his heel and disappeared out into the sunlight outside, ignoring Grad’s half-hearted objections. Grad wiped the clammy sweat from his brow and hauled himself into the cockpit one more time.

  Chapter 22

  Grad took off gently with the load of the vat on the cargo deck, he was not too sure of the lashing he had used to secure the weight to the rings in the floor, but he certainly didn’t want to hang around waiting to receive another visit from Raoul. Glancing across as he rose through ten metres he caught movement and a flash of pale blue in Cassini’s cockpit. He knew that it would have been Lana. Lana had a one piece suit that colour. He wondered numbly if she had seen him, and felt sure that she must have. Only a few short days ago she would have waved to him from the window of the immense spacecraft, or maybe jokingly would have made a rude or suggestive gesture. At the thought he almost smiled, then reality crashed back in on him and the smile froze before it was born.

  The first time they had gone away together Grad and Lana had spent two days in a space observation capsule watching the fantastic play of a deep space aurora. The craft they had hired had the capability to have the gravity set to zero for periods of up to twelve hours, and the trip as a whole was considered the latest thing in romance, or at least so the sales brochure said. They both secretly thought it was cheesy until they got out well past the nearest inhabited star system, and then the magic of the journey started to make itself felt. There was a moment Grad knew would last with him for all his life, no matter what became of them, when he looked at the girl curled in his arms, floating with him in the centre of the transparent sphere, with a backcloth of clouds of million – hued ionised particles casting coloured shadows across her sleeping face.

  She had sighed a long sigh and her eyes fluttered open, taking a moment to focus on his face, then a beam of pure joy lit up her features so strongly that Grad felt first surprise and then gratitude flow through his whole being. He pulled her to him, feeling his own body move forward to meet her in the zero G.

  They each covered the other’s face with soft kisses, then they kissed more strongly, cramming their mouths together, biting at each other’s lips in play. There was a second’s pause where they drew apart a little, panting, then she caught his outstretching hand and she pulled him close again with a small groan of arousal.

  It was, he had to admit with a crooked grin, pretty fucking close to the ideal. Lana smiled up at him, her disarrayed curly mop of dark gold hair framing her mocha skin. Outside an aurora flare echoed the fire of fierce pride and love which welled up in him…

  Afterwards, they fell into a light sleep once more, floating curled together in the centre of the sphere, the warm air caressing their naked skin as the ship recirculated the atmosphere, cleansing their environment and keeping them safe, protected. Outside the fantastic show of lights continued, unregarded by the lovers.

  <><><>

  Looking out of the cockpit window, Lana had seen Grad lifting away and heading out towards the new quarry. The sheer sight of him had felt like an invasion of the sanctuary she had found here where nobody ever came except her. Everywhere else on the ship was crowded since the refugees had come in, and it stank. Not this time the imagined odour of deep space recycled air, but the very real smell of too many bodies and inadequate ventilation. When she had thrown her stuff into a kit bag and had walked past Grad and out of their shared quarters, she hadn’t anticipated the trouble she would have finding somewhere quiet to bed down. Now, whenever she made her way through the corridors and open spaces of the ship she could see that things had got even worse. In the first weeks of settlement the interior of Cassini had been harvested for sheets of construction material, lengths of cable and piping, in fact everything which the ship could surrender without losing space-worthiness. Everywhere now there were vast open spaces where before there had been rows of tiny cabins. Everywhere people sat around on the floor in glum small groups with a few belongings, inactivity and anxiety sapping all moral. Lana struggled through the crowd in the much enlarged canteen, At first people had established orderly areas in which to sit; neat squares divided by straight aisles, but now the system was breaking down, the children spread into the access spaces first, their parents too tired or demoralised to restrain them, in the end baggage was allowed to drift out so that straight lines became tortuous winding paths through piles of objects, lolling legs, and crawling children. Lana felt cold, no one, she realised, was in charge here anymore. The absence of Athena had left a vacuum which needed filling before this listless crowd became a dangerous frightened mob. Yet Jim Chan and the Doctor were both too busy to fill the role. She wondered if she herself could use the authority she had left from the long space flight under her joint command, hers was a face which they all knew after all…but no; she was barely keeping it together herself at the moment. Grad’s betrayal at a time when she needed his comfort, his support, even, dammit, his protection had left her bruised and weak. She didn’t feel in full control of herself. She passed on, murmuring apologies and excuses to the endless enquiries.

  Seeing Grad take off, she had wondered for a moment where he might be going, but had decided very firmly that she couldn’t care less. However, she still had one major problem to take care of, and for that Grad’s absence for the next half hour or so would be very welcome. As she left the canteen she noted that the corridor she was in now led to a square of sky, achingly blue, where the main doors had been left open to aid ventilation. The air she was walking in was indeed, moving briskly towards the exit, carrying with it the smells of seven hundred people. It felt warm and breathed, and it put her in mind of termites in a mound. Near the doorway she turned left into the corridor leading to the sickbay, Raoul and four troopers were coming the other way, and she was surprised at how bright they looked; she had seen the soldiers come in a few hours earlier, and they had looked exhausted from the exertions of the days before and the come – down from the military grade stimulant they had taken. She recognised the red headed trooper, Williams, and knowing the girl had suffered the loss of her settler boyfriend, smiled and nodded to her. But like Raoul, Williams swept past, only the briefest meeting of eyes telling her that the trooper was scared. The soldiers turned right at the junction with the main corridor, and the sound of their boots receded in the direction Lana had just come from. Lana took a deep breath and approached the sickbay door. Through the glass she could see that the doctor was not alone, and she turned away.

  <><><>

  The computer projection had changed, was changing. Dr Clarke watched it in consternation, behind Chan’s unseeing back. The engineer was lost to the world, deep in thought, the pieces of rotting flesh lying discarded for the moment in the glassteen bowl before him

  “Jim, what’s happening to the sample projection. Why has it changed?”

  Jim looked up glumly. “The structure of the organism changes as it reaches maturity. The changes in the structure of the projection reflect this. These changes are due to the reproductive cycle of the organism. The organism is preparing itself to create spores….”

  “Spores? Did you say spores?”

  “The organism is in some ways analogous to mould and fungi originating on earth. like them it reproduces itself through the medium of air borne spores…”

  “Airborne? Are you saying that the organism reproduces through the release of airborne spores?”

  “That is correct. The organism is capable of regenerating itself through annexing more flesh by touch, or by contamination of the air. This capacity has lain dormant within the species for many millennia. The individual humans and animals which have been taken over have in effect been colonised elements of the one original specimen, like plants being cloned through cuttings.. David, I really think we’re in trouble here. According to my projection, the organism should be pumping out these spores at any time. I don’t see what we can do if we can’t get off the planet, we’ve had it.
Watch this…” Chan touched the controls and the computer display changed to one showing in large, a section of the planet on which were three dots showing the settlement sites, with Cassini herself showing most prominently. Nearby was a cluster of the ominous red dots inside the waters of a large lake. As Dr Clarke watched, a sequence began which started with a black cloud drifting up out of the lake to blanket the countryside around. As soon as it reached Cassini, the green dots in and around the site turned red, and even then the cloud continued to disperse around the display, and to be pumped out from the lake cluster. The doctor felt the blood drain from his face.

  “Any chance that the computer is wrong?”

  “Not a chance worth taking. The only area of doubt is why the organism hasn’t begun this cycle yet. Perhaps it needs a seasonal prompt. Anyway, we’re on borrowed time.”

  “How far does it spread? Can we move the people out of range?”

  “There isn’t any truly safe range. It all depends on things like wind conditions at the time the spores start to be released. We’d have to get everyone at least five thousand kilometres away. To do that would take about three months of non-stop effort with the shuttle. Or one journey with Cassini.”

  “With Cassini? Could she be got ready in time?”

  “There indeed is the question. We still have to get the plasma sphere back from the mine site, and even then, installing it will take about half a day. I honestly don’t know if we have that much time. There is another possibility though. All the infective agents are gathered here in the lake at Crescent Waters. We could wipe them out. If we’re lucky we could get them before they spore.”