Blighted Star

by Tom Parkinson

  “I wasn’t aware we had that kind of weaponry. what have we got? A bomb?”

  “No, but we still have a plasma sphere.” Chan looked at the Doctor, his face still.

  “Ahh…”

  The air in the lab seemed to have got colder, even though the sun’s rays were once more streaming across the room. Doctor Clarke suddenly brightened.

  “Listen, Jim, aren’t the spores destroyed by sunlight in the same way that the infected hosts are?”

  “I’m afraid not, they’re coated in a layer which gives then U.V. protection. What happens when they land on a host we can only guess until it happens, but I expect that they don’t operate until darkness falls. Then probably infection takes place at the usual accelerated pace.”

  <><><>

  The shuttle dropped down and kissed the earth next to Athena. Grad was trying not to stare, and she felt an urge to say something, anything, to put him at his ease. Even smiling at him wasn’t working, the rictus she managed with her facial muscles gone just seemed to appal him a little, though he was trying not to show it.

  Giving up the attempt to appear human for now, Athena used her full strength to lift down the vat, then passed him the plasma sphere, knowing that he would treat it with the care it warranted. With a brief farewell he took to the sky once more and she was left in the peace of the late afternoon.

  She lifted the flimsy door of the vat and climbed in, immersing herself like someone taking a bath in the nutrient enriched fluids inside. The apparatus began to hum, much more quietly than a human could have heard, and at once Athena felt tiny patches of flesh begin to form on her exposed skeleton. She wondered for a second whether she should have the hatch open or shut, and decided to leave it open. She was at least in some part hoping that the restoration of her flesh would bring a return of her human memories and the loss of this knowledge of herself as a machine. If she did come back human, she didn’t want her first feeling to be one of fear. She lay still, watching the clouds pass over in the direction of Cassini, and tuned into the general channel, keeping her identity shielded, quietly monitoring what people were saying and doing.

  Chapter 23

  Amy pretended to be asleep, knowing that that was what her dad wanted. She could hear very clearly, more clearly she thought, with her eyes closed. He was breathing very carefully and quietly as he closed the book they had been looking at together. Now he was standing up very slowly, his knee gave a small creak and she stifled a giggle. He stopped and she opened one eye just as he leant down to give her a kiss on the forehead. Not expecting his face to be so close she squeaked with surprise. Their laughter was cut short by a curt knock at the door and he crossed the room and went out through her bedroom door. She could hear him talking in the hallway with another man who had a deep, angry sounding voice. Amy was a little shocked to hear her dad sounding a bit frightened. She wanted to get out of bed, but had to summon up all her courage to do so, Tiptoeing across the room, over a warm patch of flooring where the evening sunlight was pooling on its way to the right hand wall. She approached the open bedroom door and peeped round. The soldier she didn’t like was standing there with her dad. Behind him in the corridor were another two soldiers, another soldier man and a soldier woman with red hair. The big soldier was saying something about a sphere and her father was saying “No” and then “No” again, shaking his head vigorously. Then the big soldier stepped forward and his hand moved really quickly forward and seemed to touch her dad’s stomach quite gently. Her dad grunted in a funny way and then doubled over, collapsing at the feet of the man. Amy was too shocked to do more than suck in an astonished breath, then, just as she decided to run forward and protect her father, the woman soldier with the red hair saw her and took three strides forward and scooped her up. She was bustled back off into her room while the woman made soothing clucking noises and told her that everything was going to be alright.

  <><><>

  Grad had obviously been trying hard to keep things between them normal, but, of course, everything had changed. He had if anything made more eye contact than he would have in the past, but Athena could see in those grey eyes of his something else besides the friendliness and acceptance which he was so consciously signalling. There was guardedness, a reserve. Athena felt downcast at the memory. If that was the reaction of the colony’s most open and unguarded individual, then she couldn’t expect too much from the rest of them. Grad’s willingness to overcome his human prejudice was only so deep, she was sure. If he ever perceived a conflict of interest, she didn’t think it would take him long to pick what he might see as the human side.

  Perhaps it would not come to that. Chan was keeping her informed of developments as he learned of them, and he had commed over the good news about the ultra violet modification to the targe guns. The foe they faced was already losing the battle on the ground, her careful perusal of the way things had played out the night before had shown quite clearly that they could win, even without better weapons, simply by employing better tactics than the simple hunting ones of the enemy. Perhaps the enemy might learn some new tricks, but it seemed unlikely that their soldiers would suddenly be faced with an enemy who was armed. Assuming things panned out the way they seemed to be, the question that they could now begin to ask was: what now? What should they do once they had won the war? Somewhere out there, in the air or the water or the soil, was the vector for this terrible disease, and soon they would need to turn their attention to hunting it down, and if need be, eradicating it.

  And here was a tricky philosophical point; would it be right for them to wipe out a species, even one inimical to man? The organism had more of a right to the planet than they had. That at least was certainly the way the other sentients would probably see it, particularly the Cherubim. It was generally felt that their sudden breaking off of contact was as a result of a wave of expansion which had shattered several delicately balanced ecosystems because the top predators or key pathogens in them had been the cause of death for too many settlers.

  The Saunder’s World organism was particularly deadly and particularly repugnant. Chan was probably right when he cited it as the cause of a planetary extinction event twenty thousand years before their arrival. But that still didn’t necessarily give them the right to wipe it out of existence. At the very least it had to be studied carefully. She smiled ruefully. What they would most probably do, she foresaw, was to study it, categorise it properly and log it, and then wipe it out of existence.

  She calculated that there was about an hour left before darkness came. The warm vat fluid had formed the first few layers of tissue over her metal and plastic body, and she kept extra still so as not to disrupt the process in any way. In a sense it was a shame the she couldn’t have taken the opportunity to make a few minor adjustments; a little less subcutaneous fat perhaps, or knock a few years off the appearance of her skin’s age. On the whole, though, she was just looking forward to getting herself back to normal. She wondered how much the experience would change her, inside she would after all, always be different.

  <><><>

  Patel lifted the last of the targe guns to his shoulder and took aim. The piece of infected flesh hanging on a string in a clear jar was a weird target, especially dangling against the lockers against the back wall of the equipment room. It went against all his training to pull the trigger within the confines of the hull, even after he had seen the results a couple of dozen times and knew there wouldn’t be a pulse blast of energy, and that he wouldn’t knock a hole in the lockers and the wall opposite him. He fired and the chunk of tissue crisped instantly into a blackened husk. Of the beam of U.V. light itself, of course, he could see nothing, so he put on the safety and adjusted the weapon’s controls once more. This time when he fired, the beam contained a hint of visible light as a tracer, a thin line of violet which would show up very clearly in the dark, but wouldn’t destroy their night vision.

  There hadn’t been too much work involved in modifying the guns. They were
already equipped with the ability to discharge energy across a broad spectrum, for the guns were built to be used in a variety of different environments right from deep space to the densest gas giant atmosphere. Though they hadn’t brought the U.V. bolt-ons with them, they easily scrounged U.V. filters from the purification system. By a stroke of luck, the filters actually matched the mounting brackets on the guns and clicked right into place. This was good, because it meant they could be clicked right off and the gun put back to normal if for any reason they didn’t work in the field. They wouldn’t be left with nothing but rocks to throw at the enemy if they needed to revert to normal energy bursts. One thing Patel had learned from life in general and life in the military in particular was that things went wrong, a lot. What was that phrase they’d learned in history at school? Oh yeah. “Shit happens”. Patel grinned at the essential truth of it; he’d liked it at school and he liked it still.

  He was looking forward to the coming night with keen anticipation. Physically, he was quite wasted right now, but he knew he’d get another shot of Rum in a few minutes, and he already tingled with anticipation at the thought of the enhancement his senses would get. Tonight they would settle the score once and for all. He hadn’t lost anyone himself, because he hadn’t brought anyone with him, but a lot of other members of the squad had lost people in the two towns, and besides, the creatures had turned what was going to be a beautiful world into a pile of shit. The whole planet was going to be tarnished by what had happened. The five square kilometres he had opted for in lieu of a big slice of his pay might be worth something one day, but not in his lifetime. No matter what happened, even if they wiped out this weird virus or whatever it was, Saunder’s World was just not going to be looked on as the suburban paradise he had bought into. He was going to have to replan his whole future, and for that as much as the killing of his fellow settlers, they were going to pay.

  He cut down the strings from the locker handles and put all the materials into a sterile box. He’d hated having to be the one handling the vile stuff, but everyone seemed to think there was justice in his getting the duty because he’d ridden the shuttle so much lately while they had had their boots in the mud the whole time. They seemed to forget that he had not only been on foot with them the night before, but had also been carrying the twenty which was a lot heavier than a targe gun. He’d had to carry out the duty in the locker room because it was free of civilians and more importantly, all outside light could be excluded, but there was also a little malicious satisfaction in the fact that the others too would get the benefit of the residual stench for a few hours until the air filters were back on or natural ventilation finally cleared it away. Even though the containers were airtight, the smell from when the Doc had loaded them seemed to cling to their outside surfaces even when they were heavily sterilised. Once he’d shared a cabin on a troop transport with a dead rat. The smell had got worse and worse, with increasingly bitter recriminations between the four people sharing until in the end their noses had led them unquestionably to an air vent in the corner. Deep inside it was the decaying corpse of a large rat, and they had taken this lump of moist fur and bone and had given it a military style funeral at the heads. The smell the undead gave off was akin to the stench of the rat in those confined quarters, though, of course, far more intense. He crossed to the light they had set up in the centre of the room. He switched it on, but had no way of knowing if it was working or not, the room didn’t get any brighter. He shone it this way and that, making sure he reached all the corners, then put it down on the floor next to his feet. He bathed in its light, spreading his fingers, lifting his arms to expose his armpits, turning round. Then, leaving the U.V. lamp on, he stomped out of the room, removing his respirator once the door was firmly closed behind him. He was going to be very glad indeed when they had wiped the last of the dead creatures out, just to get rid of the stench, never mind the constant fear of death.

  <><><>

  Doctor Clarke looked at the soldiers in amazement. “What do you mean you don’t believe me? How can you not believe what the computer is showing you? Why would I lie? Why would it lie?”

  “I’m not saying you are lying, I’m saying you are interpreting the data in such a way as to exaggerate the risk.” Raoul’s voice was flat, unaggressive, and yet it had an edge to it which cooled Clarke’s blood. “It seems to me that the thing we face has the potential to give out spores. but it hasn’t done that yet. Now why not? That kind of ability would have finished us overnight, especially when we didn’t know we were under attack. My guess is that it hasn’t used that trick because it can’t.”

  “The modelling suggests that such a transformation would take an enormous amount of energy, so much that the original organism dies in the process. I think we’re looking at a process which involves the burning of a lot of food, and by that I mean flesh. The organism has always sought to increase the amount of victims it has taken over, rather than picking off the odd person here and there. That looks to me like the behaviour of a living thing about to go into reproductive phase. There’s probably a particular number of bodies it has to infest, or more accurately a certain weight of flesh it needs to bring under control before it can enter its final form.”

  “There you go Doc. That’s why we’ll be okay. With our new weapon there’s no way it’s going to get any more recruits. And I guarantee you, by tomorrow A.M. There’ll be a lot less of it left anyway, I can guarantee you that.”

  Dr Clarke decided to take a different tack. Perhaps Raoul was failing to understand what he was trying to tell him because of some personality issue getting in the way. Maybe he would listen to one of the others…“Listen, Sergeant, have you seen Jim Chan anywhere? I really need to go through this with you and him. And also, I think we have to talk all this over with Athena. Is she back yet? I can’t get either of them on the comms system. That thing surely picks its moment to go bugger up.”

  Raoul leaned in close, looking into the doctor’s eyes. “Chan has had to be put away for now. He’s under tranquilizers for a few days. He went crazy with the pressure, like Jackson did.” Their eyes stayed locked for long moments, the doctor felt increasingly uncomfortable. Something was crawling behind the slightly dilated pupils of the soldier, but he couldn’t work out what it was.

  “Don’t you think I should see him?”

  “Best not. He’s my problem. You just concentrate on helping us to win the war.” Raoul rocked back on his heels, wrapping his arms round himself then letting his hands fall to his hips, and standing there. Again he looked at the doctor for long moments. “You’re doing great though Doc. keep it up.”

  “What about Athena? Can I get to see her?”

  “Go through me. She’s too busy right now to give you any face time. What do you need her for?”

  “I need to go through this data with her. She’d know what to do.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll give her the gist.” he turned and walked towards the door, the other trooper preceding him. “Just go through me from now on.” he repeated as the door closed the doctor in.

  Clarke rubbed his chin, not knowing what to make of the exchange. Was the sergeant now in charge? He needed to be sure that Athena would get proper data on the spore threat. He couldn’t help but doubt that she would; the soldier seemed determined to filter it for his own ends. And as for the story about Chan going mad; he hadn’t shown any signs of it earlier. If it was true, then they had lost a major asset.

  What they should be doing was reinstalling the plasma sphere and taking off as a precautionary measure. With Cassini operational again they could even just batten down the hatches and seal out the deadly spores when and if they came. Why wouldn’t Raoul agree to that at least? if he really was speaking for Athena, Clarke was sure that that was what she would have ordered.

  <><><>

  “Where’s my dad? I want to see him…” Amy’s voice was getting tired. She’d ended up being taken by the soldiers to the room they used for their equi
pment. Williams had sat her down on one of the benches and had told her to be quiet. It smelled bad, and all around her were the big metal looking suits the soldiers wore. They looked like the suits of armour that old knights had worn, but black. She didn’t like them. She felt like the ones behind her would start to move on their own and she had to keep twisting her neck to keep her eye on them. In the end she couldn’t stand it any longer and she had. sneaked off the bench and got as far away from the hanging suits as she could. She had expected at any moment to get told off and to be sent back to the bench again, but no one had seemed to even notice.

  Williams had come in again and had glanced at Amy and had put a smile on her mouth but not in her eyes. Then she’d gone over to where a group of the soldiers had been having a very serious whispered conversation and had joined in with them. Amy could only hear little bits of the conversation, but at one point she was sure it was about her. Williams had said a bad word about being “stuck” with her and had said the others had better bad word do their share of babysitting. Amy had decided there and then that she did not like Williams and she was going to stop trying to like Williams. Williams was horrible and she hated Williams with her stupid pink face and red hair. She didn’t like any of the others either; most of them just ignored her and those who didn’t talked to her like she was a baby. Soon she realised that if she asked about her father, it made them uncomfortable, and soon after they went away and stopped bothering her. So every time another soldier came into the room she would go and stand next to them until they had finished whatever they were doing, then she would politely ask where her father was. It was driving them crazy and Amy knew it. She didn’t know why they didn’t give her a straightforward answer, they all just claimed not to know. But that was impossible, they had been the ones who took him after all. They must know where he was. In the end they would tell her. She could keep it up much longer than they could, she had nothing else to do after all.