Blighted Star

  Chapter 24

  Athena tried again to commlink with Chan, but still received only a dead signal. It was actually getting a little scary considering the current situation and she couldn’t help but feel an undercurrent of irritation that he wasn’t keeping her informed. She tried to link with Grad, but he was unreachable too, and she began to worry, a few more attempts and she got the picture. She was being frozen out, but who by? Only the military personnel had the ability to jam her signal. Them and Jim Chan, but he wouldn’t leave her cut off like this would he? Suddenly the dark tank of viscous fluid seemed horribly confining and she longed to get out and run back to Cassini, to find out what was happening. Most of her flesh had grown back, but she still needed an overlay of skin and hair. Outside it was going dark, and she realised that half the night would go by before she could get picked up by Grad. If the soldiers were monitoring, that must mean they knew about her secret, were they making some sort of move against her? What would they do next? She steeled herself, then commed Raoul. Confirmation of her fears came when she established a link to him without trouble. In her mind he presented an image of himself sitting at a desk on which was a large spherical object which reflected like a globe of mercury. It was the remaining Plasma Sphere.

  “What?” Raoul’s voice barked at her. She was taken aback, she had not been expecting such open aggression.

  “Why are you blocking my comms?” The image she was sending of herself was her standing next to the mining machine, she wondered if he could tell she was projecting falsely; she had no idea after all where he was, or if he really had taken possession of the sphere.

  “I’m letting you contact me as a one-time only thing. From now on you are not to have any contact with any member of this colony. This is a human colony, not a machine one. Is that clear robot?”

  “Wait just a minute…”

  “If you come anywhere near any human being you will be destroyed. Within twenty-four hours you are to leave the area in which the remaining humans are gathered or you will be destroyed. You will keep heading due north until you reach the polar sea. You will remain there until I decide what should be done with you. Is that clear?”

  “Why are you..”

  “Robot, I don’t know why you infiltrated us, or what your mission was, but the only reason we haven’t taken care of you already is that we’ve got our hands full right now. But tomorrow… “

  With that threat hanging he severed the link.

  Lying there in the tank Athena felt like crying, yet she knew that as yet the vat had not grown any tear ducts for her. The conversation had left her stunned and seemingly incapable of action, of even knowing what to do next. Her world had collapsed, no imploded, in just a few hours since the horse had stumbled into her. Where was the anger she wanted to feel? She had felt angry on many occasions in her life, and looking back on them now the anger had always been a motivating force. A force she had used to get things done by those around her and by herself. She wished now that she felt angry at Raoul, but she felt only a numbing sadness, it was as if all she had ever been was draining away. She felt as if the tank might be full of some subtle acid which was dissolving away the person known as Athena. Leaving in its place an empty husk: a hollow manikin baring only the most passing of resemblances to the original. She had failed in every way. Her continued presence, even her continued existence contributed nothing to the prospects of the crippled colony, and her absence was the only gift she had left to offer.

  In a few hours her skin would have completely reformed. She began to make the resolve to abandon the settlement and head north as Raoul had told her. The alternative would be to have some kind of confrontation with Raoul which she doubted she could win. She didn’t have any weapons for one thing, for another, she lacked the will to stare him down. But where, she wondered, would that leave the wider mission? Her true identity had been uncovered, but would Raoul guess beyond that? What did her presence on the planet signify for him? Could he guess that she was part of a conspiracy, a benevolent one but a conspiracy none the less, to guide humanity by the gentlest of touches, the lightest of metal hands on the wheel, or would he simply see her as a spy sent by some rival agency to infiltrate the planetary mission in its earliest days? She knew what he would do. If they got through this crisis, he would pursue her and use any means he could to find out more. She would, she was sure, be impervious to torture, but there might be invasive hacking techniques to access areas of her artificial mind which she might not even be aware of herself. Most importantly of all, he had the other colonists under his power, and might be capable of using them as hostages.

  In answer to these doubts, she suddenly became aware of her own self-destruct facility. Deep within her skull was a silver sphere the size of an egg. The sphere was a plasma source and the sequence for causing a violent breach resolved itself to her. She knew that, rather than endure capture, she would cause a breach to occur. The resulting explosion would be nowhere like the scale of the one at the quarry, but it would vaporize everything within a radius of three hundred metres or so. Strangely enough. the prospect gave her some solace. If she was to end up going out, better to go with a bang. The knowledge too gave her a further insight into her mechanical nature; the knowledge that the source of power on which she relied was located within her skull did not disgust or repel her. she realised on the contrary that the location was an eminently sensible one. She did not have a brain to protect in there after all, and so the hard case of her skull could be used to give a secure lodging to the vulnerable plasma sphere. Studying her schematics as she lay in the tank, she had to acknowledge that she was a finely crafted artefact. If some way could be found to continue to exist and not to be forced to erase the evidence of her existence, then she could see that she would have thousands of years of potential life ahead of her. The information caused her to dig a little deeper, and at the conscious request for information, several hundred years of memories which had been sublimated in the preparation for this mission made themselves extant to her. She had been several people in the past, each time placed in different locations where humans were pushing back the boundaries of exploration. Her relationship with Saunders was far more extensive and complex, and she had met him before being sent out on these missions a total of six times in the past. Each time he had looked deep into her eyes and had sought there for some recognition. Each time the vat grown eyes had been different, set in a different face, and no recognition had been there.

  Receiving this new information made Athena all the more determined to survive to make her report to the agency as she was designed and programmed to do. She might be the last man standing, the observer. She was the colony’s black box. Her first duty was to her fellow colonists, but if their situation was hopeless, then the next duty was to the agency. There might be a time when the continued existence of human life on this world was impossible. If that happened, then she would follow a programme in which her own survival would take precedence.

  By now it was quite dark. Athena wished she knew where the others were and what they were doing, but she already felt at one remove from them, an outsider. Calculating the odds based on the information she had had up until Raoul had cut her adrift, she felt that they were probably not going to make it. If they had put the sphere back into Cassini and were now preparing to take off then that would be a different story. This planet was hostile, and survival here called for equipment and techniques they did not have. The Agency had miscalculated and its first colonizing effort was likely to fail. All the more reason that the reasons for failure must not perish with the humans.

  Her flesh was half formed now. Chances were, it would never be seen by any human being. She intended to keep well out of the way of the colony until they were either all dead or the present situation had resolved itself completely. Raoul thought he had cut her adrift? Well, let him have a little more than he bargained for; she prepared her system to go into stealth mode, if he was planning to hunt her, then the h
unt would be a damn long and difficult one for him, in the meantime, let him think she was lying here plain on his readout.

  <><><>

  Lana lifted the shuttle from the ground, feeling the weight of the troops once again. She could sense their jitteriness partly through their forced banter, partly through the way they kept shifting around, altering the trim of the craft. The controls were still far from the automatic refinement of the old shuttle, and so she had to constantly adjust the power feeds or they would have tilted from side to side all over the sky.

  That was how she felt within herself too, as if she had to keep a constant controlling handle on her feelings. Without this steadying hand she might stagger off into a bout of uncontrollable sobbing or a screaming fit of fury. When she had relieved Grad earlier, she had had to make a conscious effort not to pick up the twenty millimetre from the cargo deck and blast him into windblown ash. A few short moments later as she watched his back retreating she felt like her heart was breaking once more, and her vision was blurred by treacherous tears.

  The mood amongst the troops was similarly unstable, and Raoul was clamping down on them even harder than usual to bring them to order. The mood throughout Cassini had been weird. She had left her high refuge on the command deck and had walked through the crowded corridors. Something new had happened, something drastic, yet it was unclear what it was. Raoul now appeared to be in control, and Athena and Chan were nowhere to be seen. Lana had wanted to talk to the Doctor, but there hadn’t been any time. She wasn’t sure who else she could speak to. In the end she had seen one of the engineers who had worked for Chan, but the woman had just turned frightened eyes on her and had shaken her head, glancing round as if worried that someone might be listening. Several of the soldiers were staying behind during tonight’s mission, and Lana had the distinct impression that they were staying not merely to guard the ship from the undead but also to keep order, at the end of a targe gun if necessary. Certainly, the weapons they bore had not been given the ultra violet modification which the weapons of the foraying party had received.

  Tonight the sky was absolutely crystal clear, and she felt she could see for a hundred miles. On the horizon away to the west the very last of the light was augmented moment by moment by the tiny flicker of a far-off thunderstorm. Above once more was the whirling morass of the Skagorack, looking up at it put her once more in mind of the early days of the mission when she and Grad would take long walks out into the long grass under those stars. At times the points of light had blurred with the tears of happiness she had felt at being alive in that place at that time with her man. Flying now through a night filled with danger she wondered if she would ever feel that degree of tenderness again, or if her scorched and blasted heart was forever incapable of nourishing the soft seed of love.

  They were closing now on the target, and behind her Raoul was issuing final orders. She felt a light but firm gloved hand on her shoulder. It was the sergeant, he grinned at her and indicated the respirator which she was wearing far back on her head. She nodded, smiling back and drew the mask down. The readout to one side of the mask’s windows indicated that the air already bore elements of toxicity, and the toxic loading rose as they approached the landing zone. She checked in with the life trace readout too, and immediately saw what Raoul had selected that area for: there were three large lakes and numerous ponds dotted around the landscape. As she watched, the red dots were gathering in the central area between the lakes into one main clot of glowing crimson. To the left of the display, an arrow of green sped towards the mass of red. It was them.

  She felt fear rising in her stomach like an icy tide, spreading through her body and clutching at her heart. All she wanted to do at that moment was to throw the shuttle round in a tight turn and rocket off back towards Cassini. There she would leap from the craft and dash upstairs to her sanctuary on the flight deck. Seal herself in and live on the emergency life support system until everything was over one way or another. She had spent most of her waking life in the twenty square metres of the flight deck on her way to Saunder’s World. Right now it looked like the only safe space on the whole planet. Sure it would be boring, very boring, but boring would be heaven, she had had all the excitement she could handle for a long, long time. Scarcely had the thought formed itself in her mind when she saw ahead in the faint blue light from the stars, a crowd of ghostly figures wading through the grass. With her heart hammering against her ribs, at Raoul’s instruction she dropped the craft to the ground before the advancing dead.

  <><><>

  Grad’s feet dragged as he walked through the crowd to his quarters. The air in the corridor leading to his room smelt desperately stale, as if it was hardly breathable at all, and it gave him a strange stabbing series of twinges in his guts which gave him the unpleasant sensation his bowels were about to loosen. He neared the door and the last few metres seemed to take forever. He sighed and entered. Christel was in bed, she turned to him as he entered and smiled, but he felt that there was calculation in her eyes.

  She had spent the day alternating between being cooped up in the quarters and asking round for the latest rumours. Going out was a chore; those who had known Grad and Lana seemed able, even in the face of the catastrophe which had overwhelmed them, to reserve a little hostility just for her. Everyone else was aware of the situation merely through the spectacle of the day before when Jackson had gone insane. She obviously had some sort of unsavoury reputation among the populace at large and so she was seriously short of people to simply discuss what was going on with, normally, person to person. Strangely enough, the soldiers were the ones she got on best with; they had always been reserved around her as their boss’s woman, and so now they treated her with something approaching the mixture of distrust and begrudging respect they always had. Certainly it seemed not to occur to them to treat her in the off-hand manner many of the civilians were now doing. It was from them she had learned of Raoul’s takeover, though none of them had been very clear of the nature of Athena’s treachery, just that the scuttlebutt had it that she had been trying to sabotage the colony from the outset.

  Christel actually couldn’t care less who was in charge just as long as they kept the monsters well away from her. And now that seemed to be the case. The soldiers were exuding confidence when they spoke of the zombies, they clearly thought they had got the zombie problem licked, especially now they had the right weapon, and they seemed sure that they would have the monsters wiped out by morning. Christel knew the soldiers well enough to know that none of this was bluff or bravado and so she also knew that perhaps she could begin to think ahead to life after the crisis. After the crisis was over she did not intend to be on her own for one thing, and Grad was showing definite signs of pining after Lana. He had been distant and had avoided her company. When they were together he had looked anywhere but in her eyes. She had worn herself out trying to get him to give her a reaction. When she had finally thrown a tantrum to get him to take her seriously he had just walked out with a wry smile on his lips. Well she had had many men far more withdrawn and unreadable than Grad, and she had shown every single one of them who was boss, and he would be no different.

  As he entered she rose from the bed and walked slowly towards him, giving him plenty of time to take in her long shapely legs, her cleft with its tuft of dark hair, her flat stomach and her perfect, firm breasts, faintly swinging as her hips tilted with each step. By the time his eyes travelled to hers the sour look he had worn was fading, and a grin was starting to form in its place. She wrapped her arms around him and her nakedness was underlined by the rough cool cloth of his flying suit. She tilted her head and kissed him, then, as he responded to the pressure of her lips. she drew him, still kissing hard, towards the bed. By now, the familiar lopsided grin was back, and when she sneakily opened one eye to gauge his response she could not help but grin back herself. She felt the edge of the bed against the bare backs of her knees and quickly drew him round, tripping him a little so that he
fell backwards under her. She straddled him, opening his clothes from the top down and tugging them away from his shoulders, rolling them down his arms and his chest. They got irrevocably jammed and she made little mewing noises of impatience. Grad laughed and shrugged the flight gear off so that it gathered round his waist. Christel stood up and placing a hand on Grad’s chest pushed him hard so that he flopped back protesting onto the bed. She took hold of his trousers at the cuffs and with a sudden swift tug, pulled them down and off, swung them from one hand over her shoulder and tossed them into the corner of the room. Grad laughed again, impressed, then drew in his breath with a sudden gasp, and bit his lip as her cool hand took a firm grasp on his swelling cock…

  Chapter 25

  The imperative to form a fruiting body now overwhelmed all other urges for the organism. The sudden burst of new life, the like of which it had not experienced for millennia, seemed now to have been dammed up, and it had encountered resistance for which nothing in its long development had prepared it. Never before had a species not only resisted its annexing of individuals so effectively, but had fought back so strongly that the infected population actually began to shrink. It was time now to employ the only strategy which would ensure survival into the distant future, and which would extend the reach of the organism to the otherwise inaccessible potential new hosts. As the dark gathered in the lakeland where most of its agents were gathered, it emerged from the mud of the lake beds and began to gather them in a compact pile of corpses. The flesh began to liquefy from the bones, but that was acceptable, for there was no need now to maintain integrity for the purposes of locomotion. The decaying flesh fell from the bones, through the pile of corpses and dripped to the ground below. A large pool of rotting gel began to form beneath the pile of corpses, and as the reaction got underway which would transform the cellular structure of the organism into its fruiting form, the gel began to glow softly green. The process gave off enough heat for steam to rise from the pool like the breath of a dying dragon, and this began in part to obscure the dreadful sight. The transformation would take most of the night, but when the sun rose in the morning, it would rise on a giant spherical case, packed with tiny spores. The ultra violet rays would cause the fragile skin of the case to rupture, and the pressurised contents would be ejected high into the morning breeze. They would disperse across the hemisphere, and the organism would have ensured its dominance for another millennium.