Blighted Star

by Tom Parkinson

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  Raoul ran the squad in towards the enemy’s concentration, not knowing what to expect, but ready for anything. On the way a target presented itself in the form of a dead man. He was utterly unrecognisable, his face entirely gone, and even his clothing had by now rotted entirely away except the remnants of his shoes. Raoul had Williams step forward and take down the retreating figure. Her targe gun shone out its beam of ultra violet, along with the tracer of visible light and the creature ahead burst into weird flame, with tongues of red green and blue fire licking where the light had fallen. The monster writhed as if in agony, yet no sound came from it other than the hissing of the flames. The first shot had ignited the left arm and shoulder, and this burnt entirely to crisp ash before the flames sputtered out. Williams fired again, and this time the body turned towards them and staggered a few steps in their direction, flaring strongly from the waist up. Williams fired one last time and the corpse sat down heavily, coming apart into several burning pieces. They gave it a respectful distance and walked on towards the cluster of contacts not far ahead.

  Next a small group of ambulatory dead moved in from the left, three males and what had been a female. Combined fire from the troops set them flaming and the light they gave off as they burned lit up another corpse moving in the long grass in the background. This corpse had been partially destroyed in an earlier engagement, the right side of its torso was missing and consequently there was no trace on their readouts. They fired, and at the greater distance of a hundred metres, the guns were a little less effective. The corpse cooked and charred in the light but did not burst into flame. Large pieces of blackened ash began to fall from it. But it would not go down. In the end so much of the muscular system was burnt out that the thing toppled to the ground, still trying ineffectively to crawl towards the cluster to the east. They left it lying there, wanting their targe guns to replenish themselves to the maximum before they reached the main force.

  They moved carefully and silently through the night toward what they now saw as a cloud of white miasma, under lit by a faint green glow. They looked at Raoul in doubt, not knowing what it was they now faced. If he shared their fears, he did not show it, but instead indicated that he wanted them to divide into two groups, one to go each side of the cluster. As he always did in times of close engagement, he gave his instructions in a series of brief emphatic hand gestures rather than over the internal comms.

  In fact, though perplexed, Raoul did not feel afraid. The enemy were not setting up an ambush, they were not either in retreat, this was something different. The enemy had merely ceased to wage war and was engaged in something else. The monsters they had attacked had not been coming on to fight, they had been moving to join the main body, though why, he could not say. The disposition of the main force could not have been worse from a military point of view. The only people dumb enough to cluster together like that were civilians, had they given up fighting? Perhaps this was some form of act of surrender? The display the doctor had shown him came back to mind, and he had to admit, there was an increasing possibility that the doctor was right. If that was the case, then he’d better act fast.

  The cloud of steam was close enough to be opaque now and they began to see the pile of bodies it shrouded. The team halted and Raoul raised his left arm, taking aim with the targe gun gripped in his right fist. The team readied themselves. He dropped his left arm and they opened fire, fourteen beams of light lancing from the darkness into the mass like the spokes of a wheel.

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  The knock at the door woke Grad, and he found that he was still pinned under Christel’s sleeping form. He gently rolled her to one side, and pulling on the discarded flight suit, walked over to the door just as the knock was repeated. It was Doctor Clarke.

  “I need to show you something.” Clarke’s tone was low, he looked past Grad to the sleeping Christel’s back and seemed to stiffen a little “Please come with me, Raoul won’t listen to me, but we are all in the deadliest danger. We have to act, and act now or we’re all as good as dead.” He gestured down the corridor. “Please.”

  The desperation in his tone was obvious, and Grad quietly retrieved his boots, and stepped out of the doorway with the Doctor “What’s the problem doc? Have the zombies got through?”

  “No. It’s worse than that. It’s best I show you, it won’t take long.”

  Behind them Christel opened her eyes and slipped quietly out of bed. If there was a secret, there was no way she was going to be left out, especially if it had a bearing on their survival.

  The lab was dark when they got there, and Grad went to turn on the lights.

  “Wait!” Clarke first crossed to the window and set the glassteen to total blackout. He had no intention of being observed by the military personnel Raoul had left behind., who were probably out there patrolling in the dark. He nodded and Grad switched on the light, blinking for a moment in the flat white illumination. Unfortunately the window in the door could not be blacked out, and so he conducted Grad to a corner of the room where the bench was least easily visible. There was a tub in which he had vat - grown a sizable chunk of the infected flesh. Only now the flesh was gone, and in its place was a deepish puddle of glowing gel. As he explained the computer’s prediction about the substance, he noticed that the flesh was beginning to form black spots, and that these were sending out roots throughout the viscous liquid. Soon these numerous threads would become so dense that the liquid would be entirely black. On the surface, under the pale steam the heat of the transformation was giving out, a large disk formed which at once began to grow. He halted his monologue.

  “Look, I had better just destroy this specimen, I think it’s close to bearing spores. I’d better expose it to U.V.” he reached into a cupboard and brought out a lamp. “The key to all this is Jim Chan. I can’t get to speak to him, Raoul seems to have arrested him or something, but we really need to get him involved. He can get Athena on our side and Raoul will have to listen to her.”

  He placed the lamp on top of the tub. Inside, the gel was almost entirely black and a fist sized knob had formed on the surface. Clarke flicked the lamp’s switch and there was a sudden thudding noise as something in the tub exploded. There was no flash of light with the noise, but it was obvious that something inside had been under great pressure. The seal around the tub was broken, and wisps of a black substance like smoke wafted up. Grad’s nerves were already taut, and he jumped back towards the door at the unexpected noise. Clarke just had time to turn frightened eyes on him before the black smoke curled around his hand, licking at the skin.

  At once blisters rose on the pink flesh, and the doctor began to howl in pain, flapping the arm up and down as if it was on fire. He staggered against the metal bench jolting the tub and sending it rocking near the edge. Near the door Grad felt impelled to help, but could not take one step forward on his fear frozen legs.

  A cloud of spores now billowed around the doctor, agitated by the movement of his arms, and for a second his face was obscured. When it came back into view, his eyes were milky, and beginning to liquefy. The pain drove him berserk, and he flailed across the room, yelling. Grad backed towards the door.

  An alarm began to shriek, and the computer’s calm tones announced a total lockdown, but Grad was far too stunned to take in the message, and the doctor, now falling to the ground, was beyond all caring. The tentacles of the organism broke through the blood/brain barrier and his infected brain died in a final sensory burst. He lay still on the floor, the wisps of spore now curling towards Grad and the closed door.

  Waking to the danger, Grad tore his eyes away from Clarke’s still form, and turned towards the doorway into the medical bay. He saw instantly that he was too late. The door was closed, and the readout on the door’s top panel showed that the system would lock down gas tight in two seconds. He leapt towards it, but as he did so the readout clicked to ”one”.

  The doorway burst open and there was Christel, gesturing wildly fo
r him to hurry. The grinding of gears was audible over the alarm’s wailing, and Christel was pushed backwards as the door asserted itself. Her feet were skidding on the floor and her bare shoulders rippled with ropes of straining muscle as she fought the mechanism. She turned her face to him with a desperate look and croaked the word “Hurry.”.

  He needed no second telling, he sprinted the last metre or so. He reached her just as she lost the battle and it banged shut, throwing them both halfway across the sickbay. Some wisps must have got though too because now the alarm in the sickbay began to sound. They scrambled to their feet and ran from the sickbay into the corridor just as Gregorovitch arrived with two others.

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  The corpse of Saul MacGregor moved forward another metre and crashed to the ground again. With half of one leg and all of its right arm gone, the body was compelled to move in agonising lurches where it would pick itself up into a crouch, then launch its weight forward. Sometimes it was able to catch itself on its one remaining arm, sometimes it was not and it would flop back into the grass. Each time that happened, more of it would become detached, and its progress was marked by blotches of smeared broken flesh in the irregular crushed down patches of grass, pointing south from the lake where Williams had swum earlier that day. The other agents which had sheltered in the pond had gone north, called to give their tissue and bone to the great transformation, but the organism in MacGregor, aware that the host was incapable of travelling that far in its partially destroyed state, moved instead towards the faintly burning life source nearby. The journey was likely to take half the night, but could be accomplished before the body lost its integrity.

  The grass was dry in the warm breeze coming from the West, and it moved in gentle billows. The corpse, as it reared up from and fell down into the grass, bobbed briefly into and out of view. It bore an uncanny resemblance to a man swimming at the end of his strength through small choppy waves. But the track wore relentlessly forward towards the goal. Behind the body, far to the north beyond the lake, the night sky lit up with flickering light, and for a moment the cadaver twitched as if under a rain of unseen blows. Then it picked up the dreadful rhythm of its movements and left the flashing horizon behind it.

  The controlling organism had felt something akin to pain as once more it had come under attack, this time right in the middle of its transforming process, when it was at its most vulnerable. When the killing light had shone upon it, all hosts, no matter how far from the main cluster, had felt the unpleasant stimulus, and had briefly been filled with the imperative to withdraw. Pieces of flesh lying rotting in the beds of lakes and ponds had curled and shivered, and where there was any capacity for movement left, the dead flesh had cringed at one and the same moment. Far away in the soil the remaining infected worms flinched and coiled, breaking off for a moment from their hunting.

  The corpse now mindlessly dragged itself on, its fingers breaking under the repeated strain, and splits forming in the naked flesh of its shoulder as the skin lost what was left of its elasticity under the chafing of the dead muscle fibres. The attack on the main cluster gave new urgency to the foraging of the organism in this host, but that urgency was not reflected in the actions of the corpse, which continued at the same slow but deadly pace.

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  They were definitely winning, but Raoul found the battle to be too slow, just through the sheer number of enemies they had to eliminate. The guns were effective, but limited by their small bore and by their need to recharge. They were finding that they could get off ten shots before they needed to recharge as opposed to the guns’ usual four, but even that wasn’t really enough when so many shots were needed to destroy one of the enemy completely. And Raoul was under no illusion about that any more: they needed to leave no trace of these creatures, the doctor was obviously right. They had foiled the enemy just before he had launched a surprise attack with a deadly new weapon. That was what this piling up of the dead, this weird pool of glowing vomit and the associated clouds of steam must all be about. They had got here just in time, Raoul reckoned, and the enemy had been caught nicely bunched up, presenting the target of a lifetime.

  In the end they discovered that the best way to deal with so many targets was to set large fires going by aiming all together at the base of the pile in the green goo and letting go pulses of light on the count of three. The scene had its own evil beauty, Raoul reflected, as the naked limbs, all entwined, burnt and writhed in fantastic colours. He watched, entranced, knowing that this was a moment he would remember all his life, every time he lay awake in the night. They walked around the pyre, starting fires and then moving on. He would stop, point to where he wanted the fire lit, where a skeletal hand rose from the pool, or where an eyeless face hung out of the morass. His men would stop and on his command would let loose the cleansing light. It was like painting with fire, and the subject was an orgy of the damned. He recorded the whole event on his internal comms. There were, he knew, many places where a sight such as this would command a huge fee, yet he had no intention of selling this memory. In all probability one of the others would, but for him the moment would always be a sacred one. He captured all he could, ignoring the annoyingly insistent attempts of Gregorovitch back at Cassini to contact him. In the end he flipped the command switch on his external comms to block the signal completely. He wanted to savour these precious unrepeatable moments of time unsullied. And, as he looked around at the shining fires reflected in the masks of the troops, he knew that they felt the same way. This was a holy moment for them too. He was glad he had taken the Rum, it enhanced not only the glory of the sight, but also deepened the sense of righteous awe. He was a priest, a high priest, and these men and women who wielded his fire were his acolytes, doing his holy bidding and learning from the wisdom of his ways. In the new world they were burning into being, this night would be remembered each year, in perpetuity.

  In the pile a man and a woman lay as if copulating in the green filth He pointed and the targe guns flickered. As the flames sprang up he noticed that the goo was now shot through with small black blotches. He pursed his lips with displeasure, then shrugged. Nothing could detract for long from the loveliness he beheld. He clasped his hands behind him and took a few more steps, looking for the next perfect spot to light.

  Chapter 26

  Jim had actually managed to fall asleep, still nursing the pain in his midriff where Raoul’s fingers had driven into the soft unprepared flesh. His pride was crushed too, he had handed over the sphere without further struggle, mutely acknowledging his fear of the other man and his submission to him. Yet without the sphere safely reconnected to Casssini’s drive, they were all most likely doomed anyway, whatever threats Raoul might employ. He felt full of draining despair; he had brought his young daughter, all he had left of his wife, to this hell hole to die. They had all been misled completely. They had come expecting a garden, but had instead had found themselves in a war zone. Now Raoul had gone insane, and had trapped them all when escape could have been easy.

  Why did Raoul still command the respect of his soldiers? Were they stupid? Had they gone mad too? He had heard in the past that military training prepared the individuals to carry out orders from a superior no matter how unreasonable these orders might be, but couldn’t they see that this was madness? If Saunder’s was to be settled, and that was a big if right now, then what was needed was a full scale planetary study followed by a very careful step by step colonization programme; with a first wave of professional volunteers, and only at the end a civilian contingent.

  What they should be doing now was sending a full “Turn Back” signal to those following

  behind in “Hubble”. At this extreme distance the signal would only just reach the oncoming craft before it reached the point at which to turn back would involve a longer journey than to come on. He could imagine the scenes on the following ship: morale would plummet; order might to some extent break down among the passengers, even in the crew, just as it had for t
hem here. But at least those people would be alive and out of danger. The misery of their seemingly hopeless situation was too much to bear. With a despairing heart he fell into a light sleep on the bench in the corner of the room.

  Jim had been seven when he had been trapped in a cupboard by the older brothers of a friend. It had started out as a game of hide and seek in which three older children had joined. Jim and his friend had been hopelessly outmatched by the older kids who had appeared to dissolve into the very fabric of the old fashioned colonial era house, with its quaint rooms hewn from the living rock. When it had been his turn to hide he had run through the interconnecting caverns with an increasing frustration, until at last he had dived into a small cupboard in one of the spare bedrooms. This room was far away from the kitchen, the centre of operations for the day, and far along the hillside into which most of the house had been cut.