Blighted Star

  When he had first climbed into the low cupboard, a profound silence fell in which his own breathing had at first rasped and wheezed, then as his panic subsided, had soughed and sighed, still sounding deafeningly loud in his own ears. After a while he had stilled his breath for moments at a time, listening hard to the distant sounds of doors banging. No one came his way, and after a long time he had begun to consider making his presence known. The giddy sense of power at his own hiding skill slowly evaporated as loneliness developed into a disquieting feeling that perhaps the other children simply weren’t bothering to look for him. He decided to break cover and pushed against the cupboard door. It creaked but stayed firmly shut. In the room, startlingly close, someone giggled, and someone else went “Shhh…” He rattled the door, not knowing whether the etiquette of this new game called for him to address the others. He banged on the sides of the cupboard, making the palm of his hand hurt a little. They obviously had no intention of letting him out. He stopped banging and stayed perfectly still, listening once more. Now he felt nothing but stubborn defiance. They would have to let him out eventually. All he had to do was to wait them out, Either his friend would make them release him, or if that friend had turned traitor, then in the end the grownups would intervene and he would either see the others punished, or would, with great dignity, not deign to call down the vengeance of the adults upon their heads. Both ways would savour of victory.

  Footsteps went away, leaving the room and the door closed. Not with a bang, but firmly nonetheless. If they had gone, then he could leave the cupboard and at least look around the room, stretch out a little. He placed his hand against the door, but then, just in time, stopped himself from pushing on it. What if it was a trick? What if they were still in the room and he climbed out of the cupboard and found that they were still playing hide and seek after all? He would have lost… Or worse still, what if they were in the room, waiting for him to show weakness by trying the door again? What if they wouldn’t let him open it again? They would laugh at him; He would probably have to plead to be let out like a baby. Unendurable! He crossed his arms.

  The minutes crawled by like hours in the stifling cupboard. Gradually his eyes grew accustomed somewhat to the faint light creeping in through the crack between the cupboard’s doors. Wait! Had the light changed? Grown dimmer and then brighter as if someone had crossed before the window where it came into the room? He stared at the ribbon of light on the dusty floor with all his concentration, trying to read the message it conveyed. Now it seemed to brighten and dim, brighten and dim as if, outside in the room, people were dancing backwards and forwards in front of the cupboard, moving with utter silence across the floor. His brow furrowed with concentration, he studied the light until he realised that what was causing it to wax and wane was in reality, some function of his own vision. The discovery fascinated him; did everyone else perceive the world in this shifting way? He almost forgot the strange not game he was not playing with the others and almost pushed on the door. He drew back his hand for a moment, then shrugged. He had an important thing to discuss with someone and couldn’t be bothered to play this idiotic game anymore. His decision made, he put his hand on the door and pushed. It still wouldn’t move, and once more in the room came the sound of stifled laughter. Humiliated, he had gone back to sulking, hands crossed and fingers trapped under his armpits. They had kept him there for what seemed like hours, but he had not given them the satisfaction of making another sound.

  He had tried to concentrate on the musings the ribbon of light had invoked but found it impossible to think, knowing as he did that he was being watched over by unseen tormentors. He had shut his eyes and had tried to will himself to sleep, believing that this would not only pass the time but would show them how little he cared for their tricks; so bored he had gone to sleep. His bony knee flopped against the side of the cupboard with a painful clonk. The sound seemed loud enough to make his ears ring, but those same ears reddened with mortified anger when, once more, the laughter came from outside. Trying to be quiet he had hugged his knees, shuffling on his buttocks until he was pressed into the back corner and couldn’t accidentally tip and make more noise.

  And jammed in the corner was where he stayed, watching the light from the cupboard doors. An age passed in which he genuinely felt that he had grown up a little. Suddenly the cupboard door opened and there was the mother of his friend. She was looking at him very strangely, not entirely unkindly, but not in the way he had become accustomed to be looked at by adults who were usually impressed by his maturity. The others, he imagined, had told her that he had gone to sit in the cupboard and wouldn’t come out. In one sense they were right. That was, he could now see, one way in which his behaviour could be interpreted, and he even began to see it in this light himself. A weird kid sitting in a cupboard, too proud to get out of it. He alternated between this view and the other one in which his defiance had won an obscure but still very real victory. The two views coalesced in his mind like the ribbon of light on the dusty floor.

  <><><>

  The doorway to the locker room opened and there were Grad and Christel. Behind them stood one of the troops, a Russian who had always made an impression on Chan by the surliness of his demeanour. Grad was turning to remonstrate with the man, who seemed in some doubt as he pushed the pilot in the chest and propelled him into the makeshift cell. Grad, backed by Christel was desperately arguing about something which had happened to the doctor, and he seemed to have made some impact. Even so, the soldier shook his head and shut the door. The lock engaged. Grad turned and spotted Chan’s form in the corner.

  “Jim! What the hell is happening? Why are the troops acting like this? Jim…” Grad’s voice lowered “Clarke is dead.”

  Grad explained what had happened in the laboratory, and while he did so, Christel gently wept, the reaction settling on her heart like a heavy cold layer. When Grad had finished the three of them sat quietly for a few minutes. It was Chan who broke the silence first.

  “If the organism is mutating into a new form, then we’re in even more danger than we were. You say that the contents of the sealed container exploded when Doctor Clarke shone a light onto it? And this was a U.V. light? Then we have to get a warning to Raoul and the others. The weapons they’re armed with are basically just powerful U.V. lights. If they attack the infected using them they could cause even worse trouble. Do they know any of this? Are they in contact with Raoul or any of his troops?”

  “There seems to be some kind of block on all the comms. I haven’t been able to reach Athena or anyone else all evening. Basically Raoul has taken over and doesn’t want any of us talking to each other. Jim, I’m really worried about Athena. I think he knows, and I think he’s going to do something to her.”

  Chan shook his head, but not in denial of what Grad was saying. Until earlier that same evening he would not have thought it possible for Raoul to have acted with such disregard for consequences. Now it seemed all too likely that the sergeant might well intend to do Athena harm. They had to contact her somehow and warn her. She would still be in the vat, recreating her soft tissue. If Raoul caught her in there…Raoul’s refusal to keep contact open just underlined the change in his personality. With the bruise forming under the skin of his midriff, Chan was coming more and more to the conclusion that Raoul was in the early stages of psychosis. The plight they were all in was affecting them all in different ways, but it seemed to be bringing out a streak of violence in Raoul’s soul which was directed mostly at Athena. Had he learned her true nature? It seemed all too possible that he had. This grasping at power was more than a palace coup, some evil thing was uncoiling in the man. And it was getting ready to strike.

  Christel resented in a dull sort of way the secret that the two men were sharing and from which they were excluding her. Clearly there was some big news about Athena. Something they felt she could not be trusted with. At any other time she would have been insulted by their attitude, but right now she had had all the s
urprises she wanted for a while. Yet she knew that the night was far from over, and that there would no doubt be many more things happening to her or those around her before morning brought with it the familiar feeling of relative safety. Morning had become in a few days, the time at which the costs of the night before were counted, and at which plans and preparations were made for the assaults of the next night. It seemed to her now that the night would never again bring peace and rest, but always fear and death. She looked around the room gloomily. It was like a million other locker rooms, particularly military ones, across the human universe, and its very mundanity was a form of refuge from the bizarreness of the deadly situation she had found herself in. It was in just such a locker room that she had lost her virginity at the age of fourteen, a whole lifetime ago. The same recessed doors let into the walls on either side, the same benches formed from a lower tier of lockers standing proud into the room. The same fingerprint and sweat recognition locks on the little doors. Here the background colour was a light grey, there it had been light blue, or so she remembered it anyway. Like back then, she wanted nothing more than for the door to stay firmly shut, only now she feared far more than the mild censure which would have followed the opening of that other door. Beyond the door now was a world of exhausting, terrifying danger.

  She watched the two men surreptitiously. They looked so concerned with whatever it was that they were brewing, but Christel could almost taste the doom that was coming towards the shut door. It was only a matter of short time now before the rising black tide of death overwhelmed them and they too were swept away. She wished she could have spent these last few hours alone with Grad, but at least he was here with her now, even if the engineer was with them. She lay down on an empty stretch of bench and closed her eyes. For a moment she had a vision of the future she had begun to plan out for herself before horror had darkened their world. She would have taken her grant of land in lieu of some of her wages and would have set up home somewhere outside of town, up a track she would have the farmbots only partly construct. They would have left the surface uncarbonised so that the soil of the planet could show through. A rough track which would be dusty in dry weather, muddy when it got wet She suddenly saw that that was why she had gone into agriculture in the first place; it had seemed an odd decision not only to those around her but even to herself at the time, and she had wondered whether she was drawn in part because of its overtones of fertility. The simplicity of her true motive made her smile in surprise; she just liked soil. She felt regret that such clarity of self-knowledge should come at the end of her life, and she wished in an abstracted, weary sort of way that she could have explored this insight further in the years to come. Years she knew that she was to be denied. She began to wish now that the door would open. She didn’t want to meet the end in a sterile place such as this with its pale gleaming surfaces. She wanted to stand in the open one last time with her bare toes touching the cool dirt.

  <><><>

  Athena had not been asleep, but she had put herself into a low energy state. Now though, she became fully alert. Something was moving through the grass towards the vat. The hatchway was distinguishable only by the backdrop of stars, but something now came between Athena and those stars Her eyes snapped into enhanced mode, and the silhouette resolved into the broken features of the corpse of one of the settlers. Her systems added the tag “.MacGreggor. Saul. 27. Deceased.” with some futility. Athena sat up out of the vat fluid and reached for the hatchway to throw herself clear, but she knew she had no chance of getting free. She grasped the edges of the hatchway but already the monster was there, reaching for her. She fell back, and the corpse slithered in on top of her, trapping her beneath it.

  Once again pain burnt its way into her mind as the bare skin and flesh blistered and rotted from her alloy frame. She bucked and kicked beneath the dead man, losing the control of her limbs as the pain signals overwhelmed her motor functions. She experienced once more a flash of bright light as the overloaded systems shut down. She was still.

  The organism absorbed Athena’s flesh, this time turning it immediately into the gel from which spore pods could be grown. Then, from that gel began to emanate a fur of fine tendrils growing into the life-giving vat fluid itself. The organism found the unfamiliar substance compatible with its needs and the tendrils sprang out in all directions, blackening the liquid and thickening it until it was one solid block. From the hatchway a monstrous grey excrescence began to grow. In a matter of hours it would form an enormous fruiting head packed to near bursting with billions of spores. Enough to engulf an entire planet. When the sun’s light split the spore bud’s surface, and the contents were ejected, the organism would ensure its survival for millennia to come.

  Athena lay embedded in the root of the spore bud. Had she wished to move, she would have been unable to, so densely was the vat packed with root tendrils. All the flesh she had grown was once again rotted away, but her inner essence slept on, contained safe within its walls of exotic alloys.

  <><><>

  Gregorovitch gave himself five last attempts to force open a link with the troops in the field, but the commander’s block Raoul had employed was just too effective. All the same, Gregorovitch knew that Raoul must at least be aware of his attempts to establish a link because his comm. set would be flashing an unobtrusive alert.

  Gregorovitch was spooked. He had arrived outside the door of the medical bay just as the full gas tight isolation protocol had initialised. Looking through the door he had seen the figure of the doctor staggering against the inner door to the lab just as the emergency sterilisation procedure had begun. In both the sickbay and the laboratory four small steel spheres had dropped out of a recess in the ceiling and had hovered in mid-air in the middle of the room. Dozens of thin, powerful beams of focussed energy had sprung out, and at the same time the spheres had begun to rapidly rotate, sweeping every inch with burning light so that by the time they had finished their work, every cubic millimetre would have been lazered into sterility over and over again. The doctor, caught in that maelstrom of whirling light was sliced and resliced until the remaining mush was cut into steam, then into plasma. Finally, the contents of the room was sucked into a holding tank located in the starships’s main drive, ready to be exposed to raw energy next time the engines were fired. All that was left in the lab and the sickbay was hard vacuum, and that would remain until the humans on board elected to reopen the two rooms.

  Watching the doctor’s end had given the Slavonican a scare. He had been brought up in spacefaring vessels by parents who were professional spacers, and he had always looked on spacecraft as sanctuaries against the dangers of outside. Planets often were inimical to life, but inside a spacecraft, the climate was perfect, the food was guaranteed pure, and everything was designed for the comfort and protection of man. Now this. This fucking planet… It had got past Raoul somehow and had got inside the ship. The more he thought about it the angrier Gregorovitch felt about Raoul’s cutting off communication. Raoul was in command, he was paid to take decisions, Gregorovitch wasn’t. Yet now here he was, having to choose whether or not to sit here like a fool trying to get the sergeant to answer or to try to do something about the worsening situation. He felt dangerously unqualified to tackle a problem like this, and yet down in the locker room was a man who up till now had taken many of the life or death decisions of the colony. Raoul had hit the roof when he had found out that Athena was artificial, but Gregorovitch had been round A.I. all his life: spacecraft could not function without it. Where Raoul had seemed to feel massively betrayed by the secret role Athena had played, he felt only a little irritated by yet another secretive ploy of authority. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more Raoul’s reaction appeared naïve and even a little hysterical.

  By now he had given the sergeant way more than five chances to answer his comms. Fuck him. It was time to do something or they might lose the ship.

  Chapter 27

  Raoul loved the way the w
eird gel at the bottom of the pile of bones burned: the flames it gave off were of different colours just as the flames from the burning corpses had been, but these ones changed and danced with a far greater rhythm, and where there had once been a collage of two or three shifting colours, now there was a myriad of varied bright hues spreading out in a perfect circle from where the troops had set the fire going. All that was left of the corpses were a few twisted blackened bones, an arm or a skull sinking into the slutch, or a brittle ash ribcage ready to collapse into powder. Underneath, the gel glowed brightly enough to light the scene, so that he and the others were bathed in a green light. The gel was also now spider webbed with a tracery of black veins on which, here and there, nodules were forming. There was something about them which Raoul distrusted, and the others obviously felt the same because they were targeting them. He had issued the order to fire at will now, and the entire surface of the pool was beginning to char, blacken and burn in dozens of places. Coronas of multi-hued tongues of fire would spread from wherever the soldier’s beams had flickered in. In the end the many fires all fused into one and the entire surface was ablaze. They stood back, watching the inferno. A column of steam and greasy smoke rose into the sky bending a little in the night breeze in the direction of Cassini.

  The roar of the flames seemed to fill Raoul’s head, but beneath it he could make out a clatter of small popping sounds. He looked into the rainbow coloured flames and could make out, at the base of them, in the bubbling and shrivelling gel, the little black nodules. They were bursting. From them little puffs of dust or smoke were being whisked up by the updrafts and flung into the night sky. He shrugged, whatever the nodules had been didn’t matter now; nothing could live in that. They had won. He checked the time on his readout, it was a little after two in the morning. He was about to reconnect to Cassini then paused. On the one hand there were a lot of people back at the ship waiting anxiously to learn if they were going to die, and surely he owed it to them to let them know that victory had spared them. On the other hand there was still another matter to take care of – that of the robot spy. Perhaps on reflection it would be better to deal with that under the cover of a communication blackout. In the morning, everyone would be too full of rejoicing to feel as deeply any outrage they might feel over her elimination. Besides, he would be the hero of the hour, he would never get a better opportunity to act decisively and to do what had to be done, without too much civilian whining.