Blighted Star

by Tom Parkinson

  “What the fuck is it?” Williams had leaned in close, pressing the material of her mask against his and breathing the words. He merely shrugged his shoulders. She leaned in again.

  “What do you want us to do?” She lifted her gun slightly, but Raoul shook his head from side to side, very slowly. There was no way of guessing what the strange shape might be. It might be capable of movement, and he was reluctant to provoke it until they knew more. In a few minutes the sun would come up, then they would get a proper look at it. It was hard to tell in the predawn but it looked black in colour, so perhaps it was already burned to ash, whatever it was. At the thought, he quickly re-attached the UV filter to his targe gun

  His readout gave Athena’s position as underneath the object, and he had to face the possibility that it was somehow connected to her, it might be some trick or distraction she had created to slow down his pursuit. Still the indecision paralysed him and, to make matters worse, he could feel the growing restlessness of the others.

  “Stay calm. We’re going to wait ‘til daylight before…” His words were cut short by a sudden rushing noise and the arrival of a large object just in front of them in the grass. Reacting instinctively, he fired twice at the vague form before he recognised it as Grad in the skyak. Had the gun been unfiltered, Grad would have been vaporised. As it was, Grad’s skin was blistered, and the vision in one eye burned out in a sheet of excruciating white light which made him yell with pain. He slumped forward in the cockpit and rolled to one side whimpering.

  Keeping a careful watch on the still stationary object on the vat, Raoul ran forward and dragged the pilot out of the cockpit. He laid him on the ground. Grad was moaning incoherently, one side of his face blistering as if it had been licked by flame. Raoul took hold of the pilot and shook him. Grad opened his eyes and moaned with the pain.

  “Why are you here? What are you doing here?” Raoul rasped the questions through the breath mask, then, impatiently, tore it off. After the filter, the night air seemed to rush into his lungs as if it were composed of lighter, thinner gases. Even so, the next moment, the all-pervading smell of decaying flesh left his throat with a sensation as if he had swigged fetid oily water. He suppressed the urge to spit, knowing it would do no good.

  “Grad. Grad. Why have you come here? What do you want?”

  Raoul’s face was dark against the sky, where the pale clouds drifting against the deep blue foretold another bright day to come. The pain in Grad’s head was unbelievable,. He felt like clawing the cooked flesh away to relieve the agony; yet knew that he couldn’t even bear to touch it. He couldn’t work out what had happened, one moment he had been flying in the dark, looking for something. Then the next moment he had been smashed in the side of the face by red hot fist of pain. He knew he had to remember what it was that he had been looking for… It was silver. He had seen it in the dark below, a flash of silver, and he had known he had to go down to it. Why was that? He was tired, tired of the pain in his face, in his eye. He felt as if his mind had been damaged when the eye had gone blind. Why was Raoul here? To speak caused peels of pain to course through him, yet he had to know what had happened to him. Was he going to die?

  “Wh…What happened?”

  “It’s okay. You were hit by a U.V. beam. It’s pretty bad but we’ll get you back to Clarke and he’ll fix you up.”

  “Dr Clarke’s dead.” the words came out as a whisper, but in the pale light, Grad saw the shock on Raoul’s face.

  “What? What’s been going on?”

  “U.V. light, don’t use it. It can trigger off an explosion. Please, open your comms.”

  Raoul had already done so, connecting straight to Chan. As he did so there were a series of loud cracks behind him. He whirled round to see large thin flakes sliding from the top of the giant shape and falling to the ground around the vat.

  “Chan. What’s going on?”

  “Where’s Grad? Listen to him.”

  “He’s here but he’s been injured. I can’t understand what he’s trying to tell me. What the fuck is this thing?” he commed through the image of the weird giant.

  “Oh God! You have to destroy it? It’s full of spores! If you don’t destroy it completely everyone will die. Everyone. Have you got any grenades left?”

  “No. What about the U.V. Why can’t we use it?”

  “U.V. would cause it to vent the spores. It’s how Clarke died, he was trying to use a U.V. lamp to sterilise spore bearing nodules. U.V. will cause the thing growing out of the vat to detonate too.”

  “What the hell do you want me to do then? We’ve got nothing.”

  “Raoul. What about the sphere? We could cause a breach. Use it as a bomb.”

  “I haven’t got the fucking sphere.” snarled Raoul “It’s back at Cassini. I’ll send Lana back to fetch it.”

  “There isn’t time. When the sunlight hits that thing it’s going to release.”

  “Then we’re fucked.”

  “No, Sergeant, there is just one other way, Athena has a plasma sphere in her skull as her on board power supply. She could detonate that and it would be enough. Where is she?”

  “She’s still in the vat, at least, that’s where her trace is.”

  “Shit, you’ll have to get close enough to activate her. It’s done by giving her the reboot command by the voice signal “Protocol Seven”.”

  Raoul stood up. “This is only going to take two of us, Patel, Hernandez, take him clear. Williams, you come with me. If I go down, you have to give the command signal. Let’s go.”

  The giant was now shuddering and groaning under the forces trapped within, and there was a constant rain of fragments like the blackened bark of a burned tree. The hairs on Raoul’s neck stood up. The stench made him gag. He felt like taking Williams’ hand as much for his reassurance as for hers. They knelt beside the vat and putting their lips close, began to yell the voice command as loud as they could. As if in answer, the monstrous shape above them began to shake violently.

  <><><>

  Athena snapped back into consciousness. Once again she felt the disequilibrium of having been stripped of her outer self. This time she felt the rising panic of claustrophobia being suppressed by subroutines and personality damping buffers. She felt even less human than she had before. Every part of her was constrained and constricted and she reached out with her senses to her immediate surroundings. The shock at what she found left her bewildered and frightened. she commed through to Chan.

  “Jim! What’s happening? I’m trapped in the vat by some sort of root system!”

  “Athena, my dear sweet Athena. I’m so sorry, but the roots belong to a fungus which is the final form of the organism which has been killing all those people. Athena, the fungus is full of spores which are about to become air borne. The only way to stop that from happening is for you to detonate your plasma sphere.”

  “Oh…”

  “Athena, download yourself into Cassini’s banks then I swear I’ll get you a new body as soon as I can. It’ll be a few years of course, but at least you’ll live.”

  “Is there no other way?”

  “I’m afraid not. There just isn’t time. Download now Athena. We have to hurry.”

  Athena felt herself streaming away from the confines of the vat as if she was becoming opaque and insubstantial, like a strand of mist caught by a night breeze. She steeled herself for what she had to do as the transfer was completed and once again she felt all too solid. As her senses filled in once more she became aware of screaming and yelling from outside, and a tremendous ripping sound followed by the roar of the spores bursting free. At the same time she felt the roots which bound her pulse and writhe. She instructed the plasma sphere in her skull to overload and breach.

  <><><>

  The rending noise was accompanied by a short lived roaring whoosh as the entire side of the fungus was burned to ash by the descending rays of the sun. Raoul turned sad eyes on Williams. She had stopped screaming just as he had, but the g
irl was terrified, and for the first time he felt a fatherly compassion for her, as well as remorse that it should be she who he had chosen to accompany him into death. He held open his arms in a gesture which offered both shelter and apology. Above their heads, the great fist had been transformed into a hollow flapping rag which flogged a little as it burned away. Beyond that the sky was full of an expanding black cloud which had been ejected in the direction of the rising sun but was already beginning to obey the wind’s gentle pressure and to drift westwards. Williams nestled into his chest. She was shaking, and her breathing was shallow. He patted her back, his fingers slapping quietly on the tough armour. Resting his chin on her head he looked at the side of the vat. Something inside was glowing with such heat that the outside wall of the vat was letting through some of the energy, and a hot orange disk had appeared. He held on tight to Williams as the light climbed up though the spectrum. The flash when it came was too quick for his mind to register.

  <><><>

  The early dawn grew much darker when the glowing sphere rose to the south. Lana snapped round in her seat to look, and the shuttle turned as if on its own volition to follow her gaze, rotating until its nose faced southwards. She was dumbfounded. She knew what she was looking at, but simply couldn’t believe it. The expanding ball of pure light seemed to nestle in the ground as if the planet itself was pushing up some strange pearl. Before she had the presence of mind to close her eyes against the glare, she thought she saw veins of blue and red flashing within the white globe which now reached higher into the sky than the altitude at which she flew. When her eyes were shut, the image was still there, and she was unsure how much of it was persisting and how much was shining through the thin skin of her eyelid.

  She gunned the motors of the craft, moving cautiously to the south, fearing the concussion wave which would come from the superheated air around the plasma breach. This would be followed she knew by far more violent disturbance of the atmosphere as the air rushed back into the half - kilometre wide vacuum left by the event. The sensible thing, she knew, was to put the shuttle down on the quaking ground and to wait for a few minutes until the vortices and weird flukes of air had subsided a little. Yet this she could not do: somewhere in all that maelstrom was Grad, either in the sky in that flimsy craft she’d made or maybe lying injured in the grass. If he’d been within the arc of the plasma breach, then he was gone, far more effectively than if he’d died. his very atoms would have been vaporised into wavelengths of heat and light.

  She pushed forward a little faster, feeling the first buffets from the disrupted sky. She opened her eyes and the glowing globe had gone, in its place leaving, like at the original quarry, a large deep bowl scooped from the substrata. The sides were glowing white hot still, and she knew that as at the other site they would be metres thick with black glass. Two mute testaments to their time on the planet. Both would fill she supposed, with run-off water, and would form strangely uniform lakes on this world of standing water.

  The air now snatched and clawed at her, and without refined computer systems to help her fly, the craft leapt and fell, tilting from side to side and dropping its nose, only to throw it back towards the sky again. It felt as if a giant hand was twisting and pulling at the airframe, trying to throw her from her seat. In a moment of relative calm, she tightened her straps as hard as they could go, and with gritted teeth, she flew on into the storm, scanning the ground all the while with dying hope.

  As she neared the edge of the crater, the craft began to whirl and dance beyond her control. At one point a tornado whirled her high into the sky amidst a blizzard of grass fragments and tiny stones. As soon as she wrestled free of that, a violent downdraft threw her within metres of the ground, as she coaxed her way back upwards, she glanced to her left and saw them. She let the tail end of the downdraft push her down and reversed the polarity of the A.G.s, clamping her to the ground next to the three figures.

  She had to shout to make herself heard over the screaming and wailing of the tortured air. But in the end, Patel looked up. The respirator had melted , but it had at least offered some protection from the fiery blast of the air around the crater. Some instinct to altruism had made him throw himself across the body of the pilot in his care, and so Grad had escaped some of the damage which he might have suffered to his wrecked face. All three men had, however, had to breath, and the nanos in their seared lungs were struggling against the injuries sustained in the roasting temperatures. Lana had to leave the craft to help the men across the wilted smoking grass, and to heave Grad’s inert weight onto the cargo deck. The ruination of his face made tears of pity roll down her cheeks.

  Back in her seat she reduced the power to the motors, so that the skids dragged along the ground. She drove the shuttle like that for several minutes until the buffeting from the air reduced enough. Then she aimed the shuttle at the sky and raced for Cassini.

  As she did so, she called ahead for medical aid to be ready, remembering that Dr Clarke was dead. To her astonishment, it was Athena’s voice which responded in place of Cassini’s flat tones.

  “Athena? What the hell?”

  “Long story, I’ll fill you in when you get back. Just be careful, the air out there’s all mixed up.”

  Athena now had a massive range of senses at her disposal as Avatar of Cassini. She could reach out into the emptiness of space around the planet to read the flow of radiation or focus her attention on the molecules in the grains of soil in the ground below her. Each and every one of the humans under her care was open to her scrutiny, and she very quickly, with a fading sense of guilt, perused their metabolic readouts, looking for the signs of stress as told by increased heart rates or raised adrenalin levels. She became aware of another difference as her humanity fell away; she was able to absorb far more information than she used to be able to, and to process it in what felt like slow motion. Part of her was aware too of the barriers she was breaking of privacy. Barriers she had herself been utterly committed to only a few short hours before which now she had to remind herself were of any consequence.

  She knew it would take a long time to get used to the ship as her body. There was no sense in which the systems of the starship were analogous to the limbs she had lost. She did not, for example experience the landing struts as being like legs or the numerous cameras and other sensors as being like eyes and ears. The sensation she was experiencing was more akin to the sensation she had felt when she was entombed among the roots in the vat, except this was in its own way a benevolent entombment.

  Best thing of all was to have access once more to Chan. He was so kind and sympathetic, and so positive about the future that she herself was losing her glum fear of the settlers and how they were going to accept her new role as the ghost in the machine. So far, after all that had happened, people seemed to be responding to the weird news as just one more thing. The spreading rumours had been overtaken by the spreading news of the victory over the zombies, and already people were gathering outside and in the mess hall. She wondered if it would be best to keep a low profile during the course of the aftermath. She decided to check in with Chan once more in the engine bay where he was still working on connecting the remaining plasma sphere to the main drive engines. The work was not going well, and as she focussed her attention on the security camera in the small bay, she heard him cursing as he banged his elbow in the narrow confines of the machine.

  “Hi Jim.”

  “Oh hi Athena, how are you feeling?” Chan waved a hand vaguely in her direction, but didn’t wriggle free from the machine. She felt some sympathy with that, the spheres were not installed into the equipment with the idea of being removed at whim.

  “Not too bad really. I wouldn’t want to stay this way forever, but hey, it’s better than the alternative!”

  “Huh. Yes, see what you mean.”

  “How are you getting along?”

  “Not well. Damn thing has about a million connections. Could you run a diagnostic, make sure I’m right
so far?”

  Athena could have been offended if she had chosen to be. In one way Chan was treating her like a computer, and indeed it was a task which Cassini’s computer would normally carry out. But she knew that it was his own clumsy way of keeping her in the loop, and of paying his respects to her as a technician at the same time. The test took a millisecond to run, and she wasn’t at all surprised to find that he had made no mistakes at all.

  Chapter 29

  Once again Grad lay in a daze between consciousness and unknowingness, floating as his body waited for the nanos to do their work of repair. The sickbay had been scoured clean but still felt somehow shabbier than it had before, and Dr Clarke’s absence gave it an indefinable sense of being abandoned. The beds were all empty apart from the one Grad occupied, but this was not a sign of health among the colonists, indeed the past week had taken its toll on the health of nearly everyone. The unbearable level of anxiety had given birth to a range of stress symptoms. Athena hoped that the relief that the victory would bring would give all the chance to recover from the crushing burden of fear, but she knew that this would in most cases merely be replaced by sadness as the colony counted its losses. Very few people, she knew, would want to remain if they were asked at that moment. She would wait. When the sphere was safely reinstalled she would still wait. She would give them every chance to take the decision in a spirit of calm deliberation.

  Christel was doing well in her care of Grad. She had assigned herself the role of medical officer as soon as he had been brought in by Lana, and had been at his side ever since. Athena had supplied the advice on what medication to administer, but Christel had taken to it as if she was a born practitioner. In fact, Christel had candidly said that it was not that unlike dealing with a sick farmbot.