Blighted Star

by Tom Parkinson

  It was while she was thinking along these lines that Christel suddenly had an insight.

  “Athena! The plague is carried by the soil dwelling creatures, isn’t it? The worms and so on?” There was an excitement in Christel’s voice which drove it higher, and Athena felt a smile come to her lips, and then remembered. “The ghost of a smile…” she thought grimly.

  “Yes, Christel, that was what Dr Clarke thought anyway.”

  “The farmbots can be calibrated to track down organisms in the soil. It’s one of their functions, to count them and keep track of the soil’s health. Anyway, they could be reconfigured to zap the little bastards. All of them, or just the ones which are infected.”

  “Well…What are we waiting for? Let’s get them in! This could solve all our problems!”

  “There isn’t any need to bring them in to reconfigure them. It’s not that big a change from the functions they normally carry out. All we need to do is identify the infected worms as a crop pest and set the ‘bots off to seek them out. they could clear a cordon sanitaire around Cassini of a couple of square kilometres wide in a matter of days!”

  “…We’re saved! Christel!”

  “Yes, I think we really are.” Christel’s voice had sunk a little with solemnity as the impact of what she was saying took hold. Their hold on the planet was going to be secure after all. There would be generations born here for who the troubled history of the early colony would be no more than one of the more interesting history lessons. Christel took Grad’s hand in hers and held it up to her lips. There would be a future, and this man would share in it with her. Her feelings as she had watched danger beset Grad time after time both confused and excited her. She had wondered whether she would ever experience love, and in fact had become resigned somewhat to the idea that romantic love probably wasn’t for her. Now here was another person whose safety felt more important to her than her own. Sitting here it was easy to say that she would gladly give her life for him. But in fact she very nearly had done that in the accident in the lab. She had acted then without a second’s hesitation, and she knew that she would again if she ever needed to. She had never experienced feelings remotely like those she felt now, and it was something of a surprise to her to find out that they even really existed, let alone that she too could feel them.

  Underlying the warm glow her feelings of love gave her were the colder touches of fear that were the inevitable accompaniment; some part of her knew that Grad did not as yet feel the same way. It had all happened too fast for him to transfer his love from Lana to her. But he would. She would look after him. The disfigurement of his face would lessen over time but without sophisticated medical care it would always be there. It would not matter to her, and he would see that. It would prove to him that her love for him was the real deal. In time he would feel the same way, and now they had time.

  Grad’s hand stirred in hers and she looked down at his burned face, half hidden in bandages. reading his one good eye was difficult, and she thought for a moment the shadow of regret had passed behind it, then he pulled her into his arms with a gentle “C’mere, you.”

  <><><>

  In a strange way the gathering of the colonists out on the green below Cassini mirrored the one a few weeks ago when the ship first landed, and many of them must have been aware of the similarity, and of the missing third of their number, for the mood was both sombre and to some extent one of relief. As they wandered among the survivors of what someone had dubbed “Saunder’s Rot”, the individuals who made up the crowd looked at each face more carefully than they would have before, and people seemed to recollect a closer acquaintance with those they would not necessarily have recognised in the corridor.

  The mood changed a little when, in the beginning of the afternoon, a row of dots appeared in the distance. as they came closer, the shapes resolved into the twelve farmbots from Crescent Waters. The reason for their arrival quickly spread, triggering a moment or two of slight panic, followed by titters of anxious laughter as people around the field checked the ground beneath their feet for signs of infected worms. The farmbots formed a line, with one end anchored at Cassini, and began to patrol round and round the great ship, moving out a little each time until within a few hours the whole field could be declared to have been swept clear. The announcement lifted the mood. Those who had not lost any friends or family did not burst into wild cheers in the face of so many who had, but here and there in the crowd were islands of cheerful conversation, smiles and even a little laughter.

  As the day wore on, the colonists, who had gravitated to the circle of cleared ground around Cassini, spread further away little by little as the line of robots spiralled out. Everyone seemed to find increasing comfort and growing confidence in this most visible demonstration of their reconquest of the planet, metre by metre. Towards sunset, when the circle had grown to nearly half a kilometre in circumference, a sudden murmur broke out. Someone had seen a flash from one of the robots, or thought they had and for a few minutes the rumours ran through the crowd like buffets of wind through wheat. It had been a worm, making its way towards them through the soil. It had been a severed hand, crawling in their direction. It had been a malfunction, and the line of robots was about to stop completely. In the end Athena pointed out in a general announcement that the robots would destroy anything they found by excavating it first, then giving it a pulse of Ultra Violet radiation, which would be invisible. The flash they had seen had merely been the sun’s dying light glinting off a metal surface. The sound of Athena’s voice created the same buzz of conversation which had accompanied it every time she had spoken to the colonists. Though in some quarters the facts surrounding her true identity had been received with anger and fear, on the whole the recent days of horror and death had left the colonists with little appetite for further startling news. All any of them really wanted was a period of calm and stability in which to re-establish their lives. To that extent Athena’s continued existence and continued position of pre-eminence was a kind of comfort. When general announcements had been made in the past it had always been by the same kindly voice after all.

  At seven o’clock the faces of the crowd turned towards the top of the stairs where Grad and Christel had appeared. The pilot was leaning heavily on the horticulturists arm, but at the chorus of cheers from the crowd he raised a bemused hand and gave a wave. With Raoul out of the picture, the crowd had rather taken Grad to their hearts, and found in the already popular and charismatic young man, the wounded hero the occasion seemed to demand. One or two of those cheering cast a wry eye on where the other pilot, who had been previously romantically linked with Grad, disappeared abruptly into the open hangar doors.

  <><><>

  The empty corridor rang with her footsteps as Lana stomped her way through Cassini towards the cockpit. She considered, briefly, turning down to where she knew Chan would be working on the engine. She badly wanted to know that the possibility existed at least, of getting off this evil rock. But she was just too angry to be around any other person at that moment. She climbed the last steps and positively bashed the button to activate the outer door to the flight deck. A moment’s wait in the airlock, then she was through and into her sanctuary. One downside, she thought, of life when they did leave “Saunder’s” would be that she would have to share her private kingdom with that prick. She slumped down in her chair, drumming her fingers on her stomach, and then she remembered about the growing life contained within it. Her fury increased at Grad. How could he do it? In one way she had had a lucky escape; she had actually been contemplating spending her life with that buffoon and his brat. Now the sooner it was out of her the better. Of course, with Dr Clarke out of the picture she would have to administer her own medicine to terminate the pregnancy, but Cassini would make the drugs she needed to reabsorb the thing clinging to the lining of her womb like a leech. Damn! Now approaching Cassini would inevitably mean Athena would be involved. Lana wasn’t at all sure how she felt about that. All th
is anger was making her tired, and she knew that really she should be feeling the joy of relief at their deliverance. She looked out of the cockpit window at the crowd below and felt more isolated than she ever had before. Down there in the evening light they were still all making merry. Most of them had been out pretty much all day, not surprising considering the time they had been forced to spend in the close confines of the ship, breathing and rebreathing stale air.

  The ship was beginning to cast a long shadow, and the crowd had divided into two as people moved to stay in the warm golden light on either side. The air in the cockpit began to feel cool, and Lana tapped a button to activate a small jet of warmth across her feet. This was the way she had always set the heater. Whenever Grad had been in the pilot’s chair he had always tampered with the settings so that the air blew across his face. It had been a minor irritation, the sudden dry air in her eyes, along with the seat being too far back and the control pad too high. Sooner or later, she supposed, she would have to share this area again with him. When that happened she had a bad feeling that all those little things would begin to grate on her nerves, and that wouldn’t be good in space’s limitless prison. She sighed. she was really going to have to get a rein on her feelings over the next few days. She rested her head on one side and closed her eyes.

  <><><>

  The last of the sun’s rays lit the western sky into a glowing red mountain of fire against which the ship towered above them like an immense silver coral head in some fantastic shallow sea specked with stars. Grad gazed at the sight, lost for words at the beauty of it. He had always loved spacecraft since he was a little kid growing up in the shadow of a spaceport, where the craft used to drop down through the sky, creating their own trailing tresses of clouds as the moisture in the air reacted with the hulls, still deeply cold from the icy touch of space. At one time he knew, spacecraft used to smash into the upper atmosphere like cannon balls dropping onto the surface of a lake, and they would still be sizzling when they thumped onto the ground. But that had been in the early days of spaceflight, and for centuries vessels had eased themselves back into atmospheric flight at mere hundreds of miles per hour. Looking at Cassini now, Grad wondered when she would fly again, if ever. Most colonies kept their ships intact for generations. Those ships were so solidly built that they were space worthy long after they needed to be, but very few of them ever actually flew again, They became, in effect, their planet’s first civil monuments.

  Here on Saunder’s their situation was so very different. The present mood was one of triumph, but they had been through so much since the days when they had called it “Goldilocks” that he wondered if any of them had an appetite for much more of the planet. He wasn’t sure if he had himself. There were plenty of other worlds after all..

  Up in the cockpit’s bulge there was a soft light shining, which, he knew must be Lana, and for a moment his heart turned over and he felt a hard painful lump rise in his throat. The next moment, a commotion at the far end of the crowd he was in claimed his unwilling attention. Were people messing around? Tonight surely wasn’t the occasion for such boisterousness. The crowd surged away from the source of the disturbance, pressing back towards him as people lost their footings, spilling onto the ground and bringing others down with them. Christel was nearby and she grabbed his arm, her fingers digging into the flesh painfully. Athena’s voice boomed inside his head

  “GET INSIDE! NOW!”

  At that moment the screams began.

  <><><>

  Athena watched with some satisfaction as Amy spoke to her father, but she took her attention away from the microphones in the engine room to afford them a little privacy. It had been nice guiding the child through the empty corridors to where Chan was working. It was not at all unlike walking next to the little girl, holding her hand as she must have done a thousand times. She had explained what had happened to her body, but Amy had hardly batted an eyelid, asking only what had it been like being dead? The answer that Athena hadn’t experienced death, only a near instant transfer to Cassini’s computer systems didn’t particularly seem to satisfy Amy, but in the end the child had simply nodded and changed the subject, as if saying “Okay, we’ll leave it there for now.”

  From now on she was going to take a far more active role in the lives of the children, Athena decided. Obviously, the leadership role she had fulfilled until now wasn’t going to be possible in the future, but if she got any choice in the matter then she was going to take on more pastoral work while someone else dealt with the big troubles which might come along. Perhaps she could combine healthcare and education? With her ability to process information from dozens of sensors so quickly, she could almost be everywhere at once, looking after all the children, keeping them safe. The thought was pleasing. She tested her theory, and found that she could easily follow all the children on the planet, and all the grownups too. It was a little as if time slowed down for her, and she could look at each individual in turn in near freeze frame. There was Lana, sealed off in the cockpit. She didn’t know that down on the field below, in the gathering twilight, Grad was looking up at her with sadness written across his damaged face. He didn’t know that Christel was watching him over the rim of her glass. Her expression was unreadable. Not far away a circle of children were dancing round holding hands, their teacher in the middle playing a tune for them to dance to and projecting fish and other sea creatures which whirled round with the kids. A single note from the song was attenuated in Athena’s hearing, it wasn’t, she was interested to hear, lower in tone like notes in old slow motion films, but more as if someone was holding the same perfect note for an impossibly long time. Jim would no doubt have something to say about the phenomenon. She recognised this song. It was a traditional children’s rhyme about life under the sea. In the far east of the crowd a couple were hugging. From the dilation of the woman’s eyes and the reddening of the vascular bundles in her earlobes, Athena could see that they would soon be heading off to somewhere more private. Interesting. The man wasn’t the woman’s husband. He was two metres away, clutching his hand to his neck. Athena zoomed in close, focussing her vision on what lay under the man’s hand. A blister had risen around which the skin was shrinking and decaying as she watched. Already the contagion had transferred to the palm of the man’s hand. The air around him was dotted with spores. panning across the field, she saw that there were thousands more blowing in on the light breeze from the East which had blown all day. Widening her senses, she could see them flowing in a long thin cloud back to where Raoul had burned the corpses. She commed through to all of them to shout a warning, but she had to synchronise her experience of time with theirs in order to communicate. When she did, time speeded up again and she watched the man go down, writhing in agony. Around him the settlers fell back in fear and confusion, but they could not escape the onslaught of the tiny spores.

  As Athena watched in growing horror, first one person then another was struck by the deadly particles. The stricken crowd surged back towards Cassini, panicking at the feet of the stairways.

  On the Eastern fringe the forgotten children were screaming in pain and fear and clawing at themselves as if they were being attacked by a swarm of stinging insects. As if on the cue of a line from a song they fell as one into the grass the farmbots had so recently passed over.

  In the area before the steps, fights had broken out as people tried to scramble their way to safety. As Athena watched impotently, Grad, who was on the stairway already, reached back into the boiling mass of humanity and grabbed at Christel’s out flung hand, only their fingers touched and he leaned forward again and grabbed, just as a shove from someone behind pushed her forward by a few inches. He closed her wrist in an iron grip, and with his other hand anchored firmly to the railing, hauled with all his strength. Christel’s shoulder dislocated with an audible “Clop” but she slithered over the heads of the crowd and into his arms. Badly crushed, she had only the breath to whimper. They turned, and with the other forerunn
ers, made their way up the flights of stairs and into the hull of the ship.

  Below them, the screams of the dying reached a crescendo as the spores swept into the gathered humanity. As if they were being exposed to some deadly gas the people stumbled and fell or died standing where the force of the crowd held them on their feet. More people made it through the throng only to fall twisting in agony on the steps.

  As the last rays of light left the upper hull of the starship, and night finally arrived, the field fell silent and one by one, the strewn corpses rose to their feet.

  Chapter 30

  Athena wanted to weep, but she was disembodied and was aware of herself as nothing more than strands of data, There was almost nothing she could do. She sounded the alarm and attempted to initiate the hull breach procedure which would seal off areas of the ship. But throughout Cassini the doors and ventilators had been removed or disabled in the open position to prevent accidental closure from causing the stifling hazard of carbon dioxide build up. Operating in speeded up mode she shut down what fans she could, and reversed the flow on others but it was utterly hopeless. The spores were in the ship and spreading fast. They had been drawn through the main corridor from side to side of the ship like toxic dust being inhaled deeply into a lung, and now they were dispersing through the side corridors and ducts into all parts. She had nothing to give any of them, no advice, no warnings that would do any good. Desperate not to see any of them die she maximised her processing power until for her a second stretched out into the dim future. but this was almost worse; she could see with absolute clarity what order they would die in, three settlers in the main door way were already stricken, though only two of them had become aware of the pain of the infection, the third had been touched by a spore on the wrist and already the tiny pod had glued itself onto her skin and bitten into the surrounding cells. Around the woman’s head blew hundreds more of the deadly motes which would kill her before the contagion spread up her arm. On her face was an expression of relief at having escaped the field below.