In all there were nearly a hundred people in Cassini. Some had been dotted around the ship already, others had been down on the field when the spores had blown in. Those in this second group were the most immediately vulnerable because they had not travelled far from the open doors. Many of them now stood panting in the entrances to the access corridors which opened off on either side of the main vassicle. Among these were Grad and Christel. Tears were streaming down Christel’s pain wracked face, and Grad was supporting her or she would have surely collapsed onto the metal deck. They were near the access route to the flight deck, but Athena could see at a glance that they had no hope at all of reaching the distant sanctuary before they died.
In the engine room Chan, alerted by her earlier general alarm call to those on the field, was looking with concern at Amy. Neither of them could see the puff of black dust from the ventilator above them. Beyond the doorway, the corridor was already full of air borne death.
One nanosecond at a time the events unfolded, so that the helpless Athena experienced what was, for her, day after day of her friends’ deaths, Many times she was tempted to return to a human chrono-conception just to get the next few moments over with, but to her this would have been like bringing their doom forward and she simply could not bring herself to do it. Each “day” was agony as she watched, a helpless immortal, death take all of them. Only when Lana’s green life trace up in the sealed off cockpit was the only one left did Athena slow down to a human time frame again. She felt shaky, on the very edge of madness, and the terror filled sobs of the young pilot did little to lessen the feeling of alienation.
As planetfalls went, this was a most sober affair, and both Janice and Teresa kept an uncharacteristic silence as Huygens nudged her way through the upper layers of the atmosphere and eased herself out of interstellar space and into sub – orbital flight. The wisps of cloud they fell towards looked heart-achingly beautiful, particularly as they spoke to the pilots of the relief of drinking fresh water for the first time in two years. In fact, Janice thought, the water they would soon be drinking would be the freshest and purest any of them would ever drink, most of the colonists came from world where human settlement was based on the constant recycling of the necessities of life.
Janice wondered how they were all feeling, strapped into the various chairs and benches throughout the colony ship. Most of them had been in the central mess hall when she had come through to join her co-pilot on the bridge, and there the mood had been a sombre one. No sense of fear; the updates from Cassini had been reassuring that the area had been disinfected and a wide perimeter of sensors had been long established to screen for incursions of the soil dwelling creatures or the floating spores, now an increasingly rare occurrence, apparently.
Even so, the vote to press on with the colonisation had been a tricky one. A sizable minority were still threatening not to even get off the ship on this world which had already taken so much life. Odd to think that they were involved in one of the great disasters of the diaspora movement,one which would be talked about for centuries yet to come. She was lucky that she had not had anyone close to her in the first wave. Many people behind her in the body of the ship were coming out to join family and friends who had been in the first wave. Though they had known the fate of those people for well over a year now, it was hard to comprehend that the first wave had been wiped out so completely that only two human beings were alive to greet them; one of the pilots and her newborn son
Unfortunately what was making the life of people like her who wanted to stay difficult was the total lack of faith most of the colonists now had in the Agency. The Agency had blown it, big time, by its secret programme of emplacing artificial staff on new worlds. On balance, Janice was inclined to believe them when they claimed it was for benevolent reasons, but she was not so certain of that as to be able to argue persuasively against the many people who found the whole episode distasteful at best and dangerously undemocratic at worse. Given mankind’s troubled history, it was little wonder that conspiracies tended to bring out a paranoid response when they were discovered. The response this time threatened to disrupt the whole movement. Though only, she supposed, for a short time.
On Huygens there had been something of a witch hunt as the colonists demanded to know who the android amongst them was. The whole thing had left a very bitter taste in her mouth, but it had really been an expression of the helplessness and impotence they had all felt when the news had come through about what had happened to the Cassini group. The mob needed to do something, to react to the danger and the pain of so much loss. When the tearful agricultural expert had been identified, the poor woman’s reaction of shock and disbelief had been so obviously genuine that the rage of the committee which had convened itself to search her out was softened and the matter had been dealt with by putting her in the brig rather than in an open airlock as many of the colonists would have liked. Janice had even been to see her though they had never been close before the scanners had revealed her true identity. She wasn’t being in any way maltreated, but when the time came she would be sent back to join the thousands of other artificials in the detention camps across the galaxy.
Cassini’s Artificial was going to pose an interesting question or two. She had taken refuge in the main computer of the first colony ship from where she could wield a great deal of power. Steps had been taken to shield the computer in Huygens from her but no one really knew if the hastily erected firewall would keep her out. Or even if, in the many days for which she was in unrestricted communication with Huygen’s mainframe she might have already subverted the computer. For all Janice knew, she might be steering the colony ship straight into the ground right now, though that would be pretty counter to the constant reassurances the artificials were giving of being the friends of mankind. In the end they would just have to take on trust that Athena Johnson wasn’t going to kill them all, and that, if they asked her nicely, she would come out of the machine and put herself in secure data storage. Fat chance of that, Janice couldn’t help but think. If she’d been in Athena’s shoes, she would have politely declined such an offer.
That was all waiting for them when they got down on the planet, and personally, Janice felt that the best thing they could do over the whole artificial situation, not just here but everywhere, was just to calm the fuck down. By all accounts, artificials had been around for at least a hundred years and they hadn’t taken over yet. In fact, they had, here and there, done some good. The danger was that once again humanity was likely to create an enemy where there hadn’t been one before. Push the artificials hard enough and they might be forced to push back just to save themselves. Unless they were a damn sight more altruistic than humans ever could be. The Amish on board must be quietly laughing their socks off to see mainstream society at such odds with its own technology. Or at least they would be laughing if they hadn’t lost so many of their kinsfolk in the first settlement.
The new plan was very much to take each day as it came. They would to begin with life on the two ships while extensive cleansing of the whole planet took place. Interstellar trade would be put on hold for the time being, not that they had anything to trade with the loss of the olerite mines. Huygens was supposed to have loaded up on sheets of processed metals and to have set off back to settled space, but none of that would now happen. This was okay with Janice who had always planned on staying, but it was a bitter blow to Teresa who had a life to get back to. Obviously, follow up waves were on the way but the next one wouldn’t land for nearly a year, and it would be almost empty. When Saunder’s World had been unveiled as the number one colonial destination, the demand for places had been overwhelming, but now, with the disaster of “Saunder’s Rot”, the planet had acquired an evil reputation.
They were gliding down nicely now, through a patch of drizzle which streamed off the screen before her to be replaced by a blast of white sunlight from the left which glowed in Teresa’s red hair, showing the halo of strands which had wandered
free from the severe bun hairstyle she affected. On the horizon ahead a flash of silver showed where the first ship waited for them and the two pilots could not help but exchange a glance at the sight. The landscape they were travelling over at such speed was flat and dull green, torn by strips and puncture wounds of motionless water which reflected the sky for a moment as they flew past only to become dark and unfathomable again as the light left them. Over on the left she could just make out a half moon of water near which the grey smudge of an abandoned town sat on a track which led towards the sunset. As they dropped lower, a perfectly circular lake nearly filled the bowl a plasma blast had cut into the rock. To the North, she knew, an even bigger round lake marked where the colony had had its first plasma explosion. She wondered how many more scars the planet would bear in a hundred years to show the presence of man.
The End
Thank you for reading ‘Blighted Star’.
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