Blighted Star (34 page)

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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.

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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.

Raoul
loved the way the weird 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.

The
fires were burning low now, and so, he knew, would be the ardour of the troops.
He ordered three to remain, keeping the conflagration going by bursts from
their targe guns. The others fell in behind him and began the trek to the
south. There were grumbles, but right now he could do no wrong, he had brought
them victory. The grass beneath his boots seemed to push back as he trod on it,
and for the first time in many days he felt the benefit of Saunder’s World’s lesser
gravity. He felt a giddiness, a loosening of his grip on his senses, and
allowed himself the indulgence of a grin. When the next ship arrived, he would
revert back to just being a sergeant. But that was two years away still. Until
then, this whole planet was his. All that stood between that and him was one
illegal piece of machinery. The engineer had put himself out of the picture by
being implicated in whatever scam or plot the robot represented. When Raoul had
dismantled her, he would decide what to do with Chan on the basis of whatever
they found in her memory banks. Whatever it was, the engineer was up to his
balls in it and Raoul had no intention of letting him off the hook.

Above
them the shuttle still hovered over the site of the burning. Lana would be
wondering what  they were doing, heading off to the south like this, but
he would just let her stew. This one was for the chosen few only.

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Lana
had indeed seen them heading south, and had wondered whether she should follow them.
In the absence of further orders from Raoul, and unable to reach him, she had
continued to hover. the flames below were beginning to die down a little and
she could see that the pool was almost completely burned away. Even so, she
could still feel the fire’s heat on her face where the light from those evil
looking flames fell on her. Earlier, the fire had caused a considerable
updraft, and she had been forced to move out of its buffeting. Looking across
she could still make out in the firelight the column of filthy smoke which
flowed into the sky and, high above her turned to the west, fanning out in the
direction of Cassini. In a few hours, she reckoned, they would be able to smell
the end of the battle back at the ship.

It
was hard to believe that they had won. In fact she doubted that they had, but
at least the immediate crisis had been contained, and they had a powerful new
weapon they could use to stave off any more zombies while they fixed Cassini’s
drive and got the hell out of there.

Raoul
was their saviour. You could really see a master at work with the way he had
directed the battle. There were patterns in the way the dots had moved which
had been obvious even to her civilian eyes. It was like watching the history
presentations the boys had gone in for at school in which they demonstrated the
ways battles had played out. In the actions Raoul had directed, the winning
strategist had been clear from the beginning each time. They had so much to be
grateful to him for, every man woman and child left alive on the planet. There
could be little doubt that it was his sure hand which had guided them out of
the valley of the shadow of death.

Whatever
he was up to now, it must be something which would be in their best interests.
Lana continued to hover in the darkness, waiting to hear her next instruction.

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The
door to the locker room finally opened and Christel sat up. Her hair fell
across her face and partially blocked her view of Gregorovitch. The soldier
pointed silently at Grad and the pilot rose and walked over to him. The two
exited, and Chan and Christel looked at each other anxiously.

Outside
in the corridor Gregorovitch leaned close to Grad.

“We
need to talk. You said disease is changing, no? What is change?”

“It’s
gone air borne, and it seems to react to ultra violet light, it seems to
explode when you shine ultra violet on it, and all kinds of particles get in
the air. Dr Clarke thought they were spores like those from a fungus.”

“If
ultra violet light does this then we are in great danger. Guns all fire ultra
violet beams now.” The two men regarded each other as the information sank in.

“You
need to warn Raoul. They mustn’t fire on anything which looks black, or is
growing out of green matter. Tell him the most dangerous bits look like black
spheres. If he hits them he could be in real trouble. We have to get him to
lift the communications block. can you do it?”

“Is
very difficult. system designed so that only commander can control in event of
crisis. Raoul has code. In end I could build new system but would take hours to
get even basic system working. We need to get Raoul. He can restart whole
system with one command.”

“It
would take us hours to find him in this dark, and that’s assuming the night isn’t
crawling with those things. If we had the shuttle… but Lana’s out there with
it…”

“There
is other flying machine, you can fly that one, yes?”

“Oh
course! The Skyak! Come on!” Grad bounded away down the corridor, the Russian’s
boots pounding behind him.