Blighted Star (36 page)

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
girl 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.”