Blighted Star (11 page)

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Grad
stared dolefully at the chessboard they had made in the sand. Once again he
felt a desire to reach down and rub the whole thing out, possibly gathering up
two of the white pieces to shove up Jim’s nose. He wasn’t a good enough player
to see any way out of the elegant trap he had blundered into, but he
was
good enough to see clearly how it would unfold no matter what he did.

“Aww.
Shit.”

“What?”
Jim was trying to look innocent, but the smirk lurking behind his deadpan
expression was struggling to escape.

“Fuckit.
I declare.” Grad pushed over his King. It, like all the other pieces had been
made out of mud by Chan while Grad was out on a walk. The fiendish intricacy
and sheer attention to detail Jim had put into the set of chessmen had been in
themselves a warning of the engineer’s love of the game. They had played six
times, and now it was nearly midnight. Grad had won the first one, but had the
disquieting feeling that his opponent had been more interested in observing how
he had played, rather than in an initial victory. Certainly, Chan had won every
game since then with ease, seeming to anticipate all Grad’s moves. Grad’s
suggestion that a game of Draughts might make a nice change of pace had been
met with nothing more than a raised eyebrow as Jim had set up the pieces for
their fifth game. Now with alarm he saw the pieces being lined up again in the
glow of the lamp/oven.

“Well,
I’m bushed,” he lied, stretching ostentatiously, “…time to get some Z’s.” Tomorrow
would probably be their last full day together, and the routine would be broken
up by a visit from Lana in that death-trap she had built, assuming she didn’t
drop out of the sky on the way here. Before that he could make a big deal out
of his exercise programme, with a long swim followed by a dozen jogged circuits
of the lake. If he was lucky, and he stretched things out as much as possible,
that would only leave time for three or four games of chess…

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The
people of Heart Lake stood on the common and stared. The horse had recovered
from its terror and placidly munched on the grass. No one was quite sure what
to do, how to approach what was after all a really large animal. Obviously it
had come from the Amish settlement to the east, it had probably run away or
just wandered off and got itself lost. But now someone would have to let the
Amish know where their beast had ended up, and because the Amish had no
telecommunications devices, someone would have go and do this face to face. All
the sitting around and waiting for supplies to restart had left the town in a
strange limbo where doing nothing had developed its own inertia. Though they
had nothing better to do, nobody wanted to undertake the thirty-kilometre trek.
Staring glumly at the horse, Gerard connected to Jackson for the second time
that day. Jackson’s projected image stood perfectly still, with unreadable body
language, but Gerard was well aware that he was regarded as a troublemaker by
the Lieutenant.

“Monsieur
Pitot.”

“Lieutenant,
are you aware that there is a horse on the green behind me?”

“Yes
Monsieur Pitot, we have received several calls already about the stray animal.”

“Very
good. And what are you going to do about it? Has anyone contacted the Amish?”

“The
Amish don’t have telecoms, Monsieur, but we have taken steps to notify them.”

“And
what steps are those, Lieutenant Jackson? Surely you don’t think the Amish will
be very happy talking to a probe. And what if something has gone wrong out
there? I don’t think the Amish would have just let the horse go, do you?”
Gerard warmed to his theme. “Has anything been done to contact them yet? Has a
probe been sent out?”

“Monsieur
Pitot. We have only just learned about the stray animal ourselves down here. We
have sent out an airborne mission to assess the situation Not that we even
think there
is
a situation. So far there’s just a stray horse. It is a
manned airborne mission…”

“Ah!
So the new shuttle is ready!”

“…the
craft used is not the new shuttle which will be ready very soon according to
schedule. The craft we are using was constructed out of spares by one of the
pilots. It has limited capacity but does give us back some element of air
mobility. In fact she set off from here ten minutes ago so she should be
crossing over you within the hour.”

Gerard
nodded curtly and cut the link. Really these people were beyond incompetence,
and it was a waste of breath to engage them in argument. Sending out a mere
girl on what could, for all they knew, be a dangerous mission on her own. The
Amish were a bunch of weirdoes from ancient Earth history, who knew what they
might do to an unescorted female. It would serve them right if she was raped or
even killed.

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Jackson
was worried himself. It had, he had always thought, been a mistake to let the
Amish have their way over ID tracers. The agency had been keen to have the
Amish on board to give a little local colour. Every planet they settled seemed
to have a component of one minority group or another. The NeoMarxists on Tgao
4, the Silent Order of Penitents on Felixia and many more. The policy had
worked well, and had added to the variety of ways of life being tried out by
humanity, which was generally considered to be a good thing.

But
good thing or not, it left Jackson with four adults and two children
unaccounted for who he couldn’t trace. Shit, no. Five adults, there was still
that first guy, Gunnar Olafson. There was still no sign of him. Jackson
connected to Lana.

“Lana.
How are you getting on?” In the background he could faintly hear what she was
hearing, the rush of wind.

“Hi
Jackson. Doing fine, just been over Crescent Waters, Heart Lake in about forty
minutes. The horse still there?”

“Yes,
it’s still there. Listen, do me a favour. Could you keep an eye open for a
solitary walker? I meant to track him down a few days ago but a lot has
happened since then…”

“Oh
yes, is this that Norwegian Asteroid guy?”

“Yes,
that’s him. Don’t deviate from the course, but if you see him let me know.”

“Will
do. Speak to you soon.”

“Thanks
Lana.”

“Don’t
mention it.”

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Lana
trimmed the canoe to lose a little height, she had just remembered a trick her
brother had invented and she wanted to try it out. You left the A/Gs on the
setting they were on, trying to hold you at a certain height, then you forced
the canoe down against their resistance by leaning forward, putting the nose
down and using the fan propulsion and the aerodynamic forces on the hull to
force you down in a nose dive. In the end you reached a point where the A/G’s
won out and you wouldn’t sink any further. Then you leaned back and shot into
the sky like a catapulted stone! With a whoop Lana shot upwards, completing the
stunt, her stomach full of fluttering wings and her sight greying just a little
at the edges.

Lana
got her breath back and started the manoeuvre again. Ahead she could see the
settlement of Crescent Waters with its big open green on which the tiny rash of
a crowd was gathered. She adjusted her course a touch to the left so that she
would pass near one edge of the crowd. By now, the A/G’s were grumbling and the
canoe was just about at the bottom of the dive. She held it just a little
longer, passing over the houses at a hundred metres. She could see the crowd
turning to look at her, suddenly turning lighter as upturned faces replaced
darker hair. She caught a glimpse of the horse in the middle of the crowd, now
being ignored.

She
leaned back, hard, and the canoe stood on its stern. The A/Gs’ grumble rose to
a whine as the load on them was suddenly reduced. The canoe shot forward and
up, pinning her into the rear of the cockpit. Her toes felt tingly and were
being pulled back towards her away from the footrest by the Gs.

Her
velocity began to decrease and she pulled gently on the stick, steepening her
angle while she still had momentum, maintaining the pressure of centrifugal
force pushing her into her seat. The canoe went through the vertical and tilted
backward, more and more until she lost centrifugal force and after a second’s
weightlessness, hung from her straps, looking down from a thousand metres to
the gasping crowd below her.

She
leaned hard forward, her stomach muscles straining with the effort, and the
nose came down through the horizon and began to point ever more directly at the
ground below until she was hurtling straight down, height peeling away in the
screaming wind. Her hair, in its pony tail, flapped and banged in the
turbulence behind her, tugging pleasurably at her scalp. Her eyes streamed with
tears which were flicked away as soon as they formed, and her cheeks bulged
wide as the wind blasted into her open mouth, making her teeth throb a little
as if she had drunk icy water. She tugged the stick again, leaning back to help
the nose up, and the town below slid out of view beneath her. Though her cheeks
were frozen, she was streaming with sweat inside her flight suit. Wearing a
lopsided grin, she left the settlement behind and cruised nonchalantly east,
where the last of the sun’s rays were reflecting on the silver - grey rocks of
an outcrop set like an island in the sea of grass.

Athena
felt she had to be here even though she knew that everything was done
automatically. Such a great deal depended on success that it seemed wrong to
let the occasion pass without
some
acknowledgement. Besides, she had
about twenty more minutes to kill before Lana reached the Amish, and this was
one way of using them productively. She also wanted, at this critical moment,
to be alone with her thoughts and away from the bustle of the control room. Out
here the evening was still and calm, and the eastern horizon, as it darkened,
was shot with the tiniest glimmers which would soon become the awesome display
of the Skagorack.

As
she crossed the final few steps to her machine she could see no visible change
in its status, no change in the pitch of the gentle thrumming of the focussed
power within. The only outward sign was the ticking down of the gauge. She
watched the countdown reached zero and the mining machine went seamlessly,
without even a click to show a change in its function, over to “Extraction”.
Far below her, magnetic force beams reached into the core of the planet and
drew out the metallic elements from the olerite. The elements were pulled into
the shaft, and on being released from the tremendous pressure they had been
under, sprang out of the liquid metal state and into the gaseous one. From this
the problem wasn’t so much drawing the metal up the shaft as holding back the
excess. Athena had once seen a histortainment visual about an olerite mining
disaster from the late twenty-second century; it had been excruciating, with
chronological errors which even an amateur fan of early space like herself had
had trouble ignoring. It had been famous really for its near – life special
effects, and those
had
been pretty spectacular. A volcano of molten
metal had grown up before her, and she had seemed to smell the burning of her
own hair as the planetary atmosphere had cooked. When the volcano had grown to
full size, and had bulged out of the side of the dying planet like a ghastly
beak, its own weight had driven it back towards the core and she had seen, from
space, the whole planet turn itself inside out; pieces of crust tens of kilometres
wide upending in seas of glowing magma, cracks spreading round the entire
surface of the planet as seas turned to steam, hiding the pandemonium below
beneath a white death shroud of cloud. In the real events the vid portrayed,
ten billion people had been killed, only sixty million had escaped.

That
was long ago of course, and techniques had completely changed. Still, it was a
sobering thought that just below her feet; planet killing forces were being
held in check by a machine that she had built. She checked the time, she still
had about five minutes she could spare before she had to get back to witness
Lana’s meeting with the Amish, that should be just enough time…

As
she watched, from the far end of the machine, a cloud of super – heated metal steam
jetted out of the long chimney. The heat glowed on her skin as she smelled
again the smell of ozone which was an integral part of an olerite mine.
Personally she quite liked the smell, but she knew that many people hated it,
and she could understand why. Though harmless, it did leave a somewhat cloying
taste in the back of your mouth.

Now
came the moment of truth; incredibly powerful magnetic forces took hold of the
cloud of molten metal particles and drew them together, shaping them at the
same time into a two metre square sheet of metal, if she had made the slightest
error in the building of the machine, then here was another bottle neck in the
process where such mistakes would show. The particles gelled together with a
final pulse of heat and light, and there, hovering high in the air, was a
perfect sheet of glowing metal, already being lowered onto a waiting pallet. As
it cooled, it twisted out of true with a deep “Bong”, but Athena knew that this
was normal, olerite mines were almost musical places… Already another cloud of
gas was jetting out into the sky and Athena allowed herself a brief moment to
watch. They were back in business. She turned and jogged back towards
Cassini.