Blighted Star (24 page)

“Keep
trying.” Athena closed the link and knelt down next to the mining machine.

<><><> 

A
figure came out of the dark to the left and three of the soldiers fired at
once. The figure broke apart and fell into the rising mist. Raoul scanned the read
- out again; three more were getting close to their right. He had noticed
during the action that the dead were now moving better, they still staggered a
little, but they were a lot faster. The three came in and were chopped down and
that was the last for a few minutes. On his visuals he could see that the ones
they had dropped were still moving, albeit slowly. The rest of the red traces
were reaching around them again in a pincer formation. He ordered another
withdrawal eastwards. Soon their boots were crunching again on the road, and
the manmade surface, grey in the starlight reminded them of what they were
fighting for; they had made progress on this planet before the enemy appeared.
It was more than just a question of survival, they had achievements to defend
and ground to take back. These feelings increased as they entered the first
buildings of the town.

A
short series of hand signals had the troops deploying to either side of the
road, crouching at the corners of buildings as if expecting incoming fire. This
time the dead held back, forming a long line like a barrier between the squad
and the distant refuge of Cassini. Raoul broadened out his readout and picked
up the two green civilian traces of Athena, stationary at the mine site, and
Grad, circling slowly above her. The hard breathing of the soldiers eased and
Raoul told them to take a drink from their flasks. In pairs they lifted the
respirators, took a swig or two, then dropped down the gas masks again. A
series of soft hisses sighed out as the breathing devises purged themselves.
When the others had drunk, Raoul took a last lungful, then holding his breath
and keeping his eyes tight shut he pushed the respirator up with the heel of
his hand. He put the nozzle of his flask between his lips and took a long,
sweet pull on the liquid inside. He grabbed the beak of his gear and dragged it
back down again. The purge brought a blast of good clean air across his face,
but even after that he could smell and even taste the stench from the rotting
corpses. He opened his eyes and looked down the road to where it disappeared
into the mist. Nothing. He overlaid it with the trace readout and there was the
line of the enemy. as he watched it began to move in on them.

The
first figures appeared, stepping forward out of the fog around the lake. Raoul
nodded and again his squad opened fire. By now they all knew not to try for
kill shots, but to aim for disabling points such as the legs or hips or the
base of the spine. even so, nearly all of the targets took more than one hit to
stop them, and even then Raoul could see from his readout that the enemy’s
numbers were not reducing by more than a few red dots which littered the ground
back through the way they had come.

He
raised his targe gun and fired three shots into the oncoming cadaver of a young
woman he had noticed more than once in the social areas of Cassini during the
voyage here. He had a sudden vivid memory of her, about a year ago, at a party
given for her birthday by her friends. She had been with some dumb looking
young guy with a stupid haircut, all shaved off at the back leaving a floppy
mop which ended at his ears. Raoul had watched them together, thinking about
his own youth and girls he had known back on Stella Mexico. What a fucking
waste he thought as she fell, cut through the middle by his shots and was lost
in the mist.

He
dropped two more then called to the others. They fell back in good order to the
other side of town. This time, however, something was wrong. The dead had
stopped their pursuit of the living and were turning back the way they had
come. Had they realised that they were in a race they could never win? Raoul
quickly went through some mental calculations, there was no way the enemy could
do more than make back the ground they had wasted hunting the squad. They had
done enough. They would move in  behind and try to pick a few off, if the
dead turned back round and attacked again, then all well and good, they would
draw them further east. If they didn’t take the bait then Raoul would follow at
their heels, killing those he could.

“Mrs
Johnson, Raoul here. They’re heading your way, but unless they suddenly grow
wings, you don’t have much to worry about. We led them all the way to Crescent
Waters before they gave up on us.”

“Well
done Sergeant, I’m not far off being finished here too. about another hour will
do it.” Athena was lying on her back with her whole upper body inside the
machine. Her legs felt cold and vulnerable.

Raoul
turned to the squad.

“Right
then. We’re the hunters now, let’s get after them!”

Circling
round was beginning to get on Grad’s nerves, but he felt it established a
better perimeter, than simply hovering over Athena’s position would have done.
He covered a lot more ground and performed a six kilometre patrol with each
sweep. But after twenty minutes it was starting to get dizzying Looking up to
rest his eyes and regain his equilibrium he saw the same swirl of stars
endlessly moving above the nose of the shuttle. They were quite bright, due he
supposed to the absolutely pollution free nature of Saunder’s World’s
atmosphere. They cast a fairly powerful light on the ground below too, giving
the motionless grass in its ankle deep fog a silvery blue sheen. Out of this
eerie carpet the occasional bushes stood out in stark contrast. All in all the
effect was quite beautiful, and it was hard to reconcile such loveliness with
the deadly events they were living through. Beneath the fog’s soft blanket Grad
could see patches of bright lights. It took him several seconds of quizzical
viewing to work out that the lights were on the surface of the mist - hidden
ponds, where the still waters reflected the stars in perfect precision. To
Grad’s tired mind, it looked as if the fog below were merely a thin skin
beneath which another sky fell away, and the lakes and ponds were holes in that
covering skin. He felt as if he could point the nose down and fly through into
that other sky. The urge left him feeling deeply sad at the way things had
turned out between him and Lana. Right now he wanted desperately to protect her
from the doom which hung over them, but he knew Lana, and had seen the look in
her eyes. Perhaps, in that other world down there beyond the water’s mirror,
another Lana and another Grad were finding a way to make things work
differently…

He
continued the turn, heading briefly north, and looked again at a group of lakes
which seemed to form a pattern not unlike the clover on the club suit of cards.
This time he noticed a large looking bush which he could have sworn hadn’t been
there before. The impression was a fleeting one as the bush passed out of view
beneath the craft. He twisted his head to try and see as the small group of
ponds slid beneath the metal sheet which gave the craft its cargo floor. Oh
well, he thought, eyes playing tricks maybe…He decided to look carefully on his
next turn in another minute’s time. He was already disorientated enough, if he
started throwing the shuttle around the sky he would probably lose his bearings
completely and end up never seeing the damn bush again. Far better to continue
the manoeuvre and see if the thing was still there on the  next time
round. He headed south, and the Skagorack was directly in front of him, seeming
to loom over  him. He had the disconcerting feeling that the vortex was
about to spiral forward and down out of the sky like a water spout touching the
ocean’s surface. Sucking him up like a frail piece of flotsam and whirling him
off into oblivion.

 
As he came round again onto the northerly heading there was no sign of the
bush, and he decided that it was probably just a random patch of dark in the
grass that had fooled his tired eyes. Even so he owed it to Athena to be
thorough, so he tightened the turn and dropped quickly from two hundred metres
to fifty, zeroing in on the mining machine and its surrounding stacks of sheet
metal. He hovered scanning the ground below in every direction. There, close to
the side of the mining apparatus which Athena lay working on, was a shadow
moving in the starlight. At first he had difficulty in making out what it was.
The wildlife on his home planet had evolved without a central spine, and with
more legs than four. Even so, like kids across the galaxy he had been brought
up with images of old earth farmyard animals and he recognised a horse, even
without its head.

“Athena!
Watch out! It’s right on top of you! Move!”

Athena
did not have to be told twice, her nerves, down there in the lonely dark had
been stretched taut, and she started to wriggle free from the mining machine’s
innards at once. The problem was that the connections she had been working on
were located right at the back of the machine and she had burrowed deep into it
until only her legs protruded. She backed out as fast as she could, catching
her sleeve and losing valuable seconds on the way. Bumping her head painfully
on the hatch, she scrambled up from her knees and turned, just in time to see
the broken, smashed front of the horse as it staggered the last metre and
collapsed into her.

The
horse was surprisingly light, even though it drove her back against the machine
and pinned her there for a moment. She put her bare hands against the shards of
bone and rancid meat and pushed with all her strength. The horse fell backwards
and to one side, legs splaying and snapping under it. She ran past the carcass.

Already
the palms of her hands were burning and blistering and she held them up before
her face, eyes opening wide in terror as the contagion raced up her arms. Her flesh
was peeling and splitting, revealing the glistening sheen of metal within. The
pain became unbearable, and with a final burst of whiteness, Athena fell into
kindly oblivion.

Powerless,
Grad watched the whole thing, saw Athena stagger a few feet away from the
carcass of the horse and fall to her knees, hands stretched out before her
dying face. He saw her fall forward into the grass and lie there, body arching
and contorting briefly, then lying still with an awful finality. He was
stupefied by the sight. He sat in his chair unable to move a muscle as the
shuttle drifted in closer and closer to where Athena lay next to the horse,
whose limbs were windmilling slowly, pointlessly. With a start he realised that
the sight was drawing him in, that he would have to move, to direct his flight
or risk crashing slowly into the ground beside her. With a terrible effort of
will he forced his hands to go through the necessary motions and the shuttle
rose swiftly into the air. He could not believe it. He felt an overwhelming
urge to drop back down and confirm the dreadful truth. Athena was gone. Athena
had been for so long so much more than just a head administrator. There was not
a person in the colony who had not felt their lives enriched by her kindly
presence. She was like a mother to them all, and now she was gone. He felt a
deep and personal sense of loss. What were they going to do now? What would
become of them? Athena was their soul. Feeling shaky, he opened a private link
to Chan, meanwhile wrenching the shuttle high up into the sky.

“Athena
‘s gone, Chan. That fucking horse came out of nowhere. It got her. There was no
warning.”

“Oh
shit. Of course, the horse had no tracer. None of the animals do.” Chan sounded
remarkably calm, Grad himself was close to tears. “Listen, come and get me.
Don’t tell anyone else just for now. Okay?”

Grad
broke the link, feeling anger welling up below the sorrow. Fucking Chan. He’d
been closer to Athena than anyone, yet he’d sounded so damn cool about it. Grad
drove the shuttle through the sky so fast that the air screamed through the
exposed spars, and his tears were whipped away in the night.

<><><> 

Lana
woke up crying. She’d never done that before, and for a moment the sheer
surprise dried her tears, then the pain in her heart crashed in again. She had
had no idea of the feeling of bereavement she would face once the initial anger
had worn off, Perhaps that was one of the reasons it had happened. Perhaps she
had in some way taken for granted what they had had together. She had been like
a child, blithely going along, not knowing what was round the corner. Had
everyone else seen it coming before she did?

It
was exactly as if someone had died, and that someone was her old self. She felt
as if she had suddenly advanced about twenty years in age, and now she was
alone in the cold world. Was this how poor mad Jackson had felt? Certainly she
could see herself getting hold of a grenade and…

No.
The real problem was that even after he had killed her old self, she still
couldn’t bring herself to truly hate him, not yet. And that in itself was a
further source of humiliation. She was just going to have to let time pass.
Lots of it. Hopefully in the end she would hate Grad and not herself. One person
she could hate already was Christel, but even then the feeling was hollow,
insubstantial. Christel was almost irrelevant in the spacewreck of all her
dreams. Grad had betrayed her with Christel, but the pain was that he was
capable of betraying her at all. He couldn’t have felt the way she had over the
last couple of years, or he wouldn’t have done what he had. That too was
humiliating because it meant that while she was mooning around thinking that
she was so deeply in love and loved, he had been feeling something totally
different. She had been ascribing to him feelings he just hadn’t had. Even her
despair now was a foolish, weak thing because he was no doubt out there
feeling…What? What was he feeling? Maybe he was feeling stupid for having been
caught. Maybe he was wishing he hadn’t done it. He looked full of regret when
he had gone off earlier. Perhaps he had even been surprised himself at the ease
with which he had broken their unspoken vows. Maybe he too was looking back on
the time they had had together in a new light.