Blighted Star (26 page)

“We’d
like to Grad.” Athena had come back from the pond, all the pieces of decay had
been washed from her and she gleamed in the pre – dawn light. “It would only be
for a short while until Jim can grow me a new outer body, probably just two
days. Then I could make my big comeback”

“How
will you manage? I mean, where will you hide?”

“Athena
needs to be in one of the vats, Grad. we’ll need to fetch it out here, or
somewhere nearby. That’s all you’ll have to do, that and keep the secret of
what you saw here. Can you do that?”

Grad
looked at them both steadily. The whole thing seemed pretty pointless to him,
after all they all faced the probability of death within the next couple of
days. Against that background their secret seemed almost trivial. However, if
it seemed important to them, then what did he care? He’d had a good
relationship with Athena. The fact that she was artificial would take some
getting used to, but he had to admit, he was glad she was back.

“I’ll
do my best.” he said.

<><><> 

 In
the lab Clarke looked for the thousandth time at the sample under the
microscope. The structure of the cells seemed stable until the slightest touch
revealed them to be nothing more than burned out husks. He compared it again
with a sample taken from one of the mice. In this one the process of
putrefaction was well underway, but even so, there was not the catastrophic
loss of vitality to be found in the sample from the dead child which Jackson
had collected. In the one sample the matter was rotting away rapidly, with most
of the soft tissue consumed, and the bone close to dissolving. In the other
sample the processes of morbidity had advanced really far, but then some new
catastrophe had befallen, the tissue looked as if it had been consumed into
charcoal by a vast temperature increase.

He
cupped his chin in his hands and stared glumly into space. The child’s body had
been lying on the grass in the open, there had been no sign of fire, and it
presumably had fallen where it had died, because when they had tried to move it
the structure had finally failed completely and the whole thing had blown away,
there was little chance that it could have been moved to that position in that
state.

He
needed to think, but the whole thing was too confusing. He had come here thinking
that he would be practising simple medicine, with once every few years an
interesting case. But this? He just didn’t have the skills…

 He
had signed up with the Agency in a fit of youthful adventurousness which had
long passed before they finally came calling, wanting a return on their long
sponsorship of him through medical training. He had felt trapped by his
obligations, even though they had given him every opportunity to back out. In
the end, he had used the call from the agency to precipitate a crisis in an
affair of the heart which had never really got started. He could still see the
look of dismay on the face of the man he had loved for so long in secret.
Apparently his unrequited love was
not
the secret he had thought it was,
and the object of his affections had been seeking a way to reduce the contact
they had had over the last few months, but had held him in too high esteem as a
friend to confront him directly. Within days of this painful scene Clarke had
been fully signed up to the mission to Saunder’s World. He had hoped that the
immensity of the distance he had travelled would soothe his aching heart, but
the memories were still painful, especially when they were mixed with
humiliation as they were. Little matter that every human has to, at some point
in their life, to experience the pain of a love which isn’t returned. Each
person’s pain has a particular poignancy to him.

He
shook his head, Time to concentrate on the crisis at hand. The morning sun was
slanting in through the window once again and it was hurting his eyes, bruised
from their night of straining at the microscope and the computer
representations. Over the last two years the view from the window had changed
so much; stars gradually stretching from points of light to smears distorted by
the speed of Cassini’s travel through the cosmos. Then the smearing reducing
over another period of months as they decelerated on their final approach until
the stars had once more been points of light. Then the spectacular swirl of the
Skagorack creeping further and further into the centre of the window. Everyone
else had been glued to the windows on the front of the ship, where Saunder’s
World had been daily growing brighter, but he had been happier looking at the
chaotic swirl round the distant blackhole. The Skagorack seemed somehow to fit
the mood of melancholy he found himself in so often. Now of course the window
gave him a splendid view of the goings on in the landing ground. Every night
there had been some sort of entertainment out there, and Clarke had watched,
content to observe from a distance, feeling a connection with his fellow
colonists, and yet a comfortable distance from them.

It
was hard looking out through the window at this time of day. Hot sunlight
poured in, turning the metallic surface of the bench into a blinding beacon,
falling directly on the container with the zombie mice. Clarke’s instinct was
to move them along the bench into the shade; even if they were vile undead
things, they were in his care. He shuffled his legs round on the stool, freeing
them from the bench, and as he did so he noticed that the mice were no longer
making the soft clunks and thuds they had been making all night in their
efforts to break through the side of the container. They must have finally rotted
away, he reasoned. Not much meat on a mouse.

Inside
the container a thin layer of smoke obscured the little forms beneath, but even
so, Clarke could see at a glance that the mice were nothing more than grey ash.
He looked from them to the window, following the track of the yellow morning
sunlight. Then back at the sample of the burned child. A flash of realisation
went off in his mind almost as blinding as the stream of sunlight. Of course!
That was why the organism was so completely nocturnal! It was destroyed by
sunlight, probably by the ultra violet component in the light. Man had been
using ultra violet to kill pathogens for centuries, and now here it was come to
his aid again. The targe guns they used could surely be easily adapted to fire
beams of ultra violet light…

Clarke
suddenly felt a little humble. It wasn’t given to many men to save an entire
world. When the history books of Saunder’s World came to be written, his name
would be one of the ones which people would know as long as there were people
on the planet. Hell, they would probably name schools and hospitals after him,
even towns!

Chuckling
at his own flights of fancy, he dimmed the window, turning up the tinting to maximum
until the light was excluded completely. Then he set about creating a few new
samples of zombie flesh. First they must know how much sunlight was needed to
neutralise the pathogen…

<><><> 

Sitting
in the back of the shuttle on the cold cargo deck, Raoul pulled the mask off
and gripped it in his big left fist, enjoying the give of the gel as his
fingers absently stretched and crushed the soft material.

 
The news of the breakthrough seemed unbelievably fortuitous to Raoul. So much
so that he was inclined to take it with a pinch of salt, following the old
maxim that if something seems too good to be true, it probably
isn’t
true. Even so, it was something he would have to check out, and that meant
putting his investigation into the whole Athena thing onto hold for the moment.
Something was going on there, he knew it. He’d dealt with enough bullshit from
superiors as well as soldiers under his care to know a snow job when he was
given one. Only thing was, what was the angle they were working? It must have
something to do with the sphere, that was after all what Athena was working on.
What he couldn’t get, though, was why they might be delaying the retrieval of
the plasma sphere. They’d all wanted to cut and run before now. Here they were
causing a delay, assuming of course that there wasn’t really a complication
with the sphere. Raoul sighed and yawned a little. Rum, he knew, could make you
a little paranoid. The whole world seemed to slow down a little so that it
seemed to take an age to cross a room. This was a great advantage in combat
because your reaction time was unbelievably fast. Trouble was, when the shit
stopped flying your brain tended to still be looking for something to react to.
Maybe that was all it was.

They
had done well, as well as could possibly be expected. They’d contained the
threat for another night. They hadn’t lost any more people, either civilian or
military. If things stayed as they were there was a good chance that they could
defeat this enemy on the ground, especially if he didn’t pull some unexpected
moves. The reappearance of the civilian command was a real pain. With Athena
gone the whole thing had fallen into place for him. He was honest enough with
himself to acknowledge that when she came back on the scene he’d felt disappointed.
No, that was the wrong word. He hadn’t wanted to take over control for himself,
so disappointment didn’t really come into it. What he felt was more
frustration. Athena was a potential barrier between him and the right thing for
the colony. If she still wanted to cut and run, to abandon the planet, then he
was going to have to deal with her. It hadn’t escaped his notice that at the
end of the day, he and his men had all the guns.

But
still. It would not come to that. Athena wasn’t going to get the Sphere out of
the mining machine until after nightfall, and then she would take the rest of
the night and all the next morning to reconnect it to Cassini’s drive. By that
time, he and his men would have cleared the field of the major opposition,
especially if those modifications the Doc was talking about actually worked.

<><><> 

The
organism was getting ready for its final change deep in the warm salt rich
water of the crater lake. All the fish had died, and it had piloted their dead
bodies down into the mud and silt, far away from the piercing rays of the sun.
Now however, as another night began, it drove them to rise to the surface and
to wriggle out into the shallows. There was just enough flesh on them for it to
make its final desperate cast of the dice. The fish piled one twitching corpse
on another and the flesh on them began to break down and to bubble. Some heat
was given off in the reaction which took place, and wisps of steam rose into
the cooling night air.

Throughout
the night the change continued until the biomass of the fish was utterly
converted into a great dark globe, the stretched outer skin of which waited
only for the kiss of the sun to burst, releasing the millions of tiny spores
packed within to the morning breeze. Each spore could survive the deadly ultra
violet due to a tough shell of keratin, a coating which could keep it alive
though dormant for a thousand years. These spores would disperse throughout the
planet, ensuring the organism’s continued existence wherever the depleted remnants
of life could be found throughout the millennia.

The
sun’s first beams caught the rim of the crater high above the globe, and the
pale rocks seemed to catch with fire against the soft blue of the sky. As the
morning light strengthened, the stars of the Skagorack were outshone, seeming
to fade into oblivion until even the brightest of them was gone.

As
Raoul walked down the corridor, a dark shape stepped out of the Tracer Room
door and partially blocked his way. It was Orlov, one of the Slavonicans.

“Sergeant,
you’d better take look at this.” The trooper led the way into the room and
indicated a seat in front of the display screen. Raoul sat down, looking at the
patterns of red and blue dots, recognising after a few seconds the situation as
it stood of the night before, close to dawn. There to the North was the cluster
of red dots he had thought of as the “Northern Pocket” contained by his
skirmish line, and about to be wiped out. south and west of it patches of red
dots were drifting towards Cassini. With this new perspective, he wondered if
he hadn’t taken too much of a risk, and allowed too much ground to the enemy in
his pursuit of a small victory in the north. But none of this was what Orlov
had brought him to see.

“Please
look down at this life trace.” Orlov indicated a green dot at the mine site
which was being slowly circled by Grad’s airborne trace. It was that of Athena.
Raoul straightened up and looked more closely. as he did so, Athena’s trace
turned from green to red, and that of Grad moved erratically. Raoul nodded
grimly.

“Please
keep looking. The life trace clearly shows she is dead, No? But
later,   Orlov  tapped in some instructions and the display
changed to half an hour later. Now Athena’s trace had been joined by that of
Grad and Chan. As Raoul watched, the trace turned green again. He looked at the
Russian.

“So?
Chan fixed her trace. So what?”

“Yes
I think so too. At first I think, but then I think, “Better run Diagnostic on trace,
don’t want it going on blink. No?” Raoul smiled at the archaism, and nodded.
Both of the Russians had reputations for exactness in all their actions A
reputation which was only reinforced by the fact that even here in the heart of
Cassini the trooper had full kit with him including weapons and respirator.