Blighted Star (31 page)

Receiving
this new information made Athena all the more determined to survive to make her
report to the agency as she was designed and programmed to do. She might be the
last man standing, the observer. She was the colony’s black box. Her first duty
was to her fellow colonists, but if their situation was hopeless, then the next
duty was to the agency. There might be a time when the continued existence of human
life on this world was impossible. If that happened, then she would follow a
programme in which her own survival would take precedence.

By
now it was quite dark. Athena wished she knew where the others were and what
they were doing, but she already felt at one remove from them, an outsider.
Calculating the odds based on the information she had had up until Raoul had
cut her adrift, she felt that they were probably not going to make it. If they
had put the sphere back into Cassini and were now preparing to take off then
that would be a different story. This planet was hostile, and survival here
called for equipment and techniques they did not have. The Agency had
miscalculated and its first colonizing effort was likely to fail. All the more
reason that the reasons for failure must not perish with the humans.

Her
flesh was half formed now. Chances were, it would never be seen by any human
being. She intended to keep well out of the way of the colony until they were
either all dead or the present situation had resolved itself completely. Raoul
thought he had cut her adrift? Well, let him have a little more than he
bargained for; she prepared her system to go into stealth mode, if he was
planning to hunt her, then the hunt would be a damn long and difficult one for
him, in the meantime, let him think she was lying here plain on his readout.

<><><> 

Lana
lifted the shuttle from the ground, feeling the weight of the troops once
again. She could sense their jitteriness partly through their forced banter,
partly through the way they kept shifting around, altering the trim of the
craft. The controls were still far from the automatic refinement of the old
shuttle, and so she had to constantly adjust the power feeds or they would have
tilted from side to side all over the sky.

That
was how she felt within herself too, as if she had to keep a constant
controlling handle on  her feelings. Without this steadying hand she might
stagger off into a bout of uncontrollable sobbing or a screaming fit of fury.
When she had relieved Grad earlier, she had had to make a conscious effort not
to pick up the twenty millimetre from the cargo deck and blast him into
windblown ash. A few short moments later as she watched his back retreating she
felt like her heart was breaking once more, and her vision was blurred by
treacherous tears.

The
mood amongst the troops was similarly unstable, and Raoul was clamping down on
them even harder than usual to bring them to order. The mood throughout Cassini
had been weird. She had left her high refuge on the command deck and had walked
through the crowded corridors. Something new had happened, something drastic,
yet it was unclear what it was. Raoul now appeared to be in control, and Athena
and Chan were nowhere to be seen. Lana had wanted to talk to the Doctor, but
there hadn’t been any time. She wasn’t sure who else she could speak to. In the
end she had seen one of the engineers who had worked for Chan, but the woman
had just turned frightened eyes on her and had shaken her head, glancing round
as if worried that someone might be listening. Several of the soldiers were
staying behind during tonight’s mission, and Lana had the distinct impression
that they were staying not merely to guard the ship from the undead but also to
keep order, at the end of a targe gun if necessary. Certainly, the weapons they
bore had not been given the ultra violet modification which the weapons of the
foraying party had received.

Tonight
the sky was absolutely crystal clear, and she felt she could see for a hundred
miles. On the horizon away to the west the very last of the light was augmented
moment by moment by the tiny flicker of a far-off thunderstorm. Above once more
was the whirling morass of the Skagorack, looking up at it put her once more in
mind of the early days of the mission when she and Grad would take long walks
out into the long grass under those stars. At times the points of light had
blurred with the tears of happiness she had felt at being alive in that place
at that time with her man. Flying now through a night filled with danger she
wondered if she would ever feel that degree of tenderness again, or if her
scorched and blasted heart was forever incapable of nourishing the soft seed of
love.

They
were closing now on the target, and behind her Raoul was issuing final orders.
She felt a light but firm gloved hand on her shoulder. It was the sergeant, he
grinned at her and indicated the respirator which she was wearing far back on
her head. She nodded, smiling back and drew the mask down. The readout to one
side of the mask’s windows indicated that the air already bore elements of
toxicity, and the toxic loading rose as they approached the landing zone. She
checked in with the life trace readout too, and immediately saw what Raoul had
selected that area for: there were three large lakes and numerous ponds dotted
around the landscape. As she watched, the red dots were gathering in the
central area between the lakes into one main clot of glowing crimson. To the
left of the display, an arrow of green sped towards the mass of red. It was
them.

She
felt fear rising in her stomach like an icy tide, spreading through her body
and clutching at her heart. All she wanted to do at that moment was to throw
the shuttle round in a tight turn and rocket off back towards Cassini. There
she would leap from the craft and dash upstairs to her sanctuary on the flight
deck. Seal herself in and live on the emergency life support system until
everything was over one way or another. She had spent most of her waking life
in the twenty square metres of the flight deck on her way to Saunder’s World.
Right now it looked like the only safe space on the whole planet. Sure it would
be boring, very boring, but boring would be heaven, she had had all the
excitement she could handle for a long, long time. Scarcely had the thought
formed itself in her mind when she saw ahead in the faint blue light from the
stars, a crowd of ghostly figures wading through the grass. With her heart
hammering against her ribs, at Raoul’s instruction she dropped the craft to the
ground before the advancing dead.

<><><> 

Grad’s
feet dragged as he walked through the crowd to his quarters. The air in the
corridor leading to his room smelt desperately stale, as if it was hardly
breathable at all, and it gave him a strange stabbing series of twinges in his
guts which gave him the unpleasant sensation his bowels were about to loosen.
He neared the door and the last few metres seemed to take forever. He sighed
and entered. Christel was in bed, she turned to him as he entered and smiled,
but he felt that there was calculation in her eyes.

She
had spent the day alternating between being cooped up in the quarters and
asking round for the latest rumours. Going out was a chore; those who had known
Grad and Lana seemed able, even in the face of the catastrophe which had
overwhelmed them, to reserve a little hostility just for her. Everyone else was
aware of the situation merely through the spectacle of the day before when Jackson
had gone insane. She obviously had some sort of unsavoury reputation among the
populace at large and so she was seriously short of people to simply discuss
what was going on with, normally, person to person. Strangely enough, the
soldiers were the ones she got on best with; they had always been reserved
around her as their boss’s woman, and so now they treated her with something
approaching the mixture of distrust and begrudging respect they always had.
Certainly it seemed not to occur to them to treat her in the off-hand manner
many of the civilians were now doing. It was from them she had learned of
Raoul’s takeover, though none of them had been very clear of the nature of
Athena’s treachery, just that the scuttlebutt had it that she had been trying
to sabotage the colony from the outset.

Christel
actually couldn’t care less who was in charge just as long as they kept the
monsters well away from her. And now that seemed to be the case. The soldiers
were exuding confidence when they spoke of the zombies, they clearly thought
they had got the zombie problem licked, especially now they had the right
weapon, and they seemed sure that they would have the monsters wiped out by
morning. Christel knew the soldiers well enough to know that none of this was bluff
or bravado and so she also knew that perhaps she could begin to think ahead to
life after the crisis. After the crisis was over she did not intend to be on
her own for one thing, and Grad was showing definite signs of pining after
Lana. He had been distant and had avoided her company. When they were together
he had looked anywhere but in her eyes. She had worn herself out trying to get
him to give her a reaction. When she had finally thrown a tantrum to get him to
take her seriously he had just walked out with a wry smile on his lips. Well
she had had many men far more withdrawn and unreadable than Grad, and she had
shown every single one of them who was boss, and he would be no different.

As
he entered she rose from the bed and walked slowly towards him, giving him
plenty of time to take in her long shapely legs, her cleft with its tuft
of  dark hair, her flat stomach and her perfect, firm breasts, faintly
swinging as her hips tilted with each step. By the time his eyes travelled to
hers the sour look he had worn was fading, and a grin was starting to form in
its place. She wrapped her arms around him and her nakedness was underlined by
the rough cool cloth of his flying suit. She tilted her head and kissed him,
then, as he responded to the pressure of her lips. she drew him, still kissing
hard, towards the bed. By now, the familiar lopsided grin was back, and when
she sneakily opened one eye to gauge his response she could not help but grin
back herself. She felt the edge of the bed against the bare backs of her knees
and quickly drew him round, tripping him a little so that he fell backwards
under her. She straddled him, opening his clothes from the top down and tugging
them away from his shoulders, rolling them down his arms and his chest. They
got irrevocably jammed and she made little mewing noises of impatience. Grad
laughed and shrugged the flight gear off so that it gathered round his waist.
Christel stood up and placing a hand on Grad’s chest pushed him hard so that he
flopped back protesting onto the bed. She took hold of his trousers at the
cuffs and with a sudden swift tug, pulled them down and off, swung them from
one hand over her shoulder and tossed them into the corner of the room. Grad
laughed again, impressed, then drew in his breath with a sudden gasp, and bit
his lip as her cool hand took a firm grasp on his swelling cock…

The
imperative to form a fruiting body now overwhelmed all other urges for the
organism. The sudden burst of new life, the like of which it had not experienced
for millennia, seemed now to have been dammed up, and it had encountered
resistance for which nothing in its long development had prepared it. Never
before had a species not only resisted its annexing of individuals so
effectively, but had fought back so strongly that the infected population
actually began to shrink. It was time now to employ the only strategy which
would ensure survival into the distant future, and which would extend the reach
of the organism to the otherwise inaccessible potential new hosts. As the dark
gathered in the lakeland where most of its agents were gathered, it emerged
from the mud of the lake beds and began to gather them in a compact pile of
corpses. The flesh began to liquefy from the bones, but that was acceptable, for
there was no need now to maintain integrity for the purposes of 
locomotion. The decaying flesh fell from the bones, through the pile of corpses
and dripped to the ground below. A large pool of rotting gel began to form
beneath the pile of corpses, and as the reaction got underway which would
transform the cellular structure of the organism into its fruiting form, the
gel began to glow softly green. The process gave off enough heat for steam to
rise from the pool like the breath of a dying dragon, and this began in part to
obscure the dreadful sight. The transformation would take most of the night,
but when the sun rose in the morning, it would rise on a giant spherical case,
packed with tiny spores. The ultra violet rays would cause the fragile skin of the
case to rupture, and the pressurised contents would be ejected high into the
morning breeze. They would disperse across the hemisphere, and the organism
would have ensured its dominance for another millennium.

<><><> 

Raoul
ran the squad in towards the enemy’s concentration, not knowing what to expect,
but ready for anything. On the way a target presented itself in the form of a
dead man. He was utterly unrecognisable, his face entirely gone, and even his
clothing had by now rotted entirely away except the remnants of his shoes.
Raoul had Williams step forward and take down the retreating figure. Her targe
gun  shone out its beam of ultra violet, along with the tracer of visible
light and the creature ahead burst into weird flame, with tongues of red green
and blue fire licking where the light had fallen. The monster writhed as if in
agony, yet no sound came from it other than the hissing of the flames. The
first shot had ignited the left arm and shoulder, and this burnt entirely to
crisp ash before the flames sputtered out. Williams fired again, and this time
the body turned towards them and staggered a few steps in their direction,
flaring strongly from the waist up. Williams fired one last time and the corpse
sat down heavily, coming apart into several burning pieces. They gave it a
respectful distance and walked on towards the cluster of contacts not far
ahead.