Blighted Star (32 page)

Next
a small group of ambulatory dead moved in from the left, three males and what
had been a female. Combined fire from the troops set them flaming and the light
they gave off as they burned lit up another corpse moving in the long grass in
the background. This corpse had been partially destroyed in an earlier
engagement, the right side of its torso was missing and consequently there was
no trace on their readouts. They fired, and at the greater distance of a
hundred metres, the guns were a little less effective. The corpse cooked and
charred in the light but did not burst into flame. Large pieces of blackened
ash began to fall from it. But it would not go down. In the end so much of the
muscular system was burnt out that the thing toppled to the ground, still
trying ineffectively to crawl towards the cluster to the east. They left it
lying there, wanting their targe guns to replenish themselves to the maximum
before they reached the main force.

They
moved carefully and silently through the night toward what they now saw as a
cloud of white miasma, under lit by a faint green glow. They looked at Raoul in
doubt, not knowing what it was they now faced. If he shared their fears, he did
not show it, but instead indicated that he wanted them to divide into two
groups, one to go each side of the cluster. As he always did in times of close
engagement, he gave his instructions in a series of brief emphatic hand
gestures rather than over the internal comms.

In
fact, though perplexed, Raoul did not feel afraid. The enemy were not setting
up an ambush, they were not either in retreat, this was something different.
The enemy had merely ceased to wage war and was engaged in something else. The
monsters they had attacked had not been coming on to fight, they had been
moving to join the main body, though why, he could not say. The disposition of
the main force could not have been worse from a military point of view. The
only people dumb enough to cluster together like that were civilians, had they
given up fighting? Perhaps this was some form of act of surrender? The display
the doctor had shown him came back to mind, and he had to admit, there was an
increasing possibility that the doctor was right. If that was the case, then
he’d better act fast.

The
cloud of steam was close enough to be opaque now and they began to see the pile
of bodies it shrouded. The team halted and Raoul raised his left arm, taking
aim with the targe gun gripped in his right fist. The team readied themselves.
He dropped his left arm and they opened fire, fourteen beams of light lancing
from the darkness into the mass like the spokes of a wheel.

<><><> 

The
knock at the door woke Grad, and he found that he was still pinned under
Christel’s sleeping form. He gently rolled her to one side, and pulling on the
discarded flight suit, walked over to the door just as the knock was repeated.
It was Doctor Clarke.

“I
need to show you something.” Clarke’s tone was low, he looked past Grad to the
sleeping Christel’s back and seemed to stiffen a little “Please come with me,
Raoul won’t listen to me, but we are all in the deadliest danger. We have to
act, and act now or we’re all as good as dead.” He gestured down the corridor.
“Please.”

The
desperation in his tone was obvious, and Grad quietly retrieved his boots, and
stepped out of the doorway with the Doctor “What’s the problem doc? Have the
zombies got through?”

“No.
It’s worse than that. It’s best I show you, it won’t take long.”

Behind
them Christel opened her eyes and slipped quietly out of bed. If there was a
secret, there was no way she was going to be left out, especially if it had a
bearing on their survival.

The
lab was dark when they got there, and Grad went to turn on the lights.

“Wait!”
Clarke first crossed to the window and set the glassteen to total blackout. He
had no intention of being observed by the military personnel Raoul had left behind.,
who were probably out there patrolling in the dark. He nodded and Grad switched
on the light, blinking for a moment in the flat white illumination.
Unfortunately the window in the door could not be blacked out, and so he
conducted Grad to a corner of the room where the bench was least easily
visible. There was a tub in which he had vat - grown a sizable chunk of the
infected flesh. Only now the flesh was gone, and in its place was a deepish
puddle of glowing gel. As he explained the computer’s prediction about the
substance, he noticed that the flesh was beginning to form black spots, and
that these were sending out roots throughout the viscous liquid. Soon these
numerous threads would become so dense that the liquid would be entirely black.
On the surface, under the pale steam the heat of the transformation was giving
out, a large disk formed which at once began to grow. He halted his monologue.

“Look,
I had better just destroy this specimen, I think it’s close to bearing spores.
I’d better expose it to U.V.” he reached into a cupboard and brought out a
lamp. “The key to all this is Jim Chan. I can’t get to speak to him, Raoul
seems to have arrested him or something, but we really need to get him
involved. He can get Athena on our side and Raoul will
have
to listen to
her.”

He
placed the lamp on top of the tub. Inside, the gel was almost entirely black
and a fist sized knob had formed on the surface. Clarke flicked the lamp’s
switch and there was a sudden thudding noise as something in the tub exploded.
There was no flash of light with the noise, but it was obvious that something
inside had been under great pressure. The seal around the tub was broken, and
wisps of a black substance like smoke wafted up. Grad’s nerves were already
taut, and he jumped back towards the door at the unexpected noise. Clarke just
had time to turn frightened eyes on him before the black smoke curled around
his hand, licking at the skin.

At
once blisters rose on the pink flesh, and the doctor began to howl in pain,
flapping the arm up and down as if it was on fire. He staggered against the
metal bench jolting the tub and sending it rocking near the edge. Near the door
Grad felt impelled to help, but could not take one step forward on his fear
frozen legs.

A
cloud of spores now billowed around the doctor, agitated by the movement of his
arms, and for a second his face was obscured. When it came back into view, his
eyes were milky, and beginning to liquefy. The pain drove him berserk, and he
flailed across the room, yelling. Grad backed towards the door.

An
alarm began to shriek, and the computer’s calm tones announced a total
lockdown, but Grad was far too stunned to take in the message, and the doctor,
now falling to the ground, was beyond all caring. The tentacles of the organism
broke through the blood/brain barrier and his infected brain died in a final
sensory burst. He lay still on the floor, the wisps of spore now curling
towards Grad and the closed door.

Waking
to the danger, Grad tore his eyes away from Clarke’s still form, and turned
towards the doorway into the medical bay. He saw instantly that he was too
late. The door was closed, and the readout on the door’s top panel showed that
the system would lock down gas tight in two seconds. He leapt towards it, but
as he did so the readout clicked to  ”one”.

The
doorway burst open and there was Christel, gesturing wildly for him to hurry.
The grinding of gears was audible over the alarm’s wailing, and Christel was
pushed backwards as the door asserted itself. Her feet were skidding on the
floor and her bare shoulders rippled with ropes of straining muscle as she
fought the mechanism. She turned her face to him with a desperate look and
croaked the word “Hurry.”.

He
needed no second telling, he sprinted the last metre or so. He reached her just
as she lost the battle and it banged shut, throwing them both halfway across
the sickbay. Some wisps must have got though too because now the alarm in the
sickbay began to sound. They scrambled to their feet and ran from the sickbay
into the corridor just as Gregorovitch arrived with two others.

<><><> 

The
corpse of Saul MacGregor moved forward another metre and crashed to the ground
again. With half of one leg and all of its right arm gone, the body was
compelled to move in agonising lurches where it would pick itself up into a
crouch, then launch its weight forward. Sometimes it was able to catch itself
on its one remaining arm, sometimes it was not and it would flop back into the
grass. Each time that happened, more of it would become detached, and its
progress was marked by blotches of smeared broken flesh in the irregular
crushed down patches of grass, pointing south from the lake where Williams had
swum earlier that day. The other agents which had sheltered in the pond had
gone north, called to give their tissue and bone to the great transformation,
but the organism in MacGregor, aware that the host was incapable of travelling
that far in its partially destroyed state, moved instead towards the faintly
burning life source nearby. The journey was likely to take half the night, but
could be accomplished before the body lost its integrity.

The
grass was dry in the warm breeze coming from the West, and it moved in gentle
billows. The corpse, as it reared up from and fell down into the grass, bobbed
briefly into and out of view. It bore an uncanny resemblance to a man swimming
at the end of his strength through small choppy waves. But the track wore
relentlessly forward towards the goal. Behind the body, far to the north beyond
the lake, the night sky lit up with flickering light, and for a moment the
cadaver twitched as if under a rain of unseen blows. Then it picked up the
dreadful rhythm of its movements and left the flashing horizon behind it.

The
controlling organism had felt something akin to pain as once more it had come
under attack, this time right in the middle of its transforming process, when
it was at its most vulnerable. When the killing light had shone upon it, all
hosts, no matter how far from the main cluster, had felt the unpleasant
stimulus, and had briefly been filled with the imperative to withdraw. Pieces
of flesh lying rotting in the beds of lakes and ponds had curled  and
shivered, and where there was any capacity for movement left, the dead flesh
had cringed  at one and the same moment. Far away in the soil the
remaining infected worms flinched and coiled, breaking off for a moment from
their hunting.

The
corpse now mindlessly dragged itself on, its fingers breaking under the
repeated strain, and splits forming in the naked flesh of its shoulder as the
skin lost what was left of its elasticity under the chafing of the dead muscle
fibres. The attack on the main cluster gave new urgency to the foraging of the
organism in this host, but that urgency was not reflected in the actions of the
corpse, which continued at the same slow but deadly pace.

<><><> 

They
were definitely winning, but Raoul found the battle to be too slow, just
through the sheer number of enemies they had to eliminate. The guns were
effective, but limited by their small bore and by their need to recharge. They
were finding that they could get off ten shots before they needed to recharge
as opposed to the guns’ usual four, but even that wasn’t really enough when so
many shots were needed to destroy one of the enemy completely.  And Raoul
was under no illusion about that any more: they needed to leave no trace of
these creatures, the doctor was obviously right. They had foiled the enemy just
before he had launched a surprise attack with a deadly new weapon. That was
what this piling up of the dead, this weird pool of glowing vomit and the
associated clouds of steam must all be about. They had got here just in time,
Raoul reckoned, and the enemy had been caught nicely bunched up, presenting the
target of a lifetime.

In
the end they discovered that the best way to deal with so many targets was to
set large fires going by aiming all together at the base of the pile in the
green goo and letting go pulses of light on the count of three. The scene had
its own evil beauty, Raoul reflected, as the naked limbs, all entwined, burnt
and writhed in fantastic colours. He watched, entranced, knowing that this was
a moment he would remember all his life, every time he lay awake in the night.
They walked around the pyre, starting fires and then moving on. He would stop,
point to where he wanted the fire lit, where a skeletal hand rose from the
pool, or where an eyeless face hung out of the morass. His men would stop and
on his command would let loose the cleansing light. It was like painting with
fire, and the subject was an orgy of the damned. He recorded the whole event on
his internal comms. There were, he knew, many places where a sight such as this
would command a huge fee, yet he had no intention of selling this memory. In
all probability one of the others would, but for him the moment would always be
a sacred one. He captured all he could, ignoring the annoyingly insistent
attempts of Gregorovitch back at Cassini to contact him. In the end he flipped
the command switch on his external comms to block the signal completely. He
wanted to savour these precious unrepeatable moments of time unsullied. And, as
he looked around at the shining fires reflected in the masks of the troops, he
knew that they felt the same way. This was a holy moment for them too. He was
glad he had taken the Rum, it enhanced not only the glory of the sight, but
also deepened the sense of righteous awe. He was a priest, a high priest, and
these men and women who wielded his fire were his acolytes, doing his holy
bidding and learning from the wisdom of his ways. In the new world they were
burning into being, this night would be remembered each year, in perpetuity.