Blighted Star (33 page)

 In
the pile a man and a woman lay as if copulating in the green filth He pointed and
the targe guns flickered. As the flames sprang up he noticed that the goo was
now shot through with small black blotches. He pursed his lips with
displeasure, then shrugged. Nothing could detract for long from the loveliness
he beheld. He clasped his hands behind him and took a few more steps, looking
for the next perfect spot to light.

Jim
had actually managed to fall asleep, still nursing the pain in his midriff
where Raoul’s fingers had driven into the soft unprepared flesh. His pride was
crushed too, he had handed over the sphere without further struggle, mutely
acknowledging his fear of the other man and his submission to him. Yet without
the sphere safely reconnected to Casssini’s drive, they were all most likely
doomed anyway, whatever threats Raoul might employ. He felt full of draining
despair; he had brought his young daughter, all he had left of his wife, to
this hell hole to die. They had all been misled completely. They had come
expecting a garden, but had instead had found themselves in a war zone. Now
Raoul had gone insane, and had trapped them all when escape could have been
easy.

Why
did Raoul still command the respect of his soldiers? Were they stupid? Had they
gone mad too? He had heard in the past that military training prepared the
individuals to carry out orders from a superior no matter how unreasonable
these orders might be, but couldn’t they see that this was madness? If
Saunder’s was to be settled, and that was a big if right now, then what was
needed was a full scale planetary study followed by a very careful step by step
colonization programme; with a first wave of professional volunteers, and only
at the end a civilian contingent.

What
they should be doing now was sending a full “Turn Back” signal to those following

behind
in “Hubble”. At this extreme distance the signal would only just reach the
oncoming craft before it reached the point at which to turn back would involve
a longer journey than to come on. He could imagine the scenes on the following
ship: morale would plummet; order might to some extent break down among the
passengers, even in the crew, just as it had for them here. But at least those
people would be alive and out of danger. The misery of their seemingly hopeless
situation was too much to bear. With a despairing heart he fell into a light
sleep on the bench in the corner of the room.

Jim
had been seven when he had been trapped in a cupboard by the older brothers of
a friend. It had started out as a game of hide and seek in which three older children
had joined. Jim and his friend had been hopelessly outmatched by the older kids
who had appeared to dissolve into the very fabric of the old fashioned colonial
era house, with its quaint rooms hewn from the living rock. When it had been
his turn to hide he had run through the interconnecting caverns with an
increasing frustration, until at last he had dived into a small cupboard in one
of the spare bedrooms. This room was far away from the kitchen, the centre of
operations for the day, and far along the hillside into which most of the house
had been cut.

When
he had first climbed into the low cupboard, a profound silence fell in which
his own breathing had at first rasped and wheezed, then as his panic subsided,
had soughed and sighed, still sounding deafeningly loud in his own ears. After
a while he had stilled his breath for moments at a time, listening hard to the
distant sounds of doors banging. No one came his way, and after a long time he
had begun to consider making his presence known. The giddy sense of power at
his own hiding skill slowly evaporated as loneliness developed into a
disquieting feeling that perhaps the other children simply weren’t bothering to
look for him. He decided to break cover and pushed against the cupboard door.
It creaked but stayed firmly shut. In the room, startlingly close, someone
giggled, and someone else went “Shhh…” He rattled the door, not knowing whether
the etiquette of this new game called for him to address the others. He banged
on the sides of the cupboard, making the palm of his hand hurt a little. They
obviously had no intention of letting him out. He stopped banging and stayed
perfectly still, listening once more. Now he felt nothing but stubborn
defiance. They would
have
to let him out eventually. All he had to do
was to wait them out, Either his friend would make them release him, or if that
friend had turned traitor, then in the end the grownups would intervene and he
would either see the others punished, or would, with great dignity, not
deign
to call down the vengeance of the adults upon their heads. Both ways would
savour of victory.

Footsteps
went away, leaving the room and the door closed. Not with a bang, but firmly
nonetheless. If they had gone, then he could leave the cupboard and at least
look around the room, stretch out a little. He placed his hand against the
door, but then, just in time, stopped himself from pushing on it. What if it
was a trick? What if they were still in the room and he climbed out of the
cupboard and found that they were still playing hide and seek after all? He
would have lost… Or worse still, what if they were in the room, waiting for him
to show weakness by trying the door again? What if they wouldn’t let him open
it again? They would laugh at him; He would probably have to plead to be let
out
like a baby
. Unendurable! He crossed his arms.

The
minutes crawled by like hours in the stifling cupboard. Gradually his eyes grew
accustomed somewhat to the faint light creeping in through the crack between
the cupboard’s doors. Wait! Had the light changed? Grown dimmer and then
brighter as if someone had crossed before the window where it came into the
room? He stared at the ribbon of light on the dusty floor with all his
concentration, trying to read the message it conveyed. Now it seemed to
brighten and dim, brighten and dim as if, outside in the room, people were
dancing backwards and forwards in front of the cupboard, moving with utter
silence across the floor. His brow furrowed with concentration, he studied the
light until he realised that what was causing it to wax and wane was in
reality, some function of his own vision. The discovery fascinated him; did
everyone else perceive the world in this shifting way? He almost forgot the
strange not game he was not playing with the others and almost pushed on the
door. He drew back his hand for a moment, then shrugged. He had an important
thing to discuss with someone and couldn’t be bothered to play this idiotic
game anymore. His decision made, he put his hand on the door and pushed. It
still wouldn’t move, and once more in the room came the sound of stifled
laughter. Humiliated, he had gone back to sulking, hands crossed and fingers
trapped under his armpits. They had kept him there for what seemed like hours,
but he had not given them the satisfaction of making another sound.

He
had tried to concentrate on the musings the ribbon of light had invoked but
found it impossible to think, knowing as he did that he was being watched over
by unseen tormentors. He had shut his eyes and had tried to will himself to
sleep, believing that this would not only pass the time but would show them how
little he cared for their tricks; so bored he had gone to sleep. His bony knee
flopped against the side of the cupboard with a painful clonk. The sound seemed
loud enough to make his ears ring, but those same ears reddened with mortified
anger when, once more, the laughter came from outside. Trying to be quiet he
had hugged his knees, shuffling on his buttocks until he was pressed into the
back corner and couldn’t accidentally tip and make more noise.

And
jammed in the corner was where he stayed, watching the light from the cupboard
doors. An age passed in which he genuinely felt that he had grown up a little.
Suddenly the cupboard door opened and there was the mother of his friend. She
was looking at him very strangely, not entirely unkindly, but not in the way he
had become accustomed to be looked at by adults who were usually impressed by
his maturity. The others, he imagined, had told her that he had gone to sit in
the cupboard and wouldn’t come out. In one sense they were right. That was, he
could now see, one way in which his behaviour could be interpreted, and he even
began to see it in this light himself. A weird kid sitting in a cupboard, too
proud to get out of it. He alternated between this view and the other one in
which his defiance had won an obscure but still very real victory. The two
views coalesced in his mind like the ribbon of light on the dusty floor.

<><><> 

The
doorway to the locker room opened and there were Grad and Christel. Behind them
stood one of the troops, a Russian who had always made an impression on Chan by
the surliness of his demeanour. Grad was turning to remonstrate with the man,
who seemed in some doubt as he pushed the pilot in the chest and propelled him
into the makeshift cell. Grad, backed by Christel was desperately arguing about
something which had happened to the doctor, and he seemed to have made some
impact. Even so, the soldier shook his head and shut the door. The lock
engaged. Grad turned and spotted Chan’s form in the corner.

“Jim!
What the hell is happening? Why are the troops acting like this? Jim…” Grad’s
voice lowered “Clarke is dead.”

Grad
explained what had happened in the laboratory, and while he did so, Christel
gently wept, the reaction settling on her heart like a heavy cold layer. When
Grad had finished the three of them sat quietly for a few minutes. It was Chan
who broke the silence first.

“If
the organism is mutating into a new form, then we’re in even more danger than
we were. You say that the contents of the sealed container exploded when Doctor
Clarke shone a light onto it? And this was a U.V. light? Then we have to get a
warning to Raoul and the others. The weapons they’re armed with are basically
just powerful U.V. lights. If they attack the infected using them they could
cause even worse trouble. Do they know any of this? Are they in contact with
Raoul or any of his troops?”

“There
seems to be some kind of block on all the comms. I haven’t been able to reach
Athena or anyone else all evening. Basically Raoul has taken over and doesn’t
want any of us talking to each other. Jim, I’m really worried about Athena. I
think he knows, and I think he’s going to do something to her.”

Chan
shook his head, but not in denial of what Grad was saying. Until earlier that
same evening he would not have thought it possible for Raoul to have acted with
such disregard for consequences. Now it seemed all too likely that the sergeant
might well intend to do Athena harm. They had to contact her somehow and warn
her. She would still be in the vat, recreating her soft tissue. If Raoul caught
her in there…Raoul’s refusal to keep contact open just underlined the change in
his personality. With the bruise forming under the skin of his midriff, Chan
was coming more and more to the conclusion that Raoul was in the early stages
of psychosis. The plight they were all in was affecting them all in different
ways, but it seemed to be bringing out a streak of violence in Raoul’s soul
which was directed mostly at Athena. Had he learned her true nature? It seemed
all too possible that he had. This grasping at power was more than a palace
coup, some evil thing was uncoiling in the man. And it was getting ready to
strike.

Christel
resented in a dull sort of way the secret that the two men were sharing and
from which they were excluding her. Clearly there was some big news about
Athena. Something they felt she could not be trusted with. At any other time
she would have been insulted by their attitude, but right now she had had all
the surprises she wanted for a while. Yet she knew that the night was far from
over, and that there would no doubt be many more things happening to her or
those around her before morning brought with it the familiar feeling of
relative safety. Morning had become in a few days, the time at which the costs
of the night before were counted, and at which plans and preparations were made
for the assaults of the next night. It seemed to her now that the night would
never again bring peace and rest, but always fear and death. She looked around
the room gloomily. It was like a million other locker rooms, particularly
military ones, across the human universe, and its very mundanity was a form of
refuge from the bizarreness of the deadly situation she had found herself in.
It was in just such a locker room that she had lost her virginity at the age of
fourteen, a whole lifetime ago. The same recessed doors let into the walls on
either side, the same benches formed from a lower tier of lockers standing
proud into the room. The same fingerprint and sweat recognition locks on the
little doors. Here the background colour was a light grey, there it had been
light blue, or so she remembered it anyway. Like back then, she wanted nothing
more than for the door to stay firmly shut, only now she feared far more than
the mild censure which would have followed the opening of that other door.
Beyond the door now was a world of exhausting, terrifying danger.

 She
watched the two men surreptitiously. They looked so concerned with whatever it
was that they were brewing, but Christel could almost taste the doom that was
coming towards the shut door. It was only a matter of short time now before the
rising black tide of death overwhelmed them and they too were swept away. She
wished she could have spent these last few hours alone with Grad, but at least
he was here with her now, even if the engineer was with them. She lay down on
an empty stretch of bench and closed her eyes. For a moment she had a vision of
the future she had begun to plan out for herself before horror had darkened
their world. She would have taken her grant of land in lieu of some of her
wages and would have set up home somewhere outside of town, up a track she
would have the farmbots only partly construct. They would have left the surface
uncarbonised so that the soil of the planet could show through. A rough track
which would be dusty in dry weather, muddy when it got wet  She suddenly
saw that that was why she had gone into agriculture in the first place; it had
seemed an odd decision not only to those around her but even to herself at the
time, and she had wondered whether she was drawn in part because of its
overtones of fertility. The simplicity of her true motive made her smile in
surprise; she just liked soil. She felt regret that such clarity of
self-knowledge should come at the end of her life, and she wished in an
abstracted, weary sort of way that she could have explored this insight further
in the years to come. Years she knew that she was to be denied. She began to
wish now that the door would open. She didn’t want to meet the end in a sterile
place such as this with its pale gleaming surfaces. She wanted to stand in the
open one last time with her bare toes touching the cool dirt.