Blighted Star (38 page)

The
ship was beginning to cast a long shadow, and the crowd had divided into two as
people moved to stay in the warm golden light on either side. The air in the
cockpit began to feel cool, and Lana tapped a button to activate a small jet of
warmth across her feet. This was the way she had always set the heater.
Whenever Grad had been in the pilot’s chair he had always tampered with the
settings so that the air blew across his face. It had been a minor irritation,
the sudden dry air in her eyes, along with the seat being too far back and the
control pad too high. Sooner or later, she supposed, she would have to share
this area again with him. When that happened she had a bad feeling that all
those little things would begin to grate on her nerves, and that wouldn’t be
good in space’s limitless prison. She sighed. she was really going to have to
get a rein on her feelings over the next few days. She rested her head on one
side and closed her eyes.

<><><> 

The
last of the sun’s rays lit the western sky into a glowing red mountain of fire
against which the ship towered above them like an immense silver coral head in
some fantastic shallow sea specked with stars. Grad gazed at the sight, lost
for words at the beauty of it. He had  always loved spacecraft since he
was a little kid growing up in the shadow of a spaceport, where the craft used
to drop down through the sky, creating their own trailing tresses of clouds as
the moisture in the air reacted with the hulls, still deeply cold from the icy
touch of space. At one time he knew, spacecraft used to smash into the upper
atmosphere like cannon balls dropping onto the surface of a lake, and they
would still be sizzling when they thumped onto the ground. But that had been in
the early days of spaceflight, and for centuries vessels had eased themselves
back into atmospheric flight at mere hundreds of miles per hour. Looking at
Cassini now, Grad wondered when she would fly again, if ever. Most colonies
kept their ships intact for generations. Those ships were so solidly built that
they were space worthy long after they needed to be, but very few of them ever
actually flew again, They became, in effect, their planet’s first civil
monuments.

Here
on Saunder’s their situation was so very different. The present mood was one of
triumph, but they had been through so much since the days when they had called
it “Goldilocks” that he wondered if any of them had an appetite for much more
of the planet. He wasn’t sure if he had himself. There were plenty of other
worlds after all..

Up
in the cockpit’s bulge there was a soft light shining, which, he knew must be
Lana, and for a moment his heart turned over and he felt a hard painful lump
rise in his throat. The next moment, a commotion at the far end of the crowd he
was in claimed his unwilling attention. Were people messing around? Tonight
surely wasn’t the occasion for such boisterousness. The crowd surged away from
the source of the disturbance, pressing back towards him as people lost their
footings, spilling onto the ground and bringing others down with them. Christel
was nearby and she grabbed his arm, her fingers digging into the flesh
painfully. Athena’s voice boomed inside his head

“GET
INSIDE! NOW!”

At
that moment the screams began.

<><><> 

Athena
watched with some satisfaction as Amy spoke to her father, but she took her
attention away from the microphones in the engine room to afford them a little
privacy. It had been nice guiding the child through the empty corridors to
where Chan was working. It was not at all unlike walking next to the little
girl, holding her hand as she must have done a thousand times. She had
explained what had happened to her body, but Amy had hardly batted an eyelid,
asking only what had  it been like being dead? The answer that Athena
hadn’t experienced death, only a near instant transfer to Cassini’s computer
systems didn’t particularly seem to satisfy Amy, but in the end the child had
simply nodded and changed the subject, as if saying “Okay, we’ll leave it there
for now.”

From
now on she was going to take a far more active role in the lives of the
children, Athena decided. Obviously, the leadership role she had fulfilled
until now wasn’t going to be possible in the future, but if she got any choice
in the matter then she was going to take on more pastoral work while someone
else dealt with the big troubles which might come along. Perhaps she could
combine healthcare and education? With her ability to process information from
dozens of sensors so quickly, she could almost be everywhere at once, looking
after all the children, keeping them safe. The thought was pleasing. She tested
her theory, and found that she could easily follow all the children on the
planet, and all the grownups too. It was a little as if time slowed down for
her, and she could look at each individual in turn  in near freeze frame.
There was Lana, sealed off in the cockpit. She didn’t know that down on the
field below, in the gathering twilight, Grad was looking up at her with sadness
written across his damaged face.
He
didn’t know that Christel was
watching him over the rim of her glass. Her expression was unreadable. Not far
away a circle of children were dancing round holding hands, their teacher in
the middle playing a tune for them to dance to and projecting fish and other
sea creatures which whirled round with the kids. A single note from the song
was attenuated in Athena’s hearing, it wasn’t, she was interested to hear, lower
in tone like notes in old slow motion films, but more as if someone was holding
the same perfect note for an impossibly long time. Jim would no doubt have
something to say about the phenomenon. She recognised this song. It was a
traditional children’s rhyme about life under the sea. In the far east of the
crowd a couple were hugging. From the dilation of the woman’s eyes and the
reddening of the vascular bundles in her earlobes, Athena could see that they
would soon be heading off to somewhere more private. Interesting. The man
wasn’t the woman’s husband. He was two metres away, clutching his hand to his
neck. Athena zoomed in close, focussing her vision on what lay under the man’s
hand. A blister had risen around which the skin was shrinking and decaying as
she watched. Already the contagion had transferred to the palm of the man’s
hand. The air around him was dotted with spores. panning across the field, she
saw that there were thousands more blowing in on the light breeze from the East
which had blown all day. Widening her senses, she could see them flowing in a
long thin cloud back to where Raoul had burned the corpses. She commed through
to all of them to shout a warning, but she had to synchronise her experience of
time with theirs in order to communicate. When she did, time speeded up again
and she watched the man go down, writhing in agony. Around him the settlers
fell back in fear and confusion, but they could not escape the onslaught of the
tiny spores.

As
Athena watched in growing horror, first one person then another was struck by
the deadly particles. The stricken crowd surged back towards Cassini, panicking
at the feet of the stairways.

On
the Eastern fringe the forgotten children were screaming in pain and fear and
clawing at themselves as if they were being attacked by a swarm of stinging
insects. As if on the cue of a line from a song they fell as one into the grass
the farmbots had so recently passed over.

In
the area before the steps, fights had broken out as people tried to scramble
their way to safety. As Athena watched impotently, Grad, who was on the
stairway already, reached back into the boiling mass of humanity and grabbed at
Christel’s out flung hand, only their fingers touched and he leaned forward
again and grabbed, just as a shove from someone behind pushed her forward by a
few inches. He closed her wrist in an iron grip, and with his other hand
anchored firmly to the railing, hauled with all his strength. Christel’s
shoulder dislocated with an audible “Clop” but she slithered over the heads of
the crowd and into his arms. Badly crushed, she had only the breath to whimper.
They turned, and with the other forerunners, made their way up the flights of
stairs and into the hull of the ship.

Below
them, the screams of the dying reached a crescendo as the spores swept into the
gathered humanity. As if they were being exposed to some deadly gas the people
stumbled and fell or died standing where the force of the crowd held them on
their feet. More people made it through the throng only to fall twisting in
agony on the steps.

As
the last rays of light left the upper hull of the starship, and night finally
arrived, the field fell silent and one by one, the strewn corpses rose to their
feet.

Athena
wanted to weep, but she was disembodied and was aware of herself as nothing
more than strands of data, There was almost nothing she could do. She sounded
the alarm and attempted to initiate the hull breach procedure which would seal
off areas of the ship. But throughout Cassini the doors and ventilators had
been removed or disabled in the open position to prevent accidental closure
from causing the stifling hazard of carbon dioxide build up. Operating in
speeded up mode she shut down what fans she could, and reversed the flow on
others but it was utterly hopeless. The spores were in the ship and spreading
fast. They had been drawn through the main corridor from side to side of the
ship like toxic dust being inhaled deeply into a lung, and now they were dispersing
through the side corridors and ducts into all parts. She had nothing to give
any of them, no advice, no warnings that would do any good. Desperate not to
see any of them die she maximised her processing power until for her a second
stretched out into the dim future. but this was almost worse; she could see
with absolute clarity what order they would die in, three settlers in the main
door way were already stricken, though only two of them had become aware of the
pain of the infection, the third had been touched by a spore on the wrist and
already the tiny pod had glued itself onto her skin and bitten into the
surrounding cells. Around the woman’s head blew hundreds more of the deadly
motes which would kill her before the contagion spread up her arm. On her face
was an expression of relief at having escaped the field below.

In
all there were nearly a hundred people in Cassini. Some had been dotted around
the ship already, others had been down on the field when the spores had blown
in. Those in this second group were the most immediately vulnerable because
they had not travelled far from the open doors. Many of them now stood panting
in the entrances to the access corridors which opened off on either side of the
main vassicle. Among these were Grad and Christel. Tears were streaming down
Christel’s pain wracked face, and Grad was supporting her or she would have
surely collapsed onto the metal deck. They were near the access route to the
flight deck, but Athena could see at a glance that they had no hope at all of
reaching the distant sanctuary before they died.

In
the engine room Chan, alerted by her earlier general alarm call to those on the
field, was looking with concern at Amy. Neither of them could see the puff of black
dust from the ventilator above them. Beyond the doorway, the corridor was
already full of air borne death.

One
nanosecond at a time the events unfolded, so that the helpless Athena
experienced what was, for her, day after day of her friends’ deaths, Many times
she was tempted to return to a human chrono-conception just to get the next few
moments over with, but to her this would have been like bringing their doom
forward and she simply could not bring herself to do it. Each “day” was agony
as she watched, a helpless immortal, death take all of them. Only when Lana’s
green life trace up in the sealed off cockpit was the only one left did Athena
slow down to a human time frame again. She felt shaky, on the very edge of
madness, and the terror filled sobs of the young pilot did little to lessen the
feeling of alienation.

As
planetfalls went, this was a most sober affair, and both Janice and Teresa kept
an uncharacteristic silence as Huygens nudged her way through the upper layers
of the atmosphere and eased herself out of interstellar space and into sub –
orbital flight. The wisps of cloud they fell towards looked heart-achingly
beautiful, particularly as they spoke to the pilots of the relief of drinking
fresh water for the first time in two years. In fact, Janice thought, the water
they would soon be drinking would be the freshest and purest any of them would
ever drink, most of the colonists came from world where human settlement was
based on the constant recycling of the necessities of life.

Janice
wondered how they were all feeling, strapped into the various chairs and
benches throughout the colony ship. Most of them had been in the central mess
hall when she had come through to join her co-pilot on the bridge, and there
the mood had been a sombre one. No sense of fear; the updates from Cassini had
been reassuring that the area had been disinfected and a wide perimeter of
sensors had been long established to screen for incursions of the soil dwelling
creatures or the floating spores, now an increasingly rare occurrence,
apparently.