Blighted Star (15 page)

He
looked around at his team, they looked young, fresh, and eager. Down the ages
he reflected, time and time over, the history of mankind had come down to a
dozen or so young soldiers like these making a stand at a crossroads somewhere.
Sometimes they prevailed, and history streamed off one way. Or they failed, and
history took another path to the present…

Lana
turned back towards him and said something which was whipped away in the
slipstream. She was pointing down at a large body of water shaped like a love -
heart, the lake from which Heart Lake got its name. The road, on which he could
see the silver blobs of two or three farmbots working, gently curved along the
side of the lake for a kilometre before straightening out as it reached the
town. Somewhere under those pleasant looking waters were the bodies of the
townsfolk, if the readouts of the tracking system could be believed. From the
cluster of red blips only one was missing, and that was located in the third
house on the northern side road.

They
crossed over the town and started their descent. Cruising round the streets at
a height of ten metres, staring out through the windows of their masks at the
empty doorways they glided past. They all looked tense, kneeling with weapons
at the ready. Jackson felt the rightness of it all. As a child he had known that
this was what he was for; he had always wanted to play war, had wanted to play
army long after his schoolfellows had outgrown such games. Whatever happened to
him tonight, he had at last achieved the ambition of a lifetime. He was going
into combat.

 Everywhere
was the confirmation of what the probe had shown; there had been a terrible
battle, blood was everywhere lying in black pools. Yet there were no corpses,
the only human matter were piles of what, with blenching horror, he realised
were the intestines and soft tissues of victims. He was aware of the theory
that was forming that they were the victims of an attack by human forces. but
no humans could carry out an atrocity like this, surely? If they could, they
did not deserve the title “Human” at all. No matter who or what they were. He
was going to wipe them out. Lana finished the aerial recce of the town and
headed back out the way they had come a little, aiming at a spot on the road a
hundred or so metres beyond the last houses. Jackson pulled on his breathing
gear and signalled the others to do the same. As the skids of the shuttle
scraped on the carbonised surface of the road, a faint breeze blowing towards
them through the town brought a stench which they could smell even after the
breathing units’ filters had done their work. Jackson jumped out and stood by
the flyer as his men disembarked. Glancing back he saw that Lana was gagging
and fumbling with the straps of her mask. She was going to remove it! He
reached through the airframe and grabbed her hands. As she turned panicking
eyes on him he shook his head sternly and pointed up. After a second, she
nodded and the shuttle rose straight up into the air, Leaving the noxious fumes
below it. Lana’s voice crackled over his comms.

“Ss
– sorry. Rooky mistake. Though I was going to hurl in my mask.”

“Okay
if you had. They’re designed to take it. Should have told you. My fault.”

“I’ll
hover over you. If you need me, I’ll be there.”

“Good
to know.”  without taking his eyes off the nearby buildings, Jackson gave
a half-wave to the aircraft. And then signalled his troops into combat fours.
This left two spare, and these he put on point. He raised his hand, then let it
fall, they advanced.

<><><> 

“Athena!
Athena! There’s something really strange going on! Look at the visual I’m
sending you. Athena! Are you there?”

Athena
put herself into comms mode.

“Jim,
I’m here. Are you okay? Are you under attack?”

 Jim’s
voice had sounded weird, and the picture he was transmitting was wobbly and
poor resolution. She wondered why for a moment then remembered that Jim’s
internal comms set had been fried in the plasma breach, and that he was using
the emergency wrist set they’d sent out on the probe. The picture she was
receiving was of a large animal about fifty metres away, moving towards her
through the storm’s darkness. It was a horse, but something terrible had
happened to it. The image was bouncing around as Jim backed away from the
advancing creature, and she could hear his breath rasping away. The display
kept flashing, and she thought for a moment that something was wrong with the
comms set until she recognised the growling of thunder in the background.

The
horse was in tatters. It looked as if it had been in an explosion, with great
shards of skin hanging from it. It moved forward by staggering a few steps,
tottering, then staggering a few steps more in a parody of the first steps of a
new born foal. Though Jim could keep ahead with ease, there was a sense that
the horse would never stop, would pursue him until it finally reached him.

Its
face was the worst. It had no eyes, and the soft velvet of its nose was gone,
leaving a gaping hole from which a thickened mass of green, yellow and red
dangled and dripped.

Jim’s
shocked face appeared, next to him, Athena caught a glimpse of Grad, he had a
guiding arm on Jim’s. And was keeping a lookout in front of them.

“Athena?
What the hell is it? What happened to the horse? It won’t go away, it keeps
coming after us, but it looks… it looks dead, Athena. I know that can’t be, but
it does. Athena. We need to get out right now.”

“Keep
moving, Jim. Grad, carry him if you have to, I’ll get Lana over there as soon
as I can.”

<><><> 

The
tiny biped raced across the dark plain, slewing first one way, then another,
whip-like tail whisking out to balance it on the turns, the large red crest of
exposed bundles of vassicles pulling enough oxygen from the dense air to fuel
its flight, but only just, so that it wheezed and gasped, the primitive lung
billowing and collapsing as it bounced behind the biped’s head. The other
members of its pod were far behind, it had got a good head start on them when
they had been attacked and they had fallen, infected. The disease debilitated
its victims somewhat, and the biped was in reality in less danger from them
than the panic it felt warranted. The swarm of infected insects were also no
threat any longer; insect bodies were quickly used up by the pestilence, their
insides liquefying within a few hours, It was unlucky that this had for once
been enough time for them to transmit the contagion.

The
biped loped on through the night under the flickering Skagorack, knowing that
it had only to survive until the day then it would be able to rest. Its pod had
been attacked many times in its short life, and until now the escapes had been
alarming but at the same time routine; they had lost a night’s grazing, but had
never until this night lost more than a few pod members.

In
some ways the world they had inherited, a world in which they were the fastest
thing left alive, was more benevolent than the one in which their ancestors had
lived with any of a half dozen species of predator posing a serious
threat.  Every so often they would be assaulted by infected animals, but
even when they found themselves surrounded, their turn of speed was usually
enough to get them out of trouble.

The
biped crested a hill and saw before it a herd of rollers, these lumbering
beasts were capable of no more than a steady trundle on land, using whip like
tentacles at either end of their cylindrical bodies, and were in truth an
aquatic species, taking to land only when the pondweeds they fed upon became
depleted. The biped knew that it was safe, and it loped down through them,
leaving a trail which would lead its pursuers to the slower prey. The rollers,
oblivious, kept to their course, pressing down the grass as they went, creating
one wide lane as they rolled in single file, the strongest in the lead.

The
biped left the rollers behind and ran up the slope of an outcrop of rock. At
the top it caught the first glimmers of the coming day. Perhaps the rollers
might live after all. The pursuing dead would be seeking shelter from the sun’s
rays soon, and if during the course of the day the rollers could find a
sufficiently large stretch of water, then they might swim to safety.

Dropping
down the other side of the outcrop, the biped saw several large shapes out on
the dark plain, but felt no fear; these were the remnants of a long dead
species of crablike creature, and the empty carapaces were inches thick in
moss, the chitin crumbling at the slightest touch. A light rain began to fall,
and the biped loped over to one of the empty crab shells and crept in. Tomorrow
it would begin the long search across the plains for others of its kind. It had
a memory of an encounter many years before with another troupe, far to the
west. It would begin its search there.

Athena
tapped her teeth anxiously “Look, Lieutenant, I really think you should withdraw
to the Landing Zone while Lana’s gone. Or at least hold your position. She’s
not only your means of escape if you run into trouble. Don’t forget that the
shuttle’s also carrying your heavy artillery.”

Jackson
considered what she had said, but it was nothing new, he’d already gone over
the same arguments in his mind.

“She
be gone for a hour at least. Meanwhile it’ll be going fully dark and the people
at Heart Lake will be getting scared. We get things finished up here while
she’s gone, we can get straight over to the blocking point when she gets back.
Besides, who’s to say we’re any safer sitting in a field waiting? I appreciate
the input, Athena, but we’re going in.”

A
shower of rain had just washed the streets spreading the blood, refreshing it
so that under the glare of the illumination panels built into their chest
armour, the streets once more had patches of red. Jackson found himself staring
at one.

<><><> 

The
weeks of training culminated in a series of combat V.R. tests. Jackson had not
done particularly well so far and though the next one was not make or break for
his training for command, it was the last one he could afford to fail if he
didn’t want a mediocre score. He entered the booth, sat on the chair, and
pulled the V.R .helmet down over his head. At once his body felt numb as the
precision magnetic field shut off the signals running between his brain and his
spine. He had never enjoyed this moment of paralysis at the beginning of every
session of V.R., though he appreciated the need to prevent the body responding
to the stimuli the brain was experiencing. Undisconnected, the body would give
spasms like that of a stressed person drifting into sleep who experiences
falling for a moment. With the much more intense input of V.R. you were likely
to find your body sprawled across the floor rather than sitting in the chair as
you left it.

The
feeling of paralysis passed and he found himself sitting in a seat in a landing
craft approaching the planet below. He commed in to the landing craft’s visuals
and saw below him a worldscape of verdant green islands separated by stretches
of ocean that were, for some reason blood red. Around him a thousand other
assault craft were dropping down through the outer atmosphere, heading for
their various objectives.

The
scenario was; human settlers had been welcomed by a primitive race of
cephalopods who possessed a rich ocean based culture, who could communicate
through gestures with their twenty tentacles and seemed peace-loving. At first
the humans had prospered, keeping to the land, and there had been no conflicts
of interest with the sea living neighbours. Then, inadvertently, the humans had
defiled a site so sacred to the cephalopods that only the extermination of
every human being on the surface of the planet would expiated the crime.
Jackson’s task, in all this chaos, was to command a platoon he had led through
half a dozen other simulations, in the securing of a hard pressed compound of
human settlers on one of those green blobs below.

Looking
around him in the craft he could see only seven of the original platoon left,
and these were a really mixed bag. Most of them held him responsible for the
deaths of their comrades, and the animosity they felt for him seemed real, even
if the men weren’t.

The
fleet of shuttles dropped closer to the surface, still keeping perfect
formation, then suddenly the scene erupted with colour. The surface of the sea
was pierced in a thousand places by  high – energy beams which probed the
sky all around him. Many passed harmlessly into space, but many more struck
their targets in the now frail seeming space - to - surface craft. The shuttles
which were struck fell from the sky all around him like shot birds, splashing
into the sea in plumes of spray, surrounded by the smaller impacts of their own
debris.

Jackson
shut his mouth and took a second to think. Eight more ships went down, trailing
smoke.

“Evade!
Evasive action!” Still linked to the flyer’s visuals, he watched the ocean
below tilt one way, then another. More beams of energy sprang from the crimson
surface.