Blighted Star (17 page)

Athena‘s
thoughts went back to the final weeks before embarkation. She had had a final
meeting with Saunders himself, a sprightly two hundred year old, and very much
a legend within the Diaspora movement. He had been every bit the charismatic
visionary she had been expecting. When she had walked into the room he had been
looking at a hologram of a blue green planet circling in the air before him. It
was a huge representation about a metre across, and Athena had wondered for a
moment why Saunders didn’t simply have the image projected onto his internal
comms, then she remembered that it was one of his eccentricities not to have
any such devices implanted.

The
hologram was of a planet she did not at first recognise. It looked beautiful
and diverse, with nearly half its surface covered by one immense blue ocean
over which swirls of white showed the presence of many different weather
systems. As the planet rotated, the other side came into view with land masses
richly banded in the green of verdant forests and farmland, the browns and
yellows of deserts, and the stark white of polar regions.

“Earth.”
Saunders gestured at the hologram. “Earth as it was back in the Pre – Plastic
ages. Beautiful, wasn’t it?” He turned his brown eyes to hers, two still ponds
of vast depth. “We threw all that away. Ever since, we’ve been trying to find
the same thing again, but we never quite find a perfect match.” He watched the
globe again for a few moments, and Athena watched with him as four hundred
years of history were condensed graphically. She watched processes which had
taken decades happen before her eyes as the atmosphere became opaque, and the
dark green bands of the forests were eroded, first into the light green of
farmland, then into the brown of desert. Everywhere grey cities formed like
scabs across the continents, even into the seas. Several times, numbers of
these cities were blackened by wars, but each time they re-erupted, usually in
the same place. Meanwhile, the white zones at the top and the bottom of the
globe were retreating, and the sea, now grey and lifeless looking, expanded ,
travelling far into the continents. In the last phases, the earth lost all of
its colours except browns, blacks and greys as the atmosphere exceeded the
temperature and the toxicity at which life could exist. Athena had had a paint
set when she was a little girl. Sometimes she would mix the paints too much in
the search for new colours, and the picture she was working on would end up
like the hologram before her, a mass of vile mud tones. She would know then
that her labour had been lost, that it was easier to start again than to try to
retrieve her work. She would cry hot tears of anger at the wasted paint, the
wasted paper, and the wasted effort.

Saunders
had searched her eyes, but what he was looking for she had no idea.

“Even
with all the advances we’ve made we still basically do the same thing. Do you
know what the Cherubim call us? They call us “The Plunderers”.”

The
Diaspora movement was not without critics, both human and other sentients; many
were of the opinion that mankind’s record on many planets, not least of its
home world, was to say the least questionable. That, in fact, mankind did not
deserve the stars and as a species allowed itself to exist through expansion
and not through the careful gardening of its resources as other species did. It
was a fortunate thing indeed that the three other space – faring species that
mankind had encountered so far had evolved way past the use of violence. It was
the Cherubim who had given man scavenger technology, at one stroke taking away
the struggle for sources of energy. The gift had worked to some extent; since
the advent of scavenger tech, only two interplanetary wars had been fought.
Mankind had one less pressing need to fight over. But the sad truth was that
scavenger technology had been used to create weapons of true hideousness. The Cherubim,
seeing this, had broken off contact and now were only ever glimpsed when their
projected selves moved like ghosts through some human area. The projections
never replied to the beseeched enquiries put to them.

 Saunders
and other second generation Diasporists argued that humankind needed to expand
because of its fragility; that spreading the stars offered a refuge from the
extinction that humans so readily courted.

What
it boiled down to was the philosophical question. Was mankind worthy of life?
Athena had asked herself this on many occasions. She had an interest in
history, and she was all too familiar with the catalogue of atrocities,
genocides and holocausts. the wars, the drivings to extinction, the destruction
of habitat on a planetary scale. In all, the sheer blindness to their own best
interests that humans had consistently shown. But in the end, she had to take
the wager that mankind had a chance to be great. It was an act of faith, but it
was one she was willing to perform.

Whatever
it was that Saunders had been looking for in her eyes, his manner suddenly
changed. he waved his hand at the globe and it  faded rapidly and was
gone. In its place, a planet she was more familiar with appeared, the one they
were about to travel to, Saunder’s World.

<><><> 

Jackson’s
squad was within a kilometre of the lakeside when they came across the first
burned out body of a child. Gently, reverently, the man detailed took the
sample while the others slogged on, all of them only too aware of the sun falling
below the horizon. Another small pile of blackened remains, then another, and
soon after another. In the end they barely checked their pace. Each time,
Jackson merely called out a name, and the trooper nominated would fall behind
for a few seconds. Though they displayed no emotion at each site, the anger
which had been building in their hearts against their unknown enemy began to
solidify into a cold longing for revenge. Jackson glanced round at the set
faces, and knew that when the time came, not one soldier would hold back.

They
drew up a little short of the edge of the lake, keeping to the roughly
carbonised surface of the unfinished road. Then Sanchez, covered by two others,
ran forward and placed the Aqua – probe in the shallows. As he ran back, a
ripple spread out from the fist-sized object, distorting the reds and yellows
of the reflected sunset. Sanchez re-joined them and took control of the device.
Jackson patched in to the remote probe’s visuals.

The
water shelved away quickly before the small craft, and Sanchez guided it
forward, hugging the bottom. The probe moved quickly and didn’t have far to go;
all the traces were registering in a closely packed group about twenty metres
out, in about five metres of water. The probe was equipped with the ability to
see in a wide range of the spectrum, but with no body heat registering on infra
– red, Sanchez elected for normal visual range, and switched on the probe’s
powerful lights.

The
lakebed before them was made up of loosely packed mud and slime, and at first,
there was no sign of the missing three hundred people. Sanchez nosed in closer;
right where they knew there to be a trace. Still nothing, just the uneven bed
of the lake, Sanchez looked across at Jackson, shrugging. He put the probe into
reverse, and the gentle jets from the forward thrusters caused twin puffs to
rise from the loose sediment. As the visual angle changed, Jackson caught sight
of something in the tail of his eye.

“Hold
on, go back, but go in slowly, try not to stir things up too much.”

The
probe nudged forward again, and as the sediment dispersed, the men could see
clearly the face of a woman, but a ravaged face like one from a hundred-year
tomb. Sanchez switched to Sonics, and the sound signals cut straight through
the mud to reveal the full horror of the scene. depicted in black and white,
the bodies of three hundred people lay in dreadful community beneath the silt
of the lake. They lay in piles like fallen branches, Limbs twisted, stomachs
ruptured. All of the dead faces  had suffered the same decay as the woman.
Jackson restrained the urge to gag and turned to Sanchez.

“Keep
looking; see if you can find the creatures that did this. Look for movement.”

He
straightened up, longing to take off the respirator and to draw in a deep
breath, but knowing that to do so would give him only the stench of corruption.
The HUD in the corner of the screen was telling him that the air was not
deadly, but was still fairly noxious.

“Ma’am,
did you get all that?”

“Yes.
Thank you Lieutenant.” Athena’s voice was subdued, though it wasn’t obvious, he
could tell the she was crying. “Are you going on to the blocking point now?”

“Just
as soon as transport arrives.”

“Be
careful Lieutenant.”

Hernandez
tapped him on the arm and pointed to the sky, the shuttle was dropping rapidly
towards them. In moments it was nestling onto the grass beside them and Jackson
was accepting Grad’s arm as he clambered in. The pilot and the engineer were
both gagging and coughing in the foul air. Sanchez was still on the grass.

“You
want me to get the probe back, sir?” Jackson could imagine what that would be
like, running back over on your own to the side of the lake…

“Leave
it. We’ll get it some other time.” he held out his hand and hauled in a
grateful Sanchez.

“Yeah,
let’s get the fuck out of Dodge.” said one of the men, his voice hard to
identify through the respirator. Jackson, scowling for form’s sake at the lack
of discipline, inwardly wholeheartedly agreed. The shuttle, heavily loaded now,
rose high into the air and turned to head for a point halfway down the road to
nearby Heartlake.

Behind
them, beneath the still waters, the probe switched itself off and inflated its
swim bladder, it rose inertly to the surface. Its cameras blind to the stirrings
of the bodies in the depths below, it floated under the brightening stars.

<><><> 

The
men formed a line across the road and knelt at the ready in the rapidly cooling
night air. Every man strained his sight, looking for movement of any kind in
the dark. With no idea of what they faced, each had his own nightmare version
of their foe.

The
shuttle left them for a few moments, whisking back to the town to organise the
townsfolk should an evacuation be necessary. Jackson fervently hoped that it would
not be. Moving three hundred people safely through a night time landscape
without anyone getting lost or hurt would be a hell of a task at the best of
times. Add the panic and the haste, and you had a real recipe for disaster.
Besides, if they couldn’t hold the enemy here or at the crossroads, then
holding attacks off in open country while at the same time shepherding
civilians on a twenty klick hike? Well, he just couldn’t see it working. They
might not have much choice though, the gas the creatures gave off could easily
kill the whole populace.

“Lieutenant,
please check your readout on the traces.” Athena’s voice had an urgency which
made him lose no time in studying the visual. There, behind the tiny cluster of
green dots which reported his own and his men’s position, was the large
gathering of the townspeople’s life traces. Moving swiftly towards him from
there was a group of four green traces which were the blips from the shuttle.
But what drew his astonished attention was the large blotch of red clusters to
the east where the lake with the bodies was. He looked, and looked again, but
there was no way to deny what his eyes were telling him, the red dots were
moving, and they were moving in his direction.

What
could it mean? Were the dead being brought along by the creatures? Were they a
movable food supply? It seemed to mean that there were enough of the creatures
to carry three hundred bodies, albeit slowly. They would need to know, and
Jackson contacted the shuttle whose dark shadow blotted out a handful of stars
above them

“Lana,
take a look at the movement near the lake. Do you see it?”

“What
the… Yes, I see it. What’s happening?”

“That’s
what we need to find out, can you overfly, but don’t get too close; we have no idea
what’s out there. For all we know they might be weapons capable.”

 “Shit,
point taken. We’re right there.”

<><><> 

Lana
lifted the nose of the craft and climbed an extra fifty metres as she headed in
the direction of the red blips. From the craft she had a good view of the
silvery starlit lake and the road which curved round it. Down there in the
blackness, she knew, was the thing which had killed a whole town, which would,
if it could, kill her, Grad, and their unborn child. She set her jaw, glancing
across at Patel. He’d proved himself once with that gun, she hoped he’d soon
prove himself again. They cruised on through the night sky, pushing against the
cold air.

“There,
down there!” Grad’s sharp eyes had picked out something on the ground, something
she could not as yet seen herself. Patel, though, was aiming carefully at
something just a little in front of them on the road. Lana came to the hover
and peered hard through the gaps in the floor.

“Can
you bring us down just a little? I’m not sure what I’m aiming at.” Patel
sounded concerned “It looks to me like it’s just people down there, I can’t see
any lake monsters or anything.”