Blighted Star (22 page)

Williams
kept them moving, impersonal, professional. She kept her mask on throughout, as
did Lana. Many of the refugees were suffering from the effects of the corpse –
gas, but there was, once again, nothing that could be done about that out here
in the field. Lana wondered how many had been overcome by the miasma in the
night, and had been easier prey because of it.

Williams
was working mechanically. Throughout the night’s engagement she had kept an eye
on Mack’s trace, and she had watched, helpless, as he had fallen, nearly a full
kilometre beyond her position. Even after his trace had turned red she had followed
it, watching it take part in attacks, some successful, some not. She had wanted
him to come within her range one time, she needed to see him, to understand
what he had become. She would have pulled the trigger if she had had to, in
fact, she wanted to be the one, didn’t want anyone else to do the job. In the
morning, when the civilians were being rounded up, she had put herself forward
to be the one in this area to get the people together. In the large pond nearby
was the trace which marked where Mack’s body lay.

The
last of the civilians climbed onto the cargo deck and Williams waved them off.
Lana lifted the craft gently into the sky, she had not been able to help her
passengers last night through their ordeal, but she wanted now to give them as comfortable
a ride as she could. she whispered in the power and headed the overloaded craft
back towards Cassini.

Behind
her, Williams strode towards the silent pond, stripping off her bulky combat
gear.

<><><> 

Grad’s
racking cough woke him, and for a moment he wondered where he was. He had never
been in the sickbay before, and could get no clue from the white ceiling with
its soft hidden lighting. He sat up and looked around him. The room was white
apart from a trail of red which lead from one of the other beds to his own.
There were bare footprints in the trail of blood, and smears across the sheets
of his bed. On the covers, over his own lap, lay a blanched - out bloodless
object like a large white maggot. He stared at it for some moments, unable to
believe what his eyes were seeing, then he struggled out of the bed and shrank
away from the vile thing. He filled his lungs and yelled.

On
his third yell the doctor and Chan rushed in through an adjoining door. Still
speechless, Grad pointed at the bed. The smears of blood spelt out the words:

“Leave
the whore alone.”

“Wha….What
does it mean?” Chan looked at Grad in horrified mystification.

“Where
is Lieutenant Jackson? Did he do this to himself?” the Doctor’s grip on Grad’s
arm was painful, but helped to bring him back from the edge a little.

“J
– Jackson? He was here?”

“Yes,
yes! That  was his bed. Did you not see anything?”

“No,
no. Where is Christel? We have to make sure she’s okay…” he stumbled towards
the door of the sickbay, fear making his heart race.

“Grad,
wait. What’s going on?”

“Christel’s
in danger, he knows about us. We have to find her before he does.” Grad tried
frantically again to open a link to Christel’s comms, but she was still not
answering. With the others trailing behind him he set off down the corridor.

<><><> 

Climbing
the access hatch to the outer deck of Cassini was difficult, And without the
added power he had gained from the infection of evil, Jackson knew he could not
have done it. No one had come this way, even after they had landed, and so
Jackson had no fear that the flat area outside where the purification must take
place would be empty. Clambering out into the bright world outside, he dumped
Christel’s senseless form on the sun warmed outer hull of the colossal
spacecraft. He slammed the hatch shut behind him and drew out from his pocket
one of the scavenger grenades. He dragged Christel clear and returned, placing
the grenade on the hatch and activating it. He backed away quickly, feeling the
growing cold in the area around the grenade as it absorbed all the energy in
its vicinity. The silver surface of the hull grew a perfect circle of frost
around the grenade and the hatch. The white fur of ice looked pure, unsullied,
unpolluted. The sight of it confirmed for Jackson the course he must take.
Purification through ice and fire! After ten seconds the device released the
energy it had sucked in from its surroundings. There was a flash as all the air
particles in a two metre radius were ignited, and the resulting blast wave
knocked Jackson off his feet, his head rang with the noise. He looked at the
hatch, the tough composites of which it was constructed had shrugged off the
explosion which in the mud of a battlefield would have left a two metre deep
gauge in the ground. It had never been his intention to destroy the hatch,
merely to activate the safety lockdown mechanism, which it would take any
pursuers many minutes to bypass. The hatch was now sealed as tightly as if
Cassini was in deep space. Jackson turned, looking out at the distant horizon.
He had always hated heights, but now he felt invincible. He wondered abstractly
whether the upper hull of Cassini was the highest point on the planet.

Christel
was now groaning and rolling her head, he took a handful of dark hair and
hauled her to her feet. Her eyes opened, but she was finding it hard to focus.
Putting his arm around her waist, he half dragged, half carried her to the
distant edge of the upper hull, close to where it curved in a giant hump to
accommodate the drive engines. He looked down on the crowd far below in
triumph.

“Look!
Look! I’ve got her! You’re all going to be saved!” faces were turning towards
his bellowing voice. He had never before felt so powerful.

“She
is the one! She caused all our troubles! She’s evil, but don’t worry! I have
the cure for evil!” he brandished the second grenade. “I’m going to burn the
witch!” He beamed down on them, his people, in his charge. He was going to give
them back their pristine world. His only regret was that he could not share in
it with them. The thought brought tears to his eyes. But they were pure tears,
without the sully of self-aggrandisement. This sacrifice he would make for the
good of his fellow men, and he would not see it demeaned by the hope of a
reward, even if that reward was no more than the good opinion of those people
so far below him, down upon whom he now smiled a kindly blessing.

“I
must leave you, I must burn with the witch. But I do this gladly, for you!
Goodbye, my friends!” He threw up his free hand in a final gesture of farewell,
and activated the grenade. Christel came to life, kicking and screaming,
scratching and clawing at him as she wriggled, trying to break his hold on her.
Her hair in his fist tore slightly, and he could feel both where the strands of
hair were cutting into his palm and where the broken tufts were coming loose.
With the back of the hand which held the grenade he smashed her across the
face, her teeth cutting his knuckles.  He drew back his hand to deliver a
blow using its heel, aiming for a point on the bridge of her nose, anticipating
the crunch of the thin bones that would come. At his feet a large shadow
flicked across the hull’s surface, but there was no time to
react.   

Something
caught him in the side with numbing force and a cracking of ribs. Gasping, he
was thrown to one side, still clutching the activated grenade.

“Take
my hand!” Grad leaned far out of the skyak, and drove the fragile craft down
until it scraped along the hull next to where Christel had sprawled. She held
up a weak hand, and Grad clasped it, the canoe’s momentum drew her over the
edge into thin air, and she dangled in Grad’s grip. The canoe staggered
downwards, struggling with the weight of two people, motors whining.

Groggily,
his side burning with pain, Jackson got to his knees, his hand was beginning to
freeze solid gripping the rapidly heating grenade, and he clutched at it with
the other one. In seconds this adhered too in a mockery of prayer, skin
cracking and blistering with the speed with which the heat was exiting his
body. The frost was travelling up his arms as he shook the grenade before him,
holding it up to the sky, even the light from the sun was being sucked into it
at this range as it reached the climax of its acquisition phase. There was a
flash, and Jackson was gone.

<><><> 

The
canoe fluttered down to the ground in the middle of the crowd. Christel’s legs
touched first, and she settled on the grass like a puppet coming to rest. She sat
in the space left by the crowd, rubbing her arm and sobbing like a child. Grad
levered himself out of the cockpit and sat down next to her. He enfolded her in
his arms and whispered to her over and over that it would be all right. She
turned her face towards him and her lips sought his with a ferocious hunger.
Grad held her tighter and kissed her back. The sun was blocked out for a moment
as the shuttle glided down to land close to the canoe. Lana’s face was puzzled,
frightened.

<><><> 

Sergeant
Raoul took the news of Jackson’s death, and his own promotion to head of a
planet’s military forces in his stride. The urgency of the work which faced
them left no room for reflection, and he simply took the news as battlefield
developments. Right now he had the familiar problem of dissuading a civilian
authority from ordering a course of action which would get them all killed.

“We simply haven’t got the firepower to
mount that kind of operation, ma’am. The enemy is just too strong, we couldn’t
hold him back.”

Athena
nodded, the sergeant was only confirming what she feared already.

“But
we have to get a move on if we’re going to get the sphere back. If we have to
leave it until daylight to retrieve it then the infected will be at Cassini
before we can install it and take off. We couldn’t survive a siege of even one
night with the gas from those things.”

Raoul
looked across the landscape, back in the direction they had come from, back
towards where he knew the next attack would come from. If only they had just a
few more resources at their disposal. With some decent ordnance he could turn
this whole thing round on the next engagement. They knew where the enemy was in
precise detail, in fact they quite literally had tabs on him. All they would
have to do was to bomb each of the lakes which had a red cluster of life traces
in it. But they had nothing from which to make even a single bomb. Even twenty
first century warriors would have had endless supplies of gasoline, or
hydrogen, or any one of a dozen different dangerous explosives just lying
around. But modern technology was just not built on making things go “bang”
anymore. On this treeless planet they didn’t even have wood to pile up and
burn.

“Ma’am,
just how intelligent are these creatures anyway, do you think? My view is that
they have a crude intelligence but they are single minded, like a shark or
something.”

“Go
on Sergeant Raoul.”

“Well
if they have no overall plan, and are just reactive, then maybe we can use that
against them, decoy them away while you work on the plasma sphere.”

Athena
thought for a few moments, looking at the screen which showed Raoul’s position
and towards the extreme right, the still stationary clusters of red dots. With
less than an hour until sundown, the green dots had all been evacuated back to
Cassini.

“Sergeant,
are you and your men up to this? You’ve all been going for forty – eight hours
now, don’t you need rest?”

The
soldier held a small packet before his eyes and transmitted the image to
Cassini. “Combat rations ma’am. Rum. Passing them round now.”

Athena
looked to the trooper  at the other monitor  for clarification.

“It’s
a strong stimulant ma’am, we call it “Rum” or “Dutch Courage” for a joke. It
keeps you going for twenty four hours. Then you drop no matter what you’re doing.”

Athena
nodded her thanks. Realising as she did so that Raoul must think that after the
next twenty – four hours it might no longer matter if the drug wore off…

<><><> 

Chan
looked at the samples with a growing sense of despair. Under the microscope he
could see that they had the same cellular structure as the samples of living
alien tissue, but these ones were not just dead, they looked as if they had
been burned to ash. The distraction of Jackson’s death had put back the work by
hours as well, and also at the back of his mind was a growing fear for the
safety of his daughter as the crisis deepened. He had only managed a few
moments with her since he awoke, and now that he was back, he found the lack of
her presence at his side more acute than he had when he had been nearly fifty
kilometres away. He paused for a moment to send her a gentle “Hi” through her
comms, the equivalent of a pat on the back, After a second or so she sent a
“Hi” back, with a visual flash of what she was looking at. Mr Simmons was
working with a small group of the bigger kids at the front of the classroom
while Amy and the younger children were working on individual projects at their
own tables.