Blighted Star (23 page)

Could
the organisms be using a natural form of the telepathy that humans had had to develop
all this technology for? The dead mice had not stopped their nudging of the
side of the container even when he had pushed the tub right across the bench
away from the window. He could just about make out the tiny noises they made
from here, three metres away. But what were they thinking? When they
coordinated their attacks, were they able to sense what each other was
thinking? The infection hadn’t given them the ability to communicate in some
way had it? It had taken away the power of speech from the human victims, but
they too had shown coordinated behaviour in their assaults.

 Maybe
this was a distraction, maybe they needed to work out a way of killing the
creatures first, then worry about their communication techniques afterwards…

Chan
rubbed his eyes, he was bone tired still from the events of the last week. The
damage to his arm was still painful, even if the Doctor had set things right
while he was unconscious from the gas. He felt sure he wasn’t doing his best
work, but he had often found in the past that his mind contained solutions to
problems which he could not force to the surface but which drifted up into his
conscience when left alone. He allowed his mind to empty, watching the sunlight
drifting across the back wall of the lab.

The
water was cooler than she had expected, and Williams dreaded the sapping cold
which she knew would be in the layers below her, down where the brown water
filtered out the rays of sunlight. She wanted desperately to get out of the pond
entirely, failing that she wanted to stay here on the surface, with her pale
limbs no deeper than half a metre into the stained water. The pond water was
full of particles which stuck against her arms, tiny black dots of filth. Each
time the windows of her breathing apparatus dipped into the water she could see
the same black dots across her vision, before the next dip washed them away and
new ones took their place.

The
respirator was straining already, and she knew that she would have only a few
minutes of underwater use before it would pack in altogether. She checked her
visuals, she was above the place where Mack’s body was.

It
was hard to drive herself downwards against her own buoyancy, and she had to
kick hard with her legs, angling down towards the darkening depth. She
stretched her arms out before her with the targe gun in her right and a
powerful light ring on her left index finger. She activated the light ring and
a beam of light stabbed into the murk. Even so, visibility wasn’t much more than
a metre. she forced herself on, checking her readout, Mack was still below her,
only a short distance away and she strained her eyes to pick out any
recognisable shape in the silt laden water. The pond, she knew, was only six
metres deep. Yet the pressure seemed far more, as if a cold hand was clutching
her in its evil embrace. Her clothing reacted to the drop in her skin
temperature by heating  itself, but it did not feel like enough, and her
stomach felt as if she had swallowed a large cold stone. Her bare legs and arms
too, felt as if the water they were thrashing in had recently been ice.

In
the few seconds it took Williams to swim down she felt like turning back a
dozen times, yet something pushed her on despite the rising dread in her soul.
And then, abruptly, she was there and the torch beam was pooling through the
particle clouded water on the black silt of the bed of the pond. For a few
seconds, Williams hung there, her feet kicking strongly to stop her floating
up, her eyes searching for any sign of the lover she knew lay beneath the
shrouding mud. Then she saw the tip of a shoe. It was a light blue sports shoe
Mack had worn when he went running, and the sight made her gasp with the pain
of her loss. From the position of the shoe she knew where the rest of his body
must lie and she aimed the targe gun at the mud where the head would join the
body. She fired,  the beam from the gun boiled a narrow pipe of water into
bubbles of superheated steam which billowed up scalding her bare skin. As she rose
to the surface she fired again and again at the same spot, through the
obscuring disturbed silt. On the second shot the red marker on her tracer
readout had blinked off, but she continued to fire even as she broached the
surface in a flail of legs.

She
swam towards the shore, checking her readout more carefully. The remaining
three dots had begun to move towards her. She swam as fast as she could with
panicky, jerking movements. The mask over her face was beginning to falter, and
the flexible sides sucked in a little as she drew in breaths. It was hard to
resist the urge to tear the damn thing off her face and breathe normally, yet
she knew the air around the pond would choke her.

Something
touched her leg, and she stifled a scream. The nearest of the red dots was
still ten metres away, and well below her in the dark, but she dreaded feeling
a hand close on her naked foot. She swam on, and again the touch came, this
time on her fingers as her arm powered into its down stroke. Sobbing, she
realised that it was the soft mud of the pond’s shore that she was bumping, and
she staggered up, her feet sinking deeply in as she waded clumsily through the
shallows, her vision greying with anoxia.

She
collapsed, gulping for air against the mask’s decreasing resistance. As it
found new power outside the blanketing effect of the water, the mask was able
to meet the rising demand by pumping in fresh clean air and William’s breathing
gradually slowed, leaving only the memory of the near stifling her aching lungs
had gone through. She checked the readout. The red dots had returned to their
original positions. Behind the image of the readout, Williams saw the ground in
front of her. On that ground was a pair of boots. She followed the legs up from
the boots and there was Raoul. He looked down at her from the pond which he had
been scrutinizing.

“Been
swimming, Huh?” He dropped her discarded equipment beside her and turned away.

<><><> 

Raoul
felt the power of the stimulant coursing through his veins as his boots slogged
through the long grass near the water’s edge. Each particular droplet which
flicked up off the grass caught the dying sun’s rays in a prismatic flash which
captured the eye. Raoul had only taken Rum a few times but each time he had
been struck by the great beauty of the world and a feeling in his soul of being
at peace. Even the rhythmic clumping of his and the men’s boots seemed somehow
fitting and right. No wonder they ration this stuff out so thin, he thought.

Right
now they were in the centre of the system of lakes into which the dead had
disappeared that morning, and looking on his display he could see what a
military nightmare their deployment was. He sure as hell hoped he was right
about the enemy acting on instinct, because if they ignored the bait, and went straight
for Cassini, there would be little he could do about it. The breeze died with
the falling of the sun, and Raoul cursed inwardly. With no wind, there would be
a good likelihood of mist He knew the enemy would not be hidden from his
readout, and the there was no risk of being ambushed, but all the same he knew
his men could do without the spooky atmospherics.

Through
the filters he could still catch the weird smell, and it burned the back of his
throat producing a cloying taste and a strong urge to spit. The other thing it
did was put him in the mood for battle. Raoul had fought on two other
campaigns, one against humans, one against a troublesome semi sentient
insectiodal life - form. Each time he had felt the same tightening of his
balls, the same building of rage deep within him. A rage he could direct
against the fuckers whose actions had meant he had to be here, risking those
same clenching nuts…

The
last rays of light washed out the sky and the swirling mass of the Skagorack
emerged from the blackening immensity of space over their heads. Raoul called
up his display and at once the stars were overlaid by a small patch of blue
dots surrounded by many groups of red ones. As he watched, the red ones began
to move.

<><><> 

Grad
grabbed Lana’s arm and she span round to face him, her eyes flaring. He let go
immediately.

“Don’t.”
she said. Where he had touched her felt bizarre, like the feeling of an
amputated limb, he had held her arm on a thousand occasions but now? Surely he
would never touch her again. Both were aware of the uncrossable gulf between
what existed between them now and what had existed just a short time ago.

“Lana,
listen. You’re exhausted. I’ll go.” he searched her eyes, “Lana, whatever I’ve done,
you still shouldn’t fly when you’re so tired…” he tailed off into coughing.

Lana’s
shoulders drooped. After all she had been through, she no longer had the
strength to resist anymore. She hung her head and shrugged.

“I’ll
go.” he made to pat her arm but held back.

It
felt good to be back behind the controls. Simple. The stream of air flowing
back through the open structure seemed for a moment to strip away his troubles
and he was glad to be flying through the night sky towards the possibility of
oblivion. Athena had made no comment when she had seen who her pilot was to be.
She and the whole colony were aware of the scene which had taken place earlier
and its background, not that anyone gave a damn about such things in the
present circumstances.

The
dreadfulness of the situation between him and Lana could wait for the dawn, if
there was one. He concentrated instead on the simple act of flying the pared
down shuttle, the greatly increased drag doing weird things to its flight
characteristics, the nose was forever drifting up, and he kept adjusting the
trim to fetch it back down again. Still, he thought, better to have it tend
upwards than to wanting to point at the ground all the time.

From
this height, they saw the sun sink a little after everyone else, and so the
Sergeant’s whispered report of movement came a little before they expected,
However, they were reached a point in the twilit sky above the mine site when
the dead began once more to stir. Grad put the craft into a long lazy circle
while they waited to see whether the bait would be taken. They went full circle
six times, and each time the sun on the horizon pierced their vision a little
less. On the final circuit, its orange glow was gone.

“Okay,
looks like we’re “it”.” Raoul’s voice was calm, yet beneath the stillness lay
an edge of exhilaration.  They both looked again at the readout from the
life tags. The blue dots were surrounded and were making a break for the
western side of the encirclement.

“Be
careful Sergeant Raoul, They’re reinforcing” Athena was right, to the west the
containing line of the red dots was thickening rapidly. The blues got close,
the rest of the surrounding traces drawing in hard behind them, then suddenly
there was a triple flicker on the horizon. A dozen of the red dots blinked out,
and the blue dots moved through the temporary gap.

“What
was that Sergeant?”

“Last
of the scavenger grenades ma’am, couldn’t use them last night, too many
civilians around.” Raoul’s voice was now ragged; the man had obviously been
running hard. “Tonight it’s just us and them”

“Okay,
Sergeant. Be careful. We’re going down to the mine site now.” Athena tapped
Grad on the shoulder, though he had of course, followed the exchange on his own
comms and had inputted the necessary commands. As they dropped into the dark
below them, Athena looked again at the display. The red dots had once more
opened up on the sides, like two arms reaching out to take the soldiers in a
deadly embrace. The men, free now of the initial trap, backed away in the
direction of Crescent Waters. The dead followed.

<><><> 

Athena
found herself standing once again before the mining machine they had built
using the plasma sphere from Cassini. The shiny top surface was beaded with
droplets from the cooling evening air, and these sparkled lightly under a sky
flecked with stars. Athena took one more look at the visual display of the
distant action. The blues had outstripped the pursuing reds and had stopped,
hanging themselves out as bait to the groping tentacles of the red dots. The
display also showed the topography of the area, with six small bodies of water
blocking the way to the near corner of the big lake from which Crescent Waters
got its name. the water was shown in a lighter green against the olive
background, with the distant town shown in blocks of brown. Athena could see a
dozen different ways in which the soldiers could get trapped and killed, but
she guessed that there was little she could do to help. She had her own job to
do, and something about Raoul inspired her with confidence. She shutdown the
visual and opened a protected link to Chan back at Cassini.

“Jim?
Are you able to talk?”

“Athena.
You’re at the mine site?”

“Yeah,
I’m just about to begin. Have you made any progress with the organism?”

“Some;
it can be killed, though it’s extremely resistant to all our toxins. Fire
damages it, but that’s only really effective when the organism is exposed. To
kill it when it’s embedded in a host you have to basically cook it out by
roasting the host’s flesh. Only real answer at the moment is to destroy the
host’s mobility. The dead ash samples are still a mystery. Mostly the organism
had eaten away all the useful tissue, but what turned it into burned powder we
don’t as yet know.”