Blighted Star (25 page)

 Plenty
of couples had open relationships. On some worlds it was close to being the
norm. But they had never even discussed it seriously. There had never been
room, or so she thought for anyone else in their lives. She wondered about Jackson
and Christel, had they been open? It wouldn’t have surprised her. They had
always seemed a bit weird as a couple…But then, she
had
thought that
Grad and her were strong.

She
had to pull herself together. This was the only chance she was likely to get
for some time to get some sleep and she was wasting it lying here being
miserable. There were more important things to worry about right now than her
love life. There was the small matter of survival on a planet which had
suddenly become ultra-hostile. Here was she, moping because her boyfriend had
two – timed her, when she was surrounded by people whose loved ones had been
killed in the vilest way possible. They were all in the greatest of peril and
it was quite possible that in a few days she wouldn’t be worried about Grad
because she too would be dead. There, did that make her feel better?

Strangely
enough she
did
feel a little stiffening of her resolve. Fuck Grad. She
would sort out all her feelings properly when this planet was a tiny dot on the
scope. The voyage back would take two years after all, plenty of time for
wallowing in self-pity then. Plenty of time too, to decide what should be done
about the baby. Right now she wished with all her aching heart that the child
had nothing of Grad in it. She wished in some way that her DNA could be
separated out from Grad’s and that she could have a child all of her own.
Again. that was something she would face in a few days if she stayed alive. She
turned over her pillow so that the side she rested her cheek on was dry. The
thoughts continued to revolve around in her head for a little longer, then she
fell asleep.

<><><> 

The
Rum was still coursing through their bloodstreams and his men were straining to
get into the fight, but Raoul was all too aware that the foe they faced was a
cunning one. Right now he kept a close watch on a large grouping of red which
had broken away to the north. It posed no immediate threat, but if he let his
squad go running into the gap it had created, then the shore of Crescent lake
could become a wall against which they could be trapped. Instead, he turned to
face that grouping and left the main body of the enemy to make its way east
without harassment while he eliminated the northerly patch. He had a feeling
that the enemy was sacrificing this group to distract him, but he was prepared
to play along, they had already achieved their goal of delaying the enemy
advance for one day, now a nice victory against the northern pocket would give
his troops a good morale boost. After all, even a withdrawal to achieve the
strategic goal of drawing the enemy away still felt like a retreat if you were
the one with your boots in the mud.

They
moved north with extreme caution. The life tracers were located in loose skin
near the elbow of the left arm, but in all the firing several limbs had been
struck off the dead, leaving their owners traceless. This had caused one or two
nasty surprises during the course of the night. Sometimes limbs had lain like
snakes in the long grass and had twitched as they went past. They were fairly
harmless, but were demoralising to the squad.

Williams
had come good, and he felt some satisfaction with how that one had played out.
He’d been scoping her during the whole swimming party she’d given herself. He’d
been aware of whose red trace was at the bottom of the lake, and had thought it
best to let her get it out of her system. The night before she’d not pulled her
weight, and he’d had a good idea at the time that it was the presence of her
boyfriend on the battlefield which had divided her attention so badly. He’d had
to call her back into focus several times. Towards the end of the battle there
had been a moment when she had suddenly cried out, and he’d watched her like a
hawk in case she went to pieces on him. She hadn’t, but her heart had not
really been in the fight anymore. He’d known what she was doing when she’d
angled things so that she was near that pond, and he had considered getting her
the hell out. In the end he’d wanted her to either to work it through her
system, or if necessary to get herself killed somewhere where it didn’t put the
rest of the squad in danger. Tonight she had fought like he did himself. Like
it was only him. Like there was no one to worry about back at home. Like a true
warrior. Looking in her eyes he had seen the same guarded emptiness that he
wanted to see in the eyes of all his men.

The
continued silence of Athena, and then the cryptic message from Chan that she
was out of action was food for thought. The way Raoul saw it that put
him
in charge. The strong ethic that the military gave way to civilian authority
only went so far. Chan was Chief Engineer, but that made him, in Raoul’s eyes,
Chief of the engineers. The way Raoul saw it; there was no longer any civilian
authority to give way to. Now  it was time for a firm hand to take charge.
Besides, the Chinese guy had only been back for five minutes from his week -
long camping expedition. He’d been out of the loop.  Raoul, or any one of
his soldiers, had a better grasp of the enemy they were facing, and how to deal
with it. Unclouded military thought was what the situation was calling for now.
Not civilian emotional bullshit. But if he was going to be making the decisions
from now on, Raoul could see that there was probably going to be some initial
resistance. Civilians hated being ordered about by someone in a uniform… But
hey! Fuck’em. They’d had their shot, and they’d got the whole mission into deep
shit. They might not like being under martial law, but he wasn’t asking them to
like it. His main problem might be getting the squad to go along with
him… 

Movement
in the fog a little ahead brought Raoul’s attention back to the present.
Another untraced threat. It had been a pair of legs, no upper body, just a pair
of legs. It had walked towards them with weird comical movements in which its
knees were bent really far and the rear swayed far out to the right as a
counterbalance as the left foot came forward, then to the left as the right
slid out. It was slow, but it was moving in toward them for ages while they
all, even Raoul, stood mesmerised by it. Only when a stumble broke the rhythm
did they snap out of the spell and they all opened up at once. The sudden fire
from the targe guns blew it into vapour. After a moment someone laughed, then
laughter swept through them, dropping the tension. Raoul let it run, even
joining in a little with his own bass chuckle.

<><><> 

Raoul
rubbed the back of his neck and stretched both of his arms out wide. A bad fall
he had once had had stretched the ligaments in one shoulder and now prolonged
activity made the joint throb deep in the meat. Part of him was tired, the rest
was still wired by the drug. The last of the northern pocket were now falling
to his squad’s fire. In all about forty bodies were lying in a rough circle
about twenty metres wide. The soldiers stood near the edge of this circle, but
knew better than to walk among the still twitching corpses .Even chopped down
to torsos with stumps, and with smashed limbs scattered around the trampled
grass, the dead were still potentially lethal. Raoul looked round at the eyes
of the troops, and read in them no pleasure at the grim task of mopping up.
When the pocket had first been engaged and it had become clear that here at
last was an easy victory, they had cheered and whooped as they had mown down
the opposition. There had been just enough threat in the group of cadavers to
give the sense of triumph, especially when they came on in a wave that took a
little containing. For several minutes now though, the thing had become more of
a massacre, and it was time to get the troops away from the pitiful sight.

The
brightening east gave Raoul even more reason to get away; the light was
beginning to reveal the residual humanity of the creatures they had destroyed,
and soon it might be possible to identify individuals who they had destroyed.
In the dim twilight, a red dress looked little different from a blue one or a
green one, but give it another few minutes and details of clothing would become
clearer as the light grew stronger. People might be recognised, and that could
not be good…

He
gave the order, and they marched away from the site. Raoul noted that the enemy
main force had gone to earth again in the same lakes and ponds it had sheltered
in yesterday. He marched his unit in that direction, calling Grad in with the
shuttle as they went.

<><><> 

Grad
got Raoul’s message as he and Chan neared the partially dismantled mining machine.
Already the sky was filling with light as a new day dawned, and of the dead
there was now no sign. Except that, greatly to Grad’s surprise, the body of
Athena still lay where it had fallen. Grad called up the trace readout, there
was Athena’s trace, now glowing red.

“Set
me down right next to her.” Chan was shouting in his ear, rather than using the
internal comms. Grad had to check himself in order to do the same, turning his
head slightly and yelling through a still hoarse throat.

“Are
you sure? Isn’t that a bit dangerous? What if she reanimates on you?”

Chan
shook his head. “Don’t worry. Look, Grad, can you keep a secret? I’m going to
show you something that I think it’s best if nobody else on the planet knows.
Set us down next to her, there won’t be any danger.”

The
skids sank through the long grass, finding the firm ground, and Grad
reluctantly followed Chan over to the prone figure. The now familiar stench
arose from the corpse and he stepped back a few metres. Chan pressed on and
knelt beside Athena, drawing on thick gloves. As Grad looked on in horror, he
took hold of the collar of Athena’s shirt and wrenched the perished cloth. It
gave along the seams and tore away exposing the dead flesh underneath. Now Chan
took hold of the loose skin at the top of Athena’s shoulders and again wrenched
away. The stench intensified as, with a wet tearing sound, the decaying skin
and flesh came away in a long strip. Chan threw this as far away as he could.
Underneath was not the bony ribcage Grad had expected to see, but instead a
skeleton of shiny alloy with a long vertebrae made up of chunky pieces of metal
like a glittering centipede. The skeleton was overlaid by sheets and strands of
a transparent gel which mimicked muscle tissue both in shape, and no doubt in
function too. The parts of Athena which had rotted away were the layers of
subcutaneous fat and skin which had hidden her true identity from them all.
Chan was locating a small control panel with which he fiddled for a moment,
then he sat back on his heels.

“Protocol
Seven.” He said clearly, and for a moment Grad thought he was talking to him.
Then the corpse of Athena turned over and sat up. Grad cried out and fell
backwards. Checking his tracer he noted that Athena’s blip had turned back from
red to green.

“It’s
okay,” Chan made a calming gesture with his hand, and looked intently into the
Athena’s eye sockets, two glowing blue lights lay deep inside them. “Hi Athena,
you had to shut yourself down for a while, deep trauma to your soft tissue I’m
afraid. How are you feeling?”

“Awful.
Listen, I’d better get rid of this dead flesh.” She got to her feet, a little
unsteadily and went over to the nearest pond. With swift motions which revealed
the tremendous power in her limbs, she struggled out of the suit of rotting
flesh and started systematically washing her metallic skeleton and plastic gel
muscle structure.

Grad,
shaking a little with the shock of all he had seen, leaned close to Chan. “What
the fuck is going on?”

“It’s
okay Grad, Athena’s a partly artificial human. Most colonies have one even if
they aren’t usually revealed. They are always senior personnel. Athena just
happens to be in overall command. We always keep them secret simply because
they are more effective that way.”

“But
why…?”

“Listen,
first, this really shouldn’t go any further. The Agency wants one person in
each colony to act as a failsafe. If the colony runs into a real disaster, say,
everyone gets killed, the partly artificial staff should survive to tell the
story of what went wrong, and to hopefully set the situation on the ground
straight for when the next ship arrives. So far that has never happened, and
all the P/A staff have done their tours of duty without anyone being the wiser.
The feeling at the Agency is that it would be a bad thing if it became general
knowledge that in every colony there is one person whose main purpose is to
record the deaths of all their companions in as great detail as possible, and
to outlive them. The least it would do is demoralise the other colonists. It
might cause all sorts of trouble in terms of chains of command. There’s still
an awful lot of hostility to artificial and partly artificial people, and a lot
of people wouldn’t take an order off a lifeform they consider to be less than
human. Besides, many of the pioneer types attracted to colony life have
religious or ideological scruples to working with high technology anyway.”

Grad
thought for a moment “What about now? Are you still going to try to keep this a
secret? With everything else that’s going on?”