Blighted Star (3 page)

He
continued to outline the possibilities in detail, but she wasn’t really
listening any more. She was going to have a baby! A baby! Grad’s child! She
longed to be home. Looking out of the window she could see the class of
children playing out on the green under the supervision of their mechaniod
teacher. The six foot human shaped robot was projecting three dimensional
fairy-tale creatures with which the class was constructing an imaginative
narrative. Lana smiled, remembering her own teacher, Ms Sparx. She wondered
what Ms Sparx was doing right now. Probably still teaching about Old Australia;
teaching robots often got a little fixed in their ways as they got older, it
was some function of them having a capacity to empathise with their young
charges. Some odd ones got so much personality that they became even a little
eccentric, but those were the ones that everyone liked best. By the time her
baby was ready for school, the teacher outside would have been in service for
three more years, still not really time enough to have developed a style of its
own. Lana smiled to herself, her baby would have a brand new world to grow up
in, those children playing out there so happily would be his or her friends and
fellow citizens.

<><><> 

Over
twenty kilometres away in the settlement of Crescent Waters, Grad was unloading
the last of the farmbots from the shuttle. As each was taken from the hatch it
was placed on the ground in front of Christel Robbins, one of the farming
consultants of the colony. Christel was good fun to be with in a flirtatious
sort of way, and Grad could not help but acknowledge in himself an awareness of
her physically. If it weren’t for Lana…

A
sudden commotion at the other end of Crescent’s main street of close mown grass
made them both glance that way, and there, flanked by the settlement’s three hundred
or so occupants, was the small Amish group. As they proceeded up the wide road
with their menagerie following their cart, they looked something like a circus
visiting an old Earth town.

“Bloody
savages!” The whole subject of the Amish was one which Grad was learning to
avoid with Christel. Her usually tolerant and easy-going attitude completely
altered whenever the Amish were mentioned. She found their way of life; raising
and killing animals for their flesh, totally unacceptable. And their belief in
a supreme being mystifying. For his part, Grad agreed with her; why couldn’t
they eat vat meat like civilised people? On the other hand, live and let live.
As long as they didn’t ask him to eat any of the vile stuff…

Whatever
the townsfolk thought of the eating habits of the Amish, they were certainly
giving them a rousing welcome now. When the little procession finally headed
out of the town and continued on the last short leg of its journey, it was with
the all of the children and many of the adults too. And Grad  was sure
he’d seen a look of surprised amusement on the bearded face of the senior
Amish. Clearly, they were not going to have the problems other religious groups
often encountered from their neighbours on other settled worlds.

“C’mon.
I’m all done here.” Christel straightened her back and stretched her arms after
leaning over for so long. The farmbot scuttled off towards its first
assignment, and they both watched it go, flashing in the sunlight. Grad held
out his hand and Christel took it, hauling herself in through the hatch. Grad
couldn’t help but notice that she held on to his hand for a good deal longer
than was strictly necessary, and even when she let go she did not stop looking
right into his eyes. He looked away in confusion When he glanced back at her
face, she was looking at him with a quirky, wry twist to her lips. He grinned
back.

<><><> 

When
Athena got back to her office, she barely had time to sit down behind her desk
when there was an agitated knocking at the door.  It was Lieutenant
Jackson.

“Ma’am,
we have a potentially serious breach of security.”

She
looked up sharply, “Go on.”

“Ma’am,
the satellite tracking system has been in place for three days now. We had
teething problems, but everyone’s safely accounted for except one. It
highlighted a trace which hadn’t moved for more than forty hours so we went to
investigate. The trace was coming from a cubicle on Cassini, and when we forced
open the door this is what we found.” he opened a box and held it out to her.
Inside was a tiny pellet of plastic and metal like a multi coloured grain of
rice, and several surgical swabs of the kind found all over the colony in first
aid boxes. The decreasing amounts of blood on the swabs spoke eloquently of the
wound incurred when the tracking pellet had been dug out of the individual’s
arm, and how it had quickly dried with the application of the haemostat-spray
whose light blue stains were still visible. Athena could think of several
explanations, and didn’t like any of them.

“Who
does it belong to?”

“A
settler called Gunnar Olafson.”

“Ah
yes, Gunnar.” Athena felt a little lightening of her worries. She could recall
with perfect clarity Gunnar’s background file and did not even need to access
Cassini’s computer via her comms. It painted the picture of an outsider, a
loner, even a misfit. At first sight not the sort you would want to bring on a
mission such as this, but in fact, a type of person that contributed in all
sorts of ways to a society’s wellbeing. Indeed, history had shown all too clearly
what happened to the cultures which turned on their own mavericks. None of
those stories ended happily… All the same, they could be a royal pain in the
neck if you happened to be in charge, and here was a good example.

“Have
we any idea which way he went?”

“Not
yet Ma’am, shall I send out a probe?”

“Do
so, it shouldn’t be too difficult to locate him. He’ll be the biggest lifeform
after all.”

“What
then ma’am? Do I bring him in?”

“God,
no! Just leave him to it. I’ll shuttle out myself and have a word with him.”
she could see that Jackson wasn’t happy.

“What
steps will be taken to restrain him?”

“That
will depend rather on his reasons for going off like this. But probably none.”
she watched Jackson’s posture stiffen as he considered openly confronting her
over this, then he relaxed ever so slightly. 

“Yes
ma’am.” he still stood, waiting. A model soldier, who wasn’t about to challenge
an order which he though was stupid.

“Dismiss.”
she pulled a face at his retreating back.
Go and write that into a report
.
she thought.
Jackass
.

Jackson
left the office, shaking his head a little once the door was closed. On the
whole he respected Athena Johnson and trusted her judgement on most things, but
the tracer system was there for everyone’s safety, and there had already been
too many exceptions made. Everyone should wear a trace, then he would know at
all times where everyone was. That was the whole point. What if there was an
emergency? How would he do his job? The damned Amish were one thing, for them
not being tagged was some kind of religious thing, not one he could understand,
but he just had to accept it. But  if everyone went off the system…
Jackson called up the tracer readout on the comms set feeding into his visual
cortex and immediately the corridor in front of him was overlaid by a thousand
tiny green dots. He thought about Christel, and her dot was highlighted for him
by the system. She was moving between Heartlake and Crescent Waters, cruising
at forty kilometres an hour, rather slow for the shuttle. Beside her dot was
another one, the pilot of the shuttle. He quizzed the system and the green dot
briefly bore the name Grad Hutchinson. Not the attractive woman pilot then…The
thought of Lana called his attention automatically to where she was; her dot
was embedded in the large cluster around Cassini. Zooming in brought a greater
resolution, she was nearby, two floors down, just leaving the sickbay.

Jackson
was coming to the end of the corridor, and he logged off the tracer system, at
once the dots disappeared and his view of the crowded internal canteen of
Cassini was unobscured. Near the serving counter were six of his troops.
Jackson got his food and went to sit with them. He noted the slight widening of
the eyes as they gave each other signals of despair, but he also knew that this
forced intimacy was just something they all had had to learn to live with. It
would be great to have a separate mess for officers, but as he was the only one
in this tiny command that would seem to be something of a waste of resources.
One of the troops, A red headed New Argentinian called Williams broke the
uncomfortable silence.

“What
we doin’ this afternoon Lieutenant?” She scratched her tattooed arm with her
fork.

“We’ll
patrol out along the route the road will take as far as Crescent Waters.”
Jackson was a little surprised  at the answer himself; up until now he had
meant to take up the afternoon with simple drill and kit cleaning but something
had prompted him…Oh yes, he had seen Williams tearfully kissing a boy who was
leaving for Crescent Waters a couple of days before. she certainly looked
pleased now.

“We
all going Lieutenant?” One of the two Slavonicans with the platoon, Petric,
looked slightly less happy, Jackson wondered what the man had had planned for the
evening. Probably staring morosely at the other Slavonican, Orlov. That seemed
to be their main pastime, both men were known to hate each other, yet were
compelled by some tribal instinct to spend many of their evenings in joyless
drinking competitions, Hard alcohol pouring into their bloodstreams to battle
with the nano immune system’s enhanced defences.

“No,
us.” he circled his knife pointing to all around the table. “We’ll stay out
there overnight, Sergeant Raoul will hold the fort with the others while we’re
away.” He settled into his meal. The decision he had made was possibly a bad
one, after all, soldiers thrive on routine, not sudden whims. But really there
couldn’t be any harm in it, and it would give them more of a chance to
acclimatise to local conditions, like the weird lightness of gravity. At the
back of his mind too was the feeling that Christel and he needed a break from
each other. Their relationship had changed since they had made planetfall, and
he wasn’t sure about the direction it had gone in. Perhaps if he absented
himself overnight she might have time to appreciate him, to stop at least from
finding his presence the great irritant she seemed to find it at the moment. He
shovelled another mouthful of the vat grown food into his mouth without
enthusiasm.

<><><> 

Williams
always felt self-conscious out of uniform. She had never been a particularly
good dresser, unlike her older sister who had had an innate sense of style. Juliette
had always known when something was just at the point of being really
fashionable, and just as importantly had always known when to abandon a style
and to move on. Williams had never had this gift, and to make things worse, had
had too much pride to copy her older sibling, so she had lost out doubly, and
had, she was sure, never once hit the cusp of a fashion. On New Argentina this
had been a problem; the whole planet was a fashion power house to which scores
of other planets looked for coming trends. If you couldn’t strut it on 
N.A. you were nothing, totally invisible.

Joining
the Marines had got her away from all that, and it had opened up new worlds to
Williams. In her combat fatigues she felt just as invisible as she had been
standing next to her gorgeous, immaculately dressed older sister, but in her
line of work now, invisibility was a good thing, and the various camouflage
patterns her combats adopted were all purposeful, interesting, and chosen
automatically so she didn’t have to worry.

Best
of all, she had a boyfriend now who said he liked the soldier girl look. She
slogged on through the grass behind the others thinking about what she would do
to him just as soon as she found an excuse to slip away for twenty minutes…

It
would have been nice to have had Anti-Gravity packs, they could have just
floated their way to Crescent Waters, dangling their boots through the grass,
hovering straight out and across the little lakes they were forced to detour
round now. But this was such a cheapskate mission. They had fuck all,
absolutely nothing. Just miserable Scavenger Tech Targe guns with a range of a
few hundred metres, and one lousy twenty mil, which was also Scavenger Tech. It
was a damn good job they weren’t expecting any trouble because they could not
have done much about it if they had found it. Other than put up just enough of
a fight to get themselves killed, rather than just throwing their arms up in
the traditional sign of surrender. At least the lack of equipment meant that
marches like the one they were on now were relatively easy, with light packs,
and the whisker less gravity was still giving them an extra few centimetres on
each stride.

Behind
them the sun sank towards the horizon behind which Cassini had long been lost.
Williams wondered  what Macintyre was doing, and wished that she could
comm. him for a chat, but knew how that would go down with Jackass. Even Raoul
would have sat down hard on her for that one. At least there’d been time to let
Mack know that she was on her way. He’d commed back an image of herself seen
from his point of view from one of their previous encounters which had made her
blush all the way to the red roots of her red hair.