Blighted Star (37 page)

Athena
now had a massive range of senses at her disposal as Avatar of Cassini. She
could reach out into the emptiness of space around the planet to read the flow
of radiation or focus her attention on the molecules in the grains of soil in
the ground below her. Each and every one of the humans under her care was open to
her scrutiny, and she very quickly, with a fading sense of guilt, perused their
metabolic readouts, looking for the signs of stress as told by increased heart
rates or raised adrenalin levels. She became aware of another difference as her
humanity fell away; she was able to absorb far more information than she used
to be able to, and to process it in what felt like slow motion. Part of her was
aware too of the barriers she was breaking of privacy. Barriers she had herself
been utterly committed to only a few short hours before which now she had to
remind herself were of any consequence.

She
knew it would take a long time to get used to the ship as her body. There was
no sense in which the systems of the starship were analogous to the limbs she
had lost. She did not, for example experience the landing struts as being like
legs or the numerous cameras and other sensors as being like eyes and ears. The
sensation she was experiencing was more akin to the sensation she had felt when
she was entombed among the roots in the vat, except this was in its own way a
benevolent entombment.

Best
thing of all was to have access once more to Chan. He was so kind and
sympathetic, and so positive about the future that she herself was losing her
glum fear of the settlers and how they were going to accept her new role as the
ghost in the machine. So far, after all that had happened, people seemed to be
responding to the weird news as just one more thing. The spreading rumours had
been overtaken by the spreading news of the victory over the zombies, and
already people were gathering outside and in the mess hall. She wondered if it
would be best to keep a low profile during the course of the aftermath. She
decided to check in with Chan once more in the engine bay where he was still
working on connecting the remaining plasma sphere to the main drive engines.
The work was not going well, and as she focussed her attention on the security
camera in the small bay, she heard him cursing as he banged his elbow in the
narrow confines of the machine.

“Hi
Jim.”

“Oh
hi Athena, how are you feeling?” Chan waved a hand vaguely in her direction,
but didn’t wriggle free from the machine. She felt some sympathy with that, the
spheres were not installed into the equipment with the idea of being removed at
whim.

“Not
too bad really. I wouldn’t want to stay this way forever, but hey, it’s better
than the alternative!”

“Huh.
Yes, see what you mean.”

“How
are you getting along?”

“Not
well. Damn thing has about a million connections. Could you run a diagnostic,
make sure I’m right so far?”

Athena
could have been offended if she had chosen to be. In one way Chan was treating
her like a computer, and indeed it was a task which Cassini’s computer would normally
carry out. But she knew that it was his own clumsy way of keeping her in the
loop, and of paying his respects to her as a technician at the same time. 
The test took a millisecond to run, and she wasn’t at all surprised to find
that he had made no mistakes at all.

Once
again Grad lay in a daze between consciousness and unknowingness, floating as
his body waited for the nanos to do their work of repair. The sickbay had been
scoured clean but still felt somehow shabbier than it had before, and Dr
Clarke’s absence gave it an indefinable sense of being abandoned. The beds were
all empty apart from the one Grad occupied, but this was not a sign of health
among the colonists, indeed the past week had taken its toll on the health of nearly
everyone. The unbearable level of anxiety had given birth to a range of stress
symptoms. Athena hoped that the relief that the victory would bring would give
all the chance to recover from the crushing burden of fear, but she knew that
this would in most cases merely be replaced by sadness as the colony counted
its losses. Very few people, she knew, would want to remain if they were asked
at that moment. She would wait. When the sphere was safely reinstalled she
would still wait. She would give them every chance to take the decision in a
spirit of calm deliberation.

Christel
was doing well in her care of Grad. She had assigned herself the role of
medical officer as soon as he had been brought in by Lana, and had been at his
side ever since. Athena had supplied the advice on what medication to
administer, but Christel had taken to it as if she was a born practitioner. In
fact, Christel had candidly said that it was not that unlike dealing with a
sick farmbot.

It
was while she was thinking along these lines that Christel suddenly had an
insight.

“Athena!
The plague is carried by the soil dwelling creatures, isn’t it? The worms and
so on?” There was an excitement in Christel’s voice which drove it higher, and
Athena felt a smile come to her lips, and then remembered. “
The ghost of a
smile
…” she thought grimly.

“Yes,
Christel, that was what Dr Clarke thought anyway.”

“The
farmbots can be calibrated to track down organisms in the soil. It’s one of
their functions, to count them and keep track of the soil’s health. Anyway,
they could be reconfigured to zap the little bastards. All of them, or just the
ones which are infected.”

“Well…What
are we waiting for? Let’s get them in! This could solve all our problems!”

“There
isn’t any need to bring them in to reconfigure them. It’s not that big a change
from the functions they normally carry out. All we need to do is identify the
infected worms as a crop pest and set the ‘bots off to seek them out. they
could clear a cordon sanitaire around Cassini of a couple of square kilometres
wide in a matter of days!”

“…We’re
saved! Christel!”

“Yes,
I think we really are.” Christel’s voice had sunk a little with solemnity as
the impact of what she was saying took hold. Their hold on the planet was going
to be secure after all. There would be generations born here for who the
troubled history of the early colony would be no more than one of the more
interesting history lessons. Christel took Grad’s hand in hers and held it up
to her lips. There would be a future, and this man would share in it with her.
Her feelings as she had watched danger beset Grad time after time both confused
and excited her. She had wondered whether she would ever experience love, and
in fact had become resigned somewhat to the idea that romantic love probably
wasn’t for her. Now here was another person whose safety felt more important to
her than her own. Sitting here it was easy to say that she would gladly give
her life for him. But in fact she very nearly had done that in the accident in
the lab. She had acted then without a second’s hesitation, and she knew that
she would again if she ever needed to. She had never experienced feelings
remotely like those she felt now, and it was something of a surprise to her to find
out that they even really existed, let alone that she too could feel them.

Underlying
the warm glow her feelings of love gave her were the colder touches of fear
that were the inevitable accompaniment; some part of her knew that Grad did not
as yet feel the same way. It had all happened too fast for him to transfer his
love from Lana to her. But he would. She would look after him. The
disfigurement of his face would lessen over time but without sophisticated
medical care it would always be there. It would not matter to her, and he would
see that. It would prove to him that her love for him was the real deal. In
time he would feel the same way, and now they had time.

Grad’s
hand stirred in hers and she looked down at his burned face, half hidden in
bandages. reading his one good eye was difficult, and she thought for a moment
the shadow of regret had passed behind it, then he pulled her into his arms
with a gentle “C’mere, you.”

<><><> 

In
a strange way the gathering of the colonists out on the green below Cassini
mirrored the one a few weeks ago when the ship first landed, and many of them
must have been aware of the similarity, and of the missing third of their
number, for the mood was both sombre and to some extent one of relief. As they
wandered among the survivors of what someone had dubbed “Saunder’s Rot”, the
individuals who made up the crowd looked at each face more carefully than they
would have before, and people seemed to recollect a closer acquaintance with
those they would not necessarily have recognised in the corridor.

The
mood changed a little when, in the beginning of the afternoon, a row of dots
appeared in the distance. as they came closer, the shapes resolved into the
twelve farmbots from Crescent Waters. The reason for their arrival quickly
spread, triggering a moment or two of slight panic, followed by titters of
anxious laughter as people around the field checked the ground beneath their
feet for signs of infected worms. The farmbots formed a line, with one end
anchored at Cassini, and began to patrol round and round the great ship, moving
out a little each time until within a few hours the whole field could be
declared to have been swept clear. The announcement lifted the mood. Those who
had not lost any friends or family did not burst into wild cheers in the face
of so many who had, but here and there in the crowd were islands of cheerful
conversation, smiles and even a little laughter.

As
the day wore on, the colonists, who had gravitated to the circle of cleared
ground around Cassini, spread further away little by little as the line of
robots spiralled out. Everyone seemed to find increasing comfort and growing
confidence in this most visible demonstration of their reconquest of the
planet, metre by metre. Towards sunset, when the circle had grown to nearly
half a kilometre in circumference, a sudden murmur broke out. Someone had seen
a flash from one of the robots, or thought they had and for a few minutes the
rumours ran through the crowd like buffets of wind through wheat. It had been a
worm, making its way towards them through the soil. It had been a severed hand,
crawling in their direction. It had been a malfunction, and the line of robots
was about to stop completely. In the end Athena pointed out in a general
announcement that the robots would destroy anything they found by excavating it
first, then giving it a pulse of Ultra Violet radiation, which would be
invisible. The flash they had seen had merely been the sun’s dying light
glinting off a metal surface. The sound of Athena’s voice created the same buzz
of conversation which had accompanied it every time she had spoken to the
colonists. Though in some quarters the facts surrounding her true identity had
been received with anger and fear, on the whole the recent days of horror and
death had left the colonists with little appetite for further startling news.
All any of them really wanted was a period of calm and stability in which to
re-establish their lives. To that extent Athena’s continued existence and
continued position of pre-eminence was a kind of comfort. When general
announcements had been made in the past it had always been by the same kindly
voice after all.

At
seven o’clock the faces of the crowd turned towards the top of the stairs where
Grad and Christel had appeared. The pilot was leaning heavily on the
horticulturists arm, but at the chorus of cheers from the crowd he raised a
bemused hand and gave a wave. With Raoul out of the picture, the crowd had
rather taken Grad to their hearts, and found in the already popular and
charismatic young man, the wounded hero the occasion seemed to demand. One or
two of those cheering cast a wry eye on where the other pilot, who had been
previously romantically linked with Grad, disappeared abruptly into the open
hangar doors.

<><><> 

The
empty corridor rang with her footsteps as Lana stomped her way through Cassini
towards the cockpit. She considered, briefly, turning down to where she knew
Chan would be working on the engine. She badly wanted to know that the
possibility existed at least, of getting off this evil rock. But she was just
too angry to be around any other person at that moment. She climbed the last
steps and positively bashed the button to activate the outer door to the flight
deck. A moment’s wait in the airlock, then she was through and into her
sanctuary. One downside, she thought, of life when they did leave “Saunder’s”
would be that she would have to share her private kingdom with
that
prick. She slumped down in her chair, drumming her fingers on her stomach, and
then she remembered about the growing life contained within it. Her fury
increased at Grad. How could he do it? In one way she had had a lucky escape;
she had actually been contemplating spending her life with that buffoon and his
brat. Now the sooner it was out of her the better. Of course, with Dr Clarke
out of the picture she would have to administer her own medicine to terminate
the pregnancy, but Cassini would make the drugs she needed to reabsorb the
thing clinging to the lining of her womb like a leech. Damn! Now approaching
Cassini would inevitably mean Athena would be involved. Lana wasn’t at all sure
how she felt about that. All this anger was making her tired, and she knew that
really she should be feeling the joy of relief at their deliverance. She looked
out of the cockpit window at the crowd below and felt more isolated than she
ever had before. Down there in the evening light they were still all making
merry. Most of them had been out pretty much all day, not surprising
considering the time they had been forced to spend in the close confines of the
ship, breathing and rebreathing stale air.