Blighted Star (5 page)

With,
due to the anti-gravity units, in effect no friction, the gigantic load
continued on its way while Jim watched appalled. He realised with a crippling
jolt of fear that it was heading for the Plasma Sphere. The men in the quarry
must have realised the same thing because they sprinted away yelling warnings.
Jim burst out of the lab and ran down the steps, he took half a dozen steps
towards the pallet, if they could only switch off one of the A/G units it would
destabilise the pallet… It was hopeless; the pallet was out of range and
spinning too quickly anyway, shedding lethal sheets of iron as it went. He
turned and began to run the other way, knowing that running away was hopeless
too. Behind him the pallet must be nearing its target. When it broke the
sphere, which it surely must, the plasma breach would vaporise everything in
the quarry. He was glad he hadn’t let Amy come with him to work today. He hoped
Athena would look after her, knew that she would. He stopped running; there was
no point. He looked up at the sky; it really was very beautiful. He wished he
had spent more time looking at it. Off to the east there was a metallic glint in
the sunshine. It was racing towards the quarry. He waved frantically; the
shuttle must turn back. It wouldn’t stand a chance.

<><><> 

“Help!
This is the quarry! We have a full emergency!” the squawk on the radio startled
Grad out of his reverie, already en route, he pushed the throttle lever full
forward.

“Quarry,
this is the shuttle. I am inbound and about six klicks out. What can I do?”
There was no reply from the comms, and Grad cursed under his breath. The abject
panic in the man’s voice had been plain enough. The quarry was now ahead and
Grad arced down without slowing until the final second, flashing over the heads
of the people still running away from the lip of the quarry’s deep bowl. Down
below someone was waving. Grad cut the power and let the shuttle drop like a
brick directly down to the figure. At four metres the motors cut back in on
their own and the shuttle stopped, hovering just above the ground.

Jim
was frantically pointing across the quarry to where a massive object was just
covering the last few metres between it and a large white ball. The Plasma
Sphere! Grad reached across and taking Jim by the front of his overalls, hauled
him in through the open passenger window, At the same time feeding full power
into the A/G  and throwing the throttle full forward. Jim, not strapped in
or wearing G-cancellation, screamed as a bone broke, then mercifully passed
out, a thin stream of blood starting from his nose.

<><><> 

Lana
started out of her afternoon nap, a deep feeling of unease deadening her heart.
Something had happened to Grad. She just knew it. She tried calling him on his
internal comms but there was nothing. It was more than just being out of range.
It was like the sensation of trying to contact an infant who had no
implants.  She dressed hurriedly and ran down the corridors to the Comms
Centre. As she entered she could see everyone looking at her. Athena Johnson
came forward and took her hands. Her legs almost gave way.

“What’s
happened? Is he dead?”

“We
don’t know yet, reports are still coming in. There is still hope but I want you
to be ready.” Athena guided her gently to a chair. “There has been a plasma
burst at the quarry. Witnesses say that Grad flew in just before it happened
and no one saw him fly out. But things are very confused. We won’t know for
sure until a proper search has been done. We’ve sent out probes to look for
life traces.”

Lana
sat in the chair, waves of misery washing over her. Christel came over and put
her arm round her. Lt Jackson looked up from the Probe monitors and smiled
thinly. Time seemed to slow down.

<><><> 

Gunnar
flattened down the grass as best he could so that when he lay down he felt both
sheltered and cushioned. Although it was open to the sky it was in every other
way a perfect camping spot. The lake glowed in the last light from the day, and
reflected the studding of thousands of stars with the vortex of the Skagorack
just beginning to rise in the east.

He
looked into his pack and found the lamp. Placing it on the ground in front of
him he set it for both heat and light, and then he took out his pan. Finding
that he wasn’t really hungry he decided to leave dinner for a short while and
just to lie contemplating the stars for a while. If he dozed off, well that was
all right too. He stretched out his long form and allowed his eyelids to droop.
He wondered idly if there would be a thunderstorm later. Occasionally they
occurred, were bound to, he supposed, in a planet where there was so much
moisture. There had been a flicker of light in the sky behind him earlier on
which had seemed like it might be lightning. Oh well, if there was a storm he
would just have to turn the heater up and tough it out.

He
awoke, startled. Something had bitten or stung him on the hand. That was
impossible; there were no aggressive insects on Saunder’s World. Yet down on
the ground lay a tiny spasming worm. He looked at his hand from which came an
excruciating pain. A blotch of grey discoloration was spreading unbelievably
fast. Now the entire back of his hand was covered and the blotches were
spreading up his wrist. He clutched his right arm with his left hand, and the
pain started in that too. Both hands infected, he stood up and began to run.
Now his arms were covered in pussing black and white boils from hand to armpit
and still the infection raged on unchecked, down across his chest, up the veins
of his neck. It raced across his face, bursting his eyeballs and drawing back
his lips in a vile rictus of a scream. In his last second of consciousness
before the organism, spreading up his spinal cord, burst into his brain, Gunnar
was aware only of exploding lights and crashing noise. Then he fell.

The
organism completed its conquest. There had been no resistance, none at all. The
ancient parasite had complete possession of its new host but it needed to
spread further; it needed new hosts to survive.

Gradually
it located each of the nerves needed for locomotion. The corpse of Gunnar
Olafson began to twitch. Stiffly it levered itself to its feet and stood, the
pus which had been its brain drooling from the twisted lips. The wrecked and
ruined internal organs were allowed to slough out through the corpse’s anus.
The organism directed the dead muscles to move, and the corpse staggered away
from the light of the lamp and towards the distant beacons of life.

Athena
bit her finger ends with worry. Worry not only for the missing men and the
colony’s only shuttle, but also for the long-term prospects of the colony
itself. The loss of the quarry was a blow from which they might not be able to
recover. Not only had the equipment been vaporised with literally no trace of
it left, but the very shaft they had bored into the ground had collapsed in on
itself. All that was left at the site was a smouldering crater the bottom of
which was still glowing with residual heat. The only mercy had been the small
number of casualties. Of the quarrymen only three had been unaccounted for,
with witnesses pretty clear what had happened to them. The last of the
survivors had just been brought into Cassini’s mess, now converted into a
makeshift hospital. They all showed signs of shock, and extreme fatigue from
the fifteen kilometre evacuation from the site of the disaster under Sgt
Raoul’s care.

When
she had been a young girl, Athena had taken part in a class end of term project
in which they were all supposed to contribute to a tableau vivant. The theme
had been “Moments in History” and they had debated long and hard before
deciding to portray the death of Julius Caesar. Each member of the class was
assigned a character from the moment to create a hologram of: Brutus and the
other conspirators, passing Roman citizens and so on. These were to be made
complete not only in surface detail, but also with an interior monologue which
observers could access as they wandered through the scene. Athena had had a
couple of good years academically, so her peers entrusted her with the
centrepiece of the tableau, Caesar himself, just at the moment of being stabbed.
What none of her school fellows had really noticed was that Athena’s grades had
been in free-fall for a few months and that she had been resting on what had
been considerable laurels.

It
was hard to say what had led to this decline in academic prowess; she had
really just lost interest in the whole process of education and had begun to
drift. Her teacher had picked up on the tiny cues which her body language gave
off as she attended, there in body but not in mind, the classes the robot gave.
Her slightly dilated pupils, the angle at which she tilted her head, the sleepy
rhythm of her breathing. It read the signs and went through the usual routines
to focus her attention, pleading, exhorting, nagging, until finally it backed
away from her, sensing that nothing it could do would reawaken the interest she
had once felt, that any such academic renaissance would have to come from
within herself.

Which
was all well and good, but it unfortunately left her with the problem of a
piece of work vital not only to her but to a dozen other kids, which was due in
the next day and which she had not even started. She began the work,
constructing as clear a mental picture as she could of the Roman leader,
projecting it into an imager, tweaking it, revising it, working on every aspect
of its appearance and its mannerisms. At about one o’clock in the morning, it
became clear that there was no chance of her finishing, no chance at all.

Waves
of anguished despair swept through her, and a profound feeling of shame and
defeat. It was her first public humiliation and the memory of it made her blush
until her ears burned, years later. And now the same feelings were beginning to
form within her once again. Half a lifetime away, and half the cosmos away from
the planet where she grew up.

With
the loss of the mining equipment went all their ability to create iron sheeting
and girders. The initial buildings of each town were in place, roughly
constructed from carbolite panels harvested from Cassini, but that was all. At
least the people would have some kind of shelter, but they would have to get
their deep core supplies going again, and they couldn’t wait two years for the
next colony ship. Saunders World had precious few other resources, no forests
they could chop down for timber, even the rocks beneath their feet would be
incredibly difficult to quarry for building materials without the right
equipment. Their only option other than mining olerite was to cannibalise the
rest of Cassini itself for the materials to finish their towns, and Athena just
wasn’t going to let that happen. The ship was already stripped down to the bare
hull, and anything further would compromise its space worthiness on a permanent
basis. They needed Jim, badly.

With
the thought of Jim came to her with total clarity the mental image of him
taking her through the blueprints of the mining machine. He was showing her how
to jury-rig a replacement which would not be as fine-tuned, would only turn out
sheeting and girders, rather than the limitless variety of objects the original
had been able to conjure out of the molten metal, but it would make their stay
on the planet possible. The vision was the strangest sensation because she
could hear every word he was saying as if he was in the room with her and yet
she felt sure that this wasn’t a memory of a conversation they had actually
had. Athena had a photographic memory; that was one of the reasons she had been
picked for this mission. Yet here was a clear image which was both a memory and
not a memory at the same time. She was perplexed. However, now wasn’t the time
for musing on where the information was coming from, now was the time for
acting upon it. They would need to take major components from the main gravity
drive of the Cassini including the ship’s plasma sphere. This would mean they
would lose the ability to take off from the planet’s surface. But if that
became necessary they could quickly put the components back…

<><><> 

Lana
paced backwards and forwards outside the control room. Movement seemed to do
some good to her frayed nerves. As she paced she willed Grad to be safe. 
The corridor led out onto the main access passage of the ship in one direction,
and she always turned before she got to that, the soles of her shoes squeaking
gently on the metal surface. Padding back the other way she could go forty-five
paces before she reached the turning where the corridor took a left down to the
power room. Before she got to that, though, she passed the open doorway to the
control room where Jackson still sat hunched in the green glow from the console
from which the drones were controlled. Each time she passed the doorway she
forced herself not to look in directly. They would tell her when there was
news. Looking in would just jinx it. She could look through the corner of her
eye, that was O.K. and she would see well enough if there were any change…

The
problem was that there was no trace at all of the tracking pellets. This might
mean that the shuttle, and everything in it had been plasmarised in the blast
at the quarry. Or it could mean that the pellets had been knocked out by the
electro-magnetic pulse from the bursting plasma sphere. Eyewitnesses thought
they had seen the shuttle disappearing after the explosion but at the time
everyone’s eyes had been seared by the blue flash. Lana kept her eyes straight
ahead and kept pacing. Grad would be O.K. He always was.