Blighted Star (6 page)

The
long night dragged on. At about three o’clock  Athena passed on her way to
the main A.G. As she passed she patted Lana on the arm. She didn’t suggest that
Lana got some sleep and for that the pilot was grateful.

<><><> 

Gunnar’s
corpse staggered on through the night, heading east. As it went, skin, hair and
even clumps of flesh rotted off as the voracious organism devoured the body it had
colonised. Yet the decaying muscles still possessed enough consistency to obey
the commands of the dead nerves. On the horizon, the cluster of life signals
exerted their irresistible pull. One step at a time the corpse closed the
distance.

<><><> 

Jackson
rubbed his dry eyes and cursed softly. The drones had just finished another
search pattern with no results. He had sent them out on the “best guess”
direction, the one the most reliable seeming witness had said he thought he had
seen the shuttle flung in after the plasma blast, but the man’s streaming eyes
and reddened face bore testimony to the intensity of the flash of heat and
light  the plasma breach had released. And the man had said himself that
the next moment his vision had gone for some minutes, and that even now
everything he looked at had a greenish tinge as if he had looked at the sun.
One other person who had been curled up in a protective ball at the time of the
flash had reported seeing something glinting in the sky to the north in the
immediate aftermath, and two people were pretty sure they had seen a trail of
smoke dispersing a short time afterwards. 

Personally
he couldn’t really give a damn about the two missing men. He had hardly ever
spoken to Chan and suspected that the engineer didn’t think all that highly of
him. Grad made him feel uncomfortable, the pilot was friendly enough but was
too cocksure for Jackson’s taste. He wanted to get them back, obviously, but he
had to admit to himself that this was because he wanted the kudos of rescuing
them, rather than because either of them was any more important to him than he
was to them. It would be good to see them humbled just a little, to see them
huddled in blankets while he and his troops delivered them from danger…

The
shuttle was another matter. The shuttle was an invaluable piece of equipment.
Without it everything on the planet would have to be lifted and carried and he
could guess who that task would fall to. The colonial marines always got stuck
with the shitty end of the stick. Outside in the corridor that damned woman was
still pacing up and down. Every time she went passed the doorway he felt she
was staring right at his back. And that was getting
really
unnerving. He
wondered if he was missing under similar circumstances what Christel would be
doing. Probably getting a good night’s sleep, he thought bitterly. He tapped
out a few instructions on the keyboard and the drones began set off from the
quarry site on another quadrant.

<><><> 

When
the plasma sphere had burst, the shuttle had been right on the periphery of the
resulting explosion. The rear of the craft had been instantly vaporised leaving
the exposed ends of the bulkheads, walls and floor glowing with heat fading
from white hot down through orange. The cabin filled for a moment with the
smoke from the burned metal, then the smoke had been whisked away by the
screaming gale from the gaping hole where the back had been bitten off.

Grad’s
head had been smacked into the back of the seat by the jolt, and it took him a
moment or two for his blurred vision to clear. When he did so, the console
before him was utterly dead. He realised the pulse of electricity and magnetism
must have tripped all the safeguards. Looking out of his cracked side window he
could see that they were still going upwards, carried by their own momentum and
by the push from the blast, but they would soon be arcing down again. He had to
get the controls on line.  His hands danced across the control pad,
tapping in instructions urgently. Nothing responded. The shuttle, guided and
powered entirely by electronic systems, was now nothing more than a three tonne
alloy building a mile above the planet, with nothing to hold it in the sky.

Their
momentum was slowing and as it did so the aerodynamic forces on the hull
shifted, pushing the nose down and initiating a sickening tumbling motion. In
the passenger side footwell Jim’s unconscious form flopped from side to side.
They began to fall, tumbling erratically. Grad continued to run through all the
sequences of his training, struggling to regain control. They dropped through a
layer of wispy cloud. He felt like punching the console with his fist but
forced himself to caress the keys normally, even as the cracked screen before
him showed him the ground, then the sky, then the ground again. It was hard to
get a good estimate of the rate of descent but he knew it must be great because
each time the ground was in front of him it was closer. A lot closer. Now he
could make out details quite clearly; an outcrop of rock, a series of small
ponds and a larger body of water. It looked as if they might be going to crash
into the lake rather than smash into the ground. At this speed it would make no
difference…

It
was an effort to concentrate now; all he wanted to do was to spend his last few
moments thinking about Lana. He dragged his mind back to the task in hand,
feeling strangely detached. Not long now. The lake filled the entire windscreen
then slipped from view as the craft flipped into another rotation.

Suddenly,
with a panicky sounding series of bleeps, the entire control panel blinked back
to life. Grad took a fraction of a second to register this and a fraction
longer to realise that it was too late, they were going to impact anyway. But perhaps
he could lessen the angle of that impact and turn their steep dive into a
shallow one. If he could make it shallow enough then they might just skip like
a stone off the surface of the lake…

Cursing,
he realised that the rear A/Gs were gone, literally gone, vapourised by the
plasma rupture. He would have to wait until the craft rotated round again
before firing maximum thrust into the remaining two front and single central
main units. If he did this too soon  then he would merely reverse their
spin and they would stand no better chance. The rotation, which had seemed so
unbearably fast now seemed to be taking an agonisingly long time. The sky
inched out of the top of the screen and the lake crept up from the bottom,
shadows and beams of light moved crazily round the cabin, and a screaming roar
came and went as the torn rear of the craft swung forward into the airstream,
then rotated out of it again. They were about a hundred and fifty metres up and
going in at an angle of forty degrees at four hundred kilometres per hour. He
gauged his moment, then hit full emergency boost on the main central A/G, a
second later bringing in the front units as well.

The
shuttle tried valiantly to comply, as if aware of the peril it was in. The dive
angle lessened through thirty to twenty degrees. The speed came right down to
two hundred and sixty km/h. When the front A/Gs came on the nose sprang right
back as if the craft were rearing away from the danger. Ruined tail first, she
struck the still water, and with a shriek of ripping metal panels, bounced back
into the sky by thirty metres.

In
the cockpit Grad felt as if every muscle in his body had been pulled, and every
bone end had been bashed against every other. It took him a second to realise
that he should really feel very grateful to be in all this pain, for it meant
that he was still alive. The next thing he noticed was that the lake was once
again coming up to meet them and that the nose of the craft was way too low.
The windscreen had at last given up the struggle and had shattered in the
impact, letting in a gale of wind which was hard to keep his eyes open against.
He fired the front units again and brought the shuttle upright ready for the
next impact.

Once
again they struck and bounced, and again the craft shrieked as if in agony. The
elasticity of the water threw them back into the sky, shedding large areas of
the airframe as they ascended. In the cockpit Grad was suddenly in the open air
as the roof, shaken loose by the tremendous jolts, bulged in the blast of air
from the broken windscreen and was peeled back and then off.

They
fell again and slammed into the lake, this time sliding across the surface like
a hydrofoil. Grad’s door dangled in their wake and then was plucked off by the
water. Grad had a sudden vision of himself being left with only his chair,
sinking into the lake at the head of a trail of broken parts. Glancing up from
the now useless panel he watched the approach of the shoreline. They grounded
in the shallows and the wrecked shuttle slid to a halt and settled gently into
the mud. The lights on the control panel went out from right to left as if a
large hand was wiping them away. The beeping died with a strangled note.

Grad
sat for a moment blinking in the sunlight then woke up and briskly undid his
straps. he reached for the handle of his door, then remembered and stepped out
through the side and lowered his boot into the cool water. The bottom had an
ankle deep layer of oozing  mud over a firm layer of gravel. He
sloshed  round to Jim’s side and grasped the handle of the passenger door.
He pulled open the door and it broke away in his hand. He let it fall into the
water and reached into the wrecked cockpit. He put a hand on Jim’s neck and was
reassured to find a strong pulse. He gently drew Chan out from the footwell and
collected him in his arms. He waded to the shore and laid the unconscious man
on the sand of a narrow beach. Feeling the strain in every limb, he lowered
himself down into a sitting position and began the long wait.

Johan
got up in the pre-dawn paleness. In many ways this was his favourite time of
day; he liked the coolness and the stillness. He liked being the only one awake
out of his little household, he was providing for them while they slept on,
peaceful and safe. Trying as he always did to be as quiet as possible, he
pulled on his trousers and white shirt and lifted the flap of the wagon cover.
Glancing back at the bed he saw Katinka watching him through one open eye,
smiling. She’d been awake all along, as she always was. He strode down to the
pond, collecting a bucket on the way, and was soon yawning as the clear water
filled the bucket with a swoosh. He stretched his back and hefted the weight.
By now Katinka would be coaxing alight the blocks of compacted grass in their
little stove.  He walked back towards the wagon, enjoying the way the soft
warm light from within cast shadows on the white cloth of the cover, disliking
the wet feel of the bucket bumping against his leg. This first bucket was for
the humans, the next six would be for the animals; that was a lot of carrying,
and he would have to do it all again four more times today.
Ach well
, it
was worth it not to have the kine wreck the pond by stirring it all up. Soon he
would finish the diverting of the little stream and they would have fresh water
right to their door. Then the animals could help themselves to the pond while
the humans drank beautiful clear water which bubbled out of a spring at the
foot of the outcrop of rocks. Today he would dig the new stream channel until
lunch, rest for an hour, then plant the last of the apple trees until dark.
Tomorrow morning he would dig again, then in the afternoon he would put
together the plough and try it out on the big flat area below the ridge.

Looking
up at the distant rocks he was startled to see the figure of a man silhouetted
against the lightening sky. The impression lasted only a moment then the figure
was gone into the gloom below the summit. Johan blinked. His eyes, like
everything else, were getting old. After all, who would be about this far out
at this time of day? He must have been mistaken…

<><><> 

Athena
passed back all the components carefully as she came to them. The two engineers
with her took each part from her and packed them. Some for storage, some for
the building of the new mining machine. Hopefully the stored ones wouldn’t be
needed for a few years until the colony was in a position to begin exports. If
they didn’t get the mine going again they never would be in that position, and
the second wave of settlement would take on the character of a rescue mission.

The
engineers had looked at each other with open scepticism when Athena had first
told them what she intended to do, and had obviously been ready to try to
dissuade her. She suspected that if they had had stronger personalities she
might have had to emphasise her position to get her way but as it was, in the
end they had glanced at each other, then meekly followed her down to the engine
room, past the poor girl who was still waiting for news about the missing
pilot. Athena thought grimly that a replacement for the shuttle would be next
on the list. They had enough spare anti-grav units to power a flyable craft,
but they would first need to mine the raw metal from which to make the airframe
as all the readily usable spars  had already been cannibalised in the
harvesting of Cassini for building materials. In interstellar haulage, the
margins were extremely fine, and they had carried no spare material on their
one way trip. Once the shaft was sunk and the mine in operation, creating the
parts they needed should only take another two days, even with the limited
metal shaping capabilities of the machine she was about to create. Say five
days all together. Athena wondered if Grad and Jim
were
out there
waiting for help. In her heart of hearts she doubted that they were, But she
supposed it was possible that the life tracing pellets would have been knocked
out by the electro – magnetic pulse, after all, the same E.M.P. had destroyed
all the life - tracers of the miners who had been near the blast. The process
of replacing the pellets was luckily a simple and painless one, and they had of
course pellets by the tens of thousands in storage for the unborn generations
yet to come. Dr Clarke had given each of the quarrymen a new pellet as part of
the first aid process when they had first been walked in by Sergeant Raoul’s
rescue party. A more serious problem was that each of them had lost internal
comms.