Blighted Star (7 page)

The
engineers had quickly dropped their guarded stance when, within moments, Athena
had taken off the panel of the main drive and had correctly sequenced the
shutdown and isolation procedure. Both of them would have had to comm detailed
instructions on how to carry this out, but Athena’s hands had seemed to know
what to do on their own. In under an hour she was looking at a silver ball the
size of a human  head in which the raging power of a plasma field was
contained. This one was state of the art, and though it might be smaller than
the one they had lost at the quarry, it was a great deal more powerful. She
reached in, and as if taking up a holy relic, lifted the ball gently.

<><><> 

Grad
had dozed fitfully through the night, lying on the sand of the shoreline. He
had grown up on Patel 5, one of a series of Earth like planets discovered by
the legendary astronomer who had given them her name. There, sleeping out was
one of the rituals of childhood, despite the many minor hazards of stinging
moss and itchy bugs. He’d always thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Here,
though, it was a little different and it was during the night that Grad
realised why: it was too quiet. Sure there was the odd sound of wind through
the grass, but that was all. No birds, no nocturnal animals, not even any trees
being blown about. Grad looked forward to when a hundred years or so had passed
and the planet had been stocked with the best of the galaxy’s wildlife. Trout
from earth in the ponds and rivers. Strobos from Uxalla flitting through the
trees, maybe even a few top predators, suitably conditioned not to attack
humans of course, like Lion-Apes or Dracos. Imagine that, he thought, you’re in
your tent and there’s a crashing in the bushes. You roll out of your sleeping
bag, open the tent flaps a tiny crack, trying not to breathe too noisily. And a
full grown female Draco goes streaming past, starlight glinting off her silver
scales, back crest and mane throbbing and pulsing with inner fires. You’d be
scared, but you would be exhilarated. Course, he’d be an old, old man by then,
but he made a date with himself to come back here and camp. This very spot. In
two hundred years’ time. It would be easy to find, he realised; it would be a
national historic spot. “Here, in the year 2532, Grad Ranahoff crashed the
colony’s one and only shuttle, thereby earning the name “Grad the Failure”, and
dooming the colony to the backwater status it suffers to this day.” He ground
his teeth. Like all pilots in all times he resented the ground man’s readiness
to blame “Pilot Error”.

Grad
must have dozed off again because when he opened his eyes the very first light
of dawn was washing out the stars. He sat up and looked over to check on Jim,
and Chan groaned a little and opened his eyes. His pupils were wide with shock
and pain. Grad bustled around him, piling up the sand into a kind of bolster
behind Jim’s head. There wasn’t really anything else he could do. He cupped his
hands and gathered a little water which Jim sucked down greedily, nodding his
thanks. Grad went back for more, going onto one knee in the cool soft sand at
the lake’s edge.

Then
he saw it. Two glowing red eyes were rushing across the beach towards him. For
a second he thought he must be dreaming, then he knew that he was not. The eyes
were set into a large flattish  head, and the head trailed what looked
like a length of spinal cord. It floated about six feet above the ground.
Glaring balefully, the head rushed along the beach and came to a halt, hovering
just in front of him. Looking closer, Grad laughed out loud with relief. They
were rescued.

<><><> 

Jackson
poked his head out of the control room door and coughed. Lana stopped three
paces from the bend in the corridor and turned, barely daring to look. Jackson
was grinning smugly.

“I’ve
got him for you. Do you want to talk to him?”

In
the room there was a projected image of Grad. He was standing next to a lake in
the pale pre-dawn light, on the ground next to him lay the prone form of Jim
Chan, the missing Chief Engineer. He was grinning weakly and holding his arm in
a funny way.

 Grad
must have seen her on the Probe’s projection because he broke into a massive
grin.

“Hey
kiddo! Guess what? I broke my aeroplane…!”

<><><> 

The
organism sensed the coming of day and instinct drove it to seek shelter. The
ultra violet rays of the sun would destroy its structure and kill it in
moments, even in the deepest parts of the body it had taken possession of there
would be no safety and so it reverted to an ancient pattern of behaviour, the
one with which it had met the coming of hundreds of thousands of years as it
had evolved amongst the creatures the planet had once supported. It turned its
host away from the pursuit of new vessels to infect, and sought the shelter of
a lake’s deepest mud.

Gunnar’s
corpse sloshed through the shallows, wading deeper and deeper until the water
rose past the empty sockets and closed over the skull and only oily traces were
left on the gently rocking surface.

<><><> 

Jackson’s
next move was to run down the corridor to tell Athena of his success locating
the missing men. As he approached her cabin he slowed his pace and sucked in
lungfuls of air, trying to slow his breathing. It had suddenly struck him that
he would cut a ridiculous figure, bursting in red and out of breath, and at
that very thought he felt his face redden even more with embarrassment. He
wished he had stayed in the plotting room and had contacted Athena through
internal comms instead; he could have projected any image he had wanted, or
none at all. Now he was going to look foolish, running down here like a child…

Athena
was delighted with the news, but even in the heady rush of relief she knew that
they would still have to keep to the schedule she had set. The two men would
have to be supplied with what they needed by small packages carried by probes
until they could be extracted by air when the new shuttle was ready. She could
see that this wasn’t a popular decision, Jackson had wanted to lead a rescue
party of marines. “Two days out, two days back” he had claimed. But really it
wasn’t worth the trouble to save  Jim and Grad from one extra night’s
camping. When she had consulted Jim he had concurred, and the greyness of his
face showed that he could at any rate, in no way have managed a two day journey
bouncing on a stretcher.

In
the end it was decided that a probe would have to be taken off the emergency
role they had assumed, flying a sort of skeleton shuttle service of small
packages of supplies. One shuttle would keep a daily link between the downed
men and Cassini. Medical supplies would go out on the first trip, and when they
reached the crash site in four hours’ time, Dr Clark would talk Grad through
scanning himself and his companion for internal injuries and setting Jim’s
broken arm. If the scan did not show up anything complicated, then the next
probe would take out food supplies, and a final flight would take out shelter
for the night. If one of them had sustained life threatening internal injuries
then Jackson might get his little cross-country march after all, and Dr Clark
would have to go out with them.

Before
Athena could get back to work on the new mining machine, though, she had one
little job to do which she didn’t mind at all. Knocking softly on the door she
entered Amy’s room. The child lifted its sleepy head from the pillow.

“Is
it about Daddy?”

“Yes,
dear, we’ve found him. he’s all right but he’s broken his arm. He can’t get
back to see you just yet but he should be here at the end of the week.” She tussled
the child’s unkempt hair, then stroked it flat. Amy solemnly considered what
she had been told.

“Daddy’s
arm, is it broken off?”

<><><> 

The
morning was now well under way, and everyone was up, even Hannah’s lazy husband
Daniel who slept in every day until nearly half past seven. They were digging
now at the trench which would fetch the stream closer to their camp site. They
had finished a whole section yesterday, and today they would finish the next.
The channel would have a very slow flow, for, like almost everywhere on the
planet the ground for miles around was pretty flat, but there would be enough
movement to ensure clean water all the time. Of course Daniel had been in
favour of moving the wagons closer to the stream and setting up camp there, but
Johan had managed to overcome his friend’s lazy inclinations by pointing out to
him the signs of occasional flooding around the stream’s present banks, and the
muddy shallow pool it flowed into so quickly. Bringing the stream to the lager
would also bring it nice and close to the fields they would soon create. After
that they would dig another channel to return it to the pond.

The
digging had a rhythm which kept Johan going even when he was tired, with the
spade jabbing in, cutting through the turf and into the rich clay underneath
when given the weight of a man’s foot. A tug on the handle and the clod would
come away in a lump which then would be thrown up onto the bank, leaving a hole
which advanced the trench just a little bit. His rhythm and that of Daniel were
slightly different so that for most of the time they were not digging in at the
same moment. Indeed, it had become obvious that Daniel dug at a slightly faster
rate, making up for his lay-a-bed ways by harder work during the day. 

At
the end of the morning, one of the children would be allowed to cut the turf
they had left as a baulk between today’s efforts and those of yesterday. As the
children whooped and squealed they would run alongside the newly freed water as
it chuckled down the new course to the end of the trench, a mere one last day’s
digging from their camp.

Again,
Johan felt a deep connection with his pioneering ancestors. They too must have
done work like this, and it was amazing to think of the way in which, after
centuries of history ending in the tragedy of the loss of Earth, after billions
of miles of travel amongst the stars, after so many compromises, big and little
on the use of technology. It
still
all came down to a man with a spade,
digging through God’s good soil, providing for his family.

The
thought of his ancestors gave Johan the familiar feeling of discomfort which,
he knew, most of the New Amish had. They had made too big a compromise when
they agreed to leave the doomed Earth, even though they all knew what had befallen
the zealots who stayed until the seas boiled. They too could hardly have been
said to have been living in the traditional way under their domes, until they
perished.

Johanna’s
Great, Great, Grandfather had done what his Pastor had told him to do; had
passively resisted “The Expulsion” (or “The Intervention” as the English called
it). He had been loaded, stunned into unconsciousness, on a giant freighter,
and had woken up well outside the Solar System on an automated flight to the
distant stars. In the end their Pastors had told them to accept it as the will
of God, but even so they had had to put on one side a great deal of Biblical
Cosmology just to explain their being here in the heavens, and this threatened
to erode the very basis of their faith.

But
surely this world, with its climate so perfect for mankind, had to be the gift
of a kind God, the English called it “Goldilocks”, but to Johan it was a second
Eden. The decision to spread themselves further had cost the faithful dearly;
many amongst them had argued that the forced expulsion from Earth had been one
thing, after all, they had done all they could to resist that. But in taking
further steps to other planets they were not only complying with their exile,
but actually travelling further from the Earth and, some argued, further from
Grace. In the end a vote had been taken and a narrow majority had voted for the
right of a man to settle where he liked, at least until such time as it was
possible to return to Earth. As often happens when a movement of deep and
sincerely held beliefs comes to a crossroads and such a vote is taken, the
losing side elected to schism from the main body of the Amish, they were still
on the relatively hostile desert world they were first landed on, while the
authorities sought either to induce them to move or at least let them terra
form the dry planet into somewhere more conducive to life. Last Johan had
heard, his brothers were still refusing point blank to farm the sand and dust
in anything but the hard way. He couldn’t help but admire their firmness of
will and feel a little jealous of their strength of faith, even in the face of
a dreadful mortality rate.

 Johan
loved to work in this way, with Daniel toiling beside him, giving him the
comfort of a companion but the space to think his own big thoughts. And now
here were the children, using the break in their lessons to run over and see
the progress the channel was making.

Athena
looked up from the circuit she was assembling, Lana was standing before her and
Athena could tell that she had a request to make.

“Hello,
dear. Have you managed to get some sleep yet?”