Blighted Star (21 page)

Clarke
watched the construct revolve a few more times, there was something familiar
about the shape, but he couldn’t quite work it out. It looked more like
something from the world of plants or of bacteria.

“I
give up. I know I’ve seen something like it before, I just don’t recall where.
What is it?”

“The
closest thing we have encountered in the past is slime mould.”

 Dr
Clark looked disbelieving for a moment or two, peering closely at the revolving
construct. “Oh yes, I see it, the organism is essentially a form of parasitic mould,
albeit one which spreads with unprecedented ferocity. It infects a host, uses
that host to spread itself further, and consumes that host.”

“I’m
looking at it but I can scarcely believe my eyes. Where did it come from? Did
we bring it with us? If it’s a parasite, where are all the hosts? There was
nothing here when we arrived for it to be a parasite of, was there?”

“That
we don’t know yet. Perhaps it lay dormant in the soil as spores. It seems to
have some association with the lakes, though they were looked at very closely
indeed at the survey stage.” Both men looked gloomily at the rotating image.

“Are
you familiar with the work of Duprey?”

“You
mean “The Evolutionary Bar fight Theory” I haven’t studied it but I am aware of
it. Yes.”

“Well,
I think Saunder’s World might well be an example of that. When we mined we
turned up hundreds of fossils. Saunder’s once teemed with life, and for a long
time too. It had its own carboniferous period, for example. And it wasn’t just
plant life, there were animals analogous to most earth forms, some really big,
all struggling for dominance in the “Bar Fight” . Then, suddenly they all went
to the wall. At first I thought they’d been killed by a gamma pulse, but I
guess that now we know different. A biological agent came to the fore that the
other forms could not compete with…”

“The
Sheriff evolved…”

“The
Sheriff evolved. The organism that is the biggest and the baddest. The
“Sheriff” steps in and the bar fight comes to a bloody end. On Earth, we were
the Sheriff. When we evolved, ninety nine percent of all other things died out.
On Saunder’s I’m guessing, this little beast is the Sheriff.”

Both
men stared at the representation in silence for a while. In the end it was the
engineer who spoke first.

“When
the infection takes place, the organism takes over the host completely. I mean
completely. Other parasites draw sustenance from the bodies they attack, this
one destroys the host in its first assault. It wipes out the nervous system,
the brain, all the various organs and so on. It seems to have no interest in
keeping the host alive at all. And yet the hosts not only remain mobile, but
actually hunt down new victims.”

“They
don’t only hunt down new hosts, they do so in a coordinated pack. Did you see
the visuals from last night? It looks like sentience and communication.”

Chan
looked at his companion for a long time. “Listen,” he said in a low voice, “I
want to perform an experiment to explore that very aspect. But the method I want
to use is, to say the least, questionable.” without another word he reached
into a cupboard and brought out a small cage in which there were three mice. He
put them down on the counter. “I vatted these while you were operating on
Jackson.” He reached back into the cupboard and brought out the container which
Grad had brought back. He handled it, the doctor noted, with a great deal of
care.

Clarke
watched in fascination as Chan placed the mice in a tray with a clear sheet of
glassteen as a sealable cover. Next he took a pair of tongs, and with a gloved
hand lifted a piece of the rancid flesh. The room filled with stench. He lifted
the cover slightly, and there was a short pause while he inelegantly trapped
one of the mice against a corner of the tray. He touched it lightly with the
putrid flesh and at once stood back, leaving the tongs and the flesh in the box
and sealing the lid. Both men watched as the mouse went through its ghastly
transformation, and began to hunt the other mice.

The
hunt took a great deal of time, but in the end the infected mouse succeeded in
lunging at one of the others as it scurried past.

“Now
watch…” Chan drew closer to the tray, and almost against his will, so did the
doctor. This time the hunt took very little time at all, the first mouse went
very still in a corner, and the other one drove the healthy mouse before it
into what was unmistakeably, even on this small scale, an ambush. In the end,
all three mice were blundering repeatedly into the wall of the container at a
spot closest to the nearest human. The doctor stepped back a little. The two
men looked at each other.

“I’m
sorry you had to see that but I think you’ll agree that we had to know.
Definite evidence of coordination. Question is, how the hell are they
communicating?”

<><><> 

Lana
landed as near as she dared in her fatigued state to where the sergeant had
marshalled another  shuttle load. The runs out had got significantly
shorter each time she made them as the column of refugees had moved closer to
Cassini during the day. Now they were in sight of the new olerite mine, and
Lana guessed, when she did her next run later in the evening  they would
be on the western side of the facility.

Sergeant
Raoul looked just the same as he had throughout the action, except that his
boots had gathered a little mud. As he directed the small group of male
civilians onto the shuttle, his eyes met Lana’s and he nodded slightly.

 She
was worried about Grad, even though Dr Clarke was increasingly sanguine about
him. Her mind drifted back to the first time she had seen him, and she couldn’t
help but smile despite her concern.

He
had been riding on a surfboard in six metre surf. As she watched, he
disappeared from view in the tunnel formed when the top of one of the giant
breakers had fallen forward. She had been in the middle of a conversation with
one of the mission designers, whose name now completely eluded her though at
the time they had been growing increasingly aware of each other over a period
of a few weeks in the run up to the launch day. Her companion had just asked
her a question, but Lana’s attention was transfixed by the man on the board.
The designer had followed her gaze and had seen Grad burst free from the tunnel
of water, whooping in the light from the solar satellites. They had both turned
away from the sea, but the ground had shifted beneath them and both of them had
known it.

Not
that what they stood on was quite ground anyway; the sand in which their feet
were leaving crisp prints was laid over the deck of a huge vessel which had
flown to this world through space, and the sea itself was, only a few decades
before, solid ice. They were on Tethys 4, a giant ice ball which had been
selected to house the extinct species of the Earth’s oceans. The necessary
engineering had been carried out to create a world made completely of water
round which three light and heat emitting satellites supplied the role of
warming suns, while dozens of floating islands, starcraft built to land in the
water and fulfil this one purpose, pumped warmth into the depths below.

All
the marine species from the data files were vatted and released into their new
boundless home and the entire planet was designated a wildlife park. Mankind
had recreated to some extent that which he had destroyed. At the same time he
had created a vacation paradise.

Lana
stole another glance at Grad. He was back out at the surf line, and a wall of
green blue water was rising high up behind him. He was lying face down on the
board, paddling furiously forward with his hands to gain speed. In the vertical
surface behind him a huge grey shape moved, a shark, attracted to the commotion
of the beach party. Lana knew there was no danger, the shark would have been
conditioned out of any possibility of attacking a human, yet she couldn’t help
but shudder a little as her flesh crept in atavistic fear.

Later,
when the overhead satellite had dimmed to approximate moonlight she had shaken
free of the mission designer and had sought out Grad where he sat laughing with
some friends. she had found him easy to approach and they had made a date to go
surfing the next day. He would teach her the ancient art. As the conversation
developed, they realised that they were the two pilots of the mission to
Saunder’s World, and the knowledge seemed to add a rightness to the already
strong attraction that was so obvious between them. They had spent the rest of
the night together, and the following day, and had hardly ever been apart
since.

<><><> 

Jackson
floated upwards out of the darkness towards the white light of the sickbay. He
opened his eyes a little and tried to move his head. It would not move. As his
senses flooded back he realised it was the poison coursing through his blood.
Gathering all his strength, he lifted his arm before his eyes and sobbed with
terror. The infected limb was back. How long it had been attached to him he did
not know, but it had been long enough. He knew that in his veins his blood had
turned black.

The
diseased limb formed a claw before his face. Strive as he might he could not
force the fingers to relax even though waves of cramping pain ran up the back
of the hand. The ligaments stood out starkly under the taught skin and he
managed only, with an effort which left his vision greying, to force the hand
to pulse like some obscene arachnid building a web.

The
hand began to take control of his mind, and he threw his head from side to side
in a vain effort to escape the evil thoughts which came whispering in.

It
was her. She was the root of all the evil that had befallen them. This world
had been a paradise before she had brought contagion to it with her sin. She
had fornicated and that had been the beginning of all their woe. Jackson sat
up, his bare feet cold on the floor by his bed. His strength was returning with
every pulse of the dark blood though his contaminated heart. His fists clenched
and unclenched and his breath rasped through his teeth.

She
had denied it but he knew. His mind gave him the picture of her with the pilot,
naked bodies twisting together as she seduced her victim. She had offered
herself on her hands and knees like a beast to him, arching her back and
pulling open her clothes, and he had moved towards her, covering her, his hands
gripping her waist, then sliding forward over her sweating skin to grasp her
breasts…

Jackson’s
own prick was swollen hard now, and the infected hand reached down to grasp it,
the burning heat throbbing against his palm. With the other hand he reached out
to the tray of instruments and, fumbling a little, picked up a scalpel. With
deft strokes he severed the erect member and the dangling testicles. Still
grasping them hard so that the blood would be trapped inside them he held them
aloft. He stood up, blood pissing down his leg from the gaping wound at his
crotch, and he staggered over to where Grad still slept.

Christel
looked up at her door. The knocking came again. Puzzled, she rolled her legs
over the side of the bed and stood up.  She crossed the room, frowning,
and put her ear to the door.

“Who
is it?”

No
answer came, and she opened the door a little, keeping her foot behind it. The
door burst inward and she was thrown staggering back across her quarters until
she tripped and fell onto the bed. Jackson strode towards her, and she
struggled up indignantly. Pushing hard with her hands and struggling up so that
she was on her feet as he came close..

“Hey!
What do you thi…”

Jackson’s
fist thumped into her, and she doubled over, not so much from the pain, which took
a moment or two to register, as from the shock of the assault. She looked up at
his contorted face, reading in it the hatred and rage he felt for her. She
opened her mouth to gasp, but her teeth were immediately smashed together by an
uppercut to her jaw. She dropped to the floor unconscious. Jackson stooped and
pulled the flesh of her arms, bruising them at the wrist, then with a grunt he
gathered her over his shoulder and left the room.

<><><> 

Yet
another group of refugees were being marshalled in the direction of the shuttle
by Williams. As they approached, Lana could feel their accusing eyes on her,
and knew that from their point of view her actions of the night before must
have seemed inhuman. She wished that somehow she could tell them that she had
acted in the only way she could have, that for the good of all she had
overflown them in their misery. Here in the midday sunshine it seemed beyond
belief that these same open plains had contained such menace in the dark of the
early hours before the sun’s return, Now the grass waved in the light breeze,
showing its darker and lighter sides in billowing waves. Yet she knew that in
the grass, visible from the air, were patches which had been trampled down, and
sloughed out piles of human offal.

The
settlers who were not looking at her were keeping a wary eye on the nearby
pond, where there was known to be traces of the dead. If only there was some
way of attacking them where they lay, in the ooze at the bottom, or perhaps by
igniting some flammable liquid on the surface… But Lana knew that in order to
create sufficient alcohol or similar they would need days and days of vat time.
Time they did not have.