Blighted Star (29 page)

“Any
chance that the computer is wrong?”

“Not
a chance worth taking. The only area of doubt is why the organism hasn’t begun
this cycle yet. Perhaps it needs a seasonal prompt. Anyway, we’re on borrowed
time.”

“How
far does it spread? Can we move the people out of range?”

“There
isn’t any truly safe range. It all depends on things like wind conditions at
the time the spores start to be released. We’d have to get everyone at least
five thousand kilometres away. To do that would take about three months of
non-stop effort with the shuttle. Or one journey with Cassini.”

“With
Cassini? Could she be got ready in time?”

“There
indeed is the question. We still have to get the plasma sphere back from the
mine site, and even then, installing it will take about half a day. I honestly
don’t know if we have that much time. There is another possibility though. All
the infective agents are gathered here in the lake at Crescent Waters. We could
wipe them out. If we’re lucky we could get them before they spore.”

“I
wasn’t aware we had that kind of weaponry. what have we got? A bomb?”

“No,
but we still have a plasma sphere.” Chan looked at the Doctor, his face still.

“Ahh…”

The
air in the lab seemed to have got colder, even though the sun’s rays were once
more streaming across the room. Doctor Clarke suddenly brightened.

“Listen,
Jim, aren’t the spores destroyed by sunlight in the same way that the infected hosts
are?”

“I’m
afraid not, they’re coated in a layer which gives then U.V. protection. What
happens when they land on a host we can only guess until it happens, but I
expect that they don’t operate until darkness falls. Then probably infection
takes place at the usual accelerated pace.” 

<><><> 

The
shuttle dropped down and kissed the earth next to Athena. Grad was trying not
to stare, and she felt an urge to say something, anything, to put him at his
ease. Even smiling at him wasn’t working, the rictus she managed with her
facial muscles gone just seemed to appal him a little, though he was trying not
to show it.

Giving
up the attempt to appear human for now, Athena used her full strength to lift
down the vat, then passed him the plasma sphere, knowing that he would treat it
with the care it warranted. With a brief farewell he took to the sky once more
and she was left in  the peace of the late afternoon.

She
lifted the flimsy door of the vat and climbed in, immersing herself like
someone taking a bath in the nutrient enriched fluids inside. The apparatus
began to hum, much more quietly than a human could have heard, and at once
Athena felt tiny patches of flesh begin to form on her exposed skeleton. She
wondered for a second whether she should have the hatch open or shut, and
decided to leave it open. She was at least in some part hoping that the
restoration of her flesh would bring a return of her human memories and the
loss of this knowledge of herself as a machine. If she did come back human, she
didn’t want her first feeling to be one of fear. She lay still, watching the
clouds pass over in the direction of Cassini, and tuned into the general
channel, keeping her identity shielded, quietly monitoring what people were
saying and doing.

Amy
pretended to be asleep, knowing that that was what her dad wanted. She could
hear very clearly, more clearly she thought, with her eyes closed. He was
breathing very carefully and quietly as he closed the book they had been
looking at together. Now he was standing up very slowly, his knee gave a small
creak and she stifled a giggle. He stopped and she opened one eye just as he
leant down to give her a kiss on the forehead. Not expecting his face to be so
close she squeaked with surprise. Their laughter was cut short by a curt knock
at the door and he crossed the room and went out through her bedroom door. She
could hear him talking in the hallway with another man who had a deep, angry
sounding voice. Amy was a little shocked to hear her dad sounding a bit
frightened. She wanted to get out of bed, but had to summon up all her courage
to do so, Tiptoeing across the room, over a warm patch of flooring where the
evening sunlight was pooling on its way to the right hand wall. She approached
the open bedroom door and peeped round. The soldier she didn’t like was
standing there with her dad. Behind him in the corridor were another two
soldiers, another soldier man and a soldier woman with red hair. The big
soldier was saying something about a sphere and her father was saying “No” and
then “No” again, shaking his head vigorously. Then the big soldier stepped
forward and his hand moved really quickly forward and seemed to touch her dad’s
stomach quite gently. Her dad grunted in a funny way and then doubled over,
collapsing at the feet of the man. Amy was too shocked to do more than suck in
an astonished breath, then, just as she decided to run forward and protect her
father, the woman soldier with the red hair saw her and took three strides
forward and scooped her up. She was bustled back off into her room while the
woman made soothing clucking noises and told her that everything was going to
be alright.

<><><> 

Grad
had obviously been trying hard to keep things between them normal, but, of
course, everything had changed. He had if anything made more eye contact than
he would have in the past, but Athena could see in those grey eyes of his
something else besides the friendliness and acceptance which he was so
consciously signalling. There was guardedness, a reserve. Athena felt downcast
at the memory. If that was the reaction of the colony’s most open and unguarded
individual, then she couldn’t expect too much from the rest of them. Grad’s
willingness to overcome his human prejudice was only so deep, she was sure. If
he ever perceived a conflict of interest, she didn’t think it would take him
long to pick what he might see as the human side.

Perhaps
it would not come to that. Chan was keeping her informed of developments as he
learned of them, and he had commed over the good news about the ultra violet
modification to the targe guns. The foe they faced was already losing the
battle on the ground, her careful perusal of the way things had played out the
night before had shown quite clearly that they could win, even without better
weapons, simply by employing better tactics than the simple hunting ones of the
enemy. Perhaps the enemy might learn some new tricks, but it seemed unlikely
that their soldiers would suddenly be faced with an enemy who was armed. Assuming
things panned out the way they seemed to be, the question that they could now
begin to ask was: what now? What should they do once they had won the war?
Somewhere out there, in the air or the water or the soil, was the vector for
this terrible disease, and soon they would need to turn their attention to
hunting it down, and if need be, eradicating it.

And
here was a tricky philosophical point; would it be right for them to wipe out a
species, even one inimical to man? The organism had more of a right to the
planet than they had. That at least was certainly the way the other sentients
would probably see it, particularly the Cherubim. It was generally felt that
their sudden breaking off of contact was as a result of a wave of expansion
which had shattered several delicately balanced ecosystems because the top
predators or key pathogens in them had been  the cause of death for too
many settlers.

The
Saunder’s World organism was particularly deadly and particularly repugnant.
Chan was probably right when he cited it as the cause of a planetary extinction
event twenty thousand years before their arrival. But that still didn’t
necessarily give them the right to wipe it out of existence. At the very least
it had to be studied carefully. She smiled ruefully. What they would most
probably do, she foresaw, was to study it, categorise it properly and log it,
and
then
wipe it out of existence.

She
calculated that there was about an hour left before darkness came. The warm vat
fluid had formed the first few layers of tissue over her metal and plastic
body, and she kept extra still so as not to disrupt the process in any way. In
a sense it was a shame the she couldn’t have taken the opportunity to make a
few minor adjustments; a little less subcutaneous fat perhaps, or knock a few
years off the appearance of her skin’s age. On the whole, though, she was just
looking forward to getting herself back to normal. She wondered how much the
experience would change her, inside she would after all, always be different.

<><><> 

Patel
lifted the last of the targe guns to his shoulder and took aim. The piece of
infected flesh hanging on a string in a clear jar was a weird target,
especially dangling against the lockers against the back wall of the equipment
room. It went against all his training to pull the trigger within the confines
of the hull, even after he had seen the results a couple of dozen times and
knew there wouldn’t be a pulse blast of energy, and that he wouldn’t knock a
hole in the lockers and the wall opposite him. He fired and the chunk of tissue
crisped instantly into a blackened husk. Of the beam of U.V. light itself, of
course, he could see nothing, so he put on the safety and adjusted the weapon’s
controls once more. This time when he fired, the beam contained a hint of
visible light as a tracer, a thin line of violet which would show up very
clearly in the dark, but wouldn’t destroy their night vision.

There
hadn’t been too much work involved in modifying the guns. They were already
equipped with the ability to discharge energy across a broad spectrum, for the
guns were built to be used in a variety of different environments right from
deep space to the densest gas giant atmosphere. Though they hadn’t brought the
U.V. bolt-ons with them, they easily scrounged U.V. filters from the
purification system. By a stroke of luck, the filters actually matched the
mounting brackets on the guns and clicked right into place. This was good,
because it meant they could be clicked right off and the gun put back to normal
if for any reason they didn’t work in the field. They wouldn’t be left with
nothing but rocks to throw at the enemy if they needed to revert to normal
energy bursts. One thing Patel had learned from life in general and life in the
military in particular was that things went wrong, a lot. What was that phrase
they’d learned in history at school? Oh yeah. “Shit happens”. Patel grinned at
the essential truth of it; he’d liked it at school and he liked it still.

He
was looking forward to the coming night with keen anticipation. Physically, he
was quite wasted right now, but he knew he’d get another shot of Rum in a few
minutes, and he already tingled with anticipation at the thought of the
enhancement his senses would get. Tonight they would settle the score once and
for all. He hadn’t lost anyone himself, because he hadn’t brought anyone with
him, but a lot of other members of the squad had lost people in the two towns,
and besides, the creatures had turned what was going to be a beautiful world
into a pile of shit. The whole planet was going to be tarnished by what had
happened. The five square kilometres he had opted for in lieu of a big slice of
his pay might be worth  something one day, but not in his lifetime. No
matter what happened, even if they wiped out this weird virus or whatever it
was, Saunder’s World was just not going to be looked on as the suburban
paradise he had bought into. He was going to have to replan his whole future,
and for that as much as the killing of his fellow settlers, they were going to
pay
.

He
cut down the strings from the locker handles and put all the materials into a
sterile box. He’d hated having to be the one handling the vile stuff, but
everyone seemed to think there was justice in his getting the duty because he’d
ridden the shuttle so much lately while they had had their boots in the mud the
whole time. They seemed to forget that he had not only been on foot with them
the night before, but had also been carrying the twenty which was a lot heavier
than a targe gun. He’d had to carry out the duty in the locker room because it
was free of civilians and more importantly, all outside light could be
excluded, but there was also a little malicious satisfaction in the fact that
the others too would get the benefit of the residual stench for a few hours
until the air filters were back on or natural ventilation finally cleared it
away. Even though the containers were airtight, the smell from when the Doc had
loaded them seemed to cling to their outside surfaces even when they were
heavily sterilised. Once he’d shared a cabin on a troop transport with a dead
rat. The smell had got worse and worse, with increasingly bitter recriminations
between the four people sharing until in the end their noses had led them
unquestionably to an air vent in the corner. Deep inside it was the decaying
corpse of a large rat, and  they had taken this lump of moist fur and bone
and had given it a military style funeral at the heads. The smell the undead
gave off was akin to the stench of the rat in those confined quarters, though,
of course, far more intense. He crossed to the light they had set up in the
centre of the room. He switched it on, but had no way of knowing if it was
working or not, the room didn’t get any brighter. He shone it this way and
that, making sure he reached all the corners, then put it down on the floor
next to his feet. He bathed in its light, spreading his fingers, lifting his
arms to expose his armpits, turning round. Then, leaving the U.V. lamp on, he
stomped out of the room, removing his respirator once the door was firmly
closed behind him. He was going to be very glad indeed when they had wiped the
last of the dead creatures out, just to get rid of the stench, never mind the
constant fear of death.