Blighted Star (10 page)

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Jim
could hear the disturbance in Grad’s breathing. He did not know him well enough
to guess whether Grad was awake or in the grip of some disturbing dream,
but  he worried that the pilot seemed restless.

Once,
long before, he had lain listening to the breathing of another and had wondered
if they were awake. Beside him in the dark had floated the still form of his wife
on their gravity field bed. He felt, as he always felt when he remembered those
nights, a feeling of separation like deep homesickness, a longing for a time
and a place when he had been truly happy.

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Johan
sat up bolt upright. The animals were screaming in agony and terror. The noise
slashed  the night like a butcher’s knife and left Johan paralysed with
fear. A dog was barking hysterically, the sound crashing in waves against the
canvas of the wagon cover. Katinka clutched his arm and the sudden touch almost
made his heart stop. The dog’s voice gurgled out into silence as if its throat
had been sliced through. In the following moment of calm Johan could hear the
sound of disappearing hooves as the animals broke free of the flimsy rope fencing
and escaped into the night.

Like
most men, Johan had at times imagined some threat to his family and how he
would respond to it. Scenes of sadistic madmen holding them hostage had been
played out in his mind before being dismissed with a rueful smile. In all these
scenes he had played the part of a hero, vanquishing the foe and saving the day
in a most un – Amish fashion. This was not like that. Johan tried to move but
just could not. Again the night broke into frantic sound as more screams, this
time, human ones, came from the tent Daniel had pitched nearby. Still he could
not move. Now Katinka and Petre were cowering behind him. Keeping as far away
from the loose flaps at either end of the wagon cover, the little family
huddled.

There
was a lull of a few moments then soft shuffling noises began to come from
outside, Katinka once again clutched at Johan’s arm. Shaking with fear he at
last found the strength to react, but only to say a silent prayer, lips moving
over chattering teeth. The noises were outside the wagon now, and came from all
sides, his imagination pictured gigantic black cats, prowling through the
grass, and his mind quailed.

The
flap moved slightly and Katinka screamed. A human arm came through, groping
from one side then to another. It was Hannah’s. It still had the sleeve of her
nightgown on, but this could not disguise the ravages that had occurred to the
flesh; vile blisters oozed pus, and the skin was rent by gaping cracks from
which blackened blood smeared the surfaces she touched. It was as if some
searing heat had blasted her flesh. In horror they watched as Hannah heaved
herself through the flaps, followed by another monstrous form in the
nightclothes of Daniel. Neither one of them had eyes any more, but still the
wrecked faces quested the interior of the wagon and settled fixedly on the
three terrified people inside.

Petre
shrieked in fear and pain and Johan whirled round. One of the dogs had battened
on to the child’s arm with its teeth. It had undergone a transformation like
that of the humans. Most of its fur had been shed, and its entire stomach had
fallen away, leaving a snakelike spine running down to a scabrous tail. An
empty ribcage hung from the string of vertebrae. Petre was squealing now, in
ever higher pitch as a rash of white blisters tore up his arm and burst across
his face. He turned one more despairing look on his father’s face as his eyes
became milky, bulged and then burst. With a spasm he died in his mother’s arms.

Now
Katinka was jerking and twitching. She lifted her dying arms before her face
and fell back into him, coughing up a black substance which stank like ooze
from a death - pit. She curled impossibly tightly and then fell still. Johan
felt a touch to his bare neck and instantly fire exploded along the length of
his spine. He began, but did not finish, a prayer for mercy.

<><><> 

Christel
lay on her stomach and idly kicked her feet in the air. She was bored. It was
only ten o’clock and she had nothing, absolutely nothing to do. Usually at this
time she would be watching the 3D, and she could, if she wanted to, put it on
now. Her favourite show would be on. But she couldn’t be bothered; there didn’t
seem any point without someone to watch it with, even if they weren’t really
interested. Still two days ‘til Grad got back,
then
she wouldn’t be
bored, she had a feeling that he wouldn’t be either…In the meantime… She ran
over in her mind what had happened in the shuttle.

They
had risen into the sky, leaving the settlement basking in the afternoon
sunshine below and had turned to head towards Cassini. She had been bored then,
and boredom had for Christel, always brought with it the temptation to do
something reckless to break its grip. She had looked across at the blonde giant
at the controls to her right and had decided, then and there, that she would
give free rein to an urge she had been harbouring.

“What
does this button do?” she had asked, knowing full well, touching her lip with
her finger and brushing it across the red, moist, surface. Grad had looked at
her through his lowered lashes.

“It’s
the auto…” he had begun, but had lost the thread of his sentence. His Adam’s
apple had moved on his tanned throat.

“So
if I press this.” she had said, doing so, “The shuttle will fly itself…” Grad
had just nodded. “…and if I pull this lever…” she ran her hand up the stubby
shaft of a throttle control and gently tugged the knob at the end towards her,
“The shuttle will fly itself really slowly…”

Lana
held her breath, counted to seven, her lucky number, and then tapped the
activation point on the control pad. The A/G’s started to hum and the canoe
lifted into the air. Had the back lifted fractionally more quickly than the
front had? Was that a faint smell of hot circuit? She forced herself to calm
down. So far, so good. She tapped the pad again and the canoe lowered itself
gently onto the floor of the workshop. Lana reached in and hefted out all the
bags of dirt she had put in to the cockpit to simulate her own weight.

She
sat in and tapped the activation point again. The canoe rose with her in it,
then hovered. It felt horribly unstable. When she leaned forward, the front
dipped and the back rose, and the canoe wandered forward a little until the
front unit compensated and the craft slowed. Leaning back had the reverse
effect. Leaning to the side caused the motors to groan with effort as they
strove to re-establish the horizontal attitude they were programmed to
maintain. Lana reached forward and took hold of the joystick she had put in. It
had a trigger near the top, and when she was ready she tapped the trigger with
her index finger. At the back of the canoe a cooling fan mounted on a pivot
whirred into life and the canoe shot forward towards the open doors. Lana burst
out into the daylight, startling a group of settlers, and wobbled out across
the field. Tugging a little on the stick, and feeding a little more power into
the Anti-Gravity disks, she pointed the nose towards the sky and soared slowly
away. She levelled out at a five hundred metres and flew straight for a while,
regaining her composure, and building up momentum. Up here the air was
surprisingly crisp, despite the warmth of the afternoon, and she realised how
pampered she had been, in a climate controlled cockpit all this time. Away to
the south, puffs of cloud a little above her level showed the presence of
rising columns of air, triggered by hot spots on the ground. Far away to the
north, a thunderstorm flickered just on the horizon. She had only spent a few
days out of the air but during that time had felt the airman’s frustration at
being grounded. Now, the magic of what she was doing was negating the fear she
felt whenever the skyak gave an unexpected lurch. She only wished that there
were birds or other flight capable creatures here on this empty world with
which she could share this wide sky. She could picture eagles turning in the
gyre of the heated air, or flocks of pterosaurs from Jodrell flapping slowly at
great altitude. Sad to think that on all this world she was the only living
thing enjoying this perfect sky. 

 The
skyak was moving really beautifully now. The trick was to keep sufficient speed
on so that the rushing air itself held the sides straight and prevented any
tail slewing. She touched the stick to the left. The canoe obediently turned
and she slowly began to enjoy the flight. It was all coming back to her. She
tried a dive and the wind streamed through her hair as the speed built up until
her eyes began to swim with tears. The ground close, she pulled back and the
sky was before her once more.

When
she finally came to the hover two hundred metres over Cassini, she no longer
felt unstable in the tiny craft. Her old skills had come back to her and with them
had come back her old love for the sport. Why, she wondered, had she ever given
it up? She bled off power from the A/Gs and the canoe sank towards the field
below. Only now did she notice the crowd that had gathered to watch her
performance, and she felt overcome with shyness as she guided the aircraft into
the workshop amidst their applause.

<><><> 

Athena
had watched some of Lana’s flight from the new quarry site where the initial
shaft sinking had nearly been completed. She patted the mining machine
affectionately. Really, she felt more than just the joy of ownership; it was
almost akin to parenthood, this sense of pride in her creation. “Good boy.” she
said under her breath, feeling a little foolish. “Good boy.”

The
counter on the control panel was measuring the thickness of rock left to cut
though, yet as the digits unwound towards zero, it was hard not to see the
display as a countdown to when the colony could get restarted. The constant
enquiries from the settlements had been an unwelcome distraction from the job
she had been trying to do, but at least she had had positive news of progress
being made to give them. Even so, to the more persistent enquirers she had felt
on several occasions like yelling “It’ll be all the quicker if you stop hassling
me!”

In
the end, Jackson had come to the rescue. He had been present when the
irritating Frenchman from Heart Lake had made his morning call. She had pulled
a face as she fielded the questions, and though Jackson’s lugubrious mouth
hadn’t cracked a smile, he had re-routed all further calls from her comms to
his for the time being. Athena had been anxious at first that he might be too
brusque in his brush-offs, but she had seen him take many calls since then and
he had put on a façade that was positively breezy.

 The
countdown was into treble figures now; it would not be long before the next
phase could begin. A moment’s calculation brought a smile to her face; the
first sheets should be being extruded by sunset, and it was feasible that she
might have the new shuttle ready by the afternoon of tomorrow. If the two
engineers were prepared to work on it through the night, as she was sure they
would be. They obviously worshipped her now, and indeed, they had never asked
her a question about which she hadn’t known the answer. Really, when she saw
Jim again he would have some explaining to do; she was sure he’d hypnotised her
and  taught her all this engineering as an experiment on the way to
Saunder’s World. It was just like him…

A
small breeze blew up and the grass around her moved in slow waves. It put her
in mind of the two big seas on their new world, far away to the north and the
south, across the immensity of the grass plain. Both “seas” were really rings
of melt water around the frozen polar regions. They were only a handful of
 kilometres wide, but were thousands of kilometres long. From space the
planet had a strange, almost manufactured look, with the glaring white poles
giving way to the bands of intense blue of the high latitude seas. These in
turn giving way to glowing green shot with tiny dots of lakes. The whole had a
sense of regularity which most planets, like Earth with its restless plate
tectonics, lacked. Both seas were the only places of extreme weather on the
tranquil planet, where polar winds clashed with those of the temperate zone,
whipping up immense waves which circled and re - circled the poles until they
were almost like the tides the moonless seas lacked. On the polar shores the
seas had polished the dripping ice until the surface shone like a mirror, on
the landward side they had gauged a deep channel along the side of which they
had deposited enormous embankments of drying silt. Every few hours the
katabatic waves would thunder through, and the level of the water would rise
through a dozen metres or more, before dropping in moments to far below what it
had been, briefly exposing the scoured seabed One day she would like to see
those waves for herself, and she was sure it would, in the fullness of time, be
somewhere people went to on holiday. No doubt the likes of Lana would come up
with some extreme sport which she would have to restrict…Athena smiled at the
thought of a future with room for such frivolities. It would come, she was
sure. As if to confirm her optimism the counter wound down past eight hundred
metres.