Blighted Star (20 page)

For
Lana it was a night of pandemonium. She flew backwards and forwards along the
line of battle, with Patel pumping columns of flickering fire into the masses
below. With each pass, the dead could be distinguished from the living even in
the dark because they did not raise despairing hands towards her, or hold their
crying children out for a rescue she had no time to give. She felt a deep sense
of guilt and shame, here out of reach of the monsters while below her the
vulnerable fled for their lives. Often, when they came to the hover over a knot
of advancing corpses, the pulsing of the twenty millimetre seemed to flash out
her own hatred of the vile enemy who had brought about all this misery. Then
they would drift away into the night, leaving the dead shattered and broken
behind them and the feeling of guilt would descend upon her once more, this
time compounded by the realisation that those they had destroyed were, until
very recently, people themselves. Looking down on the ravaged, blind faces,
with their empty sockets, she recognised many that she had known from her
flights in the shuttle, yet there was something in the way these creatures
moved, the way their rotting fingers grasped at the sky as you flew past them,
which left you in no doubt that they were beyond the name of human. From the
depth of the superstitious past came a word which Lana only half knew, but one
which made her flesh crawl,
zombie
.

Over
to the east a small group of green dots were being cut off from the rest of the
retreat, and Lana had canted the craft round and fed in a handful of boost even
before Raoul’s crisp commands had directed her that way. They slanted through
the air at eighty kilometres, Lana torn between the need to get there quickly
and the fear of overshooting in the dark. Patel saw them first and the twenty
spoke. knocking down the first three of the advancing enemy, and those directly
behind them. The green traces turned out to belong to a family group, whose
progress was being slowed by the father, who was struggling along with a
twisted ankle. Even from above Lana could see that he was exhorting his wife to
go, and take their two girls with her. More dead lurched in from the left, and
Patel had to fire repeatedly to keep them at bay. Now, with the gun’s energy
depleted, Patel was forced to take down only the very closest of the attackers,
and still the woman refused to leave her man.

Suddenly,
Lana had a clear memory of where she had seen these people before. Two weeks
ago they had ridden into Cassini to visit relatives. The two girls were called
Jay and Marthy. Lana got the craft in closer, hoping for a chance to pick them up,
knowing that she was being criminally foolish in risking the shuttle in this
way, but not caring. At that moment, one of the creatures stepped forward out
of the gloom, and even as the barrel of the gun swung round onto it, a fan
shaped spray of black vomit erupted from its cracked lips, splattering the
family. A shot from Patel knocked it back into the darkness. The children, then
their parents, began to writhe, clawing at the exposed parts of their skin
where the matter had touched them. One by one they went down. Lana started to
turn away, then Patel spoke. “Wait.” It was the first thing he had said for
many hours, Lana brought the craft back to the hover, hardly bearing to look to
where the four figures were just beginning to twitch and rise. Patel fired four
times. then without exchanging another word, they turned away. Four hundred
metres to the south another small group were in danger of trapping themselves
in a narrow gap between two ponds.

Through
it all, Raoul’s calm voice kept terror at bay as the implacable enemy followed
the frightened civilians further into a plain of lakes and deep ponds. Somehow,
in the broken landscape, Raoul retained some control as the battle moved
through more than four hours of night until the dawn streaked the sky to the
East.

Then
suddenly the enemy was gone. The exhausted civilians collapsed where they
stood, and Lana, circling higher to where the sun’s rays already shone, could
see how vastly depleted their numbers were. From her vantage point, they were
not just green dots, but badly frightened, miserable people. Despite all their
efforts, nearly another hundred people had been taken. She dropped back down to
where Raoul, still on his feet, still giving short clear orders, was gathering
the first shuttle load of children together.

<><><> 

 Jim
awoke in the sickbay, his throat felt as if he had been breathing in flames,
and his throbbing head span with the slightest movement. But he was alive, and
that in itself seemed like a miracle. Of the night before he had little
recollection other than a nightmare series of images, However, beneath the pain
in his head there was one clear idea. He lifted his hand as Dr Clarke went by,
and the doctor came over.

“Sss,
ssamples…” he managed to croak.

“Just
a moment Mr Chan.” the doctor lifted a glass to Jim’s lips, and Jim took it
himself, drinking deeply. The doctor waited.

“The
samples of the material. Did they remember the samples?” the doctor’s face lost
its puzzled look.

“Ah
yes, Mr Chan. I’ve got them isolated in my laboratory. When you feel a little
stronger we can look at them together if you wouldn’t mind.”

“Last
night…was it bad?”

“We
lost a hundred people from the Heart Lake settlement. But by all accounts it could
have been worse.” the doctor patted his arm and stood to go.

“Amy?
Is she okay?”

“Oh
yes indeed. Your daughter’s been in to see you while you slept. Mrs Johnson
will be bringing her back at four. Try to get some rest ‘til then.”

Jim
lay back on the pillows. He had been looking forward for so long to sleeping on
a proper bed, but now his ideas about what it was that they faced were keeping
him awake. He really needed to see those samples… The doctor had gone over to
see Jackson at the other end of the sickbay. If he could just get to his feet,
the doctor would be faced with a fait accompli, he would scold, but he wasn’t
likely to perform a flying tackle to get his patient back in bed was he? Jim
made an effort and hauled himself to his elbows. Coloured lights flashed before
his eyes, and he flopped back, vision greying. Perhaps he would lie here for a
short while after all.

<><><> 

Jackson
floated in a pleasant haze through which he was dimly aware of the doctor’s voice
calling his name. He retreated further into unconsciousness, though not before
he sensed the stump of his arm being manipulated.

Dr
Clarke took the necessary readings from the nano – scabbed flesh at the end of
Jackson’s arm, and banked them in the medical recorder. After checking on
Grad’s stasis, he would program the details into the vat and grow Jackson a new
forearm. The procedure was a straightforward one, even if it was one which most
medical practitioners did not get to try out, not at any rate in times of
galactic peace. If no complications arose, Jackson would have his new arm by
the afternoon,
if
no complications arose, the Doctor thought. He had
been aware throughout the night of the catastrophic turn events had taken, and
had stayed awake throughout, monitoring the crisis on the general channel. The
expected injured casualties had not arisen, and it was increasingly obvious
that the enemy they faced did not take prisoners. You either escaped, or were
destroyed by them. Clarke still found it hard to believe that it was their own
people who were in some way responsible. He itched to get to work on the
samples that he had been given, but first he had more work to do with the
patients.

Chan
was already coming out of any danger, and the nano supplement that he had been
given was helping to knit the torn tissue and the broken bone from the week old
injury. Another few hours would see the resilient Chan up and at work.
Cogniscent  of the engineer’s strong grounding in biology, the doctor was eager
to get his help, and keyed the nanos to administer a stimulant as soon as the
arm was ready.

Grad
was stable, but stable at low rate. Little could be done for him other than
keeping him comfortable until his nanos could do their work. In the end, Grad
had youth on his side, he would be okay. Dr Clarke felt a little more concern
at the continued stress that Lana would be under, but about that too, he could
do very little.

<><><> 

Athena
looked gloomily at the readout from the tracers. In the swampy landscape where
the action of the night before had broken off there were scores of lakes and
ponds. Many of these now held a cluster of red dots. The greens and the blues
had, at least, managed to vacate the immediate area, but their progress towards
the relative safety of Cassini was painfully slow, even with the shuttle
flights going to and fro.

Their
best estimate was that they would be able to get all but twenty or so of the
civilians out by nightfall. That should be good enough if the soldiers could
keep up a steady retreat ahead of the enemy until their turn for extraction
came.

They
had no effective way at present of hitting back at the monsters in the shelter
of the lakes. They had come here with the equipment to colonise an empty
planet, not to fight a war. Perhaps, given time they could manufacture the
weapons to defend themselves, but right now they had too little.

Another
problem they would soon face was the one of what to do with the refugees; over
six hundred people were going to need accommodation. That in itself would not
have been a problem, they had after all, been accommodated in far greater
numbers on Cassini all the way here. People could pretty much have had their
old cabins back, except that in the first weeks of the colony’s life, much of the
interior had been harvested for building materials. This was standard practice,
and all colony ships were designed with it in mind. The problem they now had
was one of ventilation; stripping the air down and re-circulating it clean and
breathable took tremendous amounts of power, as did all the other elements
of  life support. They no longer had access to that power since she had,
with her own hands taken the plasma sphere out of Cassini to use in the mining
operation. Even this would not have been critical under normal circumstances;
there were ways of arranging the doors and hatches to promote a through – flow
of air which would leave a few cabins stuffy but the majority of areas
liveable. Now though, if they did this, and they managed to keep the creatures
outside, they would still face the gas that came with their attacks.

They
would have to get the sphere back from the mine and reconnected to Cassini
before the creatures arrived. She knew, deep down, that this wasn’t going to be
possible, but what other course of action could they take? She looked out
towards the east where the night was beginning to gather on the horizon once
more. The air would be still tonight, and the stars would shine with their full
brightness. The night sky of Saunders was one of its attractions, or at least
it had been until now, with the incredible swirl of the Skagorack like a
whirlpool on a leaf-strewn lake. Now the thought of the stars tumbling so
inevitably towards extinction in that ravening blackhole filled her with a foreboding
sense of their own doom. She shivered and turned away from the window, opening
a link to the general channel, but keeping quietly in the background, though
without holding back her identity. As usual, the babble of voices in her head
gave her a feeling of comfort, of belonging, even if the voices were murmuring
in fear and in mourning for lost friends and loved ones as they were now. She
wondered what she could say to these frightened people, and realised that she
had nothing concrete to offer them, that words of reassurance would have to be
backed up with something practical, and she logged back out, feeling like a
coward for doing so.

Dr
Clarke placed the last of the surgical instruments on the tray with a series of
small, precise clinks. The operation had gone extremely well, but then he had
not expected trouble. He lifted Lieutenant Jackson’s arm and looked at it
closely, there would always be a raised band where the new flesh had been
grafted on to the old, but with time, the weal would lose this angry puffiness
and the arm would be to all intents as good as new. All in all, he was quite
pleased with his work. He briefly considered giving Jackson a stimulant to wake
him up, but then thought better of the idea. A sleep would do the man good.

He
straightened up carefully, feeling the strain in his back muscles, and pushed
through the door into the small lab attached to the sickbay. Chan was already
there, as the door gently closed he stepped away from the work bench and
gestured towards 3D visual which slowly revolved on the brushed metal surface.

“What
do you make of this?”

The
Dr looked carefully at the sculpted light.

“Well,
it’s definitely organic. This is the agent, I take it?”

“This
is the agent. I extrapolated this representation from the sample Grad brought
back from the horse. The other samples were badly degraded, but they all showed
the same thing. Mammalian cells were converted into this.”