Blighted Star (28 page)

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Athena
looked down at the metal skeleton of her hand. How was it possible she had not
known? She searched her mind for all the memories she thought she had had but
not one of them came to her in the old familiar way. All of them now seemed
like the memories of 3D shows or even of stories other people had told her.
Suddenly the memory of the meeting she had had with Saunders came back to her,
and she looked once more into those pale eyes. Now she understood fully the
mystery behind them, and what they had been communicating to her as he had
gazed so searchingly into her eyes. She sensed the immensity of the secret they
held; of worlds, even entire systems secretly governed by the mechanical
offspring of mankind for mankind’s own good. She felt the rightness of the
arrangement, a conspiracy of benevolence, and she saw the desperate importance
of the maintaining of the great secret.

She
felt a slight sadness at the loss of her old self, but the knowledge that had
been unlocked far outstripped in importance the concerns of her own life. She
had to concede as well that her new incarnation gave her a certain degree of
usefulness which her vulnerable human self had not had. It would be easier for
her to combat the dead now that she could, if she wished, walk amongst them. On
the other hand she could see that there would be difficulties with her position
amongst the settlers. Humans were happy to work alongside constructed people, but
nowhere was there a society which knowingly put itself under the control of a
machine. Quite probably, the settlers would lynch her if they knew her true
nature, yet she wanted still to help them in any way that she could. This, she
realised, must be down to programming, and not to her character as she had felt
it to be in the past. She wondered why the devastating news of her true nature
had left her so calm, and realised that that too was down to some subroutine or
other which deflected her emotions away from what would have been a human
response. Once again she reflected on the way in which knowledge had come
unbidden to her when she needed to remove the ship’s plasma sphere. She
realised more clearly the relationship between herself and Chan. He was one of
her creators.

She
watched the clouds above her moving to the South and saw them as
conglomerations of droplets of moisture suspended in the air. She knew now that
they were at three thousand metres, moving at two kilometres per hour. The
processes of cooling at work within them would cause aggregation and
precipitation to occur in approximately three and a quarter hours. Next she
looked at the grass at her feet, she could see every detail of each blade, the
tiny delicate fringe of hairs at the edges, the sap slowly rising through each
cell, the shifting ripples of light from the system’s sun refracting through
micro densities in the atmosphere like the focussed light on the floor of a
swimming pool  right down to a miniature scale. 

She
scanned the internal comms and found, not surprisingly that her absence was one
of the main topics of conversation. There was an increased level of fear and a
feeling in the hearts of all the settlers that she had in some obscure way let
them down when they needed her most. Athena longed to reveal herself to them,
but knew that she wouldn’t while there was any chance of maintaining the
secret. She went back to work, adopting again the posture in which she had been
trapped, with her head and trunk deep in the bowels of the mining machine.

<><><> 

Grad
pushed the vat across the hangar and pulled it to a halt beside the shuttle.
Here in the hangar it was possible to load the bulky piece of equipment without
prying eyes, and Grad worked quickly to secure the vat and to disguise it with
a cargo sheet. He had just finished when the light from the hangar door was
briefly eclipsed. Grad looked up and found himself meeting Raoul’s hard stare.
They locked gazes for a few moments, then the soldiers eyes slid away to the
shuttle. He looked at that for a moment or two, seeming slightly distracted,
then his eyes swivelled back to Grad’s.

“Got
a little job for you. You feeling fit?”

Grad
felt sick with tiredness, and still quite poisoned from toxic air he had
breathed two nights ago, but he nodded, and Raoul seemed satisfied.

“We
still got farm creatures roaming around untagged. Maybe they’re okay, maybe
they’re dead. Either way, we’ve got to get rid of them. I’m sending out the
probes. When they find them, we’ll go out and blast them. Okay?”

“Yeah,
sure.” Grad felt grey inside, he had been hoping for at least a little rest.
How quickly the surfeit of sleep and enforced idleness from the week before had
drained away.

“Listen,
forget it. You need some rest, you look wasted. I’ll get Lana to fly this one.
Get some rest.” Raoul turned on his heel and disappeared out into the sunlight
outside, ignoring Grad’s half-hearted objections. Grad wiped the clammy sweat
from his brow and hauled himself into the cockpit one more time.

Grad
took off gently with the load of the vat on the cargo deck, he was not too sure
of the lashing he had used to secure the weight to the rings in the floor, but
he certainly didn’t want to hang around waiting to receive another visit from
Raoul. Glancing across as he rose through ten metres he caught movement and a
flash of pale blue in Cassini’s cockpit. He knew that it would have been Lana.
Lana had a one piece suit that colour. He wondered numbly if she had seen him,
and felt sure that she must have. Only a few short days ago she would have
waved to him from the window of the immense spacecraft, or maybe jokingly would
have made a rude or suggestive gesture. At the thought he almost smiled, then
reality crashed back in on him and the smile froze before it was born.

The
first time they had gone away together Grad and Lana had spent two days in a
space observation capsule watching the fantastic play of a deep space aurora.
The craft they had hired had the capability to have the gravity set to zero for
periods of up to twelve hours, and the trip as a whole was considered the
latest thing in romance, or at least so the sales brochure said. They both
secretly thought it was cheesy until they got out well past the nearest
inhabited star system, and then the magic of the journey started to make itself
felt. There was a moment Grad knew would last with him for all his life, no
matter what became of them, when he looked at the girl curled in his arms,
floating with him in the centre of the transparent sphere, with a backcloth of
clouds of million – hued ionised particles casting coloured shadows across her
sleeping face.

She
had sighed a long sigh and her eyes fluttered open, taking a moment to focus on
his face, then a beam of pure joy lit up her features so strongly that Grad
felt first surprise and then gratitude flow through his whole being. He pulled
her to him, feeling his own body move forward to meet her in the zero G.

They
each covered the other’s face with soft kisses, then they kissed more strongly,
cramming their mouths together, biting at each other’s lips in play. There was
a second’s pause where they drew apart a little, panting, then she caught his
outstretching hand and she pulled him close again with a small groan of
arousal.

 It
was, he had to admit with a crooked grin, pretty fucking close to the ideal.
Lana smiled up at him, her disarrayed curly mop of dark gold hair framing her
mocha skin. Outside an aurora flare echoed the fire of fierce pride and love
which welled up in him…

Afterwards,
they fell into a light sleep once more, floating curled together in the centre
of the sphere, the warm air caressing their naked skin as the ship recirculated
the atmosphere, cleansing their environment and keeping them safe, protected.
Outside the fantastic show of lights continued, unregarded by the lovers.

<><><> 

Looking
out of the cockpit window, Lana had seen Grad lifting away and heading out
towards the new quarry. The sheer sight of him had felt like an invasion of the
sanctuary she had found here where nobody ever came except her. Everywhere else
on the ship was crowded since the refugees had come in, and it stank. Not this
time the imagined odour of deep space recycled air, but the very real smell of
too many bodies and inadequate ventilation. When she had thrown her stuff into
a kit bag and had walked past Grad and out of their shared quarters, she hadn’t
anticipated the trouble she would have finding somewhere quiet to bed down.
Now, whenever she made her way  through the corridors and open spaces of
the ship she could see that things had got even worse. In the first weeks of
settlement the interior of Cassini had been harvested for sheets of
construction material, lengths of cable and piping, in fact everything which
the ship could surrender without losing space-worthiness. Everywhere now there
were vast open spaces where before there had been rows of tiny cabins.
Everywhere people sat around on the floor in glum small groups with a few
belongings, inactivity and anxiety sapping all moral. Lana struggled through
the crowd in the much enlarged canteen, At first people had established orderly
areas in which to sit; neat squares divided by straight aisles, but now the system
was breaking down, the children spread into the access spaces first, their
parents too tired or demoralised to restrain them, in the end baggage was
allowed to drift out so that straight lines became tortuous winding paths
through piles of objects, lolling legs, and crawling children. Lana felt cold,
no one, she realised, was in charge here anymore. The absence of Athena had
left a vacuum which needed filling before this listless crowd became a
dangerous frightened mob. Yet Jim Chan and the Doctor were both too busy to
fill the role. She wondered if she herself could use the authority she had left
from the long space flight under her joint command, hers was a face which they
all knew after all…but no; she was barely keeping it together herself at the moment.
Grad’s betrayal at a time when she needed his comfort, his support, even,
dammit, his protection had left her bruised and weak. She didn’t feel in full
control of herself. She passed on, murmuring apologies and excuses to the
endless enquiries.

Seeing
Grad take off, she had wondered for a moment where he might be going, but had
decided very firmly that she couldn’t care less. However, she still had one
major problem to take care of, and for that Grad’s absence for the next half
hour or so would be very welcome. As she left the canteen she noted that the
corridor she was in now led to a square of sky, achingly blue, where the main
doors had been left open to aid ventilation. The air she was walking in was
indeed, moving briskly towards the exit, carrying with it the smells of seven
hundred people. It felt warm and breathed, and it put her in mind of termites
in a mound. Near the doorway she turned left into the corridor leading to the
sickbay, Raoul and four troopers were coming the other way, and she was
surprised at how bright they looked; she had seen the soldiers come in a few
hours earlier, and they had looked exhausted from the exertions of the days
before and the come – down from the military grade stimulant they had taken.
She recognised the red headed trooper, Williams, and knowing the girl had
suffered the loss of her settler boyfriend, smiled and nodded to her. But like
Raoul, Williams swept past, only the briefest meeting of eyes telling her that
the trooper was scared. The soldiers turned right at the junction with the main
corridor, and the sound of their boots receded in the direction Lana had just
come from. Lana took a deep breath and approached the sickbay door. Through the
glass she could see that the doctor was not alone, and she turned away.

<><><> 

The
computer projection had changed,
was
changing. Dr Clarke watched it in
consternation, behind Chan’s unseeing back. The engineer was lost to the world,
deep in thought, the pieces of rotting flesh lying discarded for the moment in the
glassteen bowl before him

“Jim,
what’s happening to the sample projection. Why has it changed?”

Jim
looked up glumly. “The structure of the organism changes as it reaches
maturity. The changes in the structure of the projection reflect this. These
changes are due to the reproductive cycle of the organism. The organism is
preparing itself to create spores….”

“Spores? 
Did you say spores?”

“The
organism is in some ways analogous to mould and fungi originating on earth.
like them it reproduces itself through the medium of air borne spores…”

“Airborne?
Are you saying that the organism reproduces through the release of airborne
spores?”

“That
is correct. The organism is capable of regenerating itself through annexing
more flesh by touch, or by contamination of the air. This capacity has lain
dormant within the species for many millennia. The individual humans and
animals which have been taken over have in effect been colonised elements of
the one original specimen, like plants being cloned through cuttings.. David, I
really think we’re in trouble here. According to my projection, the organism
should be pumping out these spores at any time. I don’t see what we can do if
we can’t get off the planet, we’ve had it. Watch this…” Chan touched the
controls and the computer display changed to one showing in large, a section of
the planet on which were three dots showing the settlement sites, with Cassini
herself showing most prominently. Nearby was a cluster of the ominous red dots
inside the waters of a large lake. As Dr Clarke watched, a sequence began which
started with a black cloud drifting up out of the lake to blanket the
countryside around. As soon as it reached Cassini, the green dots in and around
the site turned red, and even then the cloud continued to disperse around the
display, and to be pumped out from the lake cluster. The doctor felt the blood
drain from his face.