Blighted Star (30 page)

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Doctor
Clarke looked at the soldiers in amazement. “What do you mean you don’t believe
me? How can you not believe what the computer is showing you? Why would I lie?
Why would it lie?”

“I’m
not saying you are lying, I’m saying you are interpreting the data in such a
way as to exaggerate the risk.” Raoul’s voice was flat, unaggressive, and yet
it had an edge to it which cooled Clarke’s blood. “It seems to me that the
thing we face has the potential to give out spores. but it hasn’t done that
yet. Now why not? That kind of ability would have finished us overnight,
especially when we didn’t know we were under attack. My guess is that it hasn’t
used that trick because it can’t.”

“The
modelling suggests that such a transformation would take an enormous amount of
energy, so much that the original organism dies in the process. I think we’re
looking at a process which involves the burning of a lot of food, and by that I
mean flesh. The organism has always sought to increase the amount of victims it
has taken over, rather than picking off the odd person here and there. That
looks to me like the behaviour of a living thing about to go into reproductive
phase. There’s probably a particular number of bodies it has to infest, or more
accurately a certain weight of flesh it needs to bring under control before it
can enter its final form.”

“There
you go Doc. That’s why we’ll be okay. With our new weapon there’s no way it’s
going to get any more recruits. And I guarantee you, by tomorrow A.M. There’ll be
a lot less of it left anyway, I can guarantee you that.”

Dr
Clarke decided to take a different tack. Perhaps Raoul was failing to
understand what he was trying to tell him because of some personality issue
getting in the way. Maybe he would listen to one of the others…“Listen,
Sergeant, have you seen Jim Chan anywhere? I really need to go through this
with you and him. And also, I think we have to talk all this over with Athena.
Is she back yet? I can’t get either of them on the comms system. That thing surely
picks its moment to go bugger up.”

Raoul
leaned in close, looking into the doctor’s eyes. “Chan has had to be put away
for now. He’s under tranquilizers for a few days. He went crazy with the
pressure, like Jackson did.” Their eyes stayed locked for long moments, the
doctor felt increasingly uncomfortable. Something was crawling behind the
slightly dilated pupils of the soldier, but he couldn’t work out what it was.

“Don’t
you think I should see him?”

“Best
not. He’s my problem. You just concentrate on helping us to win the war.” Raoul
rocked back on his heels, wrapping his arms round himself then letting his
hands fall to his hips, and standing there. Again he looked at the doctor for
long moments. “You’re doing great though Doc. keep it up.”

“What
about Athena? Can I get to see her?”

“Go
through me. She’s too busy right now to give you any face time. What do you
need her for?”

“I
need to go through this data with her. She’d know what to do.”

“Don’t
worry, I’ll give her the gist.” he turned and walked towards the door, the
other trooper preceding him. “Just go through me from now on.” he repeated as
the door closed the doctor in.

Clarke
rubbed his chin, not knowing what to make of the exchange. Was the sergeant now
in charge? He needed to be sure that Athena would get proper data on the spore
threat. He couldn’t help but doubt that she would; the soldier seemed
determined to filter it for his own ends. And as for the story about Chan going
mad; he hadn’t shown any signs of it earlier. If it was true, then they had
lost a major asset.

What
they should be doing was reinstalling the plasma sphere and taking off as a
precautionary measure. With Cassini operational again they could even just
batten down the hatches and seal out the deadly spores when and if they came.
Why wouldn’t Raoul agree to that at least? if he really was speaking for
Athena, Clarke was sure that that was what she would have ordered.

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“Where’s
my dad? I want to see him…” Amy’s voice was getting tired. She’d ended up being
taken by the soldiers to the room they used for their equipment. Williams had
sat her down on one of the benches and had told her to be quiet. It smelled
bad, and all around her were the big metal looking suits the soldiers wore.
They looked like the suits of armour that old knights had worn, but black. She
didn’t like them. She felt like the ones behind her would start to move on
their own and she had to keep twisting her neck to keep her eye on them. In the
end she couldn’t stand it any longer and she had. sneaked off the bench and got
as far away from the hanging suits as she could. She had expected at any moment
to get told off and to be sent back to the bench again, but no one had seemed
to even notice.

Williams
had come in again and had glanced at Amy and had put a smile on her mouth but
not in her eyes. Then she’d gone over to where a group of the soldiers had been
having a very serious whispered conversation and had joined in with them. Amy
could only hear little bits of the conversation, but at one point she was sure
it was about her. Williams had said a bad word about being “stuck” with her and
had said the others had better
bad word
do their share of babysitting.
Amy had decided there and then that she did not like Williams and she was going
to stop
trying
to like Williams. Williams was horrible and she hated
Williams with her stupid pink face and red hair. She didn’t like any of the
others either; most of them just ignored her and those who didn’t talked to her
like she was a baby. Soon she realised that if she asked about her father, it
made them uncomfortable, and soon after they went away and stopped bothering
her. So every time another soldier came into the room she would go and stand
next to them until they had finished whatever they were doing, then she would
politely ask where her father was. It was driving them crazy and Amy knew it.
She didn’t know why they didn’t give her a straightforward answer, they all
just claimed not to know. But that was impossible, they had been the ones who
took him after all. They must know where he was. In the end they would tell
her. She could keep it up much longer than they could, she had nothing else to
do after all.

Athena
tried again to commlink with Chan, but still received only a dead signal. It
was actually getting a little scary considering the current situation and she
couldn’t help but feel an undercurrent of irritation that he wasn’t keeping her
informed. She tried to link with Grad, but he was unreachable too, and she
began to worry, a few more attempts and she got the picture. She was being
frozen out, but who by? Only the military personnel had the ability to jam her
signal. Them and Jim Chan, but he wouldn’t leave her cut off like this would
he? Suddenly the dark tank of viscous fluid seemed horribly confining and she
longed to get out and run back to Cassini, to find out what was happening. Most
of her flesh had grown back, but she still needed an overlay of skin and hair.
Outside it was going dark, and she realised that half the night would go by
before she could get picked up by Grad. If the soldiers were monitoring, that
must mean they knew about her secret, were they making some sort of move
against her? What would they do next? She steeled herself, then commed Raoul.
Confirmation of her fears came when she established a link to him without
trouble. In her mind he presented an image of himself sitting at a desk on
which was a large spherical object which reflected like a globe of mercury. It
was the remaining Plasma Sphere.

“What?”
Raoul’s voice barked at her. She was taken aback, she had not been expecting
such open aggression.

“Why
are you blocking my comms?” The image she was sending of herself was her standing
next to the mining machine, she wondered if he could tell she was projecting
falsely; she had no idea after all where he was, or if he really had taken
possession of the sphere.

“I’m
letting you contact me as a one-time only thing. From now on you are not to
have any contact with any member of this colony. This is a
human
colony,
not a machine one. Is that clear
robot
?”

“Wait
just a minute…”

“If
you come anywhere near any human being you will be destroyed. Within
twenty-four hours you are to leave the area in which the remaining humans are
gathered or you will be destroyed. You will keep heading due north until you
reach the polar sea. You will remain there until I decide what should be done
with you. Is that clear?”

“Why
are you..”

“Robot,
I don’t know why you infiltrated us, or what your mission was, but the only
reason we haven’t taken care of you already is that we’ve got our hands full
right now. But tomorrow… “

With
that threat hanging he severed the link.

Lying
there in the tank Athena felt like crying, yet she knew that as yet the vat had
not grown any tear ducts for her. The conversation had left her stunned and
seemingly incapable of action, of even knowing what to do next. Her world had
collapsed, no
imploded,
in just a few hours since the horse had stumbled
into her. Where was the anger she wanted to feel? She had felt angry on many
occasions in her life, and looking back on them now the anger had always been a
motivating force. A force she had used to get things done by those around her
and by herself. She wished now that she felt angry at Raoul, but she felt only
a numbing sadness, it was as if all she had ever been was draining away. She
felt as if the tank might be full of some subtle acid which was dissolving away
the person known as Athena. Leaving in its place an empty husk: a hollow
manikin baring only the most passing of resemblances to the original. She had
failed in every way. Her continued presence, even her continued existence
contributed nothing to the prospects of the crippled colony, and her absence
was the only gift she had left to offer.

In
a few hours her skin would have completely reformed. She began to make the
resolve to abandon the settlement and head north as Raoul had told her. The
alternative would be to have some kind of confrontation with Raoul which she
doubted she could win. She didn’t have any weapons for one thing, for another,
she lacked the will to stare him down. But where, she wondered, would that
leave the wider mission? Her true identity had been uncovered, but would Raoul
guess beyond that? What did her presence on the planet signify for him? Could
he guess  that she was part of a conspiracy, a benevolent one but a
conspiracy none the less, to guide humanity by the gentlest of touches, the
lightest of metal hands on the wheel, or would he simply see her as a spy sent
by some rival agency to infiltrate the planetary mission in its earliest days?
She knew what he would do. If they got through this crisis, he would pursue her
and use any means he could to find out more. She would, she was sure, be
impervious to torture, but there might be invasive hacking techniques to access
areas of her artificial mind which she might not even be aware of herself. Most
importantly of all, he had the other colonists under his power, and might be
capable of using them as hostages.

In
answer to these doubts, she suddenly became aware of her own self-destruct
facility. Deep within her skull was a silver sphere the size of an egg. 
The sphere was a plasma source and the sequence for causing a violent breach
resolved itself to her. She knew that, rather than endure capture, she would
cause a breach to occur. The resulting explosion would be nowhere like the
scale of the one at the quarry, but it would vaporize everything within a
radius of three hundred metres or so. Strangely enough. the prospect gave her
some solace. If she was to end up going out, better to go with a bang. The
knowledge too gave her a further insight into her mechanical nature; the knowledge
that the source of power on which she relied was located within her skull did
not disgust or repel her. she realised on the contrary that the location was an
eminently sensible one. She did not have a brain to protect in there after all,
and so the hard case of her skull could be used to give a secure lodging to the
vulnerable plasma sphere. Studying her schematics as she lay in the tank, she
had to acknowledge that she was a finely crafted artefact. If some way could be
found to continue to exist and not to be forced to erase the evidence of her
existence, then she could see that she would have thousands of years of
potential life ahead of her. The information caused her to dig a little deeper,
and at the conscious request for information, several hundred years of memories
which had been sublimated in the preparation for this mission made themselves
extant to her. She had been several people in the past, each time placed in
different locations where humans were pushing back the boundaries of exploration.
Her relationship with Saunders was far more extensive and complex, and she had
met him before being sent out on these missions a total of six times in the
past. Each time he had looked deep into her eyes and had sought there for some
recognition. Each time the vat grown eyes had been different, set in a
different face, and no recognition had been there.