Blighted Star by Tom Parkinson Read Free Book Online

a clear image which was both a memory and
not a memory at the same time. She was perplexed. However, now wasn’t the time
for musing on where the information was coming from, now was the time for
acting upon it. They would need to take major components from the main gravity
drive of the Cassini including the ship’s plasma sphere. This would mean they
would lose the ability to take off from the planet’s surface. But if that
became necessary they could quickly put the components back…
     
    <><><> 
     
    Lana
paced backwards and forwards outside the control room. Movement seemed to do
some good to her frayed nerves. As she paced she willed Grad to be safe. 
The corridor led out onto the main access passage of the ship in one direction,
and she always turned before she got to that, the soles of her shoes squeaking
gently on the metal surface. Padding back the other way she could go forty-five
paces before she reached the turning where the corridor took a left down to the
power room. Before she got to that, though, she passed the open doorway to the
control room where Jackson still sat hunched in the green glow from the console
from which the drones were controlled. Each time she passed the doorway she
forced herself not to look in directly. They would tell her when there was
news. Looking in would just jinx it. She could look through the corner of her
eye, that was O.K. and she would see well enough if there were any change…
    The
problem was that there was no trace at all of the tracking pellets. This might
mean that the shuttle, and everything in it had been plasmarised in the blast
at the quarry. Or it could mean that the pellets had been knocked out by the
electro-magnetic pulse from the bursting plasma sphere. Eyewitnesses thought
they had seen the shuttle disappearing after the explosion but at the time
everyone’s eyes had been seared by the blue flash. Lana kept her eyes straight
ahead and kept pacing. Grad would be O.K. He always was.
    The
long night dragged on. At about three o’clock  Athena passed on her way to
the main A.G. As she passed she patted Lana on the arm. She didn’t suggest that
Lana got some sleep and for that the pilot was grateful.
     
    <><><> 
     
    Gunnar’s
corpse staggered on through the night, heading east. As it went, skin, hair and
even clumps of flesh rotted off as the voracious organism devoured the body it had
colonised. Yet the decaying muscles still possessed enough consistency to obey
the commands of the dead nerves. On the horizon, the cluster of life signals
exerted their irresistible pull. One step at a time the corpse closed the
distance.
     
    <><><> 
     
    Jackson
rubbed his dry eyes and cursed softly. The drones had just finished another
search pattern with no results. He had sent them out on the “best guess”
direction, the one the most reliable seeming witness had said he thought he had
seen the shuttle flung in after the plasma blast, but the man’s streaming eyes
and reddened face bore testimony to the intensity of the flash of heat and
light  the plasma breach had released. And the man had said himself that
the next moment his vision had gone for some minutes, and that even now
everything he looked at had a greenish tinge as if he had looked at the sun.
One other person who had been curled up in a protective ball at the time of the
flash had reported seeing something glinting in the sky to the north in the
immediate aftermath, and two people were pretty sure they had seen a trail of
smoke dispersing a short time afterwards. 
    Personally
he couldn’t really give a damn about the two missing men. He had hardly ever
spoken to Chan and suspected that the engineer didn’t think all that highly of
him. Grad made him feel uncomfortable, the pilot was friendly enough but was
too cocksure for Jackson’s taste. He wanted to get them back, obviously, but he
had to admit to himself that this was because he wanted the kudos of rescuing
them, rather than because either of