Blighted Star by Tom Parkinson Page A

scraped across the ground. The corpse lurched across the grass
to where, a short distance away, the warm glow from a lantern cast shadows on
the canvas of a wagon-cover.
     
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    Athena
stood back and straightened up. Now that the end of the task was in sight she allowed
the weariness she had kept at bay for so long to wash over her. Craning her
neck to relieve the sore muscles she looked up at the stars which cast as much
light into the dark sky as the moon still shed on the abandoned Earth. They
were shining clearly now as the last dregs of the sunset drained away to the
west. Above her, the whirl of the Skagorack Nebula dominated the eastern half
of the sky, the centre stars fading as their light struggled to escape the pull
of the black hole at the centre. A soft noise in the grass brought her back to
the present moment as Jackson joined her. He too looked up to see what had
caught her interest, then he looked into her face with the same sadness she had
been sensing all evening. She smiled.
    “Alright
Lieutenant. I think we’re ready. Get everyone to retire to a safe distance just
in case I’ve wired this up wrongly. About three hundred metres should do I
think.”
    As
Jackson nodded and went back to where the small troop were resting, Athena
reflected once again on where her knowledge had come from. She and Jim had
spent a great deal of time together over the course of the voyage, they had hit
it off right from the beginning, and they had had thousands of conversations on
nearly as many topics. But none of the hours they had spent together had
covered the kind of advanced engineering she had employed to put together the
rig that stood before her now. She wondered whether what she had experienced
was some kind of telepathy. When Jim got back she and he would have to discuss
the matter thoroughly. She reached out her hand to activate the machine, and
again the gentle noise of footfalls in the grass made her pause. Jackson
returned to her side.
    “They’ve
gone back Ma’am.”
    “You
should go back too Jackson. I have to be here to monitor the start-up but
there’s no point in both of us taking a risk.”
    Jackson
paused, torn between his wish to stay and his need to follow the procedure
which stated unambiguously that executive officers were not to be exposed to
danger without overriding reasons. 
    “I’d
rather stay.” he said in the end, a little apologetically.
    Athena
reached out again and the control panel glowed. The whole contraption gave a
very slight shudder and began to hum softly. She knew that far beneath their
feet the borer was now focussing energy forces which would melt and reshape the
rock until a smooth sided shaft, two metres wide, sank down through the crust
into the slow moving magma far below. When that stage was complete the machine
would cap off the mine by creating a large magma chamber from which the metals
they sought could be drawn. The colony would be back in business.
    Athena
turned and caught Jackson’s eye. “That should do, or at least, if the readings
are true we should be O.K. Shall we sit a while?” Sitting down on the
grass, they leaned their backs against the warming metal sides of the mining
machine. Athena felt her eyelids weighed down by an impossible weight. She let
them shut and in a moment her head drooped to one side and came to rest on
Jackson’s shoulder. He looked down in some surprise and adjusted his arm so
that she would be more comfortable. His men had orders to keep back for half an
hour, and then to come up if there had been no plasma breach. He would let her
sleep until he heard them coming. God knew she had earned it.
     
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     Grad
turned over once more on the camping mattress the probe had brought. Beside him
in the energy tent Jim snored softly but it wasn’t that which was keeping the
pilot awake. Neither was it the ridiculous earliness of the hour, the sun
having only just set. It was the turmoil he felt in his heart and in