Blighted Star Read Online Free PDF

for one reason or another, it had never happened for him. The
mood drugs had kept his depression at bay, and he had functioned efficiently as
a worker, digging he supposed, hundreds of kilometres of tunnel. Each night,
though, he had gone to sleep dreaming of stepping out of a spacecraft onto the
ground of some open planet.
    In
the end, he had seen a cast of the probe work on Saunders, and the moment he
had seen the blue sky he had been sold. As soon as he had been accepted onto
the program he had told his current cluster of his decision, and they had taken
his departure, man woman and child, with the usual lack of feeling, one way or
another.
     
    <><><> 
     
    Johan
looked around him with an intense pleasure. Their camp was fully established.
The animals had suffered no ill effects from the long trek out here and were
already putting on condition in the fruitful pastures with which they were
surrounded. He gave a long and silent prayer of thanks. Above him the beacon
ridge glowed softly in the late afternoon sunlight. The soft evening breeze
brought with it a delicious smell of pancakes cooking on the fire of compacted
straw. Petre came and stood quietly beside him waiting respectfully. Johan
finished his prayer and turned to his little son.
    “Ja,
jong. What is it?”
    “Papa.
I have a present for you.” the child held out a tightly grasped fist.
    “Oh
ho! A present for me? What can it be? I’m sure I don’t deserve a present.” He
bent his knees and lowered his tall frame so that he and his son were face to
face.
    “You
do deserve a present because you are the best Papa anywhere in the whole…”
Petre sought the right word “Galaxy!”
    “That’s
very kind of you. You are the best son in the whole Universe.” He cupped his
hand and Petre dropped something into it. It was a golden berry the size of a
gooseberry. Johan looked at it very carefully. It was one of the few types of
fruit indigenous to the planet, and had a smoky, sweet flavour. The children
had gone wild for it, running ahead of the wagons on the way here to harvest
each bush they had seen.
    “Eat
it Papa!” Petre accompanied the instruction with appropriate gestures as if
teaching a baby “Eat it!”
    “Eat
it? Certainly not. I’m going to treasure it forever.” Johan pretended to put it
in his top pocket.
    “No
Papa! It’s for eating, not treasuring!” Petre was beginning to look concerned.
    “Oh,
is it? Well perhaps we should eat it together. How would that be? You bite it
first then I’ll have the rest. We’ll eat it on the way back to camp.” He held
out his hand.
     
    <><><> 
     
    Christel’s
back was turned to him. She was driving him crazy. There was definitely
something going on and Jackson didn’t like it. She had been weird since he got
back from Crescent Waters. If he had done something wrong he had no idea what
it might be and she would do a lot better by telling him. Ever since they had
got together in the first year of the voyage she had known exactly how to play
him. He had no resistance to her, that was the trouble. He had never had
trouble like this with anyone else he had been with. But then no one else had
made him feel like she did. He reached out his hand and pushed her gently, she
turned her head slightly making a small angry noise, and carried on munching
her food. In front of them the corner of the room flickered with movement and
light as a 3D spooled out its banality. Someone was confronting someone else
about lies they had been telling. It was a long running real-time show from
Milano Prime and she followed the latest developments whenever she could. The
show had followed them out through space on their journey along with all the
latest news, gossip, sport and culture from across Humandom. Well, not the
latest, by now the communications they received had a two year delay.
    He
reached out his foot this time and pushed her quite hard. She shrugged roughly
and threw “Don’t.” over her shoulder. She