THE BURNING HEART OF NIGHT

by Ivan Cat

  Karr scratched the brainroom walls affectionately. "Excellent choice."

  It was six realtime months to CG-423-B—twelve fuguetime hours—and they were a roller coaster of hope and disappointment. Karr was prepared to fight the ship's tendency to steer for a gas giant, as it normally did upon entering a new system; feasting upon ring belts and atmosphere, Long Reach was able to replenish stores of fuel, carbon, and other heavy elements. However, Long Reach surprised Karr by heading straight for the silver-white planet. Karr attributed the peculiar behavior to a symptom of its sickness and spent his time monitoring its condition and looking for signs of a colony.

  There was a satellite in orbit around CG-423-B.

  And Karr was not talking about any of the planet's four small celestial moons, but a man-made satellite—probably a weather-communication satellite. Karr had set them up for each of the colonies he planted. Another fugueship had been here. Good news. Unfortunately, the satellite did not respond when Karr interrogated it. More urgent levels of communication protocol all failed. Only Karr's own weak signal echoed back. Bad news. The satellite was dead. That meant the colony had lost the capability to service it. The only useful information to be gleaned from the dead satellite was the colony's probable location, which should be on the surface, directly under its geosynchronous position.

  The day wore on. Long Reach closed on CG-423-B. Further instrument checks, between jaunts to dose up on fugue and decontaminate, picked up no signs of human activity. No beacon, no overspill of local transmissions, no ozone holes, no sparkle of light on the night side. Karr was disappointed but not really surprised. The legacy of human expansion to the stars was a legacy of hardship. A large percentage of all seeded colonies failed. There were famine worlds, war worlds, plague worlds, disaster worlds (like Sheldon's World), and a dozen other variations. It looked like CG-423-B was just one more failure among many.

  This was not good news for Long Reach. In its present condition, Karr doubted his fugueship would survive another interstellar jaunt. With the help of a colony, it would take years of nursing and recuperation before Long Reach could refuel and brave the voyage back to Evermore. Without help, it might take decades or not happen at all.

  Not long after discovering the dead satellite, Pilot Lindal Karr learned the problem with letting a fugueship set its own course.

  The first indications of a problem occurred when he was in the brainroom. Karr felt a rumbling through the seat of his crash couch and a warning light blinked on the nav station, alerting him that Long Reach was adjusting trajectory. Perilous data spewed from a viewer. Long Reach hadn't set itself on just any old trajectory for CG-423-B, Long Reach had set itself on an impact trajectory with CG-423-B and was coming in way too fast. Karr would never dare to set such a course. The fugueship had nerve, he admitted, but he was not about to wait around and see if it made another engine burn to safely enter orbit later.

  Karr sprang into action, initially trying to slow Long Reach down by activating the repaired starlure. He set it to maximum brightness, the idea being to fool the ship into believing that it was too close to a real star and brake harder. Karr also used remotes in the brainroom to move the lure across Long Reach's external eye, but the deviations got bigger and bigger until it was a joke. Long Reach, it seemed, couldn't care less. Karr's dour expression grew more dour as none of the other simple options worked either.

  In the blink of an eye, things had gone from not so good to disastrous. Karr was on a collision course with the only habitable planet within twenty light-years and in severe time trouble. He rebuked himself for not having enough foresight. If he had stopped dosing on fugue earlier, he could have reacted more effectively to the ship's errant behavior, but it was routine procedure to stay fugued-up until just before making safe orbit and Karr had followed that routine. So he was moving too slow to stop Long Reach. Karr needed to drop out of fuguetime before they plowed into CG-423-B and he needed to do it yesterday.

  VII

  Pilot Academy transcript, planet Solara, 10.21.3526.

  Document status: CLASSIFIED.

  File: Consequences 342.

  (Subject Lindal Karr, aged twelve standard years, squares his shoulders and refuses to cry. Major Vidun stands facing Lindal, looking stern in the blank white room with rounded corners. Tall, thin Dr. Uttz stands compliantly behind Vidun.)

  Vidun: As punishment for allowing touch-contact with Dr. Uttz, you will study in solitary for the next six months. Lessons will be taken through indirect voice communication only. (Lindal's cheeks redden, but he does not break.)

  Lindal: Yes, sir.

  Vidun: If you apply yourself, study your qi harder, perhaps the term of punishment can be shortened by a month.

  Lindal: Thank you, sir.

  Vidun: Dismissed. Go wash your face.

  (A hole appears in the wall. Lindal exits though it. Dr. Uttz shakes his head. Vidun is not apologetic.)

  Vidun: It is your own fault.

  Dr. Uttz: It was a simple touch on the shoulder, no more. He did so well on the tests.

  Vidun: You know the rules. Trainees are not permitted tactile human contact. This facilitates a bond forming between Pilot and fugueship.

  Dr Uttz: It is harsh.

  Vidun (irritated): Why state the obvious? Do you wish to undermine my judgment? Do you wish my position? I will gladly step aside. Dr. Uttz: No, and no. But I worry. He has had no other contact for seven years. Vidun: As you know, that is the regimen. We must instill a predisposition to shun human contact and bond with his ship. If he bonds with his ship he will naturally want to keep it alive—at all costs. Dr. Uttz: But I worry. Such isolation can lead to abhorrent sociological behavior. Vidun: You are the expert. Should we be worried? Dr. Uttz (sighs): I suppose not. He has a great sense of responsibility. I suspect it is rooted in the belief that his parents sold him because he was unworthy.

  Each failure and hardship only strengthens his resolve to prove them wrong. Vidun: Good. Mark my words, that boy will be the greatest Pilot humanity has ever seen. Dr. Uttz: If we don't break him first.

  Far too late Long Reach altered course, making several destructive braking orbits through CG-423-B's atmosphere. Unfortunately, by the time Karr had endured deep-fugue withdrawal and could clamber along the perilously tilted ceilings and walls in slowtime, Long Reach was plunging into the planet's gravity well. Karr succeeded in dumping the reserve fuel, but he didn't have much time left, maybe one orbit, maybe less, and then Long Reach would break up.

  Karr scaled gourds of suede-like tissue past his quarters and back into the brainroom. He touched the cortex in passing. It felt feverish.

  "Hang in there." Karr strapped into the crash couch, which was halfway up the wall because of Long Reach's weird angle relative to the planet below.

  The human instrument panels painted a grim picture. Nav readouts were particularly harsh: there was no chance of stabilizing orbit and little chance of a soft landing. Karr should have run for the escape gig right then, but he refused to entertain such thoughts and again tried to correct Long Reach's trajectory, but none of the standard controls had any effect. Karr tried harsher measures, activating a network of remotes that administered painful electric shocks to the ship's nervous system. He preferred qi needles hand placed in exact pressure points because they caused less trauma, but there was no time. Karr applied current, intending to open deceleration nozzles and control Long Reach's headlong plunge.

  "Brake, brake," he urged through gritted teeth. Electrodes crackled, some right in the brainroom, but nothing happened. Karr increased power to maximum and repeated. Whiffs of scorched fat filled the air, but Long Reach stubbornly refused to obey its helm.

  "Do what I say," Karr implored. "Please do what I say."

  Vital seconds ticked off. Control panels went dead as their corresponding external sensors burned off in the heat of atmospheric friction, but Karr would not admit defeat. Grabbing his Gattler, he unstrapped and slid down to Long Reach's brain. A tw
ist of the selector rotated barrel three into position. Karr aimed the tool at the crenellated dome of gray matter.

  Karr bit his lip. "Sorry. This is going to hurt."

  It was the last thing Karr could think of. Jerks of his trigger finger shot sonic pulses deep into the fugueship's brain. Unlike human brains, which felt no pain, fugueship's brains were extremely sensitive. Long Reach moaned with each experimental shot. Karr could hardly bear it—he was hurting his ship—but he kept at the barbaric stimulation until finally locating a target neural cluster.

  Engine thrum suddenly reverberated throughout the ship. Karr crashed into the foreword bulkhead as Long Reach finally opened its braking nozzles at full power. Karr was so happy, he hardly felt the impact. Climbing back up the wall to the crash couch, Karr made attitude corrections that he believed would increase the chances of a soft landing, but by that time all of the external sensors were burned off. Karr was flying blind with only his gut and inner ear to guide him, and those could be deceptive. A few minutes later, even blind flying came to an end; the controls gave out altogether.

  Karr pounded the dash in frustration.

  Why couldn't he stop his ship?

  Karr felt a dizzy pull down and to the right. Long Reach was picking up a foreboding spin. Soon it would start tumbling and that would be the end. Karr gripped the controls, determined to ride Long Reach through the gates of hell if he had to, but in his rush to work the helm he had forgotten to strap in. A sudden tilt of the ship ripped his. hands free and flung him across the brainroom. Karr got back up, fighting lurch after lurch and unable to regain the control seat.

  It was as if Long Reach was telling Karr to get out.

  "I won't!" Karr bellowed over the growing rumble. "Do you hear me? I won't leave! You can't make me!"

  But it could make him. The lurching flung Karr around helplessly. He could not get back to the helm and even if he did, Long Reach would not respond. There was nothing he could do. Nothing. It was a terrible, stark revelation for a Pilot. Like it or not, duty or not, feelings or not, it was time to abandon ship.

  Long Reach was burning up.

  Karr raced through the dreamchamber, grief tearing him apart. Wendworm Way had collapsed and the space between the inner and outer hulls was now the quickest way aft. Somewhere the hull was breached. Air howled around the kilnsuit Karr had scrambled into. Dream-capsule lids clattered in a gale spawned by decompression. Karr picked up Wendworm Way farther aft where it was not blocked, but where the walls had the alarming tendency to constrict with each spasm of Long Reach's pain, jostling Karr mercilessly before he arrived under a metal hatch. A sign read: ESCAPE GIG. Karr wasted no time undogging the locking wheel, climbing up into a small, metal airlock, and opening the inner hatch.

  Karr expected a view of the gig's interior, cockpit, seats, and overhead storage bins. What he actually saw through the hatch was a snapshot from hades, a gut-wrenching exterior view of Long Reach breaking apart. A blizzard of plasma-hot sparks showered over his fugueship. Flaming spirals of hide peeled off and streamed behind it like red-hot ribbons.

  And the escape gig was gone.

  Karr stood in a hatchway to nowhere, looking dumbfounded out of a gutted half-shell. The gig's other half and innards were missing. Strong winds tried to suck Karr out the opening as a massive fissure ripped open across Long Reach's hull, splitting thick hide apart like a self-destructing zipper and leaving a raw, bleeding canyon behind. Shreds of hide exploded outward as the fault rushed at Karr.

  "Shit," said Karr.

  He slammed the outer hatch, spun the locking wheel, and then, punching an override code to open the inner hatch without waiting for recompression, dove back into Long Reach. A titanic concussion hit, smashing away the remains of the escape gig and the entire airlock, leaving Karr in a bloody foxhole, clinging to a large vein for dear life—and with an even better view of the destruction outside.

  It was lucky for Karr that the gig had been moored aft. The turbulent eddies rolling across Long Reach's stern were nothing compared to the pressure wave he saw spraying out from the fugueship's midsection bulge. Those mach four winds would have cut him in half.

  Karr needed a new plan.

  Salvation, it turned out, was a mere fifty yards from his foxhole, in the form of an ungainly craft with oversized thrusters at the corners of its wide cargo platform, four large robotic grapple arms folded underneath, and a chunky cab that seemed attached to its leading edge as a sloppy afterthought. That decidedly nonaerodynamic vessel was Long Reach's heavy lifter, intended to ferry giant seed-colony containers from orbit to planet surface. It was not designed for high speed atmospheric descents and already showed signs of damage, but it was now Karr's only way off.

  Problem: it was impossible to get to.

  Karr could barely hold on in his foxhole. Walking or crawling in the intense winds was not feasible, even in the brief lulls when spiral eddies canceled out the force of the wind. Karr contemplated a desperate jump through one such a lull, using the suit's thrusters to propel him to the heavy lifter, but decided that he was only desperate, not suicidal. He would much rather stay with his ship than experience a long, drawn out plunge to his death from one hundred thousand feet.

  The process of disintegration intensified. More strips of hide peeled off into the maelstrom as Karr tried to think. One of the strips missed the heavy lifter by mere feet, but the gouge it left behind gave Karr an idea.

  Making a note of the geography outside the fugueship, Karr rigged pinch-cleats and crawled deeper inside. Gripping already traumatized surfaces with the spiked cleats, Karr was able to squirm through the sub-hide anatomy. His initial path through ligaments and around a grouping of girder-rib end flanges was a dead end. He backtracked, disoriented, then tried several other fruitless routes, before finally pressing through an intertwining of arteries and subdermal fat and coming out in one of the newly ripped gouges on Long Reach's hull.

  Success: the heavy lifter was right above.

  Ten feet to the hatch: now Karr would risk a jump. Studying the pattern of eddies rolling down at him, Karr prepared a short safety line with a carabiner on the end. He did not attach it to the fugueship—there were no anchor points on the burned, bleeding mass anyway. Instead, he anticipated the next lull in the blizzard of sparks.

  Steady, steady—now!

  Karr thumbed the suit's thruster controls and rocketed out of the fissure. Glowing embers showered his helmet and he slammed into the heavy lifter, snapping the carabiner onto a handhold beside the hatch. The eddy passed. Kilnsuit plates locked as the extreme pressure returned. Karr dangled on the end of the line, joints stiff and smacking into the lifter hull. Crack, whack! Then another eddy washed over. The suit loosened. Karr pulled himself around on the line and manhandled the latch, his own muscles and the ghimpsuit fibers straining to the limit. Finally, the seal broke and the hatch grumbled open. Karr dragged himself out of the buffeting winds, plopped into the cockpit, and resealed the hatch behind him.

  Karr's lungs wanted to rest and his heart wanted to stay with Long Reach until the last possible moment, but every second the lifter spent docked was a second in dire jeopardy. Karr flipped system switches two at a time while recanting the preflight check so as not to mess up. "Engine run-ups number one, two, three, four." Click, click, click, click. "Cowl fields engaged and locked open." Snap. Klack. "Throttle mixtures to rich." Zwik. "Thrusters buffering to full. D.O.I. throughput at seventy-five percent, eighty...."

  Through the canopy's transparent ceramite tiles, Karr saw a wide swath of fugueship hull separate from the ship and skid toward him.

  The D.O.I. gauge wound up. "Ninety, ninety-five... Come on, you piece of junk!"

  The strip of fugueship hull tumbled, flattening everything in its path.

  "One hundred! Punching!" Karr jammed the throttle levers forward and hammered the emergency release catch. Explosive bolts severed mooring clamps and Karr braced for a three-g rush, but the lifter was not the high perfo
rmance escape gig. It wallowed up slowly. Karr shoved the throttle levers harder, but they were already full, open. The lifter wallowed only slightly faster. And here came the fracture, like four tons of slow motion bullwhip. Karr gritted his teeth.

  Wham! Disintegrating fugueship slammed into the lifter. An ominous crack resounded as the heavy vehicle tumbled away from Long Reach. Visibility dropped to nothing as plasma sparks blotted out every window, then cleared again as the lifter passed through the blazing wake, revealing the whole of the fugueship.

  Karr's stomach leapt into his mouth. Long Reach was unraveling like a burning onion, riding down on four spears of braking fire. And he could do absolutely nothing to help it. It was Karr's worst nightmare come true. He felt the fiery plasma burning Long Reach as if it were his own flesh. He felt each strip of hide peeling away like chunks tearing from his heart.

  Karr concentrated on the frenzied activity of flying the heavy lifter. If he did not, he would surely be overcome by emotion. And then he would die, because the lifter had taken damage during launch and was still taking damage from its headlong descent. Karr fought to stop its tumble, but each time equilibrium neared a new crack or groan resounded and the oscillations grew worse again.

  Alternating views of stars, fugueship, stars, and planet whizzed around. A picture of the world below built up in Karr's mind between horror-stricken glimpses of Long Reach. CG-423-B was a ball of silvery-blue, unbroken except by clouds. There was no land. Where was it, Karr wondered. Due to the extreme rate of failure, colonies were no longer seeded under water.

  Trying to anticipate the gyrations of the heavy lifter occupied Karr down past eighty thousand feet, then sixty thousand. The damaged lifter responded to its helm with a delay between input and response. Karr figured out that he could not react, but must instead anticipate what the vehicle would do a full two seconds later, because reacting only added to the errant oscillations and sent the heavy craft spiraling more quickly toward an uncontrollable spin.