THE BURNING HEART OF NIGHT

by Ivan Cat

  Alive. His ship was alive!

  "So that's a fugueship," Jenette yelled, awestruck. She had never seen one of the legendary creatures before. It was like turning a corner and unexpectedly coming face to face with a dragon or unicorn. A fugueship had seeded New Ascension twenty-three years ago, so this one before her was a tangible link to her past as well as the intangible worlds beyond New Ascension's sky. Its sheer physical presence was astounding. The tiny part of the fugueship above the waves was huge, a thousand times bigger than the largest creatures on New Ascension. The sheer force of its engines enlivened the water with inarching rings of vibration; the rows became beads where conflicting sources of the turbulence overlapped and made moiré patterns. Jenette gulped air smelling of jasmine even as a prickling in the back of her mind warned that something was amiss. "It doesn't look like the pictures I've seen."

  It didn't look like a fugueship to Fugueship Pilot Lindal Karr, either. The portion above the waterline did not swell out from the stern to make the grub shape he knew so well, but was slimmer. The four engine orifices opened, not from knotty bulges set directly on the hull, but from the ends of tall, living columns. And the ship's surface was not wart-infested and knobbly like toad skin, but a glassy crimson. Furthermore, there was no sign of charring as there should have been after such a catastrophic landing— and where was the magnetic field? The compass was still rock steady, accurately reading southwest, which should have been impossible so close to a fugueship; fugueships could not turn their ramfields off.

  Karr needed to board and investigate.

  But he dared not fly any closer to Long Reach for fear of searing himself and Jenette to a crisp. His attention returned to the controls in the cockpit. In the light of that day's dawn Karr had set down temporarily. He had cleared the deck of the previous night's carnage, plugged most of the remaining cracks in the hull, and made additional repairs to the flight controls. He had rigged additional circuitry—sort of a rudimentary autopilot—which now allowed the lifter to be flown with simple inputs to the steering yoke and made it capable of executing simple operations like hovering. So Karr could now set the heavy lifter to hover two yards above the waves. He did so, then pointed at the collective throttle lever. "watch that," he said in Jenette's ear. "If the lifter starts to sink, pull up. You can handle that, right?"

  Jenette looked at the controls skeptically.

  Oblivious, Karr climbed out of the cockpit and rummaged through his gear, retrieving a small outboard thruster from the survival raft and a reflective blanket. That he tossed to Jenette, motioning that she should put it over her head to block the heat.

  Karr pulled on the segments of his kilnsuit.

  Wearing the blanket like a shawl, Jenette joined him. "Where do you think you're going?" she demanded.

  Karr tipped his head at the blast furnace that was Long Reach. "To shut that off," he yelled.

  "You'll be burned to a crisp!" Jenette objected.

  Karr patted his ceramite suit. "Not in this."

  Jenette looked even more skeptically between the kilnsuit and the fugueship. "This can't be safe. Let it burn out."

  Karr locked his glove seals, shaking his head. "It won't burn out. The ship eats hydrogen and it's face down in an ocean of food." Long Reach could split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen atoms indefinitely. "And it's my Duty," Karr added, before Jenette could object again. "It needs me."

  Jenette acquiesced, returning to the cockpit, but she didn't like it.

  Karr locked his helmet into place. The suit's life-support system activated, circulating cool air over his sweaty skin. Karr looped the Gattler over a shoulder, grabbed the thruster unit, and, with a final thumbs up to Jenette, stepped over the side.

  Karr splashed under the surface and then bobbed up like a cork. Holding the thruster unit ahead of him, he twisted its handgrips. Thrumming, it pulled him through the oscillating water. The marching waves of interference grew as he neared Long Reach. Karr felt the vibration through his helmet. Readouts under his chin showed the external temperature rising, but still well under the suit's limits. Karr actually felt cooler inside the suit that he had outside of it.

  Shortly, the small thruster bumped into Long Reach. Karr climbed onto the towering hull and wiped water droplets from his helmet. What he saw weakened his knees.

  Long Reach was one gigantic, raw wound. Atmospheric friction had stripped its outer hide away—in fact the entire outer hull was gone, which accounted for the ship's thinner profile. Long Reach had survived planetfall at the expense of sloughing off half its mass. The scope of its trauma was horrifying. Exposed muscles pulsed and writhed under Karr's boots.

  "I'm sorry," he whispered, as a parent might upon finding a badly burned child. Karr's vaunted Pilot training was obviously lacking. Never once had a lecture or manual explained what to do when half a fugueship's body was burned off. He had no idea how Long Reach was still alive or, more importantly, how to keep it alive.

  Karr took deep breaths of reconstituted air. Panic wouldn't help Long Reach. And it didn't really need the missing parts of its body anymore, he rationalized. The outer hull largely contained storage cells and bladders for fuel and other materials needed to cross interstellar space. All vital life processes occurred within the smaller inner hull and, in a way, that made Karr's task easier, since he was closer to the internal locations where a few judicious qi manipulations would shut down the engines. After that he could begin the healing process in earnest.

  That was, if he could get in.

  Karr did not recognize the new external topography. There were no landmarks on the bleeding mass of ship. His best guess placed him in the neighborhood Wendworm Way, where it used to cross from the outer hull to the inner hull, but a slow walk around the circumference of gently bobbing stern revealed no passageways or iris-portals leading inside. The stern towered six stories above Karr. Fusion fire pillars speared thousands of yards into the sky above that, but there was no entrance anywhere on the steep slope. Below the water, where Long Reach's, slimmer profile disappeared into foreboding silvery darkness, was the only hope.

  So without a second thought about the risk, Karr waved to Jenette and allowed himself to fall forward into the water. Huddled under the blanket in the cockpit, Jenette waved back.

  The thruster unit pulled Karr's buoyant suit down. The sensation of descent was a lot like being weightless, a warm pressure all around, resisting Karr's movements, not like the giddy, fear-of-plummeting sensation of zero gravity. Karr panned a headlamp back and forth along the descending curve of the fugueship, eventually focusing on a depression which looked, in the deepening gloom, like an iris-portal. It turned out to be collapsed and impassable. Karr continued down and around. External pressure rose as he descended. A gauge read two atmospheres at twenty yards, then three at thirty, which was still nothing compared to what the kilnsuit was designed to withstand, but then he was only a tiny way down the four-kiloyard-long hull. Karr had to grip the thruster firmly to keep from slipping and bobbing back to the surface like a bubble.

  As he inspected another collapsed portal, he began to worry that all the entrances to the ship would be blocked, but a glance back at the surface saved the day. What looked like squirming pools of liquid mercury jiggled under overhangs all around Long Reach's hull. Karr floated back up to one. It was actually a bubble of air trapped in an unsealed opening; because the opening faced down, the air was unable to escape. Looking through the flexing, fish-eye refraction, Karr saw a passage that snaked into the ship. Perfect. He killed the thruster unit and burst up inside.

  Karr was back in his ship.

  But the inside, which should have been a cocoon of familiarity and safety, was not. It was dark, the man-made lighting systems having failed. Karr was forced to use the helmet's less than efficient spotbeams for illumination. And the passages Karr climbed through were distorted, squeezed and twisted by the pressure of atmosphere and water on a creature evolved to live in zero gravity. So Karr c
ould not figure out where he was. Walls seeped blood, in spasms as Long Reach reacted to its pain. Water leaked in everywhere. Karr splashed though pools of brine. Tiny creatures, sucked in with the ocean water, floated in fugue-coma, hairy yellow foodyeast already feasting on their belly-up bodies. As Karr pressed deeper, trying to find a landmark of any kind, lakes of viscous blood replaced seawater, coating his kilnsuit in congealing, ropy strands, making it difficult to see and note the windings of his path.

  Twist left, crawl right, open sphincter, climb up, press on.

  It was a nightmare. Believing Long Reach dead in a quick, catastrophic impact had been hard enough, but Karr was confronted with his ship alive and suffering now—suffering that his own ineptitude had lead to. He recited from training manuals to reduce his emotions to a manageable level. Concentrate on the big picture. Isolate the ship from additional trauma. Triage tasks to maximize the results of treatment. Right then, that meant closing the engine orifices and damping down the fusion furnace to minimum, thereby decreasing the chance of the hull shifting and also lessening the tremendous heat and danger outside.

  One small mercy: the volume of the inner hull was much less than that of the outer hull. Karr eventually recognized a series of gigantic vertebra. They paralleled a ceramite pipeline, three yards across, which ran vertically through the ship. Karr followed the vertebrae, climbing down using bone spurs for footholds and looking for an entry duct. After a short descent, he discovered that the paralleling pipeline was broken in half, shattered from the force of the crash impact. Inside, the ceramite of Long Reach's superconductor core was visible, a striated column of rust and white, plated in platinum and then wrapped in insulating ceramite. Grown in zero gravity, the crystals of the superconductor structure were perfectly aligned to the massive current that coursed through Long Reach to generate an electromagnetic ramfield. The break in the superconductor explained why Long Reach was not affecting compasses. The circuit was broken and couldn't generate a ramfield anymore.

  Climbing down a dozen more yards, Karr put the superconductor out of his mind and located a suitable entry to the vertebrae. A fine cutting beam broke a milky membrane sealing an entry duct, and then qi needles calmed the spasms of a narrow crawlway. Karr squirmed through like a worm and entered the spinal foramen, a triangular conduit formed by the gentle curve of the vertebrae on one side and the processes of shorter bone spurs opposite.

  The beam of Karr's helmet lamps glistened on strands of nerve fiber that filled the conduit: Long Reach's spinal column. Three days ago, Karr would not have considered entering this delicate area for fear of crippling the ship. Today, he set to work inserting qi needles with the Gattler. Lying on his back with his arms outstretched into the spinal conduit and his body confined in the entry duct, Karr aimed for fatty junctures where nerve strands split off to different parts of the ship. Calm the sympathetic systems. Bwap, bwap. Simple. Stimulate the parasympathetic systems. Equally simple. Bwap, bwap. Now the risky shot. Thwok! A long non-resorting needle to block a nerve cluster and anesthetize the aft sections of the hull before attempting to damp down the engines.

  If it worked Karr's task would be a whole lot easier. He waited for an adverse reaction. Nothing. "Hang with me," he muttered to the ship while visualizing a picture of the best meridians for the next needles.

  A trickle of seawater dribbled down the entry duct, slithering past Karr's shoulders and cascading into the spinal conduit. The whole ship shuddered and the narrow duct clamped down on Karr, shoving the interlocking plates of his kilnsuit together. Long Reach, it appeared, did not like seawater in its nerve canal—at all. For a few nervous seconds Karr was immobilized by the ship's tremendous muscular power, but then the duct relaxed again.

  Karr held his ground. "Sorry. Just a little more." He hurried the qi injections, but another spasm followed, stronger than the first, and a third was more violent still. Each spasm held longer, severely decreasing the slack time in between. Karr should have left right then, but persevered until muscle pressure made work impossible. The kilnsuit creaked ominously and his helmet made the sound of sand grinding on sand.

  Using only his fingers and wrists, Karr twisted the Gattler around to point back at the entry duct. It was difficult to keep his gloved forefinger on the trigger in that position, but he managed to fire a ring of qi needles around the duct. Pressure eased off enough for him to squirm back half a yard, but then clamped back down. Karr repeated the process several times. He kept squirming as the ship kept lurching. Finally, he inched far enough back to slip out into a rising pool of blood and water. Splash.

  Karr swiped his helmet clean as best he could. All the connecting tubes and cavities around him were convulsing. It might settle down if he waited, but it might worsen, and if it got much worse, there wouldn't be any safe place for Karr inside the fugueship. With only half his job accomplished—anesthetizing the engines from the spinal conduit—Karr decided to flee and finish the job from outside.

  Long Reach had other ideas. Each time Karr attempted to take a passage, it slammed the passage shut with crushing force. It was as if the ship didn't want to let him leave. "I have to go, just for a little while," Karr promised, trying a different route, "but I'll be back."

  Slam!

  Sheets of muscle hammered down on him.

  Karr tried to pull back, but the outboard thruster caught on a tendon. The kilnsuit withstood the force; the thruster was crushed to bits.

  Spurred on by the fear of losing the Gattler in a similar fashion, Karr fired qi needles like never before. Bappata-babada-bap! A complete ring around the passage. Advance and repeat. Bappata-babada-bap! Karr ignored the ammunition and propellant counters. Bappata-babada-bap! Bappata-babada-bap! If they reached zero he was dead anyway. His rhythm built up. Karr jogged back along the steps of his mental map. Straight out, climb up—oops, duck back, wham!—-shoot again, crawl left, twist right.

  Bappata-babada-bap! Bappata-babada-bap!

  Beep, the Gattler warned. Low ammunition.

  Bappata-babada-bap! Bappata-babada-bap! Bappata-babada-bap! Bappata-babada-bap!

  Click. Empty.

  Karr had made it to one of the few fuel-bladder galleries within the Long Reach's inner hull. He scrambled down the gallery, which was large enough that even when compressed there was still room for Karr to move safely, but he was forced to halt at a sledge-hammering muscle group at the far end. By Karr's calculations, he was less than twenty yards from an opening that would lead to the freedom of open water. All he needed was a few more needles.

  So near and yet so far.

  Karr ransacked crates in the netting between fuel bladders, but came up empty-handed and confused: ancient statues, priceless paintings, masterpieces of jewelry and art looted from Sheldon's World. Useless, useless, useless.

  "Goddamnit!" The bastards from Sheldon's World had screwed him again. Karr hurled a solid gold statue at a fuel bladder in frustration. It bounced off the skin, making a hollow sound—and a strange, man-made flap fluttered open.

  Karr splashed over and looked through the opening. His helmet lamp illuminated a treasure trove inside. Heaped around a simple bedmat, amid piles of garbage and dirty clothes, were cases of qi needles, propellant, adhesive, other Gattler munitions, the jewel-studded sphere of a spare starlure, an empty fugue purifier, and many other pilfered items.

  Bob. It was Bob's hideout.

  This was how Bob evaded detection for so long. The interior walls of the bladder were artfully braced so that they appeared to be swollen full from the outside. Karr must have passed by a hundred times and not seen the hideout.

  Long Reach lurched.

  Karr decided to berate himself later, shimmied into the hideout, and reloaded the Gattler as fast as he could. Empty metal spheres hit the floor as new ones snapped into position and then Karr fastened as many extra loads as possible onto the kilnsuit's attachment clips.

  A scrap of stimpaper caught his eye.

  For my buddy, Karr, it read.<
br />
  The paper was attached to a data cube. Karr wanted to kill Bob all over again, or at least throw the cube away like he had the statue, but he couldn't—what if the message contained information that would help Karr in his struggle to rescue and repair Long Reach? Karr angrily stuffed the cube in a suit pouch and turned to leave. As an afterthought Karr stopped, reached under a heap of trash, and grabbed the spare starlure. Discarding one precious Gattler reload, he clipped the sphere onto the kilnsuit and exited.

  Karr careened down the pitching gallery and used the refilled Gattler to shoot his way out. Minutes later, he dropped into the ocean and let his suit's buoyancy pull him past the convulsing leviathan to the surface.

  Karr crawled out of the water back onto the hull. It shuddered and shook. Jenette waved frantically for Karr to return, but he ignored her and scaled the raw surface. Halfway up, he stole a glance back. Jenette was a small huddled figure on the lifter. Further behind, small fires winked in the encircling fog bank.

  Above Karr, great beams of thrust shifted dangerously against the sky. Why were the stern engine nozzles open, he wondered. If anything, Long Reach's bow nozzles should have been open, as Karr had left them when he abandoned ship. Like so much of what Karr saw, it did not make sense.

  Karr pulled his way to the top. Like the rest of the ship, the stern looked very different from how Karr remembered it. In the very center was a striated column of superconductor, which before had been only a knob barely protruding from surrounding hide. Now it was ten yards high. Karr felt an unsettling electrical buzz, even over the engine rumble. It was the superconductor's I've got a hell of a lot of electrical charge on me warning; he must not touch it in his dripping wet kilnsuit, because that would make a circuit with the hull and then there would be a flow, and flow of that magnitude was bad. Arrayed around the superconductor were four wide pillars with engine exhaust spewing from nozzles on top. They were also ten yards high: the thickness of the missing outer hull at that point.