THE BURNING HEART OF NIGHT

by Ivan Cat

  Bigelow, who had no stomach for such unpleasantries, walked down an aisle hoping to get a C-55 reading with his detector. As he neared the far end of the yard, he abruptly stopped and straightened in the dark.

  "That's not funny," he said, an indignant hand going to his buttocks.

  "What not funny?" asked Bronte, who had gone ahead to where Guardsman Skutch stood in an archway at the rear of the yard.

  Bigelow turned around. There was no one in sight, no practical joker, no mischievous domestic—nothing that could explain the distinct sensation that someone had just pinched him on the butt.

  "Problems?" asked Skutch.

  "Never mind," said Bigelow, hurrying to join the Guard. "My mind is beginning to play tricks on me."

  "Go figure," said Skutch, rolling his eyes at the glum surroundings.

  They exited the storage yard.

  Behind them in the shadows, a deeper shadow moved.

  "Nice skin," it hissed.

  XXX

  Action causes more trouble than thought.

  —the private journals of Olin Tesla

  "Check it out," said Skutch.

  "Oooh," said Bigelow.

  Karr followed the voices out into a back alley. A narrow strip of roadwort bent sharply down, pulled by the weight of a sinking dome, which was the cause of the exclamations. The structure glittered like mother-of-pearl under Skutch's searchbeam. As the rest of the colonists followed Karr, they, too, stared at the rosy pearl.

  "What is it?" asked Jenette.

  "N253-G pleasure-drome," Karr answered.

  "A pleasure-drome?" Liberty asked, puzzled.

  "Standard colony issue," said Karr. As a Pilot had he off-loaded one with every colony seeded—disassembled of course, but he recognized the parts.

  The locals shared looks of confusion.

  "A relaxation center," Jenette finally said, remembering that her father disapproved of the impure connotations of the structure's common name.

  "A meditation mosque, a brain brothel," Karr said, rattling off a few slang terms from other planets. "A twitch palace."

  "A pleasure-drome," Bigelow said with glassy eyes, "by any other name would smell as sweet." He crept forward and caressed the burnished half sphere. "Now this is stylish."

  "More than stylish," said Karr. "It's a landmark."

  "Oh, yes, of course," the large man said, pulling out his mapreader. Everyone crowded around. "We're here." He pointed out the pleasure-drome, offset a few blocks from Coffin Island's center on the old map. "But we still don't know where the bunker is."

  Karr looked around. They were at the lowest point of the cavern, where its floor seemed to have been pulled down by the pleasure-drome. Root matter nearby was stretched and cracked by the weight of the large structure. "It's sinking," he decided.

  Jenette followed his train of thought. "It looks like the larger, denser structures are sinking faster than the smaller, lighter ones."

  "Mmmm," said Bigelow, gazing again at the wondrous pleasure-drome. "And a munitions bunker would be particularly heavy. Much heavier by volume than a pleasure-drome, certainly."

  Karr looked at the map-reader, cross-referenced the armory's last mapped position in relation to the pleasure-drome, aimed the Gattler at a forty-five degree angle down, and began to bore a descending tunnel into Coffin Island.

  Karr bored a series of tunnels down through consecutive caverns until one came out on level ground. Then, the explorers searched for the elusive bunker. The deeper they burrowed, the larger the structures became and the more morbid the caverns became. Soot charred many crumpled buildings. Some of the prefab sections were shattered, as if blown out from the inside. Pulse-rifle hits were peppered across walls.

  Scourge-twisted skeletons littered the ruins. Jenette tried not to look at the reminders of her own probable demise, but that proved impossible. Instead, she tried to focus on the other things around her and not the mutilations caused by the pathogen inside her own body. Many of the skeletons were still clothed. Man-made fabrics had not decayed after nearly two decades. However, she could not find a single garment without ragged slashes and accompanying pools of red-brown stain. Broken pulse-rifles, mauler pistols, quiver-shivs bayonets, and other improvised weaponry lay amidst the bones. And for every human skeleton there were many Khafra skeletons.

  The Ferals had attacked ferociously after the Great Betrayal.

  Karr kept the Gattler thrumming, burning through a series of descending cavities and a lot of ghutzu root without locating another landmark. Bigelow periodically scanned for signs of the warheads, but came up empty; either they were not degrading (impossible, he said), blocked from his sensors by too much root mass, or gone; Skutch's scanner also read nothing. Headway was slow and made even slower by Corporal Toliver's insistence on double-checking every step Karr wished to make. Although the soldiers were rapid and efficient, Karr railed at the wasted time. The Guards picked up on his impatience and tried to hurry, but that only increased everyone's tension.

  "You are not very good at working with other people," Jenette scolded quietly.

  "Why would I be?" Karr asked in all seriousness. "Teamwork and trust are four letter words to a Pilot."

  "You are seriously messed up," Jenette said.

  "I suppose I am," Karr agreed. After that he gritted his teeth and tried, not very successfully, to accommodate his overprotective retinue.

  Not very much later, Karr felt the resistance of the ghutzu burning under the cutting beam slacken, but instead of the expected usual draft of musty air wafting out of the new tunnel, a torrent of water geysered back at the humans and domestics. The stream was relatively small, but powerful, and knocked several unprepared humans off their feet. Karr himself slipped back into Arrou, who dug in with all the claws on all four of his paws. Leaning against the alien, Karr grasped the Gattler's now-slippery selector knob and twisted. Chrome barrels whirled and he sprayed surgical adhesive into the breach. In no time at all the flow of water was staunched. There were no injuries, only wet clothes, but the incident effectively served to reignite the group's fears about tunneling so far down into the dead island.

  "Must have cut into one of those crevices we saw on the surface," Karr remarked, as the water slowly seeped away.

  "Or the ocean," Mok mumbled nervously as the expedition members scrambled to their feet.

  "Stuff it, Mok," Toliver ordered.

  Skutch dipped a finger into a puddle of the water and tasted it. He frowned. "Not the ocean. Not salty. Just collected rain water."

  "Yeah," said Mok, "but when's it going to get salty? We're a long way down. We'll be underwater soon. And what happens if that—" Mok gestured furtively at Karr's Gattler, "—cuts through to the ocean? No glue shooter is going to stop the weight of the ocean from pouring in and drowning us!"

  "I said stuff it!" Toliver snapped at Mok, but the damage was done. Humans and domestics, who were not warm to the idea of being underground in the first place, began looking around as if the walls of the passage might crush in on them at any moment.

  Karr tried to picture the pattern of crevices on the surface in relation to where the lifter had set down. As far as he could remember they had been at least half a kiloyard distant in any direction, so if he was breaking through into a crevice, he was wandering too far afield from the last recorded location of the munitions bunker. When Karr resumed tunneling with the Gattler, he kept the pattern to a tight spiral, twisting ever deeper toward the island's center. Karr was fairly confident they would not breach through into any more pockets of water, but the others were not so sure and for a while nobody spoke much.

  Eventually, Karr burned through a section of ceramite into the upper end of a different sort of cavity. Unlike the previous convex caverns, this space was rectangular and the floor sloped down at a very steep angle.

  Karr and the Guards hopped down from the entry hole.

  Menacing shapes rose up from the sloping floor and loomed overhead, sporting appendag
es tipped with pincers and claws and vise-like mouths. Oily blood seeped from metal-wrapped cables. The humans edged down the incline between the large shapes. Arrou and the domestics skittered down the hard, slick surface, claws finding no purchase.

  Jenette slipped and slid down the slope, thudding with a woof against a giant shape. Arrou hurried down to her and helped her to her feet. She was dirty and dusty but none the worse for the wear.

  "I know where we are," she declared suddenly, shining her flashlight up at a multi-armed giant, whose arms seemed poised to snatch her up. "This is the robotic factory!"

  Searchbeams zigzagged over machined surfaces. Arrou nosed curiously, if suspiciously, around dusty control panels and power conduits. The looming shapes were assembly robots, set in lines or clusters and bearing all manner of appendages from huge lifting claws down to tiny dexterous arms with even tinier pincers like forceps and microwelders designed for precision work. Roots, grown in from the building's broken windows, clogged joints and hydraulic hoses, but the factory was largely intact.

  "What we wouldn't give to get this back to the Enclave," Jenette wondered, all their other troubles temporarily forgotten, "No more shortages. No more patching and repatching broken equipment."

  "New things," agreed Marsh dreamily.

  As they slid down from one shadowy titan to the next, Jenette sidled up to Karr. "Could your heavy lifter transport this factory?"

  "Most likely," Karr admitted, skidding to the bottom where the angled floor made a v-shape meeting a wall. Two large sliding doors hung askew on tracks in the tilted wall. "Assuming the pieces could somehow be brought to the surface."

  "That's a process that will need to be figured out," Jenette said. "Any deeper than this and we'll need a submarine to recover the C-55s."

  "I know," Karr fretted. He had been hoping to find the munitions bunker at a relatively shallow depth, use Skutch's explosives to blow off the overburden and then simply hoist the core-boring warheads out with the heavy lifter, but that plan didn't seem very plausible anymore.

  Karr dropped through a crack between the sliding doors and found himself in a small cavity. In its center lay a wrecked robotic crane.

  A shrill bleeping sounded from the factory behind him.

  "Hey," said Skutch. "My detector's going nuts."

  "That's funny," said Bigelow. "Mine reads zero."

  Karr edged forward, squeezing around the crane to get a look at the back of the small space, and came face to face with a very large plasteel door, set in a reinforced plasteel wall, and with a large locking wheel in the center. An increasingly fast-paced bleeping alerted Karr to the fact that Skutch and the others had squeezed up behind him.

  "Jackpot!" said the explosives expert.

  "Tell me what you see!" Bigelow called from behind them. "These factory doors are too tightly closed for me to pass through."

  Karr described the scene.

  "That certainly sounds like the munitions bunker," Bigelow called back. "I wonder why I'm not getting any readings on my scanner?"

  Despite the conflicting readings on the two sensors, Karr began to feel excited. He and the Guards spun the locking wheel and were able to heave the door open a few feet before it jammed on overhanging ghutzu growth. Searchbeams stabbed in, glancing off of upright torpedo shapes in a dark, cube-shaped room. Skutch went in alone for a closer examination. He clicked off his screaming detector as he neared one of the torpedo forms.

  "Yup, these are C-55s all right. Looks like three, six, nine ... at least twenty-four." Skutch whistled. "That's enough to bore a thermal mine straight through the planet's core and out the other side and snuff out the fire over your ship." Karr sensed that the Guard might be exaggerating a little, but was too pleased at that moment to care much, that is, until the tone of Skutch's voice changed. "Oh ... never mind." For some reason, the Guard then leaned into one of the teardrop shapes and pushed.

  Karr, and everyone around him, tensed as the baby whale-sized munition toppled with a loud clang, but no explosion followed, only a puff of dust rose into the air.

  Hutch motioned them in.

  Karr and the others entered. The combined light of searchbeams and Khafra illuminated a disappointing scene. The bunker was filled with C-55s and a host of smaller explosive devices, with all manner of differing shapes and intended purposes, but they might as well have been stuffed animals for all the use they could now serve.

  Skutch pointed to the end of the toppled C-55. "Warhead's missing," he said, indicating where the bomb's tip should have been. "The propulsion system is intact, but there is no bam-bam."

  As quickly as Karr's hopes had been raised, they were dashed. Further scrutiny revealed that all the warheads, detonators, and explosive charges had been removed from all of the munitions in the armory. Anything that could explode, engulf, or ignite had been removed, hollowed out, or chewed to pieces.

  "Big bugs," said Arrou.

  "Big bugs that can lock and unlock blast doors," Dr. Marsh observed nervously.

  "Something has gone to great lengths to disarm this stockpile," Jenette agreed. She turned to Karr. "What do we do now?"

  "I don't know," Karr admitted glumly. "Are there other bunkers?"

  Skutch shook his head. "There were, but they were evacuated. And, anyway, this was the only stockpile of C55s."

  Karr kicked angrily at a pile of chewed-up explosive matter. "Are we agreed that the warheads are not present?"

  Skutch looked around, nodding. "Yes."

  "Then we will just have to keep searching, and find them, even if we have to disintegrate this island foot by cubic foot."

  None of the others seemed happy at that prospect, but they did not get a chance to protest, because at that moment, Dr. Bigelow's voice echoed down from the robotic factory.

  "That's not funny!"

  "Who's he talking to?" asked Guardsman Grubb.

  No one knew. Jenette did a quick head count. Aside from Bigelow, everyone else was in the bunker.

  "I have had enough of this. I demand to know who—oh shit!"

  Bigelow screamed. The sound then trailed away into the distance.

  "Dr. Bigelow's in trouble!" said Jenette.

  All at once, there was a mad rush out of the bunker, around the wrecked crane, and back to the factory doors. Too many people tried to shove through the narrow crack. Jenette only just managed to poke her head through and look around. Two shadowy things were dragging Dr. Bigelow away, scuttling deeper into the darkness at one edge of the inclined factory floor. One of the things was human-pink, like Karr, one human-tan, like Marsh. But no human Jenette had ever seen moved that way, first upright, then on all fours, then upright again.

  "Something's got him!" she yelled to the others.

  "Clear the door, Consul!" Toliver barked. "Move through!"

  Jenette squirmed into the factory, but Guards and domestics blocked up the narrow crack in their haste to pass through behind her.

  "Get out of the way!" Toliver ordered, to no effect.

  "Must go! Must chase!" the panicked voice of Bronte moaned from behind the corporal.

  The confusion continued. Seconds dragged by, seeming like hours.

  "EVERYBODY DOWN!" a voice suddenly yelled.

  Jenette heard the clatter of weapons and bodies hitting the deck and then, abruptly, a two-yard circle of factory door began to glow bright red beside Jenette. The ceramite sucked up a prodigious amount of heat being thrown at it. Finally, it vaporized, revealing a bunch of humans and domestics crouched on the ground, and Karr standing upright behind them, grim faced, with the Gattler in his hands. An instant later domestics sprang up from the ground and through the hole. Toliver and the Guards followed the aliens. Marsh and Karr came last.

  The mob rushed along the angled factory floor. Bronte tried to bound ahead, her fear of the underground forgotten in her concern for Bigelow, but for once the quadrupeds were at a disadvantage. Rubbery soled human boots gripped the slick surface better than claws. Crash r
epeatedly skittered down into the v-shape where the sloping floor met the wall.

  Guardsman Mok scrambled up a flow of roots that cascaded around a robot base. His searchbeam slashed across towering machines but did not locate the kidnapped scientist. "I don't see him!"

  Liberty climbed up beside Mok, her weapon also slashing from side to side. "Dr. Bigelow! Dr. Bigelow!" she called on the comset. "Do you know where you are?"

  There were a few words, cut short by static, and then silence.

  "Must find! Must save!" Bronte moaned.

  "Quiet, everyone!" Toliver ordered. Bigelow's cries echoed chaotically in the otherwise silent factory. The humans were confused.

  Except for Jenette. "Arrou" she asked, "which way?"

  Arrou's earpits swiveled, then locked. The other domestics, calmed by his capable demeanor, did the same, then they sprinted off, following Arrou as he leapt from one robot base to another. They dove through a hole chewed in the far factory wall and raced out into a series of interlocking caverns.

  Bigelow's cries were louder there.

  "That way!" Jenette said, coming out of the factory as the domestics took off, finding plenty of purchase for their claws in the rough ghutzu.

  "Go, go, go!" yelled Toliver.

  The pursuit wound through a series of bubble-shaped grottos, Bigelow's abductors always managing to stay one turn ahead and out of sight. Domestics careened around a corner where two grottos met. By the time the humans caught up, the aliens were clustered at the far end. Bronte was poking her head into a tower of steel lattice that slanted down out of the grotto's ceiling and stabbed further down into its floor.

  "Colony beacon support strut," Karr announced before any of the colonists could ask what it was. There would be three other struts buried somewhere in the roots and, presumably, a parabolic dish three hundred yards in diameter, which they were designed to support.

  "Bigelow, Bigelow!" Bronte called as the domestics bolted down a shaft formed by the three inner sides of the beacon strut.