THE BURNING HEART OF NIGHT

by Ivan Cat

  The humans arrived and looked in. Above, overgrown roots blocked the inside of the strut. Below, the shaft descended as far as searchbeams could penetrate into the rotting bowels of Coffin Island. A few faint human cries echoed up from below the domestics, who were still visible in the Guard's searchbeams, climbing down spider-like by digging in with their talons.

  After a second or two, the human cries stopped.

  The Guards immediately started to rig themselves to a line.

  "I'm not staying up here," Jenette said, as Toliver suggested the Guards continue pursuit alone. "Not with things coming out of the walls and grabbing people."

  "Me neither," said Marsh.

  "All right," Toliver acquiesced. "Clip on." He attached a descender rig to the each of their belts and set the tension to high. "If it gets too hairy for you, just clamp down on this hand brake and stay put."

  Karr attached his own descender rig, quietly and efficiently. Toliver checked and found nothing wrong with his setup.

  When everybody was secured to the line, the descent began. Guards went first, walking down the walls face down and with weapons ready. Karr went next, Pilot-style, headfirst with legs wrapped around the line for extra control. Jenette and Marsh came last, sitting in their harness rigs and letting the descender gullies slowly let them down.

  The inside of the beacon strut, which should have been straight, was warped by the overwhelming pressure of island growth pressing in on it. The faint glow of the domestics below disappeared as it twisted.

  "What's that? Water?" Mok asked from below Karr, where the sides of the shaft had begun to glisten. "Hey, water's leaking in. Guys, water's leaking in."

  "Heard you the first time," Toliver said from the bottom of the line.

  Skutch swiped a wet patch with his forefinger and then licked his finger.

  "Is it salty?" Mok asked.

  Skutch frowned.

  Coffin Island creaked and groaned eerily around them, presumably due to the distant motion of the ocean putting stress on brittle ghutzu fibers. Mok shivered. "I'm a soldier, not a sharkworm."

  "Ah, get some gusto in your shorts," Liberty chided. "We volunteered. There's no backing out now."

  "Who said anything about backing out?" Mok retorted, suddenly defensive. "Not me."

  Mok kept quiet after that, even when a patch of irregular shadows on the walls proved to be head-sized holes, chewed in the fibrous material by some unknown creature or creatures, but his eyes goggled wide.

  Some distance later, Dr. Marsh cleared her throat and whispered. "Jenette?"

  "Yes, Deena?" Jenette whispered back.

  "I've been thinking about our theory that these colony structures are sinking. I don't believe they are."

  "No?" said Jenette, a bit relieved to have conversation to take her mind off the harrowing descent. "They certainly seem to be sinking."

  "No," said Marsh, clamping her brake hard after letting herself slide too fast. "I have studied ring-island biology, and I suspect that we are making a mistake by assuming that ecological processes are the cause of the apparent sinking around us. Heavy objects do sink on ring-islands, but not to this extreme extent, maybe a few feet per year, but that is due largely to the growth of new island over the objects in question as old island growth sinks. Forgetting about the fact that this island is supposedly dead and should not have been growing at all, seventeen years of normal ring-island subduction could account for perhaps a one hundred to one hundred and fifty foot depth for extremely massive objects."

  "We are clearly lower than that now," said Jenette.

  "Exactly," said Marsh. "Also, the cavities we have been encountering do not line up with what we know of ring-island growth. There are typically small cavities underground, two to five yards in diameter, but nothing big enough to accommodate buildings and streets. The entire subterranean structure of this island seems to have been compromised."

  "So what are you saying, Deena?"

  "What I'm saying is that some force or selection of forces has drastically altered the growth pattern of this island, and I, for one, would like to know what those forces are."

  "Don't wish too hard," Jenette said as she adjusted her own descender rig speed. "I'm not sure we really want to know."

  The light of the three domestics reappeared below, silencing further discourse on the subject. The aliens were stopped at a level patch where the shaft bent at right angles to itself, both leveling off and narrowing to a tight horizontal crack. Dr. Bigelow was nowhere to be seen, but one of the glowing quadrupeds, Arrou, was holding a blinking object. Toliver halted a few feet above their heads. The object turned out to be Bigelow's detector. The Guards handed it up the chain of humans to Jenette.

  "Can anybody read this?" she asked.

  The lights on the scanner were blipping, but Jenette could not tell if that indicated the presence of nearby warheads, or if that was just the instrument's normal negative readout.

  "Any one of us can set it to read the charge level in our pulse-rifles," Liberty said in reference to herself and the other Guards, "but that's it."

  "Better than nothing," said Jenette. She handed Karr the scanner. He handed it to Liberty, who hooked it onto her belt.

  Toliver slipped off the line to the ground, then dropped to his belly near the horizontal fissure.

  "You think Dr. Bigelow got through that crack?" Jenette called skeptically from above.

  Toliver shrugged. "I don't see any other way he could have exited this shaft, Consul."

  "Point taken."

  Squirming on his chest, Toliver entered the tight fissure. Bronte, and then the Guards followed, Grubb and Mok hanging back to bring up the rear after Karr, Arrou, Jenette, Crash, and Marsh.

  The fissure was six to eight feet wide, but no more than eighteen inches high and required a determined effort to maneuver through, pulling with hands and scrambling with feet—and all the while feeling the immense weight of Coffin Island surrounding and pressing down in the near dark. Light beams flickered off sweating faces.

  "In the dictionary—" Skutch grunted, breathing out to pass through a particularly tight spot, "—right next to claustrophobia, I bet there's a picture of this place."

  A few yards in, Karr noticed that the surface pressing down on his back had transformed from abrasive fiber strands to something slick, damp, and pliable. As the Guards inched on, Karr managed to roll over. Beside him, Arrou looked up and gasped.

  "Aaaahhrr!"

  "What's wrong?' Jenette asked from behind them.

  "Ghosts!" Arrou exclaimed.

  Skulls leered down at Karr and the alien. Tightly packed, Scourge-crippled human bones pressed down on a transparent barrier filled with murky blue fluid. Preserved flesh clung to hundreds of cadavers and skeletons, the great mass of which faded into gloom above as the fluid devoured Arrou's glowbud light.

  Jenette crawled up between Karr and the Khafra, and turned over herself. "Arrou, there are no such things as ghosts—ugh!" Jenette immediately tried to flatten out and not touch the clammy membrane. The skeleton of a baby stared hollowly down at her. She clenched her eyes and did not move.

  "What is this?" Karr asked.

  Jenette shivered, saying, "Body dump," as if that explained it all.

  "I don't understand."

  Forcing herself to open her eyes, Jenette explained further. "From when there were too many Scourge deaths to bury colonists individually, and before the invention of reusable incinerods." Jenette shivered. She remembered rumors of strange experiments perpetrated on dead human bodies in an effort to understand Scourge better....

  Gathering her courage, Jenette wriggled for the far side of the fissure. Karr and Arrou kept pace. The humans worried that the alien's armor plates would rip the membrane, but it held.

  They came out of the crack on a cliff-like ledge where the shaft reopened and took a sharp plunge back downward. The body dump now pressed in on the shaft from the sides of the support strut structure as well as the ce
iling. Skulls wore silent screams like victims drowning under ice, testament to their final horror.

  No one wanted to spend much time there.

  "Hey stragglers," Toliver muttered into his comset. "You coming through or what?"

  "Just about, sir," buzzed Mok's voice. "Grubb and Dr. Marsh are coming through now—whoa...!"

  A strange noise carried over the comsets: Kekitekitekitek.

  "What's that?" said Jenette.

  "Sonofabitch!" came Mok's voice.

  Thok, thok! Pulse-rifle concussions thumped.

  "Mok? Report!" Toliver dropped down to the crack, but he couldn't see through. "Mok? Mok...? Grubb, fill me in!"

  "Can't see!" Grubb replied. "I'm in the squeeze."

  Kekitek, kekitekitek.

  More shots resounded. Thok! Thok! Thoka-thoka-thok! Then the noise died down.

  "Whooo-hoooo!" buzzed a jubilant voice. "Look at 'em run!"

  "Mok, report!"

  "I'll do better than that, sir. I'll show you."

  "This better be good," Toliver muttered to himself as they waited for Mok to come through.

  Shortly, the fissure lit up with wavering searchbeam light. "Make way, make way! Man on a mission!" Mok wriggled out and stood up. He opened a thigh pocket and, carefully, pulled out a plum-sized object. "Hey Arrou, is this your big bug?" Mok held a diminutive creature between thumb and forefinger. Legs and mandibles twitched helplessly under a helmet-shaped carapace. Mok feigned fright. "Ooooh, aaaaah."

  "That not big bug," Arrou grumbled.

  "There were thousands of these," Mok reported to Toliver, "but a few well-placed blasts frightened them off."

  Faces leaned in for a closer look at the helpless creature.

  Mok grinned at his triumph. "They're kind of cute, don't you think?" He winked at Arrou. Arrou rumbled grumpily. Mok gloated. But then, abruptly—

  Snak!

  "Aaaaagh!" Mok yowled as the suddenly not so helpless creature twisted its tree-pruner mandibles around and snipped off his right forefinger. "Ah fuck! Ow! Owwww!" Mok flailed his hand. The buzzer fell away with its ill-gotten prize firmly in its teeth and skittered for the narrow fissure. Blood fountained from Mok's stump. "It's got my finger! It's got my fucking finger! Don't let it get away!"

  Dr. Marsh grabbed for the Guard's hand.

  Grubb dove after the tiny thief.

  "No!" Karr yelled, too late.

  Grubb's pulse-rifle, which was slung over his shoulder and sticking point up, ripped into the body-dump membrane. With appalling speed, the small puncture widened into a huge gash. A tidal wave of cadavers and blue embalming fluid vomited out, engulfing the hapless humans and Khafra on the ledge.

  Karr was swept down the chasm, spinning end over end in the noxious brew. He clung to the Gattler for dear life as the flood scraped him against tower girders and roots, pummeling him with clammy bones and body parts. Impacts came without warning in the dark. Karr couldn't see or feel anyone else. He couldn't breathe. Ten seconds elapsed. Twenty seconds. Forty seconds. Karr had not been able to take a deep breath before the flood hit him. His lungs burned from stale air.

  Just as Karr's instinct to breathe was about to force him to gulp a lungful of blue death, the torrent passed out of the bottom of the beacon tower. Karr broke the surface and gulped fetid air, uncaring of its flavor. For a spinning instant he heard screaming—Mok? Marsh? And he saw a glowing Khafra head rise above the flood— Arrou? The faint glowbud light illuminated scattered images: an inverted teardrop cavern, an extremely large root running down through the center, steaming pits ringing that thick trunk at the narrow bottom of the hollow.

  The torrent swept Karr down into one of the pits. He jammed the Gattler into its smooth lip and was rewarded with a precarious hold, but then a Khafra body slammed into him. The Gattler slipped free and the torrent sucked Karr down a long, subterranean tube. Twisting. Falling. Half-breathing, half-drowning. In the dark. Karr felt the torrent speed up. His stomach heaved as the fluid flung him down a cataract and then pressed him through a jam of cadavers around the inside of a tight curve.

  And then, as quickly as the flood had hit, Karr was left behind, tumbling over a heap of fetid corpses, alone and gasping for air, his head hitting too hard against the floor. He fell unconscious in a black passage deep under Coffin Island.

  XXXI

  Man is great, Man is good, Let us thank him for our food.

  —In-human prayer

  Consciousness returned to Karr. Stiffness in his joints hinted that he had been out for a while. Stench in his nostrils compelled him to move. In the pitch black, he rolled off a pile of slippery corpses and leaned against the side of what seemed to be an organic sewer pipe. Groping about, he located the Gattler. The device had no searchbeam or flashlight; Karr made a mental note to report the design flaw to its manufacturers, if he ever got the chance. He tipped the device down and heard fluid drain from its many barrels.

  "Hello?" he said quietly into the darkness.

  Only a distant gurgling answered.

  Karr strained with his other senses in the dark. The tunnel was small and round; outstretched arms touched all sides. Karr noted that while the fetid air seemed smothering and hot, the walls were cool. He felt disoriented, as if the entire tunnel was swaying gently. He decided that his inner ear was still spinning from the trip down and sat still for a minute or two, but the sensation did not go away.

  "Hello?" he called again, louder. "This is Pilot Karr. Jenette? Arrou? Anybody?"

  No response. And he couldn't just sit still. They had come to Coffin Island to gather enough munitions to make an explosive device yielding forty to fifty kilotons. That, he admitted, might be a bit difficult, considering recent developments. But that was his mission, and he must attempt to fulfill it, even if he had no idea how that could now occur.

  A muffled buzz arose from his left.

  Karr tensed, finger on the Gattler's trigger. He thumbed the selector to check that the cutting beam was still activated. But nothing attacked. Slowly, Karr crawled toward the sound. Lumps of flesh slipped out from under his hands and feet. After a few feet, the buzzing seemed to be below him, and sounded halfway familiar. Karr wormed his left hand into a heap of body parts. Cold and soft... cold and soft... warm and firm. Karr's fingertips closed around a thin object and pulled it free. It buzzed. Karr jumped, then cursed himself for a fool and squeezed dry foamies on each end of the flexible loop in his hands and pulled it over his head.

  Mok's disembodied voice buzzed over the comset. "—my leg's broke!"

  "Thank piss you're still alive," Liberty's gruff female voice complained.

  "And my finger's gone," Mok moaned. "My finger's gone, my leg's broke, and I can't feel my arm."

  "Fuck your fucking finger," Liberty exploded. "You dumb shit, it's always the same, fuckup, fuckup, fuckup. Squad on punishment detail. Squad on graveyard watch. Squad on KP. Now this!"

  "It wasn't my fault," Mok whined. "Grubb broke the body dump open."

  "Fuckwit," said Liberty. "I've had it with your stupid, pud-pounding crap!"

  The com channel squawked with arguing Guard voices.

  "Liberty, do you talk to your mother with that mouth?" Jenette's unmistakable soprano cut in.

  "Not anymore—she's dead," Liberty at first quipped. Eventually, she regained her composure. "Sorry, Consul."

  "Whatever," said Jenette. "Just everybody pipe down. Pipe down." The radio chatter subsided. "Where's our doctor?"

  Marsh obligingly broke into the circuit. "Mok, how's the leg? Is the skin pierced by bone?"

  A brief pause as Mok examined his leg. "Oww. Shit. I don't think so."

  "So it's not bleeding?"

  "No, just broken."

  "At least it's not a compound fracture. Do you have a venom kit for your arm?"

  "No," Mok said in a worried tone. "Dr. Marsh, I can't feel my arm. The poison's moving up my arm and it's twitching all by itself."

  "Wrap something around the stump. And
don't move. Hold your arm below your heart. You don't want to pump the toxins through your system faster than you have to. Try to keep your heart rate low."

  "Keep my heart rate low?" Mok said with rising panic. "How the fuck am I supposed to do that?"

  "Just stay calm. Calm."

  Mok moaned.

  "Mok, do you have any idea where you are?" Jenette demanded.

  "No."

  "All right," Jenette paused. Karr had a distinct mental image of her nose crinkled up in thought. "Stay put. We'll find you. Deena, are you hurt and where are you?"

  "I'm with Skutch. Neither of us are injured."

  "Liberty?"

  "Up to my ass in cadavers and bitchy as hell."

  "I'll take that as an uninjured."

  "Did I mention alone and lost in the dark?"

  "That makes two of us," Jenette's voice buzzed. Further conversation revealed that Liberty's searchbeam was broken. Everyone else, except for Skutch, had lost their light sources in the flood. "What about our domestics?"

  Crash was with Marsh and Skutch. No one knew where Arrou and Bronte were.

  "Where's the Corporal?" Skutch asked. "Why isn't he on comset?"

  "Toliver? Corporal Toliver?" There was no response to Jenette's query. "And where's our Pilot?"

  Karr spoke up, "I'm okay."

  "Pilot Lindal Karr...? Anybody see Lindal Karr?"

  "I'm okay," Karr repeated.

  Liberty sighed angrily. "Great. We lost the fucking Pilot."

  Karr realized that he was not getting through to them. As he had done for so many fuguetime years, Karr unconsciously reached to adjust a voice emulator at his throat. Of course, there was no voice emulator at his throat. It and the pitch adjusters for his ears had gone missing when he crashed into New Ascension's ocean. Rethinking his predicament, Karr examined his headset in the dark. The microphone tip was broken off. The comset could receive, but not transmit.

  Disembodied voices bantered for a while in his ears. Then a bleeping sounded over the channel.

  "Crap," said Liberty, "Dr. Bigelow's scanner is flipping out."