THE BURNING HEART OF NIGHT

by Ivan Cat

  Karr sighed again. At a nod of his head, Liberty and the Guards let Kthulah go. The old Feral rose to all fours and padded, glowering, onto the gangway. Jenette's Feral guards gave her a shove. She stumbled, passing Kthulah midway, and fell onto the lifter near Karr's feet.

  Joining his brethren, Kthulah turned. <>

  In unison, the crowd of assembled Ferals began to blink on and off, counting down heartbeats. Karr gave Jenette an arm up, then waked calmly to the cockpit.

  Jenette followed, displeased, but making no comment.

  "Our mission has changed," Karr announced, adjusting himself before the flight controls. As the lifter disengaged from the gangway, Karr's mouth bent into a guilty grin. "We're going to witness the birth of four baby fugueships!"

  "Don't get too excited," Jenette cautioned. "We have to go back to the Enclave first."

  "Back to the Enclave? But the spawning could occur at any moment."

  "The gestation period is two hundred and fifty-six days," Jenette said matter-of-factly. "Four days after the Tears fall, the Burning Heart blossoms. Four times four, times four, times four days later, the Burning Heart births. Your ship sank and ignited twenty days ago. Therefore there are two hundred and thirty-six days to go. Therefore we have time to return to the Enclave—and I need to return right away."

  "You extracted this information from Feral texts?"

  "Yes, and I believe them to be accurate."

  "Fine," said Karr, taking only a little time to think it over. "I trust you."

  Jenette smiled stiffly.

  With a last look at the Ferals, who were counting down to a renewed state of hostilities, Karr pulled up on the throttle and the lifter soared high into the sky on a heading for the human colony.

  No one was able to make comset contact with the Enclave; no one had been able to since leaving Coffin Island. Karr and Arrou flew shifts of four hours on, four hours off; that night, after a switch of hands for paws at the helm, Arrou trotted to the left-hand edge of the deck and looked down.

  "Urft."

  Arrou's earpits opened and his head tilted, orb eyes narrowing. He gripped the sidewall, then his head and shoulders disappeared from view entirely.

  "Hrrr-rrrffft."

  Dr. Bigelow, whose nights had been melancholic and sleepless since Coffin Island, craned his head up from his bedroll. "Problem?"

  Arrou's head bobbed back up, teeth clattering. "Reactor door open."

  "An open hatch, on my reactor?" Bigelow levered himself to his feet and trundled over to join Arrou. "How could that happen?"

  Bigelow looked down. Arrou looked down.

  "Where?"

  Arrou pointed. "There."

  "I discern no open hatch."

  "Urrr ... was open."

  "I hauled myself out of a cozy bed for 'was open'?"

  "Heard scraping," Arrou insisted. "Saw with own eyes. Vrrrrrph—look, look!"

  Bigelow squinted in the moonlight. The reactor was a dark hourglass shape against the glimmer of moonlit waves. He retrieved a searchbeam and swept the gunmetal reactor casing.

  "There, there!" said Arrou.

  Bigelow moved the beam where Arrou indicated. "Well, what do you know? It's not exactly open, but it's not exactly closed, either."

  "Was open before."

  Stringy green fronds were jammed in a hatch preventing it from locking fully shut. Only Arrou could have seen it without the searchbeam.

  "However did that happen?" Bigelow wondered.

  "Arrou want to know, too."

  Bigelow considered. "In any event, we can't leave it like that. The Enclave could use a second reactor and I intend to keep this one functional." He unfastened a cargo hook from the sidewall, extending its telescoping segments. "Lend a paw, please."

  Human and alien maneuvered the long pole down and hooked the seaweed. A flip of the pole tossed the hairy mass back down into the ocean and a broadside smack closed the hatch with the distinct clunk and click of latches locking.

  "That ought to do it," Bigelow said as they pulled the pole back onboard, collapsed it, and re-stowed it on the sidewall.

  Bigelow snapped off the searchbeam and returned to his bedroll, his melancholy, and his insomnia. Neither Karr nor Jenette took notice of the incident; each was wrapped tight in their own concerns. But Arrou remained where he was for some time, looking down suspiciously at the reactor and the hatch that wasn't open anymore.

  The Enclave island and the Feral island were rammed together, edges overlapping; other smaller islands drifted nearby, apparently abandoned. The impact had crushed a portion of the Enclave's battlements near a cluster of hydroponic domes. Feral bodies littered the breach. Pulse-cannon gouges smoldered like fissures to the underworld. Fires burned from wrecked crawlers and windowless buildings, bathing the grisly scene in flickering crimson.

  It was eleven hours after Jenette had been summarily ejected from Gnosis.

  Karr spiraled the heavy lifter through funnels of oily-smelling smoke, warily closing on the battleground. He flicked on the lifter's landing lights; four broad beams shimed down from the corners of its hull. His human passengers looked down in silent distress. The domestics moaned deep in their barrel chests.

  Within the colony walls, human and alien corpses lay where they had fallen. Feral dead outnumbered human dead many times over. Tall parasitic grasses had sprung up all over the island, attracted by those carcasses, overgrowing and inundating fields, streets, and alleys with an eerie flood of shoulder-high fronds.

  "Polyp-grass," Dr. Marsh observed.

  The other colonists shivered.

  Jenette pointed to a wide boulevard which led to the cylindrical Chamber of the Body Pure. "Set down over there."

  Karr didn't like the idea of setting down in the high fronds and said so. Liberty and the Guards swept the area with searchbeams, the tight bright beams illuminating details of the carnage. No Ferals were visible, but Karr still didn't like it.

  Jenette glowered. "Just get us down. I don't care where—"

  "Look!" interrupted Skutch. "Searchbeams! On the crawler barns."

  Lights shot up from a warehouse roof. Narrow beams waggled frantically in thick smoke. Karr flew closer. Colonists waved and shouted from the roof. Karr's passengers waved and shouted back. More colonists showed themselves, crowding surrounding roofs and alleys. All of them gestured for Karr to land.

  "This roof won't take the weight of the reactor," Karr said, sizing up the area, "and the streets are too narrow to set down. I'll drop you off, then hover until you can get back to me with a report on where it's safe to land."

  Jenette nodded.

  The lifter sank, its edge contacting the edge of the garage roof. Karr held the flying platform steady as Jenette and the others hurried off, eager for news of friends and family.

  Colonel Halifax, Subconsul Bragg, and a score of battle-bruised colonists rushed to meet Jenette on the roof. Halifax opened his mouth to speak, but Bragg interrupted.

  "Where's the fugue?" Bragg demanded. "We need the fugue right away." Dirty battlefoam dressings swathed Bragg's left arm. Many of the Guards and Reserves bore wounds as well.

  The flicker of disappointment on Jenette's brow was enough of an answer for Halifax, but Bragg and the others were not so observant. Their hopeful faces fixated on the heavy lifter and those same faces fell when Karr flew up and away from the roof.

  "Where's he going?" Bragg shouted, stirring the colonists up.

  "Steady," Halifax growled. The Guards in the crowd wavered and held, but the less disciplined Reserves (many of whom wore the red-and-green armband of Bragg's Volunteer Forces) rushed the roof edge with Bragg.

  "The Body Pure! Stop! Come back!"

  "Order, order!" Halifax barked. "Form up in squads!" The Reservists might have rallied, if Bragg had not been adding to the hy
steria. Halifax's voice lowered in disgust. "Someone should code red that bastard."

  Jenette looked around. The roof top vantage gave a clear, unambiguous view of the colony's desperate position.

  "Where's my father, Colonel?"

  At that point, the stalwart soldier frowned.

  Karr auto-hovered at a safe height for a minute or two, collecting items from his small equipment stockpile: extra charge nodules for the Gattler, a tool whose handle looked like it would make a good club, even the data cube that Karr had recovered from Mad Bob's hideout in Long Reach. Anything that looked like it could possibly be useful went into his pockets or snapped onto belt loops in preparation for the time when he must land on the battle-torn island below. Then Karr flew slow circles over the Enclave, observing as he waited for word from Jenette.

  Human and Feral forces had fought to a standoff. Humans held a small triangular area bounded by the crawler garage, the armory, and the Great Hall. Ferals occupied the rest of the island. Karr could see them, hiding in the polyp grass; sometimes they reflexively flared white when the lifter's landing lights passed over them. Karr suspected there were several thousands of the aliens within the Enclave's breached defenses. A no-man's land—the exact width of a pulse-rifle shot—separated the two opposing forces. The humans were in a bad way, but the Ferals did not seem to have the ability to finish them off.

  Karr saw the reason why.

  A pair of Ferals attempted to sneak across the contested area. A fusillade of pulse-rifle fire erupted from its human defenders. The Ferals stopped and took cover, but did not retreat. What drove the Ferals back was a wide line of domestics, lead by a single, bold domestic, who left the cover of human barricades and paced slowly, unwaveringly, straight for the Ferals. Unwilling to fight their domesticated brethren, the Ferals retreated. At a signal from their leader, another domestic, the domestic line halted and then, without breaking formation, marched slowly backward to the human barricades.

  Stalemate.

  Karr continued overflying the crawler garage. Each time he looked for Jenette, but she did not reappear. The circuits began to add up. Karr began to feel uneasy. In their haste to disembark from the lifter, the colonists had not left him a comset. What was going on down there? After quite some time, a few searchbeams stabbed up to attract his attention. Karr flew closer. A press of colonists shouted and gesticulated at him. Karr leaned over the edge of the cockpit.

  "Over there! Put the reactor down over there!" they shouted, pointing to a wide street that ringed the Great Hall.

  "Where's Consul Jenette?" Karr shouted back.

  The response was hard for Karr to make out, something about an emergency briefing with Colonel Halifax and that they, the crowd, would take Karr to Jenette as soon as he set down. It was a less than perfect scenario as far as Karr was concerned, but then the situation at the Enclave was far from perfect. Karr followed the crowd to a space where they had flattened the polyp grasses down into a makeshift landing pad. With a last look around for Ferals, Karr let the lifter sink; he felt a solid jolt as the null-fusion reactor touched ground. Karr worked the grapple remotes. The hull bobbed upward as the robotic arms released their weighty burden.

  "Now set down!" the crowd shouted. "That's it! Over here!"

  Karr hovered over to a second flattened patch of polyp grass and was just easing down on the throttle, everything seeming okay, when the crowd became agitated, like a disturbed buzzer nest. A man came running out of an alley, screaming and waving madly at Karr. "No! Don't do it! Get away!" A scuffle broke out. Crude wooden clubs appeared in the hands of individuals in the crowd, which seemed peculiar, but then the colonists turned and beat the protesting man into unconsciousness—which seemed absolutely bizarre.

  Karr reapplied power to the thrusters. Unfortunately, his reaction was a split second too late.

  Zing, clak!

  A grappling line shot up and hooked the lifter. Zing, zing, zing! Clakety, clak, clak! A dozen more lines hooked around engine cowlings, cargo arms, and sidewalls. Karr ducked as a self-guided rocket whooshed around the cockpit, looping a noose of filament around Karr and cinching him tight in place. Karr yanked the throttle. Colonists holding the lines soared off the ground. Bunches of other colonists grabbed hold of the lines, but the orbiter easily pulled them all into the air. Karr jerked the power, hoping to dislodge the attackers. A few fell, but most hung on tenaciously, some even activated climbing winches and reeled themselves upward. One industrious group spooled out more line, dropping to the ground, and anchored the line around a sailtree. Now Karr gunned the engines to full force. The lifter swung to the limit of the tether, bowing the sailtree over with brute force. The high tensile cable shuddered. Tree roots tore up from the ground, clinging, clinging— and then gave out all at once. Freed of restraint, the heavy lifter shot sideways over the island, colonists dangling from the grapple lines, the uprooted tree trunk caroming behind, crushing ceramite structures and flesh-and-blood bipeds with uncaring abandon.

  Karr almost regained control of the lifter at the edge of the structures that marked the boundary of no-man's land, but another swarm of colonists charged out from a cluster of water treatment spheroids, each carrying shoulder mounted launchers. Pif, pif, piffff. Glittering braids of thread arched up and exploded. Fap! Charged strands showered down on deck, contacting the micro-fiber relays that ran from cockpit to thrusters. Sparks crackled. White-hot current jumped. Karr clung to the stick and throttle as the engines sputtered and went into safety glide-down. The heavy lifter twirled out over no-man's land, altitude dropping. The rear of the deck hit first, crushing polyp fronds, the aft thrusters gouging deep scars into the island; colonists bounced like rag dolls, losing hold of their lines and falling limp. Engine thrust tapered out, leaving Karr with no control whatsoever.

  Karr prayed that the lifter would just skate through the polyp field, bouncing and tearing up the parasitic grasses and dissipating energy. Perhaps the orbiter could then come to a stop relatively unhurt—and hopefully not in Feral territory. But the hull pitched sideways as it passed over a small rise in the ground. The right front corner dug in, causing the lifter to flip end over end and, as ill luck would have it, smash down on the only hard object in the open area, a bunker-like hexagonal structure. The lifter's ceramite hull broke into several sections upon impact with the unforgiving plasteel formation. Karr's forward section ground to an abrupt, violent halt, upside-down and with its leading edge in a shallow depression. Only the engine cowlings saved Karr from being crushed flat. He hung upside down from the cockpit, entrapped by the grapple lines, his head swimming from the impact, and the sound of pulse-rifle shots cracking in his ears. Before he could collect his wits and sever the imprisoning grapple-line filaments, colonists swarmed the lifter.

  "Get him! Hold him, hold him!"

  White-haired, pasty-skinned preadolescents—too many to fight, even if Karr hadn't been dazed—grabbed and clutched. They cut his bindings, stripped the Gattler, club tool, recharge containers, and any other potential weapon from Karr's possession, and manhandled him out from under the lifter.

  "The Body Pure! The Body Pure!"

  The mob hoisted Karr into the air like a trophy and, firing pulse-rifles to cover their retreat, swept him across no-man's land and back behind the buildings within human-held territory.

  XLV

  "It is not the unconquerable soul of man, nor the complexity of his tools, but the white-knuckle fear of death that insures his survival."

  —from the speeches of Olin Tesla

  Jenette entered the room expecting a fight. What awaited her was closer to a funeral.

  The gutted records room was at the back of the Great Hall. It made a poor infirmary, but then the hospital had been overrun by Ferals, and furthermore, the room's occupant had refused to be evacuated from the Enclave's seat of government. Olin Tesla lay on a couch at the rear of the narrow space. Dusty outlines revealed where boxes and shelves had been removed to make room for him. The
air smelled of stimpaper, dust, and sterile spray. Medical devices provided the only illumination: biosentries blinked along Tesla's form, powerbeads glowed in battle dressings, hoses pumped in luminescent fluids under green surgical sheets and drew other, darker fluids out and away.

  Jenette drew the door shut behind her. Click.

  The wounded Prime Consul strained, unsuccessfully, to turn his head. "Who's there?"

  "It's me," Jenette answered in a small voice. She did not want to go any further into the room. She did not want to see what she would see if she moved closer. She leaned against the door for support. Don't forget, he brought this on himself. He brought this on all of us.

  "Jenette," Tesla said, hope flaring in his weak voice. "I knew you would come. Your mission, was it a success?"

  "No," Jenette admitted. Her father sagged visibly. "Sorry."

  "Don't be sorry," he said. "Succeed or fail, but don't be sorry as long as you did your best."

  Jenette flinched. Was that compassion from her father? She did not want it. Not with what she had festering in her gut. Soon it would explode. Soon, but not just yet.... For now Jenette was still intimidated by what she saw. "Colonel Halifax says you saved a squad of Reserves," she said, her voice sounding distant in her own head. "He says you fought off two Ferals with your bare hands."

  "With a knife. I didn't fare so well."

  "Halifax says you won."

  "Halifax has a strange definition of winning."

  As if to punctuate the irony of that word, a fit of choking overcame the Prime Consul. Thick fluid appeared at the corners of his mouth. The drawn-out sounds left the room feeling empty.

  Jenette's hands began to shake. She clenched them behind her back and forced herself to walk to her father's side. His Feral opponents had not surrendered their lives easily. Her father's head was a broken mess, his extremities slashed in a dozen places, his abdomen gored open. Surgical foam covered the wounds, inset organisms buzzed frantically to stem internal damage, but they could not hide the severity of his condition.