by Ivan Cat
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Suddenly, Tlalok's choice was easy.
Tlalok tortured Karr for another three days. Then, and only then, when the human's story did not change, did Tlalok relent and agree to Karr's proposal.
XLIX
Sunset, six days later.
The passageway descended through layers and layers of ghutzu root. Karr followed it down to a grotto where stacks of equipment and glowbars on tripod stands surrounded the null-fusion reactor. Cables snaked from null-regulator sinks and other diagnostic devices to various apertures on the elephantine hourglass. Dr. Bigelow and Guardsman Skutch were hard at work rigging the reactor, leaning in through two of its many access hatches. Karr did not disturb the two humans, but observed, trying to discern if all was going according to plan.
"I've worked out the sequence for shaping the blast," Hutch was saying in a muffled voice.
"Are you certain?" Bigelow responded, equally muffled. "The fields must drop in precisely the right order to shape the detonation up and away from the Pilot's ship."
"Had to increase the figures in the formula by a factor of ten thousand, but it should work..."
Karr felt a chill. Was he doing the right thing?
Hutch leaned out of the reactor to get a different tool and spotted Karr. "Pretty amazing what a few thousand Ferals can do, hunh?" the Guard quipped, apparently far more confident in his equations than Karr was with his own plans.
"Yes," Karr agreed without enthusiasm. Hordes of the aliens had dragged the reactor to its present location by sheer force of numbers, pulling on a web of lines half a kiloyard long. Now that mass of Ferals was above Karr, using their immune venom to stimulate the growth of dense, fire-resistant ghutzu over the top of the reactor grotto. The protective mound thickened at the rate of one foot per hour. Presently it was the height of a seven-story building. Karr hoped that would be thick enough because it wasn't going to get a lot thicker than that before its protective capabilities were put to the test.
"You brought it, I see," Skutch noted.
"Yes," said Karr, holding up his Gattler. "This won't affect the plan, will it?"
Skutch walked over to Karr and took the Gattler. "Not a chance. There's enough juice in this reactor to snuff out your fire, and then some." Skutch attached the Gattler to one of the many cables connecting to the reactor. The multitool began to bleep happily, its powerpaks recharging. "Where you're going, I figure you might need to use a cutting beam."
Skutch returned to work. Karr stepped over to Bigelow, who was taking readings with a hand-held scan-tap and holding another complicated instrument in his teeth. Bigelow noticed Karr's presence, but kept on at his task and, for a while, Karr waited patiently.
"Will it work?" Karr asked when he finally could restrain himself no longer.
Bigelow shot Karr a sweaty look and removed the tool from his mouth. "The difficulties," he pronounced, his fingers moving with artful precision and speed, testing, tuning, and realigning the reactor's innards, "are a matter of scale rather than probability. The reactor is more than capable of producing the desired pyrotechnics. Not, however, before the null-core is operating at full capacity, a process which alone will take eight more hours. Furthermore, while it is commonly assumed that null-fusion processes are held in check by a single null-field, that is not strictly true. In fact, there are some one thousand two hundred and ninety-six separate nodes, which are divided into twenty-four separate sectors. Each and every one of those nodes generates a portion of the field and each and every one of them must be examined and brought up to specifications. I estimate sixteen hours to completion."
Karr tapped his subdermal chronometer. "Ten hours and counting down."
"Ten hours?" Bigelow repeated. His pudgy hands faltered on a recalcitrant regulator of some kind. Sparks popped. He yanked back and sucked his fingers. "Ten hours...?"
Karr's comset activated.
"It's time," Jenette's voice buzzed.
"On my way."
Karr turned away and started back up the passage.
"Wait!" called Bigelow.
Karr looked back. Bigelow and Skutch had expressions best described as those of condemned men who had just received the sentence of a brainwiping.
"Don't you want to know if we can be done in that amount time?" the scientist asked.
"No," Karr said, grimly rubbing one of the many torture marks visible on his neck. He strode away. "I've got to love what I don't want to love and trust what I don't want to trust."
A setting sun impaled itself upon the pillars of the Burning Heart of Night. The orb deflated as it sank, surrendering its essence to those radiant skewers, rimming the waves around Gnosis blood red. Kthulah had a clear view of the ill omen from the uppermost slopes of the floating mountain city: the number of Radiances was not four. Four was the number of the Prophecy. The Prophecy said a Pact would come. The Prophecy said that that Pact would make the number of the Radiances four and save a piece of the light. Pact had gathered. Pact had awaited. But the Pact had not come. What was Kthulah to do? What would come of the fourth Gift, the Gift of Gamut? Kthulah feared for the Balance. He feared for all that was precious to Pact. A decision was imminent. Kthulah did not know what that decision was yet, but he felt it in his bones, a momentous decision, requiring the wielding of much power and a reciprocal punishment such as ... such as Kthulah shuddered to think upon.
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Kthulah turned from looking inward at the Burning Heart to looking outward from the pillars of fire, his gaze following the lengthening shadows of sunset. Just beyond Gnosis, which was at a distance of one exact horizon span from the center of the Burning Heart of Night, the rest of the Pact fleet formed a vast double-tiered ring, sealing off the pillars of Radiance from outside forces. Sailtrees on the many blockading islands jutted up into the Burning Heart's flaring red light like so many blood-soaked teeth. Further out beyond the blockade, sparkling, radiant words were being relayed from where the black line of the ocean met a quickly darkening sky.
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Kthulah could feel the decision creeping closer to him, but he was not yet ready to face it.
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Kthulah's words were relayed out. More words were relayed back.
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Jenette argued, <
Kthulah objected, <
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Kthulah responded with challenging hues. <
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Jenette's words flashed meekly. <
Kthulah was angry with h
imself. He had felt a surge of hope at the possible coming of the prophesied Pact, even though the promise came from a blank-one, whom no sane Pact would trust even if they did speak the radiant language of truth. He abruptly ended the communication. <
The renegade ring-island bludgeoned through ocean waves like an ancient Terran dreadnaught. Ferals manned the island's sail-trees, spreading maximum surface of leaf-sail to the wind. Human soldiers and pulse cannons bristled along its broad flanks. It was an unlikely sight, the product of an even more unlikely alliance: Tlalok's fierce Ferals, colony humans loyal to Jenette (those of the non-loyal, Pilot-consuming variety had stayed behind on the decimated Enclave island), and a few precious scores of domestics were all united to save the fugueship, Long Reach, the Burning Heart of Night.
Karr stood at the center of that maelstrom upon a dome of fire-insulating ghutzu. Ferals swarmed over the mound, like a nest of disturbed insects, stabbing their long teeth into the roots and injecting growth-stimulating immune venom. Tendrils sprouted and entwined before Karr's very eyes. Karr had to keep shifting his boots to keep from being rooted to the spot. Shy of being up in a sailtree, however, it was the best vantage point on the island. Karr had a clear view downwind, where the Feral battle lines were coming into view, their islands stretched across the western horizon from one end to the other, steadfastly maintaining their position by tacking against the wind, first one way and then the other, as Tlalok's island charged directly downwind at them.
Beside Karr, Jenette lowered the starlure and switched it off. Her arms hung slack at her sides, defeated.
"How are you holding up?" Karr asked quietly.
"I'm fine," Jenette replied, keeping a brave front. "I didn't really expect to convince him."
Karr had not been asking about Kthulah. Jenette's father had been found with his heart ripped out. She had found out during Karr's six-day interaction with Tlalok. Karr did not know how she was taking it. There had been precious little opportunity to speak to her during the preceding, highly stressful days. Ferals and Enclave humans had now been allied for three days; they had been enemies for far longer. Enmity on both sides was in constant danger of erupting and it was a testament to Jenette's diplomatic abilities that she kept the two sides focused and more or less working together. Outwardly she appeared to be under control, but Karr did not know how she was holding up, inwardly. It would be disastrous if she broke and succumbed to grief at any point in the next few critical hours. Karr did not get an opportunity to ask further questions and set his mind at ease, however. Tlalok was also atop the ghutzu mound with Karr and Jenette; Karr was wary of how the fierce alien would react to any mention of Prime Consul Olin Tesla.
And Karr was downright afraid of how Tlalok would react to what Karr must say next.
"Night is coming," Karr said, marshaling his nerve.
Tlalok's glowering head swung to face Karr.
Karr held up a black sack, which he had been clutching behind his back.
Simultaneously, Jenette spoke into her comset. "Relay command: Ferals put protection hoods on."
"Urr, protection hoods on," came the replies of numerous Khafra voices. A flashing of light code then erupted, single points of light in the island's sailtrees stuttering as domestics stationed there translated and relayed the command to all the Ferals on the island—all the thousands and thousands of Ferals of Tlalok's horde, who were crowded onto the single floating island.
Karr felt the eyes of all those Ferals turn in his direction as he continued to offer the sack to Tlalok. Jenette used the word protection to describe the hoods which had been distributed to the Ferals, but the aliens were not fooled; the sacks might be made of a special human-manufactured fabric which blocked light while allowing sound and air to pass freely, and they might also all have a single human glowbead affixed in the lining to lessen the utter darkness within, but they were blinding hoods, plain and simple. The Ferals did not care if it had taken a phenomenal human effort to construct so many in such a limited time; they did not care that if they did not don the sacks, the Burning Heart of Night would surely perish. The Ferals did not want to put them on and they would not put them on if their leader did not put his on.
And none was more loath to don a blinding hood than Tlalok.
"The human Karr will never truly grasp what he asks," the large alien growled. In the following seconds, Karr feared that Tlalok would break their covenant then and there, that suddenly the thousands and thousands of predatory aliens would revolt and cut Jenette's sixteen hundred Enclave humans to shreds. But Tlalok abruptly snatched the hood from Karr's grasp and pulled it over his head. Karr sighed with relief as he then heard the reassuring rustle of thousands more hoods being pulled over thousands more Feral heads.
Wind moaned through the sailtrees.
The blinded juggernaut continued its charge downwind.
The Clash of Radiance erupted.
The islands of the Feral blockade lost headway and drifted at the mercy of air and sea currents as countless incandescent points flared along their shores and on scattered scouting vessels arrayed across the ocean. Kthulah unleashed the might of his Radiance. Cloud bellies reflected artillery round flashes, broadsides of light volleyed toward Tlalok's island, but not a single one of Tlalok's Ferals submitted to the power of Kthulah's radiant commands. They surely would have, except that they could not submit to that which they could not see. Harder and harder Kthulah tried to win the battle of light. Even Karr, an illiterate in the alien language, could see the urgency building in Kthulah's display and its single-minded focus on making Tlalok's Ferals submit.
That was fine by Karr. The longer and harder Kthulah and his Ferals fought, the less chance they had of noticing anything else. Karr could not help glancing back to a luminescent wake, which was spreading out behind Tlalok's island. Fifty yards back, barely discernible on either side of the v-shaped trail, were two shadowy blots, each a few dozen yards across, each rimmed by faint crescents of ocean froth.
Enclave domestics, who wore no blinding-hoods, responded to the Clash of Radiance, flashing ineffectually in reaction to the entrancing lights. However, when the Clash came to an end, those domestics were no longer affected. The domestics' bonds to their humans were too strong for Kthulah to break, just as Arrou's bonds to Jenette had been too strong to be broken by the Clash of Radiance that he had witnessed from high up in a shooting-star palm along the shore of FI-716.
"Maintain heading. Maintain speed," Jenette's voice commanded in Arrou's comset.
Arrou's blood was still afire from the euphoria of the Clash of Radiance; he had enjoyed a particularly spectacular view from halfway up the island's leading sailtree. Trying to calm his racing heart, he concentrated on translating Jenette's human words into Khafra verbal language.
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Teeth clattered affirmatively inside blinding hoods near Arrou and the verbal command was relayed by Ferals up and down that sailtree's mighty bole—just as it was also being translated by domestics and relayed by Ferals in all the other sailtrees on Tlalok's island. The four hundred hunters in Arrou's tree held their positions, heads motionless in the featureless black hoods, glowbuds rippling faintly with both fear and determination. They were brave.
They were blind; Arrou was their eyes.
That was a position of great responsibility, Arrou knew. It made him edgy. Ferals did not like or trust domestics and Arrou wanted very much to prove that they were wrong about domestics. He fidgeted, scrubbing his claws on the tree branch he was perched upon.
The Feral closest to Arrou in the tree, the Feral appointed by Tlalok to speak for all the Pact in the tree, was a female. Trim and graceful of body, her glowbuds sparkled sharply, like ice under stars. Arrou felt that she was somehow observing him despite the hood over her head.
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Arrou did not know if he believed that. Probably the female was just trying to be nice. Not that there was anything specifically wrong with being nice, he decided.
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Kitrika thought about it. <
Arrou believed her, since Kitrika not only spoke her vote of trust, but also flashed it on her glowbuds, the radiant language of truth, and that calmed Arrou's worries.
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The female's colors smiled enigmatically. <
Tlalok's island continued its charge at Kthulah's blockade.
The battle lines did not stay disorganized long after the Clash of Radiance fizzled. The islands swung into the wind once more, tightening their spacing as more islands crowded in from further along the blockade to meet the intruder. None of the islands were very large; these were the nimblest, fastest sailing islands in Kthulah's armada, but the numbers were daunting. Plus, they were not content to play a waiting game. They immediately began to close against the wind, tacking diagonally to the north and then back to the south in an effort to take the battle to their enemy. At the end of each leg, light code staccatoed from one island to another along the tips of high trees and the islands heaved around in perfect synchrony. The rustle of many leafy sails going slack and then snapping back taut to the wind was audible across the ocean even at a distance of three kiloyards.
Tlalok's island battleship mustered four, perhaps five knots with the wind at its back, pushing its sailtrees forward, so that if Arrou looked straight down he was actually over water and not island. Kthulah's fleet managed far less speed tacking against the wind, but the speeds meant little. The opposing factions would meet.