Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

Karr's fugueship was dying.

Karr could barely bring himself to think the ugly thought. But the facts could not be avoided.

Fact: Bob had gone berserk with Gattler and qi needles. Hardly an organ, qi meridian or bone in the fugueship had gone untouched. Karr had hunted for and removed many of the needles that Bob had implanted with such callous abandon, but Long Reach's condition continued to worsen.

Fact: Bob had damaged the navigation-lure in a crude attempt to change course. The remotes in the brainroom would take weeks to fix, weeks Karr did not have.

Fact: Bob had opened Long Reach's aft engine orifices at right angles to its proper trajectory, which sent the titanic ship skewing off course.

Result: although Karr had closed the aft orifices and restored the proper flow of fuel from storage bladders into the fusion furnace, there was no chance of getting back on course for Evermore.

Fugueship trajectories built up from day after day, year after year of constant thrust. Before turnover from acceleration to braking, a trajectory change of four degrees was possible. After turnover, trajectory could not safely be altered more than two degrees. Bob, in his desperation to avoid judgment on Evermore, had opened up the reserve hydrogen bladders and attempted a course change exceeding thirty-five degrees. The mad maneuver was doomed to fail, except that Long Reach was now three degrees off course, sick, and plunging into deep space like an express elevator to hell. Karr had only enough reserve fuel to correct course one degree and still be able to brake when Long Reach dropped below ramscoop speed.

And, perhaps worse than all these physical difficulties, was Bob's final gift to Karr: the realization that it was all Karr's fault. Although rarely at the forefront of his mind, Karr was proud of being a Pilot. And not just a good Pilot, but the best Pilot. Together Karr and Long Reach had seeded more colony worlds faster and more efficiently than any other fugueship-Pilot combination. But now it was obvious that Karr was not holding up his end of the partnership.

He was a bad Pilot.

A good Pilot would have paid attention to the levels of disinfectant fluid and antifungal pills in his quarters. A good Pilot would have discovered Bob long ago and Long Reach would not be dying. It didn't matter to Karr that no one, not even his drill instructors, would have faulted him for ignoring a billion to one long shot. All Karr had was his duty. The precious moments of Karr's life, which others spent building the memories that make up a lifetime, Karr had spent in the fugueship, alone. Karr did not exist in the real world. There were no friends, lovers, family; they were dead or had never existed at all.

What did Karr's life mean if Long Reach died?

Nothing. That's what.

It was worse than if he had never been born at all.

Karr closed his eyes and pressed further back into his bed of warm brain. He had to concentrate.

Bob had shaken his universe, but Karr must not think of Bob. Karr had to solve this deadly puzzle and save his ship, before time ran out.

PART TWO

COLLISIONS

IV

Enclave of the Body Pure Planet New Ascension Seventeen years later.

It was a hopeful evening. The motion of the ground was a soothing wide roll, almost imperceptible.

Jorjorra mounds sighed and divided, sighed and divided, piling up content and calm, like melons, and warm breezes caressed clouds of petals down from blooming sailtrees. The darkness, usually full of fear and misgiving, seemed that night to wrap the ring-island and its inhabitants in sheltering arms.

A heavy duty crawler lumbered through this unaccustomed serenity, an overgrown scarab, but with six immense studded wheels instead of insect legs. Electric motors whined as it rolled along a rutted track. A one-man cab, its doors long since removed for ease of use, perched at the front of the vehicle's flat deck. Inside, a teenage-looking Jenette Tesla worked the control levers, her lithe body taut on the seat. Keen blue eyes peered past bobbed hair? which was a light gray, almost white, blonde, marking her as a second generation colonist? and she wore a one-piece daysuit the color of scorched sand.

Beside her on the engine cowling sat the predatory silhouette of a Khafra, its dagger teeth glinting in pale dashboard light.

"Rickety-brick-house," said the massive alien.

Unable to feel hopeful that night, Jenette focused on the task at hand. "Rikit-a-brikhauss. No. Rikit?

EE? brikhauss," she repeated.

Yellow starlights cascaded down flashbuds on the alien's bullet head. Jenette had said it right.

"That's what I would say," said Jenette. "Then what do you say?"

"Don't-touch-my-mustache."

"Arrou, will you please be serious," Jenette chided. "Your language is hard enough already."

"Easier this way," Arrou asserted. "Easy to remember funny rhyme." He looked down devilishly at her. "Don't-touch-my-mustache."

Jenette sighed and made a valiant attempt to wrap her lips around the alien words.

"Din-tixss-ymisstash? "

"Don't-TOUCH-my-mustache," Arrou corrected, body pulsing with the Khafra light-language equivalent. Flash, pop, sparkle, pop.

Jenette was limited to the verbal version, and her vocal cords sounded nowhere near as windy and hollow as a Khafra's, but she tried. "Din-TIXSS-ymisstash."

Again, Arrou's head glittered.

Arrou was Jenette's bonded domestic of five years. Large and covered in black armor plate, Arrou had a stunted right forepaw from an injury when human Guards kidnapped him from the wild.

The crawler lumbered over a recently fallen tree; scavenger moss was already wriggling greedily over

the windfall. Jenette turned onto a lane paved with roadwort tubers, which glowed golden yellow in the crawler's headlamps. She had been driving clockwise along the ring-island, now she steered into the residential area of the Enclave, inward from its bastion-like perimeter walls. The crawler's hollow wheels rattled on the faux-cobblestone surface.

"Oh great," Jenette grumbled, shifting the vehicle into its low power range. Colonists, unaccustomed to the feeling of well-being that night, had come out of their domiciles to stroll stiffly down the road with their domestics. All of them were moving in the same direction as Jenette, blocking the road. It was impossible to drive faster than a slow amble. "I should shut down. We could walk faster."

Arrou cocked his head, contented waves of green fading from his flashbuds. "Leave crawler?"

"Yes, you lazy Khafra, leave the crawler."

"But crawler good." It was a quirk that domestic Khafra could run a string of human words together in rhyme or play-song, but could only speak simple sentences in regular conversation. "Crawler fast."

"It's not that fast," Jenette snapped as the foot traffic increased. They passed a team of domestics repairing a pothole in the roadwort. The aliens doused damaged tubers with silvery seawater from backpack tanks and then injected immune venom through their long teeth. In response, the tubers grew with visible speed, dividing and swelling like cells reproducing in a petri dish. The hole would be filled in under an hour. Jenette didn't care. Rapid plant growth was commonplace on New Ascension, unlike the traffic. Frustrated, she let go of the drive levers and fidgeted as the crawler idled along.

"Practice more words?" Arrou offered.

"No. My brain hurts."

Jenette steered the crawler around a large group of colonists. She was just about to shoot them a reproachful glare when she suddenly focused instead on two figures farther up the road. "Look," she hissed to Arrou. "Halifax and Luca. Did we get them yet?"