Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

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 hysteria. 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.