Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

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.