Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

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.

Arrou's gut tightened.

He hoped Pilot Karr's trick would work.

The gap between closed to two kiloyards.

Wind speed surged and ebbed. The rhythmic thunder of Tlalok's island plowing through ocean swells counted off the minutes.

The gap narrowed to one kiloyard.

Arrou could now make out individual Ferals, swarming at the forward edges of their islands, ready to spill onto the shores of the blockade-runner the instant the opposing sides made contact.

Five hundred yards. Four hundred yards.

"Get ready, get ready," Jenette warned on the comset.

Three hundred yards.

"Now!" Jenette ordered. "Let her drift!"

Lose wind, lose wind! Arrou translated.

His sailtree? and all the others on Tlalok's island? came alive with activity. Thousands of Feral forepaws, Kitrika's included, felt for and located stems where sail leaves anchored to horizontal branches. Teeth injected immune venom into those junctures, easily piercing through the blinding hood fabric and into the wood. The large, green leaves immediately twisted up tight. With no surfaces to grab hold of, wind rushed past unfettered. Sailtrees swayed back up to vertical. Tlalok's island lost headway fast.

A roar arose from Kthulah's fleet as his countless Ferals saw their enemies apparently lose nerve and falter.

Halifax's gravelly voice buzzed on the comset. "Main towlines away! Skimmer teams away!"

Behind Tlalok's island, where the two dark shapes had been trailing along, two filaments glinted briefly and fell slack, dropping into the frothing water. Six plumes of spray then erupted, three ahead of each dark shape; the sound of six turbine engines revving up reached Arrou's perch. With the dark shapes in tow, the skimmers circled around opposite sides of Tlalok's island, breaking out from its shadow into the glare of the Burning Heart. Short towlines could now be seen, stretching back from two groups of three skimmers each to two small skrag islands, each less than one hundred feet in diameter.

The two skimmer teams joined up in front of Tlalok's island and proceeded to charge at the Feral battle lines.

What do you see? Kitrika asked.

Brave humans, Arrou said, without truly answering her question. He was glad Kitrika did not know what the humans were really up to. The six tiny machines dragging two pathetic skrag islands at Kthulah's armada did not make an impressive sight. As the skimmer teams closed to within two hundred yards of the blockade, the nearest Feral islands altered their direction so as to be on a course that would overrun and crush the skimmers and skrags.

Halifax's spoke on the comset again, yelling over the howl of turbines and the crash of waves. "On my mark. Three, two, one? mark!"

"Fire in the hole!" buzzed Guard voices Arrou did not recognize.

FOOM! FOOM!

White plumes flared from the skrag islands as charges preset by Guardsman Skutch ignited. Sheets of hungry green flame climbed skyward, devouring stockpiles of incendiary fuel. Candles of viridian spark flurried back and up from fires that swelled ten times larger than the skrag islands they originated from.

Confusion flashed discordantly across the blockade lines. Sail-trees on the Feral islands suddenly heaved over, groaning, dragging the islands of the fleet to either side of the oncoming menace. A gap grew in the first battle line as one island swerving caused the next in line to veer off, and so on, like falling dominoes.

The fire-skrags passed through the first battle line.

"Full speed ahead," Jenette ordered. "Full speed ahead!"

Grab wind, grab wind! Arrou yelled.

Again Kitrika and the other Ferals on his tree injected immune venom into sail-leaf stems. This time the green sheets unfurled, billowing out and catching the wind. The sailtrees on the island groaned, leaning forward once more as the island picked up speed and was soon churning along after the skimmers and fire-skrags.

Radiance flickered as leaders on the Feral fleet rallied their forces, but by the time the islands began to turn back inward, in a vain attempt to reform the first battle line, Tlalok's island was charging through the gap. Another cheer arose in the night, this time it was not from Kthulah's Ferals but from the humans on Tlalok's island, and Arrou, who tilted back his head and howled right along with them.

L

At the darkest, most desperate point of our lives, that is where we find out what we are truly made of.

? from the private journals of Olin Tesla

Tlalok's hood-blinded Ferals did not rejoice with the noisy humans and domestics. Neither did Jenette. She had direct experience with Kthulah and the Ferals of Gnosis; the fire-skrags had taken them by surprise, but they were too sophisticated to react the same way twice.

Tlalok's island, lead by the skimmers and the flaming skrags, charged at Kthulah's second battle line.

True to Jenette's fears, the Ferals of that second line reacted with none of the disarray shown by the first. The chain of islands splits, tacking away to the north and south, forming a gap in the path of the burning skrags. When the breach was wide enough to allow the fire-skrags to pass harmlessly through, the Feral islands tacked back inward on exactly the right angle to intercept Tlalok's island.

Jenette did not know what Kthulah's Ferals would do with Tlalok's Ferals if the opposing forces met, but she knew that her fellow humans would fight to the bitter end. They had gambled everything on this daring plan. They would succeed and live or fail and die. It was as simple as that. Many of both species would perish. For the greater good. Her father would have approved. Jenette hated it. She felt trapped.

Furious, she looked around the reactor mound.

Tlalok stood immobile, legs splayed and head down, a barely perceptible clenching of muscles visible under his thick armor plate. Unpredictably his head would jerk erect, his teeth splaying, stretching the blinding-hood fabric tight, and an ominous rumble would resonate through the alien's torso as he fought his deep-rooted hatred of the hood.

Karr, to Jenette's surprise, was focused on winding a small length of microfiber string around his left index finger. Once in a while, he peeked up at the unfolding sea battle, but mostly he stared at the string.

When it was all coiled up around his finger, he methodically uncoiled it, at which point he started the obsessive process all over again.

"What are you doing?" she hissed at Karr.

"Nothing," he responded without looking up.

With growing annoyance, Jenette waved an arm at the battle unfolding ahead of them. "Don't you see what's happening out there?"

"Yes," Karr said, pointedly not looking up from his winding and unwinding. "And there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. I helped make the plan. Now it is in motion. Capable humans and aliens are

executing it. I need to let them do their jobs. That's what you told me back on Coffin Island. And you were right. I must trust." Karr gritted his teeth. "Does it drive me crazy to stand here doing nothing?

Emphatically, yes! That's why I'm taking this action which affects nothing, meddles with nothing, interferes with nothing. I'm going to wind this string around my finger until we break through the Feral lines or don't.

Either way, I figure there will be plenty to keep me occupied at that point."

There was a crazy logic to Karr's explanation, Jenette had to admit.