Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

Karr charged at the in-human's back. Clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, his heavy kilnsuit joints sounded.

WHAM! Karr's impact knocked the in-human over the well shaft. Karr himself teetered on the edge. The in-human fell, whirling in midair. One of its claws grabbed Karr's leg. Karr could not move; the kilnsuit had momentarily locked up from the collision. The in-human's weight yanked. Karr lost his balance and felt himself begin to fall. The pit seemed to reach up, a hungry, swallowing mouth.

He and the in-human plummeted out of view.

"Get out! Leave me!" Bigelow's voice choked on Jenette's comset.

"Not right, not right! Come with, come with!" she heard Arrou protest in the background.

"Do as he says, Clarence!" Jenette ordered.

"No," Bigelow gasped. "I can't? I won't ? live like this? ."

"Get him out of here, Arrou...."

Click. The comset went dead.

"We've got to get out of the blast zone!" Liberty yelled into Jenette's ear.

Jenette shook her head. "Arrou's coming!"

"He can't make it!" Liberty objected.

"He'll make it!"

But even as Jenette uttered the words, she did not believe them. Another of the smaller pillars of fire was thundering toward Tlalok's island, and this time there would be no near miss.

Arrou struggled to carry Tlalok up the tunnel. The Feral was even bigger than Arrou. Arrou could not move very fast with such a heavy weight on his back, and the fact that he could not see just made matters worse.

No, no, Tlalok protested meekly, too beautiful... stay, stay....

Halfway up the passage, Arrou ripped the blinding hood off his head and threw it away. Dazzling light poured up from behind him, teasing him to stop and take a look at its beauty, maybe even go back. But Arrou must not look back, not for the light, not even for his friend Dr. Bigelow. Arrou had touched his friend Dr. Bigelow and found out what the in-human had done to him. Arrou felt very bad about that. If only he had not shown the abomination mercy back on Coffin Island. He wished, he wished... but wishing was useless! All that was left was doing. Now all Arrou could do was respect Bigelow's wishes

? and get out.

The island shuddered under Arrou's legs. Something big had collided with it. BOOM!

The tunnel mouth was getting closer. Tlalok began to struggle on Arrou's back. Arrou wondered if he was strong enough to knock Tlalok out, but, unexpectedly, Tlalok spoke coherently.

Put Tlalok down. Tlalok can walk.

Tlalok could walk. As distance made the null-field radiance weaker and weaker, Tlalok even began

to run. The two Khafra broke out of the tunnel at a full gallop.

The surface of the island was bathed in blood-red light, the ground lurching as one of the four small columns of hydrogen fire rammed against it, carving into it and hammering up cyclones of sparks. Flaming debris rained down around Arrou and Tlalok, exploding on impact and setting shriveled vegetation on fire. Arrou and Tlalok bounded down the mound of ghutzu as the island began to spin, grinding around the flaming spear, rotating ever nearer to the central inferno. Red hot hail pelted their backs. Smoke stung their eyes. The heat of the air sawed at their throats and lungs.

Land waves rippled out from the impacting pillar of fire, kicking the ground up under their feet. Tlalok, not yet fully recovered from his encounter with the null-field Radiance, faltered. Arrou nipped at his heels to keep him going. Somehow, running through the rolling hills and valleys, evading scorched, heavy tree trunks that swung at them like giant pendulums, they made it to the shore? but there was no skimmer!

Arrou clawed the ground in frustration.

Arrou's blank-one has abandoned us, Tlalok rumbled, as if he had expected such a betrayal all along.

No, said Arrou, searching the nearby ocean in the hope that the skimmer was close and they would be able to swim out after it. Jenette not abandon Arrou. Of course, even as he flashed his thoughts, he remembered that Jenette had abandoned him once before. He tried to tell himself that that time was different, that she had been trying to save his life? however misplaced that sentiment had been? and that she would never abandon him to die, but he wasn't doing a good job convincing himself. The longer he searched, the more hopeless it seemed.

The island lurched hard. Arrou watched a particularly large land wave ripple across the island. The ground under him and Tlalok was sucked down as it rolled toward them and then they were riding up its steep face and then looking out from high atop its crest.

And there was the skimmer!

Off, clockwise, along the shore, there were Jenette and the Guards, desperately waving heat-shield blankets to attract attention. Arrou realized he had somehow become disoriented in the run down from the tunnel. The skimmer was where it was supposed to be? and so was Jenette. With a howl of relief, Arrou took a fix on the vehicle and lead Tlalok diagonally through the hills and troughs of land waves. In very little time they were in the right location. The skimmer was floating a dozen yards off shore to keep from being battered to pieces by the island's pistoning shoreline. Liberty gunned the skimmer's turbine engine, circling the craft closer to the two Khafra. Arrou and Tlalok sprang onto its near wing. Their claws skittered on the wet surface. Skutch and Grubb reached out and heaved Tlalok inside. Arrou half leapt, half crashed into the inner hull beside them.

The island spun free of the flame pillar. It and the skimmer were now within the orbit that the small pillars took around the large one.

"Go, go, go!" screamed Jenette. "Hit it!"

Liberty applied full power. The skimmer's speed ramped up and it rose onto its stubby, ground-effects wings. Exposed human skin began to burn and blister as Liberty steered a path outward, equidistant between two of the small columns of flame.

The null-field was dim once more; it had been an easy task for Bigelow to correct the in-human's amateurish sabotage. The scientist sat cross-legged under the pinched midsection at the reactor's waist, a

Buddha of exquisite agony, his life fluids seeping away. Teeny-tiny buzzers swarmed over him, attracted by the sickly sweet smell of a meal, tickling his internal organs with their dozens of scurrying legs.

In each hand Bigelow held a wire. The ends were frayed. He did not allow them to touch.

The time was near. Bigelow could feel it. The cavity shook from the colossal impact of the island against the central column of fugueship fire. The room shuddered more violently as, Bigelow deduced, the island was being sucked in and consumed by the great inferno. Even the mound of fire-resistant ghutzu would be burning now, his shielding becoming weaker by the heartbeat.

He must wait.

His mind became calm. A few lines of a favorite poem played upon his tongue.

"And you, my father, there on the sad height, "Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray ? "

The temperature soared. He felt the air being sucked out of the chamber. He must hold off. Until he was as near to the center of the inferno as possible.

"Do not go gentle into that good night,"

"Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

The island began to tilt.

Bigelow touched the wires together.

The island, a ragged crescent tearing itself apart upon the pillar of fugueship fire behind Jenette, disappeared. The world abruptly went out of focus. A ghostly cloud of Shockwave exploded, rising up and out as it expanded over the ocean, hammering away the clouds above. Out of where the island had been, seeming to fold itself out of a dimension which originated somewhere behind Jenette's head, a null-sun erupted, evil and black, ringed with purple, swelling, boiling, snuffing out the Burning Heart of Night. This was the power of that-which-should-not-be, the power humans stole from that the awful, angry void of pre-creation. It rose, mushrooming, its antediluvian hunger greedily devouring all matter in its path.