Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

"Sonofabitch," Jenette heard Skutch gasp beside her. "That's an explosion."

At which point an overspill of the blast, an infinitesimal portion of the total unleashed energy, which had not been diverted up and away from the ocean surface by Bigelow's careful null-field shaping, smashed down on the skimmer.

LII

Play the curveballs destiny throws at you. Do not mourn for what-could-have-beens and if-onlies. Do what is right, no matter what the cost.

? from the speeches of Olin Tesla

Karr sank, tumbling out of control, deeper and deeper into the boiling water. The in-human clutched Karr's kilnsuit, the gouts of ferocious bubbles tearing at its ghastly costume as convection currents drew the two of them inexorably toward the fugueship fires. Five orange plumes became visible through the hellish gloom, huge and smearing up from the depths like the tails of spinning, underwater comets. The colors grew hotter and brighter as the distance decreased. In no time, Karr was amidst the fires. An eddy caught him and the in-human and spun them back and forth between plumes of instant incineration.

And then there was nothing.

Hard hitting. Black. Enveloping. The death throes of the null-fusion reactor. Blotting out the world from above and sucking the life out of the submerged fires. Karr's kilnsuit went rigid. His helmet cracked along a thousand fracture lines. The proximity of such a voracious nonexistence overwhelmed him, seeming to tug at the very threads of his DNA, as if to unravel all trace of his ever having been alive at all.

Karr and the in-human were separated.

At length, his sense of self returned.

The laminated layers of his helmet were fractured, but fortunately no water was leaking in. Through that transparent bubble, in a faint gloom seeping down from above, Karr saw the huge and slowly rotating mass of his fugueship. Four bulbous forms sprouted from its grub-shaped midsection, rocket-shaped stamens in the heart of a titanic bloom, each one over half a kiloyard long; each of these booster-spawn making its own plume of water split into hydrogen and oxygen gas. Karr's heart quickened. Here was a vision no other human had seen before: a fugueship reproducing. In spite of the circumstances that he found himself in, Karr could not help but feel a pang of paternal pride. Look what his Long Reach had done! It was almost as if the spawn were his children too. He suddenly felt some of the emotions that normal humans feel as they live their normal lives, falling in love, reproducing, seeking out a piece of immortality in the form of their blood descendants. Karr longed to be Pilot for each of the four, to watch them grow, protecting them from harm, sheltering them from sorrow, letting them fly free through the stars ... and he certainly did not wish to be the cause of their premature deaths, that was for sure. More than ever he knew he had to set the spawning to rights, to do whatever he had to do to set Long Reach's normal reproductive process back on track and make the number of hydrogen fires four?

as demanded by the Feral prophecy of the Burning Heart of Night.

A petulant current ended Karr's ruminations, seizing and hammering him against Long Reach, scraping him down the side of the immense hull. His arms flailed, fingers striving ineffectually to get a grip on the slick surface as he plummeted into the deep.

The Null was gone. Horror.

His new skin was gone. Torn away by the angry water. In-bigelow was dead before even beginning to live. Desolation.

After pulling himself into the strange, new place, he could not move very well. He hurt all over. One of his hind legs did not work anymore.

And yet... the in-human was not overcome.

"Ooooooooooh," he cooed.

He felt salvation as he lay prostrate. It throbbed through the fleshy walls, the pulse of a fusion furnace far, far greater than the Null had ever been. This new Null was so big that the in-human could stretch out his arms and not feel the walls of the passage around him, and he sensed that it was much bigger, even, than that. It was a Null with Pact flowing through its veins! That part he did not care for. He remembered what Pact was from the before-time, before his transformation to in-human. The smell of this Null-Pact made him feel strangely slow, in a way that he could not understand, and he did not like that, either. But he did not let those things bother him much. What, after all, was a bit of filthy Pact compared to the power of this new Null?

The Null was dead, long live the Null!

This Null he would keep Safe. This Null he would not fail? no matter what skin he bore. Uncoiling a dirty loop from around his neck, the in-human unfolded the last remnants of his old in-robert mask. He stretched it over his head as best he could. He was not hidden very well from the Balance, but at least he had a name, and therefore a purpose.

Hobbling three-legged through pools of fugueship blood, in-robert wormed his way deeper into the ship.

Karr clawed in through an iris-valve at the end of a bilge duct and collapsed onto the floor in a small alley between cartilage arches. Fugueship ichor streaked and stained his already cracked helmet. He could not see a thing. He unlocked the fishbowl and removed it. The smell of jasmine? of familiarity, of duty, of travel between the rainbow lights of distant stars? swamped Karr. He felt lightheaded for a while as his body absorbed and reaccustomed itself to the fugue in the air. Then, using the light of a glowstrip that he had brought to facilitate moving around inside the darkened hulk, Karr removed the other ungainly segments of his kilnsuit and stacked them in a fleshy alcove for safekeeping.

The passages Karr wound through were distorted, squeezed, and twisted by the pressures of gravity and water on a creature designed to live in zero gravity, but they were not spasming dangerously as they had been the last time he was on board. Long Reach seemed to have found a new, tenuous state of equilibrium. It was still dying, Karr could see, but no longer imminently. Walls no longer wept blood.

Infectious patches no longer made walking treacherous. His ship was dying a death by increments, a slow withering. It was not a reassuring prognosis, but at least it meant Karr had a chance to redeem himself as a Pilot, to make up for the ignorant meddling which had jeopardized the lives of his wonderful ship and its even more wonderful spawn. And, most importantly, to save them. He just needed to keep them alive for two hundred and twenty-four realtime days more, until the prophesied escape of the Burning Heart of Night. After that, Karr did not know what would happen, but he had placed his faith in the Ferals and

their knowledge and prophesies. They believed that everything would all work out, so he believed.

Trust.

"Don't worry," Karr said, easily falling into his old habit of reassuring dialogue with the ship.

"Everything is going to be all right, somehow."

Perhaps there was hope after all.

Karr recognized a few landmarks. He was on Bloodflower Boulevard. He followed it down, toward the bow of the ship, where he was pleasantly surprised to find areas where implanted power and light sources still functioned and, not too long after that, he discovered the remains of his old quarters, now looking like a heap of discarded child's blocks. Turning the glowstrip off with a sharp squeeze and stuffing it into a pocket, Karr dug through the jumble of white cubicles. He located and donned a clean ghimpsuit. Normally, a ghimpsuit was not necessary in slowtime. But then again, normally, a Pilot was not trying to function under the pull of one full gravity and Karr figured he could use all the help he could get.