Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

Kthulah had never seen so strong a reaction from the four.

Look

For

A

Sign! they proclaimed.

As one, the heads of every Khafra and blank-one in sight swiveled, looking, searching, seeking. A hush descended. Not even the distant cry of blank-one pain, which Kthulah had been hearing in the background for some time now, intruded into the expectant quiet. The crowd on the charred skrag island shifted. It began to part, in a wave of motion from its center out to its shore. Equally confused as Kthulah, Tlalok and the blank-one Jenette also stepped aside as the parting of bodies reached them.

Two blank-ones, a large male and a fatigued female assisted by other females and No-pact, made their way into Kthulah's view. The large male and the fatigued female each held two cloth-swathed bundles in their arms. Standing reverently, they held the bundles up for Kthulah to see. The two blank-ones spoke.

Jenette's No-pact translated, The blank-ones Burke and Panya offer gifts to Kthulah to make Pact and bind the peace between Khafra and blank-ones.

Kthulah squinted with his old eyes. The bundles were newly born blank-one nurslings!

The sacred Number Of

Four! the Judges exclaimed. Their talons flew over their loops of beads. It! Is!

The!

Sign!

A warmth enveloped Kthulah's old heart. The Balance was wise. Here was the portent to end all of Kthulah's uncertainty. He bowed his wizened head.

So it is decided. So it shall be done.

After the superconductor was disconnected, things really began to change inside Long Reach.

Muscles, unneeded bones, entire systems of organs began to shrivel and resorb, their amino acids, minerals and other life-sustaining building blocks diverted to the of the nourishment and development of the spawn. Spaces began to open up in the normally crowded and constricted inner hull. Karr had no time for the sorrow he felt watching this process. He focused on one thing and one thing only.

He must locate and terminate in-bob.

It required no leap of genius to know where the in-human could be found. The creature's last words had made that clear enough. Little Nulls are sucking Big Null's life out. Little Nulls must die.

Working his way back up to the midsection of the fugueship, Karr located four critically strong junctures in Long Reach's rib system, from which the fugueship spawn sprouted. Of course Karr could not see the booster-rocket shape of the baby fugueships as they appeared from outside the parent ship.

Karr saw only the business end of the spawn: the growing superconductor cores, the blast nozzles which would channel the thrust necessary to set the spawn free of New Ascension's gravity well, the angle of umbilical arteries and veins and other conduits carrying nutrients from Long Reach to the spawn.

The first spawn was uninjured. Karr found the second in distinctly different condition. Its umbilical connections were ripped and torn. Long Reach's lifeblood pumped out of them, collecting in growing ponds. The spawn was perishing. Karr consulted his subdermal chronometers. It had only been five

realtime hours since in-bob had left the brainroom. That was not much time in comparison to a two hundred and fifty-six day spawning cycle. The spawn had a slight bluish tinge to its tissues, Karr saw, but perhaps the damage could still be reversed.

Karr set to work, repairing wounded umbilicals by first pinning the severed ends together with qi needles, and then hand applying surgical adhesive from a Gattler canister that he broke open with a pry bar. When all the veins and arteries were reconnected, there were still many leaks, so he retrieved a barrel of quick drying flexicrete, which he had seen while searching the storage units, mixed it up, and applied it over the entire traumatized area with a shovel. The improvised cast worked. The leaks were plugged. The booster-spawn began to look healthier right away.

"Bad, bad Pilot," hissed a voice behind Karr.

Karr whirled to see in-bob perched on a raised juncture of two gigantic ribs. The creature fell onto Karr, slashing and biting, and slamming Karr to the ground. Dagger sharp teeth gnashed inches from Karr's jugular, held back only by the stock of Karr's Gattler. Karr kicked his boot heels into the creature's fractured rear leg. Shrieking in agony, in-bob fell back. Karr swung the Gattler to bear, fumbling to activate the cutting beam. He fired, but not before the blind in-human attacked again, slashing with a forearm and knocking Karr's aim off. The cutting beam burned a hole in a cluster of enormous glands nearby. The sacks ruptured, inundating Karr and in-bob in ejecta; both of them disappeared under the flood and came up choking, fague- rich fluid in their eyes, throats, and nasal passages. Karr attempted to stand, but he was suddenly dizzy and fell. He could not seem to focus on the in-human. He struggled to his feet again, this time keeping his balance, and raising the rudimentary Gattler to his shoulders, but he still could not take proper aim at in-bob. The creature's four-legged form seemed to blur in and out of view, first standing, nearly paralyzed, and then streaking out of sight. The strange phenomena repeated several times before Karr figured it out.

He and in-bob had become saturated in fugue.

They were transitioning into fuguetime, where one subjective day equaled one realtime year. The freezing and streaking away was a side effect of the differing rates at which their dissimilar physiologies were adjusting to the change. Karr felt ill and then, as that sensation passed, great weight. He felt as though the gravity of a gas giant was pressing down on him. His slow moving muscles were overwhelmed. The ghimpsuit was all that kept him from collapsing into a feeble pile of skin and bones.

Karr scanned around for in-bob, but the creature was gone. The only evidence of its having been there at all was a blood-streaked trail winding up away from the base of the booster-spawn, out into a connecting passage. Karr determined that the spawn had not been effected by the rupture of fugue

-containing glands and then lumbered off along in-bob's track. The ghimpsuit actually emitted a scorched electrical odor as it strained toward the limit of its capabilities to keep his body functioning in the high gravity environment.

Thwak, thwak, thwak, thwak.

Kthulah's Radiance was fading, one blow at a time. Sixty-four for forgiving actions against Prophecy.

Thwak, thwak, thwak, thwak.

Sixty-four for allowing traitor Pact to remain, unostracized, within the bounds of the Radiance of Gnosis.

Thwak, thwak, thwak, thwak.

Two hundred and fifty-six for making peace with blank ones.

Thwak, thwak, thwak, thwak.

Five hundred and twelve for allowing blank-one nurslings to make Pact Thwak, thwak, thwak, thwak.

One hundred and twenty-eight more for passing his own sacred Pact on to two of the nurslings (the doing of which had given him much contentment).

Thwak, thwak, thwak, thwak.

One thousand and twenty-four in all. The Judges wept as they administered the punishment.

Thwak, thwak, thwak, thwak.

Kthulah had not quite made the sixteen thousand days of his forty allotted years, and he had not seen the escape of the Burning Heart of Night, but he had lived a life worthy of the Roots of Wisdom and he had passed without shadow in his heart.

Thwak, thwak, thwak... thwak.

The Judges of Gnosis glowed with the crimson stigmata of grief.

The trail of blood and fugue soon dried up. Karr followed the dusty residue. A few subjective minutes later, even the residue was gone, resorbed by the ship's realtime biological processes. Karr kept going. In-bob's tracks had been heading clockwise around Long Reach toward the next booster-spawn.