Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

In the uncomfortable silence that followed, Toliver dug a forgotten pill out of a small box and washed it down with more pop-skull.

"Limp noodle!" Grubb laughed. "Limp noodle pill!"

This time nobody else laughed.

Jenette didn't find it funny either. She put the crawler back in drive, "Bye guys," and applied power to the crawler's wheels.

"I got a limp noodle, too!" Grubb half-laughed, half-cried as Jenette drove away from the painful scene.

Gate Four.

Jenette steered for that remote post. Mok was there? sleeping on duty? but he woke at the sound of the crawler and let Jenette through the gate without asking any questions or recording it in the official log.

The gate ground open and the crawler rumbled down a ramp, out from the protection of the battlements, and splashed into the dangerous open ocean. The vehicle's six hollow wheels buoyed it up.

The large studs on the wheels spun like paddle wheels for propulsion.

"Where do you want to go?" Jenette finally asked.

Arrou looked up at the sky, then down at the horizon where the shooting star had disappeared.

"Find Tears."

"Okay, find Tears."

Arrou was referring to the Tears of the Burning Heart or some other such Feral fairy tale and did not understand that the meteorite would have long since sunk to the bottom of the ocean by now, but Jenette supposed it was as good a direction as any. Expecting that they would find tears enough wherever they headed, she angled the crawler in the direction Arrou indicated and set it churning off into the night.

4

VI

Pilot Academy transcript from visual recording, Planet of Industry, 6.17.3508.

Document status: CLASSIFIED.

File name: Conscription.

(Five-year-old Lindal Karr, a soft-looking child, cries as black-uniformed men drag him from a faceless warren of domicile cubes. He has just tested positive for fugue resistance. His worker-class parents stand in the narrow alley watching. His sorrow-eyed mother shooes Lindal's five siblings back into the cubes.)

Lindal: I don't want to go! I don't want to go!

Father (hecto-carbon grime blackens an impassive face): Don't be a crybaby.

Major Vidun (a short, arrogant man, standing beside a windowless security transport): You're destined for great things, Lindal. You're going to be a Pilot.

Lindal: I don't want to be a Pilot! I want to stay home! (He reaches for his mother, but the soldiers hold him tight and load him into the transport.) Momma!

Mother: Be a brave boy. Try to make us proud.

(Dr. Uttz, a thin old man, meticulously seals Lindal into a hermetic sphere. Lindal's weeping muffles. The transport doors slide shut.)

Father: When do we get the money?

Major Vidun (eyes narrowed with disgust): It's already in your account.

Decades after Bob died, Karr was still fighting the madman's deadly legacy. Long Reach shuddered as it ground against the abrasive atmosphere of an unknown planet. The super-heating friction caused bitter squalls of wind to moan through the ship's innards. Gravity was askew because of Long Reach's rakish angle relative to the planet below. The cockeyed g-forces pulled Karr toward the corners between walls and ceilings.

Karr scrambled along a fuel-bladder gallery, his adrenaline pumping. Calling on years of training and experience to stay level-headed, he carefully adjusted the Gattler to its slowtime setting and shot qi needles into the base of each bulging fuel-bladder sack. Flow ducts swelled in response, like sausages, and carried fuel out of the storage bladders toward unseen bilge-pores on the fugueship's external flanks.

Must make one hell of a fireworks display on the planet below, Karr thought. The mother of all shooting stars. Atmospheric friction would ignite the fuel into a long fiery tail. Not exactly standard procedure upon arrival at a planet, but then again this was not exactly a standard arrival. If Karr did not get rid of the reserve fuel, the whole ship might soon become a flaming smear across that unknown

planet's sky.

It had all begun shortly after Bob's death. Karr had left the brainroom with a plan to undo Bob's damage. Still aching from the madman's attack in the dreamchamber, Karr had sidled through narrowing passages, and then crawled on hands and knees as the ship's internal spaces pinched together near its bow. Karr was very close to Long Reach's fusion core at that point and it was very hot as he squirmed toward the ship's forward-most airlock. Karr had not dosed up on fugue yet; he was in slowtime, so he was getting the most possible use out of each individual realtime second. On arrival at the airlock, he donned a kilnsuit from a storage locker, rigged pinch-cleats to his hands and feet, attached a descender rig to his belt, and cycled through the airlock's standard double iris-portals.

Outside, it took a moment to get oriented. Karr clung to the narrowing shaft of Long Reach's engine pinnacle, which projected down from the ramfunnel maw above, like a handle under a red-hot umbrella.

Below Karr, pillars of fire erupted from four nozzles spaced around the tip of the pinnacle and thundered into a bottomless black void lined with stars. It was a daunting view. And the fact that the ship was braking, creating the dizzying sensation of gravity pulling Karr down toward that bottomless void didn't help matters. But between those engine nozzles, at the very forward-most point of Long Reach was where Karr's objective lay, and so he was going there.

Karr attached a safety line, set the torque on his descender rig, and went down headfirst. The initial hundred feet were easy, but as he neared the huge engine nozzles Karr was careful to set the pinch-cleats extra firmly. A slip at that point would have sent him careening out on the safety line and into one of the pillars of engine thrust. There, even the kilnsuit, with its ceramite tiles specifically designed to operate in extreme heat and pressure, would vaporize. Life support mechanisms labored hard inside the suit as Karr reached the narrowest point between the nozzles. A temperature sensor under his chin read one hundred and thirteen degrees internal. Karr didn't look at the outside reading. It was too scary. Remember the ship. He pressed on as fast as prudence allowed and disappeared under the very front of the pinnacle.

Karr's impression of being on the pinnacle's forward end was that of being a bug, clinging to the underside of a round table that had four immense pillars of flame for legs. Internal kilnsuit temperature dropped to ninety-three degrees? not much cooler, but at least he was not boiling in his own sweat.

Crawling upside-down? again, like a bug? Karr made his way toward the only two features on the circular prow. The nearer feature was a rust-and-white colored metallic knob, two yards in diameter, which was one protruding end of the superconductor that generated the fugue-ship's ramscoop field.

Karr ignored it and headed instead for the upside-down teepee directly in the center of the bow space.

It was, in fact, a tent of sorts. Karr pulled back a flap of its light-impervious material and uncovered a ten foot wide, highly reflective shallow bowl that was recessed into the body of the ship above. A ropy stalk grew down from the center of the bowl and that was capped with a torus of bug-eye receptors: it resembled a radio telescope dish. And that is what it was: a living telescope, Long Reach's eye. Light bounced off the broad dish and focused on the receptor torus where different sensory organs responded to, and analyzed, different segments of the electromagnetic continuum: ultraviolet and visible light, radio frequencies and x-rays, red shifts, Fraunhofer lines, and probably a dozen other things humans hadn't discovered yet.