Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

Long Reach moaned with each experimental shot. Karr could hardly bear it? he was hurting his ship?

but he kept at the barbaric stimulation until finally locating a target neural cluster.

Engine thrum suddenly reverberated throughout the ship. Karr crashed into the foreword bulkhead as Long Reach finally opened its braking nozzles at full power. Karr was so happy, he hardly felt the impact. Climbing back up the wall to the crash couch, Karr made attitude corrections that he believed would increase the chances of a soft landing, but by that time all of the external sensors were burned off.

Karr was flying blind with only his gut and inner ear to guide him, and those could be deceptive. A few minutes later, even blind flying came to an end; the controls gave out altogether.

Karr pounded the dash in frustration.

Why couldn't he stop his ship?

Karr felt a dizzy pull down and to the right. Long Reach was picking up a foreboding spin. Soon it would start tumbling and that would be the end. Karr gripped the controls, determined to ride Long

Reach through the gates of hell if he had to, but in his rush to work the helm he had forgotten to strap in.

A sudden tilt of the ship ripped his. hands free and flung him across the brainroom. Karr got back up, fighting lurch after lurch and unable to regain the control seat.

It was as if Long Reach was telling Karr to get out.

"I won't!" Karr bellowed over the growing rumble. "Do you hear me? I won't leave! You can't make me!"

But it could make him. The lurching flung Karr around helplessly. He could not get back to the helm and even if he did, Long Reach would not respond. There was nothing he could do. Nothing. It was a terrible, stark revelation for a Pilot. Like it or not, duty or not, feelings or not, it was time to abandon ship.

Long Reach was burning up.

Karr raced through the dreamchamber, grief tearing him apart. Wendworm Way had collapsed and the space between the inner and outer hulls was now the quickest way aft. Somewhere the hull was breached. Air howled around the kilnsuit Karr had scrambled into. Dream-capsule lids clattered in a gale spawned by decompression. Karr picked up Wendworm Way farther aft where it was not blocked, but where the walls had the alarming tendency to constrict with each spasm of Long Reach's pain, jostling Karr mercilessly before he arrived under a metal hatch. A sign read: ESCAPE GIG. Karr wasted no time undogging the locking wheel, climbing up into a small, metal airlock, and opening the inner hatch.

Karr expected a view of the gig's interior, cockpit, seats, and overhead storage bins. What he actually saw through the hatch was a snapshot from hades, a gut-wrenching exterior view of Long Reach breaking apart. A blizzard of plasma-hot sparks showered over his fugueship. Flaming spirals of hide peeled off and streamed behind it like red-hot ribbons.

And the escape gig was gone.

Karr stood in a hatchway to nowhere, looking dumbfounded out of a gutted half-shell. The gig's other half and innards were missing. Strong winds tried to suck Karr out the opening as a massive fissure ripped open across Long Reach's hull, splitting thick hide apart like a self-destructing zipper and leaving a raw, bleeding canyon behind. Shreds of hide exploded outward as the fault rushed at Karr.

"Shit," said Karr.

He slammed the outer hatch, spun the locking wheel, and then, punching an override code to open the inner hatch without waiting for recompression, dove back into Long Reach. A titanic concussion hit, smashing away the remains of the escape gig and the entire airlock, leaving Karr in a bloody foxhole, clinging to a large vein for dear life? and with an even better view of the destruction outside.

It was lucky for Karr that the gig had been moored aft. The turbulent eddies rolling across Long Reach's stern were nothing compared to the pressure wave he saw spraying out from the fugueship's midsection bulge. Those mach four winds would have cut him in half.

Karr needed a new plan.

Salvation, it turned out, was a mere fifty yards from his foxhole, in the form of an ungainly craft with oversized thrusters at the corners of its wide cargo platform, four large robotic grapple arms folded underneath, and a chunky cab that seemed attached to its leading edge as a sloppy afterthought. That

decidedly nonaerodynamic vessel was Long Reach's heavy lifter, intended to ferry giant seed-colony containers from orbit to planet surface. It was not designed for high speed atmospheric descents and already showed signs of damage, but it was now Karr's only way off.

Problem: it was impossible to get to.

Karr could barely hold on in his foxhole. Walking or crawling in the intense winds was not feasible, even in the brief lulls when spiral eddies canceled out the force of the wind. Karr contemplated a desperate jump through one such a lull, using the suit's thrusters to propel him to the heavy lifter, but decided that he was only desperate, not suicidal. He would much rather stay with his ship than experience a long, drawn out plunge to his death from one hundred thousand feet.

The process of disintegration intensified. More strips of hide peeled off into the maelstrom as Karr tried to think. One of the strips missed the heavy lifter by mere feet, but the gouge it left behind gave Karr an idea.

Making a note of the geography outside the fugueship, Karr rigged pinch-cleats and crawled deeper inside. Gripping already traumatized surfaces with the spiked cleats, Karr was able to squirm through the sub-hide anatomy. His initial path through ligaments and around a grouping of girder-rib end flanges was a dead end. He backtracked, disoriented, then tried several other fruitless routes, before finally pressing through an intertwining of arteries and subdermal fat and coming out in one of the newly ripped gouges on Long Reach's hull.

Success: the heavy lifter was right above.

Ten feet to the hatch: now Karr would risk a jump. Studying the pattern of eddies rolling down at him, Karr prepared a short safety line with a carabiner on the end. He did not attach it to the fugueship? there were no anchor points on the burned, bleeding mass anyway. Instead, he anticipated the next lull in the blizzard of sparks.

Steady, steady? now!

Karr thumbed the suit's thruster controls and rocketed out of the fissure. Glowing embers showered his helmet and he slammed into the heavy lifter, snapping the carabiner onto a handhold beside the hatch.

The eddy passed. Kilnsuit plates locked as the extreme pressure returned. Karr dangled on the end of the line, joints stiff and smacking into the lifter hull. Crack, whack! Then another eddy washed over. The suit loosened. Karr pulled himself around on the line and manhandled the latch, his own muscles and the ghimpsuit fibers straining to the limit. Finally, the seal broke and the hatch grumbled open. Karr dragged himself out of the buffeting winds, plopped into the cockpit, and resealed the hatch behind him.

Karr's lungs wanted to rest and his heart wanted to stay with Long Reach until the last possible moment, but every second the lifter spent docked was a second in dire jeopardy. Karr flipped system switches two at a time while recanting the preflight check so as not to mess up. "Engine run-ups number one, two, three, four." Click, click, click, click. "Cowl fields engaged and locked open." Snap. Klack.

"Throttle mixtures to rich." Zwik. "Thrusters buffering to full. D.O.I. throughput at seventy-five percent, eighty...."

Through the canopy's transparent ceramite tiles, Karr saw a wide swath of fugueship hull separate from the ship and skid toward him.