Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

The D.O.I. gauge wound up. "Ninety, ninety-five... Come on, you piece of junk!"

The strip of fugueship hull tumbled, flattening everything in its path.

"One hundred! Punching!" Karr jammed the throttle levers forward and hammered the emergency release catch. Explosive bolts severed mooring clamps and Karr braced for a three-g rush, but the lifter was not the high performance escape gig. It wallowed up slowly. Karr shoved the throttle levers harder, but they were already full, open. The lifter wallowed only slightly faster. And here came the fracture, like four tons of slow motion bullwhip. Karr gritted his teeth.

Wham! Disintegrating fugueship slammed into the lifter. An ominous crack resounded as the heavy vehicle tumbled away from Long Reach. Visibility dropped to nothing as plasma sparks blotted out every window, then cleared again as the lifter passed through the blazing wake, revealing the whole of the fugueship.

Karr's stomach leapt into his mouth. Long Reach was unraveling like a burning onion, riding down on four spears of braking fire. And he could do absolutely nothing to help it. It was Karr's worst nightmare come true. He felt the fiery plasma burning Long Reach as if it were his own flesh. He felt each strip of hide peeling away like chunks tearing from his heart.

Karr concentrated on the frenzied activity of flying the heavy lifter. If he did not, he would surely be overcome by emotion. And then he would die, because the lifter had taken damage during launch and was still taking damage from its headlong descent. Karr fought to stop its tumble, but each time equilibrium neared a new crack or groan resounded and the oscillations grew worse again.

Alternating views of stars, fugueship, stars, and planet whizzed around. A picture of the world below built up in Karr's mind between horror-stricken glimpses of Long Reach. CG-423-B was a ball of silvery-blue, unbroken except by clouds. There was no land. Where was it, Karr wondered. Due to the extreme rate of failure, colonies were no longer seeded under water.

Trying to anticipate the gyrations of the heavy lifter occupied Karr down past eighty thousand feet, then sixty thousand. The damaged lifter responded to its helm with a delay between input and response.

Karr figured out that he could not react, but must instead anticipate what the vehicle would do a full two seconds later, because reacting only added to the errant oscillations and sent the heavy craft spiraling more quickly toward an uncontrollable spin.

Below, the globe swelled to fill Karr's view and there were finally spots of land. The surface of the ocean was dotted with tiny ring-shaped islands, the circles seeming almost too perfect to be natural.

And all the while Long Reach continued to drift away, a ball of fire plunging through thin stratospheric clouds. Karr's companion of so many years, the only living creature he had been allowed to care about, was dying.

Down, down they plunged, thirty thousand feet, twenty thousand feet, both ships piercing the planet's terminator. Day turned into night.

It gave Karr no comfort that he had done a better job than he thought during those brief moments when Long Reach had responded to its braking controls; both ships were going down in the general area below the weather satellite, where the colony would have been planted. Karr blinked watering eyes as Long Reach disappeared, a soft red glow behind thicker clouds at the horizon.

Now it was just Karr and the heavy lifter.

Buffeting increased in the denser, low altitude air. Time for final descent. Saving himself hardly seemed to matter in the depths of Karr's anguish, but Karr rattled through the landing procedure even though he could barely read the instruments. "Everything seems fine," he said in a wavering voice.

Pieces of the lifter began to break off.

"Encountering a bit of turbulence. We've done our checks. Leveling off for final approach." There was no hope of a vertical landing on one of the small islands, but Karr could ditch in the water? if he got the lifter down below one hundred and fifty knots. He checked the airspeed: four hundred knots. Karr turned up the cowl fields.

"Damp it down. Damp it way down," Karr recited. "Bleeding speed. Three ninety, three fifty-five...."

Altitude dropped to under a thousand feet. Surface details resolved. Individual waves tossed on the surface of the ocean. The lifter whooshed over an island covered in spindly trees, their puff-ball tops tossing in the vehicle's wake.

"Three hundred, two eighty. Slow lifter, slow."

Karr felt the world reaching up to swat him. The lifter was coming in way too fast and the physics were unforgiving. Below one fifty the lifter would hold together, above that speed the hull would experience catastrophic failure.

Whoop, whoop! Abort! warned a klaxon.

"Two seventy."

Karr wasn't going to make one fifty.

"Come on lifter, slow, slow."

Here came the water, rushing up with frightening speed.

Whoop, whoop! Abort!

Karr grabbed a handle above his head and yanked down with all his might. Solid rocket cells ignited, flashing hot under his seat. Ceramite windows shattered overhead and Karr lost consciousness as he shot out of the cockpit into the bittersweet air of an alien world.

VIII

Overesteem a leader and the people become powerless, Overvalue possessions and the needy become thieves, Overcling to life and the living become assassins.

? Feral aphorism

The four of them spoke in Khafra light-code:

Tesla does it tonight.

Tonight? No, no.

Yes, yes.

But tonight big celebration.

Especially tonight. Fit pattern. Make Sacrament, call Body to celebration, make big surprise.

What kind of surprise?

Not know. Bad surprise.

Urr, maybe you right. Too bad. So beautiful...

The dining hall was beautiful. More beautiful? as far as the domestics were concerned? than any other place in the Enclave. Golden rays shone down from clouds of floating glowbeads. Gold light, the color of happiness. It filled the grand room. It shone on intriguing, lonely things the humans called art and statues. It shone on the long white-clothed table, the sparkling see-through glasses, the gleaming metal and ceramic eating things. It shone on the feast plant, around which the table was built; it made the stunted branches, steaming waxy seedpods, and leathery leaves seem almost beautiful. Almost. And the light shone down on a wooden floor so glossy that, reflected in it, the domestics could see themselves and the forty humans that were gathered in their fine Consular robes and glittering badges and pins.

So beautiful, Tengen, one of the youngest domestics, repeated.

Rusty, the oldest of them, sighed. Yes, and so dangerous.

Patton looked around the assembled humans. Pearl Harbor, 0755 hours, Sunday morning, he flashed soberly.

What harbor? Tengen asked Rusty, confused. What-day morning?

Rusty looked at Patton, also confused.

Never mind, said Spike, Consul Trurl's new domestic. Patton always talk funny. Maybe Patton and Rusty too paranoid?

Spike didn't get the chance to finish his sentence, because at that moment every bullet-shaped head in the dining hall cocked toward the entry doors. The humans, as usual, paid little attention.

Tesla flung the doors open.

Webs, a young Subconsul, snapped to attention. "Prime Consul Olin Tesla," she quickly announced.

Tesla nodded briskly in the silence that followed, his gaze scouring human face after human face.

Tries to find friends? Tengen wondered at the behavior unfamiliar to him.

Tries to surprise enemies, corrected Patton, who had seen it many times before.