Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

the little girl. Stinging spray obscured his vision as the vast islands pulled apart and slammed back together.

Boom! Boom!

Surely there was no hope. Numb horror swept over Tesla. What had he done?

But then paws, each with two pairs of opposed thumbs and no fingers, scrambled into view. The domestics pulled themselves back up. The fabric of his daughter's daysuit was pinched in then-teeth.

Tesla hurried over. A huff of fear shook his heavy frame as he checked the biosentry sewn into her garment. "Blessed be the Body Pure," he prayed, fumbling to activate the tiny display. "All contamination it purges. All faithful it protects. ..."

The display blinked green.

Alive! His precious Jinnybug was alive! He hugged her to his chest.

Jenette did not struggle, did not fight, but hung limp, tears streaming from her eyes. "I hate you. I hate you," she wept.

The domestics flushed crimson, nosing Tarkas' inert form. They shone accusing colors at Tesla.

"Hunter man."

"Killer man."

They pulsed in time. Two heartbeats on, two heartbeats off. The grisly scene strobed.

"Chaos man!"

"Quiet!" barked Tesla. "Quiet damn you, beasts!"

Blood pounded in Tesla's head. This was the disaster of weakness. It was all his fault. He knew what his daughter was like. He should have known. She was his flesh and blood, his responsibility. She was the last trace of his beloved wife Helena.

"Howaroooooooooo!" the aliens grieved.

"I said quiet!"

Tesla swiped wetness from his eyes. More weakness. He had been fond of the traitorous Tarkas. But he could not afford the luxury of grief. His feelings for what had been lost did not matter. He must be strong for that which remained.

The woods rustled behind Tesla.

The other colonists had caught up. They hung back, ghostly shadows in the night. Tesla tensed. What would be their judgment? Would they condemn or embrace?

As one, the colonists bowed their heads, stacking and kissing balled up fists. "The Body must be Pure," they murmured.

Another huff of breath shook Tesla's form, this one of relief. Without letting go of Jenette, he bowed his own head and kissed his own balled-up fist. "The Body must be Pure," he repeated.

Of course, there had never been a choice for the colonists of New Ascension. Not for him, not for them, not for his beloved Jinnybug; not since they had set foot on this new planet. Anything less than fighting tooth and nail to survive betrayed the Body Pure. They might succeed or they might fail, but they would fight.

That was why they had come.

And suddenly it was over. One by one, the humans disappeared into darkness, winding their way back to the Enclave.

The domestics looked across the rift where the kits had fled, and at their dead brother. "Tears must fall," they keened. "Tears must fall."

Tesla followed the other humans, clutching his daughter tightly and praying that one day she would find a way to forgive him.

She never did.

II

Location: deep space.

Velocity: 0.7 lightspeed.

Mission status: past the point of no return.

Sounds echoed in the dark, lonely corner of the ship.

Zik, shsssh. Zik, shsssh.

Worry twisted Fugueship Pilot Lindal Karr's face as he stood before the ailing airlock. The portal looked normal. Its skin was a healthy pink. But the circular inner door was irising open and shut inexplicably, twice in one second, then staying shut for two seconds, then the pattern repeated. The portal made about twenty of its strange cycles per minute, one hundred in the five minutes Karr watched.

Of course, Karr's bloodstream was saturated with fugue. His metabolism and perception were slowed so that only one subjective day passed for each realtime year. Karr did a quick calculation in his head. The airlock cycle took a languorous eighteen minutes in realtime, not the rapid three seconds that he saw.

Zik, shsssh. Zik, shsssh.

Karr tilted his head, as if a different viewing angle would explain the malfunction. Dark hair, cut short on the sides and long on top, flopped from one side of his dour face to the other, but he did not notice.

Neither did he notice the blocky kilnsuit's weight on his tall, lean body. What was wrong? Mercifully, the outer airlock door was not malfunctioning, otherwise Karr and everything else not bolted down would have been sucked out into space. But if the inner iris-portal could malfunction, so could the outer one. It was just a matter of time. Karr pondered. There were nine other airlocks. One potential solution was to simply seal off the malfunctioning lock and use an alternate, but then that was not Lindal Karr's way. If there was a problem with the ship, he would not rest until he found out what was wrong and corrected it.

He must take care of his ship.

Karr inspected a pulsing hose, which pierced an adjacent plump bulkhead: nothing out of the ordinary there. The hose swelled rhythmically as a small life support unit pumped atmosphere in and out of the airlock. The life support unit itself was sealed and, theoretically, never needed service, but Karr gave it a once-over anyway. He depressed a red knob atop the unit to shut it down. Pumping stopped for a few seconds, but then a green knob beside the red one mysteriously clicked down and the machinery chugged back to life.

Karr blinked. How odd.

He pressed the red knob again, then again and again as the green knob kept depressing by itself and reactivating the small unit.

How very odd. And a little bit creepy.

Karr stepped up and ran his hand across the iris-portal itself. It was leathery and warm, no abrasions or other signs of trauma. No clues to what was wrong there, either.

It took a moment before Karr realized that the unusual cycle had stopped. He watched a few seconds longer. The portal remained shut.

On impulse, Karr stepped aside.

Zik, shsssh. Zik, shsssh.

Step in front of the portal. No activity.

Step aside. The cycle began again.

Karr frowned. Airlocks were not supposed to behave like this. They were not triggered by proximity sensors. The iris-portals were manually activated. Karr blocked the door again, determined to stand there until he figured what was wrong. The cycle stopped. Seconds, then minutes ticked by.

Suddenly, an invisible impact knocked the wind out of Karr. The interlocking plates of his kilnsuit locked up, as they were designed to do against impact or pressure, and he found himself airborne, shooting down the organic passage and colliding with its far end.

Karr wiped deck sweat off his face and looked back. The undulating passage was empty. There was no sign of a pressure rupture in the iris-portal or its surrounding membranes, nothing that could have propelled Karr through the air with such force. Karr did notice unusual blurring motions at the corners of his vision, but he quickly forgot about these as he stood up to get a better view of the passageway.

The problem with the airlock was not limited to just the airlock. Unhealthy purple veins were visible through the translucent passage walls and angry bruises were developing along its entire length. Karr leaned into one of the large veins and took a pulse. The rhythm felt deep and tentative where it should be shallow and firm. And it was too warm. Whatever was affecting the iris-portal was spreading.

Zik, shsssh. Zik, shsssh.

Karr patted the ship walls nervously. "It's okay. I'll take care of it." Karr knew the ship could not hear or understand him, but expressing the bond between them made Karr feel better.

He hurried back to the airlock. The cycle stopped again. Determined to get to the bottom of the problem, Karr pulled on his kilnsuit gloves. He picked up a bubble helmet and locked it on. He also retrieved a five-foot-long chrome implement with six rotating barrels and a cluster of chrome spheres on one end: Karr's Colt Krupp AB-8 Gattler. Each of its long barrels had a different function. The chrome spheres were binary propellant tanks and munition clips.