Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

Grasping the Gattler's handgrips, Karr thumbed a selector. Barrel number one rotated into position and he shot a slow-resorbing qi needle into a muscle group beside the airlock. Pffft. The fatty bulge quivered around the long needle, then relaxed. The inner portal irised open and stayed open. Karr stepped inside. Ten seconds later, the needle dissolved and the portal irised back shut.

The interior of the lock appeared normal. Scarring circled the chamber where the outer iris-portal had been grafted on to form the airlock chamber. There was nothing else in the space except a reserve kilnsuit locker. Karr shot another qi needle into a nerve cluster controlling the outer portal. It dilated.

Karr slung the Gattler over a shoulder, hooked a safety tether around his waist, and stepped outside into

space.

For a moment, Karr was awestruck. No matter how many times he saw it, the fugueship took his breath away. He grasped a handhold as the airlock closed behind him.

Karr was a flea on the midsection of an immense, grub-shaped body, a living creature four kiloyards long and two kiloyards thick. Wart-encrusted hide stretched away fore and aft of Karr, narrowing to engine orifices at either end. During the first twenty years of Karr's present mission, knotty stern bulges had spewed fusion fire, accelerating the fugueship. Now, after the mission's halfway point, they were closed. Ahead of the ship, an aurora danced where five hundred kiloyards of electromagnetic field met with faint ripples of solar wind. Rainbows pulsated against the stars of deep space, like oil on water, as interstellar hydrogen swept down the cone-shaped field into a gaping maw. The fugueship digested the hydrogen in fusion furnaces deep in its belly and spit the atomic fire back out through engine orifices on its bow. Karr felt the rumbling fury through the palm of his glove on the handhold. He also felt the subtle g-force of deceleration tugging his inner ear down toward the bow, giving him the distinct sensation that the ship was falling headlong into the bowels of the universe on four shafts of star-hot flame. This was Karr's astounding companion. His fugueship. His cosmosaurus planetos. His Long Reach.

A string of tumbling beads arched out from the airlock, trailing down as the fugueship slowly decelerated and they did not. Karr did not at first know what they were. Was Long Reach shedding some part of itself? Karr's throat tightened as he began to understand what he was actually looking at.

The irregular shapes were not beads. Each shiny object was a part of Karr's cargo: a human body. Each body was swathed in a hermetically sealed membrane, each one having somehow been ripped from the safety of a dream-chamber deep within the ship and ejected. Karr counted hundreds? no, thousands? of bodies spinning into the void.

Frozen-solid death was transforming the victims' peaceful fuguesleep into nightmares that would last for all of eternity.

The airlock twitched behind Karr. He twisted around, but not fast enough to keep from being bowled over by the ejection of another body from the airlock. Karr was not hurt, the plates of his kilnsuit locked up protectively. But he tumbled away from the ship, plunging down toward the ramscoop along with the string of dead human bodies. Karr grabbed frantically for his maneuvering thrusters, however by the time his fugue-slowed reactions kicked in, his realtime rate of fall had yanked him to the end of the safety tether. Karr spun on the end of the pendulum. When his fingers finally hooked into thruster controls inside his gloves, a shot of acceleration swung him inward at Long Reach. Karr hit hard, grabbing a rope-thick hair so as not to bounce off. After taking a moment to catch his breath, he began the arduous climb back to the airlock.

Every three seconds the lock shot another victim into space.

Something was very wrong. Sick or not, fugueships did not eject dreamers into space. As Karr climbed he wrestled with an unthinkable, improbable theory. He couldn't believe it. He didn't want to believe it. But Karr could think of no other explanation that made any sense.

There was a stowaway on his ship.

Back in the airlock, Karr stripped off the heavy kilnsuit, revealing a skintight ghimpsuit, which augmented his human muscles. Karr didn't take the time to don his white Pilot's uniform, but picked up

the body of a dreamer, which had just mysteriously appeared in the airlock with him and which he had grabbed before it could mysteriously be ejected into space. Then Karr exited the airlock and hurried down springy passageways toward the center of the ship.

Karr's mind raced. The odds of a stowaway inside Long Reach were a billion to one. The vast majority of humans who entered a fugueship immediately succumbed to fugue, the vessel's immune defense system, and fell into suspended animation. Without the protection of a hermetic membrane, foodyeast would then absorb these victims the same as it would attack any other intruding organism.

Except Lindal Karr.

Karr was different. He did not fall into fuguesleep, but slowed a varying amount depending on how much fugue was in his bloodstream. Just breathing fugueship air, Karr moved half as fast as realtime.

One subjective day for every two realtime days = slow time.

And Karr could go one step further. Artificially saturating his blood with fugue, the present forty-year mission would elapse, from Karr's point of view, in forty days.

One subjective day for every realtime year = fugue time.

It was a perfect solution to the problem of sub-lightspeed travel between stars. Unfortunately, individuals like Karr were extremely rare. One in a billion. Humanity, spread across its many colonized worlds, spent vast amounts of time and energy searching such individuals out and training them to be fugueship Pilots, but few were found. The last time two fugue -resistant humans had been together inside Long Reach had been on Karr's apprentice voyage, when a retiring Pilot had taught Karr the finer points of fugueship husbandry.

For all these reasons, a stowaway was unlikely, but Karr was convinced it was the only explanation for such strange events. Which left the unsettling question of why the stowaway was murdering Karr's cargo.

It was an unknown sensation for Karr to feel ill at ease inside his ship. The ship was his world. The ship was his reason for existence. It might be a great, dumb beast, but Long Reach was also the closest thing to a friend that Karr had. Now, for the first time in centuries, the jasmine scent of fugue gave Karr no comfort, and neither did the grandeur of sweeping ivory archways, or wall-fields of beautiful follicle flowers. There were kiloyards and kilo-yards of passages inside the ship, meandering around colossal internal organs, ducking under girderbones, squeezing between broad sheets of muscle. It was a maze in three dimensions with a thousand places for an interloper to hide and Karr just could not search them all.

Even with his experience in the labyrinth, Karr had to be careful in remote areas or risk getting lost. He hurried past a series of air-scrubber pillboxes with funnel intakes protruding from their tops. It occurred to him that the stowaway might be lurking behind one of the human-implanted devices at that very instant.

Or the stowaway could be hiding in the next overhead bile duct waiting to pounce down on him.

It was unsettling.

More unsettling was that fact that unhealthy blotches and purple veins were now swelling up throughout the ship. Whatever the stowaway was doing was not limited to the airlock.

Karr turned onto Wendworm Way, a cathedral-shaped passage that spiraled through Long Reach's massive hull from stem to stern. Karr followed its gentle slope through towering fuel bladders. Some of the bladders held reserve hydrogen. Others stored reserves of oxygen, carbon, and all other substances necessary for a fugueship's survival. Cargo netting held stacks of crates in the spaces between the