Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

The human had a pulse-rifle.

The long weapon foreshortened, pointing Arrou's way. Arrou hoped the human was looking through the far-sight tube to check him out, and not aiming.

The skimmer circled again.

The human's arm rose and jerked the weapon back in an all too obvious arming motion. The human would have a perfect shot the next time by.

"Urrrk-urrrk-urrrk," Arrou worried. What to do? What to do? Everything died, but this would be a silly way to die, killed by humans of his own side. In a flash of desperation, Arrou waived both forelegs in the air, pointing and calling attention to his lame right one. The skimmer circled around. The human did not lower the weapon. Arrou waved harder and almost capsized the paddleboard.

Eventually the human sat back at the controls and the skimmer turned in, its rooster tail spraying sideways and diminishing as it slowed. The hull glided lower, hydroplaned on the vertical ends of its short wings, and then sunk into the water, pushing a large bow wave which fanned out and almost swamped Arrou's tiny boat. The skimmer engine whined down to idle as it drifted within hail.

Now Arrou saw that it wasn't just any old skimmer, but the fastest one, so he was not surprised when Olin Tesla stood up into view.

"Arrou!" Tesla demanded, not at all pleased. "What are you doing out here? Where's Jenette?"

"Ferals attacked. Separated," Arrou answered. "Arrou follows Jenette."

Tesla grunted. "That's what I thought. The homing device went dead yesterday."

"Home device?"

"Homing device," Tesla corrected. "Every Enclave vehicle has a transponder." He looked around the empty ocean for any sign of Jenette. "It's like a big smell that you can sniff from far away? oh, never mind."

Arrou understood enough to know that a transponder was a device in the crawler that he hadn't known about before, and that Karr had probably accidentally disabled it when they borrowed parts from the crawler. Arrou also understood that Tesla was talking down to him.

The skimmer drifted closer. Arrou grabbed its wing, to keep it from crunching into his fragile leaf boat and he noticed with displeasure that Toby sat on the seat beside Tesla.

Arrou look stupid, the larger Khafra hissed in Domestic dialect. Stupid in stupid boat.

Tesla ignored Toby. "Is Jenette all right?"

"All right, last night," said Arrou.

"Good." Tesla actually looked concerned, which surprised Arrou. Tesla usually looked and acted angry, but true to form, Tesla's next words sounded gruff again. "Get in."

Arrou hesitated.

"I said get in."

Arrou did not want to go with Tesla. Tesla was not nice. Tesla made him and Jenette do bad things.

Also, Arrou was proud of his little boat, no matter what Toby said, and he did not want to leave it behind. Things got lonely when they were left behind.

Tesla misread Arrou's hesitancy. Shaking his head, he attempted to speak in a softer tone (which seemed to Arrou a bit like a pitlurker trying to talk sweet around all its many, many sharp teeth). "You're not in trouble, Arrou. I know you only did what Jenette told you to. You won't be punished."

Arrou let Tesla be confused. Jenette always told Arrou not to tell Tesla the truth. So Arrou gave up and tried to step carefully onto the skimmer, but his paddleboard wobbled and filled with water anyway.

He watched it sink.

Toby read his colors and gloated. Ruuharrr. Stupid boat gone.

Arrou did not return the growl. Toby was bigger and not very nice, either. Toby thought he was better than Arrou because Tesla was his human. Toby was a bully. Arrou wished he could wipe the smug colors off Toby's back.

Tesla did it for him. "Toby, get in the back."

Toby turned a humiliated brown. "Toby in back?"

"That's right. Out of the front seat. Let Arrou sit there."

"But... Toby not bad today."

"It's not about bad."

"Toby's place in front. Arrou go in back."

"Toby," Tesla warned. "Don't make this hard." Arrou noted a dangerous change of tone in the human's voice. Toby did not.

"Toby want sit in front," Toby protested submissively.

Tesla matter of factly grabbed a triangular, palm-sized device from his belt. Arrou recognized the device instantly. So did Toby. The large domestic half-jumped out of his skin scrambling to get into the back, but not before Tesla touched it between Toby's eyes with a bzat! Toby yowled in terror, falling into the rear compartment, teeth chattering convulsively from the effects of the prod. Jenette had once told Arrou that it was actually an amaurotic prod, in an effort to lessen his fear of the device; it temporarily short-circuited the neural connections between eyes and brain, she had explained. But those explanations did not lessen Arrou's sickly horror of the device which domestics called the blinder.

Nothing could be more terrifying to a Khafra than to be forever without light. Butt pressed against the rear bulkhead, Toby's claws clattered on the deck. He tried to back away from the awful darkness? like a mlum with a bag over its head. Tesla methodically replaced the prod at his belt. Arrou felt sorry for Toby, bully or not. Tesla casually held Toby's head to keep him from injuring himself while the blindness lasted. Toby whimpered. Then, eyes clearing, Toby snapped at Arrou.

Get you, get you! Toby hissed.

Oblivious to the conflict, Tesla demanded, "Arrou, you sit there. You know where Jenette went."

Arrou climbed off the wing into the front seat.

Tesla revved the skimmer. The turbine built up speed. The hull hydroplaned, whipping salty mist onto the windscreen and Arrou's nose, and then lifted off the water to a height of two yards.

"Which way did she go?" asked Tesla.

Arrou obediently pointed southwest and Tesla steered in that direction. Arrou didn't offer any information about Karr, the Burning Heart, or anything else. The less Arrou said, the less chance Tesla would get mad at him. For the rest of the trip, Arrou did what he was told and thought bad thoughts about Tesla, for which he felt very guilty.

The fog had taken on a suffocating yellow tinge. Visibility was up to a hundred yards, but Karr wished it was not. Big chunks of disintegrated flesh littered the ocean under the heavy lifter and their origin was

clear. Karr was looking at the remains of his fugueship. They smelled like burned meat, even from twenty feet up, and they grew thicker in the water the farther the lifter penetrated into the fog. Karr did his best to keep his emotions in check.

Focus. Focus on the mission. You are a Pilot, damn it.

"Is it always this hot?" Karr asked, raising his voice over a rumble that had been building ahead of them for the last few kiloyards. Both he and Jenette were drenched in sweat.

"Can be," Jenette replied, "but this yellow fog is not normal. Hey, what's that?" She pointed ahead to several patches of flickering red and orange in the mist, ghostly candles with dark smudges above.

Karr did not want to know.

Jenette's dainty nostrils flared. "Smells like burning hair."

Karr rode out a lurch of his stomach and forced himself to alter course and fly close by one of the patches. It resolved out of the fog into a smoldering clump of organic growth, half the size of the lifter.

Sickly smoke rose off of it into the air, but to Karr's relief it was not a piece of Long Reach.

"It's a fragment of ring-island," Jenette decided. "I don't see any surface growth at all, no brainturf, no trees, but that dark stuff is ghutzu."

Like a scene from Hades, the debris grew denser as the lifter proceeded. The ring-island fragments progressed from smoldering to burning and came in all shapes from head-sized bits to sections poking skyward like the sterns of sinking ships. One large serpentine form, easily as big as three or four Terran blue whales placed end to end, Jenette said was the shattered island's keelroot She said that they always floated to the surface when a ring-island broke up.