Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

Karr steered the lifter through pillars of lazily rising smoke.

"Ouch," said Jenette, blinking rapidly and scrubbing her face as clouds of sooty flakes stung their eyes.

Glints of metal and plastic bobbed in the debris field, amid much, much more fugueship tissue. It coated the oily water, like the leavings of an unsavory butcher shop.

Jenette whistled at the destruction.

Karr suddenly felt very cold in the tropical heat. The stinking remains confronted Karr with the awful end Long Reach had suffered. The burning wasteland was a graveyard.

Jenette shot Karr a glance. "You didn't expect to find your ship alive ... did you?"

"No, no," Karr said a bit too quickly.

As he had a thousand times in the last two days, he checked the cockpit compass. It read the same as it had for the last two days: the lifter was pointing southwest. "Does that look right to you?"

Jenette craned her head up, trying to place the position of the obscured sun. "Near as I can tell.

Why?"

"A living fugueship has an electromagnetic field large enough to cause false readings on a compass."

"Ah." Jenette remembered how the crawler's compass had acted up when a certain shooting star had passed over the Enclave. "So if your ship was alive, you would expect the compass needle to point

straight at it, as if it were the north pole...?"

"Or the south pole," Karr said darkly. "At least it went with a bang and not a whimper," he added, too softly to be heard over the growing rumble.

"I wonder why sharkworms haven't eaten the remains?" Jenette wondered indelicately. "There was a ring-island here. There should sharkworms."

Karr shrugged, trying to muster the cool professionalism that he expected from himself, but it was elusive.

Jenette touched his arm. He jumped. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Karr lied.

"You look gray."

Karr changed the subject. "It's louder here." The rumble was becoming louder, but it did not emanate from the burning fragments.

The sound resonated full and huge, seemingly from just out of sight ahead of the lifter. "Like a big waterfall or a forest fire," Karr observed.

Jenette did not understand either concept. The debris field thinned as Karr explained them. Jenette countered that New Ascension had no waterfalls or forest fires. "There is no water above sea level, except that stored in plants, so no waterfalls, but the idea sounds very beautiful," she yelled, trying to imagine the concept. "And as for forest fires, natural fire is rare. It rains a lot here and the plant life tends to be quite moist, so it takes a lot to set it on fire? although," she allowed, "I guess a fugueship exploding would be pretty hot."

"Hydrogen fuel burns at forty seven hundred degrees," Karr said, becoming more and more pallid,

"and it fuses into helium in the fusion core a whole lot hotter than that."

Jenette stared at the smoldering fragments of ring-island. "These tiny fires couldn't be the cause of the glow we saw on the horizon last night, could they?"

Karr shook his head somberly.

The temperature in the fog rose rapidly as they proceeded. The yellow tinge became a yellow radiance ahead of the lifter, which grew in intensity until it rivaled the sun above. They were very near the source of the mysterious phenomenon.

"Are you sure you want to see this?" Jenette asked, leaning close for Karr to hear.

Karr's expression tightened. "Yes."

The rumble had become a roar. They squinted as the fog became painfully bright. The enveloping water vapor abruptly parted, leaving them face to face with a breath-stealing panorama. Fog surrounded a sunny, clear circle of ocean that in turn centered around four columns of yellow-white fire, the cause of the fog's yellow tinge. The pillars of fire extended from sea level high into the heavens, leaving sharp after-images on the awed observers' eyes. Below the pillars was an iceberg-sized mass of... raw meat?

Jenette didn't know what to make of it. "It's big. What is it?"

Karr's face fell in utter, ashen disbelief. "It's ... it's my fugue-ship!"

XVII

Pact, guard your actions! Do not unleash great evil to perform small good! Great is that arrogance. Great is that guilt. Purge hearts of this selfishness or the Balance will swing.

? Feral warning

Even from five hundred yards the heat was scorching. Karr raised an arm to shield his face. There, bobbing face down in the ocean with its stern humped above the surface and its engine fires thundering into the sky, was Karr's ship. Somehow, Long Reach had landed without tearing into a million pieces.

Karr was overwhelmed. Tears of relief mingled with the sweat pouring off his face.

Alive. His ship was alive!

"So that's a fugueship," Jenette yelled, awestruck. She had never seen one of the legendary creatures before. It was like turning a corner and unexpectedly coming face to face with a dragon or unicorn. A fugueship had seeded New Ascension twenty-three years ago, so this one before her was a tangible link to her past as well as the intangible worlds beyond New Ascension's sky. Its sheer physical presence was astounding. The tiny part of the fugueship above the waves was huge, a thousand times bigger than the largest creatures on New Ascension. The sheer force of its engines enlivened the water with inarching rings of vibration; the rows became beads where conflicting sources of the turbulence overlapped and made moiré patterns. Jenette gulped air smelling of jasmine even as a prickling in the back of her mind warned that something was amiss. "It doesn't look like the pictures I've seen."

It didn't look like a fugueship to Fugueship Pilot Lindal Karr, either. The portion above the waterline did not swell out from the stern to make the grub shape he knew so well, but was slimmer. The four engine orifices opened, not from knotty bulges set directly on the hull, but from the ends of tall, living columns. And the ship's surface was not wart-infested and knobbly like toad skin, but a glassy crimson.

Furthermore, there was no sign of charring as there should have been after such a catastrophic landing?

and where was the magnetic field? The compass was still rock steady, accurately reading southwest, which should have been impossible so close to a fugueship; fugueships could not turn their ramfields off.

Karr needed to board and investigate.

But he dared not fly any closer to Long Reach for fear of searing himself and Jenette to a crisp. His attention returned to the controls in the cockpit. In the light of that day's dawn Karr had set down temporarily. He had cleared the deck of the previous night's carnage, plugged most of the remaining cracks in the hull, and made additional repairs to the flight controls. He had rigged additional circuitry?

sort of a rudimentary autopilot? which now allowed the lifter to be flown with simple inputs to the steering yoke and made it capable of executing simple operations like hovering. So Karr could now set the heavy lifter to hover two yards above the waves. He did so, then pointed at the collective throttle lever. "watch that," he said in Jenette's ear. "If the lifter starts to sink, pull up. You can handle that, right?"

Jenette looked at the controls skeptically.

Oblivious, Karr climbed out of the cockpit and rummaged through his gear, retrieving a small outboard thruster from the survival raft and a reflective blanket. That he tossed to Jenette, motioning that she should put it over her head to block the heat.

Karr pulled on the segments of his kilnsuit.

Wearing the blanket like a shawl, Jenette joined him. "Where do you think you're going?" she demanded.

Karr tipped his head at the blast furnace that was Long Reach. "To shut that off," he yelled.