Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

"You'll be burned to a crisp!" Jenette objected.

Karr patted his ceramite suit. "Not in this."

Jenette looked even more skeptically between the kilnsuit and the fugueship. "This can't be safe. Let it burn out."

Karr locked his glove seals, shaking his head. "It won't burn out. The ship eats hydrogen and it's face down in an ocean of food." Long Reach could split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen atoms indefinitely. "And it's my Duty," Karr added, before Jenette could object again. "It needs me."

Jenette acquiesced, returning to the cockpit, but she didn't like it.

Karr locked his helmet into place. The suit's life-support system activated, circulating cool air over his sweaty skin. Karr looped the Gattler over a shoulder, grabbed the thruster unit, and, with a final thumbs up to Jenette, stepped over the side.

Karr splashed under the surface and then bobbed up like a cork. Holding the thruster unit ahead of him, he twisted its handgrips. Thrumming, it pulled him through the oscillating water. The marching waves of interference grew as he neared Long Reach. Karr felt the vibration through his helmet. Readouts under his chin showed the external temperature rising, but still well under the suit's limits. Karr actually felt cooler inside the suit that he had outside of it.

Shortly, the small thruster bumped into Long Reach. Karr climbed onto the towering hull and wiped water droplets from his helmet. What he saw weakened his knees.

Long Reach was one gigantic, raw wound. Atmospheric friction had stripped its outer hide away? in fact the entire outer hull was gone, which accounted for the ship's thinner profile. Long Reach had survived planetfall at the expense of sloughing off half its mass. The scope of its trauma was horrifying.

Exposed muscles pulsed and writhed under Karr's boots.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, as a parent might upon finding a badly burned child. Karr's vaunted Pilot training was obviously lacking. Never once had a lecture or manual explained what to do when half a fugueship's body was burned off. He had no idea how Long Reach was still alive or, more importantly, how to keep it alive.

Karr took deep breaths of reconstituted air. Panic wouldn't help Long Reach. And it didn't really need the missing parts of its body anymore, he rationalized. The outer hull largely contained storage cells and bladders for fuel and other materials needed to cross interstellar space. All vital life processes occurred within the smaller inner hull and, in a way, that made Karr's task easier, since he was closer to the internal locations where a few judicious qi manipulations would shut down the engines. After that he

could begin the healing process in earnest.

That was, if he could get in.

Karr did not recognize the new external topography. There were no landmarks on the bleeding mass of ship. His best guess placed him in the neighborhood Wendworm Way, where it used to cross from the outer hull to the inner hull, but a slow walk around the circumference of gently bobbing stern revealed no passageways or iris-portals leading inside. The stern towered six stories above Karr. Fusion fire pillars speared thousands of yards into the sky above that, but there was no entrance anywhere on the steep slope. Below the water, where Long Reach's, slimmer profile disappeared into foreboding silvery darkness, was the only hope.

So without a second thought about the risk, Karr waved to Jenette and allowed himself to fall forward into the water. Huddled under the blanket in the cockpit, Jenette waved back.

The thruster unit pulled Karr's buoyant suit down. The sensation of descent was a lot like being weightless, a warm pressure all around, resisting Karr's movements, not like the giddy, fear-of-plummeting sensation of zero gravity. Karr panned a headlamp back and forth along the descending curve of the fugueship, eventually focusing on a depression which looked, in the deepening gloom, like an iris-portal. It turned out to be collapsed and impassable. Karr continued down and around. External pressure rose as he descended. A gauge read two atmospheres at twenty yards, then three at thirty, which was still nothing compared to what the kilnsuit was designed to withstand, but then he was only a tiny way down the four-kiloyard-long hull. Karr had to grip the thruster firmly to keep from slipping and bobbing back to the surface like a bubble.

As he inspected another collapsed portal, he began to worry that all the entrances to the ship would be blocked, but a glance back at the surface saved the day. What looked like squirming pools of liquid mercury jiggled under overhangs all around Long Reach's hull. Karr floated back up to one. It was actually a bubble of air trapped in an unsealed opening; because the opening faced down, the air was unable to escape. Looking through the flexing, fish-eye refraction, Karr saw a passage that snaked into the ship. Perfect. He killed the thruster unit and burst up inside.

Karr was back in his ship.

But the inside, which should have been a cocoon of familiarity and safety, was not. It was dark, the man-made lighting systems having failed. Karr was forced to use the helmet's less than efficient spotbeams for illumination. And the passages Karr climbed through were distorted, squeezed and twisted by the pressure of atmosphere and water on a creature evolved to live in zero gravity. So Karr could not figure out where he was. Walls seeped blood, in spasms as Long Reach reacted to its pain. Water leaked in everywhere. Karr splashed though pools of brine. Tiny creatures, sucked in with the ocean water, floated in fugue-coma, hairy yellow foodyeast already feasting on their belly-up bodies. As Karr pressed deeper, trying to find a landmark of any kind, lakes of viscous blood replaced seawater, coating his kilnsuit in congealing, ropy strands, making it difficult to see and note the windings of his path.

Twist left, crawl right, open sphincter, climb up, press on.

It was a nightmare. Believing Long Reach dead in a quick, catastrophic impact had been hard enough, but Karr was confronted with his ship alive and suffering now? suffering that his own ineptitude had lead to. He recited from training manuals to reduce his emotions to a manageable level. Concentrate on the big picture. Isolate the ship from additional trauma. Triage tasks to maximize the results of treatment. Right then, that meant closing the engine orifices and damping down the fusion furnace to

minimum, thereby decreasing the chance of the hull shifting and also lessening the tremendous heat and danger outside.

One small mercy: the volume of the inner hull was much less than that of the outer hull. Karr eventually recognized a series of gigantic vertebra. They paralleled a ceramite pipeline, three yards across, which ran vertically through the ship. Karr followed the vertebrae, climbing down using bone spurs for footholds and looking for an entry duct. After a short descent, he discovered that the paralleling pipeline was broken in half, shattered from the force of the crash impact. Inside, the ceramite of Long Reach's superconductor core was visible, a striated column of rust and white, plated in platinum and then wrapped in insulating ceramite. Grown in zero gravity, the crystals of the superconductor structure were perfectly aligned to the massive current that coursed through Long Reach to generate an electromagnetic ramfield. The break in the superconductor explained why Long Reach was not affecting compasses. The circuit was broken and couldn't generate a ramfield anymore.

Climbing down a dozen more yards, Karr put the superconductor out of his mind and located a suitable entry to the vertebrae. A fine cutting beam broke a milky membrane sealing an entry duct, and then qi needles calmed the spasms of a narrow crawlway. Karr squirmed through like a worm and entered the spinal foramen, a triangular conduit formed by the gentle curve of the vertebrae on one side and the processes of shorter bone spurs opposite.