Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

The beam of Karr's helmet lamps glistened on strands of nerve fiber that filled the conduit: Long Reach's spinal column. Three days ago, Karr would not have considered entering this delicate area for fear of crippling the ship. Today, he set to work inserting qi needles with the Gattler. Lying on his back with his arms outstretched into the spinal conduit and his body confined in the entry duct, Karr aimed for fatty junctures where nerve strands split off to different parts of the ship. Calm the sympathetic systems.

Bwap, bwap. Simple. Stimulate the parasympathetic systems. Equally simple. Bwap, bwap. Now the risky shot. Thwok! A long non-resorting needle to block a nerve cluster and anesthetize the aft sections of the hull before attempting to damp down the engines.

If it worked Karr's task would be a whole lot easier. He waited for an adverse reaction. Nothing.

"Hang with me," he muttered to the ship while visualizing a picture of the best meridians for the next needles.

A trickle of seawater dribbled down the entry duct, slithering past Karr's shoulders and cascading into the spinal conduit. The whole ship shuddered and the narrow duct clamped down on Karr, shoving the interlocking plates of his kilnsuit together. Long Reach, it appeared, did not like seawater in its nerve canal? at all. For a few nervous seconds Karr was immobilized by the ship's tremendous muscular power, but then the duct relaxed again.

Karr held his ground. "Sorry. Just a little more." He hurried the qi injections, but another spasm followed, stronger than the first, and a third was more violent still. Each spasm held longer, severely decreasing the slack time in between. Karr should have left right then, but persevered until muscle pressure made work impossible. The kilnsuit creaked ominously and his helmet made the sound of sand grinding on sand.

Using only his fingers and wrists, Karr twisted the Gattler around to point back at the entry duct. It was difficult to keep his gloved forefinger on the trigger in that position, but he managed to fire a ring of qi

needles around the duct. Pressure eased off enough for him to squirm back half a yard, but then clamped back down. Karr repeated the process several times. He kept squirming as the ship kept lurching.

Finally, he inched far enough back to slip out into a rising pool of blood and water. Splash.

Karr swiped his helmet clean as best he could. All the connecting tubes and cavities around him were

convulsing. It might settle down if he waited, but it might worsen, and if it got much worse, there wouldn't be any safe place for Karr inside the fugueship. With only half his job accomplished? anesthetizing the engines from the spinal conduit? Karr decided to flee and finish the job from outside.

Long Reach had other ideas. Each time Karr attempted to take a passage, it slammed the passage shut with crushing force. It was as if the ship didn't want to let him leave. "I have to go, just for a little while," Karr promised, trying a different route, "but I'll be back."

Slam!

Sheets of muscle hammered down on him.

Karr tried to pull back, but the outboard thruster caught on a tendon. The kilnsuit withstood the force; the thruster was crushed to bits.

Spurred on by the fear of losing the Gattler in a similar fashion, Karr fired qi needles like never before.

Bappata-babada-bap!

A complete

ring

around

the

passage.

Advance

and

repeat.

Bappata-babada-bap! Karr ignored the ammunition and propellant counters. Bappata-babada-bap!

Bappata-babada-bap! If they reached zero he was dead anyway. His rhythm built up. Karr jogged back along the steps of his mental map. Straight out, climb up? oops, duck back, wham! ? -shoot again, crawl left, twist right.

Bappata-babada-bap! Bappata-babada-bap!

Beep, the Gattler warned. Low ammunition.

Bappata-babada-bap! Bappata-babada-bap! Bappata-babada-bap! Bappata-babada-bap!

Click. Empty.

Karr had made it to one of the few fuel-bladder galleries within the Long Reach's inner hull. He scrambled down the gallery, which was large enough that even when compressed there was still room for Karr to move safely, but he was forced to halt at a sledge-hammering muscle group at the far end. By Karr's calculations, he was less than twenty yards from an opening that would lead to the freedom of open water. All he needed was a few more needles.

So near and yet so far.

Karr ransacked crates in the netting between fuel bladders, but came up empty-handed and confused: ancient statues, priceless paintings, masterpieces of jewelry and art looted from Sheldon's World.

Useless, useless, useless.

"Goddamnit!" The bastards from Sheldon's World had screwed him again. Karr hurled a solid gold statue at a fuel bladder in frustration. It bounced off the skin, making a hollow sound? and a strange, man-made flap fluttered open.

Karr splashed over and looked through the opening. His helmet lamp illuminated a treasure trove inside. Heaped around a simple bedmat, amid piles of garbage and dirty clothes, were cases of qi needles, propellant, adhesive, other Gattler munitions, the jewel-studded sphere of a spare starlure, an empty fugue purifier, and many other pilfered items.

Bob. It was Bob's hideout.

This was how Bob evaded detection for so long. The interior walls of the bladder were artfully braced

so that they appeared to be swollen full from the outside. Karr must have passed by a hundred times and not seen the hideout.

Long Reach lurched.

Karr decided to berate himself later, shimmied into the hideout, and reloaded the Gattler as fast as he could. Empty metal spheres hit the floor as new ones snapped into position and then Karr fastened as many extra loads as possible onto the kilnsuit's attachment clips.

A scrap of stimpaper caught his eye.

For my buddy, Karr, it read.

The paper was attached to a data cube. Karr wanted to kill Bob all over again, or at least throw the cube away like he had the statue, but he couldn't? what if the message contained information that would help Karr in his struggle to rescue and repair Long Reach? Karr angrily stuffed the cube in a suit pouch and turned to leave. As an afterthought Karr stopped, reached under a heap of trash, and grabbed the spare starlure. Discarding one precious Gattler reload, he clipped the sphere onto the kilnsuit and exited.

Karr careened down the pitching gallery and used the refilled Gattler to shoot his way out. Minutes later, he dropped into the ocean and let his suit's buoyancy pull him past the convulsing leviathan to the surface.

Karr crawled out of the water back onto the hull. It shuddered and shook. Jenette waved frantically for Karr to return, but he ignored her and scaled the raw surface. Halfway up, he stole a glance back.

Jenette was a small huddled figure on the lifter. Further behind, small fires winked in the encircling fog bank.

Above Karr, great beams of thrust shifted dangerously against the sky. Why were the stern engine nozzles open, he wondered. If anything, Long Reach's bow nozzles should have been open, as Karr had left them when he abandoned ship. Like so much of what Karr saw, it did not make sense.

Karr pulled his way to the top. Like the rest of the ship, the stern looked very different from how Karr remembered it. In the very center was a striated column of superconductor, which before had been only a knob barely protruding from surrounding hide. Now it was ten yards high. Karr felt an unsettling electrical buzz, even over the engine rumble. It was the superconductor's I've got a hell of a lot of electrical charge on me warning; he must not touch it in his dripping wet kilnsuit, because that would make a circuit with the hull and then there would be a flow, and flow of that magnitude was bad. Arrayed around the superconductor were four wide pillars with engine exhaust spewing from nozzles on top. They were also ten yards high: the thickness of the missing outer hull at that point.