Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

bladders.

Karr observed that several stacks had collapsed where nets had somehow become unfastened.

Karr tapped the back of his left wrist. Three sets of numerals glowed subdermally. The first two, which counted slowtime and realtime, scrolled unreadably fast. The third counted fuguetime. It was almost time for Karr to resaturate his blood with fugue, Karr sped up, carrying his human cargo to a cockeyed intersection where Wendworm Way met up with an internal iris-valve. There, Karr unslung the Gattler, shot a qi needle to open the portal and stepped through.

The dreamchamber appeared tranquil at first glance. Salmon-colored glowbars bathed the curving space between the ship's inner and outer hulls. Broad girderbones kept the layers apart. Sprinkled between those rib humps was a profusion of human-sized capsules. Each was supposed to contain a dreamer, sealed in a hermetic membrane.

Karr's second glance around the chamber was more disturbing. Most of the capsules were open, lids sticking up like violated shellfish, and the dreamers were no longer inside. Some, like the body Karr carried, had been removed with their membranes intact Many more had been ripped free. Fugue-rich blood seeped from torn membranes.

And the horror continued to unfold. Before Karr's very eyes. Approximately every three seconds another capsule opened, another body disappeared. Karr did a quick scan of the chamber: out of thousands of capsules, only a few hundred still contained dreamers.

The peculiar motion blurs were back.

Smearing shadows danced around the dreamchamber. With a sinking feeling, Karr realized what they were. The stowaway was not dosed up on fugue like Karr, but merely breathing the fugue in Long Reach's atmosphere. That meant the stowaway was only moving half as fast as realtime? one hundred and eighty times faster than Karr! The blurs were the stowaway moving in the chamber around Karr, ripping dreamers from their capsules and stealing them away to eject into space.

Putting down the body he carried, Karr turned to the dream-chamber entrance and adjusted the Gattler. Metallic spheres rotated, changing the multitool's load to long, permanent needles. Looking over his shoulder, he watched the capsules. The next step had to be timed just right...

Snap went a capsule lid. Blink, a body disappeared.

One thousand and one, one thousand and two, Karr counted in his head. Then he fired metal needles into qi points all around the iris-valve. Bap, bap, bap. Karr drove the shafts deep with the heel of a boot.

Now the portal would not open from the outside and it would be very hard to get the needles out, even from the inside.

But had he succeeded?

Hairs prickling on the back of his neck, Karr turned back to the chamber. Snap, one more capsule sprang open. Blink, another dreamer disappeared. But then no more capsules were violated. Karr waited nervously. The body of a dreamer reappeared a few yards from its original location? pop! ?

carelessly discarded between two empty capsules.

The stowaway was trapped in the chamber.

Of course, that also meant Karr was trapped in the chamber with the stowaway, which was not a pleasant feeling. Even though Karr had known that this would be the consequence of his actions, he

could not suppress a sense of growing dread. The lightning-fast intruder could attack at any time, with no warning at all. And by the time Karr's fugue -slowed brain registered the pain of a mortal attack, Karr would have already been dead for five minutes.

Wait a second, Karr thought, cold sweat forming on his brow. Long Reach was at the midpoint of it present mission. At any time in those preceding ten years, the stowaway could have killed Karr. The stowaway must need him alive. Yes, of course. What good was a fugueship without a Pilot? No good at all. If the stowaway killed Karr, he was signing his own death warrant.

So be calm, he said to himself. There has to be a way to stop this mass murderer.

Karr considered the enormity of the problem. The killer would have to hold still for three slowtime minutes in order for Karr to get a mere one-second glimpse of him. And what could Karr do even if that unlikely event happened? Karr was virtually petrified compared to the killer.

They couldn't even exchange insults.

The killer's speech would be a high-pitched squirt of noise to Karr. Karr had pitch-translators in his ear canals, but the inefficient things had trouble translating simple sounds, like that of the malfunctioning airlock or the pulse of the Gattler injecting needles. Voice synthesis was right out. Karr could not speak, either. His vocal cords could not make sounds at the slow realtime rate at which he spoke, not enough air passed through his throat. A voice emulator, implanted in Karr's neck, was capable of reading nerve impulses and, working in conjunction with the pitch translators in his ears, recreating his voice for his own benefit, but the stowaway would hear nothing. Because of the difference in speed between Karr and the stowaway, even gestures and sign language were impossible.

The obvious answer came to Karr as his heart rate calmed a little: he had to out-think his opponent.

As a Pilot, he was presumed to be of high intelligence. Now he had better prove it Eerie smears of motion flittered around Karr. The murderer was within arm's reach. Karr inhaled a whiff of bitter body odor.

Inspiration struck. Karr dug a stylus and mindercard out of his ghimpsuit pockets. He scribbled a message on the card's memory surface and held it outstretched at eye level.

"Who are you?" it read.

Karr felt pretty silly, but he had to engage his enemy, to learn what that enemy's weaknesses might be.

Blink! The stylus disappeared from Karr's fingers.

Blip, something was stuck to Karr's nose. He reached up and pulled off a quickfood wrapper. Lines were scraped out of its printed surface. Karr puzzled, turning the scrawl sideways.

It was a winged stick figure with a squat oval above its head.

Karr frowned. What did it mean?

The wrapper pulsed away and back onto Karr's nose. Examination revealed that there were now words under the drawing.

"I'm your guardian angel."

The stylus reappeared in Karr's hand. He wiped ink scrapings off its tip, cleared the mindercard and wrote, "My what?"

Again, the stylus disappeared. Another wrapper popped onto Karr's nose, with more ghostly writing.

"Your guardian angel, friend."

Karr crumpled and tossed the wrapper. He wrote, "Do I know you?"

This time Karr offered the mindercard so that the stowaway could respond without sticking garbage to his face. Karr's message cleared and another appeared.

"No, but I've met you. I know all about you. We have enemies in common, you see. But don't worry about them. I'm making them pay."

The dialogue gave Karr the creeps. It was more of a seance really. He glanced around the dreamchamber. The violated capsules were testament to the stowaway's form of payment.

When Karr did not quickly respond, the message lengthened. " I know how they fucked you on this mission. The bastards. They fucked you just like they fucked me. You see? We're just like two fleabhps in a pod."

The motion streaks began to coalesce as the paranoid note continued. In the split second that the apparition hung around, Karr got a glimpse of an emaciated, male frame.

Karr wrote, "You need to stop. Don't kill any more dreamers."

"You're the one who wanted them dead."

"I want them alive," Karr scribbled, underlining alive.