THE BURNING HEART OF NIGHT Read online

  That was why they had come.

  And suddenly it was over. One by one, the humans disappeared into darkness, winding their way back to the Enclave.

  The domestics looked across the rift where the kits had fled, and at their dead brother. "Tears must fall," they keened. "Tears must fall."

  Tesla followed the other humans, clutching his daughter tightly and praying that one day she would find a way to forgive him.

  She never did.

  II

  Location: deep space.

  Velocity: 0.7 lightspeed.

  Mission status: past the point of no return.

  Sounds echoed in the dark, lonely corner of the ship.

  Zik, shsssh. Zik, shsssh.

  Worry twisted Fugueship Pilot Lindal Karr's face as he stood before the ailing airlock. The portal looked normal. Its skin was a healthy pink. But the circular inner door was irising open and shut inexplicably, twice in one second, then staying shut for two seconds, then the pattern repeated. The portal made about twenty of its strange cycles per minute, one hundred in the five minutes Karr watched.

  Of course, Karr's bloodstream was saturated with fugue. His metabolism and perception were slowed so that only one subjective day passed for each realtime year. Karr did a quick calculation in his head. The airlock cycle took a languorous eighteen minutes in realtime, not the rapid three seconds that he saw.

  Zik, shsssh. Zik, shsssh.

  Karr tilted his head, as if a different viewing angle would explain the malfunction. Dark hair, cut short on the sides and long on top, flopped from one side of his dour face to the other, but he did not notice. Neither did he notice the blocky kilnsuit's weight on his tall, lean body. What was wrong? Mercifully, the outer airlock door was not malfunctioning, otherwise Karr and everything else not bolted down would have been sucked out into space. But if the inner iris-portal could malfunction, so could the outer one. It was just a matter of time. Karr pondered. There were nine other airlocks. One potential solution was to simply seal off the malfunctioning lock and use an alternate, but then that was not Lindal Karr's way. If there was a problem with the ship, he would not rest until he found out what was wrong and corrected it. He must take care of his ship.

  Karr inspected a pulsing hose, which pierced an adjacent plump bulkhead: nothing out of the ordinary there. The hose swelled rhythmically as a small life support unit pumped atmosphere in and out of the airlock. The life support unit itself was sealed and, theoretically, never needed service, but Karr gave it a once-over anyway. He depressed a red knob atop the unit to shut it down. Pumping stopped for a few seconds, but then a green knob beside the red one mysteriously clicked down and the machinery chugged back to life.

  Karr blinked. How odd.

  He pressed the red knob again, then again and again as the green knob kept depressing by itself and reactivating the small unit.

  How very odd. And a little bit creepy.

  Karr stepped up and ran his hand across the iris-portal itself. It was leathery and warm, no abrasions or other signs of trauma. No clues to what was wrong there, either.

  It took a moment before Karr realized that the unusual cycle had stopped. He watched a few seconds longer. The portal remained shut.

  On impulse, Karr stepped aside.

  Zik, shsssh. Zik, shsssh.

  Step in front of the portal. No activity.

  Step aside. The cycle began again.

  Karr frowned. Airlocks were not supposed to behave like this. They were not triggered by proximity sensors. The iris-portals were manually activated. Karr blocked the door again, determined to stand there until he figured what was wrong. The cycle stopped. Seconds, then minutes ticked by.

  Suddenly, an invisible impact knocked the wind out of Karr. The interlocking plates of his kilnsuit locked up, as they were designed to do against impact or pressure, and he found himself airborne, shooting down the organic passage and colliding with its far end.

  Karr wiped deck sweat off his face and looked back. The undulating passage was empty. There was no sign of a pressure rupture in the iris-portal or its surrounding membranes, nothing that could have propelled Karr through the air with such force. Karr did notice unusual blurring motions at the corners of his vision, but he quickly forgot about these as he stood up to get a better view of the passageway.

  The problem with the airlock was not limited to just the airlock. Unhealthy purple veins were visible through the translucent passage walls and angry bruises were developing along its entire length. Karr leaned into one of the large veins and took a pulse. The rhythm felt deep and tentative where it should be shallow and firm. And it was too warm. Whatever was affecting the iris-portal was spreading.

  Zik, shsssh. Zik, shsssh.

  Karr patted the ship walls nervously. "It's okay. I'll take care of it." Karr knew the ship could not hear or understand him, but expressing the bond between them made Karr feel better.

  He hurried back to the airlock. The cycle stopped again. Determined to get to the bottom of the problem, Karr pulled on his kilnsuit gloves. He picked up a bubble helmet and locked it on. He also retrieved a five-foot-long chrome implement with six rotating barrels and a cluster of chrome spheres on one end: Karr's Colt & Krupp AB-8 Gattler. Each of its long barrels had a different function. The chrome spheres were binary propellant tanks and munition clips.

  Grasping the Gattler's handgrips, Karr thumbed a selector. Barrel number one rotated into position and he shot a slow-resorbing qi needle into a muscle group beside the airlock. Pffft. The fatty bulge quivered around the long needle, then relaxed. The inner portal irised open and stayed open. Karr stepped inside. Ten seconds later, the needle dissolved and the portal irised back shut.

  The interior of the lock appeared normal. Scarring circled the chamber where the outer iris-portal had been grafted on to form the airlock chamber. There was nothing else in the space except a reserve kilnsuit locker. Karr shot another qi needle into a nerve cluster controlling the outer portal. It dilated. Karr slung the Gattler over a shoulder, hooked a safety tether around his waist, and stepped outside into space.

  For a moment, Karr was awestruck. No matter how many times he saw it, the fugueship took his breath away. He grasped a handhold as the airlock closed behind him.

  Karr was a flea on the midsection of an immense, grub-shaped body, a living creature four kiloyards long and two kiloyards thick. Wart-encrusted hide stretched away fore and aft of Karr, narrowing to engine orifices at either end. During the first twenty years of Karr's present mission, knotty stern bulges had spewed fusion fire, accelerating the fugueship. Now, after the mission's halfway point, they were closed. Ahead of the ship, an aurora danced where five hundred kiloyards of electromagnetic field met with faint ripples of solar wind. Rainbows pulsated against the stars of deep space, like oil on water, as interstellar hydrogen swept down the cone-shaped field into a gaping maw. The fugueship digested the hydrogen in fusion furnaces deep in its belly and spit the atomic fire back out through engine orifices on its bow. Karr felt the rumbling fury through the palm of his glove on the handhold. He also felt the subtle g-force of deceleration tugging his inner ear down toward the bow, giving him the distinct sensation that the ship was falling headlong into the bowels of the universe on four shafts of star-hot flame. This was Karr's astounding companion. His fugueship. His cosmosaurus planetos. His Long Reach.

  A string of tumbling beads arched out from the airlock, trailing down as the fugueship slowly decelerated and they did not. Karr did not at first know what they were. Was Long Reach shedding some part of itself? Karr's throat tightened as he began to understand what he was actually looking at. The irregular shapes were not beads. Each shiny object was a part of Karr's cargo: a human body. Each body was swathed in a hermetically sealed membrane, each one having somehow been ripped from the safety of a dream-chamber deep within the ship and ejected. Karr counted hundreds—no, thousands—of bodies spinning into the void.

  Frozen-solid death was transforming
the victims' peaceful fuguesleep into nightmares that would last for all of eternity.

  The airlock twitched behind Karr. He twisted around, but not fast enough to keep from being bowled over by the ejection of another body from the airlock. Karr was not hurt, the plates of his kilnsuit locked up protectively. But he tumbled away from the ship, plunging down toward the ramscoop along with the string of dead human bodies. Karr grabbed frantically for his maneuvering thrusters, however by the time his fugue-slowed reactions kicked in, his realtime rate of fall had yanked him to the end of the safety tether. Karr spun on the end of the pendulum. When his fingers finally hooked into thruster controls inside his gloves, a shot of acceleration swung him inward at Long Reach. Karr hit hard, grabbing a rope-thick hair so as not to bounce off. After taking a moment to catch his breath, he began the arduous climb back to the airlock.

  Every three seconds the lock shot another victim into space.

  Something was very wrong. Sick or not, fugueships did not eject dreamers into space. As Karr climbed he wrestled with an unthinkable, improbable theory. He couldn't believe it. He didn't want to believe it. But Karr could think of no other explanation that made any sense.

  There was a stowaway on his ship.

  Back in the airlock, Karr stripped off the heavy kilnsuit, revealing a skintight ghimpsuit, which augmented his human muscles. Karr didn't take the time to don his white Pilot's uniform, but picked up the body of a dreamer, which had just mysteriously appeared in the airlock with him and which he had grabbed before it could mysteriously be ejected into space. Then Karr exited the airlock and hurried down springy passageways toward the center of the ship.

  Karr's mind raced. The odds of a stowaway inside Long Reach were a billion to one. The vast majority of humans who entered a fugueship immediately succumbed to fugue, the vessel's immune defense system, and fell into suspended animation. Without the protection of a hermetic membrane, foodyeast would then absorb these victims the same as it would attack any other intruding organism.

  Except Lindal Karr.

  Karr was different. He did not fall into fuguesleep, but slowed a varying amount depending on how much fugue was in his bloodstream. Just breathing fugueship air, Karr moved half as fast as realtime.

  One subjective day for every two realtime days = slow time.

  And Karr could go one step further. Artificially saturating his blood with fugue, the present forty-year mission would elapse, from Karr's point of view, in forty days.

  One subjective day for every realtime year = fugue time.

  It was a perfect solution to the problem of sub-lightspeed travel between stars. Unfortunately, individuals like Karr were extremely rare. One in a billion. Humanity, spread across its many colonized worlds, spent vast amounts of time and energy searching such individuals out and training them to be fugueship Pilots, but few were found. The last time two fugue-resistant humans had been together inside Long Reach had been on Karr's apprentice voyage, when a retiring Pilot had taught Karr the finer points of fugueship husbandry.

  For all these reasons, a stowaway was unlikely, but Karr was convinced it was the only explanation for such strange events. Which left the unsettling question of why the stowaway was murdering Karr's cargo.

  It was an unknown sensation for Karr to feel ill at ease inside his ship. The ship was his world. The ship was his reason for existence. It might be a great, dumb beast, but Long Reach was also the closest thing to a friend that Karr had. Now, for the first time in centuries, the jasmine scent of fugue gave Karr no comfort, and neither did the grandeur of sweeping ivory archways, or wall-fields of beautiful follicle flowers. There were kiloyards and kilo-yards of passages inside the ship, meandering around colossal internal organs, ducking under girderbones, squeezing between broad sheets of muscle. It was a maze in three dimensions with a thousand places for an interloper to hide and Karr just could not search them all. Even with his experience in the labyrinth, Karr had to be careful in remote areas or risk getting lost. He hurried past a series of air-scrubber pillboxes with funnel intakes protruding from their tops. It occurred to him that the stowaway might be lurking behind one of the human-implanted devices at that very instant. Or the stowaway could be hiding in the next overhead bile duct waiting to pounce down on him.

  It was unsettling.

  More unsettling was that fact that unhealthy blotches and purple veins were now swelling up throughout the ship. Whatever the stowaway was doing was not limited to the airlock.

  Karr turned onto Wendworm Way, a cathedral-shaped passage that spiraled through Long Reach's massive hull from stem to stern. Karr followed its gentle slope through towering fuel bladders. Some of the bladders held reserve hydrogen. Others stored reserves of oxygen, carbon, and all other substances necessary for a fugueship's survival. Cargo netting held stacks of crates in the spaces between the 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.