Resplendent

SILVER GHOST

AD 5499

Minda didn’t even see the volcanic plume before it swallowed up her flitter.

Suddenly the fragile little craft was turning end over end, alarms wailing and flashing, all its sensors disabled. But to Minda, feeling nothing thanks to her cabin’s inertial suspension, it was just a light show, a Virtual game, nothing to do with her.

Just seconds after entering the ash plume, the flitter rammed itself upside down into an unfeasibly hard ground. Crumpling metal screamed. Then the inertial suspension failed. Minda tumbled out of her seat, and her head slammed into the cabin roof.

Immersed in sudden silence, sprawled on the inverted ceiling, she found herself staring out of a window. Gushing vapour obscured the landscape. That was air, she thought woozily. The frozen air of this world, of Snowball, blasted to vapour by the flitter’s residual heat.

All she could think of was what her cadre leader would have to say. You fouled up, Bryn would tell her. You don’t deserve to survive. And the species will be stronger for your deletion.

I’m fifteen years old. I’m strong. I’m not dead yet. I’ll show her.

She passed out.

Maybe she awoke, briefly. She thought she heard a voice.

‘…You are a homeotherm. That is, your body tries to maintain a constant temperature. It is a common heat management strategy. You have an inner hot core, which appears to comprise your digestive organs and your nervous system, and an outer cooler shell, of skin and fat and muscle and limbs. The outer shell serves as a buffer between the outside world and the core. Understanding this basic mechanism should help you survive…’

Through the window, between gusts of billowing mist, she glimpsed something moving: a smooth curve sliding easily past the wreck, a distorted image of a crumpled metallic mass. It couldn’t be real, of course. Nothing moved on this cold world.

When she woke up properly, it was going to hurt. She closed her eyes.

When she couldn’t stay unconscious any longer, she was relieved to find she could move.

She climbed gingerly out of the crumpled ceiling panel. She probed at her limbs and back. She seemed to have suffered nothing worse than bruises, stiffness and pulled muscles.

But she was already feeling cold. And she had a deepening headache that seemed to go beyond the clatter she had suffered during the landing.

Her cabin had been reduced to a ball, barely large enough for her to stand up. The only light was a dim red emergency glow. She quickly determined she had no comms, not so much as a radio beacon to reveal her position – and there was only a trickle of power. Most of the craft’s systems seemed to be down – everything important, anyhow. There was no heat, no air renewal; maybe she was lucky the gathering cold had woken her before the growing foulness of the air put her to sleep permanently.

But she was stuck here. She sat on the floor, tucking her knees to her chest.

It all seemed a very heavy punishment for what was, after all, a pretty minor breach of discipline.

OK, Minda shouldn’t have taken a flitter for a sightseeing jaunt around the glimmering curve of the new world. OK, she shouldn’t have gone solo, and should have lodged and stuck to a flight plan. OK, she shouldn’t have flown so low over the ruined city.

But the fact was that after grousing her way through the three long years of the migration flight from Earth – three years, a fifth of her whole life – she’d fallen in love with this strange, lonely, frozen planet as soon as it had come swimming toward her through sunless space. She had sat glued before Virtual representations of her new home, tracing ocean beds with their frozen lids of ice, continents coated by sparkling frost – and the faint, all-but-erased hints of cities and roads, the mark of the vanished former inhabitants of this unlucky place. The rest of her cadre were more interested in Virtual visions of the future, when new artificial suns would be thrown into orbit around this desolate pebble. But it was Snowball itself that entranced Minda – Snowball as it was, here and now, a world deep-frozen for a million years.

As the Spline fleet had lumbered into orbit – as she had endured the ceremonies marking the claiming of this planet on behalf of the human species and the Coalition – she had itched to walk on shining lands embedded in a stillness she had never known in Earth’s crowded Conurbations.

Which was why, just a week after the first human landing on Snowball, she had gotten herself into such a mess.

Well, she couldn’t stay here. Reluctantly she got to her feet.

With a yank on a pull-tag, her seat cushion opened up into a survival suit. It was thick and quilted, with an independent air supply and a sewn-in grid of heating elements and lightweight power cells. She sealed herself in. Clean air washed over her face, and the suit’s limited medical facilities probed at her torn muscles.

She had to trigger explosive bolts to get the hatch open. The last of the flitter’s air gushed out into a landscape of silver and black, and crystals of frost fell in neat parabolas to an icebound ground. Though she was cocooned in her suit, she felt a deeper chill descend on her.

And as the vapour froze out, again she glimpsed strange sudden movement – a surface like a bubble, or a distorting mirror – an image of herself, a silvery figure standing framed in a doorway, ruddy light silhouetting her. The image shrank away.

It had been like seeing a ghost. This world of death might be full of ghosts. I should be scared, she thought. But I’m walking away from a volcanic eruption and a flitter crash. One thing at a time, Minda. Clumsily she clambered through the crash-distorted hatchway.

She found herself standing in a drift of loose, feathery snow that came up to her knees. Beneath the snow was a harder surface: perhaps water ice, even bare rock. Where her suit touched the snow, vapour billowed around her.

To her left that volcano loomed above the horizon, belching foul black fast-moving plumes that obscured the stars. And to her right, in a shallow valley, she made out structures – low, broken walls, perhaps a gridwork of streets. Everything was crystal clear: no mist to spoil the view on this world, where every molecule of atmosphere lay as frost on the ground. The sky was black and without a sun – yet it was far more crowded than the sky of Earth, for here, at the edge of the great interstellar void known as the Local Bubble, the hot young stars of Scorpio were close and dazzling.

The landscape was wonderful, what she had borrowed the flitter to come see. And yet it was lethal: every wisp of gas around her feet was a monument to more lost heat. Her fingers and toes were already numb, painful when she flexed them.

She walked around the crash site. The flitter had dug itself a trench. And as it crashed the flitter had let itself implode, giving up its structural integrity to protect the life bubble at its heart – to protect her. The craft had finished up as a rough, crumpled sphere. Now it had nothing left to give her.

Her suit would expire after no more than a few hours. She had no way to tell Bryn where she was – they probably hadn’t even missed her yet. And she and her flitter made no more than a metallic pinprick in the hide of a world as large as Earth.

She was, she thought wonderingly, going to die here. She spoke it out loud, trying to make it real. ‘I’m going to die.’ But she was Minda. How could she die? Would history go on after her? Would mankind sweep on, outward from the Earth, an irresistible colonising wave that would crest far beyond this lonely outpost, with her name no more than a minor footnote, the first human to die on the new world? ‘I haven’t done anything yet. I haven’t even had sex properly—’

A vast, silvered epidermis ballooned before her, and a voice spoke neutrally in her ear.

‘Nor, as it happens, have I.’

It was the silver ghost.

She screamed and fell back in the snow.

A bauble, silvered, perhaps two metres across, hovered a metre above the ground, like a huge droplet of mercury. It was so perfectly reflective that it was as if she couldn’t see it at all: only a fish-eye reflection of the flitter wreck and her own sprawled self, as if a piece of the world had been cut out and folded over.

And this silvery, ghostly, not-really-there creature was talking to her.

‘Native life forms are emerging from dormancy,’ said a flat, machine-generated voice in her earpieces. ‘Your heat is feeding them. To them you are a brief, unlikely summer. How fascinating.’

Clumsy in her thick protective suit, bombarded by shocks and strangeness, she twisted her head to see.

The snow was melting all around her, gushing up in thin clouds of vapour that quickly refroze and fell back, so that she was lying in the centre of a spreading crater dug out of the soft snow. And in that crater there was movement. Colours spread over the ice, all around her: green and purple and even red, patches of it like lichen, widening as she watched. A clutch of what looked like worms wriggled in fractured ice. She even saw a tiny flower push out of a mound of frozen air, widening a crimson mouth.

Struck with revulsion, she stumbled to her feet. With her heat gone the life forms dwindled back. The colours leached out of the lichen-like patches, and that single flower closed, as if regretfully.

‘A strange scene,’ said the silver ghost. ‘But it is a common tactic. The living things here must endure centuries in stillness and silence, waiting a chance benison of heat – from volcanic activity, perhaps even a cometary impact. And in those rare, precious moments, they live and die, propagate and breed. Perhaps they even dream of better times in the past.’

Though she had endured orientation exercises run by the Commission for Historical Truth, Minda had never encountered an alien before. She bunched her fists. ‘Are you a Qax?’

‘…No,’ it replied, after some hesitation. ‘Not a Qax.’

‘Then what?’

Again that hesitation. ‘Our kinds have never met before. You have no name for me. What are you?’

‘I’m a human being,’ she said defiantly. She pushed out her chest; her suit was emblazoned with a green tetrahedron. ‘And this is our planet. You’ll see, when we get it sorted out. These things, these flowers and worms, cannot compete with us.’

The ghost hovered, impassive. ‘Compete?’

She swivelled her head to confront the hovering ghost. ‘All life forms compete. It is the way of things.’ But it was as if her skull was full of a sloshing liquid; she felt herself stumbling forward.

‘Try to stay upright,’ the ghost said, its voice free of inflection. ‘Your insulation is imperfect. To reduce heat loss, you must minimise your surface contact with the ice.’

‘I don’t need your advice,’ she growled. But her breath was misting, and there were tiny frost patterns in the corners of her faceplate. The cold was sharp in her nose and mouth and eyes.

The ghost said, ‘Your body is a bag of liquid water. I surmise you come from a world of high ambient temperatures. I, however, come from a world of cold.’

‘Where?’

The hovering globe’s hide was featureless, but nevertheless she had the impression that it was spinning. ‘Towards the centre of the Galaxy.’ Something untranslatable. A distance? ‘And yours?’

She knew how to find the sun from here. Minda had travelled across a hundred and fifty light years, at the edge of the great colonising bubble called the Third Expansion, towards the brilliant young stars of Scorpio and the Southern Cross. Now those dazzling beacons were easily identifiable in the sky over her head, jewels thrown against the paler wash of the Galaxy centre. To find home, all she had to do was look the other way, back the way the great fleet of Spline ships had come. The sun, Earth and all the familiar planets were therefore somewhere beneath her feet, hidden by the bulk of this frozen rock.

She was never going to see Earth again, she thought suddenly, desolately; and because this ice-block world happened to be turned this way rather than that, she would never even see the dim, unremarkable patch of sky where Earth lay.

Without thinking, she found herself looking that way. She snapped her head up. ‘I mustn’t tell you.’

‘Ah. Competition?’

Was the ghost somehow mocking her? She said sharply, ‘If we have never met before, how come I understand you?’

‘Your vessel carries a translator box. The box understands both our languages. It is of Squeem design.’

Minda hadn’t even known her flitter was equipped with a translator box. ‘It’s a human design,’ she said.

‘No,’ the ghost said gently. ‘Squeem. We have never met before, but evidently the Squeem have met us both. Ironic. It is a strange example of inadvertent cooperation between three species: Squeem, your kind, mine.’

The Squeem were the first extra-solar species humanity had encountered. They were also the first to have occupied Sol system; the Qax, soon after, had been the second. Minda had grown up understanding that the universe was full of alien species hostile to humanity. She glanced around. Were there more silver ghosts out there, criss-crossing the silent plains, their perfect reflectiveness making them invisible to her untrained eye? She tried not to betray her fear.

She asked cautiously, ‘Are you alone?’

‘We have a large colony here.’ Again that odd hesitation. ‘But I, too, am stranded in this place. I came to investigate the city.’

‘And you were caught by the volcano?’

‘Yes. What is worse, my investigation did not advance the goals of the colony.’ She sensed it was studying her. ‘You are shivering. Do you understand why? Your body knows it is losing heat faster than it is being replaced. The shivering reflex exercises many muscles, increasing heat production by burning fuel. It is a short-term tactic, but—’

‘You know a lot about human bodies.’

‘No,’ it said. ‘I know a lot about heat. I am equipped to survive in this heat-sink landscape for extended periods. You, however, are not.’

It was as if cadre-leader Bryn was lecturing her on the endless struggle that was the only future for mankind. We cannot be weak. The Qax found us weak. They enslaved us and almost wiped our minds clean. If we are unfit for this new world, we must make ourselves fit. Whatever it takes. For only the fittest survive. If she let herself die before this enigmatic silver ghost, she would be conceding the new world to an alien race.

Impulsively, she began to stalk into the shallow valley, towards the antique city. Maybe there was something there she could use to signal, or survive.

The silver ghost followed her. It swam over the ground with a smooth, unnatural ease; it was a motion neither biological nor mechanical that she found disturbing.

She pushed through snowed-out air. The cold seemed to be settling in her lungs, and when she spoke her voice quavered from shivering.

‘Why are you here? What do you want on Snowball?’

‘We are’ – a hesitant pause – ‘researchers. This world is like a laboratory to us. This is a rare place, you see, because near-collisions between stars, of the kind that hurled this world into the dark, are rare. We are conducting experiments in low-temperature physics.’

‘You’re talking about absolute zero. Everybody knows you can’t reach absolute zero.’

‘Perhaps not. But the journey is interesting. The universe was hot when it was born,’ the ghost said gently. ‘Very hot. Since then it has expanded and cooled, slowly. But it still retains a little of that primal warmth. In the future, it will grow much colder yet. We want to know what will happen then. For example, it seems that at very low temperatures quantum wave functions – which determine the position of atoms – spread out to many times their normal size. Matter condenses into a new jelly-like form, in which all the atoms are in an identical quantum state, as if lased…’

Minda didn’t want to admit she understood none of this.

The ghost said, ‘You see, we seek to study matter and energy in configurations which might, perhaps, never before have occurred in all the universe’s history.’

She clambered over low, shattered walls, favouring hands and feet which ached with the cold. ‘That’s a strange thought.’

‘Yes. How does matter know what to do, if it has never done it before? By probing such questions we explore the boundaries of reality.’

She stopped, breathing hard, and gazed up at the hovering ghost. ‘Is that all you do, this physics stuff? Do you have a family?’

‘That is … complicated. More yes than no. Do you?’

‘We have cadres. I met my parents before I left home. They were there at my Naming, too, but I don’t remember that. Do you have music?’

‘More yes than no. We have other arts. Tell me why you are here.’

She frowned. ‘We have a right to be here.’ She waved an arm over the sky. ‘Some day humans are going to reach every star in the sky, and live there.’

‘Why?’

‘Because if we don’t, somebody else will.’

‘Is that all you do?’ the ghost asked. ‘Fly to the stars and build cities and compete?’

‘No. We have music and poetry and other stuff.’ Defensively, she plodded on through deepening snow. ‘Soon we’ll change this world. We’re going to terraform it.’ She had to explain what that meant. ‘It will be a heroic project. It will require hard work, ingenuity and perseverance. Also we have brought creatures with us that are used to the cold. We found them on an ice moon a long way from our sun, a place called Port Sol. They have liquid helium for blood. Now we farm them. They can live here, even before the terraforming.’

‘How remarkable. But there are already creatures living here.’

‘We’ll put them in cases,’ said Minda. ‘Or zoos.’

‘We, my kind, can live here, on this cold world, without making it warm.’

‘Then you’ll have to leave,’ she snapped.

She reached the outskirts of the city.

It was a gridwork of foundations and low walls, all of it half-buried under a blanket of rock-hard water ice and frozen air. The buildings and roads seemed to follow a pattern of interlocking hexagons, quite unlike the cramped, organic, circle-based design of modern Conurbations on Earth, or the rectangular layout of many older, pre-Qax human settlements.

As she walked along what might once have been a street, the pain in her hands and feet seemed to be metamorphosing to an ominous numbness.

The ghost seemed to notice this. ‘You continue to lose heat,’ it said. ‘Shivering is no longer enough to warm you. Now your body is drawing heat back from your extremities to your core. Your limbs are stiffening—’

‘Shut up,’ she hissed.

She found a waist-high fragment of wall protruding from the layers of ice. She brushed at it with her glove; loose snow fell away, revealing a surface of what looked like simple brick. But it crumbled at her touch, perhaps frost-shattered.

She walked on into what might once have been a room, a space bounded by six broken walls. Though there were many rooms close by here – clustered like a honeycomb, closer than would have been comfortable for people – it was hard to believe the inhabitants of this place had been so different from humans.

She wondered what it had been like here, before.

Once, Snowball had been Earth-like. There had been continents, oceans of water, and life – based on an organic chemistry of carbon, oxygen and water, like Earth life, and it had worked to create an atmosphere of oxygen and nitrogen, not so dissimilar to Earth’s. And there had been people here: people who had built cities, and breathed air, and perhaps gazed at the stars.

But the long afternoon of this world had been disturbed.

Its sun had suffered a chance close encounter with another star. It was an unlucky, unlikely event, Minda knew; away from the Galaxy’s centre the stars were thinly scattered. As the interloper fell through the orderly heart of this world’s home system, there must have been immense tides, ocean waves that ground cities to dust, and earthquakes, a flexing of the rocky crust itself.

And then, at the intruder’s closest approach, Snowball was slingshot out of the heart of its system.

The home sun had receded steadily. Ice spread from polar caps across the land and the oceans, until much of the planet was clad in a thick layer of hardening water ice. At last the very air began to rain out of the sky, liquid oxygen and nitrogen running down the frozen river valleys to pool atop the vast ice sheets, forming a softer snow metres thick.

She wondered what had become of the people. Had they retreated underground into caves? Had they fled their planet altogether – perhaps even migrated to new worlds surrounding the wrecking star?

‘This world itself is not without inner heat,’ the ghost said softly. ‘The deep heart of a planet this size would scarcely notice the loss of its sun.’

‘The volcano,’ Minda said dully.

‘Yes. That is one manifestation. And vents of hot material on the spreading seabed have even kept the lower levels of the ocean unfrozen. We believe there may still be active life forms there feeding on the planet’s geothermal heat. But they must have learned to survive without oxygen…’

‘Do you have that on your world? Deep heat, water under the ice?’

‘Yes. But my world is small and cold; long ago it lost much of its inner heat.’

‘The world I come from is bigger than this frozen ruin,’ she said, spreading her arms wide. ‘It has lots of heat. And it is a double world. It has a Moon. I bet even the Moon is bigger than your world.’

‘Perhaps it is,’ the ghost said. ‘It must be a wonderful place.’

‘Yes, it is. Better than your world. Better than this.’

‘Yes.’

She was very tired. She didn’t seem to be hungry, or thirsty. She wondered how long it was since she had eaten. She stared at the frozen air around her, trying to remember why she had come here. An idea sparked, fitfully.

She got to her knees. She could feel the diamond grid of the suit’s heating elements press into the flesh of her legs. She swept aside the loose snow, but beneath there was only a floor of hard water ice.

‘There’s nothing here,’ she said dully.

‘Of course not,’ the ghost said gently. ‘The tides washed it all away.’

She began to pull together armfuls of loose snow. Much of it melted and evaporated, but slowly she made a mound of it in the centre of the room.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Maybe I can breathe this stuff.’ She knew little about the flitter’s systems. Maybe there was some hopper into which she could cram this frozen air.

But the ghost was talking to her again, its voice gentle but persistent, unwelcome. ‘Your body is continuing to manage the crisis. Carbohydrates which would normally feed your brain are now being burnt to generate more heat. Your brain, starved, is slowing down; your coordination is poor. Your judgement is unreliable.’

‘I don’t care,’ she growled, scraping at the frozen air.

‘Your plan is not likely to succeed. Your biology requires oxygen. But the bulk of this snow is nitrogen. And there are trace compounds which may be toxic to you. Does your craft contain filtering systems which—’

Minda drove her suited arm through the pile of air, scattering it in a cloud of vapour. ‘Shut up. Shut up.’

She walked back to the flitter. By now it felt as if she was floating, like a ghost herself.

The silver ghost told her about the world it came from. It was like Snowball, and yet it was not.

The ghosts’ world was once Earth-like, if smaller than Earth: blue skies, a yellow sun. But even as the ghosts climbed to awareness their sun evaporated, killed by a companion pulsar. It was a slower process than the doom of Snowball, but no less lethal. The oceans froze and life huddled inward; there was frantic evolutionary pressure to find ways to keep warm.

Then the atmosphere started snowing.

The ghosts had gathered their fellow creatures around them and formed themselves into compact, silvered spheres, each body barely begrudging an erg to the cold outside. Finally clouds of mirrored life forms rolled upwards. The treacherous sky was locked out – but every stray wisp of the planet’s internal heat was trapped.

Minda wondered if this was true, or just some kind of creation myth. But the murmuring words were comforting.

‘My home Conurbation is near a ruined city. A bit like this one. The ruin is an old pre-Occupation city. It was called Pah-reess. Did you know that?’

‘No. It must be a wonderful place.’

She found she had reached the flitter. She was so cold she wasn’t even shivering any more. It was almost comfortable.

She couldn’t lie on the ground. But she found a way to use bits of debris from the flitter, stuck in the ice, to prop herself up without having to lean on anything. After a time it seemed easier to leave her eyes closed.

‘Your body is losing its ability to reheat itself. You must find an external source of heat. You will soon drift into unconsciousness…’

‘I’m in my eighth cadre,’ Minda whispered. ‘You have to move cadres every two years, you know. But I was chosen for my new cadre. I had to pass tests. My best friend is called Janu. She couldn’t come with me. She’s still on Earth…’ She smiled, thinking of Janu.

She felt herself tilting. She forced open her eyes, frost crackling on her eyelashes. She saw that the pretty, silvered landscape was tipping up around her. She was falling over. It didn’t seem to matter any more; at least she could let her sore muscles relax.

Somewhere a voice called her: ‘Always protect your core heat. It is the most important thing you possess. Remember…’

There was something wrong with the silver ghost, she saw, through sparkling frost crystals.

The ghost had come apart. Its silvery hide had unpeeled and removed itself like a semi-sentient overcoat. The hide fell gracelessly to the frozen ground and slithered towards her.

She shrank back, repelled.

What was left of the ghost was a mass of what looked like organs and digestive tracts, crimson and purple, pulsing and writhing, already shrivelling back, darkening. And they revealed something at the centre: almost like a human body, she thought, slick with pale pink fluid, and curled over like a foetus. But it, too, was rapidly freezing.

All around the subsiding sub-organisms, the frozen air of Snowball briefly evaporated, evoking billowing mist. And the dormant creatures of the Snowball enjoyed explosive growth: not just lichen-like scrapings and isolated flowers now, but a kind of miniature forest, trees pushing out of the ice and frosted air, straining for a black sky. Minda saw roots tangle as they dug into crevices in the ice, seeking the warmth of deeper levels, perhaps even liquid water.

But in no more than a few seconds it was over. The heat the ghost had hoarded for an unknown lifetime was lost to the uncaring stars, and the small native forest was freezing in place for another millennium of dormancy. Then the air frosted out once more.

At last Minda fell.

But there was something beneath her now, a smooth, dark sheet that would keep her from the ice. She collapsed onto it helplessly. A thick, stiff blanket stretched over her, shutting out the starry sky.

She wasn’t warm, but she wasn’t getting any colder. She smiled and closed her eyes.

When she opened her eyes again, the stars framed a Spline ship, rolling overhead, and the concerned face of her cadre leader, Bryn.

The Spline rose high, and the site of Minda’s crash dwindled to a pinpoint, a detail lost between the tracery of the abandoned city and the volcano’s huge bulk.

‘It was the motion of the vegetation that our sensors spotted,’ Bryn said. Her face was sombre, her voice tired after the long search. ‘That was what drew us to you. Not your heat, or even your ghost’s. That was masked by the volcano.’

‘Perhaps the ghost meant that to happen,’ Minda said.

‘Perhaps.’ Bryn glanced at the ghost’s hide, spread on a wall. ‘Your ghost was astonishing. But its morphology is a logical outcome of an evolutionary drive. As the sky turned cold, living things learned to cooperate, in ever greater assemblages, sharing heat and resources. The thing you called a silver ghost was really a community of symbiotic creatures: an autarky, a miniature biosphere in its own right, all but independent of the universe outside. Even the skin that saved you was independently alive … This is a new species for us. Evidently we have reached a point where two growing spheres of colonisation, human and ghost, have met. Our future encounters will be interesting.’

As the planet folded on itself, Minda saw the colony of the ghosts rising over the chill horizon. It was a forest of globes and half-globes anchored by cables; gleaming necklaces swooped between the globes. The colony, a sculpture of silver droplets glistening on a black velvet landscape, was quite remarkably beautiful.

But now a dazzling point of light rose above the horizon, banishing the stars. It was a new sun for Snowball made by humans, the first of many fusion satellites hastily prepared and launched. The ghost city cast dazzling reflections, and the silver globes seemed to shrivel back.

Bryn said, watching her, ‘Do you understand what has happened here? If the ghosts’ evolution was not competitive as ours was, they must be weaker than us.’

‘But the ghost gave me its skin. It gave its life to save me.’

Bryn said sternly, ‘It is dead. You are alive. Therefore you are the stronger.’

‘Yes,’ Minda whispered. ‘I am the stronger.’

Bryn eyed her with suspicion.

Where the artificial sun passed, the air melted, pooling and vaporising in great gushes.

After that first contact, two powerful interstellar cultures cautiously engaged. One man, called Jack Raoul, played a key role in developing a constructive relationship.

To understand the creatures humans came to know as ‘Silver Ghosts’ – so Raoul used to lecture those who were sceptical about the mission that consumed his life – you had to understand where they came from.

After the Ghosts watched their life heat leak away to the sky, they became motivated by a desire to understand the fine-tuning of the universe. As if they wanted to fix the design flaws that had betrayed them.

So they meddled with the laws of physics. This made them interesting to deal with. Interesting and scary.

Relationships deepened. The ‘Raoul Accords’ were established to maintain the peace, and give humans some say in the Ghosts’ outrageous tinkering with the universe.

But times changed. The Coalition tightened its grip on human affairs.

Three centuries after Minda, there was rising friction between Ghost and human empires. And Jack Raoul found himself out of favour.

THE COLD SINK

AD 5802

‘I called on Jack Raoul at the time appointed, acting in my capacity as a representative of the Supreme Court of the Third Expansion. Raoul submitted himself to my custody without complaint or protest.

‘I must record that the indignity of the armed escort, as ordered by the court, only added to the cruelty of the procedure I was mandated to perform.’

It was as if somebody had called his name.

He was alone in his Virtual apartment – drinking whisky, looking out at a fake view of the New Bronx, missing his ex-wife – alone in a home become a gaol, in fact. Now he looked to the door.

Maybe they’d come to get him already. He felt his remote heart beat, and his mood of gloomy nostalgia gave way to hard fear. Don’t let ’em see they’ve won, Jack.

With a growl, he commanded the door to open.

And there, instead of the surgeons and Commission goons he had expected, was a Silver Ghost: a spinning, shimmering bauble as tall as Raoul, crowding the dowdy apartment-block corridor. It was intimidating close to in this domestic environment, like some huge piece of machinery. In its mirrored epidermis he could see his own gaunt Virtual face. An electromagnetic signature was quickly overlaid for him – Ghosts looked alike only in normal human vision – but he would have recognised his visitor anyhow.

‘You,’ he said.

‘Hello, Jack Raoul.’ It was the Ghost known to humans as the Ambassador to the Heat Sink. Raoul had dealt with this one many times before, over decades.

‘What are you doing here? How did you get past the Commission security? … Ambassador, I’m afraid I’m not much use to you any more.’

‘Jack Raoul, I am here for you.’

Raoul grimaced. What in Lethe did that mean? ‘Look, I don’t know how closely you’ve been following human politics. This isn’t a good day for me.’

‘As in former times, you hide your emotions behind weak jokes.’

‘They’re the best jokes I’ve got,’ he said defensively.

‘The truth is well known. Today you must face the sentence of your conspecifics.’

‘So you’re here for the spectacle?’

The Ghost said, ‘I am here to present another option, Jack Raoul.’

Raoul studied the Ghost’s bland, shimmering surface. There was no hope for him, of course. But he felt oddly touched. ‘You’d better come in.’

The Ambassador sailed easily into the apartment, making the walls crumble to pixels where its limbs brushed against them. ‘How is the whisky today?’

Raoul sipped it, savouring its peaty smoke. ‘You know, I’m more than two hundred years old. But I figure that I could live another two hundred and not get this stuff right.’ Still, maybe this would be his lasting legacy, he thought sourly: the best Virtual whisky in all the Third Expansion, savoured and remembered long after the Raoul Accords had been forgotten – which time might not be so far into the future.

‘You are missing Eve,’ said the Ambassador.

The Ghost’s perception had always surprised him. ‘Yeah,’ he admitted. ‘In a way this place is all I have left of her. But even here she is just an absence.’

‘You must leave her now,’ said the Ghost. ‘Come with me.’

The abruptness of that startled him. ‘Leave? How? Where are we going?’

‘Jack Raoul, do you trust me?’

Escape was impossible, of course; Coalition security was tight, the Commission omnipresent. But this lunatic Ghost must have come a long way for this stunt, whatever it was. Maybe it was only respectful to go along for the ride.

Anyhow, what did he have to lose? One last adventure, Jack: why not?

He put the whisky glass down on a low table, savouring the weight of the heavy crystal, the gentle clink of its base on the table. ‘Yes,’ he said, looking into his heart. ‘Yes, I guess I do trust you.’ He stood straight. ‘I’m ready.’

Again he had the sensation that somebody was calling his name.

The room crumbled into blocky pixels that washed away like spindrift, and suddenly he was suspended in light.

‘It is important to understand that Raoul’s fully human brain was maintained by normal physiological functions. Think of him as a human being, then, flensed and de-boned, sustained within a shell of alien artifice.

‘The operation was more like a dismantling than a medical procedure. It was rapid.

‘Immediately after the beheading I lifted the head and observed Raoul’s eyes.

‘The lids worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds. Then the spasmodic movements ceased. The face relaxed, the lids half-closed on the eyeballs, leaving only the white of the conjunctiva visible. (It will be recalled that Raoul’s “eyes” were quasi-organic Ghost artefacts.)

‘I called in a sharp voice: “Jack Raoul!” I saw the eyelids lift up, without any spasmodic contractions.

‘Raoul’s eyes fixed themselves on mine.’

Raoul looked down at himself. His body gleamed, a silver statue.

He peered around, trying to get oriented. He made out a tangle of silvery rope, a complex, multi-layered webbing that appeared to stretch around him in all directions. Everywhere he looked, Ghosts slid along the cables like droplets of mercury. And beyond and through it all, a deep glimmering light shone, a universal glow made pearl grey by the depth of the tangle.

He sure wasn’t on 51 Pegasi I-C any more.

Jack Raoul had spent his working life at the uneasy political interface between Ghost and human. In those vanishing days of more-or-less friendly rivalry, governed by more-or-less equable accords, it had been Raoul’s responsibility to ensure that humans knew what the Ghosts were doing, on their vast, remote experimental sites, just as Ghost observers were allowed to inspect human establishments. Mutual security through inspection and verification, an old principle.

But Raoul had soon learned that asking for evidence wasn’t enough. Somebody had to go out there and see for himself – and on Ghost terms. That meant a sacrifice, though, that nobody was prepared to accept.

Nobody but Raoul himself.

So his brain and spinal cord were rolled up and moved into a cleaned-out chest cavity. His circulatory system was wrapped into a complex mass around the brain pan. The Ghosts built a new metabolic system, far more efficient than the old and capable of working off direct radiative input. New eyes, capable of working in spectral regions well beyond the human range, were bolted into his skull. He was given Ghost ‘muscles’ – a tiny antigravity drive and compact actuator motors. At last he was wrapped in something that looked like sheets of mercury.

Thus he was made a Ghost.

Jack Raoul couldn’t live with people any more, outside of Virtual environments. Not that he wanted to. But he could fly in space. He could eat sunlight and survive the vacuum for days at a time, sustaining his antique human core in warmth and darkness. It was odd that he was actually more at home here in a Ghost ship than anywhere in the human Expansion.

‘…Jack Raoul.’ The Sink Ambassador swum before him, spinning languidly. ‘How do you feel?’

Raoul flexed his metal fingers. ‘How do you think I feel?’

‘You are as evasive as ever.’

‘Am I on a ship, Ambassador?’ If so it was bigger than any Ghost cruiser he had ever seen.

‘In a manner of speaking. For now, we must ascend.’

‘Ascend?’

‘Towards the light. Please.’ The Ghost rose, slow waves crossing its surface.

Effortlessly Raoul followed.

Soon they were passing into the tangle of silvery ropes. When he looked back, there was nothing to mark the place he had emerged from – not even a hollow in the tangle.

At home or not, he knew he shouldn’t be here.

‘Ambassador, I was under house arrest. How did you get me out of there?’

‘Have you improved your understanding of quantum physics since we last met?’

Inwardly, Raoul groaned.

The Ambassador began, somewhat earnestly, to describe how the Ghosts had learned to break up electrons: to divide indivisible particles.

‘The principle is simple,’ said the Ghost. ‘An electron’s quantum wave function describes the probability of finding it at any particular location. In its lowest energy state, the wave function is spherical. But in its next highest energy state the wave function has a dumb-bell shape. Now, if that dumb-bell could be stretched and pinched, could it be divided?…’

The Ambassador described how a vat of liquid helium was bathed in laser light of a precise frequency, exciting electron wave functions into their dumb-bell configurations. Then, as the pressure within the helium was increased, the electron dumb-bells split and pairs of half-bubbles drifted apart.

To Raoul it sounded like a typical Ghost experiment: extremes of low temperature, the fringe areas of physical law.

‘Jack Raoul, you must understand that the quantum wave function is no mathematical abstraction, but a physical entity. We have split and trapped a wave function itself – perhaps the first time in the history of the universe this has occurred,’ the Ghost said immodestly.

Raoul suppressed a sigh. ‘You guys never do anything simply, do you? So you split an electron’s wave function. So what?’

‘The half-electrons, coming from the same source, are forever entangled. Put another way, if the bubbles are separated and the wave function collapsed, an electron can leap from one bubble to another…’

Raoul fought his way through that fog of words. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Teleportation. You’re talking about a new kind of teleportation. Right? And that’s what you used to get me out of my cell.’

‘Yes. Time was short, Jack Raoul. Your conspecifics were closing in.’

So they were, and so they had been for decades.

Still they rose through the crowded tangle. That all-consuming light seemed, if anything, to be growing brighter. He could sense deep vibrations passing through the ship’s structure, the booming low-frequency calls of Silver Ghosts. Here and there he saw denser concentrations – nurseries, perhaps, or control centres, or simply areas where Ghosts lived and played – little more than patches of silvery shadow, like birds’ nests in the branches of some vast tree. It was characteristic Ghost architecture, vibrant, complex, beautiful, alive – and totally inhuman.

It had always seemed to Jack Raoul that humans and Ghosts were different enough that everybody could get along. Their goals were utterly unlike humanity’s, after all. That had been the motivation behind the patchwork of treaties eventually known as the Raoul Accords. But times changed.

When Raoul was a boy, the human colonisation programme was still piecemeal, driven by individual initiative. The leading edge of the Third Expansion had been too remote from the centre, Earth, to be tightly controlled. Players like Jack Raoul had freedom of movement. But gradually the Coalition – especially its executive arm the Commission for Historical Truth – had infiltrated all mankind’s power centres. The ideologues of the Coalition had provided the species with a unity of purpose, belief, even language. The Third Expansion became purposeful, a powerful engine of conquest.

But from Jack Raoul’s point of view, it was all downside. The pro-human ideology grew ferocious. Soon even longevity, like Raoul’s, was seen as a crime against the interests of the species. As the short generations had ticked by, and as the worlds of humanity filled up with fifteen-year-old soldiers, Raoul had come to feel like a monument left standing from an earlier, misunderstood era.

And it got worse.

Raoul had been summoned back to Earth, to appear before the Commission for Historical Truth. It was part of the great cleansing that had been pursued ever since the days after the fall of the Qax Occupation of Earth, when collaborators had been hunted down and judged. After a curt hearing, Raoul’s life’s work had been retrospectively labelled as counter to the evolutionary interests of mankind.

His advisers had urged him to appeal. Everything he had done had been under the specific direction of legally constituted governments and inter-governmental bodies of the time. But he wasn’t about to justify himself to a bunch of children. He knew the true value of his legacy. After all, it had cost him his own humanity.

And so sentence had been passed.

‘How did you and I get to be the bad guys, Ambassador?’

The Ambassador’s perfect hide cast glimmering highlights from the tangle sliding past them. ‘We are old, Jack Raoul. Old and out of our time.’

‘That we are, my friend.’

‘Nevertheless, Jack Raoul, you have been a valuable interface between our species. Many sentient beings were saved from unhappiness and premature termination by your actions. This “punishment” is absurd and disproportionate. It is probably not even legal in your own terms.’

‘You’re storing up trouble,’ Raoul said. ‘Like it or not, I was tried by humanity’s highest court. If you intervene it will surely go badly for you; the Coalition is not noted for its forgiveness. As for me, maybe it’s my duty to sit tight and take my punishment. I will be the greater martyr for it.’

‘See what we offer you, Jack Raoul, before you turn it down for the sake of martyrdom.’

At last, Raoul saw, their steady rise was slowing, the tangle of silver cables thinning out, as if they were reaching the top of a vast metallic tree. But there was still no sign of black, star-studded sky above; rather he made out swathes of light, glowing brightly, bright as the sun. Maybe the ship was actually sailing through the outer layers of a sun; it wouldn’t be the first time the Ghosts had pulled such a stunt.

But the light, so his smart eyes quickly told him, was too complex for that. It was as if the sky was crowded with stars, every place he looked.

And suddenly he understood. Olbers’ paradox…

‘Sink Ambassador. This teleportation technique of yours. It can carry you from one side of the universe to the other. Yes?’

‘Further than that.’

‘And the light that bathes us—’

‘It is starlight, Jack Raoul. Nothing but starlight.’

Again he had the sense that someone called him. He ascended into the light, seeking the voice.

‘After several seconds the eyelids closed again, slowly and evenly, and the eyes took on the same appearance as before.

‘I called out again.

‘Once more, without any spasm, the lids lifted. Undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids, but now less complete.’

He looked down at the Ghost ship, a mass of entwined silvery cables with knots of life embedded everywhere, all of it glowing in the endless starlight. He could still make out the Sink Ambassador, a mercury droplet clinging to the tangle.

But the structure was shrinking, closing on itself. The sky was a sphere of light, glowing white, and he felt he was being drawn away from the tangle, up into the light.

‘Olbers’ paradox,’ he whispered.

‘Yes,’ said the Ghost. ‘A key moment in the evolution of human thought, a philosophical fossil preserved by exiles through the Qax Extirpation … If the universe were infinite and static, every line of sight would meet the surface of a star, and the whole sky would be as bright as the surface of a sun. Even occluding dust clouds would soon become as hot as the stars themselves. That was evidently not so, observed those thinkers of old Earth. Therefore their universe could not be infinite or static.’

‘But here—’

‘But here, things are different. This appears to be a pocket universe, Jack Raoul. We believe it is a bubble of spacetime pinched off by a singularity. The heart of a black hole, perhaps.’

‘Infinite and static.’

‘Yes.’

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Raoul said. ‘If the whole sky is as hot as the surface of the sun – Ambassador, how do you keep cool?’

The Ghost rolled, shimmering. ‘There is another pocket universe at the centre of the colony. Our heat is dumped there.’

Raoul gaped. ‘You have a whole universe for a heat dump? And is that how the stars keep shining?’

‘We think so. Otherwise, immersed in this heat bath, simple thermodynamics would soon cause the stars to evaporate. We have only recently arrived here, Jack Raoul; there is much we have yet to explore. But it is clear to us that this cosmos is heavily engineered.’

‘Engineered? Who by?’

‘The Xeelee,’ the Ghost said.

‘Ah.’ The Xeelee: aloof from the petty squabbles of lesser kinds, even of sprawling, brawling humanity. The Xeelee, as remote as clouds.

‘It is not certain,’ said the Ghost. ‘But there are certain signatures we have come to recognise … Such universe-modelling does appear to be a characteristic Xeelee strategy.’

Raoul laughed, wondering. ‘At last you’ve found yourselves an inverted sky, Ambassador. A Cold Sink.’ Considering their evolutionary history, shaped by cosmic betrayal and cold, this place was like a Ghost wish-fulfilment fantasy.

‘Yes. Jack Raoul, we believe we were led here, by the Xeelee. Perhaps they have prepared a bolt-hole of their own, in case their epochal war with the photino birds is ultimately lost.’

‘You see this place as a bolt-hole? What are you hiding from?’

‘You,’ said the Ambassador.

That took him aback.

‘Jack Raoul, your Expansion is already expanding exponentially. We are in your way.’

Raoul had heard this said. The Ghosts’ home range lay between mankind and the rich fields of the Galaxy’s Core, and the Expansion was pressing.

But he protested, ‘It’s a big Galaxy. It’s not even as if we are fighting over the same kinds of territory, or resource. Ghosts are adapted to the cold and dark, humans to deep gravity wells. There is room for all of us.’

‘That is true,’ said the Ambassador. ‘But irrelevant. Your Expansion is fuelled by ideology as much as resource acquisition – and it is not an ideology that preaches of sharing. In such a situation there can be no diplomacy.

‘There is already war. A series of flashpoints, all along the Expansion’s growing border. Naturally we will use our every resource in our fight for survival, just as we did when our sun died. There will be epic battles. But the logic is against us. Our most optimistic projection is three thousand years.’

‘Until what?’

‘Until the Silver Ghosts are extinct.’

Raoul said grimly, ‘I spent my life fighting against such outcomes, Ambassador. As did you. Are you telling me now it was all futile?’

‘From the beginning. But there is no failure, Jack Raoul. Here we have found a sanctuary. Though the Xeelee do not intervene in the squabbles of lesser types like us, they appear to embrace diversity. They gave us this place. Perhaps they have prepared a haven for your kind, against the inevitable day when humanity too must decline.’

But Raoul found it increasingly hard to concentrate; his attention was drawn away from the Ghost and his words, away from the tangle, up to that infinite light.

The Ghost spun on its invisible axis, this way and that. ‘Jack Raoul, I urge you to consider. If we are safe here, so are you. We can provide any Virtual environment you desire.’ The Ghost seemed to hesitate. ‘We can give you Eve.’

Ah, Eve…

You can ‘t stay. It was as if he could hear her voice, see her pushing her fingers through her greyed hair. You held on to me for too long. And now, this. You never could let go Jack. But now you have to. You see that, don’t you?

He felt himself rise further. The tangle shrank beneath him, becoming lost in the light.

It’s time to go, Jack.

‘The Sink Ambassador is a friend,’ he told Eve.

‘Jack Raoul?’

Sure he’s a friend. That’s why he’s showing you what you want to see. You don’t want to die a failure. But it isn’t real. You know that, don’t you?

Perhaps the Sink Ambassador somehow heard this inner voice. ‘Jack Raoul, it can be as real as you desire. We have only a single moment to give you. But we can make that moment last an eternity.’

‘Thank you, my friend. But this isn’t my place.’

‘Jack Raoul, please…’

The tangle faded into the light. Raoul had time for a last, brief stab of regret.

Then, artificial eyes raised, he ascended into the white glow that was calling him.

‘I attempted a third call, but there was no further movement. The eyes finally took on the glazed look of the dead.

‘The whole sequence of post-excision events lasted twenty-five to thirty seconds. More precise timings are of course available in the record.

‘Death occurred due to separation of the brain and spinal cord, after transection of the surrounding tissues and excision of the brain from the chest cavity, which probably caused acute and possibly severe pain. Consciousness was lost due to a rapid fall of intracranial perfusion of blood. Throughout the procedure nervous connections were maintained with sensory organs, notably the “eyes”, “ears” and “nose”.

‘As noted, Jack Raoul did not resist.

‘It may be that because of Raoul’s unique physical condition, this “beheading” was the only available mode of execution. However I believe that my precise observations during my administration of this case demonstrate that Raoul was aware of what was happening to him even after excision, thus casting doubt on the humanity of the procedure.

‘I will concede that I saw a certain peace, at the last, in Jack Raoul’s dying eyes. It may be that somehow he found consolation, which may in turn give comfort to those who passed sentence on this complex man.

‘Death occurred at the time and place noted.

‘Signed: HAMA TINIF, Attending Physician.’

The Sink Ambassador was right. War was inevitable. The logic of the Third Expansion would have it no other way.

At first human forces made spectacular advances. The Ghosts, capable of manipulating physical law, were on paper formidable adversaries. But we were better at making war.

In the centuries of conflict that followed, the Coalition completed its control. Humanity’s ideology and economics were reoriented. Our entire civilisation became a machine to serve the Expansion and the war, and in turn became dependent on those two projects.

But then, as we approached the Ghosts’ home ranges, the Expansion stalled.

ON THE ORION LINE

AD 6454

The Brief Life Burns Brightly broke out of the fleet. We were chasing down a Ghost cruiser, and we were closing.

The lifedome of the Brightly was transparent, so it was as if Captain Teid in her big chair, and her officers and their equipment clusters – and a few low-grade tars like me standing by – were just floating in space. The light was subtle, coming from a nearby cluster of hot young stars, and from the rivers of sparking lights that made up the fleet formation we had just left, and beyond that from the sparking of novae. This was the Orion Line – six thousand light years from Earth and a thousand lights long, a front that spread right along the inner edge of the Orion Spiral Arm – and the stellar explosions marked battles which must have concluded years ago.

And, not a handful of klicks away, the Ghost cruiser slid across space, running for home. The cruiser was a rough egg-shape of silvered rope. Hundreds of Ghosts clung to the rope. You could see them slithering this way and that, not affected at all by the emptiness around them.

The Ghosts’ destination was a small, old yellow star. Pael, our tame Academician, had identified it as a fortress star from some kind of strangeness in its light. But up close you don’t need to be an Academician to spot a fortress. From the Brightly I could see with my unaided eyes that the star had a pale blue cage around it – an open lattice with struts half a million kilometres long – thrown there by the Ghosts, for their own purposes.

I had a lot of time to watch all this. I was just a tar. I was fifteen years old.

My duties at that moment were non-specific. I was supposed to stand by, and render assistance any way that was required, most likely with basic medical attention should we go into combat. Right now the only one of us tars actually working was Halle, who was chasing down a pool of vomit sicked up by Pael, the Academician, the only non-Navy personnel on the bridge.

The action on the Brightly wasn’t like you see in Virtual shows. The atmosphere was calm, quiet, competent. All you could hear was the murmur of voices, from the crew and the equipment, and the hiss of recycling air. No drama: it was like an operating theatre.

There was a soft warning chime.

The Captain raised an arm and called over Academician Pael, First Officer Till, and Jeru, the Commissary assigned to the ship. They huddled close, conferring – apparently arguing. I saw the way flickering nova light reflected from Jeru’s shaven head.

I felt my heart beat harder.

Everybody knew what the chime meant: that we were approaching the fortress cordon. Either we would break off, or we would chase the Ghost cruiser inside its invisible fortress. And everybody knew that no Navy ship that had ever penetrated a Ghost fortress cordon, ten light-minutes from the central star, and come back out again.

One way or the other, it would all be resolved soon.

Captain Teid cut short the debate. She leaned forward and addressed the crew. Her voice, cast through the ship, was friendly, like a cadre leader whispering in your ear. ‘You can all see we can’t catch that swarm of Ghosts this side of the cordon. And you all know the hazard of crossing a cordon. But if we’re ever going to break this blockade of theirs we have to find a way to bust open those forts. So we’re going in anyhow. Stand by your stations.’

There was a half-hearted cheer.

I caught Halle’s eye. She grinned at me. She pointed at the Captain, closed her fist and made a pumping movement. I admired her sentiment but she wasn’t being too accurate, anatomically speaking, so I raised my middle finger and jiggled it back and forth.

It took a slap on the back of the head from Jeru, the Commissary, to put a stop to that. ‘Little morons,’ she growled.

‘Sorry, sir—’

I got another slap for the apology. Jeru was a tall, stocky woman, dressed in the bland monastic robes said to date from the time of the founding of the Commission for Historical Truth a thousand years ago. But rumour was she’d seen plenty of combat action of her own before joining the Commission, and such was her physical strength and speed of reflex I could well believe it.

As we neared the cordon the Academician, Pael, started a gloomy countdown. The slow geometry of Ghost cruiser and tinsel-wrapped fortress star swivelled across the crowded sky. Everybody went quiet.

The darkest time is always just before the action starts. Even if you can see and hear what is going on, all you do is think. What was going to happen to us when we crossed that intangible border? Would a fleet of Ghost ships materialise all around us? Would some mysterious weapon simply blast us out of the sky?

I caught the eye of First Officer Till. He was a veteran of twenty years; his scalp had been burned away in some ancient close-run combat, long before I was born, and he wore a crown of scar tissue with pride. ‘Let’s do it, tar,’ he growled.

All the fear went away. I was overwhelmed by a feeling of togetherness, of us all being in this crap together. I had no thought of dying. Just: let’s get through this. ‘Yes, sir!’

Pael finished his countdown.

All the lights went out. Detonating stars wheeled.

And the ship exploded.

I was thrown into darkness. Air howled. Emergency bulkheads scythed past me, and I could hear people scream.

I slammed into the curving hull, nose pressed against the stars.

I bounced off and drifted. The inertial suspension was out, then. I thought I could smell blood – probably my own.

I could see the Ghost ship, a tangle of rope and silver baubles, glinting with highlights from the fortress star. We were still closing. We were going to collide in minutes, no more.

But I could also see shards of shattered lifedome, a sputtering drive unit. The shards were bits of the Brightly. It had gone, all gone, in a fraction of a second.

‘Let’s do it,’ I murmured.

Maybe I was out of it for a while.

Somebody grabbed my ankle and tugged me down. There was a competent slap on my cheek, enough to make me focus.

‘Case. Can you hear me?’

It was First Officer Till. Even in the swimming starlight that burned-off scalp was unmistakable.

I glanced around. There were four of us here: Till, Commissary Jeru, Academician Pael, me. We were huddled up against what looked like the stump of the First Officer’s console. I realised that the gale of venting air had stopped. I was back inside a hull with integrity, then—

‘Case!’

‘I—yes, sir.’

‘Report.’

I touched my lip; my hand came away bloody. At a time like that it’s your duty to report your injuries, honestly and fully. Nobody needs a hero who turns out not to be able to function. ‘I think I’m all right. I may have concussion.’

‘Good enough. Strap down.’ Till handed me a length of rope.

I saw that the others had tied themselves to struts. I did the same.

Till, with practised ease, swam away into the air, I guessed looking for other survivors.

Academician Pael was trying to curl into a ball. He couldn’t even speak. The tears just rolled out of his eyes. I stared at the way big globules welled up and drifted away into the air, glimmering. The action had been over in seconds. That was war in space for you, journeys that can last years, combat that’s over in heartbeats, and your story is done. All a bit sudden for an earthworm, I guess.

Nearby, I saw, trapped under one of the emergency bulkheads, there was a pair of legs – just that. The rest of the body must have been chopped away, gone drifting off with the rest of the debris from Brightly. But I recognised those legs, from a garish pink stripe on the sole of the right boot. That had been Halle. She was the only girl I had ever screwed – and more than likely, given the situation, the only girl I ever would get to screw. I couldn’t figure out how I felt about that.

Jeru was watching Pael, and me. ‘Tar – do you think we should all be frightened for ourselves, like the Academician?’ Her accent was strong, unidentifiable.

‘No, sir.’

‘No.’ Jeru studied Pael with contempt. ‘We are in an escape yacht, Academician. A bit of the lifedome, carved out by the emergency bulkheads when the Brightly was attacked.’ She sniffed. ‘We have air, and it isn’t foul yet. But we’re still closing on that Ghost cruiser.’

I’d managed to forget where we were going, and how little time we had. Fear pricked.

Jeru winked at me. ‘Maybe we can do a little damage to the Ghosts before we die, tar. What do you think?’

I grinned. ‘Yes, sir.’

Pael lifted his head and stared at me with salt water eyes. ‘Lethe. You people are monsters.’ His accent was gentle, a lilt. ‘Even a child such as this. You embrace death—’

Jeru grabbed Pael’s jaw in a massive hand, and pinched the joints until he squealed. ‘Captain Teid grabbed you, Academician; she threw you here, to safety, before the bulkhead came down. I saw it. If she hadn’t taken the time to do that, she would have made it herself. Was she a monster? Did she embrace death?’ And she pushed Pael’s face away.

For some reason I hadn’t thought about the rest of the crew until that moment. I guess I have a limited imagination. Now, I felt adrift. The Captain – dead? I said, ‘Excuse me, Commissary. How many other yachts got out?’

‘None,’ she said steadily, making sure I had no illusions. ‘Just this one. They died doing their duty, tar. Like the Captain.’

Of course she was right, and I felt a little better. Whatever his character, Pael was too valuable not to save. As for me, I had survived through sheer blind chance, through being in the right place when the walls came down: if the Captain had been close, her duty would have been to pull me out of the way and take my place. It isn’t a question of human values but of economics: a lot more is invested in the training and experience of a Captain Teid – or a Pael – than in me.

First Officer Till came bustling back with a heap of equipment. ‘Put these on.’ He handed out pressure suits. They were what we called slime suits in training: lightweight skinsuits, running off a backpack of gen-enged algae. ‘Move it,’ said Till. ‘Impact with the Ghost cruiser in four minutes. We don’t have any power; there’s nothing we can do but ride it out.’

I crammed my legs into my suit.

Jeru complied, stripping off her robe to reveal a hard, scarred body. But she was frowning. ‘Why not heavier armour?’

For answer, Till picked out a gravity-wave handgun from the gear he had retrieved. Without pausing he held it to Pael’s head and pushed the fire button.

Pael twitched.

Till said, ‘See? Nothing is working. Nothing but bio systems, it seems. They have been spared, presumably deliberately – that is a characteristic Ghost tactic. They disable your weapons but leave you alive.’ He threw the gun aside.

Pael closed his eyes, breathing hard.

Till said to me, ‘Test your comms.’

I closed up my hood and faceplate and began intoning, ‘One, two, three…’ I could hear nothing.

Till began tapping at our backpacks, resetting the systems. His hood started to glow with transient, pale blue symbols. And then, scratchily, his voice started to come through. ‘…Five, six, seven – can you hear me, tar?’

‘Yes, sir.’

The symbols were bioluminescent. There were receptors on all our suits – photoreceptors, simple eyes – which could ‘read’ the messages scrawled on our companions’ suits. It was a backup system meant for use in Ghost-ridden environments where anything higher-tech would be a liability. But obviously it would only work as long as we were in line of sight.

‘That will make life harder,’ Jeru said. Oddly, mediated by software, she was easier to understand.

Till shrugged. ‘You take it as it comes.’ Briskly, he began to hand out more gear. ‘These are basic field kits. There’s some medical stuff: a suture kit, scalpel blades, blood-giving sets. You wear these syrettes around your neck, Academician. They contain painkillers, various gen-enged med-viruses … No, you wear it outside your suit, Pael, so you can reach it. You’ll find valve inlets here, on your sleeve, and here, on the leg.’ Now came weapons. ‘We should carry handguns, just in case they start working, but be ready with these. ‘He handed out combat knives.

Pael shrank back.

‘Take the knife, Academician. You can shave off that ugly beard, if nothing else.’

I laughed out loud, and was rewarded with a wink from Till.

I took a knife. It was a heavy chunk of steel, solid and reassuring. I tucked it in my belt. I was starting to feel a whole lot better.

‘Two minutes to impact,’ Jeru said. I didn’t have a working chronometer; she must have been counting the seconds.

‘Seal up.’ Till began to check the integrity of Pael’s suit; Jeru and I helped each other. Face seal, glove seal, boot seal, pressure check. Water check, oh-two flow, cee-oh-two scrub…

When we were sealed I risked poking my head above Till’s chair.

The Ghost ship filled space, occluding the stars and the warring fleets. The craft was kilometres across, big enough to have dwarfed the poor, doomed Brief Life Burns Brightly. It was a tangle of silvery rope studded with bulky equipment pods. And Silver Ghosts were everywhere. I could see how the yacht’s emergency lights were returning crimson highlights from the featureless hides of Ghosts, so they looked like blood droplets sprayed across that shining perfection.

The four of us huddled together. We had been granted a little bit of peace while the yacht drifted across space, an interval between the destruction of the Brightly and this inevitable collision with the Ghost cruiser. Now the interval was over.

‘Ten seconds,’ Till called. ‘Brace.’

Suddenly silver ropes thick as tree trunks were all around us, looming out of the sky, and we were thrown into chaos again.

I heard a grind of twisted metal, a scream of air. The hull popped open like an eggshell. The last of our air fled in a gush of ice crystals, and the only sound I could hear was my own breathing.

The crumpling hull soaked up some of our momentum. But then the base of the yacht hit, and it hit hard. The chair was wrenched out of my grasp, and I was hurled upwards. There was a sudden pain in my left arm. I couldn’t help but cry out.

I reached the limit of my tether and rebounded. The jolt sent further waves of pain through my arm. From up there, I could see the others were clustered around the base of the First Officer’s chair, which had collapsed.

The grinding, the shuddering stopped. The impact was over.

We had stuck like a dart in the outer layers of the Ghost ship. Shining threads arced all around us, as if a huge net had scooped us up.

Jeru grabbed me and pulled me down. She jarred my bad arm, and I winced. But she ignored me, and went back to working on Till. He was under the fallen chair.

Pael started to take a syrette of dope from the sachet around his neck.

Jeru knocked his hand away. ‘You always use the casualty’s,’ she hissed. ‘Never your own.’

Pael looked hurt, rebuffed. ‘Why?’

I could answer that. ‘Because the chances are you’ll need your own in a minute.’

Jeru stabbed a syrette into Till’s arm.

Pael was staring at me through his faceplate with wide, frightened eyes. ‘You’ve broken your arm.’

Looking closely at the arm for the first time, I saw that it was bent back at an impossible angle. I couldn’t believe it, even through the pain. I’d never bust so much as a finger, all the way through training.

Now Till jerked, a kind of miniature convulsion, and a big bubble of spit and blood blew out of his lips. Then the bubble popped, and his limbs went loose.

Jeru sat back, breathing hard. She said, ‘OK. OK. How did he put it? – You take it as it comes.’ She looked around, at me, Pael. I could see she was trembling, which scared me.

I said, ‘The First Officer—’

Jeru looked at me, and for a second her expression softened. ‘Is dead.’

Pael just stared, eyes empty.

I asked, ‘Sir – how?’

‘A broken neck. Till broke his neck, tar.’

Another death, just like that: for a heartbeat that was too much for me.

Jeru said briskly, ‘Now we move. We have to find an LUP. A lying-up point, Academician. A place to hole up. Do your duty, tar. Help the worm.’

I snapped back. ‘Yes, sir.’ I grabbed Pael’s unresisting arm.

Led by Jeru, we began to move, the three of us, away from the crumpled wreck of our yacht, deep into the alien tangle of a Silver Ghost cruiser.

We found our LUP.

It was just a hollow in a somewhat denser tangle of silvery ropes, but it afforded us some cover, and it seemed to be away from the main concentration of Ghosts. We were still open to the vacuum – as the whole cruiser seemed to be – and I realised then that I wouldn’t be getting out of this suit for a while.

As soon as we picked the LUP, Jeru made us take up positions in an all-round defence, covering a 360-degree arc.

Then we did nothing, absolutely nothing, for ten minutes.

This was SOP, standard operating procedure, and I was impressed a Commissary knew about it. You’ve just come out of all the chaos of the destruction of the Brightly and the crash of the yacht, a frenzy of activity. Now you have to give your body a chance to adjust to the new environment, to the sounds and smells and sights.

Only here, there was nothing to smell but my own sweat and piss, nothing to hear but my ragged breathing. And my arm was hurting like hell.

To occupy my mind I concentrated on getting my night vision working. Your eyes take a while to adjust to the darkness – forty-five minutes before they are fully effective – but you are already seeing better after five. I could see stars through the chinks in the wiry metallic brush around me, the flares of distant novae, and the reassuring lights of our fleet. But a Ghost ship is a dark place, a mess of shadows and smeared-out reflections. It was going to be easy to get spooked here.

When the ten minutes were done, Academician Pael started bleating, but Jeru ignored him and came straight over to me. She got hold of my busted arm and started to feel the bone. ‘So,’ she said briskly. ‘What’s your name, tar?’

‘Case, sir.’

‘What do you think of your new quarters?’

‘Where do I eat?’

She grinned. ‘Turn off your comms,’ she said.

I complied.

Without warning she pulled my arm, hard. I was glad she couldn’t hear how I howled. She pulled a canister out of her belt and squirted gunk over my arm; it was semi-sentient and snuggled into place, setting as a hard cast around my injury. When I was healed the cast would fall away of its own accord.

She motioned me to turn on my comms again, and held up a syrette.

‘I don’t need that.’

‘Don’t be brave, tar. It will help your bones knit.’

‘Sir, there’s a rumour that stuff makes you impotent.’ I felt stupid even as I said it.

Jeru laughed out loud, and just grabbed my arm. ‘Anyhow it’s the First Officer’s, and he doesn’t need it any more, does he?’

I couldn’t argue with that; I accepted the injection. The pain started ebbing almost immediately.

Jeru pulled a tactical beacon out of her belt kit. It was a thumb-sized orange cylinder. ‘I’m going to try to signal the fleet. I’ll work my way out of this tangle; even if the beacon is working we might be shielded in here.’ Pael started to protest, but she shut him up. I sensed I had been thrown into the middle of an ongoing conflict between them. ‘Case, you’re on stag. And show this worm what’s in his kit. I’ll come back the same way I go. All right?’

‘Yes.’ More SOP.

She slid away through silvery threads.

I lodged myself in the tangle and started to go through the stuff in the kits Till had fetched for us. There was water, rehydration salts and compressed food, all to be delivered to spigots inside our sealed hoods. We had power packs the size of my thumb nail, but they were as dead as the rest of the kit. There was a lot of low-tech gear meant to prolong survival in a variety of situations, such as a magnetic compass, a heliograph, a thumb saw, a magnifying glass, pitons and spindles of rope, even fishing line.

I had to show Pael how his suit functioned as a lavatory. The trick is just to let go; a slime suit recycles most of what you give it, and compresses the rest. That’s not to say it’s comfortable. I’ve never yet worn a suit that was good at absorbing odours. I bet no suit designer spent more than an hour in one of her own creations.

As for me, I felt fine.

The wreck, the hammer-blow deaths one after the other – none of it was far beneath the surface of my mind. But that’s where it stayed, for now; as long as I had the next task to focus on, and the next after that, I could keep moving forward. The time to let it all hit you is after the show.

I guess Pael had never been trained like that. He was a thin, spindly man, his eyes sunk in black shadow, and his ridiculous red beard was crammed up inside his faceplate. Now that the great crises were over, his energy seemed to have drained away, and his functioning was slowing to a crawl. He looked almost comical as he pawed at his useless bits of kit.

After a time he said, ‘Case, is it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Are you from Earth, child?’

‘No, I—’

He ignored me. ‘The Academies are based on Earth. Did you know that? But they do admit a few off-worlders.’

I glimpsed a lifetime of outsider resentment. But I couldn’t care less. Also I wasn’t a child. I asked cautiously, ‘Where are you from, sir?’

He sighed. ‘51 Pegasi. I-B.’

I’d never heard of it. ‘What kind of place is that? Is it near Earth?’

‘Is everything measured relative to Earth? … Not very far.

My home world was one of the first extra-solar planets to be discovered – or at least, the primary is. I grew up on a moon. The primary is a hot Jupiter.’

I knew what that meant: a giant planet huddled close to its parent star.

He looked up at me. ‘Where you grew up, could you see the sky?’

‘No—’

‘I could. And the sky was fall of sails. That close to the sun, solar sails work efficiently, you see. I used to watch them at night, schooners with sails hundreds of kilometres wide, tacking this way and that in the light. I loved to watch them. But on Earth you can’t even see the sky – not from the Academy bunkers anyhow.’

‘Then why did you go there?’

‘I didn’t have a choice.’ He laughed, hollowly. ‘I was doomed by being smart. That is why your precious Commissary despises me so much, you see. I have been taught to think – and we can’t have that, can we?…’

I turned away from him and shut up. Jeru wasn’t ‘my’ Commissary, and this sure wasn’t my argument. Besides, Pael gave me the creeps. I’ve always been wary of people who know too much stuff. With a weapon, all you want to know is how it works, what kind of energy or ammunition it needs, and what to do when it goes wrong. People who know all the technical background and the statistics are usually covering up their own failings; it is experience of use that counts.

But this was no loudmouth weapons tech. This was an Academician: one of humanity’s elite scientists. I felt I had no point of contact with him at all. I looked out through the tangle, trying to see the fleet’s sliding, glimmering lanes of light.

There was motion in the tangle. I turned that way, motioning Pael to keep still and silent, and got hold of my knife in my good hand.

Jeru came bustling back, exactly the way she had left. She nodded approvingly at my alertness. ‘Not a peep out of the beacon.’

Pael said, ‘You realise our time here is limited.’

I asked, ‘You mean the suits?’

‘He means the star,’ Jeru said heavily. ‘Case, fortress stars seem to be unstable. When the Ghosts throw up their cordon equipment, the stars don’t last long before going pop.’

Pael shrugged. ‘We have hours, a few days at most.’

Jeru said, ‘Well, we’re going to have to get out, beyond the fortress cordon, so we can signal the fleet. That or find a way to collapse the cordon altogether.’

Pael laughed hollowly. ‘And how do you propose we do that?’

Jeru glared. ‘Isn’t it your role to tell me, Academician?’

Pael leaned back and closed his eyes. ‘Not for the first time, you’re being ridiculous.’

Jeru growled. She turned to me. ‘You. What do you know about the Ghosts?’

I said, ‘They come from someplace cold. That’s why they are wrapped up in silvery shells. You can’t bring a Ghost down with laser fire because of those shells. They’re perfectly reflective.’

Pael said, ‘Not perfectly. They are based on a Planck-zero effect … About one part in a billion of incident energy is absorbed.’

I hesitated. ‘They say the Ghosts experiment on people.’

Pael sneered. ‘Lies put about by Jeru’s Commission for Historical Truth. To demonise an opponent is a tactic as old as mankind.’

Jeru wasn’t perturbed. ‘Then why don’t you put young Case right? How do the Ghosts go about their business?’

Pael said, ‘The Silver Ghosts tinker with the laws of physics. The Ghosts are motivated by a desire to understand the fine-tuning of the universe, which they believe betrayed them. Why are we here? You see, young tar, there is only a narrow range of the constants of physics within which life of any sort is possible. We think the Ghosts are studying this question by pushing at the boundaries – by tinkering with the laws which sustain and contain us all.’

I looked to Jeru; she shrugged. She said, ‘So how do they do this, Academician?’

Pael tried to explain. It was all to do with quagma.

Quagma is the state of matter which emerged from the Big Bang. Matter, when raised to sufficiently high temperatures, melts into a magma of quarks – a quagma. And at such temperatures the four fundamental forces of physics unify into a single superforce. When quagma is allowed to cool and expand its binding superforce decomposes into four sub-forces.

To my surprise, I understood some of this. The principle of the GUTdrive, which powers intrasystem ships like Brief Life Burns Brightly, is related.

Anyhow, by controlling the superforce decomposition, you can select the ratios between those sub-forces. And those ratios govern the fundamental constants of physics.

Something like that.

Pael said, ‘That marvellous reflective coating of theirs is an example. Each Ghost is surrounded by a thin layer of space in which a fundamental number called the Planck constant is significantly lower than elsewhere. Thus, quantum effects are collapsed … Because the energy carried by a photon, a particle of light, is proportional to the Planck constant, an incoming photon must shed most of its energy when it hits the shell – hence the reflectivity.’

‘All right,’ Jeru said. ‘So what are they doing here?’

Pael sighed. ‘The fortress star seems to be surrounded by an open shell of quagma and exotic matter. We surmise that the Ghosts have blown a bubble around each star, a spacetime volume in which the laws of physics are – tweaked.’

‘And that’s why our equipment failed.’

‘Presumably,’ said Pael, with cold sarcasm.

Jeru said, ‘An enemy who can deploy the laws of physics as a weapon is formidable. But in the long run, we will out-compete the Ghosts.’

Pael said bleakly, ‘Ah, the evolutionary destiny of mankind. How dismal. But we lived in peace with the Ghosts, under the Raoul Accords, for centuries. We are so different, with disparate motivations – why should there be a conflict, any more than between two species of birds in the same garden?’

I’d never seen birds, or a garden, so that passed me by.

Jeru glared. ‘Let’s return to practicalities. How do their fortresses work?’ When Pael didn’t reply, she snapped, ‘Academician, you’ve been inside a fortress cordon for an hour already and you haven’t made a single fresh observation?’

Acidly, Pael demanded, ‘What would you have me do?’

Jeru nodded at me. ‘What have you seen, tar?’

‘Our instruments and weapons don’t work,’ I said promptly. ‘The Brightly exploded. I broke my arm.’

Jeru said, ‘Till snapped his neck also.’ She flexed her hand within her glove. ‘What would make our bones more brittle? Anything else?’

Pael admitted, ‘I do feel somewhat warm.’

Jeru asked, ‘Could these body changes be relevant?’

‘I don’t see how.’

‘Then figure it out.’

‘I have no equipment.’

Jeru dumped spare gear – weapons, beacons – in his lap. ‘You have your eyes, your hands and your mind. Improvise.’ She turned to me. ‘As for you, tar, let’s do a little infil. We still need to find a way off this scow.’

I glanced doubtfully at Pael. ‘There’s nobody to stand on stag.’

‘I know, tar. But there are only three of us.’ She grasped Pael’s shoulder, hard. ‘Keep your eyes open, Academician. We’ll come back the same way we left. So you’ll know it’s us. Do you understand?’

Pael shrugged her away, focusing on the gadgets on his lap.

I looked at him doubtfully. It seemed to me a whole platoon of Ghosts could have come down on him without his even noticing. But Jeru was right; there was nothing more we could do.

She studied me, fingered my arm. ‘You up to this?’

I could use the arm. ‘I’m fine, sir.’

‘You are lucky. A good war comes along once in a lifetime. And this is your war, tar.’

That sounded like parade-ground pep talk, and I responded in kind. ‘Can I have your rations, sir? You won’t be needing them soon.’ I mimed digging a grave.

She grinned back fiercely. ‘Yeah. When your turn comes, slit your suit and let the farts out before I take it off your stiffening corpse.’

Pael’s voice was trembling. ‘You really are monsters.’

I shared a mocking glance with Jeru. But we shut up, for fear of upsetting the earthworm further.

I grasped my fighting knife, and we slid away into the dark.

What we were hoping to find was some equivalent of a bridge. Even if we succeeded, I couldn’t imagine what we’d do next. Anyhow, we had to try.

We slid through the tangle. Ghost cable is tough, even to a knife blade. But it is reasonably flexible; you can just push it aside if you get stuck, although we tried to avoid doing that for fear of leaving a sign of our passing.

We used standard patrolling SOP, adapted for the circumstance. We would move for ten or fifteen minutes, clambering through the tangle, and then take a break for five minutes. I’d sip water – I was getting hot – and maybe nibble on a glucose tab, check on my arm, and pull the suit around me to get comfortable again. It’s the way to do it. If you just push yourself on and on you run down your reserves and end up in no fit state to achieve the goal anyhow.

And all the while I was trying to keep up my all-around awareness, protecting my dark adaptation, making appreciations. How far away is Jeru? What if an attack comes from in front, behind, above, below, left or right? Where can I find cover?

I began to build up an impression of the Ghost cruiser. It was a rough egg shape a couple of kilometres long, and basically a mass of the anonymous silvery cable. There were chambers and platforms and instruments stuck as if at random into the tangle, like food fragments in an old man’s beard. I guess it makes for a flexible, easily modified configuration. Where the tangle was a little less thick, I glimpsed a more substantial core, a cylinder running along the axis of the craft. Perhaps it was the drive unit. I wondered if it was functioning; perhaps, unlike the Brightly’s gear, Ghost equipment was designed to adapt to the changed conditions inside the fortress cordon.

There were Ghosts all over the craft.

They drifted over and through the tangle, following pathways invisible to us. Or they would cluster in little knots on the tangle. We couldn’t tell what they were doing or saying. To human eyes a Silver Ghost is just a silvery sphere, visible only by reflection, and without specialist equipment it is impossible even to tell one from another.

We kept out of sight. But I was sure the Ghosts must have spotted us, or were at least tracking our movements. After all we’d crash-landed in their ship. But they made no overt moves toward us.

We reached the outer ‘hull’, or at least the place the cabling ran out, and dug back into the tangle a little way to stay out of sight.

At last I got an unimpeded view of the stars. Still those nova firecrackers went off all over the sky; still those young stars glared like lanterns. It seemed to me the fortress’s central, enclosed star looked a little brighter, hotter than it had been. I made a mental note to report that to the Academician.

But the most striking sight was the human fleet.

Over a volume light-months wide, countless craft slid silently across the sky. They were organised in a complex network of corridors filling three-dimensional space: rivers of light gushed this way and that, their different colours denoting different classes and sizes of vessel. And, here and there, denser knots of colour and light sparked, irregular flares in the orderly flows. They were places where human ships were engaging the enemy, places where people were fighting and dying.

The Third Expansion had reached all the way to the inner edge of our spiral arm of the Galaxy. Now the first colony ships were attempting to make their way across the void to the next arm, the Sagittarius. Our arm, the Orion Arm, is really just a shingle, a short arc. But the Sagittarius Arm is one of the Galaxy’s dominant features. For example it contains a huge region of star-birth, one of the largest in the Galaxy, immense clouds of gas and dust capable of producing millions of stars each. It was a prize indeed.

But that is where the Silver Ghosts live.

When it appeared that our inexorable expansion was threatening not just their own mysterious projects but their home systems, the Ghosts began, for the first time, to resist us systematically.

They had formed a blockade, called by Navy strategists the Orion Line: a thick sheet of fortress stars, right across the inner edge of the Orion Arm, places the Navy and the colony ships couldn’t follow. It was a devastatingly effective ploy.

Our fleet in action was a magnificent sight. But it was a big, empty sky, and the nearest sun was that eerie dwarf enclosed in its spooky blue net, a long way away, and there was movement in three dimensions, above me, below me, all around me…

I found the fingers of my good hand had locked themselves around a sliver of the tangle.

Jeru grabbed my wrist and shook my arm until I was able to let go. She kept hold of my arm, her eyes on mine. I have you. You won’t fall. Then she pulled me back into a dense knot of the tangle, shutting out the sky.

She huddled close to me, so the bio lights of our suits wouldn’t show far. Her eyes were pale blue, like windows. ‘You aren’t used to being outside, are you, tar?’

‘I’m sorry, Commissar. I’ve been trained—’

‘You’re still human. We all have weak points. The trick is to know them and allow for them. Where are you from?’

I managed a grin. ‘Mercury. Caloris Planitia.’ Mercury is a ball of iron at the bottom of the sun’s gravity well. It is an iron mine, and an exotic matter factory, with a sun like a lid hanging over it. Most of the surface is given over to solar power collectors. It is a place of tunnels and warrens, where as a kid you compete with the rats.

‘And that’s why you joined up? To get away?’

‘I was drafted.’

‘Come on,’ she scoffed. ‘On a rat-hole like Mercury there are places to hide. Are you a romantic, tar? You wanted to see the stars?’

‘No,’ I said bluntly. ‘Life is more useful here.’

She studied me. ‘A brief life should burn brightly – eh, tar?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I came from Deneb,’ she said. ‘Do you know it?’

‘No.’

‘Sixteen hundred light years from Earth – a system settled some four centuries after the start of the Third Expansion. By the time the first ships reached Deneb, the mechanics of exploitation were efficient. From preliminary exploration to working shipyards and daughter colonies in less than a century. Deneb’s resources – its planets and asteroids and comets, even the star itself – have been mined out to fund fresh colonising waves, the greater Expansion and, of course, to support the war with the Ghosts. And that’s how the system works.’

She swept her hand over the sky. ‘Think of it, tar. The Third Expansion: between here and Sol, across six thousand light years, there is nothing but mankind and human planets, the fruit of a thousand years of world-building. And all of it linked by economics. Older systems like Deneb, their resources spent – even Sol system itself – are supported by a flow of goods and materials inward from the growing periphery of the Expansion. There are trade lanes spanning thousands of light years, lanes that never leave human territory, plied by vast schooners kilometres wide. But now the Ghosts are in our way. And that’s why we’re fighting!’

‘Yes, sir.’

She eyed me. ‘You ready to go on?’

‘Yes.’

We began to make our way forward again, just under the tangle, still following patrol SOP.

I was glad to be moving again. I’ve never been comfortable talking personally – and for sure not with a Commissary. But I suppose even Commissaries need to chat.

Jeru spotted a file of the Ghosts moving in a crocodile, like so many schoolchildren, towards the head of the ship. It was the most purposeful activity we’d seen so far, so we followed them.

After a couple of hundred metres the Ghosts began to duck down into the tangle, out of our sight. We followed them in.

Maybe fifty metres deep, we came to a large enclosed chamber, a smooth bean-shaped pod that would have been big enough to enclose our yacht. The surface appeared to be semi-transparent, perhaps designed to let in sunlight. I could see shadowy shapes moving within. Ghosts were clustered around the pod’s hull, brushing its surface.

Jeru beckoned, and we worked our way through the tangle towards the far end of the pod, where the density of the Ghosts seemed to be lowest.

We slithered to the surface of the pod. There were sucker pads on our palms and toes to help us grip. We began crawling along the length of the pod, ducking flat when we saw Ghosts loom into view. It was like climbing over a glass ceiling.

The pod was pressurised. At one end of the pod a big ball of mud hung in the air, brown and viscous. It seemed to be heated from within; it was slowly boiling, with big sticky bubbles of vapour crowding its surface, and I saw how it was laced with purple and red smears. There is no convection in zero gravity, of course. Maybe the Ghosts were using pumps to drive the flow of vapour.

Tubes led off from the mud ball to the hull of the pod. Ghosts clustered there, sucking up the purple gunk from the mud.

We figured it out in bioluminescent ‘whispers’. The Ghosts were feeding. Their home world is too small to have retained much internal warmth, but, deep beneath their frozen oceans or in the dark of their rocks, a little primordial geotherm heat must leak out still, driving fountains of minerals dragged up from the depths. And, as at the bottom of Earth’s oceans, on those minerals and the slow leak of heat, life forms feed. And the Ghosts feed on them.

So this mud ball was a field kitchen. I peered down at purplish slime, a gourmet meal for Ghosts, and I didn’t envy them.

There was nothing for us here. Jeru beckoned me again, and we slithered further forward.

The next section of the pod was … strange.

It was a chamber full of sparkling, silvery saucer-shapes, like smaller, flattened-out Ghosts, perhaps. They fizzed through the air or crawled over each other or jammed themselves together into great wadded balls that would hold for a few seconds and then collapse, their component parts squirming off for some new adventure elsewhere. I could see there were feeding tubes on the walls, and one or two Ghosts drifted among the saucer things, like an adult in a yard of squabbling children…

There was a subtle shadow before me. I looked up, and found myself staring at my own reflection – an angled head, an open mouth, a sprawled body – folded over, fish-eye style, just centimetres from my nose.

The bulging mirror was the belly of a Ghost. It bobbed massively before me.

I pushed myself away from the hull, slowly. I grabbed hold of the nearest tangle branch with my good hand. I knew I couldn’t reach for my knife, which was tucked into my belt at my back. And I couldn’t see Jeru anywhere. It might be that the Ghosts had taken her already. Either way I couldn’t call her, or even look for her, for fear of giving her away.

The Ghost had a heavy-looking belt wrapped around its equator. I had to assume that those complex knots of equipment were weapons. Aside from its belt, the Ghost was quite featureless: it might have been stationary, or spinning at a hundred revolutions a minute. I stared at its hide, trying to understand that there was a layer in there like a separate universe, where the laws of physics had been tweaked. But all I could see was my own scared face looking back at me.

And then Jeru fell on the Ghost from above, limbs splayed, knives glinting in both hands. I could see she was yelling – mouth open, eyes wide – but she fell in utter silence, her comms disabled.

Flexing her body like a whip, she rammed both knives into the Ghost’s hide. If I took that belt to be its equator, she hit somewhere near its north pole.

The Ghost pulsated, complex ripples chasing across its surface. Jeru did a handstand and reached up with her legs to the tangle above, and anchored herself there. The Ghost spun, trying to throw Jeru off. But she held her grip on the tangle, and kept the knives thrust in its hide, and all the Ghost succeeded in doing was opening up twin gashes, right across its upper section. Steam pulsed out, and I glimpsed redness within.

Meanwhile I just hung there, frozen.

You’re trained to mount the proper reaction to an enemy assault. But it all vaporises when you’re faced with a tonne of spinning, pulsing monster, and you’re armed with nothing but a knife. You just want to make yourself as small as possible; maybe it will all go away. But in the end you know it won’t, that something has to be done.

So I pulled out my own knife and launched myself at that north pole area.

I started to make cross-cuts between Jeru’s gashes. I quickly learned that Ghost skin is tough, like thick rubber, but you can cut it if you have the anchorage. Soon I had loosened flaps and lids of skin, and I started pulling them away, exposing a deep redness within. Steam gushed out, sparkling to ice.

Jeru let go of her perch and joined me. We clung with our fingers to the gashes we’d made, and we cut and slashed and dug; though the Ghost spun crazily, it couldn’t shake us loose. Soon we were hauling out great warm mounds of meat – rope-like entrails, pulsing slabs like a human’s liver or heart. At first ice crystals spurted all around us, but as the Ghost lost the heat it had hoarded all its life, that thin wind died, and frost began to gather on the cut and torn flesh.

At last Jeru pushed my shoulder, and we both drifted away from the ragged Ghost. It was still spinning, off-centre, but I could see that the spin was nothing but dead momentum; the Ghost had lost its heat, and its life.

I said breathlessly, ‘I never heard of anyone in hand-to-hand with a Ghost before.’

‘Neither did I. Lethe,’ she said, inspecting her hand. ‘I think I cracked a finger.’

It wasn’t funny. But Jeru stared at me, and I stared back, and then we both started to laugh, and our slime suits pulsed with pink and blue icons.

‘He stood his ground,’ I said.

‘Yes. Maybe he thought we were threatening the nursery.’

‘The place with the silver saucers?’

She looked at me quizzically. ‘Ghosts are symbiotes, tar. That looked to me like a nursery for Ghost hides. Independent entities.’

I had never thought of Ghosts having young. And I had not thought of the Ghost we had killed as a parent protecting its young. I’m not a deep thinker now, and wasn’t then; but it was not a comfortable notion.

Jeru started to move. ‘Come on, tar. Back to work.’ She anchored her legs in the tangle and began to grab at the still-rotating Ghost carcase, trying to slow its spin.

I anchored likewise and began to help her. The Ghost was massive, the size of a major piece of machinery, and it had built up respectable momentum; at first I couldn’t grab hold of the skin flaps that spun past my hand.

As we laboured I became aware I was getting uncomfortably hot. The light that seeped into the tangle from that caged sun seemed to be getting stronger by the minute. But as we worked those uneasy thoughts soon dissipated.

At last we got the Ghost under control. Briskly Jeru stripped it of its kit belt, and we began to cram the baggy corpse as deep as we could into the surrounding tangle. It was a grisly job. As the Ghost crumpled further, more of its innards, stiffening now, came pushing out of the holes we’d given it in its hide, and I had to keep from gagging as the foul stuff came pushing out into my face.

At last it was done – as best we could manage it, anyhow.

Jeru’s faceplate was smeared with black and red. She was sweating hard, her face pink. But she was grinning, and she had a trophy, the Ghost belt around her shoulders. We began to make our way back, following the same SOP as before.

When we got back to our lying-up point, we found Academician Pael was in trouble.

Pael had curled up in a ball, his hands over his face. We pulled him open. His eyes were closed, his face blotched pink, and his faceplate dripped with condensation.

He was surrounded by gadgets stuck in the tangle – including parts from what looked like a broken-open starbreaker handgun; I recognised prisms and mirrors and diffraction gratings. Well, unless he woke up, he wouldn’t be able to tell us what he had been doing here.

Jeru glanced around. The glow of the fortress’s central star had gotten a lot stronger. Our lying-up point was now bathed in light – and heat – with the surrounding tangle offering very little shelter. ‘Any ideas, tar?’

I felt the exhilaration of our infil drain away. ‘No, sir.’

Jeru’s face, bathed in sweat, showed tension. I noticed she was favouring her left hand. She seemed to come to a decision. ‘All right. We need to improve our situation here.’ She dumped the Ghost equipment belt and took a deep draught of water from her hood spigot. ‘Tar, you’re on stag. Try to keep Pael in the shade of your body. And if he wakes up, ask him what he’s found out.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good. I’ll be back.’

And then she was gone, melting into the complex shadows of the tangle as if she’d been born to these conditions.

I found a place where I could keep up 360-degree vision, and offer a little of my shadow to Pael – not that I imagined it helped much.

I had nothing to do but wait.

As the Ghost ship followed its own mysterious course, the light dapples filtering through the tangle shifted and evolved. Clinging to the tangle, I thought I could feel vibration: a slow, deep harmonisation that pulsed through the ship’s giant structure. I wondered if I was hearing the deep voices of Ghosts, calling to each other from one end of their mighty ship to another. It all served to remind me that everything in my environment, everything, was alien, and I was very far from home.

During a drama like the contact with the Ghost, you don’t realise what’s happening to you because your body blanks it out; on some level you know you just don’t have time to deal with it. Now that I had stopped moving, the aches and pains of the last few hours started crowding in on me. I was still sore in my head and back and, of course, my busted arm. I could feel deep bruises, maybe cuts, on my gloved hands where I had hauled at my knife, and I felt as if I had wrenched my good shoulder. One of my toes was throbbing ominously: I wondered if I had cracked another bone, here in this weird environment in which my skeleton had become as brittle as an old man’s. I was chafed at my groin and armpits and knees and ankles and elbows, my skin rubbed raw. I was used to suits; normally I’m tougher than that, and again I felt unreasonably fragile.

The shafts of sunlight on my back were working on me too; it felt as if I was lying underneath the elements of an oven. I had a headache, a deep sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, a ringing in my ears, and a persistent ring of blackness around my eyes. Maybe I was just exhausted, dehydrated; maybe it was more than that.

I counted my heartbeat, my breaths; I tried to figure out how long a second was. ‘A thousand and one. A thousand and two…’ Tracking time is a fundamental human trait; time provides a basic orientation, and keeps you mentally sharp and in touch with reality. But I kept losing count.

And all my efforts failed to stop darker thoughts creeping into my head. I started to think back over my operation with Jeru, and the regrets began. OK, I’d stood my ground when confronted by the Ghost and not betrayed Jeru’s position. But when she launched her attack I’d hesitated, for those crucial few seconds. Maybe if I’d been tougher the Commissary wouldn’t find herself hauling through the tangle, alone, with a busted finger distracting her with pain signals.

Our training is comprehensive. You’re taught to expect this kind of hindsight torture, in the quiet moments, and to discount it – or, better yet, learn from it. But, effectively alone in that metallic alien forest, I wasn’t finding my training was offering much perspective.

And, worse, I started to think ahead. Always a mistake.

I couldn’t believe that the Academician and his reluctant gadgetry were going to achieve anything significant. And for all the excitement of our infil, we hadn’t found anything resembling a bridge or any vulnerable point we could attack, and all we’d come back with was a bit of field kit we didn’t even understand.

For the first time I began to consider seriously the possibility that I wasn’t going to live through this – that I was going to die when my suit gave up or the sun went pop, whichever came first, in no more than a few hours.

It was my duty to die. A brief life burns brightly. That’s what you’re taught. Longevity makes you conservative, fearful, selfish. Humans made that mistake before, and we finished up a subject race. Live fast and furiously, for you aren’t important – all that matters is what you can do for the species.

But I didn’t want to die.

If I never returned to Mercury again I wouldn’t shed a tear. But I had a life now, in the Navy. And then there were my buddies: the people I’d trained and served with, people like Halle – even Jeru. Having found fellowship for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to lose it so quickly, and fall into the darkness alone – especially if it was to be for nothing.

But maybe I wasn’t going to get a choice.

After an unmeasured time, Jeru returned. She was hauling a silvery blanket. It was Ghost hide. She started to shake it out.

I dropped down to help her. ‘You went back to the one we killed—’

‘—and skinned him,’ she said, breathless. ‘I just scraped off the meaty crap with a knife. The Planck-zero layer peels away easily. And look…’ She made a quick incision in the glimmering sheet with her knife. Then she put the two edges together again, ran her finger along the seam, and showed me the result. I couldn’t even see where the cut had been. ‘Self-sealing, self-healing,’ she said. ‘Remember that, tar.’

‘Yes, sir.’

We started to rig the punctured, splayed-out hide as a rough canopy over our LUP, blocking as much of the sunlight as possible from Pael. A few slivers of frozen flesh still clung to the hide, but mostly it was like working with a fine, light metallic foil.

In the shade, Pael started to stir. His moans were translated to stark bioluminescent icons.

‘Help him,’ Jeru snapped. ‘Make him drink.’ And while I did that she dug into the med kit on her belt and started to spray cast material around the fingers of her left hand.

‘It’s the speed of light,’ Pael said. He was huddled in a corner of our LUP, his legs tucked against his chest. His voice must have been feeble; the bioluminescent sigils on his suit were fragmentary and came with possible variants extrapolated by the translator software.

‘Tell us,’ Jeru said, relatively gently.

‘The Ghosts have found a way to change lightspeed in this fortress. In fact to increase it.’ He began talking again about quagma and physics constants and the rolled-up dimensions of spacetime, but Jeru waved that away irritably.

‘How do you know this?’

Pael began tinkering with his prisms and gratings. ‘I took your advice, Commissary.’ He beckoned to me. ‘Come see, child.’

I saw that a shaft of red light, split out and deflected by his prism, shone through a diffraction grating and cast an angular pattern of dots and lines on a scrap of smooth plastic.

‘You see?’ His eyes searched my face.

‘I don’t get it. I’m sorry, sir.’

‘The wavelength of the light has changed. It has been increased. Red light should have a wavelength, oh, a fifth shorter than that indicated by this pattern.’

I was struggling to understand. I held up my hand. ‘Shouldn’t the green of this glove turn yellow, or blue?…’

Pael sighed. ‘No. Because the colour you see depends, not on the wavelength of a photon, but on its energy. Conservation of energy still applies, even where the Ghosts are tinkering. So each photon carries as much energy as before – and evokes the same “colour” in your eye. Since a photon’s energy is proportional to its frequency, that means frequencies are left unchanged. But since lightspeed is equal to frequency multiplied by wavelength, an increase in wavelength implies—’

‘An increase in lightspeed,’ said Jeru.

‘Yes.’

I didn’t follow much of that. I turned and looked up at the light that leaked around our Ghost-hide canopy. ‘So we see the same colours. The light of that star gets here a little faster. What difference does it make?’

Pael shook his head. ‘Child, a fundamental constant like lightspeed is embedded in the deep structure of our universe. Lightspeed is part of the ratio known as the fine structure constant.’ He started babbling about the charge on the electron.

Jeru cut him off. ‘Case, the fine structure constant is a measure of the strength of an electric or magnetic force.’

I could follow that much. ‘And if you increase lightspeed—’

‘You reduce the strength of the force.’ Pael raised himself. ‘Consider this. Human bodies are held together by molecular binding energy – electromagnetic forces. But here, electrons are more loosely bound to atoms; the atoms in a molecule are more loosely bound to each other.’ He rapped on the cast on my arm. ‘And so your bones are more brittle, your skin more easy to pierce or chafe. Do you see? You too are embedded in spacetime, my young friend. You too are affected by the Ghosts’ tinkering. And because lightspeed in this infernal pocket continues to increase – as far as I can tell from these poor experiments – you are becoming more fragile every second.’

It was a strange, eerie thought, that something so basic in the universe could be manipulated. I put my arms around my chest and shuddered.

‘Other effects,’ Pael went on bleakly. ‘The density of matter is dropping. Perhaps our bodies’ very structure will eventually begin to crumble. And dissociation temperatures are reduced.’

Jeru snapped, ‘What does that mean?’

‘Melting and boiling points are reduced. No wonder we are overheating. It is intriguing that bio systems have proven rather more robust than electromechanical ones. But if we don’t get out of here soon, our blood will start to boil…’

‘Enough,’ Jeru said. ‘What of the star?’

‘A star is a mass of gas with a tendency to collapse under its own gravity. But heat, supplied by fusion reactions in the core, creates gas and radiation pressures which push outwards, counteracting gravity.’

‘And if the fine structure constant changes?’

‘Then the balance is lost. Commissary, as gravity begins to win its ancient battle, the fortress star has become more luminous – it is burning faster. That explains the observations we made from outside the cordon. But this cannot last.’

‘The novae,’ I said.

‘Yes. The explosions, layers of the star blasted into space, are a symptom of destabilised stars seeking a new balance. The rate at which our star is approaching that catastrophic moment fits with the lightspeed drift I have observed.’ He smiled and closed his eyes. ‘A single cause predicating so many effects. It is all rather pleasing, in an aesthetic way.’

Jeru said, ‘At least we know how the ship was destroyed. Every control system is mediated by finely tuned electromagnetic effects. Everything must have gone crazy at once…’

The Brief Life Burns Brightly had been a classic GUTship, of a design that hasn’t changed in its essentials for thousands of years. The lifedome, a tough translucent bubble, contained the crew of twenty. The dome was connected by a spine a klick long to a GUTdrive engine pod. When we crossed the cordon boundary – when all the bridge lights failed – the control systems went down, and all the pod’s superforce energy must have tried to escape at once. The spine of the ship had thrust itself up into the lifedome, like a nail rammed into a skull.

Pael said dreamily, ‘If lightspeed were a tad faster, throughout the universe, then hydrogen could not fuse to helium. There would only be hydrogen: no fusion to power stars, no chemistry. Conversely if lightspeed were a little lower, hydrogen would fuse too easily, and there would be no hydrogen, nothing to make stars – or water. You see how critical it all is? No doubt the Ghosts’ science of fine-tuning is advancing considerably here on the Orion Line, even as it serves its trivial defensive purpose…’

Jeru glared at him, her contempt obvious. ‘We must take this piece of intelligence back to the Commission. It might be the key to breaking the Orion Line, at last. We are at the pivot of history, gentlemen.’

I knew she was right. The primary duty of the Commission for Historical Truth is to gather and deploy intelligence about the enemy. And so my primary duty, and Pael’s, was now to help Jeru get this piece of data back to her organisation.

But Pael was mocking her. ‘Not for ourselves, but for the species. Is that the line, Commissary? You are so grandiose. And yet you blunder around in comical ignorance. Even your quixotic quest aboard this cruiser was futile. There probably is no bridge on this ship. The Ghosts’ entire morphology, their evolutionary design, is based on the notion of cooperation, of symbiosis; why should a Ghost ship have a metaphoric head? And as for the trophy you have returned with’ – he held up the belt of Ghost artefacts – ‘there are no weapons here. These are sensors, tools. There is nothing here capable of producing a significant energy discharge. This is less threatening than a bow and arrow.’ He let go of the belt; it drifted away. ‘The Ghost wasn’t trying to kill you. It was blocking you. Which is a classic Ghost tactic.’

Jeru’s face was stony. ‘It was in our way. That is sufficient reason for destroying it.’

Pael shook his head. ‘Minds like yours will destroy us, Commissary.’

Jeru stared at him with suspicion. Then she said, ‘You have a way. Don’t you, Academician? A way to get us out of here.’

He tried to face her down, but her will was stronger, and he averted his eyes.

Jeru said heavily, ‘Regardless of the fact that three lives are at stake – does duty mean nothing to you, Academician? You are an intelligent man. Can you not see that this is a war of human destiny?’

Pael laughed. ‘Destiny – or economics?’ He said to me, ‘You see, child, as long as the explorers and the mining fleets and the colony ships are pushing outwards, as long as the Third Expansion is growing, our economy works. But the system is utterly dependent on continued conquest. From virgin stars the riches can continue to flow inwards, into the older mined-out systems, feeding a vast horde of humanity who have become more populous than the stars themselves. But as soon as that growth falters…’

Jeru was silent.

I understood some of this. This was a war of colonisation, of world-building. For a thousand years we had been spreading steadily from star to star, using the resources of one system to explore, terraform and populate the worlds of the next. With too deep a break in that chain of exploitation, the enterprise broke down.

And the Ghosts had been able to hold up human expansion for fifty years.

Pael said, ‘We are already choking. There have already been wars, young Case: human fighting human, as the inner systems starve. Not mentioned in Coalition propaganda, of course. If the Ghosts can keep us bottled up, all they have to do is wait for us to destroy ourselves, and free them to continue their own rather more worthy projects.’

Jeru floated down before him. ‘Academician, listen to me. Growing up at Deneb, I saw the great schooners in the sky, bringing the interstellar riches that kept my people alive. I saw the logic of history – that we must maintain the Expansion, because there is no choice. And that is why I joined the armed forces, and later the Commission for Historical Truth. Not for ideology, not for misty notions of destiny, but for economics. We must labour every day to maintain the unity and purpose of mankind. We must continue to expand. For if we falter we die; as simple as that.’

Pael raised an eyebrow. ‘Perhaps I have underestimated you. But, Commissary, sincere or not, your creed of mankind’s evolutionary destiny condemns our own kind to become a swarm of children, granted a few moments of loving and breeding and dying, before being cast into futile war.’

Jeru snapped, ‘It is a creed that has bound us together for a thousand years. It is a creed that unites uncounted trillions of human beings across thousands of light years. Are you strong enough to defy such a creed now? Come, Academician. None of us chooses to be born in the middle of a war. We must all do our best for each other, for other human beings; what else is there?’

I looked from one to the other. I thought we should be doing less yapping and more fighting. I touched Pael’s shoulder; he flinched away. ‘Academician – is Jeru right? Is there a way we can live through this?’

Pael shuddered. Jeru hovered over him.

‘Yes,’ Pael said at last. ‘Yes, there is a way.’

The idea turned out to be simple.

And the plan Jeru and I devised to implement it was even simpler. It was based on a single assumption: Ghosts aren’t aggressive. It was ugly, I’ll admit that, and I could see why it would distress a squeamish earthworm like Pael. But sometimes there are no good choices.

Jeru and I took a few minutes to rest up, check over our suits and our various injuries, and to make ourselves comfortable. Then, following patrol SOP once more, we made our way back to the pod of immature hides.

We came out of the tangle and drifted down to that translucent hull. We tried to keep away from concentrations of Ghosts, but we made no real effort to conceal ourselves. There was little point, after all; the Ghosts would know all about us, and what we intended, soon enough.

We hammered pitons into the pliable hull, and fixed rope to anchor ourselves. Then we took our knives and started to saw our way through the hull.

As soon as we started, the Ghosts began to gather around us, like vast antibodies. They just hovered there, eerie faceless baubles drifting as if in vacuum breezes. But as I stared up at a dozen distorted reflections of my own skinny face, I felt an unreasonable loathing rise up in me. Maybe you could think of them as a family banding together to protect their young. I didn’t care; a lifetime’s carefully designed hatred isn’t thrown off so easily. I went at my work with a will.

Jeru got through the pod hull first. The air gushed out in a fast-condensing fountain. The baby hides fluttered, their distress obvious. And the Ghosts began to cluster around Jeru, like huge light globes.

Jeru glanced at me. ‘Keep working, tar.’

‘Yes, sir.’

In another couple of minutes I was through. The air pressure was already dropping, and it dwindled to nothing when we cut a big door-sized flap in that roof. Anchoring ourselves with the ropes, we rolled that lid back, opening the roof wide. A few last wisps of vapour came curling around our heads, ice fragments sparkling.

The hide babies convulsed. Immature, they could not survive the sudden vacuum, intended as their ultimate environment. But the way they died made it easy for us. The silvery hides came flapping up out of the hole in the roof, one by one. We just grabbed each one – like grabbing hold of a billowing sheet – and we speared it with a knife, and threaded it on a length of rope. All we had to do was sit there and wait for them to come. There were hundreds of them, and we were kept busy.

I hadn’t expected the adult Ghosts to sit through that, non-aggressive or not; and I was proved right. Soon they were clustering all around me, vast silvery bellies looming. A Ghost is massive and solid, and it packs a lot of inertia; if one hits you in the back you know about it. Soon they were nudging me hard enough to knock me flat against the roof, over and over. Once I was wrenched so hard against my tethering rope it felt as if I had cracked another bone or two in my foot.

And, meanwhile, I was starting to feel a lot worse: dizzy, nauseous, overheated. It was getting harder to get back upright each time after being knocked down. I was growing weaker fast; I imagined the tiny molecules of my body falling apart in this Ghost-polluted space.

For the first time I began to believe we were going to fail.

But then, quite suddenly, the Ghosts backed off. When they were clear of me, I saw they were clustering around Jeru.

She was standing on the hull, her feet tangled up in rope, and she had knives in both hands. She was slashing crazily at the Ghosts, and at the baby hides which came flapping past her, making no attempt to capture them now, simply cutting and destroying whatever she could reach. I could see that one arm was hanging awkwardly – maybe it was dislocated, or even broken – but she kept on slicing regardless. And the Ghosts were clustering around her, huge silver spheres crushing her frail, battling human form.

She was sacrificing herself to save me – just as Captain Teid, in the last moments of the Brightly, had given herself to save Pael. And my duty was to complete the job. So I stabbed and threaded, over and over, as the flimsy hides came tumbling out of that hole, slowly dying.

At last no more hides came.

I looked up, blinking to get the salt sweat out of my eyes. A few hides were still tumbling around the interior of the pod, but they were inert and out of my reach. Others had evaded us and gotten stuck in the tangle of the ship’s structure, too far and too scattered to make them worth pursuing further. What I had would have to suffice. I started to make my way out of there, back through the tangle, to the location of our wrecked yacht, where I hoped Pael would be waiting.

I looked back once. I couldn’t help it. The Ghosts were still clustered over the ripped pod roof. Somewhere in there, whatever was left of Jeru was still fighting. I had an impulse, almost overpowering, to go back to her. No human being should die alone. But I knew I had to get out of there, to complete the mission, to make her sacrifice worthwhile.

So I got.

Pael and I finished the job at the outer hull of the Ghost cruiser.

Stripping the hides turned out to be as easy as Jeru had described. Fitting together the Planck-zero sheets was simple too – you just line them up and seal them with a thumb. I got on with that, sewing the hides together into a sail, while Pael worked on a rigging of lengths of rope, all fixed to a deck panel from the wreck of the yacht. He was fast and efficient: Pael, after all, came from a world where everybody goes solar-sailing on their vacations.

We worked steadily, for hours.

I ignored the varying aches and chafes, the increasing pain in my head and chest and stomach, the throbbing of a broken arm that hadn’t healed, the agony of cracked bones in my foot. And we didn’t talk about anything but the task in hand. Pael didn’t ask what had become of Jeru, not once; it was as if he had anticipated the Commissary’s fate.

We were undisturbed by the Ghosts through all of this.

I tried not to think about whatever emotions churned within those silvered carapaces, what despairing debates might chatter on invisible wavelengths. I was, after all, trying to complete a mission. And I had been exhausted even before I got back to Pael. I just kept going, ignoring my fatigue, focusing on the task.

I was surprised to find it was done.

We had made a sail hundreds of metres across, stitched together from the invisibly thin immature Ghost hide. It was roughly circular, and it was connected by a dozen lengths of fine rope to struts on the panel we had wrenched out of the wreck of the yacht. The sail lay across space, languid ripples crossing its glimmering surface.

Pael showed me how to work the thing. ‘Pull this rope, or this one…’ The great patchwork sail twitched in response to his commands. ‘I’ve set it so you shouldn’t have to try anything fancy, like tacking. The boat will just sail out, hopefully, to the cordon perimeter. If you need to lose the sail, just cut the ropes.’

I was taking in all this automatically. It made sense for both of us to know how to operate our little yacht. But then I started to pick up the subtext of what he was saying. You, not us.

He shoved me onto the deck panel, and pushed it away from the Ghost ship. His strength was surprising. He was left behind. It was over before I understood what he was doing.

I watched him recede. He clung wistfully to a bit of tangle.

The sail above me slowly billowed, filling up with the light of the brightening sun. Pael had designed his improvised craft well; the rigging lines were all taut, and I could see no rips or creases in the silvery fabric.

‘Where I grew up, the sky was full of sails…’ My suit could read Pael’s, as clear as day.

‘Why did you stay behind, Academician?’

‘You will go further and faster without my mass to haul. And besides – our lives are short enough; we should preserve the young. Don’t you think?’

I had no idea what he was talking about. Pael was much more valuable than I was; I was the one who should have been left behind. He had shamed himself.

Complex glyphs crisscrossed his suit. ‘Keep out of the direct sunlight. It is growing more intense, of course. That will help you…’ And then he ducked out of sight, back into the tangle.

I never saw him again.

The Ghost ship soon receded, closing over into its vast egg shape, the detail of the tangle becoming lost to my blurred vision. I clung to my bit of decking and sought shade.

Twelve hours later, I reached an invisible radius where the tactical beacon in my pocket started to howl with a whine that filled my headset. My suit’s auxiliary systems cut in and I found myself breathing fresh air.

A little after that, a set of lights ducked out of the streaming lanes of the fleet, and plunged towards me, growing brighter. At last it resolved into a golden bullet shape adorned with a blue-green tetrahedron, the sigil of free humanity. It was a supply ship called The Dominance of Primates.

And a little after that, as a Ghost fleet fled their fortress, the star exploded.

As soon as I had completed my formal report to the ship’s Commissary – and I was able to check out of the Dominance’s sick bay – I asked to see the Captain.

I walked up to the bridge. My story had got around, and the various med patches I sported added to my heroic mythos. So I had to run the gauntlet of the crew – ‘You’re supposed to be dead, I impounded your back pay and slept with your mother already’ – and was greeted by what seems to be the universal gesture of recognition of one tar to another, the clenched fist pumping up and down around an imaginary penis. But anything more respectful just wouldn’t feel normal.

The Captain turned out to be a grizzled veteran type with a vast laser burn scar on one cheek. She reminded me of First Officer Till.

I told her I wanted to return to active duty as soon as my health allowed.

She looked me up and down. ‘Are you sure, tar? You have a lot of options. Young as you are, you’ve already made your contribution to the Expansion. You can go home.’

‘Sir, and do what?’

She shrugged. ‘Farm. Mine. Raise babies. Whatever earth-worms do. Or you can join the Commission for Historical Truth.’

‘Me, a Commissary?’

‘You’ve been there, tar. You’ve been in amongst the Ghosts, and come out again – with a bit of intelligence more important than anything the Commission has come up with in fifty years. Are you sure you want to face action again?’

I thought it over.

I remembered how Jeru and Pael had argued about economics. It had been an unwelcome perspective, for me. I was in a war that had nothing to do with me, trapped by what Jeru had called the logic of history. But then, I bet that’s been true of most of humanity through our long and bloody story. All you can do is live your life, and grasp your moment in the light – and stand by your comrades.

A farmer – me? And I could never be smart enough for the Commission. No, I had no doubts.

‘A brief life burns brightly, sir.’

Lethe, the Captain looked like she had a lump in her throat. ‘Do I take that as a yes, tar?’

I stood straight, ignoring the twinges of my injuries. ‘Yes, sir !’

The Orion Line was broken. Humanity spilled into Ghost space, slaughtering and colonising.

But the war would last centuries more. Such is the nature of conflict on interstellar scales.

In time the Ghosts learned to fight back, with new weapons, new tactics.

Even a new breed of Ghost.

GHOST WARS

THE GHOST PIT

AD 7524

As soon as the Spline dropped out of hyperspace our flitter burst from its belly.

After our long enclosure in the crimson interior of the huge living ship, it was like being reborn. Even though I had to share this adventure with L’Eesh, my spirits surged.

‘Pretty system,’ L’Eesh said. He was piloting the flitter with nonchalant ease. He was about sixty years old, some three times my age, a lot more experienced – and he didn’t miss a chance to let me know.

Well, pretty it was. The Jovian and its satellites were held in a stable gravitational embrace at the corners of a neat equilateral triangle, the twin moons close enough to the parent to be tidally locked. And beyond it all I glimpsed a faint blue mesh thrown across the stars: an astonishing sight, a net large enough to enclose this giant planet, with struts half a million kilometres long.

I grinned. That netting, that monstrous grandiosity, was typical Ghost. It was proof that this Jovian system was indeed a Ghost pit – a new pit, an unopened pit.

Which was why its discovery had sent such a stir through the small, scattered community of Ghost hunters. And why L’Eesh and I were prepared to fire ourselves into it without even looking where we were going. We were determined to be the first.

Already we were sweeping down towards one of the moons. Beneath a dusty atmosphere the surface was brick red, a maze of charred pits.

‘Very damaged landscape,’ I said. ‘Impact craters? Looks as if it’s been bombed flat…’

‘You know,’ said L’Eesh laconically, ‘there’s a bridge between those moons.’

At first his words made no sense. Then I peered up. He was right: a fine arch leapt from the surface of one moon and crossed space to the other.

‘Lethe,’ I swore. I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t seen it immediately. But then, you don’t look for such a thing.

L’Eesh grunted. ‘I hope you have a strong stomach, Raida. Hily never did. Like mother like daughter—’

He had me off balance. ‘What about my mother?’

‘Bogeys.’

And suddenly they were on us, a dozen angular craft that looped around the flitter, coming from over our heads like falling fists.

L’Eesh yanked at the stick. We flipped backwards and sped away. But the bogeys were faster. I cowered, an ancient, useless reflex; I wasn’t used to being in a dogfight that humans aren’t dominating.

‘Remarkable accelerations,’ murmured L’Eesh. ‘An automated defence?’

The bogeys surrounded us in a tidy cloud, and hosed us with a crimson haze.

‘There is nothing we can do.’ L’Eesh sat stoically at his controls; blood-red light glinted from the planes of his shaven scalp.

Abruptly the bogeys tipped sideways and squirted away. As the mist cleared I let out my breath.

At first it seemed the unexpected assault had done us no harm. We were still descending to the moon, which was flattening out from a closed-in crimson ball to a landscape beneath us.

Now my softscreen filled with the mournful face of Pohp, the agent who had brought us both here, calling from the Spline. But her image was broken up, her words indistinct: classification of … Ghost … vacuum energy adjustment, which…

A warning chimed.

‘Raida, help me.’ L’Eesh was battling his controls. ‘We’ve lost telemetry from the portside drive.’

It was worse than that. Through the crystal hull I saw a drive pod tumbling away, surrounded by a cloud of frozen fluids and bits of hull material.

I tried my controls. With half our drive gone, they felt soggy.

I looked up to that impossible bridge, a line drawn across the sky, aloof from our petty struggles. There are times when you just can’t believe what you are seeing. A survival mechanism, I guess.

More alarms.

‘Another drive pod has cut out.’ L’Eesh sat back, pressing his fists against his softscreen in genteel frustration.

We tipped down, suddenly buffeted by thickening air. A pink-white plasma glow gathered, hiding the stars, the bridge, and the land below.

There was a howling noise. My pressure suit stiffened suddenly. Peering down I saw a hole in the hull, a ragged gash reaching right through the hull’s layers; I stared, fascinated, as fluffy clouds shot past my feet.

L’Eesh turned in his couch. ‘Listen to me, child. We may yet survive this. The flitter is designed to keep us alive, come what may. It should be able to withstand a gliding descent from orbit on a world this size.’

‘But we’re breaking up.’

His grin was feral. ‘Let’s hope the hull ablates slowly enough.’

The blasted landscape flattened out further. The sky above had turned pink-brown. Rocks and craters shot beneath the prow. There was a last instant of calm, of comparative control. I clung to my couch.

The flitter bellied down.

Orange dust flew. The nose crumpled. The inertial suspension failed and I was flung forward. Foam erupted around me. I was trapped, blinded, feeling nothing.

Then the foam popped and burst, quickly evaporating, and I was dropped into rust-red dirt.

...Down, just like that, deposited in silence and stillness and orange-brown light, amid settling debris.

I brushed at the dirt with my gloved hand. There were bits of white embedded in the dust: shards and splinters that crackled, the sound carrying through my suit hood. Bones?

L’Eesh was lying on his back, surrounded by wreckage, peering up at the muddy sky. He barked laughter. ‘What a ride. Lethe, what a ride!’ He lifted his hands over his head, and bits of bone tumbled in the air around him, languidly falling in the low gravity.

When I was a kid, rogue Ghost cruisers still sailed through the less populated sectors of the Expansion. As parties of hunters scoured those great tangles of silvery rope, my mother would send me into Ghost nurseries armed with knives and harpoons. Watch your back, she would call, as I killed. Use your head. There is always an option. I was five years old, six.

That was how I started in this business.

L’Eesh was the most formidable Ghost hunter of his generation. And he was here because he was after what I believed to be rightfully my prey.

Once this system, in the crowded Sagittarius Arm, had been at the heart of the range of the Silver Ghosts. But the Third Expansion had rolled right through here, a wave of human colonisation heading for the centre of the Galaxy. Until a few decades back some Ghost nests survived within the Expansion itself; that fast-moving front left great unexplored voids behind it. My mother, a hunter herself, took part in such actions. She never came back from her last operation, the cleansing of a world called Snowball.

But those nests have long been cleaned out. The last wild Ghosts have retreated to their pits – like the one L’Eesh and I had gotten ourselves stuck in.

I had thought I would be first here. I had been dismayed to find L’Eesh had grabbed a place on the same Spline transport as me. Though I had warily gone along with his proposal that we should pool our resources and split the proceeds, I wasn’t about to submit to him.

Not even in the mess we found ourselves in now.

We dug ourselves out of the dirt.

Our med systems weren’t functioning, so we put each other through brisk checks – limbs, vision, coordination. Then we tested out the equipment. Our pressure suits were lightweight skinsuits, running off backpacks of gen-enged algae. The comms system worked on pale blue bioluminescent glyphs that crawled over each suit’s surface.

I poked around in the dirt. Remnants of struts and hull plates crumbled. The little ship had broken up, sacrificing the last of its integrity to save us as it was designed to, and then it had broken up some more. There was nothing to salvage. We had the suits we wore, and nothing else.

L’Eesh was watching me. His augmented Eyes were like steel balls in his head; when he blinked you could hear the whirr of servomotors. ‘It doesn’t surprise you that your suit works, does it? Even here – it doesn’t occur to you to ask the question.’

I glared back, not wishing to give him any satisfaction.

He dug a weapon out of the scattered wreckage of the flitter; it looked like a starbreaker hand-gun. ‘This is a Ghost pit.’ He crushed the gun like a dead leaf. ‘Stuff like this happens. Pits are pockets of spacetime where nothing works right, where you can’t rely on even the fundamental laws of physics and chemistry. But the Ghosts always arrange it so that living things are conserved – including us, and the little critters that live in our backpacks. You see? We know very little of how all this works. We don’t even know how they could tell what is alive. And all of this is engineered – remember that.’

I knew all this, of course. ‘You’re full of shit, L’Eesh.’

He grinned. At some point in his life his teeth had been replaced by a porcelain sheet. ‘You bet I am. Shit from battlefields a thousand years old.’ He had an air of wealth, control, culture, arrogance; he was effortlessly superior to me. ‘We’re on our own down here. Pohp may be able to see us. But she can’t speak to us, can’t reach us.’ He took a deep breath, as if he could smell the air. ‘What now, Raida?’

There was one obvious place to go. ‘The bridge between the moons.’

‘It must be a hundred kilometres away,’ he said. ‘Our transportation options are limited.’

‘Then we walk.’

He shrugged, dropped the remains of the gun. There was nothing to carry, nothing to be done with the remains of the flitter. Without preamble, he set off.

I followed. I’d sooner be watching L’Eesh’s back than the other way around.

Soon our lower suits were stained bright orange by the dust.

This trapped moon was too small for tectonic cycling. The land was old, eroded to dust, mountains and crater rims worn flat. Iron oxides made the ground and the air glow crimson. On the horizon, dust devils spun silently. It was a museum of dust, that had nowhere to go.

Everywhere you looked – every time you dug a trench with your toe – you found more bits of bone. Perhaps there had been a vast flood, I thought, that had washed up this vast assemblage of remains. Or perhaps there had been a drought, and this was a place where animals had gathered around the drying water holes, fighting to suck at the mud, while the predators watched and waited.

Or maybe it was a battlefield.

Whatever the story of this place, it was long over. Nothing moved, save us and the dust. Not even the sun: the ‘days’ here lasted as long as an orbit of the moon around the Jovian, which was about ten standard days.

Over it all loomed the bridge. It rose lumpily from beyond the horizon. It looked crude – almost unfinished – but it became a thread that arrowed through the clouds, making the sky stretch into a third dimension.

And what a complex sky it was. The sister moon scowled down, scarred and bitter, and the Jovian primary loomed massively on the horizon, the corners of a great celestial triangle forever frozen in place.

The Spline ship rolled over the horizon, tracking its low orbit. It was like a moon itself, a mottled, meaty moon made grey by the dusty air. Even from here I could see the big green tetrahedron on its hull, the sigil of free humanity. The leathery hull-epidermis of the Spline was pocked with sensor arrays; we had spent a lot of money to ensure our capture of any wild Ghosts was recorded and certified, to preserve the value of the hides. Of course our problem was we had no way to get back up to the Spline, which we could see so clearly.

As we walked L’Eesh studied me, his inhuman Eyes glistening. ‘It looks as if we are going to spend some time together.’ I didn’t reply.

‘So. Tell me about yourself.’

‘I’m not interested in playing head games with you, L’Eesh.’

‘So defensive, little Raida! I did know your mother.’

‘That doesn’t give you the right to know me.’ I saw a chance to get the upper hand. ‘Listen to me, L’Eesh. I think I know what’s going on here.’

Know your prey. This was my first pit, but I had prepared myself. The Ghosts seem to use only a small number of pit types – our flitter had been designed to cope with some of the common variants – and when Pohp sent us her cryptic message, I knew what she must have been talking about.

Vacuum energy: even in ‘empty’ space there has to be some energy, a ground energy level, because of quantum uncertainty. What was important for us was the effect this had – and the effect of the Ghosts’ tinkering.

‘Think of an atom,’ I said. ‘Like a little solar system with the electrons as planets, right? But what keeps a negative electron out of the positive nucleus?’

‘Vacuum energy?’

‘Right. The electron, and everything else, is surrounded by a sea of vacuum energy. And as fast as the electron loses energy and tries to spiral in, the vacuum sea supplies some more. So the electron stays in orbit.’ I peered up at the complicated sky. ‘Those weapons extracted some of the vacuum energy from the substance of our flitter. Or lowered the level of the background, so the vacuum energy drained away: something like that. All the electrons spiralled in, and molecular structures fell apart.’

L’Eesh listened, his face unreadable. Presumably he knew all this. His silence was more impressive than my babbling, even to me.

We walked on.

I felt naked without a weapon. I dug around among a thick patch of bones. I found a long, thin shaft that might have been a thigh-bone. I cracked it against a rock; it splintered, leaving a satisfactorily vicious point. As we walked I put myself through elementary drill routines.

A spear will take down a Ghost, but you have to be careful. The key resource you get from a Ghost is his hide – a perfectly reflective heat trap, with a thousand applications. Now that Ghosts are so rare, wild hides are a luxury item. People sell little squares and triangles of hide for use as charms, curios: this was, after all, a lucky species that survived the death of its sun, so the story goes.

Anyhow if you come at a Ghost with a jabbing weapon, you should try to get your spear into the carcase along the spin axis, where the hide is a little thinner, and you won’t rip it unnecessarily. Then you just follow the trail of excrement and blood and heat until he dies, which might take a day or two. Ghosts don’t leave spoor, my mother used to say. So you have to cut him an asshole.

L’Eesh was watching me analytically. ‘You’re, what, twenty, twenty-one? No children yet?’

‘Not until I can afford to buy them out of the Coalition draft.’

He nodded. ‘As Hily did you. I knew her ambition for you. It’s good to see it realised so well. It must have been hard for you when she died. I imagine you got thrown into a cadre by the Commissaries – right?’

‘I won’t talk to you about my mother, L’Eesh.’

‘As you wish. But you need to keep your mind clear, little Raida. And you might want to think about saving your energy. We have a long way to go.’

I worked with my bone spear and tried to ignore him.

We had to sleep in our suits, of course. I dug a shallow trench in the dust. I couldn’t shut out the crimson light. I slept in patches.

I woke up in my own stink. The recycled gloop from my hood nipples already tasted stale, my skinsuit was chafing in a dozen places, and I felt bruises from that landing that hadn’t registered at the time.

If the sun had moved across the sky at all, I couldn’t see it.

It’s a strange thing, but it wasn’t until that second ‘morning’ that I took seriously the possibility that I might die here. I guess I had been distracted by the hunt, my conflict with L’Eesh. Or maybe I just lack imagination. Anyhow my adrenaline rush was long gone; I was numb, flat, feeling beaten.

Through that endless day, we walked on.

We came to what might once have been a township. There was little left but a gridwork of foundations, a few pits like cellars, bits of low wall. I thought I could see a sequence, of older buildings constructed of massive marble-like blocks, later structures made of what looked like the local sandstone or else bits of broken-up marble ruins.

All of it trashed, burned out, knocked flat.

I squatted, chewing on a glucose tab.

L’Eesh, his suit scuffed and filthy, began poking around a large battleship-shaped mound of rubble. ‘You know, there’s something odd here. I thought this was a fort, or perhaps some equivalent of a cathedral. But it looks for all the world as if it crashed here.’

‘You don’t make aircraft from brick.’

‘Whatever made such a vast, ungainly structure fly through the air is gone now. Nevertheless there was clearly once a pretty advanced civilisation here. On the way in I glimpsed extensive ruins. And some of those impact craters looked deliberately placed. This whole world is an arena of war. But it seems to have been a war that was fought with interplanetary weapons, and then flying brick fortresses, and at last fire and clubs.

‘It’s likely both moons were inhabited. Life could have been sparked on either moon, in some tidal puddle stirred by the Jovian parent. And then panspermia would work, spores wafting on meteorite winds, two worlds developing in parallel, cross-fertilising…’

On he talked. I wasn’t interested. I was here for Ghosts, not archaeology.

I waited until he took the lead, and we walked on, leaving the ruined township behind.

Another ‘night’, another broken sleep in the dirt. Another ‘day’ on that endless plain. In places the surface had been blasted to glass; it prickled my feet as I staggered across it. We didn’t seem to get any closer to that damn bridge.

We had nothing to do but talk.

A lot of it was L’Eesh’s refined bragging. ‘You know, the Commission was always very tolerant of us, we hunters. Under the Coalition, you aren’t supposed to get old and rich. The species is the thing! Of course the Coalition found us useful, in the closing phases of its war with the Ghosts. It is not comfortable to feel one has been manipulated, even controlled. But it has been glorious nevertheless.’

It turned out L’Eesh had taken part in that great Ghost massacre on Snowball.

‘Snowball was actually the first Ghost planet anybody found. Did you know that? The site of first contact two thousand years ago. When Ghost numbers collapsed the Commission slapped on conservation orders – some nonsense about preserving cultural diversity – but there wasn’t a great deal of will behind the policing. On the day the orders were lifted we were already in orbit around Snowball. We made a huge circle around the major Ghost nest, with aerial patrols overhead, and we just worked our way in on foot, firing at will, until we met in the centre. The major challenge was counting up the carcases.

‘So it went: while those big nests lasted it was a feeding frenzy. You were born too late, Raida. You know, a thousand years ago the Ghosts’ pits of twisted spacetime struck dread into human hearts. They were deployed as fortresses, a great wall right across the disc of the Galaxy. Magnificent! … And now we hunt down the Ghosts like animals, for their hides. An intelligent species hunted as game. Remarkable! Appalling!’

‘Who cares? Ghosts are predators.’

‘They are colony creatures,’ he said gently. ‘Communities of symbiotes. You have been listening to too much Commission propaganda.’

‘After all you’ve done, why go on? Why risk your neck in places like this, for the last few scraps of hide?’

‘Because some day there will be a last Ghost of all. I must be there when he is brought down. It is the logic of my whole life.’

We walked on, across a land like a dusty table-top. L’Eesh kept up his dogged, unspectacular plod, hour after hour. He looked determined, sharp, as if he had plenty of reserve.

I was determined not to let my own gathering weakness show. I continued to carry that bone spear.

At the end of the third ‘day’ we reached the bridge.

Exhausted, filthy, uncomprehending, I peered up. About a hundred paces across, it was just a rough pile of mud bricks. And yet it towered above me, reaching up to infinity.

L’Eesh was breathing hard, sucking water. ‘Magnificent,’ he said. ‘Mad. They built a brick tower to reach to heaven!…’

I went exploring.

I came to a crumbled gap in the base of the tower. I crawled into an unlit interior. My suit’s low-output bioluminescent lamp glowed. I craned my neck. The bridge rose up vertically above me, a tunnel into the sky.

Metal gleamed amid the rubble on the floor.

I kicked aside half-bricks and uncovered a squat cuboid about half my height. It was featureless except for a fat red button. When I pressed the button the cube rose magically into the air, trailing a rose-coloured sparkle, like the bogeys’ vacuum-energy weapon; I kept out of the way of the wake. When I released the button the cube dropped again.

It was pretty obviously a lifting palette.

There was another palette buried in the wall of the bridge – and further up another, and another beyond that.

‘Now we know how they made their castles fly,’ L’Eesh said. ‘And how they raised this bridge.’ He was standing beside me, his suit glowing green. I saw he had scraped a channel in mould-softened brick with his thumb. Beneath it, something gleamed, copper-brown. ‘It’s not metal,’ he said. ‘Not even like Xeelee construction material.’

‘Maybe that’s the original structure.’

‘Yes. No suite of moons is stable enough to allow the building of a brick bridge between them; the slightest tidal deflection would be enough to bring it tumbling down. There must be something more advanced here – perhaps the moons’ orbits are themselves regulated somehow … The bridge itself is just a clumsy shell. The inhabitants must have constructed it after the intervention.’

‘What intervention?’

He sighed. ‘Think, child. Try to understand what you see around you. Imagine millennia of war between the two moons.’

‘What was there to fight over?’

‘That scarcely ever matters. Perhaps it was just that these were sibling worlds. What rivalry is stronger? Finally the moons were ruined, serving only as a backdrop for the unending battles – until peacemakers sent down blood-red rays, vacuum energy beams that turned the weapons to dust.’

‘Peacemakers? Silver Ghosts?’

‘Well, it’s possible,’ he said. ‘Though it’s not characteristic of Ghost behaviour. It was a draconian solution: a quarantine of technology, the trashing of two spacefaring civilisations … How arrogant. Almost human.’

I felt uncomfortable discussing Ghosts with human-like motives. ‘What about these lift palettes?’

‘It makes a certain sense,’ he said. ‘From the point of view of a meddling Ghost anyhow. A simple technology to help the survivors rebuild their ruined worlds – something you surely couldn’t turn into a weapon – but it didn’t work out.’ He smiled thinly. ‘Instead the populations used the gifts to build this insane bridge.’

‘How is this going to help us find the Ghosts?’

He seemed surprised by the question. ‘There are no Ghosts here, child.’

Of course he was right. I saw it as soon as he said it. Ghosts spread out over every world they infest. We would have seen them by now, if they were here. The Ghosts had intervened here but they had not inhabited this world. I’d known this for a while, I guess, but I hadn’t wanted to face the possibility that I’d thrown away my life for nothing.

I slumped to the littered floor. The strength seemed to drain out of me.

In retrospect I can see his tactics. It was as if he had designed the whole situation as a vast trap. He waited until I had reached the bottom – at the maximum point of my tiredness, as I was crushed with disappointment at the failure of the hunt, surrounded by alien madness.

Then he struck.

The length of bone came looming out of the dark, without warning, straight at my head.

I ducked. The bone clattered against the wall. ‘L’Eesh, you bastard—’

‘It’s just business, little Raida.’

My heart hammered. I backed away until my spine was pressed against the rough wall. ‘You’ve found something you want. The vacuum-energy weapons. Is that it?’

‘Not what we came for, but I’ll turn a profit, if I can manage to get off this moon.’

‘It’s not as if you need to do this, to rob me,’ I said bitterly.

He nodded. ‘True. You actually have the stronger motive here. Which is why I have to destroy you.’ He spoke patiently, as if instructing a child. He raised the bone, its bulging end thick, hefting it like a club, and he moved towards me, his movements oily, powerful.

I felt weak before his calm assurance. He was better than me, and always would be; the logic of the situation was that I should just submit.

In desperation I jumped onto the lift palette – it was like standing on a bobbing raft – and stamped on the button. I rose immediately, passing beyond the reach of his swinging club. I had been too fast, faster than his reactions. The advantage of youth.

But L’Eesh easily prised another palette out of the wall and followed me up into the darkness.

My palette accelerated, bumping against walls that were as rough as sandpaper. L’Eesh’s green glow followed me, bioluminescent signals flickering.

Thus our ascension, two dead people racing into the sky.

On an interplanetary scale the tunnel arched, but from my petty human point of view it rose straight up. All I could see was a splash of bio light on the crude brickwork around me, sliding past, blurred by my speed.

L’Eesh tried to defeat me with words.

‘Imagine, Raida,’ he said softly. ‘They must have come here from across the moon, carrying their mud bricks, a global pilgrimage that must have lasted generations. What a vision! They sacrificed everything – abandoned their farms, trashed their biosphere down to the slime on the rocks … And you know what? The two populations must have worked together to build their bridge, so they could continue their war. I mean, you couldn’t build it just from one end or the other, could you? They cooperated so they could get at each other and carry on fighting. In the end, the war became the most important thing in their universe. More important than life, the continuation of the species.’

‘Insane,’ I whispered.

‘Ah, but once we built vast structures, waged terrible wars, all in the names of gods we have long forgotten. And are we so different now? What of our magnificent Galaxy-spanning Expansion? Isn’t that a grandiose folly built around an idea, a mad vision of cosmic destiny? Who do you think we more resemble – this moon’s warmongers or its peacemakers?’

I was exhausted. I clung to my scrap of ancient technology as it careened up into the dark.

That sleek voice whispered in my ear, on and on. ‘You can never live up to Hily’s memory, little Raida. You do see that, don’t you? You needn’t feel you have failed. For you could never have succeeded … I saw your mother die.’

‘Shut up, L’Eesh.’

‘I was at her side—’

‘Shut up.’

He fell silent, waiting.

I knew he was manipulating me, but I couldn’t help but ask. ‘Tell me.’

‘She was shot in the back.’

‘Who?’

‘It doesn’t matter. She was killed for her catch, her trophies. Her death wasn’t dishonourable. She must even have expected it. We are a nation of thieves, you see, we hunters. You shouldn’t feel bitter.’

‘I don’t feel anything.’

‘Of course not.’

His brooding glow was edging closer.

I closed my eyes. What would Hily have said? Use your head. There is always an option.

I took my hand off the button. The palette rocked to a halt. ‘Get it over,’ I panted.

Now he had nothing to say; his words had fulfilled their purpose. He closed, that eerie green glow sliding over the crude brickwork.

And I jammed my hand back on the button. My palette lumbered into motion. I watched the exhaust gather into a thick crimson mist below me.

L’Eesh hurtled up into the mist, crouching on his palette – which abruptly cracked apart and crumbled. Stranded in the air, he arced a little higher, and then began to fall amid the fragments.

I sat there until my heart stopped rattling. Then I followed him down.

‘My fall is slow,’ he said, analytic, observing. ‘Low gravity, high air resistance. You could probably retrieve me. But you won’t.’

‘Come on, L’Eesh. It’s business, just as you said. You know what happened. These palettes extract their energy from the vacuum energy sea.’

‘Leaving some kind of deficit in their wake, into which I flew. Yes? And so we both die here.’ He forced a laugh. ‘Ironic, don’t you think? In the end we’ve cooperated to kill each other. Just like the inhabitants of these desolate moons.’

But I was thinking it over. ‘Not necessarily.’

‘What?’

‘Suppose I head up to the midpoint of the bridge and burn my way through the wall. Pohp ought to see me and come in for me. I’d surely be far enough out of the vacuum field for the Spline to approach safely.’

‘What about the quarantine ships?’

‘They must primarily patrol the moons’ low orbits. Perhaps I’d be far enough from the surface of either moon to leave them asleep.’

He considered. ‘It would take days to get there. But it might work. You have something of your mother’s pragmatism, little Raida. I guess you win.’

‘Maybe we both win.’

There was silence. Then he said coldly, ‘Must I beg?’

‘Make me an offer.’

He sighed. ‘There has been a sighting of a school of Spline. Wild Spline.’

I was startled. ‘Wild?’

‘These Spline are still spacegoing. But certain of their behavioural traits have reverted to an ancestral state. They believe they swim in their primordial ocean—’

I breathed, ‘Nobody has ever hunted a Spline.’

‘It would be glorious. Like the old days. Hily would be proud.’ It was as if I could hear his smile.

I was content with the deal. It was enough that I’d beaten him; I didn’t need to destroy him.

Not yet. Not until I knew who killed my mother.

We argued percentages, all the way down towards the light.

The human victory was probably always inevitable. We were better at waging war: after all, we had spent a hundred thousand years practising on each other.

But the war transformed humanity too. After seventeen hundred years of conflict the Coalition’s grip on mankind, body and soul, was total.

We undying kept out of sight, tending our own long-term concerns. But we never went away.

The Expansion swept on across the face of the Galaxy, centralised, united, purposeful, ideological, purified by war.

It was not healthy to be in its way.