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?’