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.