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
AD 7004
I
The needleship Spear of Orion dropped out of hyperspace. Its tetrahedral Free Earth sigils shone brightly, its weapons ports were open, and its crew were ready to do their duty.
Pilot Officer Hex glanced around the sky, assessing the situation.
She was deep in the Sagittarius Spiral Arm, a place where stars crowded, hot and young. One star was close enough to show a disc, the sun of this system. And there was the green planet she had been sent here to defend. Labelled 147B by the mission planners, this was a terraformed world, a human settlement thrust deep into Silver Ghost territory. But the planet’s face was scarred by fire, immense ships clustered to evacuate the population - and needleships like her own popped into existence everywhere, Aleph Force swimming out of hyperspace like a shoal of fish. This was a battlefield.
All this in a heartbeat. Then the Silver Ghosts attacked.
‘Palette at theta ten degrees, phi fifty!’ That was gunner Borno’s voice, coming from the port blister, one of three dotted around the slim waist of the Spear.
Hex, in her own cramped pilot’s blister at the very tip of the needleship, glanced to her left and immediately found the enemy. Needleship crews were warriors in three-dimensional battlefields; translating positional data from one set of spherical coordinates to another was drummed into you before you were five years old.
Borno had found a Ghost intrasystem cruiser, the new kind - a ‘palette,’ as the analysts were calling them. It was a flat sheet with its Ghost crew sitting in pits in the top surface like blobs of mercury. The ship looked a little like a painter’s palette, hence the nickname. But palettes were fast, manoeuvrable and deadly, much more effective in battle than the classic tangled-rope Ghost ships of the past. And just seconds after she came down from hyperspace this palette was screaming down on Hex, energy weapons firing.
Hex felt her senses come alive, her heartbeat slow to a resolute thump. One of her instructors once said she had been born to end Ghost lives on battlefields. At moments like this, that was how it felt. Hex was twenty years old.
She hauled on her joystick. The needleship swung like a compass needle and hurled itself directly at the Ghost palette. As weapons on both ships fired, the space between them filled with light.
‘About time, pilot,’ Borno said. ‘My fingers were getting itchy.’
‘All right, all right,’ Hex snapped back. Gunner Borno, of all the needleship crew she had ever met, had the deepest, most visceral hatred of the Ghosts and all their works. ‘Just take that thing down before we collide.’
But no lethal blow was struck, and as the distance between the ships closed, uneasiness knotted in Hex’s stomach.
She thumbed a control to give her a magnified view of the palette’s upper surface. She heard her crew murmur in surprise. These Ghosts weren’t the usual silver spheres. They had sharp edges; they were cubes, pyramids, dodecahedrons - even a tetrahedron, as if mocking the ancient symbol of Earth. And they showed no inclination to run away. These were a new breed of Ghost, she realised.
The Spear shuddered. For an instant the Virtual displays clustered around her fritzed, before her systems rebooted and recovered.
‘Jul, what was that? Did we take a hit?’
Jul was the ship’s engineer, young, bright, capable - and a good pilot before her lower body was cut away by a lucky strike from a dying Ghost. ‘Pilot, we ran through g-waves.’
‘Gravity waves? From a starbreaker?’
‘No,’ called navigator Hella, the last of the Spear’s four crew. ‘Too long-wavelength for that. And too powerful. Pilot, this space is full of g-waves. That’s how the Ghosts are hitting the planet.’
‘Where are they coming from?’
‘The scouts can’t find a source.’
‘New weapons, new ships, new tactics,’ Borno said darkly.
‘And new Ghosts,’ said Hella.
‘You know what’s behind this,’ Jul said uneasily.
Hex said warningly, ‘Engineer—’
‘The Black Ghost. It has to be.’
Unlike any of its kind before, the barracks-room scuttlebutt went, the Black Ghost was an enemy commander that fought like a human - better than a human. The Commissaries claimed this was all just rumour generated by stressed-out crews, but Hex herself had heard that the stories had originated with Ghosts themselves, captives under interrogation. And whether the Black Ghost existed or not, you couldn’t deny that something was making the Ghosts fight better than they ever had.
And meanwhile that palette still hadn’t broken off.
‘Thirty seconds to close,’ Hella said. ‘We won’t survive an impact, pilot.’
‘Neither will they,’ Borno said grimly.
‘Fifteen seconds.’
‘Hold the line!’ Hex ordered.
‘Those dimples,’ said engineer Jul hastily. ‘Where the Ghosts are sitting. There has to be some interface to the palette’s systems. They must be weak spots. Gunner, if you could plant a shell there …’
Hex imagined Borno’s grin.
‘Seven seconds! Six!’
A single shell sailed out through the curtain of fire. It was a knot of unified-field energy, like a bit of the universe from a second after the Big Bang itself.
The shell hit a dimple so squarely it probably didn’t even touch the sides. The resident Ghost, a squat cube, was vaporised instantly. Then light erupted from every dimple and weapons port on the palette. The Ghost crew scrambled away, but Hex saw silver skin wrinkle and pop, before the palette vanished in a flash of primordial light.
The needleship slammed through a dissipating cloud of debris, and the blisters turned black to save the crew’s eyes.
The Spear sat in space, its hull charred, still cooling as it dumped the energy it had soaked up. Sparks drifted through the sky: more needleships, a detachment of Aleph Force forming up.
For the first time since they’d dropped out of hyperspace Hex was able to catch her breath, and to take a decent look at the world she had been sent to defend.
Even from here she could see it was suffering. Immense storm systems swathed its poles and catastrophic volcanism turned its nightside bright. Sparks climbed steadily up from the planet’s surface, refugee transports to meet the Navy ships - Spline, living starships, kilometre-wide spheres of flesh and metal.
Hella murmured, ‘That’s what a g-wave weapon will do to you, if it’s sufficiently powerful.’
Borno asked, ‘How? By ripping up the surface?’
‘Probably by disrupting the planet’s orbital dynamics. You could knock over a world’s spin axis, maybe jolt it into a higher eccentricity orbit. If the core rotation collapsed its magnetic field would implode. You’d have turmoil in the magma currents, earthquakes and volcanism …’
The destruction of a world as an act of war. The people being driven from their homes today were not soldiers. They had come here as colonists, to build a new world. But the very creation of this settlement had been an act of war, Hex knew, for this settlement had been planted deep inside what had been Ghost space until five centuries ago.
The Ghost Wars had already lasted centuries. War with an alien species was not like a human conflict. It was ecological, the Commissaries taught, like two varieties of weed competing for the same bit of soil. It could be terminated by nothing short of total victory - and the price of defeat would be extinction, for one side or another.
And now the Ghosts had a weapon capable of wreaking such damage on a planetary scale, and, worse, were prepared to use it. These were not the Ghosts Hex had spent a lifetime learning to fight. But in that case, she thought harshly, I’ll just have to learn to fight them all over again.