Borno said, ‘I don’t like just sitting out here.’
‘Take it easy,’ Hex said. She downloaded visual feed from the command loops. Ghost ships were being drawn away from the battle around the planet itself, and were heading out to this concentration.
Aleph Force was Strike Arm’s elite, one of the most formidable rapid-response fighting units in the Navy. From their base on the Orion Line they were hurled through hyperspace into the most desperate situations - like this one. Aleph Force always made a difference: that was what their commanders told them to remember. Even the Ghosts had learned that. And that was why Ghosts were peeling off from their main objective to engage them.
‘Gunner, we’re giving that evacuation operation a chance just by sitting here. And as soon as we’ve lured in enough Ghosts we’ll take them on. I have a feeling you’ll be slitting hides before the day is done.’
‘That might be sooner than you think,’ called engineer Jul, uneasily. ‘Take a look at this.’ She sent another visual feed around the loop.
Sparks slid around the sky, like droplets of water condensing out of humid air.
Hex had never seen anything like it. ‘What are they?’
‘Ghosts,’ Borno said. ‘Swarming like flies.’
‘They’re all around us,’ Hella breathed. ‘There must be thousands.’
‘Make that millions,’ Jul said. ‘They’re surrounding the other ships as well.’
Hex called up a magnified visual. As she had glimpsed on the palette, the Ghosts were cubes, pyramids, spinning tetrahedrons, even a few spiny forms like mines.
Jul said, ‘I thought all Ghosts were spheres.’
Ghosts were hardened to space, and their primary driver was the conservation of their body heat. For a given mass a silvered sphere, the shape with the minimum surface area, was the optimal way to achieve that.
‘But they weren’t always like that,’ said Borno. He had studied Ghosts all his life, the better to destroy them. ‘Ghosts evolved. Maybe these are primitive forms, before they settled for the optimum.’
‘Primitive?’ Hex asked. ‘Then what are they doing here?’
‘Don’t ask me.’ His voice was tight. His loathing of Ghosts was no affectation; it was so deep it was almost phobic.
‘They’re closing,’ Jul called.
The Spear’s weapons began to spit fire into the converging cloud. Hex saw that one Ghost, two, was caught, flaring and dying in an instant. But it was like firing a laser into a rainstorm.
Hex snapped, ‘Gunner, you’re just wasting energy.’
‘The systems can’t lock,’ Borno said. ‘Too many targets, too small, too fast-moving.’
‘Another new tactic,’ Jul murmured. ‘And a smart one.’
Navigator Hella called, ‘Hex, you’d better take a look at this.’
In a new visual, Hex was shown a dense mass of Ghost hide. It was a sheet, a ragged segment of a sphere that grew even as she watched, with more Ghosts clustering around its spreading edges.
‘It’s the Ghosts,’ Hella said. ‘Some of those shapes, for instance the cubes, are space-filling. They’re forming themselves into a shell around us. A solid shell.’
Jul said, wondering, ‘They are acting in a coordinated way, millions of them, right across the battlefield.’
‘Like humans,’ Hella said. ‘They are fighting like humans, unified under a single command.’
The name hung unspoken between them: this was the work of the Black Ghost.
‘We’re losing the comms nets,’ Jul said, tense. ‘They’re isolating us.’
Hex glanced around the sky. The other needleships of Aleph Force were being enclosed by their own shells of Ghost hide; they hung in space like bizarre silvered fruit. She thought frantically. ‘If we try to ram that wall—’
‘They’ll just fall back and track us,’ Hella said.
‘What if we go to hyperdrive?’
Engineer Jul snapped, ‘Are you crazy? With all this turbulence in the gravity field, surrounded by a wall of reflective Ghost hide, you may as well just detonate the engines.’
Hella said, ‘It’s that or be destroyed anyhow.’
Borno said, ‘At least we will take down a lot of them with us. Millions, maybe.’
They fell silent for a heartbeat. Then Hella called, ‘Pilot? It’s your decision.’
Hex knew this was a war of economics. A great deal had been invested in her crew’s raising and training, and in the ship itself. But that investment had been made to be spent. The four of them and the ship, in exchange for millions of these strange swarming new Ghosts: it was a fair price.
‘It is our duty,’ she said. She brought up a bright, colour-coded display and began to work through the self-destruct procedure.
She heard Hella sigh.
Borno said grimly, ‘It’s been good to serve with you all.’
Jul said, ‘Not for long enough.’
Hex heard the tension in their voices. She had been trained for this, as for every other conceivable battlefield scenario. She knew that none of them really believed this was the end, not deep in their guts. If suicide was the only option, you did it quickly, before you had time to understand what you were doing. ‘I’ll set it to five seconds. Good luck, everybody.’ She reached out her gloved hand to finalise the sequence.
‘Wait.’ It was a new voice, smooth, toneless, coming from her command net.
In a visual before her was a Silver Ghost. It was one of the classic sort, a perfect sphere. The image was about the size of her head, a ball of silver turning slowly in the middle of her blister.
‘You hacked into our command net,’ Hex said.
‘It wasn’t difficult,’ the Ghost said. Its voice, translated by the Spear’s systems from some downloaded feed, was bland, without inflection. But did she detect a trace of sarcasm?
Jul spoke, her voice tremulous with fear. ‘Hex? What’s going on? Just get it over—’
‘Wait,’ Hex snapped.
The Ghost said, ‘I will let you live, in return for a service.’
Hex could hardly believe she was hearing this. She heard the voice of her training officers in her head; in a situation like this, faced with a new stratagem by the Ghosts, it was her job to extract as much intelligence as possible. ‘Why us?’
‘Because Aleph Force are the supreme killers in a species of killers, and you are the best of Aleph Force. Quite an accolade.’
‘And what’s this “service”? You want us to kill somebody, is that it?’ A military leader, Hex speculated, a senior Commissary, maybe a minister of the Coalition’s grand councils back on Earth - Ghosts had never resorted to assassination that she knew of, but then this was a day when nothing about the Ghosts seemed predictable. ‘Who?’
Even on this day of shocks, the answer was stunning. ‘We want you to assassinate the Black Ghost.’
II
Scarcely believing what she was doing, Hex set up a conference call involving herself, her crew, her commander at the base of Aleph Force back on the Orion Line - and a Silver Ghost.
Commodore Teel, a disembodied Virtual head floating in Hex’s blister, glared at her. In his forties, Teel’s face was hard, his eyes flat, and his scalp was a mass of scar tissue. ‘None of you should even be alive. Pilot Officer Hex, charges aren’t out of the question.’
Hex swallowed her shame. ‘I know that, sir. It was a judgement call to abort the self-destruct.’
‘Show me where you are.’
Navigator Hella hastily downloaded positional data to the Commodore. The Spear of Orion had been smuggled through some kind of hyperspace jump out of its cage of Ghosts and brought to a position at the rim of the system, where only icy comets swam in the dark. They were far from the fighting which still raged in the inner system.
Teel stared at the Ghost’s Virtual, which spun silently, complacently. ‘How did this creature bring you out here?’
Jul answered, ‘We’re not sure, sir. We didn’t monitor any communication between it and any other Ghost. The Ghost, um, broke us out.’
‘I think we’re dealing with factions among the Ghosts, sir,’ Hex said. ‘Maybe there’s an opportunity here. That’s why I thought it best to pass it up the chain of command.’
‘And this Ghost wants you to kill one of its own.’
‘This Ghost has a name,’ the Ghost said. ‘Or at least a title.’
‘I’ve heard of this,’ Borno sneered. ‘Ghosts like titles. They are all ambassadors.’
‘I am no ambassador,’ the Ghost said. This is not an age for ambassadors. I am an Integumentary.’ The Spear’s systems displayed various alternative translations for ‘Integumentary’: prophylaxis, quarantine. ‘I am part of an agency that insulates humans from Ghosts, like the hide that shields my essence from the vacuum of space.’
‘Charming,’ Teel said. ‘But, fancy title or not, you are my mortal enemy. If you want us to do something for you, then you must give us something in return.’
The Ghost spun, its flawless hide barely showing its rotation. ‘I expected nothing less. The one thing you wasteful bipeds relish even more than killing is trade. Bargaining, mutual deception—’
Teel snapped, ‘If you expected it you have something to offer.’
‘Very well,’ said the Ghost. ‘If you succeed we will decommission the new weapon system.’
‘What new weapon?’
‘Directional gravity waves on a large scale.’
The weapon that had churned up a planet. Hex held her breath.
‘Download some data,’ Teel said. ‘Prove you can do this. Then we’ll talk.’
Hex watched, astonished, as the Spear’s systems began to accept data from the Ghost.
Every human knew the story of the Silver Ghosts, and their war with humanity.
For fifteen hundred years the Third Expansion of mankind had been spreading across the face of the Galaxy. First contact between humans and the alien kind they labelled ‘Silver Ghosts’ had come only a few centuries after the start of the Expansion. The Ghosts were silvered spheres, up to two metres across. Their hide was perfectly reflective - hence the human label ‘Silver Ghosts’; in starlight they were all but invisible.
The key to the Ghosts was their past. The world of the Silver Ghosts was once Earthlike: blue skies, a yellow sun. But as the Ghosts climbed to awareness their sun evaporated, its substance torched away by a companion star. As their world froze the Ghosts rebuilt themselves. They became symbiotic creatures, each one a huddled cooperative collective. That spherical shape and silvered hide minimised heat loss.
The death of the Ghosts’ sun was a betrayal by the universe itself, as they saw it. But that betrayal shaped them for ever. Their science was devoted to fixing the universe’s design flaws: they learned to tinker with the very laws of physics.
When humans found the Ghosts, at first two powerful interstellar cultures cautiously engaged. But the Ghosts’ home range lay between mankind and the rich star fields of the Galaxy’s Core. The Ghosts were in humanity’s way. War was inevitable.
After early quick victories, for centuries the Ghosts stalled the human advance at the Orion Line, an immense static front along the outer edge of the Sagittarius Arm. The Ghosts, capable of changing the laws of physics in pursuit of weapons technology, were a formidable foe; but humans were the more warlike.
A weapon that could use g-waves to devastate worlds was a characteristic Ghost weapon, exotic and powerful. And it worked, the Integumentary said, by tapping into the large-scale properties of the universe itself.
‘Perhaps you understand that the universe has more dimensions than the macroscopic, the three spatial and one of time. Most of the extra dimensions are extremely small.’ A technical sidebar translated this for Hex as ‘Planck scale’. ‘But one extra dimension is rather larger, perhaps as much as a millimetre. You must think of the universe, then, as a blanket of spacetime, stretching thirteen billion years deep into the past and some twelve billion light years across—’
‘And a millimetre thick,’ said Hella.
‘There are believed to be many such universes, stacked up’ - the translator boxes hesitated, searching for a simile - ‘like leaves in a book. Also our own universe may be folded back on itself, creased in the thin dimension.’
Engineer Jul said, ‘So what? We know about the extra dimensions. We use them when we hyperdrive.’
‘But,’ said the Ghost, ‘your applications are not currently on the scale of ours.’
‘Tell us about g-waves,’ Teel commanded.
The Ghost said that all forms of energy were contained within the ‘blanket’ of the universe - all save one. Gravity waves could propagate in the extra dimensions, reaching out to the other universes believed to be stacked out there. The Ghosts had learned to focus the gravitational energy raining into their own universe from another.
‘The energy source in the other universe is necessarily large,’ the Integumentary said. ‘Alternatively it may be a remote part of our own universe, an energy-rich slice of spacetime - the instants after the initial singularity for instance, folded back. We aren’t sure. You understand that this weapon offers us a virtually unlimited source of power. It’s just a question of tapping it. Beyond weaponry, many large-scale projects become feasible.’