Hella said, ‘I wonder what “large-scale” might mean for a species of universe-botherers like the Silver Ghosts.’
Teel said, ‘Even when we were friendly with them the Ghosts scared us, I think.’
Hex had had enough of awe. ‘Let’s talk about the target. This weapon system is in the control of the Black Ghost …’
Recently the Ghosts had suddenly been scoring victories against the human forces. Their tactics had undergone a revolution that must reflect a change in their command structure, perhaps their very society.
‘Humans work in hierarchies,’ Teel said. ‘Chains of command. All large-scale military organisations in the past have done so. We tend to think it’s the only way to operate, but in fact it’s a very human way to work.’
‘An evolutionary legacy of your past,’ the Integumentary said. ‘When you were squabbling apes in some dismal forest, in thrall to the strongest male—’
‘Shut up,’ Teel said without emotion. ‘Ghosts, however, have always worked differently. Their organisation is more fluid, bottom-up, with distributed decision-making. The whole of their society is self-organising.’
‘Like a Coalescence,’ Borno said with disgust.
‘Like a hive, yes.’
‘The Ghosts are this way,’ said the Integumentary, ‘because of our evolutionary past. As you would understand if you knew anything about the species you are endeavouring to wipe out.’
‘Maybe,’ Teel said, ‘but you stayed that way because it’s efficient. Even in some military applications: if you’re waging a guerrilla war on an occupied world, for instance, a network of cells can be very effective. But in large-scale set-piece battles, which we always try to draw the Ghosts into, you need a command structure.’
‘And now they have one,’ Hex said.
‘Which makes them harder to beat. But it also makes them more vulnerable, because suddenly assassination is an effective weapon.’
Hex, intrigued, asked, ‘Why would any Ghost commit this treason? If the Black Ghost exists - if it lies behind these new effective tactics—’
The Integumentary said, ‘The Black Ghost’s is the greater treason, because of where its project will inevitably lead.’
Teel prompted, ‘Which is?’
‘To an arms race. Humans will steal or reinvent the gravity wave technology for themselves. Then we will conspire together, humans and Ghosts, to wreck the Galaxy between us. Or, worse—’
‘Ah,’ said Teel. ‘The Black Ghost will unleash such power that there won’t be anything left for the victors to take.’
‘It’s possible,’ Borno said. ‘Ghosts are single-minded. They choose a plan and stick to it, whatever the cost.’
In the training academies there was a joke about Ghosts that had the right of way to cross a road. But the transport drivers ignored the stop signs. So the first Ghost crossed, exerting its rights, and was creamed in the process. So did the second, the third, the fourth, each sticking to what it believed was right regardless of the cost. Then the fifth invented a teleport, changing physical law to make the road obsolete altogether …
Teel said, ‘So you want the Black Ghost eliminated before it destroys everything. Even though this may be your best chance of winning the war and of avoiding the subjugation or even extinction that would follow.’
‘Sooner extinction than universal destruction,’ the Integumentary said.
‘How noble.’
Hex said, ‘And you, Integumentary, are prepared to make the most profound moral judgements on behalf of your whole species - and their entire future?’
Borno said, ‘Who cares about Ghost ethics? They won’t need ethics when they’re all dead.’
‘You’re deranged, gunner, but you’re right,’ said Teel. ‘We don’t need to consider Ghost consciences. Our job is to consider what use to make of this strange opportunity. Certainly we need to find out more about these new Ghost variants you’ve come up against. I’ll pass this up the line to—’
‘You decide now,’ the Ghost snapped.
Borno said, ‘If you think a commodore is going to take orders from a ball of fat like you—’
‘Can it, gunner,’ Hex snapped.
‘You decide now,’ the Ghost said again. ‘You allow this crew, in this ship, to follow my instructions, or I disconnect the link.’
Hella said, ‘I guess the Integumentary has its own pressures. Imagine trying to run a covert operation like this from our side.’
‘We’ll follow your orders, whatever you say, Commodore,’ Hex said.
‘I know you will,’ Teel said dismissively. ‘But I’ve no way of assessing your chances of success - let alone survival.’
‘Our survival is irrelevant, sir,’ Jul said.
‘I know that’s what you’re taught, engineer. Perhaps there are a few desk-bound Commissaries back on Earth who actually believe that. But out here we who do the fighting are still human. The mission has a greater chance of success if you’re willing to take it on.’
‘I’m willing,’ Borno said immediately.
‘I’ve seen your file, gunner. What about those of you who aren’t psychopathically hostile to the Ghosts and all their works?’
Hella was uncertain. ‘We’re flight crew. We aren’t infantry, or covert operatives. We may not be right for the job.’
‘We’re Aleph Force,’ Hex said firmly. ‘In Aleph Force you do whatever it takes.’
‘Anyhow I don’t think there’s a choice,’ Jul said. ‘Us or nobody.’
Hella asked, ‘So what do you think, pilot?’
Hex looked into her soul. A journey into the very heart of Ghost territory - a mission that might turn the course of the war - how could she refuse? ‘I’m in.’
Jul, Hella and Borno quickly concurred.
‘I’m proud of you,’ the Commodore said.
The Ghost spun. ‘Humans!’
Hex snapped, ‘All right, Ghost, let’s get on with it. Where are we going?’
More data chattered into the Spear’s banks.
III
The Spear of Orion swept through space. The needleship moved from point to point through hyperdrive jumps, each too brief for a human eye to follow, so that the stars seemed to slide through the sky like lamp posts beside a road. For the crew the journey was a routine marvel.
But Hex and her crew had come far from the outermost boundary of human space, farther than any human had travelled from Earth save for a handful of explorers. And every star they could see must host a Ghost emplacement: if humanity was turning the Galaxy green, then this rich chunk of it still gleamed Ghost-silver. But the Spear remained undisturbed.
‘It’s eerie,’ engineer Jul said. ‘Ghosts should be swarming all over us.’
Hex said, ‘The Integumentary promised to make us invisible to the Ghosts’ sensors, and it’s keeping its word.’
Jul, a practical engineer, snorted. ‘I’d feel a lot more reassured if I knew how.’
Borno said, ‘What do you expect? Ghosts don’t give you anything.’ His pent-up rage, here in Ghost territory, was tangible.
They sailed on in tense silence.
Borno had been born between the stars. His ancestors, who called themselves ‘Engineers’, had fled Earth at the time of an alien occupation. With no place to land the refugees had ganged together their spacecraft and found ways to live between the stars, through trading, piloting, even a little mercenary soldiering.
When the Third Expansion came, Borno’s Engineers had been one of a number of peripheral cultures recontacted by the Coalition, the new authority on Earth. But the Engineers had also forged tentative links with the Silver Ghosts, who were undergoing their own expansion out of the heart of the Galaxy. For a time the Engineers had profited from trade between two interstellar empires. They even welcomed small Ghost colonies on their amorphous islands of relic spacecraft and harnessed asteroids.
But then Navy ships came spinning down to impose Coalition authority on the Engineers’ raft culture. There had been a strange period when autonomous Ghost enclaves had been granted room to live under the new regime: Silver Ghosts, living under Coalition authority. But the Ghosts had been taxed, marginalised and discriminated against until their position was untenable. Their maltreatment had led to a rescue mission from Ghost worlds - and that had led to one of the first military engagements of the long Ghost Wars, fought out over the Engineers’ fragile raft colony. Among the Engineers, many had died, and the rest had been dispersed to colonies deeper within Coalition space.
All this was centuries ago. But Borno’s people had never forgotten who they were and where they had come from; they still called themselves ‘Engineers’. And in their minds it had been Ghost aggression that had resulted in the deaths of so many and the loss of an ancient homeland.
Hex reflected that it would do no good to try to explain to Borno that it had been Coalition policy that had precipitated that defining crisis in the first place. And besides, Borno’s wrath was useful for the Coalition’s purposes. In a war that spanned the stars, he was not unique.
‘Heads up,’ Hella said. ‘I have a visual. Theta eighty-six, phi five.’
Their destination was dead ahead.
Hex saw a double star: a misty sphere that glowed a dull coal red while a pinpoint of electric blue trawled across its face.
The Spear’s crew had had to find their way here by dead reckoning. This system didn’t show up in the Navy’s data banks. After fifteen centuries of the Third Expansion, the Commission for Historical Truth believed it had mapped every single one of the Galaxy’s hundreds of billions of stars, human-controlled or not - but it hadn’t mapped this one.
Anomaly or not, somewhere in this unmapped system, the Integumentary had promised, the crew of the Spear would find the Black Ghost.
Gunner Borno said hastily, ‘We’re crawling with Ghosts.’
Hex checked her displays. All around her were Ghosts: their ships, their emplacements, their sensor stations and weapons platforms. The whole system was like a vast fortress, defended to a depth of half a light year from that central double sun, with more monitoring stations and fast-response units even further out.
‘None of them are reacting,’ Jul said, sounding disbelieving. ‘Not one unit.’
Hex said, ‘Then forget them. What are we looking at?’
Jul said, ‘I’ve seen systems like this before. That blue thing is a neutron star, right?’
‘Yes,’ Hella said, ‘Actually a pulsar …’
Once this had been a partnership of two immense stars - until the larger, too massive, had detonated in a supernova explosion, for a few days outshining the whole Galaxy. Its ruin had collapsed to form a neutron star, a sun-sized mass compressed down to the size of a city block. As it spun on its axis a ferocious magnetic field threw out beams of charged particles to flash in the eyes of radio telescopes: it was a pulsar.
As for the supernova’s companion, the tremendous detonation stripped away most of its outer layers. Its fusing core, exposed, had not been massive enough to maintain the central fire. The remnant star had subsided to misty dimness.
Hella said, ‘But the system is actually still evolving. That pulsar is dragging material out of the parent.’ She displayed a false-colour image that showed a broad disc, material the pulsar’s gravity had dug out of the larger star’s flesh and thrown into orbit.
‘So that star blew its companion up,’ Borno said, ‘and now it’s taking it apart bit by bit. What a dismal place this is.’
‘And yet,’ Hella said, ‘this system has planets. Two, three, four - more off in the dark, they surely don’t matter. It’s the innermost that has the most Earthlike signature: air, liquid water, oxygen, carbon compounds. Smaller than Earth, though.’
Across human space people always spoke of Earthlike worlds, though few of them had ever seen Earth; the mother planet remained the reference for all her scattered children.
The original binary could have hosted Earths, if they were far enough from the brilliance of the central stars. No biosphere could have survived the supernova detonation, but once the system became stable again, any surviving worlds could have been reborn. Comets or outgassing could create a new atmosphere, a new ocean. And life could begin again, perhaps crawling out of the deepest rocks, or brought here by the comets - or even delivered by conscious intent; this was a Galaxy crowded with life. How strange, Hex thought, a planet that might have hosted not one but two generations of life. She wondered if its new inhabitants had any idea of what went before - if those doomed by the supernova had managed to leave a trace of their passing, before being put to the fire.
‘But that pulsar is still chipping away at the red star,’ Jul said. ‘The sun is failing.’
‘And if there are Ghosts here they are suffering.’ Borno snarled. ‘Good.’
Hella called, ‘There isn’t much off-world, but I can see one large habitat orbiting the innermost planet.’
‘Then that’s our destination.’ Hex set up an approach trajectory. She felt the needleship’s intrasystem engines thrumming around her, powerful and secure, and the dim red sun swept towards them.