Borno said, ‘Pilot, your trajectory will take us right through the thick of the Ghosts.’
‘Gunner, they either see us or they don’t. We may as well walk in the front door.’
Borno said tensely, ‘Trusting a Ghost with our lives?’
‘That’s always been the deal.’
‘You mean,’ Jul said, ‘the whole mission’s always been halfassed. ’
‘Stay focused,’ Hex murmured.
‘Closest approach,’ Hella called now.
The star ballooned out of the dark. Its dim photosphere bellied beneath Hex’s blister, churning dully, disfigured by huge spots. A pinpoint of electric blue rose over the crimson horizon of the parent, casting long shadows through the columns of glowing starstuff that its gravity hauled up from the body of the parent star.
‘Sunrise on a star,’ Borno said. ‘Now there’s something you don’t see every day.’
‘But we’ve got more anomalies,’ Jul reported. ‘The parent’s composition is all wrong. Too much hydrogen, not enough metals. Younger stars incorporate the debris of earlier generations, fusion products, heavy elements like metal, carbon. It’s as if this star is too old - only by a million years or so, but still—’
‘I’ll tell you something stranger,’ Hella said. ‘This star system may not be in the Coalition catalogues, but it’s a near-identical twin of a system that is.’ She brought up an image of another system, another red star with a bright blue companion pulsar; Hex saw from the accompanying data that the system’s orbital dynamics were virtually identical. Hella said, ‘This other star is in Ghost space too. Only a few tens of light years away.’
Hex let all this wash through her. You weren’t wise to block information flows, especially when you were flying into the unknown like this. But she couldn’t see an immediate relevance in these stellar mysteries.
She was relieved when the twin stars fell away, the needleship climbed back out of the parent star’s gravity well, and the target planet came looming out of the dark.
Unlike the rest of her crew Hex had been brought up on a planet, only a few light years from Earth itself. But even to her eyes this little world looked strange. Huddled close for warmth, it kept one face to the parent star. The subsolar point on the daylight hemisphere, where the sun would be perpetually overhead, must be the warmest place on the planet. Hex made out climatic bands of increasing dimness sprawling around that central point, so that the face of the planet was like a target, bathed crimson red. And on the dark side, illuminated only by starlight, she glimpsed the blue tint of ice.
As the needleship swung closer, she made out more detail on the sunward side: dark patches that might have been seas, broad crimson plains, and here and there a bubbling grey that was the characteristic of habitation, cities. But sparks crawled over the terminator, the boundary between day and night, and where they landed fire splashed.
Jul murmured, ‘What are we getting into here? It looks like a war between the day and night sides.’
Hella said, ‘That big orbital habitat is by far the highest technology on or around the planet. The materials, the trace radiation - it looks like it’s the only example of modern Ghost technology here.’
‘If the Black Ghost is anywhere,’ Hex said, ‘that’s where it will be. Fix the course, navigator—’
The Spear shuddered and spun crazily, that faint sun and its huddled world whirling like spectres. Hex’s blister lit up with alarm flags, flaring bright red.
She barked out commands and wrestled with her joystick. ‘Report!’
‘It was g-waves,’ Jul called back. ‘Just like the beams they used back on 147B.’
‘Were we targeted? They aren’t supposed to be able to see us.’
Hella said, ‘The whole system is crisscrossed by the beams. We just ran into one.’
‘A defensive measure?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe. Or something to do with the stellar system itself—’
Borno said, ‘We have company. Theta thirty, phi one hundred. They are coming out of that habitat.’
A swarm of palette-ships came swooping down on the Spear. Maybe it had been too much to expect the Integumentary’s shielding to survive the g-wave buffeting.
Grimly Hex fought with the still-spinning ship. ‘Open up the weapons ports.’
‘Half of them are off-line,’ Jul called back. ‘And our sensors are blitzed too. Right now we’re de-fanged, pilot. Give me two minutes and—’
The first shot sizzled through space only a couple of kilometres from the Spear’s nose.
‘We don’t have two minutes,’ Hex snapped. ‘Options. Come on, guys!’
‘Fight!’ Borno called.
‘Run,’ said Jul.
‘Abort to the planet’s surface,’ advised Hella.
At last Hex got the spin under control. But the face of the planet was a mottled crimson shield before her. More alarms lit up as the needleship sensed the first touch of this world’s thin atmosphere. ‘Looks like we don’t have much choice.’ She hauled on her controls, turned the needleship so its nose pointed down into the atmosphere - and she lit up the intrasystem drive to hurl the ship into the cover of air. A ball of light engulfed the Spear, atmospheric gases ionised and driven to white heat. In the blisters the inertial control held, more or less; Hex and her crew felt only the mildest of judders as they fell into the air of an unknown world.
All this in utter silence.
‘We’re kind of lighting up the sky here, pilot,’ Borno called.
Hex said, ‘It will get us down quicker. The ground proximity sensors will pull us out before—’
‘Sensors are off-line,’ Jul reminded her hastily.
‘Oops,’ said Hex. She hauled on her joystick.
‘Land below us,’ Hella called. ‘Now over ocean—’
Hex’s blister filled up with crash foam, embedding her like a wrapped-up doll, so tight she couldn’t move a finger. She felt nothing as the Spear of Orion cut a tunnel through an ocean a half-kilometre deep, and then, before the waters had even closed, gouged a crater fifty kilometres across in the soft rocks of the ocean floor.
Her crash foam shattered, broke up and fell away.
She was floating. She was surrounded by misty grey-green air, illuminated by dim slanting light - no, not air, she realised as she tried to move her limbs. This medium was water. Thankfully her skinsuit was holding.
She looked around. Flecks of her crash foam fell away. Of the needleship, her crew, there was no sign in this murky soup. The Spear of Orion had been her first command, and now it was gone in seconds.
And here she was, immersed in an unknown sea. Hex’s world was largely untamed. Her people, like humans everywhere, were drawn to the sea, but you never went swimming, for the ocean was full of monsters. She didn’t even know how deep she was - or which way was up. For a moment panic bubbled, and she thrashed, wasting energy, until she forced herself to be still.
She ordered her skinsuit to use the planet’s gravity field to find the local vertical. Then, when it was oriented, she made the suit climb. She glimpsed the ocean’s scummy meniscus an instant before she broke through into the air, to her huge relief.
She rose into a crimson sky, where a misshapen sun hung low. Beneath her the ocean looked black, oily, and huge, languid low g-waves crossed its surface. But she could see, deep down beneath the waters, a pale pink glow that must be the crater they had made.
Another skinsuit broke the surface, popping up like a balloon. Then a third, and a fourth. Hex made them sound off and report on their status. Everybody was unscathed, physically anyhow. They bobbed over the surface of the ocean, four drifting people in bright green suits.
‘The Spear has had it,’ Jul said. She downloaded to Hex a last data squirt from the dying ship.
‘We’re stranded,’ Hella said gloomily.
‘We still have weapons in our suits,’ Borno said.
Hex said, ‘If we can find anybody to shoot at.’
Jul pointed down at the ocean. ‘Pilot - what’s that?’
Something moved, just under the surface. Larger than a human, amorphous, dimly glimpsed, it seemed to be moving purposefully.
Hex could hear her mother’s voice: There are monsters in the sea. ‘My turn to be phobic,’ she murmured.
Hella said, ‘What? … Look. It’s breaking the surface.’
Hex glimpsed sleek flesh humping above the water. Then something like a limb protruded. Hex flinched; it was as if the limb had reached for her.
‘I can’t make out its shape,’ Borno said.
‘Maybe it has no fixed shape,’ Hella said. ‘I’ve read some creatures of the seas are like that.’
‘But it’s a toolmaker,’ Jul said calmly. She pointed. ‘It’s wearing a kind of belt.’
All this seemed utterly horrific to Hex. That limb, muscular, equipped with suckers and fine manipulators, continued to writhe in the air.
‘You know,’ Hella said, ‘I think it’s beckoning.’
‘To us?’
‘Of course to us. I think it wants us to follow it - to the land, probably.’
‘What land?’ Jul asked.
Hella sighed. ‘Some navigator you would make. Over there.’
There was a dark shading on the horizon.
Hex’s sharp pilot’s eyes picked out sparks descending from the sky. ‘We’re out of time.’
‘They’re tracking the wreckage of the ship,’ Jul said.
‘We stand and fight,’ Borno snarled.
‘Not here,’ Hex snapped. ‘Not now. Borno, we can’t win.’
‘We should follow the swimming thing,’ Hella said. ‘It might help us.’
‘You think so?’ Jul asked.
‘It’s clearly smart. And it’s trying to help us right now. Why not?’
Hex looked down with huge reluctance at the blank surface of the water, the uncharted depths beneath. ‘We don’t have a choice,’ she told her crew, and herself.
She flipped in the air and plunged head-first back into the water. Her suit’s systems whirred as it sought neutral buoyancy, and made her legs kick. Her tell-tales showed her that her crew followed her in: one, two, three.
They all struggled through the water in pursuit of the ‘swimming thing’.
IV
Hex woke. She was reasonably comfortable, even warm. But when she looked up, she peered out through a translucent bubble-wall at the roof of a cave.
She stretched, sat up.
By the light of a suit lamp, the others were already eating. They sat around suit backpacks that glowed green, giving off light and warmth. Breakfast was a slab of sticky, green, manufactured by a backpack from the organic produce of this world’s ocean, washed down by a visor-full of water.
On staggering into this sea-shore cave Hex had inflated her own suit to form this bubble-tent. If you looked carefully you could see the suit’s seams, even one stretched-out glove. Inside, the crew had stripped off their suits, pooled their backpacks, and slept, lying on one stretched-out suit while blanketed by another. They had needed time for some essential maintenance, of themselves as much as their suits.
In the mouth of the cave, beyond their shelter, a fire burned fitfully, hampered by poor convection in the low gravity. Oddly the flickering glow of the fire seemed more human than the pale green of the suit lights, but it had been built by an utterly alien being.
It was odd for Hex to have her crew together like this. She had spent most of the last year with them, but for most of their time together they were sealed up in their blisters. Now here they were, stripped down to their heated undergarments, all crammed in. Borno, the only man, was bulky, big-boned, hard-muscled. She imagined him spending hours honing his body so he could take down Ghosts hand on hand if he had to. Hella was smaller, thin, morose and anxious, but possibly the smartest of the three. Jul looked a little overweight; maybe she had been skimping physical exercise. Of course the fact that the lower half of her body was a clunky prosthetic didn’t help.
And then there was Hex - the youngest, she uncomfortably reminded herself.
Borno groused, ‘We’re interstellar warriors and we’re reduced to this. Stuck in a cave like animals. You can’t even tell if it’s morning or night.’
‘It’s always day here, dummy,’ Hella said. She sounded tired, drained; she chewed on her food tablets without enthusiasm.
‘Lethe, you know what I mean. It’s morning somewhere …’
Restless, Hex made her way to the wall of her suit-tent. They were in the northern hemisphere, but the cave was oriented south, so she could see the twin suns, a glum red blur with that spark of bright blue crawling over its face. It was strange to think that the double star never moved from its station in the sky, as if nailed there. The ground was worn, a thin soil lying over the melted bedrock that was all that had survived a supernova torching. The air was less than a fifth Earth’s pressure: too thin for them to breathe, but enough to transport sufficient heat around the planet to keep all the water, and indeed the air itself, from freezing out on the dark side.