Hex looked north into the darkness. She saw motion: palette-ships, patrolling this boundary between day and night.
Borno pointed. ‘There are structures over that way.’
‘Let’s get on with it,’ Hella said tautly.
Following Borno’s lead, they walked into the night. Hex could sense Jul’s fear, Hella’s tension, and Borno’s grim, bloody determination.
The sun disappeared altogether. They passed a few last trees, so tall that their leaves blazed in sunlight while frost gathered on their roots. ‘Interesting bit of biomechanics,’ Jul said nervously. ‘They must have evolved to exploit the temperature differences between their crowns and their roots. And I guess these last trees must be as tall as this stock can grow, otherwise—’
‘Shut up,’ Borno hissed.
They came to a wall. It was just a heap of what looked like sandbags, glowing silvery in the dim light. They crouched behind this and cautiously peered at the structures that lay beyond.
Hex saw a kind of city, spun out of silver and ice, resting on a black velvet landscape. Necklaces swooped between cool globes, frosted, icicles dangling. Sparks of light drifted between silvered domes: Ghosts, or ur-Ghosts. The place had an organic look, as if it had been grown here rather than planned. But there was nothing of Swimmer’s vibrant, swarming physicality to be seen in this chill place.
This was a typical Ghost colony. Ghosts stayed away from the heat of stars, but they had remained planet-dwellers; they tapped a world’s geothermal heat for their energy, just as they evidently had on this, their own freezing world. And their colonies always had this tangled, unplanned look.
There were anomalies, though. On a slim spire that towered over the reef-city, a light pulsed steadily, brilliant electric blue. And at the very centre of the township a squat cylinder brooded. Hex’s suit sensors told her this was merely the upper level of a complex dug deep into the ground, where thousands of Ghosts swarmed. This fortress, very unlike Ghost architecture, was the work of the Black Ghost, obvious even here, just inside the boundary of night.
Borno tapped Hex on the shoulder and pointed.
A handful of ur-Ghosts swarmed around a palette-ship on the ground. The Ghosts’ forms were variants of parallelepipeds, like slanted boxes. They were really quite beautiful, Hex thought, their facets flashing like mirrors in the starlight as they worked.
Borno whispered, ‘Four of them, four of us. We can take them out. And then we can grab that palette-ship and get to orbit.’
Jul hissed, ‘We only just crossed the terminator. Maybe we should go further before—’
‘What’s the point? We came here to find a way off the planet. There’s our opportunity.’ He raised his hand, holding a knife.
Hex said, ‘Borno is right. The longer we hang around the more chance we have of getting caught. Let’s do this. There’s a blind side over there, to their right. Borno, if you take Jul and head that way, Hella and I can—’
Hella cried, ‘Look out!’
The wall behind Hex’s back suddenly gave way, and she was tipped onto the cold ground. When she looked up she saw that the ‘sandbags’ were suspended in the thin air, heavy, rippling sacks swarming over her head. There must have been fifty of them, more.
This ‘wall’ had a been a reef of ur-Ghosts, huddled together. She should have known, she thought; she had seen their space-filling antics in combat. What a stupid mistake.
The ur-Ghosts descended.
Borno screamed, ‘Weapons!’ Snarling, his blade in his hand, he was trying to get to his feet.
Hex raised her arms. Her suit weapons powered up.
‘Don’t fire.’
The ur-Ghosts went limp, quivered, and fell. It was like having sacks of water dropped on you from a height. Hex’s suit turned rigid to protect her. Then the crew of the Spear fought their way out from the heap, shoving the floppy sacks away with a whir of exoskeletal multipliers.
Beyond this chaotic scene a Ghost hovered, bobbing gently with a delicacy that belied its mass. It was one of the modern kind, a smooth, seamless sphere. Borno raised his blade, but Hex grabbed his arm.
‘You are the Ghost we met. The Integumentary. You’ve dogged us all the way.’
‘Yes. From one blunder to another. I am here to ensure the success of the mission. I hoped I wouldn’t have to reveal myself; I hoped in vain. I never believed you would be so stupid as to hide behind a stack of warriors.’
Jul looked around at the limp ur-Ghosts that lay like immense raindrops on the ground. ‘Why do they cluster like this? You don’t.’
‘Perhaps it’s a relic of their past,’ Hella said. ‘Swimmer congregated with his kind. These strange forms long to do the same.’
‘Now they know you are here,’ the Ghost said. ‘The Black Ghost and his hierarchy. They know I am here. You have little time. I suggest you hurry to the transporter you chose.’
They clambered past the heaps of fallen Ghosts and ran.
The four ur-Ghosts who had been tending the palette-ship had fallen like the others. When Borno reached the first of the ur-Ghosts he raised his knife, preparing to cut into its hide.
‘It is dead,’ the Integumentary said quickly. ‘I had to kill it. I had to kill them all.’ It hovered over the fallen ur-Ghosts, its movements agitated.
Borno, his knife still raised, laughed. ‘You killed your own kind, dozens of them, to aid an enemy that is determined to eradicate your species. You really are screwed up, Ghost.’
‘I serve a cause beyond your comprehension.’
‘Oh, really? Comprehend this.’ Borno plunged his knife into Ghost hide. A watery fluid, laced with red blood, spilled out onto the cold ground.
‘I told you it is dead,’ said the Integumentary.
‘I know,’ Borno said. With an effort he ripped back the ur-Ghost’s skin, exposing glistening muscles, organs. ‘Pilot, we can ride this ship up to orbit, but do you think the Black Ghost will let us just sail in? We’ll wrap ourselves up in this stuff. Camouflage. Come on, help me.’
Jul said, ‘That’s repulsive.’
Borno shrugged and carried on cutting.
Such an unsophisticated ploy would never work, Hex thought. But maybe they could use a little psychology, let the Black Ghost think it had won a victory. She stepped forward, chose an ur-Ghost of her own, and took her knife from its sleeve on her leg. ‘Let’s get it over.’
The Integumentary spun, agitated. ‘You humans are beyond understanding.’
‘Which is why you hired us to do your dirty work,’ Borno snapped, contemptuous.
As she worked Hella said, ‘Integumentary - what is that?’ She pointed at the tower that rose from the Ghost city, with its electric-blue light pulsing at its tip.
The Ghost said, ‘You understand where you are, what world this is. In these times, my ancestors understood full well that it was the pulsar that was destroying their sun. So they venerated it. They made it a god. They called it—’
Hex’s translator unit stumbled, and offered her a range of options. Hex selected Destroyer.
Hella said, ‘Fascinating. Humans have always worshipped gods who they believed created the world. You worship the one that destroyed it.’
‘It is a higher power, if a destructive one. It is rational to try to placate it. All intelligent creatures are shaped by the circumstances of our origins.’
Borno sneered. ‘It’s terrible for you to be brought here, isn’t it, Ghost? To confront the darkest time of your species. You’d prefer to believe it never happened. And now humans are learning all about it.’
The Ghost spun and receded. ‘You haven’t much time.’
Borno had already got the skin off his ur-Ghost. An independent entity in its own right, it was flapping feebly on the cold ground, and the ur-Ghost’s innards were creatures that flopped and crawled. Borno kicked apart the mess with a booted foot.
VI
The cup-shaped indentations in the surface of the palette-ship were just shallow pits. Hex had to sit cross-legged.
Borno set up an ur-Ghost hide over her, like a crude silvered tent. Hex was sealed in the dark. The hide, freshly killed, was still warm, and she felt blood drip on her back. But she shut her suit lamp down, set her visor to show her the exterior of the ship, and tried to forget where she was.
The palette-ship turned out to be simple to operate. After all, analysts in military labs had been taking apart Ghost technology for generations. All Hex had to do was slap her gloved palms flat against the palette’s hull, and her suit found a way to hack into its systems. Experimentally she raised her arm. The palette lifted, tipped and wobbled, a flying carpet on which they were all precariously sitting. But then the inertial control cut in properly, interfacing with their suits’ inertial packs, and she felt more secure.
‘Some ride this is going to be,’ Borno said.
‘Yes, and then what?’ Jul snapped.
‘We’ll deal with that when it comes,’ Hex said. ‘Have your suit weapons ready at all times.’
‘I think we’d better get on with it, pilot,’ Hella murmured.
Hex, through her visor’s systems, glanced around. She was a hundred metres above the ground, and the Ghost city was laid out beneath her, a chaotic tangle of silver cables. She could still see the bloody smears that were all that was left of the ur-Ghosts they had skinned. And silvery sparks were converging.
Hex called, ‘Everybody locked in? Three, two, one—’ She raised her arm again, and the palette shot skywards.
From space the extent of the ur-Ghosts’ betrayal of their cousins was clear. Their chrome-dipped cities clustered over every scrap of land, with only the ghostly blue-white of the ice cap left untouched. No wonder this terrible fratricidal episode was expunged from the Ghosts’ racial memory.
‘Pilot,’ Hella whispered. ‘The habitat. Theta ninety, phi twenty.’
Hex looked ahead. Riding high above the icy nightside clouds a structure was rising. At first glance it looked like typical Ghost architecture, a mesh of silver thread. But Hex made out a darker knot at the centre of the tangle.
So this was the bastion of the Black Ghost. It was no more than a kilometre away.
‘End game,’ Borno said softly.
‘Let’s move in.’ Hex raised her arms, and the platform slid forward.
Suddenly palette-ships came rushing out of the tangle like a flock of startled birds.
Jul cried out, ‘Lethe!’
Hella said tightly, ‘They’re going around us, pilot. Hold your line. Hold your line!’
Hex ground her teeth, and kept her hands steady as a rock. The fleet swarmed around her and banked as one, swooping down over the limb of the planet.
‘You’ve got to admire their coordination,’ Hella said. ‘I’ve never seen Ghost ships move like that.’
‘That’s the influence of the Black Ghost,’ said Borno.
‘They’re heading for the dayside,’ Jul murmured. ‘Swimmer and his people are going to get another pasting.’
Hex said firmly, ‘Then let’s see if we can put a stop to it.’
They covered the remaining distance quickly.
The palette slid into the habitat, among threads and ducts; it was like flying into the branches of a silvered tree. Though individual ur-Ghosts slid around the inner structure, nothing opposed them.
Soon the clutter of threads cleared away, and the big central bastion was revealed. It was a sphere, black as night, kilometres across. In the jungle-like tangle of Ghost architecture it didn’t fit; it was alien within the alien.
‘That wall is a perfect absorber of radiation,’ Jul called. ‘A black body.’
‘You see what this is,’ Borno brayed. ‘The Black Ghost built its central bastion in its own image. What arrogance!’
Hella murmured, ‘Haven’t human rulers always done this?’
Hex said, ‘I’m hoping we can use its arrogance against it.’ She inched forward cautiously. Still they weren’t challenged. The hull of the bastion was a smoothly curving blankness before her, reflecting not a photon of starlight. She sensed the Black Ghost in there somewhere, watching, drawing out the moment as she was. ‘Come on, you bastard,’ she muttered. ‘You know I’m out here. Let’s see what you got.’
The black wall quivered. Then it split along a seam, revealing a pale silvery glow. When the wound stopped dilating it was a vertical slit hundreds of metres long, more than wide enough for the palette to pass.
‘I can’t see inside,’ Jul said.
‘Our suit sensors don’t work,’ Hella said, sounding alarmed.
‘But the invitation’s clear,’ Hex said tightly. She brushed her hands forward.
The walls of the bastion slid past her; the fortress’s hull looked no more than paper-thin. Twenty metres inside the hull she brought the palette to a stop. Her visor showed her nothing but empty space, a sphere kilometres wide filled with a cold silver-grey glow.
Then the ur-Ghost hide around her began to crumple and blister, and a harsher light broke through, shining directly on her. She threw up her hands to protect her vision. She heard the others cry out. The hide, scorched, crumbled and fell away.