Cautiously she lowered her arms. Now she could see what the sensors hadn’t been allowed to show her. This space wasn’t empty at all. It was filled with Silver Ghosts, spheres like droplets of molten metal, and ur-Ghosts of every shape and size, faceted and spiny, ranked around her in a hexagonal array that filled space as far as she could see. They were motionless, positioned with utter accuracy, objects of geometry rather than life. And, scattered through the ranks of silent Ghosts, lanterns pulsed, blue-white: models of the pulsar that was destroying the world, they were marks of adherence to the Ghosts’ Destroyer god.
This was nothing like the way humans had seen Ghosts behave before, over centuries of contact and warfare. The command of the Black Ghost, here at the heart of its empire, was total.
Hex’s palette-ship hung like a bit of flotsam before this symmetrical horde. With their skin covers burned away, her crew sat cross-legged in their little hollows, cowering. ‘Everybody OK?’
‘What do you think?’ Jul said.
Borno was staring at the arrayed Ghosts greedily. ‘Lethe,’ he said. ‘There must be thousands of them.’
‘Actually more than a million.’ The voice, delivered through their translator boxes, was flat, impersonal, artificial.
Hex looked into the geometric centre of the sphere, for she knew that was where it would be; its sense of its own importance would admit nothing less. And there she saw a black fist, a sphere twice, three times the size of those clustered around it. The ranks of Ghosts parted in shining curtains, and that central dark mass slid forward.
Hex heard the harsh breathing of her crew. ‘Take it easy,’ she murmured. ‘We’ve come this far—’
‘I’ve let you come this far,’ said the Black Ghost. ‘Did you think your absurd concealment would fool me?’
‘Actually no,’ Hex said. ‘I thought you would be so arrogant you would let us in anyhow. You’re very predictable.’
The Black Ghost rolled before them, its coating black as the inside of her own skull. Hex was guessing at the psychology of an alien being exceptional even among its own kind. Well, the Black Ghost showed some characteristics of humanity, and no human, especially the arrogant sort, liked to be mocked.
Almost experimentally, Hex raised her arm and held it out straight, pointing at the Black Ghost. An energy weapon was built into the sleeve of her suit. She fired; her suit reported the energy drain. But there was no sign of the discharge.
Her crew quickly tried the other weapons at their disposal. Nothing worked. With an angry cry Borno even hurled his knife. It crumbled to dust before it left his hand.
The Black Ghost said, ‘And you call me predictable?’
‘We’re here to kill you, you bag of shit,’ Borno said.
‘To kill me, yes. Humans walk in death. Each Ghost is a complete ecological unit. When we went into space we brought the life of our world with us. Whereas you killed off your ecology, killed the world that produced you, all of it except yourselves, and the pests and parasites too wily to be eradicated. You even call us Ghosts, named after imaginary creatures you associate with death. How appropriate.’
‘And what about you?’ Hella asked. ‘How many humans have you slaughtered - how many of your own kind have you put to the flame?’
‘Ah, but I am different. I relish death, as you do. Can you see my black hull? These others are silvered to save their heat. I relish the obscenity of waste - as you do. I am like you. Or I am like our Destroyer god of old.’
‘Your own kind despise you,’ Borno said.
‘That may be. That is why I brought back these others …’ Hex’s translator box interpolated, the ur-Ghosts. ‘These, forged in the cold desperation of our race’s most difficult age, don’t deny what they are. It is strange. Once the ur-Ghosts were called back from space, to help save a dying world. Now I have called them again, back from the deeper darkness of the past, to help me save my kind from humans.’
‘It’s crazy,’ Hella whispered.
‘So you have us,’ Hex said. ‘What now?’
‘You will serve me. Three of you will be given to my ur-Ghosts, my scientists. We will drain you of what you know, and then use you to explore ways of killing humans. Oh, you will be bred first; we are running short of laboratory animals. The fourth will be flayed, kept alive, and sent back where you came from. Perhaps you, the commander. A warning, you see; a statement of intent. Don’t you think I know human psychology well?’
‘Not well enough,’ Borno said.
Hex snapped, ‘Gunner—’
‘For the Engineers!’
With a roar Borno straightened his legs and hurled himself out of his palette station, straight at the Ghost’s bland black hide. In mid-flight his suit slit open and fell away, leaving him naked save for underwear, his head, hands and feet bare. His last breath frosted in the vacuum, his mouth gaping. But he held out his hands like claws.
Jul screamed, ‘What’s he doing? He’s killing himself!’
Hex, stunned, could only watch.
Borno landed on the Ghost’s night-dark hide and grabbed big handfuls, pulling and crumpling. The Black Ghost rolled, trying to shake off its assailant. Around it the other Ghosts bobbed, agitated, but they had no way to help; they couldn’t fire on Borno for fear of hitting the Black Ghost itself.
Then Borno took a mouthful of hide, bit down hard, and arched his back. The Ghost’s hide ripped, and a clear fluid laced with crimson boiled within the wound. Borno’s eyes were bleeding now, his ears too, but he dug into the Black Ghost with his teeth and nails, the only weapons he had left.
‘We have to help him,’ Hella called. She breathed hard; Hex sensed her psyching herself up to follow Borno. ‘Are you with me?’
‘All right,’ Hex said. ‘On my mark—’
Before they could move one of the Ghosts broke ranks. A perfect silver sphere, it swept down purposefully on the Black Ghost and its clinging human assailant. A slit opened in its own belly, a weapon nozzle protruded - and a projectile fired neatly into the black hide through the wound Borno had opened. The Black Ghost emitted no sound, but it quivered and thrashed. Borno clung on, but he was limp now.
And every other Ghost among the million arrayed around them froze in place.
As the Black Ghost suffered its death throes, the assassin came drifting to Borno’s vacated station.
Hex asked, ‘Integumentary?’
Hella said, ‘How do you keep doing this?’
‘I suggest you get us out of here, pilot,’ said the Ghost. ‘Without leadership the troops are paralysed, but they will react soon. If you want to live—’
‘Not without Borno,’ Jul said.
‘He’s already dead,’ said the Ghost.
‘No!’
The Integumentary spun in its station and spat another bullet, this time neatly lancing through Borno’s limp body. ‘Now can we go?’
Hex grimly drew her hands towards her lap. The palette shot backwards out of the bastion, and into open space.
VII
The palette hovered at the rim of the system. The misty, dying star of the Ghosts was still visible, as was its intensely blue companion.
‘They won’t find you here,’ the Integumentary said, still nestling in Borno’s vacated pod.
Commodore Teel’s disembodied head appeared before Hex. ‘So the Black Ghost is dead. Good. Now we will see how the war turns out. You did well, Hex.’
‘Borno did well.’
‘He will be remembered.’
The Integumentary seemed to feel its plan had worked out as it hoped. It had been able to penetrate the Black Ghost’s bastion, even smuggle in a weapon so crude it wasn’t picked up by the defensive systems. But it could never have penetrated the Black Ghost’s hide if not for Borno’s attack, which the Black Ghost clearly hadn’t anticipated.
Teel said, ‘So the most powerful Ghost in generations was defeated by human qualities: Borno’s raw anger and courage, and the Black Ghost’s own arrogance.’
The Integumentary murmured, ‘And what could be more human than savagery and arrogance?’
Hex was still trying to understand what had happened. ‘Ghost, when your sun died, there was a bloody battle for survival. You’ve spent a million years denying that about yourselves. But the Black Ghost saw it was precisely that streak of primitive brutality you had to rediscover to fight humanity. It might even have succeeded. But you couldn’t bear the image of yourself it showed you, could you?’
The Integumentary said, ‘The Black Ghost was an anomaly. This is not what we are, what we aspire to be.’
Teel looked at Hex. ‘Pilot, it isn’t just their past that the Ghosts want to expunge, but what they have glimpsed of their future - or anyhow that’s what the analysts in the Commission for Historical Truth have made of this incident.’
It was a question of natural selection. For centuries, Ghosts had been losing battles to humanity. Only those capable of dealing with humans - of anticipating human intentions, of thinking like a human - survived to breed. ‘It’s a selection pressure,’ Teel said. ‘Only those Ghosts who are most like us have been surviving. So maybe it’s not surprising that there should emerge a Black Ghost, a Ghost so like a human it organises its own hierarchical society, fights a war like a human commander. What do you think about that, Ghost?’
The Integumentary rose up out of the palette cradle. ‘I am relieved our business together is done. The Black Ghost is dead. The exploitation of interdimensional energy will be closed down, the research destroyed. It is a weapon too dangerous to be used.’
‘Until we rediscover it,’ Hella murmured.
Teel wasn’t done yet. ‘You can’t stand this, can you, Ghost? You needed humanity to resolve this problem among yourselves. And to do it, you had to think like a human yourself, didn’t you?’
The Integumentary said, ‘It is true that we would rather go to extinction than to become like you. Is that something you take pride in? Pilot, the ancient star system will be restored to its proper time. You have only seconds before the energy pulse that will follow. I tell you this as a courtesy. We will not speak again.’ And it disappeared, as if folding out of existence.
Jul said, ‘Seconds?’
Hella said, ‘How fast can this thing go, pilot?’
‘Let’s find out,’ Hex said, and she flexed her gloved hands. ‘Everybody locked in? Three, two, one—’
The Black Ghost inspired its kind’s last effective stand. After its fall, the Ghosts’ political unity fragmented, and they fell back everywhere.
For the Ghosts, the consequence of defeat was dire.
THE GHOST PIT
AD 7524
As soon as the Spline dropped out of hyperspace our flitter burst from its belly.
After our long enclosure in the crimson interior of the huge living ship, it was like being reborn. Even though I had to share this adventure with L’Eesh, my spirits surged.
‘Pretty system,’ L’Eesh said. He was piloting the flitter with nonchalant ease. He was about sixty years old, some three times my age, a lot more experienced - and he didn’t miss a chance to let me know.
Well, pretty it was. The Jovian and its satellites were held in a stable gravitational embrace at the corners of a neat equilateral triangle, the twin moons close enough to the parent to be tidally locked. And beyond it all I glimpsed a faint blue mesh thrown across the stars: an astonishing sight, a net large enough to enclose this giant planet, with struts half a million kilometres long.
I grinned. That netting, that monstrous grandiosity, was typical Ghost. It was proof that this Jovian system was indeed a Ghost pit - a new pit, an unopened pit.
Which was why its discovery had sent such a stir through the small, scattered community of Ghost hunters. And why L’Eesh and I were prepared to fire ourselves into it without even looking where we were going. We were determined to be the first.
Already we were sweeping down towards one of the moons. Beneath a dusty atmosphere the surface was brick red, a maze of charred pits.
‘Very damaged landscape,’ I said. ‘Impact craters? Looks as if it’s been bombed flat …’
‘You know,’ said L’Eesh laconically, ‘there’s a bridge between those moons.’
At first his words made no sense. Then I peered up. He was right: a fine arch leapt from the surface of one moon and crossed space to the other.
‘Lethe,’ I swore. I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t seen it immediately. But then, you don’t look for such a thing.
L’Eesh grunted. ‘I hope you have a strong stomach, Raida. Hily never did. Like mother like daughter—’
He had me off balance. ‘What about my mother?’
‘Bogeys.’
And suddenly they were on us, a dozen angular craft that looped around the flitter, coming from over our heads like falling fists.
L’Eesh yanked at the stick. We flipped backwards and sped away. But the bogeys were faster. I cowered, an ancient, useless reflex; I wasn’t used to being in a dogfight that humans aren’t dominating.