Pael started to take a syrette of dope from the sachet around his neck.
Jeru knocked his hand away. “You always use the casualty’s,” she hissed. “Never your own.”
Pael looked hurt, rebuffed. “Why?”
I could answer that. “Because the chances are you’ll need your own in a minute.”
Jeru stabbed a syrette into Till’s arm.
Pael was staring at me through his faceplate with wide, frightened eyes. “You’ve broken your arm.”
Looking closely at the arm for the first time, I saw that it was bent back at an impossible angle. I couldn’t believe it, even through the pain. I’d never bust so much as a finger, all the way through training.
Now Till jerked, a kind of miniature convulsion, and a big bubble of spit and blood blew out of his lips. Then the bubble popped, and his limbs went loose.
Jeru sat back, breathing hard. She said, “Okay. Okay. How did he put it?—You take it as it comes.” She looked around, at me, Pael. I could see she was trembling, which scared me. She said, “Now we move. We have to find an LUP. A lying-up point, Academician. A place to hole up.”
I said, “The First Officer—”
“Is dead.” She glanced at Pael. “Now it’s just the three of us. We won’t be able to avoid each other any more, Pael.”
Pael stared back, eyes empty.
Jeru looked at me, and for a second her expression softened. “A broken neck. Till broke his neck, tar.”
Another death, just like that: just for a heartbeat that was too much for me.
Jeru said briskly, “Do your duty, tar. Help the worm.”
I snapped back. “Yes, sir.” I grabbed Pael’s unresisting arm.
Led by Jeru, we began to move, the three of us, away from the crumpled wreck of our yacht, deep into the alien tangle of a Silver Ghost cruiser.
We found our LUP.
It was just a hollow in a somewhat denser tangle of silvery ropes, but it afforded us some cover, and it seemed to be away from the main concentration of Ghosts. We were still open to the vacuum—as the whole cruiser seemed to be—and I realized then that I wouldn’t be getting out of this suit for a while.
As soon as we picked the LUP, Jeru made us take up positions in an all-round defense, covering a 360-degree arc.
Then we did nothing, absolutely nothing, for ten minutes.
It was SOP, standard operating procedure, and I was impressed. You’ve just come out of all the chaos of the destruction of the Brightly and the crash of the yacht, a frenzy of activity. Now you have to give your body a chance to adjust to the new environment, to the sounds and smells and sights.
Only here, there was nothing to smell but my own sweat and piss, nothing to hear but my ragged breathing. And my arm was hurting like hell.
To occupy my mind I concentrated on getting my night vision working. Your eyes take a while to adjust to the darkness—forty-five minutes before they are fully effective—but you are already seeing better after five. I could see stars through the chinks in the wiry metallic brush around me, the flares of distant novae, and the reassuring lights of our fleet. But a Ghost ship is a dark place, a mess of shadows and smeared-out reflections. It was going to be easy to get spooked here.
When the ten minutes were done, Academician Pael started bleating, but Jeru ignored him and came straight over to me. She got hold of my busted arm and started to feel the bone. “So,” she said briskly. “What’s your name, tar?”
“Case, sir.”
“What do you think of your new quarters?”
“Where do I eat?”
She grinned. “Turn off your comms,” she said.
I complied.
Without warning she pulled my arm, hard. I was glad she couldn’t hear how I howled.
She pulled a canister out of her belt and squirted gunk over my arm; it was semi-sentient and snuggled into place, setting as a hard cast around my injury. When I was healed the cast would fall away of its own accord.
She motioned me to turn on my comms again, and held up a syrette.
“I don’t need that.”
“Don’t be brave, tar. It will help your bones knit.”
“Sir, there’s a rumor that stuff makes you impotent.” I felt stupid even as I said it.
Jeru laughed out loud, and just grabbed my arm. “Anyhow it’s the First Officer’s, and he doesn’t need it any more, does he?”
I couldn’t argue with that; I accepted the injection. The pain started ebbing almost immediately.
Jeru pulled a tactical beacon out of her belt kit. It was a thumb-sized orange cylinder. “I’m going to try to signal the fleet. I’ll work my way out of this tangle; even if the beacon is working we might be shielded in here.” Pael started to protest, but she shut him up. I sensed I had been thrown into the middle of an ongoing conflict between them. “Case, you’re on stag. And show this worm what’s in his kit. I’ll come back the same way I go. All right?”
“Yes.” More SOP.
She slid away through silvery threads.
I lodged myself in the tangle and started to go through the stuff in the belt kits Till had fetched for us. There was water, rehydration salts, and compressed food, all to be delivered to spigots inside our sealed hoods. We had power packs the size of my thumbnail, but they were as dead as the rest of the kit. There was a lot of low-tech gear meant to prolong survival in a variety of situations, such as a magnetic compass, a heliograph, a thumb saw, a magnifying glass, pitons, and spindles of rope, even fishing line.
I had to show Pael how his suit functioned as a lavatory. The trick is just to let go; a slime suit recycles most of what you give it, and compresses the rest. That’s not to say it’s comfortable. I’ve never yet worn a suit that was good at absorbing odors. I bet no suit designer spent more than an hour in one of her own creations.
I felt fine.
The wreck, the hammer-blow deaths one after the other—none of it was far beneath the surface of my mind. But that’s where it stayed, for now; as long as I had the next task to focus on, and the next after that, I could keep moving forward. The time to let it all hit you is after the show.
I guess Pael had never been trained like that.
He was a thin, spindly man, his eyes sunk in black shadow, and his ridiculous red beard was crammed up inside his faceplate. Now that the great crises were over, his energy seemed to have drained away, and his functioning was slowing to a crawl. He looked almost comical as he pawed at his useless bits of kit.
After a time he said, “Case, is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you from Earth, child?”
“No. I—”
He ignored me. “The Academies are based on Earth. Did you know that, child? But they do admit a few offworlders.”
I glimpsed a lifetime of outsider resentment. But I could care less. Also I wasn’t a child. I asked cautiously, “Where are you from, sir?”
He sighed. “It’s 51 Pegasi. I—B.”
I’d never heard of it. “What kind of place is that? Is it near Earth?”
“Is everything measured relative to Earth… ? Not very far. My home world was one of the first extrasolar planets to be discovered—or at least, the primary is. I grew up on a moon. The primary is a hot Jupiter.”
I knew what that meant: a giant planet huddled close to its parent star.
He looked up at me. “Where you grew up, could you see the sky?”
“No—”
“I could. And the sky was full of sails. That close to the sun, solar sails work efficiently, you see. I used to watch them at night, schooners with sails hundreds of kilometers wide, tacking this way and that in the light. But you can’t see the sky from Earth—not from the Academy bunkers anyhow.”
“Then why did you go there?”
“I didn’t have a choice.” He laughed, hollowly. “I was doomed by being smart. That is why your precious commissary despises me so much, you see. I have been taught to think—and we can’t have
that, can we… ?”
I turned away from him and shut up. Jeru wasn’t “my” commissary, and this sure wasn’t my argument. Besides, Pael gave me the creeps. I’ve always been wary of people who knew too much about science and technology. With a weapon, all you want to know is how it works, what kind of energy or ammunition it needs, and what to do when it goes wrong. People who know all the technical background and the statistics are usually covering up their own failings; it is experience of use that counts.
But this was no loudmouth weapons tech. This was an Academician: one of humanity’s elite scientists. I felt I had no point of contact with him at all.
I looked out through the tangle, trying to see the fleet’s sliding, glimmering lanes of light.
There was motion in the tangle. I turned that way, motioning Pael to keep still and silent, and got hold of my knife in my good hand.
Jeru came bustling back, exactly the way she had left. She nodded approvingly at my alertness. “Not a peep out of the beacon.”
Pael said, “You realize our time here is limited.”
I asked, “The suits?”
“He means the star,” Jeru said heavily. “Case, fortress stars seem to be unstable. When the Ghosts throw up their cordon, the stars don’t last long before going pop.”
Pael shrugged. “We have hours, a few days at most.”
Jeru said, “Well, we’re going to have to get out, beyond the fortress cordon, so we can signal the fleet. That or find a way to collapse the cordon altogether.”
Pael laughed hollowly. “And how do you propose we do that?”
Jeru glared. “Isn’t it your role to tell me, Academician?”
Pael leaned back and closed his eyes. “Not for the first time, you’re being ridiculous.”
Jeru growled. She turned to me. “You. What do you know about the Ghosts?”
I said, “They come from someplace cold. That’s why they are wrapped up in silvery shells. You can’t bring a Ghost down with laser fire because of those shells. They’re perfectly reflective.”
Pael said, “Not perfectly. They are based on a Planck-zero effect… . About one part in a billion of incident energy is absorbed.”
I hesitated. “They say the Ghosts experiment on people.”
Pael sneered. “Lies put about by your Commission for Historical Truth, Commissary. To demonize an opponent is a tactic as old as mankind.”
Jeru wasn’t perturbed. “Then why don’t you put young Case right? How do the Ghosts go about their business?”
Pael said, “The Silver Ghosts tinker with the laws of physics.”
I looked to Jeru; she shrugged.
Pael tried to explain. It was all to do with quagma.
Quagma is the state of matter that emerged from the Big Bang. Matter, when raised to sufficiently high temperatures, melts into a magma of quarks—a quagma. And at such temperatures the four fundamental forces of physics unify into a single superforce. When quagma is allowed to cool and expand its binding superforce decomposes into four sub-forces.
To my surprise, I understood some of this. The principle of the GUTdrive, which powers intrasystem ships like Brief Life Burns Brightly, is related.
Anyhow, by controlling the superforce decomposition, you can select the ratio between those forces. And those ratios govern the fundamental constants of physics.
Something like that.
Pael said, “That marvelous reflective coating of theirs is an example. Each Ghost is surrounded by a thin layer of space in which a fundamental number called the Planck constant is significantly lower than elsewhere. Thus, quantum effects are collapsed… because the energy carried by a photon, a particle of light, is proportional to the Planck constant, an incoming photon must shed most of its energy when it hits the shell—hence the reflectivity.”
“All right,” Jeru said. “So what are they doing here?”
Pael sighed. “The fortress star seems to be surrounded by an open shell of quagma and exotic matter. We surmise that the Ghosts have blown a bubble around each star, a spacetime volume in which the laws of physics are—tweaked.”
“And that’s why our equipment failed.”
“Presumably,” said Pael, with cold sarcasm.
I asked, “What do the Ghosts want? Why do they do all this stuff?”
Pael studied me. “You are trained to kill them, and they don’t even tell you that?”
Jeru just glowered.
Pael said, “The Ghosts were not shaped by competitive evolution. They are symbiotic creatures; they derive from life forms that huddled into cooperative collectives as their world turned cold. And they seem to be motivated—not by expansion and the acquisition of territory for its own sake, as we are—but by a desire to understand the fine-tuning of the universe. Why are we here? You see, young tar, there is only a narrow range of the constants of physics within which life of any sort is possible. We think the Ghosts are studying this question by pushing at the boundaries—by tinkering with the laws that sustain and contain us all.”
Jeru said, “An enemy who can deploy the laws of physics as a weapon is formidable. But in the long run, we will out-compete the Ghosts.”
Pael said bleakly, “Ah, the evolutionary destiny of mankind. How dismal. But we lived in peace with the Ghosts, under the Raoul Accords, for a thousand years. We are so different, with disparate motivations—why should there be a clash, any more than between two species of birds in the same garden?”
I’d never seen birds, or a garden, so that passed me by.
Jeru just glared. She said at last, “Let’s return to practicalities. How do their fortresses work?” When Pael didn’t reply, she snapped, “Academician, you’ve been inside a fortress cordon for an hour already and you haven’t made a single fresh observation?”
Acidly, Pael demanded, “What would you have me do?”
Jeru nodded at me. “What have you seen, tar?”
&8220;Our instruments and weapons don’t work,” I said promptly. “The Brightly exploded. I broke my arm.”
Jeru said, “Till snapped his neck also.” She flexed her hand within her glove. “What would make our bones more brittle? Anything else?”
I shrugged.
Pael admitted, “I do feel somewhat warm.”
Jeru asked, “Could these body changes be relevant?”
“I don’t see how.”
“Then figure it out.”
“I have no equipment.”
Jeru dumped spare gear—weapons, beacons—in his lap. “You have your eyes, your hands and your mind. Improvise.” She turned to me. “As for you, tar, let’s do a little infil. We still need to find a way off this scow.”
I glanced doubtfully at Pael. “There’s nobody to stand on stag.”
Jeru said, “I know. But there are only three of us.” She grasped Pael’s shoulder, hard. “Keep your eyes open, Academician. We’ll come back the same way we left. So you’ll know it’s us. Do you understand?”
Pael shrugged her away, focusing on the gadgets on his lap.
I looked at him doubtfully. It seemed to me a whole platoon of Ghosts could have come down on him without his even noticing. But Jeru was right; there was nothing more we could do.
She studied me, fingered my arm. “You up to this?”
“I’m fine, sir.”
“You are lucky. A good war comes along once in a lifetime. And this is your war, tar.”
That sounded like parade-ground pep talk, and I responded in kind. “Can I have your rations, sir? You won’t be needing them soon.” I mimed digging a grave.
She grinned back fiercely. “Yeah. When your turn comes, slit your suit and let the farts out before I take it off your stiffening corpse—”
Pael’s voice was trembling. “You really are monsters.”
I shared a glance with Jeru. But we shut up, for fear of upsetting the earthworm further.
I grasped my fighting knife, and we slid away into the dark.
What we were hoping to f
ind was some equivalent of a bridge. Even if we succeeded, I couldn’t imagine what we’d do next. Anyhow, we had to try.
We slid through the tangle. Ghost cable stuff is tough, even to a knife blade. But it is reasonably flexible; you can just push it aside if you get stuck, although we tried to avoid doing that for fear of leaving a sign.
We used standard patrolling SOP, adapted for the circumstance. We would move for ten or fifteen minutes, clambering through the tangle, and then take a break for five minutes. I’d sip water—I was getting hot—and maybe nibble on a glucose tab, check on my arm, and pull the suit around me to get comfortable again. It’s the way to do it. If you just push yourself on and on you run down your reserves and end up in no fit state to achieve the goal anyhow.
And all the while I was trying to keep up my all-around awareness, protecting my dark adaptation, and making appreciations. How far away is Jeru? What if an attack comes from in front, behind, above, below, left or right? Where can I find cover?
I began to build up an impression of the Ghost cruiser. It was a rough egg-shape, a couple of kilometers long, and basically a mass of the anonymous silvery cable. There were chambers and platforms and instruments stuck as if at random into the tangle, like food fragments in an old man’s beard. I guess it makes for a flexible, easily modified configuration. Where the tangle was a little less thick, I glimpsed a more substantial core, a cylinder running along the axis of the craft. Perhaps it was the drive unit. I wondered if it was functioning; perhaps the Ghost equipment was designed to adapt to the changed conditions inside the fortress cordon.
There were Ghosts all over the craft.
They drifted over and through the tangle, following pathways invisible to us. Or they would cluster in little knots on the tangle. We couldn’t tell what they were doing or saying. To human eyes a Silver Ghost is just a silvery sphere, visible only by reflection like a hole cut out of space, and without specialist equipment it is impossible even to tell one from another.
We kept out of sight. But I was sure the Ghosts must have spotted us, or were at least tracking our movements. After all we’d crash-landed in their ship. But they made no overt moves toward us.
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