Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

  We reached the outer hull, the place the cabling ran out, and dug back into the tangle a little way to stay out of sight.

  I got an unimpeded view of the stars.

  Still those nova firecrackers went off all over the sky; still those young stars glared like lanterns. It seemed to me the fortress’s central, enclosed star looked a little brighter, hotter than it had been. I made a mental note to report that to the Academician.

  But the most striking sight was the fleet.

  Over a volume light-months wide, countless craft slid silently across the sky. They were organized in a complex network of corridors filling three-dimensional space: rivers of light gushed this way and that, their different colors denoting different classes and sizes of vessel. And, here and there, denser knots of color and light sparked, irregular flares in the orderly flows. They were places where human ships were engaging the enemy, places where people were fighting and dying.

  It was a magnificent sight. But it was a big, empty sky, and the nearest sun was that eerie dwarf enclosed in its spooky blue net, a long way away, and there was movement in three dimensions, above me, below me, all around me… .

  I found the fingers of my good hand had locked themselves around a sliver of the tangle.

  Jeru grabbed my wrist and shook my arm until I was able to let go. She kept hold of my arm, her eyes locked on mine. I have you. You won’t fall. Then she pulled me into a dense knot of the tangle, shutting out the sky.

  She huddled close to me, so the bio lights of our suits wouldn’t show far. Her eyes were pale blue, like windows. “You aren’t used to being outside, are you, tar?”

  “I’m sorry, Commissary. I’ve been trained—”

  “You’re still human. We all have weak points. The trick is to know them and allow for them. Where are you from?”

  I managed a grin. “Mercury. Caloris Planitia.” Mercury is a ball of iron at the bottom of the sun’s gravity well. It is an iron mine, and an exotic matter factory, with a sun like a lid hanging over it. Most of the surface is given over to solar power collectors. It is a place of tunnels and warrens, where kids compete with the rats.

  “And that’s why you joined up? To get away?”

  “I was drafted.”

  “Come on,” she scoffed. “On a place like Mercury there are ways to hide. Are you a romantic, tar? You wanted to see the stars?”

  “No,” I said bluntly. “Life is more useful here.”

  She studied me. “A brief life should burn brightly—eh, tar?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I came from Deneb,” she said. “Do you know it?”

  “No.”

  “Sixteen hundred light years from Earth—a system settled some four centuries after the start of the Third Expansion. It is quite different from the solar system. It is—organized. By the time the first ships reached Deneb, the mechanics of exploitation had become efficient. From preliminary exploration to working shipyards and daughter colonies in less than a century… . Deneb’s resources—its planets and asteroids and comets, even the star itself—have been mined to fund fresh colonizing waves, the greater Expansion—and, of course, to support the war with the Ghosts.”

  She swept her hand over the sky. “Think of it, tar. The Third Expansion: between here and Sol, across six thousand light years—nothing but mankind, the fruit of a thousand years of world-building. And all of it linked by economics. Older systems like Deneb, their resources spent—even the solar system itself—are supported by a flow of goods and materials inward from the growing periphery of the Expansion. There are trade lanes spanning thousands of light years, lanes that never leave human territory, plied by vast schooners kilometers wide. But now the Ghosts are in our way. And that’s what we’re fighting for!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  She eyed me. “You ready to go on?”

  “Yes.”

  We began to make our way forward again, just under the tangle, still following patrol SOP.

  I was glad to be moving again. I’ve never been comfortable talking personally—and for sure not with a Commissary. But I suppose even Commissaries need to talk.

  Jeru spotted a file of the Ghosts moving in a crocodile, like so many schoolchildren, toward the head of the ship. It was the most purposeful activity we’d seen so far, so we followed them.

  After a couple of hundred meters the Ghosts began to duck down into the tangle, out of our sight. We followed them in.

  Maybe fifty meters deep, we came to a large enclosed chamber, a smooth bean-shaped pod that would have been big enough to enclose our yacht. The surface appeared to be semi-transparent, perhaps designed to let in sunlight. I could see shadowy shapes moving within.

  Ghosts were clustered around the pod’s hull, brushing its surface.

  Jeru beckoned, and we worked our way through the tangle toward the far end of the pod, where the density of the Ghosts seemed to be lowest.

  We slithered to the surface of the pod. There were sucker pads on our palms and toes to help us grip. We began crawling along the length of the pod, ducking flat when we saw Ghosts loom into view. It was like climbing over a glass ceiling.

  The pod was pressurized. At one end of the pod a big ball of mud hung in the air, brown and viscous. It seemed to be heated from within; it was slowly boiling, with big sticky bubbles of vapor crowding its surface, and I saw how it was laced with purple and red smears. There is no convection in zero gravity, of course. Maybe the Ghosts were using pumps to drive the flow of vapor.

  Tubes led off from the mud ball to the hull of the pod. Ghosts clustered there, sucking up the purple gunk from the mud.

  We figured it out in bioluminescent “whispers.” The Ghosts were feeding. Their home world is too small to have retained much internal warmth, but, deep beneath their frozen oceans or in the dark of their rocks, a little primordial geotherm heat must leak out still, driving fountains of minerals dragged up from the depths. And, as at the bottom of Earth’s oceans, on those minerals and the slow leak of heat, life forms feed. And the Ghosts feed on them.

  So this mud ball was a field kitchen. I peered down at purplish slime, a gourmet meal for Ghosts, and I didn’t envy them.

  There was nothing for us here. Jeru beckoned me again, and we slithered further forward.

  The next section of the pod was… strange.

  It was a chamber full of sparkling, silvery saucer-shapes, like smaller, flattened-out Ghosts, perhaps. They fizzed through the air or crawled over each other or jammed themselves together into great wadded balls that would hold for a few seconds and then collapse, their component parts squirming off for some new adventure elsewhere. I could see there were feeding tubes on the walls, and one or two Ghosts drifted among the saucer things, like an adult in a yard of squabbling children.

  There was a subtle shadow before me.

  I looked up, and found myself staring at my own reflection—an angled head, an open mouth, a sprawled body—folded over, fish-eye style, just centimeters from my nose.

  It was a Ghost. It bobbed massively before me.

  I pushed myself away from the hull, slowly. I grabbed hold of the nearest tangle branch with my good hand. I knew I couldn’t reach for my knife, which was tucked into my belt at my back. And I couldn’t see Jeru anywhere. It might be that the Ghosts had taken her already. Either way I couldn’t call her, or even look for her, for fear of giving her away.

  The Ghost had a heavy-looking belt wrapped around its equator. I had to assume that those complex knots of equipment were weapons. Aside from its belt, the Ghost was quite featureless: it might have been stationary, or spinning at a hundred revolutions a minute. I stared at its hide, trying to understand that there was a layer in there like a separate universe, where the laws of physics had been tweaked. But all I could see was my own scared face looking back at me.

  And then Jeru fell on the Ghost from above, limbs splayed, knives glinting in both hands. I could see she was yelling—mouth open, eyes wide—but she fell in
utter silence, her comms disabled.

  Flexing her body like a whip, she rammed both knives into the Ghost’s hide—if I took that belt to be its equator, somewhere near its north pole. The Ghost pulsated, complex ripples chasing across its surface. But Jeru did a handstand and reached up with her legs to the tangle above, and anchored herself there.

  The Ghost began to spin, trying to throw Jeru off. But she held her grip on the tangle, and kept the knives thrust in its hide, and all the Ghost succeeded in doing was opening up twin gashes, right across its upper section. Steam pulsed out, and I glimpsed redness within.

  For long seconds I just hung there, frozen.

  You’re trained to mount the proper reaction to an enemy assault. But it all vaporizes when you’re faced with a ton of spinning, pulsing monster, and you’re armed with nothing but a knife. You just want to make yourself as small as possible; maybe it will all go away. But in the end you know it won’t, that something has to be done.

  So I pulled out my own knife and launched myself at that north pole area.

  I started to make cross-cuts between Jeru’s gashes. Ghost skin is tough, like thick rubber, but easy to cut if you have the anchorage. Soon I had loosened flaps and lids of skin, and I started pulling them away, exposing a deep redness within. Steam gushed out, sparkling to ice.

  Jeru let go of her perch and joined me. We clung with our fingers and hands to the gashes we’d made, and we cut and slashed and dug; though the Ghost spun crazily, it couldn’t shake us loose. Soon we were hauling out great warm mounds of meat—ropes like entrails, pulsing slabs like a human’s liver or heart. At first ice crystals spurted all around us, but as the Ghost lost the heat it had hoarded all its life, that thin wind died, and frost began to gather on the cut and torn flesh.

  At last Jeru pushed my shoulder, and we both drifted away from the Ghost. It was still spinning, but I could see that the spin was nothing but dead momentum; the Ghost had lost its heat, and its life.

  Jeru and I faced each other.

  I said breathlessly, “I never heard of anyone in hand-to-hand with a Ghost before.”

  “Neither did I. Lethe,” she said, inspecting her hand. “I think I cracked a finger.”

  It wasn’t funny. But Jeru stared at me, and I stared back, and then we both started to laugh, and our slime suits pulsed with pink and blue icons.

  “He stood his ground,” I said.

  “Yes. Maybe he thought we were threatening the nursery.”

  “The place with the silver saucers?”

  She looked at me quizzically. “Ghosts are symbiotes, tar. That looked to me like a nursery for Ghost hides. Independent entities.”

  I had never thought of Ghosts having young. I had not thought of the Ghost we had killed as a mother protecting its young. I’m not a deep thinker now, and wasn’t then; but it was not, for me, a comfortable thought.

  But then Jeru started to move. “Come on, tar. Back to work.” She anchored her legs in the tangle and began to grab at the still-rotating Ghost carcass, trying to slow its spin.

  I anchored likewise and began to help her. The Ghost was massive, the size of a major piece of machinery, and it had built up respectable momentum; at first I couldn’t grab hold of the skin flaps that spun past my hand. As we labored I became aware I was getting uncomfortably hot. The light that seeped into the tangle from that caged sun seemed to be getting stronger by the minute.

  But as we worked those uneasy thoughts soon dissipated.

  At last we got the Ghost under control. Briskly Jeru stripped it of its kit belt, and we began to cram the baggy corpse as deep as we could into the surrounding tangle. It was a grisly job. As the Ghost crumpled further, more of its innards, stiffening now, came pushing out of the holes we’d given it in its hide, and I had to keep from gagging as the foul stuff came pushing out into my face.

  At last it was done—as best we could manage it, anyhow.

  Jeru’s faceplate was smeared with black and red. She was sweating hard, her face pink. But she was grinning, and she had a trophy, the Ghost belt around her shoulders. We began to make our way back, following the same SOP as before.

  When we got back to our lying-up point, we found Academician Pael was in trouble.

  Pael had curled up in a ball, his hands over his face. We pulled him open. His eyes were closed, his face blotched pink, and his faceplate dripped with condensation.

  He was surrounded by gadgets stuck in the tangle—including parts from what looked like a broken-open starbreaker handgun; I recognized prisms and mirrors and diffraction gratings. Well, unless he woke up, he wouldn’t be able to tell us what he had been doing here.

  Jeru glanced around. The light of the fortress’s central star had gotten a lot stronger. Our lying-up point was now bathed in light-and heat-with the surrounding tangle offering very little shelter. “Any ideas, tar?”

  I felt the exhilaration of our infil drain away. “No, sir.”

  Jeru’s face, bathed in sweat, showed tension. I noticed she was favoring her left hand. She’d mentioned, back at the nursery pod, that she’d cracked a finger, but had said nothing about it since—nor did she give it any time now. “All right.” She dumped the Ghost equipment belt and took a deep draught of water from her hood spigot. “Tar, you’re on stag. Try to keep Pael in the shade of your body. And if he wakes up, ask him what he’s found out.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.”

  And then she was gone, melting into the complex shadows of the tangle as if she’d been born to these conditions.

  I found a place where I could keep up 360-degree vision, and offer a little of my shadow to Pael—not that I imagined it helped much.

  I had nothing to do but wait.

  As the Ghost ship followed its own mysterious course, the light dapples that came filtering through the tangle shifted and evolved. Clinging to the tangle, I thought I could feel vibration: a slow, deep harmonization that pulsed through the ship’s giant structure. I wondered if I was hearing the deep voices of Ghosts, calling to each other from one end of their mighty ship to another. It all served to remind me that everything in my environment, everything, was alien, and I was very far from home.

  I tried to count my heartbeat, my breaths; I tried to figure out how long a second was. “A thousand and one. A thousand and two… “ Keeping time is a basic human trait; time provides a basic orientation, and keeps you mentally sharp and in touch with reality. But I kept losing count.

  And all my efforts failed to stop darker thoughts creeping into my head.

  During a drama like the contact with the Ghost, you don’t realize what’s happening to you because your body blanks it out; on some level you know you just don’t have time to deal with it. Now I had stopped moving, the aches and pains of the last few hours started crowding in on me. I was still sore in my head and back and, of course, my busted arm. I could feel deep bruises, maybe cuts, on my gloved hands where I had hauled at my knife, and I felt as if I had wrenched my good shoulder. One of my toes was throbbing ominously: I wondered if I had cracked another bone, here in this weird environment in which my skeleton had become as brittle as an old man’s. I was chafed at my groin and armpits and knees and ankles and elbows, my skin rubbed raw. I was used to suits; normally I’m tougher than that.

  The shafts of sunlight on my back were working on me too; it felt as if I was lying underneath the elements of an oven. I had a headache, a deep sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, a ringing in my ears, and a persistent ring of blackness around my eyes. Maybe I was just exhausted, dehydrated; maybe it was more than that.

  I started to think back over my operation with Jeru, and the regrets began.

  Okay, I’d stood my ground when confronted by the Ghost and not betrayed Jeru’s position. But when she launched her attack I’d hesitated, for those crucial few seconds. Maybe if I’d been tougher the commissary wouldn’t find herself hauling through the tangle, alone, with a busted finger distracting her with pain sig
nals.

  Our training is comprehensive. You’re taught to expect that kind of hindsight torture, in the quiet moments, and to discount it—or, better yet, learn from it. But, effectively alone in that metallic alien forest, I wasn’t finding my training was offering much perspective.

  And, worse, I started to think ahead. Always a mistake.

  I couldn’t believe that the Academician and his reluctant gadgetry were going to achieve anything significant. And for all the excitement of our infil, we hadn’t found anything resembling a bridge or any vulnerable point we could attack, and all we’d come back with was a belt of field kit we didn’t even understand.

  For the first time I began to consider seriously the possibility that I wasn’t going to live through this—that I was going to die when my suit gave up or the sun went pop, whichever came first, in no more than a few hours.

  A brief life burns brightly. That’s what you’re taught. Longevity makes you conservative, fearful, selfish. Humans made that mistake before, and we finished up a subject race. Live fast and furiously, for you aren’t important—all that matters is what you can do for the species.

  But I didn’t want to die.

  If I never returned to Mercury again I wouldn’t shed a tear. But I had a life now, in the Navy. And then there were my buddies: the people I’d trained and served with, people like Halle—even Jeru. Having found fellowship for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to lose it so quickly, and fall into the darkness alone—especially if it was to be for nothing.

  But maybe I wasn’t going to get a choice.

  After an unmeasured time, Jeru returned. She was hauling a silvery blanket. It was Ghost hide. She started to shake it out.

  I dropped down to help her. “You went back to the one we killed—”

  “—and skinned him,” she said, breathless. “I just scraped off the crap with a knife. The Planck-zero layer peels away easily. And look… “ she made a quick incision in the glimmering sheet with her knife. Then she put the two edges together again, ran her finger along the seam, and showed me the result. I couldn’t even see where the cut had been. “Self-sealing, self-healing,” she said. “Remember that, tar.”