‘Sir, and do what?’
She shrugged. ‘Farm. Mine. Raise babies. Whatever earth-worms do. Or you can join the Commission for Historical Truth.’
‘Me, a Commissary?’
‘You’ve been there, tar. You’ve been in amongst the Ghosts, and come out again - with a bit of intelligence more important than anything the Commission has come up with in fifty years. Are you sure you want to face action again?’
I thought it over.
I remembered how Jeru and Pael had argued about economics. It had been an unwelcome perspective, for me. I was in a war that had nothing to do with me, trapped by what Jeru had called the logic of history. But then, I bet that’s been true of most of humanity through our long and bloody story. All you can do is live your life, and grasp your moment in the light - and stand by your comrades.
A farmer - me? And I could never be smart enough for the Commission. No, I had no doubts.
‘A brief life burns brightly, sir.’
Lethe, the Captain looked like she had a lump in her throat. ‘Do I take that as a yes, tar?’
I stood straight, ignoring the twinges of my injuries. ‘Yes, sir !’
The Orion Line was broken. Humanity spilled into Ghost space, slaughtering and colonising.
But the war would last centuries more. Such is the nature of conflict on interstellar scales.
In time the Ghosts learned to fight back, with new weapons, new tactics.
Even a new breed of Ghost.
GHOST WARS
AD 7004
I
The needleship Spear of Orion dropped out of hyperspace. Its tetrahedral Free Earth sigils shone brightly, its weapons ports were open, and its crew were ready to do their duty.
Pilot Officer Hex glanced around the sky, assessing the situation.
She was deep in the Sagittarius Spiral Arm, a place where stars crowded, hot and young. One star was close enough to show a disc, the sun of this system. And there was the green planet she had been sent here to defend. Labelled 147B by the mission planners, this was a terraformed world, a human settlement thrust deep into Silver Ghost territory. But the planet’s face was scarred by fire, immense ships clustered to evacuate the population - and needleships like her own popped into existence everywhere, Aleph Force swimming out of hyperspace like a shoal of fish. This was a battlefield.
All this in a heartbeat. Then the Silver Ghosts attacked.
‘Palette at theta ten degrees, phi fifty!’ That was gunner Borno’s voice, coming from the port blister, one of three dotted around the slim waist of the Spear.
Hex, in her own cramped pilot’s blister at the very tip of the needleship, glanced to her left and immediately found the enemy. Needleship crews were warriors in three-dimensional battlefields; translating positional data from one set of spherical coordinates to another was drummed into you before you were five years old.
Borno had found a Ghost intrasystem cruiser, the new kind - a ‘palette,’ as the analysts were calling them. It was a flat sheet with its Ghost crew sitting in pits in the top surface like blobs of mercury. The ship looked a little like a painter’s palette, hence the nickname. But palettes were fast, manoeuvrable and deadly, much more effective in battle than the classic tangled-rope Ghost ships of the past. And just seconds after she came down from hyperspace this palette was screaming down on Hex, energy weapons firing.
Hex felt her senses come alive, her heartbeat slow to a resolute thump. One of her instructors once said she had been born to end Ghost lives on battlefields. At moments like this, that was how it felt. Hex was twenty years old.
She hauled on her joystick. The needleship swung like a compass needle and hurled itself directly at the Ghost palette. As weapons on both ships fired, the space between them filled with light.
‘About time, pilot,’ Borno said. ‘My fingers were getting itchy.’
‘All right, all right,’ Hex snapped back. Gunner Borno, of all the needleship crew she had ever met, had the deepest, most visceral hatred of the Ghosts and all their works. ‘Just take that thing down before we collide.’
But no lethal blow was struck, and as the distance between the ships closed, uneasiness knotted in Hex’s stomach.
She thumbed a control to give her a magnified view of the palette’s upper surface. She heard her crew murmur in surprise. These Ghosts weren’t the usual silver spheres. They had sharp edges; they were cubes, pyramids, dodecahedrons - even a tetrahedron, as if mocking the ancient symbol of Earth. And they showed no inclination to run away. These were a new breed of Ghost, she realised.
The Spear shuddered. For an instant the Virtual displays clustered around her fritzed, before her systems rebooted and recovered.
‘Jul, what was that? Did we take a hit?’
Jul was the ship’s engineer, young, bright, capable - and a good pilot before her lower body was cut away by a lucky strike from a dying Ghost. ‘Pilot, we ran through g-waves.’
‘Gravity waves? From a starbreaker?’
‘No,’ called navigator Hella, the last of the Spear’s four crew. ‘Too long-wavelength for that. And too powerful. Pilot, this space is full of g-waves. That’s how the Ghosts are hitting the planet.’
‘Where are they coming from?’
‘The scouts can’t find a source.’
‘New weapons, new ships, new tactics,’ Borno said darkly.
‘And new Ghosts,’ said Hella.
‘You know what’s behind this,’ Jul said uneasily.
Hex said warningly, ‘Engineer—’
‘The Black Ghost. It has to be.’
Unlike any of its kind before, the barracks-room scuttlebutt went, the Black Ghost was an enemy commander that fought like a human - better than a human. The Commissaries claimed this was all just rumour generated by stressed-out crews, but Hex herself had heard that the stories had originated with Ghosts themselves, captives under interrogation. And whether the Black Ghost existed or not, you couldn’t deny that something was making the Ghosts fight better than they ever had.
And meanwhile that palette still hadn’t broken off.
‘Thirty seconds to close,’ Hella said. ‘We won’t survive an impact, pilot.’
‘Neither will they,’ Borno said grimly.
‘Fifteen seconds.’
‘Hold the line!’ Hex ordered.
‘Those dimples,’ said engineer Jul hastily. ‘Where the Ghosts are sitting. There has to be some interface to the palette’s systems. They must be weak spots. Gunner, if you could plant a shell there . . .’
Hex imagined Borno’s grin.
‘Seven seconds! Six!’
A single shell sailed out through the curtain of fire. It was a knot of unified-field energy, like a bit of the universe from a second after the Big Bang itself.
The shell hit a dimple so squarely it probably didn’t even touch the sides. The resident Ghost, a squat cube, was vaporised instantly. Then light erupted from every dimple and weapons port on the palette. The Ghost crew scrambled away, but Hex saw silver skin wrinkle and pop, before the palette vanished in a flash of primordial light.
The needleship slammed through a dissipating cloud of debris, and the blisters turned black to save the crew’s eyes.
The Spear sat in space, its hull charred, still cooling as it dumped the energy it had soaked up. Sparks drifted through the sky: more needleships, a detachment of Aleph Force forming up.
For the first time since they’d dropped out of hyperspace Hex was able to catch her breath, and to take a decent look at the world she had been sent to defend.
Even from here she could see it was suffering. Immense storm systems swathed its poles and catastrophic volcanism turned its nightside bright. Sparks climbed steadily up from the planet’s surface, refugee transports to meet the Navy ships - Spline, living starships, kilometre-wide spheres of flesh and metal.
Hella murmured, ‘That’s what a g-wave weapon will do to you, if it’s sufficiently powerful.’
Borno
asked, ‘How? By ripping up the surface?’
‘Probably by disrupting the planet’s orbital dynamics. You could knock over a world’s spin axis, maybe jolt it into a higher eccentricity orbit. If the core rotation collapsed its magnetic field would implode. You’d have turmoil in the magma currents, earthquakes and volcanism . . .’
The destruction of a world as an act of war. The people being driven from their homes today were not soldiers. They had come here as colonists, to build a new world. But the very creation of this settlement had been an act of war, Hex knew, for this settlement had been planted deep inside what had been Ghost space until five centuries ago.
The Ghost Wars had already lasted centuries. War with an alien species was not like a human conflict. It was ecological, the Commissaries taught, like two varieties of weed competing for the same bit of soil. It could be terminated by nothing short of total victory - and the price of defeat would be extinction, for one side or another.
And now the Ghosts had a weapon capable of wreaking such damage on a planetary scale, and, worse, were prepared to use it. These were not the Ghosts Hex had spent a lifetime learning to fight. But in that case, she thought harshly, I’ll just have to learn to fight them all over again.
Borno said, ‘I don’t like just sitting out here.’
‘Take it easy,’ Hex said. She downloaded visual feed from the command loops. Ghost ships were being drawn away from the battle around the planet itself, and were heading out to this concentration.
Aleph Force was Strike Arm’s elite, one of the most formidable rapid-response fighting units in the Navy. From their base on the Orion Line they were hurled through hyperspace into the most desperate situations - like this one. Aleph Force always made a difference: that was what their commanders told them to remember. Even the Ghosts had learned that. And that was why Ghosts were peeling off from their main objective to engage them.
‘Gunner, we’re giving that evacuation operation a chance just by sitting here. And as soon as we’ve lured in enough Ghosts we’ll take them on. I have a feeling you’ll be slitting hides before the day is done.’
‘That might be sooner than you think,’ called engineer Jul, uneasily. ‘Take a look at this.’ She sent another visual feed around the loop.
Sparks slid around the sky, like droplets of water condensing out of humid air.
Hex had never seen anything like it. ‘What are they?’
‘Ghosts,’ Borno said. ‘Swarming like flies.’
‘They’re all around us,’ Hella breathed. ‘There must be thousands.’
‘Make that millions,’ Jul said. ‘They’re surrounding the other ships as well.’
Hex called up a magnified visual. As she had glimpsed on the palette, the Ghosts were cubes, pyramids, spinning tetrahedrons, even a few spiny forms like mines.
Jul said, ‘I thought all Ghosts were spheres.’
Ghosts were hardened to space, and their primary driver was the conservation of their body heat. For a given mass a silvered sphere, the shape with the minimum surface area, was the optimal way to achieve that.
‘But they weren’t always like that,’ said Borno. He had studied Ghosts all his life, the better to destroy them. ‘Ghosts evolved. Maybe these are primitive forms, before they settled for the optimum.’
‘Primitive?’ Hex asked. ‘Then what are they doing here?’
‘Don’t ask me.’ His voice was tight. His loathing of Ghosts was no affectation; it was so deep it was almost phobic.
‘They’re closing,’ Jul called.
The Spear’s weapons began to spit fire into the converging cloud. Hex saw that one Ghost, two, was caught, flaring and dying in an instant. But it was like firing a laser into a rainstorm.
Hex snapped, ‘Gunner, you’re just wasting energy.’
‘The systems can’t lock,’ Borno said. ‘Too many targets, too small, too fast-moving.’
‘Another new tactic,’ Jul murmured. ‘And a smart one.’
Navigator Hella called, ‘Hex, you’d better take a look at this.’
In a new visual, Hex was shown a dense mass of Ghost hide. It was a sheet, a ragged segment of a sphere that grew even as she watched, with more Ghosts clustering around its spreading edges.
‘It’s the Ghosts,’ Hella said. ‘Some of those shapes, for instance the cubes, are space-filling. They’re forming themselves into a shell around us. A solid shell.’
Jul said, wondering, ‘They are acting in a coordinated way, millions of them, right across the battlefield.’
‘Like humans,’ Hella said. ‘They are fighting like humans, unified under a single command.’
The name hung unspoken between them: this was the work of the Black Ghost.
‘We’re losing the comms nets,’ Jul said, tense. ‘They’re isolating us.’
Hex glanced around the sky. The other needleships of Aleph Force were being enclosed by their own shells of Ghost hide; they hung in space like bizarre silvered fruit. She thought frantically. ‘If we try to ram that wall—’
‘They’ll just fall back and track us,’ Hella said.
‘What if we go to hyperdrive?’
Engineer Jul snapped, ‘Are you crazy? With all this turbulence in the gravity field, surrounded by a wall of reflective Ghost hide, you may as well just detonate the engines.’
Hella said, ‘It’s that or be destroyed anyhow.’
Borno said, ‘At least we will take down a lot of them with us. Millions, maybe.’
They fell silent for a heartbeat. Then Hella called, ‘Pilot? It’s your decision.’
Hex knew this was a war of economics. A great deal had been invested in her crew’s raising and training, and in the ship itself. But that investment had been made to be spent. The four of them and the ship, in exchange for millions of these strange swarming new Ghosts: it was a fair price.
‘It is our duty,’ she said. She brought up a bright, colour-coded display and began to work through the self-destruct procedure.
She heard Hella sigh.
Borno said grimly, ‘It’s been good to serve with you all.’
Jul said, ‘Not for long enough.’
Hex heard the tension in their voices. She had been trained for this, as for every other conceivable battlefield scenario. She knew that none of them really believed this was the end, not deep in their guts. If suicide was the only option, you did it quickly, before you had time to understand what you were doing. ‘I’ll set it to five seconds. Good luck, everybody.’ She reached out her gloved hand to finalise the sequence.
‘Wait.’ It was a new voice, smooth, toneless, coming from her command net.
In a visual before her was a Silver Ghost. It was one of the classic sort, a perfect sphere. The image was about the size of her head, a ball of silver turning slowly in the middle of her blister.
‘You hacked into our command net,’ Hex said.
‘It wasn’t difficult,’ the Ghost said. Its voice, translated by the Spear’s systems from some downloaded feed, was bland, without inflection. But did she detect a trace of sarcasm?
Jul spoke, her voice tremulous with fear. ‘Hex? What’s going on? Just get it over—’
‘Wait,’ Hex snapped.
The Ghost said, ‘I will let you live, in return for a service.’
Hex could hardly believe she was hearing this. She heard the voice of her training officers in her head; in a situation like this, faced with a new stratagem by the Ghosts, it was her job to extract as much intelligence as possible. ‘Why us?’
‘Because Aleph Force are the supreme killers in a species of killers, and you are the best of Aleph Force. Quite an accolade.’
‘And what’s this “service”? You want us to kill somebody, is that it?’ A military leader, Hex speculated, a senior Commissary, maybe a minister of the Coalition’s grand councils back on Earth - Ghosts had never resorted to assassination that she knew of, but then this was a day when nothing about the Ghosts seemed predictable. ‘Who?’
II
Scarcely believing what she was doing, Hex set up a conference call involving herself, her crew, her commander at the base of Aleph Force back on the Orion Line - and a Silver Ghost.
Commodore Teel, a disembodied Virtual head floating in Hex’s blister, glared at her. In his forties, Teel’s face was hard, his eyes flat, and his scalp was a mass of scar tissue. ‘None of you should even be alive. Pilot Officer Hex, charges aren’t out of the question.’
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