Resplendent

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘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 a
larmed.

  ‘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.

  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.’