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, 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.
We reached the outer ‘hull’, or at least the place the cabling ran out, and dug back into the tangle a little way to stay out of sight.
At last 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 human fleet.
Over a volume light-months wide, countless craft slid silently across the sky. They were organised in a complex network of corridors filling three-dimensional space: rivers of light gushed this way and that, their different colours denoting different classes and sizes of vessel. And, here and there, denser knots of colour 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.
The Third Expansion had reached all the way to the inner edge of our spiral arm of the Galaxy. Now the first colony ships were attempting to make their way across the void to the next arm, the Sagittarius. Our arm, the Orion Arm, is really just a shingle, a short arc. But the Sagittarius Arm is one of the Galaxy’s dominant features. For example it contains a huge region of star-birth, one of the largest in the Galaxy, immense clouds of gas and dust capable of producing millions of stars each. It was a prize indeed.
But that is where the Silver Ghosts live.
When it appeared that our inexorable expansion was threatening not just their own mysterious projects but their home systems, the Ghosts began, for the first time, to resist us systematically.
They had formed a blockade, called by Navy strategists the Orion Line: a thick sheet of fortress stars, right across the inner edge of the Orion Arm, places the Navy and the colony ships couldn’t follow. It was a devastatingly effective ploy.
Our fleet in action 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 on mine. I have you. You won’t fall. Then she pulled me back 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, Commissar. 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 as a kid you compete with the rats.
‘And that’s why you joined up? To get away?’
‘I was drafted.’
‘Come on,’ she scoffed. ‘On a rat-hole like Mercury there are places 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. By the time the first ships reached Deneb, the mechanics of exploitation were 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 out to fund fresh colonising waves, the greater Expansion and, of course, to support the war with the Ghosts. And that’s how the system works.’
She swept her hand over the sky. ‘Think of it, tar. The Third Expansion: between here and Sol, across six thousand light years, there is nothing but mankind and human planets, the fruit of a thousand years of world-building. And all of it linked by economics. Older systems like Deneb, their resources spent – even Sol 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 kilometres wide. But now the Ghosts are in our way. And that’s why we’re fighting!’
‘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 chat.
Jeru spotted a file of the Ghosts moving in a crocodile, like so many schoolchildren, towards 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 metres the Ghosts began to duck down into the tangle, out of our sight. We followed them in.
Maybe fifty metres 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 towards 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 pressurised. 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 vapour 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 vapour.
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.