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 centimetres from my nose.
The bulging mirror was the belly of 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, she hit somewhere near its north pole.
The Ghost pulsated, complex ripples chasing across its surface. Jeru did a handstand and reached up with her legs to the tangle above, and anchored herself there. The Ghost spun, 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.
Meanwhile I just hung there, frozen.
You’re trained to mount the proper reaction to an enemy assault. But it all vaporises when you’re faced with a tonne 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. I quickly learned that Ghost skin is tough, like thick rubber, but you can cut it 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 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 – rope-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 ragged Ghost. It was still spinning, off-centre, but I could see that the spin was nothing but dead momentum; the Ghost had lost its heat, and its life.
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. And I had not thought of the Ghost we had killed as a parent protecting its young. I’m not a deep thinker now, and wasn’t then; but it was not a comfortable notion.
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 carcase, 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 laboured 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 recognised 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 glow 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 favouring her left hand. She seemed to come to a decision. ‘All right. We need to improve our situation here.’ 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. I’ll be back.’