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 filtering through the tangle shifted and evolved. Clinging to the tangle, I thought I could feel vibration: a slow, deep harmonisation 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.
During a drama like the contact with the Ghost, you don’t realise 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 that 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, and again I felt unreasonably fragile.
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 counted my heartbeat, my breaths; I tried to figure out how long a second was. ‘A thousand and one. A thousand and two…’ Tracking time is a fundamental 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. I started to think back over my operation with Jeru, and the regrets began. OK, 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 signals.
Our training is comprehensive. You’re taught to expect this 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 bit 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.
It was my duty to die. 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 meaty 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.’
‘Yes, sir.’
We started to rig the punctured, splayed-out hide as a rough canopy over our LUP, blocking as much of the sunlight as possible from Pael. A few slivers of frozen flesh still clung to the hide, but mostly it was like working with a fine, light metallic foil.
In the shade, Pael started to stir. His moans were translated to stark bioluminescent icons.
‘Help him,’ Jeru snapped. ‘Make him drink.’ And while I did that she dug into the med kit on her belt and started to spray cast material around the fingers of her left hand.
‘It’s the speed of light,’ Pael said. He was huddled in a corner of our LUP, his legs tucked against his chest. His voice must have been feeble; the bioluminescent sigils on his suit were fragmentary and came with possible variants extrapolated by the translator software.
‘Tell us,’ Jeru said, relatively gently.
‘The Ghosts have found a way to change lightspeed in this fortress. In fact to increase it.’ He began talking again about quagma and physics constants and the rolled-up dimensions of spacetime, but Jeru waved that away irritably.
‘How do you know this?’
Pael began tinkering with his prisms and gratings. ‘I took your advice, Commissary.’ He beckoned to me. ‘Come see, child.’
I saw that a shaft of red light, split out and deflected by his prism, shone through a diffraction grating and cast an angular pattern of dots and lines on a scrap of smooth plastic.
‘You see?’ His eyes searched my face.
‘I don’t get it. I’m sorry, sir.’
‘The wavelength of the light has changed. It has been increased. Red light should have a wavelength, oh, a fifth shorter than that indicated by this pattern.’
I was struggling to understand. I held up my hand. ‘Shouldn’t the green of this glove turn yellow, or blue?…’
Pael sighed. ‘No. Because the colour you see depends, not on the wavelength of a photon, but on its energy. Conservation of energy still applies, even where the Ghosts are tinkering. So each photon carries as much energy as before – and evokes the same “colour” in your eye. Since a photon’s energy is proportional to its frequency, that means frequencies are left unchanged. But since lightspeed is equal to frequency multiplied by wavelength, an increase in wavelength implies—’
‘An increase in lightspeed,’ said Jeru.
‘Yes.’
I didn’t follow much of that. I turned and looked up at the light that leaked around our Ghost-hide canopy. ‘So we see the same colours. The light of that star gets here a little faster. What difference does it make?’
Pael shook his head. ‘Child, a fundamental constant like lightspeed is embedded in the deep structure of our universe. Lightspeed is part of the ratio known as the fine structure constant.’ He started babbling about the charge on the electron.