Jeru snapped, ‘It is a creed that has bound us together for a thousand years. It is a creed that unites uncounted trillions of human beings across thousands of light years. Are you strong enough to defy such a creed now? Come, Academician. None of us chooses to be born in the middle of a war. We must all do our best for each other, for other human beings; what else is there?’
I looked from one to the other. I thought we should be doing less yapping and more fighting. I touched Pael’s shoulder; he flinched away. ‘Academician – is Jeru right? Is there a way we can live through this?’
Pael shuddered. Jeru hovered over him.
‘Yes,’ Pael said at last. ‘Yes, there is a way.’
The idea turned out to be simple.
And the plan Jeru and I devised to implement it was even simpler. It was based on a single assumption: Ghosts aren’t aggressive. It was ugly, I’ll admit that, and I could see why it would distress a squeamish earthworm like Pael. But sometimes there are no good choices.
Jeru and I took a few minutes to rest up, check over our suits and our various injuries, and to make ourselves comfortable. Then, following patrol SOP once more, we made our way back to the pod of immature hides.
We came out of the tangle and drifted down to that translucent hull. We tried to keep away from concentrations of Ghosts, but we made no real effort to conceal ourselves. There was little point, after all; the Ghosts would know all about us, and what we intended, soon enough.
We hammered pitons into the pliable hull, and fixed rope to anchor ourselves. Then we took our knives and started to saw our way through the hull.
As soon as we started, the Ghosts began to gather around us, like vast antibodies. They just hovered there, eerie faceless baubles drifting as if in vacuum breezes. But as I stared up at a dozen distorted reflections of my own skinny face, I felt an unreasonable loathing rise up in me. Maybe you could think of them as a family banding together to protect their young. I didn’t care; a lifetime’s carefully designed hatred isn’t thrown off so easily. I went at my work with a will.
Jeru got through the pod hull first. The air gushed out in a fast-condensing fountain. The baby hides fluttered, their distress obvious. And the Ghosts began to cluster around Jeru, like huge light globes.
Jeru glanced at me. ‘Keep working, tar.’
‘Yes, sir.’
In another couple of minutes I was through. The air pressure was already dropping, and it dwindled to nothing when we cut a big door-sized flap in that roof. Anchoring ourselves with the ropes, we rolled that lid back, opening the roof wide. A few last wisps of vapour came curling around our heads, ice fragments sparkling.
The hide babies convulsed. Immature, they could not survive the sudden vacuum, intended as their ultimate environment. But the way they died made it easy for us. The silvery hides came flapping up out of the hole in the roof, one by one. We just grabbed each one – like grabbing hold of a billowing sheet – and we speared it with a knife, and threaded it on a length of rope. All we had to do was sit there and wait for them to come. There were hundreds of them, and we were kept busy.
I hadn’t expected the adult Ghosts to sit through that, non-aggressive or not; and I was proved right. Soon they were clustering all around me, vast silvery bellies looming. A Ghost is massive and solid, and it packs a lot of inertia; if one hits you in the back you know about it. Soon they were nudging me hard enough to knock me flat against the roof, over and over. Once I was wrenched so hard against my tethering rope it felt as if I had cracked another bone or two in my foot.
And, meanwhile, I was starting to feel a lot worse: dizzy, nauseous, overheated. It was getting harder to get back upright each time after being knocked down. I was growing weaker fast; I imagined the tiny molecules of my body falling apart in this Ghost-polluted space.
For the first time I began to believe we were going to fail.
But then, quite suddenly, the Ghosts backed off. When they were clear of me, I saw they were clustering around Jeru.
She was standing on the hull, her feet tangled up in rope, and she had knives in both hands. She was slashing crazily at the Ghosts, and at the baby hides which came flapping past her, making no attempt to capture them now, simply cutting and destroying whatever she could reach. I could see that one arm was hanging awkwardly – maybe it was dislocated, or even broken – but she kept on slicing regardless. And the Ghosts were clustering around her, huge silver spheres crushing her frail, battling human form.
She was sacrificing herself to save me – just as Captain Teid, in the last moments of the Brightly, had given herself to save Pael. And my duty was to complete the job. So I stabbed and threaded, over and over, as the flimsy hides came tumbling out of that hole, slowly dying.
At last no more hides came.
I looked up, blinking to get the salt sweat out of my eyes. A few hides were still tumbling around the interior of the pod, but they were inert and out of my reach. Others had evaded us and gotten stuck in the tangle of the ship’s structure, too far and too scattered to make them worth pursuing further. What I had would have to suffice. I started to make my way out of there, back through the tangle, to the location of our wrecked yacht, where I hoped Pael would be waiting.
I looked back once. I couldn’t help it. The Ghosts were still clustered over the ripped pod roof. Somewhere in there, whatever was left of Jeru was still fighting. I had an impulse, almost overpowering, to go back to her. No human being should die alone. But I knew I had to get out of there, to complete the mission, to make her sacrifice worthwhile.
So I got.
Pael and I finished the job at the outer hull of the Ghost cruiser.
Stripping the hides turned out to be as easy as Jeru had described. Fitting together the Planck-zero sheets was simple too – you just line them up and seal them with a thumb. I got on with that, sewing the hides together into a sail, while Pael worked on a rigging of lengths of rope, all fixed to a deck panel from the wreck of the yacht. He was fast and efficient: Pael, after all, came from a world where everybody goes solar-sailing on their vacations.
We worked steadily, for hours.
I ignored the varying aches and chafes, the increasing pain in my head and chest and stomach, the throbbing of a broken arm that hadn’t healed, the agony of cracked bones in my foot. And we didn’t talk about anything but the task in hand. Pael didn’t ask what had become of Jeru, not once; it was as if he had anticipated the Commissary’s fate.
We were undisturbed by the Ghosts through all of this.
I tried not to think about whatever emotions churned within those silvered carapaces, what despairing debates might chatter on invisible wavelengths. I was, after all, trying to complete a mission. And I had been exhausted even before I got back to Pael. I just kept going, ignoring my fatigue, focusing on the task.
I was surprised to find it was done.
We had made a sail hundreds of metres across, stitched together from the invisibly thin immature Ghost hide. It was roughly circular, and it was connected by a dozen lengths of fine rope to struts on the panel we had wrenched out of the wreck of the yacht. The sail lay across space, languid ripples crossing its glimmering surface.
Pael showed me how to work the thing. ‘Pull this rope, or this one…’ The great patchwork sail twitched in response to his commands. ‘I’ve set it so you shouldn’t have to try anything fancy, like tacking. The boat will just sail out, hopefully, to the cordon perimeter. If you need to lose the sail, just cut the ropes.’
I was taking in all this automatically. It made sense for both of us to know how to operate our little yacht. But then I started to pick up the subtext of what he was saying. You, not us.