The Spear shuddered. For an instant the Virtual displays clustered around her fritzed, before her systems rebooted and recovered.
‘Jul, what was that? Did we take a hit?’
Jul was the ship’s engineer, young, bright, capable – and a good pilot before her lower body was cut away by a lucky strike from a dying Ghost. ‘Pilot, we ran through g-waves.’
‘Gravity waves? From a starbreaker?’
‘No,’ called navigator Hella, the last of the Spear’s four crew. ‘Too long-wavelength for that. And too powerful. Pilot, this space is full of g-waves. That’s how the Ghosts are hitting the planet.’
‘Where are they coming from?’
‘The scouts can’t find a source.’
‘New weapons, new ships, new tactics,’ Borno said darkly.
‘And new Ghosts,’ said Hella.
‘You know what’s behind this,’ Jul said uneasily.
Hex said warningly, ‘Engineer—’
‘The Black Ghost. It has to be.’
Unlike any of its kind before, the barracks-room scuttlebutt went, the Black Ghost was an enemy commander that fought like a human – better than a human. The Commissaries claimed this was all just rumour generated by stressed-out crews, but Hex herself had heard that the stories had originated with Ghosts themselves, captives under interrogation. And whether the Black Ghost existed or not, you couldn’t deny that something was making the Ghosts fight better than they ever had.
And meanwhile that palette still hadn’t broken off.
‘Thirty seconds to close,’ Hella said. ‘We won’t survive an impact, pilot.’
‘Neither will they,’ Borno said grimly.
‘Fifteen seconds.’
‘Hold the line!’ Hex ordered.
‘Those dimples,’ said engineer Jul hastily. ‘Where the Ghosts are sitting. There has to be some interface to the palette’s systems. They must be weak spots. Gunner, if you could plant a shell there…’
Hex imagined Borno’s grin.
‘Seven seconds! Six!’
A single shell sailed out through the curtain of fire. It was a knot of unified-field energy, like a bit of the universe from a second after the Big Bang itself.
The shell hit a dimple so squarely it probably didn’t even touch the sides. The resident Ghost, a squat cube, was vaporised instantly. Then light erupted from every dimple and weapons port on the palette. The Ghost crew scrambled away, but Hex saw silver skin wrinkle and pop, before the palette vanished in a flash of primordial light.
The needleship slammed through a dissipating cloud of debris, and the blisters turned black to save the crew’s eyes.
The Spear sat in space, its hull charred, still cooling as it dumped the energy it had soaked up. Sparks drifted through the sky: more needleships, a detachment of Aleph Force forming up.
For the first time since they’d dropped out of hyperspace Hex was able to catch her breath, and to take a decent look at the world she had been sent to defend.
Even from here she could see it was suffering. Immense storm systems swathed its poles and catastrophic volcanism turned its nightside bright. Sparks climbed steadily up from the planet’s surface, refugee transports to meet the Navy ships – Spline, living starships, kilometre-wide spheres of flesh and metal.
Hella murmured, ‘That’s what a g-wave weapon will do to you, if it’s sufficiently powerful.’
Borno asked, ‘How? By ripping up the surface?’
‘Probably by disrupting the planet’s orbital dynamics. You could knock over a world’s spin axis, maybe jolt it into a higher eccentricity orbit. If the core rotation collapsed its magnetic field would implode. You’d have turmoil in the magma currents, earthquakes and volcanism…’
The destruction of a world as an act of war. The people being driven from their homes today were not soldiers. They had come here as colonists, to build a new world. But the very creation of this settlement had been an act of war, Hex knew, for this settlement had been planted deep inside what had been Ghost space until five centuries ago.
The Ghost Wars had already lasted centuries. War with an alien species was not like a human conflict. It was ecological, the Commissaries taught, like two varieties of weed competing for the same bit of soil. It could be terminated by nothing short of total victory – and the price of defeat would be extinction, for one side or another.
And now the Ghosts had a weapon capable of wreaking such damage on a planetary scale, and, worse, were prepared to use it. These were not the Ghosts Hex had spent a lifetime learning to fight. But in that case, she thought harshly, I’ll just have to learn to fight them all over again.
Borno said, ‘I don’t like just sitting out here.’
‘Take it easy,’ Hex said. She downloaded visual feed from the command loops. Ghost ships were being drawn away from the battle around the planet itself, and were heading out to this concentration.
Aleph Force was Strike Arm’s elite, one of the most formidable rapid-response fighting units in the Navy. From their base on the Orion Line they were hurled through hyperspace into the most desperate situations – like this one. Aleph Force always made a difference: that was what their commanders told them to remember. Even the Ghosts had learned that. And that was why Ghosts were peeling off from their main objective to engage them.
‘Gunner, we’re giving that evacuation operation a chance just by sitting here. And as soon as we’ve lured in enough Ghosts we’ll take them on. I have a feeling you’ll be slitting hides before the day is done.’
‘That might be sooner than you think,’ called engineer Jul, uneasily. ‘Take a look at this.’ She sent another visual feed around the loop.
Sparks slid around the sky, like droplets of water condensing out of humid air.
Hex had never seen anything like it. ‘What are they?’
‘Ghosts,’ Borno said. ‘Swarming like flies.’
‘They’re all around us,’ Hella breathed. ‘There must be thousands.’
‘Make that millions,’ Jul said. ‘They’re surrounding the other ships as well.’
Hex called up a magnified visual. As she had glimpsed on the palette, the Ghosts were cubes, pyramids, spinning tetrahedrons, even a few spiny forms like mines.
Jul said, ‘I thought all Ghosts were spheres.’
Ghosts were hardened to space, and their primary driver was the conservation of their body heat. For a given mass a silvered sphere, the shape with the minimum surface area, was the optimal way to achieve that.
‘But they weren’t always like that,’ said Borno. He had studied Ghosts all his life, the better to destroy them. ‘Ghosts evolved. Maybe these are primitive forms, before they settled for the optimum.’
‘Primitive?’ Hex asked. ‘Then what are they doing here?’
‘Don’t ask me.’ His voice was tight. His loathing of Ghosts was no affectation; it was so deep it was almost phobic.
‘They’re closing,’ Jul called.
The Spear’s weapons began to spit fire into the converging cloud. Hex saw that one Ghost, two, was caught, flaring and dying in an instant. But it was like firing a laser into a rainstorm.
Hex snapped, ‘Gunner, you’re just wasting energy.’
‘The systems can’t lock,’ Borno said. ‘Too many targets, too small, too fast-moving.’