‘We’ll follow your orders, whatever you say, Commodore,’ Hex said.
‘I know you will,’ Teel said dismissively. ‘But I’ve no way of assessing your chances of success – let alone survival.’
‘Our survival is irrelevant, sir,’ Jul said.
‘I know that’s what you’re taught, engineer. Perhaps there are a few desk-bound Commissaries back on Earth who actually believe that. But out here we who do the fighting are still human. The mission has a greater chance of success if you’re willing to take it on.’
‘I’m willing,’ Borno said immediately.
‘I’ve seen your file, gunner. What about those of you who aren’t psychopathically hostile to the Ghosts and all their works?’
Hella was uncertain. ‘We’re flight crew. We aren’t infantry, or covert operatives. We may not be right for the job.’
‘We’re Aleph Force,’ Hex said firmly. ‘In Aleph Force you do whatever it takes.’
‘Anyhow I don’t think there’s a choice,’ Jul said. ‘Us or nobody.’
Hella asked, ‘So what do you think, pilot?’
Hex looked into her soul. A journey into the very heart of Ghost territory – a mission that might turn the course of the war – how could she refuse? ‘I’m in.’
Jul, Hella and Borno quickly concurred.
‘I’m proud of you,’ the Commodore said.
The Ghost spun. ‘Humans!’
Hex snapped, ‘All right, Ghost, let’s get on with it. Where are we going?’
More data chattered into the Spear’s banks.
III
The Spear of Orion swept through space. The needleship moved from point to point through hyperdrive jumps, each too brief for a human eye to follow, so that the stars seemed to slide through the sky like lamp posts beside a road. For the crew the journey was a routine marvel.
But Hex and her crew had come far from the outermost boundary of human space, farther than any human had travelled from Earth save for a handful of explorers. And every star they could see must host a Ghost emplacement: if humanity was turning the Galaxy green, then this rich chunk of it still gleamed Ghost-silver. But the Spear remained undisturbed.
‘It’s eerie,’ engineer Jul said. ‘Ghosts should be swarming all over us.’
Hex said, ‘The Integumentary promised to make us invisible to the Ghosts’ sensors, and it’s keeping its word.’
Jul, a practical engineer, snorted. ‘I’d feel a lot more reassured if I knew how.’
Borno said, ‘What do you expect? Ghosts don’t give you anything.’ His pent-up rage, here in Ghost territory, was tangible.
They sailed on in tense silence.
Borno had been born between the stars. His ancestors, who called themselves ‘Engineers’, had fled Earth at the time of an alien occupation. With no place to land the refugees had ganged together their spacecraft and found ways to live between the stars, through trading, piloting, even a little mercenary soldiering.
When the Third Expansion came, Borno’s Engineers had been one of a number of peripheral cultures recontacted by the Coalition, the new authority on Earth. But the Engineers had also forged tentative links with the Silver Ghosts, who were undergoing their own expansion out of the heart of the Galaxy. For a time the Engineers had profited from trade between two interstellar empires. They even welcomed small Ghost colonies on their amorphous islands of relic spacecraft and harnessed asteroids.
But then Navy ships came spinning down to impose Coalition authority on the Engineers’ raft culture. There had been a strange period when autonomous Ghost enclaves had been granted room to live under the new regime: Silver Ghosts, living under Coalition authority. But the Ghosts had been taxed, marginalised and discriminated against until their position was untenable. Their maltreatment had led to a rescue mission from Ghost worlds – and that had led to one of the first military engagements of the long Ghost Wars, fought out over the Engineers’ fragile raft colony. Among the Engineers, many had died, and the rest had been dispersed to colonies deeper within Coalition space.
All this was centuries ago. But Borno’s people had never forgotten who they were and where they had come from; they still called themselves ‘Engineers’. And in their minds it had been Ghost aggression that had resulted in the deaths of so many and the loss of an ancient homeland.
Hex reflected that it would do no good to try to explain to Borno that it had been Coalition policy that had precipitated that defining crisis in the first place. And besides, Borno’s wrath was useful for the Coalition’s purposes. In a war that spanned the stars, he was not unique.
‘Heads up,’ Hella said. ‘I have a visual. Theta eighty-six, phi five.’
Their destination was dead ahead.
Hex saw a double star: a misty sphere that glowed a dull coal red while a pinpoint of electric blue trawled across its face.
The Spear’s crew had had to find their way here by dead reckoning. This system didn’t show up in the Navy’s data banks. After fifteen centuries of the Third Expansion, the Commission for Historical Truth believed it had mapped every single one of the Galaxy’s hundreds of billions of stars, human-controlled or not – but it hadn’t mapped this one.
Anomaly or not, somewhere in this unmapped system, the Integumentary had promised, the crew of the Spear would find the Black Ghost.
Gunner Borno said hastily, ‘We’re crawling with Ghosts.’
Hex checked her displays. All around her were Ghosts: their ships, their emplacements, their sensor stations and weapons platforms. The whole system was like a vast fortress, defended to a depth of half a light year from that central double sun, with more monitoring stations and fast-response units even further out.
‘None of them are reacting,’ Jul said, sounding disbelieving. ‘Not one unit.’
Hex said, ‘Then forget them. What are we looking at?’
Jul said, ‘I’ve seen systems like this before. That blue thing is a neutron star, right?’
‘Yes,’ Hella said, ‘Actually a pulsar…’
Once this had been a partnership of two immense stars – until the larger, too massive, had detonated in a supernova explosion, for a few days outshining the whole Galaxy. Its ruin had collapsed to form a neutron star, a sun-sized mass compressed down to the size of a city block. As it spun on its axis a ferocious magnetic field threw out beams of charged particles to flash in the eyes of radio telescopes: it was a pulsar.
As for the supernova’s companion, the tremendous detonation stripped away most of its outer layers. Its fusing core, exposed, had not been massive enough to maintain the central fire. The remnant star had subsided to misty dimness.
Hella said, ‘But the system is actually still evolving. That pulsar is dragging material out of the parent.’ She displayed a false-colour image that showed a broad disc, material the pulsar’s gravity had dug out of the larger star’s flesh and thrown into orbit.
‘So that star blew its companion up,’ Borno said, ‘and now it’s taking it apart bit by bit. What a dismal place this is.’
‘And yet,’ Hella said, ‘this system has planets. Two, three, four – more off in the dark, they surely don’t matter. It’s the innermost that has the most Earthlike signature: air, liquid water, oxygen, carbon compounds. Smaller than Earth, though.’
Across human space people always spoke of Earthlike worlds, though few of them had ever seen Earth; the mother planet remained the reference for all her scattered children.