The original binary could have hosted Earths, if they were far enough from the brilliance of the central stars. No biosphere could have survived the supernova detonation, but once the system became stable again, any surviving worlds could have been reborn. Comets or outgassing could create a new atmosphere, a new ocean. And life could begin again, perhaps crawling out of the deepest rocks, or brought here by the comets – or even delivered by conscious intent; this was a Galaxy crowded with life. How strange, Hex thought, a planet that might have hosted not one but two generations of life. She wondered if its new inhabitants had any idea of what went before – if those doomed by the supernova had managed to leave a trace of their passing, before being put to the fire.
‘But that pulsar is still chipping away at the red star,’ Jul said. ‘The sun is failing.’
‘And if there are Ghosts here they are suffering.’ Borno snarled. ‘Good.’
Hella called, ‘There isn’t much off-world, but I can see one large habitat orbiting the innermost planet.’
‘Then that’s our destination.’ Hex set up an approach trajectory. She felt the needleship’s intrasystem engines thrumming around her, powerful and secure, and the dim red sun swept towards them.
Borno said, ‘Pilot, your trajectory will take us right through the thick of the Ghosts.’
‘Gunner, they either see us or they don’t. We may as well walk in the front door.’
Borno said tensely, ‘Trusting a Ghost with our lives?’
‘That’s always been the deal.’
‘You mean,’ Jul said, ‘the whole mission’s always been halfassed.’
‘Stay focused,’ Hex murmured.
‘Closest approach,’ Hella called now.
The star ballooned out of the dark. Its dim photosphere bellied beneath Hex’s blister, churning dully, disfigured by huge spots. A pinpoint of electric blue rose over the crimson horizon of the parent, casting long shadows through the columns of glowing starstuff that its gravity hauled up from the body of the parent star.
‘Sunrise on a star,’ Borno said. ‘Now there’s something you don’t see every day.’
‘But we’ve got more anomalies,’ Jul reported. ‘The parent’s composition is all wrong. Too much hydrogen, not enough metals. Younger stars incorporate the debris of earlier generations, fusion products, heavy elements like metal, carbon. It’s as if this star is too old – only by a million years or so, but still—’
‘I’ll tell you something stranger,’ Hella said. ‘This star system may not be in the Coalition catalogues, but it’s a near-identical twin of a system that is.’ She brought up an image of another system, another red star with a bright blue companion pulsar; Hex saw from the accompanying data that the system’s orbital dynamics were virtually identical. Hella said, ‘This other star is in Ghost space too. Only a few tens of light years away.’
Hex let all this wash through her. You weren’t wise to block information flows, especially when you were flying into the unknown like this. But she couldn’t see an immediate relevance in these stellar mysteries.
She was relieved when the twin stars fell away, the needleship climbed back out of the parent star’s gravity well, and the target planet came looming out of the dark.
Unlike the rest of her crew Hex had been brought up on a planet, only a few light years from Earth itself. But even to her eyes this little world looked strange. Huddled close for warmth, it kept one face to the parent star. The subsolar point on the daylight hemisphere, where the sun would be perpetually overhead, must be the warmest place on the planet. Hex made out climatic bands of increasing dimness sprawling around that central point, so that the face of the planet was like a target, bathed crimson red. And on the dark side, illuminated only by starlight, she glimpsed the blue tint of ice.
As the needleship swung closer, she made out more detail on the sunward side: dark patches that might have been seas, broad crimson plains, and here and there a bubbling grey that was the characteristic of habitation, cities. But sparks crawled over the terminator, the boundary between day and night, and where they landed fire splashed.
Jul murmured, ‘What are we getting into here? It looks like a war between the day and night sides.’
Hella said, ‘That big orbital habitat is by far the highest technology on or around the planet. The materials, the trace radiation – it looks like it’s the only example of modern Ghost technology here.’
‘If the Black Ghost is anywhere,’ Hex said, ‘that’s where it will be. Fix the course, navigator—’
The Spear shuddered and spun crazily, that faint sun and its huddled world whirling like spectres. Hex’s blister lit up with alarm flags, flaring bright red.
She barked out commands and wrestled with her joystick. ‘Report!’
‘It was g-waves,’ Jul called back. ‘Just like the beams they used back on 147B.’
‘Were we targeted? They aren’t supposed to be able to see us.’
Hella said, ‘The whole system is crisscrossed by the beams. We just ran into one.’
‘A defensive measure?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe. Or something to do with the stellar system itself—’
Borno said, ‘We have company. Theta thirty, phi one hundred. They are coming out of that habitat.’
A swarm of palette-ships came swooping down on the Spear. Maybe it had been too much to expect the Integumentary’s shielding to survive the g-wave buffeting.
Grimly Hex fought with the still-spinning ship. ‘Open up the weapons ports.’
‘Half of them are off-line,’ Jul called back. ‘And our sensors are blitzed too. Right now we’re de-fanged, pilot. Give me two minutes and—’
The first shot sizzled through space only a couple of kilometres from the Spear’s nose.
‘We don’t have two minutes,’ Hex snapped. ‘Options. Come on, guys!’
‘Fight!’ Borno called.
‘Run,’ said Jul.
‘Abort to the planet’s surface,’ advised Hella.
At last Hex got the spin under control. But the face of the planet was a mottled crimson shield before her. More alarms lit up as the needleship sensed the first touch of this world’s thin atmosphere. ‘Looks like we don’t have much choice.’ She hauled on her controls, turned the needleship so its nose pointed down into the atmosphere – and she lit up the intrasystem drive to hurl the ship into the cover of air. A ball of light engulfed the Spear, atmospheric gases ionised and driven to white heat. In the blisters the inertial control held, more or less; Hex and her crew felt only the mildest of judders as they fell into the air of an unknown world.
All this in utter silence.
‘We’re kind of lighting up the sky here, pilot,’ Borno called.
Hex said, ‘It will get us down quicker. The ground proximity sensors will pull us out before—’
‘Sensors are off-line,’ Jul reminded her hastily.
‘Oops,’ said Hex. She hauled on her joystick.
‘Land below us,’ Hella called. ‘Now over ocean—’
Hex’s blister filled up with crash foam, embedding her like a wrapped-up doll, so tight she couldn’t move a finger. She felt nothing as the Spear of Orion cut a tunnel through an ocean a half-kilometre deep, and then, before the waters had even closed, gouged a crater fifty kilometres across in the soft rocks of the ocean floor.
Her crash foam shattered, broke up and fell away.
She was floating. She was surrounded by misty grey-green air, illuminated by dim slanting light – no, not air, she realised as she tried to move her limbs. This medium was water. Thankfully her skinsuit was holding.