Hex said, ‘Borno is right. The longer we hang around the more chance we have of getting caught. Let’s do this. There’s a blind side over there, to their right. Borno, if you take Jul and head that way, Hella and I can—’
Hella cried, ‘Look out!’
The wall behind Hex’s back suddenly gave way, and she was tipped onto the cold ground. When she looked up she saw that the ‘sandbags’ were suspended in the thin air, heavy, rippling sacks swarming over her head. There must have been fifty of them, more.
This ‘wall’ had a been a reef of ur-Ghosts, huddled together. She should have known, she thought; she had seen their space-filling antics in combat. What a stupid mistake.
The ur-Ghosts descended.
Borno screamed, ‘Weapons!’ Snarling, his blade in his hand, he was trying to get to his feet.
Hex raised her arms. Her suit weapons powered up.
‘Don’t fire.’
The ur-Ghosts went limp, quivered, and fell. It was like having sacks of water dropped on you from a height. Hex’s suit turned rigid to protect her. Then the crew of the Spear fought their way out from the heap, shoving the floppy sacks away with a whir of exoskeletal multipliers.
Beyond this chaotic scene a Ghost hovered, bobbing gently with a delicacy that belied its mass. It was one of the modern kind, a smooth, seamless sphere. Borno raised his blade, but Hex grabbed his arm.
‘You are the Ghost we met. The Integumentary. You’ve dogged us all the way.’
‘Yes. From one blunder to another. I am here to ensure the success of the mission. I hoped I wouldn’t have to reveal myself; I hoped in vain. I never believed you would be so stupid as to hide behind a stack of warriors.’
Jul looked around at the limp ur-Ghosts that lay like immense raindrops on the ground. ‘Why do they cluster like this? You don’t.’
‘Perhaps it’s a relic of their past,’ Hella said. ‘Swimmer congregated with his kind. These strange forms long to do the same.’
‘Now they know you are here,’ the Ghost said. ‘The Black Ghost and his hierarchy. They know I am here. You have little time. I suggest you hurry to the transporter you chose.’
They clambered past the heaps of fallen Ghosts and ran.
The four ur-Ghosts who had been tending the palette-ship had fallen like the others. When Borno reached the first of the ur-Ghosts he raised his knife, preparing to cut into its hide.
‘It is dead,’ the Integumentary said quickly. ‘I had to kill it. I had to kill them all.’ It hovered over the fallen ur-Ghosts, its movements agitated.
Borno, his knife still raised, laughed. ‘You killed your own kind, dozens of them, to aid an enemy that is determined to eradicate your species. You really are screwed up, Ghost.’
‘I serve a cause beyond your comprehension.’
‘Oh, really? Comprehend this.’ Borno plunged his knife into Ghost hide. A watery fluid, laced with red blood, spilled out onto the cold ground.
‘I told you it is dead,’ said the Integumentary.
‘I know,’ Borno said. With an effort he ripped back the ur-Ghost’s skin, exposing glistening muscles, organs. ‘Pilot, we can ride this ship up to orbit, but do you think the Black Ghost will let us just sail in? We’ll wrap ourselves up in this stuff. Camouflage. Come on, help me.’
Jul said, ‘That’s repulsive.’
Borno shrugged and carried on cutting.
Such an unsophisticated ploy would never work, Hex thought. But maybe they could use a little psychology, let the Black Ghost think it had won a victory. She stepped forward, chose an ur-Ghost of her own, and took her knife from its sleeve on her leg. ‘Let’s get it over.’
The Integumentary spun, agitated. ‘You humans are beyond understanding.’
‘Which is why you hired us to do your dirty work,’ Borno snapped, contemptuous.
As she worked Hella said, ‘Integumentary – what is that?’ She pointed at the tower that rose from the Ghost city, with its electric-blue light pulsing at its tip.
The Ghost said, ‘You understand where you are, what world this is. In these times, my ancestors understood full well that it was the pulsar that was destroying their sun. So they venerated it. They made it a god. They called it—’
Hex’s translator unit stumbled, and offered her a range of options. Hex selected Destroyer.
Hella said, ‘Fascinating. Humans have always worshipped gods who they believed created the world. You worship the one that destroyed it.’
‘It is a higher power, if a destructive one. It is rational to try to placate it. All intelligent creatures are shaped by the circumstances of our origins.’
Borno sneered. ‘It’s terrible for you to be brought here, isn’t it, Ghost? To confront the darkest time of your species. You’d prefer to believe it never happened. And now humans are learning all about it.’
The Ghost spun and receded. ‘You haven’t much time.’
Borno had already got the skin off his ur-Ghost. An independent entity in its own right, it was flapping feebly on the cold ground, and the ur-Ghost’s innards were creatures that flopped and crawled. Borno kicked apart the mess with a booted foot.
VI
The cup-shaped indentations in the surface of the palette-ship were just shallow pits. Hex had to sit cross-legged.
Borno set up an ur-Ghost hide over her, like a crude silvered tent. Hex was sealed in the dark. The hide, freshly killed, was still warm, and she felt blood drip on her back. But she shut her suit lamp down, set her visor to show her the exterior of the ship, and tried to forget where she was.
The palette-ship turned out to be simple to operate. After all, analysts in military labs had been taking apart Ghost technology for generations. All Hex had to do was slap her gloved palms flat against the palette’s hull, and her suit found a way to hack into its systems. Experimentally she raised her arm. The palette lifted, tipped and wobbled, a flying carpet on which they were all precariously sitting. But then the inertial control cut in properly, interfacing with their suits’ inertial packs, and she felt more secure.
‘Some ride this is going to be,’ Borno said.
‘Yes, and then what?’ Jul snapped.
‘We’ll deal with that when it comes,’ Hex said. ‘Have your suit weapons ready at all times.’
‘I think we’d better get on with it, pilot,’ Hella murmured.
Hex, through her visor’s systems, glanced around. She was a hundred metres above the ground, and the Ghost city was laid out beneath her, a chaotic tangle of silver cables. She could still see the bloody smears that were all that was left of the ur-Ghosts they had skinned. And silvery sparks were converging.
Hex called, ‘Everybody locked in? Three, two, one—’ She raised her arm again, and the palette shot skywards.
From space the extent of the ur-Ghosts’ betrayal of their cousins was clear. Their chrome-dipped cities clustered over every scrap of land, with only the ghostly blue-white of the ice cap left untouched. No wonder this terrible fratricidal episode was expunged from the Ghosts’ racial memory.
‘Pilot,’ Hella whispered. ‘The habitat. Theta ninety, phi twenty.’
Hex looked ahead. Riding high above the icy nightside clouds a structure was rising. At first glance it looked like typical Ghost architecture, a mesh of silver thread. But Hex made out a darker knot at the centre of the tangle.
So this was the bastion of the Black Ghost. It was no more than a kilometre away.