‘End game,’ Borno said softly.
‘Let’s move in.’ Hex raised her arms, and the platform slid forward.
Suddenly palette-ships came rushing out of the tangle like a flock of startled birds.
Jul cried out, ‘Lethe!’
Hella said tightly, ‘They’re going around us, pilot. Hold your line. Hold your line!’
Hex ground her teeth, and kept her hands steady as a rock. The fleet swarmed around her and banked as one, swooping down over the limb of the planet.
‘You’ve got to admire their coordination,’ Hella said. ‘I’ve never seen Ghost ships move like that.’
‘That’s the influence of the Black Ghost,’ said Borno.
‘They’re heading for the dayside,’ Jul murmured. ‘Swimmer and his people are going to get another pasting.’
Hex said firmly, ‘Then let’s see if we can put a stop to it.’
They covered the remaining distance quickly.
The palette slid into the habitat, among threads and ducts; it was like flying into the branches of a silvered tree. Though individual ur-Ghosts slid around the inner structure, nothing opposed them.
Soon the clutter of threads cleared away, and the big central bastion was revealed. It was a sphere, black as night, kilometres across. In the jungle-like tangle of Ghost architecture it didn’t fit; it was alien within the alien.
‘That wall is a perfect absorber of radiation,’ Jul called. ‘A black body.’
‘You see what this is,’ Borno brayed. ‘The Black Ghost built its central bastion in its own image. What arrogance!’
Hella murmured, ‘Haven’t human rulers always done this?’
Hex said, ‘I’m hoping we can use its arrogance against it.’ She inched forward cautiously. Still they weren’t challenged. The hull of the bastion was a smoothly curving blankness before her, reflecting not a photon of starlight. She sensed the Black Ghost in there somewhere, watching, drawing out the moment as she was. ‘Come on, you bastard,’ she muttered. ‘You know I’m out here. Let’s see what you got.’
The black wall quivered. Then it split along a seam, revealing a pale silvery glow. When the wound stopped dilating it was a vertical slit hundreds of metres long, more than wide enough for the palette to pass.
‘I can’t see inside,’ Jul said.
‘Our suit sensors don’t work,’ Hella said, sounding alarmed.
‘But the invitation’s clear,’ Hex said tightly. She brushed her hands forward.
The walls of the bastion slid past her; the fortress’s hull looked no more than paper-thin. Twenty metres inside the hull she brought the palette to a stop. Her visor showed her nothing but empty space, a sphere kilometres wide filled with a cold silver-grey glow.
Then the ur-Ghost hide around her began to crumple and blister, and a harsher light broke through, shining directly on her. She threw up her hands to protect her vision. She heard the others cry out. The hide, scorched, crumbled and fell away.
Cautiously she lowered her arms. Now she could see what the sensors hadn’t been allowed to show her. This space wasn’t empty at all. It was filled with Silver Ghosts, spheres like droplets of molten metal, and ur-Ghosts of every shape and size, faceted and spiny, ranked around her in a hexagonal array that filled space as far as she could see. They were motionless, positioned with utter accuracy, objects of geometry rather than life. And, scattered through the ranks of silent Ghosts, lanterns pulsed, blue-white: models of the pulsar that was destroying the world, they were marks of adherence to the Ghosts’ Destroyer god.
This was nothing like the way humans had seen Ghosts behave before, over centuries of contact and warfare. The command of the Black Ghost, here at the heart of its empire, was total.
Hex’s palette-ship hung like a bit of flotsam before this symmetrical horde. With their skin covers burned away, her crew sat cross-legged in their little hollows, cowering. ‘Everybody OK?’
‘What do you think?’ Jul said.
Borno was staring at the arrayed Ghosts greedily. ‘Lethe,’ he said. ‘There must be thousands of them.’
‘Actually more than a million.’ The voice, delivered through their translator boxes, was flat, impersonal, artificial.
Hex looked into the geometric centre of the sphere, for she knew that was where it would be; its sense of its own importance would admit nothing less. And there she saw a black fist, a sphere twice, three times the size of those clustered around it. The ranks of Ghosts parted in shining curtains, and that central dark mass slid forward.
Hex heard the harsh breathing of her crew. ‘Take it easy,’ she murmured. ‘We’ve come this far—’
‘I’ve let you come this far,’ said the Black Ghost. ‘Did you think your absurd concealment would fool me?’
‘Actually no,’ Hex said. ‘I thought you would be so arrogant you would let us in anyhow. You’re very predictable.’
The Black Ghost rolled before them, its coating black as the inside of her own skull. Hex was guessing at the psychology of an alien being exceptional even among its own kind. Well, the Black Ghost showed some characteristics of humanity, and no human, especially the arrogant sort, liked to be mocked.
Almost experimentally, Hex raised her arm and held it out straight, pointing at the Black Ghost. An energy weapon was built into the sleeve of her suit. She fired; her suit reported the energy drain. But there was no sign of the discharge.
Her crew quickly tried the other weapons at their disposal. Nothing worked. With an angry cry Borno even hurled his knife. It crumbled to dust before it left his hand.
The Black Ghost said, ‘And you call me predictable?’
‘We’re here to kill you, you bag of shit,’ Borno said.
‘To kill me, yes. Humans walk in death. Each Ghost is a complete ecological unit. When we went into space we brought the life of our world with us. Whereas you killed off your ecology, killed the world that produced you, all of it except yourselves, and the pests and parasites too wily to be eradicated. You even call us Ghosts, named after imaginary creatures you associate with death. How appropriate.’
‘And what about you?’ Hella asked. ‘How many humans have you slaughtered – how many of your own kind have you put to the flame?’
‘Ah, but I am different. I relish death, as you do. Can you see my black hull? These others are silvered to save their heat. I relish the obscenity of waste – as you do. I am like you. Or I am like our Destroyer god of old.’
‘Your own kind despise you,’ Borno said.
‘That may be. That is why I brought back these others…’ Hex’s translator box interpolated, the ur-Ghosts. ‘These, forged in the cold desperation of our race’s most difficult age, don’t deny what they are. It is strange. Once the ur-Ghosts were called back from space, to help save a dying world. Now I have called them again, back from the deeper darkness of the past, to help me save my kind from humans.’
‘It’s crazy,’ Hella whispered.
‘So you have us,’ Hex said. ‘What now?’
‘You will serve me. Three of you will be given to my ur-Ghosts, my scientists. We will drain you of what you know, and then use you to explore ways of killing humans. Oh, you will be bred first; we are running short of laboratory animals. The fourth will be flayed, kept alive, and sent back where you came from. Perhaps you, the commander. A warning, you see; a statement of intent. Don’t you think I know human psychology well?’
‘Not well enough,’ Borno said.
Hex snapped, ‘Gunner—’
‘For the Engineers!’