With a roar Borno straightened his legs and hurled himself out of his palette station, straight at the Ghost’s bland black hide. In mid-flight his suit slit open and fell away, leaving him naked save for underwear, his head, hands and feet bare. His last breath frosted in the vacuum, his mouth gaping. But he held out his hands like claws.
Jul screamed, ‘What’s he doing? He’s killing himself!’
Hex, stunned, could only watch.
Borno landed on the Ghost’s night-dark hide and grabbed big handfuls, pulling and crumpling. The Black Ghost rolled, trying to shake off its assailant. Around it the other Ghosts bobbed, agitated, but they had no way to help; they couldn’t fire on Borno for fear of hitting the Black Ghost itself.
Then Borno took a mouthful of hide, bit down hard, and arched his back. The Ghost’s hide ripped, and a clear fluid laced with crimson boiled within the wound. Borno’s eyes were bleeding now, his ears too, but he dug into the Black Ghost with his teeth and nails, the only weapons he had left.
‘We have to help him,’ Hella called. She breathed hard; Hex sensed her psyching herself up to follow Borno. ‘Are you with me?’
‘All right,’ Hex said. ‘On my mark—’
Before they could move one of the Ghosts broke ranks. A perfect silver sphere, it swept down purposefully on the Black Ghost and its clinging human assailant. A slit opened in its own belly, a weapon nozzle protruded – and a projectile fired neatly into the black hide through the wound Borno had opened. The Black Ghost emitted no sound, but it quivered and thrashed. Borno clung on, but he was limp now.
And every other Ghost among the million arrayed around them froze in place.
As the Black Ghost suffered its death throes, the assassin came drifting to Borno’s vacated station.
Hex asked, ‘Integumentary?’
Hella said, ‘How do you keep doing this?’
‘I suggest you get us out of here, pilot,’ said the Ghost. ‘Without leadership the troops are paralysed, but they will react soon. If you want to live—’
‘Not without Borno,’ Jul said.
‘He’s already dead,’ said the Ghost.
‘No!’
The Integumentary spun in its station and spat another bullet, this time neatly lancing through Borno’s limp body. ‘Now can we go?’
Hex grimly drew her hands towards her lap. The palette shot backwards out of the bastion, and into open space.
VII
The palette hovered at the rim of the system. The misty, dying star of the Ghosts was still visible, as was its intensely blue companion.
‘They won’t find you here,’ the Integumentary said, still nestling in Borno’s vacated pod.
Commodore Teel’s disembodied head appeared before Hex. ‘So the Black Ghost is dead. Good. Now we will see how the war turns out. You did well, Hex.’
‘Borno did well.’
‘He will be remembered.’
The Integumentary seemed to feel its plan had worked out as it hoped. It had been able to penetrate the Black Ghost’s bastion, even smuggle in a weapon so crude it wasn’t picked up by the defensive systems. But it could never have penetrated the Black Ghost’s hide if not for Borno’s attack, which the Black Ghost clearly hadn’t anticipated.
Teel said, ‘So the most powerful Ghost in generations was defeated by human qualities: Borno’s raw anger and courage, and the Black Ghost’s own arrogance.’
The Integumentary murmured, ‘And what could be more human than savagery and arrogance?’
Hex was still trying to understand what had happened. ‘Ghost, when your sun died, there was a bloody battle for survival. You’ve spent a million years denying that about yourselves. But the Black Ghost saw it was precisely that streak of primitive brutality you had to rediscover to fight humanity. It might even have succeeded. But you couldn’t bear the image of yourself it showed you, could you?’
The Integumentary said, ‘The Black Ghost was an anomaly. This is not what we are, what we aspire to be.’
Teel looked at Hex. ‘Pilot, it isn’t just their past that the Ghosts want to expunge, but what they have glimpsed of their future – or anyhow that’s what the analysts in the Commission for Historical Truth have made of this incident.’
It was a question of natural selection. For centuries, Ghosts had been losing battles to humanity. Only those capable of dealing with humans – of anticipating human intentions, of thinking like a human – survived to breed. ‘It’s a selection pressure,’ Teel said. ‘Only those Ghosts who are most like us have been surviving. So maybe it’s not surprising that there should emerge a Black Ghost, a Ghost so like a human it organises its own hierarchical society, fights a war like a human commander. What do you think about that, Ghost?’
The Integumentary rose up out of the palette cradle. ‘I am relieved our business together is done. The Black Ghost is dead. The exploitation of interdimensional energy will be closed down, the research destroyed. It is a weapon too dangerous to be used.’
‘Until we rediscover it,’ Hella murmured.
Teel wasn’t done yet. ‘You can’t stand this, can you, Ghost? You needed humanity to resolve this problem among yourselves. And to do it, you had to think like a human yourself, didn’t you?’
The Integumentary said, ‘It is true that we would rather go to extinction than to become like you. Is that something you take pride in? Pilot, the ancient star system will be restored to its proper time. You have only seconds before the energy pulse that will follow. I tell you this as a courtesy. We will not speak again.’ And it disappeared, as if folding out of existence.
Jul said, ‘Seconds?’
Hella said, ‘How fast can this thing go, pilot?’
‘Let’s find out,’ Hex said, and she flexed her gloved hands. ‘Everybody locked in? Three, two, one—’
The Black Ghost inspired its kind’s last effective stand. After its fall, the Ghosts’ political unity fragmented, and they fell back everywhere.
For the Ghosts, the consequence of defeat was dire.
THE GHOST PIT
AD 7524
As soon as the Spline dropped out of hyperspace our flitter burst from its belly.
After our long enclosure in the crimson interior of the huge living ship, it was like being reborn. Even though I had to share this adventure with L’Eesh, my spirits surged.
‘Pretty system,’ L’Eesh said. He was piloting the flitter with nonchalant ease. He was about sixty years old, some three times my age, a lot more experienced – and he didn’t miss a chance to let me know.
Well, pretty it was. The Jovian and its satellites were held in a stable gravitational embrace at the corners of a neat equilateral triangle, the twin moons close enough to the parent to be tidally locked. And beyond it all I glimpsed a faint blue mesh thrown across the stars: an astonishing sight, a net large enough to enclose this giant planet, with struts half a million kilometres long.
I grinned. That netting, that monstrous grandiosity, was typical Ghost. It was proof that this Jovian system was indeed a Ghost pit – a new pit, an unopened pit.
Which was why its discovery had sent such a stir through the small, scattered community of Ghost hunters. And why L’Eesh and I were prepared to fire ourselves into it without even looking where we were going. We were determined to be the first.
Already we were sweeping down towards one of the moons. Beneath a dusty atmosphere the surface was brick red, a maze of charred pits.