I poked around in the dirt. Remnants of struts and hull plates crumbled. The little ship had broken up, sacrificing the last of its integrity to save us as it was designed to, and then it had broken up some more. There was nothing to salvage. We had the suits we wore, and nothing else.
L’Eesh was watching me. His augmented eyes were like steel balls in his head; when he blinked you could hear the whir of servomotors. “It doesn’t surprise you that your suit works, does it? Even here—it doesn’t occur to you to ask the question.”
I glared back, not wishing to give him any satisfaction.
He dug a weapon out of the scattered wreckage of the flitter; it looked like a starbreaker hand-gun. “This is a Ghost pit.” He crushed the gun like a dead leaf. “Stuff like this happens. Pits are pockets of spacetime where nothing works right, where you can’t rely on even the fundamental laws of physics and chemistry. But the Ghosts always arrange it so that living things are conserved—including us, and the little critters that live in our backpacks. You see? We know very little of how all this works. We don’t even know how they could tell what is alive. And all of this is engineered—remember that.”
I knew all this, of course. “You’re full of shit, L’Eesh.”
He grinned. His teeth had been replaced by a porcelain sheet. “Of course I am. Shit from battlefields a thousand years old.” He had an air of wealth, control, culture, arrogance; he was effortlessly superior to me. “Pohp may be able to see us. But she can’t speak to us, can’t reach us.” He took a deep breath, as if he could smell the air. “What now, Raida?”
There was one obvious place to go. “The bridge.”
“It must be a hundred kilometers away,” he said. “Our transportation options are limited—”
“Then we walk.”
He shrugged, dropped the remains of the gun. There was nothing to carry, nothing to be done with the remains of the flitter. Without preamble, he set off.
I followed. I’d sooner be watching L’Eesh’s back than the other way around.
Soon our lower suits were stained bright orange, as if we were transmuting into creatures of bone and dirt ourselves.
This trapped moon was too small for tectonic cycling. The land was old, eroded to dust, mountains and crater rims worn flat. Iron oxides made the ground and the air glow crimson. On the horizon, dust devils spun silently.
We saw no animals. I spotted tiny burrows and mounds in the dirt, perhaps made by insects. A kind of lichen clung to the larger rocks. Nothing moved, save us and the dust. Not even the sun: the “days” here lasted as long as an orbit of the moon around the Jovian, which was about ten standard days.
And over it all loomed the bridge. It rose lumpily from beyond the horizon. It looked crude—almost unfinished—but it became a thread that arrowed through the clouds, making the sky stretch into a third dimension.
And what a complex sky it was. The sister moon scowled down, scarred and bitter, and the Jovian primary loomed massively on the horizon, the corners of a great celestial triangle forever frozen in place.
The Spline ship rolled over the horizon, tracking its low orbit. It was like a moon itself, a mottled, meaty moon made grey by the dusty air. Even from here I could see the big green tetrahedron on its hull, the sigil of free humanity. The leathery hull-epidermis of the Spline was pocked with sensor arrays; we had spent a lot of money to ensure our capture of any wild Ghosts was recorded and certified, to preserve the value of the hides.
Everywhere you looked—every time you dug a trench with your toe—you found more bits of bone. Perhaps there had been a vast flood, I thought, that had washed up this vast assemblage of remains. Or perhaps there had been a drought, and this was a place where animals had gathered around the drying water holes, fighting to suck at the mud, while the predators watched.
Or maybe it was a battlefield.
As we walked, L’Eesh studied me, his inhuman eyes glistening. “It looks as if we are going to spend some time together.”
I didn’t reply.
“So. Tell me about yourself.”
“I’m not interested in playing head games with you, L’Eesh.”
“So defensive, little Raida! I did know your mother.”
“That doesn’t give you the right to know me.” I saw a chance to get the upper hand. “Listen to me, L’Eesh. I think I know what’s going on here … ”
Know your prey. This was my first pit, but I had prepared myself. The Ghosts seem to use only a small number of pit types—our flitter had been designed to cope with some of the common variants—and when Pohp sent us her cryptic message, I knew what she must have been talking about.
Vacuum energy: even in “empty” space there has to be an energy level, because of quantum uncertainty. What was important for us was the effect this had—and the effect of the Ghosts’ tinkering.
“Think of an atom,” I said. “Like a little solar system with the electrons as planets, right? But what keeps a negative electron out of the positive nucleus?”
“Vacuum energy?”
“Right. The electron, and everything else, is surrounded by a sea of vacuum energy. And as fast as the electron loses energy and tries to spiral in, the vacuum sea supplies some more. So the electron stays in orbit.” I peered up at the complicated sky. “Those weapons extracted some of the vacuum energy from the substance of our flitter. Or lowered its leveclass="underline" something like that. All the electrons spiraled in, and molecular structures fell apart.”
L’Eesh listened, his face unreadable.
Suddenly I felt naked.
I dug around among a thick patch of bones. I found a long, thin shaft that might have been a thigh-bone. I cracked it against a rock; it splintered, leaving a satisfactorily vicious point.
As we walked on I put myself through elementary drill routines.
The key resource you get from a Ghost is his hide—a perfectly reflective heat trap, with a thousand applications. Now that Ghosts are so rare, wild hides are a luxury item. People sell little squares and triangles of hide for use as charms, curios: this was, after all, a lucky species that survived the death of its sun, so the story goes.
Anyhow, if you come at a Ghost with a jabbing weapon, you should try to get your spear into the carcass along the spin axis, where the hide is a little thinner, and you won’t rip it unnecessarily. Ghosts don’t leave spoor, my mother used to say. So you have to cut him an asshole. You just follow the trail of excrement and blood and heat until he dies, which might take a day or two.
L’Eesh was watching me analytically. “You’re, what, twenty, twenty-one? No children yet?”
“Not until I can buy them out of the Coalition draft.”
He nodded. “As Hily did you. I knew her ambition for you. It’s good to see it realized so well. It must have been hard for you when she died. I imagine you got thrown into a cadre by the Commissaries—right?”
“I won’t talk to you about my mother, L’Eesh.”
“As you wish. But here and now you need to keep your mind clear, little Raida. And you might want to think about saving your energy. We have a long way to go.”
I worked with my bone spear and tried to ignore him.
We had to sleep in our suits, of course. I dug a shallow trench in the dust. I couldn’t shut out the crimson light. I slept in patches.