symbols. And then, scratchily, his voice started to come through. “…Five, six, seven-can you hear me, tar?”

“Yes, sir.”

The symbols were bioluminescent. There were receptors on all our suits-photoreceptors, simple eyes-which could “read” the messages scrawled on our companions’ suits. It was a backup system meant for use in environments where anything higher-tech would be a liability. But obviously it would only work as long as we were in line of sight.

“That will make life harder,” Jeru said. Oddly, mediated by software, she was easier to understand.

Till shrugged. “You take it as it comes.” Briskly, he began to hand out more gear. “These are basic field belt kits. There’s some medical stuff: a suture kit, scalpel blades, blood-giving sets. You wear these syrettes around your neck, Academician. They contain painkillers, various gen-enged med-viruses…no, you wear itoutside your suit, Pael, so you can reach it. You’ll find valve inlets here, on your sleeve, and here, on the leg.” Now came weapons. “We should carry handguns, just in case they start working, but be ready with these.” He handed out combat knives.

Pael shrank back.

“Take the knife, Academician. You can shave off that ugly beard, if nothing else.”

I laughed out loud, and was rewarded with a wink from Till.

I took a knife. It was a heavy chunk of steel, solid and reassuring. I tucked it in my belt. I was starting to feel a whole lot better.

“Two minutes to impact,” Jeru said. I didn’t have a working chronometer; she must have been counting the seconds.

“Seal up.” Till began to check the integrity of Pael’s suit; Jeru and I helped each other. Face seal, glove seal, boot seal, pressure check. Water check, oh-two flow, cee-oh-two scrub…

When we were sealed I risked poking my head above Till’s chair.

The Ghost ship filled space. The craft was kilometers across, big enough to have dwarfed the poor, doomedBrief Life Burns Brightly. It was a tangle of silvery rope of depthless complexity, occluding the stars and the warring fleets. Bulky equipment pods were suspended in the tangle.

And everywhere there were Silver Ghosts, sliding like beads of mercury. I could see how the yacht’s emergency lights were returning crimson highlights from the featureless hides of Ghosts, so they looked like sprays of blood droplets across that shining perfection.

“Ten seconds,” Till called. “Brace.”

Suddenly silver ropes thick as tree trunks were all around us, looming out of the sky.

And we were thrown into chaos again.

I heard a grind of twisted metal, a scream of air. The hull popped open like an eggshell. The last of our air fled in a gush of ice crystals, and the only sound I could hear was my own breathing.

The crumpling hull soaked up some of our momentum.

But then the base of the yacht hit, and it hit hard.

The chair was wrenched out of my grasp, and I was hurled upward. There was a sudden pain in my left arm. I couldn’t help but cry out.

I reached the limit of my tether and rebounded. The jolt sent further waves of pain through my arm. From up there, I could see the others were clustered around the base of the First Officer’s chair, which had collapsed.

I looked up. We had stuck like a dart in the outer layers of the Ghost ship. There were shining threads arcing all around us, as if a huge net had scooped us up.

Jeru grabbed me and pulled me down. She jarred my bad arm, and I winced.

But she ignored me, and went back to working on Till. He was under the fallen chair.

Pael started to take a syrette of dope from the sachet around his neck.

Jeru knocked his hand away. “You always use the casualty’s,” she hissed. “Never your own.”

Pael looked hurt, rebuffed. “Why?”

I could answer that. “Because the chances are you’ll need your own in a minute.”

Jeru stabbed a syrette into Till’s arm.

Pael was staring at me through his faceplate with wide, frightened eyes. “You’ve broken your arm.”

Looking closely at the arm for the first time, I saw that it was bent back at an impossible angle. I couldn’t believe it, even through the pain. I’d never bust so much as a finger, all the way through training.

Now Till jerked, a kind of miniature convulsion, and a big bubble of spit and blood blew out of his lips.

Then the bubble popped, and his limbs went loose.

Jeru sat back, breathing hard. She said, “Okay. Okay. How did he put it?-You take it as it comes.”

She looked around, at me, Pael. I could see she was trembling, which scared me. She said, “Now we move. We have to find an LUP. A lying-up point, Academician. A place to hole up.”

I said, “The First Officer-”

“Is dead.” She glanced at Pael. “Now it’s just the three of us. We won’t be able to avoid each other anymore, Pael.”

Pael stared back, eyes empty.

Jeru looked at me, and for a second her expression softened. “A broken neck. Till broke his neck, tar.”

Another death, just like that: just for a heartbeat that was too much for me.

Jeru said briskly, “Do your duty, tar. Help the worm.”

I snapped back. “Yes, sir.” I grabbed Pael’s unresisting arm.

Led by Jeru, we began to move, the three of us, away from the crumpled wreck of our yacht, deep into the alien tangle of a Silver Ghost cruiser.

We found our LUP.

It was just a hollow in a somewhat denser tangle of silvery ropes, but it afforded us some cover, and it seemed to be away from the main concentration of Ghosts. We were still open to the vacuum-as the whole cruiser seemed to be-and I realized then that I wouldn’t be getting out of this suit for a while.

As soon as we picked the LUP, Jeru made us take up positions in an all-around defense, covering a 360-degree arc.

Then we did nothing, absolutely nothing, for ten minutes.

It was SOP, standard operating procedure, and I was impressed. You’ve just come out of all the chaos of the destruction of theBrightly and the crash of the yacht, a frenzy of activity. Now you have to give your body a chance to adjust to the new environment, to the sounds and smells and sights.

Only here, there was nothing to smell but my own sweat and piss, nothing to hear but my ragged breathing. And my arm was hurting like hell.

To occupy my mind I concentrated on getting my night vision working. Your eyes take a while to adjust to the darkness-forty-five minutes before they are fully effective-but you are already seeing better after five. I could see stars through the chinks in the wiry metallic brush around me, the flares of distant novae, and the reassuring lights of our fleet. But a Ghost ship is a dark place, a mess of shadows and smeared-out reflections. It was going to be easy to get spooked here.

When the ten minutes were done, Academician Pael started bleating, but Jeru ignored him and came straight over to me. She got hold of my busted arm and started to feel the bone. “So,” she said briskly.

“What’s your name, tar?”

“Case, sir.”

“What do you think of your new quarters?”

“Where do I eat?”

She grinned. “Turn off your comms,” she said.

I complied.

Without warning she pulled my arm, hard. I was glad she couldn’t hear how I howled.

She pulled a canister out of her belt and squirted gunk over my arm; it was semi-sentient and snuggled into place, setting as a hard cast around my injury. When I was healed the cast would fall away of its own accord.

She motioned me to turn on my comms again, and held up a syrette.

“I don’t need that.”

“Don’t be brave, tar. It will help your bones knit.”

“Sir, there’s a rumor that stuff makes you impotent.” I felt stupid even as I said it.

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