“And that’s why our equipment failed.”
“Presumably,” said Pael, with cold sarcasm.
I asked, “What do the Ghosts want? Why do they do all this stuff?”
Pael studied me. “You are trained to kill them, and they don’t even tell you that?”
Jeru just glowered.
Pael said, “The Ghosts were not shaped by competitive evolution. They are symbiotic creatures; they derive from life-forms that huddled into cooperative collectives as their world turned cold. And they seem to be motivated-not by expansion and the acquisition of territory for its own sake, as we are-but by a desire to understand the fine-tuning of the universe.Why are we here? You see, young tar, there is only a narrow range of the constants of physics within which life ofany sort is possible. We think the Ghosts are studying this question by pushing at the boundaries-by tinkering with the laws that sustain and contain us all.”
Jeru said, “An enemy who can deploy the laws of physics as a weapon is formidable. But in the long run, we will out-compete the Ghosts.”
Pael said bleakly, “Ah, the evolutionary destiny of mankind. How dismal. But we lived in peace with the Ghosts, under the Raoul Accords, for a thousand years. We are so different, with disparate motivations-why should there be a clash, anymore than between two species of birds in the same garden?”
I’d never seen birds, or a garden, so that passed me by.
Jeru glared. She said at last, “Let’s return to practicalities.How do their fortresses work?” When Pael didn’t reply, she snapped, “Academician, you’ve beeninside a fortress cordon for an hour already and you haven’t made a single fresh observation?”
Acidly, Pael demanded, “What would you have me do?”
Jeru nodded at me. “What haveyou seen, tar?”
“Our instruments and weapons don’t work,” I said promptly. “TheBrightly exploded. I broke my arm.”
Jeru said, “Till snapped his neck also.” She flexed her hand within her glove. “What would make our bones more brittle? Anything else?”
I shrugged.
Pael admitted, “I do feel somewhat warm.”
Jeru asked, “Could these body changes be relevant?”
“I don’t see how.”
“Then figure it out.”
“I have no equipment.”
Jeru dumped spare gear-weapons, beacons-in his lap. “You have your eyes, your hands and your mind. Improvise.” She turned to me. “As for you, tar, let’s do a little infil. We still need to find a way off this scow.”
I glanced doubtfully at Pael. “There’s nobody to stand on stag.”
Jeru said, “I know. But there are only three of us.” She grasped Pael’s shoulder, hard. “Keep your eyes open, Academician. We’ll come back the same way we left. So you’ll know it’s us. Do you understand?”
Pael shrugged her away, focusing on the gadgets on his lap.
I looked at him doubtfully. It seemed to me a whole platoon of Ghosts could have come down on him without his even noticing. But Jeru was right; there was nothing more we could do.
She studied me, fingered my arm. “You up to this?”
“I’m fine, sir.”
“You are lucky. A good war comes along once in a lifetime. And this is your war, tar.”
That sounded like parade-ground pep talk, and I responded in kind. “Can I have your rations, sir? You won’t be needing them soon.” I mimed digging a grave.
She grinned back fiercely. “Yeah. When your turn comes, slit your suit and let the farts out before I take it off your stiffening corpse-”
Pael’s voice was trembling. “You really are monsters.”
I shared a glance with Jeru. But we shut up, for fear of upsetting the earthworm further.
I grasped my fighting knife, and we slid away into the dark.
What we were hoping to find was some equivalent of a bridge. Even if we succeeded, I couldn’t imagine what we’d do next. Anyhow, we had to try.
We slid through the tangle. Ghost cable stuff is tough, even to a knife blade. But it is reasonably flexible; you can just push it aside if you get stuck, although we tried to avoid doing that for fear of leaving a sign.
We used standard patrolling SOP, adapted for the circumstance. We would move for ten or fifteen minutes, clambering through the tangle, and then take a break for five minutes. I’d sip water-I was getting hot-and maybe nibble on a glucose tab, check on my arm, and pull the suit around me to get comfortable again. It’s the way to do it. If you just push yourself on and on you run down your reserves and end up in no fit state to achieve the goal anyhow.
And all the while I was trying to keep up my all-around awareness, protecting my dark adaptation, and making appreciations. How far away is Jeru? What if an attack comes from in front, behind, above, below, left or right? Where can I find cover?
I began to build up an impression of the Ghost cruiser. It was a rough egg-shape, a couple of kilometers long, and basically a mass of the anonymous silvery cable. There were chambers and platforms and instruments stuck as if at random into the tangle, like food fragments in an old man’s beard. I guess it makes for a flexible, easily modified configuration. Where the tangle was a little less thick, I glimpsed a more substantial core, a cylinder running along the axis of the craft. Perhaps it was the drive unit. I wondered if it was functioning; perhaps the Ghost equipment was designed to adapt to the changed conditions inside the fortress cordon.
There were Ghosts all over the craft.
They drifted over and through the tangle, following pathways invisible to us. Or they would cluster in little knots on the tangle. We couldn’t tell what they were doing or saying. To human eyes a Silver Ghost is just a silvery sphere, visible only by reflection like a hole cut out of space, and without specialist equipment it is impossible even to tell one from another.
We kept out of sight. But I was sure the Ghosts must have spotted us, or were at least tracking our movements. After all we’d crash-landed in their ship. But they made no overt moves toward us.
We reached the outer hull, the place the cabling ran out, and dug back into the tangle a little way to stay out of sight.
I got an unimpeded view of the stars.
Still those nova firecrackers went off all over the sky; still those young stars glared like lanterns. It seemed to me the fortress’s central, enclosed star looked a little brighter, hotter than it had been. I made a mental note to report that to the Academician.
But the most striking sight was the fleet.
Over a volume light-months wide, countless craft slid silently across the sky. They were organized in a complex network of corridors filling three-dimensional space: rivers of light gushed this way and that, their different colors denoting different classes and sizes of vessel. And, here and there, denser knots of color and light sparked, irregular flares in the orderly flows. They were places where human ships were engaging the enemy, places where people were fighting and dying.
It was a magnificent sight. But it was a big, empty sky, and the nearest sun was that eerie dwarf enclosed in its spooky blue net, a long way away, and there was movement in three dimensions, above me, below me, all around me…
I found the fingers of my good hand had locked themselves around a sliver of the tangle.
Jeru grabbed my wrist and shook my arm until I was able to let go. She kept hold of my arm, her eyes locked on mine.I have you. You won’t fall. Then she pulled me into a dense knot of the tangle, shutting out the sky.
She huddled close to me, so the bio lights of our suits wouldn’t show far. Her eyes were pale blue, like windows. “You aren’t used to being outside, are you, tar?”
“I’m sorry, Commissary. I’ve been trained-”
“You’re still human. We all have weak points. The trick is to know them and allow for them. Where are you from?”
I managed a grin. “Mercury. Caloris Planitia.” Mercury is a ball of iron at the bottom of the sun’s gravity well. It is an iron mine, and an exotic matter factory, with a sun like a lid hanging over it. Most of the surface is given over
