to solar power collectors. It is a place of tunnels and warrens, where kids compete with the rats.
“And that’s why you joined up? To get away?”
“I was drafted.”
“Come on,” she scoffed. “On a place like Mercury there are ways to hide. Are you a romantic, tar? You wanted to see the stars?”
“No,” I said bluntly. “Life is more useful here.”
She studied me. “A brief life should burn brightly-eh, tar?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I came from Deneb,” she said. “Do you know it?”
“No.”
“Sixteen hundred light years from Earth-a system settled some four centuries after the start of the Third Expansion. It is quite different from the solar system. It is-organized. By the time the first ships reached Deneb, the mechanics of exploitation had become efficient. From preliminary exploration to working shipyards and daughter colonies in less than a century…Deneb’s resources-its planets and asteroids and comets, even the star itself-have been mined to fund fresh colonizing waves, the greater Expansion-and, of course, to support the war with the Ghosts.”
She swept her hand over the sky. “Think of it, tar. The Third Expansion: between here and Sol, across six thousand light years-nothing but mankind, the fruit of a thousand years of world-building. And all of it linked by economics. Older systems like Deneb, their resources spent-even the solar system itself-are supported by a flow of goods and materials inward from the growing periphery of the Expansion. There are trade lanes spanning thousands of light years, lanes that never leave human territory, plied by vast schooners kilometers wide. But now the Ghosts are in our way. Andthat’s what we’re fighting for!”
“Yes, sir.”
She eyed me. “You ready to go on?”
“Yes.”
We began to make our way forward again, just under the tangle, still following patrol SOP.
I was glad to be moving again. I’ve never been comfortable talking personally-and for sure not with a Commissary. But I suppose even Commissaries need to talk.
Jeru spotted a file of the Ghosts moving in a crocodile, like so many school children, toward the head of the ship. It was the most purposeful activity we’d seen so far, so we followed them.
After a couple of hundred meters the Ghosts began to duck down into the tangle, out of our sight. We followed them in.
Maybe fifty meters deep, we came to a large enclosed chamber, a smooth bean-shaped pod that would have been big enough to enclose our yacht. The surface appeared to be semi-transparent, perhaps designed to let in sunlight. I could see shadowy shapes moving within.
Ghosts were clustered around the pod’s hull, brushing its surface.
Jeru beckoned, and we worked our way through the tangle toward the far end of the pod, where the density of the Ghosts seemed to be lowest.
We slithered to the surface of the pod. There were sucker pads on our palms and toes to help us grip.
We began crawling along the length of the pod, ducking flat when we saw Ghosts loom into view. It was like climbing over a glass ceiling.
The pod was pressurized. At one end of the pod a big ball of mud hung in the air, brown and viscous. It seemed to be heated from within; it was slowly boiling, with big sticky bubbles of vapor crowding its surface, and I saw how it was laced with purple and red smears. There is no convection in zero gravity, of course. Maybe the Ghosts were using pumps to drive the flow of vapor.
Tubes led off from the mud ball to the hull of the pod. Ghosts clustered there, sucking up the purple gunk from the mud.
We figured it out in bioluminescent “whispers.” The Ghosts werefeeding. Their home world is too small to have retained much internal warmth, but, deep beneath their frozen oceans or in the dark of their rocks, a little primordial geotherm heat must leak out still, driving fountains of minerals dragged up from the depths. And, as at the bottom of Earth’s oceans, on those minerals and the slow leak of heat, life-forms feed. And the Ghosts feed onthem.
So this mud ball was a field kitchen. I peered down at purplish slime, a gourmet meal for Ghosts, and I didn’t envy them.
There was nothing for us here. Jeru beckoned me again, and we slithered further forward.
The next section of the pod was…strange.
It was a chamber full of sparkling, silvery saucer-shapes, like smaller, flattened out Ghosts, perhaps.
They fizzed through the air or crawled over each other or jammed themselves together into great wadded balls that would hold for a few seconds and then collapse, their component parts squirming off for some new adventure elsewhere. I could see there were feeding tubes on the walls, and one or two Ghosts drifted among the saucer things, like an adult in a yard of squabbling children.
There was a subtle shadow before me.
I looked up, and found myself staring at my own reflection-an angled head, an open mouth, a sprawled body- folded over, fish-eye style, just centimeters from my nose.
It was a Ghost. It bobbed massively before me.
I pushed myself away from the hull, slowly. I grabbed hold of the nearest tangle branch with my good hand. I knew I couldn’t reach for my knife, which was tucked into my belt at my back. And I couldn’t see Jeru anywhere. It might be that the Ghosts had taken her already. Either way I couldn’t call her, or even look for her, for fear of giving her away.
The Ghost had a heavy-looking belt wrapped around its equator. I had to assume that those complex knots of equipment were weapons. Aside from its belt, the Ghost was quite featureless: it might have been stationary, or spinning at a hundred revolutions a minute. I stared at its hide, trying to understand that there was a layer in there like a separate universe, where the laws of physics had been tweaked. But all I could see was my own scared face looking back at me.
And then Jeru fell on the Ghost from above, limbs splayed, knives glinting in both hands. I could see she was yelling-mouth open, eyes wide-but she fell in utter silence, her comms disabled.
Flexing her body like a whip, she rammed both knives into the Ghost’s hide-if I took that belt to be its equator, somewhere near its north pole. The Ghost pulsated, complex ripples chasing across its surface.
But Jeru did a handstand and reached up with her legs to the tangle above, and anchored herself there.
The Ghost began to spin, trying to throw Jeru off. But she held her grip on the tangle, and kept the knives thrust in its hide, and all the Ghost succeeded in doing was opening up twin gashes, right across its upper section. Steam pulsed out, and I glimpsed redness within.
For long seconds I just hung there, frozen.
You’re trained to mount the proper reaction to an enemy assault. But it all vaporizes when you’re faced with a ton of spinning, pulsing monster, and you’re armed with nothing but a knife. You just want to make yourself as small as possible; maybe it will all go away. But in the end you know it won’t, that something has to be done.
So I pulled out my own knife and launched myself at that north pole area.
I started to make cross-cuts between Jeru’s gashes. Ghost skin is tough, like thick rubber, but easy to cut if you have the anchorage. Soon I had loosened flaps and lids of skin, and I started pulling them away, exposing a deep redness within. Steam gushed out, sparkling to ice.
Jeru let go of her perch and joined me. We clung with our fingers and hands to the gashes we’d made, and we cut and slashed and dug; though the Ghost spun crazily, it couldn’t shake us loose. Soon we were hauling out great warm mounds of meat-ropes like entrails, pulsing slabs like a human’s liver or heart. At first ice crystals spurted all around us, but as the Ghost lost the heat it had hoarded all its life, that thin wind died, and frost began to gather on the cut and torn flesh.
At last Jeru pushed my shoulder, and we both drifted away from the Ghost. It was still spinning, but I could see that the spin was nothing but dead momentum; the Ghost had lost its heat, and its life.
Jeru and I faced each other.
I said breathlessly, “I never heard of anyone in hand-to-hand with a Ghost before.”
