“Neither did I. Lethe,” she said, inspecting her hand. “I think I cracked a finger.”
It wasn’t funny. But Jeru stared at me, and I stared back, and then we both started to laugh, and our slime suits pulsed with pink and blue icons.
“He stood his ground,” I said.
“Yes. Maybe he thought we were threatening the nursery.”
“The place with the silver saucers?”
She looked at me quizzically. “Ghosts are symbiotes, tar. That looked to me like a nursery for Ghost hides. Independent entities.”
I had never thought of Ghosts having young. I had not thought of the Ghost we had killed as a mother protecting its young. I’m not a deep thinker now, and wasn’t then; but it was not, for me, a comfortable thought.
But then Jeru started to move. “Come on, tar. Back to work.” She anchored her legs in the tangle and began to grab at the still-rotating Ghost carcass, trying to slow its spin.
I anchored likewise and began to help her. The Ghost was massive, the size of a major piece of machinery, and it had built up respectable momentum; at first I couldn’t grab hold of the skin flaps that spun past my hand. As we labored I became aware I was getting uncomfortably hot. The light that seeped into the tangle from that caged sun seemed to be getting stronger by the minute.
But as we worked those uneasy thoughts soon dissipated.
At last we got the Ghost under control. Briskly Jeru stripped it of its kit belt, and we began to cram the baggy corpse as deep as we could into the surrounding tangle. It was a grisly job. As the Ghost crumpled further, more of its innards, stiffening now, came pushing out of the holes we’d given it in its hide, and I had to keep from gagging as the foul stuff came pushing out into my face.
At last it was done-as best we could manage it, anyhow.
Jeru’s faceplate was smeared with black and red. She was sweating hard, her face pink. But she was grinning, and she had a trophy, the Ghost belt around her shoulders. We began to make our way back, following the same SOP as before.
When we got back to our lying-up point, we found Academician Pael was in trouble.
Pael had curled up in a ball, his hands over his face. We pulled him open. His eyes were closed, his face blotched pink, and his faceplate dripped with condensation.
He was surrounded by gadgets stuck in the tangle-including parts from what looked like a broken-open starbreaker handgun; I recognized prisms and mirrors and diffraction gratings. Well, unless he woke up, he wouldn’t be able to tell us what he had been doing here.
Jeru glanced around. The light of the fortress’s central star had gotten alot stronger. Our lying-up point was now bathed in light-and heat-with the surrounding tangle offering very little shelter. “Any ideas, tar?”
I felt the exhilaration of our infil drain away. “No, sir.”
Jeru’s face, bathed in sweat, showed tension. I noticed she was favoring her left hand. She’d mentioned, back at the nursery pod, that she’d cracked a finger, but had said nothing about it since-nor did she give it any time now. “All right.” She dumped the Ghost equipment belt and took a deep draft of water from her hood spigot. “Tar, you’re on stag. Try to keep Pael in the shade of your body. And if he wakes up,ask him what he’s found out.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.”
And then she was gone, melting into the complex shadows of the tangle as if she’d been born to these conditions.
I found a place where I could keep up 360-degree vision, and offer a little of my shadow to Pael-not that I imagined it helped much.
I had nothing to do but wait.
As the Ghost ship followed its own mysterious course, the light dapples that came filtering through the tangle shifted and evolved. Clinging to the tangle, I thought I could feel vibration: a slow, deep harmonization that pulsed through the ship’s giant structure. I wondered if I was hearing the deep voices of Ghosts, calling to each other from one end of their mighty ship to another. It all served to remind me that everything in my environment,everything, was alien, and I was very far from home.
I tried to count my heartbeat, my breaths; I tried to figure out how long a second was. “A thousand and one. A thousand and two…” Keeping time is a basic human trait; time provides a basic orientation, and keeps you mentally sharp and in touch with reality. But I kept losing count.
And all my efforts failed to stop darker thoughts creeping into my head.
During a drama like the contact with the Ghost, you don’t realize what’s happening to you because your body blanks it out; on some level you know you just don’t have time to deal with it. Now I had stopped moving, the aches and pains of the last few hours started crowding in on me. I was still sore in my head and back and, of course, my busted arm. I could feel deep bruises, maybe cuts, on my gloved hands where I had hauled at my knife, and I felt as if I had wrenched my good shoulder. One of my toes was throbbing ominously: I wondered if I had cracked another bone, here in this weird environment in which my skeleton had become as brittle as an old man’s. I was chafed at my groin and armpits and knees and ankles and elbows, my skin rubbed raw. I was used to suits; normally I’m tougher than that.
The shafts of sunlight on my back were working on me too; it felt as if I was lying underneath the elements of an oven. I had a headache, a deep sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, a ringing in my ears, and a persistent ring of blackness around my eyes. Maybe I was just exhausted, dehydrated; maybe it was more than that.
I started to think back over my operation with Jeru, and the regrets began.
Okay, I’d stood my ground when confronted by the Ghost and not betrayed Jeru’s position. But when she launched her attack I’d hesitated, for those crucial few seconds. Maybe if I’d been tougher the commissary wouldn’t find herself hauling through the tangle, alone, with a busted finger distracting her with pain signals.
Our training is comprehensive. You’re taught to expect that kind of hindsight torture, in the quiet moments, and to discount it-or, better yet, learn from it. But, effectively alone in that metallic alien forest, I wasn’t finding my training was offering much perspective.
And, worse, I started to think ahead. Always a mistake.
I couldn’t believe that the Academician and his reluctant gadgetry were going to achieve anything significant. And for all the excitement of our infil, we hadn’t found anything resembling a bridge or any vulnerable point we could attack, and all we’d come back with was a belt of field kit we didn’t even understand.
For the first time I began to consider seriously the possibility that I wasn’t going to live through this-that I was going to die when my suit gave up or the sun went pop, whichever came first, in no more than a few hours.
A brief life burns brightly. That’s what you’re taught. Longevity makes you conservative, fearful, selfish.
Humans made that mistake before, and we finished up a subject race. Live fast and furiously, foryou aren’t important-all that matters is what you can do for the species.
But I didn’t want to die.
If I never returned to Mercury again I wouldn’t shed a tear. But I had a life now, in the Navy. And then there were my buddies: the people I’d trained and served with, people like Halle-even Jeru. Having found fellowship for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to lose it so quickly, and fall into the darkness alone-especially if it was to be fornothing.
But maybe I wasn’t going to get a choice.
After an unmeasured time, Jeru returned. She was hauling a silvery blanket. It was Ghost hide. She started to shake it out.
I dropped down to help her. “You went back to the one we killed-”
“-and skinned him,” she said, breathless. “I just scraped off the crap with a knife. The Planck-zero layer peels away easily. And look…” she made a quick incision in the glimmering sheet with her knife.
Then she put the two edges together again, ran her finger along the seam, and showed me the result. I couldn’t even see where the cut had been. “Self-sealing, self-healing,” she said. “Remember that, tar.”
“Yes, sir.”
We started to rig the punctured, splayed-out hide as a rough canopy over our LUP, blocking as much of the sunlight as possible from Pael. A few slivers of frozen flesh still clung to the hide, but mostly it was like working with a fine, light metallic foil.
