Pael said, watching me, “You see, child, as long as the explorers and the mining fleets and the colony ships are pushing outward, as long as the Third Expansion is growing, our economy works. The riches can continue to flow inward, into the mined-out systems, feeding a vast horde of humanity who have become more populous than the stars themselves. But as soon as that growth falters…”
Jeru was silent.
I understood some of this. The Third Expansion had reached all the way to the inner edge of our spiral arm of the galaxy. Now the first colony ships were attempting to make their way across the void to the next arm.
Ourarm, the Orion Arm, is really just a shingle, a short arc. But the Sagittarius Arm is one of the galaxy’s dominant features. For example, it contains a huge region of star-birth, one of the largest in the galaxy, immense clouds of gas and dust capable of producing millions of stars each. It was a prize indeed.
But that is where the Silver Ghosts live.
When it appeared that our inexorable expansion was threatening not just their own mysterious projects but their home system, the Ghosts began, for the first time, to resist us.
They had formed a blockade, called by human strategists the Orion Line: a thick sheet of fortress stars, right across the inner edge of the Orion Arm, places the Navy and the colony ships couldn’t follow. It was a devastatingly effective ploy.
This was a war of colonization, of world-building. For a thousand years we had been spreading steadily from star to star, using the resources of one system to explore, terra form and populate the worlds of the next. With too deep a break in that chain of exploitation, the enterprise broke down.
And so the Ghosts had been able to hold up human expansion for fifty years.
Pael said, “We are already choking. There have already been wars, young Case: human fighting human, as the inner systems starve. All the Ghosts have to do is wait for us to destroy ourselves, and free them to continue their own rather more worthy projects.”
Jeru floated down before him. “Academician, listen to me. Growing up at Deneb, I saw the great schooners in the sky, bringing the interstellar riches that kept my people alive. I was intelligent enough to see the logic of history-that we must maintain the Expansion,because there is no choice. And that is why I joined the armed forces, and later the Commission for Historical Truth. For I understood the dreadful truth which the Commission cradles. And that is why we must labor every day to maintain the unity and purpose of mankind. For if we falter we die; as simple as that.”
“Commissary, your creed of mankind’s evolutionary destiny condemns our own kind to become a swarm of children, granted a few moments of loving and breeding and dying, before being cast into futile war.”
Pael glanced at me.
“But,” Jeru said, “it is a creed that has bound us together for a thousand years. It is a creed that binds uncounted trillions of human beings across thousands of light years. It is a creed that binds a humanity so diverse it appears to be undergoing speciation…Are you strong enough to defy such a creed now?
Come, Academician. None of uschooses to be born in the middle of a war. We must all do our best for each other, for other human beings; what else is there?”
I touched Pael’s shoulder; he flinched away. “Academician-is Jeru right? Is there a way we can live through this?”
Pael shuddered. Jeru hovered over him.
“Yes,” Pael said at last. “Yes, there is a way.”
The idea turned out to be simple.
And the plan Jeru and I devised to implement it was even simpler. It was based on a single assumption:
Ghosts aren’t aggressive. It was ugly, I’ll admit that, and I could see why it would distress a squeamish earthworm like Pael. But sometimes there are no good choices.
Jeru and I took a few minutes to rest up, check over our suits and our various injuries, and to make ourselves comfortable. Then, following patrol SOP once more, we made our way back to the pod of immature hides.
We came out of the tangle and drifted down to that translucent hull. We tried to keep away from concentrations of Ghosts, but we made no real effort to conceal ourselves. There was little point, after all; the Ghosts would know all about us, and what we intended, soon enough.
We hammered pitons into the pliable hull, and fixed rope to anchor ourselves. Then we took our knives and started to saw our way through the hull.
As soon as we started, the Ghosts began to gather around us, like vast antibodies.
They just hovered there, eerie faceless baubles drifting as if in vacuum breezes. But as I stared up at a dozen distorted reflections of my own skinny face, I felt an unreasonable loathing rise up in me. Maybe you could think of them as a family banding together to protect their young. I didn’t care; a lifetime’s carefully designed hatred isn’t thrown off so easily. I went at my work with a will.
Jeru got through the pod hull first.
The air gushed out in a fast-condensing fountain. The baby hides fluttered, their distress obvious. And the Ghosts began to cluster around Jeru, like huge light globes.
Jeru glanced at me. “Keep working, tar.”
“Yes, sir.”
In another couple of minutes I was through. The air pressure was already dropping. It dwindled to nothing when we cut a big door-sized flap in that roof. Anchoring ourselves with the ropes, we rolled that lid back, opening the roof wide. A few last wisps of vapor came curling around our heads, ice fragments sparkling.
The hide babies convulsed. Immature, they could not survive the sudden vacuum, intended as their ultimate environment. But the way they died made it easy for us.
The silvery hides came flapping up out of the hole in the roof, one by one. We just grabbed each one-like grabbing hold of a billowing sheet-and we speared it with a knife, and threaded it on a length of rope. All we had to do was sit there and wait for them to come. There were hundreds of them, and we were kept busy.
I hadn’t expected the adult Ghosts to sit through that, non-aggressive or not; and I was proved right.
Soon they were clustering all around me, vast silvery bellies looming. A Ghost is massive and solid, and it packs a lot of inertia; if one hits you in the back you know about it. Soon they were nudging me hard enough to knock me flat against the roof, over and over. Once I was wrenched so hard against my tethering rope it felt as if I had cracked another bone or two in my foot.
And, meanwhile, I was starting to feel a lot worse: dizzy, nauseous, overheated. It was getting harder to get back upright each time after being knocked down. I was growing weaker fast; I imagined the tiny molecules of my body falling apart in this Ghost-polluted space.
For the first time I began to believe we were going to fail.
But then, quite suddenly, the Ghosts backed off. When they were clear of me, I saw they were clustering around Jeru.
She was standing on the hull, her feet tangled up in rope, and she had knives in both hands. She was slashing crazily at the Ghosts, and at the baby hides that came flapping past her, making no attempt to capture them now, simply cutting and destroying whatever she could reach. I could see that one arm was hanging awkwardly-maybe it was dislocated, or even broken-but she kept on slicing regardless.
And the Ghosts were clustering around her, huge silver spheres crushing her frail, battling human form.
She was sacrificing herself to save me-just as Captain Teid, in the last moments of theBrightly, had given herself to save Pael. Andmy duty was to complete the job.
I stabbed and threaded, over and over, as the flimsy hides came tumbling out of that hole, slowly dying.
At last no more hides came.
I looked up, blinking to get the salt sweat out of my eyes. A few hides were still tumbling around the interior of the pod, but they were inert and out of my reach. Others had evaded us and gotten stuck in the tangle of the ship’s structure, too far and too scattered to make them worth pursuing further. What I had got would have to suffice.
I started to make my way out of there, back through the tangle, to the location of our wrecked yacht, where I hoped Pael would be waiting.
I looked back once. I couldn’t help it. The Ghosts were still clustered over the ripped pod roof.
Somewhere in there, whatever was left of Jeru was still fighting.
I had an impulse, almost overpowering, to go back to her. No human being should die alone. But I knew I had
