The needleship Spear of Orion dropped out of hyperspace. Its tetrahedral Free Earth sigils shone brightly, its weapons ports were open, and its crew were ready to do their duty.
Pilot Officer Hex glanced around the sky, assessing the situation.
She was deep in the Sagittarius Spiral Arm, a place where stars crowded, hot and young. One star was close enough to show a disc, the sun of this system. And there was the green planet she had been sent here to defend. Labeled 147B by the mission planners, this was a terraformed world, a human settlement thrust deep into Silver Ghost territory. But the planet’s face was scarred by fire, immense ships clustered to evacuate the population—and needleships like her own popped into existence everywhere, Aleph Force swimming out of hyperspace like a shoal of fish. This was a battlefield.
All this in a heartbeat. Then the Silver Ghosts attacked.
“Palette at theta ten degrees, phi fifty!” That was gunner Borno’s voice, coming from the port blister, one of three dotted around the slim waist of the Spear.
Hex, in her own cramped pilot’s blister at the very tip of the needleship, glanced to her left and immediately found the enemy. Needleship crews were warriors in three-dimensional battlefields; translating positional data from one set of spherical coordinates to another was drummed into you before you were five years old.
Borno had found a Ghost intrasystem cruiser, the new kind—a “palette” as the analysts were calling them. It was a flat sheet with its Ghost crew sitting in pits in the top surface like blobs of mercury. The ship looked a little like a painter’s palette, hence the nickname. But palettes were fast, maneuverable and deadly, much more effective in battle than the classic tangled-rope Ghost ships of the past. And just seconds after she came down from hyperspace, this palette was screaming down on Hex, energy weapons firing.
Hex felt her senses come alive, her heartbeat slow to a resolute thump. One of her instructors once said she had been born to end Ghost lives on battlefields. At moments like this, that was how it felt. Hex was twenty years old.
She hauled on her joystick. The needleship swung like a compass needle and hurled itself directly at the Ghost palette. As weapons on both ships fired, the space between them filled with light.
“About time, pilot,” Borno said. “My fingers were getting itchy.”
“All right, all right,” Hex snapped back. Gunner Borno, of all the needleship crew she had ever met, had the deepest, most visceral hatred of the Ghosts and all their works. “Just take that thing down before we collide.”
But no lethal blow was struck, and as the distance between the ships closed, uneasiness knotted in Hex’s stomach.
She thumbed a control to give her a magnified view of the palette’s upper surface. She heard her crew murmur in surprise. These Ghosts weren’t the usual silver spheres. They had sharp edges; they were cubes, pyramids, dodecahedrons—even a tetrahedron, as if mocking the ancient symbol of Earth. And they showed no inclination to run away. These were a new breed of Ghost, she realized.
The Spear shuddered. For an instant the Virtual displays clustered around her fritzed, before her systems rebooted and recovered.
“Jul, what was that? Did we take a hit?”
Jul was the ship’s engineer, young, bright, capable—and a good pilot before her lower body was cut away by a lucky strike from a dying Ghost. “Pilot, we ran through g-waves.”
“Gravity waves? From a starbreaker?”
“No,” called navigator Hella, the last of the Spear’s four crew. “Too long-wavelength for that. And too powerful. Pilot, this space is full of g-waves. That’s how the Ghosts are hitting the planet.”
“Where are they coming from?”
“The scouts can’t find a source.”
“New weapons, new ships, new tactics,” Borno said darkly.
“And new Ghosts,” said Hella.
“You know what’s behind this,” Jul said uneasily.
Hex said warningly, “Engineer—”
“The Black Ghost. It has to be.”
Unlike any of its kind before, the barracks-room scuttlebutt went, the Black Ghost was an enemy commander that fought like a human—better than a human. The Commissaries claimed this was all just rumor generated by stressed-out crews, but Hex herself had heard that the stories had originated with Ghosts themselves, captives under interrogation. And whether the Black Ghost existed or not, you couldn’t deny that something was making the Ghosts fight better than they ever had.
And meanwhile that palette still hadn’t broken off.
“Thirty seconds to close,” Hella said. “We won’t survive an impact, pilot.”
“Neither will they,” Borno said grimly.
“Fifteen seconds—”
“Hold the line!” Hex ordered.
“Those dimples,” said engineer Jul hastily. “Where the Ghosts are sitting. There has to be some interface to the palette’s systems. They must be weak spots. Gunner, if you could plant a shell there—”
Hex imagined Borno’s grin.
“Seven seconds! Six!”
A single shell sailed out through the curtain of fire. It was a knot of unified-field energy, like a bit of the universe from a second after the Big Bang itself.
The shell hit a dimple so squarely it probably didn’t even touch the sides. The resident Ghost, a squat cube, was vaporized instantly. Then light erupted from every dimple and weapons port on the palette. The Ghost crew scrambled away, but Hex saw silver skin wrinkle and pop, before the palette vanished in a flash of primordial light.
The needleship slammed through a dissipating cloud of debris, and the blisters turned black to save the crew’s eyes.
The Spear sat in space, its hull charred, still cooling as it dumped the energy it had soaked up. Sparks drifted through the sky: more needleships, a detachment of Aleph Force forming up.
For the first time since they’d dropped out of hyperspace, Hex was able to catch her breath, and to take a decent look at the world she had been sent to defend.
Even from here she could see it was suffering. Immense storm systems swathed its poles and catastrophic volcanism turned its nightside bright. Sparks climbed steadily up from the planet’s surface, refugee transports to meet the Navy ships—Spline, living starships, kilometer-wide spheres of flesh and metal.
Hella murmured, “That’s what a g-wave weapon will do to you, if it’s sufficiently powerful.”
Borno asked, “How? By ripping up the surface?”
“Probably by disrupting the planet’s orbital dynamics. You could knock over a world’s spin axis, maybe jolt it into a higher eccentricity orbit. If the core rotation collapsed, its magnetic field would implode. You’d have turmoil in the magma currents, earthquakes, and volcanism. . . .”
The destruction of a world as an act of war. The people being driven from their homes today were not soldiers. They had come here as colonists, to build a new world. But the very creation of this settlement had been an act of war, Hex knew, for this settlement had been planted deep inside what had been Ghost space until five centuries ago.
The Ghost Wars had already lasted centuries. War with an alien species was not like a human conflict. It was ecological, the Commissaries taught, like two varieties of weed competing for the same bit of soil. It could be terminated by nothing short of total victory—and the price of defeat would be extinction, for one side or another.
And now the Ghosts had a weapon capable of wreaking such damage on a planetary scale, and, worse, were prepared to use it. These were not the Ghosts Hex had spent a lifetime learning to fight. But in that case, she thought harshly, I’ll just have to learn to fight them all over again.
Borno said, “I don’t like just sitting out here.”
“Take it easy,” Hex said. She downloaded visual feed from the command loops. Ghost ships were being drawn away from the battle around the planet itself, and were heading out to this concentration.
Aleph Force was Strike Arm’s elite, one of the most formidable rapid-response fighting units in the Navy. From their base on the Orion Line they were hurled through hyperspace into the most desperate situations—like this one. Aleph Force always made a difference: that was what their commanders told them to remember. Even the Ghosts had learned that. And that was why Ghosts were peeling off from their main objective to engage them.
“Gunner, we’re giving that evacuation operation a chance just by sitting here. And as soon as we’ve lured in enough Ghosts we’ll take them on. I have a feeling you’ll be slitting hides before the day is done.”
“That might be sooner than you think,” called engineer Jul, uneasily. “Take a look at this.” She sent another visual feed around the loop.
Sparks slid around the sky, like droplets of water condensing out of humid air.
Hex had never seen anything like it. “What are they?”
“Ghosts,” Borno said. “Swarming like flies.”
“They’re all around us,” Hella breathed. “There must be thousands.”
“Make that millions,” Jul said. “They’re surrounding the other ships as well.”
Hex called up a magnified visual. As she had glimpsed on the palette, the Ghosts were cubes, pyramids, spinning tetrahedrons, even a few spiny forms like mines.
Jul said, “I thought all Ghosts were spheres.”
Ghosts were hardened to space, and their primary driver was the conservation of their body heat. For a given mass a silvered sphere, the shape with the minimum surface area, was the optimal way to achieve that.
“But they weren’t always like that,” said Borno. He had studied Ghosts all his life, the better to destroy them. “Ghosts evolved. Maybe these are primitive forms, before they settled for the optimum.”
“Primitive?” Hex asked. “Then what are they doing here?”
“Don’t ask me.” His voice was tight; his loathing of Ghosts was no affectation, so deep it was almost phobic.
“They’re closing,” Jul called.
The Spear’s weapons began to spit fire into the converging cloud. Hex saw that one Ghost, then another, was caught, flaring and dying in an instant. But it was like firing a laser into a rainstorm.
Hex snapped, “Gunner, you’re just wasting energy.”
“The systems can’t lock,” Borno said. “Too many targets, too small, too fast-moving.”
“Another new tactic,” Jul murmured. “And a smart one.”
Navigator Hella called, “Hex, you’d better take a look at this.”
In a new visual, Hex was shown a dense mass of Ghost hide. It was a sheet, a ragged segment of a sphere that grew even as she watched, with more Ghosts clustering around its spreading edges.
“It’s the Ghosts,” Hella said. “Some of those shapes, for instance the cubes, are space-filling. They’re forming themselves into a shell around us. A solid shell.”
Jul said, wondering, “They are acting in a coordinated way, millions of them, right across the battlefield.”
“Like humans,” Hella said. “They are fighting like humans, unified under a single command.”
The name hung unspoken between them: this was the work of the Black Ghost.
“We’re losing the comms nets,” Jul said, tense. “They’re isolating us.”
Hex glanced around the sky. The other needleships of Aleph Force were being enclosed by their own shells of Ghost hide; they hung in space like bizarre silvered fruit. She thought frantically. “If we try to ram that wall—”
“They’ll just fall back and track us,” Hella said.
“What if we go to hyperdrive?”
Engineer Jul snapped, “Are you crazy? With all this turbulence in the gravity field, surrounded by a wall of reflective Ghost hide, you may as well just detonate the engines.”
Hella said, “It’s that or be destroyed anyhow.”
Borno said, “At least we will take down a lot of them with us. Millions, maybe.”
They fell silent for a heartbeat. Then Hella called, “Pilot? It’s your decision.”
Hex knew this war was of economics. A great deal had been invested in her crew’s raising and training, and in the ship itself. But that investment had been made to be spent. The four of them and the ship, in exchange for millions of these strange swarming new Ghosts: it was a fair price.
“It is our duty,” she said. She brought up a bright, color-coded display and began to work through the self-destruct procedure.
She heard Hella sigh.
Borno said grimly, “It’s been good to serve with you all.”
Jul said, “Not for long enough.”
Hex heard the tension in their voices. She had been trained for this, as for every other conceivable battlefield scenario. She knew that none of them really believed this was the end, not deep in their guts. If suicide was the only option, you did it quickly, before you had time to understand what you were doing. “I’ll set it to five seconds. Good luck, everybody.” She reached out her gloved hand to finalize the sequence.
“Wait.” It was a new voice, smooth, toneless, coming from her command net.
In a visual before her was a Silver Ghost. It was one of the classic sort, a perfect sphere. The image was about the size of her head, a ball of silver turning slowly in the middle of her blister.
“You hacked into our command net,” Hex said.
“It wasn’t difficult,” the Ghost said. Its voice, translated by the Spear’s systems from some downloaded feed, was bland, without inflection. But did she detect a trace of sarcasm?
Jul spoke, her voice tremulous with fear. “Hex? What’s going on? Just get it over—”
“Wait,” Hex snapped.
The Ghost said, “I will let you live, in return for a service.”
Hex could hardly believe she was hearing this. She heard the voice of her training officers in her head; in a situation like this, faced with a new stratagem by the Ghosts, it was her job to extract as much intelligence as possible. “Why us?”
“Because Aleph Force are the supreme killers in a species of killers, and you are the best of Aleph Force. Quite an accolade.”
“And what’s this ‘service’? You want us to kill somebody, is that it?” A military leader, Hex speculated, a senior Commissary, maybe a minister of the Coalition’s grand councils back on Earth—Ghosts had never resorted to assassination that she knew of, but then this was a day when nothing about the Ghosts seemed predictable. “Who, Ghost?”
Even on this day of shocks, the answer was stunning. “We want you to assassinate the Black Ghost.”
Scarcely believing what she was doing, Hex set up a conference call involving herself, her crew, her commander at the base of Aleph Force back on the Orion Line—and a Silver Ghost.
Commodore Teel, a disembodied Virtual head floating in Hex’s blister, glared at her. In his forties, Teel’s face was hard, his eyes flat, and his scalp a mass of scar tissue. “None of you should even be alive. Pilot Officer Hex, charges aren’t out of the question.”
Hex swallowed back her shame. “I know that, sir. It was a judgment call to abort the self-destruct.”
“Show me where you are.”
Navigator Hella hastily downloaded positional data to the Commodore. The Spear of Orion had been smuggled through some kind of hyperspace jump out of its cage of Ghosts and brought to a position at the rim of the system, where only icy comets swam in the dark. They were far from the fighting that still raged in the inner system.
Teel stared at the Ghost’s Virtual, which spun silently, complacently. “How did this creature bring you out here?”
Jul answered, “We’re not sure, sir. We didn’t monitor any communication between it and any other Ghost. The Ghost, umm, broke us out.”
“I think we’re dealing with factions among the Ghosts, sir,” Hex said. “Maybe there’s an opportunity here. That’s why I thought it best to pass it up the chain of command.”
“And this Ghost wants you to kill one of its own.”
“This Ghost has a name,” the Ghost said. “Or at least a title.”
“I’ve heard of this,” Borno sneered. “Ghosts like titles. They are all ambassadors.”
“I am no ambassador,” the Ghost said. “This is not an age for ambassadors. I am an Integumentary.” The Spear’s systems displayed various alternative translations for “Integumentary”: prophylaxis, quarantine. “I am part of an agency that insulates humans from Ghosts, like the hide that shields my essence from the vacuum of space.”
“Charming,” Teel said. “But, fancy title or not, you are my mortal enemy. If you want us to do something for you, then you must give us something in return.”
The Ghost spun, its flawless hide barely showing its rotation. “I expected nothing less. The one thing you wasteful bipeds relish even more than killing is trade. Bargaining, mutual deception—”
Teel snapped, “If you expected it, you have something to offer.”
“Very well,” said the Ghost. “If you succeed we will decommission the new weapon system.”
“What new weapon?”
“Directional gravity waves on a large scale.”
The weapon that had churned up a planet. Hex held her breath.
“Download some data,” Teel said. “Prove you can do this. Then we’ll talk.”
Hex watched, astonished, as the Spear’s systems began to accept data from the Ghost.
Every human knew the story of the Silver Ghosts, and their war with humanity.
For fifteen hundred years the Third Expansion of mankind had been spreading across the face of the Galaxy. First contact between humans and the alien kind they labeled “Silver Ghosts” had come only a few centuries after the start of the Expansion. The Ghosts were silvered spheres, up to two meters across. Their hide was perfectly reflective—hence the human label “Silver Ghosts”; in starlight they were all but invisible.
The key to the Ghosts was their past. The world of the Silver Ghosts was once Earthlike: blue skies, a yellow sun. But as the Ghosts climbed to awareness their sun evaporated, its substance torched away by a companion star. As their world froze, the Ghosts rebuilt themselves. They became symbiotic creatures, each one a huddled cooperative collective. That spherical shape and silvered hide minimized heat loss.
The death of the Ghosts’ sun was a betrayal by the universe itself, as they saw it. But that betrayal shaped them forever. Their science was devoted to fixing the universe’s design flaws: they learned to tinker with the very laws of physics.
When humans found the Ghosts, at first two powerful interstellar cultures cautiously engaged. But the Ghosts’ home range lay between mankind and the rich star fields of the Galaxy’s core. The Ghosts were in humanity’s way. War was inevitable.
After early quick victories, for centuries the Ghosts stalled the human advance at the Orion Line, an immense static front along the outer edge of Sagittarius Arm. The Ghosts, capable of changing the laws of physics in pursuit of weapons technology, were a formidable foe; but humans were the more warlike. After the final collapse of the Orion Line, humanity spilled into Ghost space, slaughtering and colonizing.
But now the Ghosts had suddenly hardened once more, with new weapons, new tactics—even a new breed of Ghost, it seemed.
A weapon that could use g-waves to devastate worlds was a characteristic Ghost weapon, exotic and powerful. And it worked, the Integumentary said, by tapping into the large-scale properties of the universe itself.
“Perhaps you understand that the universe has more dimensions than the macroscopic, the three spatial and one of time. Most of the extra dimensions are extremely small.” A technical sidebar translated this for Hex as “Planck scale.” “But one extra dimension is rather larger, perhaps as much as a millimeter. You must think of the universe, then, as a blanket of spacetime, stretching thirteen billion years deep into the past and some twelve billion light years across—”
“And a millimeter thick,” said Hella.
“There are believed to be many such universes, stacked up—” the translator boxes hesitated, searching for a simile— “like leaves in a book. Also our own universe may be folded back on itself, creased in the thin dimension.”
Engineer Jul said, “So what? We know about the extra dimensions. We use them when we hyperdrive.”
“But,” said the Ghost, “your applications are not currently on the scale of ours.”
“Tell us about g-waves,” Teel commanded.
The Ghost said that all forms of energy were contained within the “blanket” of the universe—all save one. Gravity waves could propagate in the extra dimensions, reaching out to the other universes believed to be stacked out there. The Ghosts had learned to focus the gravitational energy raining into their own universe from another.
“The energy source in the other universe is necessarily large,” the Integumentary said. “Alternatively it may be a remote part of our own universe, an energy-rich slice of spacetime—the instants after the initial singularity for instance, folded back. We aren’t sure. You understand that this weapon offers us a virtually unlimited source of power. It’s just a question of tapping it. Beyond weaponry, many large-scale projects become feasible.”
Hella said, “I wonder what ‘large-scale’ might mean for a species of universe-botherers like the Silver Ghosts.”
Teel said, “Even when we were friendly with them, the Ghosts scared us, I think.”
Hex had had enough of awe. “Let’s talk about the target. This weapon system is in the control of the Black Ghost. . . .”
Recently the Ghosts had suddenly been scoring victories against the human forces. Their tactics had undergone a revolution that must reflect a change in their command structure, perhaps their very society.
“Humans work in hierarchies,” Teel said. “Chains of command. All large-scale military organizations in the past have done so. We tend to think it’s the only way to operate, but in fact it’s a very human way to work.”
“An evolutionary legacy of your past,” the Integumentary said. “When you were squabbling apes in some dismal forest, in thrall to the strongest male—”
“Shut up,” Teel said without emotion. “Ghosts, however, have always worked differently. Their organization is more fluid, bottom-up, with distributed decision-making. The whole of their society is self-organizing.”
“Like a Coalescence,” Borno said with disgust.
“Like a hive, yes.”
“The Ghosts are this way,” said the Integumentary, “because of our evolutionary past. As you would understand if you knew anything about the species you are endeavoring to wipe out.”
“Maybe,” Teel said, “but you stayed that way because it’s efficient. Even in some military applications: if you’re waging a guerrilla war on an occupied world, for instance, a network of cells can be very effective. But in large-scale set-piece battles, which we always try to draw the Ghosts into, you need a command structure.”
“And now they have one,” Hex said.
“Which makes them harder to beat. But it also makes them more vulnerable, because suddenly assassination is an effective weapon.”
Hex, intrigued, asked, “Why would any Ghost commit this treason? If the Black Ghost exists—if it lies behind these new effective tactics—”
The Integumentary said, “The Black Ghost’s is the greater treason, because of where its project will inevitably lead.”
Teel prompted, “Which is?”
“To an arms race. Humans will steal or reinvent the gravity wave technology for themselves. Then we will conspire together, humans and Ghosts, to wreck the Galaxy between us. Or, worse—”
“Ah,” said Teel. “The Black Ghost will unleash such power that there won’t be anything left for the victors to take.”
“It’s possible,” Borno said. “Ghosts are single-minded. They choose a plan and stick to it, whatever the cost.”
In the training academies there was a joke about Ghosts that had the right of way to cross a road. But the transport drivers ignored the stop signs. So the first Ghost crossed, exerting its rights, and was creamed in the process. So did the second, the third, the fourth, each sticking to what it believed was right regardless of the cost. Then the fifth invented a teleport, changing physical law to make the road obsolete altogether. . . .
Teel said, “So you want the Black Ghost eliminated before it destroys everything. Even though this may be your best chance of winning the war and of avoiding the subjugation or even extinction that would follow.”
“Sooner extinction than universal destruction,” the Integumentary said.
“How noble.”
Hex said, “And you, Integumentary, are prepared to make the most profound moral judgments on behalf of your whole species—and their entire future?”
Borno said, “Who cares about Ghost ethics? They won’t need ethics when they’re all dead.”
“You’re deranged, gunner, but you’re right,” said Teel. “We don’t need to consider Ghost consciences. Our job is to consider what use to make of this strange opportunity. Certainly we need to find out more about these new Ghost variants you’ve come up against. I’ll pass this up the line to—”
“You decide now,” the Ghost snapped.
Borno said, “If you think a commodore is going to take orders from a ball of fat like you—”
“Can it, gunner,” Hex snapped.
“You decide now,” the Ghost said again. “You allow this crew, in this ship, to follow my instructions, or I disconnect the link.”
Hella said, “I guess the Integumentary has its own pressures. Imagine trying to run a covert operation like this from our side.”
“We’ll follow your orders, whatever you say, Commodore,” Hex said.
“I know you will,” Teel said dismissively. “But I’ve no way of assessing your chances of success—let alone survival.”
“Our survival is irrelevant, sir,” Jul said.
“I know that’s what you’re taught, Engineer. Perhaps there are a few desk-bound Commissaries back on Earth who actually believe that. But out here we who do the fighting are still human. The mission has a greater chance of success if you’re willing to take it on.”
“I’m willing,” Borno said immediately.
“I’ve seen your file, gunner. What about those of you who aren’t psychopathically hostile to the Ghosts and all their works?”
Hella was uncertain. “We’re flight crew. We aren’t infantry, or covert operatives. We may not be right for the job.”
“We’re Aleph Force,” Hex said firmly. “In Aleph Force you do whatever it takes.”
“Anyhow I don’t think there’s a choice,” Jul said. “Us or nobody.”
Hella asked, “So what do you think, Pilot?”
Hex looked into her soul. A journey into the very heart of Ghost territory—a mission that might turn the course of the war—how could she refuse? “I’m in.”
Jul, Hella, and Borno quickly concurred.
“I’m proud of you,” the Commodore said.
The Ghost spun. “Humans!”
Hex snapped, “All right, Ghost, let’s get on with it. Where are we going?”
More data chattered into the Spear’s banks…
