Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

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, unlike the Brightly’s gear, 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,
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’, or at least the place the cabling ran
out, and dug back into the tangle a little way to stay out of
sight.
    At last 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 human fleet.
    Over a volume light-months wide, countless craft slid silently
across the sky. They were organised in a complex network of corridors
filling three-dimensional space: rivers of light gushed this way and
that, their different colours denoting different classes and sizes of
vessel. And, here and there, denser knots of colour 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.
    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, the
Sagittarius. Our arm, 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 systems, the Ghosts
began, for the first time, to resist us systematically.
    They had formed a blockade, called by Navy 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.
    Our fleet in action 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 on mine. I have you. You won’t
fall. Then she pulled me back 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, Commissar. 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 to solar power collectors. It is a
place of tunnels and warrens, where as a kid you compete with the
rats.
    ’And that’s why you joined up? To get away?’
    ’I was drafted.’
    ’Come on,’ she scoffed. ’On a rat-hole like Mercury there are
places 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