Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

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. By the time
the first ships reached Deneb, the mechanics of exploitation were
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 out to fund fresh colonising waves, the greater Expansion and,
of course, to support the war with the Ghosts. And that’s how the
system works.’
    She swept her hand over the sky. ’Think of it, tar. The Third
Expansion: between here and Sol, across six thousand light years,
there is nothing but mankind and human planets, the fruit of a
thousand years of world-building. And all of it linked by economics.
Older systems like Deneb, their resources spent - even Sol 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 kilometres wide. But now the
Ghosts are in our way. And that’s why we’re fighting!’
    ’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 chat.
     
    Jeru spotted a file of the Ghosts moving in a crocodile, like so
many schoolchildren, towards 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 metres the Ghosts began to duck down
into the tangle, out of our sight. We followed them in.
    Maybe fifty metres 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 towards
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 pressurised. 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 vapour
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 vapour.
    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 were
feeding. 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 on them.
    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