Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

enough
to defy such a creed now? Come, Academician. None of us chooses 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 looked from one to the other. I thought we should be doing less
yapping and more fighting. 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, and 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
vapour 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 which 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