Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

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, kilometre-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; it was 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, two, was caught, flaring and dying in an
instant. But