Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

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 was a war 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, colour-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
finalise 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 >servicethat 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?’
    Even on this day of shocks, the answer was stunning. ’We want you
to assassinate the Black Ghost.’

 
II
     
     
    Scarcely believing what she was doing, Hex set up a conference
call involving herself, her crew, her commander at the base of Aleph
Force