Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

born between the stars. His ancestors, who called
themselves ’Engineers’, had fled Earth at the time of an alien
occupation. With no place to land the refugees had ganged together
their spacecraft and found ways to live between the stars, through
trading, piloting, even a little mercenary soldiering.
    When the Third Expansion came, Borno’s Engineers had been one of a
number of peripheral cultures recontacted by the Coalition, the new
authority on Earth. But the Engineers had also forged tentative links
with the Silver Ghosts, who were undergoing their own expansion out
of the heart of the Galaxy. For a time the Engineers had profited
from trade between two interstellar empires. They even welcomed small
Ghost colonies on their amorphous islands of relic spacecraft and
harnessed asteroids.
    But then Navy ships came spinning down to impose Coalition
authority on the Engineers’ raft culture. There had been a strange
period when autonomous Ghost enclaves had been granted room to live
under the new regime: Silver Ghosts, living under Coalition
authority. But the Ghosts had been taxed, marginalised and
discriminated against until their position was untenable. Their
maltreatment had led to a rescue mission from Ghost worlds - and that
had led to one of the first military engagements of the long Ghost
Wars, fought out over the Engineers’ fragile raft colony. Among the
Engineers, many had died, and the rest had been dispersed to colonies
deeper within Coalition space.
    All this was centuries ago. But Borno’s people had never forgotten
who they were and where they had come from; they still called
themselves ’Engineers’. And in their minds it had been Ghost
aggression that had resulted in the deaths of so many and the loss of
an ancient homeland.
    Hex reflected that it would do no good to try to explain to Borno
that it had been Coalition policy that had precipitated that defining
crisis in the first place. And besides, Borno’s wrath was useful for
the Coalition’s purposes. In a war that spanned the stars, he was not
unique.
    ’Heads up,’ Hella said. ’I have a visual. Theta eighty-six, phi
five.’
    Their destination was dead ahead.
     
    Hex saw a double star: a misty sphere that glowed a dull coal red
while a pinpoint of electric blue trawled across its face.
    The Spear’s crew had had to find their way here by dead reckoning.
This system didn’t show up in the Navy’s data banks. After fifteen
centuries of the Third Expansion, the Commission for Historical Truth
believed it had mapped every single one of the Galaxy’s hundreds of
billions of stars, human-controlled or not - but it hadn’t mapped
this one.
    Anomaly or not, somewhere in this unmapped system, the
Integumentary had promised, the crew of the Spear would find the
Black Ghost.
    Gunner Borno said hastily, ’We’re crawling with Ghosts.’
    Hex checked her displays. All around her were Ghosts: their ships,
their emplacements, their sensor stations and weapons platforms. The
whole system was like a vast fortress, defended to a depth of half a
light year from that central double sun, with more monitoring
stations and fast-response units even further out.
    ’None of them are reacting,’ Jul said, sounding disbelieving. ’Not
one unit.’
    Hex said, ’Then forget them. What are we looking at?’
    Jul said, ’I’ve seen systems like this before. That blue thing is
a neutron star, right?’
    ’Yes,’ Hella said, ’Actually a pulsar…’
    Once this had been a partnership of two immense stars - until the
larger, too massive, had detonated in a supernova explosion, for a
few days outshining the whole Galaxy. Its ruin had collapsed to form
a neutron star, a sun-sized mass compressed down to the size of a
city block. As it spun on its axis a ferocious magnetic field threw
out beams of charged particles to flash in the eyes of radio
telescopes: it was a pulsar.
    As for the supernova’s companion, the tremendous detonation
stripped away most of its outer layers. Its fusing core, exposed, had
not been massive enough to maintain the central fire. The remnant
star had subsided to misty dimness.
    Hella said, ’But the system is actually still evolving. That
pulsar is dragging material out of the parent.’ She displayed a
false-colour image that showed a broad disc, material the pulsar’s
gravity had dug out of the larger star’s flesh and thrown into
orbit.
    ’So that star blew its companion up,’ Borno said, ’and now it’s
taking it