Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

apart bit by bit. What a dismal place this is.’
    ’And yet,’ Hella said, ’this system has planets. Two, three, four
- more off in the dark, they surely don’t matter. It’s the innermost
that has the most Earthlike signature: air, liquid water, oxygen,
carbon compounds. Smaller than Earth, though.’
    Across human space people always spoke of Earthlike worlds, though
few of them had ever seen Earth; the mother planet remained the
reference for all her scattered children.
    The original binary could have hosted Earths, if they were far
enough from the brilliance of the central stars. No biosphere could
have survived the supernova detonation, but once the system became
stable again, any surviving worlds could have been reborn. Comets or
outgassing could create a new atmosphere, a new ocean. And life could
begin again, perhaps crawling out of the deepest rocks, or brought
here by the comets - or even delivered by conscious intent; this was
a Galaxy crowded with life. How strange, Hex thought, a planet that
might have hosted not one but two generations of life. She wondered
if its new inhabitants had any idea of what went before - if those
doomed by the supernova had managed to leave a trace of their
passing, before being put to the fire.
    ’But that pulsar is still chipping away at the red star,’ Jul
said. ’The sun is failing.’
    ’And if there are Ghosts here they are suffering.’ Borno snarled.
’Good.’
    Hella called, ’There isn’t much off-world, but I can see one large
habitat orbiting the innermost planet.’
    ’Then that’s our destination.’ Hex set up an approach trajectory.
She felt the needleship’s intrasystem engines thrumming around her,
powerful and secure, and the dim red sun swept towards them.
    Borno said, ’Pilot, your trajectory will take us right through the
thick of the Ghosts.’
    ’Gunner, they either see us or they don’t. We may as well walk in
the front door.’
    Borno said tensely, ’Trusting a Ghost with our lives?’
    ’That’s always been the deal.’
    ’You mean,’ Jul said, ’the whole mission’s always been halfassed.
’
    ’Stay focused,’ Hex murmured.
    ’Closest approach,’ Hella called now.
    The star ballooned out of the dark. Its dim photosphere bellied
beneath Hex’s blister, churning dully, disfigured by huge spots. A
pinpoint of electric blue rose over the crimson horizon of the
parent, casting long shadows through the columns of glowing starstuff
that its gravity hauled up from the body of the parent star.
    ’Sunrise on a star,’ Borno said. ’Now there’s something you don’t
see every day.’
    ’But we’ve got more anomalies,’ Jul reported. ’The parent’s
composition is all wrong. Too much hydrogen, not enough metals.
Younger stars incorporate the debris of earlier generations, fusion
products, heavy elements like metal, carbon. It’s as if this star is
too old - only by a million years or so, but still - ’
    ’I’ll tell you something stranger,’ Hella said. ’This star system
may not be in the Coalition catalogues, but it’s a near-identical
twin of a system that is.’ She brought up an image of another system,
another red star with a bright blue companion pulsar; Hex saw from
the accompanying data that the system’s orbital dynamics were
virtually identical. Hella said, ’This other star is in Ghost space
too. Only a few tens of light years away.’
    Hex let all this wash through her. You weren’t wise to block
information flows, especially when you were flying into the unknown
like this. But she couldn’t see an immediate relevance in these
stellar mysteries.
    She was relieved when the twin stars fell away, the needleship
climbed back out of the parent star’s gravity well, and the target
planet came looming out of the dark.
    Unlike the rest of her crew Hex had been brought up on a planet,
only a few light years from Earth itself. But even to her eyes this
little world looked strange. Huddled close for warmth, it kept one
face to the parent star. The subsolar point on the daylight
hemisphere, where the sun would be perpetually overhead, must be the
warmest place on the planet. Hex made out climatic bands of
increasing dimness sprawling around that central point, so that the
face of the planet was like a target, bathed crimson red. And on the
dark side, illuminated only by starlight, she glimpsed the blue tint
of ice.
    As the needleship swung closer, she made out more detail on the
sunward side: dark patches