Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

outnumbered by the daysiders, but were far
more technologically advanced. For centuries they had been launching
missile after missile over the terminator, from the dark to the
light. At first the daysiders had fought back; epic invasions of the
night had been launched. But as its cities and farms were devastated,
the thin material base of the dayside crumbled. By now only scattered
survivors, like Swimmer, remained. They mounted guerrilla actions
against nightside patrols. But they knew the war was lost, and their
future with it.
    And recently, as if they had not suffered enough, a new peril had
arisen, when a new light crossed the sky.
    ’The habitat of the Black Ghost,’ Borno said grimly.
    Suddenly the simple ships of the nightsiders had been equipped
with faster drives and still deadlier weapons. Swimmer, with a
resigned acceptance, had come to believe that his people’s time was
up - until, in the form of the humans, he had stumbled on his own
miracle from the sky.
    Hex was distracted by a shadow crossing the cave mouth.
    Hella was growing excited. ’Pilot, I think I’ve figured it out -
’
    ’Shut up,’ Hex hissed. The shadow crossed again. Now she was sure:
it was a palette-ship, and four, five, six Ghosts, angular rhomboids,
rode it menacingly. Hastily she shut down their packs, and made her
crew lie flat. Even Swimmer lay still in his puddle of slime.
    The palette paused briefly at the cave mouth, but anything within
was hidden by the fire. With a careless burst of an energy weapon the
Ghosts smashed Swimmer’s hearth, scattering its fuel. Then the
palette moved on.
    The crew stood up cautiously.
    Borno said, ’So they’re looking for us. We have to get out of
here.’
    Hella grabbed his arm. ’Not before you listen to me. I’ve worked
it out. This world is - ’
    ’The home world of the Ghosts,’ Borno said, dismissively. ’And
this is their origin, from a million years back or so, somehow
brought forward in time. Isn’t that obvious?’
    Not to Hex. Her jaw dropped; she deliberately closed it.
    Jul was figuring it out too. ’Yes, yes. Swimmer speaks a variant
of one of their languages. Ghosts are cooperative organisms, just
like Swimmer. Even their hides were once independent creatures -
’
    ’Every Ghost is a whole ecology in a sack,’ Borno murmured,
repeating training-ground lore.
    Hella said, still excited, ’We even found a copy of this system
thirty light years away! That must be the present-day copy - this one
is dredged up from the past…’
    Jul said, ’The >primitive< Ghosts must come from this world.
The Black Ghost recruited them here.’
    ’Maybe that’s why this was done,’ Borno said darkly. ’The Black
Ghost has tapped its own deep past for raw material for the war with
humans. When Ghosts told us about their origin they never mentioned
this devastating civil war, did they? Funny, that.’
    Hella turned to Hex. ’Pilot? You’ve been very quiet. What are you
thinking?’
    Hex looked at her, abstracted. ’About time travel.’ Humans had
achieved time travel, of course. Every faster-than-light ship was a
time machine, and it was said that in the old days the legendary hero
Michael Poole once travelled through time in a wormhole. ’We’ve sent
a few people, a ship or two, through a few centuries. But the Ghosts
have brought a star system, a whole system, up through a million
years.’
    That sobered them.
    Jul said, ’The Integumentary did say that their new
extra-dimension technology was opening up vast energy sources for
them.’
    ’Yes. But I never dreamed it would be capable of something like
this.’
    ’And,’ Borno said coldly, ’it’s in the hands of the Black
Ghost.’
    ’So we have to stop it,’ Hex said. The others nodded,
determined.
    ’All right,’ Hella said. ’But how? We’re still stuck in this
cave.’
    ’We have to get off the planet,’ Hex said. ’And as far as I know
the only launch capabilities are the nightsiders’.’ She considered
Swimmer. She wondered if he knew he had been projected into the
farthest future of his own kind. ’Hella, do you think your new friend
could help us get across the terminator?’

 
V
     
     
    Under the guidance of Swimmer-with-Somethings, they journeyed
north. They would cross into night somewhere near the planet’s spin
pole.
    The journey took them days - Earth days. They travelled out of
sight of the ur-Ghosts, as they took to calling them, these cousins
of Swimmer hardened for space but