Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

bastion was a smoothly curving blankness before her, reflecting
not a photon of starlight. She sensed the Black Ghost in there
somewhere, watching, drawing out the moment as she was. ’Come on, you
bastard,’ she muttered. ’You know I’m out here. Let’s see what you
got.’
    The black wall quivered. Then it split along a seam, revealing a
pale silvery glow. When the wound stopped dilating it was a vertical
slit hundreds of metres long, more than wide enough for the palette
to pass.
    ’I can’t see inside,’ Jul said.
    ’Our suit sensors don’t work,’ Hella said, sounding alarmed.
    ’But the invitation’s clear,’ Hex said tightly. She brushed her
hands forward.
    The walls of the bastion slid past her; the fortress’s hull looked
no more than paper-thin. Twenty metres inside the hull she brought
the palette to a stop. Her visor showed her nothing but empty space,
a sphere kilometres wide filled with a cold silver-grey glow.
    Then the ur-Ghost hide around her began to crumple and blister,
and a harsher light broke through, shining directly on her. She threw
up her hands to protect her vision. She heard the others cry out. The
hide, scorched, crumbled and fell away.
    Cautiously she lowered her arms. Now she could see what the
sensors hadn’t been allowed to show her. This space wasn’t empty at
all. It was filled with Silver Ghosts, spheres like droplets of
molten metal, and ur-Ghosts of every shape and size, faceted and
spiny, ranked around her in a hexagonal array that filled space as
far as she could see. They were motionless, positioned with utter
accuracy, objects of geometry rather than life. And, scattered
through the ranks of silent Ghosts, lanterns pulsed, blue-white:
models of the pulsar that was destroying the world, they were marks
of adherence to the Ghosts’ Destroyer god.
    This was nothing like the way humans had seen Ghosts behave
before, over centuries of contact and warfare. The command of the
Black Ghost, here at the heart of its empire, was total.
    Hex’s palette-ship hung like a bit of flotsam before this
symmetrical horde. With their skin covers burned away, her crew sat
cross-legged in their little hollows, cowering. ’Everybody OK?’
    ’What do you think?’ Jul said.
    Borno was staring at the arrayed Ghosts greedily. ’Lethe,’ he
said. ’There must be thousands of them.’
    ’Actually more than a million.’ The voice, delivered through their
translator boxes, was flat, impersonal, artificial.
    Hex looked into the geometric centre of the sphere, for she knew
that was where it would be; its sense of its own importance would
admit nothing less. And there she saw a black fist, a sphere twice,
three times the size of those clustered around it. The ranks of
Ghosts parted in shining curtains, and that central dark mass slid
forward.
    Hex heard the harsh breathing of her crew. ’Take it easy,’ she
murmured. ’We’ve come this far - ’
    ’I’ve let you come this far,’ said the Black Ghost. ’Did you think
your absurd concealment would fool me?’
    ’Actually no,’ Hex said. ’I thought you would be so arrogant you
would let us in anyhow. You’re very predictable.’
    The Black Ghost rolled before them, its coating black as the
inside of her own skull. Hex was guessing at the psychology of an
alien being exceptional even among its own kind. Well, the Black
Ghost showed some characteristics of humanity, and no human,
especially the arrogant sort, liked to be mocked.
    Almost experimentally, Hex raised her arm and held it out
straight, pointing at the Black Ghost. An energy weapon was built
into the sleeve of her suit. She fired; her suit reported the energy
drain. But there was no sign of the discharge.
    Her crew quickly tried the other weapons at their disposal.
Nothing worked. With an angry cry Borno even hurled his knife. It
crumbled to dust before it left his hand.
    The Black Ghost said, ’And you call me predictable?’
    ’We’re here to kill you, you bag of shit,’ Borno said.
    ’To kill me, yes. Humans walk in death. Each Ghost is a complete
ecological unit. When we went into space we brought the life of our
world with us. Whereas you killed off your ecology, killed the world
that produced you, all of it except yourselves, and the pests and
parasites too wily to be eradicated. You even call us Ghosts, named
after imaginary creatures you associate with death. How
appropriate.’
    ’And what about you?’ Hella asked. ’How many humans have