Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

started in this business.
    L’Eesh was the most formidable Ghost hunter of his generation. And
he was here because he was after what I believed to be rightfully my
prey.
    Once this system, in the crowded Sagittarius Arm, had been at the
heart of the range of the Silver Ghosts. But the Third Expansion had
rolled right through here, a wave of human colonisation heading for
the centre of the Galaxy. Until a few decades back some Ghost nests
survived within the Expansion itself; that fast-moving front left
great unexplored voids behind it. My mother, a hunter herself, took
part in such actions. She never came back from her last operation,
the cleansing of a world called Snowball.
    But those nests have long been cleaned out. The last wild Ghosts
have retreated to their pits - like the one L’Eesh and I had gotten
ourselves stuck in.
    I had thought I would be first here. I had been dismayed to find
L’Eesh had grabbed a place on the same Spline transport as me. Though
I had warily gone along with his proposal that we should pool our
resources and split the proceeds, I wasn’t about to submit to
him.
    Not even in the mess we found ourselves in now.
     
    We dug ourselves out of the dirt.
    Our med systems weren’t functioning, so we put each other through
brisk checks - limbs, vision, coordination. Then we tested out the
equipment. Our pressure suits were lightweight skinsuits, running off
backpacks of gen-enged algae. The comms system worked on pale blue
bioluminescent glyphs that crawled over each suit’s surface.
    I poked around in the dirt. Remnants of struts and hull plates
crumbled. The little ship had broken up, sacrificing the last of its
integrity to save us as it was designed to, and then it had broken up
some more. There was nothing to salvage. We had the suits we wore,
and nothing else.
    L’Eesh was watching me. His augmented Eyes were like steel balls
in his head; when he blinked you could hear the whirr of servomotors.
’It doesn’t surprise you that your suit works, does it? Even here -
it doesn’t occur to you to ask the question.’
    I glared back, not wishing to give him any satisfaction.
    He dug a weapon out of the scattered wreckage of the flitter; it
looked like a starbreaker hand-gun. ’This is a Ghost pit.’ He crushed
the gun like a dead leaf. ’Stuff like this happens. Pits are pockets
of spacetime where nothing works right, where you can’t rely on even
the fundamental laws of physics and chemistry. But the Ghosts always
arrange it so that living things are conserved - including us, and
the little critters that live in our backpacks. You see? We know very
little of how all this works. We don’t even know how they could tell
what is alive. And all of this is engineered - remember that.’
    I knew all this, of course. ’You’re full of shit, L’Eesh.’
    He grinned. At some point in his life his teeth had been replaced
by a porcelain sheet. ’You bet I am. Shit from battlefields a
thousand years old.’ He had an air of wealth, control, culture,
arrogance; he was effortlessly superior to me. ’We’re on our own down
here. Pohp may be able to see us. But she can’t speak to us, can’t
reach us.’ He took a deep breath, as if he could smell the air. ’What
now, Raida?’
    There was one obvious place to go. ’The bridge between the
moons.’
    ’It must be a hundred kilometres away,’ he said. ’Our
transportation options are limited.’
    ’Then we walk.’
    He shrugged, dropped the remains of the gun. There was nothing to
carry, nothing to be done with the remains of the flitter. Without
preamble, he set off.
    I followed. I’d sooner be watching L’Eesh’s back than the other
way around.
     
    Soon our lower suits were stained bright orange by the dust.
    This trapped moon was too small for tectonic cycling. The land was
old, eroded to dust, mountains and crater rims worn flat. Iron oxides
made the ground and the air glow crimson. On the horizon, dust devils
spun silently. It was a museum of dust, that had nowhere to go.
    Everywhere you looked - every time you dug a trench with your toe
- you found more bits of bone. Perhaps there had been a vast flood, I
thought, that had washed up this vast assemblage of remains. Or
perhaps there had been a drought, and this was a place where animals
had gathered around the drying water holes, fighting to suck at the
mud, while the predators watched and waited.
    Or maybe it was a battlefield.
    Whatever the story of this place, it was long