Galactic Empires (40 page)

"Why do they bring us here? Why the Samples?"

Hama eyed him. "You said you worked with Ghosts. You don't know? I think it's because they are trying to understand us, the Ghosts. They fear us, for right now the Third Expansion is overwhelming them. But you can't defeat what you don't understand."

"So they take us for study." Donn shook his head. "But these random abductions, of a child from a mother, a father from a daughter—my own brother was taken. The Ghosts couldn't antagonize us more if they tried."

"I guess that shows how little they understand us, yes?"

"And what about Five, the girl with no name?"

"Ah. She was taken as an infant, under two years old, I think. As she grew, she was surrounded only by Ghosts. The only human she ever saw was her own reflection in the hide of a Ghost. She grew up thinking that she was some kind of deformity, a mutant, disabled Ghost.

"Eventually, a rat pack broke into her cage. She thought they were as diseased as she was. I think they raped her. She was only thirteen, fourteen. What a welcome to humanity! Somehow, she came through that, and emerged as a functioning human being-I say functioning: all she knows is this, life as a rat, and all she wants to do is to kill Ghosts." He smiled. "She's inventive about it, though."

Donn watched Five with the mother. "I'll be wary."

"Yes, do. Don't get any foolish ideas of
saving her.
And there are worse. Rat packs that prey on humans, other Samples. Even at the moment of abduction."

Donn looked at him curiously. "And what do you want, Hama?"

"I came to the Association to save
you,
Donn, all of you living non-Doctrinally out here in the dark. If all I can do is live here as if in a guerrilla cell behind the lines, killing a few Ghosts before my short life is over—well, maybe that's enough. It is my duty to die.
A brief life burns brightly?

Donn said carefully, "I think I'm more afraid of you than of the feral girl over there."

Hama laughed.

Five came to stand over Hama and Donn. Naked, lithe, her body was a pale streak in the silvery light, her nipples hard, her public hair a blond tuft. "Rested, are you? We're mounting a raid. You're lucky, Donn Wyman. We've been planning this one for a while; you'll be there for the payoff."

Donn made to protest. "I only just got here. I need to find my brother-the Silverman-"

But she was already walking away.

Hama nudged him. "That wasn't a request. Come on, on your feet."

Donn struggled up, his chest still aching from his fall.

A party of a dozen adults suited up.

They clambered up through the airtight membrane into the spectral stillness of the landscape. Donn was shocked that the Boss had shifted in the sky, moving away from the zenith, and the shadows it cast were long. But Donn had never seen a sunset, or a dawn; this was a planet, not an artifice like the Reef.

They checked each other's suits and were handed weapons. Donn was astonished to be given a spear. Then, following Five's lead, they set off over the ice.

The weapons were mostly crude, things with spinning blades, or even cruder than that, daggers and swords, pikes and spears, lengths of barbed wire and ugly tangles of spikes and hooks. But there were a few more sophisticated instruments, a kind of projectile weapon like a bazooka, even what looked like a Qax-era gravity-wave handgun, much repaired, polished smooth by usage.

They carried these weapons, walking to war.

"I can't believe we're doing this," Donn said to nobody in particular. "We're like preindustrial savages."

"I know how you feel," said a woman walking beside him. "I was a food technician back on the Reef. I'm the nearest thing to a biologist this little crew has. But by day I'm a spear-carrier." Brisk, purposeful, she was perhaps forty; she might once have been plump, but now the skin of her cheeks and neck sagged, as if emptied. "My name's Kanda Fors, by the way."

"I am-"

"We all heard who you are." She smiled, a dogged sort of expression. "We like to act indifferent. I guess that's to do with Five's hold over us. But wait until she's asleep. We'll all be at you then, finding out what you know of home, our families. We only get news from Samples. And it's all one-way."

With her calm Reef accent, she was more like Donn's family than anybody else he had yet met here. "This is real, isn't it?" he said slowly. "I think maybe I'm working through some kind of shock." He looked at the spear he had been given. It was clearly improvised from some ripped-off bit of equipment, not much more than a steel rod with its tip laboriously sharpened. "I really am stuck here, at the wrong end of a one-way funnel to this shithole in the ice."

Hama Belk said, "It isn't so bad here. It's not just a scramble for survival, you know. We're still human. We can still have higher goals."

"Like what?"

"Like science," Kanda said. "There is life here, for instance."

"I saw it. In my footsteps."

"That's what survives." This rogue world had been detached from its parent star by a close stellar encounter perhaps, or a gravitational slingshot by a wandering Jovian. "Any civilization must have been smashed quickly. Quakes, tides, even before the oceans froze over, water ice setting hard as rock, and then the air froze out on top of that. But there is life here, still. You saw it in your footsteps. And," she said dreamily, "there is
other
life. A more exotic sort, blown in from the stars, cold-lovers, psychrophiles, colonizing this cold world."

"Psychrophiles?"

"Watch." She took the index finger of her left hand in her right and squeezed the fingertip of her glove. A seam broke, and ice crystals gushed out into the vacuum. She bent and pressed this breach to the frozen ground, just for a second. Then she pulled back her hand and sealed up the glove. "Ouch, that's enough. I can do without frostbite. Now, look."

Where she had touched, a pit opened up in the ground, the width of a fist, the lip pulling back as if recoiling. The little pit closed up again in a couple of seconds. But when Kanda stirred it with a fingertip, it was broken up, like dust. "See that? Ice, permafrost, even rock, broken up to powder."

"What's going on?"

Kanda grinned. "Cryo-panspermia bugs."

There were ways that even terrestrial life could survive at extremely low temperatures. There was always the odd scrap of water even in the coldest ice, in brine pockets perhaps, or in nanofilms, kept liquid through pressure contact. And even on this frozen world, there were nutrients, seeping up from the core, or drifting down from space, comet dust.

"At these temperatures, you can't be ambitious," Kanda said. "You don't aim to grow much, just repair a bit of cellular damage once every millennium or so. Chemistry can be a help. There is a gloopy, starchlike material called exopolymer that has a way of preventing the formation of ice crystals. To such creatures, though, even the Ghosts are refugees from a warmer regime, balls of liquid water, like lava monsters. There's a whole ecosphere here, Donn, that we know hardly anything about. I long to come back here someday and do some proper science. Fascinating."

"Fascinating," Donn repeated. "While we march to war like apes."

"But there is science in the fighting, too," Hama said, almost enthusiastically. "Most analysts think it will take millennia of war before the Ghosts are exterminated. There will be plenty of need for hand-to-hand combat-it's always true in any war. So the ways we learn to fight the Ghosts, here today, could be remembered forever."

"That's a lovely thought."

Kanda frowned. "Listen, Donn Wyman. You'd better take our miserable little war seriously. We need the resources we steal from the Ghosts, or we'd die. Simple as that. So when Five tells you to fight, fight. We don't have a lot of spare capacity for passengers. Of course, she can hear every word we say."

Five turned. "Yes, though at least the Ghosts cannot hear your pointless babbling. Ever trained to fight a Ghost?"

"No." The very thought shocked Donn.

"The easiest way to bring him down is just to puncture his hide, and follow the trail of excrement and blood and heat until he dies, which might take a day or two. We'll show you how to skin a fatball later."

"You're a monster," Donn blurted.

"No. I'm alive." She smiled at him, her beauty dazzling.

After perhaps an hour's walking, only a few kilometers, they crested a frozen ridge. And here Five had them hunch down and approach more cautiously.

So Donn got his first glimpse of a Ghost city. Sprawled over a valley carved by some long-frozen river, it was a forest of globes and half globes draped in a gleaming netting. The colony lacked a clear center, and there was no simple geometry; it looked as if it had grown in place, and perhaps it had. A slim tower dominated, silvered like the rest, with a sharp electric-blue light pulsing at its summit.

Ghosts streamed everywhere, following their own enigmatic business, like silver blood flowing through the open carcass of their silver city. The Boss cast highlights from every hide, so the city gleamed, as if it had been scattered with diamonds.

Five grinned at Donn. "So what do you think of your prey, hunter?"

"I'm no hunter. I'm surprised we're so close to a city."

Hama shrugged. "We are all escapees from the Sample zoos in that city, or else we were teleported to the ice nearby."

Five said, "Actually, everywhere on this world is near a Ghost city. The planet is filthy with them, the fatballs, billions or trillions, swarming."

That electric-blue light winked mournfully. "What's the tower?"

"Well, we don't know," Hama said. "Best guess is, it's a Destroyer tower. The Commission knows of such things on other Ghost worlds."

"Destroyer?"

"In ancient times, the Ghosts' ancestors understood full well that it was the rogue pulsar that was destroying their sun. So they venerated it. They made it a god."

Kanda murmured, "Actually, it's fascinating. Humans have always worshiped gods who they believed created the world. The Ghosts worship the one that destroyed it."

"Quiet," hissed Five. "This talk is purposeless."

"Talking is what people do, child," said Kanda.

"We are not people. We are rats. We are here to fight, not to talk."

Donn looked down at the extraordinary, beautiful city in dismay. "Fight for what? Resources? Hides, equipment-"

"That," Five said, "and the destruction of the Seer."

Donn frowned. "What do you know of the Seer?"

"Not much more than you do on your Reef," Hama said.

Five said, "The Ghosts talked of it, when I was in their zoos, when they thought I could not understand. Those who dealt with me were far from the centers of power. Yet it exists."

"So what is it?"

"We don't know," said Hama. "But if the chance arises to destroy it, we should take it. The Green Army has learned that Ghost concentrations are hard to defeat, short of out-and-out genocide. It's like stabbing on a pool of mercury with a fork; it just fragments and runs away. They lack hierarchies, like human societies, which makes them impossible to decapitate. Assassinations are useless. But in this particular case you have this Seer, whatever it is, a source of power. So if we could get to that, we could indeed inflict a great defeat in this war."

"We're not at war," Donn said.

"Oh yes, we are."

Five whispered, "Let's move in." She waved them forward.

Donn approached the Ghost city, running at a crouch from one bit of cover to the next, watching the silvered backs of his companions running ahead-silvered as the city itself was silvered, for their suits were made of the same stuff.

The city itself loomed huge before them now, a sculpture park of silvered monuments that hovered off the ground, utterly still. Light rope trailed everywhere, linking one floating building to the next, and filling the whole with a silver-gray glow. And Donn heard music. The ground throbbed with a bass harmonization, as if he could hear the heartbeat of the frozen planet.

Five raised a hand to call a halt. They were at the head of a kind of thoroughfare that led into the heart of the city, reasonably clear, reasonably straight. The rats got to work, laying barbed wire and spiky obstacles across the smooth surface of the roadway.

Donn murmured to Kanda, "What are they doing?"

"Setting traps," she replied. "Ghosts don't follow human ideas of geography, you know that. But if they need to evacuate fast, they'll use thoroughfares like this. In fact, they come swarming along the ground when they're alarmed. Some primitive instinct, but useful for us. They'll hit the traps."

"What is going to make them evacuate?"

Five grinned at him. "We are. Come on."

Leaving half a dozen hunters behind at the barricade, the rest moved deeper into the city.

The crowded tangle of light ropes grew thicker over their heads. In the complexity, Donn saw denser concentrations-nurseries of Ghost subcomponents, perhaps, or control centers, or simply areas where Ghosts lived and played-little more than patches of silvery shadow in the tangle. It was characteristic Ghost architecture, vibrant, complex, beautiful, alive, totally inhuman.

And there were Ghosts all over. They drifted over and through the tangle, following pathways invisible to Donn, or they would cluster in little clusters, whirling in chains like necklaces, apparently for the fun of it.

In one place, Donn saw an orderly queue of Ghosts, almost like a line of human schoolchildren waiting for a punishment. They filed patiently into a floating dodecahedral box that opened to embrace each Ghost, closed around it, and opened again, empty, ready for the next.

There must have been thousands of Ghosts in the patient line, he saw. And as the dodecahedral chamber hovered, far from any building, it was hard to see where all the Ghosts it swallowed were going.

He pointed this out to Hama. "What's that?"

"I suppose there are two possible answers," Hama said. "It's either an extermination chamber. Or it's a teleport."

The thought excited Donn. "Like the Sampling, the abductions. So where are they going?"