The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Anyhow, by controlling the superforce decomposition, you can select the ratio between those forces. And those ratios govern the fundamental constants of physics.

  Something like that.

  Pael said, “That marvelous reflective coating of theirs is an example. Each Ghost is surrounded by a thin layer of space in which a fundamental number called the Planck constant is significantly lower than elsewhere. Thus, quantum effects are collapsed … . Because the energy carried by a photon, a particle of light, is proportional to the Planck constant, an incoming photon must shed most of its energy when it hits the shell—hence the reflectivity.”

  “All right,” Jeru said. “So what are they doing here?”

  Pael sighed. “The fortress star seems to be surrounded by an open shell of quagma and exotic matter. We surmise that the Ghosts have blown a bubble around each star, a space-time volume in which the laws of physics are—tweaked.”

  “And that’s why our equipment failed.”

  “Presumably,” said Pael, with cold sarcasm.

  I asked, “What do the Ghosts want? Why do they do all this stuff?”

  Pael studied me. “You are trained to kill them, and they don’t even tell you that?”

  Jeru just glowered.

  Pael said, “The Ghosts were not shaped by competitive evolution. They are symbiotic creatures; they derive from life-forms that huddled into cooperative collectives as their world turned cold. And they seem to be motivated—not by expansion and the acquisition of territory for its own sake, as we are—but by a desire to understand the fine-tuning of the universe. Why are we here? You see, young tar, there is only a narrow range of the constants of physics within which life of any sort is possible. We think the Ghosts are studying this question by pushing at the boundaries—by tinkering with the laws that sustain and contain us all.”

  Jeru said, “An enemy who can deploy the laws of physics as a weapon is formidable. But in the long run, we will out-compete the Ghosts.”

  Pael said bleakly, “Ah, the evolutionary destiny of mankind. How dismal. But we lived in peace with the Ghosts, under the Raoul Accords, for a thousand years. We are so different, with disparate motivations—why should there be a clash, anymore than between two species of birds in the same garden?”

  I’d never seen birds, or a garden, so that passed me by.

  Jeru glared. She said at last, “Let’s return to practicalities. How do their fortresses work?” When Pael didn’t reply, she snapped, “Academician, you’ve been inside a fortress cordon for an hour already and you haven’t made a single fresh observation?”

  Acidly, Pael demanded, “What would you have me do?”

  Jeru nodded at me. “What have you seen, tar?”

  “Our instruments and weapons don’t work,” I said promptly. “The Brightly exploded. I broke my arm.”

  Jeru said, “Till snapped his neck also.” She flexed her hand within her glove. “What would make our bones more brittle? Anything else?”

  I shrugged.

  Pael admitted, “I do feel somewhat warm.”

  Jeru asked, “Could these body changes be relevant?”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Then figure it out.”

  “I have no equipment.”

  Jeru dumped spare gear—weapons, beacons—in his lap. “You have your eyes, your hands and your mind. Improvise.” She turned to me. “As for you, tar, let’s do a little infil. We still need to find a way off this scow.”

  I glanced doubtfully at Pael. “There’s nobody to stand on stag.”

  Jeru said, “I know. But there are only three of us.” She grasped Pael’s shoulder, hard. “Keep your eyes open, Academician. We’ll come back the same way we left. So you’ll know it’s us. Do you understand?”

  Pael shrugged her away, focusing on the gadgets on his lap.

  I looked at him doubtfully. It seemed to me a whole platoon of Ghosts could have come down on him without his even noticing. But Jeru was right; there was nothing more we could do.

  She studied me, fingered my arm. “You up to this?”

  “I’m fine, sir.”

  “You are lucky. A good war comes along once in a lifetime. And this is your war, tar.”

  That sounded like parade-ground pep talk, and I responded in kind. “Can I have your rations, sir? You won’t be needing them soon.” I mimed digging a grave.

  She grinned back fiercely. “Yeah. When your turn comes, slit your suit and let the farts out before I take it off your stiffening corpse—”

  Pael’s voice was trembling. “You really are monsters.”

  I shared a glance with Jeru. But we shut up, for fear of upsetting the earthworm further.

  I grasped my fighting knife, and we slid away into the dark.

  What we were hoping to find was some equivalent of a bridge. Even if we succeeded, I couldn’t imagine what we’d do next. Anyhow, we had to try.

  We slid through the tangle. Ghost cable stuff is tough, even to a knife blade. But it is reasonably flexible; you can just push it aside if you get stuck, although we tried to avoid doing that for fear of leaving a sign.

  We used standard patrolling SOP, adapted for the circumstance. We would move for ten or fifteen minutes, clambering through the tangle, and then take a break for five minutes. I’d sip water—I was getting hot—and maybe nibble on a glucose tab, check on my arm, and pull the suit around me to get comfortable again. It’s the way to do it. If you just push yourself on and on you run down your reserves and end up in no fit state to achieve the goal anyhow.

  And all the while I was trying to keep up my all-around awareness, protecting my dark adaptation, and making appreciations. How far away is Jeru? What if an attack comes from in front, behind, above, below, left or right? Where can I find cover?

  I began to build up an impression of the Ghost cruiser. It was a rough egg-shape, a couple of kilometers long, and basically a mass of the anonymous silvery cable. There were chambers and platforms and instruments stuck as if at random into the tangle, like food fragments in an old man’s beard. I guess it makes for a flexible, easily modified configuration. Where the tangle was a little less thick, I glimpsed a more substantial core, a cylinder running along the axis of the craft. Perhaps it was the drive unit. I wondered if it was functioning; perhaps the Ghost equipment was designed to adapt to the changed conditions inside the fortress cordon.

  There were Ghosts all over the craft.

  They drifted over and through the tangle, following pathways invisible to us. Or they would cluster in little knots on the tangle. We couldn’t tell what they were doing or saying. To human eyes a Silver Ghost is just a silvery sphere, visible only by reflection like a hole cut out of space, and without specialist equipment it is impossible even to tell one from another.

  We kept out of sight. But I was sure the Ghosts must have spotted us, or were at least tracking our movements. After all we’d crash-landed in their ship. But they made no overt moves toward us.

  We reached the outer hull, the place the cabling ran out, and dug back into the tangle a little way to stay out of sight.

  I got an unimpeded view of the stars.

  Still those nova firecrackers went off all over the sky; still those young stars glared like lanterns. It seemed to me the fortress’s central, enclosed star looked a little brighter, hotter than it had been. I made a mental note to report that to the Academician.

  But the most striking sight was the fleet.

  Over a volume light-months wide, countless craft slid silently across the sky. They were organized in a complex network of corridors filling three-dimensional space: rivers of light gushed this way and that, their different colors denoting different classes and sizes of vessel. And, here and there, denser knots of color and light sparked, irregular flares in the orderly flows. They were places where human ships were engaging the enemy, places where people were fighting and dying.

  It was a magnificent sight. But it was a big, empty sky, and the neares
t sun was that eerie dwarf enclosed in its spooky blue net, a long way away, and there was movement in three dimensions, above me, below me, all around me … .

  I found the fingers of my good hand had locked themselves around a sliver of the tangle.

  Jeru grabbed my wrist and shook my arm until I was able to let go. She kept hold of my arm, her eyes locked on mine. I have you. You won’t fall. Then she pulled me into a dense knot of the tangle, shutting out the sky.

  She huddled close to me, so the bio lights of our suits wouldn’t show far. Her eyes were pale blue, like windows. “You aren’t used to being outside, are you, tar?”

  “I’m sorry, Commissary. I’ve been trained—”

  “You’re still human. We all have weak points. The trick is to know them and allow for them. Where are you from?”

  I managed a grin. “Mercury. Caloris Planitia.” Mercury is a ball of iron at the bottom of the sun’s gravity well. It is an iron mine, and an exotic matter factory, with a sun like a lid hanging over it. Most of the surface is given over to solar power collectors. It is a place of tunnels and warrens, where kids compete with the rats.

  “And that’s why you joined up? To get away?”

  “I was drafted.”

  “Come on,” she scoffed. “On a place like Mercury there are ways to hide. Are you a romantic, tar? You wanted to see the stars?”

  “No,” I said bluntly. “Life is more useful here.”

  She studied me. “A brief life should burn brightly—eh, tar?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I came from Deneb,” she said. “Do you know it?”

  “No.”

  “Sixteen hundred light years from Earth—a system settled some four centuries after the start of the Third Expansion. It is quite different from the solar system. It is—organized. By the time the first ships reached Deneb, the mechanics of exploitation had become efficient. From preliminary exploration to working shipyards and daughter colonies in less than a century … . Deneb’s resources—its planets and asteroids and comets, even the star itself—have been mined to fund fresh colonizing waves, the greater Expansion—and, of course, to support the war with the Ghosts.”

  She swept her hand over the sky. “Think of it, tar. The Third Expansion: between here and Sol, across six thousand light years—nothing but mankind, the fruit of a thousand years of world-building. And all of it linked by economics. Older systems like Deneb, their resources spent—even the solar system itself—are supported by a flow of goods and materials inward from the growing periphery of the Expansion. There are trade lanes spanning thousands of light years, lanes that never leave human territory, plied by vast schooners kilometers wide. But now the Ghosts are in our way. And that’s what we’re fighting for!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  She eyed me. “You ready to go on?”

  “Yes.”

  We began to make our way forward again, just under the tangle, still following patrol SOP.

  I was glad to be moving again. I’ve never been comfortable talking personally—and for sure not with a Commissary. But I suppose even Commissaries need to talk.

  Jeru spotted a file of the Ghosts moving in a crocodile, like so many schoolchildren, toward the head of the ship. It was the most purposeful activity we’d seen so far, so we followed them.

  After a couple of hundred meters the Ghosts began to duck down into the tangle, out of our sight. We followed them in.

  Maybe fifty meters deep, we came to a large enclosed chamber, a smooth bean-shaped pod that would have been big enough to enclose our yacht. The surface appeared to be semi-transparent, perhaps designed to let in sunlight. I could see shadowy shapes moving within.

  Ghosts were clustered around the pod’s hull, brushing its surface.

  Jeru beckoned, and we worked our way through the tangle toward the far end of the pod, where the density of the Ghosts seemed to be lowest.

  We slithered to the surface of the pod. There were sucker pads on our palms and toes to help us grip. We began crawling along the length of the pod, ducking flat when we saw Ghosts loom into view. It was like climbing over a glass ceiling.

  The pod was pressurized. At one end of the pod a big ball of mud hung in the air, brown and viscous. It seemed to be heated from within; it was slowly boiling, with big sticky bubbles of vapor crowding its surface, and I saw how it was laced with purple and red smears. There is no convection in zero gravity, of course. Maybe the Ghosts were using pumps to drive the flow of vapor.

  Tubes led off from the mud ball to the hull of the pod. Ghosts clustered there, sucking up the purple gunk from the mud.

  We figured it out in bioluminescent “whispers.” The Ghosts were feeding. Their home world is too small to have retained much internal warmth, but, deep beneath their frozen oceans or in the dark of their rocks, a little primordial geotherm heat must leak out still, driving fountains of minerals dragged up from the depths. And, as at the bottom of Earth’s oceans, on those minerals and the slow leak of heat, life-forms feed. And the Ghosts feed on them.

  So this mud ball was a field kitchen. I peered down at purplish slime, a gourmet meal for Ghosts, and I didn’t envy them.

  There was nothing for us here. Jeru beckoned me again, and we slithered further forward.

  The next section of the pod was … strange.

  It was a chamber full of sparkling, silvery saucer-shapes, like smaller, flattened-out Ghosts, perhaps. They fizzed through the air or crawled over each other or jammed themselves together into great wadded balls that would hold for a few seconds and then collapse, their component parts squirming off for some new adventure elsewhere. I could see there were feeding tubes on the walls, and one or two Ghosts drifted among the saucer things, like an adult in a yard of squabbling children.

  There was a subtle shadow before me.

  I looked up, and found myself staring at my own reflection—an angled head, an open mouth, a sprawled body—folded over, fish-eye style, just centimeters from my nose.

  It was a Ghost. It bobbed massively before me.

  I pushed myself away from the hull, slowly. I grabbed hold of the nearest tangle branch with my good hand. I knew I couldn’t reach for my knife, which was tucked into my belt at my back. And I couldn’t see Jeru anywhere. It might be that the Ghosts had taken her already. Either way I couldn’t call her, or even look for her, for fear of giving her away.

  The Ghost had a heavy-looking belt wrapped around its equator. I had to assume that those complex knots of equipment were weapons. Aside from its belt, the Ghost was quite featureless: it might have been stationary, or spinning at a hundred revolutions a minute. I stared at its hide, trying to understand that there was a layer in there like a separate universe, where the laws of physics had been tweaked. But all I could see was my own scared face looking back at me.

  And then Jeru fell on the Ghost from above, limbs splayed, knives glinting in both hands. I could see she was yelling—mouth open, eyes wide—but she fell in utter silence, her comms disabled.

  Flexing her body like a whip, she rammed both knives into the Ghost’s hide—if I took that belt to be its equator, somewhere near its north pole. The Ghost pulsated, complex ripples chasing across its surface. But Jeru did a handstand and reached up with her legs to the tangle above, and anchored herself there.

  The Ghost began to spin, trying to throw Jeru off. But she held her grip on the tangle, and kept the knives thrust in its hide, and all the Ghost succeeded in doing was opening up twin gashes, right across its upper section. Steam pulsed out, and I glimpsed redness within.

  For long seconds I just hung there, frozen.

  You’re trained to mount the proper reaction to an enemy assault. But it all vaporizes when you’re faced with a ton of spinning, pulsing monster, and you’re armed with nothing but a knife. You just want to make yourself as small as possible; maybe it will all go away. But in the end you know it won’t, that something has to be done.

  So I pulled out my own knife and
launched myself at that north pole area.

  I started to make cross-cuts between Jeru’s gashes. Ghost skin is tough, like thick rubber, but easy to cut if you have the anchorage. Soon I had loosened flaps and lids of skin, and I started pulling them away, exposing a deep redness within. Steam gushed out, sparkling to ice.

  Jeru let go of her perch and joined me. We clung with our fingers and hands to the gashes we’d made, and we cut and slashed and dug; though the Ghost spun crazily, it couldn’t shake us loose. Soon we were hauling out great warm mounds of meat—ropes like entrails, pulsing slabs like a human’s liver or heart. At first ice crystals spurted all around us, but as the Ghost lost the heat it had hoarded all its life, that thin wind died, and frost began to gather on the cut and torn flesh.

  At last Jeru pushed my shoulder, and we both drifted away from the Ghost. It was still spinning, but I could see that the spin was nothing but dead momentum; the Ghost had lost its heat, and its life.

  Jeru and I faced each other.

  I said breathlessly, “I never heard of anyone in hand-to-hand with a Ghost before.”

  “Neither did I. Lethe,” she said, inspecting her hand. “I think I cracked a finger.”

  It wasn’t funny. But Jeru stared at me, and I stared back, and then we both started to laugh, and our slime suits pulsed with pink and blue icons.

  “He stood his ground,” I said.

  “Yes. Maybe he thought we were threatening the nursery.”

  “The place with the silver saucers?”

  She looked at me quizzically. “Ghosts are symbiotes, tar. That looked to me like a nursery for Ghost hides. Independent entities.”

  I had never thought of Ghosts having young. I had not thought of the Ghost we had killed as a mother protecting its young. I’m not a deep thinker now, and wasn’t then; but it was not, for me, a comfortable thought.

  But then Jeru started to move. “Come on, tar. Back to work.” She anchored her legs in the tangle and began to grab at the still-rotating Ghost carcass, trying to slow its spin.