The Ghost Pit

by Stephen Baxter

  The Ghost Pit

  Stephen Baxter

  Hugo Best Short Story nominee (2002).

  Stephen Baxter

  The Ghost Pit

  As soon as the Spline dropped out of hyperspace, our flitter burst from its belly. After our long enclosure in the crimson interior of the huge living ship, it was like being reborn.

  Even though I had to share this adventure with L’Eesh, my spirits surged.

  “Pretty system,” L’Eesh said. He was piloting the flitter with nonchalant ease. He was about sixty years old, some three times my age, a lot more experienced—and he didn’t miss a chance to let me know.

  Well, pretty it was. The Jovian and its satellites were held in a stable gravitational embrace at the corners of a neat equilateral triangle, the twin moons close enough to the parent to be tidally locked.

  And beyond it all I glimpsed a faint blue mesh thrown across the stars: an astonishing sight, a net large enough to enclose this giant planet, with struts half a million kilometers long.

  I grinned. That was proof that this Jovian system was indeed a Ghost pit—a new pit, an unopened pit. Which was why its discovery had sent such a stir through the small, scattered community of Ghost hunters. And why, to be first, L’Eesh and I were prepared to fire ourselves in without even looking where we were going.

  Already we were sweeping down toward one of the moons. Beneath a dusty atmosphere, the surface was brick red, a maze of charred pits.

  “Very damaged landscape,” I said. “Impact craters? Looks as if it’s been bombed flat … ”

  “You know,” said L’Eesh laconically, “there’s a bridge between those moons.”

  At first his words made no sense. Then I peered up.

  He was right: a fine arch leapt from the surface of one moon and crossed space to the other.

  “Lethe!” I swore. I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t seen it immediately. But then, you don’t look for such a thing.

  L’Eesh grunted. “I hope you have a strong stomach, Raida. Hily never did. Like mother like daughter—”

  He had me off balance. “What about my mother?”

  “Bogeys!”

  And suddenly they were on us, a dozen angular craft that looped around the flitter, coming from over our heads like falling fists.

  L’Eesh yanked at the stick. We flipped backward and sped away. But the bogeys were faster.

  I cowered, an ancient, useless reflex; I wasn’t used to being in a dogfight that humans aren’t dominating.

  “Remarkable accelerations,” murmured L’Eesh. “An automated defense?”

  The bogeys surrounded us in a tidy cloud, and hosed us with a crimson haze.

  “There is nothing we can do.” L’Eesh sat stoically at his controls; blood-red light glinted from the planes of his shaven scalp.

  Abruptly the bogeys tipped sideways and squirted away. As the mist cleared, I let out my breath.

  At first, it seemed the unexpected assault had done us no harm. We were still descending to the moon, which was flattening out from a closed-in crimson ball to a landscape beneath us.

  Now my softscreen filled with the mournful face of Pohp, the agent who had brought us both here, calling from the Spline. But her image was broken up, her words indistinct: … classification of … Ghost … vacuum energy adjustment, which …

  A warning chimed.

  “Raida, help me.” L’Eesh was battling his controls. “We’ve lost telemetry from the portside drive.”

  It was worse than that. Through the crystal hull, I saw a drive pod tumbling away, surrounded by a cloud of frozen fluids and bits of hull material.

  I tried my controls. With half our drive gone, they felt soggy.

  I wasn’t afraid, at that point. I looked up to that impossible bridge, a line drawn across the sky, aloof from our petty struggles. There are times when you just can’t believe what you are seeing. A survival mechanism, I guess.

  More alarms.

  “Another drive pod has cut out.” L’Eesh sat back, pressing his fists against his softscreen in genteel frustration.

  We tipped down, suddenly buffeted by thickening air. A pink-white plasma glow gathered, hiding the stars and the land below.

  There was a howling noise. My pressure suit stiffened suddenly. Peering down, I saw a hole in the hull, a ragged gash reaching right through the hull’s layers; I stared, fascinated, as fluffy clouds shot past my feet.

  L’Eesh turned in his couch. “Listen to me, child. We may yet survive this. The flitter is designed to keep us alive, come what may. It should be able to withstand a gliding descent from orbit on a world this size.”

  “But we’re breaking up.”

  His grin was feral. “Let’s hope the hull ablates slowly.”

  The blasted landscape flattened out further. The sky above had turned pink-brown. Rocks and craters shot beneath the prow.

  There was a last instant of calm, of comparative control. I clung to my couch.

  The flitter bellied down.

  Orange dust flew. The nose crumpled. The inertial suspension failed, and I was flung forward. Foam erupted around me.

  I was trapped, blinded, feeling nothing.

  Then the foam popped and burst, quickly evaporating, and I was dropped into rust-red dirt.

  … Down, just like that, deposited in silence and stillness and orange-brown light, amid settling debris.

  I brushed at the dirt with my gloved hand. There were bits of white embedded in the dust: shards and splinters that crackled, the sound carrying through my suit hood. Bones?

  L’Eesh was lying on his back, peering up at the muddy sky. He barked laughter. “What a ride. Lethe, what a ride!” He lifted his hands over his head, and bits of bone tumbled in the air around him, languidly falling in the low gravity.

  When I was a kid, rogue Ghost cruisers still sailed through the less populated sectors of the Expansion. As parties of hunters scoured those great tangles of silvery rope, my mother would send me into the nurseries armed with knives and harpoons. Watch your back, she would call as I killed. Use your head. There is always an option. I was five years old, six.

  That was how I started.

  L’Eesh was the most formidable hunter of his generation. And he was here for my prey.

  Once this system, in the crowded Sagittarius Arm, was at the heart of the range of the Silver Ghosts. But the Third Expansion rolled right through here, a great wave of human colonization heading for the center of the Galaxy. Until a few decades back, some 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 whir 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. His teeth had been replaced by a porcelain sheet. “Of course I am. Shit from battlefields a thousand years old.” He had an air of wealth, control, culture, arrogance; he was effortlessly superior to me. “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.”

  “It must be a hundred kilometers 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, as if we were transmuting into creatures of bone and dirt ourselves.

  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.

  We saw no animals. I spotted tiny burrows and mounds in the dirt, perhaps made by insects. A kind of lichen clung to the larger rocks. Nothing moved, save us and the dust. Not even the sun: the “days” here lasted as long as an orbit of the moon around the Jovian, which was about ten standard days.

  And over it all loomed the bridge. It rose lumpily from beyond the horizon. It looked crude—almost unfinished—but it became a thread that arrowed through the clouds, making the sky stretch into a third dimension.

  And what a complex sky it was. The sister moon scowled down, scarred and bitter, and the Jovian primary loomed massively on the horizon, the corners of a great celestial triangle forever frozen in place.

  The Spline ship rolled over the horizon, tracking its low orbit. It was like a moon itself, a mottled, meaty moon made grey by the dusty air. Even from here I could see the big green tetrahedron on its hull, the sigil of free humanity. The leathery hull-epidermis of the Spline was pocked with sensor arrays; we had spent a lot of money to ensure our capture of any wild Ghosts was recorded and certified, to preserve the value of the hides.

  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.

  Or maybe it was a battlefield.

  As we walked, L’Eesh studied me, his inhuman eyes glistening. “It looks as if we are going to spend some time together.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “So. Tell me about yourself.”

  “I’m not interested in playing head games with you, L’Eesh.”

  “So defensive, little Raida! I did know your mother.”

  “That doesn’t give you the right to know me.” I saw a chance to get the upper hand. “Listen to me, L’Eesh. I think I know what’s going on here … ”

  Know your prey. This was my first pit, but I had prepared myself. The Ghosts seem to use only a small number of pit types—our flitter had been designed to cope with some of the common variants—and when Pohp sent us her cryptic message, I knew what she must have been talking about.

  Vacuum energy: even in “empty” space there has to be an energy level, because of quantum uncertainty. What was important for us was the effect this had—and the effect of the Ghosts’ tinkering.

  “Think of an atom,” I said. “Like a little solar system with the electrons as planets, right? But what keeps a negative electron out of the positive nucleus?”

  “Vacuum energy?”

  “Right. The electron, and everything else, is surrounded by a sea of vacuum energy. And as fast as the electron loses energy and tries to spiral in, the vacuum sea supplies some more. So the electron stays in orbit.” I peered up at the complicated sky. “Those weapons extracted some of the vacuum energy from the substance of our flitter. Or lowered its level: something like that. All the electrons spiraled in, and molecular structures fell apart.”

  L’Eesh listened, his face unreadable.

  Suddenly I felt naked.

  I dug around among a thick patch of bones. I found a long, thin shaft that might have been a thigh-bone. I cracked it against a rock; it splintered, leaving a satisfactorily vicious point.

  As we walked on I put myself through elementary drill routines.

  The key resource you get from a Ghost is his hide—a perfectly reflective heat trap, with a thousand applications. Now that Ghosts are so rare, wild hides are a luxury item. People sell little squares and triangles of hide for use as charms, curios: this was, after all, a lucky species that survived the death of its sun, so the story goes.

  Anyhow, if you come at a Ghost with a jabbing weapon, you should try to get your spear into the carcass along the spin axis, where the hide is a little thinner, and you won’t rip it unnecessarily. Ghosts don’t leave spoor, my mother used to say. So you have to cut him an asshole. You just follow the trail of excrement and blood and heat until he dies, which might take a day or two.

  L’Eesh was watching me analytically. “You’re, what, twenty, twenty-one? No children yet?”

  “Not until I can buy them out of the Coalition draft.”

  He nodded. “As Hily did you. I knew her ambition for you. It’s good to see it realized so well. It must have been hard for you when she died. I imagine you got thrown into a cadre by the Commissaries—right?”

  “I won’t talk to you about my mother, L’Eesh.”

  “As you wish. But here and now you need to keep your mind clear, little Raida. And you might want to think about saving your energy. We have a long way to go.”

  I worked with my bone spear and tried to ignore him.

  We had to sleep in our suits, of course. I dug a shallow trench in the dust. I couldn’t shut out the crimson light. I slept in patches.

  I woke up in my own stink.

  The recycled gloop from my hood nipples already tasted stale, my skinsuit was chafing in a dozen places, and I felt bruises from that landing that hadn’t registered at the time. If the sun had moved across the sky at all, I couldn’t see it.

  It’s a strange thing, but it wasn’t until that second “morning” that I took seriously the possibility that I might die here. I guess I had been distracted by the hunt, my conflict with L’Eesh. Or maybe I just lack imagination. Anyhow, my adrenaline rush was long gone; I was numb, flat, feeling beaten.

  Through that endless day, we walked on.

  We came to what might have been a township. There was little left but a gridwork of foundations, a few pits like cellars, bits of low wall. I thought I could see a sequence, of older buildings constructed of massive marble-like blocks, later structures made of wh
at looked like the local sandstone or else bits of broken-up marble ruins.

  All of it trashed, burned out, knocked flat.

  L’Eesh, his suit scuffed and filthy, began poking around a large battleship-shaped mound of rubble.

  I squatted, chewing on a glucose tab.

  L’Eesh called, “You know, there’s something odd here. I thought this was a fort, or perhaps some equivalent of a cathedral. But it looks for all the world as if it crashed here.”

  “You don’t make aircraft from brick.”

  “Well, whatever made such a vast, ungainly structure fly through the air is gone now. Nevertheless there was clearly once a pretty advanced civilization here. On the way in I glimpsed extensive ruins. And some of those impact craters looked deliberately placed. This whole world is an arena of war. But it seems to have been a war that was fought with interplanetary weapons, and then flying brick fortresses, and at last, fire and clubs … ”

  He laughed, fiddling with his hood. “Of course it’s likely both moons were inhabited. Life could have been sparked on either moon, in some tidal puddle stirred by the Jovian parent. And then panspermia would work, spores wafting on meteorite winds, two worlds developing in parallel, cross-fertilizing … ”

  On he talked. I wasn’t interested. I was here for Ghosts, not archaeology.

  I waited until he took the lead, and we walked on, leaving the ruined township behind.

  Another “night,” another broken sleep in the dirt. Another “day” on that endless plain.

  We didn’t seem to get any closer to that damn bridge. In places the surface had been blasted to glass; it prickled my feet as I staggered across it.

  We had nothing to do but talk.

  A lot of it was L’Eesh’s refined bragging. “You know, I always wondered why the Commission is so tolerant of us, we hunters. Under the Druz Coalition, you aren’t supposed to get old and rich. The species is the thing! It is not comfortable to feel one has been manipulated, controlled. But it has been glorious nevertheless.”

  Turned out L’Eesh had taken part in that great Ghost massacre on Snowball.