Exultant (27 page)

Draq said, “We’ll walk from here, rather than fly. It’s best if you come to the facility yourself. There’s nothing quite so striking as a purely human experience—don’t you think, Commissary?”

Pirius was glad to seal up his skinsuit, which smelled of nothing but him. But the Commissary, as usual, demurred, and insisted that a Virtual projection would do just as well for him.

So Pirius stepped out onto the surface of yet another world. Sol was halfway up the sky, a diamond of light.

He took a few experimental steps. Gravity was only a few percent of standard. The ice crunched, compressing, but the fractured surface supported his weight. Pluto ice was a rich crimson laced with organic purple. He made out patterns, dimly, in the ice; they were like bas-relief, discs the size of dinner plates, with the intricate complexity of snowflakes. The suit’s insulation was good, but enough heat leaked to send nitrogen clouds hissing up around his footsteps.

The group began to climb the shallow ridge. There were five of them out on the ice, if you included Nilis. Draq led the way, and Pirius and Nilis followed, with two other Plutinos, including Mara, who walked with Pirius. Nilis floated serenely a few centimeters above the ice, barefoot and without so much as a face mask, once more blithely ignoring all Virtual protocols. It was crassly discourteous, Pirius thought, irritated. But the Plutinos were too polite, or too cowed, to mention it.

Where the ground was steeper, the frost covering had slipped away. The “bedrock” here was water ice, but ice so cold it was hard as granite on Earth, and Pirius thought he could feel its chill through the heated soles of his boots. But it wasn’t slippery; at Pluto’s temperatures even the heat his suit leaked wasn’t sufficient to melt the surface.

And when Pirius stepped onto the bare ice, he thought he heard music. He stopped, surprised. The ground throbbed with a bass harmonization he could feel in his chest. It was as if he heard the frozen planet’s beating heart.

Mara smiled. “Wait and see,” she said.

They reached the shallow breast of the ridge. Pirius saw now that the ridge was one of a line of shallow, eroded hills that circled a basin. It was a crater, he realized, but clearly a very ancient one. Though the floor was cracked and tumbled, its unevenness was worn down almost to smoothness. Over perhaps billions of years, the remnants of the great scar had sublimated away, the icy hillocks of its rim relaxed to shallowness, and the invisible hail of cosmic rays had battered at the crust, turning it blood red, like the ice of Port Sol.

And Pirius saw what he had been brought to witness. On the floor of this palimpsest of a crater nestled a city.

At first all Pirius could make out was a pale, scattered sparkle, as if stars from the silent sky had fallen down to the ice. Then he realized he was seeing the
reflections
of the stars, returned from silvered forms that nestled on the crater floor.

He tapped his faceplate to increase the magnification. The basin was covered by reflective forms, like mercury droplets, glistening on a black velvet landscape. It was a forest of globes and half-globes, anchored by cables. Necklaces swooped between the globes, frosted with frozen air. A city, yes, obviously artificial, and presumably the source of the deep harmonics that traveled to him through the ice. But it wasn’t a human city, and as the ground throbbed beneath his feet, Pirius felt his heart beat faster in response.

Every child in every cadre in every colony across the Galaxy would have recognized this city for what it was, and who must have built it. Every child grew up learning all there was to know about mankind’s greatest enemy save the Xeelee—long vanquished, scattered, its worlds invested and occupied, its facilities destroyed, and yet still a figure of legend and nightmare.

Pirius sensed something behind him, something massive. He turned slowly.

He found himself facing a silvered sphere perhaps two meters across. Pirius could see his own reflection, a bipedal figure standing on blood-dark ice, distorted in the sphere’s belly, and Sol cast a flaring highlight. The sphere hovered without support above the ice, wafting gently as if in some intangible breeze. Its hide was featureless, save for an equipment belt slung around its equator.

Draq stood alongside the sphere, which loomed over him, and slapped its hide. “Now, sirs—what do you think of that? Isn’t it a magnificent beast?”

It was a Silver Ghost. Pirius wished he had a weapon.

The Commissary, taller and bulkier than any of the Plutinos, drew himself up to his full height. Pirius wondered if he had pumped up his Virtual a little for effect. Nilis seemed coldly furious. “Curator Draq, I thought Ghosts had been driven to extinction.”

“Evidently not,” Pirius growled. Mara looked at him uneasily.

Draq gazed at the Ghost’s hide. “Look at this stuff! A Ghost’s skin is the most reflective material in the known universe—and so the most effective heat trap, of course. But it is actually technological. It contains what we call a Planck-zero layer, a sandwich around a zone where the very constants of physics have been tweaked. And the Ghosts incorporated that technology into their own biology. Remarkable: at one time, every living Ghost went about its business clad in a shell that was effectively part of another universe!”

Mara, standing by the Ghost, actually stroked its hide. Pirius thought her gesture was soft, perhaps meant to be reassuring—reassuring
to the Ghost.

Pirius’s confusion deepened further. “Commissary, this is a
Silver Ghost.
It shouldn’t even exist, let alone be bouncing around on Pluto!”

Draq was intimidated by a Commissary, but evidently not by a kid like Pirius. He even seemed triumphant. “We’ve done this to further the goals of the Coalition, Ensign. To serve the Third Expansion!”

Nilis turned on him. “But the boy’s right, curator.”

Draq’s restless hands, encumbered by his skinsuit gloves, wriggled and pulled at each other. “But can’t you see—that’s the sheer
excitement
of the project. The Ghosts were of course wiped out. But perhaps you know that the Ghosts were composite creatures—each of them symbiotic communities, comprising many living beings, some from worlds alien to the Ghosts themselves, and with their technology merged into their structure, too. And their technologies were simply too useful. For example, hides like this are grown on controlled farms across the Galaxy. Strange to think that
bits
of what might have been Ghosts are at work, in the service of mankind, all across the Galaxy. If we had been defeated, perhaps the Ghosts would use human leg muscles and livers, hearts, and bones in
their
machinery!

“And so when, ah, the decision was made that the Ghosts themselves should be
revived,
under controlled conditions of course, it wasn’t hard to reassemble a self-sustaining community. They are quite at home here, on Pluto; perhaps you know they came from a chill world, colder than Pluto, and their technology, what we’ve been able to recover, serves them well.”

“But why?”

“Because Ghosts are a valuable resource.”

Ghosts were . . . strange.

Early in their history, their sun had failed, their world had frozen. The universe had betrayed them, literally—and this had taught them that the universe contained design flaws. And so their science turned to fixing those flaws. They ran experimental programs of quite outrageous ambition. Humans certainly had cause to fear them, before they were crushed.

Draq said, “Long ago, the Coalition councils decided that the Ghosts’ . . . ah,
ingenuity
should be revived—put to use as an engine of ideas, a resource for the benefit of mankind. This was done over and over with other races during the Assimilation, you know. Why not the Ghosts?”

Pirius said, “A resource you had to conceal.”

“Yes! For security—both for humanity’s protection from the Ghosts, and vice versa. And for deniability, I won’t pretend that isn’t true. But you’re here for the Ghosts, whether you know it or not, Commissary. The gravastar idea is
theirs—
”

Mara said coldly, “This ‘valuable resource’ can talk.”

The Ghost hovered impassively. There was no change in its appearance, yet the grammar of the group changed. Suddenly the Ghost stopped being an object, but became a person, a contributor to the conversation.

Nilis walked up to the silvered hide, his Virtual projection casting a blurred reflection on the Ghost’s belly. “It can talk, can it? I see it has a translator box on that belt.” He stood before the Ghost, hands on hips. “You! Ghost!”

Mara said, “There’s no need to shout, Commissary.”

Nilis said, “Do you have a name?”

The Ghost’s voice was synthetic, a neutral human-female voice generated by the translator box it carried, and transmitted to their receiving gear. “I am known as the Ambassador to the Heat Sink.”

Nilis seemed startled. He prodded the Ghost’s hide, but his Virtual finger slid into the reflective surface, shattering into pixels. “And do you know the meaning of the name?”

“No,” the Ghost said bluntly. “I am a reconstruction. A biological echo of my forebears. We have records, but no memory. There can be no true cultural continuity.”

Nilis nodded coldly. “Despite all our ingenuity, extinction is forever.”

“Yes,” the Ghost said simply.

Mara’s expression was dark. “What do you think now, Ensign?”

Pirius spoke without thinking about it. “The Ghosts killed millions of us.” He faced the Ghost. “I’m glad you are conscious. I’m glad you know about the elimination of your kind. I am glad you are suffering.”

The Ghost didn’t respond.

Mara’s bleak gaze was on Pirius. He had to look away, disturbed by the turmoil inside him.

Nilis seemed fascinated by the Ghost, as his scientist’s curiosity overcame his Commissary’s ideology. “If you don’t know who you are, do you at least know what you want?”

“To serve you,” the Ghost said.

Chapter
22

It took ten hours for a dropship to come pick them up from Factory Rock. Pirius Blue and his two wounded charges spent all that time huddling in the ruins of the Xeelee emplacement.

When the medical-corps orderly clambered out of his little craft, he was surprised to find them. The three of them were the only survivors of two platoons. “You must be the luckiest man alive,” the orderly said.

“I must be,” said Pirius Blue.

Cohl’s injury was obvious; Tili Three was in deep shock. The orderly said he was supposed to separate able-bodied Pirius from Cohl and Tili Three, and send them back through different “processing channels,” as he put it. Pirius refused to be parted from his comrades. It boiled down to a standoff between Pirius and the small, heavy orderly, there on the churned-up surface of the Rock. The orderly caved in, shrugging his shoulders, saying the officers would sort it out later.

So they loaded Cohl and Tili onto the dropship. By now their skinsuits had turned rigid and filled up with a greenish stabilizing fluid full of nutrients, anesthetics, and stimulants. You were actually supposed to
breathe
this stuff. Pirius had tried it in training and, no matter what assurances he had got about the glop’s oxygen content, it had felt like drowning. But both the wounded were mercifully unconscious; as they were manhandled, the dense fluid sloshed around their faces.

The dropship lifted easily. Pirius glanced back at the ruined emplacement, the scarred bit of ground that marked the site of the monopole factory. It was just another battlefield, in an unending war of a million battlefields. But it could have been the most important place in his entire life, for he could easily have died here. He knew he would never see it again.

The ride was short, a flea-hop to the nearest clearing station. The dropship skimmed over the ground. The casualties lay like two statues, locked into their rigid suits. The ship had no medical facilities. It couldn’t even be pressurized, so the casualties couldn’t be taken out of their skinsuits.

The orderly was cheerful; he actually whistled tunelessly as he flew the ship. Pirius shut down his comm loop.

After a couple of minutes, more dropships came into sight, other bubbles of light skimming over the asteroid’s battered surface, converging from all over the Rock. A crude traffic control system cut in, and Pirius’s dropship joined a queue. Soon they were so close to the ship in front Pirius could see its passengers, and their bewildered expressions. Ships streamed the other way, too, dropships heading back out across the Rock to ferry in yet more casualties.

The clearing station had been set up in a wide impact crater. A pressurized dome perhaps a kilometer wide sat in the crater like a huge droplet of water, its skin rippling languidly. It was marked with a tetrahedral sigil, the symbol of free Earth.

The dome was studded with airlocks, to which ships came nuzzling up. Some of them were dropships, others larger boats; there was even a captain’s corvette. The ships rose steadily toward a fleet of Spline craft which drifted far above, fleshy, patient moons. Pirius could see movement inside the dome, through its translucent walls: it was a hive of frantic activity. But there was commotion outside as well, and the surface of the Rock around the dome was covered with glistening rows, as if it had been plowed up, like a big nano-food farm.

Pirius expected his own dropship to dock with one of the dome’s ports. He was surprised when the little craft began to descend a few hundred meters short of the dome. It came down on a patch of bare dust, a landing site hastily cordoned off and marked with winking globe lamps.

The hull popped open, and the orderly, still businesslike and cheery, asked Pirius to give him a hand with the casualties. They set Cohl and Tili in their rigid suits down on the bare ground.

All around the ship, troopers were lying in the dirt, their skinsuits glowing orange or red. This was what Pirius had glimpsed from above, what he had thought looked like the furrows of a plowed nano-food farm. The furrows were rows of wounded, thousands or tens of thousands of them, lying patiently in the dirt, waiting for treatment.