Old Earth Stories Part 13

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 n.o.body 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 s.h.i.thole 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 other life. A more exotic sort, blown in from the stars, cold-lovers, psychrophiles, colonizing this cold world." 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 sc.r.a.p 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 s.p.a.ce, 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, b.a.l.l.s 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 a.n.a.lysts 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 pa.s.sengers. 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 carca.s.s 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 fatb.a.l.l.s, 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 G.o.d."

Kanda murmured, "Actually, it's fascinating. Humans have always worshiped G.o.ds 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. a.s.sa.s.sinations 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 ba.s.s 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 cl.u.s.ter in little cl.u.s.ters, 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?"

"We only have rumors," Hama said cautiously. "Briefings from the Commission, gossip from the zoos. It may have something to do with the Seer."

"Or," Kanda said, "it may have to do with the instability of the star. The Boss-all that flaring."

"You're suggesting the Ghosts are trying to mend a failing star?"

"We know they think big," Hama said. "Anyhow, it makes no difference to us."

Donn stared at the chamber, avid. For if this was a teleport terminal, it might be a way off this dismal planet. But the dodecahedral chamber wasn't their destination.

The party came to a big transparent sphere, apparently pressurized. At the center of the sphere, 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 it was laced with purple and red smears. Tubes led off from the mud ball to the hull of the pod. Ghosts cl.u.s.tered there, sucking up the purple gunk from the mud.

Donn crouched with the others, awed. "The Ghosts are feeding." feeding."

"Yes," Kanda said. "This is how Ghosts live. Even on their home world, deep beneath their frozen oceans, a little primordial geothermal heat must leak out still, dragging minerals up from the depths. Life-forms feed. And the Ghosts feed on them.'" them.'"

So this mud ball was a kitchen-and no wonder the Ghosts liked a little sea-bottom ooze to play in at Minda's. "So what are we doing here?"

Kanda murmured, "It's not the kitchen itself that's the target. It's about the warmest place in the city. What we intend to do is release all that heat, dump it into the environment."

"Why?"

"We're going to give them indigestion," Five murmured. "Positions."

The hunters spread out. Their projectile weapons were aimed at the feeding pod and that antiquated handgun.

Five called, "Three, two, one."

Fire burst from the projectile weapons, and cherry-red star-breaker light ripped from the ancient handgun. The pod's wall was elastic; it burst like a soap bubble, and that big floating mud ball splashed to the ground amid a hail of ice droplets.

Steam flashed, instantly frosting. The feeding Ghosts fled in panic.

And as the mud's heat was dumped, the ground subsided, a pit dilating open, like an immense version of the fingertip dimple Kanda had made on the walk here.

Kanda said, "We've been seeding this whole area with cryo nests for weeks. If you hit the cryos with too much heat, they have ways of hitting back."

Away from the smashed pod, larger structures began to slip into the widening pit, or they floated away, gravitational anchors broken. The disruption spread rapidly as buildings far from the center were hauled over by the rope tangle. The hunters started to make the damage worse, slashing light cables with chain saws.

Ghosts spilled out of the tangle. They poured down the open throughway and flowed over the ground out of the city, just as Kanda had suggested. And they started to get caught in the traps the humans had set.

Five stood in the open. "We'll have fifteen, twenty minutes before they organize to get rid of us. Let's get this done." She raised her spear.

Donn watched Five slaughter one Ghost.

Its skin was already punctured where it was snagged on the wire, and b.l.o.o.d.y water and air fountained, crystalline, from the wounds. Now Five leapt on the Ghost, landing sprawled on its hide. Gripping with her legs, she coiled her back upward and struck down with a stabbing sword, as hard as she could. The blade was buried up to the hilt in the Ghost's carca.s.s. But the hilt was attached by a rope to a stake driven into the hard ground, and as the Ghost thrashed, its own motions tore gouges into its flesh.

Five slid to the ground, then lunged in again. This time she used a tool like a long-handled hook to dig into the gaping wounds, and she dragged out a length of b.l.o.o.d.y rope, intestine perhaps. It coiled on the ground, steaming and freezing.

All around Donn, the humans labored at the trapped Ghosts with chain saws and axes and swords and daggers. Hama and Kanda worked as hard as the rest. One man thrust a kind of lance into the side of a Ghost. Donn couldn't see its purpose, the wound didn't seem deep, but it thrashed in agony. Kanda told him it was a refrigeration laser, cannibalized from a crashed Ghost ship, invisibly pouring out the Ghost's precious h.o.a.rded heat.

Above their heads, even as the slaughter went on, Ghosts fled from the collapsing city, shimmering mercury droplets drifting away.

Five approached Donn. She held out the knife to him, handle first. "Here. Finish this one. Easy first kill, my treat."

Donn took a step forward, toward the Ghost she had eviscerated. He actually held out his hand, holding the knife. He knew this was the only way he was going to survive here.

But all the emotions, all the shock of this extraordinary day, focussed into this moment. He felt detached from the ice world, from the grinning girl before him, detached from it by more than the smear of frozen blood on his Ghost-hide visor.

He stepped back. "No," he said.