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.