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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 halfglobes draped in a chrome netting. The colony lacked a clear centre, 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 droplets of silver blood flowing through the open carcass of their silver city. The Boss cast highlights from every hide, so that 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 fatballs, 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, on their home world, the Ghosts’ ancestors understood full well that a rogue pulsar was destroying their sun. So they venerated the pulsar. They made it a god.’

Kanda murmured, ‘Actually it’s fascinating. Humans have always worshipped gods 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 centres 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 Coalition’s forces have learned that Ghost concentrations are hard to defeat, short of out-and-out genocide. They lack hierarchies, like human societies, which makes them impossible to decapitate. Usually assassinations are useless. It’s like stabbing a pool of mercury with a fork; it just fragments and runs away. 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 mirrored 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-grey glow. And Donn heard music. The ground throbbed with a bass harmonisation, 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. Now the rats got to work, laying barbed wire and spiky obstacles across the smooth surface of the roadway.

Donn murmured to Kanda, ‘What are we 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 net of light ropes grew thicker over their heads. In the complexity Donn saw denser concentrations – nurseries of Ghost sub-components, perhaps, or control centres, 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 gather in little clusters, sometimes whirling in chains like necklaces, apparently for the fun of it.

The rats clung to the shadows, out of sight, and Donn followed their example.

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 to.

He pointed this out to Hama. ‘What’s that?’

‘I suppose there are two possible answers,’ Hama said drily. ‘I don’t believe it’s an extermination chamber. Maybe it’s a teleport.’

The thought excited Donn. ‘Like the Sampling, the abductions. So where are they going?’

‘We only have rumours,’ Hama said cautiously. ‘Briefings from the Commission before we were abducted, gossip from inside the Ghosts’ 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. Maybe the Ghosts are trying to mend a failing star . . . That would be their style.’

The thought staggered Donn.

‘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, and they passed on.

The party came to a big transparent sphere, apparently pressurised. At the centre 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 vapour crowding its surface, and it was laced with purple and red smears. Tubes led off from the mud ball to the hull of the spherical pod. Ghosts clustered there, sucking up the purple gunk from the mud.

Donn crouched with the others, awed. ‘The Ghosts are 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. Down there, life forms feed, blind, pale. And the Ghosts feed on 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. ‘What are we doing here?’

Kanda murmured, ‘This is 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.’