The hunters spread out. Their projectile weapons and that antiquated gravity-wave handgun were raised at the feeding pod.
Five called, ‘Three, two, one.’
Fire burst from the projectile weapons, and cherry-red starbreaker light ripped from the ancient handgun. The pod’s wall was elastic; it burst like a soap bubble. 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. It was as if the substance of the world had shrunk back in protest from the warmth, Donn thought. Nearby structures began to slip into the widening pit, or they floated away, gravitational anchors broken.
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 responding . . .’
The disruption spread rapidly as buildings further from the imploding centre were hauled over by the disrupted rope tangle. The hunters started to make the damage worse, slashing glowing light cables with their blades.
Now Ghosts spilled out of the tangle, trying to escape. Just as Kanda had suggested, they fell to the ground, poured down the open throughway and flowed out of the city. 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 organise 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 barbed wire the humans had set, and air and bloody liquid fountained, crystalline, from its wounds. Now Five leapt on the Ghost, landing sprawled on its hide. Gripping with her legs, she coiled her back upwards, and struck down with a stabbing sword, as hard as she could. Then she slid to the ground, leaving the blade buried up to the hilt in the Ghost’s carcass. 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 lunged again. This time she used a tool like a long-handled hook to dig into the already gaping wounds, and she dragged out a length of bloody rope, intestine perhaps. It coiled on the ground, steaming and quickly freezing. And Five struck again, and again.
All around Donn, the humans laboured at trapped Ghosts with 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, cannibalised from a crashed Ghost ship, invisibly pouring out the Ghost’s precious hoarded heat.
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, towards the Ghost she had eviscerated. He actually put 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 focused 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.
She glared at him. She took back the knife and cut through the Ghost’s trailing intestine with a savage swipe. Dark fluid poured out, congealing onto the ice, freezing immediately. The Ghost subsided, as if deflating. Five faced Donn. ‘I knew you were a weak one, the minute I saw you.’
‘Then you were right.’
‘We only survive here by killing Ghosts. If you won’t kill you have no right to live.’
‘I understand that.’
She held out her hand. ‘Your suit. Give it back to me. I’ll find a better use for it.’
He found he had nothing to say. He reached up and pinched his hood by the cheeks. One firm tug and all this would be over—
‘Wait.’
A human being came walking out of the calamitous Ghost city – walking without a pressure suit, of Ghost skin or otherwise. It was Eve Raoul. And a Ghost rolled at her shoulder. It was the Sink Ambassador, Donn knew it must be.
The rats, Hama and Kanda and the rest, evidently astonished, stood back from their butchery. They were crusted with frozen blood, weapons in their hands.
Eve Raoul looked down at her feet. She was up to her ankles in frozen air. The Virtual protocol violations must be agonising for her, Donn thought; it was supposed to hurt if you walked out into the vacuum without a suit. She turned to the Ambassador. ‘I did the job you wanted. I snagged the rats’ attention.’ Yes, Donn thought. As no Ghost, among a million Ghosts, ever could. ‘Let me go now. Please.’
‘Thank you, Eve Raoul.’
Eve turned to Donn. ‘Listen to the Sink Ambassador. Do what it says. This is more important than you can imagine . . .’ Her voice tailed off, and she broke up into a cloud of blocky pixels that dwindled and vanished.
Trembling, exhausted, Donn felt irritated. If they’d let him die it could all have been over in an instant. No more shocks, no more changes, no more choices. Death would have been easier, he felt, than facing whatever came next. He said, ‘How did you know I would be here?’
‘You are not hard to track,’ the Ambassador said. ‘Your biochemical signature – none of you can hide. Not even you, Sample 5A43.’
Five flinched. ‘You know where we are, our bunker?’
‘Of course we do.’
‘Then why don’t you hunt us down, kill us?’
‘For what purpose? We brought you here to understand you, not kill you.’ The Ambassador lifted off the ground and hovered over the deflated corpses of its kind, impaled on the crude human traps. ‘We seem to have trouble anticipating such actions as this. We do not think the way you do. I suppose we lack imagination. We try to learn.’
Donn said, ‘What do you want of me, Ambassador?’
‘We need your help.’ It was another voice. A Silverman came walking from the chaotic city – the Silverman, Donn saw, the one from Minda’s Saviour, with its human-tech neck band and one arm lopped off above the elbow.
Donn stared. ‘Ambassador, since when has a Silverman spoken for the Ghosts?’
The Ambassador said, ‘Since you made this one as smart as any Ghost. You Reefborn made him intelligent enough to suffer. But sentience always has unexpected consequences. In fact, he has become intelligent enough, and human enough, to be able to anticipate how you will react when you learn what we have been up to here. Donn Wyman, we need you to tell the humans. They would not listen to us. You, though, might be believed.’
Donn was bewildered. ‘And what have you been up to?’
‘We will show you. Come.’
The Silverman turned and walked back towards the city. The Ambassador followed.
Donn saw that they were heading for the dodecahedral transfer station. ‘You want me to get into that thing?’
‘Yes,’ said the Ambassador.
‘Where will it take me?’
‘To somewhere beyond your imagination.’
‘And what will I meet there?’
‘The one known in your human rumours as the Seer.’
Kanda laughed. ‘You lucky cuss . . . Go, man. Go!’
But still Donn hesitated. ‘I’ll come with you if you let these others go. Not back to their cave under the ice. Send them home. Don’t harm them further.’
The Ambassador didn’t pause. ‘Done.’
‘Thank you,’ whispered Hama Belk.
Kanda grinned. ‘A brief life, Hama?’
‘Not that brief, thanks.’
Donn said, ‘One more thing, Ambassador.’