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.”