But the war would last centuries more. Such is the nature of conflict on interstellar scales.

In time the Ghosts learned to fight back, with new weapons, new tactics.

Even a new breed of Ghost.

GHOST WARS - AD 7004

GHOST WARS

AD 7004

I

The needleship Spear of Orion dropped out of hyperspace. Its tetrahedral Free Earth sigils shone brightly, its weapons ports were open, and its crew were ready to do their duty.

Pilot Officer Hex glanced around the sky, assessing the situation.

She was deep in the Sagittarius Spiral Arm, a place where stars crowded, hot and young. One star was close enough to show a disc, the sun of this system. And there was the green planet she had been sent here to defend. Labelled 147B by the mission planners, this was a terraformed world, a human settlement thrust deep into Silver Ghost territory. But the planet’s face was scarred by fire, immense ships clustered to evacuate the population - and needleships like her own popped into existence everywhere, Aleph Force swimming out of hyperspace like a shoal of fish. This was a battlefield.

All this in a heartbeat. Then the Silver Ghosts attacked.

‘Palette at theta ten degrees, phi fifty!’ That was gunner Borno’s voice, coming from the port blister, one of three dotted around the slim waist of the Spear.

Hex, in her own cramped pilot’s blister at the very tip of the needleship, glanced to her left and immediately found the enemy. Needleship crews were warriors in three-dimensional battlefields; translating positional data from one set of spherical coordinates to another was drummed into you before you were five years old.

Borno had found a Ghost intrasystem cruiser, the new kind - a ‘palette,’ as the analysts were calling them. It was a flat sheet with its Ghost crew sitting in pits in the top surface like blobs of mercury. The ship looked a little like a painter’s palette, hence the nickname. But palettes were fast, manoeuvrable and deadly, much more effective in battle than the classic tangled-rope Ghost ships of the past. And just seconds after she came down from hyperspace this palette was screaming down on Hex, energy weapons firing.

Hex felt her senses come alive, her heartbeat slow to a resolute thump. One of her instructors once said she had been born to end Ghost lives on battlefields. At moments like this, that was how it felt. Hex was twenty years old.

She hauled on her joystick. The needleship swung like a compass needle and hurled itself directly at the Ghost palette. As weapons on both ships fired, the space between them filled with light.

‘About time, pilot,’ Borno said. ‘My fingers were getting itchy.’

‘All right, all right,’ Hex snapped back. Gunner Borno, of all the needleship crew she had ever met, had the deepest, most visceral hatred of the Ghosts and all their works. ‘Just take that thing down before we collide.’