But no lethal blow was struck, and as the distance between the ships closed, uneasiness knotted in Hex’s stomach.

She thumbed a control to give her a magnified view of the palette’s upper surface. She heard her crew murmur in surprise. These Ghosts weren’t the usual silver spheres. They had sharp edges; they were cubes, pyramids, dodecahedrons - even a tetrahedron, as if mocking the ancient symbol of Earth. And they showed no inclination to run away. These were a new breed of Ghost, she realised.

The Spear shuddered. For an instant the Virtual displays clustered around her fritzed, before her systems rebooted and recovered.

‘Jul, what was that? Did we take a hit?’

Jul was the ship’s engineer, young, bright, capable - and a good pilot before her lower body was cut away by a lucky strike from a dying Ghost. ‘Pilot, we ran through g-waves.’

‘Gravity waves? From a starbreaker?’

‘No,’ called navigator Hella, the last of the Spear’s four crew. ‘Too long-wavelength for that. And too powerful. Pilot, this space is full of g-waves. That’s how the Ghosts are hitting the planet.’

‘Where are they coming from?’

‘The scouts can’t find a source.’

‘New weapons, new ships, new tactics,’ Borno said darkly.

‘And new Ghosts,’ said Hella.

‘You know what’s behind this,’ Jul said uneasily.

Hex said warningly, ‘Engineer—’

‘The Black Ghost. It has to be.’

Unlike any of its kind before, the barracks-room scuttlebutt went, the Black Ghost was an enemy commander that fought like a human - better than a human. The Commissaries claimed this was all just rumour generated by stressed-out crews, but Hex herself had heard that the stories had originated with Ghosts themselves, captives under interrogation. And whether the Black Ghost existed or not, you couldn’t deny that something was making the Ghosts fight better than they ever had.

And meanwhile that palette still hadn’t broken off.

‘Thirty seconds to close,’ Hella said. ‘We won’t survive an impact, pilot.’

‘Neither will they,’ Borno said grimly.

‘Fifteen seconds.’

‘Hold the line!’ Hex ordered.

‘Those dimples,’ said engineer Jul hastily. ‘Where the Ghosts are sitting. There has to be some interface to the palette’s systems. They must be weak spots. Gunner, if you could plant a shell there . . .’

Hex imagined Borno’s grin.

‘Seven seconds! Six!’

A single shell sailed out through the curtain of fire. It was a knot of unified-field energy, like a bit of the universe from a second after the Big Bang itself.

The shell hit a dimple so squarely it probably didn’t even touch the sides. The resident Ghost, a squat cube, was vaporised instantly. Then light erupted from every dimple and weapons port on the palette. The Ghost crew scrambled away, but Hex saw silver skin wrinkle and pop, before the palette vanished in a flash of primordial light.