The needleship slammed through a dissipating cloud of debris, and the blisters turned black to save the crew’s eyes.

The Spear sat in space, its hull charred, still cooling as it dumped the energy it had soaked up. Sparks drifted through the sky: more needleships, a detachment of Aleph Force forming up.

For the first time since they’d dropped out of hyperspace Hex was able to catch her breath, and to take a decent look at the world she had been sent to defend.

Even from here she could see it was suffering. Immense storm systems swathed its poles and catastrophic volcanism turned its nightside bright. Sparks climbed steadily up from the planet’s surface, refugee transports to meet the Navy ships - Spline, living starships, kilometre-wide spheres of flesh and metal.

Hella murmured, ‘That’s what a g-wave weapon will do to you, if it’s sufficiently powerful.’

Borno asked, ‘How? By ripping up the surface?’

‘Probably by disrupting the planet’s orbital dynamics. You could knock over a world’s spin axis, maybe jolt it into a higher eccentricity orbit. If the core rotation collapsed its magnetic field would implode. You’d have turmoil in the magma currents, earthquakes and volcanism . . .’

The destruction of a world as an act of war. The people being driven from their homes today were not soldiers. They had come here as colonists, to build a new world. But the very creation of this settlement had been an act of war, Hex knew, for this settlement had been planted deep inside what had been Ghost space until five centuries ago.

The Ghost Wars had already lasted centuries. War with an alien species was not like a human conflict. It was ecological, the Commissaries taught, like two varieties of weed competing for the same bit of soil. It could be terminated by nothing short of total victory - and the price of defeat would be extinction, for one side or another.

And now the Ghosts had a weapon capable of wreaking such damage on a planetary scale, and, worse, were prepared to use it. These were not the Ghosts Hex had spent a lifetime learning to fight. But in that case, she thought harshly, I’ll just have to learn to fight them all over again.

Borno said, ‘I don’t like just sitting out here.’

‘Take it easy,’ Hex said. She downloaded visual feed from the command loops. Ghost ships were being drawn away from the battle around the planet itself, and were heading out to this concentration.