Aleph Force was Strike Arm’s elite, one of the most formidable rapid-response fighting units in the Navy. From their base on the Orion Line they were hurled through hyperspace into the most desperate situations - like this one. Aleph Force always made a difference: that was what their commanders told them to remember. Even the Ghosts had learned that. And that was why Ghosts were peeling off from their main objective to engage them.

‘Gunner, we’re giving that evacuation operation a chance just by sitting here. And as soon as we’ve lured in enough Ghosts we’ll take them on. I have a feeling you’ll be slitting hides before the day is done.’

‘That might be sooner than you think,’ called engineer Jul, uneasily. ‘Take a look at this.’ She sent another visual feed around the loop.

Sparks slid around the sky, like droplets of water condensing out of humid air.

Hex had never seen anything like it. ‘What are they?’

‘Ghosts,’ Borno said. ‘Swarming like flies.’

‘They’re all around us,’ Hella breathed. ‘There must be thousands.’

‘Make that millions,’ Jul said. ‘They’re surrounding the other ships as well.’

Hex called up a magnified visual. As she had glimpsed on the palette, the Ghosts were cubes, pyramids, spinning tetrahedrons, even a few spiny forms like mines.

Jul said, ‘I thought all Ghosts were spheres.’

Ghosts were hardened to space, and their primary driver was the conservation of their body heat. For a given mass a silvered sphere, the shape with the minimum surface area, was the optimal way to achieve that.

‘But they weren’t always like that,’ said Borno. He had studied Ghosts all his life, the better to destroy them. ‘Ghosts evolved. Maybe these are primitive forms, before they settled for the optimum.’

‘Primitive?’ Hex asked. ‘Then what are they doing here?’

‘Don’t ask me.’ His voice was tight. His loathing of Ghosts was no affectation; it was so deep it was almost phobic.

‘They’re closing,’ Jul called.

The Spear’s weapons began to spit fire into the converging cloud. Hex saw that one Ghost, two, was caught, flaring and dying in an instant. But it was like firing a laser into a rainstorm.

Hex snapped, ‘Gunner, you’re just wasting energy.’

‘The systems can’t lock,’ Borno said. ‘Too many targets, too small, too fast-moving.’

‘Another new tactic,’ Jul murmured. ‘And a smart one.’

Navigator Hella called, ‘Hex, you’d better take a look at this.’

In a new visual, Hex was shown a dense mass of Ghost hide. It was a sheet, a ragged segment of a sphere that grew even as she watched, with more Ghosts clustering around its spreading edges.

‘It’s the Ghosts,’ Hella said. ‘Some of those shapes, for instance the cubes, are space-filling. They’re forming themselves into a shell around us. A solid shell.’

Jul said, wondering, ‘They are acting in a coordinated way, millions of them, right across the battlefield.’