‘Charming,’ Teel said. ‘But, fancy title or not, you are my mortal enemy. If you want us to do something for you, then you must give us something in return.’

The Ghost spun, its flawless hide barely showing its rotation. ‘I expected nothing less. The one thing you wasteful bipeds relish even more than killing is trade. Bargaining, mutual deception—’

Teel snapped, ‘If you expected it you have something to offer.’

‘Very well,’ said the Ghost. ‘If you succeed we will decommission the new weapon system.’

‘What new weapon?’

‘Directional gravity waves on a large scale.’

The weapon that had churned up a planet. Hex held her breath.

‘Download some data,’ Teel said. ‘Prove you can do this. Then we’ll talk.’

Hex watched, astonished, as the Spear’s systems began to accept data from the Ghost.

Every human knew the story of the Silver Ghosts, and their war with humanity.

For fifteen hundred years the Third Expansion of mankind had been spreading across the face of the Galaxy. First contact between humans and the alien kind they labelled ‘Silver Ghosts’ had come only a few centuries after the start of the Expansion. The Ghosts were silvered spheres, up to two metres across. Their hide was perfectly reflective - hence the human label ‘Silver Ghosts’; in starlight they were all but invisible.

The key to the Ghosts was their past. The world of the Silver Ghosts was once Earthlike: blue skies, a yellow sun. But as the Ghosts climbed to awareness their sun evaporated, its substance torched away by a companion star. As their world froze the Ghosts rebuilt themselves. They became symbiotic creatures, each one a huddled cooperative collective. That spherical shape and silvered hide minimised heat loss.

The death of the Ghosts’ sun was a betrayal by the universe itself, as they saw it. But that betrayal shaped them for ever. Their science was devoted to fixing the universe’s design flaws: they learned to tinker with the very laws of physics.

When humans found the Ghosts, at first two powerful interstellar cultures cautiously engaged. But the Ghosts’ home range lay between mankind and the rich star fields of the Galaxy’s Core. The Ghosts were in humanity’s way. War was inevitable.

After early quick victories, for centuries the Ghosts stalled the human advance at the Orion Line, an immense static front along the outer edge of the Sagittarius Arm. The Ghosts, capable of changing the laws of physics in pursuit of weapons technology, were a formidable foe; but humans were the more warlike.

A weapon that could use g-waves to devastate worlds was a characteristic Ghost weapon, exotic and powerful. And it worked, the Integumentary said, by tapping into the large-scale properties of the universe itself.