Borno had been born between the stars. His ancestors, who called themselves ‘Engineers’, had fled Earth at the time of an alien occupation. With no place to land the refugees had ganged together their spacecraft and found ways to live between the stars, through trading, piloting, even a little mercenary soldiering.

When the Third Expansion came, Borno’s Engineers had been one of a number of peripheral cultures recontacted by the Coalition, the new authority on Earth. But the Engineers had also forged tentative links with the Silver Ghosts, who were undergoing their own expansion out of the heart of the Galaxy. For a time the Engineers had profited from trade between two interstellar empires. They even welcomed small Ghost colonies on their amorphous islands of relic spacecraft and harnessed asteroids.

But then Navy ships came spinning down to impose Coalition authority on the Engineers’ raft culture. There had been a strange period when autonomous Ghost enclaves had been granted room to live under the new regime: Silver Ghosts, living under Coalition authority. But the Ghosts had been taxed, marginalised and discriminated against until their position was untenable. Their maltreatment had led to a rescue mission from Ghost worlds - and that had led to one of the first military engagements of the long Ghost Wars, fought out over the Engineers’ fragile raft colony. Among the Engineers, many had died, and the rest had been dispersed to colonies deeper within Coalition space.

All this was centuries ago. But Borno’s people had never forgotten who they were and where they had come from; they still called themselves ‘Engineers’. And in their minds it had been Ghost aggression that had resulted in the deaths of so many and the loss of an ancient homeland.

Hex reflected that it would do no good to try to explain to Borno that it had been Coalition policy that had precipitated that defining crisis in the first place. And besides, Borno’s wrath was useful for the Coalition’s purposes. In a war that spanned the stars, he was not unique.

‘Heads up,’ Hella said. ‘I have a visual. Theta eighty-six, phi five.’

Their destination was dead ahead.

Hex saw a double star: a misty sphere that glowed a dull coal red while a pinpoint of electric blue trawled across its face.

The Spear’s crew had had to find their way here by dead reckoning. This system didn’t show up in the Navy’s data banks. After fifteen centuries of the Third Expansion, the Commission for Historical Truth believed it had mapped every single one of the Galaxy’s hundreds of billions of stars, human-controlled or not - but it hadn’t mapped this one.

Anomaly or not, somewhere in this unmapped system, the Integumentary had promised, the crew of the Spear would find the Black Ghost.

Gunner Borno said hastily, ‘We’re crawling with Ghosts.’