Hex checked her displays. All around her were Ghosts: their ships, their emplacements, their sensor stations and weapons platforms. The whole system was like a vast fortress, defended to a depth of half a light year from that central double sun, with more monitoring stations and fast-response units even further out.

‘None of them are reacting,’ Jul said, sounding disbelieving. ‘Not one unit.’

Hex said, ‘Then forget them. What are we looking at?’

Jul said, ‘I’ve seen systems like this before. That blue thing is a neutron star, right?’

‘Yes,’ Hella said, ‘Actually a pulsar . . .’

Once this had been a partnership of two immense stars - until the larger, too massive, had detonated in a supernova explosion, for a few days outshining the whole Galaxy. Its ruin had collapsed to form a neutron star, a sun-sized mass compressed down to the size of a city block. As it spun on its axis a ferocious magnetic field threw out beams of charged particles to flash in the eyes of radio telescopes: it was a pulsar.

As for the supernova’s companion, the tremendous detonation stripped away most of its outer layers. Its fusing core, exposed, had not been massive enough to maintain the central fire. The remnant star had subsided to misty dimness.

Hella said, ‘But the system is actually still evolving. That pulsar is dragging material out of the parent.’ She displayed a false-colour image that showed a broad disc, material the pulsar’s gravity had dug out of the larger star’s flesh and thrown into orbit.

‘So that star blew its companion up,’ Borno said, ‘and now it’s taking it apart bit by bit. What a dismal place this is.’

‘And yet,’ Hella said, ‘this system has planets. Two, three, four - more off in the dark, they surely don’t matter. It’s the innermost that has the most Earthlike signature: air, liquid water, oxygen, carbon compounds. Smaller than Earth, though.’

Across human space people always spoke of Earthlike worlds, though few of them had ever seen Earth; the mother planet remained the reference for all her scattered children.

The original binary could have hosted Earths, if they were far enough from the brilliance of the central stars. No biosphere could have survived the supernova detonation, but once the system became stable again, any surviving worlds could have been reborn. Comets or outgassing could create a new atmosphere, a new ocean. And life could begin again, perhaps crawling out of the deepest rocks, or brought here by the comets - or even delivered by conscious intent; this was a Galaxy crowded with life. How strange, Hex thought, a planet that might have hosted not one but two generations of life. She wondered if its new inhabitants had any idea of what went before - if those doomed by the supernova had managed to leave a trace of their passing, before being put to the fire.