‘But that pulsar is still chipping away at the red star,’ Jul said. ‘The sun is failing.’

‘And if there are Ghosts here they are suffering.’ Borno snarled. ‘Good.’

Hella called, ‘There isn’t much off-world, but I can see one large habitat orbiting the innermost planet.’

‘Then that’s our destination.’ Hex set up an approach trajectory. She felt the needleship’s intrasystem engines thrumming around her, powerful and secure, and the dim red sun swept towards them.

Borno said, ‘Pilot, your trajectory will take us right through the thick of the Ghosts.’

‘Gunner, they either see us or they don’t. We may as well walk in the front door.’

Borno said tensely, ‘Trusting a Ghost with our lives?’

‘That’s always been the deal.’

‘You mean,’ Jul said, ‘the whole mission’s always been halfassed. ’

‘Stay focused,’ Hex murmured.

‘Closest approach,’ Hella called now.

The star ballooned out of the dark. Its dim photosphere bellied beneath Hex’s blister, churning dully, disfigured by huge spots. A pinpoint of electric blue rose over the crimson horizon of the parent, casting long shadows through the columns of glowing starstuff that its gravity hauled up from the body of the parent star.

‘Sunrise on a star,’ Borno said. ‘Now there’s something you don’t see every day.’

‘But we’ve got more anomalies,’ Jul reported. ‘The parent’s composition is all wrong. Too much hydrogen, not enough metals. Younger stars incorporate the debris of earlier generations, fusion products, heavy elements like metal, carbon. It’s as if this star is too old - only by a million years or so, but still—’

‘I’ll tell you something stranger,’ Hella said. ‘This star system may not be in the Coalition catalogues, but it’s a near-identical twin of a system that is.’ She brought up an image of another system, another red star with a bright blue companion pulsar; Hex saw from the accompanying data that the system’s orbital dynamics were virtually identical. Hella said, ‘This other star is in Ghost space too. Only a few tens of light years away.’

Hex let all this wash through her. You weren’t wise to block information flows, especially when you were flying into the unknown like this. But she couldn’t see an immediate relevance in these stellar mysteries.

She was relieved when the twin stars fell away, the needleship climbed back out of the parent star’s gravity well, and the target planet came looming out of the dark.