Unlike the rest of her crew Hex had been brought up on a planet, only a few light years from Earth itself. But even to her eyes this little world looked strange. Huddled close for warmth, it kept one face to the parent star. The subsolar point on the daylight hemisphere, where the sun would be perpetually overhead, must be the warmest place on the planet. Hex made out climatic bands of increasing dimness sprawling around that central point, so that the face of the planet was like a target, bathed crimson red. And on the dark side, illuminated only by starlight, she glimpsed the blue tint of ice.

As the needleship swung closer, she made out more detail on the sunward side: dark patches that might have been seas, broad crimson plains, and here and there a bubbling grey that was the characteristic of habitation, cities. But sparks crawled over the terminator, the boundary between day and night, and where they landed fire splashed.

Jul murmured, ‘What are we getting into here? It looks like a war between the day and night sides.’

Hella said, ‘That big orbital habitat is by far the highest technology on or around the planet. The materials, the trace radiation - it looks like it’s the only example of modern Ghost technology here.’

‘If the Black Ghost is anywhere,’ Hex said, ‘that’s where it will be. Fix the course, navigator—’

The Spear shuddered and spun crazily, that faint sun and its huddled world whirling like spectres. Hex’s blister lit up with alarm flags, flaring bright red.

She barked out commands and wrestled with her joystick. ‘Report!’

‘It was g-waves,’ Jul called back. ‘Just like the beams they used back on 147B.’

‘Were we targeted? They aren’t supposed to be able to see us.’

Hella said, ‘The whole system is crisscrossed by the beams. We just ran into one.’

‘A defensive measure?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. Or something to do with the stellar system itself—’

Borno said, ‘We have company. Theta thirty, phi one hundred. They are coming out of that habitat.’

A swarm of palette-ships came swooping down on the Spear. Maybe it had been too much to expect the Integumentary’s shielding to survive the g-wave buffeting.

Grimly Hex fought with the still-spinning ship. ‘Open up the weapons ports.’

‘Half of them are off-line,’ Jul called back. ‘And our sensors are blitzed too. Right now we’re de-fanged, pilot. Give me two minutes and—’

The first shot sizzled through space only a couple of kilometres from the Spear’s nose.

‘We don’t have two minutes,’ Hex snapped. ‘Options. Come on, guys!’

‘Fight!’ Borno called.

‘Run,’ said Jul.

‘Abort to the planet’s surface,’ advised Hella.