On the Orion Line – Baxter, Stephen

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The Brief Life Burns Brightly broke out of the fleet. We were chasing down a Ghost cruiser, and we were closing.

The lifedome of the Brightly was transparent, so it was as if Captain Teid in her big chair, and her officers and their equipment clusters–and a few low-grade tars like me–were just floating in space. The light was subtle, coming from a nearby cluster of hot young stars, and from the rivers of sparking lights that made up the fleet formation we had just left, and beyond that from the sparking of novae. This was the Orion Line–six thousand light years from Earth and a thousand lights long, a front that spread right along the inner edge of the Orion Spiral Arm–and the stellar explosions marked battles that must have concluded years ago.

And, not a handful of klicks away, the Ghost cruiser slid across space, running for home. The cruiser was a rough egg-shape of silvered rope.

Hundreds of Ghosts clung to the rope. You could see them slithering this way and that, not affected at all by the emptiness around them.

The Ghosts’ destination was a small, old yellow star. Pael, our tame Academician, had identified it as a fortress star from some kind of strangeness in its light. But up close you don’t need to be an Academician to spot a fortress. From the Brightly I could see with my unaided eyes that the star had a pale blue cage around it–an open lattice with struts half a million kilometers long–thrown there by the Ghosts, for their own purposes.