Chasing the Dragon by Justina Robson Page A

didn't catch the
words. If she hadn't known better she'd have thought he was afraid.
    "'Kay." She nodded, glad to be useful or, indeed, glad to be anything positive this morning for however long it could last.
    He led the way over the wet sand to the point where the stick man
had stood. The hull listed over them here, but was broken down enough
that the lower decks were exposed. Seeing it from there made it quite
clear the thing was a ruin. Water dripped from it, and Lila copied Mal's
studious avoidance of the fall. It was black and difficult to make out any
details inside. The witchlight that shone from its vertices was so weak
that the contrast with the sun rendered it useless. The whole thing gave
off a chill that made the air around it noticeably colder-almost three
degrees colder, Lila noted-and there was a smell like metal but no
smell of anything else. She put her hand out and touched her fingertips
to its hull. The cold there was actually blistering, but she was able to
stand it long enough to get plenty of information.
    "That's not wood."
    "Yeah, no shit," Mal whispered, keeping his words from the others.
    Lila looked at the stern of the ship, where a large portion of it was
still in contact with the water. For the first time she noticed the tiny
alteration in sound where tiny pieces of ice were washing in the lukewarm waves. White ice formed jutting spars just above the water line. Where the sun shone on the bulk of the wreck however, water was running freely.

    "How could a ghost stay this solid here?" It didn't make sense to
her. She'd seen ghosts before, but not like this one. They had forms
made of light and air; sometimes they could use small particulatessand, dust, snow-and small items to make their forms, but this was
unheard-of. "I mean, it isn't wood, but it looks and feels like it. It has
the same molecular structures, hydrocarbons, water, mineral traces. It's
got the same properties as something you'd cut from a sizeable tree.
It's even been splintered by cannon shot. The light is in the midrange
for ghostlights." She would have gone on, but analysis of ghost forms
was an incomplete, almost un-begun science.
    "It's part of the Fleet," Malachi murmured. His eyes searched and
searched it relentlessly. "But the Fleet was never wrecked. All the vessels were whole. I don't understand...."
    "What's the Fleet?" she asked.
    "Trouble," he said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his coat
and slowly backing up, all the while keeping an eye on the ship.
    "Are you expecting someone to come out of it?"
    His eyes flashed as he turned abruptly to look at her. "No. No."
    "So, you're done?"
    "Hardly."
    "Someone has to go into it."
    "Yes."
    "Do a proper survey. See the insides."
    "Yes." He nodded vigorously.
    "We can wait until noon. Get some scaffolding. If you think it'll
last."
    "Good idea." He backed off from it so fast he was giving orders to
the support crew at the fence line before she had time to make another
suggestion.
    She was pleased, kind of. It seemed that in a crisis they were bud dies again. At least he was talking to her. That was good, she felt, but
she didn't hope for a lot more, though she needed it. Above her the
ship creaked and groaned as the water left more and more of it on the
beach. Lila scanned it and reanalysed the information her fingers had
gathered.

    It was the oddest thing. There was no scientific framework that
dealt with this, to her knowledge. Ghosts spawned in the Void, by
methods that were imperfectly understood. The relation of the Void to
the worlds wasn't understood. Ghosts had always previously appeared
and vanished on their own schedules, even if they could be logically
attached to places, and some tests had said they were clearly composed
of aether. Here, in this ship, the aether had started to resemble matter.
It was doing a fake job, like any glamour, but it was a remarkably good
fake in the making. It was almost ... real.
    Nobody in