by Gary Gibson
This ship had too many shadows for its own good. Dakota’s senses prickled apprehensively as she found her way through its musty, darkened corridors and drop shafts. She checked and rechecked the vessel’s security logs, including her own illegal alterations. There were, indeed, curious omissions or glitches that had nothing to do with her efforts, incredibly easy to miss if she hadn’t been looking for something just a little bit unusual.
She couldn’t dismiss either the possibility that someone—or something—had gained access to the logs without her knowledge. Dakota shivered at the thought.
But surely it simply wasn’t possible. Only another machine-head could possess that level of skill.
She thought often of some of the few words she had exchanged with Corso: his revelation that he was aboard the Hyperion only under severe duress. It revealed a streak of honesty in him—or so she believed—that made him substantially different from the others aboard.
Regardless of that, ever since their return from Ascension she had been avoiding him, afraid he might still betray her. He owed her absolutely nothing, after all.
Yet during his own subsequent interrogation by Kieran, he had clearly lied about what had happened in Severn’s bar. On the few occasions they crossed paths she had seen the sympathetic way he looked at her, those furtive glances when he thought she wasn’t paying attention.
It had been a long, long time since Dakota had felt comfortable with the thought of intimacy with another human being—long and lonely years with no one to trust. But a lifetime of betrayal didn’t lend itself to a sudden acquiescence to physical desire or momentary lust. So she kept to herself, and avoided Corso, making occasional trips back to the cargo bay and the Piri’s effigy, in order to assuage her tension via brief, erotic encounters, while always wary of the turmoil in her heart and in her mind.
Seventeen
Redstone Colony
Consortium Standard Date: 03.06.2538
Port Gabriel Incident -2 Hours
The Consortium task force tore through Redstone’s stratosphere on tails of bright plasma. The rising sun dazzled the powered dust-mote lenses that followed in their wake as they pumped terabytes of real-time visual data to Orbital Command as well as to the Circus Ring on the surface.
Severn was a distant presence, seventeen kilometres east of Dakota, as they rose over the limb of the horizon, a pinprick of nervous humour and black wit hovering among a legion of Ghost-boosted consciousnesses, each node in constant communication with all the rest.
What each of them sensed, Dakota also sensed. What each of them knew, Dakota knew immediately, according to a complex hierarchy known as a threat/ significance tree, almost without her being fully conscious of the process.
From moment to moment, Dakota was aware of. . .
. . . Alejandro Najario, running constant threat analyses from the command deck of the Winter’s Night, ignoring the bickering, and sly, bemused comments of the Freehold troops locked into their launch restraints in the rear of his dropship.
. . . Tessa Faust, another pilot, checking her screens and altering her delta vee. She was tired, her head sore from a bad headache she’d suffered the night before.
. . . Chris Severn, alert and sharp, constantly monitoring the transceiver relays that had been used to compromise the Uchidan early-warning system.
Severn had been right, of course, about her on-off relationship with Josef Marados. It hadn’t taken long before Josef had again zeroed in on Dakota, and she herself, of course, had been a willing collaborator in his seduction.
She could still smell the scent of his skin, in her thoughts, from last night. Her concern over Severn’s jealousy was offset by the knowledge of his own separate, developing relationship with Tessa Faust.
—
‘I noticed the Shoal-member in the Circus Ring,’ Dakota had muttered, lying naked under the bare arm Josef had cast over her. ‘What’s it here for?’
‘Privileged information,’ replied Josef, in a sleepy post-coital mumble.
‘Oh, bullshit.’ Dakota jabbed him with an elbow. Dawn light leaked through the blinds. ‘It’s here to watch from the sidelines, isn’t it? Isn’t it bad enough they started this whole business in the first place?’
Josef sighed and pulled himself around until he faced her. ‘What are you up to now, recruiting for the Uchidans?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, you know exactly what I mean.’
‘Dak, we all know about the Treaty Clause, but we still have a job to do.’
‘There’s something that really bothers me. It’s the names those things give themselves.’
‘The Shoal?’ Josef cast her an incredulous look. ‘They’re aliens, Dakota. That’s what aliens do: alien stuff. You’re on a fast ride to nowhere if you start trying to figure out how their minds work.’
‘I’m not so sure.’ Dakota pushed herself up on one elbow. Further sleep had suddenly become a distant prospect. ‘Understanding what they say is one thing, but sometimes . . . it’s like they’re having a massive joke at our expense. I couldn’t believe it when I heard what that thing calls itself.’
Josef shifted on to his back, and closed his eyes. At first Dakota thought he’d fallen asleep again, but after a moment he replied: ‘I’ll have to admit Trader-In-Faecal-Matter-Of-Animals isn’t a name that promotes much respect.’
‘But that’s just it,’ Dakota said, punching a pillow in exasperation. ‘They’re laughing at us. They don’t need us, but we need them really badly.’
‘OK, granted. But what can we do?’
Dakota made an exasperated sound and let her head fall back on the pillow. They were both staring up at the ceiling now.
‘You know, I feel like a fish out of water here. I don’t feel like I belong. It’s like I shouldn’t really be here.’
‘What do you mean?’ Josef asked.
‘I’m from Bellhaven, remember. I didn’t exactly volunteer to be here.’
Josef nodded with apparent sympathy, the circumstances being well known throughout the Consortium.
The first generation of Bellhaven colonists had put into action an extensive terraforming programme designed to increase the mean global temperature of their new world. When the first of the civil wars broke out a few decades later, the terraforming process had collapsed into disarray. The Elders, once they emerged victorious, had been forced to seek aid from the Consortium in order to reinstate the process—seeking aid, in fact, from the very Devil they had chosen to escape from when they had first arrived on Bellhaven.
The price for that help had been considerable. Since long before Dakota’s time, Bellhaven had gained a powerful reputation for innovation in the development of machine-head technology. In return for making Bellhaven more habitable, the Consortium demanded -and got—special concessions that included the acquisition of native-trained machine-heads for peacekeeping purposes.
Dakota had never previously seen herself as a soldier. She was, after all, a machine-head, someone who could endow mute machinery with her human intelligence. She had successfully avoided thinking too hard about what the Bellhaven technology treaties meant for her. Yet here she was, far from home, wondering just who she was meant to be.
—
In the moments before waking that morning, Dakota had found herself in an unfamiliar city, wearing a long pale dress with sleeves that trailed on the ground. Buildings rose like steel dandelions far into a pale blue sky, as if reaching out to ensnare a sun that beat down with not only warmth and heat, but also love and kindness and wisdom.
The idea of looking into that bright incandescence had terrified her. So she had kept her eyes downcast, knowing the light was alive, intelligent, that it knew everything about her that could possibly be known: every thought and action and desire she had ever felt or acted upon, good or bad.
And, yet, the light loved her regardless.
She moved through an unending throng, a billion people crammed into streets that ended in impossibly distan
t vanishing points, all dressed in a thousand colours. Every face she saw was serene, peaceful and content. She tried desperately to find the angel she had encountered in her previous dream.
The knowledge that the light shining down upon those streets was in fact God came to Dakota as if it were something she had always known.
As she walked on among those impossible spires, a terrible awareness came to her: that she was no more than a ghost to these people, an invisible wraith insufficiently worthy to rightly walk in their angelic city. As much as the light shining down on her loved her, it also told her she was of far less account than any of the city’s genuine inhabitants.
She stumbled, unable to accept the truth of this knowledge, filled with a sense of loss so unbearable and so deep that she cried ghost tears, torn apart by her own sense of failure. She had reached out then, her spectral fingers brushing against a wall the colour of fine alabaster. Black cracks spread out from under her fingertips with astonishing speed: the wall began crumbling and rotting and turning black.
Deep within her lay a terrible dark void that could never coexist with such a perfect realm. Not unless she could find some way to prove her worth to that beatific light shining down on her.
Some way to show that she, too, was pure of heart.
—
The dropship rattled as it skimmed over Redstone’s bleak terrain. Emergency signals began to come through from some of the other machine-head pilots, including Severn. She could almost taste his fright through the Ghost link.
Chris?
No reply. Instead he dropped out of contact, followed by three others. Panic began to overwhelm Dakota’s thoughts. Something, somewhere was very badly wrong. A priority command from the Circus Ring flashed up: they were aware of the problem, and were changing the current attack formation in response.
It didn’t make sense. The formation protocols being uploaded to her were only to be implemented if some of their ships got taken out. Yet all the other ships within her formation remained stubbornly visible on all the sensor systems. What to do?
Another two machine-heads disappeared from her Ghost link. Something worse than panic enveloped Dakota’s body, cold sweat slicking her skin under her gee suit. Perhaps Severn and the others were gone, and the Uchidans were feeding her false telemetry to fool her into thinking they were still there.
She fired out emergency signals to the Circus Ring, to Orbital, to the other dropships, the warnings slowly disappearing, one by one, off the Ghost link. When replies and acknowledgements came back, they had somehow been rendered incomprehensible, as if she had forgotten how to understand simple human speech overnight.
And then she saw an angel striding across the horizon, golden, terrible and beautiful. The very same creature she’d encountered in her dream. The one she’d been searching for.
It moved below the silver darts of the Consortium task force, wings spread like a great vale of white across a sky streaked with morning red. It might have been a kilometre in height, and in one enormous hand it bore a sword that sparked with lightning. And Dakota knew immediately that when it killed, it killed with compassion and kindness.
It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
An unfamiliar voice gabbled in the back of her mind, speaking in a language simultaneously unfamiliar and immediately recognizable—the same language, she realized, in which the angel had spoken to her in her dreams. All the things she had forgotten upon waking came back to her in that instant: she remembered the truth within Uchida’s Oratory. Revelation seemed ingrained in the very air she breathed, in the speeding electrons and quantum arrays buried within her Ghost circuits, even within the very fabric of the universe itself.
The truth of Uchida filled her with agonizing joy, and a terrible, overwhelming regret that for so long, so long, his Truth had been hidden from her.
Dakota shut down her Ghost link, falling as silent as the rest of them and thereby severing her connection with Command. All that mattered now was that the angel was calling her to battle. She would gladly follow, indifferent to her fate. Tears of almost unbearable happiness ran down her cheeks, and she tasted salt.
The angel commanded her to land, and she banked her dropship at a dangerously sharp angle. Other dropships, she saw, had already dived towards the ground. She saw one come apart in a blaze of actinic brightness, moving so fast and at so steep an angle it was torn apart by hull stresses.
Somehow, her own ship held together. She watched as others spiralled out of control, streaking to their doom like silver shooting stars plummeting through the clouds. Voices sang in Dakota’s mind, compelling her downwards, careless of the dangers.
Below lay a Freehold settlement called Port Gabriel, situated on one of the many tributaries of the mighty Ka River which bisected the continent. Her Ghost circuits reminded her that Cardinal Point still lay at least a thousand kilometres to the east. But that was no longer her destination.
The angel’s blazing sword pointed instead to Port Gabriel, beckoning like a divine general leading an army of holy warriors into battle. Around her, the dropship’s comms equipment buzzed and flashed as Orbital Command desperately tried to reassert their authority over the fleet.
Except the Consortium had now become the enemy—had always been the enemy, if only she’d been able to see it. The other surviving machine-heads in the fleet were reactivating their Ghost links via an ad hoc network that rerouted past Orbital Command and the Circus Ring.
Dakota was distantly aware of the tumult of Freehold troops trapped in the rear of her dropship, desperately trying to bypass the lock on the cockpit door. Barely coherent threats and pleas went unnoticed as she dived towards a range of mountains extending to the west of Port Gabriel.
The dropship attempted to engage automatic emergency descent protocols in response to her suicidal plummet. It thinks I’ve been injured or compromised, Dakota realized. Instead, she had never been happier.
The dropship faded away completely, and she was back in the same marketplace that had featured regularly in her dreams. Angels drifted past, some as lofty as the clouds, unseen by the oblivious human masses passing by them.
There was something she was supposed to know. It came to her now: Banville, the scientist, architect of Bellhaven’s machine-head development programme, had willingly and happily joined with the Uchidans.
This brief moment of revelation was followed by an equally brief stab of doubt. A spark of reason contradicted angelic command. What if the angel isn’t real? What if it’s some hallucination from my implants? What if Banville gave the Uchidans something they could use to compromise me, make me believe something I. . . something I wouldn’t. . .
That light of reason flickered and died. She was back in the dropship cockpit, the ground rushing towards her at a terrifying velocity.
She never recalled the impact.
—
Consciousness returned only slowly.
Dakota coughed, feeling dizzy and ill. A black weight built up in her lungs. Can’t breathe. Realizing the hull had been breached, she fumbled frantically for her respirator mask. She pulled it over her mouth and nose, inhaling in short, steady gasps.
Close. Very close. She couldn’t have been out for more than a few moments, but any longer and she might well have suffocated. That she was still alive was in itself a miracle of chance.
Dakota moved carefully, probing herself for broken bones or other injuries. The dropship was lying at an angle, so that she herself was tipped over, still locked into her seat, at an angle of about forty degrees. Her biomed monitors informed her she had a fracture in her ribs. Gel impact pads had blossomed out to cushion her body, but had now deflated, the soft fabric of the pads lying empty and forlorn across her lap and legs. They’d helped save her life.
Dakota unlocked her seat restraints and tumbled out. She could hear the sound of wind blowing. Her eyes were dazzled by a sliver of bright sunlight coming through an enormous rent in the side of the cockpit.
She found the manual switch for the emergency exit and watched as a panel slid away in the cockpit’s ceiling. Moving carefully, she lifted herself through it and saw the craft had gouged a hole in the frozen soil, thirty metres in length, a long black scar that intersected a narrow highway crossing a flat plain of snow and rock, but scattered with the vast plumes of canopy trees further away towards the horizon.
Frozen air assaulted Dakota’s lungs. She scanned the horizon, feeling the whip of frigid wind over her stubbled scalp. Black columns of smoke rose up towards the sky from downed dropships all around. In the distance she could see the tented buildings and ‘scrapers of Port Gabriel, and the winding curve of the river it stood next to.
The ad hoc Ghost network, of which she was now part, informed her how many serving God’s purpose had survived the impacts, reminding her that those who died would now be safe in God’s embrace. And before too long, Dakota would join them in eternity. The knowledge filled her heart with gladness.
In the meantime, she was in danger of freezing to death, as her suit might insulate her, but not indefinitely. She reached into pockets provided on the hips and shins of her suit and pulled out high-quality survival gear, composed of super-thin fabrics designed to keep her insulated and alive. Last of all, she pulled the hood over her head, and down over the top of her gee suit.
Next, she checked her weapon. She had heard voices coming from the rear of the dropship, so there were survivors among the Freeholders.
She noticed that her dropship, too, was sending its own thick, black contrail of death spiralling into the sky. She strode past the ruined command module, in which the cockpit was located, heading for the rear of the craft.
Pausing, she saw the command module had been largely torn away from the rest of the ship.
Hearing more voices, she kept going and, as she came aft, she saw several figures struggling out through another emergency exit. Shouting and calling to each other, they were intent on lowering bodies to the ground from inside the ship. She’d had two dozen Freehold assault troops on board, and it appeared the majority of them were now either dead or severely injured. Bodies lay everywhere, many without breather masks.
