‘I said, it’s good when you finally get to go down below, get walking around on solid ground and, OK, maybe not breathing fresh air, but it’s a lot better than being stuck on a fucking rock for years on end, y’know?’

Severn grinned and reached out with a fist to wallop the bulkhead next to his acceleration couch, presumably in order to emphasize this slice of homespun philosophy. Most of the way down, he’d been talking about the interior of Dakota’s shuttle.

She had decorated the cabin of the little craft with small items originating from the Grover shanties back home. Fetish dolls hung from different points around the cabin. Dakota was hardly the religious type, yet the Revised Catholic icons epoxied on to a shelf above the entrance to the aft bay reminded her strongly of her own formative years in Erkinning-effigies of Peter, Anthony, Theresa, Presley and Autonomous Ethical Device Model 209, all rendered in gaudy clashing colours, their features beatific and childlike.

‘You should know I’m not a Rocker, I’m from Bellhaven,’ Dakota told him. ‘Life on the boosted asteroids isn’t so bad. Is it?’

‘Yeah? Well, the kinds of places I grew up, they don’t have the time or resources for fancy shit like field-retention atmospheres or artificial gravity.’

Dakota shrugged in response, twitching the control stick as the craft juddered. She could have guided the ship down using only her Ghost implants, but the general practice was to keep things reasonably physical. Even with implants, the mind could wander.

She’d left Bellhaven for the very first time three months before, and she was still learning just how adaptive the technology inside her skull could be. Already her ship was starting to feel like an extension of her body.

When it became clear, by the end of the twenty-first century, that anything resembling true artificial intelligence was still a long way off, scientific research had shifted instead to a far greater emphasis on mind-machine interfaces. Dakota’s implants were learning how her mind worked equally as she was learning just how they worked. It was like possessing a backup subconscious-something that could almost anticipate what you were thinking, thus allowing a degree of control and flexibility verging on the superhuman. An extra ghost in the machine.

They had a name for people like her: machine-heads.

‘You’re new to all this, aren’t you?’ Severn asked.

‘Thought we were all new here.’ The shuttle bumped and rattled as it came into closer contact with the atmosphere, the view beyond the windscreen fading as the optical niters reacted to the blazing heat of reentry. A break in the cloud cover far below revealed the ruins of the town that surrounded the Redstone skyhook: this had spent half a year under bombardment by Uchidan forces, using conventional explosives before they’d scraped together enough resources for a couple of nukes.

The nukes had been high in radiation yield, but low in destructive capacity, insufficient to seriously damage the skyhook’s structural integrity. Nevertheless, only the arrival of the Consortium had prevented the Uchidans making one last push and taking away the Freehold’s only remaining link to the rest of the universe.

Dakota flashed a smile over her shoulder. ‘You’re a machine-head too, right?’

‘Wow, how could you tell?’ he replied in mock amazement. ‘Worse. I’m a pilot as well, though this is gonna be the first time I do my job inside an atmosphere. Maybe you should hold my hand ‘case it gets rough on the way down?’ he leered, brushing a hand across the rough stubble of his scalp.

Dakota grinned and shook her head. Severn laughed at his own wit, and she noted they’d be landing in just under thirteen minutes, give or take the vagaries of ground control, and whether they’d managed to find enough secure landing spots for all the hardware currently on its way down from orbit. It would have been easier to ride down on the skyhook, but there was no telling whether the Uchidans might strike again with more nuclear mortar fire. Apparently there were still one or two pockets of resistance holed up down below.

‘I’m Dakota.’ She shoved one hand behind her seat for him to shake, and felt Severn grasp it after a moment’s hesitation. ‘Dakota Merrick.’

‘Chris Severn.’

‘Yeah, you see I knew that.’

‘Mind reader.’

‘Manifest reader.’ She tapped the readout screen printed on the thigh of her trousers. ‘Same thing, just more boring.’

‘Lean forward again so I can see more of your butt, and then I’ll stay interested.’

‘I could tell from how much your hands are sweating. Hang on.’

During the final descent, tortured air ripped around the tiny craft as she manoeuvred them into a tight spiral that factored in Ghost-fed random shifts designed to make it harder for any enemy forces to target them on their approach. She’d heard rumours that the Consortium were bargaining with the Shoal to acquire the same kind of inertialess technology they used on the coreships that had brought her and the rest of the fleet to Redstone, and fervently wished they’d get the hell on with the deal as her insides rattled in their bony cage.

‘Listen, I got a confession to make. This is my first time on the surface,’ Severn murmured.

Dakota took a moment to process this information before it made sense to her.

‘On a planet, you mean?’

Severn nodded.

‘Ever?’

‘Ever,’ he repeated excitedly, a grin spreading across his face. ‘Seventh-generation Rocker. My daddy never set foot on nothing more Earthlike than Mesa Verde. Said he didn’t like the smell of the place. Figured anything green that grew outside of a hydroponics tank wasn’t natural.’

Dakota merely nodded, and sank once more into the multiple Ghost-mediated conversations flowing between herself and traffic control, and included several other pilots at once. Sometimes a dozen separate strands of conversation would merge for a few moments into one babbling cacophony, at other times unravelling and becoming more distinct, the words flowing like some arcane magical tongue.

‹Sittin’ steady guys, can you give me an update on local conditions?›

‹Roger that, your delta vee is good by the way. Patching in weather feed-uh oh…›

‹їCuбl es йl?›

This last from Severn who, Dakota had not noticed until that moment, was hooked into her comms feed. She could hear the tension in his voice, and she realized his Ghost must have picked up on the weather feed reference, subsequently pulling fresh data from a string of appropriated local weather sats.

‹Got converging thermals off the coast,› came the report from Kirov, one of the traffic control staff. Projections show a storm is likely by 1400 hours local time. You’ll be here way before, but we might suggest some course corrections just to stay on the safe side.›