She had dreamed of angels with wings. They had drifted down to alight in the centre of a town marketplace she remembered from her childhood. Warmth and beauty and a sense of welcoming had been carried in the opalescent radiance of their perfect golden skin. One, a woman with long flowing hair and an expression so kind that Dakota had wept even in her sleep, floated just millimetres above the cobbled ground, regarding her with infinite compassion.

The angel had spoken to her in some strange, incomprehensible dialect that somehow translated into perfect meaning the instant she heard it.

On waking that morning, she hadn’t been able to recall a single word the angel had said. But the sense of having been somewhere real was sufficiently strong to leave her with an overwhelming sense of loss.

Dakota hesitated, and thought about turning back. But what exactly could she tell O’Neill? That she had experienced a particularly vivid dream? She would only be making a fool of herself.

Instead she continued on her way. O’Neill surely knew what he was doing, and orders were indeed orders. The med-tech would have just reprimanded her for wasting his time. The dream itself was only that, a dream-perhaps brought about by her general state of anxiety in the run-up to the assault on Cardinal Point.

On her way to that morning’s briefing, Dakota passed through a wide circular room that had been nicknamed the Circus Ring. This had become the centre of operations for the Consortium’s ground command, and a huge array of communications and data systems had been set up all around the Ring’s perimeter.

There, the general air of tension had been given an overnight boost by a threefold increase in the number of staff now wandering the corridors. The briefings were being run constantly, along with endless strategy meetings and drills. Within just a few hours, the arrival and departure of orbital personnel carriers and dropships had become a constant background roar that was expected to continue for several days and nights.

Dakota stood on a walkway running around the Circus Ring’s circumference and looked down at a group of Freehold commanders talking with their Consortium equivalents. There seemed something peculiarly archaic about the Freeholders’ uniforms, as one of them stood with hands planted imperiously on hips.

After a moment, Dakota noticed the Freeholder was talking with Josef Marados, whose face was red and angry She felt a stab of sympathy for him, having already heard numerous stories of such encounters with arrogant Freeholders making extraordinary demands of the people there to help them win their war. The calm of Consortium staffers moving past the tense knot of Freeholders made for a stark contrast.

The Freeholders were a joke, and they didn’t even know it.

Then she noticed the alien for the first time, gliding like a watery phantasm across the central space of the Ring.

Shoal-members were generally about as easy to miss as an elephant in a tuxedo playing the flute. A few of its tentacles regularly shot out from underneath its body, grabbing at smaller creatures swimming within its gravity-suspended ball of water, and drawing them rapidly in towards it and out of sight. A few moments later, tiny pieces of bloody cartilage and bone spewed out from the creature’s underside, staining the water.

Josef broke off from his argument with the Freeholders and went immediately over to the alien, followed by his suborn, Ulmer. The alien was already accompanied by a phalanx of black-armoured Consortium elite security.

Dakota recalled something Severn had said the night before: one of these days, someone’s going to figure out how a bunch of fish ended up ruling the galaxy without learning how to make fire.

This increased entourage swept across the Circus Ring, before disappearing through a door leading into a part of the complex for which Dakota didn’t have clearance.

It was the first time she’d ever seen one of the Shoal in the flesh.

She’d heard arguments day and night throughout the mess halls and these temporary barracks about how none of them would be here at all if it were not for the Shoal’s restrictive colonial contracts. There had been something terrifyingly random, even meaningless, about the expulsion of the Uchidans from their original colony, so it was far easier to blame the Shoal for the current unhappy state of affairs than anything else.

She recognized the guard posted outside the doorway Josef had just passed through along with the alien. She’d met him at a drinking session, just before dropping down from orbit, and recalled his name was Milner. He had made the mistake of trying to match her, and three others, shot for shot before he wound up comatose under a bar table.

He grinned as she came up to him. ‘Merrick, right? And my head still hurts.’

‘Call me Dakota,’ she said, then, ‘What’s with the alien?’ nodding towards the door he was guarding.

Milner shrugged. ‘Beats me why that thing’s here. And even if I knew…’ he shrugged.

‘Yeah, yeah, I know, you couldn’t tell me. I wasn’t asking you for any secrets, I was just wondering if I’d missed something in the briefings this morning. I had to go to see the doctor.’

‘It’s here just to observe,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Like maybe it’s curious to see how we handle these things, but I don’t think anybody really knows.’

Part Two

Thirteen

Dakota was relieved to find no one else on the bridge of the Hyperion when she got there.

For a sophisticated piece of technology, an imaging plate didn’t look like much. Just a circular platform: you took an object, stuck it on the plate, and waited while the item was scanned. That simple.

Except, it wasn’t really so simple as that. Placing her figurine on the plate wouldn’t just return data concerning the raw composition of the materials comprising it. If the imager’s database was up to date, it could also return a whole slew of information about the figurine’s probable cultural origin and significance, and maybe even the name of whoever had created it. Beyond that it could also return reams of forensic data, including the DNA traces of every human-or non-human-who had ever handled it.

Accordingly, any number of artefacts-jewellery, mementos, even works of art-had been designed specifically with imager technology in mind. A ring placed on such a plate might generate a wide-band artificial sensorium representing the sight, sound, memory and tactile experience of an associated loved one. The pornographic potential of this technology had therefore been explored for centuries. On top of which, plate-readable data could be encoded into almost any substrate, and often was.