‘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 distant 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.