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.
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.