Josef?

Josef was dead.

For all their sophistication, Ghost implants could sometimes produce unexpected results, varying from individual to individual. In a few very extreme cases they had been known to subtly twist the perceptions of those who possessed them. In such cases the subconscious began to manifest itself in unexpected ways, via the artificial conduit of the implants.

This was why Dakota at first fervently hoped she had only imagined the flagged news item. But hope rapidly gave way to a bottomless despair as she stared miserably at the information now on the screen before her.

Josef Marados, late of Black Rock Ore Industries, had been found dead, apparently murdered. Unpleasant images of a vicious murder scene-Josef's office, and a brief glimpse of a body that was hard to reconcile with Dakota's memories of the living, breathing man -flashed before her in gory detail.

I should go back, she thought miserably. But who could have done it? she thought miserably. But who could have done it?

Bourdain.

Who else? It had to be Bourdain. He was still alive, and hot on her trail. Josef's only reward for helping her had been his own murder.

After a few minutes, good sense prevailed. Under the circ.u.mstances, returning to Mesa Verde now would be tantamount to suicide. With Josef gone, there was no one there to protect her any more.

Then she had a better idea. She could lose herself somewhere on the coreship they were now rushing to meet.

The alien starship continually sent out informational ripples that lapped upon the sh.o.r.e of Dakota's boosted consciousness. Any ship Bourdain sent after her would never be able to catch up with the Hyperion, Hyperion, but it might still be able to rendezvous with the Shoal coreship before it departed the solar system. but it might still be able to rendezvous with the Shoal coreship before it departed the solar system.

At least once the Hyperion Hyperion had rendezvoused with the coreship, she herself could disappear into the throng of humans who made their lives there, then keep moving, boarding other coreships for as long as it took for Bourdain either to give up or lose interest. It was a worst-case scenario-and one that would guarantee her the additional enmity of the Freehold-but if things really were as bad as she thought, any other options were seriously limited. had rendezvoused with the coreship, she herself could disappear into the throng of humans who made their lives there, then keep moving, boarding other coreships for as long as it took for Bourdain either to give up or lose interest. It was a worst-case scenario-and one that would guarantee her the additional enmity of the Freehold-but if things really were as bad as she thought, any other options were seriously limited.

Paranoia began to spin new webs inside her mind. The alien had given her the statuette while she was still on board Bourdain's Rock. Was it possible, she wondered, that the statuette might contain something within it that allowed Bourdain to keep track of her?

No, too paranoid, she thought, shaking her head. The concept of an alien collaborating with Bourdain in some way raised a thousand more questions than it provided answers. And yet. . . she thought, shaking her head. The concept of an alien collaborating with Bourdain in some way raised a thousand more questions than it provided answers. And yet. . .

And then she remembered noticing an imager on the bridge of the Hyperion. Hyperion.

If there was anything hidden inside the figurine, then that would be the best way to find it. The easier solution would be simply to destroy or get rid of it, but that overwhelming feeling there was something desperately important about the object continued to haunt her.

She cursed herself as an idiot for not considering an imager scan earlier. At the very least doing so would keep her preoccupied until she had a better idea what exactly had happened back on Mesa Verde.

She stepped through the door of her quarters into the corridor beyond, the figurine squeezed securely into a jacket pocket.

Twelve.

Redstone Colony Consortium Standard Date: 01.06.2538 3 Days to Port Gabriel Incident

Dakota snapped awake to hear the duty klaxon blaring like Satan's own alarm clock. She stumbled out of her cot-Severn mumbling behind her, only just beginning to stir-and collapsed to her knees beneath the window, gripping her head in her hands until the pain of the headache began to ebb. The last lingering fragments of her dream faded with it.

Frequent migraines were a worrying sign. They could get worse, much worse, and sometimes the only cure for a machine-head was to have the implants removed altogether. The idea of life without her Ghost was already unthinkable.

Finally, as the pain faded to nothing, Dakota stood up and let her forehead touch the icy windowpane. She stared outside to the spot where the altercation had taken place the night before. Fresh snow had fallen, obliterating any history.

Then the second klaxon sounded, and Severn finally jerked upright with a surprised snort.

Less than twenty minutes later, Dakota felt another sharp stab of pain in her temple as they both made their way to the mess hall. It felt like tiny, fire-breathing dragons were rampaging through her skull, but there and gone in an instant.

's.h.i.t. Dak, you OK?' Severn put a hand on her shoulder as she leaned her head against a wall.

'No ... I don't know, Chris. I think I need to see someone.'

He offered to accompany her to the medical labs, but she waved him off, suddenly not wanting any company at all. She was nervous enough about this morning's mission, and didn't feel too much like breakfast anyway.

'Sounds like a standard circuit-induced migraine to me.'

The doctor was a youngish man with dark curly hair. Her Ghost informed her his name was O'Neill. She lay back in something that looked like Hieronymous Bosch's idea of a dentist's chair, staring up at the ceiling beyond the curving plastic of the scan unit. The chair was angled so far back, she suspected she might slide right out of it and headfirst on to the floor, had she not been tightly strapped in place. Her head was held immobilized as tiny, needle-like devices rotated on well-oiled arms around her scalp, interrogating her implants. Ultrasound images were projected on a nearby wall.

'Well, it felt worse than any f.u.c.king circuit headache I've ever had before,' Dakota complained bitterly.

O'Neill shook his head. 'See, this is exactly why they should keep machine-heads apart as long as possible. With so many of you gathered together like this, if one's got any kind of a problem, the rest of them will pick it up in no time.'

'I know Chris Severn's been having the same problem. Anyone else?'

O'Neill hit a b.u.t.ton and the chair back rolled up with a soft hum. 'You're not the first this morning,' he agreed, while a nurse undid the straps and helped her down.

Dakota watched him carefully, noting his tight-lipped expression. 'Then is it safe to go ahead with our scheduled missions? Shouldn't we be investigating this?'

'Yeah, we should. But there'll be s.h.i.t to pay if we have to pull back now. We'll be losing a vital "window of opportunity", as they like to say upstairs.'

Dakota was scandalized. 'And this comes from Commander Marados?'

O'Neill paused for a moment with his mouth open. 'No, higher, I think,' he finally admitted.

'It just seems a bit dubious.'

'Well,' O'Neill touched her elbow to lead her out the room, 'that's the military for you. One big, happy, bureaucratic family. If anything goes wrong, it's always somebody else's fault.'

Dakota stopped at the door and glared back at him accusingly.

'Look,' said O'Neill, 'there's really nothing to worry about, OK? Otherwise orders would have come down from Command to postpone the mission. If they're happy, we're happy.'

Perhaps, Dakota thought, as she walked away, she should have mentioned the hallucinations as well.

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 compa.s.sion.

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 real was sufficiently strong to leave her with an overwhelming sense of loss. 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 a.s.sault on Cardinal Point.

On her way to that morning's briefing, Dakota pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mference 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 s.p.a.ce 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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. 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 pa.s.sed 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 Hyperion when she got there. 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 a.s.sociated loved one. The p.o.r.nographic 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.

Perhaps this, then, was why the alien had handed her the figurine-because it contained some form of encoded data.

She had muttered curses at the empty corridors as she pa.s.sed through them on her way across the ship, wondering why she'd taken so long for this to occur to her.

She pushed back the cover over the imager, a horizontal flat black disc set into a wall recess. Dakota pulled the figurine out of her pocket, placed it on the plate and stepped back. A few seconds pa.s.sed and nothing happened.

She began to wonder if she'd been wrong after all.

The Hyperion Hyperion shuddered and the bridge lights flickered. shuddered and the bridge lights flickered.Piri! What was that? A light blinked and she realized the imager had begun its scan, although it was taking a lot longer to do so than normally. Numerical and compositional data began to spill across the imager's screen: COMPOSITION.88% ferric alloy, 10% organic matter, 2% other factors ORIGIN OF COMPOSITE ELEMENTS.unknown/not on record. Phylogenetic a.n.a.lysis of organic materials suggests: Indonesian maize hybrid.MICROSCOPIC SOIL TRACES DETECTED.