A smile drifted across her face, but it seemed to catch on something painful as it passed. “Yeah. All that crabshit we used to talk, and I’m really the one that swings it. Doesn’t seem possible, does it?”

I pressed a hand hard against my face. “Sylvie, you’re going to have to slow down. What happened to Ishii’s jetcopter?”

“Nothing. I mean, everything, exactly what you read about in school. The angelfire got it, just like they tell you when you’re a kid. Just like the story.” She was talking more to herself than to me, still staring away into the mist the orbital strike had created when it vaporised Impaler and the four metres of water beneath. “It’s not the way we thought, Micky. The angelfire. It’s a blast beam, but it’s more than that. It’s a recording device too. A recording angel. It destroys everything it touches, but everything it touches has a modifying effect on the energy in the beam as well. Every single molecule, every single subatomic particle changes the beam’s energy state fractionally, and when it’s done, it carries a perfect image of whatever it’s destroyed. And it stores the images afterwards. Nothing’s ever lost.”

I coughed, laughter and disbelief. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. You’re telling me Quellcrist Falconer has spent the last three hundred years inside a fucking Martian database?”

“She was lost at first,” she murmured. “She wandered for such a long time among the wings. She didn’t understand what had happened to her. She didn’t know she’d been transcribed. She had to be so fucking strong.”

I tried to imagine what that might be like, a virtual existence in a system built by alien minds, and couldn’t. It made my skin crawl.

“So how did she get out?”

Sylvie looked at me with a curious gleam in her eyes. “The orbital sent her.”

“Oh, please.”

“No, it’s.” She shook her head. “I don’t pretend to understand the protocols, only what happened. It saw something in me, or in the combination of me and the command software, maybe. Some kind of analogy, something it thought it understood. I was the perfect template for this consciousness, apparently. I think the whole orbital net is an integrated system, and I think it’s been trying to do this for some time. All that modified mimint behaviour in New Hok. I think the system’s been trying to download the human personalities it has stored, all the people the orbitals have burnt out of the sky over the past four centuries, or whatever’s left of them. Up to now, it’s been cramming them into mimint minds. Poor Grigori Ishii—he was part of the scorpion gun we took down.”

“Yeah, you said you knew it. When you were delirious in Drava.”