[Author's Note: Since this is the last in the trilogy, I've decided to dispense with all pretence at rationality and give the Aurora Borealis a bit of dialogue for once!]

I awoke suddenly, aware that somebody was in the room with me. One hand grabbed my Beretta, whilst the other turned on the light.

"Who the HELL are YOU?"

There was a woman of about thirty at the end of the bed. She was wearing a silver flight suit, much like my own. She had pale silver hair down to her waist, pulled back in a loose ponytail, and eyes that flashed a dozen colours- Like Aurora's hull,I thought disjointedly. She was about my height, and when she spoke it was with a surprisingly strong Midlands accent, even stronger than John's.

"You might find this a little hard to believe," she said with a winning smile. "Watch!"

There was a flash, and the bird I'd seen in God's office landed on the shelf above my head. I opened the drawer beside my bed and pulled out a half-bottle of Famous Grouse, which I kept there for whenever I felt unable to cope with things whilst sober. I unscrewed it and took a long pull. "Okay, I think I'll be able to get my head around this now."

The woman returned, laughing at me. "You spend to much time in the real world."

"Look, I'm not really good at this kind of thing. I'm not used to the concept of beautiful women incorporeally posessing aeroplanes, or beautiful women anywhere near my room come to that. This 'ghost in the machine' stuff is all a bit hard to grasp."

"You never cottoned on before? You're always talking to me, occasionally using words you wouldn't to your mother, I might add. You always acted like I was a person, why act so amazed when you find out I really am?" She shook her head. "Dave, you are HOPELESS!"

"Elaine always said that about me," I muttered sourly. "Especially when I used to talk to you. Thought it was rather silly. Look, this is all getting a bit metaphysical for me, you know?"

"Yeah, I suppose it does sound a bit weird. Any chance of some of that whiskey?" I handed over the bottle. She drank nearly a quarter of it.

"Bloody hell!" I remarked. She grinned.

"I've had plenty of practice, like whenever you use kerosene as an alternate fuel!"

"That Famous Grouse must be starting to work; that almost made sense." We laughed. "So, what should I call you? Aurora?"

"I'll answer to Rori," she replied, curling her legs up underneath her. "So, you're finally shot of that hellion you maried, then." I gave her a sharp look. "Okay, sorry, sorry. I't's just that she seemed to spend most of her time alternately berating and patronising you; hadn't you noticed?" This last comment was delivered in a tone of which Elaine herself would have been proud, but I felt that this might not be a good moment to say so.

"It's something I've had nearly fifteen years to get used to. Ellie's a good person underneath it all, though I'll grant you that I'm enjoying the sudden peace and quiet!" We laughed again.

"By the way, I'm thinking that this is something I souldn't mention to the others. They'd think I was nuts- hell, before I let Will and Mary get me mixed up in all this I'd have come to the same conclusion myself. I haven't wholly discounted the possibility just yet, of course."

"I can see why. Night, Dave." She faded away.

Well,I thought to myself, there's something you don't see very often...

When I woke up eight hours later, I was half-convinced it was some kind of bizarre dream. A glance at the whiskey bottle firmly disproved that. My brain simply shut down in the face of the implications of this, and the task of figuring them all out. I decided not to think of it this side of a decent cup of tea, and possibly a bacon roll for a change. Elaine was always telling me off about my cholesterol intake, among other things...

Suddenly I stopped minding altogether that she'd picked John Parry over me. I had a starkly transparent insight into what Gerry out of The Good Life must have felt like when Margo was away. I began to whistle tunelessly as I strode to the galley in search of breakfast.

My good cheer had evaporated by the time I'd left the plane. "He's WHAT?"

"Taken the Havoc and lit off someplace, swearing he'd disembowel Marissa with a rusty spoon when he caught up with her. Isobel was in the other cockpit, and she was even more pissed, if that's possible." Will shook his head. "John's done some crazy things, but nothing like this."

"So Asriel finally cracked? If he got something useful out of him then surely-?"

"Couldn't tell you; Asriel's tied up in the back of the chopper." The part of my mind not actively engaged in thinking of painful things to do to John recalled that the Mi-28 has a small compartment in the back to accomodate downed aircrew or Special Forces.

"Shit!" I yelled. "Have they completely lost the bloody plot?"

"How rational are you about looking after your kid?" Mary pointed out.

"He never needed rescuing," I replied. "See what you mean, though. Question is, what do we do now?"

"Go after them, and hope they haven't got themselves killed yet."

I sighed. "Yeah, because I'm going to kill him myself!"

"See anything?"

"Nothing, and there's not a cat in hell's chance of spotting them on radar in this place. Wait... No, just a deer." I readjusted the Forward Looking Infared scanner slightly. "Hmm. There's a VERY faint heat signature just over that ridge. Can you circle around and let me take a look from the other side?"

"Sure." Mary dipped Aurora's left wing and banked around in a circle. We'd been taking it in turns for the past six hours, and we were even less optimistic than when we'd started. John, when I get my hands on you then I'm going to..."Hello, what have we here?"

"What do you see?" Mary tapped at the keyboard set into the panel above her head, and brought up a repeat of the FLIR image on the screen just above the artificial horizon. "A chopper, but not John's Mil-28. Interesting..."

We found a landing spot and disembarked, guns in hand. "Hello? Is anybody there?" I called.

A pistol shot ricocheted off an outcrop of granite. "Don't come any closer or I'll kill the child!" Mrs Coulter yelled back. "I've got a lot less to lose than you!"

"Precisely what would that achieve?" Mary enquired. "Just give it up, toss the gun out here and I'll try and prevent anybody from lynching you, okay?"

"Go to hell- Argh! You BRAT!" There was a brief commotion, and a couple of gunshots. Chloe ran towards us.

I raised my rifle, seeing Mrs Coulter aiming her handgun. "Chloe, get out of the way!" She dived for the ground, just as bullets began to fly. Marissa was slightly quicker off the mark, and a round slammed into my body armour and sent me staggering. My own three round burst struck sparks off the abandoned helicopter's tail rotor. Mary had been behind me, and was unable to get a shot in. She ran forward, shooting as she ran. "Damn, she's gone!"

"Forget her. As long as the kid's okay," I replied. "What is it with that woman and these useless little popguns? I should be curled up and gasping for breath." I unzipped my flight suit and extracted the round. "No wonder; she's using hollowpoints, the bitch!"

"You okay?" Chloe asked me. I nodded.

"I'll live, kiddo. Now let's see if we can find your mum and dad, wherever they've bloody gone!"

Mary glared at me in a very Elaine-esque manner. "Watch the language, Dave."

"Nothing she hasn't heard before," I replied mildly. Chloe's immediate family were what my grandmother, God rest her soul, would have referred to as: 'Rough. Not really our sort of people, dear.' You can guess the rest.

There was another fusillade of shots. "That'll be Daddy," Chloe concluded happily.

Several machine guns began to go off. I began to get a mite concerned.

"That doesn't sound like..."

A very large transport helicopter loomed above us. "Ohh, SHIT!" the three of us chorused. I raised my rifle and sprayed the helicopter, but my bullets skittered harmlessly off the sides. A torrent of gunfire answered.

"Head for the plane! Go, go, go!" We scrambled aboard, and I tried frantically to get the engines started. Mary swung the dorsal turret around and opened fire on the helicopter. There was a violent concussion, and gravel showered the windscreen. "That's not good!" I remarked.

"They're using rockets or something. Get us outta here, goddamit!"

"Working on it," I replied, opening both throttles and kicking in the afterburners. Aurora can generally take off on ground effect at about 80% power, but that assumes a two hundred yard runway. I had about half that distance to work with here.

"This one's going to be pretty close. Hang on!" We cleared a low hill by less than a metre, rockets exploding to either side. "Right," I growled, deploying the missile pylons. "Where are you, you little..."

"Heatseeker launched! Break right!" Mary warned. I swore, dropping half a dozen flares and banking hard. "So it's like that, is it?" My forward guns blazed at the helicopter, to no apparent effect. I swung past, getting ready to finish it with a Sidewinder, but the Radar Warning Reciever began stridently blaring at me.

"Shit, somebody just lit us up!" I glanced at the radar. "Christ, fighters! Where the hell did they come from?"

The klaxon notched up three octaves and fifteen decibels as a missile launched. "Oh, just great!" I activated my jammers and dropped to treetop height. Radar doesn't work to well near the ground, especially in hilly terrain like this; too many back echoes from the ground. Between that and the heavy jamming -and the Aurora Borealis has jamming systems way ahead of anything the military are using, a side benefit of being co-designed by somebody with a PHD in electromagnetic physics- the missiles would struggle to home in on us.

I hoped.

"Hello any callsign, this is Sparrow one. I'm under fire and heavily outnumbered. Requesting assistance!" My only reply was an earsplitting whine. "Bastards are jamming the radio!" I cursed. "We are in really big trouble!"

Will stared at his radar screen. "Where the hell did they come from? You seeing this, Lyra?"

"Yeah. Something's going on over there. We'd better check it out. I've got a bad feeling about this."

The two aircraft turned in unison and headed towards the unknown radar signatures. Will stared at his screen, noting that somebody's ECM was turned on. "There's definitely a firefight going on," he mused. "Sparrow two to Sparrow one, what's your position, over? Aah!" He cried out as the screech of jamming assaulted his ears. He finally obtained a visual.

"Junkers 578s," he breathed. "I should've known..." He armed his AA-12s and sought a lock. A glance to his left revealed that Lyra was doing the same. "Fox one, fox one," he said to himself out of professional habit, as there was nobody to hear over the screech of jamming.

Two fighters were plucked out of the sky and crashed in flames. The others swung around, their pilots scanning the sky in confusion. Mrs Coulter swore, and seized command of one door gun. It was a thirty millimetre weapon, with a fairly low rate of fire but a lot of punch. She aimed it in the direction of the missiles. "Where are you, you... Oh, HELL!"

"Boo," Lyra said dryly, opening fire with her guns. The helicopter veered, the door gunners struggling to aim at their tormentor.

"Two more MiG-29s approaching from the north!" the pilot warned. "We're badly outmatched; Junkers 578s don't stand a chance against those!"

Mrs Coulter swore viciously. "Get us back to the portal, and order the fighters to cover our retreat. Let's just hope they don't pursue."

The helicopter broke away and dashed hell for leather out of the combat. The surviving fighters gave the matter some thought, then engaged their afterburners and began the runup to Drive jumps.

"Let 'em go," I ordered. "We got Chloe, and John'll turn up sooner or later. Huh, speak of the Devil..."

The Mi-28 appeared from behind a ridge, and fired a burst past the transport helicopter's nose. "Drop your landing gear and follow me," John ordered over the distress frequency. "I really won't need much convincing to shoot you down."

The door gun returned fire, forcing the gunship to bank sideways. "Steady on, Marissa," John remarked. "I've got your boyfriend tied up in the back."

"Yeah, we've got one source of information. Why bother taking HER prisoner?" Lyra said nastily. "by the way, do you two mind explaining why you dashed off like that?"

"The plan was that Isobel would hold Asriel at gunpoint and offer an exchange. I'd be hiding elsewhere and nail her once the swap had taken place. It was all going more or less to plan until that flying APC turned up. I'd come without escort so as not to make her suspicious, but you can see where that got me."

"Okay, but let us know next time, so we can get you out of trouble a bit easier."

The helicopter took advantage of the distraction to make a break for it, but we weren't THAT distracted. I'd never seen six air-to-air missiles all hit a target at once, and it's quite something. There wasn't much left to hit the ground, and what DID was scattered over a radius of about three miles.

"Well, that's that then. Come on, let's head back to base."

"So," I said once we were back at our temporary headquarters, "our next objective is the City of Angels. Not that there's many of them about there, of course."

"We should have been ready to go by now, except the transports haven't turned up yet," Eddie grumbled. "Ever get the feeling you're the only halfway organised person in an organisation?"

"Nah, Frank's pretty good when there's readies involved. Wonder what's gone wrong?"

"Give it another two hours, then we're going to look for him."