Stiles came towards her and pulled Megan into a brief hug. Then she turned and walked towards the door leading back into the base.

Now get the hell out of here, she called over her shoulder, before I come to my senses.

At first, Megan thought she might have an easy time of it, but the clear skies evident on the morning of her departure proved to be little more than a temporary lull in an ongoing tempest.

Towards the end of her first day of driving, Megan came to the banks of a river that the trucks AI assured her was shallow enough to ford. She sat there for a while, staring out through the windscreen at the primordial tempest sweeping past in front of her, and guessed that, with the Tabernacles satellites out of commission, the trucks maps probably hadnt been updated since several days before the storm hit.

She reversed back the way she had come for a couple of kilometres, the vehicle bouncing and shifting from side to side as it made its way over rough and broken terrain, then drove upriver until evening fell. Eventually she found a point where the river was just about shallow enough that she could finally get the truck across. After that, she had to drive all the way back downriver again, so she could get back onto the optimal route that the truck had picked for her. Before long she was driving into the foothills of mountains that looked like a smaller version of the Montos de Frenezo.

The journey brought her the visceral realization of just how very sparsely inhabited Redstone really was. Most of its major population centres clustered around the equatorial coastal regions. Beyond that lay only a few scattered outposts amidst a windblown and icy wasteland. It would be all too easy for her truck to break down and get buried in snow within hours.

She parked in the lee of a canopy trees roots, and woke up again to darkness. At first she thought she had been roused in the middle of the night, but on investigation it proved to be already late morning. The storm had returned, filling the landscape with a rising howl and blanketing out the sun. She took a chance and drove on for a few hours, until the truck flashed a warning that she needed to find shelter as fast as possible.

The wind kept building in force until the truck rocked on its suspension with such violence that Megan feared it might be blown over, regardless of its size and squat, bulky shape. The storm howled unceasingly like a demon out of hell, striking terror into Megans heart.