She thought hard about the potential risks, for if she got hit by another storm as bad as the one shed just lived through, her chances of survival were not likely to be good. But getting to the Wanderer and back even assuming she was successful in her mission would take her half a year, and by then the Swarm would be getting dangerously close to the Accord. Time was fast running out.

The truck had emergency gear stowed in the back, including an inflatable tent, several high-quality breather masks, some portable water and air filtration systems, not to mention the emergency rations. It was indeed a risk, but one she decided she had to take.

She set out at dawn the next morning, beneath a bright and clear sky. She had uploaded a map of the terrain to her implants, and fixed for the truck to transmit constant weather updates to her in case the weather did decide to get bad again.

Two days after she set out, it did, and she had to fight her way through a wind threatening to carry her off bodily, until she at last found a narrow ravine. She pitched the tent in the most sheltered part of it and settled in to wait.

Six more days passed before Megan finally emerged beneath clear skies, feeling grimy and cold and slightly unhinged. Her breath smelled foul inside her breather mask and her skin itched beneath clothes she hadnt been able to take off for a week.

She reached the military outpost a whole two weeks later, only to find it deserted, and half the buildings bombed out from some kind of attack.

She crept cautiously across a landing field on which sat the still-smoking remains of a dropship. At one point she came across the body of a Freeholder lying in the shadow of a huge storage shed, his kill-ratio tattoos vivid above the collar of his white-and-grey camouflage. After that, she moved with even greater caution. Even if the Freehold had moved on, it might have left gun-drones behind to guard the place.

Megan made her way inside one of the buildings and found only death. In an auditorium she discovered rows of corpses, their wrists tied behind their backs and neat holes drilled through the backs of their heads.

She pictured a night raid in which Freehold saboteurs had destroyed the dropship on the landing field, while others worked at neutralizing the perimeter defences and jamming all communications. Then she thought of Otto Schelling, and the vast resources such a man could provide.

Enough, perhaps, to equip an entire army.