Wandering on, she came eventually to the garage block. It contained more than a dozen vehicles, all of which appeared to have been sabotaged. But they included a bus that looked in slightly better condition than the rest and, having worked on it for a couple of hours, Megan managed to get its internal diagnostics running. After that, she was able to pinpoint the damage: a circuit board controlling the fuel systems had been ripped out, along with some other vital engine parts.

Locating a machine shed stocked with a fabricator, miraculously undamaged, she then managed to program it to produce some of the replacement parts, before finding somewhere to sit down and chew on a protein bar.

A couple of hours later, she had acquired some shiny new engine parts and a replacement circuit board.

As the bus powered up on her first try, Megan pressurized its cabin and pulled off her breather mask for the first time in a very, very long time. The canned air inside the vehicle tasted sweeter than spring blossoms.

After shutting the bus down again, she found her way into an empty dormitory block equipped with bunks and showers. After standing under a hard spray of hot water until her skin was raw and pink, she stepped out, dressed and then studied herself carefully in a mirror. The image confronting her was one she hardly recognized: positively gaunt, and with her clothes hanging loose on a bony frame.

More than a month and a half since setting out on Stiless truck, and it felt as if an eternity had passed.

Megan finally reached Aguirre just four days later, only to find that the Freehold had already paid the city a visit. After passing through half a dozen Accord checkpoints in the citys outskirts, she joined a long tailback of traffic that then took hours to work its way through. At one point an Accord trooper carried out a cursory search of her bus, before waving her on.

By now she had picked up some idea of what had happened since her last visit here. Over the course of a week, waves of guerrilla fighters had struck periodically, flying low over the mountains and hills in stealthed gliders, and working in small isolated teams according to some prearranged plan. This series of carefully coordinated attacks had caught the overstretched Accord forces unawares. To make things worse, they had dressed themselves in the same heavy outdoor coats and breather masks worn by Aguirres own citizens, making it nearly impossible to tell friend from foe.

Sarbakshians place, when she finally reached it, turned out to have been demolished some time during the fighting. After poking half-heartedly through the still-smoking debris, she eventually found a body so badly charred that it was impossible to tell whose it might once have been.

So much for her nova ship, then.