At one stage she passed through what her maps assured her was a provincial town, but all she could see was waterlogged wreckage and ruins. Every now and then she came across small convoys of civilian vehicles, heavy bundles strapped on their roofs, heading slowly in the opposite direction. Small shanty towns had sprung up around the roots of a few canopy trees that had managed to survive the devastation. Some of the refugees she passed stared with disbelief as she drove by, heading in what they clearly considered to be the wrong direction.

Some hours later, as the sky darkened into dusk, she pulled up next to an Accord military convoy that appeared to have been destroyed in an attack. There were corpses scattered everywhere, and trucks and rover units reduced to piles of twisted wreckage.

Driving for a short distance back the way she had come, she kept a nervous eye on the landscape all around, then parked for the night in the shelter of a building that had been flushed out during the flood. Every now and then, before she fell fast asleep, she spotted the sleek shapes of Accord military cruisers cutting through the clouds overhead.

She woke once, in the middle of the night, to see beams of light playing across the horizon, then heard the distant thunder of heavy artillery. The flash of orbital beam weapons lit up the clouds from beneath as they struck at some unseen target on the ground, and more than likely, she thought, they were firing at whoever had destroyed the Accord convoy.

After that, she drove a lot more cautiously. Once, after catching sight of figures far off in the distance, she halted the bus and climbed up on its roof with a pair of binoculars to grab an enhanced video image. She saw men dressed in grey-and-white Freehold fatigues, weighed down under equipment and weapons. They were, she saw with relief, heading in the opposite direction to her. Clearly they hadnt seen her.

She decided to wait out another night, then resumed her journey. By now, perhaps no more than another days drive from Dios, she could see the twisting, sinuous shape of one of the Kas major tributaries snaking off towards the west.

Setting out the next morning, she came across the site of another battle: the ruins of buildings were still smouldering, and there was a greater variety of corpses this time. Most of the Freehold dead sat inside appropriated civilian vehicles, and only their neck tattoos identified them as enemy soldiers, since they were dressed in civilian clothes. The craters pitting the road all around them might have been caused by grenades or mines, or both.

Hearing a noise, she glanced up to see, above the curving expanse of a shattered biome, a half-dozen gun-drones locked in battle with an unseen enemy somewhere on the ground.