It occurred to Megan that driving a bus into Dios was likely to attract entirely the wrong kind of attention. She pulled the vehicle to one side of the road and slept again until nightfall. Then, shouldering an ultra-light rifle she had brought with her from Sarbakshians apartment, she set out to cover the rest of the way on foot.

Over the next couple of days, Megan continued through low-lying mounds of weed-entangled rubble that were all that was left of what had once been Dioss satellite towns. She slept during daylight in some of the better-preserved ruins, wrapped up in a survival sleeping-bag, with her rifle close by her hand. She avoided moving during the day, and paralleled the roads from a distance, hiding whenever she heard the sound of approaching vehicles.

Before dawn one morning, she crested a hill on the outskirts of Dios, and found herself looking out across the mouth of the Ka River. Few of the citys slender towers had survived the floods, and the stink of decay and death came to her strongly on the breeze. The sheer scale of so much tragedy now overwhelmed her.

She hid in the remains of an apartment building until nightfall, then made her way through rubble-strewn streets that were not entirely deserted. She occasionally caught sight of guerrillas moving in groups of two or three, chased by or chasing flocks of Accord gun-drones. She hid a couple of times, waiting for over an hour each time before daring to venture back out into the open.

It was nearly dawn by the time Megan reached the Ship of the Covenant. All the structures that had once surrounded it the research labs, the dormitories and barracks were gone, entirely swept away.

Her heart began beating harder and harder as she made her way to where the ship had come to rest against the shattered ruins of a skyscraper. Beyond an occasional flash off in the distance, or the occasional sound of gunfire far off across the ruins, she saw and heard nothing. The ship appeared to be entirely unguarded.

She stepped into the shadows, where the Magi ships hull pressed deep into the soil, then fell to her knees, opening up the machine part of her mind to the crowded intelligences she could already sense buried within. She could hear their murmuring voices, the gathered memories of a million long-dead civilizations.

They were waiting for her as they had always done for the woman who had once been Dakota Merrick.

She got up and pulled off a glove, then reached out to touch the great ship with her fingers. The hull had a slight give to it, almost like living flesh, a fact that had never failed to surprise her in that other life.

The hull dimpled where she touched it, growing rapidly deeper and wider and forming deep shadows within. She waited, tense, as a tunnel formed before her, extending deep within the body of the ship.