She let her breath out slowly, forcing herself to ignore the way Luiz was roughly pushing and shoving Bash towards the door. There wasnt anything she could do about that right now, anyway.

The two of them exited the room, leaving her alone with the zombies. They were almost certainly controlled by an AI somewhere else on Sifras estate. But remote analysis with her implants rapidly made it clear that the encryption on their control beads was of a highly sophisticated nature. Were she to make a brute-force attempt at subverting them, Luiz and Sifra would soon know about it.

Then she felt a growing sense of excitement when her implants identified what appeared to be flaws or possible points of entry in the encryption. Could there be some way to subvert, or even take over, one or both of them?

Except, she realized belatedly, doing so would require her to be in the direct physical presence of these zombies for quite some period of time more time than Sifra or Luiz were ever likely to allow her. Instead they would stick her on board some ship bound for Redstone, dump her in some other makeshift cell, and that would be that.

She felt her earlier sense of hopelessness return, grey and deadening, and she could hardly be bothered to fight it.

Luiz soon returned for her, leading her back upstairs and into brilliant simulated sunlight. The two zombies, she noted with interest, accompanied them.

A small flyer, with bulbous shaped-field generators on its lower fuselage and a translucent upper hull, sat waiting for them on a grassy lawn. Like the spider-truck, it was decorated with Avilon Security decals. Luiz guided her on board, where she found that Bash had already been strapped in.

She watched with deep interest as the two zombies followed them aboard, Luiz carefully strapping them one after the other into their own seats behind her and Bash. The thought of them sitting so close, yet out of sight, made her skin crawl. But it was still an unexpected opportunity to investigate the limits of their secured encryption more thoroughly. She wondered what would be used to run and control the zombies, once they were out of range of the estates AI systems.

Sifra himself was the last to board. He threw a single, uninterested glance at her before stepping on through into the cockpit, closely followed by Luiz. The craft rose immediately, so Megan had only a last brief glimpse of Cockaigne.

Just fifteen minutes later, they dropped to a landing at Avilons primary spaceport, where Luiz herded her and Bash towards a nearby dropship. A tannoy boomed indecipherably some way off in the distance, with the electronic chime of an automated cargo truck dopplering somewhere to her right.