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space station. She had no way of really knowing. No way of contacting him. That hurt more than losing her implant and access to her full suite of internal equipment. In the short time she had spent with Gerry, she knew she loved him, at least on some level.
    “Dammit, Gez!”
    She approached the ATV, which still hovered a meter or so above the ground, and jumped into the driver’s side. Petal considered the possibility of heading straight for the Dome. But Unmanned Aerial Vehicles—UAV drones circled the crystalline orb like eagles around a nest and would soon spot her.
    There’s no way she’d get anywhere near the place, not in a Red Widow vehicle anyway, and especially after what had gone down in Cemprom. The president would have the place on lock-down, and The Family would have surely upgraded their security protocols.
    Petal closed her eyes and thought of a solution. The options were slim. Not having their virtual private network—VPN running there was no chance of contacting him directly. Perhaps the Meshwork, she thought, but then remembered Gabe saying it was somehow offline, repressed.
    Given the demon AI had used the Meshwork as a way into City Earth, she doubted The Family still allowed it to exist. And even if they did, she had no terminal or connection.
    She looked at the wound on her wrist and realised how cut off she felt without it. She felt useless and weak. The body on the ground, however, told her otherwise. Gritting her teeth she looked at the control panel on the vehicle and tried to figure out how to fire that great weapon on the front.
    The dashboard was a long, thin touch-screen. Foreign symbols were labelled with a language she couldn’t understand, an alphabet, which might as well have come from aliens.
    Petal reached out a hand and gently touched a symbol resembling a spark. The engine whined-up and the vehicle jittered and vibrated like a boat. She pressed another symbol that looked like a pane of glass with a cross through it. A holographic targeting window popped up in front of her.
    That’s more like it .
    She touched a map-like icon, thinking it would be the navigation controls, but a pulse of laser shot from the hood-mounted cannon, missing the building’s door by a number of metres and flying off into the distance.
    Her entire body convulsed with the shockwave, and her mohican stood on end.
    Petal screamed and whooped, but soon realised that the laser bolt probably wouldn’t stop until it hit something or someone. Crap , crap, crap!
    She frantically swept her hand across the symbols and the vehicle lurched and pitched. She eventually discovered the navigation and propulsion controls. Steering the vehicle so that the door lined up with the holographic targeting overlay, she hit the fire button and rocked back with another blast of laser. The door didn’t stand a chance. It exploded on impact and hung off its hinges, swinging wildly open.
    “That’s what I’m talking about!”
    Behind the settling dust and smoke, the hangar appeared dark inside. Within the gloom, however, she could make out the shape of a pristine h-core powered dune buggy. Much like the ones the Bachians at GeoCity-1 drove about in. “That’s more my style,” she said jumping out of the Widow’s vehicle. She dragged the body inside the building.
    She shivered in the chilled air inside the hangar. Besides the seemingly brand-new buggy, it contained little else of value. It contained a workbench, a rack of tools, and a smaller room to the back of the building. She quickly got out of her prison clothes, and dressed in the dead Widow’s robes. They fitted surprisingly well, and were reasonably warm. She expected them to be tight, and rough. She felt like a ninja in the light cloth and the flat, comfortable shoes.
    Taking her precious chip with CRIBORG stamped onto its surface and the slate given to her by Gabe, she placed them within the numerous internal pockets of the under-robe that fitted like a body suit. The