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whole thing was comfortably loose fitting on her, being much smaller and petite than her assailant, but it was a huge improvement over the chaffing and harsh fabric of her prison-issue outfit.
    Something was inside one of the pockets. She fished out a small leather-bound book, no larger than her hand that featured a hundred pages of intelligible script: the same alphabet as the vehicle’s control panel. A curious symbol of a sickle-like blade surrounding a cross embossed the cover.
    Must be a kind of religious prayer book or something . She pocketed it thinking it might be useful at some point. Even though she couldn’t understand it, books were so rare she quite liked having it around. She thought she might translate it one day.
    She didn’t want to leave the body in such an open place, considering the doors had no chance of being repaired, so she dragged it across the Polymar™ floor to the smaller room at the back. Inside she found a desk, a computer terminal that had rust on its ancient metal frame, and a large humming cylinder. She dumped the body under the desk and checked the computer. Nothing. Dead like the Widow.
    Petal considered taking the woman’s communicator: a small bud within her ear, but couldn’t trust that it wasn’t transmitting GPS data as well as receiving radio communications, so she removed it and crushed it underfoot. Her comrades would likely be on Petal’s trail soon enough, but that might slow them down for a few minutes.
    She inspected the large metal cylinder attached to the rear wall. It was essentially a huge upside-down cone. Pipes snaked into it from the ceiling. Next to it a metal ladder protruded from the wall. She climbed up, poked her head out of a trap door, and noticed that a secret level half a metre high ran the length of the building, beneath its flat ceiling. Water gathered from gullies in the roof and filled the space. It flowed down the pipes into the cylinder below.
    Climbing back down, she inspected the curious machinery closer. Towards the bottom of it, around knee-height, it had a wheel, a quarter metre in diameter, and beneath that a pair of tubes. She found thick, rubberised hoses wound up on the opposite wall.
    When Petal inspected the buggy she realised what it was: A hydrogen splitter. The system was designed to separate the hydrogen gas from water. So that’s how the Bachians fuelled some of their vehicles . The building must have been a reserve, a getaway contingency.
    She checked the buggy’s hydrogen tank: a thick metalled cylinder that ran the length of the vehicle. It was certainly big enough to hold a large capacity. A small dial on its side indicated a full tank. She didn’t know how far she’d get in it, but certainly with a full tank, it’d be far enough away to make any search for her difficult. And however far she’d get, it’d be a good way to start her journey to Criborg, as Gabe advised.
    An old-fashioned ignition system still had the key in it. She checked the transmission for neutral and fired up the engine. A belch of water vapour came from the twin tailpipes. The engines hummed with electricity.
    Taking out the slate, she entered the coordinates given to her by Gabe into the buggy’s navigation computer. A 3D image of her destination glowed within the holographic display. It’s an Island? What the hell?

Chapter 4
    G erry counted at least eight of them between floors one and twenty-one. Eight highly trained and augmented security operatives disguised as residents, cleaners, and maintenance people going about their morning business. Despite their attempts at looking normal it was the small things that gave them away: the way they looked at him, their eyes filled with recognition; the way they held their gaze a fraction too long; the false smiles and casual nod of the head that was a little too eager; the tell-tale EM traffic that surrounded them. They weren’t even cloaking it.
    Regular people don’t process that much data going about