PART 2
ERA: Squeem Occupation
Pilot
When the Squeem occupation laws were announced, Anna Gage was halfway through a year-long journey into Jove from Port Sol. She paged through the news channels, appalled.
Human space travel was suspended. Wherever the great GUTship interplanetary freighters landed they were being broken up. The Poole wormhole fast-transit routes were collapsed. Humans were put to work on Squeem projects.
Resistance had imploded quickly.
Anna Gage — shocked, alone, stranded between worlds — tried to figure out what to do.
She was seventy-nine years old, thirty-eight physical. She was a GUTship pilot; for ten years she’d carried bulk cargo from the inner worlds to the new colonies clustered around Port Sol in the Kuiper Belt.
Since she operated her ship on minimum overheads, her supplies were limited. She couldn’t stay out here for long. But she couldn’t return to an occupied Earth and let herself be grounded. She was psychologically incapable of that.
Still outside the orbit of Saturn, she dumped her freight and began a long deceleration.
She began probing the sky with message lasers. There had to be others out here, others like her, stranded above the occupied lands.
After a few days, with the Sun still little more than a spark ahead of her, she got a reply.
She opened up her GUTdrive and skimmed around the orbit of Saturn.
Chiron was an obscure ice dwarf, a dirty snowball two hundred miles across. It looped between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus, following a highly elliptical orbit. One day the gravitational fields of the gas giants would hurl it out of the System altogether.
It had never been very interesting.
When Gage approached Chiron, she found a dozen GUTships drifting like spent matches around the limbs of the worldlet. The ships looked as if they were being dismantled, their components being hauled down into the interior of the worldlet.
A Virtual — of a man’s head — rustled into existence in the middle of Gage’s cabin. The disembodied head eyed Gage in her pilot’s cocoon. The jostling pixels of his head enlarged, as if engorging with blood; Gage imagined data leaking down to the worldlet’s surface.
“I’m Moro. You look clean.” He looked about forty physical, with a high forehead, jet black eyebrows, a weak chin.
“Thanks a lot.”
“You can approach. Message lasers only; no wideband transmission.”
“Of course—”
“I’m a semisentient Virtual. There are copies of me all around your GUTship.”
“I’m no trouble,” she said tiredly.
“Make sure you aren’t.”
With Moro’s pixel eyes on her, she brought the GUTship through a looping curve to the surface of the ice moon, and shut down its drive for the last time.
She stepped out onto the ancient surface of Chiron.
The ice was a rich crimson laced with organic purple. The suit’s insulation was good, but enough heat leaked to send nitrogen clouds hissing around her footsteps, and where she walked she burned craters in the ice. Gravity was only a few per cent of gee, and Gage, Mars-born, felt as if she might blow away.
Moro met her in person.
“You’re taller than you look on TV,” she said.
He raised a gun at her. He kept it there while her ship was checked over.
Then he lowered the gun and took her gloved hand. He smiled through his faceplate. “You’re welcome here.” He escorted her into the interior of Chiron.
Corridors had been dug hastily into the ice and pressurized; the wall surface — Chiron ice sealed and insulated by a clear plastic — was smooth and hard under her hand.
Moro cracked open his helmet and smiled at her again. “Find somewhere to sleep. Retrieve whatever you need from your ship. Tomorrow I’ll find you a work unit; there’s plenty to be done.”
“I’m not a colonist,” she growled. “You think we’ll be here that long?”
Moro looked sad. “Don’t you?”
She found a cabin, a crude cube dug into the ice. She moved her few personal belongings into the cabin — Virtuals of her parents on Mars, book chips, a few clothes. Her things looked dowdy and old, out of place.
There were about a hundred people hiding in the worldlet. Fifty had come from a Mars-Saturn liner; the rest had followed in ones and twos aboard fugitive GUTship freighters, like Gage herself. There were no children. Except for the liner passengers — mostly business types and tourists — the colonists of Chiron were remarkably similar. They were wiry-looking, AntiSenescence- preserved, wearing patched in-ship uniforms, and they bore expressions — uneasy, hunted — that Gage recognized. These were pilots. They feared, not discovery or death, but
The drives of some of the ships were dismounted and fixed to the surface, to provide power. The colonists improvised plants for air processing and circulation, for heating and for AS treatments. Crude distilleries were set up, with tubing and vessels cannibalized from GUTdrive motors.
Gage dug tunnels, tended vegetables, lugged equipment from GUTships of a dozen incompatible designs into the ice.
It was hard work, but surprisingly satisfying. The ache in her muscles enabled her to forget the worlds beyond Chiron, places she was coming to suspect she would never see again.
This was her home now, her Universe.
Two years limped by. The Chiron colony remained undiscovered. The grip of the Squeem occupation showed no sign of relaxing.
A mile below the surface the colonists dug out a large, oval chamber. The light, from huge strips buried in the translucent walls, was mixed to feel like sunlight, and soon there was a smell of greenery, of oxygen. People established gardens in synthesized soil plastered around the walls, and built homes from the ancient ice. The homes were boxes fixed to the ends of ice pillars; homes sprouted from the walls like flower-stalks.
Each dawn arrived with a brief flicker, a buzz as the strip-lights warmed up, then a flood of illumination. Gage would emerge from her cabin, nude; she could look down the length of her home-pillar at a field of cabbages, growing in ice as old as the Solar System.
It was like being inside a huge, gleaming egg. She missed Mars, the warm confines of her pilot cocoon.
The colonists monitored the news from the occupied worlds. There seemed to be no organized resistance; the Squeem’s action had been too unexpected, too sudden and complete. As far as the colonists knew they were the only free humans, anywhere.
But they couldn’t stay here forever.
They held a meeting, in an amphitheater gouged out of the ice. The amphitheater was a saucer-shaped depression with tiered seats; straps were provided to hold the occupants in place. As she sat there Gage felt a little of the cold of the worldlet, of two hundred miles of ice, seep through the insulation into the flesh of her legs.
Some proposed that the colony should become the base for a resistance movement. But if the massed weaponry of the inner planets hadn’t been able to put up more than a token fight against the Squeem, what could one ad-hoc colony achieve? Others advocated doing nothing — staying here, and waiting until the Squeem occupation collapsed of its own accord.
If it ever did, Gage thought morosely.
A woman called Maris Mackenzie released her belt and drifted up to the amphitheater’s focal point. She was another pilot, Gage saw; her uniform was faded but still recognizable. Mackenzie had a different idea.
“Let’s get out of this System and go to the stars,” she said.
There was a ripple of laughter.
“How?”
“One day Saturn or Uranus is going to throw this ice dwarf out of the System anyway,” Maris Mackenzie said. “Let’s help it along its way. We use the GUTdrive modules to nudge it into a close encounter with one of the giants and slingshot out of the System. Then — when we already have escape velocity — we open up a bank of GUTdrives and push up to a quarter gee. We can use water- ice as reaction mass. In three years we’ll be close to lightspeed—”
“Yes, but where would we go?”
Mackenzie was tall, thin, bony; her scalp was bald, her skull large and delicate: quite beautiful, like an eggshell, Gage thought. “That’s easy,” Mackenzie said. “Tau Ceti. We know there are iron-core planets there, but — according to the Squeem data — no advanced societies.”
