“But we don’t know if the planets are habitable.”
Mackenzie spread her thin arms theatrically wide. “We have more water, here in the bulk of Chiron, than in the Atlantic Ocean. We can
“The Squeem will detect us when we open up the drives. They can outrun us with hyperdrive.”
“Yes,” said Mackenzie patiently, “but they won’t spot us until after the slingshot. By then we’ll already have escape velocity. To board us, the Squeem would have to match our velocity in normal space. We’ve no evidence they’ve anything more powerful than our GUTdrives, for normal spaceflight. So they couldn’t outrun us; even if they bothered to pursue us they could never catch us.”
“How far is Tau Ceti? It will take years, despite time dilation—”
“We
A bank of cannibalized GUTdrive engines nudged Chiron out of orbit. It took three years for the ice dwarf to crawl to its encounter with Saturn.
The time went quickly for Gage. There was plenty of work to do. Sensors were ripped from the GUTships and erected in huge, irregular arrays over the ice-ship’s surface, so they could watch for pursuit. Inside the ice cave, the colonists had to take apart their fancy zero-gee homes on stalks. One side of the chamber was designated the floor, and was flattened out; squat igloos were erected across the newly leveled surface. The vegetable farms were reestablished on the floor and on the lower slopes of the walls of the ice cave.
The colonists gathered on the surface to watch the Saturn flyby.
Gage primed her helmet nipple with whisky from one of the better stills. She found a place away from the rest, dug a shallow trench in the ice, and lay in it comfortably; vapor hissed softly around her, evoked by her leaked body heat.
Huge storms raged in the flat-infinite cloudscape of Saturn. The feathery surfaces of the clouds looked close enough to touch. Rings arched over Chiron like gaudy artifacts, unreasonably sharp, cutting perceptibly across the sky as Gage watched. It was like a slow ballet, beautiful, peaceful.
Saturn’s gravitational field grabbed at Chiron, held it, then hurled it on.
Chiron’s path was deflected towards the Cetus constellation, out of the plane of the Solar System and roughly in the direction of the Andromeda Galaxy. The slingshot accelerated the worldlet to Solar escape velocity. The encounter left the vast, brooding bulk of Saturn sailing a little more slowly around the remote Sun.
A week past the flyby the bank of GUTdrive engines was opened up.
Under a quarter gee, Gage sank to the new floor of the ice cave. She looked up at the domed ceiling and sighed; it was going to be a lot of years before she felt the exhilarating freedom of freefall again.
A week after that, riding a matchspark of GUTdrive light, the Squeem missile came flaring out of the plane of the System. It was riding a full gee.
The countdown was gentle, in a reassuring woman’s voice. Gage lay with Moro in the darkness of her igloo. She cradled him in the crook of her shoulder; his head felt light, delicate in the quarter-strength gravity.
“So we got two weeks’ head start,” she said.
“Well, we’d hoped for longer—”
“A lot longer.”
“ — but they were bound to detect the GUTdrive,” Moro said. “It could have been worse. The Squeem must have cannibalized a human ship, to launch so quickly. So the missile’s drive has to be human-rated, limited to a one-gee thrust.”
The Squeem had evidently been forced to concur with Mackenzie’s argument, that pursuit with a hyperdrive ship was impossible; only another GUTdrive ship could chase Chiron, crawling after the rogue dwarf through normal space.
The woman’s voice issued its final warnings, and the countdown reached zero.
The ice world shuddered. Gage felt as if a huge hand were pressing down on her chest and legs; suddenly Moro’s head was heavy, his hair prickly, and the ice floor was hard and lumpy under her bare back. The crown of her igloo groaned, and for a moment she wondered if it would collapse in on them.
The bank of GUTdrive pods had opened up, raising Chiron’s acceleration to a full gee, to match the missile.
If Mackenzie’s analysis was correct, Chiron couldn’t outrun the missile, and the missile couldn’t overtake Chiron. It was a stalemate.
Gage stroked the muscles of Moro’s chest. “It’s actually a neat solution by the Squeem,” she murmured. “The pursuit will take years to play out, but the missile must catch us in the end.”
Moro pushed himself away from her, rolled onto his front, and cupped her chin in his hands. “You’re too pessimistic. We’re going to the stars.”
“No. Just realistic. What happens when we get to Tau Ceti? We won’t be able to decelerate, or the missile will catch us. Although we may survive for years, the Squeem have destroyed us.”
Moro wriggled on the floor, rubbing elbows which already looked sore from supporting his weight in the new thrust regime. He pulled at his lip, troubled.
Gage let herself get pregnant by Moro. The zygote was frozen, placed with a small store of others.
It was only after the storage of her zygote that Gage questioned her own motives in conceiving. How long was she expecting to be here? What kind of future did she think any of them could hope for?
Six months later the missile increased its acceleration to two gee.
The Squeem had been smart, Gage decided; they’d given the missile the ability to redesign itself in flight.
The colonists held another meeting to decide what to do. This time they sat around on the bare floor of their darkened ice cave; their elegant zero-gee amphitheater was suspended, uselessly, high on one wall of the cave.
Some wanted to stand and fight. But they had nothing to fight with. And Chiron, with its cargo of humanity, must be much more fragile than the hardened missile.
A few wanted to give up. They were still only fifty light days from the Sun. Maybe they could surrender, and return to the occupied worlds.
But most couldn’t stand the idea; it would be better to die. Anyway, a semisentient Squeem missile was unlikely to take prisoners.
They voted to run, at two gee.
They had to rebuild their colony again. Drone robots crawled over the battered surface of the ice world, hauling water-ice to the GUTdrive engines. Shields billowed wings of electromagnetic flux around the ice dwarf; they would soon be running at close to light-speed, and the thin stuff between the stars would hit Chiron like a wall.
The beautiful ice cave was abandoned. It wouldn’t be able to withstand the stress of two gravities. More tunnels were dug through the ice; new homes, made hemispherical for maximum strength, were hollowed out. The colonists strung lights everywhere, but even so Gage found their new warren-world gloomy, claustrophobic. She felt her spirits sinking.
The drives were ramped up to two gee in a day.
Only the strongest could walk unaided. The rest needed sticks, or wheelchairs. Broken bones, failing knees and ankles, were commonplace. Those like Gage who’d grown up on low-gravity worlds, or in freefall, suffered the most. The improvised AS units were forced to cope with a plague of failing hearts and sluggish circulations.
It was like growing old, in twenty-four hours.
Gage and Moro attempted sex, but it was impossible. Neither could support the weight of the other’s body. Even lying side by side, facing each other, was unbearable after a few minutes. They touched each other tenderly, then lay on their backs in Moro’s cavern, holding hands.
After three more months Maris Mackenzie came to see Gage. Mackenzie used a wheelchair; her large, fragile, beautiful bald head lolled against the back of the chair, as if the muscles in her neck had been cut.
“The missile is changing again,” Mackenzie said. “It’s still maintaining its two-gee profile, but its drive is flaring spasmodically. We think it’s redesigning its drive; it’s going to move soon to higher accelerations still. Much higher.”
Gage lay on her pallet; she felt as if she could feel every wrinkle in the ice world under her aching back. “You can’t be surprised. It was just a question of time.”
“No.” Mackenzie smiled weakly. “I guess I’ve screwed us up. We could have just stayed in our quiet orbit between Saturn and Uranus, not bothering anybody, flying around in that beautiful freefall ice cavern.”
“The Squeem would have found us eventually.”
“We’re using up so much of our water. It breaks my heart. My beautiful ocean, thrown away into space, wasted. But we can go faster. We can still outrun the damn thing.”
Gage knew that was true.
Once GUTenergy had fueled the expansion of the Universe itself. In the heart of each GUTdrive Chiron ice was compressed to conditions resembling the initial singularity — the Big Bang. The fundamental forces governing the structure of matter merged into a single, Grand-Unified-Theory superforce. When the matter was allowed to expand again, the phase energy of the decomposing superforce, released like heat from condensing steam, was used to expel Chiron matter in a rocket action.
But none of that made a difference.
Gage sighed. “We’ve already abandoned half our tunnels because of tiny gradients we didn’t even notice under one gee. We’re slowly dying, under two gee, despite the AS units. We can’t take anymore. I guess this latest maneuver of the missile will be the end for us.”
“Not necessarily,” Mackenzie said. “I have another idea.” Gage turned her head slowly; she had to treat her skull as delicately as a china vase. “Your last one was a doozie. What now?”
“Downloading.”
It wasn’t a universally popular option. On the other hand, the alternative was death.
Eighty chose to survive, as best they could.
When her turn came Gage made her way, alone, to the modified AS machine at the heart of their warren of tunnels. The robot surgeon delicately implanted a sensor pad into her corpus callosum, the bridge of nervous tissue between the two hemispheres of her brain. It also, discreetly, pressed injection-pads against her upper arms.
All around her, in the improvised infirmary, people were dying, by choice.
So was Gage, if truth be told. All that would survive of her would be a copy, distinct from
The callosum sensor would download a copy of her consciousness in about eight hours. Gage returned to her cavern, lay on her back with a sigh, and fell asleep.
She opened her eyes.
She wasn’t hurting anymore. She was in zero gee. It felt delicious, like swimming in candy floss. She was in the ice cave — no, a Virtual reconstruction of the cave; the walls and house-stalks were just a little too smooth and regular. No doubt the realism of detail would return as their minds worked at this shared world.
