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.”
“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 make a world habitable.”
“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 have years,” Mackenzie said softly.
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.