A Planet for Rent

Escape Tunnel

Three of them.

An ideal number.

Two men and one woman.

Or, even more precisely, two male humans and one female human.

The female is Friga.

Friga doesn’t much resemble the usual idea of “what a woman should be.”

Isn’t slender with swaying hips, long legs, and smoothly curved breasts.

Doesn’t have a heart-shaped mouth, doll-like eyes, and huge ovaries.

Friga has skin as dark as ebony and pearly white teeth. She’s six foot two and two hundred pounds of muscles bulked up by the same illegal steroids that atrophied her ovaries to the size of beans after she gave birth.

A jaw like a concrete block, and a legendarily bad temper.

What you call a real butch or virago.

But those who know how she reacts to those words would never risk the consequences.

The last guy who did will never risk anything again. Ever.

Friga isn’t a whole-hearted lesbian. It’s just that she finds it harder and harder to find a man who would risk carrying on even an occasional relationship with her.

And since some women find her desirable, and she’s never been too choosy…

Friga has no visible means of support, aside from crime.

Never has.

She’s done robbery, trafficking—any job that turns up and pays well enough.

Her physique is too distinctive for her to work as a scammer or a con artist.

She’s killed a couple of times.

Out of anger, not for work or for pleasure.

She isn’t a professional killer or a psychopath.

She’s spent eight hellish long years of her life in Body Spares, sentenced for various offenses.

She doesn’t remember much about those years… She only knows that she doesn’t want to get sentenced again.

That’s her motivation for setting out on the Voyage.

People say she has a daughter, a little girl, by the name of Leilah, but that she doesn’t much care about her.

She may be coarse and uneducated and have a limited vocabulary, but she’s a perfect survivor, and a natural leader.

She always knows what to do in every situation.

And she does it without a word of complaint.

They are Adam and Jowe.

Adam is tall, young, gangly, and clumsy.

He uses artificial lenses because he wore out his own eyes long ago staring at holoscreens and browsing through technical reference manuals that are so old, they’re actually printed on paper.

Adam can build anything, using nothing but bits of trash, patience, and inventiveness.

From a hyperengine to a high-powered ruby laser.

Some say he could manage even if there weren’t any trash available…

He’s a super-handyman.

A genius of technobricolage, convinced that his talent is pitifully wasted on building illegal arms and other brilliant doohickeys.

His usual clients are people like Friga.

He’s just gotten out of eight months in Body Spares on account of some masers he made, which later on were supplied to some Yakuzas.

And Body Spares wasn’t what you might call his cup of tea.

He was conscious almost the whole time he served as a “horse.”

He was mounted by a guzoid from Regulus who was very interested in extreme experiences.

Purely sexual and other sorts.

He survived.

But he still has scars…

He dreads having to go through something like that again, which he knows will be very hard for him to avoid given the only kind of life he’s ever been able to live.

Though his sentence also had its upside.

That was how he met Jowe.

Jowe is still young, but his face already looks like a weathered chunk of rock.

Jowe would be handsome, with his golden bangs and his big blue eyes, if they weren’t as icy as the blue of chrome-vanadium steel.

Jowe has dead eyes.

The eyes of a person whose soul must have frozen.

His eyes look like the sort that have seen everything there is to see about pain, betrayal, disappointment… and more.

Jowe is intelligent, seems well educated, has delicate, sensitive, skillful hands, like an artist’s.

He never talks about his past.

In general, Jowe rarely talks…

Jowe just gazes straight ahead, at the stars.

And his gaze is terrifyingly empty, doesn’t hold much hope.

Barely even a motivation to keep on living.

Even Friga, who isn’t afraid of anyone or anything, sometimes gets a chill around Jowe.

The idea of the Voyage was Jowe’s, and when he speaks of it, the words that emerge from his lips sound like beauty itself.

The Voyage is the Exodus.

Like in the Bible.

Escaping from the kingdom of Pharaoh in search of the Promised Land.

In the Promised Land there are clusters of grapes so large it takes two men to lift them, and there’s work and opportunity for all.

The rivers flow with milk and honey, and every enterprising man can achieve his dreams of wealth.

The Promised Land is any land but Earth.

Humans aren’t exactly the Chosen People, but…

The Promised Land belongs to the Philistines, and nobody promised it to the people of Earth.

The Philistines are the power behind Pharaoh’s throne.

Xenoids who manipulate the Planetary Tourism Agency puppet and who despise the Earthlings.

Philistines who don’t want humans to enjoy the same quality of life that they do, because they fear their worlds might be polluted by the inferior race.

The xenoids are mighty in arms and money, so sword and purse are unlikely methods to win victories against them and their Planetary Security puppets.

What’s left is shrewdness and cunning.

That is, entering the Promised Land by stealth.

Taking advantage of the fact that not all Philistines think alike, that there are some who patrol the borders of their kingdoms looking for hands to work in their fields.

The fact that there are always a few “compassionate” sorts who take in runaway humans and, in exchange for the runaways’ virtual slave labor in their factories, keep them hidden for three years and three days.

After that period, if the human can show that he has remained among the Philistines the whole time, he gets a chance to become a citizen of the Promised Land.

A second-class citizen, of course.

But at least that’s something, and it’s better to suffer directly under the yoke of the Philistines than to do it under their puppet Pharaoh.

Better the Promised Land than its virtual colony, Earth.

Shrewdness and cunning, then, mean escaping.

The Voyage means Escaping.

Escaping is no easy matter.

There are two huge obstacles: Distance and Surveillance.

Distance is a serious business all by itself.

To get to the Promised Land you must always cross some desert first.

The stars that the worlds of the xenoids orbit are light-years away.

They are separated from Earth by an endless desert of empty space, which hyperships cross in a matter of seconds.

But only xenoids have the technology to build safe hyperships.

Though hyperengine construction is well within the reach of many human “super-handymen” such as Adam, the steering and power control systems are another kettle of fish.

A homemade hyperengine built on Earth works only once… and the ship that uses it can return to ordinary space almost anywhere.

Maybe near a solar system full of xenoids, maybe a thousand parsecs from any stellar bodies.

Or in the middle of a gas nebula, or inside a globular cluster.

Fortunately, the structure of the hyperengine itself prevents it from working very close to large masses.

There’s no danger of materializing in a space that’s already occupied by a sun or planet.

The flip side is that in order to activate a homemade hyperengine without control systems, you first have to get some distance away from the plane of the ecliptic containing the Sun, Earth, and the other planets.

The only way to get far enough away is by conventional propulsion, relying on the law of action and reaction.

Ballistically, the safest trajectory for getting as far away from the plane of the ecliptic as quickly as possible with minimum fuel consumption is by traveling almost perpendicular to Earth’s orbit.

The safe zone is no more than twenty arcminutes wide.

In the semisecret, semitechnical jargon of those who aim to make the Voyage, this route is called the Escape Tunnel.

Naturally, Planetary Security is also familiar with it and keeps it under constant surveillance.

Planetary Security was created, and exists, to maintain control.

Control means, among other things, stopping Voyages by all possible means.

All possible means add up to a multi-level system.

The first level includes everything from surprise raids in search of the hideouts where homemade ships are built, to generous payments to an extensive network of informants who are retained to locate those hideouts, to ultratight controls on all the raw materials and instruments used to manufacture space engine parts.

The second level is the network of Earth-based radars that rake the atmosphere with their invisible fingers day and night, distinguishing between commercial aerobus flights and any Unidentified Flying Object taking off from the planet.

The third level is the system of orbiting radars that similarly distinguish between shuttles bearing passengers or cargo to hyperships waiting at docking points and any Unidentified Flying Object that attains escape velocity.

The main players at these last two levels are the high-tech patrol ships that the xenoids supply to Planetary Security.

With crews of six, these super-aerodynamic, Mach 3 suborbital patrol ships are loaded with weaponry.

If an Unidentified Flying Object turns out to be a homemade ship headed for the Escape Tunnel, the crews on every patrol ship have instructions to open fire and destroy it.

After, of course, trying to communicate by radio first, and after warning the craft that it absolutely must return to Earth.

Generally speaking, the primitive communications gear on a homemade ship is completely incapable of working while the ship climbs into orbit, when it is subjected to an acceleration of several g and enveloped by static.

So the Planetary Security guys often forget the step of trying to communicate, or simply skip it.

And they fire on the homemade ships without further ado.

If the ships manage to slip through the first three levels of the surveillance system, there’s still the fourth and final one.

The hardest one.

After a few modifications, suborbital patrol ships designed for operating in or very near the atmosphere can also be effective in deep space.

Their crews reduced to three men each in order to carry the maximum fuel loads possible, modified patrol ships orbit in the vicinity of the Escape Tunnel on shifts lasting several weeks, scrutinizing the Tunnel with their sensitive instruments all the while.

Surveillance like this is, obviously, very difficult to elude.

But there’s always a possibility.

Friga, Adam, and Jowe are gambling it all on that possibility.

And on their knowledge of earlier attempts, in order to make their own plan better.

Now that several dozen people have attempted it, and even succeeded in one case out of fifty, aficionados have a wealth of technical information on the Voyage.

Information that, of course, is shared only by word of mouth.

It needs not be said that any mention of the Escape Tunnel is superforbidden and ultracensored.

The data come from three main sources.

Positive feedback from the few lucky ones who managed to get to the xenoid worlds and were later able to tell how they had done it.

Also, feedback from the members of their “support staff” who stayed behind on Earth, spreading information in the form of rumors about the most successful techniques and ship models.

And as negative feedback, stories about how the unsuccessful ones managed so badly.

If all the folklore on the Voyage and Voyage Vehicles were compiled in one place, it would take terabytes of memory to store it.

There’s been a bit of everything.

Ships camouflaged as commercial aerobuses to circumvent earth-based surveillance.

Using solar sails, a form of passive propulsion that is almost undetectable by a patrol ship’s instruments, to get inside the Escape Tunnel unnoticed.

Ships with several “disposable, single-use” hyperengines, to increase the chances of getting somewhere by being able to make more than one hyperspace jump.

Vehicles tricked out with handcrafted armor, and loaded with illegal weaponry such as lasers and masers, to resist and respond to any attack by Planetary Security ships.

Modular ships that break into independent small craft in order to confuse the pursuing patrols, or, if that turns out to be impossible, so the pilots might escape with their lives back to Earth, able to try it again in the future.

Vehicles with onboard anabiosis systems so the crew can remain in suspended animation… for all eternity, if their luck runs out and they return to three-dimensional space too far from a xenoid settlement…

Yes, there’s been a bit of everything.

Based on all these brilliant and desperate solutions, Friga, Adam, and Jowe have designed and built, with nearly endless ingenuity and patience, their own passport to happiness.

Their escape vehicle, which they have christened the Hope.

The Hope is a genuine marvel of improvisation.

It ought to have the old saying, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” written in gold across its bow.

The plan for getting it into the Escape Tunnel is likewise a wonder of deception, cunning… and optimism.

The Hope will lift off camouflaged inside a tremendous weather balloon, in order to trick ground-based radars.

The four square kilometers of reflective synplast required for this mimicry came from the loot taken in a robbery that Frida pulled off years ago at a grodo-owned import warehouse.

What luck she never found a buyer for all that material…

On reaching the ionosphere, the Hope will drop the balloon disguise and head into orbit along a regular commercial route.

Its exterior looks surprisingly like the hull of a Cetian-built shuttle of the Tornado class, one of the most common spacecraft in every terrestrial astroport.

Working with practically waste material, Adam and Jowe have painstakingly created a very passable imitation of the perfect outer finish typical of xenoid technology.

The looks of the Hope is half technological miracle, half sculpture: a work of bricolage and a work of art.

Thanks to her contacts and with the help of just a few credits, Friga was able to acquire the communications gear from an actual Tornado-class shuttle that was being decommissioned.

Adam fixed it up, good as new.

Now it can link to several astroports.

Thinking ahead, Adam has put in dozens of hours listening in on the conversations of traffic controllers and shuttle pilots.

When the time comes, he’s certain he’ll be able to imitate their simple technical jargon…

With that, and with the communications codes (which did indeed cost Friga quite a lot, in spite of all her ties), they expect to elude the second level of surveillance.

Any patrol ships that see or hear them would have to be magicians to so much as suspect that the Hope isn’t just an everyday shuttle headed for orbit to dock with a hypership.

But if they do, still, all is not lost.

Under its apparently defenseless imitation Tornado-class skin, the Hope conceals a system of pulsating force fields.

It’s not the nearly invulnerable armor plating of a xenoid-built patrol ship, but it should be able to take a good deal of punishment.

And, for responding to the particle-beam weapons of Planetary Security ships, it has a few high-powered masers that should cause a bit of a ruffle.

That’s how they hope to reach the Escape Tunnel without too much structural damage or loss of fuel.

Once there, hyperspace… And then, everything else.

Friga, Adam, and Jowe would have preferred to have more hyperengines, but the weaponry and the energy generators for the force shields left only enough room for two.

One to get them far away from the solar system… The other in case they get too far from everything.

But, on the other hand, they have a suspended animation system, which Adam has brilliantly modified.

The “super-handyman” guarantees that it will keep all three of them in perfect anabiosis for at least five hundred years.

At least in theory, if neither hyperengine brings them luck, five centuries should be more than enough time for the Hope to drift to some port.

Some port with xenoids.

Xenoids of good will, if at all possible.

Friga has no scientific-technical training, or any other sort of education.

Nevertheless, she’s confident that her physical strength, her stamina, her lack of scruples, and her leadership qualities will make her valuable to any xenoid boss involved in not entirely legal activities.

She knows she could be the best capo in the universe.

If not, she’s still willing to make the voyage and stick it out anyway.

Adam places high hopes on his incredible skill as a technotinkerer…

Though he doesn’t say so to anyone, he’s sort of skeptical about his utility in xenoid consumer society, where nothing gets fixed but everything is used until it breaks and then is simply thrown away.

But he aims to learn how to build things; since he already knows how to repair them…

In any case, the real trump card for both of them is Jowe.

And his mysterious friend, Moy.

Jowe doesn’t talk about Moy very much. Like, not at all.

He’s only said that Moy is an artist, an old friend of his, who’s had luck with the xenoids.

But everything indicates that they were close friends.

Maybe more than friends, Friga and Adam sometimes think, with the wickedness of the street.

Because it’s pretty rare for someone, no matter how well-off economically, to wire money orders worth nearly a million credits to a mere friend.

The remittances that Moy sends have financed the construction of the Hope, the purchase of provisions, the suspended animation system, the fuel, and the weaponry.

And none of it came cheap.

Even so, there’s a few credits left over…

Friga has declared that what’s left is an “emergency fund” for unexpected contingencies.

Credits are credits, from Betelgeuse to Aldebaran, and if no nice xenoids turn up, disposed to keeping them concealed for three years and three days…

It’s good to have some reserves.

The key thing is that, along with money, Moy constantly sends messages along the lines of “Come right away” and “I need you here” and “I’m so lonely” and “Just get here, whatever it costs.”

Jowe doesn’t tell them whether Moy knows that, like anyone ever sentenced to Body Spares, he’ll never be given permission to leave Earth legally.

But Friga and Adam are sure that Moy realizes his money is helping Jowe get back to him the only way he can.

By leaving Earth’s atmosphere and the solar system illegally.

Friga and Adam are also sure that this Moy will intercede on Jowe’s behalf once he’s far from Earth.

And on their behalf, too, while he’s at it.

Which is why they’ve taken on the greater part of the hard work.

Because, Jowe might be the one who came up with the idea of the Voyage, but he hasn’t done much to make it a concrete reality.

You might say, all he’s done has been to add a couple of stylish touches to the Hope.

And lately, nothing at all.

Because, while Friga and Adam are sweating away, rechecking things that have already been checked a thousand times and gathering provisions and tools for every eventuality, Jowe just wanders about idly, staring at the sky.

And his dead eyes only light up with a sparkle when they mention how close it is to the day of departure.

Lift-off has been cleverly scheduled for Sunday night.

There’s always plenty of weekend traffic, and the exhausted air traffic controllers can hardly wait for the relative calm of Monday.

The morning before D-Day, H-Hour, each of the three crewmembers of the Hope wants to be alone.

Adam stays onboard the Hope.

His child, his creature… the best piece of work he’s ever done.

He proudly runs his hand over its patched plastisteel armor and its heterodox control panel.

He daydreams of a future when he will design and manufacture prototypes of high-velocity ships for some xenoid corporation…

Every now and then he looks outside the hangar that hides the Hope from prying eyes and catches a glimpse of Jowe, walking along the horizon.

The hangar is just a large shed on a small island in Hudson Bay.

In the middle of a bunch of buildings, which thirty years ago formed a town, which grew up around a chemical plant.

Later the xenoids shut the plant down because of the pollution, and the town died.

There’s not a soul for miles around.

Not a human soul, that is.

There are swarms of gulls and rats building nests and romping in the empty buildings and tall chimneys of the dead plant, which will probably soon be demolished.

The sea roars and breaks against the beach, which is as unspoiled as if man had never existed on the face of the Earth.

Jowe is wandering down the line of surf, skipping stones across the water and shouting words that Adam can’t make out, between the wind and the distance.

Could be anger. Or frustration. Or hope.

Or all of it together.

As evening falls, Jowe comes back, silent, unsmiling.

Almost voiceless.

Adam shrugs: little as he normally talks, there’s not much difference…

When it’s two hours before lift-off and Friga hasn’t shown up yet, the men start to worry.

One hour to lift-off, Adam, chain-smoking one cigarette after another, mutters that if they have to leave without her…

Jowe looks at him without a word; they both know they’ll wait.

Half an hour before time’s up, Friga returns.

She is limping, her clothing in tatters.

Bruised bump over one eye, her lip split, a black eye, and red, swollen knuckles.

In the soot covering her face there are traces of tears.

But she smiles almost beatifically.

They don’t ask whether she’s coming back from a fight or from making love.

They know that for Friga, there’s not much difference.

But they both suspect that her daughter must have something to do with that happy smile.

And no doubt with the tears as well.

It must be hard to leave your family behind, no matter how little you care about them…

Of course, neither of them says any of this.

Sometimes Friga can be very… sensitive.

Nervous, they take the Hope from the hangar and start filling the enormous pear of the balloon disguise.

Fifteen minutes later, when everything is ready, Adam and Friga board.

Jowe, not caring whether they see him, kneels down, kisses the sandy Earth of the island, and collects a little in a small bag, which he stuffs into his pocket.

Then he starts the time fuse that will release the balloon from its moorings, and he too boards.

Now they can lift off.

After a tense half-minute, the fuse works perfectly.

The anchor ties come undone and the balloon rises at a dizzying speed.

Inside, the three fugitives shout for joy, leaping and hugging.

Friga gives thanks to God.

To any god, nobody cares which.

They’re on their way.

The altimeter reads 1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 35 kilometers, and Adam, listening so closely to his headphones that sometimes he gets confused by the sound of his heart beating, hears no alarms going off in the ether.

Everything’s going fine.

Though on two occasions they freeze when the bleep, bleep of the radar receiver indicates that they are being tracked by a terrestrial radar.

At an altitude of forty-five kilometers, Friga fires the Hope’s plasma reactors.

The exhaust, burning at hundreds of degrees, sets the skin of the balloon ablaze and rips through it.

Well-placed explosive charges detonate and finish opening the balloon like the peel of a squashed banana.

Weather balloons normally use hydrogen for lift, since it is cheap and effective.

The ballon disguising the Hope used helium.

It is slightly less effective—and much more expensive.

But if they had used hydrogen, the explosion when the engines switched on could have destroyed the Hope before they reached orbit.

Adam had thought of that.

As expected, when the balloon rips open, they go into a spiraling fall.

They lose altitude and free themselves from the rest of the balloon’s skin.

Finally, the Hope’s sturdy delta wings find support in the thin upper atmosphere, and the spiral turns into a dive.

At an increasing speed, but completely under control.

Acceleration forces grow: two g, three g.

Friga counts to ten, lowers the ailerons, and gives full power to the reactors.

More cheers when the Hope describes an elegant curve upward.

Just exclamations; g-forces prevent the woman and the two men from getting out of their overstuffed hydraulic armchairs.

Feeling his jowls down around his waist, Adam thinks how much easier it would have been if they had artificial gravity and an antigrav propulsion unit, like a real Tornado class…

Only the xenoids make them, and their importation to Earth is too tightly controlled…

So it was always mere speculation.

Over the headphones of all three comes a question from a controller at some astroport:

“Unidentified Tornado-class shuttle, Gander Astroport here. Attention: you have entered the Regulus corridor… Your trajectory is odd… Are you having trouble? Please identify yourself.”

Adam gulps: the moment of truth is here.

Gander lies within the realm of possibility, though Toronto had seemed more likely, given the latitude.

Trying to keep his voice from being overly distorted by the five g of inertial lift into orbit, Adam gives the answer they had previously agreed upon:

“Gander, Tornado LZ-35 from Wellington here. Have jet stream and problems with ailerons. Collision with weather balloon, destruction likely. Requesting guide beam to the point of embarkation for Regulus and free corridor.”

For an instant there is no response.

Just the crackle of static filling the cabin.

The fugitives look at each other, going pale.

Is everything lost?

So soon?

Friga fiddles with the triggers of the ship’s weaponry and nervously watches the radar screen, as if expecting to see a suborbital patrol ship appear at any moment.

At least she’ll make them pay a high price for her life.

Jowe turns pale but doesn’t move a muscle.

Adam sweats; could he have made some mistake?

He’s sure he hasn’t: it’s very unlikely that the controller would check up on them with Wellington, New Zealand, on the other side of the planet, and who would be crazy enough to enter an orbital corridor if everything wasn’t one hundred percent in order?…

“Tornado LZ-35, Gander here. Guide beam activated. The corridor is free. We detect the falling remnants of the balloon. You’ll have to be more careful! Have your ship checked over at the point of embarkation, and give my regards to Regulus.”

The road is clear.

Incredulous but relieved, Friga releases the triggers with a sigh and focuses once more on the controls of the Hope.

For now, the danger is past.

Or so it seems…

Just as they reach escape velocity, all the homemade welds on the Hope begin to vibrate.

It seems like the vehicle will be torn to pieces at any moment.

Friga turns to look at the shipbuilder questioningly.

“It’ll hold up, I swear it will!” Adam shouts, as terrified as the pilot but trying to fill her with confidence.

Jowe is unfazed.

Finally the display shows 11.2 kilometers per second, and Friga turns off the plasma reactors to let them rest and cool off.

Their supply of hydrogen is eighty-five percent spent.

But they’re already in hyperbolic escape orbit.

Every second takes them farther and farther from Earth.

A minute passes.

On the radar screen, the great echo marking the point of embarkation for Regulus, where hyperships wait for their passengers to arrive on shuttles to take them to that distant star, is being left behind.

But another echo, much smaller and faster, is growing closer.

It isn’t coming from the atmosphere of Earth.

It’s coming from another orbit.

A patrol ship.

Friga swears and turns on the hydrogen collector field to reactivate the reactors.

Jowe calmly calculates the relative trajectories and velocities of both space vehicles.

Adam complains about his bad luck: did they have to get detected so quickly?

Friga reminds him that only the weak believe in luck.

The invisible magnetic maw of the collector field which stretches out before the Hope traps the hydrogen atoms floating in space at a rate of one or two per cubic meter.

The remaining fifteen percent of hydrogen in the tanks would be enough to reignite and heat the reactors, but not much more.

The collector field becomes more effective as their speed grows: twenty seconds later, it has already stabilized the rate of supply to the engines.

The ship is capturing and consuming hydrogen at the same rate.

Jowe breaks his silence to state hoarsely that the patrol ship is gaining on them.

Adam, hysterical, tells him the Planetary Security guys have antigravity-based inertial engines, which don’t need an external source of fuel and don’t have to be warmed up… but even so, they won’t get caught, because they’re way ahead.

Jowe disagrees.

According to his calculations, the patrol ship is following a flawless interception orbit: it will reach firing range before the Hope has entered far enough inside the Escape Tunnel to activate the hyperengine and get it to work.

And that will be more or less within an hour.

Adam blows up and says that as far as he’s concerned, Jowe can go to hell right now: all he has to do is open the airlock, enter it, and jump into space, if he’s so scared.

Friga quiets them with her booming voice, reminding them that it’s just a patrol ship and that the Hope is armed and armored…

She fiddles with the triggers again.

The patrol ship must have positively ID’d them as a fugitive ship by now: it is keeping complete radio silence while continuing to approach.

Just in case, Adam throws up a curtain of interference to keep their pursuer from asking other Planetary Security ships for help.

Manipulating the controls with the dexterity of a pianist, Friga corrects the Hope’s course with plasma jets at full blast.

At ever-increasing velocity, the ship leaves the plane of the ecliptic; in a couple of hours it will be far enough away for hyperspace travel.

If the patrol ship doesn’t destroy it first.

It hasn’t even asked them to surrender.

Not that they’d surrender without a struggle.

A dogfight is inevitable.

The hour passes. Friga, impatient, burns with a desire to open fire.

Despite the Hope’s significant initial advantage, the faster-moving Planetary Security ship has significantly closed the gap between them.

Jowe reminds Friga that the masers onboard the Hope have a range of one or two kilometers farther than the particle projectile cannons that patrol ships carry.

But on the other hand, they’ll need nearly half a minute to recharge after each shot, compared with just ten seconds for the enemy’s weapon.

Adam nods and looks expressionlessly at their pilot-leader.

Friga smiles: at least she’ll have the advantages of surprise and taking the first shot, and she intends to make the most of them.

Besides, she has a few tricks and secrets up her sleeve…

Xenoids may have built the patrol ships, but that doesn’t mean their design is perfect…

She doesn’t aim at the Planetary Security ship’s ultra-armored cabin or at its super-protected inertial engine, but at the gun-ports from which its terrible weapons emerge.

When the distance-to-target indicator reaches the set point, she squeezes the triggers on her masers with determination.

Then immediately flicks off the engines.

They stop accelerating, and in the sudden weightlessness they all float, restrained only by their seat straps, and they are unable to observe the effect of their shots on the other ship.

“Turn the engines on! Why did you do that?” Adam shrieks hysterically.

On the radar screen, the enemy looks completely unharmed.

“Turning off the reactors is logical; it saves power for our shields, and changing our rate of acceleration should make it harder for them to calculate our position,” Jowe replies. “Fasten your seatbelt, Adam…”

Eight seconds after carrying out its attack, the Hope becomes the target of the charged-particle beam fired by the patrol ship.

On radar, the shot looks like a stream of bright dots linking the two ships for nearly a whole second.

In spite of the force field network that serves as their shield, the impact is right on target—and disastrous for the Hope.

The homemade ship’s plastishield plates rip from stem to stern, several structural reinforcements shatter to bits, the hydrogen tanks (fortunately almost empty now) explode and send huge flames into the void.

The worst of all is that the force field inexplicably ceases to function.

Adam, terrified, bangs away desperately at the system control keyboard, trying to reactivate it.

Without success…

“One more like that and the voyage is over,” says Jowe, strangely calm.

Friga says nothing, just watches as her weapons recharge: if she has to die, she’ll go down fighting.

Apparently, her stratagem didn’t work…

The adversary will take its second and final shot before the Hope can respond.

And with no force shield, it will destroy them for sure.

Time’s almost up: seven seconds, eight, nine, now…

The woman and the men close their eyes…

Three seconds later, they’re still alive.

Apparently, the enemy couldn’t fire…

On the radar screen, the patrol ship is taking evasive action.

It seems to be surrounded by myriads of blinking bright dots.

Friga gives a savage war cry and opens fire again.

“I knew it!” she roars, laughing. “If I could just damage the insulation on their particle projection cannon, their first shot would be their last! Take that, Planetary Security!”

The two men realize that their pursuer did fire.

The bright dots are its “cannon balls”: charged particles.

They couldn’t be projected as intended because Friga’s shot had shortcircuited their weapon.

And, attracted by the static electricity of the patrol ship’s own hull, they are gathering around it, while its force shield prevents them from adhering.

The second shot by the Hope’s masers has no visible effect.

All the same, the enemy retreats, prudently.

There are no other patrol ships on radar.

With no more pursuers to evade, no need for haste, Friga does not turn the reactors back on.

They follow their inertial trajectory to the Escape Tunnel.

The three would-be hyperspace travelers, with infinity and eternity before them, release themselves from their seats and play like little kids in the weightlessness.

They’ll repair the damage caused by the patrol ship’s attack later.

For now, they have to release some tension.

To forget, at least for a few moments, that compared with what comes next, everything they’ve done so far is just that: child’s play.

Their personal skill and the precautions they’ve taken may have made all the difference so far, but everything will depend on sheer luck when they enter the Russian roulette of hyperspace.

And, even more so, when they exit it…

They’re back in their overstuffed armchairs, panting.

On the radar, far away, two dots, getting closer.

Friga and Adam are exhausted from their extravehicular activity, in spacesuits as homemade as the rest of the ship.

Muscles that they were never aware of before ache horribly now after two hours spent repairing the damage from the dogfight.

They’re just paying the price for their lack of practice, and they know it.

But how could they have practiced moving in space without antigrav simulators or costly tanks?

In any case, they’re hoping they won’t have to do it again.

Very soon, the Hope, more patched-up than ever, will be activating one of its two “disposable” hyperengines.

The three of them, now free—almost—smile despite their worries: the two distant dots on the radar are almost certainly two more patrol ships on their way here.

But they’ll be very far from the solar system before any of the Planetary Security ships can get close enough.

“For freedom,” Frida says solemnly, and she switches on the hyperengine.

Though they’ve heard so much about the sensation of going into hyperspace transit, the three are overwhelmed by it.

“It’s like they’re turning me inside out,” thinks Friga, not very good with images. “As if I had my insides outside and my outsides inside.”

“As if all the molecules in my body were iron filings arranged around a magnet… and suddenly they switched the polarity of the magnetic field,” Adam speculates.

Jowe’s mind is blank.

For him, it’s just an agonizing new experience.

But nothing as bad as his memories.

The spatio-temporal contraction lasts a thousand years or just one long second.

Then the homemade hyperengine conks out and they return to three-dimensional space.

They have no idea where.

In any case, not very far.

To keep from putting them at risk (and also limited by the cramped space onboard the Hope), Adam didn’t make either of the twin hyperengines very powerful.

Wherever they are, it can’t be more than fifty light-years from Earth.

Very nervous, they check the readings on the computer connected to the instruments.

After noting the brightest stars and comparing them with the parallax and distance readings saved in its memory, the computer positively identifies the ship’s position.

Shouts of joy.

Which die away quickly, as the holographic map looms up before their eyes.

Near the constellation of the Whale… but eight light-years from the nearest star, which, to be precise, is Tau Ceti.

“So close to paradise, without hitting it!” Adam whines, banging furiously on a bulkhead.

“There’s still anabiosis,” says their leader, trying to stay level-headed. “It’s just eight light-years. At the highest acceleration rate we can squeeze from the engines, if no asteroids get in the way we’ll get to Tau Ceti within…”—she makes a very rough calculation—“a century and a half. Sorry about Moy, Jowe, but there’s no other way out. We ought to save the other hyperengine as a last resort. Besides, it’s dangerous; we might end up even farther away…”

Adam starts to let out a scream of dismay, and Friga silences him by covering his mouth with her enormous hand.

Jowe takes one quick glance at the holographic map.

“A century and a half…” he sighs. “Poor Moy… Maybe things will have improved some by the time we arrive. There’s nothing else to discuss; let’s head to the freezers. It’ll be anabiosis, then.”

A first-rate hypership carries suspended animation freezers only as a last resort.

Same way the ships sailing the oceans in olden times used to carry lifeboats or life-rafts.

Their freezers are high-tech: comfortable, safe, individual.

So that, if something unfortunately goes wrong and a traveler dies, the others won’t suffer the same fate.

The Hope has three freezers that are actually one divided into three compartments.

Instead of three independent biological monitoring systems, it only has three interconnected subroutines.

There wasn’t enough money or space or time for more.

On the other hand, since the ship would only be used for one voyage, Adam was able to adapt each compartment to the physical parameters of its potential occupant.

One is long and wide, for Friga.

Another, long and narrow, for himself.

The third, the smallest, is for Jowe.

Their leader is the first to take her clothes off, climb into her nook, and put on her biosensors.

But she waits until the others follow her lead before injecting herself with the mixture of antifreeze and metabolism-inhibitor drugs.

Adam programs the automatic controls of the Hope to bring them out of their frozen sleep as soon as the shining lights of Tau Ceti are close enough.

And to steer them prudently away from any dangerous asteroids.

As soon as all three are in their “coffins,” cautious Friga watches to see that both men have stuck in their syringes before she does the same.

When Adam feels the drowsiness and the cold running through his veins, he activates the second phase.

The cryogel comes bubbling into their coffins.

The drowsiness of cold is overtaking them…

The conjunction of the low-temperature colloid, the antifreeze, and the metabolic inhibitors will reduce them to unconsciousness and keep their vital functions virtually suspended while the Hope slowly consumes light-minutes, light-days, and finally whole light-years.

Theoretically…

Friga is the first to realize that something’s gone wrong.

In spite of the drug in her veins, the cold stabs at her with icy needles that will not let her lapse into unconsciousness.

A few seconds later, the discomfort is turning into pain.

Pain, pain…

Her entire body is cold, but it burns.

And her still-active lungs need air.

Air that they can’t get, with her whole body submerged in cryogel.

Air, air…

Friga gasps desperately, and a huge gulp of the frozen substance enters her mouth, her stomach, and her lungs.

It’s as bitter as death…

The drug is jumbling her thoughts: death?

She’s drowning!

And she has to live!

Panic overcomes her: she twists, struggles, swallows more gulps of the repulsive, frozen mixture that envelops her in place of the life-saving air she needs.

Her lungs ache and terror commands her to flee.

Flee, out, into the air, whatever the cost.

Calm down, there’s a way out…

Her fingers feel around for the latch to open the lid.

The latch won’t open.

Adam outdid himself on the security system: cryogel is very expensive, and the coffins are designed so that they can’t be opened until the pumps have extracted the last drop of frozen colloid from them.

Not even from the inside…

And there’s no command for activating the pumps before the deadline set on the computer expires.

Friga, overwhelmed by claustrophobia, beats furiously against the coffin’s transparent steel-glass housing.

As if through a veil of terror, she feels the banging of the two dying men who are also struggling to escape.

The steel-glass in the lid is a very resistant material.

A coffin.

Buried alive, dead, dead…

No!

The huge muscles of the woman with a man’s strength strain until their fibers are at the breaking point.

And they produce a miracle.

The steel-glass in the lid is a very resistant material… much more resistant than the synplast joints around the rim of the freezer.

The entire lid comes off, cryogel goes flying, and Friga, half-suffocated, rolls onto the floor, her whole body aching and half-frozen.

But alive!

She coughs, expelling the bitter colloid from her lungs.

She breathes… and runs to help the others.

Swaying from the shock of her near asphyxiation, the drug-induced drowsiness clouding her mental processes, she only manages to pick up a hydraulic wrench… and break the two men’s freezer lids.

Adam is already still, his mouth and eyes open.

The expression of surprise on his face is like the look of a fish out of water.

Jowe is struggling, with the cold obstinacy of instinct, but with less and less strength.

When he gets out, he and Friga, half-fainting, try clumsily and desperately to revive their “super-handyman.”

They know that their lives depend on his skill…

Cardiac massage, electric defibrillator, the same neurostimulant that they both injected into themselves with trembling fingers to erase the stupefaction brought on by the metabolic inhibitors.

Nothing works.

Adam has drowned, and he stays dead.

Worn out by their futile struggle, naked, sticky with cryogel, covered with bruises, the surviving man and woman fall asleep, weeping and splashing over the lanky cadaver.

They have no strength for more.

Much less to face the crisis.

Six hours later, encased in his improvised shroud, what had been Adam goes tumbling off through the hatch.

Friga and Jowe watch it go, silently.

There’s nothing to be said…

Their provisions will last two weeks.

They scrape off the cryogel, already half solidified, clean the grubby deck, check the instruments.

For three days they try to repair the suspended animation system.

The broken lids on the freezer are the easy part…

But meticulous Jowe discovers, and shows to Friga, the real problem.

The patrol ship’s attack damaged the Freon tubing, and some of the refrigerant leaked.

The cryogel never cooled down to the temperature (near absolute zero) necessary for bringing about anabiosis.

They could fix the tubing, but they have no stores of Freon.

Or of cryogel.

Maybe Adam could have rigged something up…

Adam is dead.

Friga blasts her bad luck, curses God and the Virgin and all the saints, asks Satan and Moloch and Zeus, anybody, for help, breaks things.

Jowe, quiet, watches her with dead eyes.

When the woman lets her fury abate from sheer weariness, Jowe touches her on the shoulder and points to the controls of the one remaining hyperengine.

Friga looks at him furiously, as if she’d like to squash him, but gives an almost imperceptible nod.

They both know that they’re down to their last resort now.

Friga’s fingers tremble above the activation switch for the hyperengine.

Under her breath she chants a meaningless prayer in which she asks all the gods to watch over her, and glances at Jowe from the corner of her eye.

Jowe’s lips aren’t moving.

His eyes, as dead as ever.

She switches on the hyperengine.

This second time, the strange sensations of spatio-temporal contraction no longer surprise the two survivors of the Hope.

Now they can almost wallow in the vertigo and disorientation of the hyperspace transit.

After an indeterminate time, the second and last engine also quits, and three-dimensional space once more receives the Hope.

Friga and Jowe repress any possible rejoicing (after all, they’re still alive!) as they wait for the onboard computer to identify their new position.

As the data begin to form a holographic image, Friga breathes easier.

It looks like they’re in luck.

A star with several planets that look very promising… And the Hope is almost inside the system.

It will only take a few hours to reach any of these planets with the plasma reactors.

Friga doesn’t know much about astronomy.

Jowe, a little more.

That is why he grows pale as the data continue appearing and forming the map.

That G-type main-sequence star and the constellations surrounding it are familiar to him…

Too familiar.

Friga, who’s feeling safe now, can’t understand why her companion’s face keeps growing longer and longer.

Until the two dots appear on the radar, and the authoritarian voice rings in her headphones:

“Unidentified ship, Planetary Security patrol ship VV.98 here. Prepare for boarding. Offer no resistance or you will be destroyed.”

Then the strong woman understands, and she howls, punching the control panel.

“Nooo…! Not the rebound effect! It’s not fair!”

Friga has calmed down… seemingly.

She drums her fingers against the control panel, and now and then strokes the minimachine gun and the vibroblade she keeps hidden in her clothing.

Jowe stares into the infinite, saying nothing.

Why bother?

In her paroxysm of fury, Friga already said it all.

“We can’t possibly have such bad luck! As vast as the cosmos is, coming right back here! Adam only mentioned the rebound effect as a curiosity! Something that happens one time out of ten thousand!”

Jowe stares at the cosmos, and nobody could know what he’s thinking.

Probably laughing about the ironic fate that brought them so close to freedom, only to deal them this masterstroke now.

Or thinking about how frustrated his friend Moy will be, waiting for him in Ningando.

Or about the long years awaiting him and Friga in Body Spares when they’re sentenced for attempted unlawful departure from the planet.

But he doesn’t say anything.

Just like Friga, when the first patrol ship boards the Hope, he passively, meekly lets himself be led away by Planetary Security agents.

They don’t even handcuff them.

Why bother?

In space, there’s nowhere to run.

Like her, he stares out the porthole at the battered and abandoned homemade ship, watching it shrink as the patrol ship pulls away under the power of its inertial engine.

When the explosive charges that the agents placed on their ship before abandoning it blow the Hope to pieces, Jowe keeps on watching the bits, unspeaking.

From his right eye, a single tear falls.

Friga doesn’t waste her energy on tears.

She takes advantage of the moment of the explosion to whip out her weapons, then quickly and deftly elbows aside both agents restraining her.

Now she’s free.

Frida is the sort of woman who never surrenders.

She knew that the damaged Hope couldn’t escape, and it couldn’t fight two patrol ships at once while keeping her alive.

That’s the only reason she let them take her away.

Patrol ship versus patrol ship is a more even match.

And she’s already aboard one of them…

She only has to get rid of three crewmembers.

Her against three: child’s play.

She’s fought against worst odds.

Onboard a patrol ship, there’s even artificial gravity, like being on Earth.

That makes things easier.

Friga has never been beaten in hand-to-hand combat.

She machine-guns the farthest one in the belly.

Sticks the vibroblade into another one’s chest before he can finish drawing his gun.

Struck by the third, she grips his neck in a stranglehold with her powerful arm, and squeezes, and squeezes, at the same time smashing his face with her knee.

Three seconds later, the Planetary Security guy is still struggling, though he should be strangled already and his neck should be broken.

Friga wonders why his blood isn’t spilling out and staining the floor like it should.

This agent has a strong neck…

And where’s Jowe?

Why isn’t he helping out?

That’s when she feels the blow to the back of her head.

Surprised and hurting, she turns around just in time to catch the next pistol-whip right in the face.

She falls, letting go of her captive, unable to understand how someone with a vibroblade plunged hilt-deep in his chest can strike with such force.

She’s about to get up, but the agent with his belly blasted open by machine-gun fire steps on her fingers and then kicks her.

Friga comprehends two things before fainting.

The first comes from the gleam of metal under the pseudoguts of the supposed Planetary Security agent.

That he isn’t a human being, but a huborg.

Just like the other two.

At least she wasn’t defeated by humans…

The second thing, as she wanders into the fog of unconsciousness, comes to her when she looks out through a porthole and identifies what she sees floating off into the vastness of space.

If she weren’t so tired… if the darkness weren’t so welcoming… she’d laugh uproariously.

Because now she knows where Jowe is.

Because, in spite of it all, in a way he’s made it.

He’ll never be sent back to Body Spares.

Now his destination is the infinite.

No spacesuit, frozen, a corpse.

But free.

At last, once and for all, completely free.