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PILOT

Stephen Baxter

First published as a Novacon chapbook, 1993; collected in Vacuum Diagrams.

When the Squeem occupation laws were announced, Anna Gage was half way 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.

Chiron ...

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 pressurised; 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.'

Work unit?

'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 recognised. These were pilots. They

feared, not discovery or death, but grounding.

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 cannibalised 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 synthesised 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 organised

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 amphitheatre gouged out of the ice. The amphitheatre 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 amphitheatre's focal point. She

was another pilot, Gage saw; her uniform was faded but still recognisable.

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 space flight. 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 cannibalised 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 levelled 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; vapour 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 cannibalised 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

Stephen Baxter - Pilot.pdf

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