The Free Outers could do nothing to help those who had been left behind because they were outnumbered and outgunned by Earth’s Three Powers Alliance: they couldn’t even reply to messages by relatives and friends, because the risk that the TPA would trace any kind of transmission was too great. And the small radio telescope they’d set up at Miranda’s north pole failed to pick up any replies to signals aimed in turn at Neptune and the dwarf planets at the outer edge of the Solar System - Pluto, Enka, Sedna and so on, places where other refugees might have settled. As far as they knew, they alone had survived to tell their tale. Burdened with the responsibility of preserving the knowledge and traditions of their home, of keeping a little candle of democracy flickering in the outer dark, they hunkered down, kept watch for enemy ships or probes, and engaged in intense discussions about their future.
Many wanted to stay where they were. To keep quiet. To stay out of sight. The TPA had not yet come after them and perhaps it never would, for it was clear that winning the peace was proving to be very much harder than winning the war. But a vociferous minority objected to the idea of spending the rest of their lives squatting in burrows, in perpetual fear that at any moment their enemy might shark in from the starry sky. Besides, most of the Free Outers were in their twenties and thirties, and many wanted to start families. Several babies had already been born on Miranda; others were on the way. Expansion of their present refuge, or setting up new refuges elsewhere, would soon become a necessity, and it would increase the risk of discovery. No, they could not hope to stay hidden for ever; instead, they should move on as quickly as possible, spread into the farthest reaches of the Solar System. To Neptune, whose largest moon, Triton, had an ocean of liquid water wrapped around its mantle. Or to Pluto and its trio of moons - one of which, Charon, also had liquid water beneath its surface. Or even further out, to one of the many other dwarf planets of the true Outer System and the Kuiper Belt. Places impossible for the TPA to attack because the supply lines would be too long and too fragile to support any sustained campaign.
Chief amongst this group was Newton Jones. He commanded a tug and possessed considerable kudos because he and his partner, Macy Minnot, had not only helped Avernus escape, but had also stolen the technical data about the Brazilians’ fast-fusion motor. And he was also the son of Abbie Jones, a famous pilot who’d been amongst the first to explore the Neptune System, had been the first person to land on Enka, and had undertaken a solo expedition to the edge of the cometary zone, travelling farther from the sun than any other human. After her great adventure in the outer dark, Abbie Jones had been one of the founding members of the commune that had briefly colonised Titania - Newt had been born there - and after the commune had failed she’d helped to build the garden habitat of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan. She’d been the senior member of the clan, a powerful matriarch, before the Quiet War, and now she was a famous political prisoner.
Newt’s detractors said that he’d spent his life trying to escape from the gravity well of his mother’s fame - that he was driven to prove that he could equal or better her achievements. He’d been something of a daredevil trader before the war, constantly getting into scrapes and dubious capers, and although he’d proved his worth during the Quiet War and had been a cheerful and energetic leader of the crew that had designed and built the ramscoops that sifted from Uranus’s atmosphere the deuterium and tritium needed to fuel the Free Outers’ ships, many people suspected that his support for exploration of Neptune and the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt was motivated not by considerations about their safety and best possible future but by his notorious addiction to self-promotion and adventure.
Many of the Free Outers didn’t trust his partner, Macy Minnot, either. After all, she was from Earth, and had defected in dubious circumstances: murder, sabotage, the abrupt end of a cooperative project involving Greater Brazil and the city of Rainbow Bridge, Callisto. There had been rumours before the war that she was some kind of double agent, that her prominent support for the peace movement had helped to undermine any possibility that the Jupiter and Saturn systems might mount a credible defence against invasion by Earth’s three great powers. The taint of these rumours still clung to her, even though she’d been instrumental in saving Avernus and stealing the fusion-motor schematics, and had shared every hardship and had worked as hard as anyone to make the tunnel habitats safe and pleasant places to live.
Macy knew that the people who objected to mounting an exploratory expedition also harboured deep and unshakeable suspicions about her, and she tried her best not to care. She herself was in two minds about the plans that Newt championed. She supported him, and she would go with him if he carried the day, no question, but it meant venturing even further away from Earth and the hearthlight of the sun, and she had already travelled further than most Outers. From Earth to Jupiter, where she had been forced to defect. Then from Jupiter to Saturn when it became clear that if she tried to return to Earth she would be arrested for treason. And then from Saturn to Uranus. But she was certain that the TPA would come after the Free Outers sooner rather than later, and that the Free Outers wouldn’t be able to mount a credible defence against a highly trained force with every kind of experience of warfare and overwhelmingly superior resources. That had been amply proven during the Quiet War, when a small expeditionary force from Earth had out-thought and out-fought the Outers on their own territory. The Free Outers who believed it might be possible to engage in a guerilla war or spin some kind of startlingly powerful weapon system out of the vast repository of the Library of the Commons and take the fight to the enemy were peddling comforting fairy tales that had about as much substance as a comet’s tail. At best, they might be able to mount some kind of Spartan last stand, but it would be a pointless sacrifice. No, from now on they’d have to live by the old maxim of every refugee: silence, exile, and cunning.
Macy was an exile twice over. First from Earth, and now from her adopted home on Dione. And although she had been living in the Outer System for two years before the Quiet War and had now spent more than a year in exile on Miranda, she was still not reconciled to spending the rest of her life under some kind of tent or dome, or inside a tunnel. And she was homesick, too. Sometimes she would pull up a telescopic view of the inner system transmitted from one or other of the observatories hidden at the south poles of Ariel, Umbriel, and Titania. Mercury was lost in the glare of the sun, but the other three rocky planets were clearly visible. Bright Venus, rust-red Mars, and the blue disc of Earth, hung in sable black with its pale bride. At maximum magnification, Macy could make out Earth’s land masses and oceans - even some of the larger weather systems, such as tropical storms swirling across the Pacific Ocean. She would think of rain lashing down on a rolling seascape that stretched from horizon to horizon, of thunder and wild wind, fingers of strong sunlight breaking through storm clouds . . . The images rising up strong and clear in her mind, a sweet sharp pang compounded of nostalgia and regret piercing her heart.
If Macy started to think about all the things that she missed she’d never stop. Snow creaking under her boots and a cutting wind pinching her face as she marched with other labourers in the R&R Corps to another day’s work dismantling the ruins of Chicago. The sun setting over Lake Superior, sinking beneath a ladder of thin clouds tinged pink in the darkening blue sky, everything reflected with perfect fidelity in the calm mirror of the water. Brassy city sunsets over the rooftops of Pittsburgh. The vast slow sunsets over the Nebraskan plain, and the starry empires mapped across Nebraska’s night sky. Sunlight hot against her face, red on her closed eyelids. Rain. Storm waves exploding into foam on a rocky shore. The chirr of grasshoppers in dry summer grass. Cathedral forests. An explosion of pale roses in a dark clearing. Crowds of strangers swirling down brawling streets.
She missed meat. The Outers were vegetarians out of habit born from necessity, and the approximations spun by the foodmakers were nothing like the real thing. Macy dreamed of keeping a few chickens amongst the truck gardens of the habitat. The Free Outers possessed the equipment and know-how to quicken plants and animals from genome maps, and there were thousands of maps of all kinds of species in the Library of the Commons. She probably wouldn’t be allowed to kill and cook a chicken - it would confirm every bad notion the Outers had about her - but at least she’d have a supply of eggs . . .
Currently, some four hundred days after the Free Outers had first settled on Miranda, Earth and Uranus were about as close to each other as they ever got - yet they were still separated by almost 4.4 billion kilometres, a gulf almost impossible to imagine. Macy had enough trouble visualising the distance between the missile silo and trailer park in Nebraska, where she’d grown up in the tender care of the Church of the Divine Regression, and Pittsburgh, where she’d lived after she’d escaped. A lousy two thousand kilometres. And the distance between Earth and Uranus was more than two million times greater. It had taken her three weeks, hitching rides and walking, to reach Pittsburgh; travelling at the same rate, it would take her 115,000 years to cross the gulf between Uranus and Earth. Even if she stole one of the ships, assuming she could learn how to fly one and it had enough fuel, it would take something like twenty-four weeks to make the trip. Yes, Earth was a very long way away. But most of the little worlds beyond the orbit of Uranus hung at even greater distances from each other in a vast cold dark through which the small lives of the Free Outers might fall for ever, dwindling to dust and less than dust. It seemed inconceivable that they could build any kind of life for themselves so far from the sun, yet that was what Newt and his little crew of maniacs were planning.
While the rest of the Free Outers had been turning the cut-and-cover tunnels into a comfortable home, Newt’s motor crew had been designing and building their first working prototype of the Brazilian fusion motor. Many of the Free Outers had worked in the transport trade before the Quiet War. They’d owned their own ships or had piloted ships on behalf of collectives. They were experts in ship construction and maintenance. But the motor crew were true technical wizards, young and eager and frighteningly intense, and used a battery of psychotropic drugs to sharpen their formidable intelligence, hone their powers of concentration, and work around the clock. They scoured the files of stolen technical data and borrowed most of the Free Outers’ memo space to construct a virtual model accurate down to the atomic level. They cannibalised two ships for components and rare metals and used printers to fabricate components and grow the ceramic reaction chamber molecule by molecule. The Brazilian motor required antiprotons to catalyse fast-fusion reactions. At first, the crew discussed mining antiprotons created by reactions between high-energy cosmic rays and Uranus’s outer atmosphere, but these were too few and too widely scattered. So instead they had the construction robots excavate a tube a kilometre long, and built inside it a linear particle accelerator that used a quantum diffraction version of a Cochcroft-Walton generator to fire raw quarks at hydrogen atoms suspended in a laser trap. This required the output of fusion generators dismounted from three ships, and some three hundred days’ hard work, but at the end of it they had enough fuel to conduct the first test firing.
The motor crew dug a pit in the icy plain a couple of hundred kilometres north of the Free Outer settlement, filled it with a web of fullerene scaffolding, inserted the prototype motor with its tail pointing upward, and connected it to fuel lines and a mass of monitoring equipment. Then they retreated over the horizon to the control-and-command bunker - they were fairly sure that if there was a containment breach it wouldn’t do much more than melt a hole in the adamantine ice, but they were taking no risks - and got ready for the critical moment.
The hot, cramped bunker stank of tension and four a.m. funk. Construction of the prototype had consumed much time and valuable and irreplaceable resources. Everyone knew that if the test failed the rest of the Free Outers would almost certainly vote against resumption of their work. The young men and women sat shoulder to shoulder on the floor, masked by spex, skating fingertips over slates or shaping the air with their hands like so many blind people investigating an elephant. Newt Jones and Macy Minnot were squashed together in one corner. Someone had rigged up a big red button that was linked to the AI that controlled the test rig. Now, with just a minute to go, Newt offered the plastic box that housed the button to Macy, asked her if she would like the honour.
‘It’s your thing. You should do it,’ Macy said.
‘It’s your thing too. And I’m so scared I’ll jinx it my hand’s cramped,’ Newt said.
‘You don’t want the responsibility if it goes wrong,’ Macy said, but took the box as one of the tech wizards began a countdown that everyone joined in, a jubilant chant reeling backwards from ten.
At zero, Macy pushed down the button with both thumbs and in the multiple views tiled in the memo space in the middle of the crowded little room a narrow searchlight shot up into the black sky, so brilliant its blaze of white light scoured all detail from the rugged plain. Everyone cheered and hugged each other and clapped each other on the back. Newt kissed Macy and she kissed him and the room began to shake and rattle as vibrations in the icy regolith raced past. Two seconds later, the AI began to throttle back the motor and the searchlight dimmed and went out. The vibrations died away. The bunker was quiet for a moment, and then everyone began to talk to everyone else, arguing over the telemetry, throwing out and refining thrust parameters and fuel consumption, exhaust velocity and burn efficiency . . .