Newt Jones wasn’t disheartened by the vote against further expeditions. In fact, he was energised by defeat, convinced that sooner rather than later he would be proven right. He worked long hours on the conversion programme, discussed refinements to the design of the motor with his crew of tech wizards. Macy Minnot returned to her work with the biome crew, tweaking and improving and enriching the habitat’s ecosystem. And then, just sixty days after the expedition returned, everything changed.
All the Free Outers spent time on the surface of Miranda. Escaping the close common air of the habitat. Exploring the fantastically varied moonscapes on solo trips or with their friends or families. Making the unfamiliar familiar. Laying down hiking trails across heavily cratered terrain and smoother, younger plains, and along the broken floors of the valleys in the parallel grooves at the edges of coronas. Setting up routes that descended deep within the enormous grabens that cut across every kind of moonscape, where rugged cliffs stepped up ten or twenty kilometres to a black sky thick with stars, and setbacks and terraces could comfortably hold small cities. They navigated by global positioning and left only a few traces: pitons hammered in ice cliffs; splashes of pigment that marked paths through the abrupt ridges and interlocked hills and rubble fields of chaotic terrain; a small number of carefully hidden refuges.
Most of the surface of Miranda was water ice, but early in its history the upwelling plumes or diapirs of soft warm ices that had created the massive upthrust domes of coronas had dragged with them significant amounts of mantle material. The survey crew had located several sources of palagonitised silicates, as well as ores rich in magnesium and aluminium, and drifts of valuable phosphates and nitrates. Newt and Macy made several trips out to the ancient cratered terrain of Bohemia Regio, where deposits of ammonia-rich smectite clays had been discovered, and to the northern edge of Arden Corona, where robots were mining seams of silicate rock. Although crops and herbs were grown hydroponically and the habitat’s big commons was floored with halflife turf, the biome crew had plans to develop pocket parks, with copses of trees and flowering bushes. Macy lacked pedon tables and other equipment necessary for the manufacture of proper soil, with its horizons and domains and complex interplay of every kind of microbiotia, but the clay from Bohemia Regio, cloddy and highly alkaline in its native state, made a nicely friable compost after it had been modified in a reactor and mixed with humus from the waste digesters. A fine example of how even this apparently inhospitable moon could yield material that could support life in all its rich variety. The silicate rock, on the other hand, was for purely decorative purposes.
On the day that everything changed, Macy and Newt had travelled a quarter of the way around Miranda to Arden Corona, a routine trip of some four hundred kilometres. They flew in Elephant. Newt piloted the tug with careless skill, swooping low over bright, gently contoured plains lightly spattered with small craters, then soaring out across a sudden transition zone where the moonscape slumped and heaved in a broken quilt of hills and valleys, a vast frozen landslip tilted towards the foot of a fault scarp more than a kilometre high, its looming face cut by massive vertical grooves - slickensides - that had been incised by friction as the block face had been pushed upwards by massive tectonic forces when the moon had cooled.
Newt flew parallel to the scarp’s grooved face for more than twenty kilometres, until it fell back in a huge cirque created by an ancient meteorite impact that had excavated billions of tons of dirty water ice, vaporising some, throwing the rest across the face of Miranda or beyond the feeble grip of the little moon’s gravity into orbit around Uranus. Newt applied retrojets to brake Elephant’s free-fall trajectory. As it dropped towards the base of the cirque, Macy saw a black animal racing across the bright ground below: the tug’s shadow, growing larger as they fell to meet it, attitude motors popping as they feathered in to a perfect landing within the cirque’s half-circle.
Macy and Newt closed up their pressure suits, wriggled through the airlock one after the other, unpacked the sled, and rode it across slopes of dusty ice under a black sky where Uranus’s bland blue crescent lay on its side. The cliffs curved around them, rippled like frozen curtains, scalloped footings rising out of cones of mass-wasted material. Macy and Newt switchbacked up the face of one of these cones to a bench butted against the cliff face, where an automobile-sized mining robot was patiently gnawing into an intrusive seam of silicates, cutting out block after block and piling them in neat pyramidal stacks. Sunlight on Miranda was just one four-hundredth as strong as sunlight falling on Earth - brighter than moonlight, but not bright enough for Macy to easily make out colours. The dusty hummocks of the bench and the cliffs rearing above were mostly shades of grey enlivened by stark black shadows and salt-sharp glints reflected from freshly-exposed facets of water ice, and the brick-sized chunks of silicate material looked like iron slag. But when Macy turned on her helmet lamp, the silicate bricks were transformed into glistening blocks of coarsely textured jade, shot through with folds of delicate yellow and carbon black. Perfect material for pavements and low sinuous walls in the little parks planned for the habitat.
She and Newt loaded a sled and hauled it back to Elephant and stacked the bricks in the tug’s external cargo lockers. After four trips the lockers were full and their work was done. They hiked out across the floor of the cirque, chasing each other in long floating leaps under the black sky. The sun’s bright chip was close to the horizon; their shadows stretched and shrank, stretched and shrank as they bounded along, dancing in the ethereal microgravity, delighted in each other’s delight. They warmed meals in the foodmaker and ate them and drank a little home-made wine, and made love and lay in each other’s arms in the hammock they’d stretched across the living space. Macy snuggled up against Newt, resting her head on his cool bony chest. She could hear his heart beating, and feel the pulse of the microheart in the wrist which lay against her neck as he stroked her hair, the short bristles making a crisp sound under his fingers.
‘We don’t have to go back,’ he said.
‘Mmm.’
‘We could build our own garden right here. Throw up a tent, fill it full of jungle.’
‘And chickens.’
‘Why not? I’d even let you kill and eat one now and then.’
‘I don’t know how you can bear to live with an unevolved barbarian like me.’
‘Oh, I’ve eaten meat before,’ Newt said. ‘There’s a cult in the free zone of Sparta, Tethys. They grow cloned cow meat, mince it up, eat it raw. A sex thing. They drink blood, too. Little sips of human blood.’
‘Is this one of your stories?’
Newt had all kinds of tall tales from back when he’d been a freebooting trader. Macy reckoned that about half of them contained a pinch of truth, and one or two might even be more or less genuine.
‘Maybe one day I’ll be able to take you there,’ Newt said. ‘Although I have to say that even though I only took the smallest mouthful, I nearly threw up.’
‘Raw meat, now that’s barbaric. We can clone up our own cow meat, and I’ll show you how to cook a hamburger. Or broil a steak.’
‘Corrupt me with your Earthly ways. We’ll build a garden here and grow chickens. And have kids. I mean, forget about the chickens, but don’t you think it’s time we did something about having kids?’
They’d talked about starting a family before, but this had arrived sideways. Macy raised her head and looked at Newt. His face, with its prominent cheekbones and narrow nose, was all highlights and shadow in the soft faint glow of the dialled-down lights. It was impossible to make out his expression.
‘Don’t joke about it,’ Macy said.
‘I’m not joking. People are having babies all around us. Four since we arrived, six more on the way. Not to mention all the kids who came out here in the first place. Oh, I know what you’re going to say, it’s too early, we’re going to have to move on when the TPA comes calling. But if we stick to that line of thought it will always be too early, until it’s too late.’
Newt was serious, for once. A rare mood for him, which meant that Macy had to take his proposal seriously. She told him that it was something that she wanted, all right, but she wasn’t sure she was ready for it, and they talked it over, rehearsing all the arguments for and against, and fell asleep twined around each other in the deep hammock.
Macy woke when Newt reared up and reached past her and pulled something towards him: his spex. They were making a soft beeping that stopped when he hooked them over his ears.
‘What is it?’ Macy said, chills chasing over her bare skin. Like everyone in the field they maintained strict radio silence. If someone had sent them a message, it meant trouble of some kind.
After a moment Newt took off his spex and handed them to her.
She put them on. Black letters marched across a flat grey background in front of her eyes:
Possible contact. Return at once. Possible contact. Return at once. Possible contact. Return at once.
‘They must have bounced it off the observatory on Titania,’ Newt said. ‘It’s the only one above the horizon right now.’
Macy clutched at the side of the hammock as he swung off. ‘Possible contact. It means they aren’t sure,’ she said.
‘I guess we’ll have to go back and find out. Any way you cut it, it’s bad news.’
‘But not the worst. Not yet.’
‘No, not yet.’
The observatories on Oberon, Titania and Ariel kept high-resolution telescopes trained on the patches of sky through which ships from Saturn, Jupiter or Earth had to pass if they were heading for orbit around Uranus. After two years, with no sign of any ships or sneaky little drones infiltrating the Uranus System, the Free Outers had begun to think that they were safe. That the TPA had decided that it was not worth chasing after them. Jupiter was presently on the far side of the sun and Saturn was drawing away from Uranus - was now further away than Earth, in fact. These vast distances were a moat separating them from the rest of humanity. A quarantine. But blink comparison of frames captured by the telescope of the Oberon observatory showed a fleck of light moving across the rigid patterns of the star field, and spectrographic analysis showed that it was fusion light: the exhaust of a ship that had been dispatched from Saturn and was now decelerating towards Uranus on a trajectory that put it at just thirty days out from orbital rendezvous.
As soon as everyone had returned to the habitat an extraordinary meeting was convened in the bowl of the commons where the Free Outers cooked communal meals and played and talked. They talked for most of the day, and long into the night. Although the general tone of the discussion was serious and sober, it was sharpened by an edge of strained anxiety that sometimes broke out in uncharacteristic catcalls and squabbles. They had made detailed plans and preparations for this day, and now that it was here they had been brought face to face with the possibility that they might not survive.
Sitting beside Newt in their usual place near the lip of the bowl, Macy watched the proceedings with growing impatience burning low in her belly. Frustration and claustrophobia. She had never doubted that one day the TPA would move against the Free Outers, but she’d been lulled into a false sense of security as she and everyone else had busied themselves with turning their temporary refuge into a home. They’d sat here making gardens and babies, growing comfortable and complacent, and now that the crisis had arrived they were wasting time with pointless arguments.
Macy had never had much time for the interminable debates that the Outers so loved, especially when it was obvious from the get-go what needed to be done. No point talking about it: they needed a strong leader who’d stand up and take charge. But Idriss Barr was more concerned with moderating the discussion than taking charge, anxious to defer to every point of view. So they wasted more than three hours debating whether they should stay or leave, and when they’d voted by a slim majority to leave they immediately settled into another discussion about whether they should head for Pluto or Neptune.
Newt, Macy, and the rest of the motor crew opted for Neptune. Ziff Larzer set out their plans calmly and methodically. Neptune was further away than Pluto, but other refugees might be hiding out there, and its big moon, Triton, was larger and more hospitable than Pluto or Charon. The motor crew had manufactured sufficient antiprotons to fuel all the ships fitted with new fusion motors, and these would be more than enough to transport everyone. They might have to leave behind the unconverted ships and a considerable amount of equipment, but they would be able to take enough to make a new home, and there was the possibility that they could return to Uranus one day and retrieve the rest. As far as Macy was concerned, it was done and dusted, but there was another interminable delay while people quibbled over this or that detail before they all voted again. This time the majority was clear. The motor crew had won the day. The Free Outers would pack up and move on to Neptune.
Before they could leave they had to strip out everything useful in the habitat, collect the final set of fuel tanks dispatched from the robots in Uranus’s atmosphere, and prep and load their ships. Macy and the rest of the biome crew spent most of the time harvesting the hydroponic farms, pruning back the gardens and simplifying the habitat’s ecosystem so that it would be easier for the maintenance bots to look after. They packed coffee and tea mosses and dried herbs and collected as much seed as they could - it would be faster and easier to grow new crops from seed than from callus cultures derived from the libraries of gene maps - but the rest of the edible biomass went into the bioreactors because they couldn’t afford to waste fuel carrying it.
Macy worked with growing regret. She’d put a lot of work and love into the gardens that curved up on either side of the habitat’s narrow floor - clumps of dwarf conifers and bamboos, squares of maize and corn and rice, peanut vines scrambling through stands of banana plants, great heaps of express vine, based on kudzu and cut so that different strains bore tomatoes or cucumbers, dozens of varieties of peas and beans, citrus bushes and grape vines, egg plants and onions, containers overflowing with thyme and mint and parsley. A dense green maze, crammed with lush and vivid life. Now all this was cut back to the bone, everything was stark and bare, domes and tepees were stranded on the floor like barnacles when the tide went out, and she could see that the habitat was no more than a tunnel jointed up from half a dozen cylinders little bigger than the airframes of transport planes, no longer any kind of home.