Refugee

by Piers Anthony

  But my glancing was wasted, for the huge elevated gravity lens was not visible. Not only did it operate only in daylight, it was not physical at all. It was generated in space, forming between key points. There was nothing to see. Still, my eye sought it out, much as it sought the gaze of a person in a picture looking in another direction. This foolishness is inherent in my nature; I seek constantly to relate to people and things directly, even when I suspect it is unwise or impossible.

  My attention wandered to the other large moons of Jupiter, all closer in than ours. Ganymede, off to the side of the Colossus, its brightness at three-quarter face; it was almost halfway in toward Jupiter, from our vantage. That is, its orbit is just over one million kilometers out, while Callisto’s is just under two million. We would pass that inner orbit on our way to Jupiter, but would not pass close to Ganymede itself, because it revolved about the planet more than twice as fast as we did and would rush to the far side when our bubble passed, as if avoiding us. Just as well; the recent political revolution there seemed to have made things even worse for peasants than before. As the ancient poet Coleridge put it: “They burst their manacles and wear the name / Of Freedom, graven on a heavier chain!” But of course Europa was little better, while the innermost big moon, Io, zooming all the way around Jupiter in less than two Earth days, was hardly habitable, even with terraform domes. No, no hope for us on the other moons.

  Down near the horizon behind us I spied a speck of light I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t a star, for it was moving, shifting somewhat erratically above the landscape, as if guided by some human hand.

  “Saucer!” I exclaimed. “What’s it doing out here at night?” For there was very little inter-dome travel by night, as Callisto is essentially a hinter-world with no major industry, other than agriculture. Unlike the hyperactive denizens of major worlds, we preferred to sleep at night.

  “The Maraud authorities wouldn’t chase us, would they?” Spirit asked. My parents were consulting with each other, helmet to helmet, but I couldn’t hear their dialogue, to my annoyance.

  “Shouldn’t,” I agreed tersely. “We’re not breaking any law. We’re just leaving the city, as ordered.”

  “And the planet,” she added. “If they found out about that—and they might suspect, the way we snuck out.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed uneasily. I would have disparaged the notion out of hand—since I knew the Maraud authorities did not care about us—except for the fact of the saucer. There had to be some reason for it to be out here, and we could not safely assume that reason had nothing to do with us.

  The light zoomed toward us. In moments we recognized a private pickup craft, used by explorers to collect samples of minerals from the planet’s surface. Callisto was extremely shy of heavy minerals, which made them all the more valuable. Prospectors were constantly ranging out with metal detectors to search for what few nuggets there were. A lode of iron ore could make a man’s fortune. Even mineral dust was far more valuable on Callisto than it was elsewhere, except on Ganymede. Most of our metals had to be imported from the inner planets of the Solar System, and even with the gravity shields, that was expensive.

  This craft was typical. It had a nether power scoop and a fair-sized storage compartment and a sealed cockpit with windows looking forward, upward, and down. That meant the occupant did not have to suffer the inconvenience of wearing a space suit, the way we peasants did. Cheaper saucers were not sealed; they might be hardly more than flying platforms, and a miscue could dump the operator off. Not so this one. I envied whoever could afford this sort of vehicle: sealed afloat instead of suited and land-bound like us.

  The saucer came right up to us, evidently using a metal detector to spy us out. The metal was the main value in a pedal car; it could be melted down and lose only a fraction of its price, and it would be very easy to spy from the dome. However, there was not a great deal of metal here, for most of the transporter’s mass was plastic; for a saucer to come out in the hope of salvaging a vehicle like this—no, that didn’t make much sense.

  It all came back to the original question: why would anyone be looking for us? Legal or illegal—I think our status was now hazy—we remained only refugees, nothing people, completely unimportant to anyone except ourselves.

  The saucer paused to hover directly over us, putting us in shadow. That hardly mattered; we weren’t trying to draw on Jupiter’s pale radiance for power. Then a bright beam of light speared down at us from a unit by the cockpit, blinding to our Jove-light-acclimatized eyes. It found us and blinked off and on again, rapidly, several times.

  The saucer was signaling us. It was, of course, impossible to communicate by sound through the vacuum when there was no direct physical contact. Saucers used radios to talk to each other and the city domes, but of course we didn’t have a radio. We didn’t have a flashlight either, and in any event didn’t know the blinking communication code. We didn’t have anything that wasn’t essential to our progress across the surface or our journey through space, because everything cost precious money. We were unable to make any meaningful response. So my father just waved and pedaled on.

  The nether hatch in the saucer opened. The scoop pincers descended slightly, holding something. They were going to drop us a message!

  The pincers descended, in order to get below the grav-lens. It was possible for objects to pass right through it without interfering with its function; gravity does not obey ordinary rules. Once below, the pincers cranked open to release the message capsule. It was a bright-orange cylinder that seemed almost to glow, even in the shadow.

  Suddenly our transporter swerved violently to the left. I was jammed into the right wall of the vehicle. We must have hit a craterlet. Craters aren’t all landscape-sized; they graduate on down to pinhead size, and some of those can be almost as deep as they are broad. They have less mass to flatten them out—no, I’m wrong, how can a hole have mass? Or maybe it is that they are fresher, so have not yet melted down to gentleness. Geologically speaking, any crater less than a million years old is an infant, born yesterday. Yet my father surely would have seen it and avoided it. Anyway, it was a bad jolt. Spirit, perched high, had to grab my head to keep from being flung out of the vehicle.

  I must recreate what followed partly from logic, as my entanglement with Spirit prevented me from paying full attention.

  The message capsule missed us and struck the rock to our right. It exploded on contact, gouging out a new little crater. That one really was fresh! The impact of the flying debris bounced off our vehicle and the expanding gas shoved the transporter across the sand. We were very lucky no sand holed our suits.

  That capsule was no message—at least, not the kind we had anticipated. That was a bomb!

  CHAPTER 5

  FIGHT FOR LIFE

  Belatedly I remembered that capsules were color-coded in an obvious manner, as it could be exceedingly awkward to open them in a vacuum to check their contents. Glaring orange was the code for explosives.

  Explosives are normally used for excavation work. It is not feasible to light fuses or whatever in a vacuum—oh, yes, they do have a fuse that burns in empty space, with its own oxygen built in—but it takes special equipment to start it going. So most small explosives are contact-detonated.

  The effect of this one did not seem great, but of course this was a mini-charge, and the debris settled out almost instantly, because there was no air to buoy it. Had that bomb struck our transporter, those of us who were not directly injured would have died from suit destruction. Even a little bomb is devastating when it detonates in your face! My father had caught on and swerved just in time; we had struck no craterlet.

  The saucer swerved to get above us again. I saw its pincers, holding another bomb. There was now no doubt about its hostile intent. But, though the immediacy of the threat somehow abated the fear I should naturally have felt, my curiosity remained undimmed. Who was trying to do this to us, and why?

  My father swerved again and bra
ked, and the second bomb missed us to the left front. This time all of us were hanging on firmly, so neither the swerving nor the jolt of the ground from the explosion dislodged us. The forward bumper took the brunt of the flying debris, and we all ducked low so the rest passed harmlessly overhead. This was nervous business, though. Sand is sharp, and while space suits are tough, they aren’t that tough.

  Still the saucer pursued. It was more maneuverable than we were, and faster; I knew we could not escape it long. I didn’t know how many bombs it had, but all it needed was one score on our vehicle. Each cylinder was small, and the saucer’s hold could contain hundreds of them. Weight wouldn’t make much difference, with the gravity shielding; a full hold weighed about the same as an empty one.

  The pincers carefully lowered each bomb below the shield before releasing it, as I mentioned; otherwise, instead of dropping, the cylinder would remain in the chamber until it banged. into something there, and—

  That gave me a notion. If I could somehow jam a bomb back into the hold, or set it off before it dropped—

  I got out my laser and took a shot, but the two vehicles were jogging about so violently relative to each other—I’m sure it was mostly us, but it seemed at the time like the saucer, which is a useful exercise in perspective—that I couldn’t aim well, and I missed. I wasn’t at all sure the laser beam would detonate the bomb anyway. Light and heat were one thing; abrupt collision was another. In any event, if the bomb did explode above us, shrapnel could rain down on us and wipe us out. Even if it also took out the saucer, what good would it do us then? Maybe it was best that I had failed. I had no business depleting the charge in the weapon uselessly.

  The third bomb missed behind us as my father accelerated, once more outsmarting the saucer pilot. Actually, it is very hard to align with an erratic target; pure chance gave us the advantage, if you consider having a chance to survive such a threat an advantage. The saucer was in no danger; it was the aggressor. These misses were too close; I knew they couldn’t go on much longer.

  Then Spirit jammed her helmet against mine. “Look!” she yelled. “The ice caves!”

  She meant the excavations made by the city of Maraud to mine clean ice. A community of a hundred thousand people needed a lot of water, and the recyclers were always breaking down and it was too expensive to replace them with new and reliable ones, so it was simpler just to quarry the water out of the ground. If there is one thing Callisto has in abundance, it is ice. The bedrock ice is very close to the surface in some places, and here there was a combination strip-and-tunnel mine. The top ice at this site was blended with minerals, but the deep ice was as clean as nature had formed it four billion years ago. Huge chunks of it were blasted free with bombs similar to those being used against us now, and gravity shields were used to float the icebergs to the dome, where smaller pieces were cut and taken inside for melting and using. There was always an iceberg perched near the dome, our guarantee that one thing we would never suffer was thirst.

  I leaned over to touch helmets with my father, who was intent on his pedaling, steering, and the saucer. He was really working hard, but he kept his helmet still for me. “The ice caves!” I shouted. “We can hide in them!”

  “Get rope!” he yelled back, and I realized he had been angling for this all along. I didn’t know what good rope would do, but I scrambled out of my seat and across Faith in the back, delving for the flexible cable every outside vehicle had for towing and such.

  In a moment I found it, as the vehicle swerved in crazy patterns, preventing the saucer from getting a good line on us. I realized the saucer was floating too high, so my father could see when the capsules were being released, and could dodge out of the way before they arrived. Things didn’t fall very rapidly out here in quarter-gee. Faster than they would in atmosphere, of course, as the prompt settling of the dust showed; but any distance made the slower pattern of natural acceleration evident. Human reactions, geared for Earth-type acceleration, were quite ready to cope with Callisto acceleration.

  The saucer, however, was catching on. First it angled toward the ice mine as if to block us off from it; then, realizing that this ploy was ineffective because we could zigzag toward the mine anyway, the saucer floated lower, so as to cut the fall time and prevent us from dodging effectively.

  My father made a throw gesture with a free arm, and I caught on. I could use the rope against the saucer! It had been floating too high for the rope to reach, before, but now it was coming down close enough. My father was still outthinking it.

  I made a lasso noose as I eyed the saucer. If I could loop that extended pincers, I could put it and the saucer out of commission. The lower the saucer got, the more in reach it got.

  I flung the loop, but missed. I wasn’t experienced at this; I didn’t know how to lasso a moving object in low-gee. The dynamics were all wrong. In addition, that hovering bomb made me excruciatingly nervous. If it dropped now, could I catch it—and do so gently enough to prevent it from detonating? I doubted it.

  Spirit climbed back to join me, moving lithely. She always had been an active type, able to fling herself about like a little monkey. She put her helmet against mine. “Dad says jump!” she cried.

  “And desert the family?” I retorted. “No.”

  “With the rope, dummy! Here, I’ll do it.” She reached for the lasso.

  Then I understood. In low-gee we could jump much higher than normal. It wasn’t as simple as jumping four times as high in one-quarter gee; it depended on technique and the center of body mass. I hadn’t had much practice at this either, but I had a general notion.

  As the saucer swooped low, lower and closer than before, I launched myself upward, carrying the loop of rope in both hands. I imagined myself a rocket, jetting from a planetary berth with an important payload. It felt like straight up, but of course it was at an angle, with the inertia of the vehicle’s forward motion slanting me. There was no atmospheric drag to slow me; I shot straight for the saucer. I was amazed, though I shouldn’t have been; the power of my leap should have taken me up a meter within the dome, which translated to somewhere in the vicinity of four meters here, allowing for the uncertainties of the situation. That was how high the saucer now floated.

  I came right up under the bomb, and with my two hands looped the rope around the extended pincers. Then I fell away to the side, slowly—and saw to my horror that I had dislodged the bomb, or at least failed to prevent it from being released.

  I grabbed for it, but that was futile. I was already out of reach, and it was falling at the same rate I was. It was traveling right toward the transporter.

  I watched helplessly as that terrible cylinder descended. Time dilated for me; everything was in slow motion. My family faced destruction—and I could only watch.

  Then Spirit jumped up and caught the bright capsule in her hands. Still aloft, she flung it from her, behind the vehicle. She had been alert, bless her, and had done what I could not. Once again she had backstopped me, and perhaps saved us all.

  The bomb exploded as Spirit and I landed on either side of the transporter. Both of us managed to get turned to face forward and hit the ground running, for we still had that forward inertia. It was rough, but I managed to keep my balance, and so did she. We jogged to clumsy stops well behind the transporter.

  The rope was tied to the saucer pincers at one end, and anchored to the land vehicle at the other. The two machines were tied together.

  The three oldest Hubrises were in the transporter—and who was in the saucer?

  Spirit rejoined me, touching helmets. “Sierra,” she said.

  “What?” My mind was distracted by more important things than her chance remarks.

  “The scion on the saucer!”

  Suddenly it came clear. The one we had humiliated! Naturally he was out to get revenge, and he had not been satisfied with our departure from the dome of Maraud. Out here at night he could destroy us and get away with it. We had fled the dome of our own volition,
leaving the protection of its law, such as it was; we had become fair targets. There wouldn’t even be any inquiries.

  Sierra must have been keeping track of us, unsatisfied without the taste of blood. The arrogance of scions was almost beyond belief; a personal humiliation by a peasant was justification for murder, in this person’s view. But not open murder, for then it would be known that he had acted in a cowardly manner, bombing a pedal-powered vehicle from a saucer. The nature of his humiliation might also become known. So his revenge had to be private and complete. Yes, it made sense at last.

  The saucer wrenched upward as its pilot realized that something was wrong, and it skewed crazily as it snapped on the end of its tether. The rope provided with out-dome vehicles is tough, for it has to stand up to the abrasion of sharp rocks and the stress of hauling a vehicle out of a mine cave-in. That saucer could not break free.

  With a gravity lens, a saucer can lift any amount that will fit in its hold, because the load has no weight provided the lens is between the load and the planet. But the rope anchored the saucer to the transporter below the lens, with its full quarter-gee weight. This was too much to lift. The propulsive rockets (no propeller out here in vacuum, of course) weren’t designed for significant lifting, only forward thrust. What a lovely trap!

  With its pincers unit immobilized, the saucer couldn’t drop any more bombs. We had muzzled it as well as tethering it. Because the pilot was sealed inside, he couldn’t go to the airless cargo hold to untie or cut the rope. Not unless he had a space suit— which was unlikely. Trying to scramble into one of those bulky things in the confines of a cockpit was so awkward as to be something a scion would not consider, anyway.