Phillip Jennings - The Runaways

They were waiting in line with their silverware and trays when soldiers from Earth pushed in through the lunchroom door. Carmen and Rachel submitted to arrest and were brought from the kitchen to stand with the others. “Don’t attract attention,” Carmen whispered to Peder. “They think you’re mentally retarded. Maybe that’s useful.”

Peder nodded. The soldiers handed out pressure suits the same blue-and-silver colors as the ones they wore, minus unit insignia, badges of rank and weapon packs. I*eder didn’t have to feign stupidity after putting on the helmet. As for the rest of the suit, he let Carmen and Rachel dress him as they dressed the others. The two nurses whimpered. “They’re going to de-activate the Higgs generator. Our atmosphere will expand. We’re not like the other asteroids. Our buckylayer isn’t heavy enough to keep the air dense. Without suits we’d die.”

“Hidalgo is being shut down,” Peder said.

“Yes. We’ll be taken to a light-gravity asteroid. Some of us will be put on trial.”

After dressing their patients and themselves, the nurses were led to a separate room and locked in. Peder and the others sat at a table. A couple of soldiers eased into place nearby, apparently stationed to keep an eye on them. They could be expected to consider themselves more protectors than guards.

Peder bent close to Michiko. “Their spaceship is on top of the south pole mountain. Hidden above the buckylayer.”

“Maybe.” She passed him a lunchroom fork. “You’re strongest.”

Peder hid it under his glove. “All those poor cows.”

“If we don’t do anything, we won’t have our good disaster.” Michiko said.

The sun rose to the north outside, visible in the lunchroom window. Moments later the window cracked. Air keened out. The fabric of their pressure suits ballooned. The sky darkened from orange through brown to black around the sun, and filled with stars. Most of the stars were crystals of snow. The snow was slow to fall.

The soldiers stared at these sights with the rest of the group. In exultant terror Peder stepped toward the two men. Already Hidalgo’s gravity was less than normal, and he bumped into his targets. He used the clumsy collision to good purpose. Air hissed from the first soldier’s suit. The man doubled over and convulsed around the floor like Rachel’s dead turkey. Peder stabbed the second, digging tine-holes into the fabric of his suit.

Olga ran to the locked door, and freed Carmen and Rachel. Peder and Michiko donned the dead soldiers’ weapons packs. They waved guns. “You’re going to play prisoners,” Michiko shrilled. “We’re leading you up the mountain.”

“What?” In thin air nobody could hear well. Michiko acted out the message, gesturing again with her weapon. For all Carmen and Rachel might know, they were prisoners. Prisoners of a gang of uneducated lunatic geniuses.

The seven exited the commissary and bounded uphill through snow-dusted grass that crumbled to the touch. Beyond the campus, the climb grew steep. More and more of Hidalgo grew visible. In one starlit night they reached altitudes beyond the peak of Gopo Hill. An oily line marked where the buckylayer had formed a ceiling above the sky for so many years. The rocks showed color below and gray sterility above—but now the buckylayer was kilometers higher and thinner, straining to hold Hidalgo’s depressurized atmosphere.

With each step, the group leapt to new heights. Below to the right, they saw Lake Lago boiling into thin air, the base of a massive spouting plume of snow. On the far side of the equator, figures flashed into the sky like atoms of silver as they tried to head south to the ship. The patients of the institute were being “rescued,” but how could they cope with such unfamiliar conditions? By now their weight must be less than one-tenth normal, but that didn’t mean severely retarded kids in wheelchairs could be taught to walk.

The forces of Earth had three places to go: north campus, south campus, and the Higgs generator. The north campus was now the focus of everyone’s attention. Everyone except the guard stationed at the foot of the spaceship entry ramp.

The group bounded into view. The guard pointed his gun, and raised his left hand to tap his helmet. At a loss, Peder tapped his helmet in answer. Michiko fired. The guard flew back violently. The group ran for the ramp, all but two. Carmen and Rachel twisted free of Sanjay’s grip, and backed away.

Sanjay was last in through the ramp. Peder nodded, and they climbed the central shaft. One of the pilots fired down. Michiko returned fire at almost the same instant, and the man tumbled over the rail.

Peder leapt in urgent hope of success and hurried toward a closing bulkhead. He thrust his blooded fork into the crack. On the far side, someone struggled to secure the door. In moments that person was outnumbered four to one. The bulkhead swung open. Michiko fired again.

Her victim was a woman. Hakim and Olga pulled her body out of the way. “Go down and shut the ramp,” Peder shouted. “We’ve got to learn how to fly this thing.”

This far toward the south pole, Hidalgo’s day was a brief gleam of light, followed by twenty-eight minutes of darkness. It took Peder an entire extra-long night to figure out the sequence of events culminating in liftoff. When one bank of controls turned out to be nothing more than a “master light control panel,” he decided the designers of Earth had gone out of their way to make piloting a spaceship daunting and complex.

Restraining his temper, he set every complexity aside. In the end it was simple. You told Computer Display 1 what you wanted. Someone else told Computer Display 2 the same thing. That freed the control stick.

Take-off! The spaceship shot up. It cut through the attenuated buckylayer, a film of soot on top of the atmosphere, composed of giant hollow molecules. The film healed shut behind them, holding in a small world’s air.

“Now all we have to learn to do is steer. Let’s get the ship pressurized first,” Peder said. “I want to take off this stupid helmet.”

“Hurry. I’m hungry,” Michiko said.

They pressurized, stripped off their pressure suits, and ate from ship’s stores, regretting Rachel’s lost turkey.

Without a Higgs generator to concentrate it, Hidalgo’s dark matter had expanded to a sphere forty thousand kilometers in diameter. Their ship swam through invisible ghost-stuff. Peder knew there was no way to orbit the asteroid very long inside this sphere, not so the spaceship wouldn’t be dragged toward the center, but the opposing factor was that the sphere began dissipating around the edges. Left to its own, un-Higged dark matter didn’t pack tightly.

“Well, we can afford to fall for a while,” Peder decided. He canceled thrust and weathered the vertigo of zero gravity. “Now let’s learn to use the radio.”

“I’ve got it figured out,” said Hakim.

“That’s what you said the last time,” Michiko answered.

Hakim flicked a switch. A voice filled the control room. “—to Queen Marguerite. Rendezvous South to Queen Marguerite. Please answer. Over.”

“Are you talking to us?” Hakim asked. “We’ve got the spaceship. Is that its name? Queen Marguerite? ”

“Who the hell are you?” came the answer. “What’s going on? Why the radio blackout? We’re at Rendezvous South and waiting. We’ve got hungry kids here.”

“Take them back to the institute,” Hakim said. “Turn on the Higgs generator. There’s a lot of dead cows you can butcher for food.” After a pause he said “Over.”

“That’s not on the program. Over.”

Hakim grinned at Peder. “We control the program. We’ve got your spaceship. You’ve got no choice.” He remembering a line from Sky Force 9. “We’re your worst nightmare. Do what we say. The longer you wait, the deader Hidalgo gets, and it’s going to take Earth a hundred trifts to send another ship.”