Phillip Jennings - The Runaways

“Trifts? That’s a local term. Are you locals?”

Hakim made a gesture of disgust and switched off the radio. “I wonder if we’ve got a CD library on this ship,” he said. “We need to polish our educations.”

“And all by ourselves. We can’t talk to Carmen and Rachel,” Michiko said. “They’ll tell us to stop being bad, and we won’t know. Is that really what they think, or are they being forced?”

“We’re being bad,” Peder said. “We killed five people. We’re runaways. Like carbon-4 plants, we have to be bad first so we can be good later. But you’re right. Let’s stay off the radio. To have Carmen tell us she’s against us—that would hurt too much.”

Half a trift later, Hidalgo’s buckylayer collapsed toward its former diameter, and grew darker as it thickened. “Things can start getting back to normal,” Peder said.

“They’re going to use a Higgs generator parked out past Jupiter to collect enough dark mass to tug Hidalgo into the outer system,” Olga said. “We’ve guessed that they’ve already started, and Hidalgo’s natural orbit will take it to the tugging place. Let’s go there. Anywhere else in the solar system, we’ll be arrested.”

“They could lose us,” Peder said. “I’m not kidding. If we keep radio silence, and change course by increments, how will Earth keep track of us? Besides, they won’t expect us to go to the supermass.”

“We have supplies to feed the whole population of Hidalgo for a hundred trifts,” Sanjay said. “Fuel, too. And exercise equipment to keep soldiers strong in zero gravity.”

“We’re set then. Let’s go.”

Peder’s group spent the next hundred fifty trifts in radio silence, studying the reference works in the Queen Marguerite’s CD library, especially the sections relevant to the planet Jupiter and orbital mechanics. After an initial period of intellectual triumph they grew bored, and invented new sex games. They returned to their computer displays to study oddball subjects like law, sewage treatment, chamber music, and religious heresies of the European Reformation. They skipped workouts and drifted in Endo-and-Ecto directions, then rebuilt their muscles in frenzies of exercise.

They played computer games and wrote novels. The games were easier to score, and provoked fewer arguments. They developed a “perfected” version of Esperanto. Hakim and Sanjay went on to create a perfected version of the perfected version. Olga and Peder coined new slang words and idioms. Michiko and Sanjay talked to each other entirely in rhyme.

Sanjay wrote a program to generate names for 237,677 prospective worlds, each not quite a thousandth the size of Earth, and therefore considerably bigger than the biggest asteroid. Of course, Jupiter was excessively gassy, and lots of hydrogen would just plain dissipate when they started pulling it apart.

Olga shook her head. “They’re too sonorous, your names. They sound too much alike.” She wrote her own program, biased in the direction of wicked consonant clusters. The group agreed to alternate Sanjay-names with Olga-names.

“It all depends, of course, on whether we can get Earth to build 237,677 Higgs generators and send them out,” Peder said.

Michiko smiled. “We’re going to make an awful mess of the solar system, if all Jupiter’s mass isn’t confined into an orbital ring. Only dark matter can maintain a permanent necklace of pearls sharing the same path. Only Higgs generators can confine dark matter.”

“We’ll be old before this project is over,” Peder said. “We’ll sacrifice our health. We may never set foot on real ground again.” He listened to an inner voice and spoke again. “Well, that’s some punishment for the bad things we’ve done.”

The Higgs supermass loomed ahead, a patch of empty space to normal eyes, with a robot station in the middle. The Queen Marguerite dropped through, tangenting past the station, and out the other side. It slowed, stopped, and fell in reverse, less energetically. With each pendulum swing, Peder braked. After another trift they came to a stop. “Okay, we’re here. This is the biggest thing ever contrived by human hands, and we’re going to use it to make something even bigger.”

Michiko ran out cables to take the robot station in tow. Hakim was designated to do the talking. He composed himself in front of his microphone and began his broadcast. At the speed of light, hours had to pass before the people of Earth learned that the solar system was no longer theirs.