8.

Macy drove as fast as she dared along a road that ran northwest across the floor of Romulus Crater and climbed through a pass that notched the rimwall and switchbacked down to the broad plain beyond. She'd overridden the rolligon's AI - although it had a comprehensive database of every metre of the roads laced around Dione, and hardwired behaviour that enabled it to adapt to every kind of off-road terrain, it possessed no tactical knowledge whatsoever, and she didn't trust it to be able to take evasive action in the crucial seconds between spotting the radar blip of an incoming missile and impact. After quitting Romulus Crater there was no sign of the war anywhere, but Macy couldn't relax. Sitting high up in the rolligon's forward blister, she kept watch on the radar and scanned the moonscape all around as she powered down the dead-straight road.

Avernus sat on one of the bench seats behind Macy's throne-like chair. She'd hardly said anything at all since they'd set out, retreating into a kind of fugue or trance, and Macy had soon given up trying to talk to her. Both of them were sealed in their pressure suits in case the worst happened.

The sun rose higher in the black sky, like a spotlight tracking above a dusty, deserted stage. The road began to curve east, climbing long flow lobes cemented by blankets of dust, cutting through low wrinkle ridges. At last, a red star appeared at the horizon: the beacon of Double Rim Station. The road met and turned to run parallel with the equatorial railway, whose superconducting magnetic track, raised on A-frame pylons, climbed a broad ridge between two medium-sized craters. At the highest point the track divided into two, and the station stood in the middle of this crossing point, a fat transparent capsule with a brightly lit waiting area in its upper half and the various machineries of life-support services underneath. To the south, the rim of a dish-shaped crater swung away left and right, embracing a wide plain where three oases gleamed like tiny emerald beads. To the north, the land dropped in benched embankments and shallow run-out slopes to the broad and buckled floor of an older oval crater created by a glancing impact.

Avernus stirred as the rolligon drew up beside the station, and Macy explained that she was going inside to check if the railway's hardwired phone system was working - she wanted to find out what was happening at her clan's habitat. They climbed out of the rolligon one after the other. Macy felt horribly exposed as she waited for Avernus to emerge; she wouldn't have been surprised if a platoon of marines had stepped out from behind the slender columns of the railway track's pylons. The nervous, airy feeling stayed with her after they had cycled through into the station, and she checked the rest-rooms and shower cubicles and the bunk capsules stacked along one wall like cordwood before at last taking off her helmet.

Avernus was talking to one of the vending machines. Giving it a long set of instructions. Macy went to the other side of the station and sat in one of the booths and told the slate to connect her to Newton Jones.

The phone system used superconducting cabling strung along the railway tracks and line-of-sight microwave masts to link every oasis, refuge and habitat in a cellular network. Now that the communication satellites had been disabled, it was the only way for Outers on Dione to talk to each other, and it was working at full capacity. Macy had to wait in a queue until at last her call was connected.

Newt answered at once. As if he had been waiting for her. His left eye was swollen shut but his smile was the same as ever. 'You're okay,' he said.

'I'm okay. Are you okay?'

She was so absolutely, breathlessly happy, seeing him.

'Listen,' he said. 'The enemy dumped a zoo of demons into the phone system. The sysadmins are doing their best to flush them out, but it's going to be a long and gnarly job. Meanwhile, every call is being encrypted and split into packets, and every packet is being sent on a different randomised route to make them hard to intercept and trace. But no one knows if any of this is even mildly confusing the demons, so be careful what you say.'

'I won't stay on the line too long. I just wanted to make sure that you're safe.'

'As you can see.'

'I see you have a black eye.'

'It isn't anything. I wanted to take off for Paris and look for you, and I got into a knock-down fight with two of my cousins over it.'

'I'm glad they made you see sense,' Macy said. 'Is everyone safe?'

'Everyone's safe.' Newt paused, then said, 'I heard all about your escape from the daughter of your new best friend.'

'She got in touch with you? Is she all right?'

'She called an hour ago, told me to tell you that Walt Hodder had taken charge of everything. And that Sada is safely locked up with the guards. I guess you know what that means.'

'It means I owe my new best friend's daughter a big favour.'

'I think you're going to get a chance to pay it off right now,' Newt said.

'She also told me that her mother needs a ride. We took a vote here, and decided that we should help out.'

'We can talk about it when I get home.'

Newt shook his head. 'We quit the habitat, figured it was too tempting a target. I can't tell you where we really are, not over the phone, but I can tell you where we can meet up. Remember the first place you helped fix up?'

'Of course.'

'I'll meet you there. Make good speed,' Newt said, and hung up.

Macy told Avernus what Yuli had told Newt, and said, 'It sounds as if she has everything under control.'

'She can look after herself,' Avernus said. 'And she's right, we should try to leave Dione by different routes. It will maximise our chances of escape. Although I wish that it were otherwise, of course, for it may be a long time before we see each other again.'

'We should get back on the road,' Macy said, after a small silence.

'First, we'll drink this soup I had the vending machine make,' Avernus said. 'And then I'll use the bathroom. I've spent more of my life off Earth than on, but I've never gotten used to peeing into a tube.'

The soup was good - noodles and chunks of tofu and green beans in a broth flavoured with chilli and ginger and lemon - but Macy ate it too quickly and burnt her mouth. And then she paced up and down and stared out at the still and empty landscape while she waited for Avernus to use the bathroom and climb back into her pressure suit. The war wouldn't wait for them. And she desperately wanted to meet up with Newt as quickly as possible.

As Macy drove the rolligon down the backslope of the double rim, a railcar sped past on the raised track, heading west. Despite the war, the trains and the hardwired phone system were still working, and everyone in the clan was hunkered down somewhere secret and safe. There was still hope. At the bottom of the slope, she turned off the main road and followed a track that wound north and east through low hills littered with blocks of ejecta, descending to a dark plain. She drove on, and at last saw a small oasis gleaming brightly at the horizon.

It was set against the low rim of a small crater. A simple tent of angled panes and fullerene struts enclosed a dense garden of semi-tropical plants, vivid green in the desolation all around. There was no sign of Elephant or any ground vehicles, but when Macy and Avernus passed through the airlock of the oasis and stepped out onto a grass-floored plaza they were greeted by a small crowd of men and women and children, all of them cheering and clapping and whistling as Newt stepped forward, took Macy in his arms, and waltzed her around and around until she was helpless with dizziness and laughter.

The people in the oasis were refugees from Paris, around fifty people belonging to two extended families, and half that number of couples and singletons. They'd left more than two weeks ago, and they wanted to thank Avernus for her advice, honour her with a meal, and ask her questions about obscure details of the oasis's ecosystem. They wanted to hear the latest news from Paris, too, but it turned out that Macy had seen less than they had of the fighting - the city's camera network had been plugged into the hardwired phone system during the early stages of the battle, and the connection hadn't fallen over until the enemy breached the main tent. So Macy was soon able to detach herself from the welcoming party and wander off with Newt through a chain of paths and bowers and bridges that threaded along and amongst the densely planted garden that filled more than half the oasis. Newt was waiting for a call from some friends of his who were disrupting the network of surveillance satellites that the enemy had put into orbit around Dione at the beginning of the war by aiming powerful transmitter dishes at them, and using smart gravel and an industrial X-ray laser to physically knock out hub satellites that transferred signals within the network.

'The satellites are hardened, but my friends have already punched some big holes in their coverage, which is why I was able to drift down here undetected,' Newt said, and told Macy that he'd parked Elephant five kilometres away, hidden under camouflage cloth.

'Everyone's vehicles are out of sight, too,' he said. 'Garaged on the other side of the rim.'

'I didn't know there was a garage,' Macy said.

They were sitting side by side at the edge of a slab of rock set high above a pond fringed with giant reeds where big electric-blue dragonflies darted and hovered. Much of the clear water was tiled by lily pads big enough to use as stepping stones. Fish glided beneath the pads, more than two dozen species. And on either side and behind them stretched a tropical profusion thick with fruiting vines and bushes, banana plants and sugar bamboo. The air was pleasantly warm. Amazing to think that just a few metres away, beyond the diamond composite panes, was a vacuum just ninety degrees above absolute zero.

'There's a ramp over the crater rim,' Newt said. 'It's how you get to the vacuum-organism fields.'

'I didn't know there were vacuum-organism fields, either.'

Newt gave her his best mock-innocent look. 'All you had to do was climb to the top of the rim and look down. The garage entrance is under an overhang right by the ramp. After that, you hike through a tunnel that cuts straight through. There are workshops and a manufactory, too.'

'It's a great hiding place, apart from the fact that the tent is entirely visible.'

'Most of the refuges and oases are visible, but that doesn't mean you can know everything about them simply by looking at them. And there are more than five thousand of them on Dione. The enemy thinks in terms of cities, centralisation, top-down leadership, hierarchies. We don't. Paris is the largest city of Dione, but it isn't the capital. And ninety-five per cent of the habitable space on Dione is in places like this. When they first came here, our grandparents and great-grandparents felt the need to huddle together against a hostile environment. But this is our home now. We don't need cities any more.'

Macy thought of thousands of small communities spread across the face of Dione, each with its own power plant and signature ecosystem, linked by roads and the railway, by a robust, non-centralised communication system . . .

She said, 'If I was paranoid, I'd think that Marisa Bassi and his fighting talk was some kind of lure got up to confuse the enemy. To make them think that Paris was the target they needed to take down, so the rest could survive unharmed.'

'A lot of people died because they listened to what Marisa Bassi had to say,' Newt said. 'We'd have to be pretty stony-hearted to have planned something like that. Marisa Bassi brought what happened on himself.'

'I thought you agreed with him. That you wanted war. I was frightened that you were ready to go tearing off on some kind of kamikaze mission.'

'Well, I was, until I was brought to my senses,' Newt said, touching his swollen eye and giving her a rueful smile.

'I meant something really stupid. Like ramming one of the Brazilian ships.'

'Why would I want to do something like that? I'm no peacenik,' Newt said. 'But I'm not like Marisa Bassi, either. We couldn't stop the enemy coming here. And we couldn't stop the war because it was mostly the enemy's idea. But that doesn't mean they've won it. It doesn't mean that we can't turn things around.'

'I can't stay here,' Macy said. 'And I can't hide out with the clan, either. Yuli believed that the spy, or whatever he was, the man who busted into the place where I was being held prisoner, he wasn't just looking for Avernus and Loc Ifrahim. He was looking for me, too. Even if he wasn't, someone will want to catch me and punish me for defecting. Make an example of me. Anywhere I go, I'll be a danger to everyone else.'

'Avernus told me that she has a place. Well, more than one place, actually. You can build a lot in a hundred years, especially when you have crews of construction robots working for you. But she mentioned one in particular.'

'Where she's going to meet Yuli.'

'Yuli, and some other people.'

'She told you where it is, didn't she?'

'Sure.'

'See, she trusts you, but she doesn't trust me. Because I'm not an Outer.'

'Don't beat yourself up,' Newt said. 'She had to tell me because she needs a lift. Want to come along?'

'Where?'

'Titania. It's one of the moons of Uranus.'

'Isn't that where your mother once lived?'

'The very same.'

'Don't get mad, but I have to ask. What does she think about you running off?'

'I'm not planning to run off. Not permanently. And I sold it to her and the rest of the clan because it will keep Elephant safe from confiscation, and because of the kudos we'll gain by helping Avernus.'

'We'd come back.'

'You've already come a long way.'

'Yes, I have. But I'm not sure that I want to live that far out. Not for ever, anyway.'

'Maybe you could come back in a few years. When things have settled down. When the Brazilians have stopped searching for you. Of course, we might have to tweak your appearance a little. A few cosmetic changes to make you look as if you belong here.'

Macy thought about it. Passing as an Outer didn't seem like a bad idea right now, all things considered. She said, 'Nothing that can't be changed back.'

'Absolutely.'

'And we're talking real, three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day years. Not the thirty-odd years it takes Saturn to go around the sun.'

'Somewhere between the two,' Newt said, and pushed up and kicked away from the slab and fell with swooning slowness feet-first into the water.

Macy jumped after him and they swam and laughed and splashed great glittering gouts of water, and afterwards clambered out onto a slope of soft dry yellow moss. Gunneras spread dark green leaves big as umbrellas over the water's edge. A swarm of silver-winged butterflies tumbled around a flowering vine that climbed a rock face. Macy and Newt stripped off their suit-liners and lay under the warm light that danced through the spreading branches and leaves in a thousand bright stars and laid a shifting mosaic of shadow and light over their bodies, his pale and long, hers dark and compact ... It occurred to her that an alien might think that they were two closely related but distinct species, that the differences between men and women were more profound than any differences between Outers and ordinary human stock.

Newt said, 'What's so funny?'

She told him, and he laughed and said that maybe it was true at the moment, but things were definitely going to change.

'The people who wanted to go to war against us convinced their governments that we were altering the course of human evolution in dangerous ways. They exaggerated the importance of a few practical or cosmetic tweaks to make their case. Pretended that what was mostly talk was actually happening. The truth is, the majority in the Outer System didn't want any kind of radical change. They voted against it, time and again. They were as much against it as the people on Earth who were talking up the case for war. But now all the radicals are fleeing outwards. Beyond the reach of any constraints or restrictions. They're going to be free to do whatever they want. The war has set them free.'

'It's a pretty high price for freedom,' Macy said. 'The war. All the people who were killed and will yet be killed.'

'But it happened, and it can't be taken back,' Newt said. 'All we can do is go forward and hope for the best.'

At last Newt's spex beeped: the network of enemy surveillance satellites was pretty thoroughly wrecked; it was safe to leave. They pulled on their suit-liners and hurried back to the scattering of two-and three-room apartments built around the plaza in front of the airlock. Avernus and the woman who'd been elected to be the oasis's gene wizard were down in the service level, talking to the oasis's AI.

'Listen to the machines,' Avernus told the woman. 'They're smarter than you think. As long as you explain exactly what you want, they'll give you good advice. And you have a fine place here. Robust. I believe you are responsible for the excellent quality of the soil,' she said, looking at Macy. 'I can find plenty of work for you. If you want to come with me, that is.'

'I think the fix is in,' Macy said, amazed and pleased.

It was time to go. Newt climbed into his familiar scuffed white pressure suit with the cheesy reproduction of Van Gogh's Starry Night splashed across its chest-plate; Macy and Avernus into brand-new matt-black pressure suits. Macy slung the pulse rifle she'd liberated from the research facility over her shoulder; Avernus took the garland offered to her by a shy, beautiful boy, and crowned her helmet with it.

Outside, the gene wizard carefully lifted off the quick-frozen flowers, stepped off the road, and laid them all white and gold on the tan dust. Then she followed Macy and Newt to the rolligon. Elephant was powered up and ready to go by the time they arrived. Macy helped Newt rip down the camouflage cloth and discovered that the tug was fattened with drop tanks full of fuel, and that it had been painted black.

'Anti-radar paint,' Newt said. 'I falsified her registry, too. No one can trace her to the clan, or to me and you.'

They dusted off ten minutes later, flying in a low, flat trajectory towards the anti-Saturnian hemisphere. After the sun disappeared above the western horizon, Newt stood Elephant on her stern and took her straight up.

Newt's friends had taken down most of the surveillance-satellite network and the Brazilian flagship was on the far side of Dione; Elephant was thirty thousand kilometres out and still accelerating before it was challenged. Macy was plugged into the comms; when the looped warning started to play for the second time, she asked Newt if he thought they'd be targeted.

'The enemy took out a fair number of ships just before the battle for Paris kicked off, but they don't seem to be going after refugees. Take a look at the sky - you'll see what I mean.'

Apart from a few fast-moving Brazilian singleships, there was almost no traffic in the volume between the outer edge of the ring system and the orbit of Iapetus. Newt pointed out radar signals that weren't tagged by ID beacons: ships killed by missiles or EMP mines, corpses falling in blind orbits around Saturn. But further out were more than fifty ships under acceleration, all heading for different parts of the sky.

'Like dandelion seeds blown on a summer breeze,' Macy said, and then had to explain what a dandelion was.

'Our only problem is that we have to head inwards before we can head out,' Newt said. 'We need to slingshot around Saturn if we're going to make good time.'

Dione rapidly dwindled behind them. Elephant drove past the orbits of Tethys and Enceladus and Mimas, heading towards the glory of the rings. Newt planned to fly through the ring-shadow and swing close around Saturn, stealing as much velocity as possible before swinging out towards Neptune. They were almost at the Keeler Gap, at the outer edge of the A Ring, when the proximity alarm blared. Something was falling towards them at a low slant, moving with incredible speed.

9.

After sitting through Loc Ifrahim's convoluted, self-serving story, Sri was ready to drag the man to the nearest airlock and boot him into orbit around Dione without the benefit of a pressure suit. The diplomat swore that he'd told her everything he knew, but Sri was certain that he'd withheld every species of vital information and embellished and distorted what little truth was left to shape himself into the principal figure of his tale. Not only that, but he expected to be handsomely rewarded, even though it was clear that he hadn't really done anything except run away.