A Planet for Rent

by Yoss

  He was mounted by a guzoid from Regulus who was very interested in extreme experiences.

  Purely sexual and other sorts.

  He survived.

  But he still has scars...

  He dreads having to go through something like that again, which he knows will be very hard for him to avoid given the only kind of life he’s ever been able to live.

  Though his sentence also had its upside.

  That was how he met Jowe.

  Jowe is still young, but his face already looks like a weathered chunk of rock.

  Jowe would be handsome, with his golden bangs and his big blue eyes, if they weren’t as icy as the blue of chrome-vanadium steel.

  Jowe has dead eyes.

  The eyes of a person whose soul must have frozen.

  His eyes look like the sort that have seen everything there is to see about pain, betrayal, disappointment... and more.

  Jowe is intelligent, seems well educated, has delicate, sensitive, skillful hands, like an artist’s.

  He never talks about his past.

  In general, Jowe rarely talks...

  Jowe just gazes straight ahead, at the stars.

  And his gaze is terrifyingly empty, doesn’t hold much hope.

  Barely even a motivation to keep on living.

  Even Friga, who isn’t afraid of anyone or anything, sometimes gets a chill around Jowe.

  The idea of the Voyage was Jowe’s, and when he speaks of it, the words that emerge from his lips sound like beauty itself.

  The Idea of the Voyage

  The Voyage is the Exodus.

  Like in the Bible.

  Escaping from the kingdom of Pharaoh in search of the Promised Land.

  In the Promised Land there are clusters of grapes so large it takes two men to lift them, and there’s work and opportunity for all.

  The rivers flow with milk and honey, and every enterprising man can achieve his dreams of wealth.

  The Promised Land is any land but Earth.

  Humans aren’t exactly the Chosen People, but...

  The Promised Land belongs to the Philistines, and nobody promised it to the people of Earth.

  The Philistines are the power behind Pharaoh’s throne.

  Xenoids who manipulate the Planetary Tourism Agency puppet and who despise the Earthlings.

  Philistines who don’t want humans to enjoy the same quality of life that they do, because they fear their worlds might be polluted by the inferior race.

  The xenoids are mighty in arms and money, so sword and purse are unlikely methods to win victories against them and their Planetary Security puppets.

  What’s left is shrewdness and cunning.

  That is, entering the Promised Land by stealth.

  Taking advantage of the fact that not all Philistines think alike, that there are some who patrol the borders of their kingdoms looking for hands to work in their fields.

  The fact that there are always a few “compassionate” sorts who take in runaway humans and, in exchange for the runaways’ virtual slave labor in their factories, keep them hidden for three years and three days.

  After that period, if the human can show that he has remained among the Philistines the whole time, he gets a chance to become a citizen of the Promised Land.

  A second-class citizen, of course.

  But at least that’s something, and it’s better to suffer directly under the yoke of the Philistines than to do it under their puppet Pharaoh.

  Better the Promised Land than its virtual colony, Earth.

  Shrewdness and cunning, then, mean escaping.

  The Voyage means Escaping.

  Escaping: Distance

  Escaping is no easy matter.

  There are two huge obstacles: Distance and Surveillance.

  Distance is a serious business all by itself.

  To get to the Promised Land you must always cross some desert first.

  The stars that the worlds of the xenoids orbit are light-years away.

  They are separated from Earth by an endless desert of empty space, which hyperships cross in a matter of seconds.

  But only xenoids have the technology to build safe hyperships.

  Though hyperengine construction is well within the reach of many human “super-handymen” such as Adam, the steering and power control systems are another kettle of fish.

  A homemade hyperengine built on Earth works only once... and the ship that uses it can return to ordinary space almost anywhere.

  Maybe near a solar system full of xenoids, maybe a thousand parsecs from any stellar bodies.

  Or in the middle of a gas nebula, or inside a globular cluster.

  Fortunately, the structure of the hyperengine itself prevents it from working very close to large masses.

  There’s no danger of materializing in a space that’s already occupied by a sun or planet.

  The flip side is that in order to activate a homemade hyperengine without control systems, you first have to get some distance away from the plane of the ecliptic containing the Sun, Earth, and the other planets.

  The only way to get far enough away is by conventional propulsion, relying on the law of action and reaction.

  Ballistically, the safest trajectory for getting as far away from the plane of the ecliptic as quickly as possible with minimum fuel consumption is by traveling almost perpendicular to Earth’s orbit.

  The safe zone is no more than twenty arcminutes wide.

  In the semisecret, semitechnical jargon of those who aim to make the Voyage, this route is called the Escape Tunnel.

  Naturally, Planetary Security is also familiar with it and keeps it under constant surveillance.

  Surveillance: Planetary Security

  Planetary Security was created, and exists, to maintain control.

  Control means, among other things, stopping Voyages by all possible means.

  All possible means add up to a multi-level system.

  The first level includes everything from surprise raids in search of the hideouts where homemade ships are built, to generous payments to an extensive network of informants who are retained to locate those hideouts, to ultratight controls on all the raw materials and instruments used to manufacture space engine parts.

  The second level is the network of Earth-based radars that rake the atmosphere with their invisible fingers day and night, distinguishing between commercial aerobus flights and any Unidentified Flying Object taking off from the planet.

  The third level is the system of orbiting radars that similarly distinguish between shuttles bearing passengers or cargo to hyperships waiting at docking points and any Unidentified Flying Object that attains escape velocity.

  The main players at these last two levels are the high-tech patrol ships that the xenoids supply to Planetary Security.

  With crews of six, these super-aerodynamic, Mach 3 suborbital patrol ships are loaded with weaponry.

  If an Unidentified Flying Object turns out to be a homemade ship headed for the Escape Tunnel, the crews on every patrol ship have instructions to open fire and destroy it.

  After, of course, trying to communicate by radio first, and after warning the craft that it absolutely must return to Earth.

  Generally speaking, the primitive communications gear on a homemade ship is completely incapable of working while the ship climbs into orbit, when it is subjected to an acceleration of several g and enveloped by static.

  So the Planetary Security guys often forget the step of trying to communicate, or simply skip it.

  And they fire on the homemade ships without further ado.

  If the ships manage to slip through the first three levels of the surveillance system, there’s still the fourth and final one.

  The hardest one.

  After
a few modifications, suborbital patrol ships designed for operating in or very near the atmosphere can also be effective in deep space.

  Their crews reduced to three men each in order to carry the maximum fuel loads possible, modified patrol ships orbit in the vicinity of the Escape Tunnel on shifts lasting several weeks, scrutinizing the Tunnel with their sensitive instruments all the while.

  Surveillance like this is, obviously, very difficult to elude.

  But there’s always a possibility.

  Friga, Adam, and Jowe are gambling it all on that possibility.

  And on their knowledge of earlier attempts, in order to make their own plan better.

  Earlier Attempts: The Folklore of the Voyage

  Now that several dozen people have attempted it, and even succeeded in one case out of fifty, aficionados have a wealth of technical information on the Voyage.

  Information that, of course, is shared only by word of mouth.

  It needs not be said that any mention of the Escape Tunnel is superforbidden and ultracensored.

  The data come from three main sources.

  Positive feedback from the few lucky ones who managed to get to the xenoid worlds and were later able to tell how they had done it.

  Also, feedback from the members of their “support staff” who stayed behind on Earth, spreading information in the form of rumors about the most successful techniques and ship models.

  And as negative feedback, stories about how the unsuccessful ones managed so badly.

  If all the folklore on the Voyage and Voyage Vehicles were compiled in one place, it would take terabytes of memory to store it.

  There’s been a bit of everything.

  Ships camouflaged as commercial aerobuses to circumvent earth-based surveillance.

  Using solar sails, a form of passive propulsion that is almost undetectable by a patrol ship’s instruments, to get inside the Escape Tunnel unnoticed.

  Ships with several “disposable, single-use” hyperengines, to increase the chances of getting somewhere by being able to make more than one hyperspace jump.

  Vehicles tricked out with handcrafted armor, and loaded with illegal weaponry such as lasers and masers, to resist and respond to any attack by Planetary Security ships.

  Modular ships that break into independent small craft in order to confuse the pursuing patrols, or, if that turns out to be impossible, so the pilots might escape with their lives back to Earth, able to try it again in the future.

  Vehicles with onboard anabiosis systems so the crew can remain in suspended animation... for all eternity, if their luck runs out and they return to three-dimensional space too far from a xenoid settlement…

  Yes, there’s been a bit of everything.

  Based on all these brilliant and desperate solutions, Friga, Adam, and Jowe have designed and built, with nearly endless ingenuity and patience, their own passport to happiness.

  Their escape vehicle, which they have christened the Hope.

  The Hope: The Vehicle

  The Hope is a genuine marvel of improvisation.

  It ought to have the old saying, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” written in gold across its bow.

  The plan for getting it into the Escape Tunnel is likewise a wonder of deception, cunning... and optimism.

  The Hope will lift off camouflaged inside a tremendous weather balloon, in order to trick ground-based radars.

  The four square kilometers of reflective synplast required for this mimicry came from the loot taken in a robbery that Frida pulled off years ago at a grodo-owned import warehouse.

  What luck she never found a buyer for all that material...

  On reaching the ionosphere, the Hope will drop the balloon disguise and head into orbit along a regular commercial route.

  Its exterior looks surprisingly like the hull of a Cetian-built shuttle of the Tornado class, one of the most common spacecraft in every terrestrial astroport.

  Working with practically waste material, Adam and Jowe have painstakingly created a very passable imitation of the perfect outer finish typical of xenoid technology.

  The looks of the Hope is half technological miracle, half sculpture: a work of bricolage and a work of art.

  Thanks to her contacts and with the help of just a few credits, Friga was able to acquire the communications gear from an actual Tornado-class shuttle that was being decommissioned.

  Adam fixed it up, good as new.

  Now it can link to several astroports.

  Thinking ahead, Adam has put in dozens of hours listening in on the conversations of traffic controllers and shuttle pilots.

  When the time comes, he’s certain he’ll be able to imitate their simple technical jargon...

  With that, and with the communications codes (which did indeed cost Friga quite a lot, in spite of all her ties), they expect to elude the second level of surveillance.

  Any patrol ships that see or hear them would have to be magicians to so much as suspect that the Hope isn’t just an everyday shuttle headed for orbit to dock with a hypership.

  But if they do, still, all is not lost.

  Under its apparently defenseless imitation Tornado-class skin, the Hope conceals a system of pulsating force fields.

  It’s not the nearly invulnerable armor plating of a xenoid-built patrol ship, but it should be able to take a good deal of punishment.

  And, for responding to the particle-beam weapons of Planetary Security ships, it has a few high-powered masers that should cause a bit of a ruffle.

  That’s how they hope to reach the Escape Tunnel without too much structural damage or loss of fuel.

  Once there, hyperspace... And then, everything else.

  Hyperspace—And Then Everything Else

  Friga, Adam, and Jowe would have preferred to have more hyperengines, but the weaponry and the energy generators for the force shields left only enough room for two.

  One to get them far away from the solar system... The other in case they get too far from everything.

  But, on the other hand, they have a suspended animation system, which Adam has brilliantly modified.

  The “super-handyman” guarantees that it will keep all three of them in perfect anabiosis for at least five hundred years.

  At least in theory, if neither hyperengine brings them luck, five centuries should be more than enough time for the Hope to drift to some port.

  Some port with xenoids.

  Xenoids of good will, if at all possible.

  Xenoids of Good Will

  Friga has no scientific-technical training, or any other sort of education.

  Nevertheless, she’s confident that her physical strength, her stamina, her lack of scruples, and her leadership qualities will make her valuable to any xenoid boss involved in not entirely legal activities.

  She knows she could be the best capo in the universe.

  If not, she’s still willing to make the voyage and stick it out anyway.

  Adam places high hopes on his incredible skill as a technotinkerer...

  Though he doesn’t say so to anyone, he’s sort of skeptical about his utility in xenoid consumer society, where nothing gets fixed but everything is used until it breaks and then is simply thrown away.

  But he aims to learn how to build things; since he already knows how to repair them...

  In any case, the real trump card for both of them is Jowe.

  And his mysterious friend, Moy.

  Jowe and Moy

  Jowe doesn’t talk about Moy very much. Like, not at all.

  He’s only said that Moy is an artist, an old friend of his, who’s had luck with the xenoids.

  But everything indicates that they were close friends.

  Maybe more than friends, Friga and Adam sometimes think, with the wickedness of the street.
>
  Because it’s pretty rare for someone, no matter how well-off economically, to wire money orders worth nearly a million credits to a mere friend.

  The remittances that Moy sends have financed the construction of the Hope, the purchase of provisions, the suspended animation system, the fuel, and the weaponry.

  And none of it came cheap.

  Even so, there’s a few credits left over...

  Friga has declared that what’s left is an “emergency fund” for unexpected contingencies.

  Credits are credits, from Betelgeuse to Aldebaran, and if no nice xenoids turn up, disposed to keeping them concealed for three years and three days...

  It’s good to have some reserves.

  The key thing is that, along with money, Moy constantly sends messages along the lines of “Come right away” and “I need you here” and “I’m so lonely” and “Just get here, whatever it costs.”

  Jowe doesn’t tell them whether Moy knows that, like anyone ever sentenced to Body Spares, he’ll never be given permission to leave Earth legally.

  But Friga and Adam are sure that Moy realizes his money is helping Jowe get back to him the only way he can.

  By leaving Earth’s atmosphere and the solar system illegally.

  Friga and Adam are also sure that this Moy will intercede on Jowe’s behalf once he’s far from Earth.

  And on their behalf, too, while he’s at it.

  Which is why they’ve taken on the greater part of the hard work.

  Because, Jowe might be the one who came up with the idea of the Voyage, but he hasn’t done much to make it a concrete reality.

  You might say, all he’s done has been to add a couple of stylish touches to the Hope.

  And lately, nothing at all.

  Because, while Friga and Adam are sweating away, rechecking things that have already been checked a thousand times and gathering provisions and tools for every eventuality, Jowe just wanders about idly, staring at the sky.

  And his dead eyes only light up with a sparkle when they mention how close it is to the day of departure.