A Planet for Rent

by Yoss

  The three of them, now free—almost—smile despite their worries: the two distant dots on the radar are almost certainly two more patrol ships on their way here.

  But they’ll be very far from the solar system before any of the Planetary Security ships can get close enough.

  “For freedom,” Frida says solemnly, and she switches on the hyperengine.

  Though they’ve heard so much about the sensation of going into hyperspace transit, the three are overwhelmed by it.

  “It’s like they’re turning me inside out,” thinks Friga, not very good with images. “As if I had my insides outside and my outsides inside.”

  “As if all the molecules in my body were iron filings arranged around a magnet... and suddenly they switched the polarity of the magnetic field,” Adam speculates.

  Jowe’s mind is blank.

  For him, it’s just an agonizing new experience.

  But nothing as bad as his memories.

  The spatio-temporal contraction lasts a thousand years or just one long second.

  Then the homemade hyperengine conks out and they return to three-dimensional space.

  They have no idea where.

  In any case, not very far.

  To keep from putting them at risk (and also limited by the cramped space onboard the Hope), Adam didn’t make either of the twin hyperengines very powerful.

  Wherever they are, it can’t be more than fifty light-years from Earth.

  Very nervous, they check the readings on the computer connected to the instruments.

  After noting the brightest stars and comparing them with the parallax and distance readings saved in its memory, the computer positively identifies the ship’s position.

  Shouts of joy.

  Which die away quickly, as the holographic map looms up before their eyes.

  Near the constellation of the Whale... but eight light-years from the nearest star, which, to be precise, is Tau Ceti.

  “So close to paradise, without hitting it!” Adam whines, banging furiously on a bulkhead.

  “There’s still anabiosis,” says their leader, trying to stay level-headed. “It’s just eight light-years. At the highest acceleration rate we can squeeze from the engines, if no asteroids get in the way we’ll get to Tau Ceti within...”—she makes a very rough calculation—“a century and a half. Sorry about Moy, Jowe, but there’s no other way out. We ought to save the other hyperengine as a last resort. Besides, it’s dangerous; we might end up even farther away...”

  Adam starts to let out a scream of dismay, and Friga silences him by covering his mouth with her enormous hand.

  Jowe takes one quick glance at the holographic map.

  “A century and a half...” he sighs. “Poor Moy... Maybe things will have improved some by the time we arrive. There’s nothing else to discuss; let’s head to the freezers. It’ll be anabiosis, then.”

  Anabiosis

  A first-rate hypership carries suspended animation freezers only as a last resort.

  Same way the ships sailing the oceans in olden times used to carry lifeboats or life-rafts.

  Their freezers are high-tech: comfortable, safe, individual.

  So that, if something unfortunately goes wrong and a traveler dies, the others won’t suffer the same fate.

  The Hope has three freezers that are actually one divided into three compartments.

  Instead of three independent biological monitoring systems, it only has three interconnected subroutines.

  There wasn’t enough money or space or time for more.

  On the other hand, since the ship would only be used for one voyage, Adam was able to adapt each compartment to the physical parameters of its potential occupant.

  One is long and wide, for Friga.

  Another, long and narrow, for himself.

  The third, the smallest, is for Jowe.

  Their leader is the first to take her clothes off, climb into her nook, and put on her biosensors.

  But she waits until the others follow her lead before injecting herself with the mixture of antifreeze and metabolism-inhibitor drugs.

  Adam programs the automatic controls of the Hope to bring them out of their frozen sleep as soon as the shining lights of Tau Ceti are close enough.

  And to steer them prudently away from any dangerous asteroids.

  As soon as all three are in their “coffins,” cautious Friga watches to see that both men have stuck in their syringes before she does the same.

  When Adam feels the drowsiness and the cold running through his veins, he activates the second phase.

  The cryogel comes bubbling into their coffins.

  The drowsiness of cold is overtaking them...

  The conjunction of the low-temperature colloid, the antifreeze, and the metabolic inhibitors will reduce them to unconsciousness and keep their vital functions virtually suspended while the Hope slowly consumes light-minutes, light-days, and finally whole light-years.

  Theoretically...

  Friga is the first to realize that something’s gone wrong.

  In spite of the drug in her veins, the cold stabs at her with icy needles that will not let her lapse into unconsciousness.

  A few seconds later, the discomfort is turning into pain.

  Pain, pain...

  Her entire body is cold, but it burns.

  And her still-active lungs need air.

  Air that they can’t get, with her whole body submerged in cryogel.

  Air, air...

  Friga gasps desperately, and a huge gulp of the frozen substance enters her mouth, her stomach, and her lungs.

  It’s as bitter as death...

  The drug is jumbling her thoughts: death?

  She’s drowning!

  And she has to live!

  Panic overcomes her: she twists, struggles, swallows more gulps of the repulsive, frozen mixture that envelops her in place of the life-saving air she needs.

  Her lungs ache and terror commands her to flee.

  Flee, out, into the air, whatever the cost.

  Calm down, there’s a way out...

  Her fingers feel around for the latch to open the lid.

  The latch won’t open.

  Adam outdid himself on the security system: cryogel is very expensive, and the coffins are designed so that they can’t be opened until the pumps have extracted the last drop of frozen colloid from them.

  Not even from the inside...

  And there’s no command for activating the pumps before the deadline set on the computer expires.

  Friga, overwhelmed by claustrophobia, beats furiously against the coffin’s transparent steel-glass housing.

  As if through a veil of terror, she feels the banging of the two dying men who are also struggling to escape.

  The steel-glass in the lid is a very resistant material.

  A coffin.

  Buried alive, dead, dead...

  No!

  The huge muscles of the woman with a man’s strength strain until their fibers are at the breaking point.

  And they produce a miracle.

  The steel-glass in the lid is a very resistant material... much more resistant than the synplast joints around the rim of the freezer.

  The entire lid comes off, cryogel goes flying, and Friga, half-suffocated, rolls onto the floor, her whole body aching and half-frozen.

  But alive!

  She coughs, expelling the bitter colloid from her lungs.

  She breathes... and runs to help the others.

  Swaying from the shock of her near asphyxiation, the drug-induced drowsiness clouding her mental processes, she only manages to pick up a hydraulic wrench... and break the two men’s freezer lids.

  Adam is already still, his mouth and eyes open.

 
The expression of surprise on his face is like the look of a fish out of water.

  Jowe is struggling, with the cold obstinacy of instinct, but with less and less strength.

  When he gets out, he and Friga, half-fainting, try clumsily and desperately to revive their “super-handyman.”

  They know that their lives depend on his skill...

  Cardiac massage, electric defibrillator, the same neurostimulant that they both injected into themselves with trembling fingers to erase the stupefaction brought on by the metabolic inhibitors.

  Nothing works.

  Adam has drowned, and he stays dead.

  Worn out by their futile struggle, naked, sticky with cryogel, covered with bruises, the surviving man and woman fall asleep, weeping and splashing over the lanky cadaver.

  They have no strength for more.

  Much less to face the crisis.

  The Crisis

  Six hours later, encased in his improvised shroud, what had been Adam goes tumbling off through the hatch.

  Friga and Jowe watch it go, silently.

  There’s nothing to be said...

  Their provisions will last two weeks.

  They scrape off the cryogel, already half solidified, clean the grubby deck, check the instruments.

  For three days they try to repair the suspended animation system.

  The broken lids on the freezer are the easy part...

  But meticulous Jowe discovers, and shows to Friga, the real problem.

  The patrol ship’s attack damaged the Freon tubing, and some of the refrigerant leaked.

  The cryogel never cooled down to the temperature (near absolute zero) necessary for bringing about anabiosis.

  They could fix the tubing, but they have no stores of Freon.

  Or of cryogel.

  Maybe Adam could have rigged something up...

  Adam is dead.

  Friga blasts her bad luck, curses God and the Virgin and all the saints, asks Satan and Moloch and Zeus, anybody, for help, breaks things.

  Jowe, quiet, watches her with dead eyes.

  When the woman lets her fury abate from sheer weariness, Jowe touches her on the shoulder and points to the controls of the one remaining hyperengine.

  Friga looks at him furiously, as if she’d like to squash him, but gives an almost imperceptible nod.

  They both know that they’re down to their last resort now.

  The Last Resort

  Friga’s fingers tremble above the activation switch for the hyperengine.

  Under her breath she chants a meaningless prayer in which she asks all the gods to watch over her, and glances at Jowe from the corner of her eye.

  Jowe’s lips aren’t moving.

  His eyes, as dead as ever.

  She switches on the hyperengine.

  This second time, the strange sensations of spatio-temporal contraction no longer surprise the two survivors of the Hope.

  Now they can almost wallow in the vertigo and disorientation of the hyperspace transit.

  After an indeterminate time, the second and last engine also quits, and three-dimensional space once more receives the Hope.

  Friga and Jowe repress any possible rejoicing (after all, they’re still alive!) as they wait for the onboard computer to identify their new position.

  As the data begin to form a holographic image, Friga breathes easier.

  It looks like they’re in luck.

  A star with several planets that look very promising... And the Hope is almost inside the system.

  It will only take a few hours to reach any of these planets with the plasma reactors.

  Friga doesn’t know much about astronomy.

  Jowe, a little more.

  That is why he grows pale as the data continue appearing and forming the map.

  That G-type main-sequence star and the constellations surrounding it are familiar to him...

  Too familiar.

  Friga, who’s feeling safe now, can’t understand why her companion’s face keeps growing longer and longer.

  Until the two dots appear on the radar, and the authoritarian voice rings in her headphones:

  “Unidentified ship, Planetary Security patrol ship VV.98 here. Prepare for boarding. Offer no resistance or you will be destroyed.”

  Then the strong woman understands, and she howls, punching the control panel.

  “Nooo...! Not the rebound effect! It’s not fair!”

  It’s Not Fair

  Friga has calmed down... seemingly.

  She drums her fingers against the control panel, and now and then strokes the minimachine gun and the vibroblade she keeps hidden in her clothing.

  Jowe stares into the infinite, saying nothing.

  Why bother?

  In her paroxysm of fury, Friga already said it all.

  “We can’t possibly have such bad luck! As vast as the cosmos is, coming right back here! Adam only mentioned the rebound effect as a curiosity! Something that happens one time out of ten thousand!”

  Jowe stares at the cosmos, and nobody could know what he’s thinking.

  Probably laughing about the ironic fate that brought them so close to freedom, only to deal them this masterstroke now.

  Or thinking about how frustrated his friend Moy will be, waiting for him in Ningando.

  Or about the long years awaiting him and Friga in Body Spares when they’re sentenced for attempted unlawful departure from the planet.

  But he doesn’t say anything.

  Just like Friga, when the first patrol ship boards the Hope, he passively, meekly lets himself be led away by Planetary Security agents.

  They don’t even handcuff them.

  Why bother?

  In space, there’s nowhere to run.

  Like her, he stares out the porthole at the battered and abandoned homemade ship, watching it shrink as the patrol ship pulls away under the power of its inertial engine.

  When the explosive charges that the agents placed on their ship before abandoning it blow the Hope to pieces, Jowe keeps on watching the bits, unspeaking.

  From his right eye, a single tear falls.

  Friga doesn’t waste her energy on tears.

  She takes advantage of the moment of the explosion to whip out her weapons, then quickly and deftly elbows aside both agents restraining her.

  Now she’s free.

  Free

  Frida is the sort of woman who never surrenders.

  She knew that the damaged Hope couldn’t escape, and it couldn’t fight two patrol ships at once while keeping her alive.

  That’s the only reason she let them take her away.

  Patrol ship versus patrol ship is a more even match.

  And she’s already aboard one of them...

  She only has to get rid of three crewmembers.

  Her against three: child’s play.

  She’s fought against worst odds.

  Onboard a patrol ship, there’s even artificial gravity, like being on Earth.

  That makes things easier.

  Friga has never been beaten in hand-to-hand combat.

  She machine-guns the farthest one in the belly.

  Sticks the vibroblade into another one’s chest before he can finish drawing his gun.

  Struck by the third, she grips his neck in a stranglehold with her powerful arm, and squeezes, and squeezes, at the same time smashing his face with her knee.

  Three seconds later, the Planetary Security guy is still struggling, though he should be strangled already and his neck should be broken.

  Friga wonders why his blood isn’t spilling out and staining the floor like it should.

  This agent has a strong neck...

  And where’s Jowe?

  Why isn’t he helpi
ng out?

  That’s when she feels the blow to the back of her head.

  Surprised and hurting, she turns around just in time to catch the next pistol-whip right in the face.

  She falls, letting go of her captive, unable to understand how someone with a vibroblade plunged hilt-deep in his chest can strike with such force.

  She’s about to get up, but the agent with his belly blasted open by machine-gun fire steps on her fingers and then kicks her.

  Friga comprehends two things before fainting.

  The first comes from the gleam of metal under the pseudoguts of the supposed Planetary Security agent.

  That he isn’t a human being, but a huborg.

  Just like the other two.

  At least she wasn’t defeated by humans...

  The second thing, as she wanders into the fog of unconsciousness, comes to her when she looks out through a porthole and identifies what she sees floating off into the vastness of space.

  If she weren’t so tired... if the darkness weren’t so welcoming... she’d laugh uproariously.

  Because now she knows where Jowe is.

  Because, in spite of it all, in a way he’s made it.

  He’ll never be sent back to Body Spares.

  Now his destination is the infinite.

  No spacesuit, frozen, a corpse.

  But free.

  At last, once and for all, completely free.

  October 3, 1998

  Somewhere, Tomorrow...

  Once, Earth was brimming with futurologists.

  Once, when Contact was just a nightmare to be found in the books of a few pessimistic science fiction writers...

  Back then, futurologists seemed to have a monopoly on optimism. It wasn’t a fact that any point in the past was always better. The future would always be brighter, more human, richer, more ecological, more...

  Or, otherwise, it would simply not be.

  The most pessimistic of these latter-day augurs only went so far as to imagine the possibility that Homo sapiens, with their nuclear weapons (or their biological weapons, or their waste—there were several apocalypses to choose from), would destroy their civilization and their race. And maybe the planet as a whole, while they were at it, but how many actors care what happens on stage after they exit the scene?