The whole situation was an unwelcome consequence of the liberation of Earth from the alien Qax, just thirteen years earlier. The Interim Coalition of Governance, the new, ideologically pure and viciously determined central authority that had emerged from the chaos of a newly freed Earth, was already burning its way out through the worlds and moons of Sol system. When the Coalition ships came, the best you could hope for was that your community would be broken up, your equipment impounded, and that you would be hauled back to a prison camp on Earth or its Moon for ‘reconditioning’.

But if a world was found to be harbouring anyone who had collaborated with the hated Qax, the penalties against it were much more extreme. The word Rusel had heard was ‘resurfacing’.

Now the Coalition had turned its attention to Port Sol. This ice moon was governed by five ‘pharaohs’, as they were called locally, an elite group who had indeed collaborated with the Qax - though they described it as ‘mediating the effects of the Occupation for the benefit of mankind’ - and they had received anti-ageing treatments as a reward. So Port Sol was a ‘nest of illegal immortals and collaborators’, the Coalition said, and dispatched its troops to ‘clean it out’. It seemed indifferent to the fact that, in addition to the pharaohs, some fifty thousand people called Port Sol home.

The pharaohs had a deep network of spies on Earth, and they had had some warning of the coming of the Coalition. As the colonists had only the lightest battery of antiquated weaponry - indeed the whole ice moon, a refuge from the Occupation, was somewhat low-tech - nobody expected to be able to resist. But there was a way out.

Five huge Ships were hastily thrown together. On each Ship, captained by a pharaoh, a couple of hundred people, selected for their health and skill sets, would be taken away: a total of a thousand, perhaps, out of a population of fifty thousand, saved from the incoming disaster. There was no faster-than-light technology on Port Sol; these would be generation starships. But perhaps that was as well. Between the stars there would be room to hide.

All these mighty historical forces had now focused down on Rusel’s life, and they threatened to tear him away from his lover.

Lora was waiting for him at the Forest of Ancestors. They met on the surface, embracing stiffly through their skinsuits. Then they set up a dome-tent and crawled through its collapsible airlock.

In the Forest’s long shadows, Rusel and Lora made love: at first urgently, and then again, more slowly, thoughtfully. In the habs, inertial generators kept the gravity at one-sixth standard, about the same as Earth’s Moon. But there was no gravity control out here in the Forest, and as they clung to each other they drifted in the tent’s cool air, light as dreams.

Rusel told Lora his news.