There were about a hundred people hiding in the worldlet. Fifty had come from a Mars-Saturn liner; the rest had followed in ones and twos aboard fugitive GUTship freighters, like Gage herself. There were no children. Except for the liner passengers -- mostly business types and tourists -- the colonists of Chiron were remarkably similar. They were wiry-looking, AntiSenescence-preserved, wearing patched in-ship uniforms, and they bore expressions -- uneasy, hunted -- that Gage recognized. These were pilots. They feared, not discovery or death, but grounding.

The drives of some of the ships were dismounted and fixed to the surface, to provide power. The colonists improvised plants for air processing and circulation, for heating and for AS treatments. Crude distilleries were set up, with tubing and vessels cannibalized from GUTdrive motors.

Gage dug tunnels, tended vegetables, lugged equipment from GUTships of a dozen incompatible designs into the ice.

It was hard work, but surprisingly satisfying. The ache in her muscles enabled her to forget the worlds beyond Chiron, places she was coming to suspect she would never see again.

This was her home now, her Universe.

Two years limped by. The Chiron colony remained undiscovered. The grip of the Squeem occupation showed no sign of relaxing.

A mile below the surface the colonists dug out a large, oval chamber. The light, from huge strips buried in the translucent walls, was mixed to feel like sunlight, and soon there was a smell of greenery, of oxygen. People established gardens in synthesized soil plastered around the walls, and built homes from the ancient ice. The homes were boxes fixed to the ends of ice pillars; homes sprouted from the walls like flower-stalks.

Each dawn arrived with a brief flicker, a buzz as the strip-lights warmed up, then a flood of illumination. Gage would emerge from her cabin, nude; she could look down the length of her home-pillar at a field of cabbages, growing in ice as old as the Solar System.

It was like being inside a huge, gleaming egg. She missed Mars, the warm confines of her pilot cocoon.

The colonists monitored the news from the occupied worlds. There seemed to be no organized resistance; the Squeem's action had been too unexpected, too sudden and complete. As far as the colonists knew they were the only free humans, anywhere.

But they couldn't stay here forever.

They held a meeting, in an amphitheater gouged out of the ice. The amphitheater was a saucer-shaped depression with tiered seats; straps were provided to hold the occupants in place. As she sat there Gage felt a little of the cold of the worldlet, of two hundred miles of ice, seep through the insulation into the flesh of her legs.