Some proposed that the colony should become the base for a resistance movement. But if the massed weaponry of the inner planets hadn't been able to put up more than a token fight against the Squeem, what could one ad-hoc colony achieve? Others advocated doing nothing -- staying here, and waiting until the Squeem occupation collapsed of its own accord.

If it ever did, Gage thought morosely.

A woman called Maris Mackenzie released her belt and drifted up to the amphitheater's focal point. She was another pilot, Gage saw; her uniform was faded but still recognizable. Mackenzie had a different idea.

"Let's get out of this System and go to the stars," she said.

There was a ripple of laughter.

"How?"

"One day Saturn or Uranus is going to throw this ice dwarf out of the System anyway," Maris Mackenzie said. "Let's help it along its way. We use the GUTdrive modules to nudge it into a close encounter with one of the giants and slingshot out of the System. Then -- when we already have escape velocity -- we open up a bank of GUTdrives and push up to a quarter gee. We can use water-ice as reaction mass. In three years we'll be close to lightspeed--"

"Yes, but where would we go?"

Mackenzie was tall, thin, bony; her scalp was bald, her skull large and delicate: quite beautiful, like an eggshell, Gage thought. "That's easy," Mackenzie said. "Tau Ceti. We know there are iron-core planets there, but -- according to the Squeem data -- no advanced societies."

"But we don't know if the planets are habitable."

Mackenzie spread her thin arms theatrically wide. "We have more water, here in the bulk of Chiron, than in the Atlantic Ocean. We can make a world habitable."

"The Squeem will detect us when we open up the drives. They can outrun us with hyperdrive."

"Yes," said Mackenzie patiently, "but they won't spot us until after the slingshot. By then we'll already have escape velocity. To board us, the Squeem would have to match our velocity in normal space. We've no evidence they've anything more powerful than our GUTdrives, for normal spaceflight. So they couldn't outrun us; even if they bothered to pursue us they could never catch us."

"How far is Tau Ceti? It will take years, despite time dilation--"

"We have years," Mackenzie said softly.

A bank of cannibalized GUTdrive engines nudged Chiron out of orbit. It took three years for the ice dwarf to crawl to its encounter with Saturn.