The time went quickly for Gage. There was plenty of work to do. Sensors were ripped from the GUTships and erected in huge, irregular arrays over the ice-ship's surface, so they could watch for pursuit. Inside the ice cave, the colonists had to take apart their fancy zero-gee homes on stalks. One side of the chamber was designated the floor, and was flattened out; squat igloos were erected across the newly leveled surface. The vegetable farms were reestablished on the floor and on the lower slopes of the walls of the ice cave.

The colonists gathered on the surface to watch the Saturn flyby.

Gage primed her helmet nipple with whisky from one of the better stills. She found a place away from the rest, dug a shallow trench in the ice, and lay in it comfortably; vapor hissed softly around her, evoked by her leaked body heat.

Huge storms raged in the flat-infinite cloudscape of Saturn. The feathery surfaces of the clouds looked close enough to touch. Rings arched over Chiron like gaudy artifacts, unreasonably sharp, cutting perceptibly across the sky as Gage watched. It was like a slow ballet, beautiful, peaceful.

Saturn's gravitational field grabbed at Chiron, held it, then hurled it on.

Chiron's path was deflected towards the Cetus constellation, out of the plane of the Solar System and roughly in the direction of the Andromeda Galaxy. The slingshot accelerated the worldlet to Solar escape velocity. The encounter left the vast, brooding bulk of Saturn sailing a little more slowly around the remote Sun.

A week past the flyby the bank of GUTdrive engines was opened up.

Under a quarter gee, Gage sank to the new floor of the ice cave. She looked up at the domed ceiling and sighed; it was going to be a lot of years before she felt the exhilarating freedom of freefall again.

A week after that, riding a matchspark of GUTdrive light, the Squeem missile came flaring out of the plane of the System. It was riding a full gee.

The countdown was gentle, in a reassuring woman's voice. Gage lay with Moro in the darkness of her igloo. She cradled him in the crook of her shoulder; his head felt light, delicate in the quarter-strength gravity.

"So we got two weeks' head start," she said.

"Well, we'd hoped for longer--"

"A lot longer."

" -- but they were bound to detect the GUTdrive," Moro said. "It could have been worse. The Squeem must have cannibalized a human ship, to launch so quickly. So the missile's drive has to be human-rated, limited to a one-gee thrust."

The Squeem had evidently been forced to concur with Mackenzie's argument, that pursuit with a hyperdrive ship was impossible; only another GUTdrive ship could chase Chiron, crawling after the rogue dwarf through normal space.

The woman's voice issued its final warnings, and the countdown reached zero.