"Not necessarily," Mackenzie said. "I have another idea." Gage turned her head slowly; she had to treat her skull as delicately as a china vase. "Your last one was a doozie. What now?"

"Downloading."

It wasn't a universally popular option. On the other hand, the alternative was death.

Eighty chose to survive, as best they could.

When her turn came Gage made her way, alone, to the modified AS machine at the heart of their warren of tunnels. The robot surgeon delicately implanted a sensor pad into her corpus callosum, the bridge of nervous tissue between the two hemispheres of her brain. It also, discreetly, pressed injection-pads against her upper arms.

All around her, in the improvised infirmary, people were dying, by choice.

So was Gage, if truth be told. All that would survive of her would be a copy, distinct from her.

The callosum sensor would download a copy of her consciousness in about eight hours. Gage returned to her cavern, lay on her back with a sigh, and fell asleep.

She opened her eyes.

She wasn't hurting anymore. She was in zero gee. It felt delicious, like swimming in candy floss. She was in the ice cave -- no, a Virtual reconstruction of the cave; the walls and house-stalks were just a little too smooth and regular. No doubt the realism of detail would return as their minds worked at this shared world.

Moro approached her; he'd resumed the crude disembodied-head Virtual form Gage had first encountered. "Hi." He grinned.

"I just died."

Moro shrugged. "Tell me about it. We're all stored inside the shelter now." This was a hardened radiation shelter they'd built hurriedly into the heart of the ice world; it contained a solid-state datastore to support their new Virtual existence, what was left of their vegetation, their precious clutch of human zygotes embedded in ice. "Our bodies have been pulped, the raw material stored in a tank inside the shelter."

"You've a way with words."

"...We're up to a thousand gee," Moro said.

Gage's Virtual reflexes hadn't quite cut in, so she made her mouth drop open. "A thousand?"

"That's what the missile is demanding of us. All our tunnels have collapsed."

"I never liked them anyway."

"And the drones are having to strengthen the structure of Chiron itself; the thing wasn't built for this, and could collapse under the stress."

At a thousand gee, the time-dilation factor they would pile up would be monstrous. Gage found herself contemplating that, her growing isolation from home in space and time, with no more than a mild detachment.

Gage rubbed Virtual hands over her arms. Her flesh felt rubbery, indistinct; it was like being mildly anesthetized. Perhaps she was, in some Virtual way.

"Come on," she said. "Let's see what the food is like here."

The chase settled down to stalemate again.