The main players at these last two levels are the high-tech patrol ships that the xenoids supply to Planetary Security.
With crews of six, these super-aerodynamic, Mach 3 suborbital patrol ships are loaded with weaponry.
If an Unidentified Flying Object turns out to be a homemade ship headed for the Escape Tunnel, the crews on every patrol ship have instructions to open fire and destroy it.
After, of course, trying to communicate by radio first, and after warning the craft that it absolutely must return to Earth.
Generally speaking, the primitive communications gear on a homemade ship is completely incapable of working while the ship climbs into orbit, when it is subjected to an acceleration of several g and enveloped by static.
So the Planetary Security guys often forget the step of trying to communicate, or simply skip it.
And they fire on the homemade ships without further ado.
If the ships manage to slip through the first three levels of the surveillance system, there’s still the fourth and final one.
The hardest one.
After a few modifications, suborbital patrol ships designed for operating in or very near the atmosphere can also be effective in deep space.
Their crews reduced to three men each in order to carry the maximum fuel loads possible, modified patrol ships orbit in the vicinity of the Escape Tunnel on shifts lasting several weeks, scrutinizing the Tunnel with their sensitive instruments all the while.
Surveillance like this is, obviously, very difficult to elude.
But there’s always a possibility.
Friga, Adam, and Jowe are gambling it all on that possibility.
And on their knowledge of earlier attempts, in order to make their own plan better.
Now that several dozen people have attempted it, and even succeeded in one case out of fifty, aficionados have a wealth of technical information on the Voyage.
Information that, of course, is shared only by word of mouth.
It needs not be said that any mention of the Escape Tunnel is superforbidden and ultracensored.
The data come from three main sources.
Positive feedback from the few lucky ones who managed to get to the xenoid worlds and were later able to tell how they had done it.
Also, feedback from the members of their “support staff” who stayed behind on Earth, spreading information in the form of rumors about the most successful techniques and ship models.
And as negative feedback, stories about how the unsuccessful ones managed so badly.
If all the folklore on the Voyage and Voyage Vehicles were compiled in one place, it would take terabytes of memory to store it.
There’s been a bit of everything.
Ships camouflaged as commercial aerobuses to circumvent earth-based surveillance.
Using solar sails, a form of passive propulsion that is almost undetectable by a patrol ship’s instruments, to get inside the Escape Tunnel unnoticed.
Ships with several “disposable, single-use” hyperengines, to increase the chances of getting somewhere by being able to make more than one hyperspace jump.
Vehicles tricked out with handcrafted armor, and loaded with illegal weaponry such as lasers and masers, to resist and respond to any attack by Planetary Security ships.
Modular ships that break into independent small craft in order to confuse the pursuing patrols, or, if that turns out to be impossible, so the pilots might escape with their lives back to Earth, able to try it again in the future.
Vehicles with onboard anabiosis systems so the crew can remain in suspended animation… for all eternity, if their luck runs out and they return to three-dimensional space too far from a xenoid settlement…
Yes, there’s been a bit of everything.
Based on all these brilliant and desperate solutions, Friga, Adam, and Jowe have designed and built, with nearly endless ingenuity and patience, their own passport to happiness.
Their escape vehicle, which they have christened the Hope.
The Hope is a genuine marvel of improvisation.
It ought to have the old saying, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” written in gold across its bow.
The plan for getting it into the Escape Tunnel is likewise a wonder of deception, cunning… and optimism.
The Hope will lift off camouflaged inside a tremendous weather balloon, in order to trick ground-based radars.
The four square kilometers of reflective synplast required for this mimicry came from the loot taken in a robbery that Frida pulled off years ago at a grodo-owned import warehouse.
What luck she never found a buyer for all that material…
On reaching the ionosphere, the Hope will drop the balloon disguise and head into orbit along a regular commercial route.
Its exterior looks surprisingly like the hull of a Cetian-built shuttle of the Tornado class, one of the most common spacecraft in every terrestrial astroport.
Working with practically waste material, Adam and Jowe have painstakingly created a very passable imitation of the perfect outer finish typical of xenoid technology.
The looks of the Hope is half technological miracle, half sculpture: a work of bricolage and a work of art.
Thanks to her contacts and with the help of just a few credits, Friga was able to acquire the communications gear from an actual Tornado-class shuttle that was being decommissioned.
Adam fixed it up, good as new.
Now it can link to several astroports.
Thinking ahead, Adam has put in dozens of hours listening in on the conversations of traffic controllers and shuttle pilots.
When the time comes, he’s certain he’ll be able to imitate their simple technical jargon…
With that, and with the communications codes (which did indeed cost Friga quite a lot, in spite of all her ties), they expect to elude the second level of surveillance.
Any patrol ships that see or hear them would have to be magicians to so much as suspect that the Hope isn’t just an everyday shuttle headed for orbit to dock with a hypership.
But if they do, still, all is not lost.
Under its apparently defenseless imitation Tornado-class skin, the Hope conceals a system of pulsating force fields.
It’s not the nearly invulnerable armor plating of a xenoid-built patrol ship, but it should be able to take a good deal of punishment.
And, for responding to the particle-beam weapons of Planetary Security ships, it has a few high-powered masers that should cause a bit of a ruffle.
That’s how they hope to reach the Escape Tunnel without too much structural damage or loss of fuel.
Once there, hyperspace… And then, everything else.
Friga, Adam, and Jowe would have preferred to have more hyperengines, but the weaponry and the energy generators for the force shields left only enough room for two.
One to get them far away from the solar system… The other in case they get too far from everything.
But, on the other hand, they have a suspended animation system, which Adam has brilliantly modified.
The “super-handyman” guarantees that it will keep all three of them in perfect anabiosis for at least five hundred years.
At least in theory, if neither hyperengine brings them luck, five centuries should be more than enough time for the Hope to drift to some port.