They both know that they’re down to their last resort now.
Friga’s fingers tremble above the activation switch for the hyperengine.
Under her breath she chants a meaningless prayer in which she asks all the gods to watch over her, and glances at Jowe from the corner of her eye.
Jowe’s lips aren’t moving.
His eyes, as dead as ever.
She switches on the hyperengine.
This second time, the strange sensations of spatio-temporal contraction no longer surprise the two survivors of the Hope.
Now they can almost wallow in the vertigo and disorientation of the hyperspace transit.
After an indeterminate time, the second and last engine also quits, and three-dimensional space once more receives the Hope.
Friga and Jowe repress any possible rejoicing (after all, they’re still alive!) as they wait for the onboard computer to identify their new position.
As the data begin to form a holographic image, Friga breathes easier.
It looks like they’re in luck.
A star with several planets that look very promising… And the Hope is almost inside the system.
It will only take a few hours to reach any of these planets with the plasma reactors.
Friga doesn’t know much about astronomy.
Jowe, a little more.
That is why he grows pale as the data continue appearing and forming the map.
That G-type main-sequence star and the constellations surrounding it are familiar to him…
Too familiar.
Friga, who’s feeling safe now, can’t understand why her companion’s face keeps growing longer and longer.
Until the two dots appear on the radar, and the authoritarian voice rings in her headphones:
“Unidentified ship, Planetary Security patrol ship VV.98 here. Prepare for boarding. Offer no resistance or you will be destroyed.”
Then the strong woman understands, and she howls, punching the control panel.
“Nooo…! Not the rebound effect! It’s not fair!”
Friga has calmed down… seemingly.
She drums her fingers against the control panel, and now and then strokes the minimachine gun and the vibroblade she keeps hidden in her clothing.
Jowe stares into the infinite, saying nothing.
Why bother?
In her paroxysm of fury, Friga already said it all.
“We can’t possibly have such bad luck! As vast as the cosmos is, coming right back here! Adam only mentioned the rebound effect as a curiosity! Something that happens one time out of ten thousand!”
Jowe stares at the cosmos, and nobody could know what he’s thinking.
Probably laughing about the ironic fate that brought them so close to freedom, only to deal them this masterstroke now.
Or thinking about how frustrated his friend Moy will be, waiting for him in Ningando.
Or about the long years awaiting him and Friga in Body Spares when they’re sentenced for attempted unlawful departure from the planet.
But he doesn’t say anything.
Just like Friga, when the first patrol ship boards the Hope, he passively, meekly lets himself be led away by Planetary Security agents.
They don’t even handcuff them.
Why bother?
In space, there’s nowhere to run.
Like her, he stares out the porthole at the battered and abandoned homemade ship, watching it shrink as the patrol ship pulls away under the power of its inertial engine.
When the explosive charges that the agents placed on their ship before abandoning it blow the Hope to pieces, Jowe keeps on watching the bits, unspeaking.
From his right eye, a single tear falls.
Friga doesn’t waste her energy on tears.
She takes advantage of the moment of the explosion to whip out her weapons, then quickly and deftly elbows aside both agents restraining her.
Now she’s free.
Frida is the sort of woman who never surrenders.
She knew that the damaged Hope couldn’t escape, and it couldn’t fight two patrol ships at once while keeping her alive.
That’s the only reason she let them take her away.
Patrol ship versus patrol ship is a more even match.
And she’s already aboard one of them…
She only has to get rid of three crewmembers.
Her against three: child’s play.
She’s fought against worst odds.
Onboard a patrol ship, there’s even artificial gravity, like being on Earth.
That makes things easier.
Friga has never been beaten in hand-to-hand combat.
She machine-guns the farthest one in the belly.
Sticks the vibroblade into another one’s chest before he can finish drawing his gun.
Struck by the third, she grips his neck in a stranglehold with her powerful arm, and squeezes, and squeezes, at the same time smashing his face with her knee.
Three seconds later, the Planetary Security guy is still struggling, though he should be strangled already and his neck should be broken.
Friga wonders why his blood isn’t spilling out and staining the floor like it should.
This agent has a strong neck…
And where’s Jowe?
Why isn’t he helping out?
That’s when she feels the blow to the back of her head.
Surprised and hurting, she turns around just in time to catch the next pistol-whip right in the face.
She falls, letting go of her captive, unable to understand how someone with a vibroblade plunged hilt-deep in his chest can strike with such force.
She’s about to get up, but the agent with his belly blasted open by machine-gun fire steps on her fingers and then kicks her.
Friga comprehends two things before fainting.
The first comes from the gleam of metal under the pseudoguts of the supposed Planetary Security agent.
That he isn’t a human being, but a huborg.
Just like the other two.
At least she wasn’t defeated by humans…
The second thing, as she wanders into the fog of unconsciousness, comes to her when she looks out through a porthole and identifies what she sees floating off into the vastness of space.
If she weren’t so tired… if the darkness weren’t so welcoming… she’d laugh uproariously.
Because now she knows where Jowe is.
Because, in spite of it all, in a way he’s made it.
He’ll never be sent back to Body Spares.
Now his destination is the infinite.
No spacesuit, frozen, a corpse.
But free.
At last, once and for all, completely free.
Somewhere, Tomorrow…
Once, Earth was brimming with futurologists.
Once, when Contact was just a nightmare to be found in the books of a few pessimistic science fiction writers…
Back then, futurologists seemed to have a monopoly on optimism. It wasn’t a fact that any point in the past was always better. The future would always be brighter, more human, richer, more ecological, more…
Or, otherwise, it would simply not be.
The most pessimistic of these latter-day augurs only went so far as to imagine the possibility that Homo sapiens, with their nuclear weapons (or their biological weapons, or their waste—there were several apocalypses to choose from), would destroy their civilization and their race. And maybe the planet as a whole, while they were at it, but how many actors care what happens on stage after they exit the scene?
In any case, the decision about the future depended entirely on man. The choices seemed very limited: either rational development at a dizzying pace, or suicide.