1 The fugitives
The freezing night-rain came two hours after sunset in the Southern Mountains, when it was already dark and the Herders at the sheep station were in their huts, snuggling in bed to keep warm. The rain lasted half the night. Only the hardy sheep stayed outside.
At midnight, with hailstones thudding on the roof and the wind rattling the shutters, two small figures crept silently out of a hut, careful not to wake the sleeping women. They carried big leather backpacks and wore wide-brimmed leather hats. They ventured fearlessly into the freezing downpour and headed up the mountain.
Rain ran down the gullies. The fugitives - two adolescent girls, one small and skinny, one taller and athletic - trudged through the streams, walking on gravel river-beds in thin leather sandals, despite their freezing feet, leaving no footprints. When the mountain streams were too narrow, they tramped over the sodden grass, avoiding the muddy sheep-tracks that would record their passing.
The volcanic mountains were old and dormant, their peaks weathered into ashy mounds that regularly crumbled down the slopes. The girls picked their way up the mountain, staying on the east side to escape the wind, but there was no escaping the freezing rain that fell in torrents.
There was a sheltered cove about five miles from the sheep station. Here they stopped to rest, unravelling one of their leather backpacks. It opened as the ground sheet of a tent. They sheltered beneath the sheet, cuddling to stay warm.
The younger girl shivered. Her teeth chattered. Her hands and feet were like ice-blocks. But she never complained nor asked to turn back. The older girl held her closely, rubbing the younger girl's hands until she could feel again.
Eventually, the rain stopped and the wind died down but the cold mist penetrated to their bones.
After a few hours' rest, well before dawn, the older girl gently woke her friend and whispered that it was time to go. They squatted together behind a large boulder to relieve themselves, then hefted up their packs and began the climb over the ridge onto the south side of the mountains, trying to put as many miles as they could between them and the Herder Tribe.
It was easier walking along the rims of the volcanoes, heading westward on the southern slopes. When the sun came up at last, it began to dry them out and to burn off the clinging mist. Then the girls could see the size of their ambition. Row upon row of brown and white volcanic peaks stretched in a line before them, leading to a grey and misty horizon under a clear blue sky.
Undaunted, they trekked on.
Their swag bags held flatbreads, round cheeses and long strips of dry salted beef. The older girl took a hunting knife from its holster on her thigh and cut strips of beef for their breakfast. They chewed as they walked. The bladders they carried over their shoulders contained milk. When they drank the bladders dry, they filled them with cold clear water from the small streams that dripped through mossy overhangs beside the ridge.
They walked all day, stopping only when exhaustion forced them to, until the low sun in their eyes meant it was time to seek shelter for the night.
There was a granite cave, a fissure in the mountainside with a roof of compacted gravel and pumice. It was dry and warm inside. Despite their exhaustion, the girls were fascinated by the coloured rocks in the walls, glistening with beams reflected from the orange sun. A purple seam ran across the floor and up one wall.
Too tired to talk, they stared at the dancing reflections until it was time to squeeze into the tent, to hold each other and sleep.
After two days trekking on the ridge of the mountains, the fugitives reached the cliffs, where the rocky walls tumbled drunkenly into the sea. They stayed the night in a hole in one of the cliffs, sheltered from the freezing night-rain. Next morning, they started northward along the beach, hidden from view by the gradually diminishing cliffs.
Before them was a wide golden beach, stretching out for more miles than even their sharp eyes could see.
Behind them were the Southern Mountains, brown-sided and snow-capped. To the left was the ocean, immeasurably vast. To the right was a wide and well-watered prairie, hot and lush, where the Herders and their cattle roamed. Beyond the prairie was a thick forest, grey and green in the hazy distance, with great snowy mountains on the horizon behind.
With wide-brimmed hats to protect them from the scorching sun, water bladders filled from sweet mountain streams and strips of good dried beef between their teeth, the girls set out northward filled with courage and hope.
2 Hyperspace
Hyperspace, so the physics textbook said, was how gravi-space and gravi-time were looped together with quantum interactions. Luckily for those who travelled vast distances through the galaxy by means of hyperspace jumps, it was possible to use a hyperdrive motor without understanding complex physics.
The pilot of a spaceship would plot the starting co-ordinates and what he hoped would be the finishing co-ordinates on a navigation system. The piloting computer would calculate the parameters for the jump and, when he engaged the hyperdrive motor (usually by pressing a big red button on the piloting console), the ship would enter hyperspace, emerging a few seconds later billions of miles away.
Someone who understood the mechanics of hyperspace travel but not the underlying science was a planetary prospector called Ezra Goldrick.
Planetary prospectors were adventurers who courted danger by jumping hundreds of light-years through hyperspace in the hope of discovering interesting and valuable new solar systems. Driven by courage and commercial ambition, they sought asteroids and moons for their mineral content, but the real prize was an Earth-sized planet capable of being terraformed to support human life.
With governments on Earth eager to transport excess populations to pristine new worlds (and the populations themselves keen to emigrate), settler companies were making huge profits and offering substantial bounties to prospectors who discovered Earth-like planets.
Aged forty, Ezra had been a successful prospector for fifteen years, in a profession where success was measured more by survival than by the number of bounties claimed. Now in Earth-year 2,554, he decided to seek his fortune with a risky venture. He had a destination in mind: a previously discovered planet, now lost, that was so much like Earth that his bounty would make him rich for life.
Ezra researched his destination in the libraries of the Anglosphere. He plotted his course on the available star maps. He studied the records of earlier voyagers. He borrowed money from investors, including his parents and friends, and fitted his spaceship out for a long and dangerous journey with a year's supply of rations and a reconditioned hyperspace engine.
He put in a bounty claim to a settler company, Outworld Ventures, but did not bother to tell the Prospectors' Guild where he was going. They would not find a volunteer to rescue him if he got in trouble. Instead, like all prospectors, who live more in fear of claim-jumpers than of jumping through hyperspace into the middle of a star, Ezra kept his destination a secret even from his closest family.
