First published as a Novacon chapbook, 1993; collected in Vacuum Diagrams.
When the Squeem occupation laws were announced, Anna Gage was half way through a year long journey into Jove from Port Sol. She paged through the news channels, appalled.
Human space travel was suspended. Wherever the great GUTship interplanetary freighters landed they were being broken up. The Poole wormhole fast-transit routes were collapsed. Humans were put to work on Squeem projects.
Resistance had imploded quickly.
Anna Gage – shocked, alone, stranded between worlds – tried to figure out what to do.
She was seventy nine years old, thirty eight physical. She was a GUTship pilot; for ten years she’d carried bulk cargo from the inner worlds to the new colonies clustered around Port Sol in the Kuiper Belt.
Since she operated her ship on minimum overheads, her supplies were limited. She couldn’t stay out here for long. But she couldn’t return to an occupied Earth and let herself be grounded. She was psychologically incapable of that.
Still outside the orbit of Saturn, she dumped her freight and began a long deceleration.
She began probing the sky with message lasers. There had to be others out here, others like her, stranded above the occupied lands.
