Chapter 1

"More power to the containment field!" the desperate tension in Rosa's voice did nothing to help Arno's confidence or his concentration.

"There is no more power!" he hollered back up the passage.

They had never figured out how to use the alien intercom, which left them with the inconvenient, and in the current situation, downright foolhardy alternative of leaving all of the pressure doors between engineering and the bridge open so that shouted commands could be passed. Fortunately, the alien ship was small enough for this to be, just barely, feasible.

Arno had been thrilled when he had discovered the secret to operating the alien drive - the secret the Conquerors thought humans too stupid to understand. His having done so had caused Rosa to redouble her efforts to learn the controls. In fits and starts, between the two of them, they had learned how to escape.

It had taken months of planning and preparation, and now, now that they were within a hair's breadth of freedom, the whole thing was falling apart at the seams.

Slowly, quietly, by ones and twos, they had got as many people aboard the craft as it could reasonably carry. It could carry more humans than Conquerors, to be sure, since humans were so much smaller, not having been raised in the kind of gravity the Conquerors had been.

The fact that the aliens could not stand Earth daylight had been a big help. No aliens around during the day to even notice the humans going aboard the ship. They still had to move fast. All people and provisions had to be aboard and stowed for takeoff before sundown, when their masters would once again be able to move about.

Servants left their masters, ostensibly running errands that their owners could not manage in daylight, and in singles and pairs had made their way to the makeshift spaceport. By the time dusk fell, there were more than a hundred of them aboard. Rosa was strapped into the too-big pilot's couch while Arno made final adjustments to the drive. At the precise moment that the Conqueror orbital patrol was on the diametrically opposite side of the globe, Rosa slammed her fist down on the mushroom-shaped button that would begin the pre-programmed liftoff sequence. To keep suspicions down, lift had to be accomplished at the ungodly acceleration used by the offworlders. Naturally, every human aboard, pressed deeply into the extra-thick heavy-worlder acceleration pads in twos and threes, lost consciousness, and two, their lives. By the time the survivors came to their senses, the autopilot had them headed for the jump horizon.

Then disaster struck. A Conqueror voice hailed the ship, and Rosa, still regaining use of her senses noticed on her sensor screen, a ship that had apparently just emerged from hyperspace. It was running at a nearly parallel vector to theirs. She knew enough of the alien language to answer, but there was no way she could make her voice sound like a heavy-worlder's basso profundo, nor could her human mouth ever form the sounds exactly the way the cavernous maws of the aliens did.

"Stand-by for further acceleration!" she cried down the passageway, hoping no one had unstrapped yet.

Her only chance was to run for the jump horizon and hope she could get the mass calculation adjusted properly while translating between Earth and alien number systems.

There were cries from the crew compartment as the impulse drive kicked in again, and she knew there would be broken bones or worse, but it could not be helped.

Fortunately, the aliens were, if anything, slightly shorter, on average, than humans, but their heavy skeletal structure and massive musculature gave them a mass more than twice that of the humans they otherwise resembled. Rosa was counting on the fact that the other ship was decelerating, trying to lose the momentum it carried from whatever system it had been in when it entered hyperspace, and hoped it would be reluctant to waste too much mass in chasing them, especially this far out. The pursuers would need all the mass they had to change their vector sufficiently to turn around and head for Earth.

She was right, but when the alien ship began firing its battle-lasers it made little difference. Alarms shrieked as her ships deflectors struggled to keep from being overwhelmed, and Rosa prayed. There might be weapons aboard her ship - probably were - but they had not had time to figure out how to work them.

Then the bilious yellow light that warned of an imminent hyperspace jump began flashing, quickly coming faster and faster as they accelerated toward the jump horizon. Just before the light became solid yellow, Rosa slammed her fist on the shut-off for the impulse drive. God knew where they would come out, but it looked like they would at least survive to reach hyperspace.

The hyperdrive surged, drawing power from the deflectors just as a laser sliced into the impulse drives. Then they were in hyperspace. In the eerie silence that followed, Rosa could hear moaning from the crew compartment, but they would have to take care of themselves. She and Arno had to take care of the ship.

"Arno! How bad are we hit?"

"I'm working on it! Wait one!"

The next thing she heard was Arno's boots on the catwalk. He poked his head through the bridge hatch looking about thirty years older than he had at the start of this impossible journey.

"We're not in too bad shape," he said, deadpan, "as long as we don't try to land."

"Can you fix it?"

"I'll have to go out..."

There was no way he was going to be able to modify one of the alien vac-suits to fit his human frame. He would just have to rattle around in it as best he could - fitting his five fingered hands into the three-fingered gloves, and taping the boot-tops tightly so they wouldn't fall off.

The damage wasn't too bad - an almost microscopic, clean-edged cut halfway through the bell of one thruster. He had been entrusted by the aliens with repairs to their ships on earth, and he found the right welding wands - the ones that were color-coded for use on thrusters. The weld was not as uniform as he would have made it on Earth, but on Earth he had not had to hold on with one hand to keep from drifting out of their little bubble of fantasy space-time and into the timeless dimension between space-time. With the grinder and polisher, he smoothed the weld as near to perfectly aligned with the inner surface of the bell as he could in the absence of the precision tools available at the alien shipyard. He prayed that it would be good enough.

It almost was.

In designing their ships, the aliens had determined that the longer (in subjective time) a ship spent in hyperspace, the more round-off errors in the jump calculations would multiply, so they had hard-coded a time limit on hyperspace jumps to keep their ships from being irrevocably lost. As that time limit approached, the ship would automatically seek a place to emerge from hyperspace. Another hard-coded sequence: Always exit hyperspace near a star system if no exit point was programmed. This way, if the ship was damaged, the crew could find raw materials to make repairs. Secondarily, should the ship be too damaged to jump again, the crew might find a planet on which they could survive.

Fortunately, their mad dash into hyperspace translated into a friendly vector for the new system - very little mass needed to be burned to put them in orbit around the only planet in the system. This was fortunate, since they had burned so much leaving the solar system.

Wonder of wonders, the alien instruments put the planet's parameters within Earth norms and with nowhere else to go, eighty two of the one hundred three living adults aboard voted to land.

They were only two miles above the planet's surface when the thruster began to fail. Arno and Rosa worked the containment fields like magicians, and almost made it. Less than a hundred meters from the surface, the wounded thruster blew, and Rosa had no choice but to shut down the other two to keep the craft from pinwheeling into the ground. Madly working the unfamiliar attitude thrusters, she managed to keep the ship's nose pointed skyward. The shock absorbers in the landing legs were built for heavy gravity, but a hundred-meter fall was too much for even those heavy-duty legs.

The legs collapsed as the ship settled on top of them, but for a long moment, it seemed as though the ship might balance on its tail anyway. Then the failed thruster nozzle cracked and crumbled, sending the ship crashing onto its side.

Rosa groaned and fought to release herself from the too-large harness. Her body had been left dangling sideways from the acceleration couch, and her weight made the quick release that was designed for heavy-worlder muscles even harder to operate. With a final push, she got the thing to let go, then had to grab the straps to keep from being dashed against one of the instrument panels.

Slowly, carefully, she lowered herself, and feeling with her feet, finally found herself standing on a panel of feebly blinking electronics. Experimentally, she twisted and turned her body, looking and feeling for injuries. To her relief, except for some bruising where the straps had stopped her fall, she seemed to be okay.

"Arno?!" she called. Long seconds dragged by as she waited for an answer. "Arno!"

Still nothing. Using whatever handholds she could find, Rosa climbed up to the hatch that had slammed shut when the ship fell over. It was not dogged and hung slightly open, but the panel was so heavy that it took all of her strength to push her way through. In so doing, she almost fell again as her body finally overcame the door's resistance and tumbled out the other side. Only her left hand on the catwalk railing saved her from being slammed into the side of the ship, nearly ten feet below. Already tired from the ordeal of getting out of the bridge compartment, Rosa swung her body until her right hand found a grip on the grating of the catwalk, then hung there by her hands, gathering strength for what was to come. When she felt she was ready, she began to swing her body, then transferred her left hand to join the right on the catwalk's grating. Her pinky finger jammed painfully against the grating as she sought a grip slightly higher than that of her right hand, but she couldn't afford to stop and nurse it. Slowly, swinging her body to use its momentum, she worked her way, hand over hand, up the narrow catwalk that was now lying on edge, until she could get her feet on the railing. With that accomplished, she was able to walk her hands up one of the stanchions and grab the railing on the other side of the catwalk.

Careful not to let her feet slip, Rosa sidled along the railings to the hatchway in the next bulkhead. This one opened inward, but thanks to the single-mindedness of the aliens, all hinges were on the same side of every door. That meant that this one lay open, flat against the stop that held it in place while in flight. The next two were in the same condition, so she had little trouble making her way through them. As she passed the crew compartment, a face peered down at her from the open hatch.

"Everything all right in there Rey?" she asked, then brought herself up short as she noticed the lifeless, staring eyes of the person she knew as Rey. Turning quickly away, she continued on toward engineering. As she fought waves of nausea, she wondered if anyone was still alive in the crew compartment. They had already had to space two of their number as they emerged from hyperspace, thanks to her evasive maneuvers and the ungodly acceleration that got them into space. Had she killed the rest making this insane attempt at a landing?

Right now, there was only one that she needed to find. The rest, she could deal with later. The door to engineering opened inward, and because an explosion in engineering could kill everyone aboard, it was designed as a thick, tapered metal plug that would only seat itself tighter in the event of such an explosion. It was also designed to dog itself automatically when closed.

The fact that the ship was on its side disoriented Rosa as she searched for the unfamiliar controls that would automatically, she hoped, open the heavy door. Finally, she found the blue button down near her boot. Giving it a viscious kick, she saw the door begin to open. The power to lift it in this position was not there, however, even though the gravity on this planet seemed about Earth-normal. The door opened until the panel was almost horizontal, then whined to a stop and began to slowly, grumblingly, close again.

"No!" Rosa cried, searching desperately for something to jam it - anything at all!

There was nothing within reach as Rosa searched the bulheads and the area around her feet. The heavy engineering boots that Arno had gotten her caught her eye, and in a flash, she had them off and wedged between the hinge side of the hatch and its metal opening. Breath caught in her throat as the heavy panel continued downward and the leather of the boots creased as though it was being cut by the sheer pressure of the two gigantic pieces of metal. Just when she thought that even the soles must give way, the door stopped moving.

Praying that the mechanism combined with the bootleather would hold it long enough, Rosa slipped into the crowded engineering compartment, smelling ozone, oil, and something sulfurous. Arno lay across one of the huge pieces of machinery that created the fantasy space that kept them alive while in hyperspace. There was a deep gash on his forehead, and blood ran down into his hairline.

"Arno!" Rosa cried, throwing herself on his body and holding him tightly, as if by doing so she could transfer her life to him. "Don't you dare be dead, you coward! Don't you dare leave me alone to handle this by myself!"

"Okay, okay," Arno grumbled from beneath her. "Geez, a guy can't even die in peace!"

As Rosa, overjoyed, rose to look down on his easy grin, Arno's hand went to the blood on his face. He stared at his scarlet fingers for a long moment before asking, "Is that you, or me?"

"You, you clown!" Rosa cried, throwing herself on him again and smothering him with kisses.

She ignored his half-hearted attempts to complain until he took both of her arms in his and lifted her bodily off of him.

"I'm going to have to insist that you wait until we get to a bed before you ravish me, you shameless hussy," he scolded. "This damned machine is digging into my back something awful!"

With tears in her eyes, Rosa moved away and got to her feet, offering him her hand. Arno took it, but his legs did most of the work as he stood to join her, bending over to keep from hitting his head on the machinery above.

It wasn't until he bent to give her a tender kiss that Rosa noticed the tears in his own eyes. "I don't know what I would have done if I had lost you," he told her softly.

"Nor I, you," she replied, holding him like she would never let go.

A noise from the catwalk outside brought them out of their embrace. Noticing how she had propped the door open, Arno retrieved a pry bar from one of the tool bins and had Rosa push the button again as he levered the heavy panel upward. She retrieved her boots, somewhat the worse for having been caught between the two pieces of metal, as he replaced them with the pry bar, holding it in place until the weight of the door once again settled to jam it in place.

Carefully, they made their way onto the catwalk railing, as Rosa had done during her trip to the engineering spaces. The noise they had heard had apparently been the sound of Rey's body falling through the open crew compartment hatch. It now lay several feet below the catwalk in a crumpled heap against the bulkhead.

They made their way to the point opposite the crew compartment, arriving just in time to help one of the passengers make the perilous descent down the connecting catwalk.

At the end of a voyage whose primary fuel had been luck, luck had smiled once more on the exiles. The ship had landed so that the main airlock in the section just abaft the bridge compartment was horizontally opposite the central catwalk, which boded well for their chances of getting off the ship without too much trouble.

Arno went about getting the airlock hatches open as Rosa helped the ambulatory passengers descend from the crew quarters.

As a precaution, even though the sensors had told them from orbit that the place should support human life, Arno closed the inner hatch before cracking the outer. He needn't have worried. The alien sensors were good at what they were designed for, and the air, though it wafted in carrying a whole range of unfamiliar scents, was eminently breathable, as confirmed by the lock's sensors.

One by one, he and Rosa helped the survivors out of the ship, handing them down the three feet or so to the barren, rocky ground below. There were several broken bones among them which had to be splinted and extra care taken when they moved, but Rey was the only new fatality. His body was the last to leave the ship.

Finally finished getting everyone safely out of the derelict, Rosa stood in the lock and surveyed their new home. For almost a mile around the ship, the ground was rocky and barren - exactly the spot for which she had been aiming, but further away could be seen lush jungle. Above the treetops flew some sort of long-tailed bird. To be visible at this distance, Rosa mused, those must be some pretty big birds.

They had had the good fortune to land less than half a klick from a stream, on whose banks grew the only vegetation in the area. Its water, too, proved to be pure and clean, and the little hill above it seemed ideal for a first camp.

Something kept buzzing in her head, as if someone was speaking just out of range of her hearing. Try as she might, Rosa couldn't make out a single word, however, and put it down to residual effects of the crash, or perhaps the recent emergence from hyperspace.

Paying it no more attention, Rosa began organizing work parties. One party was detailed to begin setting up whatever shelter could be cobbled together from the things they had brought with them and whatever pieces they could cannibalize from the ship, for it was pretty plain that if this ship ever lifted again, it would be at the end of a salvage grapple.

A second work party was designated to unload the supplies and gear that the escapees had managed to smuggle aboard during that last, tense day on Earth. Subjectively, it had been only a few hours ago that they had lifted, for perhaps the last time, from a subjugated Earth. Here and now, however, it seemed an eternity ago.