Free Refugee by Piers Anthony Page A

had no business depleting the charge in the weapon uselessly.
    The third bomb missed behind us as my father accelerated, once more outsmarting the saucer pilot.
    Actually, it is very hard to align with an erratic target; pure chance gave us the advantage, if you consider having a chance to survive such a threat an advantage. The saucer was in no danger; it was the aggressor.
    These misses were too close; I knew they couldn't go on much longer.
    Then Spirit jammed her helmet against mine. “Look!” she yelled. “The ice caves!”
    She meant the excavations made by the city of Maraud to mine clean ice. A community of a hundred thousand people needed a lot of water, and the recyclers were always breaking down and it was too expensive to replace them with new and reliable ones, so it was simpler just to quarry the water out of the ground. If there is one thing Callisto has in abundance, it is ice! The bedrock ice is very close to the surface in some places, and here there was a combination strip-and-tunnel mine. The top ice at this site was blended with minerals, but the deep ice was as clean as nature had formed it four billion years ago.
    Huge chunks of it were blasted free with bombs similar to those being used against us now, and gravity shields were used to float the icebergs to the dome, where smaller pieces were cut and taken inside for melting and using. There was always an iceberg perched near the dome, our guarantee that one thing we would never suffer was thirst.
    I leaned over to touch helmets with my father, who was intent on his pedaling, steering, and the saucer.
    He was really working hard, but he kept his helmet still for me. “The ice caves!” I shouted. “We can hide in them!”
    “Get rope!” he yelled back, and I realized he had been angling for this all along. I didn't know what good rope would do, but I scrambled out of my seat and across Faith in the back, delving for the flexible cable every outside vehicle had for towing and such.
    In a moment I found it, as the vehicle swerved in crazy patterns, preventing the saucer from getting a good line on us. I realized the saucer was floating too high, so my father could see when the capsules were being released, and could dodge out of the way before they arrived. Things didn't fall very rapidly out here in quarter-gee. Faster than they would in atmosphere, of course, as the prompt settling of the dust showed; but any distance made the slower pattern of natural acceleration evident. Human reactions, geared for Earth-type acceleration, were quite ready to cope with Callisto acceleration.
    The saucer, however, was catching on. First it angled toward the ice mine as if to block us off from it; then, realizing that this ploy was ineffective because we could zigzag toward the mine anyway, the saucer floated lower, so as to cut the fall time and prevent us from dodging effectively.
    My father made a throw-gesture with a free arm, and I caught on. I could use the rope against the saucer! It had been floating too high for the rope to reach, before, but now it was coming down close enough. My father was still outthinking it.
    I made a lasso noose as I eyed the saucer. If I could loop that extended pincers, I could put it and the saucer out of commission. The lower the saucer got, the more in reach it got.
    I flung the loop, but missed. I wasn't experienced at this; I didn't know how to lasso a moving object in low-gee. The dynamics were all wrong. In addition, that hovering bomb made me excruciatingly nervous.
    If it dropped now, could I catch it—and do so gently enough to prevent it from detonating? I doubted it.
    Spirit climbed back to join me, moving lithely. She always had been an active type, able to fling herself about like a little monkey. She put her helmet against mine. “Dad says jump!” she cried.
    “And desert the family?” I retorted. “No.”
    “With the rope, dummy! Here, I'll do it.” She reached for the lasso.
    Then I understood. In