“Let me see that,” Donna said.

Trent slid the flyer across the table, glancing up to see if anybody was watching. He didn’t suppose the people in the bar would rat on him or Donna, but it was a two-hundred-dollar fine if somebody did.

Donna held it up to the light. “Looks pretty out there. We ought to go check it out.”

“Here,” Trent said, handing her a regular menu, but another flyer dropped out of that.

She giggled at his obvious discomfort, but she took the menu and covered both Alpha Centauri flyers with it. “I’m serious,” she said. “We’re running out of money, and all the jobs are on other planets nowadays. We should at least go have a look.”

“Yeah, I know we should.” He looked at the beer menu again and decided to try the India Pale Ale. If the name meant anything, it shouldn’t be one of the dark ones. That and a bacon cheeseburger might salvage the evening.

There was a sign over the archway that led to the bathrooms: Make Beer, Not Bombs. Trent agreed with that sentiment, even if it was ferny beer like what they served here. He agreed with Donna, too, that they should go look for a better place to live, but he wasn’t ready to pack up and go just yet. For one thing, now that it was illegal, they couldn’t simply take off for a weekend. The hyperdrive would take you away from anywhere, so long as you were jumping int6 vacuum, but it couldn’t put you back onto the ground, or even into the atmosphere. You had to pop into orbit just above the atmosphere and fall the rest of the way under a parachute, which meant that the U.S. would blast your chute with its laser satellites before you even came close to the ground. That’s what had happened to Trent and Donna the first time they tried it.