Anywhere but Here

10

Gravity vanished with it, but a second later the pickup surged upward, pressing them into the seat again. Rocks and dirt flew past the windows, chased by billowing clouds of steam.

“Whoa!” Trent said. “I didn’t expect that.”

“There must have been a lot of water in the ground right next to the stream,” said Donna. “It’s all boiling at once.”

They watched their soggy dirt bowl break up and blow away, the upward pressure slowly easing as it did. The fog glowed bright white in the sunlight, and the rocks cast long shadows through it.

“This must be what it looks like inside a comet,” Donna said.

“Yeah? I thought they were mostly ice.”

“Nope. They’re full of rocks, too.”

The sun was coming in from the right, creating a bright halo on that side of the pickup and an equally bright rainbow on the other. They were going to have to wait a while for it to dissipate before they could get a position fix on the stars.

“I wonder if this’ll be visible from the ground tonight?” Trent asked.

“Hmm,” Donna squinted her eyes, thinking hard. “We’re five hundred thousand K out, which is like three hundred thousand miles, so it would be about… I’m guessin’ at least a couple thousand miles per degree looking up from the ground, and this might spread to twenty miles or so before it’s too thin to reflect much, so that would make it… what, a hundredth of a degree wide? I think that’s too small to see. What are you smiling at?”

“You’re so sexy when you do math.”

She blushed. “No wonder you couldn’t keep your eyes off Glory last night. And I thought it was just her boobs.”

Trent laughed. “I thought I was gonna drop my teeth when she started in with that velocity stuff. Blonde, boobs, and brains. Who knew?”

“Just goes to show you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.”

“Yeah,” Trent said. “I definitely prefer judging by what goes on under the covers.”

Donna gave him a playful whack on the shoulder. “Men,” she said.

An empty .45 shell floated up from the floor. Trent snagged it and tried to stick it in his pocket, then remembered he was wearing his Ziptite suit and stuck it in one of the seat cover’s pockets instead.

Then he remembered that the pistol was still in the camper. Here they were, a couple of Americans about to land on a French colony, and their pistol was in the back. It might as well be on Earth, unless he wanted to seal up his Ziptite, pop open the door, and go back and get it. He had considered putting a hatch between the cab and the camper, but he’d figured it would be too likely to break the seal when they landed, so he’d left the two compartments separate.

At least the rifle was still behind the seat. That would have to do. Trent unbuckled his seatbelt and twisted around until he could reach it, then stuck it in the gun rack and pulled the bungee straps over it so it wouldn’t drift loose.

“Expecting trouble?” Donna asked.

“Just makin’ sure I’m ready in case there is any. You ready to make the jump?”

She set the computer in place on the dashboard and brought up the destination menu. “Mirabelle’s on the list, so we don’t have to use the coordinates, but the computer can’t get a lock on the starfield yet.”

Trent could just barely see a few of the brightest stars through all the fog and dirt outside. “We may have to jump again just to get out of this,” he said.

“You want to?”

“Might as well. Won’t cost us much now that we’re off the surface. Assuming you’ve got the jump field tightened up.” “I do.”

“Then let’s give it a try.”

“Okay, another five hundred K.” She pushed the “enter” button, and most of the fog vanished.

Now the stars were much clearer, but so was Onnescu. It was a flat ceiling of clouds and ocean just overhead.

“Jesus!” Trent said. “What did you do, hit reverse?”

“We must have tumbled halfway around,” she said. “We’re still in launch mode, so the drive takes us straight up.”

And “up” was right back to Onnescu. That was a little too close for comfort. “Jump us again,” Trent said.

She did, and Onnescu blinked out. Now the stars were bright, and only a few rocks had followed them through both jumps.

The pickup was nosing upward, so Trent gave the front air nozzles a burst. The air tank under the seat hissed, two jets of fog shot upward from the front bumper, and the stars steadied out.

“We’ve got a fix now,” Donna said.

“All right, then, let’s do it.”

“Okay. Loading Mirabelle. Hmm. It’s 56.4 light-years away. That’s a pretty good jump.”

It would be the farthest they’d ever gone, that’s for sure. Distance wasn’t supposed to matter much to the hyper-drive, but it did to Trent. For a moment he wished they could just go back to Rock Springs and drop the mailbag off at the post office there, but he’d gotten them into this, and the only good way out was to go through with it.

The computer put an arrow in the upper left corner of the screen. Technically you didn’t need to be pointing at your destination when you jumped, so long as the computer knew your orientation, but Trent used the jets until it was on the screen anyway.

“Fire when ready,” he said.

Donna put her finger over the “enter” key, then looked out the windshield before she pressed it.

There was a definite moment of disorientation, much stronger than before, and the stars changed this time. Trent looked for familiar patterns and didn’t see any at first, but then he noticed the belt and sword and left leg of Orion shining just the same as always. The shoulders and the right leg were shifted upward and to the right a bit, but not too bad. Sirius wasn’t near the left shoulder anymore.

He looked up to find the dippers, but they weren’t there. He saw a string of seven or eight fairly bright stars that might have been the big one, but it was scrunched pretty bad. The Little Dipper was unrecognizable, and so was Cassiopeia, assuming he was even looking in the right patch of sky.

He took a deep breath and said, “That definitely took us somewhere.”

Donna nodded. “Yeah. Now we just have to find Mira-belle.” She set to work with the computer, and in a few seconds it had crunched its star map until it matched the view outside. “Says we’re still a light-year away. I guess that’s not too bad for a fifty-light-year jump. Ready to go closer?”

“Do it,” Trent said.

They jumped again, and this time a bright star shone in from Donna’s side. The computer compared the starfield to its map, and they did the full sky sweep for it, but they had to jump again and let it do another check before it could tell which points of light were stars and which ones were planets.

“According to this, Mirabelle is that one,” Donna said, pointing high to the left. It was just a blob of white like any other star, but when Trent squinted at it he could convince himself that it showed a disk.

One more jump and it was definitely a planet. It was half in shadow and half in light, and none of the continents they could see were shaped like a long bird, so they jumped to the other side and there it was. They didn’t see the crater until they jumped to within a few hundred miles, but then it was pretty clear. With binoculars, it was sharp as a tack.

“What’s our ground speed?” Trent asked.

“Only eleven thousand kilometers per hour,” Donna said. “Heck, that’s nothing. Five minutes of correction and we’re there. Here goes.” She called up the tangential vector translation menu, clicked the crosshairs just a nudge inland from the crater, and hit “go,” and they popped partway around the planet to let its gravity cancel their velocity.

They had only been in space for ten minutes or so. At this rate they could probably make it all the way to the ground without needing to refresh their air, but Trent wanted to make sure they were thinking as clearly as possible on their way in, so while they waited for the program to take them back over their landing site, he bled off half their air and refilled it from the tank.

“Might as well see what their beacon says,” he said, switching on the CB radio and turning it to channel 1.

The broadcast was in French, of course. They couldn’t make out any words at all. Trent switched to channel 2, and they could tell that one was in Spanish, but they couldn’t understand it, either. Channel 3 sounded like Russian. There was nothing in English all the way up the dial.

The vector translation program beeped at them, and a few seconds later zapped them back over the crater.

“Okay, we need to get close enough to find where the two rivers join,” Donna muttered, tapping at the keys.

“Hold up a sec.” Trent used the jets to point the nose of the truck straight down so they could see better.

“Taking us in closer,” Donna said, and the view expanded in three distinct jumps. There were clouds over maybe a third of the continent, but they could see a big river running out of a range of mountains into the crater, and another big river joining it a little ways inland, maybe ten times the crater’s diameter away.

“There it is.”

“Okay.” Donna clicked the crosshairs on the computer image of the junction, and the landing program shifted them sideways until they were directly over it. Then it took them down two jumps.

Donna zoomed the computer’s view in on the junction between the two rivers. “There’s the plain we’re supposed to land on,” Trent said, tapping the screen. It was more golden than green, but it looked flat where it peeked through the clouds.

“Got it.” Donna clicked on that, and the hyperdrive shifted them sideways again. “We’re good,” she said. “Twenty seconds to zero velocity.”

“Oh shit, I need to give ’em the password!” Trent yanked the microphone off its clip and punched channel 8 on the radio, then he realized the paper with the French phrase on it was still in his wallet. And the wallet was inside his Zip-tite suit.

“Damn, damn, damn,” he muttered as he peeled the suit down off his shoulders and jammed his hand between the plastic and his pants. He fumbled his wallet out of his hind pocket, tore it open, and grabbed the paper out of it, letting the wallet drift free. Donna caught it on the rebound from the windshield, and Trent turned the paper right-side-up to read, “Lee factor va a terrier. Lee factor va a terrier, over.”

The radio hissed for a second, then a heavily accented male voice said, “Who is this?”

“Poisson,” Trent read off the note before he realized that that wasn’t the response he was supposed to get. Why had they spoken English? “Poisson,” he said again, and then just to be sure he said, “Fish.”

There was a long silence before the voice said, “Very well, you may land.”