Anywhere but here

by Jerry Oltion

  Donna climbed up the truck's undercarriage to the passenger side, then swiveled around and slid feet-first down inside the cab to stand on the driver's door. She immediately started scrambling into her spacesuit, and Trent leaned down to check the parachute pods while she did that. Both fiberglass housings looked solid, and the wiring that led to the latch releases looked good, too. He would have liked to test them, but there was no time for that.

  "Hand me up my suit," he said, stripping off his coat and exchanging it for the plastic Ziptite. His footing was no better on the truck's waxed paint than on snow; he had to grip the open door with one hand to keep his balance while he slid his legs into the suit and tugged the top half up over his shoulders. He finally got it on and started to climb in after Donna, but he paused with his feet in the doorway and called out to André, who still waited beside them in his own truck, "I'm sorry about . . . well, about all of this. I'll do what I can to put a stop to it."

  "May you succeed in that!" André said. "And may we meet again in better circonstances."

  "Damn straight. Keep your powder dry, dude."

  André got a puzzled expression on his face, but then he just shrugged and said, "Always." Trent dropped down beside Donna and let the door slam closed above him. It was a tight fit, like trying to squeeze into a one-person shower stall. The cab was a couple of inches too short for Trent to stand upright in, and he almost clonked Donna on the head with his elbows when he reached up to latch her door's vacuum seals. Donna bent down to latch the driver's door and put the inner window in place, then she pulled the computer out of its slot and plugged in the data line.

  "It sees the hyperdrive," she said.

  "That's a good sign." Trent cracked the valve on the air tank and watched the air pressure gauge in the dashboard rise a few pounds. He worked his jaws until they popped, then he shut off the air flow and watched the gauge. It stayed steady. Normally they waited ten minutes or so to be sure, but they didn't have that kind of time.

  "Let's seal our Ziptites all the way just in case," he said, putting his hat on the gun rack. He pulled his hood over his head and squeezed the seam tight, then folded it over and sealed the interlock down as well. The suits had an emergency air tank that was good for about fifteen minutes of breathing, but he could last for a couple of minutes on the air trapped in the suit, so he left the tank's valve closed. With any luck, they would be in space and know if they needed the suits or not before they ran out of air.

  "Ready?" Donna called, her voice muffled from inside her own suit. Trent looked out the windshield. André was driving away, his articulated truck twisting oddly as first the front tires, and then the rear, jounced over rocks in their path. The log sticking out of the top flopped back and forth like a toggle switch, no doubt grinding the hell out of whatever was inside, but André

  didn't stop. He was fleeing two dangers: Trent and Donna's hyperdrive field as well as another meteor strike.

  Trent grabbed the Jesus bar at the top of the passenger window with his right hand and braced himself against the dashboard with his left. "Do it," he said.

  Donna hit the "enter" key, and Mirabelle vanished.

  14

  The pickup's cab didn't seem much bigger without gravity. Trent pushed himself away from the passenger door and tucked his legs into the driver's footwell, curling around Donna as she pushed herself the other way and slid into her normal position. Their coats were flying loose inside the cab, so Trent grabbed them and stuffed them behind the seat, then he grabbed the rifle that was also floating free and bungeed it back into the gun rack, wedging his hat between the rifle and the back window. The meteorite went in the glove box, then they buckled their seatbelts and let the spring-loaded inertial reels pull them down against the seats. Trent checked the air gauge while Donna put the computer up on the dash so it could get a fix on the stars.

  Dirt and snow boiled away from the passenger side of the truck, quite a bit of it banging into the windshield this time since it had a straight shot. Fortunately, not much of it stuck. It was already frozen by the time it hit, and it just glanced off and tumbled away into space. The driver's side window was completely covered with icy dirt, but that was boiling away like mad, too, and shoving the pickup outward with a pattering noise like hail on the roof. Then they felt a hard bump from beneath and the pickup started tumbling, too. The big boulder came into view just a few feet from the passenger window, but it was moving slowly away, and on the next swing around it was a couple car-lengths off, rotating on its long axis and spewing dirt outward in a ragged spiral.

  The air gauge was holding steady at eighteen pounds. That was a bit much, so Trent opened the stopcock in his door to vent a little out, but nothing happened. The nozzle was apparently plugged with dirt. That could be a real problem in a few minutes. If they couldn't vent their old air, they couldn't add any fresh. If they tried it, they would overpressurize the cab and eventually blow out a window or a door.

  "Problems?" Donna asked, barely audible inside her pressure suit.

  "Maybe." Trent opened the valve all the way, but the pressure gauge stayed rock steady. At least the cab wasn't leaking.

  His suit was starting to fog up from his breath. He reached up and unsealed it, then rolled the hood down around his neck. "Let's see if there's anything in the glove box I can shove through there and unblock that valve," he said, leaning across Donna's lap to open it and look. There were a bunch of fast-food napkins, the flashlight, a bottle opener, a Wyoming map, and a screwdriver. He tried poking the screwdriver in the stopcock's opening, but the spout was too curved to accept more than an inch or so. The church key was too wide, and a rolled-up napkin wasn't stiff enough to shove through whatever was blocking the valve.

  Donna unsealed her bubble helmet, too, and started digging in the seat covers storage pockets. She came up with a couple pens, a handful of CDs, and a little spiral notebook.

  "How about the wire from this?" she asked.

  "That might do it."

  Donna tried to unravel it, but the fingers of her pressure suit were too thick, so she took the screwdriver and pried a loop of wire free with that.

  "Careful," Trent said. "You don't want to poke a hole in your glove."

  "Right." She slid the screwdriver into the spiral and pried out another couple of loops until several inches of wire extended out from the top of the notebook, then she handed it over to Trent. He shoved the wire in the stopcock and wiggled it around, bending it so it could slide around the curve of the spigot, but it hit something hard just a couple inches in and wouldn't go any farther. No amount of wiggling helped.

  "We're wasting time," he said, handing the notebook back to her. "Has the computer got a fix on our position yet?"

  Donna looked at the screen. "No. I think we're spinning too fast." Orion's squashed body slid past their windshield at a pretty good clip, going right to left. That meant the pickup was rotating sideways, as if it were spinning on an icy patch of road. Trent thought it over for a second, trying to get a clear mental picture of their motion, then he reached up to the top door latch on his side and said, "Get ready to zip up if this doesn't work."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "Kill two birds with one stone." He popped open the latch, and air immediately began to whistle out of the cab, blowing a wide cone of fog outward just beyond his window and shoving them away from the ragged hemisphere of dirt they had brought into orbit. Since the air jet was at the top of the cab, it also shoved them over sideways, adding another axis of rotation to their spin. It didn't actually work that way—Trent still wasn't sure why it didn't, but Allen Meisner had told him that you couldn't rotate two different ways at once. What happened was that the two different motions combined to tip the nose down and flip the pickup end-for-end.

  It didn't matter. He would correct for that later. He kept his eyes on the air gauge, working his jaws to let his ears pop while it dropped, and when the needle hit twelve pounds, he snapped the latch closed again.
The whistling jet of air stopped, and the pickup continued to nose over forward as if nothing had changed, but now they were a couple dozen feet away from the main mass of dirt and rock they had brought with them. Trent pressed the valves for the rear bumper jets, afraid they would be plugged, too, but he heard the rush of air through the lines, and their downward motion stopped. He had overcorrected, so he had to hit the front jets for a short burst, and two clouds of fog shot upward in front of them.

  "Those work, at least," he said happily. "And you'll note that we're steady as a rock now. I'm definitely gettin' better at this." He retrieved his hat from behind the rifle and stuck it on his head. He always felt better driving with his hat on.

  The stars were hard little diamonds, unwinking and unmoving save for the chunks of ice and rock that still tumbled away from them.

  "You're so good," Donna said. She looked at the computer screen and said, "It's locked on. Where do we want to go?"

  That was a good question. The only people with the power to stop the United States were the Galactic Federation, but the Federation had to know what was going on already, and they were apparently unwilling to start bombarding one nation to stop it from bombarding its rivals' colonies. Besides, Federation headquarters was in a space station about fifty light-years from Earth in Cetus, and docking with a space station took a lot of time and maneuvering air. Trent didn't know how much of either they had before their luck ran out. They could go back to Alpha Centauri, but the people there already knew what was going on, too, and were powerless to stop it.

  Trent and Donna couldn't even do anything to stop the person who had dropped the bomb on them. He might be in high orbit around Mirabelle, but it would be nearly impossible to find him without radar, and it would be even harder to hit him with anything if they found him. It was tough enough to target a landing site within a few miles; pinpointing the intersection of two pickup-sized objects moving at different velocities and different angles was way beyond the capability of a homemade hyperdrive system with a shareware navigation program.

  Besides, the guy who dropped the bomb was probably just a soldier. Pissed as Trent was at him, he wasn't ready to murder someone who was just following orders.

  There was only one real choice: go back home and confront the people responsible on their own turf. Trent had no idea how to go about that yet, but he knew something like this had to be stopped at the source.

  "We've got to go back to Earth," he said.

  "Right." Donna pulled up the menu and selected "Sol" from the list of stars. The computer drew its red circle around one of the stars on the right side of the screen, and closer to the middle it drew a squashed squiggle that it claimed was Cassiopeia. Trent looked out the windshield to see if he could spot it in the real view, but it was hard to recognize anything out there. The computer might be able to correct for the distorted shapes of the constellations at this distance, but Trent couldn't recognize anything other than Orion, and that was way off to their left.

  It didn't matter. If the computer knew where the Sun was, that was good enough. "Let's go," he said.

  Donna pushed the "enter" key, and there was a moment of disorientation, much more intense than Trent remembered it from the last time. The stars didn't so much shift as blink out and get replaced with new ones.

  "That shouldn't have happened," he said.

  "What?" asked Donna. She had been watching the computer screen, not the view out the windshield.

  "The stars completely changed. They shouldn't have done that just jumping back to Earth."

  "You must have just blinked or something," she said, but then she took a good look herself and frowned. "Where's Cassiopeia? It should be straight ahead now."

  "I don't know. It's all different." There was still a wide band of Milky Way stretching diagonally across their field of view, and hundreds of individual stars scattered at random, but none of them connected up in familiar patterns. Even Orion was gone.

  "I must have picked the wrong star on the menu," Donna said. She tapped at the computer's keyboard, and a couple seconds later it made the Homer Simpson "D'oh!" noise.

  "That's not the happy sound," Trent said. He looked over at the screen and saw the words "Unable to orient" in a little message box.

  Donna tapped at the keys and got the "D'oh!" again. "No, it's not. It doesn't recognize anything."

  "What do you mean, it doesn't recognize anything? It took us here; it must know where 'here' is."

  "You'd think." Donna tried again, but still got the Homer "D'oh." "Okay," she said, "let's see what's on the menu next to 'Earth.' Hmm. Earl's Place and Edens I, II, and III. How far away are these guys?" She used the touchpad to stretch the window out a little and said, "Nothing over fifty light-years. It shouldn't have any trouble finding landmark stars at those distances."

  "We went a lot farther than that," Trent said. "I felt it, and everything changed." Donna tapped a few more keys and another window popped up on the screen. "Says here we went 60.4 light-years."

  "I don't think that's right." The hair was starting to stand up on the back of his neck. If the computer was messed up, they were screwed.

  Donna bit her lip in concentration. "Yeah. Let's hit 'undo' and go back to Mirabelle and try this again."

  "Sounds good to me."

  Donna popped up the "edit" menu and picked "undo." Trent felt the momentary disorientation of a hyperspace jump, but the stars only shifted a little this time. He looked over at Donna. She said, "According to this, we just jumped 60.4 light-years back to Mirabelle." Trent tried to see any familiar patterns in the stars. "I'll believe we went 60.4 light-years, but we didn't go back to Mirabelle."

  "That's for sure." Donna called up the locator window again anyway, but it just went "D'oh" like before.

  "How 'bout if you actually pick Mirabelle off the destination menu?" asked Trent. She tried that, but another window popped up on the screen with the message, "Unable to fix starting location."

  "I don't want you to fix it," Trent said. "I want you to find it."

  "That's what it means," Donna said. "It doesn't know where we—"

  "I know what it means. I was just givin' it shit."

  "Oh. Well, it apparently won't take us anywhere if it doesn't know where we are."

  "It took us 60.4 light-years just now."

  "That was 'undo.'"

  "So are we gonna have to 'undo' a hundred times or so to get back home?"

  "No, that would just jump us back and forth between here and where we were a minute ago. I think."

  "You think. You're supposed to be the navigator."

  She didn't reply to that, and he immediately realized how it had sounded. "Sorry. I didn't mean it like that. You're doing everything you can; I know that."

  She didn't reply to that, either. She just took the computer down off the dashboard and held it on her lap with her left hand while she typed with her right. She was clumsy in her Ziptite suit, but she took it slow and careful, pulling the plastic glove tight over her index finger so she would only hit one key at a time. Trent waited as patiently as he could, but he had never been much good at letting somebody else do the work. He knew Donna was better with computers than he was, though. If anybody was going to figure out what had happened, it would be her.

  He looked at the stars while he waited. There were a lot of them. It seemed like there were fewer of them than usual, but that might have just been because his eyes hadn't adjusted to the darkness yet. There were still quite a few. There was a constellation that looked a little like a duck, and one that looked like a fountain, or maybe a tree. No dippers, though, or Cassiopeia, or Orion, or any of the other familiar ones.

  At least not out the front. He craned his neck around and looked out the side and as far back as he could, but nothing looked familiar there, either. His mirror was crushed flat against the body of the pickup, but he couldn't see anything familiar in Donna's mirror, either, even when he leaned forward to see around the big bull's-eye crack in he
r window.

  He reached forward and pushed the buttons for the front air jets. The air tank under the seat hissed, two jets of fog shot upward from the front bumper, and the truck nosed down.

  "What are you doing?" Donna asked.

  "Havin' a look behind us. Maybe something will look familiar there."

  "Not likely, but it's worth a try."

  He let the pickup nose over until he figured half the sky had slid past, then hit the rear jets until they came to a stop. It stopped cold this time, too. Twice in a row. He peered out at the stars in that direction, but he didn't have any better luck seeing anything he recognized. Donna wedged the laptop between the dashboard and the windshield again and let it get a good look with its webcam, but after a few seconds it said "D'oh" again.

  "I'm gettin' mighty tired of that noise," Trent said.

  "I could change it."

  "I didn't mean that. I'm just getting tired of it not knowin' where we are."

  "Me too." She sat back in her seat and said, "I can't find what's wrong. It thinks it sent us to Sol on that first jump, but now that it can't figure out where we are, the only thing it will let us do besides 'undo'

  is 'explorer mode,' where we give it a direction and a distance."

  "That'd be fine if we knew what direction and distance to give it."

  "Yeah."

  Trent was starting to sweat inside his Ziptite suit, but he ignored it and tried to think things through.

  "Okay, we were pointed a little to the side of the Sun when we jumped. We obviously went too far, right? 'Cause if it was just the wrong direction, we'd still be able to see familiar stars."

  "Right," Donna said.