Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

“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.