Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

“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.”

“Five seconds to zero velocity,” Donna said. “Three, two, one, zero. Okay, now we’re falling.” Trent frantically worked the air jets to orient the pickup for the drop while she said, “Picking up speed. Fifty, a hundred, two hundred, three.”

The second the pickup was level with the ground, he flipped the parachute release switch, careful to hit just the first one this time. There was a bang from overhead, then a couple more seconds of free fall as the canopy billowed upward, then a hard lurch as it filled out.

Trent waited for the sickening moment of free fall that would mean they’d been fired upon, but it didn’t come. “Get ready on the bugout button,” he said anyway. His heart was beating faster than when they’d landed on the tree.

He wanted to call on the radio to this mysterious person on the ground and find out who they were and why they spoke English, but Greg had cautioned him against too much chatter. He was just going to have to wait until they landed and could talk face-to-face. Assuming the guy who spoke English was the same one they were supposed to hand over the mailbag to.

He stuck his arms inside the Ziptite suit and pulled it up over his shoulders again, then looked out at the planet. There was a big arc of clouds out in front of them; part of a weather front by the looks of it. He leaned up next to the window to see how thick they were directly beneath them, but he couldn’t see straight down.

“Damn it, I forgot to turn the mirrors down again.”

“That’s all right,” Donna said. “When we get down where the air’s breathable, you can do the same trick you did on Onnescu.”

“I guess. It just irritates me to be so dumb twice in a row. Makes me wonder what else I’ve forgot.”

“Nothing important, I’m sure.” She grinned at him and said, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.”

“Yeah. There’s plenty of big stuff to worry about.” He could think of a dozen things right off the top of his head, and most of them didn’t even have anything to do with landing in enemy territory. But they were committed now, and everything he could do to ensure their safety had either already been done or it was too late to make any difference, so he tried to relax and admire the view on the way down.

There was no sign of civilization. No town at the river junction, no plumes of smoke from factories or power plants or even from houses as far as they could see, and no tilled fields, either. If there hadn’t been radio beacons announcing who lived here, the place would look like an uninhabited planet.

“I wonder if there was anybody here before the French,” Trent said.

“I don’t know,” Donna said. “I never saw any samizdat for Mirabelle.”

“Big surprise there.”

There was a hell of a mountain range off in the distance. The peaks went on and on, and were mostly covered with snow. Clouds hid some of them from view, while others stuck up clear through the clouds to glisten bright white in the sun. There was forest on the flanks of the front range, but that was the only vegetation above the plains; everything else was ice and rock.

“Looks cold down there,” Donna said.

“It does.”

As they drew closer to the ground, they began to realize that a lot of what they had originally thought was clouds was actually snow-covered ground. There were still plenty of clouds, though, and it looked like they were going to fall right into a big one. Its billowy top rose up to meet them, looking almost solid in the bright sunlight.

“If there’s lightning inside that, we’re out of here,” Trent said.

“Got it,” Donna said, resting her hand on the dashboard near the computer.

When they hit, the change was instantaneous. The world suddenly went totally white, then rapidly darkened to gray. Streaks of moisture beaded up on the windshield, and the truck jounced up and down as the clouds internal winds buffeted the parachute. Trent craned his neck to see if the canopy was staying open in the turbulence, but all he could see were the shroud lines disappearing into the fog.

“Hope this doesn’t go all the way to the ground,” he said.

“It won’t.”

He wished he had Donna’s confidence. He could easily imagine them coming down on one of those cloud-covered mountain peaks and tumbling all the way to the bottom. It had looked like level ground beneath them when they had picked their landing site, but who could say what was hidden inside the clouds? You could find single mountains off by themselves in various places on Earth; why not here?

He had just about convinced himself they should jump back into space when they fell out the bottom of the cloud and saw the ground laid out below them, still a mile or two away. Trent took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

They were spinning around about once every fifteen seconds or so, which gave them a good view of the countryside, but there wasn’t much to see. The ground was mottled yellow-white and flat as a pancake for miles around. When they got closer, they could see big puffs of yellow grass waving in the breeze, sticking up between snowdrifts that ran in parallel lines like frozen ocean waves.

“It’s definitely cold down there,” Donna said.

“The wind’s blowing, too.” The grass clumps were all bent to the side and bobbing up and down, and snow swirled off the tops of the drifts. It was hard to tell how fast it was blowing, but if the parachute didn’t collapse when they hit the ground, it could drag them sideways halfway across the continent. If they didn’t have a sack of mail to deliver, Trent would have bailed out of this landing, but he had to at least give it a try.