Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

“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.

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.