Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

“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 her window.