Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

The long minutes of waiting were tough on the nerves. Donna couldn’t do anything with the computer while it was in the middle of the landing sequence, so they couldn’t even keep trying to figure out what had gone wrong with it, and Trent kept wondering when it would suddenly decide to do it again. One more bad jump and they’d be out of luck.

His throat felt dry. There was plenty of beer left in the camper, but he and Donna would have to seal up their suits and open the cab to go get it. That would waste at least fifteen minutes of air even if they waited until it was at its worst before they vented it.

“I should have put a hatch between the cab and the camper,” he said.

Donna looked over at him. “I thought you decided it would be too likely to break the seal when we landed.”

“Yeah, but I could sure use a beer about now.”

“Me too.” She shivered. “And a blanket. I’m cold.”

“We can at least do something about that.” He twisted around and pulled their coats from behind the seat.

Instead of putting hers on, Donna unbuckled her seat-belt and scooted closer to him, pushing herself down to the seat until he put his arm around her and pulled her tight against his side, then she tucked her coat around their legs like a lap blanket. He draped his over their upper bodies and tucked the arms in behind them to hold it in place.

“Just like old times,” he said. She had always used to ride in the middle when they went four-wheeling outside of Rock Springs. You couldn’t do that very well in space, because you needed the shoulder harness to hold you against the seat when you landed, but they wouldn’t be doing that for a while yet. She rested her head on his shoulder and he rested his head on hers. Her hair smelled nice. Strawberry shampoo, and her own Donna scent that he always figured he could pick out blindfolded.

The gas giant was pretty. The clouds weren’t as thickly banded as Jupiter’s; they were more like Saturn’s, just wide, even bands encircling the entire globe. He wondered what made one planet do one thing and another planet do another. Rotation rate? Chemistry in the clouds? He didn’t have a clue. There was so much stuff he didn’t know about space. It made him feel like a total idiot. Donna was always reading books about it, or had been since the whole business had landed in their laps five months ago, but he couldn’t make himself sit down and read about orbital mechanics and planetary formation and stuff like that. It was too much like school, and he’d never liked that, either. He’d always been an outdoor guy. Give him a fishing pole and a mountain stream over a book any day.

He wondered if he’d ever see a stream again.

“What you thinking about?” Donna asked softly.

“Nothin’.”

“What sort of nothin’?”

He smiled. “Okay, I was thinking about going fishing.”

“Where would you go? If we were home, I mean.”

“I don’t know. Little Sandy, maybe. I’ve always liked it up there.”

“Me too.” She laughed. “Remember when I fell in the beaver pond?”

“Face first in the mud. Man, you were a sight. You looked like some horror-show monster. Gave me nightmares for weeks.”

“Me too.” They were silent for a few minutes, then she said, “We’re going to be okay.”

He nodded. “We don’t have much other choice.”

The gas giant wasn’t quite as big as Jupiter, so it took almost four hours to kill their velocity. Every time they refreshed their air, Trent winced at the sound of the old air rushing out and the new rushing in, but they had to do it or asphyxiate on their own carbon dioxide. They traded back and forth between Donna’s door and his so they wouldn’t have to use the maneuvering jets to kill their spin every time, so that saved a few extra breaths. He just hoped it would be enough.

When the main tank ran out, they started using air out of the maneuvering tank. It was tempting to consider all of that to be breathing air, but Trent knew they needed to keep some for adjusting their position when they fell into the atmosphere. It would do no good to make it to safety only to go in upside-down and wrap the parachute around the pickup.

They napped fitfully between recharges, partly trying to conserve air and mostly because they hadn’t slept in a day and a half, but Trent kept waking out of daydreams of good times on Earth only to find himself about to die in the ass end of nowhere, and he decided he’d rather just stay awake. He was glad he wasn’t alone out here, but he would have given anything, even the last of his air, to have Donna home safe instead. It was her idea to come on this particular trip, but he’d been the one who turned their pickup into a spaceship in the first place. Who had he been kidding? He wasn’t an astronaut. If he’d just accepted who he was and left it at that, he wouldn’t have gotten either of them into this mess.

He was glad when the computer dinged at them to warn them that the velocity change was about complete. It gave him something else to think about. Something to keep his hands busy, too. At least when they were landing, he could do something. If he didn’t screw that up, they could be on the ground in another half hour, which was a good thing because that’s about all the air they had left. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if the atmosphere wasn’t breathable.

Donna slid over to her side of the cab and buckled in while the computer took them back to where it thought the Earth-like planet ought to be. It was off by about half the planets width, which wasn’t that bad considering all the jumps they’d made and the velocity change they’d gone through, but it took another jump to put them into position just outside the atmosphere, and once they picked their landing site it would take another two at the minimum to fine-tune their position and velocity so they would come in slow enough to deploy the parachute. That was cutting it awfully close. If they ever got home, it would be on the last couple of electrons in the plasma cells.

There weren’t many continents here. What land there was was mostly islands; circular bull’s-eyes with tall peaks in the middle. “Volcanoes,” Trent said when he realized what he was seeing. And now that he had the right image, he realized that a lot of the clouds down there were actually active eruptions.

“Let’s pick one that’s dormant,” Donna said.

“Good idea.”

They didn’t have a whole lot of time to decide. Every minute they spent looking meant another minute cancelling the downward velocity they picked up from the planet’s gravity. So Trent just pointed at the first island he saw that looked big enough to provide a good target and didn’t have a big thunder cloud over its peak. “There.”

“Done,” said Donna. She clicked the pointer on the widest stretch of flat land on the computer’s image of the island, then hit the “go” button. The computer zapped them over to the night side of the planet for a minute or so to kill their velocity, then popped them back into place and dropped them into the atmosphere. They made one big jump, then two more small ones, feeling out the point where the hyperdrive couldn’t go any farther, then began to drop from there. Trent used a couple more bursts of air from their dwindling supply to orient the truck so they were coming in with the parachutes on top.

“Airspeed is fifty, seventy-five, a hundred,” Donna called out. At a hundred, Trent flipped the parachute release switch, using the one they hadn’t used last time. Might as well put equal wear on them both. He’d considered using them together, since there would be no second chance if this landing didn’t go well, but then he remembered that it would just take them longer to land if he popped both chutes. They could do it down lower, just before they landed, if they wanted to, but there was really no need. One chute was enough for a normal landing.