Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

“Not us, then.” She said it playfully, but Trent looked out the windshield at the hard, unblinking stars and felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

“Not if we do too much of this.”

She shrugged. “I’d rather die doing something than just sitting around waiting to grow old.”

“Me too, but I sometimes wonder what sort of things are worth dying for.”

She looked out the windshield, too. “Sights like this are worth it,” she said after a moment. She cocked her head to the side, then pointed. “Look, there in Cassiopeia. That extra star? That’s the Sun.”

Cassiopeia. The “W” shaped one up near the north star. A year ago, Trent wouldn’t have been able to tell it from Orion, but the last few months had made him a reluctant convert to popular astronomy. He followed Donna’s outstretched finger and saw the five zigzag stars, plus another zig.

“Which end is the extra one?” he asked.

“The left side.”

So that was the Sun. It was a little brighter than the other stars, a fact that Trent found somehow encouraging.

He checked his watch. They still had five minutes to go before landing, but they’d been sealed up in the truck for maybe fifteen minutes already; it was probably time to refresh their air. He opened the stopcock by his door handle and let a couple of pounds of pressure out, swallowing to make his ears pop and watching the moisture in the air flash to fog in the vacuum outside, then he closed the stopcock and replenished what he’d bled off from the compressed-air tank under Donna’s side of the seat. When he was designing their pickup starship, he’d spent a long afternoon trying to decide whether or not he wanted to store their breathing air and their maneuvering air in the same tank. It was just plain old compressed air in either case, but it somehow seemed scary to think of watching your breathing air whoosh into space every time you maneuvered, so he had decided to separate them. Then of course he had plumbed them together so he could use either one for either purpose, reasoning that it gave them a backup system in case one tank sprang a leak.

He had positioned the pressure relief jet to push against the trucks center of mass, so it wouldn’t start them spinning. They might pick up a few feet per second of sideways velocity, but that was nothing to worry about.

He looked out again at the Sun hanging there ahead of them, then back at the dark planet blocking the stars behind them.

“This is one of those, what-you-call-’em, metaphor moments, ain’t it?” he asked.

Donna gave him an odd look. “How do you mean?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Just… here we are, headin’ out from the dark past into the bright new future, ready to roll the moment we get wherever we’re going…”

He left it hanging, already embarrassed and afraid to say anything more, but Donna reached out and took his hand in hers, their plastic spacesuits crinkling softly, and the look in her eyes told him he’d said something right.

But where were they going, anyway? Trent looked at the Sun hanging there in the distance, surrounded by more stars than he could see from the ground even on a clear dark night in Rock Springs, and wondered. Bigtown today, but where tomorrow? Where the day after that? He didn’t have a clue.

When their twelve minutes were up, the navigation program beeped a ten-second warning, then flipped them a third of the way around the planet, directly over Bigtown. The planet was overhead now, which meant that the pickup was about to enter the atmosphere upside down. Trent used the front air jets to shove its nose down until the planet slid around behind them, then beneath them. He hit the back jets to stop their motion, but inertia carried them on for a couple of seconds, and they wound up nose-down with the planet spread out in front of them like a map.

Beneath scattered puffy clouds was a long mountain range, all snow-capped peaks and green forest, running diagonally from upper right to lower left. Rivers cut meandering lines out into the foothills, which gave way to smooth grassland stretching off into the distance. Nicholas Onnescu had picked a good spot to settle.

Suddenly it expanded, then again and again as the navigation program dropped them ten kilometers at a time toward their target, which Trent assumed was not Bigtown itself, but a flat spot a ways out of town. The horizon went from curved to straight, and the view became more and more like the everyday sight from a high-flying airplane. Then the computer beeped at them and the view stopped changing.

“We’re as low as it can take us,” Donna said, “but we still have some upward velocity, so don’t pop the chute yet.”

“Right.” They were at the wrong angle for that anyway. Trent used the rear jets to push them around until the planet was below them, then hit the front jets to stop that motion, but he’d reacted too late again and they overshot the other way, going in tailfirst now. “This is trickier than it looks,” he muttered.

“You’re doing fine. We’ve still got fifteen seconds.”

“Heck, let’s take a nap,” Trent said, hitting the front jets, then immediately hitting the rear jets. That took them about halfway around to where they needed to be, so he did it again. That put them at the right angle front-to-back, but the left-side jets apparently had more push than the right-side ones, because now the ground was drifting upward on Trent’s side. He tapped the right-side valves just as the computer apparently decided they had risen high enough for it to make another ten-kilometer jump downward, so it looked for a second as if the air jets had somehow shoved them down hard.

Trent flinched back from the controls, then laughed nervously. “Damn! I’m gettin’ a little punchy here.”

“You’re doing fine,” Donna said again. “According to this our velocity is just about zero, so we want to pop the chute in about five seconds anyway. Four… three… two… one… now.”

There was no sound of air rushing past, but Trent knew that they had just sped up to about three hundred kilometers per hour in those five seconds. That was about two hundred miles an hour, a little fast to be opening a cargo parachute if you were down where the air was thick, but up here in the thin stuff at the edge of space, that was just about right.

He reached up to the switch panel above the rearview mirror and flipped the left-hand toggle, but his plastic glove caught on the right-hand one and flipped it, too. There was a double bang from overhead as the fiberglass cover over both parachutes popped open, then a long couple of seconds while the chutes streamed upward.

“Shit,” he said in the silence. “That was our reserve chute, too.” Now they didn’t have any backup if they had to abort their landing. They could expand the jump field to include the canopies, but that took a lot more power, and it would still leave them with both chutes unfurled in vacuum. They would have to go outside in their Ziptites and fold them up, a job that was anywhere from dangerous to impossible, depending on whose stories you believed. But trying to enter an atmosphere with a chute already deployed was just as dangerous.

He was expecting a hard jolt when they both filled at once, and it didn’t disappoint him, but it was nothing like their first time. Then, they had been guessing their speed by eye, and the jolt had left marks on their butts from the seat springs.

That had been on the way out. On the way home they’d guessed better, and their first chute had deployed just fine, only to get zapped by a laser satellite that had apparently thought they were an incoming missile. Their second chute had gone the same way a few minutes later, and they’d had to jump back into space and radio for help—help that wouldn’t have come if Allen Meisner and Judy Gallagher hadn’t just returned to Earth with the aliens they had met on their own travels.