Anywhere but Here

11

“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.

There was no sense opening the door to look down. They could see what they were going to hit way out in front of them. Trent just made sure he and Donna were belted in tight and grabbed the steering wheel to brace himself.

The final hundred feet or so seemed to take forever, but when they hit, it felt like they had come in without a chute at all. The truck lurched up and sideways, and a huge cloud of snow billowed up around them, completely blinding them for a second before it swirled away. Trent felt the pickup tipping to the right, so he goosed the motors and cranked the wheels into the tilt and brought it upright again, but when he let off the juice the pickup kept rolling. It bounded up over a snowdrift, caught air for a second, then plowed nose-first into the next drift, throwing up another big cloud of snow.

“The chute’s draggin’ us!” Trent growled. He concentrated on steering, hoping that the fabric would catch in a clump of grass, but when they plowed through four more snowbanks without slowing, he decided to change tactics. The shroud lines stretched out straight ahead of them, but they slacked up for a second when the pickup crested a snowbank, which meant the wind wasn’t blowing much faster than they were moving.

“Hang on!” he said, and he tromped the juice pedal. The wheels spun for a second, and the uneven power to three wheels made the truck slew around sideways, but he turned into the slide and brought it back straight before they went over. And now the shroud lines were on the ground. He aimed for them, driving right over the top of them and running up their length until he drove right onto the parachute canopy. He braked to a stop while he was still on top of it, and cloth billowed up around them, flapping like mad now that it was pinned down, but it couldn’t inflate with the pickup sitting astride it.

“Can I breathe now?” Donna asked.

“I think so.” Trent set the brake and waited to see if it would hold. The pickup lurched back and forth as the parachute tugged on it, but there wasn’t enough cloth free to drag it anymore.

The radio crackled to life. “Mon dieu! Etes vous—are you all right?”

Trent picked up the microphone. “I think so. I don’t dare move until we get the chute folded up, though, or it’ll drag us to hell and gone again.”

“Stay right there. I will be there in several minutes to help.”

“Roger. Thanks.” Trent popped the latches on his door and cautiously opened it, expecting the wind to snatch it out of his hands, but it wasn’t blowing all that hard. Maybe fifteen or twenty miles an hour was all. There was just a hell of a lot of surface area on the parachute.

There was a lot of surface area on his hat, too. He felt it lift up, but he grabbed it before it could go anywhere and set it on the back of the seat.

He stepped outside. The air swirled down the open neck of his Ziptite and bit right through his shirt. “Jesus,” he said, “It’s colder’n a witch’s tit out here. Let me get our coats.”

Donna laughed. “How cold?”

“Very fucking cold!” Trent yelled as he closed his door and fought his way through the billowing parachute to the camper. He had to watch his footing in the snow; the Ziptite suit’s plastic feet were slick as skis. The chute had wrapped itself around the whole back end of the pickup, so he had to pull it away from the camper and cram it under the truck so he could get to the door, but that actually helped cut down on the amount of it catching the wind. He popped open the door and leaned in just far enough to open the storage compartment with their sleeping bags and other cold-weather gear in it, dragged out his own coat and put it on right over his Ziptite, then grabbed Donna’s coat and went back around to the cab and handed it in to her.

While she was putting it on, he went back to look at the parachute and see how they could fold it up without it getting away from them, but he would have to drive off it to even begin to fold it properly, and there was just too much wind for that.

He looked at the situation for a few seconds, his ears growing steadily colder until he pulled his stocking cap out of his pocket and tugged it down over his head. “Welcome to the Riviera,” he muttered.

The cloth at his feet was wedged up against the tires. Trent grabbed a handful of it and wadded it up in his arms, tugging more and more of what wasn’t actually under the wheels from beneath the pickup until he had all the free cloth he could get in his hands. Maybe he could tie it up with a rope or something, and then drive off of the rest of it and do the same to that? Or… yeah. He got one arm around the ball of parachute cloth, opened the camper door with his other hand, and shoved the cloth in through the door.

“Drive forward a few feet!” he yelled.

Donna popped open her door. “What?”

“Drive forward a few feet. I’m gonna pull the parachute loose a little at a time and shove it inside the camper.”

“Oh… okay.” She closed her door, then a few seconds later the pickup rolled forward.

“That’s good!” Trent slapped the side of the truck and she stopped while he gathered up more parachute, then he had her drive forward again and gathered some more until he finally got it all inside the camper. The shroud lines were a tangled mess, and there was no way he or Donna were going to fit in the camper themselves until they got the chute folded up and stowed in its proper place, but at least they wouldn’t get dragged downwind anymore.

He climbed up on top of the pickup and unbuckled the shroud lines so he could shove the whole works inside the camper. While he was up there, he spotted motion far out across the plain. A big cloud of snow was approaching from the side.

“Company’s coming,” he shouted down to Donna.

“I see them.”

Trent tossed the shroud lines to the ground and closed the empty parachute cover, then shoved the last of the lines in the camper along with everything else and slammed the door on the whole works. He hurried around to the cab again and climbed in, grateful for the warmth and still air inside.

Donna took his hands in hers. “Man, your fingers are like icicles.”

“They’ll be all right.” He released the brake and goosed the truck forward, turning toward the oncoming cloud of snow. Whoever was out there, he wanted it clear that he had taken care of his own parachute.

Donna had left the computer on the dashboard, and Trent could see that the emergency bugout screen was still active. One keystroke would take them out of a bad situation, but unless they were about to die it would send them into an even worse one, because the door latches weren’t light. He and Donna could probably seal up their Ziptites before they passed out from lack of oxygen, but he didn’t want to try it.

They could at least improve their odds. “Snug up your door,” he told her. He reached over his left arm with his right and did his own latches while he drove. Then he reached behind his head and undid the bungees holding the rifle down. Donna gave him a funny look, but she did her door, too.

They looked ridiculous with their winter coats over their spacesuits, but Trent didn’t care. It was a hell of a lot warmer that way than with either coat or suit alone, and with any luck they wouldn’t have to stay bundled up for long. He did make one concession to appearances, swapping his stocking cap for his cowboy hat. Nothing said “Don’t mess with me” quite as well as a black Stetson.

The oncoming vehicle was painted white. They were almost on it before they saw it at the head of its plume of snow. Trent veered to the right, intending to pull up alongside it and talk with the driver window-to-window, but the other driver veered the same way.

“Look out, idiot!” Trent muttered, swerving the other way, but the other driver did the same thing and they wound up aimed head-on again. They both hit the brakes and skidded to a stop with just feet to spare. Trent was working up a good rant about lunatic Frogs, but then he realized that the other driver was facing him from the same side of his vehicle and he burst out laughing instead.

“The French drive on the left!” he said. They hadn’t always, but the anti-American sentiment in Europe had changed many things.

He wasn’t about to make Donna do the talking, not when he’d been the one to get them into this situation, so he shifted into reverse and cranked the wheels hard left, spinning the pickup around practically in its own length, then he backed up until he was even with the other truck.

The other driver was laughing, too. He was bundled up in a white coat and white stocking hat, and he had a big beard to rival Trent’s, except that was mostly white, too. He waited for Trent to unlatch his inner window and remove it, then roll down his outer window; then he rolled down his own and called out across the three-foot gap between their vehicles, “Bonjour! Welcome to Mirabelle.”

If Trent had ever doubted the need to jack up his pickup’s suspension as high as he had, the last shred of doubt vanished in that moment. The Frenchman’s vehicle looked like a military troop transport or something, with big tractor tires and a blunt, boxy body with an articulated frame, but Trent was able to look the driver straight in the eye and say, “Thanks. We’ve got your mail sack in back.”

The other man nodded, then simply looked at Trent, clearly expecting him to say something more. Trent couldn’t think what it might be, but Donna whispered, “The password,” just as the Frenchman said, his accent making the words almost comical, “That’s a verra nice chapeau you have there.”

“Right,” Trent said, slapping himself on the forehead below the hat’s brim. “Man, I’d forget my head today if it wasn’t attached. Sorry about that.”

The Frenchman laughed again. “De rien. You no doubt have many things on your mind at the moment. This is most unusual for us both, eh? How is it that an American brings our mail?”

“Sergei has the flu, and we were headed out this morning, so Greg asked us if we would make a side-trip long enough to drop it off.”

“I see. Eh bien, he must have his reasons to trust you, and here you are with the mail after all, so that trust was not injustifié. Do you wish to transfer the mail here, or would you like to go somewhere a bit less exposed?”

Trent wondered if he meant that in terms of weather or strategically, but either way the answer was the same. “Let’s get out of this wind. I’ve got my parachute balled up in the camper, and it’d be a damned sight easier to fold up if it wasn’t flappin’ all over the place.”

The Frenchman nodded. “Yes, no doubt it would. Come, then, I will lead you to my sanctuary. It’s only a few kilometers from here. Perhaps you would have time to take déjeuner—the lunch—with me? I seldom have the chance to practice my English with a native speaker.”

“Well…” Trent said, but Donna leaned over before he could say anything more and said, “We’d love to.”

The Frenchman smiled wide. “Ah chère madame, you will not have the regrets! Follow me!” He rolled up his window and pulled forward, swinging around to the left and heading back the way he had come. Trent hit the juice to follow, discovered the embarrassing way that he was still in reverse, then shifted into forward and took off after him.