Anywhere but Here

13

The light grew brighter.

“Baissez-vous!” André yelled, dropping to the floor. “Go down!”

Trent dived for the floor, his chair clattering over backwards, and threw his arm around Donna as she dropped down beside him. Coffee poured off the table onto their legs from their overturned mugs, but they didn’t have time to move. The ground heaved underneath them, throwing them and everything else in the house into the air for a second, then just as they landed again, there was a deafening explosion and they were thrown sideways into the kitchen cabinets.

Wood and rocks and dirt rained down over them. Trent pulled Donna close and covered her head with his arms, realizing in a moment of wry clarity that she was doing the same for him. A chunk of branch the size of his leg smashed down beside them and tumbled away. The table had overturned; Trent grabbed it by a leg and pulled it over the top of their bodies, and they felt the jolts as more debris bounced off it.

After what seemed like half an hour, but was probably only ten seconds or so, the patter of falling rubble stopped. Trent stuck his head out from under the table and looked up. The top half of the tree had vanished as if a giant’s fist had just swatted it away, and clouds roiled overhead like smoke over a wildfire.

“Are you okay?” he asked Donna.

“I… I think so.” Her voice sounded thin and distant through the ringing in his ears.

“André?” He turned to the Frenchman, who was sitting up and shaking the dirt out of his hair.

“Je vis,” he croaked. Blood ran down his left arm from a gash in his shoulder.

Trent staggered to his feet and helped Donna up, then turned to André and extended his hand. André looked at Trent’s hand, then looked up into his face, and for a moment Trent thought André was going to come up swinging, but he took a deep breath and grasped Trent’s hand and pulled himself to his feet.

“My apologies,” he said. “I évidemment miscalculate the risk.”

“You’ve got no reason to apologize to us,” Trent said. “We’re the ones that owe you the apology, and a whole lot more than that.” He looked up at the gaping hole where the top of the tree had been. “Son of a bitch. I can’t believe those bastards would drop a bomb on us just for… for what? Parking two trucks side-by-side?”

“One of which just arrived from off-planet,” André said. “It must have looked like a rendezvous militaire.” He kicked aside an overturned chair and staggered to the door. “And since they did not kill us with their first attempt, we should expect another. We must go.”

He tried to open the door, but it was wedged tight. He kicked at it, and it moved a little, but not far enough. Trent stepped up beside him and the two of them kicked together, knocking it another few inches before it stuck again. Donna slipped in between them and said, “All three at once. One, two, three!” They kicked in unison, putting everything they had into it, and the door cleared the jamb. Two more good kicks shoved it wide enough to squeeze out through.

André grabbed his coat and the mail bag on his way out. Trent and Donna scooped up their coats from the floor where they had fallen and followed him outside, to look in stunned amazement at the destruction all around them. None of the trees had their branches anymore, and most of them were missing the top part of their trunks as well. Several had been uprooted and toppled, making instant hollow-log habitat for brontosaurs. And all around, the ground was strewn with chunks of wood, huge boulders, rocks, and dirt.

Trent’s pickup was on its side. He ran over to it and looked for damage, but it didn’t look like it had been hit with anything bigger than his fist. There were dents all over, and when he climbed up onto the passenger side, which now pointed straight up, he found a bull’s-eye crack in the window, but it looked like ground movement had tipped the pickup, rather than something knocking it over. It actually looked like they had been lucky: a boulder the size of a refrigerator lay right where they had parked. If the pickup hadn’t already been on its side, the boulder would have smashed it flat.

André’s truck was still on its wheels. There was an eight-foot-long log sticking out of the roof just behind the articulated joint in the middle, but when André climbed into the cab and fed power to the motors, it rolled forward without hesitation.

Through the blasted trunks of the trees beyond him, Trent could see the rim of the crater the meteor had made. It was at least twenty feet high, and there didn’t seem to be much curve to it. It looked more like a dam than a crater, with steam or smoke or vaporized rock rising up in a big white plume behind it. How big a rock had the U.S. dropped on them, anyway?

André circled around and called out from his window, “I will winch your vehicle upright.”

“I don’t think that’ll work,” Trent said. “We’d have to drag it forward first to clear this boulder, and that could do more damage than tippin’ over did.”

“You have no choice,” André said. “You must move within ten or fifteen minutes, or risk the next shot is being more accurate.”

That’s how long it would take to do a tangential vector translation with another big rock. Instead of matching velocity with the ground, the bomber would be maximizing the difference, sending a piece of asteroid straight down at orbital velocity or more, but it was the same basic idea. Let the planet’s gravity do the work, and incidentally create a near-infinite supply of bombs. They wouldn’t even have to sacrifice a hyperdrive engine. They could program that to detach itself and jump to safety once the rock was on the right trajectory.

Trent looked up into the sky. The clouds were too patchy to offer much cover. Whoever was watching them could jump wherever they wanted to in order to see the ground. Trent felt the hair prickling on the back of his neck at the thought that someone was looking at him right now, bringing another meteor to bear on him.

He raised his right hand and gave them the one-finger salute. Donna laughed, and he looked over at her with a sheepish grin. “The last great act of defiance, eh babe?”

“I think we’ve got a lot more defiance in us yet,” she said, and there was fire in her voice. She was hefting a rock in her hand as if she was thinking about pitching it all the way into orbit to knock down whoever had bombed them.

“You have to survive to fight another day,” André said. “Damage or no, you must move now.”

“We can jump straight into space without havin’ to drag the truck anywhere,” Trent said. Provided they hadn’t sprung any leaks. The cracked window wouldn’t matter; that was just the regular glass. The Lexan inner window was still stout as ever. Trent had no idea how the door seals had fared, but he didn’t see that he had much choice. If they righted the pickup and tried driving anywhere, they would just be inviting another strike the next place they stopped. They had to get off the planet for the colonists’ safety as well as their own, and they had a better chance of staying sealed up if they didn’t drag the pickup on its side first.

“You are right,” André said. “Go quickly, then. And when you get home, well, perhaps it is time for revolution, yes?”

“No perhaps about it,” Trent said. “Heads are gonna roll when word of this gets out.”

André smiled grimly. “The metaphor amuses me. France will gladly provide the guillotine. Now go!”

Trent bent down to give Donna a hand up, but she passed him the rock she was carrying first. It was about the size of a baseball, almost black, deeply pitted, and way heavier than it looked. “I think this is part of the meteor that hit us,” she said.

“Sure looks like it.” Trent had seen pictures of meteorites before, but he had never held one in his hand. It weighed at least three or four pounds, and was cold as ice. Whether that was from the snowy ground, or if it was still cold from being part of an asteroid that had been way the hell and gone away from the sun just a few minutes ago, he couldn’t tell, but it felt like he was holding a little bit of space in his hand. He opened the passenger door and dropped the meteorite carefully into the pickup’s cab, making sure it hit the side of the driver’s door and not the window.

Donna climbed up the truck’s undercarriage to the passenger side, then swiveled around and slid feet-first down inside the cab to stand on the driver’s door. She immediately started scrambling into her spacesuit, and Trent leaned down to check the parachute pods while she did that. Both fiberglass housings looked solid, and the wiring that led to the latch releases looked good, too. He would have liked to test them, but there was no time for that.

“Hand me up my suit,” he said, stripping off his coat and exchanging it for the plastic Ziptite. His footing was no better on the truck’s waxed paint than on snow; he had to grip the open door with one hand to keep his balance while he slid his legs into the suit and tugged the top half up over his shoulders.

He finally got it on and started to climb in after Donna, but he paused with his feet in the doorway and called out to André, who still waited beside them in his own truck, “I’m sorry about… well, about all of this. I’ll do what I can to put a stop to it.”

“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.