Metal Boxes - Rusty Hinges by Alan Black Page A

out of hyperspace, I want you to speak up if you see something I might have missed. Do not stand on protocol, just say something, and say it fast or it might be too late. Understand?”
    Everyone agreed except Whizzer who still had his nose buried in the nape of Emmons’s neck. Stone didn’t think it mattered since Whizzer had never learned not to speak up when a thought came into his head. Stone wasn’t jealous that the scientist got to have his girlfriend on the bridge with him, but he missed his girlfriend. Allie was in her combat suit, formed up with the marines, ready to do whatever she might be called on to do.
    Stone stared at a small screen set up on the conference table. The gray flat view was more than familiar to anyone who’d ever jumped into hyperspace. Beyond the bubble generated by the ship’s jump engines, there wasn’t any light, heat, matter, or even time. All anyone ever saw was a gray nothing in hyperspace.
    Stone had spent his childhood as a freighter’s kid, jumping through hyperspace from one station to the next. He’d seen more gray than he’d seen open planets. He’d made more jumps between planets than he’d made visits to those planets themselves. Some people claimed to be able to feel the jump, but he doubted it. There wasn’t any sensation. You were in hyperspace one moment and the next you weren’t.
    Galactic time never registered any change while in hyperspace because time didn’t exist there. The only time recorded was by the ship’s internal sensors located inside the normal space bubble encapsulating the ship while in hyperspace. A ship jumped out of hyperspace at the same time they’d jumped in, no matter what the people inside the ship thought. Time continued to click by in the hyperspace bubble, but the bubble dispersed the moment the ship jumped out of hyperspace back into normal space, taking any passing moments with it.
    No matter how much math and physics Stone studied and been tutored while earning his online degree, he still didn’t understand the time thing. Whizzer claimed to grasp the concept, but no one believed him, not even Doctor Emmons.
    Something about the nothing had always fascinated Stone. The whole thought that he could look at a video of nothing wasn’t right. It wasn’t a blank picture picked up by the ship’s external sensors, but the cameras were taking a picture of nothing. No matter what most planet-bound people thought, space wasn’t empty. There was always something such as light from a distant star, dust, or gas. But, nothing existed here. Staring at the display, he missed Butcher retaking his seat.
    The petty officer at the navigation console shouted, “Nav here, Captain. We are at —” The man held up five fingers. Then four. Then three.
    Butcher said, “On your mark, nav.”
    One finger. The man used that finger to hit the button on his console.
    Stone expected to see a solar system blink into view. He’d seen more than his share of planets, space stations, raw suns, and in one case a space station so close they almost clipped a corner of it. The monitor flashed a bright green and then blanked back to the gray.
    Butcher shouted. “Nav, report. Did we miss our jump point window?”
    “No, sir. Nav reports a perfect exit exactly where the Hyrocanian computers said we had an exit.”
    Butcher called to another console, “Engineering, did we have jump engine failure?”
    “We’re in the green, Captain. Engines report that we made the transition.”
    Stone remembered Whizzer telling him about the Hyrocanian’s performing a double jump.
    Butcher said, “We are off the mark, folks. And getting farther from our destination by the second. Somebody tell me what happened?”
    Stone said, “Captain, jump out of hyperspace now.”
    Butcher asked, “What —?
    Stone interrupted, “Right now, sir.”
    Butcher shouted, “Navigation, exit hyperspace now. Engineering, bring us to a full stop relative to any spatial bodies.”
    “Nav,