Metal Boxes - Rusty Hinges by Alan Black Page B

Captain. Aye, aye, full stop relative to any — sir, there aren’t any bodies.”
    “Engineering, sir. Full stop, aye, aye, sir.”
    Butcher turned in his chair to face the conference table. “Ensign Stone, what are you thinking?”
    “Sir, Whizzer said the Hyrocanian’s made a double jump, right?”
    Whizzer, with a shocked look on his face, nodded. Stone wanted to laugh, the man’s shocked look was probably not at their navigation predicament, but at not having jumped into the middle of a Hyrocanian fleet and been killed immediately. Stone thought the man had planned and expected to die while nuzzling his girlfriend’s neck.
    Stone continued, “It’s just a theory. What if the Hyrocanian’s were jumping into the same system we just tried to jump to and they got thrown back just like we did? So, after a time, they jumped out at random, just like we did and that random jump out landed them at Allie’s World.”
    Nav interrupted. “Wait. What do you mean, they were thrown back? We didn’t make a jump. Something went wrong and we never left hyperspace.”
    Stone shook his head. “No. I don’t think so. I had my eyes glued to the display. We got a flash of color.”
    Numos added, “I concur. I saw a blue flash.”
    “Blue?” Stone asked. “Huh. I thought the color was green, but then it happened really fast. At first, I didn’t think I saw anything. Imagined it, you know? If I’d blinked, I’d have missed it.”
    Missimaya shrugged, “I was watching the Nav console and didn’t see anything.”
    Butcher said, “Give us a playback. All screens.”
    Every monitor on the bridge showed a gray screen, replaced by a flash of color and a quick return to gray. Shouts of color volleyed around the room. Everyone saw a different color from yellow to deep purple.
    Butcher said, “Play it again. Minimum speed. Frame by frame, if you please.”
    They watched as the monitors showed gray, then at a pace almost too fast to see, they caught a picture of a solar system with a small planet in the background surrounded by four rocky moons. A dot in the middle of their screen exploded in a flash of light. The light expanded until it covered the whole screen and then returned to gray.
    Someone on the bridge cursed. Stone wanted to join in. They’d been hit by a mine that instead of killing them outright, thankfully pushed them back into hyperspace. UEN mines, and by extension Hyrocanian mines, were either shot at an enemy ship like a bomb or tethered in space near a navigation point. This mine was tethered near enough to the jump point it repulsed the Rusty Hinges, shoving it away from the system.
    Jumping out of hyperspace quickly might or might not have kept them from going too far. Time in the gray didn’t hold any relationship to distance in normal space. They might end up anywhere although they would end up exactly at the same time they entered hyperspace. Now they were stuck in the middle of nowhere.
    Another trip into hyperspace was a gamble. Anywhere they jumped to might be the place that kills them. Going into hyperspace without hitting a jump point and traveling for an exact amount of time, was a practice in drawn out suicide. When the time to jump from hyperspace came, they might jump into a sun, into a planet, into the middle of a meteor storm, or inside a black hole’s event horizon.

 
     
     
    CHAPTER FOURTEEN
     
    Stone grunted as his mind whirled with weird possibilities and stupid ideas on how to recover from their predicament. He didn’t have enough information. No one else appeared to know either.
    Butcher said, “Astrogation, can you do a chart and find out where we are?”
    “Already on it, Captain. Hopefully, we’re in our own galaxy.”
    Whizzer snorted and said, “Even being in the same galaxy might leave us screwed. Our galaxy isn’t even one of the big ones and human space only covers a tiny fraction of it.”
    Emmons patted his hand. “We got here, we can get back. It’s just a matter of