Metal Boxes (16 page)

Wright shook her head. “No
, Mister Stone, it is ever so much worse than that.” She reached forward and hit a series of toggle switches. The bulkheads slid back into the ceiling, revealing a viewport that was showing a grayish nothing.

“Oh crap!”
Stone said.

“Oh crap indeed,”
Wright agreed. “I presume you have seen this before. I thought it was just that the view port was painted over so we couldn’t see out. But I ran the image through my p.a. and you know what I found, right?”

“Crap. We are in hyperspace.”

“Yes, Mister Stone, we have been put into a stripped out model 1623TZA emergency escape module and tossed into hyperspace. I think that is a bad thing, yes?”

“Crap. Commander Wright, we might have been better off if they had just killed us. Do you know how hyperspace works?” When she shook her head he continued, “Good, because that would make you freaky smart
, instead of just normal smart and pretty.”

Wright smiled, “Pretty, huh? I
can see what Allie sees in you and I know what she means when she says you are full of it. However, what I know about hyperspace is that we go in here and come out there. I never understood the time thing though.”

Stone knew that only a handful of physicists working for the Emperor
claimed to understand the time ‘thing’. Hyperspace allowed ships to traverse huge distances of space in a fraction of the time it would have taken with sub-light engines. A relatively short three week jaunt through hyperspace might have taken centuries in normal space.

However, the truly bizarre thing was
those same physicists insisted that when a ship jumped through hyperspace, it exited hyperspace at its destination at the exact time it entered hyperspace. In effect, the ship was in hyperspace for three weeks and then exited at the exact time it entered hyperspace, being in both places at the same time. This was proven time and again with timepieces and clocks of all kinds. There was no loss of external time going through a hyperspace jump.

This
was further complicated by the fact that everyone inside the spaceship knew they had just spent a few weeks traversing a grayish void of hyperspace. The physicists insisted spaceships and everything in them did not exist in hyperspace because hyperspace was nothing and nothing could exist in nothing. It did not matter if the people on the ships were working, eating, sleeping or playing checkers; they were not there. It did not matter if they remembered each moment and every activity. And it did not matter if every internal clock, no matter how precise, had to be reset to match the rest of the universe upon leaving hyperspace.

“Commander, you said this was a stripped out
escape module, right?” Stone asked.

Wright nodded, “Yes, Mister Stone, and unfortunately according to the flight manuals we have
a sub-light engine that works, but we do not have a hyperspace drive. So, we can’t be in hyperspace, right?”

Stone
was thinking and absentmindedly waived a hand at her. “That doesn’t matter, we aren’t here anyway. We are ‘when’ we entered hyperspace and we are ‘where’ we are when we exit hyperspace.”

“Nope
,” Wright said, shaking her head. “I still prefer working with goats. I have no idea what you just said.”

“We wouldn’t have
a hyperspace drive. They don’t serve any purpose on an escape pod. No one would ever leave a ship during hyperspace, no matter what the emergency. So, without a hyperspace drive, the Periodontitis must have been in hyperspace when we were expelled from the ship. There isn’t any other way for that to happen as we don’t have the systems to jump into or out of hyperspace.”

“
Oh, that is comforting to know,” Wright said sarcastically.

“Commander Wright, I don’t know if we are mildly screwed or if we are royally screwe
d. All I can say it that we are…”

Both Stone and Wright looked at each other and spoke together “screwed.”

“Yeah…I mean, yes Commander Wright,” Stone said. “How stripped is this pod?”

“I don’t really know how much stuff should be here in the first place. I have never been in one. I would assume there would be food, air and water for at least twenty-four people for however long it took them to escape from their ship and get picked up by a rescue vehicle.”

Stone nodded, “Yes, or make planet-fall somewhere. We had a class at officer’s school on basic planetary survival skills.”

“How did you manage doing
a class on survival skills with your problem of being outside?”

Stone grinned, “It was all book learning, Commander. And I could get to the classroom from the barracks by way of a tunnel. It wasn’t an issue. So, we have plenty of food, air and water?”

Wright shook her head no. “We have reasonably full water tanks and air shouldn’t be a problem, but it looks like almost everything else has been stripped out. If the designer of this escape pod expected people to survive on a planet they would have put supplies on board for the survivors.”

“Yes, I would guess those bins under the bunks would normally be stuffed with all manner of survival gear, instead of empty like they are. Have you found any food?”

“Oh yes. We have four…well, three now, survival bars I found in packs under these command chairs.” She grabbed a pack from the console behind her. Opening it up displayed various first aid supplies, a knife, fishing gear, fire starters, and other small items. There was an emergency nutrition bar.

Stone grinned. “
We stock these at home on the Golden Boulder. Nasty tasting things, but it has everything to keep you alive. Did you eat the whole thing?” Stone was laughing.

Wright nodded, “Mister Stone, it is not appropriate for
midshipmen to laugh at full commanders. I wish I hadn’t eaten anything at all. I really wish it would hurry up and pass through me. It feels like a solid lump sitting in my guts.”

“Gas, too?
” Stone laughed.

Wright looked embarrassed. “Sorry, you noticed?”

Stone laughed harder. “No Commander, but that is what happens when you eat a whole bar. They are designed to provide all the nutrients you need for four days per bar. They are also designed to plug up your…the ability to…I mean…you can’t go to the bathroom, right? That is because in an emergency you aren’t supposed to have time to stop and visit the toilet. But, the gas builds up and finds its way out anyway…ah.”

“I still don’t see that it is funny…what?”

“Are the sub-light fuel tanks filled up?” Stone asked.

“
We have full tanks according to the display the manual says to read. Whoever stripped this out only stole the stuff they could easily use or sell. Sub-light fuel would not be that easy to sell, why?”

“Is there an oven on board?”

“Yes, it is right here.” She tapped the bulkhead behind her. A section slid away to reveal an oven door.

Stone mused, “Huh? I wonder if it will work…?”

“If what will work?” Wright asked.

“
Having a gas attack reminded me of something I read in a magazine. No, it wasn’t a magazine; it was in a Captain Allnut Space Ranger comic strip.” He looked at the oven and out at the gray void of hyperspace. He shook his head no, reached up and flicked off the toggles shutting the shields over the viewports. “No. I don’t think it will work, but will most likely kill us. I just don’t know whether it will kill us fast or kill us slow.”

Wright laughed, “Do you think it matters? I sure don’t have any
way for us to get out of this mess of yours. This is all your fault anyway, Mister Stone. I am going to give you an order. If you got an idea, go ahead and try it. You don’t even have to make me understand it, just tell me what you need me to do.”

Stone
said, “We will have to make some changes to the engine so it can convert heavier matter to energy. We need to strip whatever material we can from the inside of the escape pod. We need to enrich the sub-light engine fuel; sort of make it thicker. This is going to take some time to set up, okay?”

Wright laughed, “We are in hyperspace, remember. There isn’t any time.”

Stone shook his head, “There isn’t any time out there in hyperspace. We are in a small bubble of normal universal space that we brought with us into hyperspace. We have time inside of this bubble. We may spend enough time that we may be pushing the limit on these nutrition bars by the time we are ready to try a hyperspace jump without a hyperspace capable spaceship.”

“Ooh, you make it sound so enticing. More gas bars and then imminent death. I
have got to remember to tell Allie that you really are a fun date.”

Stone blushed, “Why
? What did she say?”

Wr
ight laughed so hard she farted, making a large ‘blatt’. She laughed harder.

Stone laughed and tried to explain that sub-light engines and hyperspace jump engines were not that different. A sub-light engine output is slow and steady
, moving a ship through normal space. A hyperspace jump engine gathers its power into one big push as it generats a bubble of normal space and pushes the bubble into hyperspace. It was kind of like making a bubble by blowing though a kid’s soap bubble ring.

Of course, a hyperspace engine
had to generate the exact amount of power. Too little power and the bubble wouldn’t form. Too much power and the bubble would burst. Sub-light engines had throttles, but no real way to build up power and push it out all at once. Stone was going to have to make some unusual and seriously dangerous modifications to the sub-light engines. Rather than causing a bubble to form, they were going to try to push a hole in the bubble they were in allowing them to escape back into normal space. It would be like making a pin prick in a balloon and letting all of the air out through that tiny hole without causing the balloon to burst.

CHAPTER TEN

Commander Wright and
Midshipman Stone spent two days using survival knives to cut every scrap of the escape pod’s inside and shove it into the oven. They cooked everything down into a watery, putty-like consistency. The bedding from the bunks caused quite a stink, but the air scrubbers were designed to handle twenty-four people in tight quarters while eating special nutrition bars. The scrubbers quickly refreshed the air. Stone had the scrubbers condense any particulate matter pulled from the air and he fed it into the oven adding to their putty.

He also
tore out the shower plumbing. Using the pipes, he built a conduit from the oven to the sub-light engine intake valves. Every time the oven was full to capacity with putty, he poured it into the engines, packing it as tightly as he could.

The engine w
as off. They didn’t need to worry about using them to run any of the pod’s systems. The lights, air and water systems ran off battery power. There were not any interstellar bodies to generate gravity wells in hyperspace, so the engine was not necessary to keep them on course. There was not any need for them to even set a course. No one had ever proven that a spaceship moved through hyperspace. The prevailing theory was nothing moved in hyperspace, but normal space shifted around while a ship was making hyperspace transit.

The artificial gravity ran off power from the sub-light engine, but even without
the continuous power feed the artificial gravity system would continue to provide gravity to the escape pod for days. The series of liquid heavy-metal discs spun on almost-frictionless spindles. The artificial gravity was set at human standard 1.0. As the discs slowly spun down, the gravity levels in the pod would become less and less. Stone thought they would be ready to try a hyperspace jump long before they became weightless.

They had cut the bunks into small pieces and fed
the pieces into the oven. The flat slabs were made of extruded metal alloy that was light, but inflexible. When cooked down it became a fine, powdery slurry that mixed easily into the putty-like mixture. The bunk frames required such a high heat setting in the oven that the command bridge temperature became almost uninhabitable.

They tried to cut up
deck plating, but they could not even scratch the surface. Their survival knives had not been dulled in the process, but they were ineffective against some surfaces. They left the two command bridge chairs intact. The chairs were comfortable enough to sleep on and had command functions built directly into them. Dismantling them may have unexpected consequences.

Finally, Wright said, “That is it, Stone. We are down to everything that we can melt down, burn up,
rip out or shove in.”

Stone
pointed at the bathroom. “We have left the sink and toilet in place. At this point, I am not sure it will add any real value to our mix. They are both made of some light alloy that seems to be mostly air anyway.”

Wright shook her head. “I didn’t argue when you tore out the shower,
or when you made me rip the door to the bathroom down. But, I draw the line at not having a toilet. I want a toilet and a place to wash my hands when I am done, especially if we do survive this jump, okay? So, forget about tearing them out.”

Stone shrugged, “You are the Commander. I bow to your greater wisdom.”

“Then, let’s not wait. We are as ready as we are going to get.” She headed for the command bridge and plopped into a chair. When Stone was seated next to her, she looked at him and said, “I am ready when you are, Mister Stone. Push your buttons and get this show on the road.” She squeezed her eyes shut and gripped the arms of the chair.

“
Aye, aye, Commander,” Stone replied. He reached forward to the console and pushed the toggles that withdrew the shields from the viewports.

“Was that it? Did we die?” She asked.
Wright peeked through one small eye slit. She saw the gray void and sighed. “Didn’t work, huh?”

Stone laughed
. “Sorry, Commander, I just wanted to open the windows first to see where we are when we come out.”

“What do you mean ‘see where we are’?
” Wright looked startled. “Aren’t we going to come out at the same time and same place as the Ol’ Toothless? I thought you said that we can’t change course in hyperspace?”

“We can’t change course, but I don’t know whether our course was changed when we were pushed away from the
Ol’ Toothless or whether we are travelling along with her. We may be a hair’s width away from her hull and being pulled along with her at her exit. Or, we may be a hair’s width away from the Ol’ Toothless’ hull and still jump completely into a different place. I don’t know.”

“Wait a minute
,” Wright said. The confusion in her voice was evident. “I thought that if the Ol’ Toothless and this pod jumped into hyperspace at the same time then we will exit at the same time, right? So, how do we know when to push the button to jump? How do we manage to time our jump with the Ol’ Toothless?”

Stone laughed
at her confusion, “Exactly, Commander, now you are catching on.”

“No
, I am not. If you don’t kill me with this rebuilt jump engine, then I am going home and never getting into another space ship again. I can raise goats at home just as well as in space. This is too confusing.”

Stone
tried to explain. “In our time line, inside our bubble, which I think is just a small piece of the bubble from the Ol’ Toothless’ bigger bubble; they could have already jumped out of hyperspace. Then if we wait for another couple of weeks, assuming we had enough food and water, we would still exit at exactly the same time.”

“Do you really understand what you are saying,
Midshipman?”

Stone shook his head
. “Not really. It doesn’t make sense to me; it is just the way it is.”

“Okay then,
since we know ‘when’ we are going to exit the question is ‘where’ are we going to come out?” Wright asked.

Stone shook his head again. “I don’t have a clue.
We may jump out and still be a hair’s width from the Ol’ Toothless, we may be at the other end of the galaxy, or we may be entirely outside of our own galaxy altogether. Still, wherever we jump out of hyperspace the question will be can we still use this sub-light engine to get us to a habitable planet before we run out of air and water.”

“And food
,” Wright added.

“Oh no
, Commander,” Stone replied with a sinister laugh. “I think that if I ration you correctly I will be able to feed off your body for a couple of weeks.”

Wright laughed nervously
. “You know, sometimes I can’t tell whether you are kidding or not.”

“You know Commander, sometimes I don’t know myself
,” Stone winked at her.

“
We know when we are going to exit hyperspace, but we don’t know where. We will probably jump into empty space and turn to cannibalism before we die.”

Stone shook his head
. “You missed the possibilities that we might exit hyperspace by jumping into the heart of a planet and be crushed. Or jump into the corona of a sun and burn to death. Or jump into the middle of a Hyrocanian battle fleet.”

“Enough, I don’t want to know anymore. There are too many horrible possibilities.”

“Oh, you don’t need to worry about those things. The way I have this rigged will probably cause the engine to explode and kill us outright.”

“You are really cheerful to be around today, you know that? Okay, I didn’t think I wanted to know, but what did
you do the engine?”

Stone grinned
. “You gave me the idea. What we did was jam too much energy rich matter into the engine intakes. I have blocked the exhaust at the re-breather ports, disconnected all of the power regulators, and shut off a dozen or so other bits and pieces of the engine. The engine will build up a massive bubble of energy that will have to find a release point and then it will expel energy in the form of gas through a cobbled together jump port and push us back into normal space.”

“You are going to make the engine fart?”
Wright looked at him in shock.

Stone laughed. “Oh yeah, and if we ever get back to Empire Space
I am going to write this whole thing up as a technical specification and call it the Danielle Wright Propulsion Method.”

Wright shook a fist at him. “You do and I will have my father hunt you down.”

“Your parents still at home? Where is home anyway?” Stone asked.

“Fort Collins, Colorado.” She answered.

“Colorado? I don’t know where that is.”

“It is a small
planetary system just outside of the Ursis Major cluster. It is a-”

Stone reached out a hand and slapped the engine start button.

Nothing happened.

Wright said
. “Nothing happened.”

“
Sorry, I thought that if I distracted you it wouldn’t be such a tense moment when I hit the go-button. We have to give it time to back up. Close your eyes, click your heels three times and say ‘there is no place like home’. According to Grandma that always helps.”

Wright snorted. “Yeah, right!”

“It couldn’t hurt,” Stone shrugged. He leaned forward to check the engine pressure gauge. It was creeping slowly toward the mark he had scratched into the gauge face.”

He heard ‘…no place like home. There is no place like home. There is…’ The gauge hit the mark. He hit
a secondary button; fully expecting to die fast, or to die slow, or to die in some manner in between.

Stone
got the last thing he expected. The gray of hyperspace disappeared and the blackness of space, riddled with bright stars, soundlessly popped into place. He looked over at Commander Wright. She still had her eyes shut, chanting as if the phrase were a mantra she could use to will the universe to bend to her wishes.

“Um, Commander Wright?”
Stone said softly.

“Don’t bug me,
boy. Just let me know before you hit the go button.”

“I already did and if we are dead then heaven looks a lot like normal space.”

Wright opened her eyes, saw stars and whooped. She jumped out of her chair and kissed him on the lips. She did a little dance and sat back down with another whoop. She looked over at Stone and said “Whoop? You aren’t whooping. We are alive in normal universal space...” Her voice faded to nothing as she looked at Stone.

“Maybe we pushed ourselves into a completely different universe
,” Stone said with a shrug.

Wright laughed. “Then you proved the existence of the multi-verse and a way to get from one to the other. Genius! I’ll be famous for being along
on the ride. So, now what, boy genius?”

“Well,
the data base on this escape pod is a bit small. If my personal assistant hadn’t been wiped, I could have used the star charts I had there to upgrade them. But, I am going to try for a scan of the star systems to see if we can determine where we are.”

“What are we going to do about getting out of this
metal box?”

“We don’t have enough computing power to
both map all of the stars and to do a visual scan looking for habitable planets, but-”

“But, nothing. Look for a planet
,” Wright interrupted. “That is my command decision. Do we have enough engine power to get to a planet if we can find one?”

“
Aye, aye, Commander Wright, I will search for a planet. But, there are two ‘ifs’ on getting to a planet. We have to consider the level of go juice left in the fuel reservoir. That it is a big ‘if’. It is ‘if’ we find one a planet that is not too far away. There is the ‘if’ of whether we can restart the engine. That blast may have ruptured every seal and valve. We will just have to dig into the engine and see what we can make work.”

The pod pinged at them.

Stone frowned. “I haven’t programmed it to look for a habitable planet yet. But, it is saying it found one.”

“This is an escape pod, Mister Stone. It is probably designed to automatically look for a place to put down. Look, it just started sending out a distress message.”

Stone pointed at a display. “It is telling us there aren’t any friendly rescue ships in the area and is asking if we want to head for the planet it found.”

Wright reached forward to press the button to head to the planet.

Stone shouted, “No! Stop! Sorry, Commander, but I need to clear the engine ports before we turn the engine back on. It would also be best if we clear the slurry pipe between the engine and the oven. We don’t want to cause another back up.”

Wright threw her hands in the air. “I surrender. You are in command from now on.”

“Thank you, but you are still the boss; just remember to ask me before you order me to do something. Okay?” Stone replied with a smile.

“
Aye, aye, Mister Stone. Roger wilco. Yes, sir. Now, if you will excuse me, but our last little hyperspace jump has helped to work some of that nutrition bar through my system. I’ll be in the back. Since you took the door of the toilet, you will, I repeat, will remain upfront or down in the engine room until I say different.”