“Be careful, Elliot,” his grandmother had said to him. “Try to stay out of trouble.”

I tried, Grandma, Eli thought. “By Christ, I tried.” As the sleek craft tore through the stars, Eli was careful to check and recheck the trajectory his ship was following. He had heard stories from pilots back home and knew well enough the danger. The tiniest miscalculation could cause to wind up light-years away from his destination.

As if he had any idea where that was.

Eli wiped his eyes, freeing the caked-up goop that had resulted from a lack of sleep. “Talk to me, Orion,” he sighed, bringing his shipboard Artificial Intelligence into view on the screen before him. “Are we being followed?”

The shimmering green-and-gray figure, made of bits of code, shook his head. “My scanners aren’t picking anything up.” Orion’s head rose quickly. “There’s some indistinct chatter on the communication channel…from what I can tell, they’ve got ships all over space looking for us.”

“Oh, come on!” Eli cried, shaking his fists angrily at the stars. “Any suggestions?”

“Well, we could make a blind jump. No program involved, so there’s no chance of leaving an echo behind to be followed.” Orion made a sound like breathing, and Eli cringed; AIs were far too humanlike. “But there’s too much danger attached to that. I say we stay on course.”
Eli’s fright instantly outweighed his caution. He pushed a small red button to his side; the Nelson Sub-Light Engine mounted on the hull hummed to life. Orion panicked. “Eli, what the hell are you doing?!”

Eli smiled at the AI’s outburst. “I’m making a blind jump, pal.” A hole opened in the space in front of the ship; it was barely noticeable, a brighter shade of black.

“Are you out of your mind!?” The AI shouted. “What if we crash into something!?”

Eli accelerated the ship straight into the wormhole. As the gravity surrounding the hole sucked up the ship, the pilot, and the AI, the pilot whispered, “But what if we don’t?” The ship disappeared, and the hole closed with a wink.

An alternate galaxy, an empty universe. The sixth dimension before his very eyes. With every jump he made, Eli became more and more astounded by the fact that something like this was even possible. A Nelson Sub-Light engine opens two holes in space simultaneously; an entry and an exit. When a ship enters the sixth dimension, it simply ceases to exist in normal time and space. Then, a fraction of a second later, it emerges from the exit hole back into normal time and space.

Of course, to a ship and its passengers, it feels as though hours upon hours upon hours pass.

Scanning equipment was all but useless here, so Eli powered it all down.

“I hope you’re happy,” Orion spat. “You’ve killed us!”

“Can it, you glorified adding machine. Listen, I’m going to go take a nap. I want you to wake me up as soon as we get there, okay?” He spun his fake-leather chair around and stood up.

As he walked to the large closet tat served as his bedroom, the AI asked, “Where is there, anyway?”

“I don’t know. That’s the point of a blind jump.”

The AI appeared on the pedestal next to Eli’s worn-out mattress. “We can’t run forever, you know.”

Eli stripped down to his boxers and climbed onto the bed, yawning. “Yeah, I expect they’ll catch us eventually. But we can give ‘em one beauty of a runaround before they do, trust me.”

The AI turned the lights down and whispered, “Good night, Eli.”

“Good night, Orion.”

Eli could not immediately sleep; his mind was aflame with worry. Among the subjects he was worried about was why the FPG would be after him at all; for the most part, however, any reason was enough to run away from. Eventually, though, the part of him that was tired won out, and Eli fell into a deep slumber.

Several hours later, Orion brought the lights back up. Eli blinked rapidly against the bright onslaught, his eyes slowly returning to focus. “Get up and get dressed,” Orion said. “We just dropped back into normal space. Eli…you have got to see this.”

The words sounded garbled and foreign to Eli’s still-sleeping ears. All the same, he did as he was told. As he walked onto the small bridge, cramming a nutrient bar into his mouth, he gazed in wonder through the plasti-steel window. “Orion,” he began, swallowing the tasteless cube, “is that…is that what I think it is?”

The AI nodded on the viewscreen. “Yes. That is Earth.”

Eli fell into the pilot’s chair. “What the hell are we doing here?”

“Blind jump, remember?”

“Oh yeah.” The reality of the situation struck him then; he was in orbit around a dead planet…the perfect hiding place. “Orion,” he commanded. “Scan the planet. Let me know if there’s a safe place to land. Also, see if there are any Federation ships around.”

A few moments later, the Artificial Intelligence responded testily, “Uploading possible landing coordinates now. There’s one ship, but it’s on the edge of the system. It doesn’t know we’re here.” Then, with a slow release of breath, he said, “Eli, I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Since when has that stopped me?” He grinned madly, adjusted his seatbelt, and keyed in the landing sequence. The ship immediately descended into the upper atmosphere. “Orion, I’m gonna need you to adjust the shields to compensate the burn-through.”

“On it.”

The ship ripped through what was left of the layers of the atmosphere. Even with the energy shields in place, Eli still thought he felt the heat seeping through the plasti-steel window and into his face; he knew, though, that it was impossible. If it were really happening, the ship would be undergoing explosive decompression and he would likely die. A few minutes later, the ship touched down on one of the continents on the Western Hemisphere. From what Eli could remember of his galactic history classes, this landmass was called ‘America’.

“There’s no more radiation,” Orion said. “Been a long time since the war. Be careful, though. Take a COM link with you if you plan on going out.”

Eli plugged the microphone/speaker headset into the battery/transmitter on his belt. After a moment’s hesitation, he picked up a pistol, loaded it, and turned on the safety. He didn’t expect an attack, but by God, he’d be ready for one.