New Flash Fiction

I barely stifled a laugh at the sight of my choice for crew chief. He looked like a bit like a character from an ancient cartoon. “Hutch, what are you doing?”

“Chief Enning has his hands full keeping the engines working. I wasn’t doing much. I told him I’d have a go at the fighter elevators.”

“Any luck?” 

He waved his arms as if the answer was self-evident. “We’re still moving, aren’t we?”

“Then we can launch?”

“No.” He looked condescending. “You see the fighters lifting into the airlocks?”

I looked around reflexively. All of the fighters and all of the elevators were firmly on the floor of the hangar, just as they had been since we’d boarded Lexington. “No.”

“Then why would we be able to launch?”

“We can’t?”

“Not unless something’s changed that I’m not aware of.”

“But you said we were moving?” I couldn’t mask my confusion.

“The ship is, isn’t it?” Hutch said with a shrug. “Enning’s doing okay.”

I grabbed the edge of the rabbit hole I’d fallen down and pulled myself back up onto solid ground. It’d taken me a minute to remember that while there wasn’t anything Hutch Drummond didn’t know about anything that flew, he had all sorts of trouble keeping a simple conversation in the same perspective as most others. It was the mark of how complex his mind truly was.

I could work around it, as long as I was careful.

“Hutch, we have thirty minutes or so. We have a cargo container full of people that’s adrift as a lifepod. We need to snatch it somehow and haul it back to Ticonderoga. I need a plan.”