The Shanghaiing of Shakespeare - Part 2

2.
Coffey looked through the viewscreen and frowned.
"There's nothing there," she stated.
"I ought to name you redundancy," said Trisees. "Of course there's
nothing there, that's what I'm telling you. The scanner is either
broken, or something really bad is about to happen," he growled.
Suddenly, disrupting the total quiet of the ship, a small humming
noise sounded.
Coffey looked down at Trisees, who merely shrugged.
"So I have a big mouth," he said.
The humming increased in speed, volume and pitch, eventually
causing Trisees and Coffey to futilely cover their ears.
"Where is that coming from?" Trisees shouted to Coffey.
"I don't know, but at the moment, I'm more worried about that!" she
pointed at the viewscreen.
A small white and blue dot had formed a few metres in front of the
starbug and was growing larger by the second. It seemed to pulse in
time with the humming which had now become erratic and was shifting
up and down, back and forth.
Trisees sighed.
"I can see this is going to turn out to be one of the worst ideas
of my life," he said. Hitting the throttle, he accelerated towards
the now huge dot.
"What are you doing?" shouted Coffey.
"Trust me!" replied Trisees as their starbug hit the dot.
There was a loud whine and a flash, and the starbug vanished from
space.
The birds tweeted in the nearby trees and the sun shone brightly
overhead, coating Coffey and Trisees in scorching hot sunlight.
"I don't know why I asked you to help," she said disdainfully.
"I don't know why I bothered saying yes," he replied angrily.
They were standing by a downed starbug in the middle of a field of
corn. It looked very similar to a field you'd find on earth, but the
pair knew that it couldn't be earth as the course they had undertaken
to try to capture the starbug had taken them nowhere near Sol. This
meant they'd either hit a wormhole and arrived hundreds of light
years away back on earth, or they'd crossed over into somewhere else,
and that prospect was a lot more worrying.
Trisees stared at the wrecked Starbug forlornly. This situation
meant spending longer in Coffey's company than he'd care for. One
thing guaranteed to drive him closer to that proverbial edge was
anytime spent with a woman he utterly despised with a hatred
unrivalled for anyone except her simpering boyfriend.
"It won't fix itself with us staring at it." He muttered. "I can
probably sort it out, if we had the parts or bits similar. And you
know what that means, I guess we'll have to do some exploring."
"This is just what I wanted," said Coffey, looking at the sky and
wondering if they'd ever find Shakespeare.
"I'm glad I've not disappointed you then," growled Trisees.
Turning around the pair set off away from the bug and began
trekking through the large cornfield.
"Finally! A road!" said Coffey with more than a little jubilation.
"Good, maybe we can hitch a lift, or find civilisation, or just
something other than smegging stalks of corn!" said Trisees, pulling
another set of corn ears from his labcoat.
They stepped out onto the road and breathed a sigh of relief. From
where they were, the starbug looked no more than a large bush in the
middle of the field. Deciding there was nothing they could have
done, they simply left it there, locked it, and wandered away.
Since Trisees had hit the dot, things had not gone well. The dot
had turned out to be a tunnel of some sorts, and as they had
travelled inside, the engines had cut out along with nearly every
other system on the bug. They'd been ejected from the tunnel with
such speed that Trisees had just lost all control of the bug
whatsoever and they'd spiralled towards the planet that had suddenly
appeared in front of them. A short ten minute 'flight;' later and
they'd landed bang in the middle of what appeared to be a cornfield.
The bug's engines were dead, and they were no closer to rescuing the
surgeon.
It seemed they were in danger of failing the mission.
<to be continued>