out of the frying pan

Chief was seated at the command station on the bridge, with First Rate F. Seeley in the pilot position to his right hand.....Seeley was trying to make sense of the incoming data from the far sensor array.....but it all just seemed wrong.....the values were nothing he had ever encountered before.....

"Chief, what's going on? Where are we exactly? Navigation parameters are not reaching any coherence."

"Well, Frank, when the attack came the enemy released a whole swarm of advanced hunter-killers.....probably Machine weapons purchased from unregulated sources further down towards Center.....they took out the rest of the Group, and they were after Ready too.....so I did the only thing I could think of....I took us where a Machine won't go."

Frank Seeley sat and waited for the Old Man to continue.

"You see, the Machines fought a war once with the Ghosts.....the inhabitants of the next layer over in the Multiverse....and the Machines got their butts kicked.....so no Machine weapon will cross over the dimensional membrane....not even to fulfill a killer function in hot pursuit."

Frank thought about this carefully.....

"So, the sensors are acting strange because the physical constants in this layer of reality do not compute compared to the constants embedded in System?"

The Old Man turned and smiled at the pilot....

"You got it the first time, son.....things seem strange because they damn well are strange....we escaped getting blasted to bosons by going a little sideways during a jump.....enough to slide through to the other side .....we're in Ghost territory now....."