Alpha One - Chris Burton [151]
“Will they see anything the other side?”
“No. They will only witness the explosion if they are at this end of the wormhole. If they are at this end they will be vaporized. Are you thinking about the Kryl, or the Alpha vessels still in the Kryl galaxy?”
“Both, really. In any event, nothing will stand in the way of the charges’ deployment. If this works and we have finished off the Kryl here, then the whole Kryl ‘invasion’ can be archived once and for all.”
Cameron shifted uncomfortably. He had done his bit. Success or failure was down to the jump ship Pilots. He smiled again and paused briefly. “It will work, Admiral; It will work.”
* * * *
On the other side of the wormhole, Hoskins sighed deeply. He lost over one hundred crew members, and they were still the wrong side of the wormhole and light years from home. He found it hard to look on the bright side. He was tasked with following Winterburn, and he interpreted that task as recapturing him and bringing him back to Alpha. That task failed, and for the loss of so many people. Would it not have been better to stay with the individual ships when they first entered the wormhole? What happened to them? He thought. If they were all dead that was yet more deaths on his conscience. Clearly his interpretation was wrong.
The Halo 7 was at maximum thrust. The Stellar Drive was offline and the ship ran under the power of one of the ion-reformatting drives, at a sub-light speed of 0.78 SD. He calculated their estimated arrival at the blue wormhole fissure in a little less than thirty-six hours. This would allow for further repairs to be carried out, and for Obeya, Carter and the Stevenson sisters to catch up. The Eagle was in a pretty poor state and there was no way they should risk entering the wormhole with a ship in that condition. Hoskins would decide nearer the time as to whether they should wait for the Eagle to return or enter the wormhole immediately. Right now, his mind was clear; he would wait, but the pressure was building—more Kryl ships were being monitored on the long-range scans. If they were heading for the wormhole, then he would be through it and out the other side now rather than encounter them again.
The Eagle experienced further problems. Jake’s Rambo-esque style onslaught on the Kryl and the demolition of the Eagle’s inner access door, together with the close proximity laser attack on the Sabre, created serious flaws in the Eagle’s structural integrity. This was accepted, and Jake and Obeya took turns patching the blast areas while the other manned the pilot seat. The repairs were temporary and the Eagle’s hull continued to weaken from its original state.
The Sabre was disconnected manually and allowed to float free before scuttling remotely. She had done her job. They left Carla and Joely to recover from their ordeal in the main compartment, having first transferred all the Kryl bodies to the rear compartment to join Winterburn.
* * * *
The compartment was carbon-frozen to preserve the Kryl bodies during transit. Obeya asserted that now the Alpha forensic teams could examine the bodies even if they could not clearly talk to them.
The Eagle’s drive system was failing intermittently. Obeya discovered the Eagle had lost several hundred heat-shield tiles during the skirmish with the Sabre. Both of these new problems were irreparable, given the current circumstances. The drive system would require cooling off and shutting down before a repair could be effected, and to fit replacement shields meant someone would have to manually affix new tiles from the outside. Both of these fixes were desirable, but impossible, given the relative movements of Kryl vessels on the scanner. The lack of heat shields meant travelling through the wormhole would be impossible, and the drive system problem meant a further reduction in velocity to under two hundred thousand kilometers per hour. At that rate it was going to take another twenty hours to reach the Halo 7.
Jake left Obeya in the cockpit and joined Carla in the main compartment.