Ellis had felt it as soon as the ship had fled the jovian. At first he had put it down to the effects of damage, or the hammering meted out to both Apollo and its crew. Then, for a time, he had simply been too busy to dwell on it: as soon as the battlecruiser left the shadow of the gas-giant it had been detected by the Wraith fleet, and Ellis’ attentions had been fixed very firmly on not getting Apollo blasted to atoms before it reached the safety of hyperspace.
It had been a tense time. Several Wraith vessels had altered vector and given chase, and without shields or weapons Apollo had been in no position to do anything but run. The pursuit had stretched halfway across the system, each vessel under constant acceleration, and there had been a time when Ellis had become convinced that they weren’t going to make it. The hyperdrive had taken far longer than expected to reboot and run through its auto-calibration routines, almost allowing the Wraith vessels into weapons range before Sharpe was finally able to make the jump.
Had the main drives taken a similar time to reheat, or had the third Wraith cruiser from the storm been waiting in orbit as Ellis had feared, Apollo might never had escaped. Even when the hyperdrive had returned to normal function, using it had been something of a leap of faith. There was no time to check whether the system had accurately recalibrated. If there had been any significant error in its startup routine, all the crew’s efforts to rid the ship of its intruder and the pursuing Wraith would have come to nothing.
Any fears Ellis might have had on that matter were unfounded, thankfully, and the ship had leapt away without further incident. And once it was gone, the Wraith had not attempted to keep up their pursuit. Either they hadn’t recognized the significance of the battered spaceship that had entered their staging area, or else they simply had other fish to fry. In either case, once Apollo had jumped, it was safe.
After the trauma, then, the recovery. A quiet system in which to nestle the ship close to an uninhabited moon, and time to make the best repairs possible and to re-establish contact with Atlantis.
Later still, perhaps, a chance to mourn the dead.
For now, Ellis was content to supervise the repairs. He was in the bomb bay, watching the launch racks being disengaged and lowered onto the bay doors; they were useless now, tangles of broken gantry and dangling cable. The creature — what Colonel Carter had referred to as the hybrid — had partially ripped them apart as it had attacked McKay’s stealth sensors. Its path through them on its way out of the ship and into the jovian had finished the job.
Past the racks, steel plates were being welded over the hole in the ceiling. The fluttering blue-white glare of welding torches lit the bay, reminding Ellis uncomfortably of the lightning storm. Above that, another crew was working in the corridor, but nothing was being welded there. Corridor nine was largely off-limits, and only temporary coverings had been set down. One of the first instructions Ellis had given upon breaking out of hyperspace had been to order a crew of engineers, plus a squad of marines, into the corridor to pull away every panel from the floor, walls and ceiling.
Unsurprisingly, fragments of the hybrid still remained. Most were dead, including all of the vein-like tubules that had infiltrated the ship’s control cabling and power lines. Those were easy to remove; since the demise of their host they had already begun to rot and peel.
A few of the pieces had tried to crawl away from the light, and one had even been discovered in the process of trying to infiltrate a wiring conduit again. Engineers had used arc welders on the tenacious mass of tissue until it had shriveled, and then dumped it unceremoniously out of the airlock along with all the other pieces.
Ellis couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that they might still not have caught all the hybrid’s last scraps, but that wouldn’t be determined until the ship could be dry-docked. Hence his reluctance to order anything more than temporary coverings to be placed in the site of Kyle Deacons death. They would be lifted and the systems under them checked at regular intervals until he was sure.
If he could ever be sure.
That, he had decided, was part of the ship’s strangeness. Like a man who has recovered from a tumor no longer trusts his own body, Ellis was finding it difficult to trust Apollo. In a way that was unfair — the ship had not turned against him of its own volition. But now he could not watch a screen glitch on start-up, or hear a stutter in the air system, or see the merest hint of a flicker in the internal lighting without wondering if part of the hybrid was once again in the process of infecting Apollo and eating it away from the inside.
He hoped it was a feeling he would be able to shake, in time. For now, he was getting used to the vessel all over again.
After a while he left the bay and returned to the bridge. It was time for Apollo to jump into hyperspace again.
Both Meyers and Sharpe were back at their consoles; Ellis had ordered them away to rest while the ship orbited the silent little moon. Whether either of them had slept at all was anyone’s guess — there was probably a sizeable proportion of the crew who would prefer to rest with the lights on for a while. However, now that they were back at their stations Ellis knew the ship was in the safest of hands.
The lack of Kyle Deacon was something else he would need to get used to, though.
“Status report,” he barked, settling himself into the command throne. “What are we missing?”
“Nothing essential.” Meyers was tapping rapidly at her board, running test routines almost continuously. “Weapons are up, shields at eighty percent strength. Long-range sensors are showing some calibration errors, but short-range and passive are fine. I think we’re about as good as we’re going to get.”
“Sharpe?”
“Course laid in, sir. As long as we keep the jumps short for now, I think we’ll be okay. Hyperdrive could do with a little fine-tuning, but nothing that can’t wait.”
“Very well. Let’s do this.”
Sharpe worked her console, and within a few moments there was a throaty grumble from somewhere deep in the ship’s interior. Ellis found himself listening to it, feeling it through his boots, through the throne arms. He could sense himself waiting for it to fail.
The gray bulk of the moon slid away and out of sight as the ship accelerated smoothly out of orbit. “Jump in ten seconds,” Sharpe announced. “All systems nominal, capacitors charged. Hyperdrive at max power in three, two, one.”
Blue light whirled out from the darkness, reached out and dragged Apollo into its maw. A second later all Ellis could see outside was the spiraling tunnel of hyperspace.
He had seen far less pleasant sights. He stood up again. “Sharpe, call me when we get close.”
“Yes sir. Five minutes out?”
“That’ll be fine.”
He stood at the end of the corridor, watching the engineers checking under the floor panels and then tacking them down again with beads of silicone sealant. They were using powerful spotlamps to hunt for anomalies; wide-lensed halogens fed by thick power cables. Ellis found himself studying the lights for flickers, and shook the thought away. “Damned fool,” he muttered.
“Sir?”
He turned. Copper was there behind him, the bandage around his head replaced by an adhesive patch. He looked wan, but Ellis was coming to realize that he always did.
There was a haunted air to him, though, that hadn’t been there before. And little wonder, thought Ellis. Seeing what the hybrid had done down in the bomb bay would be enough to haunt anyone. “What brings you up here, airman?”
“I wanted to run some integrity checks on the cabling.” He held up a small aluminum briefcase. “Just to make sure there’s no stress fractures, really.”