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"Hot spot," he said, and tagged the region on his display, sending coordinates to Fred and Kelly.
Kurt's hand twitched; years of communicating by silent, efficient hand signals were something you just didn't unlearn. Talk, even using a single beam, didn't feel right on this mission. One simple wave, however, could send him spinning, and while his T-PACK could compensate, Kurt wanted to continue to stealth without thrusters.
Kelly moved her optics package on the spot, zoomed in, and they all saw a splash of rainbow colors.
Kurt's radiation counter clicked wildly and then went dead. "Broad-spectrum pulse," he reported.
"I've seen one of those before," Fred told them. "They had to repair the Shaw-Fujikawa translight engine on the Magellan. It
was a risky op. Those things aren't meant to be taken apart once they go active."
Shaw-Fujikawa engines allowed UNSC ships to leave normal space and plow through a dimensional subdomain colloquially known as "Slipstream space." Kurt had received rudimentary training in how it worked. The drive used particle accelerators to rip apart normal space-time by generating micro black holes. Those holes evaporated via Hawking radiation in a nanosecond. The real quantum mechanical "magic" of the drive was how it manipulated those holes in space-time, squeezing a hundred-thousand-ton cruiser into Slipspace. The mathematics of how this worked and how a ship reentered normal space was well beyond him. It was, actually, beyond most human geniuses.
Kurt, however, did know this about Shaw-Fujikawa drives: they were dangerous. There was radiation and anecdotal evidence that the normal laws of nature "bent" in close proximity to an active unit.
"Update your mission logs and beam them back to the Circumference," Kurt said. 'We're going to take a closer look at that thing and confirm it's what Fred thinks it is before we call in HAZMAT."
There was a slight delay before Kelly's and Fred's acknowledgment lights blinked green.
Kurt activated his T-PACK, puffed the thrusters, and angled toward Station Delphi. He tapped the attitude controls, adjusting pitch, roll, and yaw to avoid colliding with the bolts, beams, and tools spinning in the debris field.
As they closed to within one hundred meters of the sputtering, partially disassembled drive coils, his rear-angle camera fuzzed with static.
"Getting interference here," Kurt said. "You two hold position. I'll scout it out."
"Roger," Kelly said. There was an edge of concern in her voice, "Grapple lines ready."
Kurt crept closer and got a glimpse into the heart of the drive: a near-ultraviolet glow that didn't match the thermal output. It wasn't possible for a hole into Slipspace to exist for more than a fraction of an instant, but he couldn't help feeling that's exactly what this was… and the closer he drifted the more likely he'd get pulled in and forever lost.
But that was just a feeling.
He hesitated.
Kurt altered his direct trajectory and drifted toward a beam thirty meters over the Shaw-Fujikawa engine. The space near the drive rippled like heat waves rising… impossible in a hard vacuum.