Through Dangerous Times

Final Chapter

"An hour at most," he said, taking hold of each of her hands and squeezing them slightly in an attempt to tell her that everything would be okay. 

"Is that enough time to, get everything ready?" she said, looking him in the eyes with clear fear being present.

"I don't know, but we have none of it to waste, so let's go now," he said, running off to the engine room with Caitlin, both hand in hand.

As they stepped out from the elevator, they ran around the command ring reaching the top of the ship, scanning themselves into the room, still hand in hand as the bolted towards the engine. The temperature rose significantly as they entered, the engine still actually on and active, just on low power.

"Here, take these. We need to plant them equally spaced out around the entire engine room, to do this thing. They are explosives, and if placed correctly will cause a chain reaction leading to the fusion chamber, blowing this ship. As explained before, the ship will be blasted into many pieces, most of which will burn up in the atmosphere, and our timing is actually perfect, any pieces which make it through will hit the ocean. It will be a lot of money, time, and effort thrown away but then again, it is saving  the entire world and anything."

"Yeah, okay," Caitlin replied, moving off into the other section of the engine, placing and priming the explosives.

"Are you sure this is safe?" she shouted across the room.

"Of course it's not," he laughed, continuing to place them.

"Okay then, cool, she said to herself, still somewhat panicked but remaining focused on the task.

The ship was currently on the bright side of Earth, currently approaching the Pacific ocean, where they planned to be above on the explosion. The station was extremely close to the Earth at this point, at least relative to how far it was out when it originally orbited the Earth. 

"Hang on, Cait, how are we planning on getting off from the ship?"

"Well, Cisco took the last main ship out of here, and there is one escape pod remaining on board. The bad news is, they are by default programmed to leave the ship immediately in a case of danger. The second the QAN detects something wrong, we have five minutes to get on board. If we don't... well... put simply, we are stranded here."

"It's okay, we'll make it," he reassured, continuing to prime the explosives. 

"This ship is due to blow in around 50 minutes, however, the station will almost certainly detect this problem in about 20 minutes, and as a result, the pod firing will most likely set off the explosions due to overuse of power needed to launch it. So, we need to be in the pod by then, simple."

"Twenty minutes it is then," she said, planting the last of her explosives, both of them meeting in the middle of the room.

"Well, here goes," Barry said, both of them temporarily pulling into a tight hug, a few tears rolling down their faces from fear. They pulled away and shared a passionate kiss, looking into the other's eyes for a few seconds. Then out of complete nowhere, a large siren began to wail, signalling that the ship had detected the problems.

"Five minutes," she said, a deep breath following, allowing herself to prepare for the event.

They both ran through the ship, not taking long to arrive at the escape pod room. They opened the hatch and were about to step in before Barry suddenly froze, looking back at the elevator.

"We need to go back."

"What?!" Caitlin exclaimed, the tone of her voice suggesting that the idea sounded completely insane to her.