“You’d think last night’s assassination attempt would have kept the numbers down,” Lorne said quietly. “Or at least have stopped them from bringing so many kids.”
John bit his lip as he looked over the crowd again. Lorne was right, there were a lot of kids in evidence, from babies in front-sling carriers to toddlers to clusters of teenagers. On his other side, Beckett shook his head.
“I suppose they must be used to it, but even so.”
A trumpet sounded, the rest of the band joining in on the second beat, and John shifted automatically to parade rest. “Let’s hope they know what they’re doing.”
When the band had finished, Radim stepped forward for a speech. He kept it mercifully short, with only a wry allusion to the reason for the delay, and there were heartfelt cheers as he gave the signal for the fireworks to begin.
The first salvo went off with a roar, trails of light arcing not from somewhere safely down the slope, but from the very peak of the mountain above them. John flinched — how easy would it be to arrange an “accident” that would take out the entire viewing stand? — but no one else seemed to care. The sky filled with sound and great waterfalls of light, green and gold and pale purple, another salvo following almost before the first could fade. It was like the finale of most fireworks shows that John had seen, too loud and bright for comfort, and he heard one of the Marines swear under his breath.
“Man, you could see this from space,” Johnston said.
“Crazy,” Hernandez agreed, and John wondered abruptly if that were literally true. If so, if this could be seen from orbit, then this wasn’t just a celebration, a traditional show for the kids and the civilians, but an act of defiance, a proclamation that the Wraith could not stop the Genii. The air tasted of gunpowder, and he couldn’t help imagining the Wraith swooping down out of the exploding night, culling beams sweeping across the gathered crowd while they and the Genii fired uselessly at the diving Darts. He saw the same unease in Harries’ expression, and managed to catch the younger man’s eye.
“Fireworks.”
“Not my favorite thing, sir,” Harries answered.
“Mine, neither,” John said, and out of the corner of his eye saw Peebles nod.
At last it was over, not with a fusillade of every possible shell like on Earth, but with a single scarlet ball that rose higher than all the rest, until it was little more than an ember against the night. It blossomed into a scarlet flower that dissolved into an ever-paler rain and vanished in the dark. There were gasps from the crowd, and then applause.
“Very impressive,” John said. “Chief Ladon!”
Radim turned away from where he was conferring with two of his aides. “Colonel. I hope you’ve enjoyed the show.”
“Very much,” John lied. “But, you know how things go. It’s time for us to go home.”
“Ah.” Radim gave a tight smile. “I hope I can persuade you to stay just a little longer.”
John stiffened, and made himself relax. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see both Harries and Lorne coming to attention, and willed them both to wait. “I’m afraid we can’t. We’ve already stayed longer than we’d planned.”
“I’m afraid I must insist.” Radim spread his hands. “At least for a little longer. Hear me out, please, Colonel. It seems we need Atlantis’s help.”
“What?”
Radim grimaced, and lowered his voice. “We’ve lost contact with the Pride of the Genii. She was due to check in twelve hours ago, and didn’t. We’ve been unable to raise her. I’ve dispatched teams to planets along her likely line of flight, but they’ve found nothing, and aren’t likely to. We need someone who can search in space. We need your help.”
That was different. John shook himself, trying to redirect the adrenaline to the new problem. “Let me contact Atlantis, Chief, and we’ll see what we can do.”
CHAPTER FIVE
ORSOLYA DUG the heels of her hands into her eye sockets as though she could somehow force energy back into her body. The disease had defeated their attempts at quarantine, and now most of the crew was ill, so many that the least sick had been pressed into service to tend the ones who were worse off. At least no one was dead — yet, a malignant voice whispered in the back of her mind — but of the twenty-five-man crew, only eight were fully functional. Most of them were in the gun crew, the regular military detailed to handle the Pride’s weapons, and none of them had been trained to handle the ship’s systems. She was still well, as was the navigator with the natural ATA gene, Ezstli, and the doctor, but the captain lay unconscious in his cabin, and two-thirds of her technicians were out of commission as well.
“Engineer. Ma’am.”
She looked up, not recognizing the voice. It was one of the gun crew who’d been pressed into service to handle the secondary systems, a thin dark youth barely old enough to shave. “Well?”
“The warning. It’s on again.”
Damn. She rose from her chair and came to lean over his shoulder, grimacing as she saw the flicker of yellow at the corner of his display. The Ancient systems required regular input from someone with the ATA gene, and would lock down the systems for anywhere from six to forty-eight hours if it wasn’t received — a precaution against the ship being taken over by the Wraith, she presumed, or probably by ordinary humans, but it was deeply inconvenient. They couldn’t afford to let a single system go offline, not while they were in hyperdrive and so short-handed, but she felt as though she was running from one box to another in a crazed game of slap-the-jack. “All right. Let me take the station.”
The young man moved aside, and she slid into his chair, reached for the Ancient interface. The gel swelled at her touch, sucking her fingers into the pad, and she felt the ship’s systems at the back of her mind, the warning on the screen translated to a deep unease.
All right, darling, I’m here. We’re here, and all’s well.
She felt the pressure ease, the warning fading, and tried to project the fondness she had felt as a child when she’d done her rotation on the farms and had to tend the cattle. They were big and warm, kindly beasts, and she liked the ship as well as she had ever liked them.
Good girl. Just keep going, keep running, we’ll all be fine.
The warning vanished, and she looked over her shoulder at the boy from the gun crew. “How long was that?”
He glanced at his chronometer. “Eight point five hours, ma’am.”
“All right.” Orsolya noted that on the ragged notebook. Someone with a working gene would have to be back here in eight and a half hours, but they could manage that. And Ezstli was managing to stretch the intervals on the critical control systems, from a little less than five hours to almost seven now. They might make it to whatever this planet was called. “Good work. You have the station.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the gunner said again, and settled back in the chair.
Orsolya slumped back into her own place, wondering if she could risk a quick nap. Even an hour’s sleep would help. She could feel herself slipping into a doze, and jerked upright, wondering if it was a first sign of the fever. She knew better — she’d been awake for too many hours, that was all — but she touched her forehead, feeling her skin cool and dry, then touched the pulse-point at her neck. Her heartbeat was steady, her lungs were clear; there was nothing at all wrong with her that couldn’t be cured by a decent night’s sleep. Not that she was likely to get that any time soon, she thought, and reached for her notebook.
Her notes straggled across the pages, recording crewmen still standing, names crossed out haphazardly as they’d fallen, noting the vital systems and the necessary check-in intervals, a note to herself to follow up on the signal Agosten said had been sent at the captain’s orders, informing the homeworld of their change of course. There was nothing to indicate that she’d done that yet, and she frowned, trying to remember. She had spoken to the senior technician, Sanyil, and he’d promised a report, but there was no indication that he’d done it. Had he gone
down sick? Denzo had, though he had refused to leave his post until he could no longer stand.
She reached for the intercom switch. “Control room, this is Orsolya. I want to speak to Technician Sanyil.”
There was a moment of silence, and then a youthful voice answered, “In sick bay, ma’am.”
“Then I want to speak to whoever is handling communications.”
“I’m monitoring that console, ma’am.”
“One of the gun crew?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Orsolya swallowed a curse. “Is there a technician in the control room? If there is, I want to speak to them.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the gunner said, with more confidence. “One moment.”
Orsolya started to lean back, but sleep was too tempting, and she sat bolt upright, hoping that would help keep her awake.
“Engineer?” That was Katalon, her second, and Orsolya allowed herself a sigh of relief.
“Kat. I need to know if the homeworld was informed of our change of course. The Captain said he ordered a message sent, but…” She let her voice trail off, not needing to finish.
“One moment, ma’am.” Silence stretched between them, broken only by the faint noises of the ship herself and then by the muffled sound of Katalon coughing. At last Katalon spoke again, her voice hoarse. “It looks as though it was queued, but not sent. Probably one of the techs passed out and whoever took over didn’t see it. Do you want me to go ahead and send?”
Orsolya glanced automatically at the power reserves displayed on her board, but one of the great advantages of the Ancient technology was that there was almost always power to spare. “Yes, do it.”
“Sending.”
One more thing off my list, Orsolya thought, and reached for her pencil, but froze as Katalon spoke again.
“Hold on, there seems to be a problem. The transmission is in the queue, but it won’t transmit.”
Orsolya set her notebook aside, reaching for her own boards. “There’s plenty of power to spare.”
“That’s what it’s showing here, too,” Katalon said. “I order it to send what’s in the queue, the system confirms, and then I get a flashing yellow light and it dumps the message back into the queue.”
“Diagnostics?”
“Running them will take the comms off-line,” Katalon began, and then swore. “Sorry, ma’am, life support’s about to expire, and that’s my station.”
“Go,” Orsolya said. Sometimes it took a few minutes to establish an acceptable communion with the ship, and they couldn’t afford to lose control of the ship’s environmentals. “We’ll deal with comms later.” She reached for her notebook, wide awake again. Something wrong with communications, something that stopped them from sending messages: probably it was just a bad setting, someone in the first throes of fever entering an incorrect number somewhere, but if it wasn’t… She couldn’t help thinking about the damaged relay, but shoved the thought aside. There was nothing she could do until they entered orbit over Baidu.
~#~
It was dawn on Atlantis by the time the jumper returned, John fretting at the controls. Radim had wanted them to take the jumper for an immediate search, but John had convinced him that it made more sense to return to Atlantis. From there, it would be easier to send out multiple jumpers, cover more space in less time, but he had to fight the compulsion to hurry. He had liked the ship when she was called Avenger, little more than a wrecked hulk, and he still felt responsible for getting her into this mess. He let down the rear gate and followed the others out into the jumper bay, dismissing the Marines and bringing Beckett and Lorne with him to the control room.
Carter was waiting in the conference room, along with the rest of the command team, as well as Teyla, and there was coffee waiting on the sideboard. John poured himself a cup — by his internal clock, it was past midnight, and he was grateful for the caffeine — and took his place at the head of the table.
Carter leaned back in her chair. “So the Genii have gotten themselves into trouble? And they want us to get them out of it?”
“They’ve lost contact with the Pride,” John said, and reached into his pocket for a Genii data block. “Radim’s given us all the data he has — their planned course, the details of contact with the ship, and so on.”
“I’ll take that,” McKay said, and plugged it into one of the adapted computers that also had no connection with Atlantis’s main systems. “I don’t suppose they gave us any information on the ship itself? No, that would be too helpful.”
“What is it they want from us?” Carter asked.
“The Pride disappeared between two regular check-ins,” John answered. “They might have picked up a garbled signal about six hours before the scheduled check, but their technicians aren’t sure. That’s on the data block as well, just in case we can clean it up. The Pride’s course was planned in advance and the captain wasn’t supposed to deviate from it without informing the homeworld — just in case their repairs didn’t hold up, though Radim didn’t say that outright.”
“It’s a sensible precaution,” Carter said. “I’m guessing they’ve already checked any inhabited worlds along the way?”
“All of the ones with Stargates, yes,” John answered. “Nothing. So now they’re worried that the ship had to come out of hyperspace and is drifting somewhere, and they wanted us to check along the projected course and see if we could find her.” He looked at Carter. “Colonel, I was thinking the Hammond could run the course line in a day or two. If you dropped out of hyperspace and scanned, then moved to the edge of that range and scanned again —“ He stopped, not wanting to tell Carter her business, and she gave a wry smile.
“We could do that — we’ve done it before. But right now the hyperdrive is undergoing a maintenance check. We’ll be back in service in about twelve hours, but I think this needs to get underway quicker than that.”
“Yeah.” John nodded. “All right, second option. We send out teams in jumpers to the planets with Stargates and have them do a sensor scan from there. That ought to cover most of the Pride’s course.”
“We can work out a pattern that will cover all but about two percent of the projected course,” McKay said, not looking up from the laptop. “That’s just math. But who says they stayed on this course?”
“We don’t know that they didn’t,” Carter said. “Let’s not borrow trouble.”
“Right.” John looked around the table. “If we send four jumpers, we should be able to cover the possibilities pretty quickly. Major, I’d like you to take one, and then Baker and Soleil.”
“And the fourth?” Carter had a small smile, as though she already knew the answer.
“If you’d continue covering Atlantis, Colonel, I’ll take the last one.”
Carter’s smile widened. “OK, Colonel, I can do that.”
“McKay. How long is it going to take you to do the math?”
“Six, seven hours. Maybe eight.” McKay looked up sharply. “What? I’d like to see anybody else do it in less than ten.”
“Eight hours would be ideal,” John said. “Lorne and I could use some sleep, and that’ll give us time to make sure everything’s in order.”
“There’s one thing,” Beckett said. “It might be worth considering the reasons a ship might lose communications.”
Teyla was nodding in agreement, and John said, “You’re thinking of some kind of internal problem. Mutiny, or illness on board.”
“It’s disease I’m most worried about,” Beckett said. “It may not be safe to go on board the Pride.”
“We can’t just leave sick people floating out there,” Lorne said, and glanced at John. “Sorry, sir. But we can’t.”
“I’ve no intention of doing so,” Beckett said. “We can send a quarantine team if we need to. But what I don’t want is anyone taking stupid chances that risks infecting Atlantis.”
“Doc’s right,” John said. “If there’s any sign of disease, we’ll leave it to the quarantine
team.”
“You know,” McKay said, “this course plot of theirs… I can work out our most efficient search area — it’s a variation of the four-color problem. That way we can be sure none of us are going over the same areas twice. “
“That would be helpful,” John said, before McKay could launch into further details, and at the other side of the table, Teyla lifted her head.
“There is one other question that occurs to me. If the Pride is lost — even if she is merely damaged, that is a great loss of face for Chief Ladon. Does he expect us to keep this secret from the people of the worlds we must visit?”
“We didn’t discuss that,” John said. Teyla was right, of course, problems with the Pride would make Radim look foolish, particularly after they’d made this tour with all the pomp he could muster. Not all the worlds in the Genii sector wanted to be part of their system, and this would only encourage them to pull away. But when they’d talked, all Radim’s concern had been for the missing ship.
“It’s a chance to score some points,” Lorne said. “Show them we’re more use as allies than the Genii.”
“Yeah, but we’re not going to do anything to help them break free,” John said. “The IOA would have a fit, right, Colonel?”
Carter nodded. “So would General Landry.”
“We cannot encourage a rebellion that we would not assist,” Teyla said.
“It’s been done before,” John said, thinking of Afghanistan, but shook himself back to the present. “Ok. It’s a search-and-rescue mission, we won’t lie about that, or about who we’re looking for. But let’s try not to undermine our ally. Any more questions?” No one said anything. “Right. Then let’s get some rest, and get ready to do this.”
Carter caught him at the door, and he gave her a wry smile. “This is why the IOA needs to get off its collective ass and put someone in charge here.”
Stargate Atlantis #24 Page 10