by Graham, Jo
And if he had Radek Zelenka here…
John put that thought out of his mind. If they got back to Atlantis in one piece he could get Radek for the longer run to the Genii homeworld. Nobody knew the Ancient systems better than Radek, with the exception of Rodney. And ok, Rodney was better with code, no doubt about it, but Radek was the go-to guy on the hardware.
“Starting main engines.” John watched the power indicators climb, the Avenger shuddering as it began to lift, sand flying from superstructure half buried for centuries. The main thrusters hovered on the threshold of critical strain for a moment, then cleared as the Avenger shook clear of the sand, roaring into the sky. The ship trembled, inertial dampeners overcompensating, then steadied.
John gritted his teeth. They were going to have to watch the inertial dampeners. That wasn’t something he could afford to lose at speed.
Propulsion hovered in the clear, well above the caution marks.
“Ok, let’s try for some altitude,” John said, as much to himself as to anyone else. “Button up, people.” He heard the hiss of Teyla’s suit sealing a moment before his.
The Avenger gained altitude, the sky outside the main forward window darkening purple, stars appearing one by one.
There was a pop and a shudder, and John leveled it off, hands sweating in the heavy gloves. “What’s going on over there?”
“We had a decompression in deck two on the starboard side, just aft of main engineering,” Dahlia reported. “Two compartments have vented to space, but the seals to adjoining compartments seem to be holding.”
“Aft of engineering?” He couldn’t spare a look at the ship’s schematics, but he didn’t think that was good.
“I don’t see any damage to the propulsion systems,” Dahlia said. “It’s near the hyperdrive, but those systems are designed to work in vacuum if necessary. And right now the decompression is limited to just those two compartments.”
“Ok. Taking her up.” Come on, baby, John thought. You can do it. Not so far. We’ll get you home to Atlantis.
Had Atlantis originally been her home port? Or had it been one of the other worlds settled by the Ancients in the Pegasus Galaxy, one of the worlds where they had seeded humanity? It hadn’t been the most important thing, knowing how the Ancients had settled this Galaxy. It hadn’t been the field of study that seemed the most rewarding, not these last years with the Wraith breathing down their necks. He supposed there was information in the database in Atlantis — lots of it. But since Elizabeth had been lost, no one had made it a priority. There was always so much else going on, so much to do with the here and now. Nobody had time to figure out how many ships had called Atlantis home. Nobody had time to figure out where else they might have been built, or who might have crewed them.
Who had Avenger belonged to originally? Who had sat in this chair last, made the last log entries? They would find some information in dry facts held in her data banks, but they were likely to find as much truth in Teyla’s old stories, stories of colonies left to fend for themselves as inexorably the Wraith advanced. Maybe some stood a few years, solitary Camelots above the flood, but they all fell long ago. Did this ship come from those waning days, as the Aurora had? Or had it been lost early in the war, when these fringes of the galaxy were the battleground? Maybe someday he’d find out.
The stars were bright outside. The last vestiges of atmosphere streamed away.
Another shudder, another alarm.
“We’ve lost one of the storage tanks on the port side,” Dahlia reported, moving around from one console to another almost behind Teyla. “Potable water and water reclamation.”
“We can do without that for five hours,” John said. “We’ve got supplies inboard. Let’s give her a few minutes to get used to vacuum and see what else goes. Besides, it’s going to take a little while to run the course given the corrections to the database to make up for stellar drift.” He ran his hands over the console. These big fat gloves drove him crazy, but it would only be for a few hours. “Ok. Navigations to run the course for Atlantis.”
“That’s incorrect,” Dahlia said evenly.
It took a moment for him to look around.
“That is not the course you will be setting,” she said, a pistol to the back of Teyla’s head as Teyla sat before her in the navigator’s chair. “You will set a course for the Genii homeworld.”
John did the math. Normally holding a gun to Teyla’s head was a really bad idea. She was the wickedest hand to hand fighter he’d ever seen, and he’d give her even odds with Ronon. With a woman her own size who was more scientist than soldier he wouldn’t even stress. But Teyla was sitting down, fouled by the confines of the chair built into the console. And her hip was loused up badly enough that she was having trouble limping around. Kicking anything was not going to happen. And she was wearing a vacuum suit, which definitely impeded movement. No, for once he couldn’t count on Teyla to get herself out of this.
He could pretty much figure Carson out of the equation. He wasn’t a fighter at the best of times, and with his right arm messed up there was just nothing there. Not to mention that he wasn’t exactly at his most alert. It was Carson’s pistol that Dahlia had.
So it was all him.
“You will set course for the Genii homeworld,” Dahlia said calmly. The gun’s barrel just touched the back of the head of Teyla’s vacuum suit.
He had to get out of the chair. It was modular with the console, not a loose separate piece that could fly around the bridge if the inertial dampeners failed, a smart move on the Ancients’ part, but awfully hard to start something from. John lifted his hands. “Just put the gun down.”
Dahlia didn’t even flinch. “You will stay where you are, Colonel Sheppard. And you will compute the course for our homeworld. You will not be able to betray my people this time.”
“Look,” John began, “We’re not trying to double cross you. We’re going to keep our deal. But we’ve got to go to Atlantis first.”
“And you would have me believe that you will then just give us the warship?” Dahlia’s eyebrows rose. “Why would you do that?”
“Because we have an agreement,” John said doggedly.
“And that’s worth what to you?” Not so much as a waver in her voice. He wasn’t getting anywhere. Teyla was frozen, perfectly still, waiting for him to do something…
“If you shoot her, then what?”
John looked around in surprise. Carson was standing by his own chair, a rueful expression on his face. “Oh sure, you can blow Teyla away,” he said. “There’s none of us can stop the shot. But then what have you got?” He paused a moment, his eyes on hers. “If you think that once you’ve shot her, Colonel Sheppard will fly the warship for you, you’ve got another thing coming. You’ll have to kill him too, shoot him in cold blood as you stand there. But you could do it. There’s a full clip in the gun. You could probably take him down before he’d get to you.”
Carson stopped, letting that picture sink in. “And then here we are, lass. Just the two of us with a pair of corpses and an Ancient warship falling apart about our ears that neither of us knows how to fly. We’d certainly not make the Genii homeworld. I doubt I could land it in one piece. We’d die here too, trying to get back down, and no one would have the warship.” Carson shook his head sadly. “My old mum used to say it was better to live to fight another day. You’ve got nothing. Fold your cards and live to come back to the table. You know we daren’t kill you, seeing as you’re Ladon Radim’s sister.” He saw her hand move, and gave her a grave smile. “You could kill Teyla, sure. But it gets you nothing. And you’re not Kolya, to do it in sheer cursedness.”
John saw her waver, hardly dared to breathe.
“Put it away,” Carson said. “And let’s get out of here.”
Slowly, with a look of abject defeat, Dahlia lowered the pistol.
Carson crossed the room slowly and took it from her hand. “There now,” he said with his best bedside reassuring smil
e. “Let’s get on with it then. Set course for Atlantis.”
Teyla twisted around in her chair, her eyes furious, but Carson forestalled whatever she might say.
“Miss Radim and I are going back to the crew lounge. It’s an internal compartment and the pressure seems stable. We’ll pass the voyage there and see you in Atlantis, Colonel Sheppard.” He gestured for her to precede him to the back and the main bridge doors, a gesture that would have seemed pure courtesy if not for the pistol in his left hand. The doors opened before him, and they passed through, sliding shut behind with the soft sound of seals connecting.
John blinked, adrenaline still surging through his veins with nowhere to go. “What the hell was that?”
“It is called talking,” Teyla said ruefully. “And I thank the Ancestors we have someone who can do it!”
John looked toward the doors. “You think Carson will hold her at gunpoint for the next five hours?”
“Knowing Carson, he probably will not need to.” Teyla took a deep breath, as though she too were trying to still a racing heart. “She had not thought the plan through. She got Carson’s gun while he was sleeping, but she had nothing to bargain with.”
“Except destroying the ship,” John pointed out.
“With her on it?” Teyla shook her head. “She is not Kolya, and she is neither mad nor suicidal. Is death preferable to being held prisoner for five hours and then returned to her brother?”
“But we’re not actually trying to steal the ship!” John protested. “I keep telling her that! We’re not planning to double cross the Genii! We made a deal to trade piloting the ship for them for their information about Rodney. We’ve never planned to not keep the deal!”
“She does not know that,” Teyla said. “An Ancient warship for one man?” Her eyebrow lifted. “It does not seem rational.”
“This is Rodney,” John said flatly.
“I know,” Teyla said. “But she was not there when you diverted the Daedalus to Sateda for Ronon, nor when you dared Michael’s laboratory to come after me.” She shook her head as though the joke were on her. “She does not know you. And I out-clevered myself, telling her of your cruelty. I rendered the truth unbelievable.”
“Why the hell did you do that?” John asked. She didn’t think he was cruel. Probably?
“I thought…” Teyla put her hands to her face, or would have, except that the faceplate of the vacuum suit helmet was in the way. “It does not matter what I thought. You and I have both made mistakes. Let us try to get back to Atlantis before we make any more!”
“Right.” John looked down at the board, the course corrections nearly completed. “You’re going to have to handle damage control. And hope we don’t come apart when we enter hyperspace.”
“Because hoping is about all I can do,” Teyla said with a flash of black humor. “I will hope very hard for you, John.”
“Thanks.” The board cleared, the corrections completed. “Ready as we’ll be.” Hang in there, baby, he thought to the ship, and slid the indicators forward.
The hyperspace window opened before them, and Avenger slipped through.
Chapter Nineteen : Snowbound
After four years in Atlantis, Lorne had learned better than to assume that any deviation from the city’s normal routine was harmless. The problem was defining normal. They’d gotten a lot of strange sensor readings over the years, which had turned out to be — on various occasions — nothing, dangerous natural phenomena, various hostile invaders, Ancient devices someone turned on by accident, freak weather, and alien lifeforms trying to communicate with them.
This time, Lorne would have bet on ‘nothing’, followed by ‘weather’, but Colonel Sheppard didn’t keep him around to gamble. He gestured to the security team to spread out, taking up positions along the length of the corridor. The life signs detector in his hand was still showing multiple small objects on the other side of the storage room in front of them. It looked like whatever they were, they were out on the balcony.
He opened the door, P90 at the ready, and gestured for Jacobs and Hernandez to follow him in. They were both new, and he hoped he and Sheppard had impressed on them firmly enough that pretty much anything could happen at any moment. He’d been trying to walk a fine line between making it clear what the new people were in for and completely freaking them out.
The room was dim enough that he could just make out the shapes of stacked pallets. Across the room, only a little gray light filtered in through the glass in the balcony doors. It looked like it was still snowing out there.
General O’Neill had provisioned them generously but a little weirdly, having clearly transferred over whatever supplies he could get his hands on given the short notice, and they’d opened up new storage rooms for everything from spare bed linens to more breakfast cereal than he hoped they’d be going through anytime soon. He brought the lights up, and heard rustling, and then silence.
He glanced back at Jacobs, who nodded his head sharply; he’d heard something too. He motioned Hernandez up on his other side and moved slowly across the room. There was another rustling noise, fainter now. He tracked it around the side of a pallet, and leveled his P90 to reveal nothing but the crushed corner of a box.
More rustling. This time he thought it sounded like it was coming from the other side of the wall. He glanced down at the life signs detector. There were enough moving forms on the other side of the wall to account for quite a lot of noise.
Where the box was broken, something was strewn across the floor. He nudged it with the toe of his boot and decided it was cereal.
“We might have rats,” he said quietly. They hadn’t had a pest problem in the last few years, but then they’d been bringing in supplies either by Stargate or aboard the Daedalus. With all the trips back and forth on tenders while they were in San Francisco Bay, he wouldn’t be surprised if they’d picked up some unwanted guests.
Or it could be an infestation of alien bugs that would try to suck out their lives the moment they opened the door. The beauty of life in the Pegasus galaxy was that you never could tell. “Let’s just stay ready for whatever’s out there,” he said, and opened the balcony doors, letting in a rush of cold air.
There was a wild rustling and an eruption of movement. Winged things were beating against his legs and blundering against his chest and face, and he swung his P90 to track them by instinct, just barely managing not to fire. To his right, machine gun fire sounded like thunder, way too close on the narrow, icy balcony.
“Hold your fire!” he yelled. Feathers swirled around them in the wind. Hernandez lowered his weapon, already starting to look sheepish.
“Way to blow away those pigeons,” Jacobs said. “Could have been a real threat to the city there.”
Lorne waved him quiet. “It could have been,” he said patiently. He caught a feather as they started to swirl downwards from the balcony and considered it. Off in the distance, he thought he could see small dark forms arrowing their way through the snow. “It just looks like this time it wasn’t.”
“It was a flock of unknown alien organisms, sir,” Hernandez said. “Apparently avian.” Lorne felt that he got points for trying to dig himself out, and also for using the word avian correctly in a sentence, but also that there was a time to accept that you’d done something stupid and live with it.
“I think they were pigeons,” Lorne said. “Regular Earth pigeons.” He was pretty sure the biologists were going to consider this a problem, in the ‘let’s not contaminate other planets’ ecosystems’ kind of way, but he was also pretty sure it wasn’t going to be a problem from his point of view. That made one down, and a very long list to go.
The wind was shrieking against the tops of the towers, the lights of the city shining through the snow. Lorne lowered his P90 and turned back toward the doors. “Come on, and I’ll show you how we fill out a report,” he said.
He felt the tower shudder at the same time that he heard the noise, a distant thud and the
n a low groaning sound that made him think about ships grinding over rocks. They weren’t moving, and there weren’t any rocks. He turned to lean out over the balcony, trying to see any signs that something was amiss, but it was impossible to see the ends of the piers clearly through the snow.
The balcony was steady under his feet now. He could almost believe that he’d imagined it. It was just that he knew where that line of thinking usually led, and it wasn’t anywhere good.
“Never mind,” he said. “We’ve got another problem. Come on.”
“Where are we going?” Jacobs asked.
“Jumper bay,” Lorne said. “We’re going to do a little reconnaissance.”
Hernandez caught up to him on the other side, still cradling his P90 as if he expected more hostile pigeons. “What are we looking for?”
“I’m not sure,” Lorne said. “You’ll get used to that.” He caught the muzzle of Hernandez’s weapon and lowered it firmly. “Try to be a little less twitchy.”
“Yes, sir,” Hernandez said. Lorne suspected it might take him some time.
* * *
Eva Robinson swirled the last of her coffee around in her cup, looking out her office’s tall windows at the snow. It was certainly a very comfortable office, although she suspected Dr. Heightmeyer had originally chosen it for the view, which — when you could see anything but falling snow — was certainly breathtaking.
It was just that at the moment it was also empty. She’d spent the morning unpacking her books and arranging her desk the way she wanted it, but there was only so long that stayed interesting. She checked her appointment schedule on the computer again, just to make sure something hadn’t miraculously added itself. It remained blank for the rest of the day.
She’d met a few members of the expedition already, a handful of bewildered Marines who wanted reassurance that they weren’t crazy for believing that the city was flying through space and a few scientists who were having trouble settling back into their daily routine after so many unsettled months. She’d also spent a long hour with Dr. McKay, who mainly seemed to want to interrogate her about her suitability to deal with what he referred to as ‘the complicated and delicate workings of his psyche.’