STARGATE ATLANTIS: The Wild Blue (SGX-05)

by Melissa Scott

  “Let’s take a quick look in the plant,” Radek said, “make sure there are no deal-breakers before the major leaves us.”

  “An excellent idea.” Matthias Kasper nodded. He was one of the older scientists on Atlantis, didn’t travel much off world, but he’d worked on hydroelectric plants as a young man, and Radek thought his experience would be invaluable.

  “Go ahead,” Ronon said. “We’ll check the dormitory.”

  “Ms. Kos?” Kasper began, but she had already joined them, rummaging in the carryall she had slung over her shoulder.

  “I’m ready.”

  “And I,” Pin said.

  Radek nodded, and started for the plant.

  The main door was unlocked, swinging loosely on its hinges. It opened onto a broad lobby, its brightly tiled floor drifted with dirt and leaves. There was also the remains of a fire, ash and half-burnt bits of broken furniture, left over, Radek thought, from the Eze family’s stay. Pin made a small, unhappy sound.

  “The offices are upstairs. The control room and the generators are through there.” Kos pointed to a set of double doors marked with a muscular arm holding a stylized lightning bolt. There were words below it in Satedan script: the name of the plant, Radek guessed.

  “Control room first,” he said, and started for the door.

  It was locked, of course, and he swore under his breath. “Mr. Pin —”

  “I have a key,” Kos said quickly. “At least, this should be a master —” She fumbled it into the lock as she spoke, and smiled with relief as the tumblers clicked back. “There.”

  “Well done,” Kasper said, and flicked on his flashlight.

  Radek did the same, letting the circle of light play over the walls. Here in the working sections of the plant, there was less decoration, though the walls had been painted a vivid, cheerful yellow that was now peeling in strips from the plaster beneath. They were in a long hall lined with what looked like offices, each one with a forest-green door set with a large pane of pebbled glass marked with the arm and lightning bolt and more Satedan words.

  “Workers’ rep, junior director, hydrologist, another junior director…” Pin’s voice trailed off, and he shook his head. “This way.”

  There was another locked door at the end of the hall, but Kos’s bundle of keys opened that as well. They stepped through into an antechamber with metal stairs rising to either side and a room full of consoles ahead of them. Windows set high into the walls near the ceiling let in a murky light, but Radek swung his flashlight methodically across the space before moving forward. He could hear a distant deep rumble, and guessed it was the falls.

  “This is the main control room?”

  “Yes,” Kos said. He could hear the echo of the efficient secretary she had been, the pride at having everything at her fingertips. “The technicians monitored the turbines from the floor, and the supervisors were on the mezzanine, behind us.”

  Radek nodded, turning to look up at the open balcony above him, then let his flashlight play across the consoles again. Everything was dark, of course, but he saw almost no damage, no broken glass, no shattered screens, no torn and trailing wires.

  “They were supposed to do a controlled shut-down,” Kos said. “If the Wraith came. That was company procedure. Shut everything down and leave it so that it could be restarted cold. They were supposed to cover the consoles and then get out.”

  “I think they did a good job,” Pin said. “From the way the switches are set — it was all deliberate.”

  “Good,” Radek said. “So far, so good. But we still need to look at the turbines.”

  “Through here.” Kos led them through the consoles to a door set in the right-hand wall. It was heavier than the others, with a bar dropped across it as well as the locks, and Radek had to help Pin lift it out of its brackets before Kos could open the locks. She pulled the door back against the wall, fastening it in place with a heavy hook, and raised her voice to be heard over the sudden roar of water. “The generator room.”

  Radek nodded, playing his light across the cavernous space. Kasper joined him, and they moved from one generator to the next. There were four, all silent; the first three had been switched to standby and then decoupled from the system, while the fourth had its side open as though someone had been working on it when the Wraith came. The exposed parts showed signs of rust and mineral deposits, but the others seemed to be in decent shape.

  “They cut the grid power when the Wraith came,” Pin said. “Everybody went to generators — well, everybody who had them.”

  “The policy was to protect the station,” Kos said. “We’d been culled before, and once the Wraith were gone, it was important to get the power back to as many people as possible. Only this time…”

  Only this time, it hadn’t been a culling, but an all-out attack, an attempt to destroy the Satedans as a people. And by the time it was over, there had been no one left to restore the power, and no one left to use it. Radek cleared his throat, looking at Kasper. “I think the technicians did their jobs. It looks as though there’s a decent chance we could get this running.”

  “I have not worked on a system precisely like this,” Kasper said, “but I think it’s close enough. The water can be switched — through here? From the falls, I mean.”

  “That console controls the intake gates,” Kos said. “And there are manual failsafes as well.”

  Pin moved toward a panel set into the wall to the right. “At Gerilon, where I worked, we had an internal generator, just for internal system —“

  “We had one, too,” Kos began. “Oh, you’ve found it.”

  “Yes, and it looks as though everything was shut down correctly.” Pin turned his own flashlight on the panel, and Radek came to join him.

  “It has its own turbine?” All the switches were turned off, and a metal grill had been drawn across the controls, as though the technicians might appear at any moment. It was like looking at some of the Ancient ruins, Radek thought, that same haunted sense of missing time, people made vividly present by their absence.

  Pin nodded. “If we can get it running, we’ll be able to power the station buildings.”

  Radek put aside his thoughts. “All right. Let’s get back to the others and tell them so.”

  ***

  Ronon left the other Satedans to scout through the superintendent’s house and the dormitory, and walked back toward the jumper. It had landed on the cracked pavement in front of the power plant, and the remains of the road stretched back toward the distant capital. Lorne came to meet him, resting his folded arms on the stock of his P90.

  “What do you think, can they get this working?”

  Ronon shrugged. “Depends on how the plant workers left it.”

  “It would be nice to get lucky.”

  “Yeah.” Ronon shaded his eyes, trying to gauge the length of the pavement. “Do you fly those little planes? Like Colonel Hocken?”

  “I’m not really a pilot,” Lorne said. “I’m just a guy with the ATA gene. Why?”

  “Cai wanted us to see if she could land the plane up here if there was an emergency. One of the drones spotted something on the other side of the Spur, and she wanted to take a look.”

  “Maybe?” Lorne glanced over his shoulder. “Sergeant Fishman! We’re going to take a look at this road.”

  They made their way along the tarred strip, Ronon scuffing idly at the loose pebbles that had worked loose from the surface. There were plenty of cracks, and grass sprouted through many of them, but fewer potholes than he had expected — though of course there had been no wheeled traffic on this road for a decade. The snow had come and gone, but there had been no trucks or carts to damage the frozen surfaces. A few clumps of saplings encroached on the edges of the paving, but they would be easy enough to remove. They had done more damage to the rail line on its raised bed, tucked closer against the edge of the forest. The bank had washed away in places, cross-ties jumbled on top of each other, the rails spanning a gap tw
ice as long as a man’s arm. They weren’t going to get the trains running again anytime soon, Ronon thought, and that meant Hocken’s airplane was more important than ever.

  “How long a road does she need?”

  Lorne turned to look back at the power plant, already receding into the distance. “The minimum distance for the Rapide is something like 1500 feet, and we’ve probably got twice that to the edge of the clearing. The question is whether the surface is safe, and if she’s comfortable clearing the trees and those towers.”

  Ronon turned in a full circle, scanning their surroundings. The transmission towers were on the edge of the clearing opposite the rail line, and to his eyes, they looked well clear of the road. Most of them trailed strands of cable, though only a couple of lines still connected one tower to another. “I don’t think the wings are any wider than this road.”

  “Yeah.” Lorne reached into his pocket and pulled out a camera, began slowly panning around the clearing. As the lens passed him, Ronon resisted the urge to grin and wave.

  “When you give that to her, tell her we can clear out all those little trees. I don’t think there’s much we can do to even out the surface, but I’ll talk to Zelenka if she needs that.”

  “Air Force people land on worse every day,” Lorne said, with a shrug. “The Rapide’s supposed to handle bush flying.”

  “It’ll be her call,” Ronon said.

  By the time Lorne had finished filming the road and the space around it, the other Satedans had begun to set up camp in the lobby of the power plant.

  “Not the dorms?” Lorne asked, stowing his camera, and the sergeant, Fishman, shook his head.

  “They — there wasn’t time to take anything. They’re still full of people’s stuff.”

  Ronon grunted agreement. Even when he’d been a Runner, he’d hated having to camp in the wreckage of other people’s lives; he’d taken their belongings in order to survive, but it had never felt entirely right. Lorne nodded, too, and Fishman said, “Anyway, better to have everybody in the same place, just in case.”

  In case of what was a good question, Ronon thought, considering they hadn’t seen any signs of life on the flight up, but there was no point in taking chances. The Eze family and their neighbors had survived up on the Plateau, and there were bound to be others. Anyone who’d survived the culling was likely to shoot first.

  “We’ve set up the radio over there,” Fishman went on, “and Wood will stay to liaise with Dr. Zelenka.”

  The corporal looked up, hearing her name, and then bent back over her wires and boxes.

  “We were going to leave a naquadah generator, but Dr. Kasper says they may be able to get power turned on in the plant itself,” Fishman said. “The docs back on Atlantis were complaining that they didn’t have a lot of spare generators right now.”

  “Ok,” Lorne said, and the double doors at the back of the hall swung open.

  “There you are,” Kasper said. “Dr. Zelenka wanted me to warn you that we are about to start the internal generator.”

  “Ok,” Lorne said, sounding wary, and Wood looked up again.

  “That’s good, right, sir?”

  “How long have you been on Atlantis?” Fishman asked, and she frowned, looking suddenly very young.

  “About three months —”

  There was a deep rumble, more felt than heard, and the overhead lights flickered. Ronon looked up, checking for missing bulbs, and they flickered again, then steadied to a dull orange glow that brightened rapidly.

  “Excellent!” Kasper exclaimed, and darted back through the double doors.

  Ronon looked at Lorne, seeing his own uncertainty reflected in the major’s face. “Better check for short circuits.”

  “Yeah.” Lorne nodded to Fishman, and they made a quick circuit of the lobby. Somewhat to Ronon’s surprise, there were no broken wires spitting sparks, no smoke curling from between panels, just the line of chandeliers glowing in the center of the open room. It had been years since he’d seen anything like it, Ronon realized — Atlantis’s lights were different, and the lights on Earth had been a subtly different color — and he allowed himself a moment just to stare.

  The double doors swung open again, and the engineers emerged, looking and sounding pleased with themselves.

  “See, everything’s working —”

  “Beautiful!”

  “I told you that was the procedure,” Kos said, to Pin, and he nodded.

  “And you were right, absolutely right.”

  Zelenka detached himself from the group and came to join them. “We are making progress. If the other generators are in as good shape, there is no reason we can’t get them working again as well.”

  “That’s great news,” Lorne said. “But now I should get my people back to Atlantis.”

  “Actually,” Zelenka said, “I was hoping you would stay overnight, just in case we had any problems with the systems here.”

  “You’re not seriously suggesting we might need to evacuate everybody,” Lorne said.

  “No, no.” Zelenka shook his head. “I was thinking that if we had more confidence in the station’s system, we could send the naquadah generator back with you. There are backup batteries for the radio if we need them, yes? And it’s not as though we have so many naquadah generators to spare.”

  “True enough.” Lorne paused. “Let me radio Atlantis, see what the colonel says.”

  He moved away, and Ronon looked up at the blazing chandeliers. Just seeing them felt like a celebration. “Do you think we can get the plant working again? Send power to the capital?”

  “Ah.” Zelenka gave a wry smile. “Those are two very different things. The people here, they did an excellent job of mothballing the plant. It is all almost ready to start up tomorrow. But to get power to the capital — you saw how many transmission lines were lost. That is a project on an entirely different scale.”

  “Still.” It was impossible to be a pessimist standing there in the brightly-lit lobby while the sun went down outside. “We need the wires, right, the cables? And we need to string them. The towers look like they’re in good shape —”

  “The ones we’ve seen,” Zelenka said. “And neither the road nor the railroad seems to be in good repair.”

  “We’ll find a way,” Ronon said. “We can bring some of it up by puddle jumper, or in the Rapide — Lorne thinks there’s room to land here. And we can take carts along the road.” He faltered, reality setting in. That was years of work, salvaging the cable, hauling it through the woods; repairing the road would take nearly as long, and the railroad even longer, if they could even find people who knew how to do the work, because Atlantis wouldn’t — couldn’t — provide that much help…

  “I think it’s worth doing,” Zelenka said, and Ronon gave him a startled look. “But it will be better if no one expects it to be easy. Or fast. But I think it will get done in the end.”

  “Yeah,” Ronon said, and thought he did believe it. Zelenka gave him a quick smile, and turned away.

  “Excuse me.”

  Ronon turned to see Valiena Bar looking up at him. She had obviously been helping out in the generator room, her hands and pullover stained with rust and darker grime, and there was a streak of oil on her chin. “Yeah?”

  “If Major Lorne is flying back tonight — he won’t be able to see anyone on the ground.”

  Her brother had been with Evrast Mar, Ronon remembered. “I thought they were going up the other side of the Spur.”

  “They were going to the Spur,” Bar said. “Atil said last time they took the road part of the way because it was easier than cutting cross country. I thought the Lanteans said they would look for him.”

  “Lorne’s probably not going back until tomorrow morning,” Ronon said. “I’ll talk to him.”

  “Thank you.”

  Ronon frowned. “Is there any particular reason you’re worried? Anything we ought to know about?”

  “I’m worried because they didn’t chec
k in,” Bar answered. “Anything could happen up here.”

  That was true — and it was exactly why Cai tried to keep the number of exploring missions to a minimum of people who knew what they were doing — but there was something about the question that made him frown. Was she more worried than he would have expected? She had to have known the risks. He shook the thought away. There was enough to do to get the power plant secured for the night; he’d worry about her in the morning.

  ***

  Mel let the video play through to its end again, this time watching Cai as he studied the images. Lorne had done a good job surveying what was left of the roadway as well as the surrounding terrain; it was just a matter now of convincing Sateda’s governor that it was time to put the Rapide to the test. He knew it, she thought, but just hated making that last leap. Lorne had made it back to the capital a little after noon, and hung around to answer questions before taking the puddle jumper back to Atlantis. From everything he’d said, it sounded as though the scientists expected to be able to get the plant running again, and she hoped that news would put Cai in a better mood.

  “You’re sure you can land there?” Cai said, and turned the laptop back to face her. “The paving isn’t in very good shape. And you’re sure there’s enough room?”

  “Major Lorne estimates that we have about two thousand yards from the southern end of the clearing to the plant perimeter,” Mel answered. “That’s comfortably more than the minimum. Ronon’s already started clearing those little trees. And, of course, we’re not actually planning to need to land there.”

  Cai smiled at that, the oil lamps flickering. “All right. If we agree that this is an acceptable emergency landing zone — then what? What exactly are you trying to achieve?”

  Mel reached for the map she had brought from the field. It was the best they had, a copy of a copy of a real survey-style map, traced onto brittle sheets salvaged from an office supply house, and she unfolded it carefully. It showed the edge of the Alduren Plateau and the Spur trailing south and east off its edge, a knife’s edge of rock rising from the forest. The Narmoth Falls and the power plant were on the western side, at the western edge of the map; the eastern slope of the Spur was marked with squares and crosses and tiny names. “The Spur is on the edge of our planned survey area — we’d have taken in more of it, but it’s at the farthest extent of our range, and we’ve had problems with turbulence, since there’s a fairly stiff downslope wind on the eastern side of the mountains. After we got those first pictures, though, we tried a second run, and got some more images that suggest that there’s a man-made clearing here —” She touched the map beside a square that lay just below the edge of the Plateau, high on the slopes of the Spur. “We think it might be in current use.”