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There are some joys that no one can take away no matter how hard they try, and for Rodney McKay, researching a newly discovered Ancient outpost was one of them. Not just any Ancient outpost either, but what they believed might be a facility in which the Stargates were originally built. Nothing was going to stop Rodney from exploring every inch of this place.
And, oh, how they had tried to stop him. Well, not on purpose, but Teyla was off with the Athosians celebrating their harvest festival, and Ronon had gone along because he loved festivals (and may have been seeing an Athosian woman, but Rodney wasn’t one to pay too much attention to those kinds of rumors). Sheppard had offered to fly him the eight hours it took to get to the outpost, but then he had come down with some kind of awful flu which had knocked him flat on his ass for the foreseeable future. Beckett said it would probably be a week before he was up and about, but knowing Sheppard and his penchant for catching the worst of everything, it would probably be longer.
So the options had been to wait for Sheppard to get better or convince some other military schmuck to escort him because Elizabeth wouldn’t let him fly by himself and Sheppard didn’t trust a couple of scientists to take care of his jumper. And Rodney just couldn’t stand the thought that Zelenka was already there, making all the discoveries without him. In the end, he had whined at Sheppard until the sick man convinced Major Lorne to just please, please play chauffeur so he could get some sleep.
And so, while riding for eight hours in a puddle jumper with Lorne, who was at best a more boring version of Sheppard, was not ideal, nothing was going to ruin Rodney’s kid-in-a-candy-store vibe.
“How much further?” Rodney said impatiently.
Lorne glared at him sideways, and Rodney couldn’t help but wonder if he had perfected that look from dealing with his team of Marines, who were basically like large children. “It’s only been a couple of hours, McKay,” he said in a patronizing tone, confirming Rodney’s suspicion that he was indeed being treated like a child.
Sighing, Rodney drummed his fingers unconsciously on the control panel. He had never been good at long car rides. As a kid, his parents had taken the family to the Grand Canyon (a total disaster; camping in the desert to see a giant hole in the ground?), and he had spent the entire two day drive fluctuating between being carsick and fighting with his sister. That had been the last long road trip they had taken. The puddle jumper was hardly better than his parents’ station wagon.
“Do you want to fly for a while?” Lorne asked, eyeing his drumming fingers.
Rodney stopped mid drum, feeling something between annoyance at the major’s sarcasm and embarrassed by the nervous tick. He sighed again and stood, stretching out his sore back. He needed to quit slouching so much. “I’m going to organize the supplies, make sure everything is ready to go.”
He thought he saw Lorne smirking as he made his way to the back of the jumper, but ignored him, focusing instead on the box of sensors he had packed. Picking up his tablet, he opened up the supply list to check it over again. It was unnecessary as he had already checked everything three times, but it gave him an excuse to move and not try to make awkward conversation with the major.
He was halfway through sorting the various power conduits when he heard a Pop! followed by a curse from Lorne.
“What was that?” he shouted, hurrying back to the front of the jumper.
Lorne was frowning, studying the HUD. “Something just hit us,” he said, pointing to a readout on the screen. “It looks like it punctured the hull.”
Rodney’s eyes flickered over the screen. These readings couldn’t be right, how could something puncture the jumper? “Aren’t the shields up?” he asked, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. They were losing cabin pressure, albeit very slowly; he looked around to see if he could spot where the hole was and noticed a quiet hiss toward the back door.
“Whatever it was just punched right through them,” Lorne called after him as Rodney raced to the back, searching frantically for the leak. Another Pop! and then another. “Hold on! There’s more of them, whatever they are.”
Rodney was still searching for the leak, unable to spot anything. “Well, stop running into them!” he yelled back.
“I’m not trying—” Lorne’s angry reply was cut off by a yelp, making Rodney whip his head back to see what was happening in the cockpit. Lorne was gripping the controls, ducking like he was trying to avoid being hit by something. “McKay! What is this?”
“I don’t know,” Rodney shouted back. “Nothing should be able to just punch through the shields like that.” His eyes scanned the hull again. “Whatever it is, it’s small; I don’t see a hole!”
The jumper suddenly rocked to the side, the inertial dampeners not stopping Rodney from being thrown against the wall. Panic fueled, Rodney ran back to the cockpit and cursed at the flashing alarms on the HUD. There were five, no, six, hull leaks. But the light that made his heart stop was the one indicating the loss of the right drive pod. “Get us away from here!” he ordered.
“I’m trying!” Lorne snapped back, his face twisted in concentration.
Rodney grabbed his tablet, plugging it into the jumper to try and reroute power to the left drive pod and get them moving faster. More flashing warnings greeted him, but he brushed them aside and focused on the task at hand. “Okay, okay,” he said, managing to tap into the other systems and divert the power. It would set them off course with only one drive pod functioning, turning the ship in a wide circle, but at this point anything was better than staying here. “I boosted the power to the drive pod. Now go!”
Lorne didn’t waste any time following Rodney’s orders, sweating with the effort of moving the sluggish jumper.
Rodney kept working on the tablet, trying to figure out where exactly the punctures in the hull were so he could get to sealing them up. They were leaking atmosphere much faster now. He ran to the back again and started digging through the bins underneath the benches. “Patch kit, patch kit,” he mumbled to himself. “Come on... Ah!” He pulled out the kit triumphantly, ripping it open and pulling out the binding tape.
“Duct tape. Fixes everything,” he said, smiling.
“Doc?” The major sounded frazzled.
Rodney spotted the fire extinguisher and an idea slapped him in the face. “Are we clear?” he called up to the front.
Lorne appeared in the doorway between the cockpit and rear compartment. “I think so. I don’t know, but the jumper’s dead in the air.” He eyed the duct tape and fire extinguisher that Rodney was pulling off the wall. “What are you doing?”
Rodney yanked the pin out of the fire extinguisher and pressed the trigger, aiming it toward the place on the back door where he could hear the hissing. The carbon dioxide cloud obscured the spot for a moment before it was sucked through a single tiny dot in the back door. “Aha!” Rodney shouted in victory, grabbing a piece of the tape and slapping it over the hole.
“Move,” he said, pointing the extinguisher at the next spot that the HUD had indicated had a breech. Lorne ducked out of the way as Rodney shot out another cloud of carbon dioxide. “I’m patching up these holes so we don’t lose all our oxygen and die. Do you mind?”
Lorne scuttled out of the way again as Rodney went for hole number three. “Need any help?” he offered.
Rodney threw the roll of tape at him, swinging the extinguisher around to the next spot. “Here. I’ll spray, you patch.”
Ripping off a piece of tape, Lorne waited for the carbon dioxide to show him the breech and then sealed it with slightly more care than Rodney had. Once they got all six spots sealed, Rodney grabbed his tablet and brought up the schematics, looking over everything as fast as possible to assess their situation.
“How does it look?” Was Lorne out of breath?
Rodney frowned at what he was seeing on his tablet. “Bad,” he answered. “Very, very bad. We lost both drive pods and 35 percent of our atmosphere from those hull breeches. Looks like we managed to seal them for now but-”
The lights suddenly flickered off, sending sparks from the cord connecting his tablet to the jumper. Emergency lights came on, but the tablet was dark. “Dammit!” Rodney shouted, throwing it on the floor. “And now we’ve lost power.”
Lorne dropped to the bench in the rear of the jumper. “McKay!” he snapped. “Give me the bottom line.”
Rodney started pacing, stopping to fiddle with various panels to try to restore power. “Whatever hit us did a number on the jumper. It took out life support and the engines,” he growled, rearranging some control crystals to see if he could get anything to light back up. “And we are floating off into space with no way to stop,” he added. “Clear enough?”
Rodney glanced at Lorne when he didn’t respond and noticed for the first time that he was hunched over, arm protectively across his middle. His face was pale and he was breathing heavily.
“Major?” he asked, suddenly concerned.
Lorne looked up at him, pain etched across his face. “Think I got hit, too,” he admitted quietly.
Rodney just stared at him with wide eyes for a moment. A broken ship was one thing, a disaster he was familiar with. Broken people were a totally different beast. He didn’t do blood, had no semblance of bedside manner. He stuttered incoherently, trying to say something, but his mouth just opened and closed uselessly.
“McKay,” Lorne said gently, and it may have been the kindest tone he had ever used with Rodney. “Focus.”
“Right,” Rodney agreed, forcing himself to take a breath and think. He snapped his fingers. “First aid kit.”
He grabbed the kit and set it next to Lorne, who leaned back against the wall with a grimace. “I don’t think it’s that bad,” the injured man said, moving his hand to reveal a bloody spot on his right side. “Just need a bandage and some painkillers.”
Rodney swallowed reflexively at the sight of blood. He forced his eyes away and started digging through the first aid kit. “Here,” he said, passing over a pack of gauze.
“Thanks,” Lorne said, trying to staunch the blood seeping into his shirt.
“Maybe you should, uh, lie down,” Rodney stuttered, noting how pale he was. He was probably in shock, and Rodney really didn’t want the major to pass out. Having a conscious injured person was bad enough.
“I’m okay,” he insisted through a clenched jaw, shrugging out of his jacket with limited success. “Just give me something to wrap this up.”
Rodney rolled his eyes, but didn’t argue. He had dealt with Sheppard enough times to know better. After watching the major fumble for a minute, he sighed in resignation and helped, keeping his body as far from the injured man as possible and making a face to display his discomfort.
As he removed the jacket, Rodney noticed another bloody spot on the back. “Umm, Lorne?” he said slowly, holding it up for the major to see.
“Shit,” Lorne groaned. He reached his free hand to his back and let out a hiss when he found the exit wound.
The injury looked exactly like a bullet wound, except maybe a bit smaller. It was right below his rib cage and close to the side. A couple of inches and it would have missed him completely. Rodney suddenly realized that he could have been hit just as easily, and had to shake the thought before he panicked. The wound was bleeding steadily, but not profusely. The bigger concern, which Rodney didn’t mention because Lorne had probably already thought about it and there was nothing they could do anyway, was that something vital had been hit.
Lorne tried to help as much as possible, holding the gauze with shaking hands while Rodney wrapped the bandage around him snugly and then taped it off. He didn’t complain, but Rodney could tell he was feeling the pain pretty strongly. “I think there’s morphine in the first aid kit,” Rodney offered.
Shaking his head, Lorne responded, “Just give me aspirin. It’s not that bad.”
It was a blatant lie, but if Lorne wanted to suffer, that was his prerogative. Rodney dug through the kit and passed him a handful of pills and a water bottle before turning his attention back to the other disaster. Moving to the cockpit, he pulled open the bottom of the control panel and tried to get anything to light up, but nothing was responding. The jumper was very very dead.
“Any luck?” Lorne asked. He was up again, though Rodney didn’t think he looked like he should be, leaning against the door to the cockpit.
“No,” Rodney answered shortly. “No power anywhere. I have no idea where we are or how bad the damage to the ship is, but I can tell you we are very screwed.”
“Okay,” Lorne said, biting his lip and thinking for a moment. “As soon as the team at the outpost realizes we’re missing, they’ll send a someone to look for us. We just have to hold tight until then.”
Rodney turned on him, feeling the heat rise to his face. “You don’t get it, Major,” he spat. “It will be at least six hours until they realize we’re missing, and another six to get to where we were when this happened. But they won’t find us because they won’t pick us up on any scanners if we have no power. And on top of that, we flew off course before the engines went offline, and just because the engines turned off doesn’t mean we stop moving. An object in motion stays in motion, so we are flying further off into space right now with no way to tell anyone where we are. By the time they come looking for us, we’ll be God-knows-where. Not to mention, we don’t have life support. No air, no heat. We’ll either suffocate or freeze to death long before anyone finds us. And that’s if we don’t have another run in with whatever the hell caused this in the first place.”
Lorne blinked, taking the rant in stride. “Then you’ll just have to fix the jumper,” he finally said.
Rodney threw his hands up in frustration. “Oh yeah, great solution! McKay can just magically fix everything!”
“You’ve got an entire ship full of supplies,” Lorne argued motioning to the bins in the back.
With a huff of annoyance, Rodney brushed past Lorne to the rear compartment. “Fine. I’ll just pull a miracle out of my ass.” Randomly throwing things out of the bin he had been sorting earlier, he found an extra tablet and turned it on. He turned and shooed at Lorne. “Get out of my way.”
“That’s the spirit,” Lorne said with a grin.
*****
Surprisingly (or maybe not—he was, after all, a genius) Rodney did get the tablet to connect to the jumper and pull up the last readings before they lost power. Not that it really helped, other than allowing him to calculate all the ways they would die more accurately. Life support was still stubbornly off, which at this point was priority one. After poking around a bit, he found a couple of vital control crystals had been damaged by the attack (that’s how Rodney thought of it until he could better determine what had happened). He tried fitting in replacement crystals, every puddle jumper carried a couple in case of damage, but whatever had happened had thoroughly destroyed the entire system.
His next priority was the radio, and that was also a bust. All they had were their headsets, which didn’t have nearly the range they needed. Even if he could get the jumper’s radio to work, which he couldn’t, they were too far out to be able to reach the Ancient outpost.
On a positive note, he discovered that the left drive pod was actually still functional, it just had no way to receive power. There was really nothing they could do to fix that, and even if they could, flying with one drive pod would just spin them in circles.
The one piece of all of this that didn’t spell utter doom was the plethora of food and water available. They had packed for a three day stay at the outpost, which meant double the supplies because the military insisted on being over-prepared for any situation. Rodney wasn’t going to complain about that. After a couple of hours of trying to fix an unfix-able ship, he collapsed onto the bench with an MRE.
Lorne, who had been in the cockpit fiddling with the wires under the control panel, hoping to randomly get lucky and turn on the HUD, sat down across from him with a barely concealed wince.
“Well, we may freeze to death, but at least we won’t starve,” Rodney quipped darkly, stuffing his face with macaroni and cheese. The jumper was already getting cold, though at this point it was just uncomfortable.
Lorne took a breath. “We’re not going to die,” he said.
“Oh?” Rodney asked. “And do you have a plan to rescue us?”
He got a glare in response. “Not yet. But we still have time. We’ll figure something out.” He said the last sentence slow, enunciating every word carefully, as if that was the end of the argument.
“Major—”
“Listen,” Lorne snapped, cutting him off. “I am not going to sit here and listen to your doom and gloom. Until we are out of oxygen or too frozen to move anymore, there is still a chance and we are going to keep looking for it.”
Rodney snapped his mouth shut, surprised by the outburst. “Fine.” He resisted the urge to add that their chances were slim to none unless by some miracle the Daedalus happened to be passing by with their cargo bay open and scooped them up.
Lorne grabbed an MRE from the open bin and sat back carefully, picking at the food more than eating. After a minute, he asked, “How long do we have? Before, you know...”
Rodney raised an eyebrow. Oh, now he wanted to talk doom and gloom? Picking up his tablet, he checked the readings he had managed to pull up on the ship. “I estimate we have about 22 hours before we run out of oxygen, including the extra cylinders back here.” There were two extra oxygen cylinders in every jumper for emergencies or spacewalks, but they only carried a few hours of air each.
“That gives us some time,” Lorne said.
“The bigger problem,” Rodney continued, “is the cold. The ship is pretty insulated, but it’s not perfect and we’ve been slowly leaking heat already. At the rate it’s going, I calculate we’ll freeze within 18 hours.”
Lorne sighed and set down the MRE, rubbing a hand over his face. “Okay, well that’s still 18 hours we can use to figure something out, right? There’s got to be something we can do.”
Rodney wanted to say that no, there wasn’t, because he had been over the ship a hundred times already and tried every trick he knew. The power was not coming back on, no matter how hard they wished for it. He opened his mouth to say as much, but changed tactics when he saw Lorne’s hopeful expression and instead mumbled, “I’ll keep trying.”
Setting the remains of the MRE aside, he snatched his tablet and went back to the cockpit to try (he was sure uselessly) to once again get some semblance of power to the ship. He pulled up the information he had managed to pull off the jumper’s computer, flipping through the pages of information and code and looking for anything he may have missed earlier. It still showed the exact same inescapable death sentence as before.
Frustrated, he changed tactics, deciding that he might as well try to figure out what had hit them. Maybe that would help inspire something, or at least answer the nagging question of what could possibly punch through their shields like they were nothing more than a flimsy piece of paper. He might only have a day to live, but he was still a scientist, dammit.
Looking over the data, he took a closer look at the readings that had been collected in the space surrounding them just before the impact. The jumper was constantly scanning for obstacles, hazards, and other various inconsistencies as it flew. Usually, the ship alerted the passengers of such dangers on the HUD, or at least organically warned the pilot through the ATA interface. Had it been an enemy ship, they certainly would have picked it up, and even space debris should have registered, though that wouldn’t account for poking holes in the shields. But the readings were all normal. This just didn’t make any sense.
“Are you sure you didn’t see anything before we got hit?” he asked after analyzing the data for a while with no hint of an answer.
Lorne was fiddling with the Ancient PDA, still slouched on the bench. “There was nothing there,” he confirmed without looking up.
“Huh,” Rodney grunted, his brain still searching for a reasonable explanation. He thought for a few more minutes and then creased his brow at the major. “What are you doing?” he asked, realizing after he said it that the way he said it it sounded like an insult.
Glancing up at him, Lorne shrugged. “Just trying to see if there’s anything around us. Maybe a planet nearby or something.”
Rodney sighed in exasperation. Was everyone an idiot except him? “There’s not—” He stopped himself, taking a deep breath before he started back into the death speech. There was really no point. If scanning for solutions that didn’t exist kept the man occupied, so be it. “Let me know if you find anything,” he said instead, failing to keep the sarcasm from his voice.
Lorne shot him a look. “If you have something better for me to do...” he offered, matching Rodney’s tone.
Rodney waved his hand, turning back to his tablet. “No, no. You can keep...” he trailed off, an idea suddenly forming. He walked over and snatched the Ancient device out of Lorne’s hands.
“Hey!”
“I have an idea,” Rodney explained hastily, but didn’t expound on it. Instead, he popped open the panel that controlled the life support and started yanking the control crystals out.
“McKay?”
Lorne was watching him with a mixture of interest, confusion, and hope on his face.
Rodney tried to slide off the back of the scanner with no luck. “Damn thing,” he muttered, smacking it. He could never get these things open.
“Give it,” Lorne said, holding out his hand. Rodney handed it to him and he popped the back off with ease before giving it back. “What are you doing?”
Rodney took a deep breath, getting back to work. “I’m trying to use the scanner’s power to boost the life support. These things actually have a pretty decent power supply, and if I can get it routed into the system... Ow!” He pulled his hand back at the spark from the wire he was holding.
“You okay?”
Shaking off the shock, Rodney tried again, connecting the wires from the jumper to the scanner. “I’m fine,” he said dismissively. He looked around for his tablet, which was still near the cockpit, and stretched out to grab it with his fingertips. “Almost got it. Just need to...” The scanner suddenly went dark and the panel in the jumper lit. “Got it!”
He pulled up the schematics on his tablet and checked the readings hopefully. “Doc? Did it work?” Lorne asked, the same hope reflected in his voice. Rodney waved at him to give him a minute and muttered under his breath while he calculated how much power had been transferred. His face fell at the result.
“It only added a couple hours to our time,” he said mournfully.
Lorne pursed his lips. “What about all the other stuff you brought? There’s, like, three bins full of computers back here. Can we use the power from any of that?”
Rodney shook his head. “None of it’s Ancient. The technology is too different, I wouldn’t be able to patch it in, and even if I could, the power in those batteries is nothing comparatively. All of it combined might give us an extra ten minutes.”
“Well,” Lorne said after a moment. “A few hours is better than nothing.”
“Oh yeah, because it will make such a difference.” Rodney scoffed.
Lorne smiled. “What can I say? I’m an optimist.” He leaned back against the bulkhead, hand going to his injured side and face scrunching. He took a couple of deep breaths before continuing, “The longer we can give Atlantis to find us, the better.”
Rodney started pacing up and down the jumper. “Did you not hear me before? We are way off course by now. It’s still going to be hours before Atlantis hears that we’re missing, and that’s if Zelenka and whatever team is with him head straight back to tell them. By the time they come looking for us, we’ll be hours away, and they won’t even know where to start looking. Hell, I don’t even know where we are now!”
Lorne was quiet, and Rodney stopped to look at him. He was slouched down again, face pale and lined with pain. Rodney thought he saw something flickering in the major’s eyes. Doubt? Defeat? Was the unflappable major finally giving in to the inevitable? But then his jaw set with steely determination as he met Rodney’s gaze. “Then we’ll have to find a way to show them.”
*****
A few more hours passed before the cold really started to get to them. They had already pilfered their extra clothes out of what they had packed. Even in multiple layers of t-shirts and pants, the chill seeped through. The only blankets on board were the emergency blankets in the first aid kit (a huge oversight if Rodney had anything to say about it). Even those only did so much.
Rodney still fiddled with his tablet and the other equipment periodically, but it was more out of habit than anything. He had gotten no new ideas or inspiration, had tried every random trick he knew, and nothing had worked. His mood swung back and forth from determined to frustrated to hopeless before the cycle started over again. The small part of him that hoped for a magic solution was being outweighed more and more by the larger part that knew there was no way out this time.
Lorne was deteriorating quickly, though he refused to admit it and the morphine that Rodney had once again offered, saying it would just put him to sleep. Rodney thought that actually sounded nice, wondering if maybe he should just inject himself and get it over with, but dismissed the idea immediately. Perhaps he was too much a coward, but even though in some ways he had given up, he knew a small part of him would fight til his last breath. He didn’t mention the morphine to Lorne again.
Even though Rodney was thoroughly occupied with trying to save their sorry asses, the impending doom was making time a very strange conundrum. He felt like the seconds were stretching to minutes, ticking by so slowly he thought it was impossible they would reach the end of the ten or so hours they had left, and yet he couldn’t believe that ten hours had already passed. Half their time, gone already.
“You know, you’re probably using up more oxygen pacing around like that.”
Rodney stopped moving and glanced at Lorne, hunched in his spot on the bench with the foil blanket wrapped around himself, trying and failing to not look like he was on death’s door. “I already told you, we’re going to freeze before we suffocate. Moving will keep me warmer.”
Lorne nodded. “How’s that working for you?”
With a heavy sigh, Rodney gave up and sat down on the opposite bench. His pacing hadn’t really been helping anything, he was just restless. “Fine, I’ll sit. Happy?”
“You can do whatever you want, I won’t stop you. It was just giving me a headache.”
“Better get used to that. The more carbon dioxide that builds up in here, the bigger your headache will get. You know, suffocation isn’t actually a lack of oxygen, but rather-”
“Can we not describe it in detail?” Lorne interrupted with a grimace. “I don’t really want to think about it.”
Rodney held his hand in mock apology. “Sorry. I’ll just let you discover the joys of a slow, agonizing death on your own.”
Lorne rolled his eyes, but didn’t comment on Rodney’s sarcasm. Instead, he abruptly changed the subject. “What’s your favorite movie, McKay?”
Thrown off by the question, Rodney had to think for a minute. “I don’t really know,” he admitted.
“Come on,” Lorne persisted. “What’s one movie you could watch over and over and never get tired of?”
Rodney really wasn’t much of a movie person. Sure, he’d seen a lot over the years, but since going to Atlantis he hadn’t really had time for them. He caught the Friday night movies that showed in the city sometimes, but half the time he got interrupted by some fire he had to put out in the science department. He could go with something science fiction, he’d worshiped at the feet of Gene Roddenberry just like every other geek, but while he appreciated Star Trek, he wouldn’t call it his favorite. The scientific inaccuracies got to him too much. He tried to think back to something he may have liked when he was younger.
“Mary Poppins,” he finally announced.
Lorne’s eyebrows went up in surprise.
“What?” Rodney said defensively. “It’s a classic. As a boy I used to imagine I was Michael and that I got to go on magical adventures just like he did. I wanted to be a chimney sweep until my sister told me that they don’t actually dance around on the roofs like that.”
Lorne was laughing silently, shaking his head.
“Fine,” Rodney said, aware he was being made fun of. “What’s your favorite movie? Top Gun?”
“No,” Lorne said, making a face. “I’ve always liked Jaws. Scared the shit out of me as a kid.”
“Oh, God,” Rodney moaned. “I’ve never even seen it and that movie gives me nightmares.”
“Never seen it? That’s a shame, Doc.”
Rodney humphed in disagreement. “I think there’s a lot more that I’m going to regret than never having seen Jaws.”
Lorne sighed, lamenting that his diversion tactic hadn’t worked. They were right back to talking about dying.
Realizing that he was bringing down the mood (and proud of himself for making such an astute observation), Rodney decided to humor Lorne with the lighthearted conversation he had been trying to start. “Don’t they blow the shark up with an oxygen tank? By shooting it? That doesn’t even make sense.” Okay, so he was starting an argument, but to be fair, he didn’t really know how to have a conversation without arguing.
Lorne gave him a wry smile. “Oh, and Mary Poppins is plausible?”
Rodney shrugged. “It’s not supposed to be.” The two lapsed back into silence. Rodney thought about the dancing penguins in the movie, and how, as a child, he had tried to figure out how to go inside his books to play with the drawings, closing his eyes and concentrating on walking into the pages. He smiled at the memory of Jeannie teasing him for having a rampant imagination and saying if he didn’t spend so much time chasing around impossible ideas he might have some real friends. And now look at him, all grown up and living the impossible everyday. Heck, maybe Mary Poppins wasn’t so far fetched after all. Maybe somewhere out there, there was a universe with two dimensional beings...
“Microsingularities,” he said suddenly.
Lorne looked at him like he’d lost it. “What?”
“Microsingularities,” he repeated. “The things that hit us. I think they might have been microsingularities.” He grabbed his tablet, turning it back on and flipping through the data again.
“What are you talking about, McKay?”
Rodney held up a hand for him to wait a moment and continued to peruse the readings the jumper had taken just before they lost power. Nothing conclusive, unfortunately, but there were some minor fluctuations that fit his theory.
“Microsingularities are like miniature black holes,” he explained, speaking quickly as his excitement grew. “Theoretically, of course. They would be tiny, invisible to the naked eye, and have the equivalent strength of a regular black hole. They could have easily punched through our shields and taken out the power systems from the jumper.” His eyes widened as he made more connections. “Plus, it fits with being in the area of the Stargate facility. What if in trying to create wormholes, the Ancients accidentally created microsingularities instead?”
Lorne was watching him with a vaguely glazed expression, though he actually seemed to follow along a little better than Sheppard usually did. “So we got hit by some tiny black holes?”
“Well, we flew through them, technically,” Rodney corrected. “Theoretically. I would need to collect more data to be able to tell for sure. People have been trying to prove their existence for years. If I could...” He paused, excitement dropping from his voice. “If I could only go back to get more data.”
Lorne ignored his sudden lack of enthusiasm. “Can this help us? Knowing about these black hole things?”
Rodney shook his head. “No, no. It doesn’t change anything.”
A pause before Lorne said, “Okay, well then I have an idea.”
This caught Rodney’s attention. He looked at the major expectantly, waiting to see what scheme he thought he could come up with that the multiple PhD scientist couldn’t.
“We detach the drive pods and blow them up.”
Rodney narrowed his eyes. Blow up the drive pods? What good would that do? He decided to say this out loud.
“You said that you don’t know where we are,” Lorne explained. “And that Atlantis won’t be able to find us on the scanners because we don’t have power. But if we can somehow broadcast our position...”
“By blowing up half the ship?” Rodney squeaked. What was it with these military guys and blowing stuff up?
“Their long range sensors could pick up an explosion,” Lorne argued. “And it’s not half the ship. The drive pods are useless anyway.”
“And how exactly do you expect to detach them from the ship and get them to blow up?”
“There’s a release command, and we can shoot them with a drone..”
Rodney threw his hands up, despite how cold he was. “That requires power. And in case you forgot, we don’t have any power.”
Lorne creased his brow in thought. “Okay, what about a spacewalk? We have a suit back here. There’s a manual release on the outer hull. And we can blow it up with C-4.”
“Are you insane?!” Rodney suddenly found himself yelling. “Who is going to do this spacewalk? You? You can barely even sit up! Me?” He balked, but didn’t expound on how much he did not want to do it. “There are a thousand reasons why that is a very bad plan. The least of which, what about our oxygen? As soon as we open the door, we’re through!” He didn’t bother mentioning that they would need a pretty large explosion to show up on any kind of long range sensors, and that he doubted even Lorne, who never left home without his explosives, had brought enough C-4 for that.
“We can seal off the cockpit, we’ll still have the air in there.” The puddle jumpers were designed to allow the rear compartment to act as an airlock.
Rodney shook his head. “It would still cut our time in half. At least, if not more.”
Lorne tried to lean forward, but stopped and hissed in pain. “Listen,” he growled, his tone as commanding as he could muster. “You’re the one saying we’re doomed no matter what. I’m sure Atlantis is out there looking for us. I say we bet the little time we have on making ourselves visible so they can find us.” He paused for a second. “If I’m wrong, what’s the worst that can happen? We die a little sooner?”
Rodney opened his mouth with a comeback, but stopped short. Lorne had a point. As much as he didn’t like the plan, it beat sitting on their asses waiting to freeze to death. At least this way they could go out swinging. “Okay, fine,” he agreed begrudgingly. “We’ll try your suicidal plan. But if we’re going to kill ourselves, it’s going to be done my way.”
*****
Rodney had never liked wearing spacesuits. He didn’t actually know anyone who did, but his claustrophobia made it so much worse for him. After getting into the thing, he almost backed out of the whole plan, claiming that if he only had hours left to live, he didn’t want to spend them torturing himself. Somehow, Lorne managed to talk him off the ledge in that annoyingly optimistic way of his, and before Rodney knew it, he was ready to open the rear hatch.
“For the record, I still think this is a very bad plan,” he complained, double checking that his tether was secure. He certainly did not want to go floating off into space.
“Suck it up, McKay,” came the unsympathetic reply from the sealed cockpit.
He took a couple of deep breaths and actually felt better. The oxygen in the jumper had definitely been getting thin, and he could feel his head clearing with the fresh compressed air. It was a good thing they hadn’t decided to use the oxygen canisters earlier. “Okay, let’s get this over with,” he said, forcing himself to reach for the door release. “Opening the hatch. Oh, God,” he whined as the door fell open. The vast view of space made him feel like he was falling, and he clutched the handle near the door for dear life, trying not to hyperventilate or throw up in his suit.
“McKay?”
He closed his eyes against the sight and forced himself to take deeper breaths. “Give me a minute,” he ordered.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” Lorne reminded him, using that damn tone that Rodney knew was meant to calm him down. “All you have to do is get out there, plant the charge, and release the pod. You’ll be back inside before you know it.”
“Easy for you to say,” Rodney moaned, but the steady reassurances had helped a little bit. Reaching around to a hand hold on the side of the jumper, Rodney tried to keep his eyes from wandering back to the bottomless pit of the space around him. “Okay, okay, I’m going.”
He could hear his own harsh breath in his ears as he carefully felt for secure holds along the side of the jumper. The outer release lever, created for maintenance, was located just in front of where the drive pod slid out of the side of the jumper. It wasn’t a long distance to go, but Rodney felt like he was crossing the Grand Canyon on a tight rope.
“Alright,” he panted, finally reaching his destination. “I’m here. Placing the charge now.” He slowly reached for the C-4 in the pouch attached to his belt, carefully removing it and sticking it to the outside of the drive pod. The space suit was bulky and he didn’t want to drop the charge or accidentally hit the large button that would start the timer too early.
He had decided that they should only blow one of the drive pods, mostly because he believed their best shot at being noticed by long range sensors was one larger explosion, and also because he didn’t want to have to wander around to the other side of the jumper, too. They had prepped the explosive with a generous timer so that he would have plenty of time to get back inside and it would have time to drift far away before it blew.
“Okay, charge is set. Starting the timer and releasing the pod.”
He hit the big red button and the timer started counting down. Great. Now to pull the release and shove this thing far, far away. He grabbed the lever and pulled. Nothing happened.
“Dammit!” he cursed, trying again. No luck.
“What’s wrong?”
He pulled harder, straining in the awkward suit, and panicked for a second when his other hand slipped from it’s hold on the jumper. “It’s stuck!” he yelled.
He heard Lorne curse, but was too focused on yanking on the release lever to respond. “Did it get hit by the black hole thingies?”
He examined it for a second, but didn’t see anything unusual. Not that he would be able to tell if it had been hit by the microsingularities. “Not sure,” he grunted, pulling again with every ounce of strength he had. “It won’t budge.”
“Did you already start the timer?” came Lorne’s worried voice.
“Yes, I already started it!” Rodney yelled. “I didn’t want it floating off before I could hit the button.”
A sigh over the radio and then, “Okay, okay. Just keep trying.”
“Very helpful,” he growled through clenched teeth. Dammit, he was not going to let this thing beat him. He took a deep breath and focused his energy on the lever. “I. Am. Not. Dying. Like. This!” he panted, pulling on it as he said each word. With one more mighty yank, the lever finally moved and the pod popped out of the ship.
“Ha!” he shouted victoriously. “I did it!”
The drive pod was already moving away with the inertia of detaching, but Rodney gave it a good shove with his foot to get it floating a bit faster. That also pushed him and the jumper in the opposite direction.
“Good job, Doc,” Lorne said, the relief in his voice palpable. “Now get your ass back in here.”
*****
“I really hate jumpers.”
Lorne looked up at Rodney’s non sequitor. “I think everyone knows that, McKay.”
The two of them were sitting opposite each other back on the benches. Lorne had come to help Rodney out of the uncomfortable space suit and by the time they extricated him from it, neither could find the wherewithal to move. Wrapped in their blankets again, they had settled in to wait, hopefully for rescue and not the alternative.
“Yeah, I guess,” he admitted, trying to pull the blanket tighter around himself with numb hands and uncoordinated limbs. Who designed these emergency blankets anyway? They were uncomfortable and scratchy and crinkled loudly and really weren’t that warm. “But I really hate them. Remind me of a coffin.”
Lorne watched him for a moment, seemingly deciding if he wanted to probe more into the conversation. “Because of the time you were trapped underwater?” Apparently he did.
Rodney grimaced. He had been trying really hard not to think about that particular incident this entire time. The situation wasn’t exactly the same, but similar enough, and he had barely managed to survive that time. At least this time he didn’t have water pouring in on top of everything else. “That’s part of it.”
There was a pause before Lorne asked, “Did you give up that time? I mean, I know you didn’t right away, but at the end?”
“Almost,” Rodney answered quietly. “I tried, actually. But she wouldn’t let me.”
Lorne creased his brow in confusion at his reference to ‘she,’ but then seemed to remember something that made him nod in understanding. He had probably read the AAR. Or heard about it from Sheppard.
“That might be the most scared I’ve ever been,” Rodney admitted. The oxygen deprivation must have been getting to him, he couldn’t seem to stop talking. “Out of all the stupid situations...” He shook his head, a painful smile on his face. “But down there, it was just me, all alone. No one else. At least, not anyone real.” His throat grew thick with the memory, the fear of having no one to help him, no one to even spend his last moments with still so strong in his mind. He was afraid of a lot of things, but being completely cut off from everyone, dying alone... That was a different type of fear.
“You’re not alone now, McKay.” Hesitantly, he met Lorne’s eyes, saw the sincerity in them.
Another violent shiver made Rodney gasp a little. Or that’s what he told himself; he wasn’t going to admit to crying in the face of death. “Hey,” he said, breaking the tension. “Shouldn’t we, like, share body heat or something? Not that it will really make a difference, but might give us a few extra minutes.”
Lorne actually laughed out loud at that. “McKay, are you saying you want to cuddle with me?”
“No— Not— I didn’t mean—” Rodney stuttered awkwardly, feeling the blush creep into his cheeks.
“I’m teasing you,” Lorne said. “And you’re right.” He stiffly forced himself up and shuffled across the small space to sit next to Rodney, pressing his shoulder up against him and adding his own tremors to the already shaking scientist.
The two sat quietly for a long while, lost in their own thoughts, their shivering dying down as the cold took over. Rodney thought Lorne might have fallen asleep. He was afraid to look.
“Lorne?” he asked, almost in a whisper.
The other man hummed.
Rodney bit his lip, afraid to ask. “Do you really think they’ll rescue us?”
There was a long pause, long enough that Rodney didn’t think he was going to get an answer. “They always do,” he finally heard.
He closed his eyes and tried to believe it.
*****
He heard the murmur of voices first. The familiar sounds washed over him, warming him from the inside out. And then he realized that it wasn’t just the voices making him warm. He actually felt quite snug, tucked under a soft blanket. He was still cold, but not the strength-seeping, bone-chilling cold he had felt before. This was more like the kind of cold in the middle of the night when you’re too tired to grab an extra blanket, but you can’t quite fall back asleep until you do. As more awareness grew, he realized that he wasn’t on the jumper anymore. He shivered and opened his eyes.
“Rodney, you awake?”
He turned his head and focused on Sheppard’s face. Behind him, the shapes of the infirmary confirmed that he was back in Atlantis. “Sheppard?” he asked dumbly, still not quite sure this was real and not a dream. His voice sounded strange, squeaky.
A smile blossomed over Sheppard’s face. “Hey, buddy. Welcome back.”
Rodney just stared at him for a minute, studying his face. The man looked awful, dark smudges under his eyes, nose red and chafed, hair even messier than usual. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. “You look like crap,” Rodney observed aloud.
Sheppard chuckled, “Thanks. You don’t look so great yourself, you know.”
“What happened?” Rodney remembered being cold, being stuck on a jumper, something about a drive pod. Had he blown up a drive pod?
Sheppard helped him to raise the bed, handed him a cup of water. He usually complained about the tepid water in the infirmary, but this time he appreciated the lack of ice. “You tell me. We found you and Lorne half frozen and floating way off course in a dead jumper.”
The water was helping wake him up a little more. Major Lorne, right. Where was he? “Lorne?” Rodney asked with sudden worry.
“He’s in surgery,” Sheppard said. “Doctor Beckett wanted to wait for him to warm up a bit before he could check out that wound. Should be out soon.” He frowned. “What happened out there, McKay?”
Rodney let out a deep breath, feeling relief flood through him. They were safe now, back in Atlantis. “I don’t really know,” he admitted, “but I think we ran into some microsingularities. They punched straight through the shields, messed up the jumper, and put a hole through Lorne, too.”
“Micro-what now?” Sheppard asked, scrunching up his face at the term.
“Microsingularities,” Rodney repeated. “Basically, a microscopic black hole. They’re theoretical, but based on some of the readings I was getting in the jumper...”
Sheppard’s look of total confusion cut off the rest of his explanation. “Well, it’s a good thing you guys blew up that drive pod,” he said. “We wouldn’t have found you in time otherwise. You barely had any oxygen left, and you were pretty hypothermic when we got to you.”
Rodney didn’t need to be told how lucky they had been, but it sent a chill down his spine to hear how close it had come. He had been certain when he fell asleep that he would not be waking back up, and he very nearly hadn’t. An unexpected wave of emotion hit, and he nodded, not trusting himself to speak past the sudden lump in his throat.
Sheppard, sensing his friend’s emotion and the discomfort he felt at displaying it, put a hand on his shoulder. “Real glad you’re back, Rodney.” The squeeze he gave said more than the words.
Standing up and stretching, he broke the moment. “Now get some rest. Beckett will murder me if he knows I was keeping you up. Teyla and Ronon will be back from New Athos soon, so we’ll stop by later.”
Rodney nodded again, suddenly aware of how exhausted he was. He snuggled down further into the blankets and was asleep in seconds..
*****
Rodney woke to a dark infirmary, once again reveling in the fact that he was finally warm. He had slept most of the afternoon before eating dinner with his team, telling them the entire tale of his misadventure, of Lorne’s crazy plan and his heroic spacewalk (he hadn’t used the word hero, just implied it, and his team encouraged his ego by not denying it). He then listened while Sheppard recounted his side of the story. Apparently, the team at the Ancient outpost had sent for help fairly quickly after Rodney and Lorne didn’t show up, searching for them on their way back to the gate but not finding any sign of them. Atlantis sent out a search party, led by Sheppard himself, and at his insistence, also sent the Daedalus, which was in a neighboring system.
They searched with little luck when the explosion from the drive pod caught their attention. Luckily, the Daedalus had been there, otherwise Sheppard didn’t know how they would have rescued the two of them. They were surprised to find the jumper completely disabled, and even more shocked to find the two men inside nearly frozen to death.
The Daedalus, with its light-speed capabilities, had them back to Atlantis within a few hours. The rewarming process had taken a lot longer than that (and from the look on Sheppard’s face while he described it, had been fairly stressful for everyone), but Rodney had woken up within four hours of being beamed to the infirmary.
Beckett told him again how lucky he had been. Apparently he had not suffered any long term effects from the hypothermia. After an overnight stay for observation, he would be clear to be discharged.
Lorne had not been quite as lucky. The microsingularity, or whatever it was that had hit him, had nicked his liver on its way through, causing a slow internal bleed that made him more fragile (Rodney later learned that Lorne had crashed at least once on the Daedalus). But after the surgery, Beckett had given him a good prognosis as well, as long as he didn’t have any complications. He would likely be released in a few days.
Beckett had allowed Rodney’s team to hang out for a couple of hours before he threatened to put Sheppard, who was still clearly recovering from the flu, into a bed next to Rodney if he didn’t get out. Lorne’s team had stopped by as well, though the major had only been awake for a few minutes and not very lucid so far. Rodney got the impression that they were both mad at him for getting their team leader hurt (even though it wasn’t his fault) and grateful that he had gotten him rescued. After noticing Rodney wilting under their scrutinizing glances, Sheppard assured him that they were just being overprotective and feeling guilty they hadn’t been there.
Now, the infirmary was blissfully quiet save the rhythmic beeping of the monitors. Rodney tried to roll over and go back to sleep, but his body must have decided it had enough rest because he couldn’t get his mind to turn off. Sighing, he rolled out of bed instead, thankful the IV had been taken out earlier so that he could move freely.
He found himself wandering over to Lorne’s bed. He hadn’t actually visited the major yet, had seen him across the infirmary and felt like that was enough. Maybe it was because Rodney never felt comfortable around any of the military guys other than Sheppard, but now that everyone was gone he found he wanted to see Lorne for himself.
For a few minutes, he just watched Lorne’s chest rise and fall and listened to the beep of the heart monitor. He looked worse up close than he had from across the room, was still deathly pale and tucked under a couple of blankets. Rodney waffled for a moment, arguing over whether to sit or go back to bed, but berated himself for being a coward and sat down.
“Hey,” he said quietly, blushing because he felt entirely stupid for talking to an unconscious person. “Just thought you should know, we made it. And, uh, thanks. You know, for not giving up.”
Satisfied that he had said his piece, he was about to get up when Lorne’s eyes fluttered open. “McKay,” he rasped, blinking and taking in the infirmary around him. “Atlantis?”
Rodney smiled at him, surprised that he was actually pleased he hadn’t been able to sneak away. “Yep. Your suicidal plan worked. They found us.”
Lorne smirked back. “Told you.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Rodney said, rolling his eyes, the smile growing. “Lucky guess.”
“Not a guess,” Lorne murmured tiredly. “They always come.”
Rodney hummed in agreement, admiring the man’s unwavering faith. Worried that this conversation was about to go to a deep place that he did not want to visit right now, he cleared his throat and asked, “How are you feeling?”
Lorne shifted, winced a bit. “Not too bad. Must be giving me the good stuff.” He sighed, seeming to give up on finding a comfortable position, and settled again. “You?”
“Oh, I’m fine,” Rodney said quickly. “Should be discharged in the morning. Probably could have been tonight, but Carson is a mother hen.”
Lorne chuckled and then winced again.
“Sorry, sorry,” Rodney apologized, pulling his face in sympathy. He noticed Lorne’s eyes drooping. “You should go back to sleep. The nurses will probably be by to wake you up in a couple hours.”
Nodding, Lorne let his eyes close. Rodney stood, finally feeling ready to sleep himself.
“Hey, McKay?” The sleepy voice stopped Rodney halfway back to his bed, and he turned back to see Lorne watching him. “Thanks for saving us.”
He smiled, responding in a quiet voice, “Anytime.”