Work Text:
"Well.", Sheppard sighed. "This doesn't seem to be working. Is it working?" The question was mostly rhetorical but his sense of urgency made him ask anyway.
A snarl was his answer: "Does it look like it's working? Don't answer that, moron. Shut up and let me work!"
Yeah, poking at McKay's lack of progress probably wasn't the best idea, but they were running out of time. For all that he trusted the scientist to pull a miracle out of a hat to save them the waiting never got any easier and he wasn't the most patient person to begin with.
It certainly didn't help that he'd gotten injured earlier and was now relegated to last line of protection while Ronon and Teyla were outside the control room keeping them safe. If they'd managed to get past them, they were all dead anyway - but it wasn't like he was able to walk or stand at the moment. Carson would have another conniption.
He hated this.
"Anything I ca--"
"You can shut up and let me concentrate!"
Grimacing he leaned back against the wall. This mission was a clusterfuck. And it had started out so nice. But then, in his experience those missions were always the worst ones.
At least the locals would be less problematic than the Genii. While they used some cannibalized Ancient tech, they weren't space worthy and while they traded with outsiders never used their Stargate themselves for religious reasons.
And for all that interactions turned hostile and - if they survived this - they'd be banned from coming here again, they hadn't committed sacrilege by the locals standards and would not be persecuted if they made it off the planet. Something about a trial of worthiness. Not of combat, which was new.
They'd almost made it halfway to the gate when they'd stumbled into what seemed to be a defunct (prototype?) transporter.
At least it was defunct until Sheppard's gene decided to fuck them over and the thing automatically turned on. An instant later they were in some weird half-ruin of a facility that lacked a functioning life-support system and was crawling with wildlife. Wildlife that was far from happy to have their space invaded. And didn't seem to breathe oxygen.
So they had about two days of oxygen left in the almost hermetically sealed facility.
A plus, if a useless one. The carbon dioxide they exhaled and the mixture of gasses the wildlife exhaled were fast turning into toxic (and explosive but the toxins would likely kill them before the mixture ignites) mess.
According to their scanner, they had maybe seven minutes before they would be feeling an acidic burning on their skin and eleven before the gas mixture would be at a toxic enough level to knock them out. At least they wouldn't be awake to feel the seizures and their skin actually burning away that would follow?
And while Rodney had made some progress on getting shit to work, he'd been at it for at least an hour. Lights were nice, but ultimately not very helpful.