The Stars My Destination (SGA, ensemble) 9/17
Title: The Stars My Destination (9/17)
Author:
mad_maudlin
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis/Star Trek 2009 (mashup)
Length: 91,750 (total); 5,347 (this part)
Characters: All of them!
PairingS: Canonical levels of Elizabeth/Simon, Teyla/Kanaan
warnings: Graphic violence
Summary: When a terror from out of time threatens the heart of the Federation, the crew of the USS Atlantis must band together in order to stop it. But can they overcome their own demons to stop the greatest threat they'll ever face?
Part III: deep space is my dwelling place
Nine
Rodney had never developed a particularly detailed rubric for evaluating different kinds and degrees of terror; they were all unpleasant, in his mind, and all of them were to studiously be avoided whenever possibly. He did not have a well-developed vocabulary to distinguish broad-scale vague situational horror (aliens are attacking Vulcan, who why how?) from more immediate sources of panic (I am about to fly into a combat zone) from nagging abstracts (I am never going to deposit my thesis and Malcom Tunney will forever labor under the delusion that he's right) from the dark, gnawing ache in the pit of his stomach (my sister wants breed with an English major and she is only seventeen what the hell-)
At the moment, though, there was at least one problem blotting out all the others: how am I getting Sheppard on this starship?
Considering that they'd had less than an hour to get organized, the situation on the airfield was surprisingly not a chaotic mess; in fact, Rodney could dare say he identified a particular method to the madness. Their orders had each included a vague grid reference, and there were shuttles on the ground bundling people on board, along with a set of transporter staging zones, probably for transports still in orbit. It looked like they were using the same sets of shuttles to move supplies as well as people, though: trucks were lined up at the edge of the tarmac, and enlisted personnel were guiding pallets of wrapped boxes between the ranks of shuttles, occasionally arguing with the crews over what went where. Of course the starships wouldn't be fully supplied, they weren't supposed to launch for weeks yet; Starfleet must have decided to grab whatever they could find on short notice, from wherever they could find them, and if that meant raiding the Academy's meager stockpiles...
"How exactly are you planning do this, McKay?" Jonn asked, barely loud enough to be heard over the ambient noise of people yelling and shuttles landing and launching. "They're gonna notice awful quick when I don't report..."
"I'm working on that part," Rodney snapped; he wiped at the sweat stinging his face and searched furiously for some way to hide a reasonably lanky six-foot-tall half-Vulcan in the back of a shuttle. "Obviously once I get you aboard the Atlantis I can generate a false deployment orders, it'll just look like duplicates went into the system and you can pretend you never got the other ones-This way!" because he'd suddenly been struck with inspiration. He snapped in Jonn's direction and jogged towards one of the shuttles, where two human men were comparing padds and arguing loudly. Neither of them were paying the slightest attention to the large pallet of boxes one was trying to deliver to the other, and Rodney could start grabbing the boxes randomly with ease. He shoved the first one at Jonn. "Here. Carry these."
"Carry them where?" Jonn asked, as Rodney stacked another box on top of the two already in his hands. "Hey, watch it!"
"Just try to look official, okay?" Rodney said. He put a fourth box on the top of the stack; the top was level with the bridge of Jonn's nose, so all anyone would really see was his eyes and his upswept eyebrows. "All right. That's good."
Jonn grunted and tried to shift his grip on the boxes, almost causing them to tumble; Rodney had seen him pull the Samson act since the day they met, though, so he knew damn well how much Jonn could carry. "If you get me caught, McKay-" he growled petulantly.
"Nobody is getting caught," Rodney said, and oh god he hoped that was true because he didn't need other things to freak out about right now. "Keep quiet and follow me!"
"Maybe if I could see you, I would!"
Rodney grabbed him by the arm and started pulling him, counting off the grid markings in his head where the original signs had been knocked over or obscured by people running around like idiots. People such as themselves, at the moment, he supposed. They kept getting cut off by people who were lost or people who should not have been allowed to steer anything the size of an antigrav without a damned license, but Jonn did not, despite some vaguely aggrieved murmuring, drop the boxes, and suddenly Rodney found himself at the ramp of a Tereshkova-class transport marked Delta-One-Zero that was going to take him to the Atlantis.
Take them, assuming that this plan (which was looking more and more insane to him by the moment) actually worked. "Cad-uh-Lieutenant McKay reporting for duty," he said, trying to sound calm and confident. It came out like he was already pissed off at somebody, which worked, too.
"What's all that stuff?" asked a woman with a large padd who was partly blocking the hatch. She was blonde with a greenish tinge-skin and hair both-and had large, ominously orange eyes that seemed to be slightly bio-luminescence. Also, fangs. He tried not to shudder.
"Supplies," he snapped at her; he suddenly thought of his father, for some reason, and the way he used to terrorize his postdocs. If it was good enough for Benjamin Ingram... "Do they also need to report for duty, or can we go on through?"
Fang Lady checked her padd for a minute, typing quickly. "Exactly what supplies are they?"
"They're...supplies!" Oh, that was smooth. Jonn shifted the stack of boxes and almost lost the top one. Rodney groped for that particular frigid disdain that his father used to use. "Who cares what they are? We'll get it sorted out on board once we're underway."
"I need to check them against the manifest," the woman said tightly.
"Oh, yes, you do that," Rodney snarled back. "Meanwhile, we'll just stand here and hold up the departure of the entire task force while somebody shoots Vulcan all to hell, how's that?"
As if on cue, an antigrav came crashing up onto the ramp; it rammed Jonn in the knees, and Rodney had to throw up an arm to keep the boxes from flying across the shuttle. "Special delivery!" the antigrav operator sang out. "Forty units of hypodermic injector plates. Have fun."
"Does this look like a medical supply drop to you?" the woman demanded, and she pushed past Rodney and Jonn and the pallet of injector plates. "Get your ass back here and clean this up, Yeoman!"
Rodney didn't need a hint at that point; he dragged Jonn into the shuttle by the wrist, and helped him dump the boxes on the first level surface available. The other cadets in the back of the shuttle were busy buckling themselves in or trying to rearrange the pallets already stacked in the back, and didn't pay them much mind. "What's in these things, anyway?" Jonn asked as he flexed his forearms.
Rodney peered at the labels. "Rice-based emergency rations, apparently. Go on, get a seat, or else we'll have to sit on the floor."
Jonn ended up sitting on the boxes themselves, actually, without even a safety harness, and he just hissed "McKay, shut up," when Rodney tried to point out what a truly stupid idea that was. That gave Rodney one less thing to focus on that was not some form of stomach-clenching terror, and so he pulled out the padd with his orders on it and started looking up shuttle-crash data. And also forging the permissions he'd need to create a duplicate deployment order. But mostly the crash statistics, at this point. They still had time, for now...
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Elizabeth hadn't had any time to pack a bag, but it didn't appear that anyone else had, either; she found a stack of duty uniforms in a range of sizes in the cupboard of her quarters, one of the only things in the snug little stateroom-she didn't even have a desk, just an exposed panel where a computer console and screen were supposed to interface with the ship's mainframe. She pulled the golden tunic over her head and smoothed back a few wisps of hair that wouldn't quite stay in her bun. In all her time at the Academy, she'd rarely had a chance to wear a duty uniform-instructors favored the more formal service dress. The soft, snug trousers and t-shirt felt almost casual in comparison, awkward in their comfort.
Then again, she supposed she'd have to get used to it eventually-Clarke Station wasn't known for their formal dutywear, and though she hadn't yet received an official transfer order, she had been all but assured of it through less official channels. We'll miss you, of course, but they need somebody on that station to keep Hammond in line, Nixon had told her over a very private cup of coffee. Elizabeth hadn't dared ask what would happen if Hammond didn't want to be kept in line, or even whose line he was to be kept in-she knew the players well enough by now, even if she didn't always understand the game. Hammond's people had already brought down Harry Maybourne, and she didn't intend to be their next target...
That's neither here nor now, she thought sternly, tugging on the tunic again. Quit distracting yourself. You've got far too much to do.
She shut the wardrobe and slipped out of her stateroom, into the steady flow of traffic through the corridor-the freshly-commissioned crew hunting for their new quarters, going in wearing the cadet grays and coming out in the primary-colored duty uniforms of commissioned officers. She nodded at Dr. Traalee, the CMO, who was rushing in the other direction; just behind him came a tall human man, solidly built, with shockingly light eyes in a weathered face that she recognized immediately. "Captain Sumner, sir," she said, coming to attention despite the traffic swirling around them.
She expected him to say At ease, to her salute; instead, he gave her a critical once-over, like he was checking her uniform for creases. "Well, thank god for you, Commander. I was starting to think everybody on this ship was a goddamned teenager."
Elizabeth dropped her salute anyway. "I think you may be being too hard on them, sir."
"You're damned right I'm going to be too hard on them," Sumner said harshly; he waved at her to follow him as he continued on his way. "I'm going into a combat situation and I've got no idea who's gonna fold up and cry when I call red alert. You know they jumped a bunch of them straight up to full lieutenant?"
"I was part of the committee that recommended that move, actually," Elizabeth said coolly.
"Good," Sumner said. "That means you can deal with them instead of me." She followed him into a turbolift, and he manually keyed up the engineering deck. "I'm having the same talk with Commander Castilho and Dr. Traalee, if I can corner them for two minutes, but since you know these kids better than the rest of us, I'm gonna rely on you the most. If there is anyone on this boat that you have doubts about, even slightly, you need find a place to hide them before we get to Vulcan. I'm not letting them get themselves or anyone else killed. I need reliable people here, not just the ones with the best test scores, and now is not the time for surprises."
"I understand that, sir," she said. "How long do we have until we get to Vulcan?"
"Maximum sustained cruising speed on these things is supposed to be warp ten," he said. "I'm going to see if Castilho can edge us any higher without ripping the nacelles off. That gives us four hours, plus or minus."
"Pretty strenuous shakedown run," Elizabeth murmured.
Sumner stood up. "You know better than me that it's worth it, Commander. The Samarkand and the Farragut should beat us there by a fair amount, and there's three more ships converging, so if we're lucky we won't have to fire a shot. I don't put much stock in luck, myself."
"A logical opinion. The Vulcan High Council will approve," Elizabeth said.
He scowled, as if the thought of coping with the Council gave him heartburn. At the same moment, the turbolift doors opened up. "I'll see you on the bridge in twenty to cast off, Commander."
He slipped out into the corridor, and Elizabeth let the lift doors close on her again; gave herself one more minute to feel the pulse fluttering in her chest, the knots in her stomach. She looked at the padd in her hands, where the latest updates from Starfleet Command were streaming. The High Council had fallen back to a secure location, but they were refusing to evacuate, claiming that the disruption to government availability would be too severe; the civil defense was organizing evacuations, but no one knew if they could outrun the behemoth of a ship slowly bearing down on them...
She very deliberately blanked the screen. No time for sentiment now. She brought up the crew roster as she sent the lift back into motion. If Sumner wanted a reliable bridge crew, she'd give it to him.
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The shuttle came up on the aft of the Atlantis, and as much as Jonn knew he shouldn't draw attention to himself, he couldn't help leaning forward and trying to get a peek out the windows. For good or ill, everyone else was doing the same thing; over shoulders and heads, he made out the swooping nacelles and the convex curves of the saucer section, gleaming silver-white under the lights of the orbiting drydock-they hadn't even painted the underside of the saucer yet, so it was just an endless expanse of polished tritanium.
"Sit down!" Rodney squawked, tugging on the back of Jonn's jacket, when he tried to stand up to get a closer look. "Are you insane?"
"I thought we agreed we both were, yeah," Jonn muttered at him. "Don't you want to see it?"
Rodney huffed. "I could draw the schematics of this ship in my sleep. I don't need to see it."
"Yeah, you do," Jonn said, and tugged on Rodney's arm until he stood up and looked out the windows.
"I don't see the point of-oh. Oh, wow." Rodney licked his lips a couple of times, blinking widely. "That's...it looks bigger in person."
Jonn snorted, and let him sit down again. He wanted to ask about the next phase of Rodney's plan, such as it was, but didn't dare say anything while they were in the tightly packed shuttle. He caught a couple of the other passengers giving him sidelong looks, probably noticing the ears-he hoped like hell nobody said anything about it, because he wasn't feeling up to explaining his sketchy family history to half a starship. He hadn't spoken to his mother's family since he was a teenager, and somehow he didn't think now was the most practical time to start; he wasn't even sure how many of them were still living on Vulcan anymore...
The pilot took a low approach angle, giving them all a sweeping view of the ship's neck and engineering hull before they lined up with the landing bay. Rodney insisted on strapping back in for the landing, but Jonn didn't have anything to strap in to, so he just braced his elbows on his knees and enjoyed the spectacle of the ship getting larger and larger, until it finally swallowed the shuttle whole.
Almost as soon as the hatch was down, of course, Rodney was dragging Jonn off by the arm again. "Come on," he murmured, "come on, come on-"
"Where's the fire?" Jonn asked, dodging and pushing past the crowds in the landing bay. Shuttles were coming in low to unload and then taking off again over everyone's heads; cargo was getting shuffled around on antigravs or the overhead tractors, and every once in a while an entire segment of floor opened up, disappearing into the cargo hold along with everything on top of it. As if that wasn't enough, there were sections of wall where the bulkheads hadn't been installed yet, exposing raw tritanium ribs woven with fixtures and cables. A couple of the overhead lights weren't working, either.
Still, there were large blinking signs on a couple of wall panels directing incoming crew to report here or there; Jonn didn't have time read any of them closely before Rodney dragged him past. "Seriously, McKay, do you know where we're going?"
"Of course I do," he said. "We're finding you a hiding place."
"Hiding place?" Jonn dug in his heels. "Back it up a minute. Just what was the plan again?"
Rodney sighed again and dodged out of the way of a couple of people carrying containers of spare parts by hand. "Do you have anywhere on this ship to report to yet? No. Do you see anyone else lounging around with nothing to do? No-sorry! Sorry," he added to a Bolian he'd just clipped with an especially extravagant hand gesture. He turned back to Jonn "Ergo, you need to lay low for a while before somebody asks to see your papers and figures out you're supposed to be down there instead of up here."
"Could you say it a little louder, McKay?" Jonn asked, wincing.
"Considerably louder, if I was actually trying. Now come on." He started pulled Jonn along again, but Jonn shook him off-they were just going to bump into even more people that way.
Rodney lunged for a transporter, and they both managed to squeeze into the compartment. It spat them out on Deck Six, according to the sign on the opposite wall. The corridors up here were just as full, but Rodney seemed to know exactly where they were headed now: he consulted his padd just once more before charging off again, Jonn scampering in his wake while trying not to look like he was scampering anywhere.
"Here!" Rodney ducked into a room, which turned out to be crew quarters: Rodney's quarters, he assumed. Thank goodness officers didn't get roommates. "Okay, sit tight and I'll come and get you once I've had time to fix everything," Rodney told him.
"And how long is that going to be?" Jonn asked, sinking warily into the desk chair. "I didn't come here to be a stowaway, you know."
"I'm working on it, okay?" Rodney insisted. "Just...try not to freak out."
"Same to you," Jonn said, and actually meant it.
"Oh, this is not freaking out yet," Rodney said fervently. "I have not even begun to freak out. Also don't log in to anything!"
Then he was gone, and Jonn didn't have anything to do but wait, fidgeting around the room to distract himself. Once they launched, Rodney would have plenty of time to do...whatever it was he thought he could do to get Jonn in under the radar. Jonn didn't know what exactly that was going to entail. In the meantime, he searched through the room-a closet of a bathroom, a desk, a couch with a fold out table to make a kind of little dining area, one large screen-nice touch that-a cupboard with a change of linens, some standard-issue toiletries, a stack of uniforms...blue uniforms, for some reason...blue women's uniforms?
"Oh, shit," Jonn muttered.
The door behind him slid open, and a blonde Betazoid woman stepped inside and stopped short. "Who the hell are you?" she asked, staring at him.
Jonn had rarely had occasion to be thankful for the rudimentary psychic ability he'd inherited from his mother, but there were moments when it had its uses. "Sorry," he said, concentrating fiercely on putting up a game smile and nothing more. "I think I got the wrong room assignment. This isn't, uh, 3F-173, is it?"
"It's 6F-435," she shot back, frowning. God only knew what she was reading off him, but she wasn't reaching for the communicator on her belt yet, which was something.
"Damn. Sorry. I'll just-" He squirmed past her, careful not to make any skin-to-skin contact, and thankfully she let him pass. Out in the hallway, he joined the slipstream of traffic and didn't dare stop moving.
"Great job, McKay," he muttered, and took the first blind junction he came to. What was he supposed to do now?
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By the time Sumner stepped onto the bridge, Elizabeth had rewritten half the duty rosters and sent advisory messages to the other two senior officers, full of carefully-worded recommendations but no outright orders. She had one posting in particular that she was careful to fill, and when Teyla reported for bridge duty, Elizabeth was able to give her an honest smile. "I want you on communications for this mission," she told her, and Teyla didn't miss a beat, taking over the station from the yeoman who'd been coordinating the loading procedures from the bridge.
When Sumner arrived on the bridge, Elizabeth leapt to attention, and everyone else rushed to follow suit. "At ease," Sumner called, though from his expression she couldn't tell if he approved of the display or discipline or thought it was absurd. He locked eyes with her as he came down to the main level. "How are we doing, Commander?"
"All the crew are on board and have reported to their duty stations. Ready when you are, sir."
"That's what I like to hear." He looked around the bridge, at the newly-minted officers on duty. "Care to make some introductions here?"
"Lieutenant Miller, helm," Elizabeth rattled off, pointing to each station in turn. "Lieutenant Zelenka, operations and navigation. Lieutenant Emmagen, communications. Ensign Ford, weapons."
Sumner nodded absently at each of them, until he got to Ford. "How old are you, Ensign?" he asked, utterly failing to keep a dubious tone out of his voice.
"Twenty-one, sir," Ford snapped back-either he didn't notice the skepticism or he knew how to hide his reaction. His Spring Sim evaluations had been fantastic, or else Elizabeth wouldn't have taken a chance on him; as it was, if they were going to be flying into combat, they were going to need a trustworthy weapons officer.
Sumner stared at him for another moment, eyes flinty, before giving a slight nod. Whatever he'd seen in Ford's face, apparently he approved. "Take your station, Ensign." He turned back to the center of the bridge settled into the command chair. "Mr. Zelenka, what's our status?"
"Engineering reports that all systems are at baseline operating capacity," Zelenka said crisply, but his accent had Sumner raising that eyebrow again. "The Daedalus and Apollo are already in free orbit. We are prepared to disengage at your command."
"Then let's disengage," Sumner said. "Get this show on the road."
Elizabeth watched as Zelenka and Miller cleared all the systems interfaces and released the docking clamps. With agonizing slowness, they crept out of the drydock, past the skeletons of unfinished ships and the empty slips where the Apollo and Daedalus had been moored. Only when they were well clear of the docking structures did Miller activate the impulse engines, and Mars fell away below them as they slid into a higher orbit.
"Orbital insertion complete," Miller declared. "We are now orbiting freely."
"Nice work," Sumner said. "Plot us a course for Vulcan, warp ten point five."
Zelenka's hands hesitated over the controls. "Ten point five, sir?"
"That's what I said," Sumner said, letting his irritation show. "We've got no time to waste here."
"Yes, sir," Zelenka murmured, and got to work.
Sumner turned over his shoulder to the communications station. "Ms. Emmagen, make sure everyone's on the same page here. Don't want anybody to get left behind."
"Yes, sir."
Elizabeth crossed up to the back of the bridge to check the engineering station. Baseline operating capacity was a kind euphemism; minimum functionality was more accurate. They didn't even have a working long-range antenna, just a subspace transceiver with local range. Of course, there would be plenty of alternate resources when they got to Vulcan...as long as that was all they had to do...
"Daedalus and Apollo are both prepared to depart," Teyla reported, holding the receiver to her ear with one hand. "They are waiting on us."
"Mr. Zelenka?" Sumner prompted.
"I..." He scowled, and prodded at his console. "Moment, please."
"A moment?" Sumner asked, voice dangerously low.
"There appears to be a problem with the impulse drive," he said, typing furiously.
Elizabeth glanced at the engineering station, but the impulse room wasn't issuing any alerts. "What kind of a problem, exactly?"
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Jonn walked briskly out of the impulse room, trying with every fiber of his being to exude an aura of totally cool, exactly where I'm supposed to be despite the shouting going on behind him. In his defense, he hadn't recognized what he just stuck his hand in; there wasn't any bulkhead over it to put a labor on.
He'd already tried parking himself in a science lab, a transporter room, and two other suites of crew quarters, both of which had turned out to be occupied. He was starting to run out of places to lay low. By now most of the crew had changed out of their Academy togs, and his cadet jacket was making him stick out like a sore thumb; he could only hope his face wasn't as green as it felt.
Gonna kill you, McKay, he thought feverishly, climbing down an open ladder rather than risk getting trapped in a turbolift with someone paying attention. Going to kill you and then find a way to bring you back from the dead so I can kill you again.
He came out in another corridor, went into the first door he could find, and found himself in the middle of the ship's laundry-nothing but stacks of linens and mismatched uniforms as far as the eye could see. Awesome. He rooted around for the parts of a duty uniform, but only managed to find the black t-shirt and pants before he heard someone coming.
He ducked behind a hamper just as the doors he'd come in through opened. "...amazing we managed to get underway this fast."
"I know, right? And with all these precious baby officers running around..."
"Eh, they'll be back where they belong soon enough. Not the shakedown cruise I thought I'd get, though, you know?"
"Hey, at least they got the toilets working before we had to take off."
"Ha, yeah, true..."
He tried to slip away behind a counter, before they noticed his presence, but his elbow caught a stack of towels; he made one desperate attempt to catch them before they fell, but just ended up with a loose pile of fluffy white terrycloth in his arms. Something small and hard-a tube of detergent, maybe?-tumbled to the floor entirely, and the clatter when it hit the ground seemed positively deafining.
Or maybe that was the sudden silence in the laundry.
Jonn turned around and found himself looking at a couple of enlisted personnel-a man and a woman-who were blinking at him from the other side of a counter. "Can I help you, sir?" one of them asked very, very slowly.
"Er...I'm good, actually," Jonn said. He noticed the woman reaching for her communicator. "I just, uh, I didn't have any pants the right size in my quarters, so I just thought I'd come down here and help myself." He scrambled to untangle the uniform he'd grabbed from the loose towels. "Sorry for the trouble and all."
"Did you find the right pants, sir?" the man asked with an amazingly straight face.
"Yes," Jonn said firmly. "Yes, I am now good on pants. Thanks. Goodbye."
He took off down the corridor, back past the ladder, walking briskly. If he could just find a place to change, and lose his cadet uniform-even if he didn't have the right tunic, he'd immediately look less conspicuous. He saw a sign directing personnel to a rec room, and figured that that was one place that might be empty at the moment, with everyone at duty stations. Of course, that's what he'd thought about the science labs, too, but those were being used for storage, what with some of the cargo bays still not being pressurized...
The "rec room" turned out to be an arboretum, dark and still; the shift from the cool steel corridors to green trees and the smell of earth was a little disorienting. But, finally, here was a place that nobody on the whole goddamned ship was using-with good reason; many of the plants were still in pots, and only half the beds were even filled with soil. The lights didn't even come up for him on entry; he had to pick his way into a corner by the dim glow coming through the windows, a combination of running lights, Mars-shine, and the weak sunlight reflecting off the swan-neck of the secondary hull. By the time his eyes had adjusted, he had found a good-sized hiding spot in which to change clothes.
Of course, just when he'd gotten his pants off, the arboretum doors opened again..
He tried to wrestle them up as quietly as he could, but his heels kept catching in the legs, and he had one elbow in a potted shrubbery that rustled with every movement. No way was he talking his way out of this one, and in the meantime he had his pants around his damn ankles and the footsteps were coming closer and closer...
He jumped to his feet as soon as he got his fly closed, and found himself nearly nose-to-nose with McKay. Who screamed and backpedaled, nearly tripping over an empty flowerpot. "Jesus, McKay!" Jonn blurted, not sure if he was more relieved or annoyed.
Rodney, of course, was almost never not annoyed. "What the hell are you doing in here?" he demanded. "Didn't I tell you to wait in my quarters?"
"They weren't your quarters," Jonn hissed furiously. "And keep your voice down, will you?"
"Of course they weren't my quarters," Rodney said. "I figured that out in about two minutes, but by the time I got back you were gone and that woman was threatening to report you to security-were you actually fondling her clothes?"
"I am not having this conversation right now," Jonn said, crossing his arms firmly. He noticed that McKay had also changed into his duty uniform-it was odd, seeing him in red with the proper stripes. He'd sort of always assumed McKay would end up ensconced in research (and service dress) until the heat death of the universe. "What are we doing now?"
"Now we are going back to my actual quarters, where you will continue to hide," Rodney said firmly, beckoning Jonn to follow him. "Seriously, if you hadn't kept breaking things I wouldn't have found you in the first place. What were you thinking? You're the only life sign in this section, you stick out like a sore thumb...
"Stop talking," Jonn said firmly. "And get me back to the room, okay?"
A moment later, however, a subtle vibration went through the decks, just enough to be perceptible; out the arboretum's windows, the starfield shifted as the Atlantis broke orbit, a slice of Mars sliding in and out of view momentarily. "Oh," Rodney said. "Here we go-"
Mars, the drydock, the starfield-everything disappeared into a scintillating whorl of warp drive. They were underway.
"ETA to Vulcan is just a little bit less than four hours," Rodney said softly. "Just-by the time we get there I'll have everything set up and nobody should notice you. Probably. I think."
"You'd better be sure of that, Rodney," Jonn said. "If I get caught here, dishonorable discharge is gonna be the least of my worries."
"Hello, who here is forging important Starfleet documents for you?" Rodney asked irritably. "We can be pen-pals in prison. Now go on, I have to be back in engineering in ten minutes or Castilho is going to eat me alive." And he ushered Jonn out of the arboretum.
Chapter One
Chapter Eight
Chapter Ten
Author:
mad_maudlin
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis/Star Trek 2009 (mashup)
Length: 91,750 (total); 5,347 (this part)
Characters: All of them!
PairingS: Canonical levels of Elizabeth/Simon, Teyla/Kanaan
warnings: Graphic violence
Summary: When a terror from out of time threatens the heart of the Federation, the crew of the USS Atlantis must band together in order to stop it. But can they overcome their own demons to stop the greatest threat they'll ever face?
Part III: deep space is my dwelling place
Nine
Rodney had never developed a particularly detailed rubric for evaluating different kinds and degrees of terror; they were all unpleasant, in his mind, and all of them were to studiously be avoided whenever possibly. He did not have a well-developed vocabulary to distinguish broad-scale vague situational horror (aliens are attacking Vulcan, who why how?) from more immediate sources of panic (I am about to fly into a combat zone) from nagging abstracts (I am never going to deposit my thesis and Malcom Tunney will forever labor under the delusion that he's right) from the dark, gnawing ache in the pit of his stomach (my sister wants breed with an English major and she is only seventeen what the hell-)
At the moment, though, there was at least one problem blotting out all the others: how am I getting Sheppard on this starship?
Considering that they'd had less than an hour to get organized, the situation on the airfield was surprisingly not a chaotic mess; in fact, Rodney could dare say he identified a particular method to the madness. Their orders had each included a vague grid reference, and there were shuttles on the ground bundling people on board, along with a set of transporter staging zones, probably for transports still in orbit. It looked like they were using the same sets of shuttles to move supplies as well as people, though: trucks were lined up at the edge of the tarmac, and enlisted personnel were guiding pallets of wrapped boxes between the ranks of shuttles, occasionally arguing with the crews over what went where. Of course the starships wouldn't be fully supplied, they weren't supposed to launch for weeks yet; Starfleet must have decided to grab whatever they could find on short notice, from wherever they could find them, and if that meant raiding the Academy's meager stockpiles...
"How exactly are you planning do this, McKay?" Jonn asked, barely loud enough to be heard over the ambient noise of people yelling and shuttles landing and launching. "They're gonna notice awful quick when I don't report..."
"I'm working on that part," Rodney snapped; he wiped at the sweat stinging his face and searched furiously for some way to hide a reasonably lanky six-foot-tall half-Vulcan in the back of a shuttle. "Obviously once I get you aboard the Atlantis I can generate a false deployment orders, it'll just look like duplicates went into the system and you can pretend you never got the other ones-This way!" because he'd suddenly been struck with inspiration. He snapped in Jonn's direction and jogged towards one of the shuttles, where two human men were comparing padds and arguing loudly. Neither of them were paying the slightest attention to the large pallet of boxes one was trying to deliver to the other, and Rodney could start grabbing the boxes randomly with ease. He shoved the first one at Jonn. "Here. Carry these."
"Carry them where?" Jonn asked, as Rodney stacked another box on top of the two already in his hands. "Hey, watch it!"
"Just try to look official, okay?" Rodney said. He put a fourth box on the top of the stack; the top was level with the bridge of Jonn's nose, so all anyone would really see was his eyes and his upswept eyebrows. "All right. That's good."
Jonn grunted and tried to shift his grip on the boxes, almost causing them to tumble; Rodney had seen him pull the Samson act since the day they met, though, so he knew damn well how much Jonn could carry. "If you get me caught, McKay-" he growled petulantly.
"Nobody is getting caught," Rodney said, and oh god he hoped that was true because he didn't need other things to freak out about right now. "Keep quiet and follow me!"
"Maybe if I could see you, I would!"
Rodney grabbed him by the arm and started pulling him, counting off the grid markings in his head where the original signs had been knocked over or obscured by people running around like idiots. People such as themselves, at the moment, he supposed. They kept getting cut off by people who were lost or people who should not have been allowed to steer anything the size of an antigrav without a damned license, but Jonn did not, despite some vaguely aggrieved murmuring, drop the boxes, and suddenly Rodney found himself at the ramp of a Tereshkova-class transport marked Delta-One-Zero that was going to take him to the Atlantis.
Take them, assuming that this plan (which was looking more and more insane to him by the moment) actually worked. "Cad-uh-Lieutenant McKay reporting for duty," he said, trying to sound calm and confident. It came out like he was already pissed off at somebody, which worked, too.
"What's all that stuff?" asked a woman with a large padd who was partly blocking the hatch. She was blonde with a greenish tinge-skin and hair both-and had large, ominously orange eyes that seemed to be slightly bio-luminescence. Also, fangs. He tried not to shudder.
"Supplies," he snapped at her; he suddenly thought of his father, for some reason, and the way he used to terrorize his postdocs. If it was good enough for Benjamin Ingram... "Do they also need to report for duty, or can we go on through?"
Fang Lady checked her padd for a minute, typing quickly. "Exactly what supplies are they?"
"They're...supplies!" Oh, that was smooth. Jonn shifted the stack of boxes and almost lost the top one. Rodney groped for that particular frigid disdain that his father used to use. "Who cares what they are? We'll get it sorted out on board once we're underway."
"I need to check them against the manifest," the woman said tightly.
"Oh, yes, you do that," Rodney snarled back. "Meanwhile, we'll just stand here and hold up the departure of the entire task force while somebody shoots Vulcan all to hell, how's that?"
As if on cue, an antigrav came crashing up onto the ramp; it rammed Jonn in the knees, and Rodney had to throw up an arm to keep the boxes from flying across the shuttle. "Special delivery!" the antigrav operator sang out. "Forty units of hypodermic injector plates. Have fun."
"Does this look like a medical supply drop to you?" the woman demanded, and she pushed past Rodney and Jonn and the pallet of injector plates. "Get your ass back here and clean this up, Yeoman!"
Rodney didn't need a hint at that point; he dragged Jonn into the shuttle by the wrist, and helped him dump the boxes on the first level surface available. The other cadets in the back of the shuttle were busy buckling themselves in or trying to rearrange the pallets already stacked in the back, and didn't pay them much mind. "What's in these things, anyway?" Jonn asked as he flexed his forearms.
Rodney peered at the labels. "Rice-based emergency rations, apparently. Go on, get a seat, or else we'll have to sit on the floor."
Jonn ended up sitting on the boxes themselves, actually, without even a safety harness, and he just hissed "McKay, shut up," when Rodney tried to point out what a truly stupid idea that was. That gave Rodney one less thing to focus on that was not some form of stomach-clenching terror, and so he pulled out the padd with his orders on it and started looking up shuttle-crash data. And also forging the permissions he'd need to create a duplicate deployment order. But mostly the crash statistics, at this point. They still had time, for now...
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Elizabeth hadn't had any time to pack a bag, but it didn't appear that anyone else had, either; she found a stack of duty uniforms in a range of sizes in the cupboard of her quarters, one of the only things in the snug little stateroom-she didn't even have a desk, just an exposed panel where a computer console and screen were supposed to interface with the ship's mainframe. She pulled the golden tunic over her head and smoothed back a few wisps of hair that wouldn't quite stay in her bun. In all her time at the Academy, she'd rarely had a chance to wear a duty uniform-instructors favored the more formal service dress. The soft, snug trousers and t-shirt felt almost casual in comparison, awkward in their comfort.
Then again, she supposed she'd have to get used to it eventually-Clarke Station wasn't known for their formal dutywear, and though she hadn't yet received an official transfer order, she had been all but assured of it through less official channels. We'll miss you, of course, but they need somebody on that station to keep Hammond in line, Nixon had told her over a very private cup of coffee. Elizabeth hadn't dared ask what would happen if Hammond didn't want to be kept in line, or even whose line he was to be kept in-she knew the players well enough by now, even if she didn't always understand the game. Hammond's people had already brought down Harry Maybourne, and she didn't intend to be their next target...
That's neither here nor now, she thought sternly, tugging on the tunic again. Quit distracting yourself. You've got far too much to do.
She shut the wardrobe and slipped out of her stateroom, into the steady flow of traffic through the corridor-the freshly-commissioned crew hunting for their new quarters, going in wearing the cadet grays and coming out in the primary-colored duty uniforms of commissioned officers. She nodded at Dr. Traalee, the CMO, who was rushing in the other direction; just behind him came a tall human man, solidly built, with shockingly light eyes in a weathered face that she recognized immediately. "Captain Sumner, sir," she said, coming to attention despite the traffic swirling around them.
She expected him to say At ease, to her salute; instead, he gave her a critical once-over, like he was checking her uniform for creases. "Well, thank god for you, Commander. I was starting to think everybody on this ship was a goddamned teenager."
Elizabeth dropped her salute anyway. "I think you may be being too hard on them, sir."
"You're damned right I'm going to be too hard on them," Sumner said harshly; he waved at her to follow him as he continued on his way. "I'm going into a combat situation and I've got no idea who's gonna fold up and cry when I call red alert. You know they jumped a bunch of them straight up to full lieutenant?"
"I was part of the committee that recommended that move, actually," Elizabeth said coolly.
"Good," Sumner said. "That means you can deal with them instead of me." She followed him into a turbolift, and he manually keyed up the engineering deck. "I'm having the same talk with Commander Castilho and Dr. Traalee, if I can corner them for two minutes, but since you know these kids better than the rest of us, I'm gonna rely on you the most. If there is anyone on this boat that you have doubts about, even slightly, you need find a place to hide them before we get to Vulcan. I'm not letting them get themselves or anyone else killed. I need reliable people here, not just the ones with the best test scores, and now is not the time for surprises."
"I understand that, sir," she said. "How long do we have until we get to Vulcan?"
"Maximum sustained cruising speed on these things is supposed to be warp ten," he said. "I'm going to see if Castilho can edge us any higher without ripping the nacelles off. That gives us four hours, plus or minus."
"Pretty strenuous shakedown run," Elizabeth murmured.
Sumner stood up. "You know better than me that it's worth it, Commander. The Samarkand and the Farragut should beat us there by a fair amount, and there's three more ships converging, so if we're lucky we won't have to fire a shot. I don't put much stock in luck, myself."
"A logical opinion. The Vulcan High Council will approve," Elizabeth said.
He scowled, as if the thought of coping with the Council gave him heartburn. At the same moment, the turbolift doors opened up. "I'll see you on the bridge in twenty to cast off, Commander."
He slipped out into the corridor, and Elizabeth let the lift doors close on her again; gave herself one more minute to feel the pulse fluttering in her chest, the knots in her stomach. She looked at the padd in her hands, where the latest updates from Starfleet Command were streaming. The High Council had fallen back to a secure location, but they were refusing to evacuate, claiming that the disruption to government availability would be too severe; the civil defense was organizing evacuations, but no one knew if they could outrun the behemoth of a ship slowly bearing down on them...
She very deliberately blanked the screen. No time for sentiment now. She brought up the crew roster as she sent the lift back into motion. If Sumner wanted a reliable bridge crew, she'd give it to him.
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The shuttle came up on the aft of the Atlantis, and as much as Jonn knew he shouldn't draw attention to himself, he couldn't help leaning forward and trying to get a peek out the windows. For good or ill, everyone else was doing the same thing; over shoulders and heads, he made out the swooping nacelles and the convex curves of the saucer section, gleaming silver-white under the lights of the orbiting drydock-they hadn't even painted the underside of the saucer yet, so it was just an endless expanse of polished tritanium.
"Sit down!" Rodney squawked, tugging on the back of Jonn's jacket, when he tried to stand up to get a closer look. "Are you insane?"
"I thought we agreed we both were, yeah," Jonn muttered at him. "Don't you want to see it?"
Rodney huffed. "I could draw the schematics of this ship in my sleep. I don't need to see it."
"Yeah, you do," Jonn said, and tugged on Rodney's arm until he stood up and looked out the windows.
"I don't see the point of-oh. Oh, wow." Rodney licked his lips a couple of times, blinking widely. "That's...it looks bigger in person."
Jonn snorted, and let him sit down again. He wanted to ask about the next phase of Rodney's plan, such as it was, but didn't dare say anything while they were in the tightly packed shuttle. He caught a couple of the other passengers giving him sidelong looks, probably noticing the ears-he hoped like hell nobody said anything about it, because he wasn't feeling up to explaining his sketchy family history to half a starship. He hadn't spoken to his mother's family since he was a teenager, and somehow he didn't think now was the most practical time to start; he wasn't even sure how many of them were still living on Vulcan anymore...
The pilot took a low approach angle, giving them all a sweeping view of the ship's neck and engineering hull before they lined up with the landing bay. Rodney insisted on strapping back in for the landing, but Jonn didn't have anything to strap in to, so he just braced his elbows on his knees and enjoyed the spectacle of the ship getting larger and larger, until it finally swallowed the shuttle whole.
Almost as soon as the hatch was down, of course, Rodney was dragging Jonn off by the arm again. "Come on," he murmured, "come on, come on-"
"Where's the fire?" Jonn asked, dodging and pushing past the crowds in the landing bay. Shuttles were coming in low to unload and then taking off again over everyone's heads; cargo was getting shuffled around on antigravs or the overhead tractors, and every once in a while an entire segment of floor opened up, disappearing into the cargo hold along with everything on top of it. As if that wasn't enough, there were sections of wall where the bulkheads hadn't been installed yet, exposing raw tritanium ribs woven with fixtures and cables. A couple of the overhead lights weren't working, either.
Still, there were large blinking signs on a couple of wall panels directing incoming crew to report here or there; Jonn didn't have time read any of them closely before Rodney dragged him past. "Seriously, McKay, do you know where we're going?"
"Of course I do," he said. "We're finding you a hiding place."
"Hiding place?" Jonn dug in his heels. "Back it up a minute. Just what was the plan again?"
Rodney sighed again and dodged out of the way of a couple of people carrying containers of spare parts by hand. "Do you have anywhere on this ship to report to yet? No. Do you see anyone else lounging around with nothing to do? No-sorry! Sorry," he added to a Bolian he'd just clipped with an especially extravagant hand gesture. He turned back to Jonn "Ergo, you need to lay low for a while before somebody asks to see your papers and figures out you're supposed to be down there instead of up here."
"Could you say it a little louder, McKay?" Jonn asked, wincing.
"Considerably louder, if I was actually trying. Now come on." He started pulled Jonn along again, but Jonn shook him off-they were just going to bump into even more people that way.
Rodney lunged for a transporter, and they both managed to squeeze into the compartment. It spat them out on Deck Six, according to the sign on the opposite wall. The corridors up here were just as full, but Rodney seemed to know exactly where they were headed now: he consulted his padd just once more before charging off again, Jonn scampering in his wake while trying not to look like he was scampering anywhere.
"Here!" Rodney ducked into a room, which turned out to be crew quarters: Rodney's quarters, he assumed. Thank goodness officers didn't get roommates. "Okay, sit tight and I'll come and get you once I've had time to fix everything," Rodney told him.
"And how long is that going to be?" Jonn asked, sinking warily into the desk chair. "I didn't come here to be a stowaway, you know."
"I'm working on it, okay?" Rodney insisted. "Just...try not to freak out."
"Same to you," Jonn said, and actually meant it.
"Oh, this is not freaking out yet," Rodney said fervently. "I have not even begun to freak out. Also don't log in to anything!"
Then he was gone, and Jonn didn't have anything to do but wait, fidgeting around the room to distract himself. Once they launched, Rodney would have plenty of time to do...whatever it was he thought he could do to get Jonn in under the radar. Jonn didn't know what exactly that was going to entail. In the meantime, he searched through the room-a closet of a bathroom, a desk, a couch with a fold out table to make a kind of little dining area, one large screen-nice touch that-a cupboard with a change of linens, some standard-issue toiletries, a stack of uniforms...blue uniforms, for some reason...blue women's uniforms?
"Oh, shit," Jonn muttered.
The door behind him slid open, and a blonde Betazoid woman stepped inside and stopped short. "Who the hell are you?" she asked, staring at him.
Jonn had rarely had occasion to be thankful for the rudimentary psychic ability he'd inherited from his mother, but there were moments when it had its uses. "Sorry," he said, concentrating fiercely on putting up a game smile and nothing more. "I think I got the wrong room assignment. This isn't, uh, 3F-173, is it?"
"It's 6F-435," she shot back, frowning. God only knew what she was reading off him, but she wasn't reaching for the communicator on her belt yet, which was something.
"Damn. Sorry. I'll just-" He squirmed past her, careful not to make any skin-to-skin contact, and thankfully she let him pass. Out in the hallway, he joined the slipstream of traffic and didn't dare stop moving.
"Great job, McKay," he muttered, and took the first blind junction he came to. What was he supposed to do now?
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By the time Sumner stepped onto the bridge, Elizabeth had rewritten half the duty rosters and sent advisory messages to the other two senior officers, full of carefully-worded recommendations but no outright orders. She had one posting in particular that she was careful to fill, and when Teyla reported for bridge duty, Elizabeth was able to give her an honest smile. "I want you on communications for this mission," she told her, and Teyla didn't miss a beat, taking over the station from the yeoman who'd been coordinating the loading procedures from the bridge.
When Sumner arrived on the bridge, Elizabeth leapt to attention, and everyone else rushed to follow suit. "At ease," Sumner called, though from his expression she couldn't tell if he approved of the display or discipline or thought it was absurd. He locked eyes with her as he came down to the main level. "How are we doing, Commander?"
"All the crew are on board and have reported to their duty stations. Ready when you are, sir."
"That's what I like to hear." He looked around the bridge, at the newly-minted officers on duty. "Care to make some introductions here?"
"Lieutenant Miller, helm," Elizabeth rattled off, pointing to each station in turn. "Lieutenant Zelenka, operations and navigation. Lieutenant Emmagen, communications. Ensign Ford, weapons."
Sumner nodded absently at each of them, until he got to Ford. "How old are you, Ensign?" he asked, utterly failing to keep a dubious tone out of his voice.
"Twenty-one, sir," Ford snapped back-either he didn't notice the skepticism or he knew how to hide his reaction. His Spring Sim evaluations had been fantastic, or else Elizabeth wouldn't have taken a chance on him; as it was, if they were going to be flying into combat, they were going to need a trustworthy weapons officer.
Sumner stared at him for another moment, eyes flinty, before giving a slight nod. Whatever he'd seen in Ford's face, apparently he approved. "Take your station, Ensign." He turned back to the center of the bridge settled into the command chair. "Mr. Zelenka, what's our status?"
"Engineering reports that all systems are at baseline operating capacity," Zelenka said crisply, but his accent had Sumner raising that eyebrow again. "The Daedalus and Apollo are already in free orbit. We are prepared to disengage at your command."
"Then let's disengage," Sumner said. "Get this show on the road."
Elizabeth watched as Zelenka and Miller cleared all the systems interfaces and released the docking clamps. With agonizing slowness, they crept out of the drydock, past the skeletons of unfinished ships and the empty slips where the Apollo and Daedalus had been moored. Only when they were well clear of the docking structures did Miller activate the impulse engines, and Mars fell away below them as they slid into a higher orbit.
"Orbital insertion complete," Miller declared. "We are now orbiting freely."
"Nice work," Sumner said. "Plot us a course for Vulcan, warp ten point five."
Zelenka's hands hesitated over the controls. "Ten point five, sir?"
"That's what I said," Sumner said, letting his irritation show. "We've got no time to waste here."
"Yes, sir," Zelenka murmured, and got to work.
Sumner turned over his shoulder to the communications station. "Ms. Emmagen, make sure everyone's on the same page here. Don't want anybody to get left behind."
"Yes, sir."
Elizabeth crossed up to the back of the bridge to check the engineering station. Baseline operating capacity was a kind euphemism; minimum functionality was more accurate. They didn't even have a working long-range antenna, just a subspace transceiver with local range. Of course, there would be plenty of alternate resources when they got to Vulcan...as long as that was all they had to do...
"Daedalus and Apollo are both prepared to depart," Teyla reported, holding the receiver to her ear with one hand. "They are waiting on us."
"Mr. Zelenka?" Sumner prompted.
"I..." He scowled, and prodded at his console. "Moment, please."
"A moment?" Sumner asked, voice dangerously low.
"There appears to be a problem with the impulse drive," he said, typing furiously.
Elizabeth glanced at the engineering station, but the impulse room wasn't issuing any alerts. "What kind of a problem, exactly?"
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Jonn walked briskly out of the impulse room, trying with every fiber of his being to exude an aura of totally cool, exactly where I'm supposed to be despite the shouting going on behind him. In his defense, he hadn't recognized what he just stuck his hand in; there wasn't any bulkhead over it to put a labor on.
He'd already tried parking himself in a science lab, a transporter room, and two other suites of crew quarters, both of which had turned out to be occupied. He was starting to run out of places to lay low. By now most of the crew had changed out of their Academy togs, and his cadet jacket was making him stick out like a sore thumb; he could only hope his face wasn't as green as it felt.
Gonna kill you, McKay, he thought feverishly, climbing down an open ladder rather than risk getting trapped in a turbolift with someone paying attention. Going to kill you and then find a way to bring you back from the dead so I can kill you again.
He came out in another corridor, went into the first door he could find, and found himself in the middle of the ship's laundry-nothing but stacks of linens and mismatched uniforms as far as the eye could see. Awesome. He rooted around for the parts of a duty uniform, but only managed to find the black t-shirt and pants before he heard someone coming.
He ducked behind a hamper just as the doors he'd come in through opened. "...amazing we managed to get underway this fast."
"I know, right? And with all these precious baby officers running around..."
"Eh, they'll be back where they belong soon enough. Not the shakedown cruise I thought I'd get, though, you know?"
"Hey, at least they got the toilets working before we had to take off."
"Ha, yeah, true..."
He tried to slip away behind a counter, before they noticed his presence, but his elbow caught a stack of towels; he made one desperate attempt to catch them before they fell, but just ended up with a loose pile of fluffy white terrycloth in his arms. Something small and hard-a tube of detergent, maybe?-tumbled to the floor entirely, and the clatter when it hit the ground seemed positively deafining.
Or maybe that was the sudden silence in the laundry.
Jonn turned around and found himself looking at a couple of enlisted personnel-a man and a woman-who were blinking at him from the other side of a counter. "Can I help you, sir?" one of them asked very, very slowly.
"Er...I'm good, actually," Jonn said. He noticed the woman reaching for her communicator. "I just, uh, I didn't have any pants the right size in my quarters, so I just thought I'd come down here and help myself." He scrambled to untangle the uniform he'd grabbed from the loose towels. "Sorry for the trouble and all."
"Did you find the right pants, sir?" the man asked with an amazingly straight face.
"Yes," Jonn said firmly. "Yes, I am now good on pants. Thanks. Goodbye."
He took off down the corridor, back past the ladder, walking briskly. If he could just find a place to change, and lose his cadet uniform-even if he didn't have the right tunic, he'd immediately look less conspicuous. He saw a sign directing personnel to a rec room, and figured that that was one place that might be empty at the moment, with everyone at duty stations. Of course, that's what he'd thought about the science labs, too, but those were being used for storage, what with some of the cargo bays still not being pressurized...
The "rec room" turned out to be an arboretum, dark and still; the shift from the cool steel corridors to green trees and the smell of earth was a little disorienting. But, finally, here was a place that nobody on the whole goddamned ship was using-with good reason; many of the plants were still in pots, and only half the beds were even filled with soil. The lights didn't even come up for him on entry; he had to pick his way into a corner by the dim glow coming through the windows, a combination of running lights, Mars-shine, and the weak sunlight reflecting off the swan-neck of the secondary hull. By the time his eyes had adjusted, he had found a good-sized hiding spot in which to change clothes.
Of course, just when he'd gotten his pants off, the arboretum doors opened again..
He tried to wrestle them up as quietly as he could, but his heels kept catching in the legs, and he had one elbow in a potted shrubbery that rustled with every movement. No way was he talking his way out of this one, and in the meantime he had his pants around his damn ankles and the footsteps were coming closer and closer...
He jumped to his feet as soon as he got his fly closed, and found himself nearly nose-to-nose with McKay. Who screamed and backpedaled, nearly tripping over an empty flowerpot. "Jesus, McKay!" Jonn blurted, not sure if he was more relieved or annoyed.
Rodney, of course, was almost never not annoyed. "What the hell are you doing in here?" he demanded. "Didn't I tell you to wait in my quarters?"
"They weren't your quarters," Jonn hissed furiously. "And keep your voice down, will you?"
"Of course they weren't my quarters," Rodney said. "I figured that out in about two minutes, but by the time I got back you were gone and that woman was threatening to report you to security-were you actually fondling her clothes?"
"I am not having this conversation right now," Jonn said, crossing his arms firmly. He noticed that McKay had also changed into his duty uniform-it was odd, seeing him in red with the proper stripes. He'd sort of always assumed McKay would end up ensconced in research (and service dress) until the heat death of the universe. "What are we doing now?"
"Now we are going back to my actual quarters, where you will continue to hide," Rodney said firmly, beckoning Jonn to follow him. "Seriously, if you hadn't kept breaking things I wouldn't have found you in the first place. What were you thinking? You're the only life sign in this section, you stick out like a sore thumb...
"Stop talking," Jonn said firmly. "And get me back to the room, okay?"
A moment later, however, a subtle vibration went through the decks, just enough to be perceptible; out the arboretum's windows, the starfield shifted as the Atlantis broke orbit, a slice of Mars sliding in and out of view momentarily. "Oh," Rodney said. "Here we go-"
Mars, the drydock, the starfield-everything disappeared into a scintillating whorl of warp drive. They were underway.
"ETA to Vulcan is just a little bit less than four hours," Rodney said softly. "Just-by the time we get there I'll have everything set up and nobody should notice you. Probably. I think."
"You'd better be sure of that, Rodney," Jonn said. "If I get caught here, dishonorable discharge is gonna be the least of my worries."
"Hello, who here is forging important Starfleet documents for you?" Rodney asked irritably. "We can be pen-pals in prison. Now go on, I have to be back in engineering in ten minutes or Castilho is going to eat me alive." And he ushered Jonn out of the arboretum.
Chapter One
Chapter Eight
Chapter Ten