The Stars My Destination (SGA, ensemble) 11/17
Title: The Stars My Destination (11/17)
Author:
mad_maudlin
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis/Star Trek 2009 (mashup)
Length: 91,750 (total); 5,854 (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?
Eleven
Elizabeth watched Sumner leave the bridge with Sheppard and Ford, a surprising calm sweeping over her. Perhaps this was the state of perfect logic some Vulcan sages claimed to feel during deep mediation. Perhaps she was simply hysterical. She went to stand before the captain's chair, watching the hideous ship five kilometers below; at this distance she could see the rafts of dark smoke collecting in the lower atmosphere, each plume marking a city or settlement as clearly as a pin on a map.
How does it feel to watch your world burn?
"Mr. Zelenka, what's the status of the shield generators?" she asked.
He shook his head. "They are under repairs now, but it will take some time..."
"What about warp engines?" she asked.
"Commander Castilho has taken them offline pending a damage assessment," Zelenka said.
So they couldn't run, and they couldn't make a stand. "Tell him to divert all attention to the shields. Even partial protection is better than none. Monitor that ship, and take evasive action immediately if there is any sign of its weapons powering up." She glanced at Ford's replacement at the weapons station. "Mr. Campbell, if any of those fighters comes within a hundred meters of this ship, destroy it."
"Yes, ma'am," he said.
She turned to Teyla, who still looked unsettled by whatever she was sensing off the enemy ship. "Lieutenant Emmagen, you have the conn." Elizabeth told her.
Teyla sat bolt upright. "Commander Weir."
"Many members of the Vulcan Council refused to evacuate in order to maintain continuity of government functions," Elizabeth explained. "I know where their secure bunker is located, and more importantly, I'm known to their security staff. I'm taking an away team to the surface to evacuate them by transporter."
Teyla's eyes narrowed. "You are one to speak of suicide missions, Commander."
"Until our shields are repaired, there's nothing else we can do," she said. "Michael can burn the cities, but he cannot be allowed to destroy the Vulcan culture. The Council aren't just politicians, they are elders and religious leaders, and they have to survive this."
Teyla stood, and nodded sharply. "Understood, Commander. We will not raise the shields until you have returned."
"Raise the shields as soon as you can," Elizabeth corrected firmly. "In the mean time, see if you can get a lock on any of the personnel in those lifeboats, before Michael's fighters scoop them up. I'll be in touch."
-\-\-\-\-\-
Jonn ran through the preflight checks on the shuttle-a Galileo, a good all-around class but not outstanding. At the moment he was mainly concerned with the phasers, dorsal and ventral, which didn't reach nearly the power output of a shipboard array but were better than nothing. If Sumner was right, and they could get inside Michael's shield, all it would take was one or two lucky shots to ruin his day.
Ford dragged a lidless plastic crate into the back of the shuttle and hooked a single long cargo strap onto the handle. "What the hell is that?" Jonn asked him, glancing up.
"Landmines," Ford said absently.
Jonn turned around in his seat, trying to peer into the crate without much look. "Landmines?"
"I'll explain later," Ford said, and dropped into the copilot's seat. "You really a pilot?"
"You really a gunner?" Jonn shot back.
"Top of my class in marksmanship in three different categories," Ford said.
"Good, 'cause I don't think these guys are just gonna sit still," Jonn muttered.
Their radio clicked over. "Sumner to Sheppard. Keep behind me until we're inside the shield."
"Roger that, sir," Jonn said. "Though you do realize that 'behind' is a relative concept when you're talking about a ship three kilometers long?"
"Maintain radio silence," Sumner snapped back peevishly, and cut the channel.
Sumner's shuttle rose off the deck and glided towards the bay doors; Jonn took his shuttle nearly to the top of the landing bay, lining up with Sumner as best he could. Michael's ship was directly below them, so in theory-and, again, only if they were fantastically lucky or Michael's crew were asleep at their posts-Jonn's shuttle would register as little more than a sensor shadow until it was already too late.
"You really think that's the same thing that destroyed the Kelvin?" Ford asked quietly.
Jonn shrugged. "Well, on one hand, it's been twenty-five years. On the other, if there's two giant murder ships flying around the galaxy, we're really in trouble, so...." He wasn't going to think about how Michael knew his name, anyone else's. Or how throwing a warp core at this thing apparently wasn't enough to destroy it, just delay it for a generation. Focus on the mission at hand.
A spinning piece of debris-maybe from one of the other task force ships-came at them, sending the perimeter alarms squawking. Jonn couldn't take evasive action and stay centered behind Sumner; the best he could do was close the distance between them to a single meter and hold his breath, while the twisted piece of tritanium drifted by. If Sumner even noticed the move, his piloting certainly didn't show it.
"Coming up on their shield now," Ford announced. "That's weird-there's debris inside the shield perimeter."
"If it's a Holtzmann-process deflector, it'll be porous to anything without enough kinetic energy," Jonn pointed out. "Let's just hope we don't hit any of it."
On the HUD, the red line representing Michael's shields was almost on top of them. Jonn, nervous, closed to within half a meter of Sumner's shuttle. A segment of the shield flickered out, and they both eased forward, sliding into the gap...
The very instant Sumner's shuttle was clear, the same segment of shield flicked back into existence. The nose of Jonn's shuttle bounced off it with a jolt he could feel. "Damn it!" he yelped, slapping the control panels. There went the whole damn reason for being out here!
"Hang on a second," Ford said, while Jonn was still distracted by Sumner's swiftly shrinking running lights. He started by shutting off the shuttle's life support.
"The hell are you doing?" Jonn demanded, still glaring at the shield perimeter.
"You just said low kinetic energy gets you through a shield like this," Ford said, shutting down sensors and communications as well.
Jonn blinked at him, but in the next second it all came together, and he couldn't fight down a little smirk. "I think I like you, Ensign."
"Aim to please, sir," Ford said. His hand hovered over the main engines. "Though...how slow is this going to be?"
"Slow," Jonn admitted, and gave the thrusters one last little squirt.
Once the engines were shut down, they were alone in the dark. The way they were oriented, Vulcan appeared to be above them, the vastness of Michael's ship hanging in between like some kind of space-faring sea monster. Their momentum combined with the planet's gravity sent them sliding forward with agonizing slowness...and forward, and forward, a centimeter at a time.
"This is going to take a while, isn't it?" Ford asked quietly.
"Yeah," Jonn said, flexing his hands in his lap. "Good thing we got nowhere to be, though, right?"
-\-\-\-\-\-
The Central Hall of the Vulcan Science Academy had collapsed. Its foyer was the best open area the transporter technician could find to put them down, and the first thing Elizabeth saw was the toppled, broken statue of Surak laying on the floor, half-covered by the debris from the open ceiling. Overhead, Michael's fighters were strafing the city, filling the air with a terrible, grating chatter.
This isn't about the buildings. This is about the people, the memories.
Elizabeth drew her phaser and shouldered the bag of signal boosters she'd brought down. "Follow me," she told the security team-three chief petty officers and a master chief, all armed with phaser rifles-and strode out into the street.
She could navigate this city with her eyes closed, or at least she could have done so once; now there were burning, broken buildings everywhere she looked, and the streets were full of people running with purpose, but in every direction. She saw a group of volunteers, some with blood-stained robes, evacuating one building; on the next block over, uniformed Civil Defense were attempting to gather people into a different building, the only intact one on the block. Tens of thousands had evacuated, but this was a planet of six billion, and Elizabeth wished for a whole armada that could gather everyone up and take them to safety.
You can't save everyone. You can save the ones who matter.
A fighter screamed overhead, dropping a ghostly white column of light to sweep the street. Elizabeth dove out of the way, only to watch Chief Toligen stop to take aim at the ship with his phaser rifle...and get swept away by the white light. "It's a transporter!" Chief Bates called across the street. "They're beaming people up! What the hell?"
Why kidnap people instead of killing them outright? There were bodies enough in the streets-it wasn't like Michael had any aversion to casualties. Elizabeth picked herself up and checked that the boosters were undamaged. "Keep moving, and keep closer to the buildings," she said, even as a second fighter swooped down and blew a building across the street to pieces. Elizabeth felt the heat of it, felt the flecks of glass and stone bite into her face-"Come on!"
The city center was ancient, but it had been logically planned-of course-with wide radial avenues and curving cross-streets. Those avenues were giving the fighters clear lanes to swoop into, but many of the narrower streets were blocked off, cratered or piled with debris. Elizabeth clambered over one pile of broken stone to find a severed arm protruding from the other side; they raced to the next intersection, and she spotted a child of perhaps ten weeping openly next to a dead body. "Ma'am?" Chief Markham asked, cocking his head in the child's direction.
No time, she thought, but there was no other sign of life in the street, and fighters were thick in the sky. "Fine," she said, raising her phase to cover him as he darted across the street.
Another fighter swooped down at that moment, its white beam groping in search of a target. Bates, without hesitation, shouldered his rifle and fired a sustained burst directly into the fighter's belly. The fighter shuddered, and something exploded inside; it crashed into the street and somersaulted over its pointy noise, leaving behind a trail of metal and glass mixed with something that looked distinctly more...visceral. Elizabeth had never seen anything like it. She hoped never to see it again.
Markham boosted the child onto his back and nodded. "Come on, we're almost there," she said, not giving the downed fighter another look.
The entrance to the bunker was, logically enough, nowhere near the Council chambers-that would rather defeat the purpose. Elizabeth's heart leapt when she spotted the right building; it fell again when she saw three or four hulking, white-haired humanoids at the doors, battering away with fists and energy weapons. "Set phasers to kill," she instructed her men. Michael might be taking prisoners, but she wasn't interested in returning the favor at the moment.
They should've had the upper hand-they came charging out from behind a heap of broken masonry, firing continuously, and Elizabeth saw her first shot connect. The alien troops shuddered under the onslaught, and their clothes blackened or burned where they were hit, but by some insane stroke of luck or physiology, they didn't fall-just turned and raised their own weapons to return fire. Elizabeth ran for the cover of an overturned vehicle, aiming a longer, sustained burst at one of the humanoids: though she felt her phaser head up dangerously in her hand one, the enemy did ultimately jerk and fall to its knees. They were all wearing featureless face masks without even eye holes, so she had no idea how they could see, but one of them took aim directly at her with a weapon the size of a lance-
Which exploded in its hands when Markham tried shooting that instead of the alien's body. "Keep moving!" Stackhouse called, and Elizabeth knelt in the cover of the vehicle, using another sustained burst to down another enemy soldier. How many more of these could she manage without short-circuiting the phaser's power cells? What kind of alien could withstand multiple shots like this?
The last of the attack troops fell, and Elizabeth quickly climbed to her feet. "We need to get inside and into the sub-basement," she called, jogging forward.
"Ma'am, get down-!"
Bright white light registered in her peripheral vision, but she didn't have time to dodge away from it. Her entire right arm filled with painful pins and needles, and her phaser slipped from her nerveless fingers; the back of her head and neck went numb and she smelled burning hair. Stupid, she thought, stumbling, stupid, illogical-of course there are more troops on the ground-
In the shelter of the doorway, she had to fumble with the locks with the wrong hand while the others raced to cover her. Markham pressed in the back, the child still clinging to him monkey-like. "You all right, ma'am?" he asked.
"I'm fine," she said firmly. "Just a little numbness."
He slid his own sidearm into her holster. "Just in case."
-\-\-\-\-\-
"How much longer is this gonna take?" Ford asked. So far they had escaped the notice of the fighters, but from this vantage point Jonn could see them occasionally stop to sweep over lifeboats and chunks of debris with their transporters. Looks for captives, he supposed-but why?
"It was your idea," Jonn pointed out, tapping his fingers against the dead controls. The shield wasn't visible to the naked eye, but at the rate they were falling they were probably only halfway through. If the shuttle accelerated now, the reactions with the shielf could very well sheer them in half, or at least damage the hull-and he kind of liked all their antennas and vents in working shape, thanks.
"He's been in there a while," Ford murmured.
"He knew what he was doing," Jonn said, and tried to make it sound like he believed it.
They waited some more, in silence.
"You ever heard of a game called Prime-Not-Prime?" Jonn asked.
Ford gave him a sideways look. "Hell no, sir."
"Just asking."
The fighters were circulating in and out of the mothership-refueling, maybe, or delivering their captives. They were long, fragile-looking things, with the same almost organic skin, and they maneuvered like nothing Jonn had ever seen before, carving out deep curves with every turn. When one of them turned in the shuttle's direction, Jonn could see that there wasn't any kind of screen or canopy-the hull was completely opaque all the way around. Flying on instruments.
Then he realized the fighter was still coming towards them. "This is trouble," Jonn said, leaning forward.
"Think it saw our life signs?" Ford asked.
"Does it matter?" The fighter was longer than the shuttle, but that was all in the spindly nose; the actual body of the thing seemed almost the same size. "How fast do you think we can get those engines restarted?"
"You wanna find out?"
Ripping the end of the shuttle off versus getting plucked out by a transporter and taken to Michael for...whatever. "Race you," Jonn suggested, and hit the emergency engine controls.
The moment power came back up, the shuttle's attitude-control thrusters tried to correct its orientation, which was admittedly cockeyed after drifting for so long. The change in delta-v was enough to send the shield screaming over the hull with an ear-splitting whine. "Can we go yet?" Ford asked.
"Faster we move, harder the shield gets," Jonn reminded him.
"'Cause that thing's got a weapons lock," Ford pointed out.
As if Jonn couldn't see it on the HUD. "You could just shoot it," he pointed out.
"Phasers just came online-"
The dorsal phaser bank was directly below the fighter, with less than five meters' separation-as closer to a point-blank shot as you could get. The explosion, as a consequence, was pretty spectacular. But without anything but the attitude-control system to stabilize it, the shock wave of the exploding fighter broadsided the shuttle and pushed them down, sharply enough that the shield reacted and began to tighten around them. The whine canted into an even higher pitch, and warnings about hull temperature and equipment failure began to flick up over the HUD.
"Do these things not have shields?" Ford asked, as more fighters began to close on their position.
"Guess it'd interfere with the kidnapping gag," Jonn said. They were two-thirds of the way through the shield now, and it was burning into the hull. "Hey, what happens if you fire on a shield like this from the inside?"
"Let's find out." Ford fired another point-blank shot directly behind them, which scattered over the shield into a bloom of lightening. For a split second, a whole segment of the shield thinned to ephemera; Jonn slammed a hand on the acceleration, and they were finally inside.
And facing about fifteen of the dart-like fighters, but one thing at a time.
Jonn went into an evasive spiral, overriding the first set of structural integrity warnings-a direct hit from one of those fighters would breach the hull way faster than the torque of a sharp turn. Ford did his best to pick off the fighters, but what they lacked in durability they made up for in numbers. At least their weapons weren't the turbo-charged nightmares of the mothership-a barrage of fire hit them at the rear, but the shuttle's shield held, just barely.
Ford suddenly reached back and closed the door between the cockpit and the cargo compartment. "What the hell are you doing?" Jonn asked, concentrating on hugging the lower curve of the mothership's stubby wing as he searched for an engine exhaust or some other weak spot.
"Landmines," Ford said.
"You gonna explain that one now?"
Instead, he blew open the rear hatch of the shuttle. The outrushing atmosphere should've carried Ford's mystery crate with it, except, of course, he'd tied it-barely. Instead, the HUD showed a couple dozen small points sailing out of the back of the shuttle like a debris cloud. And the moment they made contact with a fighter, they exploded, setting off a chain reaction of crashes and collisions, thinning the pursuing pack to nearly nothing in an instant.
"Type four photon grenade with the pin switch taped down," Ford clarified.
"So, landmines," Jonn agreed.
And now they were nearly at the main engines, where a line of pit-like plasma vents burned yellow-orange. The amount of heat and radiation pouring out was enormous, but fighters had clustered in front of them, grouped as close as they could without giving up maneuvering ability. There was no way to get by them without flying headlong into enemy fire from one direction or another; there were too many to shoot their way through.
So Jonn, on a gamble, hugged the hull as tightly as he could, around a curve that sent the intertial dampeners to the brink of failure. He came out of it skimming the rim of the first vent, into a literal hot zone that had a new flurry of environmental warnings flicking across the HUD. And which just happened to put them directly between the fighters and the ship, instead of vice-versa.
"Holy shit, sir," Ford blurted, and before he even had to fire something fantastic happened: one of the fighters started firing at them. All Jonn had to do was roll away from the arc of the blasts, and let it shoot its own mothership's engines out.
The vents were hardened to withstand all kinds of engine exhaust, so the effect wasn't immediate. Ford didn't hesitate to help out with a few sustained phaser blasts. But all it took was one little chip in the heat shielding before all that plasma started eating its way through the vent and back into the superstructure. They passed over the second well, firing into that too, just as the first one belched a column of white fire that vaporized a dozen fighters in one blow. Out-of-control plasma burn.
The environmental warnings were getting more insistent all the time, though, and the air in the cockpit was getting uncomfortably warm. "One more for the road," Jonn told Ford, hovering as close to the third vent as he could manage.
"I can live with that," Ford said, and trained the phasers on a point deep inside the well.
At the same time, another cluster of the regrouped fighters wheeled around to face them, coming in head-on and in nearly the same plane. Jonn diverted all their shield strength to forward, but didn't alter course, not yet. Come on, he thought, hands loose and easy over the controls as they closed the distance. I'm not afraid of you.
The first concentrated barrage of fire completely destroyed their shields. The shuttle rocked, but Jonn kept it level. The fighters charged weapons for a second barrage-
And Ford raked across their whole formation with a sustained phaser beam. They burst into glittering debris clouds, and there was no time to pull away from the cloud; the best Jonn could do was slow down and ride out the shock wave, and pray there wouldn't be a hull breach.
When he rose away from the vents, however, there were no more fighters coming at them; they all seemed to be streaming back into the hangars all of a sudden. "Is that a good thing or a bad thing?" Ford asked, watching the disappear back into the ship.
"I'm not hanging around to find out," Jonn said, and followed a wide arc around the ship back towards the Atlantis.
-\-\-\-\-\-
Finally, she found a security code that worked on the doors-the old Federation embassy emergency codes, apparently still in use. Inside, the building was full of smoke from the burning upper floors, but otherwise empty; she found a stairwell and raced down as fast as she dared, holding her weakened right arm against her chest with the other.
The doors of the sub-basement appeared to be nothing more than a row of bland, basic offices, with the same sort of locks as the exterior door, but Elizabeth counted them off in her head and stopped at the sixth. She managed to press her palm against the scanner, and announced her voiceprint, "Elizabeth Weir."
A blue glyph flashed on the screen. Denied.
"Commander Elizabeth Weir, Starfleet, she tried-true, it had been a while since her last visit, but she still had connections within the council, shouldn't have been purged from the system yet. The same blue glyph came up a second time. "Doctor Elizabeth Weir, Exterior Ministry," she tried, and that was the voiceprint that worked, the screen flashing orange once before the locks gave way.
On the other side of the door was a simple, straight corridor, with just enough room for them all to fit inside. Elizabeth thumbed the panel at the other end. "This is Commander Elizabeth Weir of the Starship Atlantis," she announced to whoever was on the other end. "I'm here to evacuate the Council."
For a moment, there was a silence, and all her worst fears roared to the front of her mind.
Then the tiny speaker clicked on, almost imperceptibly. "The council has not requested evacuation."
"The Council has no choice," she said harshly. "The enemy ship has destroyed the entire Starfleet task force and they are burning this city down. We just stopped a squad of them trying to break into this facility. We have boosters; we can beam everyone directly to the Atlantis."
There was another long pause, and she wondered just who was on the other side of the door, who was foolish enough or new enough to stand between her and the council, and now of all times.
Then the door seals quietly clicked, and she found herself standing face to face with Simon.
"Elizabeth," he said quietly. "You should not be here."
"Nor should you," she said, struggling to keep her voice level, now of all times. This isn't about people! "Weren't members of the Science Ministry evacuated?"
"I elected to give my place to a colleague," he said. "Come quickly, before you are found."
He ushered them into a cramped lift, which took them into the bunker; the main illumination came from the various computer screens lining the walls, and the air was stifling hot, even by Vulcan standards. "You said the Starfleet ships have been destroyed," Simon prompted.
"Correct," Elizabeth said. "The captain of the Atlantis is attempting to negotiate, but it's only a stalling tactic."
Simon raised an eyebrow. "The hostile vessel has not responded to any of our attempts at communication."
"I'm not sure I understand the situation myself," she said, because she couldn't begin to explain the chill in her bones when Michael said Doctor Weir in that particular way. Not in any logical way, at least. "But this may be our only chance to evacuate anyone from the surface."
They came into a slightly larger room, where the Council members-scholars, priestesses, philosophers, and artists all-were gathered around a table. Vaaryl rose to her feet when Elizabeth entered, but the rest stayed seated. "Doctor Weir. Would that we were met under other circumstances."
"Councilor Vaaryl," Elizabeth said, raising a hand in greeting. "I presume you can deduce why I've come."
"You wish to evacuate us," Councilor Suvik said quietly. He was, perhaps, the oldest member of the Council, and possibly the oldest man on Vulcan. "Which presupposes we wish to be evacuated."
"I fail to see the logic in remaining," Elizabeth said.
"This is our homeworld, Doctor," Vaaryl said. "To flee would signal an abandonment of our long heritage and history."
"To stay is to risk destruction," Elizabeth said. "This is not a battle that anyone can win, Councilors. The enemy ship is simply too powerful. The most we can do is prepare ourselves for rebuilding."
Suvik tilted his head at her. "Tell me, Commander Weir," he said, with a quick glance at her sleeves. "Shall we be safer on your ship in orbit than here on the surface?"
"None of us are safe until that ship is gone," Elizabeth shot back. "But if there is any chance of escape, it's in orbit, not down here."
The Councilors sat, contemplative, and Elizabeth felt an unfamiliar urge to hurry; perhaps she'd spent too much time among humans lately. Bates and Stackhouse were fidgeting openly, and Markham kept shifting the weight of the child still clinging to his back. Far above, there was a crash like thunder, but from down here it seemed miles away.
Quietly, one of the bunker's staff members stepped into the room. "Councilors. The aliens are assaulting two of our entrances. We must assume our location is known."
"If they wished to kill us, they could do so from orbit," another councilor said.
"They may simply wish not to kill you immediately," Elizabeth could not help but snap out.
"Very well," Vaaryl said, and placed her hand against a wall panel. "If it is a choice between surrender and retreat, let us choose retreat, and return to rebuild."
"Let us be the called the ones who turned our backs on our world in its darkest hour," somebody else said sharply, but Elizabeth had verbal permission now; she gave half the boosters to Stackhouse, and they began lining the room with them.
Another explosion sounded, but this one was much, much closer. Simon stepped out of the council chambers for a moment, and Elizabeth squashed the urge to call him back-she focused instead on activating the boosters as fast as she could. This deep underground, they would need as many as possible to enable the Atlantis to get a lock.
Simon came back in, holding a very compact phaser in one hand. "The aliens have breached Entryway Four. They are on their way to the turbolift shafts."
"Atlantis, this is Weir," Elizabeth said into her communicator. "Can you read me?"
"Faintly, Commander," Teyla said; her own voice was tinny and weak. "Have you reached the council members?"
"We have, and we're activating the boosters now," Elizabeth replied. "Can Zelenka get a lock on us yet?"
"Ahm-no," Zelenka answered directly. "I am sorry, Commander, but you are simply too deep underground."
"This chamber is specifically reinforced against transporters," Simon said. "You will not be able to obtain a lock."
Elizabeth pressed another booster into the wall. "These boosters can multiply signal strength by a factor of ten. They'll get us."
"We cannot afford to wait," Simon said. Another explosive rattled the floor, this one the closet yet, and she heard phaser discharges in the room they'd just come from.
"Atlantis, how are we coming in now?" Elizabeth asked, instead of arguing the point.
"No...no...perhaps...yes!" Zelenka crowed. "I have your location. Attempting to lock."
Elizabeth held the communicator away from her mouth. "Get everyone in here."
"They can better hold off the enemy from outside the chamber," Simon said.
In a fit of frustration she didn't have the time to anaylze, Elizabeth looped her still-tingling arm around Simon's and pulled him bodily into the chamber. "Zelenka, we need you now," she said, while Bates and Stackhouse aimed their rifles into the corridor.
"Almost," he assured her.
A ball of white light came streaking through the doorway and burst a light fixture. "Now!" Elizabeth called.
And on her command, the world around her dissolved into scintillating blue light.
-\-\-\-\-\-
Jonn and Ford were halfway back to the bridge when Atlantis rocked around them, almost knocking Jonn off his feet. The lights in the corridor failed for a moment, and down a cross corridor Jonn saw a containment door drop, which either meant hull breach or fire. He raced the rest of the way to the turbolift, thinking, I am not going to die without a chance to look that creepy bastard in the face one more time, and palmed the lift controls.
Elizabeth Weir was already in the car that came, with a phaser on her hip and a spattering of bloody scratches across her face. Thick locks of hair had fallen out of her bun; they looked they they'd been burned off at the ends somehow. "What happened to you?" Jonn blurted.
She didn't even deign to acknowledge the comment. "Where's Captain Sumner?"
"He never left the ship, ma'am," Ford said, eyes averted. "We did our best to disable its engines and then returned to Atlantis."
Weir shut her eyes briefly. "Maybe that was enough to stop them," she said, massaging her right hand with her left.
The ship rocked again, knock the lift car against the side of the shaft. "Or maybe we just made them angry," Jonn muttered.
On the bridge, Teyla stood up as soon as they left the lift. "Commander Weir, Michael's ship is firing on us. We were briefly able to restore the shields, but they have failed again, and there are additional hull breaches on decks seven, eleven, fourteen and fifteen. We have attempted to return fire with no effect."
"Do we have warp?" Weir asked.
"Possibly," Zelenka said. "But power levels are not stable."
"Commander, the enemy ship is going into warp," someone called out, and Jonn looked up at the forward screen just in time to see the entire bulk of Michael's ship flicker and twist away. Apparently the engine damage hadn't done the trick. Dammit.
"We need to follow him," Jonn said immediately, eyes fixed on the screen.
"Absolutely not," Weir shot back, tucking the stray hair behind her ear.
Jonn rounded on her, gobsmacked. "You want to let him get away?"
"We don't have the power to stop him," she said firmly. "Besides, Captain Sumner's last order was to fall back to Vorash."
"Sumner is still with Michael," Jonn pointed out, fists clenching on their own accord. "Along with a hell of a lot of Vulcans and Starfleet personnel."
"Assuming any of them are still alive," Weir shot back.
"There's still a chance," Jonn insisted.
"And I will not sacrifice this ship and everyone on board it for a chance," Weir said savagely, and at some point they'd converged on each other, standing toe to toe. She was a lot shorter than she looked from afar, and the scratches on her face looked deep. "We will rescue as many of the seriously injured as we can and then we will fall back to Vorash as planned."
"You're a coward," Jonn spat, frustration rising to a peak.
Weir took a step back. "And you are guilty of desertion, trespassing, and falsifying official Starfleet documents," she said frostily. "Ensign Ford, escort Mr. Sheppard to the brig."
Jonn was struck speechless for a moment, and shook off Ford's hand when he reluctantly put it on his shoulder. "This is wrong," he said, since he figured he couldn't dig himself any deeper than he already had. "And you know it, or you wouldn't be putting me in the lockup."
"Get this man off my bridge, Ensign," Weir said, turning away. Jonn didn't have to be told twice.
-\-\-\-\-\-
Elizabeth dropped into the captain's chair, still trying to squeeze some feeling into her right hand. Sheppard's accusations hung thick in the air, almost smothering. "Mr. Zelenka, do we have warp drive or not?"
"Ah...possibly?" He typed a bit longer, then grimaced. "Main Engineering is reporting severe plasma fire."
She glanced back at Teyla, who opened an internal comm line without being prompted. "Commander Castilho, what's your status?"
"Dead," a voice, not Castilho's, responded; it took her a moment to recognize Rodney McKay. "Along with everybody who scored better than the fiftieth percentile on their aptitude tests, apparently."
Elizabeth squeezed her eyes shut momentarily, but she had to press on. "Is the warp drive functional, Mr. McKay?"
"For certain definitions of functional, sure," he said. "But you're not getting anything higher that warp six-point-five without blowing up our remaining nacelle. Three-point-nine if you want to actually sustain it."
Miller cleared his throat. "Ma'am, at that speed it'll take us four and a half days just to get back to Earth."
No point in asking about Vorash, then. Elizabeth shut her eyes. "What other destination are in range?" she asked.
Behind her, she heard Teyla move to the sensor station. "We are only ten light-years from the planet Hoff; the Federation has a reciprocal medical training program there. Their hospitals are known as the best in the Pegasus quadrant."
Ten light-years...surely they could do ten light-years. "Lay in a course, Mr. Miller. Contact the civil defense and arrange to beam up the worst injured-as many as we can carry, and as quickly as possible." She stood. "I'm going to inform the Council members of the situation. Ms. Emmagen-"
"Yes, ma'am," Teyla said, and allowed Elizabeth to escape into the lift, where she could lean against the wall and take deep, measured breaths.
Chapter One
Chapter Ten
Chapter Twelve
Author:
mad_maudlin
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis/Star Trek 2009 (mashup)
Length: 91,750 (total); 5,854 (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?
Eleven
Elizabeth watched Sumner leave the bridge with Sheppard and Ford, a surprising calm sweeping over her. Perhaps this was the state of perfect logic some Vulcan sages claimed to feel during deep mediation. Perhaps she was simply hysterical. She went to stand before the captain's chair, watching the hideous ship five kilometers below; at this distance she could see the rafts of dark smoke collecting in the lower atmosphere, each plume marking a city or settlement as clearly as a pin on a map.
How does it feel to watch your world burn?
"Mr. Zelenka, what's the status of the shield generators?" she asked.
He shook his head. "They are under repairs now, but it will take some time..."
"What about warp engines?" she asked.
"Commander Castilho has taken them offline pending a damage assessment," Zelenka said.
So they couldn't run, and they couldn't make a stand. "Tell him to divert all attention to the shields. Even partial protection is better than none. Monitor that ship, and take evasive action immediately if there is any sign of its weapons powering up." She glanced at Ford's replacement at the weapons station. "Mr. Campbell, if any of those fighters comes within a hundred meters of this ship, destroy it."
"Yes, ma'am," he said.
She turned to Teyla, who still looked unsettled by whatever she was sensing off the enemy ship. "Lieutenant Emmagen, you have the conn." Elizabeth told her.
Teyla sat bolt upright. "Commander Weir."
"Many members of the Vulcan Council refused to evacuate in order to maintain continuity of government functions," Elizabeth explained. "I know where their secure bunker is located, and more importantly, I'm known to their security staff. I'm taking an away team to the surface to evacuate them by transporter."
Teyla's eyes narrowed. "You are one to speak of suicide missions, Commander."
"Until our shields are repaired, there's nothing else we can do," she said. "Michael can burn the cities, but he cannot be allowed to destroy the Vulcan culture. The Council aren't just politicians, they are elders and religious leaders, and they have to survive this."
Teyla stood, and nodded sharply. "Understood, Commander. We will not raise the shields until you have returned."
"Raise the shields as soon as you can," Elizabeth corrected firmly. "In the mean time, see if you can get a lock on any of the personnel in those lifeboats, before Michael's fighters scoop them up. I'll be in touch."
-\-\-\-\-\-
Jonn ran through the preflight checks on the shuttle-a Galileo, a good all-around class but not outstanding. At the moment he was mainly concerned with the phasers, dorsal and ventral, which didn't reach nearly the power output of a shipboard array but were better than nothing. If Sumner was right, and they could get inside Michael's shield, all it would take was one or two lucky shots to ruin his day.
Ford dragged a lidless plastic crate into the back of the shuttle and hooked a single long cargo strap onto the handle. "What the hell is that?" Jonn asked him, glancing up.
"Landmines," Ford said absently.
Jonn turned around in his seat, trying to peer into the crate without much look. "Landmines?"
"I'll explain later," Ford said, and dropped into the copilot's seat. "You really a pilot?"
"You really a gunner?" Jonn shot back.
"Top of my class in marksmanship in three different categories," Ford said.
"Good, 'cause I don't think these guys are just gonna sit still," Jonn muttered.
Their radio clicked over. "Sumner to Sheppard. Keep behind me until we're inside the shield."
"Roger that, sir," Jonn said. "Though you do realize that 'behind' is a relative concept when you're talking about a ship three kilometers long?"
"Maintain radio silence," Sumner snapped back peevishly, and cut the channel.
Sumner's shuttle rose off the deck and glided towards the bay doors; Jonn took his shuttle nearly to the top of the landing bay, lining up with Sumner as best he could. Michael's ship was directly below them, so in theory-and, again, only if they were fantastically lucky or Michael's crew were asleep at their posts-Jonn's shuttle would register as little more than a sensor shadow until it was already too late.
"You really think that's the same thing that destroyed the Kelvin?" Ford asked quietly.
Jonn shrugged. "Well, on one hand, it's been twenty-five years. On the other, if there's two giant murder ships flying around the galaxy, we're really in trouble, so...." He wasn't going to think about how Michael knew his name, anyone else's. Or how throwing a warp core at this thing apparently wasn't enough to destroy it, just delay it for a generation. Focus on the mission at hand.
A spinning piece of debris-maybe from one of the other task force ships-came at them, sending the perimeter alarms squawking. Jonn couldn't take evasive action and stay centered behind Sumner; the best he could do was close the distance between them to a single meter and hold his breath, while the twisted piece of tritanium drifted by. If Sumner even noticed the move, his piloting certainly didn't show it.
"Coming up on their shield now," Ford announced. "That's weird-there's debris inside the shield perimeter."
"If it's a Holtzmann-process deflector, it'll be porous to anything without enough kinetic energy," Jonn pointed out. "Let's just hope we don't hit any of it."
On the HUD, the red line representing Michael's shields was almost on top of them. Jonn, nervous, closed to within half a meter of Sumner's shuttle. A segment of the shield flickered out, and they both eased forward, sliding into the gap...
The very instant Sumner's shuttle was clear, the same segment of shield flicked back into existence. The nose of Jonn's shuttle bounced off it with a jolt he could feel. "Damn it!" he yelped, slapping the control panels. There went the whole damn reason for being out here!
"Hang on a second," Ford said, while Jonn was still distracted by Sumner's swiftly shrinking running lights. He started by shutting off the shuttle's life support.
"The hell are you doing?" Jonn demanded, still glaring at the shield perimeter.
"You just said low kinetic energy gets you through a shield like this," Ford said, shutting down sensors and communications as well.
Jonn blinked at him, but in the next second it all came together, and he couldn't fight down a little smirk. "I think I like you, Ensign."
"Aim to please, sir," Ford said. His hand hovered over the main engines. "Though...how slow is this going to be?"
"Slow," Jonn admitted, and gave the thrusters one last little squirt.
Once the engines were shut down, they were alone in the dark. The way they were oriented, Vulcan appeared to be above them, the vastness of Michael's ship hanging in between like some kind of space-faring sea monster. Their momentum combined with the planet's gravity sent them sliding forward with agonizing slowness...and forward, and forward, a centimeter at a time.
"This is going to take a while, isn't it?" Ford asked quietly.
"Yeah," Jonn said, flexing his hands in his lap. "Good thing we got nowhere to be, though, right?"
-\-\-\-\-\-
The Central Hall of the Vulcan Science Academy had collapsed. Its foyer was the best open area the transporter technician could find to put them down, and the first thing Elizabeth saw was the toppled, broken statue of Surak laying on the floor, half-covered by the debris from the open ceiling. Overhead, Michael's fighters were strafing the city, filling the air with a terrible, grating chatter.
This isn't about the buildings. This is about the people, the memories.
Elizabeth drew her phaser and shouldered the bag of signal boosters she'd brought down. "Follow me," she told the security team-three chief petty officers and a master chief, all armed with phaser rifles-and strode out into the street.
She could navigate this city with her eyes closed, or at least she could have done so once; now there were burning, broken buildings everywhere she looked, and the streets were full of people running with purpose, but in every direction. She saw a group of volunteers, some with blood-stained robes, evacuating one building; on the next block over, uniformed Civil Defense were attempting to gather people into a different building, the only intact one on the block. Tens of thousands had evacuated, but this was a planet of six billion, and Elizabeth wished for a whole armada that could gather everyone up and take them to safety.
You can't save everyone. You can save the ones who matter.
A fighter screamed overhead, dropping a ghostly white column of light to sweep the street. Elizabeth dove out of the way, only to watch Chief Toligen stop to take aim at the ship with his phaser rifle...and get swept away by the white light. "It's a transporter!" Chief Bates called across the street. "They're beaming people up! What the hell?"
Why kidnap people instead of killing them outright? There were bodies enough in the streets-it wasn't like Michael had any aversion to casualties. Elizabeth picked herself up and checked that the boosters were undamaged. "Keep moving, and keep closer to the buildings," she said, even as a second fighter swooped down and blew a building across the street to pieces. Elizabeth felt the heat of it, felt the flecks of glass and stone bite into her face-"Come on!"
The city center was ancient, but it had been logically planned-of course-with wide radial avenues and curving cross-streets. Those avenues were giving the fighters clear lanes to swoop into, but many of the narrower streets were blocked off, cratered or piled with debris. Elizabeth clambered over one pile of broken stone to find a severed arm protruding from the other side; they raced to the next intersection, and she spotted a child of perhaps ten weeping openly next to a dead body. "Ma'am?" Chief Markham asked, cocking his head in the child's direction.
No time, she thought, but there was no other sign of life in the street, and fighters were thick in the sky. "Fine," she said, raising her phase to cover him as he darted across the street.
Another fighter swooped down at that moment, its white beam groping in search of a target. Bates, without hesitation, shouldered his rifle and fired a sustained burst directly into the fighter's belly. The fighter shuddered, and something exploded inside; it crashed into the street and somersaulted over its pointy noise, leaving behind a trail of metal and glass mixed with something that looked distinctly more...visceral. Elizabeth had never seen anything like it. She hoped never to see it again.
Markham boosted the child onto his back and nodded. "Come on, we're almost there," she said, not giving the downed fighter another look.
The entrance to the bunker was, logically enough, nowhere near the Council chambers-that would rather defeat the purpose. Elizabeth's heart leapt when she spotted the right building; it fell again when she saw three or four hulking, white-haired humanoids at the doors, battering away with fists and energy weapons. "Set phasers to kill," she instructed her men. Michael might be taking prisoners, but she wasn't interested in returning the favor at the moment.
They should've had the upper hand-they came charging out from behind a heap of broken masonry, firing continuously, and Elizabeth saw her first shot connect. The alien troops shuddered under the onslaught, and their clothes blackened or burned where they were hit, but by some insane stroke of luck or physiology, they didn't fall-just turned and raised their own weapons to return fire. Elizabeth ran for the cover of an overturned vehicle, aiming a longer, sustained burst at one of the humanoids: though she felt her phaser head up dangerously in her hand one, the enemy did ultimately jerk and fall to its knees. They were all wearing featureless face masks without even eye holes, so she had no idea how they could see, but one of them took aim directly at her with a weapon the size of a lance-
Which exploded in its hands when Markham tried shooting that instead of the alien's body. "Keep moving!" Stackhouse called, and Elizabeth knelt in the cover of the vehicle, using another sustained burst to down another enemy soldier. How many more of these could she manage without short-circuiting the phaser's power cells? What kind of alien could withstand multiple shots like this?
The last of the attack troops fell, and Elizabeth quickly climbed to her feet. "We need to get inside and into the sub-basement," she called, jogging forward.
"Ma'am, get down-!"
Bright white light registered in her peripheral vision, but she didn't have time to dodge away from it. Her entire right arm filled with painful pins and needles, and her phaser slipped from her nerveless fingers; the back of her head and neck went numb and she smelled burning hair. Stupid, she thought, stumbling, stupid, illogical-of course there are more troops on the ground-
In the shelter of the doorway, she had to fumble with the locks with the wrong hand while the others raced to cover her. Markham pressed in the back, the child still clinging to him monkey-like. "You all right, ma'am?" he asked.
"I'm fine," she said firmly. "Just a little numbness."
He slid his own sidearm into her holster. "Just in case."
-\-\-\-\-\-
"How much longer is this gonna take?" Ford asked. So far they had escaped the notice of the fighters, but from this vantage point Jonn could see them occasionally stop to sweep over lifeboats and chunks of debris with their transporters. Looks for captives, he supposed-but why?
"It was your idea," Jonn pointed out, tapping his fingers against the dead controls. The shield wasn't visible to the naked eye, but at the rate they were falling they were probably only halfway through. If the shuttle accelerated now, the reactions with the shielf could very well sheer them in half, or at least damage the hull-and he kind of liked all their antennas and vents in working shape, thanks.
"He's been in there a while," Ford murmured.
"He knew what he was doing," Jonn said, and tried to make it sound like he believed it.
They waited some more, in silence.
"You ever heard of a game called Prime-Not-Prime?" Jonn asked.
Ford gave him a sideways look. "Hell no, sir."
"Just asking."
The fighters were circulating in and out of the mothership-refueling, maybe, or delivering their captives. They were long, fragile-looking things, with the same almost organic skin, and they maneuvered like nothing Jonn had ever seen before, carving out deep curves with every turn. When one of them turned in the shuttle's direction, Jonn could see that there wasn't any kind of screen or canopy-the hull was completely opaque all the way around. Flying on instruments.
Then he realized the fighter was still coming towards them. "This is trouble," Jonn said, leaning forward.
"Think it saw our life signs?" Ford asked.
"Does it matter?" The fighter was longer than the shuttle, but that was all in the spindly nose; the actual body of the thing seemed almost the same size. "How fast do you think we can get those engines restarted?"
"You wanna find out?"
Ripping the end of the shuttle off versus getting plucked out by a transporter and taken to Michael for...whatever. "Race you," Jonn suggested, and hit the emergency engine controls.
The moment power came back up, the shuttle's attitude-control thrusters tried to correct its orientation, which was admittedly cockeyed after drifting for so long. The change in delta-v was enough to send the shield screaming over the hull with an ear-splitting whine. "Can we go yet?" Ford asked.
"Faster we move, harder the shield gets," Jonn reminded him.
"'Cause that thing's got a weapons lock," Ford pointed out.
As if Jonn couldn't see it on the HUD. "You could just shoot it," he pointed out.
"Phasers just came online-"
The dorsal phaser bank was directly below the fighter, with less than five meters' separation-as closer to a point-blank shot as you could get. The explosion, as a consequence, was pretty spectacular. But without anything but the attitude-control system to stabilize it, the shock wave of the exploding fighter broadsided the shuttle and pushed them down, sharply enough that the shield reacted and began to tighten around them. The whine canted into an even higher pitch, and warnings about hull temperature and equipment failure began to flick up over the HUD.
"Do these things not have shields?" Ford asked, as more fighters began to close on their position.
"Guess it'd interfere with the kidnapping gag," Jonn said. They were two-thirds of the way through the shield now, and it was burning into the hull. "Hey, what happens if you fire on a shield like this from the inside?"
"Let's find out." Ford fired another point-blank shot directly behind them, which scattered over the shield into a bloom of lightening. For a split second, a whole segment of the shield thinned to ephemera; Jonn slammed a hand on the acceleration, and they were finally inside.
And facing about fifteen of the dart-like fighters, but one thing at a time.
Jonn went into an evasive spiral, overriding the first set of structural integrity warnings-a direct hit from one of those fighters would breach the hull way faster than the torque of a sharp turn. Ford did his best to pick off the fighters, but what they lacked in durability they made up for in numbers. At least their weapons weren't the turbo-charged nightmares of the mothership-a barrage of fire hit them at the rear, but the shuttle's shield held, just barely.
Ford suddenly reached back and closed the door between the cockpit and the cargo compartment. "What the hell are you doing?" Jonn asked, concentrating on hugging the lower curve of the mothership's stubby wing as he searched for an engine exhaust or some other weak spot.
"Landmines," Ford said.
"You gonna explain that one now?"
Instead, he blew open the rear hatch of the shuttle. The outrushing atmosphere should've carried Ford's mystery crate with it, except, of course, he'd tied it-barely. Instead, the HUD showed a couple dozen small points sailing out of the back of the shuttle like a debris cloud. And the moment they made contact with a fighter, they exploded, setting off a chain reaction of crashes and collisions, thinning the pursuing pack to nearly nothing in an instant.
"Type four photon grenade with the pin switch taped down," Ford clarified.
"So, landmines," Jonn agreed.
And now they were nearly at the main engines, where a line of pit-like plasma vents burned yellow-orange. The amount of heat and radiation pouring out was enormous, but fighters had clustered in front of them, grouped as close as they could without giving up maneuvering ability. There was no way to get by them without flying headlong into enemy fire from one direction or another; there were too many to shoot their way through.
So Jonn, on a gamble, hugged the hull as tightly as he could, around a curve that sent the intertial dampeners to the brink of failure. He came out of it skimming the rim of the first vent, into a literal hot zone that had a new flurry of environmental warnings flicking across the HUD. And which just happened to put them directly between the fighters and the ship, instead of vice-versa.
"Holy shit, sir," Ford blurted, and before he even had to fire something fantastic happened: one of the fighters started firing at them. All Jonn had to do was roll away from the arc of the blasts, and let it shoot its own mothership's engines out.
The vents were hardened to withstand all kinds of engine exhaust, so the effect wasn't immediate. Ford didn't hesitate to help out with a few sustained phaser blasts. But all it took was one little chip in the heat shielding before all that plasma started eating its way through the vent and back into the superstructure. They passed over the second well, firing into that too, just as the first one belched a column of white fire that vaporized a dozen fighters in one blow. Out-of-control plasma burn.
The environmental warnings were getting more insistent all the time, though, and the air in the cockpit was getting uncomfortably warm. "One more for the road," Jonn told Ford, hovering as close to the third vent as he could manage.
"I can live with that," Ford said, and trained the phasers on a point deep inside the well.
At the same time, another cluster of the regrouped fighters wheeled around to face them, coming in head-on and in nearly the same plane. Jonn diverted all their shield strength to forward, but didn't alter course, not yet. Come on, he thought, hands loose and easy over the controls as they closed the distance. I'm not afraid of you.
The first concentrated barrage of fire completely destroyed their shields. The shuttle rocked, but Jonn kept it level. The fighters charged weapons for a second barrage-
And Ford raked across their whole formation with a sustained phaser beam. They burst into glittering debris clouds, and there was no time to pull away from the cloud; the best Jonn could do was slow down and ride out the shock wave, and pray there wouldn't be a hull breach.
When he rose away from the vents, however, there were no more fighters coming at them; they all seemed to be streaming back into the hangars all of a sudden. "Is that a good thing or a bad thing?" Ford asked, watching the disappear back into the ship.
"I'm not hanging around to find out," Jonn said, and followed a wide arc around the ship back towards the Atlantis.
-\-\-\-\-\-
Finally, she found a security code that worked on the doors-the old Federation embassy emergency codes, apparently still in use. Inside, the building was full of smoke from the burning upper floors, but otherwise empty; she found a stairwell and raced down as fast as she dared, holding her weakened right arm against her chest with the other.
The doors of the sub-basement appeared to be nothing more than a row of bland, basic offices, with the same sort of locks as the exterior door, but Elizabeth counted them off in her head and stopped at the sixth. She managed to press her palm against the scanner, and announced her voiceprint, "Elizabeth Weir."
A blue glyph flashed on the screen. Denied.
"Commander Elizabeth Weir, Starfleet, she tried-true, it had been a while since her last visit, but she still had connections within the council, shouldn't have been purged from the system yet. The same blue glyph came up a second time. "Doctor Elizabeth Weir, Exterior Ministry," she tried, and that was the voiceprint that worked, the screen flashing orange once before the locks gave way.
On the other side of the door was a simple, straight corridor, with just enough room for them all to fit inside. Elizabeth thumbed the panel at the other end. "This is Commander Elizabeth Weir of the Starship Atlantis," she announced to whoever was on the other end. "I'm here to evacuate the Council."
For a moment, there was a silence, and all her worst fears roared to the front of her mind.
Then the tiny speaker clicked on, almost imperceptibly. "The council has not requested evacuation."
"The Council has no choice," she said harshly. "The enemy ship has destroyed the entire Starfleet task force and they are burning this city down. We just stopped a squad of them trying to break into this facility. We have boosters; we can beam everyone directly to the Atlantis."
There was another long pause, and she wondered just who was on the other side of the door, who was foolish enough or new enough to stand between her and the council, and now of all times.
Then the door seals quietly clicked, and she found herself standing face to face with Simon.
"Elizabeth," he said quietly. "You should not be here."
"Nor should you," she said, struggling to keep her voice level, now of all times. This isn't about people! "Weren't members of the Science Ministry evacuated?"
"I elected to give my place to a colleague," he said. "Come quickly, before you are found."
He ushered them into a cramped lift, which took them into the bunker; the main illumination came from the various computer screens lining the walls, and the air was stifling hot, even by Vulcan standards. "You said the Starfleet ships have been destroyed," Simon prompted.
"Correct," Elizabeth said. "The captain of the Atlantis is attempting to negotiate, but it's only a stalling tactic."
Simon raised an eyebrow. "The hostile vessel has not responded to any of our attempts at communication."
"I'm not sure I understand the situation myself," she said, because she couldn't begin to explain the chill in her bones when Michael said Doctor Weir in that particular way. Not in any logical way, at least. "But this may be our only chance to evacuate anyone from the surface."
They came into a slightly larger room, where the Council members-scholars, priestesses, philosophers, and artists all-were gathered around a table. Vaaryl rose to her feet when Elizabeth entered, but the rest stayed seated. "Doctor Weir. Would that we were met under other circumstances."
"Councilor Vaaryl," Elizabeth said, raising a hand in greeting. "I presume you can deduce why I've come."
"You wish to evacuate us," Councilor Suvik said quietly. He was, perhaps, the oldest member of the Council, and possibly the oldest man on Vulcan. "Which presupposes we wish to be evacuated."
"I fail to see the logic in remaining," Elizabeth said.
"This is our homeworld, Doctor," Vaaryl said. "To flee would signal an abandonment of our long heritage and history."
"To stay is to risk destruction," Elizabeth said. "This is not a battle that anyone can win, Councilors. The enemy ship is simply too powerful. The most we can do is prepare ourselves for rebuilding."
Suvik tilted his head at her. "Tell me, Commander Weir," he said, with a quick glance at her sleeves. "Shall we be safer on your ship in orbit than here on the surface?"
"None of us are safe until that ship is gone," Elizabeth shot back. "But if there is any chance of escape, it's in orbit, not down here."
The Councilors sat, contemplative, and Elizabeth felt an unfamiliar urge to hurry; perhaps she'd spent too much time among humans lately. Bates and Stackhouse were fidgeting openly, and Markham kept shifting the weight of the child still clinging to his back. Far above, there was a crash like thunder, but from down here it seemed miles away.
Quietly, one of the bunker's staff members stepped into the room. "Councilors. The aliens are assaulting two of our entrances. We must assume our location is known."
"If they wished to kill us, they could do so from orbit," another councilor said.
"They may simply wish not to kill you immediately," Elizabeth could not help but snap out.
"Very well," Vaaryl said, and placed her hand against a wall panel. "If it is a choice between surrender and retreat, let us choose retreat, and return to rebuild."
"Let us be the called the ones who turned our backs on our world in its darkest hour," somebody else said sharply, but Elizabeth had verbal permission now; she gave half the boosters to Stackhouse, and they began lining the room with them.
Another explosion sounded, but this one was much, much closer. Simon stepped out of the council chambers for a moment, and Elizabeth squashed the urge to call him back-she focused instead on activating the boosters as fast as she could. This deep underground, they would need as many as possible to enable the Atlantis to get a lock.
Simon came back in, holding a very compact phaser in one hand. "The aliens have breached Entryway Four. They are on their way to the turbolift shafts."
"Atlantis, this is Weir," Elizabeth said into her communicator. "Can you read me?"
"Faintly, Commander," Teyla said; her own voice was tinny and weak. "Have you reached the council members?"
"We have, and we're activating the boosters now," Elizabeth replied. "Can Zelenka get a lock on us yet?"
"Ahm-no," Zelenka answered directly. "I am sorry, Commander, but you are simply too deep underground."
"This chamber is specifically reinforced against transporters," Simon said. "You will not be able to obtain a lock."
Elizabeth pressed another booster into the wall. "These boosters can multiply signal strength by a factor of ten. They'll get us."
"We cannot afford to wait," Simon said. Another explosive rattled the floor, this one the closet yet, and she heard phaser discharges in the room they'd just come from.
"Atlantis, how are we coming in now?" Elizabeth asked, instead of arguing the point.
"No...no...perhaps...yes!" Zelenka crowed. "I have your location. Attempting to lock."
Elizabeth held the communicator away from her mouth. "Get everyone in here."
"They can better hold off the enemy from outside the chamber," Simon said.
In a fit of frustration she didn't have the time to anaylze, Elizabeth looped her still-tingling arm around Simon's and pulled him bodily into the chamber. "Zelenka, we need you now," she said, while Bates and Stackhouse aimed their rifles into the corridor.
"Almost," he assured her.
A ball of white light came streaking through the doorway and burst a light fixture. "Now!" Elizabeth called.
And on her command, the world around her dissolved into scintillating blue light.
-\-\-\-\-\-
Jonn and Ford were halfway back to the bridge when Atlantis rocked around them, almost knocking Jonn off his feet. The lights in the corridor failed for a moment, and down a cross corridor Jonn saw a containment door drop, which either meant hull breach or fire. He raced the rest of the way to the turbolift, thinking, I am not going to die without a chance to look that creepy bastard in the face one more time, and palmed the lift controls.
Elizabeth Weir was already in the car that came, with a phaser on her hip and a spattering of bloody scratches across her face. Thick locks of hair had fallen out of her bun; they looked they they'd been burned off at the ends somehow. "What happened to you?" Jonn blurted.
She didn't even deign to acknowledge the comment. "Where's Captain Sumner?"
"He never left the ship, ma'am," Ford said, eyes averted. "We did our best to disable its engines and then returned to Atlantis."
Weir shut her eyes briefly. "Maybe that was enough to stop them," she said, massaging her right hand with her left.
The ship rocked again, knock the lift car against the side of the shaft. "Or maybe we just made them angry," Jonn muttered.
On the bridge, Teyla stood up as soon as they left the lift. "Commander Weir, Michael's ship is firing on us. We were briefly able to restore the shields, but they have failed again, and there are additional hull breaches on decks seven, eleven, fourteen and fifteen. We have attempted to return fire with no effect."
"Do we have warp?" Weir asked.
"Possibly," Zelenka said. "But power levels are not stable."
"Commander, the enemy ship is going into warp," someone called out, and Jonn looked up at the forward screen just in time to see the entire bulk of Michael's ship flicker and twist away. Apparently the engine damage hadn't done the trick. Dammit.
"We need to follow him," Jonn said immediately, eyes fixed on the screen.
"Absolutely not," Weir shot back, tucking the stray hair behind her ear.
Jonn rounded on her, gobsmacked. "You want to let him get away?"
"We don't have the power to stop him," she said firmly. "Besides, Captain Sumner's last order was to fall back to Vorash."
"Sumner is still with Michael," Jonn pointed out, fists clenching on their own accord. "Along with a hell of a lot of Vulcans and Starfleet personnel."
"Assuming any of them are still alive," Weir shot back.
"There's still a chance," Jonn insisted.
"And I will not sacrifice this ship and everyone on board it for a chance," Weir said savagely, and at some point they'd converged on each other, standing toe to toe. She was a lot shorter than she looked from afar, and the scratches on her face looked deep. "We will rescue as many of the seriously injured as we can and then we will fall back to Vorash as planned."
"You're a coward," Jonn spat, frustration rising to a peak.
Weir took a step back. "And you are guilty of desertion, trespassing, and falsifying official Starfleet documents," she said frostily. "Ensign Ford, escort Mr. Sheppard to the brig."
Jonn was struck speechless for a moment, and shook off Ford's hand when he reluctantly put it on his shoulder. "This is wrong," he said, since he figured he couldn't dig himself any deeper than he already had. "And you know it, or you wouldn't be putting me in the lockup."
"Get this man off my bridge, Ensign," Weir said, turning away. Jonn didn't have to be told twice.
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Elizabeth dropped into the captain's chair, still trying to squeeze some feeling into her right hand. Sheppard's accusations hung thick in the air, almost smothering. "Mr. Zelenka, do we have warp drive or not?"
"Ah...possibly?" He typed a bit longer, then grimaced. "Main Engineering is reporting severe plasma fire."
She glanced back at Teyla, who opened an internal comm line without being prompted. "Commander Castilho, what's your status?"
"Dead," a voice, not Castilho's, responded; it took her a moment to recognize Rodney McKay. "Along with everybody who scored better than the fiftieth percentile on their aptitude tests, apparently."
Elizabeth squeezed her eyes shut momentarily, but she had to press on. "Is the warp drive functional, Mr. McKay?"
"For certain definitions of functional, sure," he said. "But you're not getting anything higher that warp six-point-five without blowing up our remaining nacelle. Three-point-nine if you want to actually sustain it."
Miller cleared his throat. "Ma'am, at that speed it'll take us four and a half days just to get back to Earth."
No point in asking about Vorash, then. Elizabeth shut her eyes. "What other destination are in range?" she asked.
Behind her, she heard Teyla move to the sensor station. "We are only ten light-years from the planet Hoff; the Federation has a reciprocal medical training program there. Their hospitals are known as the best in the Pegasus quadrant."
Ten light-years...surely they could do ten light-years. "Lay in a course, Mr. Miller. Contact the civil defense and arrange to beam up the worst injured-as many as we can carry, and as quickly as possible." She stood. "I'm going to inform the Council members of the situation. Ms. Emmagen-"
"Yes, ma'am," Teyla said, and allowed Elizabeth to escape into the lift, where she could lean against the wall and take deep, measured breaths.
Chapter One
Chapter Ten
Chapter Twelve