Fic: The Man Who Would Rule Atlantis
Title: The Man Who Would Rule Atlantis
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters: Radek Zelenka, with a side of Rodney McKay and minor characters
Rating: PG
Length: 2000 words
Beta: The magnificent t_eyla
Spoilers: None.
Author's Note: Written for the 2008 sga_genficathon for the prompts "Supporting character appreciation day" and "paperwork and documents"
The first message in Radek Zelenka’s inbox when he booted his laptop up shortly after breakfast contained an attachment labelled: Attn. Dept. Heads Only.
It turned out to be a memo from Doctor Weir, and underneath the pseudo-political jargon and diplomatic tone addressed to several but implicit about nobody there was a warning to Doctor McKay that if he continued to provoke the city’s military contingent then ‘disciplinary measures’ would be taken. Radek couldn’t help but snort at Weir’s temerity at issuing the memo. It would take more than a heavy handed authoritarian tone to make McKay change his habits, especially the ones that involved intra-city hot water flow rather than the potential provocation of interstellar grudge matches and wars.
He proceeded to delete the message.
o o o o o
Less than thirty minutes after McKay had all but flounced out of the lab, decked in mission gear and bitching about overnight missions, alien plumbing and trade agreements, an email flashed up on Radek’s computer screen.
From: d.miller.med@atlantis.net
To: r.zelenka.sci@atlantis.net
Subj: ??
Msg: Tournament still on?
Radek quickly hit ‘reply’.
From: r.zelenka.sci@atlantis.net
To: d.miller.med@atlantis.net
Cc: “List:Game”
Subj: Tournament
Msg: Poker tournament will take place in rec rooms on western pier, to start at approx. 2000hrs tonight.
Usual price for seats; prize for eventual winner(s) tbc.
Card counting and other rule-breaking to be assigned special projects at the organiser’s discretion.
Signing off and returning to the science duty rosters again, Radek pondered the message he had just sent out. In fairness the last person to break the rules and tell McKay about the poker games had been a rather impressionable young engineer fresh off the Daedalus who had harboured a not-so subtle crush on the man; therefore being assigned for three days as McKay’s lackey had been encouragement rather than a punishment. Still, it never hurt to remind people what was at stake if they broke the unwritten rules of Poker Club, as Major Lorne had called it during his dorky phase a few months back.
o o o o o
It always served as a source of amusement to Radek that no matter how many shifts he pulled in the communal laboratories, where the majority of the science department toiled away in open plan settings, he always ended up conducting the greater part of business through his laptop, the email earlier that morning from Doctor Miller about the poker tournament being a shining example of this.
Another case in point was the latest message to flash up on his screen, just as he was about to go and get some lunch. Sighing, Radek sat back down and opened the message.
It was a work proposal from two of the botanists, requesting permission from Doctor McKay to set up a small arboretum away from the main greenhouse areas in order to see whether cross-breeding indigenous plant life could... induce...
Radek reread the proposal again, just to check he’d got that right. Then again, just in case. Raising his eyebrows, it was all he could do not to laugh out loud, lest the botanists in question were actually in the lab with him. He quickly recovered, and forwarded the proposal to McKay’s inbox, and made a mental note to ensure he was somewhere well away from the labs when McKay read that particular message.
Either that or take Simpson up on her idea of selling tickets.
o o o o o
Mid-afternoon, and with little more than three empty water bottles, two standby medics, a metre and a half of insulated tubing and a translated plumbing manual from the Ancient database Radek successfully prevented one of the more idiotic attempts at turning an Ancient shower system into a homemade still that he’d seen from exploding and taking out half the section with it.
He followed this up with a stern lecture (partly in Czech, of course) to the guilty parties in question before heading back to the communal labs to finish an analysis on something that looked a lot like a toaster, but had a power signature resembling a light fixture.
The makeshift still was just something else that wouldn’t be making it into the weekly reports that Doctor Weir and the SGC received. After all, it was one thing managing idiocy and containing its fallout, but quite another broadcasting it across two galaxies, and Radek was happy enough to admit that there were limits to the daily minutiae that he fed upwards into the Atlantean food chain.
Some things were really just not worth the trouble of sharing.
o o o o o
It had become readily apparent right from the beginning of this expedition that having a Chief Scientific Officer who spent a good proportion of his time on off-world missions would be... less than conducive to the day to day running of a sprawling Science Division.
That this had been McKay’s main argument in trying to reject the then Major Sheppard’s thinly veiled insistence that the scientist join the fledgling field team was not entirely incidental. But it had been when Radek first realised that he would be doing more than just intergalactic research (he himself had had no aspirations of going any more off-world than it had taken to come to Atlantis in the first place). By no other virtue than having suffered McKay for his first four months in Siberia, and apparently doing so well as to live to tell the tale, Radek had found himself hauled up to the position of de facto second in command among the greater civilian part of the expedition. And what this essentially boiled down to was he was now expected to undertake enough of the paperwork necessary to run the science teams during the times McKay was “out saving the Pegasus Galaxy from their own doom, and Major Sheppard’s libido.”
Quotable.
It didn’t exactly bother him, though. During his brief assignment to the naquada projects in Russia, first as a scientist in his own right, and later as a translator for the growing American and Canadian contingent, Radek had had to deal with an electronic and actual paper load much more substantive than what he had been used to during his doctoral studies in Brno; by the time he got to Antarctica this began to increase yet again.
The work more than compensated for the administrative side of things, however. It made for a rather attractive exponential curve; the more administration that Radek was subjected to, the more wonders he saw, experienced - and got to reverse engineer - and the closer he felt he was coming to that elusive Nobel (although he would deny this strenuously to McKay’s face; the man was competitive enough without some of Radek’s other aspirations being added to the mix).
Returning to the initial thought process, however. In dealing with the partial accumulation of McKay’s paperwork, Radek had found himself becoming more and more like a filter. With most of the science division’s documentation and other ins and outs now coming through his computer automatically, Radek would only pass onto McKay what he most needed to see; the most viable project proposals, health certificates from Carson Beckett and his staff, the occasional request for scientists from other field teams, reports and suchlike.
It had taken the other department heads - Doctor Beckett, Major Sheppard and of course Doctor Weir above them - a short while to integrate Zelenka’s filter into their day to day dealings with McKay’s department. Of course, it also helped that he had been instrumental in the establishment of the city-wide intranet system, so even without the others’ cooperation, it would have been short work for Radek to route everything addressed to McKay through his computer first; it was perhaps fortunate that it hadn’t come to this, but it hadn’t, so that idea had become largely redundant.
In his defence, the filtration process was as much for Radek’s sanity as it was for McKay’s. After all, he was the one Rodney came yelling to first about anything that came under the category of incompetence, and a McKay that yelled less was widely considered a better McKay.
Occasionally, he would let something utterly ludicrous through the net, just for the sheer entertainment value it provided in the open plan laboratory, but those were reserved for special occasions, as and when need arose.
o o o o o
From: a.biro.med@atlantis.net
To: r.zelenka.sci@atlantis.net
Subj: autopsy gremlin strikes again!!
Attch: 102-218.pdf, 103-218.pdf
Msg: Hi. It’s Biro, from Pathology. So yes, I was going through the latest Wraith data Sgt. Bates’ team brought back from one of their recent missions, you know the one where they found the partly desiccated Wraith dart complete with corpse on MG5-268? Anyway, I did some basic analyses and whatnot and you would not believe what I found!!
Radek raised an eyebrow and reached for his coffee.
The Wraith blood - their equivalent to blood anyway, I’d hate to bog you down in all the technical details and get carried away with myself - contained elevated levels of this unknown compound. Not only that, the chemical readings I managed to get from the samples brought back actually matched something in the parts of the Ancient database your linguists have been able to translate so far.
Okay. This looked like it could be something useful.
Now I’m no expert of course, but from what I can tell, this particular Wraith was sick.
Sick? She had a medical degree, and who knew what kind of specialist training within her sub profession, and she was using the word ‘sick’? Radek’s mind boggled.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but I think this was something acquired during the feeding process. Whatever disease or defect one of this Wraith’s victims had, I think it was transmitted back to the Wraith when it fed. I... this could be huge. Astronomical even. I’ve attached pdfs of the autopsy documents, take a look if you get a chance and please let me know what you think!!
Radek had to admit that Biro was right. If this chemical imbalance, or whatever it was, actually turned out to be something, then it was logically something that the expedition could utilise in their favour. Of course, this was also from the same pathologist who had become far too excited at being presented with the Pegasus equivalent of toads to dissect, following the flu pandemic that had been imported to the city, albeit one that had also been successfully contained, the previous year.
He poured himself another coffee, before returning to the email program.
From: r.zelenka.sci@atlantis.net
To: k.simpson.sc@atlantis.net
Subj: Fwd: autopsy gremlin strikes again!!
Attch: 102-218.pdf, 103-218.pdf
Msg: Please ignore the subject line and the majority of the body of the message. I need you to check the data in the attachments, and get back to me on whether there is any merit to the findings.
Thank you.
o o o o o
Twenty minutes after Rodney McKay stormed back into the lab, sporting a series of interesting looking bruises on one side of his face, mustering not so quietly about local customs and idiot colonels, Radek saved the changes in all his open documents and looked up from his computer.
Registering relative calm in the open plan laboratory, he took a tablet PC over to where McKay was attacking his own tablet with venom, and waited quietly.
A couple of minutes later McKay’s steam appeared to run out, and he noticed Radek for the first time. “Oh, what do you want?”
“Today’s activity reports,” Radek said, offering him the tablet.
McKay grunted and began to go through the files. “I notice the city hasn’t exploded today.”
“Yes, it was a magnificent day for all concerned,” Radek retorted before returning to his workstation. He’d barely sat down before -
“ANDERS! What the hell kind of a proposal do you call this!?”
Radek grinned to himself as the lanky Swedish botanist in the far corner froze in his chair and started to shake slightly.
Oh yes. This was going to be fun.
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters: Radek Zelenka, with a side of Rodney McKay and minor characters
Rating: PG
Length: 2000 words
Beta: The magnificent t_eyla
Spoilers: None.
Author's Note: Written for the 2008 sga_genficathon for the prompts "Supporting character appreciation day" and "paperwork and documents"
The first message in Radek Zelenka’s inbox when he booted his laptop up shortly after breakfast contained an attachment labelled: Attn. Dept. Heads Only.
It turned out to be a memo from Doctor Weir, and underneath the pseudo-political jargon and diplomatic tone addressed to several but implicit about nobody there was a warning to Doctor McKay that if he continued to provoke the city’s military contingent then ‘disciplinary measures’ would be taken. Radek couldn’t help but snort at Weir’s temerity at issuing the memo. It would take more than a heavy handed authoritarian tone to make McKay change his habits, especially the ones that involved intra-city hot water flow rather than the potential provocation of interstellar grudge matches and wars.
He proceeded to delete the message.
o o o o o
Less than thirty minutes after McKay had all but flounced out of the lab, decked in mission gear and bitching about overnight missions, alien plumbing and trade agreements, an email flashed up on Radek’s computer screen.
From: d.miller.med@atlantis.net
To: r.zelenka.sci@atlantis.net
Subj: ??
Msg: Tournament still on?
Radek quickly hit ‘reply’.
From: r.zelenka.sci@atlantis.net
To: d.miller.med@atlantis.net
Cc: “List:Game”
Subj: Tournament
Msg: Poker tournament will take place in rec rooms on western pier, to start at approx. 2000hrs tonight.
Usual price for seats; prize for eventual winner(s) tbc.
Card counting and other rule-breaking to be assigned special projects at the organiser’s discretion.
Signing off and returning to the science duty rosters again, Radek pondered the message he had just sent out. In fairness the last person to break the rules and tell McKay about the poker games had been a rather impressionable young engineer fresh off the Daedalus who had harboured a not-so subtle crush on the man; therefore being assigned for three days as McKay’s lackey had been encouragement rather than a punishment. Still, it never hurt to remind people what was at stake if they broke the unwritten rules of Poker Club, as Major Lorne had called it during his dorky phase a few months back.
o o o o o
It always served as a source of amusement to Radek that no matter how many shifts he pulled in the communal laboratories, where the majority of the science department toiled away in open plan settings, he always ended up conducting the greater part of business through his laptop, the email earlier that morning from Doctor Miller about the poker tournament being a shining example of this.
Another case in point was the latest message to flash up on his screen, just as he was about to go and get some lunch. Sighing, Radek sat back down and opened the message.
It was a work proposal from two of the botanists, requesting permission from Doctor McKay to set up a small arboretum away from the main greenhouse areas in order to see whether cross-breeding indigenous plant life could... induce...
Radek reread the proposal again, just to check he’d got that right. Then again, just in case. Raising his eyebrows, it was all he could do not to laugh out loud, lest the botanists in question were actually in the lab with him. He quickly recovered, and forwarded the proposal to McKay’s inbox, and made a mental note to ensure he was somewhere well away from the labs when McKay read that particular message.
Either that or take Simpson up on her idea of selling tickets.
o o o o o
Mid-afternoon, and with little more than three empty water bottles, two standby medics, a metre and a half of insulated tubing and a translated plumbing manual from the Ancient database Radek successfully prevented one of the more idiotic attempts at turning an Ancient shower system into a homemade still that he’d seen from exploding and taking out half the section with it.
He followed this up with a stern lecture (partly in Czech, of course) to the guilty parties in question before heading back to the communal labs to finish an analysis on something that looked a lot like a toaster, but had a power signature resembling a light fixture.
The makeshift still was just something else that wouldn’t be making it into the weekly reports that Doctor Weir and the SGC received. After all, it was one thing managing idiocy and containing its fallout, but quite another broadcasting it across two galaxies, and Radek was happy enough to admit that there were limits to the daily minutiae that he fed upwards into the Atlantean food chain.
Some things were really just not worth the trouble of sharing.
o o o o o
It had become readily apparent right from the beginning of this expedition that having a Chief Scientific Officer who spent a good proportion of his time on off-world missions would be... less than conducive to the day to day running of a sprawling Science Division.
That this had been McKay’s main argument in trying to reject the then Major Sheppard’s thinly veiled insistence that the scientist join the fledgling field team was not entirely incidental. But it had been when Radek first realised that he would be doing more than just intergalactic research (he himself had had no aspirations of going any more off-world than it had taken to come to Atlantis in the first place). By no other virtue than having suffered McKay for his first four months in Siberia, and apparently doing so well as to live to tell the tale, Radek had found himself hauled up to the position of de facto second in command among the greater civilian part of the expedition. And what this essentially boiled down to was he was now expected to undertake enough of the paperwork necessary to run the science teams during the times McKay was “out saving the Pegasus Galaxy from their own doom, and Major Sheppard’s libido.”
Quotable.
It didn’t exactly bother him, though. During his brief assignment to the naquada projects in Russia, first as a scientist in his own right, and later as a translator for the growing American and Canadian contingent, Radek had had to deal with an electronic and actual paper load much more substantive than what he had been used to during his doctoral studies in Brno; by the time he got to Antarctica this began to increase yet again.
The work more than compensated for the administrative side of things, however. It made for a rather attractive exponential curve; the more administration that Radek was subjected to, the more wonders he saw, experienced - and got to reverse engineer - and the closer he felt he was coming to that elusive Nobel (although he would deny this strenuously to McKay’s face; the man was competitive enough without some of Radek’s other aspirations being added to the mix).
Returning to the initial thought process, however. In dealing with the partial accumulation of McKay’s paperwork, Radek had found himself becoming more and more like a filter. With most of the science division’s documentation and other ins and outs now coming through his computer automatically, Radek would only pass onto McKay what he most needed to see; the most viable project proposals, health certificates from Carson Beckett and his staff, the occasional request for scientists from other field teams, reports and suchlike.
It had taken the other department heads - Doctor Beckett, Major Sheppard and of course Doctor Weir above them - a short while to integrate Zelenka’s filter into their day to day dealings with McKay’s department. Of course, it also helped that he had been instrumental in the establishment of the city-wide intranet system, so even without the others’ cooperation, it would have been short work for Radek to route everything addressed to McKay through his computer first; it was perhaps fortunate that it hadn’t come to this, but it hadn’t, so that idea had become largely redundant.
In his defence, the filtration process was as much for Radek’s sanity as it was for McKay’s. After all, he was the one Rodney came yelling to first about anything that came under the category of incompetence, and a McKay that yelled less was widely considered a better McKay.
Occasionally, he would let something utterly ludicrous through the net, just for the sheer entertainment value it provided in the open plan laboratory, but those were reserved for special occasions, as and when need arose.
o o o o o
From: a.biro.med@atlantis.net
To: r.zelenka.sci@atlantis.net
Subj: autopsy gremlin strikes again!!
Attch: 102-218.pdf, 103-218.pdf
Msg: Hi. It’s Biro, from Pathology. So yes, I was going through the latest Wraith data Sgt. Bates’ team brought back from one of their recent missions, you know the one where they found the partly desiccated Wraith dart complete with corpse on MG5-268? Anyway, I did some basic analyses and whatnot and you would not believe what I found!!
Radek raised an eyebrow and reached for his coffee.
The Wraith blood - their equivalent to blood anyway, I’d hate to bog you down in all the technical details and get carried away with myself - contained elevated levels of this unknown compound. Not only that, the chemical readings I managed to get from the samples brought back actually matched something in the parts of the Ancient database your linguists have been able to translate so far.
Okay. This looked like it could be something useful.
Now I’m no expert of course, but from what I can tell, this particular Wraith was sick.
Sick? She had a medical degree, and who knew what kind of specialist training within her sub profession, and she was using the word ‘sick’? Radek’s mind boggled.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but I think this was something acquired during the feeding process. Whatever disease or defect one of this Wraith’s victims had, I think it was transmitted back to the Wraith when it fed. I... this could be huge. Astronomical even. I’ve attached pdfs of the autopsy documents, take a look if you get a chance and please let me know what you think!!
Radek had to admit that Biro was right. If this chemical imbalance, or whatever it was, actually turned out to be something, then it was logically something that the expedition could utilise in their favour. Of course, this was also from the same pathologist who had become far too excited at being presented with the Pegasus equivalent of toads to dissect, following the flu pandemic that had been imported to the city, albeit one that had also been successfully contained, the previous year.
He poured himself another coffee, before returning to the email program.
From: r.zelenka.sci@atlantis.net
To: k.simpson.sc@atlantis.net
Subj: Fwd: autopsy gremlin strikes again!!
Attch: 102-218.pdf, 103-218.pdf
Msg: Please ignore the subject line and the majority of the body of the message. I need you to check the data in the attachments, and get back to me on whether there is any merit to the findings.
Thank you.
o o o o o
Twenty minutes after Rodney McKay stormed back into the lab, sporting a series of interesting looking bruises on one side of his face, mustering not so quietly about local customs and idiot colonels, Radek saved the changes in all his open documents and looked up from his computer.
Registering relative calm in the open plan laboratory, he took a tablet PC over to where McKay was attacking his own tablet with venom, and waited quietly.
A couple of minutes later McKay’s steam appeared to run out, and he noticed Radek for the first time. “Oh, what do you want?”
“Today’s activity reports,” Radek said, offering him the tablet.
McKay grunted and began to go through the files. “I notice the city hasn’t exploded today.”
“Yes, it was a magnificent day for all concerned,” Radek retorted before returning to his workstation. He’d barely sat down before -
“ANDERS! What the hell kind of a proposal do you call this!?”
Radek grinned to himself as the lanky Swedish botanist in the far corner froze in his chair and started to shake slightly.
Oh yes. This was going to be fun.