Daedalus Lost - Chapter One
Title: Daedalus Lost
Rating: PG
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Timeline/Spoilers: Set during season three -- after Episode 8 "McKay and Mrs. Miller" and before Episode 10 "The Return, Pt. 1"
Pairing(s): John Sheppard/Other Female Character, hints at Beckett/McKay and Lorne/Weir
Warnings: Major characters dead, missing, and injured
Word Count: 14,988 and counting
Prompt: For apocalypse_kree #236: John, Gen or ship -- SGA Daedalus Variations’ alien attack ‘verse. Atlantis lost contact with Earth, and two weeks later the first alien attacks started. Coincidence? John thinks not.
Author’s Note: This turned out way longer than I expected. I’ll post the remainder over the next week or so.
Disclaimer: Not mine, etc.
Summary: When the Daedalus crashes, it’s just the beginning.
Chapter One
John carefully threaded his way back out of the clearing that the surviving sickbay staff had turned into a triage area, then glanced up at the sky. It was right around high-noon on this planet, even though it was the dead of night back home on Atlantis. As tired as they all were, he tried to convince himself that it was still a blessing that night wouldn’t be falling anytime soon. They desperately needed the sunlight for their search and rescue efforts, and to sort out their general situation.
“Unsalvageable!” he heard Emma shriek several yards away. John sighed and raced to intercept what was sure to be an ugly scene. He pulled up to a stop and found the Air Force Major shoving her finger in Rodney’s chest and crowding him up against a still-smoldering bulkhead. “Listen, you overgrown Trekkie reject. You get my girl space-worthy again, or so help me, I’ll --”
“Major!” John drawled in warning before she could say or do something that would require him to write her up.
Rodney took his life in his hands and laughed in her face. “Space-worthy? Are you kidding me?” John placed a restraining hand on Emma’s arm, but Rodney continued as if he weren’t taunting a barely-controlled killing machine. “Did you crawl out of the same wreck that I did? It would be painfully obvious to a caveman,” Rodney’s voice choked for a moment, but then he barreled on. “...that the Daedalus will never fly again. But I forget myself. You military grunts don’t have two brain cells to rub together so I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised by your inevitable ignorance.”
Emma growled and made to lunge at Rodney, but John grabbed her around the waist and dragged her backwards. “McKay, you’re needed at the gate. Go!” he said in his best command voice.
“But I still --”
“Now, McKay! We have a problem and I need you on it. I’ll catch up to you in a bit,” John said, his arms still busy with a very pissed-off and scrappy space pilot.
“Another one?” Rodney groused as he turned and began walking away. “As if we didn’t have enough problems. This day just keeps getting better and better.”
Emma sagged in his arms by the time Rodney’s ever-present mumbling drifted out of earshot, all the fight drained out of her. “If I let go of you, can I trust that you won’t go after him?” John asked.
Emma paused for a beat. “Yeah,” she said, her voice sounding defeated.
John cringed at her tone and stepped around to face her. “You ok?” he asked quietly, looking her over for obvious injuries. He’d heard that she had made it through the crash relatively unscathed, but this was the first chance he’d been able to see her himself. But, other than some scrapes and bruises, she seemed fine. In fact, she was probably in better shape than he was right now, if the size of his headache was any indication.
“Yeah, I just ...” she sighed and leaned back into him. “Megan’s hurt.”
He smiled softly at her. “I know. I just came from triage. She’s pretty high on Morphine right now. It’s a good show.”
“Yeah, pain meds always make her loopy.” Emma sighed. “They said she’ll be fine as long as we can get her off this rock and to a proper infirmary sometime soon. I just needed a break and then I saw McKay over here climbing all over my girl,” she said, running her hand over a small section of undamaged hull. “I kinda lost it when he said she’d never fly again. She doesn’t deserve to be abandoned in the wastes of Pegasus.”
“I intend to salvage as much as possible,” John reassured her. “You did an awesome job getting us down here. Crash-landing a ship this size in the middle of an alien forest with as many survivors as we have? Christ, Em, you’re a part of spaceflight history now.” He squeezed her shoulder and tried to tug her away from the wreckage. “C’mon. Megan needs her big sister right now far more than Daedalus needs her favorite pilot.”
She placed a hand on John’s cheek and said, “I’m really glad you’re ok.”
John nodded at her. “Same here.”
“The rest of your team?” she asked.
John frowned and wouldn’t let himself go there. “We’re still looking. Now go. I have work to do.” He shook his head as he watched Emma wade back into the sea of injured people. He needed to get most of these people off this planet by nightfall, and fresh rescue and salvage crews in. Time to refocus on the task at hand.
By force of habit, he reached up to his ear only to remember that his headset had gone missing in the crash. Grumbling in frustration he ducked his head into the gaping hull breach nearest the launch bay. “Lorne!” he called out.
“Sir!” came the muffled response.
“New priority. Double the search and rescue on Engineering. We need more Geeks by the gate, pronto,” John said.
“But we’ve only got three teams,” Major Evan Lorne said as he emerged from the darkness, the beam of his maglite bouncing through smoke of unknown origin. John thought he would be lucky if half his people didn’t come down with lung cancer a year from now. “The survivors in the launch bay and getting supplies out of Medical’s storage area are both high-priority too,” Lorne pointed out. John knew shorting either one of those efforts sucked -- really, really sucked -- but it had to be done.
“Medical can wait,” John said and continued in low tones. “We have a problem. There’s alien tech affixed to the gate. “
Lorne swore as he mopped sweat from his face. “Wraith?”
John shook his head. “No one on the gate team I sent recognizes it. McKay’s headed out there, but he could really use some backup or at least some good news right now. Anything I can pass along, even if it’s just to boost morale?”
Lorne shook his head. “We know there’s survivors in the launch bay, but we don’t know how many or who. And there still hasn’t been a peep out of Engineering. We think we have two more bulkheads to go there. But, Sir, conditions get significantly worse very time we break through to a new zone.”
“Any sign of other survivors?” John asked hopefully.
“Not yet, Sir.”
John nodded grimly, then frowned at his Second-in-Command. “Haven’t you guys found any of the breathing masks yet? Or radiation monitors?”
“A few, but not enough to go around. We’ve got at least one radiation monitor with each team.” Lorne shrugged. “Those masks slow me down anyway.”
“Get one,” John ordered. “The last thing I need is you keeling over right now.”
Evan grimaced. “How’s Colonel Caldwell?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Critical,” John snapped. He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’m headed to the gate. You take command here.”
“Gee, thanks,” Lorne deadpanned and tossed over something black.
“Oh, good man. You found some radios!”
“Just three so far that are in working order. I already sent one to medical. I’ve got the third, but reception is spotty in the wreckage.”
John checked his watch, then glanced at Lorne’s wrist to make sure he still had his own. “Ok. Now that we have the means, hourly checkins starting one hour from now. And I mean it. Get yourself a mask.”
“Yes, Sir,” Lorne said.
John nodded and turned to trot off in the direction of the Stargate. His head was pounding, but he couldn’t let himself slow down right now. He promised himself he’d sit down once he got to his destination to see this new problem for himself.
Unfortunately, the run gave him too much time to think. So far, he’d managed to move from one crisis to the next, not letting himself go there. Allowing himself to think in situations like these never ended well for him. But he was so tired. And angry. And worried. He thought he should probably be scared, too, but he didn’t have the energy or the adrenaline for that any more. But, underneath it all, there was a little hint of triumph, and he almost felt guilty for feeling that way considering how much the triumph had cost them.
Only four days ago, the Daedalus had swooped back into the Pegasus Galaxy with new orders from Earth. Area 51 had finished building the prototype of the planetary-wide anti-replicator satellite, and they intended to test it on Asuras. If successful, they would pilfer all the ZPMs they could find.
Dr. Weir and John had both fought the orders. Elizabeth had argued that aggressions with the Asurans hadn’t yet progressed to the point that it warranted genocide. But Colonel Caldwell had countered that the replicators were machines and so all they were doing was destroying some dangerous alien technology run amok, not committing genocide.
John had argued that they hadn’t done enough recon to know what kind of defenses they’d encounter should the PWARW fail, and was a little more successful in getting through to Caldwell. He’d grudgingly agreed to delay the mission for two days while John worked with Rodney and Zelenka on a Plan B that could blow up the entire planet. Dr. Weir continued to argue with Caldwell in the interim, but without having the means to contact Earth, Caldwell had his orders and there wasn’t much she or John could do to stop him from carrying them out.
It was, however, comparatively easy to convince Caldwell to take on an extra squadron of Jumpers and pilots from Atlantis to supplement the air support he’d have with his F-302s. John had almost grinned at that. There wasn’t a commanding officer alive that would turn down a free offer of additional firepower. John’s ulterior motive was getting more of his own people on board who he could trust to think on their feet Pegasus-style. Either Caldwell had missed that, or he didn’t care.
John wanted the Asurans gone as much as anyone, and he’d love to get his hands on several ZPMs, but he’d thought this whole mission was a big mistake. They didn’t know enough about the enemy and they didn’t have many resources at the ready if they needed to get creative. And, in the grander scheme of things, John was pissed that Earth wanted to use the Pegasus Galaxy as a weapons testing lab. If things went bad, it was Atlantis and the natives of Pegasus who would pay the price, not Earth. It just wasn’t right that Earth got to call all the shots when there was so much at stake. He’d had a really bad feeling about the whole thing since the phrase “preemptive strike” had first tumbled from Caldwell’s lips.
In the end, John had been right. It turned out that the Asurans had these tiny robotic fighters that launched as soon as they were detected in orbit, and the Daedalus was swarmed with them before they could fully deploy the PWARW satellite. They’d had to resort to setting it off outside the optimal range and it only deactivated two-thirds of the replicators on the planet. John, Rodney, and team managed to recover five ZPMs, but then they’d had to resort to Rodney’s Plan B, which worked but blew up the rest of the ZPMs they’d hoped to pilfer. Finally, the Daedalus limped away only to crash-land on the nearest habitable planet to Asuras that also sported a Stargate.
They’d lost several F-302 and Jumper pilots in the battle, and the crash landing killed or injured lots of personnel all over the ship. Ronon and Teyla were still missing, and Emma and Major Marks were the only ones in decent shape from the bridge. The fact that they worked seated at consoles had probably saved their lives. Not for the first time that day, John wondered what in hell Area 51 was thinking when they didn’t provide secured chairs and restraints for every person on the ship. Didn’t they know that inertial dampeners sometimes failed?
The status of Engineering was a complete unknown. Systems had started exploding long before they reached this planet’s atmosphere, and all contact had been lost well before they hit ground. The crash had happened almost six hours ago, and still Lorne’s crews were cutting through collapsed or melted bulkheads trying to access Engineering. The life-sign detectors weren’t registering anything in there, but John didn’t really trust the readings because there was so much interference from the busted systems. They’d already found survivors in other areas of the ship where the LSDs had indicated nothing. But in the back of his head, John tried to prepare himself to lose most of their top scientists. He wouldn’t even let himself think about the Pegasus-native half of his own gate team. Yet.
John shook his head as he topped a hill and spied Rodney not too far away. It was just dumb luck that he and Rodney weren’t among the missing in Engineering. John had been escorting Rodney there with one of their pilfered ZPMs, hoping the extra power would be able to stabilize Daedalus until they could make it home. Instead, they’d gotten cut off by exploding systems and ended up riding out the crash together, clinging to one of the ladders secured to the interior of the ship.
“McKay!” John called before he pulled up right next to the scientist, not wanting to startle him.
Rodney turned and looked at him. “Hmph! I don’t know what you see in her. Major Cooper is patently insane.”
John grinned. “You’ve said that about me, too. More times than I can count.”
“Yeah, well, you I’ve gotten used to. Her, not so much.” John waited for the rest of Rodney’s usual tirade, but it didn’t come. Instead, he eventually sighed and continued, “So why am I following your Marines’ nebulous bread crumbs to the gate?”
They rounded a line of trees and froze as they got their first look at a large oval-shaped object attached to the top of the Stargate. The object was roughly the same color as the Stargates in the Milky Way, but the markings weren’t familiar at all. A dark glassy spot that reminded John a little of a camera lens was perfectly pointed at the area between the Stargate and the DHD. Two of his Marines stood sentry to either side.
“I need you to figure out what that is and give me a threat assessment,” John finally answered.
Rodney sighed. “Where is Zelenka when I need him?”
“Still missing in Engineering,” John answered automatically, his attention still on the strange device standing between him and getting his people home.
Rodney glared at him. “Hmph! Do you think you could be a little more blunt about that, Colonel?”
“Sorry, but you asked and I’m all out of tact for the day. Feel free to lodge a complaint with Elizabeth when you safely dial that gate for me.” John grabbed Rodney’s bicep and pointedly walked him around to one side of the Stargate before the scientist could try to approach the alien tech head-on. “What can you tell us, Gunny?”
“As far as we can tell, it hasn’t done anything since we found it, Sir,” the soldier reported. “We’ve swept the area in a 35-yard radius, but haven’t found anything else. We haven’t touched it.”
“Congratulations,” Rodney muttered as he bent over his field pack, rifling for something. “You win the ‘Least-Dumb Grunt of the Year’ Award.”
“McKay --” John growled in warning. John pinched the bridge of his nose again, trying to stave off the pounding that had taken up residence behind his eyes.
“Shut up, Sheppard, and let me do my job.”
John sighed and shared a look with the Marine beside him. “We’re doing everything we can. I doubled the search and rescue effort on Engineering before I came out here, and they’re still working on the launch bay. Hopefully we’ll know more soon.”
“Have they recovered the other ZPMs yet?” Rodney asked, running a scanner over the unfamiliar tech.
“Not yet. People before stuff, McKay.”
Rodney glared at him again. “Obviously, Colonel. But that was the whole point of this mess of a mission! If we have to lose all these people and the Daedalus, I would at least hope we could walk away with the stash of ZPMs we managed to pilfer. Otherwise this whole rotten thing was a waste of human lives and resources!”
“That was only half the point of the mission. The other half was to destroy Asuras. Oh, and we did that, by the way,” John grumbled.
“Huh,” Rodney said, and stared at the tech attached to the Stargate.
“I really don’t like it when you say ‘Huh.’ Nothing good ever comes after ‘Huh’ with you.”
“I have no idea who made this. It’s not Ancient, Wraith, or Asuran, or the tech of any race we’ve come across in the Milky Way.”
“Asgard?” John asked hopefully.
“Not a chance,” Rodney said. “But Hermiod might recognize it if we can find him and get him out here. They’re aware of way more races than we are.”
“I don’t think that’s happening any time soon, buddy. You’re on your own with this one.”
“Huh,” Rodney said again, and remained quiet for several minutes.
John took the opportunity to sit down and lean back against a tree. He knew from experience that it could take a while for Rodney to do his thing. Once he didn’t have anything to distract him from his headache, he realized the pounding had morphed into an incessant high-pitched whine that John thought would induce a headache all on its own under normal circumstances. “You got any aspirin in that pack of yours?” he finally asked.
“What?” Rodney said, distracted. “Yes, yes. Always. You know where I stash it. Help yourself,” he said. Then he paused and looked up, giving John a concerned glance.
John leaned over and plucked a blister pack of aspirin from Rodney’s backpack and swallowed the pills dry. He groaned involuntarily as the pain in his head flared and he let his head fall back against the tree.
“You OK Sheppard?” Rodney asked.
“Headache,” John said through clenched teeth.
Rodney looked at him askance. “Has one of the medics cleared you? You hit that bulkhead awfully hard when we landed.”
“I’m fine, McKay,” John growled. “I’ve had maybe eight hours of sleep total in the last three days, fought a battle against an entire planet of nanobots and won, survived a spaceship crash, and now I’m commanding a search and rescue operation with unknown alien tech blocking our way home. I think I’m allowed to have a headache right now.” John sighed and thought about Megan, the bridge crew, and ... all the people they hadn’t found yet. “There are people much worse off than me right now. The medical staff don’t need me distracting them because of a headache.”
Rodney frowned at him and turned back to his work. John took a deep breath and let his teammate’s familiar puzzle-solving mutterings lull him into an exhausted sleep.
Chapter Two >>
Rating: PG
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Timeline/Spoilers: Set during season three -- after Episode 8 "McKay and Mrs. Miller" and before Episode 10 "The Return, Pt. 1"
Pairing(s): John Sheppard/Other Female Character, hints at Beckett/McKay and Lorne/Weir
Warnings: Major characters dead, missing, and injured
Word Count: 14,988 and counting
Prompt: For apocalypse_kree #236: John, Gen or ship -- SGA Daedalus Variations’ alien attack ‘verse. Atlantis lost contact with Earth, and two weeks later the first alien attacks started. Coincidence? John thinks not.
Author’s Note: This turned out way longer than I expected. I’ll post the remainder over the next week or so.
Disclaimer: Not mine, etc.
Summary: When the Daedalus crashes, it’s just the beginning.
Chapter One
John carefully threaded his way back out of the clearing that the surviving sickbay staff had turned into a triage area, then glanced up at the sky. It was right around high-noon on this planet, even though it was the dead of night back home on Atlantis. As tired as they all were, he tried to convince himself that it was still a blessing that night wouldn’t be falling anytime soon. They desperately needed the sunlight for their search and rescue efforts, and to sort out their general situation.
“Unsalvageable!” he heard Emma shriek several yards away. John sighed and raced to intercept what was sure to be an ugly scene. He pulled up to a stop and found the Air Force Major shoving her finger in Rodney’s chest and crowding him up against a still-smoldering bulkhead. “Listen, you overgrown Trekkie reject. You get my girl space-worthy again, or so help me, I’ll --”
“Major!” John drawled in warning before she could say or do something that would require him to write her up.
Rodney took his life in his hands and laughed in her face. “Space-worthy? Are you kidding me?” John placed a restraining hand on Emma’s arm, but Rodney continued as if he weren’t taunting a barely-controlled killing machine. “Did you crawl out of the same wreck that I did? It would be painfully obvious to a caveman,” Rodney’s voice choked for a moment, but then he barreled on. “...that the Daedalus will never fly again. But I forget myself. You military grunts don’t have two brain cells to rub together so I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised by your inevitable ignorance.”
Emma growled and made to lunge at Rodney, but John grabbed her around the waist and dragged her backwards. “McKay, you’re needed at the gate. Go!” he said in his best command voice.
“But I still --”
“Now, McKay! We have a problem and I need you on it. I’ll catch up to you in a bit,” John said, his arms still busy with a very pissed-off and scrappy space pilot.
“Another one?” Rodney groused as he turned and began walking away. “As if we didn’t have enough problems. This day just keeps getting better and better.”
Emma sagged in his arms by the time Rodney’s ever-present mumbling drifted out of earshot, all the fight drained out of her. “If I let go of you, can I trust that you won’t go after him?” John asked.
Emma paused for a beat. “Yeah,” she said, her voice sounding defeated.
John cringed at her tone and stepped around to face her. “You ok?” he asked quietly, looking her over for obvious injuries. He’d heard that she had made it through the crash relatively unscathed, but this was the first chance he’d been able to see her himself. But, other than some scrapes and bruises, she seemed fine. In fact, she was probably in better shape than he was right now, if the size of his headache was any indication.
“Yeah, I just ...” she sighed and leaned back into him. “Megan’s hurt.”
He smiled softly at her. “I know. I just came from triage. She’s pretty high on Morphine right now. It’s a good show.”
“Yeah, pain meds always make her loopy.” Emma sighed. “They said she’ll be fine as long as we can get her off this rock and to a proper infirmary sometime soon. I just needed a break and then I saw McKay over here climbing all over my girl,” she said, running her hand over a small section of undamaged hull. “I kinda lost it when he said she’d never fly again. She doesn’t deserve to be abandoned in the wastes of Pegasus.”
“I intend to salvage as much as possible,” John reassured her. “You did an awesome job getting us down here. Crash-landing a ship this size in the middle of an alien forest with as many survivors as we have? Christ, Em, you’re a part of spaceflight history now.” He squeezed her shoulder and tried to tug her away from the wreckage. “C’mon. Megan needs her big sister right now far more than Daedalus needs her favorite pilot.”
She placed a hand on John’s cheek and said, “I’m really glad you’re ok.”
John nodded at her. “Same here.”
“The rest of your team?” she asked.
John frowned and wouldn’t let himself go there. “We’re still looking. Now go. I have work to do.” He shook his head as he watched Emma wade back into the sea of injured people. He needed to get most of these people off this planet by nightfall, and fresh rescue and salvage crews in. Time to refocus on the task at hand.
By force of habit, he reached up to his ear only to remember that his headset had gone missing in the crash. Grumbling in frustration he ducked his head into the gaping hull breach nearest the launch bay. “Lorne!” he called out.
“Sir!” came the muffled response.
“New priority. Double the search and rescue on Engineering. We need more Geeks by the gate, pronto,” John said.
“But we’ve only got three teams,” Major Evan Lorne said as he emerged from the darkness, the beam of his maglite bouncing through smoke of unknown origin. John thought he would be lucky if half his people didn’t come down with lung cancer a year from now. “The survivors in the launch bay and getting supplies out of Medical’s storage area are both high-priority too,” Lorne pointed out. John knew shorting either one of those efforts sucked -- really, really sucked -- but it had to be done.
“Medical can wait,” John said and continued in low tones. “We have a problem. There’s alien tech affixed to the gate. “
Lorne swore as he mopped sweat from his face. “Wraith?”
John shook his head. “No one on the gate team I sent recognizes it. McKay’s headed out there, but he could really use some backup or at least some good news right now. Anything I can pass along, even if it’s just to boost morale?”
Lorne shook his head. “We know there’s survivors in the launch bay, but we don’t know how many or who. And there still hasn’t been a peep out of Engineering. We think we have two more bulkheads to go there. But, Sir, conditions get significantly worse very time we break through to a new zone.”
“Any sign of other survivors?” John asked hopefully.
“Not yet, Sir.”
John nodded grimly, then frowned at his Second-in-Command. “Haven’t you guys found any of the breathing masks yet? Or radiation monitors?”
“A few, but not enough to go around. We’ve got at least one radiation monitor with each team.” Lorne shrugged. “Those masks slow me down anyway.”
“Get one,” John ordered. “The last thing I need is you keeling over right now.”
Evan grimaced. “How’s Colonel Caldwell?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Critical,” John snapped. He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’m headed to the gate. You take command here.”
“Gee, thanks,” Lorne deadpanned and tossed over something black.
“Oh, good man. You found some radios!”
“Just three so far that are in working order. I already sent one to medical. I’ve got the third, but reception is spotty in the wreckage.”
John checked his watch, then glanced at Lorne’s wrist to make sure he still had his own. “Ok. Now that we have the means, hourly checkins starting one hour from now. And I mean it. Get yourself a mask.”
“Yes, Sir,” Lorne said.
John nodded and turned to trot off in the direction of the Stargate. His head was pounding, but he couldn’t let himself slow down right now. He promised himself he’d sit down once he got to his destination to see this new problem for himself.
Unfortunately, the run gave him too much time to think. So far, he’d managed to move from one crisis to the next, not letting himself go there. Allowing himself to think in situations like these never ended well for him. But he was so tired. And angry. And worried. He thought he should probably be scared, too, but he didn’t have the energy or the adrenaline for that any more. But, underneath it all, there was a little hint of triumph, and he almost felt guilty for feeling that way considering how much the triumph had cost them.
Only four days ago, the Daedalus had swooped back into the Pegasus Galaxy with new orders from Earth. Area 51 had finished building the prototype of the planetary-wide anti-replicator satellite, and they intended to test it on Asuras. If successful, they would pilfer all the ZPMs they could find.
Dr. Weir and John had both fought the orders. Elizabeth had argued that aggressions with the Asurans hadn’t yet progressed to the point that it warranted genocide. But Colonel Caldwell had countered that the replicators were machines and so all they were doing was destroying some dangerous alien technology run amok, not committing genocide.
John had argued that they hadn’t done enough recon to know what kind of defenses they’d encounter should the PWARW fail, and was a little more successful in getting through to Caldwell. He’d grudgingly agreed to delay the mission for two days while John worked with Rodney and Zelenka on a Plan B that could blow up the entire planet. Dr. Weir continued to argue with Caldwell in the interim, but without having the means to contact Earth, Caldwell had his orders and there wasn’t much she or John could do to stop him from carrying them out.
It was, however, comparatively easy to convince Caldwell to take on an extra squadron of Jumpers and pilots from Atlantis to supplement the air support he’d have with his F-302s. John had almost grinned at that. There wasn’t a commanding officer alive that would turn down a free offer of additional firepower. John’s ulterior motive was getting more of his own people on board who he could trust to think on their feet Pegasus-style. Either Caldwell had missed that, or he didn’t care.
John wanted the Asurans gone as much as anyone, and he’d love to get his hands on several ZPMs, but he’d thought this whole mission was a big mistake. They didn’t know enough about the enemy and they didn’t have many resources at the ready if they needed to get creative. And, in the grander scheme of things, John was pissed that Earth wanted to use the Pegasus Galaxy as a weapons testing lab. If things went bad, it was Atlantis and the natives of Pegasus who would pay the price, not Earth. It just wasn’t right that Earth got to call all the shots when there was so much at stake. He’d had a really bad feeling about the whole thing since the phrase “preemptive strike” had first tumbled from Caldwell’s lips.
In the end, John had been right. It turned out that the Asurans had these tiny robotic fighters that launched as soon as they were detected in orbit, and the Daedalus was swarmed with them before they could fully deploy the PWARW satellite. They’d had to resort to setting it off outside the optimal range and it only deactivated two-thirds of the replicators on the planet. John, Rodney, and team managed to recover five ZPMs, but then they’d had to resort to Rodney’s Plan B, which worked but blew up the rest of the ZPMs they’d hoped to pilfer. Finally, the Daedalus limped away only to crash-land on the nearest habitable planet to Asuras that also sported a Stargate.
They’d lost several F-302 and Jumper pilots in the battle, and the crash landing killed or injured lots of personnel all over the ship. Ronon and Teyla were still missing, and Emma and Major Marks were the only ones in decent shape from the bridge. The fact that they worked seated at consoles had probably saved their lives. Not for the first time that day, John wondered what in hell Area 51 was thinking when they didn’t provide secured chairs and restraints for every person on the ship. Didn’t they know that inertial dampeners sometimes failed?
The status of Engineering was a complete unknown. Systems had started exploding long before they reached this planet’s atmosphere, and all contact had been lost well before they hit ground. The crash had happened almost six hours ago, and still Lorne’s crews were cutting through collapsed or melted bulkheads trying to access Engineering. The life-sign detectors weren’t registering anything in there, but John didn’t really trust the readings because there was so much interference from the busted systems. They’d already found survivors in other areas of the ship where the LSDs had indicated nothing. But in the back of his head, John tried to prepare himself to lose most of their top scientists. He wouldn’t even let himself think about the Pegasus-native half of his own gate team. Yet.
John shook his head as he topped a hill and spied Rodney not too far away. It was just dumb luck that he and Rodney weren’t among the missing in Engineering. John had been escorting Rodney there with one of their pilfered ZPMs, hoping the extra power would be able to stabilize Daedalus until they could make it home. Instead, they’d gotten cut off by exploding systems and ended up riding out the crash together, clinging to one of the ladders secured to the interior of the ship.
“McKay!” John called before he pulled up right next to the scientist, not wanting to startle him.
Rodney turned and looked at him. “Hmph! I don’t know what you see in her. Major Cooper is patently insane.”
John grinned. “You’ve said that about me, too. More times than I can count.”
“Yeah, well, you I’ve gotten used to. Her, not so much.” John waited for the rest of Rodney’s usual tirade, but it didn’t come. Instead, he eventually sighed and continued, “So why am I following your Marines’ nebulous bread crumbs to the gate?”
They rounded a line of trees and froze as they got their first look at a large oval-shaped object attached to the top of the Stargate. The object was roughly the same color as the Stargates in the Milky Way, but the markings weren’t familiar at all. A dark glassy spot that reminded John a little of a camera lens was perfectly pointed at the area between the Stargate and the DHD. Two of his Marines stood sentry to either side.
“I need you to figure out what that is and give me a threat assessment,” John finally answered.
Rodney sighed. “Where is Zelenka when I need him?”
“Still missing in Engineering,” John answered automatically, his attention still on the strange device standing between him and getting his people home.
Rodney glared at him. “Hmph! Do you think you could be a little more blunt about that, Colonel?”
“Sorry, but you asked and I’m all out of tact for the day. Feel free to lodge a complaint with Elizabeth when you safely dial that gate for me.” John grabbed Rodney’s bicep and pointedly walked him around to one side of the Stargate before the scientist could try to approach the alien tech head-on. “What can you tell us, Gunny?”
“As far as we can tell, it hasn’t done anything since we found it, Sir,” the soldier reported. “We’ve swept the area in a 35-yard radius, but haven’t found anything else. We haven’t touched it.”
“Congratulations,” Rodney muttered as he bent over his field pack, rifling for something. “You win the ‘Least-Dumb Grunt of the Year’ Award.”
“McKay --” John growled in warning. John pinched the bridge of his nose again, trying to stave off the pounding that had taken up residence behind his eyes.
“Shut up, Sheppard, and let me do my job.”
John sighed and shared a look with the Marine beside him. “We’re doing everything we can. I doubled the search and rescue effort on Engineering before I came out here, and they’re still working on the launch bay. Hopefully we’ll know more soon.”
“Have they recovered the other ZPMs yet?” Rodney asked, running a scanner over the unfamiliar tech.
“Not yet. People before stuff, McKay.”
Rodney glared at him again. “Obviously, Colonel. But that was the whole point of this mess of a mission! If we have to lose all these people and the Daedalus, I would at least hope we could walk away with the stash of ZPMs we managed to pilfer. Otherwise this whole rotten thing was a waste of human lives and resources!”
“That was only half the point of the mission. The other half was to destroy Asuras. Oh, and we did that, by the way,” John grumbled.
“Huh,” Rodney said, and stared at the tech attached to the Stargate.
“I really don’t like it when you say ‘Huh.’ Nothing good ever comes after ‘Huh’ with you.”
“I have no idea who made this. It’s not Ancient, Wraith, or Asuran, or the tech of any race we’ve come across in the Milky Way.”
“Asgard?” John asked hopefully.
“Not a chance,” Rodney said. “But Hermiod might recognize it if we can find him and get him out here. They’re aware of way more races than we are.”
“I don’t think that’s happening any time soon, buddy. You’re on your own with this one.”
“Huh,” Rodney said again, and remained quiet for several minutes.
John took the opportunity to sit down and lean back against a tree. He knew from experience that it could take a while for Rodney to do his thing. Once he didn’t have anything to distract him from his headache, he realized the pounding had morphed into an incessant high-pitched whine that John thought would induce a headache all on its own under normal circumstances. “You got any aspirin in that pack of yours?” he finally asked.
“What?” Rodney said, distracted. “Yes, yes. Always. You know where I stash it. Help yourself,” he said. Then he paused and looked up, giving John a concerned glance.
John leaned over and plucked a blister pack of aspirin from Rodney’s backpack and swallowed the pills dry. He groaned involuntarily as the pain in his head flared and he let his head fall back against the tree.
“You OK Sheppard?” Rodney asked.
“Headache,” John said through clenched teeth.
Rodney looked at him askance. “Has one of the medics cleared you? You hit that bulkhead awfully hard when we landed.”
“I’m fine, McKay,” John growled. “I’ve had maybe eight hours of sleep total in the last three days, fought a battle against an entire planet of nanobots and won, survived a spaceship crash, and now I’m commanding a search and rescue operation with unknown alien tech blocking our way home. I think I’m allowed to have a headache right now.” John sighed and thought about Megan, the bridge crew, and ... all the people they hadn’t found yet. “There are people much worse off than me right now. The medical staff don’t need me distracting them because of a headache.”
Rodney frowned at him and turned back to his work. John took a deep breath and let his teammate’s familiar puzzle-solving mutterings lull him into an exhausted sleep.
Chapter Two >>