AU Week 1: Neither Death Nor Glory (unless a star just born)
Title: Neither Death Nor Glory (unless a star just born)
Author: snarkydame
Genre: AU
Prompt suffocation
Word Count: 2000
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: none to speak of
Summary: Alone, or nearly so, on a derelict ship, Rodney tries to fix something broken.
Notes: Cyborg AU. There are probably massive scientific impossibilities here (I never more than dabbled in astrophysics) - I can only hope they aren't too egregious.
* * * *
It was not dark, this part of space. It bathed in light.
Across vast stretches of silent space, driven by explosions of unimaginable power, the light spread on wings of glowing dust and gas - the atomic bones of stars.
Green and gold and violet, and a host of colours never named.
* * *
So far from that stellar nursery that the superheated violence of its fires seemed a gentle glow, there was a ship.
It was not large, this ship, but it might once have been a graceful one. Suggestions of elegant lines showed here and there, and the shredded remains of ethereal solar sails trailed for miles in her wake. But where once she would have passed serenely between stars, sails spread wide to catch the energy of the solar winds, now the ship rolled drunkenly on her axis, nothing but inertia at her helm.
The explosion set her spinning, years and years ago. Fuel and atmosphere, debris and bodies, all spilled out into space in a glittering cloud, eery in its silence.
All spent now. The ship was hollow, empty, dark.
Or almost empty. Not quite dark.
* * *
In the back of the cargo bay in that spinning ship, there was something like a light. It didn't illuminate the hold, so much as lend the darkness a suggestion of depth, of shape.
In that depth was a ring, more than twenty feet high.
The light (the dimmest of lights, tinged faintly blue) came from its base, where a corded length of wires fell from an open panel, ran across the hold, and ended at the other side, where it was fitted firmly to a socket in a cyborg's arm.
The cyborg didn't need the light, but he had never tried to turn it off.
Dim as it was, as unnecessary an expenditure of energy as it was, it made his task . . . less endless.
* * *
He wanted, desperately, to speak. To explain to the others what he had done. What he was doing. To lift the weight of the dark and the cold and the silence.
He wanted, much more, for them to ask him questions. To tell him he'd done the right thing. Or not. He didn't really care. He'd do it again.
But they didn't say anything. Would not. Until he was finished.
Not that it mattered right now anyway. Even if they were (awake, aware, alive) able to talk to him, or he to them, it wasn't possible.
There was no air in the cargo bay to carry their voices.
There hadn't been, for two million, six hundred and twenty thousand, eight hundred minutes.
His chronometer was more accurate than that, of course. He just refused to count time in smaller increments. He had to draw a line somewhere. It wasn't important anyway. Wasn't relevant to the task at hand.
He missed breathing, though.
* * *
"Rodney!" Sheppard's voice snapped through his receptors, harsh with strain. "What's our status?"
He tore his eyes away from the viewport (the solar sail was tearing, it's gauze-like fire shredding, going dark) to focus on the consul's display.
"There's only two more pods still functioning. Tell the captain she has to go now, before I set this off." His finger hovered over the display. Blood was running from his shoulder, slick and viscous. Absently, he wiped it away before it could reach the lower gash on his arm, where exposed wires still sparked painfully.
"She will not go." Teyla's voice cracked. "She says she will not take a place away from any member of her crew. I can't convince her."
Rodney hung his head. "Dammit, Elizabeth."
Sheppard didn't pause. "Ronon! Pick her up and carry her if you have to, but get her in that pod. The Asurans have already locked the Gate. "
As he spoke, Sheppard came running around the corridor, skidding to a stop at Rodney's side. His right leg was stripped down to the metal alloy, and charred streaks from blaster fire marred its shine.
For a moment, neither cyborg said a word.
"How long," Rodney asked, "can you hold them off of this deck?"
Sheppard merely shook his head.
* * *
The task wasn't complicated. Not really. Realign the crystalline conduits so that the gate's energy, so alien to the ship's normal sources, wouldn't overload the processors. Would charge the delicately repaired power cores without burning them out. That was it. A simple enough process.
He'd done a trial run already, albeit in a much cruder fashion. Absently, he pulled at the cord attached to his arm, drawing up more slack.
But there were billions of the conduits, all nearly microscopic. If he did something wrong, it wouldn't explode. It just wouldn't work.
That wasn't acceptable. It had to work.
Really though, it was almost a miracle it had taken just this long to complete two of the three power cores. It would have been a miracle for anyone else to have done it.
Then again. He hadn't tried to use them yet.
If they didn't work - if his friends didn't open their eyes - he wouldn't have the strength to try again. To go back along every realignment, rechecking every miniscule connection. It had taken years as it was, and already he felt like the ship (the silence, the cold, the dark) was pressing in on him. He could suffocate beneath its weight.
The cyborg knew his limits.
All three, at once. If even one of them didn't work, he'd need the others there to keep him going.
If none of them worked. . .
* * *
"No. Not yet. Have you been messing with your wiring again?"
"Have you got any better ideas?"
"What makes you even think this will do any good? For all we know, the Asurans aren't any more vulnerable to vacuum than we are!"
"They came over in suits, Sheppard! They used a docking corridor. This will work!"
"Even if it does . . ." Sheppard grabbed his shoulders, met his eyes. His voice, when he spoke, was so low it was almost drowned out by the sirens blaring through the corridors. "Even if blowing the hull neutralizes all the Asurans. Even if we manage to hang on long enough to avoid being blown out into space with them. I can't . . . the crew, Rodney! There are still crew members on this ship! We're supposed to protect them!"
Rodney forced himself to ease his grip on the consul before he warped it.
"We've done all we can for them. There are no more pods. Anyone left on board . . . anyone left is dying already. And if the Asurans get to them, they'll tear through their minds like tissue paper. They'll learn all they need to know about Atlantis, and the crew will still die, John. And Atlantis will follow.
"I know, every circuit in your body is screaming at you not to do this. But it's the only option I can see. You know I have to do this."
Sheppard's grip on his arms would have bruised, if he were flesh.
* * *
The cyborg felt the surge before it reached him, and he hurriedly set the last power core down on the deck before he dropped it.
Power shuddered through the jury-rigged cording, and he shuddered with it, gritting his teeth so hard he felt something crack.
It passed. It always did.
If he could take a deep breath to steady his nerves . . . but that was pointless. Foolish.
He willed his hands to stop shaking, and picked up the power core.
Almost done.
* * *
Ronon came back right after Teyla joined them. He wouldn't tell them what he'd seen on the other decks, but Rodney could see the grip he had on his blaster. He stood closest to the bulkhead, which glowed now with a sullen fire. The Asurans were almost through.
Teyla waited, shoulder to shoulder with Sheppard. A wicked gash had sliced the left side of her face wide open. Her left eye was simply gone, and her optic receptors were charred. Still sparking. Her right eye, though, was calm. Accepting.
"I saw no one," she said simply. "No one I could help."
Sheppard bowed his head, said: "Do it, Rodney."
And the bulkheads failed.
Ronon's blaster flashed, and the lesser replicators scattered in a shower of metal shards that came together as quickly as they fell. Behind them, the true Asurans knelt, and fired their strange guns.
Rodney saw it all in patches, colored red by Ronon's blaster, by the emergency lights still bleeding into the corridors. The consul under his fingers pulsed with equations, and the sirens' cry grew shrill with urgency.
Sheppard and Teyla stood back to back, between Rodney and the replicators. But they'd be overrun soon.
There was only one command left to give.
As he input the last equation, he felt the Assuran's energy wave overtake his team. The red emergency lights all went dark.
Ronon's blaster slipped from his hand, and the silvery replicators surged over him in a wave.
Sheppard and Teyla dropped slowly to their knees, leaning against each other. Teyla's eye socket stopped sparking.
Rodney slid to the deck beside his consul. His power core was failing, like the others. Like his friends. He couldn't breathe.
The sea of lesser replicators parted around the Asuran's feet as they came closer. He didn't look at them. He ripped a panel from the consul's base, and plunged his hand into its power source, just as the sirens shut off. On instinct, blind instinct, and with the last of his strength, he sent a command over the neural net, activating his team's magnetic clamps.
Just as the hull blew out.
* * *
The cyborg settled the redesigned power cores in his friend's bodies with hands that carefully did not shake.
It had taken so long, after the hideous chaos of the ship, dying.
To gather the power from that one consul - enough to get to his feet, enough to drag his team, one by one, through the stricken, silent carcass of a ship, to the cargo bay. Recharging, after every trip, until the consul was dead.
Far too long, to reach the Stargate in the belly of the hold, when he was running so low on power he could hardly think. Hardly see.
Even longer to gather the supplies he needed to steal energy from the gate, to gather it into himself (burning with it, such alien, barely harnessed power).
But he'd done it.
He'd repaired Teyla's eye. Sheppard's leg. Ronon's . . . well. Ronon.
And now, in the dark, the new power cores began to glow, pale blue beacons. He connected them, so delicately, to his friends' hearts, and felt them pulse. Once. Twice. And steadily.
He rocked back on his heels, shaking now.
Please, he felt his lips shape the word, soundless. Come back.
He was so tired, he couldn't even smile when their eyes opened. He just dropped his head to his knees, and shook, even as arms (familiar, and so shockingly new) wrapped around him.
He could almost feel warm, in their embrace.
* * *
In the back of the cargo bay, in the belly of a ship, there was a light. Liquid blue, it washed over the hold, illuminating the length of corded wires that lay neatly coiled at the base of the light source - a ring, more than twenty feet high.
Eventually, the light went out.
The ship -- dark now, empty - spiraled down her course, straight towards the brilliant fires of newborn stars. Her tattered sails flared behind her like a comet's tail.
* * *
So far away from the massive stellar nursery that its light was an insignificant part of a minor constellation; on a stoney beach awash with the sound the sea and the high, thin cries of pale winged birds, Rodney stood with his team to look at the world, and breathed.
The air was cool and damp, tainted with salt.
"This is going to corrode our plating. We can't stay long." Despite the pessimistic words, his voice was clear - almost jubilant. He could breathe. Hell, he could talk.
"So where do we go?" Ronon didn't sound like he particularly cared, about any of this, but Rodney saw the way he tracked the birds in flight. How bright his eyes were.
"Atlantis will have changed the gate codes, long ago." Teyla crouched down to run her hand through the black sand. The straggling grass that crept to the edge of the beach was vividly green against its darkness.
Sheppard caught Rodney's eyes then, a question forming in his face. Rodney, still feeling echoes of the Stargate's power running through his circuits, nodded.
"Anywhere," he said. "Anywhere at all."
And Sheppard smiled.
fin
Author: snarkydame
Genre: AU
Prompt suffocation
Word Count: 2000
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: none to speak of
Summary: Alone, or nearly so, on a derelict ship, Rodney tries to fix something broken.
Notes: Cyborg AU. There are probably massive scientific impossibilities here (I never more than dabbled in astrophysics) - I can only hope they aren't too egregious.
* * * *
It was not dark, this part of space. It bathed in light.
Across vast stretches of silent space, driven by explosions of unimaginable power, the light spread on wings of glowing dust and gas - the atomic bones of stars.
Green and gold and violet, and a host of colours never named.
* * *
So far from that stellar nursery that the superheated violence of its fires seemed a gentle glow, there was a ship.
It was not large, this ship, but it might once have been a graceful one. Suggestions of elegant lines showed here and there, and the shredded remains of ethereal solar sails trailed for miles in her wake. But where once she would have passed serenely between stars, sails spread wide to catch the energy of the solar winds, now the ship rolled drunkenly on her axis, nothing but inertia at her helm.
The explosion set her spinning, years and years ago. Fuel and atmosphere, debris and bodies, all spilled out into space in a glittering cloud, eery in its silence.
All spent now. The ship was hollow, empty, dark.
Or almost empty. Not quite dark.
* * *
In the back of the cargo bay in that spinning ship, there was something like a light. It didn't illuminate the hold, so much as lend the darkness a suggestion of depth, of shape.
In that depth was a ring, more than twenty feet high.
The light (the dimmest of lights, tinged faintly blue) came from its base, where a corded length of wires fell from an open panel, ran across the hold, and ended at the other side, where it was fitted firmly to a socket in a cyborg's arm.
The cyborg didn't need the light, but he had never tried to turn it off.
Dim as it was, as unnecessary an expenditure of energy as it was, it made his task . . . less endless.
* * *
He wanted, desperately, to speak. To explain to the others what he had done. What he was doing. To lift the weight of the dark and the cold and the silence.
He wanted, much more, for them to ask him questions. To tell him he'd done the right thing. Or not. He didn't really care. He'd do it again.
But they didn't say anything. Would not. Until he was finished.
Not that it mattered right now anyway. Even if they were (awake, aware, alive) able to talk to him, or he to them, it wasn't possible.
There was no air in the cargo bay to carry their voices.
There hadn't been, for two million, six hundred and twenty thousand, eight hundred minutes.
His chronometer was more accurate than that, of course. He just refused to count time in smaller increments. He had to draw a line somewhere. It wasn't important anyway. Wasn't relevant to the task at hand.
He missed breathing, though.
* * *
"Rodney!" Sheppard's voice snapped through his receptors, harsh with strain. "What's our status?"
He tore his eyes away from the viewport (the solar sail was tearing, it's gauze-like fire shredding, going dark) to focus on the consul's display.
"There's only two more pods still functioning. Tell the captain she has to go now, before I set this off." His finger hovered over the display. Blood was running from his shoulder, slick and viscous. Absently, he wiped it away before it could reach the lower gash on his arm, where exposed wires still sparked painfully.
"She will not go." Teyla's voice cracked. "She says she will not take a place away from any member of her crew. I can't convince her."
Rodney hung his head. "Dammit, Elizabeth."
Sheppard didn't pause. "Ronon! Pick her up and carry her if you have to, but get her in that pod. The Asurans have already locked the Gate. "
As he spoke, Sheppard came running around the corridor, skidding to a stop at Rodney's side. His right leg was stripped down to the metal alloy, and charred streaks from blaster fire marred its shine.
For a moment, neither cyborg said a word.
"How long," Rodney asked, "can you hold them off of this deck?"
Sheppard merely shook his head.
* * *
The task wasn't complicated. Not really. Realign the crystalline conduits so that the gate's energy, so alien to the ship's normal sources, wouldn't overload the processors. Would charge the delicately repaired power cores without burning them out. That was it. A simple enough process.
He'd done a trial run already, albeit in a much cruder fashion. Absently, he pulled at the cord attached to his arm, drawing up more slack.
But there were billions of the conduits, all nearly microscopic. If he did something wrong, it wouldn't explode. It just wouldn't work.
That wasn't acceptable. It had to work.
Really though, it was almost a miracle it had taken just this long to complete two of the three power cores. It would have been a miracle for anyone else to have done it.
Then again. He hadn't tried to use them yet.
If they didn't work - if his friends didn't open their eyes - he wouldn't have the strength to try again. To go back along every realignment, rechecking every miniscule connection. It had taken years as it was, and already he felt like the ship (the silence, the cold, the dark) was pressing in on him. He could suffocate beneath its weight.
The cyborg knew his limits.
All three, at once. If even one of them didn't work, he'd need the others there to keep him going.
If none of them worked. . .
* * *
"No. Not yet. Have you been messing with your wiring again?"
"Have you got any better ideas?"
"What makes you even think this will do any good? For all we know, the Asurans aren't any more vulnerable to vacuum than we are!"
"They came over in suits, Sheppard! They used a docking corridor. This will work!"
"Even if it does . . ." Sheppard grabbed his shoulders, met his eyes. His voice, when he spoke, was so low it was almost drowned out by the sirens blaring through the corridors. "Even if blowing the hull neutralizes all the Asurans. Even if we manage to hang on long enough to avoid being blown out into space with them. I can't . . . the crew, Rodney! There are still crew members on this ship! We're supposed to protect them!"
Rodney forced himself to ease his grip on the consul before he warped it.
"We've done all we can for them. There are no more pods. Anyone left on board . . . anyone left is dying already. And if the Asurans get to them, they'll tear through their minds like tissue paper. They'll learn all they need to know about Atlantis, and the crew will still die, John. And Atlantis will follow.
"I know, every circuit in your body is screaming at you not to do this. But it's the only option I can see. You know I have to do this."
Sheppard's grip on his arms would have bruised, if he were flesh.
* * *
The cyborg felt the surge before it reached him, and he hurriedly set the last power core down on the deck before he dropped it.
Power shuddered through the jury-rigged cording, and he shuddered with it, gritting his teeth so hard he felt something crack.
It passed. It always did.
If he could take a deep breath to steady his nerves . . . but that was pointless. Foolish.
He willed his hands to stop shaking, and picked up the power core.
Almost done.
* * *
Ronon came back right after Teyla joined them. He wouldn't tell them what he'd seen on the other decks, but Rodney could see the grip he had on his blaster. He stood closest to the bulkhead, which glowed now with a sullen fire. The Asurans were almost through.
Teyla waited, shoulder to shoulder with Sheppard. A wicked gash had sliced the left side of her face wide open. Her left eye was simply gone, and her optic receptors were charred. Still sparking. Her right eye, though, was calm. Accepting.
"I saw no one," she said simply. "No one I could help."
Sheppard bowed his head, said: "Do it, Rodney."
And the bulkheads failed.
Ronon's blaster flashed, and the lesser replicators scattered in a shower of metal shards that came together as quickly as they fell. Behind them, the true Asurans knelt, and fired their strange guns.
Rodney saw it all in patches, colored red by Ronon's blaster, by the emergency lights still bleeding into the corridors. The consul under his fingers pulsed with equations, and the sirens' cry grew shrill with urgency.
Sheppard and Teyla stood back to back, between Rodney and the replicators. But they'd be overrun soon.
There was only one command left to give.
As he input the last equation, he felt the Assuran's energy wave overtake his team. The red emergency lights all went dark.
Ronon's blaster slipped from his hand, and the silvery replicators surged over him in a wave.
Sheppard and Teyla dropped slowly to their knees, leaning against each other. Teyla's eye socket stopped sparking.
Rodney slid to the deck beside his consul. His power core was failing, like the others. Like his friends. He couldn't breathe.
The sea of lesser replicators parted around the Asuran's feet as they came closer. He didn't look at them. He ripped a panel from the consul's base, and plunged his hand into its power source, just as the sirens shut off. On instinct, blind instinct, and with the last of his strength, he sent a command over the neural net, activating his team's magnetic clamps.
Just as the hull blew out.
* * *
The cyborg settled the redesigned power cores in his friend's bodies with hands that carefully did not shake.
It had taken so long, after the hideous chaos of the ship, dying.
To gather the power from that one consul - enough to get to his feet, enough to drag his team, one by one, through the stricken, silent carcass of a ship, to the cargo bay. Recharging, after every trip, until the consul was dead.
Far too long, to reach the Stargate in the belly of the hold, when he was running so low on power he could hardly think. Hardly see.
Even longer to gather the supplies he needed to steal energy from the gate, to gather it into himself (burning with it, such alien, barely harnessed power).
But he'd done it.
He'd repaired Teyla's eye. Sheppard's leg. Ronon's . . . well. Ronon.
And now, in the dark, the new power cores began to glow, pale blue beacons. He connected them, so delicately, to his friends' hearts, and felt them pulse. Once. Twice. And steadily.
He rocked back on his heels, shaking now.
Please, he felt his lips shape the word, soundless. Come back.
He was so tired, he couldn't even smile when their eyes opened. He just dropped his head to his knees, and shook, even as arms (familiar, and so shockingly new) wrapped around him.
He could almost feel warm, in their embrace.
* * *
In the back of the cargo bay, in the belly of a ship, there was a light. Liquid blue, it washed over the hold, illuminating the length of corded wires that lay neatly coiled at the base of the light source - a ring, more than twenty feet high.
Eventually, the light went out.
The ship -- dark now, empty - spiraled down her course, straight towards the brilliant fires of newborn stars. Her tattered sails flared behind her like a comet's tail.
* * *
So far away from the massive stellar nursery that its light was an insignificant part of a minor constellation; on a stoney beach awash with the sound the sea and the high, thin cries of pale winged birds, Rodney stood with his team to look at the world, and breathed.
The air was cool and damp, tainted with salt.
"This is going to corrode our plating. We can't stay long." Despite the pessimistic words, his voice was clear - almost jubilant. He could breathe. Hell, he could talk.
"So where do we go?" Ronon didn't sound like he particularly cared, about any of this, but Rodney saw the way he tracked the birds in flight. How bright his eyes were.
"Atlantis will have changed the gate codes, long ago." Teyla crouched down to run her hand through the black sand. The straggling grass that crept to the edge of the beach was vividly green against its darkness.
Sheppard caught Rodney's eyes then, a question forming in his face. Rodney, still feeling echoes of the Stargate's power running through his circuits, nodded.
"Anywhere," he said. "Anywhere at all."
And Sheppard smiled.
fin