Dead end

Chapter Eighteen

McKay was getting angry. Mostly because he was scared. And the fact that he was scared was making him angrier.

The constant cracks and moans from the ice beneath the Jumper tore his nerves to shreds. The scanner told him the Stargate was still there, but any moment he expected to see the blip disappear. And that would be the end of it.

He’d looked over the flight controls a hundred times. Should he try and take off? Sheppard had shown him how to fly the thing once, but in this weather? And even if he’d been confident about flying the Jumper, he wasn’t sure there was enough juice in the tank for more than one short burst of atmospheric flight. If he tried to take off and seek higher ground, he might ruin their chances of escaping the planet entirely. And with the blizzard still howling around the Jumper with terrifying force, leaving the vessel was no longer an option. He’d never make it back to the empty settlement alone.

The choices were looking pretty bad.

He looked over the Jumper’s instrumentation one last time. The power configuration was set for optimal delivery at the right times, and the improvised Zelenka module (he’d have to think of a better name for that) was sending out a steady stream of helpful diagnostic readings to the central computer. Everything was ready to go. All, that was, except for the crew.

McKay flicked open the dividing doors between the rear bay and the cockpit, and took a look at the external viewfinders. Nothing. The screens were white with occasional flecks of gray. The snow was tearing around the ship at frightening speeds and even inside the heavily shielded frame, the sheer noise of the maelstrom was terrifying.

He sat down in the co-pilot’s chair and began to bite his nails. It had been hours since he’d heard from Sheppard and the others. And he couldn’t shake the image of them lost, in the heart of the storm, their meager furs flapping around their freezing bodies, their limbs ravaged by frostbite. Despite all they had endured since arriving on Khost, this maelstrom was something else. The planet had begun the process of inexorably scrubbing all life from its frozen surface.

Unable to settle, McKay got up from the chair and started pacing backwards and forwards. He had to make a decision, do something. If he’d been Sheppard, he might have been able to think of a cunning intervention to resolve things. McKay was proud enough of his brain, but even he would admit that it was better at some things than others. Fixing Ancient technology against hopeless odds with terrible equipment was something he could do; making split-second choices in the absence of any helpful information at all was something he couldn’t.

He started to run down the options again. Outside, the dark of the storm was gathering. According to the plan, they should have been back by now. According to the plan, they should have made radio contact hours ago. According to the plan, they should have been long-gone through the Stargate and home again, sitting around a table drinking a cool beer and vowing never to try out experimental gate devices again.

Enough of the plan; what was he going to do? He could sit tight, and hope that the team had merely been delayed. If the radios were still affected by the storm, they might turn up at any moment, dusted with a light layer of ice and eager to get going through the wormhole. On the other hand, they might be horribly lost, or lying under a snowdrift, or stuck down a crevasse. Should he try to take off to find them? The vessel’s built-in proximity sensors would work better at short range, even in such hellish conditions. But then he risked draining the fragile power cells, dooming them all. And he couldn’t fly the Jumper. No one but Sheppard could fly it with such a storm blowing.

McKay sat down again in the cockpit. He glanced at the controls in the pilot’s seat. They looked intimidating and dangerous. He hated flying. Most of all, he hated flying in Jumpers. They had a habit of crashing, or pitching you into the sea, or getting stuck half-way through a Stargate. Really, flying them was best left to the professionals.

His thoughts were suddenly broken by a massive crack right beneath him. McKay sat bolt upright, heart thumping. That was a huge one. The Jumper groaned and shifted to one side. For a moment, nothing happened. There was the faint sound of snow tumbling against the outer walls, just audible over the scream of the wind.

McKay found that he had frozen. He tried to lift his hand, and it obeyed him only reluctantly. For all its robust design, it was clear that the hull of the Jumper was being put under some strain. The ice was moving. Things were getting very, very difficult.

There was another crack, and then a rolling, booming groan. The Jumper dropped a few inches, coming to a rest with a harsh snap. McKay leapt from his seat in panic. Was the ice completely collapsing? Or was it just a mild resettling?

Another crack — the Jumper began to slide. McKay raced to the controls in the cockpit and glanced at the external monitors. Three of them were black. He was slipping. The Jumper was tumbling into the abyss.

“We are not going to last much longer in this, Colonel!” shouted Teyla.

She was a proud woman and hated showing any weakness, but the situation was becoming desperate. She had been hurt in the rock fall, and the extreme cold had caused her right leg to seize up. Limping through the knee-deep snow was almost impossible.

Ronon came up on her left shoulder. He was badly hunched himself, and draped with layers of clinging ice, but he put his arm under her shoulders and helped to prop her up against the biting wind.

“Keep going,” he urged. “We stop, we’re dead.”

“Hate to admit it,” Sheppard shouted, “but he’s right!”

Teyla grimaced. Her leg was agonizing and her headache pounding, but for as long as there was a shred of power in her muscles she would keep going.

They toiled onwards. Ronon stayed at her side, a powerful buttress against the tearing gale. Visibility was down to a few meters and they could only walk in halting, difficult steps. With every passing minute, more snow piled up around them. What had originally reached their calves now rose above their knees. Soon it would be impassable.

She clenched her teeth, taking some comfort from Ronon’s massive presence. But the cold was terrifying, she could feel its bitter fingers clenching around her heart, and she realized that the most terrifying thing on Khost was not the Banshees, but the planet itself.

Khost was their enemy now, and like some malevolent intelligence it seemed bent on their destruction.

His stomach doing acrobatics, McKay leapt into the pilot’s seat and stared at the controls. His fingers raced across the panel and a series of lights flashed on the display. With a brief flicker, the HUD sprang up, and power surged into the drive systems.

There were more resounding cracks beneath him and the Jumper slid forward. Even without the use of the monitors, he could sense the acceleration. He was being pitched headlong into the ice. His mind racing, McKay tried to recall the procedure for a reverse take-off.

“What’s the command, dammit?” he cried out loud. “Concentrate!”

He grabbed more controls, willing his mind to make the connection. He’d done it before. He could do it again. It was just a matter of making the connection.

The Jumper continued to slide. There were more creaks from the structure. Snow cascaded across the viewscreen.

“Come on!” he cried, panic rising in his throat. “Fly, damn you!”

He screwed his eyes up, grabbed the control panel and bent his whole mind towards the link nodes on the Jumper system. It had to work!

Nothing. The slide into oblivion accelerated. He could sense the ice closing around him. So this was death. This was the end. He had failed. It was over. There was no point fighting.

His mind relaxed.

And with a stuttering blast, the engines kicked-in. The dampeners were still only semi-operational and McKay was thrown forward as the Jumper burst out from the ice. He had a vague impression of a heavy slew of snow being shed from the front of the vessel, then some of the monitors cleared and data began to pour across the HUD. He was airborne. He was moving. He couldn’t see a thing.

“Not dead…” he breathed, his heart hammering. “Really not dead. That’s a start. Now, what the hell am I doing?”

Leaning forward in the chair, he tried to get his bearings. He needed to get everything on a level for long enough to figure out where he was going and what he wanted to do. The fact that he hadn’t flown straight into a mountainside was a minor relief. Avoiding plunging into the ground was something he’d have to work on.

He ran his fingers over the display before him and the HUD finally began to give him some useful information. The Jumper had stabilized at low altitude and was cruising roughly north-west. That was lucky. Gingerly, McKay tried to adjust the course. The craft skidded wildly off-center and he was thrown over to his left. Fighting against the controls, he brought things back to equilibrium. The wind didn’t make it easy, nor did the almost total lack of visibility. His palms were sweaty, blood pounding in his ears. Between snatched breaths, he briefly had time to wonder if this was the most terrified he had ever been.

It was at that point that things began to improve.

“C’mon,” he snapped out-loud. “Would you want Carter to see you like this? Get a grip, man. You’ve made the link. Use it!”

Very slowly, the readings on the HUD started to make sense. The short-range sensors were clearly operating, and a pseudo-map of the terrain was scrolling across the display. Just like using a flight simulator, he found he could navigate pretty well using that. Looking out of the windshield was a dead loss; there was nothing but flying snow hurling itself against the screen.

“Right, now where are we going?” he said. “Concentrate! Sheppard left the coordinates. We just need to retrieve them.”

Keeping one eye firmly on the motion control readings, he scanned across the computer panels in front of him. The options were pretty complicated, but after a moment’s scrabbling around he managed to pull the coordinates out of the system.

“Good,” he said. “You’re doing well. She’d be proud of you. Now, how do you get this thing to follow them?”

That took a bit more doing. Applying the coordinates Sheppard had left in the central computer turned out to be no easy matter, especially while trying to keep the Jumper airborne in the middle of the perfect storm. In the end, the best he could do was to superimpose the destination point over the HUD’s contoured terrain map and fly toward it. There was none of the easy control that Sheppard enjoyed; he was trying to make a connection across badly faulty equipment. McKay tentatively maneuvered in what he hoped was the right direction, and the Jumper slewed across the sky like a drunkard. Despite its robust self-righting design, it was buffeted by the wind and hammered by the heavily falling sleet.

“Come on!” yelled McKay, battling against the controls with mounting frustration. Now that the imminent danger of death has passed, his irritation at not being able to control the craft had assumed priority.

“That’s better,” he growled, as the Jumper started to head along roughly the right course. The landscape scrolled across the HUD increasingly smoothly and McKay found that he was getting the hang of things. With a slight qualm, he fed more power to the drive systems and felt the vessel respond. He was now traveling at cruising speed. But it was pretty bumpy.

“Right, we should be nearly there,” mumbled McKay, staring at the readings in front of him. “They were walking in heavy snow and this thing can travel very, very fast. So, they should be anywhere from here onwards. Keep your eyes peeled.”

There was no way of gauging distance, no way of telling where they were. All that was real was the pain and the cold. Only mechanical instinct kept Teyla moving, but as her body slowly froze even that began to give out. The last shreds of energy faded away.

“I am weakening, Ronon,” she gasped. There was no point in keeping the truth from him.

The Satedan pulled her forward, plunging into the snow. “Keep moving.” His voice betrayed him. His strength was near its end too, and if Ronon failed…

Ahead of them, Sheppard fell. He was little more than a shadow in the snow, but the cord that bound them together tugged, pitching Teyla forward. In a heap, all three of them tumbled together. The snow enveloped them, blocking some of the wind.

It was a blessing to stop moving, to stop fighting.

“Get up!” Ronon growled, floundering in the snow. But he didn’t make it to his feet.

The pain was too much. The cold was too much.

“I’m sorry,” said Sheppard, his voice little more than a hoarse croak. “Guess I got this one wrong, guys.”

And above them the storm howled a mocking cry of victory.

“So where the hell are they?” muttered McKay as he slowed and the Jumper and tried to bring it around in a loop. According to the HUD, he was over the designated coordinates, but the monitor he’d assigned to display life-sign readings remained stubbornly blank.

A new, chilling thought occurred to him. What if Sheppard’s plan had failed? What if Sanctuary had turned out to be some awful trap after all, or they had fallen into a crevasse on the way over?

A warning light blinked on; the power supply had dropped again. In desperation, he started to calculate the odds of following Sheppard’s last order and getting through the Stargate on his own. He couldn’t be sure the others were even alive and, if they were, he couldn’t be expected to find them in such conditions. And the power was going down. And…

He shook his head, disgusted with himself. While there was a milliamp of power left in the Jumper, he would use it to find the team. They would do the same for him. No one gets left behind. Isn’t that what they always said?

With a slight tremor in his hands, McKay nudged the Jumper downwards. Maybe if he got closer to the surface he’d pick up their life signs. Watching the altimeter readings like a hawk, he gently eased the Jumper into a lower flight pattern. The ice rushed up to meet him terrifyingly fast and through the occasional tears in the storm clouds, he saw blank sheets of white streaking beneath him. McKay’s palms were sweaty, his heart beating fast. He began to wonder how much longer he could keep this up without having some kind of coronary episode.

Then he saw it. Just a flicker, almost a ghost of a reading. He’d passed it, and as soon as it appeared it vanished again. McKay immediately pulled the Jumper around for another pass. It responded erratically, and almost fell into a tumble. Grappling with the controls, he gradually got it back on the level. No more sudden moves. That was best left to the experts.

More carefully, he coaxed the Jumper back around. Despite all his scientific training, he found himself willing the equipment to help him out. He flew as low as he dared, scouring the HUD for anything at all. There was nothing. Maybe the readings had been an anomaly? His euphoria began to dissolve. Then he saw them again — three signals, barely moving, just beneath him.

“Yes!” He punched the air. “Yes!”

But his exuberance lost him control of the Jumper, and it pitched to one side. “Damn!” He tried to pull up, but the Jumper’s inertial compensators were far from perfect and it jerked into a too-steep climb and almost stalled. Auxiliary thrusters whined into action, but it wasn’t enough. The Jumper flipped onto its side, and started to plummet earthwards.

“What’s that?” cried Ronon, roused from his deathly stupor by a shadow in the sky.

He shook his head, flinging snow in every direction. Focus. Painfully, he hauled himself to his feet. “There’s something out there.”

Teyla rolled over in the snow, looking as content as a child in her bed. Her limbs were floppy, and the snow was beginning to mass against her. Sheppard was little better. The cords between them had come loose.

“C’mon!” cried Ronon, shaking Teyla. He dragged her to her knees.

She looked up at him blearily. “Let me sleep…”

The words were fatal. Ronon felt the drag on his fatigued limbs like they did. He could hear the siren voice within him, urging him to give in, end the pain, collapse into the snow.

“No!” he growled. “There’s something out there! Get up!”

He yanked her roughly to her feet. For a moment, she looked furious. Then something seemed to kindle inside her and the old Teyla returned. “What did you see?”

“Dunno,” he said, reaching for Sheppard’s slumped figure. “Help me get him up. We gotta move.”

“Where?” yelled Teyla. Even as she finished speaking, there was a roar from above them. Something big, black against the skirling grey of the sky, hurtled earthwards. It flew low over their heads and was lost in the white-out ahead.

“There!” said Ronon. He started to run.

McKay acted instinctively. He punched the panel, gave a flurry of mental commands, shouted out orders. When that failed, he resorted to the final tool in his repertoire — letting go of the controls and cradling his head in his hands.

With a crunch, the Jumper hit the ground. McKay was thrown forward hard in his seat as it skidded across the ice. The world whirled around him for a minute, then everything slowed.

The Jumper came to a standstill. Gingerly, McKay opened his eyes and peered at the control panel. All systems were still active. Thank God. Hands shaking, he returned to the life-sign signals. They were still there, even fainter than before, maybe a hundred meters away from where the Jumper had come down.

Clambering into the rear bay he scrambled into his fur clothing again. There was no guarantee that the others had seen his descent in such weather, and if they had missed him and kept walking then all would have been for nothing.

Quickly, clumsily, McKay pulled the hides over his standard fatigues. They smelled even worse than the last time he’d worn them. Once fully clad, he took a deep breath, and prepared to lower the rear door. His hand hesitated as he took a look at the sensor readings again. The wind was blowing at ridiculous speeds, visibility was close to zero, and the temperature wasn’t even worth thinking about. Opening the door was very silly, as silly as anything he’d ever done in the Pegasus galaxy.

McKay sighed, and pressed the a button on the improvised door release mechanism. When he finally found the others, he thought to himself, they had better be grateful.

The rear door juddered open, and immediately a storm of snow shot into the narrow space. Within a second, every surface was covered in a layer of white. The wind was mind-blowing, and once inside it began to rock the Jumper like a toy. McKay grabbed a bulkhead for support and staggered forward. He couldn’t see a thing beyond the entrance to the vessel. His heart quailed and he hesitated, clinging to the fragile hull. He couldn’t go out. He just couldn’t.

“About damn time!” came a muffled shout from the void.

Three gray figures emerged from the white-out, staggering against the force of the wind.

“Ronon!” cried McKay, rushing forward. Sheppard, Teyla and Ronon stumbled into the rear bay, barely visible beneath the snow that clung to their clothing. Once inside the rear bay, they collapsed.

“Close the door!” yelled Ronon.

McKay hurried to comply, struggling to find the closing mechanism in the swirling confusion. Eventually, his fingers located the control panel and he activated the switch. The door slammed upwards, locking out the maelstrom. The noise was reduced to a booming rumble.

“All right, that was too close,” Sheppard’s voice was alarmingly slurred. “Anyone else feel their fingers?”

McKay frowned. “We’re not out of this yet,” he said. “I don’t want to hurry you, but most of the readings here are somewhere close to critical and I don’t even want to think about what’s happening to the Stargate in our absence.”

“Just gimme a minute, will ya?” The Colonel looked horribly fatigued. McKay could only imagine what a few hours in that storm must have been like. But there was no time to rest. He looked at Ronon, who made to speak, but then the Jumper was rocked by a massive gust. It tipped to one side. McKay had difficulty keeping his feet, then fell back heavily as a series of amber lights flickered across the HUD display.

“Minute up,” Sheppard groaned, climbing painfully to his feet, beginning to strip off his sodden furs. “Just don’t expect first-class service here.”

Weir walked into the Operations Center, just as she had done every couple of hours since the databurst had been sent. It had become a ritual, increasingly devoid of hope. But it had to be done.

“Anything?” she asked Zelenka.

Just as always, Radek shook his head. Each time, he looked a little wearier, a little less full of life.

“Nothing,” he said. Weir looked at the empty Stargate below. It gazed back up at her, vacant and hollow. Every time she looked at it, she imagined the addresses whirling around the rim, the sudden burst of a new event horizon. Staring at it too long played tricks on you. She let her gaze return to Zelenka.

“How long do you think they could last in that climate?” she asked. “Have we run any models?”

Zelenka shook his head. “Not enough data. We have the readings from the MALP, but I don’t know what good it would do to speculate. We can’t reach them. We must wait.”

“Keep running the sensor tests,” she said. “We’re not giving up yet. Let me know if you get anything. I don’t care how small.”

Zelenka nodded.

“Will do,” he said, but his voice was empty.

The team clambered into the cockpit, taking their usual places and strapping in. McKay sat back against the hard seat-back with some pleasure. Sheppard brought up the controls quickly.

“So what happened out there?” said McKay. “Did it go to plan?”

“Another time, Rodney,” said Sheppard wearily. “Just sit back and enjoy the flight.”

With a sudden surge, the Jumper powered smoothly into the air once more. Unlike Rodney’s chaotic ascent, this time it traced a straight line into the storm-driven sky, the power increasing steadily as Sheppard deftly managed the power fluctuations. The Jumper turned in a wide arc and headed back towards the Stargate.

“Coming up on the Stargate now,” said Sheppard. “Anything I should know about, Rodney?”

“Aside from the fact that it might already be at the bottom of a crevasse?”

“Right. Anything useful?”

“Just keep us near to the ice. At best, it will have sunk further since we were last there. The closer you can hug the ground, the easier our passage will be.”

Sheppard shook his head and dipped the Jumper further towards the planet’s surface. “Sure, piece of cake,” he said.

McKay didn’t reply, but the Jumper noticeably slowed and the altitude continued to fall. In the rare gaps between the driving snow, McKay saw flashes of the ice speeding below them. It was happening. This was the important moment. And there was so much to get right.

“Remember what I told you about the module!” McKay said, aware that getting into the Stargate was only part of their task. “You’ll need to activate it straightaway. A second too late, and we’ll be threading through the anomaly again.”

“Don’t need to remind me,” said Sheppard. “Dialing the gate now. Hold tight folks. We’re going in — see you on the other side.”

McKay screwed his eyes shut, then opened them again. It was hard to decide which way was worse.

The Jumper dropped sharply. They were racing along. Sheppard remained silent, looking at the figures on the HUD intently. Teyla seemed barely conscious and Ronon said nothing.

And then, as if Khost wanted to give them a view to remember it by, the cloud cover broke. They were in the open, hurtling earthwards. The Stargate was directly in front of them, only partly obscured by the tearing flurries of snow and ice, and its surface boiled with the massive contained energies of the event horizon. The ZPM had kicked in. The wormhole was open.

But the power unleashed was doing dangerous things to the ice around it; there were jagged cracks all around the base. The gate itself was still above ground, but only just. As they plunged towards it, dark lines were radiating out across the plain. The Stargate was going down.

“Faster!” McKay yelled. Sheppard didn’t need to be told. As the Stargate tottered on the brink, he poured on the power and the Jumper hurled itself forward. McKay was thrown back in his seat, his heart pounding. Cracks opened, fissures yawned, and the ice floe collapsed.

The Stargate plunged into the abyss.

“We’ve got something!”

Zelenka’s voice cracked with excitement. Around him, scientists scrambled to get at a monitor. Down in the gate room, the landing bay was flooded with light. The event horizon had formed.

“Try to feed power to the link!” cried Zelenka. “I don’t care what readings you’re getting, we need to keep it open!”

The Atlantis squads swung into action. The medical team was already on its way to the gate room. Marines snapped to combat alertness, just in case. But they all knew what was coming through. Or, more accurately, they all knew what they wanted to come through.

Weir arrived, out of breath. “What is it?” she demanded. ”Do you have them?”

“Don’t know yet,” said Zelenka. “But the wormhole is from Dead End, or I’m a Slovak!”

Elizabeth raced over to the balcony and Zelenka turned back to the screen. The numbers were all over the place; this was definitely no normal transit. For a moment it looked as if they would lose the signal. Then it came back. Then it dimmed again.

“Come on, Rodney,” he breathed, gripped by the fluctuating readings. “Come on.”

The top of the Jumper screamed as they hit the falling gate, metal scraping away. It was enough. Though battered and listing, they were inside the event horizon.

“Now!” screamed McKay. “Route the power!”

For a moment, the Jumper viewscreen was filled with a confused pool of energy. It looked horribly like the tunnel of plasma they had seen before.

McKay felt the contents of his stomach rise.

“I’m losing power, Rodney!” shouted Sheppard.

McKay leapt from his seat. “This should be working!” he wailed. “Did you trip the Zelenka module?”

The Jumper swung round hard. Something up ahead was forming. The plasma conduit. Not again.

“What d’you think?” yelled Sheppard. “We can’t survive another trip into that.”

“I know!”

McKay ran his fingers over the module. It was working. Power was being routed. But not enough. Why? It wasn’t fair.

“Here it comes!” warned Sheppard. “We’re gonna hit it…”

“I’ve got it!” cried Rodney. “There it is!”

One of the nodes on the Zelenka module had worked loose. Probably knocked when the Jumper had hit the ice. Rodney slammed it back into place. Immediately, the power feed doubled. “Hit it!”

The plasma tore away. A shimmering curtain of light formed in front of them and they were out. McKay looked nervously out of the front windshield. He didn’t quite know what to expect. Part of him wouldn’t have been surprised to see a wall of ice, another part of him still expected to see the anomaly in all its horrifying glory.

The reality was much more comforting. They were in the gate room on Atlantis. With shaking hands, Sheppard brought the vessel smoothly down on to the solid floor. Once stationary, he turned to the rest of the team. His face was white.

“Hit it?” he asked. “What the hell was that?”

“It just seemed, you know, the right thing to say,” said Rodney.

He looked around the cockpit for support. Teyla was out cold and even Ronon wasn’t moving. The full enormity of what they’d just done hit home. He felt queasy.

“Oh, God,” he said, and promptly passed out.