The Lost

Chapter Nineteen: Snowbound

After four years in Atlantis, Lorne had learned better than to assume that any deviation from the city’s normal routine was harmless. The problem was defining normal. They’d gotten a lot of strange sensor readings over the years, which had turned out to be — on various occasions — nothing, dangerous natural phenomena, various hostile invaders, Ancient devices someone turned on by accident, freak weather, and alien lifeforms trying to communicate with them.

This time, Lorne would have bet on ‘nothing’, followed by ‘weather’, but Colonel Sheppard didn’t keep him around to gamble. He gestured to the security team to spread out, taking up positions along the length of the corridor. The life signs detector in his hand was still showing multiple small objects on the other side of the storage room in front of them. It looked like whatever they were, they were out on the balcony.

He opened the door, P90 at the ready, and gestured for Jacobs and Hernandez to follow him in. They were both new, and he hoped he and Sheppard had impressed on them firmly enough that pretty much anything could happen at any moment. He’d been trying to walk a fine line between making it clear what the new people were in for and completely freaking them out.

The room was dim enough that he could just make out the shapes of stacked pallets. Across the room, only a little gray light filtered in through the glass in the balcony doors. It looked like it was still snowing out there.

General O’Neill had provisioned them generously but a little weirdly, having clearly transferred over whatever supplies he could get his hands on given the short notice, and they’d opened up new storage rooms for everything from spare bed linens to more breakfast cereal than he hoped they’d be going through anytime soon. He brought the lights up, and heard rustling, and then silence.

He glanced back at Jacobs, who nodded his head sharply; he’d heard something too. He motioned Hernandez up on his other side and moved slowly across the room. There was another rustling noise, fainter now. He tracked it around the side of a pallet, and leveled his P90 to reveal nothing but the crushed corner of a box.

More rustling. This time he thought it sounded like it was coming from the other side of the wall. He glanced down at the life signs detector. There were enough moving forms on the other side of the wall to account for quite a lot of noise.

Where the box was broken, something was strewn across the floor. He nudged it with the toe of his boot and decided it was cereal.

“We might have rats,” he said quietly. They hadn’t had a pest problem in the last few years, but then they’d been bringing in supplies either by Stargate or aboard the Daedalus. With all the trips back and forth on tenders while they were in San Francisco Bay, he wouldn’t be surprised if they’d picked up some unwanted guests.

Or it could be an infestation of alien bugs that would try to suck out their lives the moment they opened the door. The beauty of life in the Pegasus galaxy was that you never could tell. “Let’s just stay ready for whatever’s out there,” he said, and opened the balcony doors, letting in a rush of cold air.

There was a wild rustling and an eruption of movement. Winged things were beating against his legs and blundering against his chest and face, and he swung his P90 to track them by instinct, just barely managing not to fire. To his right, machine gun fire sounded like thunder, way too close on the narrow, icy balcony.

“Hold your fire!” he yelled. Feathers swirled around them in the wind. Hernandez lowered his weapon, already starting to look sheepish.

“Way to blow away those pigeons,” Jacobs said. “Could have been a real threat to the city there.”

Lorne waved him quiet. “It could have been,” he said patiently. He caught a feather as they started to swirl downwards from the balcony and considered it. Off in the distance, he thought he could see small dark forms arrowing their way through the snow. “It just looks like this time it wasn’t.”

“It was a flock of unknown alien organisms, sir,” Hernandez said. “Apparently avian.” Lorne felt that he got points for trying to dig himself out, and also for using the word avian correctly in a sentence, but also that there was a time to accept that you’d done something stupid and live with it.

“I think they were pigeons,” Lorne said. “Regular Earth pigeons.” He was pretty sure the biologists were going to consider this a problem, in the ‘let’s not contaminate other planets’ ecosystems’ kind of way, but he was also pretty sure it wasn’t going to be a problem from his point of view. That made one down, and a very long list to go.

The wind was shrieking against the tops of the towers, the lights of the city shining through the snow. Lorne lowered his P90 and turned back toward the doors. “Come on, and I’ll show you how we fill out a report,” he said.

He felt the tower shudder at the same time that he heard the noise, a distant thud and then a low groaning sound that made him think about ships grinding over rocks. They weren’t moving, and there weren’t any rocks. He turned to lean out over the balcony, trying to see any signs that something was amiss, but it was impossible to see the ends of the piers clearly through the snow.

The balcony was steady under his feet now. He could almost believe that he’d imagined it. It was just that he knew where that line of thinking usually led, and it wasn’t anywhere good.

“Never mind,” he said. “We’ve got another problem. Come on.”

“Where are we going?” Jacobs asked.

“Jumper bay,” Lorne said. “We’re going to do a little reconnaissance.”

Hernandez caught up to him on the other side, still cradling his P90 as if he expected more hostile pigeons. “What are we looking for?”

“I’m not sure,” Lorne said. “You’ll get used to that.” He caught the muzzle of Hernandez’s weapon and lowered it firmly. “Try to be a little less twitchy.”

“Yes, sir,” Hernandez said. Lorne suspected it might take him some time.

Eva Robinson swirled the last of her coffee around in her cup, looking out her office’s tall windows at the snow. It was certainly a very comfortable office, although she suspected Dr. Heightmeyer had originally chosen it for the view, which — when you could see anything but falling snow — was certainly breathtaking.

It was just that at the moment it was also empty. She’d spent the morning unpacking her books and arranging her desk the way she wanted it, but there was only so long that stayed interesting. She checked her appointment schedule on the computer again, just to make sure something hadn’t miraculously added itself. It remained blank for the rest of the day.

She’d met a few members of the expedition already, a handful of bewildered Marines who wanted reassurance that they weren’t crazy for believing that the city was flying through space and a few scientists who were having trouble settling back into their daily routine after so many unsettled months. She’d also spent a long hour with Dr. McKay, who mainly seemed to want to interrogate her about her suitability to deal with what he referred to as ‘the complicated and delicate workings of his psyche.’

She’d wound up liking him more than she’d expected to by the end of the session, and actually hadn’t minded the prospect of seeing him on an ongoing basis. He mainly seemed to want help managing stress, and possibly to want to talk about his relationship with his girlfriend, both of which seemed like nice simple problems compared to some of the things that apparently happened in the Pegasus galaxy. Like being captured by the Wraith.

It was part and parcel of working with people in combat positions, she knew. One day they were telling you about their feelings about joint pet ownership as a step toward commitment, and the next day they were listed as missing, which was usually just a way of saying ‘dead, but without any reasonable sense of closure for anyone involved.’ It would have been easier if she’d had other regulars to see, to remind her that life went on.

She put the cup down with determination. At least she could go meet some of the people she’d be working with. It would be more productive than sitting in an empty office trying to figure out how much trouble she’d be in if she installed Plants vs. Zombies on her laptop.

She decided it wasn’t too early for an early lunch, and the mess hall seemed likely to be full of other people. She filled her tray with food that, for being served in another galaxy, seemed distinctly familiar from every military cafeteria line she’d ever seen, and poured herself another cup of coffee.

Few of the people whose names she felt confident she knew were in the mess hall. She did recognize one of the scientists eating at a table by the window as Dr. Zelenka, who’d been helping Dr. McKay give the orientation lecture to the science staff. He’d spent a lot of time in the meeting trying to soften McKay’s predictions that they’d probably all be dead inside of six months.

Only if you do not pay attention, Zelenka had said, his eyes on the younger and more nervous-looking of the new staff. Which we are sure you will. She wasn’t convinced he actually was sure, but he was at least comforting.

She put her tray down on the opposite side of the table. “Mind if I join you?”

“Not at all,” Zelenka said. “But I will not be here long for company. I have a very long list of places I should currently be.” He gestured to his mashed potatoes as if apologizing for the necessity of eating them.

“I’m sure you do,” she said. “It’s been an interesting first few weeks in the Pegasus galaxy.”

“You should see it when it really gets interesting,” Zelenka said. “We have only had minor catastrophes so far. If we cannot get Rodney back, or the city is overrun by strange alien lifeforms, or we are attacked by many Wraith, then we will have real problems.”

“I can see that you’d have to develop a sense of perspective.”

“That, or entirely lose your mind,” Zelenka said. “But I have not yet, so you do not have to worry that I will add to your workload.”

“I’m happy to talk to anybody who’d like to talk,” Eva said. “It’s actually pretty quiet right now from where I’m sitting. I’m hoping I can get to know people better and just get a sense of how everyone’s doing.”

“The same as usual,” Zelenka said. “We are stressed and overworked and underpaid. Everyone has had traumatic experiences that should have us all hiding under our beds, but there is too much work to do. Half the people in the city are having regrettable romances, and the other half would not know how to begin one without an instruction manual.”

Eva found herself asking “And which category would you be in?” even though she knew she probably shouldn’t.

“I prefer to be regrettable,” Zelenka said, meeting her smile with one of his own that suggested a wicked sense of humor she hadn’t suspected him of having. “In the last few weeks there has not been time.”

“I expect it’s hard for the science staff with Dr. McKay missing.”

Zelenka spread his hands. “Sheppard’s team goes missing a lot. And of course we are always very worried, but we try not to — ” He broke off, putting a hand to the radio headset he wore. “Zelenka.” He listened for a moment, then stood abruptly. “I must go,” he said. “There is a problem. Big surprise.”

“It was nice to meet you,” Eva said to his back as he hurried away, talking into his radio in low worried tones. She was getting the feeling a lot of her conversations in Atlantis were going to end like that.

Dick Woolsey sighed and looked at his open laptop. The databurst from Earth had just come in, and his inbox now showed 282 new messages. Most of them were not things he wanted to see — official messages from the IOA asking for clarification of one thing or another, screams of annoyance from various people he’d rather not talk to. He had seven days to answer them all before the next scheduled dial out, once weekly to conserve power, unless events warranted otherwise.

Three emails from General O’Neill. He opened the earliest first. It was a simple confirmation that the George Hammond had left Earth on time, Pegasus bound. Good news, but hardly unexpected. Another, three days later, confirming that the Hammond had checked in at a Milky Way gate and was still on schedule. By now it would be between galaxies, out of communications from both ends. Daedalus, on its return trip, would be reaching the edge of the Milky Way today, checking in with Stargate Command at the first gate. It always made Dick a little nervous to have all the warships out of reach.

He was going to have to write to Dr. McKay’s sister sooner or later. He’d put it off, missed this week’s databurst, telling himself that it hadn’t been long enough yet. They’d find Dr. McKay soon, and there was no reason to alarm his family unnecessarily. But another week and he would have to. There would be no excuse. He would have to start one of those letters that began with ‘regret to inform you…’

But not today. They’d find him before the next databurst. Surely.

Dick wished he truly believed that. He wished he had that kind of faith in the way the universe worked.