“What do they look like?” Teyla hissed. “What are we fighting?”
Miruva turned to face her, eyes wide and staring. “Don’t you understand?” she cried. “They look like nothing! You can’t fight them! They’re Banshees!”
Suddenly, the swishing vanished with a echoing snap. The fires in the hearths flickered and dimmed. Teyla thought she caught sight of an ephemeral shape flitting across her field of vision. She raised her gun, but it was gone. Despite herself, she felt a cold grip of fear around her stomach. How could you fight something you couldn’t see?
She spun around, trying to catch a glimpse of what was terrifying the people. There was movement, but it was impossible to see. She had an almost overwhelming urge to spray bullets indiscriminately at the shadows. Only her training and discipline prevented her. Why was she so scared? Screams echoed down the narrow tunnels, heightening the febrile atmosphere. Miruva had fallen to her knees and had her hands over her ears.
“Miruva!” shouted Teyla. “Stand up! I need your — ”
But then a shuddering wave of nausea reared up inside her. She felt her vision dim and her head throbbed. Teyla reeled, and felt the P90 slip from her fingers. She fought to retain consciousness, but something was pulling the life out of her.
For a brief moment she thought she saw something. A face: metallic, cold, severe. It seemed to be leaning over her. There was something familiar about it, something very familiar…
But then the darkness took her. The screams and wails of the Forgotten echoed away and Teyla collapsed. Her last awareness was of Miruva calling her name, but then she fell heavily and knew nothing more.
McKay pushed a series of panels back into place. One of them fizzed and popped back out again. The others stayed where they were and a propulsion sub-system came back online. A bank of lights illuminated, went red, and flashed out again. The system shut down and a sigh shuddered through the engine chamber below.
Rodney scowled. He felt like he was trying to reconstruct the Jumper more or less from scratch. Using novelty tools out of a kindergarten. As soon as one thing went right, another would go wrong. Even for someone with as much faith in his own abilities as he, there were moments when he wondered if he was attempting the impossible. At least the heating was still working. He’d just about managed to take off a top layer of furs.
Sheppard stomped back into the Jumper after a quick recon around the vessel, stamping snow from his boots. “Rodney, I need an sitrep.”
Irritated, Rodney put his work down. “I’d go a lot quicker if I could work for five minutes without — ” He stopped, catching the anxious look on the Colonel’s face. “What is it?”
“Storm coming,” said Sheppard. “You don’t really want to see it. Sky’s pretty black. A few more minutes, then we need to bail.”
McKay let slip a despondent groan. The sound was slightly more despairing than he’d intended, but it captured his mood pretty well. “I could use a few more hours,” he said. It sometimes seemed like his whole life was spent asking for a few more hours when he only ever ended up being given seconds. Scotty could go eat his heart out.
Sheppard glanced at the open rear doors. The wind was picking up already. He unclipped his radio.
“Ronon? You copy?”
Silence.
“Dammit, Ronon,” Sheppard muttered to himself. “I told you to stay in touch.”
“Could be the storm,” said McKay, looking up from his work.
“Yeah, I figured. Where are we up to with Frankenstein’s monster?”
“You’re still on that riff, eh?” McKay replied. “Here’s the good news: life support’s back up. But I’m not sure for how much longer. We’ve got fairly consistent power and the reserves are recharging. But I’m a long way off getting the drive systems online, and we’ve got no back-up at all. Another day, perhaps two, and I might be able to give you a working Jumper. But I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.”
Sheppard frowned. “That’s not good.”
As if to reinforce his pessimism, suddenly there was a great crack from beneath them. Sheppard staggered and reached for a bulkhead.
The Jumper shifted and came to rest an inch or so lower. There was a echoing sound from far beneath them — it took a long time to die away. Neither McKay nor Sheppard said a word until the noise had faded. They both knew what it meant.
“Uh, should we really have the heating on in here, Rodney?”
McKay felt a twang of irritation, the same feeling he got whenever the non-scientists on the mission tried to tell him his job. “For God’s sake, nothing’s escaping through the hull of the Jumper,” he said. “These things are designed to fly through space, as you might have observed.”
Sheppard held up his hands. “OK. My bad. No need to get snitchy.” He looked warily at the open rear doors. “But you gotta see the problem. If this ice keeps moving, we’re gonna have to think about leaving the Jumper behind.”
“
What
?” McKay fixed him with an incredulous stare. “Leave the Jumper and walk home?”
“Gate’s on the surface.”
McKay rolled his eyes. “Oh, I see,” he said, caustically. “We don’t need to worry about the fact that the gate’s got no power. Because, if getting this thing working is a problem, getting a 10,000 year old experimental Stargate operational will just be a cinch. Ignoring the fact that it’s got no DHD and the only means of dialing we have is right here. And, above all, we don’t need to worry about materializing in the middle of a wormhole in just a HAZMAT suit and a prayer, because
that never happens, does
it
?”
The first flush of anger rose in Sheppard’s face. Words began to form in his mouth that began with
Now listen, you little…
Before he could speak there was another booming crack. This time it came from above, rather than below. The storm was right above them. The Jumper began to sway slightly as the wind outside rose in speed.
“Let’s do this another time,” Sheppard snapped. “Secure this thing as best you can, we gotta go. Now.”
For once, McKay said nothing. There was a time for bickering, and this wasn’t it. He scrambled to get the haphazard systems ready for a period of hibernation. Most things responded as he expected them to. Control over the rear door was, predictably, still flaky.
“OK, you should get out of here now,” said McKay, grimly. “I’m going to have to set the rear hatch to close from here, and then try and get out before it shuts. Things are still a bit… basic.”
“You want me to handle that?” Sheppard looked doubtful. “You’re not exactly quick on your feet.”
McKay gave a dry smile. “Thanks, but no thanks. As if you’d know where to start with this stuff.”
Sheppard took one look at the morass of wires and electronics tumbling out of the Jumper’s internal structure, and the argument seemed to have been made. “OK, but be quick,” he said, turning to head out into the gathering storm. “I don’t want to have to break you out of this tin can on my own. I left my opener on Atlantis.”
The Jumper swayed again. The storm was now howling outside, and McKay could feel the snow thumping against the sides of the vessel. Sheppard leapt out of the Jumper and disappeared at once. As he did so, McKay made a few last-minute adjustments. Then he took a deep breath, got into position and set the door to close.
He scrambled to his feet as quickly as his heavy furs would allow and sped towards the door. As he did so, a gout of crimson smoke escaped from one of the pistons driving the doors. The exit suddenly began to shrink rapidly as the heavy external panel started to slam.
“Oh, sweet quantum fluctuations…” McKay yelled, flinging himself forward.
He managed to get his head and shoulders out of the gap, but the rapidly ascending doors clamped firmly on his heavily-clad waist. He felt the metal grip his body like a pair of very heavy, very uncomfortable calipers.
“John!” he cried, though his voice was swept away by the wind. The Colonel was nowhere to be seen, and the air was rapidly filling with snow and sleet.
McKay wriggled furiously and made some headway. The door mechanism, still imperfectly powered, was struggling to close properly, With a final heave, he thrust himself out of the grip of the Jumper and on to the snow beyond. Behind him, the door slammed shut. A row of lights flickered briefly and then extinguished. The Jumper was sealed. As long as the ice sheet beneath didn’t give way, it would be safe.
Unlike him. Sheppard hadn’t been exaggerating about the storm. The entire horizon was dominated by a filthy wall of near-black cloud. The wind screamed around him, throwing snow into the air, and visibility was reducing rapidly. Even within his layers of buffalo hide, McKay shuddered. He’d gotten used to the warmth of the Jumper’s internal heating very quickly.
“You OK?” came Sheppard’s voice from the blizzard.
For a moment, McKay couldn’t see where he was, but then the shape of the Colonel came blundering out of the snow. His furs were encrusted in a layer of ice.
“I am now!” yelled McKay, still shaken by his narrow escape from the Jumper. “Where the hell were you?”
“Trying to spot the route back!” shouted Sheppard over the increasing roar of the wind. “It’s this way! Let’s go!”
McKay staggered to his feet. He pulled his hood down low, and replaced the leather face guard. Only a few moments into the storm, and he was already chilled to the core. He trudged after Sheppard’s silhouette, now just vaguely visible through sheets of whirling snow and ice.
After a few moments walking, the form of the Jumper was lost in a cloud of white and McKay’s entire world drifted into a freezing nightmare of shapeless ice. The more he thought about it, the more he hated this planet.
Zelenka half-awoke from a particularly pleasant dream involving a flower meadow in the mountains of the Śnieżnik massif and a very attractive woman called Magdalena. Dragging himself away from it was really quite painful, especially as the two of them were getting on so well. Strangely, there was an incessant beeping coming from somewhere in the sky. Blearily, he dragged his eyes open, and the spartan interior of his room on Atlantis materialized around him. The alarm clanged irritatingly. With a sigh, Zelenka reached out and silenced it. Magdalena would have to wait.
He lay for a moment in the dark, gathering his strength. Getting out of bed was always difficult, especially when he’d only had two hours of sleep. Then he remembered what he’d been working on.
Zelenka hastily pushed the covers off and pulled some clothes on. A few moments to splash water over his face and soften the worst excesses of his unruly hair, and he was out of his room and striding back towards operations.
When he arrived, most of his team was still at work. They’d been working shifts under his direction and most had got considerably more sleep. Despite that, they looked as crumpled as he. What was it about scientists?
“
Dobrý den, tým
,” he said, as cheerily as he could. His colleagues had gotten used to his Czech ‘Hello, team’ greetings, and responded with tolerant smiles. “Now, where are we on this?”
One of the modules retrieved from the experimental chamber lay on a table, looking like a dissected carcass. He’d left orders for the modules to be taken apart in the hope that they would discover something useful. A slim chance, but one worth taking.
One of his colleagues, Watson, came forward.
“We’ve made some progress,” he said, looking proud of himself. “Come and look at the module.”
The Ancient device had been thoroughly pulled apart. What had initially looked like a monolithic structure had turned out to be a collection of smaller machines, encased in a thick layer of shielding. Zelenka cast his expert eye over the detritus. “It looks hastily assembled,” he mused. “I’d say a collection of pre-existing parts. Fair enough. It was experiment.”
Watson nodded. “Like many of the projects from the last days of the city, it looks like they were in a hurry. The system is composed of about twelve separate devices, each connected to each other with some fairly simple logic. If they’d had more time, this machine could have been half the size.”
Zelenka looked over the components with interest. They were all standard-looking Ancient constructions: angular, well-finished, with that esoteric patterning they were so fond of.
“This might be helpful,” Zelenka agreed, noting the way the various parts seemed to fit together. “If we could just find a way to get them through the gate to McKay…”
Watson could barely contain his excitement. “Take a closer look.”
Frowning, Zelenka cast his gaze back over the pile of machinery. For a moment, he couldn’t see anything particularly special. Then, as his sleepy brain finally hit full speed, he saw what Watson was so excited about. “These are standard Jumper parts!”
One by one, he recognized the pieces of machinery: there was a plasma transfuser straight out of the main drive system, and a crystal relay matrix that must have come from the cockpit HUD unit. “Are these all pieces cannibalized from one of the city’s Jumpers?”
“All but one,” said Watson. “Apart from the connecting equipment, there’s one component that I’ve not seen before. No doubt that’s the one that does the magic. But we’ve had a look at it and it doesn’t look that complicated. My guess is that things were pretty tight when this device was being designed. They had to use whatever they could lay their hands on. We might be able to reproduce it.”
Zelenka clapped the scientist on the shoulder. This was very good news. “Right, this is a start,” he said. “Good start. We need to figure out if there’s way of reconstructing this thing within a standard Jumper. If we can, then so can they. And that might just bring them home.”
“We’re on it,” Watson said. “There’s a Jumper kitted out in the bay, ready for work. It’s got the standard issue stuff in it, plus a few things we think Dr McKay would have had with him.”