STARGATE ATLANTIS: Dead End (31 page)

“Do not even think of that,” said Miruva. “You were all preserved, and that is enough. But what will you do now?”

“We gotta go,” said Sheppard. “Much as it looks nice around here.”

“Dr McKay is with our vessel,” said Teyla. “He thinks that we can still use the Stargate to return home.”

Aralen frowned. “You mean to return to the ice? The storm will still be fierce.”

“We have no choice,” said Teyla. “If the portal fails us, we will be stranded here — it is our only route home.”

“I wish you could stay,” said Miruva. “There is still much to learn about this place.”

Sheppard gave a grim smile. “Rodney would’ve liked to see it,” he said. “He’ll be mad as hell when we tell him what’s down here.”

“I’ll come with you,” said Orand. “You’ll need help on the ice.”

“No way,” said Ronon.

Sheppard nodded. “No dice, I’m afraid. You can’t help us out there.”

Miruva embraced Teyla. There were tears in her eyes, and Teyla felt her own throat tighten. “We will remember you always,” Miruva said. “The Ancestors will be with you.”

Ronon cast Sheppard a dark look. “They’d better be.”

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.”