“No, you haven’t,” said Miruva. “You’re making me think, Teyla.”
She looked up at the Athosian, and her smile returned. Her face was lit by the sunlight coming from above and, despite her slender features, she looked strong and determined. Like all the Forgotten, she clearly possessed resilience.
“Maybe we should be looking to make changes,” she said. “But for now, there are tapestries to be woven. Let us keep talking. Your ideas will find their ways into the designs, if nothing else.”
Teyla smiled. “I would like that.”
It studied the two subjects. One was outside the parameters, and no analysis had yielded any helpful results. The delay had caused problems. There was chatter over the data-streams.
You are wasting resources. Act.
It hung, immobile, invisible. Not yet. Information was invaluable. There were fragments, snatches. Some of them reminded it of events a long time ago. Some words were…
So much had been lost. Something like anger coursed through its cortex. Not real anger, of course. Even when things had been better, they had only been a sham set of emotions. The program couldn’t change that.
The time was coming. Power levels had fallen again, and the recovery had to commence. With every passing hour, the chatter grew.
What do I do about the newcomer?
There was no answer. They didn’t know any more than it did. The days of being able to process creatively were long gone. It was all blind interpretation now. Cold and blind, like the planet itself.
I have set the sequence in motion.
That finally shut them up. They would be getting what they wanted.
It gazed down at the scene, half regretfully. Only a matter of time now. They wouldn’t like it, of course. But it had to do it. It had to come for them.
It had to perform the cull.
McKay was cold. Seriously cold. It didn’t seem to matter how many layers of furs he had on, the freezing air took his breath away. He stood in front of the stricken Jumper, slapping his hands together in a vain attempt to keep them warm.
“Looks pretty bad,” said Sheppard.
McKay fixed him with his most withering stare. “Well, that’s an astute comment, if ever I heard one,” he said, acidly. “Why don’t you take over the repairs? Perhaps I could hand you a wrench from time to time and make the coffee?”
“Maybe you should,” Sheppard said, dryly. “Might get this thing fixed a damn sight quicker.”
The Jumper looked as if it had been through an inferno. The curved sides were blackened and scored. Many of the Ancient-designed patterns on the flanks had been razed from the superstructure. There were several places where it seemed as if explosions or heat had nearly penetrated the shielding. The windscreen, remarkably, had remained relatively unscathed. Clearly, the damage had been done as the Jumper had careered into the edges of the wormhole anomaly. There were no lights working. The vessel lay nose-first in a snowdrift, its cockpit buried deep. Fresh snow from the storm had piled up around the open rear bay, obscuring any footprints from their hasty exit. The door had been frozen in place, leaving the innards of the vessel open to the elements.
The Stargate had been the same. It looked like had been burned, and badly. There hadn’t been a flicker of life from the chevrons, and some of the inner panels were cracked. That alone was worrying. It was naquadah, for God’s sake. That stuff didn’t crack easy. What was worse, there was no sign of a DHD, nor the MALP. If a dial home device had existed in the past, it sure didn’t now. As for the MALP, there was no telling where it had ended up — probably destroyed, or buried deep in a snowdrift.
McKay sighed; once again, the entire galaxy had conspired against him.
“Well, I suppose we’d better make a start,” he said.
The two men ducked into the Jumper. Soon McKay had pulled out an array of transparent panels. He looked at them in disgust, tutting to himself as he carried out basic diagnostic tests. “Well, this is shot. So’s this. That’s totally zeroed, and I don’t even know what that does.”
Irritation began to boil inside him. The cold was part of it. Having to exist on a diet of pure meat was another factor. It seemed that whatever situation the team got itself into, it was always he who had to perform the necessary magic to get them out. And yet, who emerged with the plaudits? Most likely Sheppard, or perhaps Weir. Without McKay’s in-depth knowledge of Ancient artifacts and power systems, virtually every mission they had ever been on would have ended in failure. And the few times he got it wrong, such as the unfortunate business on Doranda, were never quite forgotten. It was unjust, and irritating, and constant.
He sighed, and stomped through the open bulkhead to the cockpit. Sheppard was sitting in the pilot’s seat, aimlessly trying a few controls.
“Nothing,” he said. “Nada. Zilch. This baby’s going nowhere.”
McKay gave him a wintry smile. “This endless positivity is really helping. Honestly, you should think about becoming a motivational speaker or something. You’d be a blast.”
“Hey!” Sheppard swung around in the seat and scowled at him. “Just what is it with you this morning? You’ve been even more grouchy than normal, which is saying something.”
“Grouchy?”
“You heard me. Grouchy.”
“Oh, let me see,” McKay snapped. “We’re stuck on a god-forsaken rock on the edge of the galaxy with no supplies and no power. We can’t send as much as a shopping-list back through the gate to Atlantis because the gate’s been served-up well-done and we’ve got the only DHD on the whole damn planet and that’s toast too. The people here are about to freeze themselves to death because they’re too stupid to look for somewhere else to live. It’s freezing cold. And I’ve got massive indigestion. So, yes, I’m not exactly the happiest I’ve ever been. But thanks a lot for asking.”
McKay picked up a loose circuit board and started poking at it.
“Oh, give it a rest, Rodney,” Sheppard snapped. “If these people hadn’t been here waiting for us, we’d be deep frozen by now. And if we can’t generate enough power to get back in the Jumper, Elizabeth will send the Daedalus. You’re worrying over nothing.”
“Am I?” The circuit board suddenly gave a fizz, and a shower of sparks burst from the housing. “Dammit!” McKay yanked his hand back. His mood was getting worse all the time, and Sheppard’s admonishment hadn’t helped. “The Daedalus isn’t available, which you’d know if you’d looked at the schedule more carefully. We’re on our own. And maybe I wouldn’t mind that if, for once, it wasn’t me in charge of getting us back.”
“You know, Rodney, you’ve really got the knack of looking on the dark side of life.”
“Well that might have something to do with being stuck here with a bunch of primitives who haven’t mastered the basic techniques of Jell-O making yet, and who seem to think the height of architectural achievement is a bunch of caves with — ”
Sheppard’s eyes widened and he shot a warning look towards the back of the Jumper. With a sudden lurch of embarrassment in the pit of his stomach, McKay turned around. Aralen was standing in the open bay, observing.
“Greetings,” the Forgotten leader said, unperturbed. “I trust things are going well?”
McKay felt his face redden, despite the cold. Why could he never learn to keep his mouth shut?
“Ah, Foremost,” he said. ”Didn’t see ya there. Did you, ah, hear much of the conversation?”
The Forgotten walked towards them, looking at the interior of the Jumper with intent interest. “I assumed you were discussing the means by which to restore your vessel.”
Sheppard gave Rodney a look which said you got away with that one. “Something like that,” he said. “We’ve just made a start.”