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?”