Grodin’s voice was quickly replaced by Dr Weir’s. “Rodney, am I talking to you instead of the Major because he’s once again the reason for the medical team?”
“Excellent deduction. It was a slight variation on the irresistible force, immovable object problem. Head injury — or more accurately, two head injuries, about twenty-four hours ago. He was functioning adequately earlier, but he just collapsed.”
“So you’re navigating the jumper?”
“I can’t tell you how much your confidence inspires me, Elizabeth. All the same, I think I’m going to need my undivided attention for this, so how about we chat when we’re both on the same side of the wormhole?”
“Understood. Good luck.”
Lieutenant Ford sat cross-legged on the deck beside his commanding officer. “I think the Major’s okay for now.” He raised his voice. “Hey, McKay — whatever you do, make sure the drive pods are retracted, all right?”
“If I were the superstitious type, I would make you very sorry for that comment, Lieutenant.” Their course was slow, but McKay’s hand betrayed a slight tremor. “You two might want to grab hold of something. Purely as a precaution. I’m not certain that we’re straight and level, given that this is space and all and I have no idea which way is supposed to be ‘up’.”
“You’ll be fine. Just calm down.”
“That’s very easy for you to say. The ‘gate looks a lot bigger when someone else is trying to thread this needle!” The rippling pool grew until it filled the windscreen, and their new pilot’s anxiety level appeared to spike. “Don’t crash, don’t crash, don’t crash,” he repeated in a low voice, his forehead dotted with sweat.
Teyla looked over at Ford, who was attempting and failing to mask a smirk. She opened her mouth to ask him what he found amusing, but the event horizon swallowed them up.
When the jumper was once again intact and hovering in the ‘gateroom, McKay sagged back in his seat. “Oh, thank God.” Within seconds, he had recovered his usual supercilious bearing and even offered an indifferent salute to Dr Weir, standing at the railing, as they rose into the jumper bay. “Make sure to tell Sheppard just how well I did that, for the record. No more of these baby-step lessons.”
“It was the autopilot, Doc.” When the scientist turned to glare at him, Ford grinned. “It takes over at a specified distance in front of the ‘gate, remember?”
It was difficult to tell whether McKay’s expression of disbelief was directed at the Lieutenant or at himself for having forgotten. Ford appeared to be enjoying the other man’s uncharacteristic speechlessness. “Seriously, it’ll park itself and everything.”
“I don’t need it to park itself for me. I think I can find an empty spot in the bay all by myself, thank you.” To prove his point, McKay made a show of locating the manual control and guiding the jumper toward the landing platform.
“Do they test you on parallel parking on Canadian driver’s tests?” Ford prodded.
“I hardly think that Americans can point any fingers regarding driving ability.”
The craft seemed not quite level to Teyla, but the others were too occupied with their discussion to heed her uncertain “Doctor—?”
Then there was a scrape of metal against metal, and she instinctively bent low to shield the Major’s body as they lurched.
“Damn it!” McKay clumsily maneuvered the jumper into place and settled it on the deck. “There’s no conceivable way I’m ever going to hear the end of this, is there?”
Ford rolled his eyes. “Only you could bottom out a jumper.”
“Hey, without me you’d still be on the other side of the ‘gate, so I don’t think a little gratitude is too much to ask.”
Upon lowering the hatch, they were greeted first by Dr Beckett, who bustled in to examine Major Sheppard. Dr Weir followed in his wake. Atlantis’s leader regarded the team: one unconscious, another in foul-smelling peasant’s garb, and the remaining two grimy and battered. “I’m guessing this is going to take a while to explain.”
“That’s a good bet, ma’am,” Ford replied. “Doc, is the Major going to be all right?”
“Aye, but he’ll not be happy for a while.” Beckett motioned to a pair of medics waiting nearby with a gurney. “I’ll want to see the rest of you in the infirmary as well. Shower first if you like, but take longer than half an hour and I’ll send out search parties.”
His mild threat was met by a trio of unenthusiastic nods. Dr Weir studied their faces and frowned slightly. “We’ll debrief later, when Major Sheppard’s able to participate. Just tell me this: did we do what we set out to do?”
Teyla was unsure how to answer. It was Dr McKay who spoke up, already halfway turned toward the door. Though she couldn’t see his face, his voice was tinged with defeat. “That depends on your point of view.”
He was out on one of the more out-of-the-way balconies, looking with unseeing eyes at the tiny whitecaps below, when someone finally took the trouble to track him down. “Hey,” came the simple greeting from behind him.
Rodney turned his head halfway toward the doors, but continued to lean forward on the railing, absorbing the chill of the brisk wind. “How’d you know to look for me here?”
Sheppard held up a life sign detector. “Figured you’d be the little dot that wanted to be as far as possible from the other little dots.”
“Remind me to lock those up when not being used for official purposes.” But he didn’t object when the Major ambled over to stand next to him at the railing. “Carson finally sprang you loose?”
“On the condition that I take a few days off from doing anything, quote, ‘bloody foolish.’ I’m taking that to mean that I get a temporary reprieve from my regular dose of Athosian-style ass-kicking. How is it that you managed to avoid a concussion, anyway?”
“Obviously there’s someone in this galaxy with a harder head than you.”
“Okay,” Sheppard commented slowly. “That’s new. The typical McKay brand of humor isn’t self-deprecating. Usually it’s… well, deprecating everyone else.”
Rodney heard the other man’s puzzlement immediately. “I’m a man of many talents, Major.”
An uncomfortable silence reigned for a few moments as they both stared out into the water. “Lousy mission.”
“Noticed that, did you?”
Sheppard cursed under his breath. “For Christ’s sake, Rodney, if you’re pissed, get pissed. Don’t just keep sulking indefinitely. Yell about it for a while and be glad someone’s actually willing to listen. You weren’t the only one who had the week from hell, all right?”
There was an unfamiliar current in that tone, and Rodney glanced over. A stay in the infirmary had returned the Major’s color and bearing to normal, but something dark still lingered behind his eyes. A fresh wave of self-loathing rolled through Rodney as he realized that Sheppard had been forced to make a number of exceptionally ugly choices during the mission, a burden that until now had gone unnoticed by at least one of his teammates. And once again we see that the world — any world — does not revolve around Rodney McKay.
He decided to offer an olive branch in the form of the confession Sheppard had apparently come here to draw out. What the hell — maybe it would help in some immeasurable way. “Look down there.” Rodney waved a hand at a pier that had taken a pounding in the recently passed storm. “We did everything we could think of, and we just barely made it through. We tried to change things for the better on Dalera, and it all went to hell anyway and will probably revert back to business as usual before long. It’s hard to keep from wondering if there really is any good we can do out here. Maybe the universe is just going to do what it wants to do, no matter how much we run around and wring our hands.”
Fatalism rang loudly in that declaration, but Sheppard seemed unmoved. “I don’t believe that, and neither do you.”
“Oh, I don’t?”
“No. If that were true, you would have wanted to leave the Dalerans to sleep in the bed they made right from the start. You sure wouldn’t have busted your butt to defend the Citadel the way you did. It undeniably sucks that it got so bad, but a lot of people are still alive on that planet because of what we did. A lot. Don’t trivialize that.”