"Next to your left hand," Zelenka said precisely.
"Ah." Rodney picked it up, slurping at it before he registered that the cup wasn't burning his fingers. "It's cold!"
"Where it has been for the last twenty minutes," Zelenka went on. He had a cup of hot coffee, Rodney noticed, but he wasn't offering to share.
Dr. Kusanagi looked up from her console, smiling. "Here, you can have this one," she said, and held out a cup.
"Oh, I couldn't," Rodney said, but reached for it anyway. It was just the way he liked it, and he couldn't repress a blissful smile. "Ah, that's better."
"Rodney, you are impossible," Zelenka said.
"Airman Salawi brought him a fresh cup on her way back from her break," Kusanagi said, to Zelenka. "It was very kind of her."
"Yes. Yes, it was," Zelenka said. "But Rodney can get his own coffee."
"Can I?" Rodney pointed to Ronon, who leaned against the end of the console. "At the moment, I can't go anywhere with Chewbacca there keeping me company."
"I'm fine with you getting coffee," Ronon said.
"You see?" Zelenka said. He looked at his own screens, touched keys to compare two sets of readings. "Oh, yes. Yes, that is going very well."
Rodney looked over his shoulder. "If you'd cross-connected the secondary conduits here and here, you'd have gotten a faster power-up —"
"Possibly," Zelenka answered. "Or equally possibly we would have blown that entire bank of circuits."
Rodney opened his mouth to protest, and Zelenka rode over him.
"And in any case, we've already started the process. There's no point in interrupting it now."
"No." Rodney stopped, blinking.
"And I could not have consulted you," Zelenka continued, "because what you were doing there was the priority."
"Well, yes," Rodney said. "Yes, it was." And that left him with nothing to say, so he took a deep swallow of his coffee. "Ow!"
"And if now you complain that it's too hot —" Zelenka broke off, muttering to himself in Czech.
"Some people let being Head of Science go to their heads," Rodney said, but not so loudly that Zelenka couldn't ignore him. He looked back at his own screen, saw that there was nothing to do until the next diagnostic finished running. That was a little weird — he felt as though he'd been working at top speed ever since he got back to Atlantis — but there was nothing he could do about it, and he took a more careful sip of his coffee, wincing at the heat on his sore tongue.
Okay, there was nothing he could do here. That left his other problem, proving that he hadn't been tampered with by the Wraith, and that — well, surely all his work getting the city ready to fly had to count for something? But, no, probably some minor component would blow out, and they'd all blame him for something like unconscious sabotage. He was pretty sure that wasn't really possible, and if only he had the time, he'd get Dr. Robinson to tell them as much.
And what the hell had happened to the weapon? He knew where he'd hidden it, he knew nobody knew about that little private stash — was it possible Sheppard had been looking in the wrong place? Maybe that was it. Maybe Sheppard had gone to the wrong lab. There were at least a dozen of them up there in the towers, all identical — that was part of why he'd chosen one to hide his emergency supplies. That was probably it. His directions hadn't been clear enough, and Sheppard had gotten it wrong. He turned to Ronon.
"We have to go back up the tower."
"What?"
"To where I hid — you know, the thing. Sheppard went to the wrong place."
Ronon was shaking his head. "No. He went to the right place."
"You can't be sure," Rodney said. "All those little labs, all the towers, they all look alike. He must have gone to the wrong one."
"McKay." Ronon sounded as though he were trying very hard to be patient and not succeeding. "He went to the right room. All your other stuff was there."
"How do you know that? You weren't there!"
"Sheppard said so." Ronon folded his arms as though that settled the matter.
Which Rodney supposed it did. Sheppard was good at his job, he wasn't going to confuse Rodney's gear with, say, Kusanagi's or that German kid's. He picked up his coffee again, frowning. And that meant the weapon was still lost, and he was still a suspect. Still potentially Wraith. The heat of the cup traced the line that had been his handmouth, as prickly and uncomfortable as all his other memories. And the worst of it was, there was nothing he could think of that would fix the problem.
Deep in Cheyenne Mountain there was trouble brewing at the SGC.
"Tell me it's not true."
Cameron Mitchell looked up from his computer with his best long-suffering expression to see Daniel Jackson glaring down at him.
"And don't give me that lost-puppy look. Is the IOA serious?"
"That was supposed to be classified information," Cam observed. "And, you know, people do sometimes knock. On doors. Before bursting in."
Jackson waved that away. "Oh, come on, nothing that important stays secret around here." He paused. "Well, not from us."
"No." That was inarguable: Cam himself wasn't supposed to know about the decision, either, but Landry had thought that the opinion of the leader of the SGC's most experienced gate team would be relevant. Or at least help him make a counterargument.
"It's insane."
"I can't argue with you there," Mitchell said, "but, yes, the IOA just ordered Woolsey to evacuate the city and destroy it rather than see it fall to the Wraith."
"We've got to stop them!"
Cam just looked at him, and Jackson waved his hands.
"All right, yes, I have no idea how we're going to do it, but we can't let them blow up the city. Particularly since I doubt they can blow it up, given that it's Ancient technology, and we all know how hard it is to destroy that when we need to get rid of it, not to mention that the Ancients already tried this —"
Cam wondered for a moment if he should just let him run down, but decided that could take too long. "Jackson. General Landry's already made those arguments."
Jackson stopped, took a deep breath. "Okay," he said, more moderately. "Is it doing any good?"
"I haven't heard."
"Jack won't let them do it," Jackson said. "Sam won't, either, and Sheppard — he'll never go along with it."
Cam nodded in agreement. That had become painfully obvious during the weeks Atlantis was on Earth. John Sheppard took a definitely proprietary interest in the city, and if the IOA had succeeded in getting control of it, Cam wouldn't have bet against Sheppard trying something stupid like stealing it. And it had become equally clear that an awful lot of the Atlantis team, civilian and military, would have been happy to help out. "And you're right, it probably wouldn't work — didn't they try to blow it up once before, only they couldn't figure out how? Not to mention that fleeing through the gate didn't work all that well the last time."
Jackson paused. "Well, technically, I suppose it did sort of work, only not as a long-term solution, and there are a lot more Wraith to deal with now anyway."
Cam stared. "Do you always have to play devil's advocate? No, sorry, dumb question."
Before Jackson could say anything, the door crashed open behind him. "Cameron! Oh, and you're here, too, darling." Vala Mal Doran gave Jackson a blinding smile, and leaned hard on Cam's desk. "Did you know that they're starting to evacuate people from Atlantis?"
"What?" Jackson straightened sharply. "They can't —"
"Hang on," Cam said. He frowned at his computer screen, checking back through his message queue. "Ok, calm down, both of you. They're evacuating non-essential personnel from a combat zone, not abandoning the city."
"So they say," Jackson said darkly.