Jo Graham: Homecoming

Sheppard frowned and put his drink down on the edge of the platform. “Ok. Let’s have a look,” he said with the air of a man about to look under a friend’s hood.

Beckett stood up, catching himself for a moment on the arm of the chair. It always felt very strange to settle back into his mere physical body after some time in the interface.

Sheppard slid into the chair and leaned back, his eyes closing as the interfaces engaged, the chair lighting around him as power flowed, a profound expression of peace on his face. Beckett knew better than to interrupt. Sheppard’s fingers twitched lightly in the interface, then stilled. He would be diving into it now, the pathways of the city’s circuits and cables mirroring the neural pathways of his mind. Done right, impulses flowed like thoughts, data streaming effortlessly into easy interpretations. Beckett usually did not find it quite that simple. Practice and diligence had made him a competent pilot for the city, but he had never quite gotten the knack of thinking in three dimensions, of visualizing so many moving points completely. He wasn’t a pilot. He was a medical doctor who through some trick of genetics had the particular piece of code that the city responded to. Sheppard was in his twentieth year in the Air Force, a man whose natural talents ran this way, honed by years of experience in high speed aircraft. He could get a lot more out of the interface than Beckett could.

It was nearly fifteen minutes before Sheppard surfaced, his eyes opening and the chair tilting halfway up. His glance fell on Beckett, but he spoke into his headset. “Control, this is Sheppard. We’ve got an anomaly in the number four induction array.”

“The east pier,” Zelenka said. “ Zatracený hajzl ! Will we ever get that piece of trash fixed?”

“Carson’s the one who tore it up fighting with the hive ship,” McKay said. “And I thought we had it. I ran a stress test on it the night before we left.”

“Well, you must have missed something,” Zelenka said. “Because here we go with it again.”

“It doesn’t look like it’s that bad,” Sheppard said, cupping the headset and straightening up completely in the chair. “It’s a wobble, like Carson said. It’s not a flat. It’s just a variance in output.”

“A crashingly small one,” McKay said. “I’ve got the power log in front of me now. Five one hundredths of one percent.”

“After running at full power for five days?” Zelenka was probably leaning over McKay’s shoulder, looking at the numbers. “No wonder you didn’t catch it. That is nothing. We cannot expect every system to run at optimal for days on end. It would not show up in a stress test.”

“Give me the summary.” That was a new voice, Richard Woolsey, Atlantis’ commander. “Should we drop out of hyperspace?” He was probably hovering over the two scientists by now.

It was McKay who spoke, of course. “And do what? We’re between the Milky Way and the Pegasus Galaxy, right in the middle of a whole lot of nothing. I’m not seeing any kind of damaged component that we can repair, or quite frankly anything that amounts to a problem. Carson, it’s nice of you to tell us about every little wobble, but this is just that. A little, tiny wobble.”

Sheppard looked at Beckett and shrugged. “That now we know about. So we can keep an eye on it. It’s just exactly like a tire. You may not need to run and do something about a little dent in the rim, but you keep an eye on it.”

Beckett unhunched his shoulders, putting his hands in his pockets.

“Yes, well. We will keep an eye on it,” McKay said. “But I think we can all take a deep breath and put this away.”

Sheppard stood up, flexing his hands as he withdrew them from the interface.

“I’m sorry to put you to trouble,” Beckett said. “I hope your dinner’s not cold.”

“It’s ok.” Sheppard picked his drink up off the floor. “Better safe than sorry. And we should keep an eye on that. You have a little wobble in your tire one minute, and the next thing you know you have a blowout doing eighty.”

“And that would be bad,” Beckett said, imagining what the analogy to a high speed blowout might be piloting a giant Ancient city through hyperspace between galaxies. It would put a pileup on the M25 to shame.

“Damn straight,” Sheppard said, taking a drink of his soda. “See you at 06:00, Carson.”

“This turn and turn again is getting old,” Beckett said. “What I’d give for another pilot!”

“We couldn’t exactly bring O’Neill with us under the circumstances,” Sheppard said.

“Four more days,” Beckett said. “Over the hump.” He slid back into the chair, feeling the interfaces clinging to his fingertips in preparation. “See you in the morning.” He closed his eyes, sinking into Atlantis’ embrace.

Nearly seven days of the journey gone, 02:47 hours. The control room was quiet, only the gentle counterpoint of machine noises breaking the silence. By their purely arbitrary designation, it was the middle of the night. Airman First Class Salawi, a new third shift controller, put her coffee carefully on the rubberized mat that Dr. McKay had specially constructed for Atlantis’ sloping control boards. At the station above on the upper tier, Dr. Zelenka had the watch, his glasses on the end of his nose as he scrolled through something on his laptop.

Salawi sighed. Three hours and a bit more of her shift. Somehow, she had thought keeping watch on a massive alien city on its way to another planet would be a little more exciting. She had been doing it for a week now, and nothing interesting had happened yet. She glanced down at her screen again, the data streaming almost too fast to make sense of it.

And then her board went crazy.

“Dr. Zelenka!”

He careened around the corner at an alarming rate, nearly throwing himself into her lap in his haste to get to the board, all the while letting forth a stream of invective in a language she didn’t understand. “Move, now. There.” She slipped out of her seat, catching her coffee before it landed on him as he ran his hands over the unfamiliar alien keys.

“I don’t know what happened,” Salawi said. “I didn’t do anything!”

“I know you did not,” he gave her a swift sideways look, a half nod that was reassurance. “This is something in the hyperdrive induction array.”

“What the hell just happened?” His radio squawked, Scots accent obvious even over Zelenka’s headset.

“I do not know, Carson.” Zelenka’s hands were flying, pulling up one incomprehensible menu after another. “I am trying to find that out.” He spared a glance for the Airman at the gate board. “Get Dr. McKay up here. And Colonel Sheppard too.” He leaned back, looking along the board to Dr. Kusanagi at the far end as the overhead lights flickered. Another incomprehensible expletive. “Miko, get the power variance under control! We are having a serious problem.”

“I’m losing systems,” Beckett said over the radio from the chair room stories below. “I’ve just lost the lateral sublight thrusters. The sublight engines have lost power.”

“What does that mean?” Salawi asked.

“It means Dr. Kusanagi had better stop the power fluctuations,” Zelenka said grimly.

“I have not got it!” Kusanagi called from the other end. “I have rerouted the priority to the shield, but I cannot stop the power drain. We are using power too fast!”

“If the shield goes…” Nobody answered her. Salawi could guess what that meant. The fragile glass windows of the control room were not meant to take hard vacuum. If the shield failed they would blow out in an explosive decompression that would fling them into space. The question would be whether they would be torn apart before or after they asphyxiated.