Jo Graham: Homecoming

Azure streaks flashed and danced, blue shifted stars shapeless blurs in the speed of her passage. Atlantis cruised through hyperspace with the majesty of Earth’s old ocean liners, her size impossible to guess in the infinity of space. Her towering spires and thousands of rooms were nothing compared to the vast distances around her. Atlantis glided through hyperspace, her massive engines firing white behind her, shields protecting fragile buildings and occupants from the vacuum.

Behind, the Milky Way galaxy spun like a giant pinwheel, millions of brilliant stars stabbing points of light in the darkness. Atlantis traversed the enormous distance between galaxies, hundreds of thousands of light years vanishing swifter than thought. Even with her enormous hyperdrive, the journey was the work of many days.

It was nine days, Dr. McKay had predicted, from Earth to Lantea, Atlantis’ original home in the Pegasus Galaxy, deserted these two and a half years since they had fled from the Replicator attack. Of all the places their enemies might seek them, they were least likely to look where they were certain Atlantis wasn’t.

Of course, no one person could stay in the command chair that controlled the city’s flight for nine days, not even lost in the piloting trance that the Ancient interfaces fostered. Not even John Sheppard could do that. Lt. Colonel Sheppard had come to Atlantis five and a half years ago at the beginning of the expedition, and the city had come to life at his touch. The City of the Ancients awoke, long-dormant systems coming on slowly when someone with the ATA gene, a descendant of the original builders, came through the Stargate. Atlantis had been left waiting. Though it had waited ten thousand years, humans had returned.

But even Sheppard could not spend nine days in the chair. The Ancients would have designated three pilots, each watching in eight hour shifts, but the humans from Earth did not have that luxury. Sheppard was First Pilot, and Dr. Carson Beckett, a medical doctor originally from Scotland, was Second. Twelve hour shifts were grueling, but at least allowed both men time to eat and sleep.

Five days of the journey gone, 20:00 hours, and Dr. Beckett was in the chair. His eyes were closed, his forehead creased in a faint frown, his arms relaxed on the arms of the chair, his fingers resting lightly on the interfaces. Nearly six years of practice had made him a competent, if reluctant, pilot. And so it was Dr. Beckett who noticed it first.

It was one tiny detail, one anomaly in a datastream of thousands of points, all fed through the chair’s controls and interpreted by the neural interfaces that fed data straight into Beckett’s body, as though all of Atlantis’ enormous bulk was nothing more than the extension of himself.

It felt like…a wobble. Just a very faint wobble, as when driving an auto along the highway you wonder if one of the tires is just a little off. It might be that, or it might be the surface of the road. Nothing is wrong on the dashboard, so you listen but don’t hear anything, and just when you’ve convinced yourself you imagined it entirely, there it is again. A wobble. A very small movement that is wrong.

Perhaps, Beckett thought, if you were borrowing a friend’s car you wouldn’t notice it at all. You’d just think that was how it was. But when it’s your own car, lovingly cared for and maintained every 5,000 miles, you know something is not quite right. Perhaps one tire is a little low. Perhaps you’ve dinted the rim just a tad, and the balance is not entirely even. It’s probably not important. But if you’re the kind of man who keeps your car that way, you know. You notice.

Beneath the blue lights of the control room, Beckett’s eyes opened. The young technician monitoring the power output looked around, surprised. It was very quiet, watching someone fly Atlantis.

His tongue flicked over his lips, moistening them, reminding himself of his own physical body, and then he spoke into the headset he wore. “Control, this is Beckett. I’ve got a wobble.”

There was a long moment of silence, then his radio crackled. “Say it again. You’ve got a what?”

“A wobble,” Beckett said. “I don’t know a better word for it.”

“A wobble.” The voice was that of Dr. Radek Zelenka, the Czech scientist who was, with Dr. McKay, one of the foremost experts on Ancient technology. Certainly he was one of the foremost experts on Atlantis, having spent most of the last five and a half years repairing her systems.

“It doesn’t feel right,” Beckett said. “I don’t know how to put it better, Radek. It feels like a tire about to go off.”

“Atlantis does not have tires, Carson,” Zelenka replied.

“I know it doesn’t.” Beckett looked up toward the ceiling, as though he could see Zelenka in the gateroom many stories above, no doubt bent worriedly over a console, his glasses askew. “That’s what it feels like. That’s how my mind interprets it.”

“He says we have a wobble. Like a flat tire.” Zelenka was talking to someone else. “I do not know. That is what Carson says.”

“A wobble?” That was McKay, the Canadian Chief of Science. “What’s a wobble, Carson?”

“It feels wrong,” Beckett said. “I don’t know how to explain the bloody thing! It feels like there’s something wrong.”

“I am seeing nothing with propulsion,” Zelenka said. Beckett could see how he would say it, his hands roving over the control board, data reflected in his glasses. “Everything is well within the normal operating parameters.”

“I think I would interpret a propulsion problem as an engine light,” Beckett said slowly.

“And a tire is what?” McKay would be putting his head to the side impatiently. “Do you think you can give me engineering, not voodoo? Your vague analogy is next to worthless.”

Lying back in the chair, Beckett rolled his eyes. Five and a half years he’d put up with Rodney bullying him over this damned interface. “Something to do with the hyperdrive?” he ventured.

“The hyperdrive. That’s very informative. The hyperdrive is a major system, Carson. It has literally tens of thousands of components.”

“I don’t know any more than that, all right?” Beckett snapped. “If you want a second opinion, get Sheppard down here and have him take a go at it.”

“He has only been off duty for two hours,” Zelenka said, presumably to McKay. “He is probably still in the mess hall. I can call him.” McKay must have nodded, because his next words were not addressed to Beckett. “Colonel Sheppard to the command chair room. Sheppard to the command chair room.”

He should love being pulled away from his dinner after a twelve hour shift. Beckett felt vaguely guilty about that. He sat up a bare ten minutes later as Sheppard barreled into the room, an open bottle of soft drink in his hand, his dark hair ruffled.

“What’s the problem?” Sheppard said. He couldn’t be too worried if he’d brought along his drink. Soft drinks were rare in Atlantis, since they had to be brought from Earth, and though they’d laid in a limited supply it could be expected to run out soon. Sheppard was unwilling to abandon his short of murder and mayhem.

Beckett smiled ruefully. For all their differences of background and skills, he had developed a considerable respect for Sheppard in their years of working together, a respect he thought was mutual. “Sorry to take you from your dinner. I’ve got an anomaly I can’t pin down.” He sat up, letting the chair come upright, the sticky interfaces disengaging from his fingertips. “It feels like a wobble. You know. When you’ve got a tire about to go.”