Chris Wraight - Dead end

He sighed, and stomped through the open bulkhead to the cockpit. Sheppard was sitting in the pilot’s seat, aimlessly trying a few controls.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nada. Zilch. This baby’s going nowhere.”

McKay gave him a wintry smile. “This endless positivity is really helping. Honestly, you should think about becoming a motivational speaker or something. You’d be a blast.”

“Hey!” Sheppard swung around in the seat and scowled at him. “Just what is it with you this morning? You’ve been even more grouchy than normal, which is saying something.”

“ Grouchy? ”

“You heard me. Grouchy .”

“Oh, let me see,” McKay snapped. “We’re stuck on a god-forsaken rock on the edge of the galaxy with no supplies and no power. We can’t send as much as a shopping-list back through the gate to Atlantis because the gate’s been served-up well-done and we’ve got the only DHD on the whole damn planet and that’s toast too. The people here are about to freeze themselves to death because they’re too stupid to look for somewhere else to live. It’s freezing cold. And I’ve got massive indigestion. So, yes, I’m not exactly the happiest I’ve ever been. But thanks a lot for asking.”

McKay picked up a loose circuit board and started poking at it.

“Oh, give it a rest, Rodney,” Sheppard snapped. “If these people hadn’t been here waiting for us, we’d be deep frozen by now. And if we can’t generate enough power to get back in the Jumper, Elizabeth will send the Daedalus . You’re worrying over nothing.”

“Am I?” The circuit board suddenly gave a fizz, and a shower of sparks burst from the housing. “Dammit!” McKay yanked his hand back. His mood was getting worse all the time, and Sheppard’s admonishment hadn’t helped. “The Daedalus isn’t available, which you’d know if you’d looked at the schedule more carefully. We’re on our own. And maybe I wouldn’t mind that if, for once, it wasn’t me in charge of getting us back.”

“You know, Rodney, you’ve really got the knack of looking on the dark side of life.”

“Well that might have something to do with being stuck here with a bunch of primitives who haven’t mastered the basic techniques of Jell-O making yet, and who seem to think the height of architectural achievement is a bunch of caves with — ”

Sheppard’s eyes widened and he shot a warning look towards the back of the Jumper. With a sudden lurch of embarrassment in the pit of his stomach, McKay turned around. Aralen was standing in the open bay, observing.

“Greetings,” the Forgotten leader said, unperturbed. “I trust things are going well?”

McKay felt his face redden, despite the cold. Why could he never learn to keep his mouth shut?

“Ah, Foremost,” he said. ”Didn’t see ya there. Did you, ah, hear much of the conversation?”

The Forgotten walked towards them, looking at the interior of the Jumper with intent interest. “I assumed you were discussing the means by which to restore your vessel.”

Sheppard gave Rodney a look which said you got away with that one . “Something like that,” he said. “We’ve just made a start.”

Aralen stared at the cockpit viewscreen with undisguised wonder; there was little glass on Khost and it must have looked like something out of the legendary past. “I am glad you’re moving toward a solution,” he said. “Surely this machine will soon be operational.”

Feeling he needed to claw back some dignity, McKay put on his most authoritative voice. “Perhaps,” he said. “There’s relatively little structural damage, but there are some important systems which might take a while to bring back on line. One problem we have is power. We don’t have any. And I fear that your Starga… — sorry, portal — might have been damaged by whatever it was we did in that wormhole. I’ll need to look into it. Whether it’s the distance, or some other problem, I don’t know yet.”

Aralen looked troubled at McKay’s downbeat assessment. Perhaps the old man thought that the visitors should be capable of fixing anything. Rodney wasn’t convinced that Aralen had entirely given up on idea that they were Ancients.

“That sounds grave,” the leader of the Forgotten said. “May we help?”

McKay couldn’t help but let a sarcastic smile slip through. “Not unless you’ve got a ZPM,” he said. “Or maybe a stash of ZPMs?”

“Forgive me, I don’t understand…”

Sheppard coughed significantly.

“Not unless you’ve got access to more power,” said McKay. “And from what I’ve seen — with all due respect — you don’t. So we may be here a while.”

Aralen nodded. “Very well. Then I will leave you to your work. But if there is anything else…”

McKay was prepared to give him his version of a polite refusal, when suddenly there was a grinding sound deep beneath them. It echoed inside the Jumper bay ominously.

“What the…?” started Sheppard, rising from his seat.

It sounded like someone was using a circular saw on metal, directly below. Aralen looked around, his face stricken with panic. The Jumper started to rock and McKay grabbed on to a bulkhead, heart hammering.

Then, as suddenly as it had started, the noise ceased. The Jumper settled back into position, listing a little further to port and embedded deeper in the snow.

“And that was?” said McKay, his voice shaky.

Sheppard looked at Aralen. “Felt like a tremor,” he said. “You get earthquakes here?”

Aralen, recovering himself, sank back against the wall of the Jumper cabin. “From time to time,” he said. “Some of the ice is less stable than the rest. Perhaps your descent has disturbed something.” He looked troubled. “But they have been increasing in recent months. Another of the many curses we have had to endure.”

“Oh, great,” said McKay, glancing towards the heavens. “Now we’re on thin ice. And I mean that, of course, entirely literally .”

“Sure puts a new spin on things,” Sheppard agreed, clearly uneasy. “If this thing disappears beneath the ice, then I start getting worried. We’re gonna have to work quicker.”

McKay shook his head bitterly. “And by we , you mean me , I take it?”

“Just get working, Rodney. If we lose the Jumper, you’ll be eating buffalo for a lot longer than you’re gonna like.”

The wind tore from the east. It was unrelenting. Despite the heavy furs, Ronon felt his legs begin to go numb. He had pulled his hood down as far as it would go, and still the chill air found its way under his collar. His fingers had long since lost most of their feeling. He wondered how useful he would be once the hunting party reached its destination. He stamped as he walked, trying to generate some blood flow. He was tightening up, and if that continued he would be worse than useless once the action began.

They’d been walking for over an hour. In the clear daylight, Ronon could see that the Forgotten settlement had been built in the center of a wide, near-circular depression. The land was broken and rocky, ideal for delving their subterranean dwellings. The going was treacherous, and would have been near-impossible had it not been for the experienced guides. Pristine snow-drifts hid knife-sharp rows of rocks or bottomless crevasses. Orand had pointed these out to Ronon as they had passed them, regaling him with stories of lost travelers blundering to their deaths in the unforgiving wastes. That had, of course, been in the days when there had been travelers abroad in Khost. Now, none went across the snowfields unless they had important business. The conditions had just become too dangerous.

From those lower regions, the hunting party had ascended narrow and winding paths and emerged on to a high plateau. The effort of climbing up to the highlands had restored much of Ronon’s body warmth, but once out on to the exposed terrain the true meaning of cold had become apparent. The wind moaned and rolled across the flat, featureless plains with no interruptions. In the far distance, Ronon could see the low outline of what might have been mountains. Otherwise, there was nothing. Just a huge, flat, empty field of dazzling white ice stretching in every direction. It looked like a vision of some frigid hell. As he trudged along, willing his body to cope with the frozen temperatures, he wondered how anything could possibly survive in such a place.