Chris Wraight - Dead end

“I’m guessing this was why the Ancients decided to use a replacement!” shouted Zelenka from the bay below.

McKay scowled. He could swear Zelenka was enjoying this. Despite the best efforts of a dozen technicians, they were still nowhere near getting the beefed-up Stargate mechanism to work and the ideas had started to run dry.

“OK, let’s try again with the re-routed backup supply,” said McKay over the intercom. “It’s all about timing. We only need a short burst.”

The figures on his monitor reset themselves, and down in the gate room the technicians set about arranging the equipment again.

McKay looked at the schematics one more time. The issue wasn’t just raw power — now that the ZPM was installed, they had plenty to spare for the operation of the gate. The problem was the efficiency of supply, ensuring that the Stargate’s complex and subtle mechanics were fed what they needed when they needed it. Opening an event horizon was an art that the Atlantis team still barely understood, and it was clear that the existing Stargate had definite limits. Trying to keep everything within the necessary parameters was like trying to herd cats. In the dark. With oven gloves.

“OK, Rodney,” came Zelenka’s voice over the intercom. “We’re done. Run the sequence when you’re ready.”

McKay took a deep breath and looked carefully at the command scripts he’d developed. He made a few minor alterations, changing the order in which certain items were run, and then packaged the lot for execution.

“Get your people out of the way,” he told Zelenka. “Here we go again. If this doesn’t work, we’ll have to start over.”

The gate room cleared. Once the area was sealed, McKay hit the Enter key on his terminal, and the power sequence activated. Lights danced across the monitor as data was relayed back to the command center. Huge amounts of energy surged down the power cables, each burst timed to what McKay hoped was perfection. A few nanoseconds apart, the carefully placed units powered up. For a moment, very little happened. Then the red lines appeared on the monitor again.

“Oh, please…” groaned McKay, feeling the empty sensation of failure in his stomach. “This should be working .”

Then the red lines cleared. There was activity in one of the compensators and a series of lights flicked on across the control terminal. With a shudder the gate stuttered into life, the familiar watery surface of the event horizon tearing across the circular aperture. Strange readings lurked at the edges, but those could be tweaked. It had worked!

“Yes!” McKay punched the air in delight. “I knew we were getting close! Oh, I’m good. I’m really good.”

“Congratulations, Rodney,” said Zelenka over the intercom. He sounded genuinely impressed, albeit grudgingly. “I didn’t think we’d squeeze that last bit out.”

McKay did his best to calm down. Victory was always sweet; there was no point milking the moment too much.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” he said. “Now we need to tie this down and do a few more tests. We’ve shown it can work, but Elizabeth will want a repeatable demonstration. I don’t want to let her down.”

“Very good,” said Zelenka, his voice breaking up slightly over the comm link. “I just hope all of this is worth it. You still haven’t convinced me we should be going there, whatever Elizabeth thinks.”

“Well, thankfully you’re not in charge of this installation, and she is,” said McKay impatiently. “Is the MALP in position?”

“It is. Sending it through now.”

Zelenka and his team stood clear as the cumbersome MALP crawled towards the shimmering gate, servos whining as it disappeared into the event horizon. Immediately, more red lights flashed across McKay’s console.

“What’s that?” said Zelenka, concerned. “We’ve got some strange readings down here.”

“Ignore it,” snapped McKay, concentrating on the data stream beginning to emerge from the wormhole. “It’s just the power drain from the extra mass in the gate buffers. It’ll clear up.”

The MALP was gone, sucked into the wormhole and hurled thousands of light years distant in a fraction of a second. The readings on the monitor went back to normal.

“It’s through,” said McKay over the intercom. “We’ll be getting telemetry any second.”

He swiveled in his chair to look at the monitor assigned to the video feed. The screen was a snowstorm; clearly the MALP hadn’t begun relaying yet.

“What a mess!” said Zelenka, suddenly appearing at McKay’s shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” said McKay, starting to get worried. “We’ll get something through soon.” It would be just his luck, after all this effort, that there was a problem with the MALP’s transmitters.

Zelenka clapped him hard on the shoulder. “Look again,” he said, enjoying the moment. “That’s a real snowstorm.”

McKay screwed his eyes up and studied the feed more closely. The lines of white and gray were momentarily broken. There was an fleeting image of a vast, open space. A glacier, or perhaps a snowfield of some kind. Then the streaks of snow and ice returned. The camera was rocking badly. The MALP had been sent into the middle of a storm. It looked absolutely filthy.

“Atmospheric readings?” asked Zelenka.

“Usual oxygen/nitrogen mix. Within standard Ancient parameters. Perfectly breathable.”

“And the temperature?”

McKay took a look down the screen at the flickering figures being transmitted by the MALP. He let out a low whistle.

“ Cold . Very cold. That’s odd.”

Zelenka gave him a quizzical look. “I don’t see why. The Czech Republic is cold. Everywhere the Ancients seeded doesn’t have to look the same. These are planets we’re talking about, not movie sets.”

McKay gave him a withering look. “Yes, but the similarity we’ve noticed between most of the places we’ve been to is no accident. Surprisingly enough, the Ancients didn’t want their populations freezing to death within a generation. So they made their homes as pleasant as possible. And this is way outside the normal envelope.”

Zelenka sucked his teeth thoughtfully. “But habitable?”

McKay studied the readings.

“Yeah, I’d say so. Just chilly.” He looked suddenly worried. “I’m really not that good in the cold. It’s a family thing. My circulation’s bad.”

Zelenka ignored him. The signal from the MALP began to break up. “You’re not the only one. We’re losing the MALP.”

“We can’t be losing the MALP,” snapped McKay, frowning. “Those things are tough. It’s got to be a transmission problem. In fact, now I look at them, there’s something really strange about these wormhole integrity indicators…”

The video feed sheered into nothing, and the data readings gave out soon afterwards. McKay looked at the empty screens, suddenly perturbed. The euphoria of getting a MALP to the mysterious gate address had dissolved into a nagging worry about what it had found.

“God, that place looks horrible,” he breathed, half to himself.

“Then good luck!” said Zelenka, grinning at him. “You’ll need it. This is one mission I’m happy to miss.”

Sheppard digested the information on the screens carefully. There were a lot of numbers he didn’t understand, but he could read a temperature gauge. The planet they’d all started to refer to as “Dead End” didn’t sound that inviting. Teyla and Ronon looked similarly thoughtful. Weir was downright skeptical.

Having finished his demonstration, McKay leaned back in his chair and looked at the others clustered around him in the Operations Center. He looked genuinely torn between his desire to see what the Ancients had been up to and his dislike for the expected conditions.