Chris Wraight - Dead end

“Keep going,” he urged. “We stop, we’re dead.”

“Hate to admit it,” Sheppard shouted, “but he’s right!”

Teyla grimaced. Her leg was agonizing and her headache pounding, but for as long as there was a shred of power in her muscles she would keep going.

They toiled onwards. Ronon stayed at her side, a powerful buttress against the tearing gale. Visibility was down to a few meters and they could only walk in halting, difficult steps. With every passing minute, more snow piled up around them. What had originally reached their calves now rose above their knees. Soon it would be impassable.

She clenched her teeth, taking some comfort from Ronon’s massive presence. But the cold was terrifying, she could feel its bitter fingers clenching around her heart, and she realized that the most terrifying thing on Khost was not the Banshees, but the planet itself.

Khost was their enemy now, and like some malevolent intelligence it seemed bent on their destruction.

His stomach doing acrobatics, McKay leapt into the pilot’s seat and stared at the controls. His fingers raced across the panel and a series of lights flashed on the display. With a brief flicker, the HUD sprang up, and power surged into the drive systems.

There were more resounding cracks beneath him and the Jumper slid forward. Even without the use of the monitors, he could sense the acceleration. He was being pitched headlong into the ice. His mind racing, McKay tried to recall the procedure for a reverse take-off.

“What’s the command, dammit?” he cried out loud. “Concentrate!”

He grabbed more controls, willing his mind to make the connection. He’d done it before. He could do it again. It was just a matter of making the connection.

The Jumper continued to slide. There were more creaks from the structure. Snow cascaded across the viewscreen.

“Come on!” he cried, panic rising in his throat. “Fly, damn you!”

He screwed his eyes up, grabbed the control panel and bent his whole mind towards the link nodes on the Jumper system. It had to work!

Nothing. The slide into oblivion accelerated. He could sense the ice closing around him. So this was death. This was the end. He had failed. It was over. There was no point fighting.

His mind relaxed.

And with a stuttering blast, the engines kicked-in. The dampeners were still only semi-operational and McKay was thrown forward as the Jumper burst out from the ice. He had a vague impression of a heavy slew of snow being shed from the front of the vessel, then some of the monitors cleared and data began to pour across the HUD. He was airborne. He was moving. He couldn’t see a thing.

“Not dead…” he breathed, his heart hammering. “Really not dead. That’s a start. Now, what the hell am I doing?”

Leaning forward in the chair, he tried to get his bearings. He needed to get everything on a level for long enough to figure out where he was going and what he wanted to do. The fact that he hadn’t flown straight into a mountainside was a minor relief. Avoiding plunging into the ground was something he’d have to work on.

He ran his fingers over the display before him and the HUD finally began to give him some useful information. The Jumper had stabilized at low altitude and was cruising roughly north-west. That was lucky. Gingerly, McKay tried to adjust the course. The craft skidded wildly off-center and he was thrown over to his left. Fighting against the controls, he brought things back to equilibrium. The wind didn’t make it easy, nor did the almost total lack of visibility. His palms were sweaty, blood pounding in his ears. Between snatched breaths, he briefly had time to wonder if this was the most terrified he had ever been.

It was at that point that things began to improve.

“C’mon,” he snapped out-loud. “Would you want Carter to see you like this? Get a grip, man. You’ve made the link. Use it!”

Very slowly, the readings on the HUD started to make sense. The short-range sensors were clearly operating, and a pseudo-map of the terrain was scrolling across the display. Just like using a flight simulator, he found he could navigate pretty well using that. Looking out of the windshield was a dead loss; there was nothing but flying snow hurling itself against the screen.

“Right, now where are we going?” he said. “Concentrate! Sheppard left the coordinates. We just need to retrieve them.”

Keeping one eye firmly on the motion control readings, he scanned across the computer panels in front of him. The options were pretty complicated, but after a moment’s scrabbling around he managed to pull the coordinates out of the system.

“Good,” he said. “You’re doing well. She’d be proud of you. Now, how do you get this thing to follow them?”

That took a bit more doing. Applying the coordinates Sheppard had left in the central computer turned out to be no easy matter, especially while trying to keep the Jumper airborne in the middle of the perfect storm. In the end, the best he could do was to superimpose the destination point over the HUD’s contoured terrain map and fly toward it. There was none of the easy control that Sheppard enjoyed; he was trying to make a connection across badly faulty equipment. McKay tentatively maneuvered in what he hoped was the right direction, and the Jumper slewed across the sky like a drunkard. Despite its robust self-righting design, it was buffeted by the wind and hammered by the heavily falling sleet.

“Come on !” yelled McKay, battling against the controls with mounting frustration. Now that the imminent danger of death has passed, his irritation at not being able to control the craft had assumed priority.

“That’s better,” he growled, as the Jumper started to head along roughly the right course. The landscape scrolled across the HUD increasingly smoothly and McKay found that he was getting the hang of things. With a slight qualm, he fed more power to the drive systems and felt the vessel respond. He was now traveling at cruising speed. But it was pretty bumpy.

“Right, we should be nearly there,” mumbled McKay, staring at the readings in front of him. “They were walking in heavy snow and this thing can travel very, very fast. So, they should be anywhere from here onwards. Keep your eyes peeled.”

There was no way of gauging distance, no way of telling where they were. All that was real was the pain and the cold. Only mechanical instinct kept Teyla moving, but as her body slowly froze even that began to give out. The last shreds of energy faded away.

“I am weakening, Ronon,” she gasped. There was no point in keeping the truth from him.

The Satedan pulled her forward, plunging into the snow. “Keep moving.” His voice betrayed him. His strength was near its end too, and if Ronon failed…

Ahead of them, Sheppard fell. He was little more than a shadow in the snow, but the cord that bound them together tugged, pitching Teyla forward. In a heap, all three of them tumbled together. The snow enveloped them, blocking some of the wind.

It was a blessing to stop moving, to stop fighting.

“Get up!” Ronon growled, floundering in the snow. But he didn’t make it to his feet.

The pain was too much. The cold was too much.

“I’m sorry,” said Sheppard, his voice little more than a hoarse croak. “Guess I got this one wrong, guys.”

And above them the storm howled a mocking cry of victory.

“So where the hell are they?” muttered McKay as he slowed and the Jumper and tried to bring it around in a loop. According to the HUD, he was over the designated coordinates, but the monitor he’d assigned to display life-sign readings remained stubbornly blank.

A new, chilling thought occurred to him. What if Sheppard’s plan had failed? What if Sanctuary had turned out to be some awful trap after all, or they had fallen into a crevasse on the way over?