Chris Wraight - Dead end

“How long do you think they could last in that climate?” she asked. “Have we run any models?”

Zelenka shook his head. “Not enough data. We have the readings from the MALP, but I don’t know what good it would do to speculate. We can’t reach them. We must wait.”

“Keep running the sensor tests,” she said. “We’re not giving up yet. Let me know if you get anything. I don’t care how small.”

Zelenka nodded.

“Will do,” he said, but his voice was empty.

The team clambered into the cockpit, taking their usual places and strapping in. McKay sat back against the hard seat-back with some pleasure. Sheppard brought up the controls quickly.

“So what happened out there?” said McKay. “Did it go to plan?”

“Another time, Rodney,” said Sheppard wearily. “Just sit back and enjoy the flight.”

With a sudden surge, the Jumper powered smoothly into the air once more. Unlike Rodney’s chaotic ascent, this time it traced a straight line into the storm-driven sky, the power increasing steadily as Sheppard deftly managed the power fluctuations. The Jumper turned in a wide arc and headed back towards the Stargate.

“Coming up on the Stargate now,” said Sheppard. “Anything I should know about, Rodney?”

“Aside from the fact that it might already be at the bottom of a crevasse?”

“Right. Anything useful ?”

“Just keep us near to the ice. At best, it will have sunk further since we were last there. The closer you can hug the ground, the easier our passage will be.”

Sheppard shook his head and dipped the Jumper further towards the planet’s surface. “Sure, piece of cake,” he said.

McKay didn’t reply, but the Jumper noticeably slowed and the altitude continued to fall. In the rare gaps between the driving snow, McKay saw flashes of the ice speeding below them. It was happening. This was the important moment. And there was so much to get right.

“Remember what I told you about the module!” McKay said, aware that getting into the Stargate was only part of their task. “You’ll need to activate it straightaway. A second too late, and we’ll be threading through the anomaly again.”

“Don’t need to remind me,” said Sheppard. “Dialing the gate now. Hold tight folks. We’re going in — see you on the other side.”

McKay screwed his eyes shut, then opened them again. It was hard to decide which way was worse.

The Jumper dropped sharply. They were racing along. Sheppard remained silent, looking at the figures on the HUD intently. Teyla seemed barely conscious and Ronon said nothing.

And then, as if Khost wanted to give them a view to remember it by, the cloud cover broke. They were in the open, hurtling earthwards. The Stargate was directly in front of them, only partly obscured by the tearing flurries of snow and ice, and its surface boiled with the massive contained energies of the event horizon. The ZPM had kicked in. The wormhole was open.

But the power unleashed was doing dangerous things to the ice around it; there were jagged cracks all around the base. The gate itself was still above ground, but only just. As they plunged towards it, dark lines were radiating out across the plain. The Stargate was going down.

“Faster!” McKay yelled. Sheppard didn’t need to be told. As the Stargate tottered on the brink, he poured on the power and the Jumper hurled itself forward. McKay was thrown back in his seat, his heart pounding. Cracks opened, fissures yawned, and the ice floe collapsed.

The Stargate plunged into the abyss.

“We’ve got something!”

Zelenka’s voice cracked with excitement. Around him, scientists scrambled to get at a monitor. Down in the gate room, the landing bay was flooded with light. The event horizon had formed.

“Try to feed power to the link!” cried Zelenka. “I don’t care what readings you’re getting, we need to keep it open!”

The Atlantis squads swung into action. The medical team was already on its way to the gate room. Marines snapped to combat alertness, just in case. But they all knew what was coming through. Or, more accurately, they all knew what they wanted to come through.

Weir arrived, out of breath. “What is it?” she demanded. ”Do you have them?”

“Don’t know yet,” said Zelenka. “But the wormhole is from Dead End, or I’m a Slovak!”

Elizabeth raced over to the balcony and Zelenka turned back to the screen. The numbers were all over the place; this was definitely no normal transit. For a moment it looked as if they would lose the signal. Then it came back. Then it dimmed again.

“Come on, Rodney,” he breathed, gripped by the fluctuating readings. “Come on .”

The top of the Jumper screamed as they hit the falling gate, metal scraping away. It was enough. Though battered and listing, they were inside the event horizon.

“Now!” screamed McKay. “Route the power!”

For a moment, the Jumper viewscreen was filled with a confused pool of energy. It looked horribly like the tunnel of plasma they had seen before.

McKay felt the contents of his stomach rise.

“I’m losing power, Rodney!” shouted Sheppard.

McKay leapt from his seat. “This should be working !” he wailed. “Did you trip the Zelenka module?”

The Jumper swung round hard. Something up ahead was forming. The plasma conduit. Not again.

“What d’you think?” yelled Sheppard. “We can’t survive another trip into that.”

“I know!”

McKay ran his fingers over the module. It was working. Power was being routed. But not enough. Why? It wasn’t fair .

“Here it comes!” warned Sheppard. “We’re gonna hit it…”

“I’ve got it!” cried Rodney. “There it is!”

One of the nodes on the Zelenka module had worked loose. Probably knocked when the Jumper had hit the ice. Rodney slammed it back into place. Immediately, the power feed doubled. “Hit it!”

The plasma tore away. A shimmering curtain of light formed in front of them and they were out. McKay looked nervously out of the front windshield. He didn’t quite know what to expect. Part of him wouldn’t have been surprised to see a wall of ice, another part of him still expected to see the anomaly in all its horrifying glory.

The reality was much more comforting. They were in the gate room on Atlantis. With shaking hands, Sheppard brought the vessel smoothly down on to the solid floor. Once stationary, he turned to the rest of the team. His face was white.

“ Hit it? ” he asked. “What the hell was that?”

“It just seemed, you know, the right thing to say,” said Rodney.

He looked around the cockpit for support. Teyla was out cold and even Ronon wasn’t moving. The full enormity of what they’d just done hit home. He felt queasy.

“Oh, God,” he said, and promptly passed out.

“I’ll see you.”

Sheppard felt confident. Real confident. Rodney was a terrible bluffer. He had trouble hiding his emotions at the best of times, but when there was money at stake his composure left him entirely.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” said McKay, looking a little uncomfortable. “You don’t want to raise the bet just a little?”

Teyla rolled her eyes. She was looking a lot healthier, Sheppard thought. Since the team had returned from Khost, she’d been kept in the infirmary longest. She’d been lucky — the injuries from the rock collapse had been relatively minor. Then again, they’d all been lucky. A few more minutes in the that storm, and it could all have been over. Not something he really wanted to think about.

“Rodney, that will hardly encourage him to raise his stake,” she said. “I am not sure you fully appreciate the subtleties of this game.”