How it should have been
Author: Pajus
I would like to thank Rosehawk for her betaing and support. Without her, this story would be full of spelling errors. Thank you.
Adrift - 1st story
Rodney tried not to show it, but he was scared. The city began collapsing the shield, because the lone ZPM didn't have enough power to supply it with the proper amount of energy. All the teams working on shutting the city down have reported their presence within the central spire of Atlantis and Rodney could now finally enter the command to collapse the shield to protect only the central spire. The only thing that made him wonder now was 'why did the Ancients put in a safeguard that prevents any alternations to the shield's size unless a fatal failure was imminent'? He managed to reveal the safeguard and disable it just as the first teams reported completion of their respective tasks. "The shield is what keeps the air from escaping into space and once it fails, there is no way we can possibly survive." Rodney thought to himself as he pressed the 'Enter' button and watched the command prompt coming to life, executing commands he wrote into the prepared script.
And that's when he finally realized the true purpose behind the safeguard's existence. The shield indeed kept the air inside.
The fluent collapsing of the shield herded all molecules of air from the city into the central spire. Some windows in the control room were already broken, but even that wasn't enough for the air that tried to equalize its pressure between the outside and the inside of the central spire. The resulting implosions sent glass fragments all over the place, cutting those, who were not injured by the first wave of glass fragments when the Asuran beam hit the control room earlier that day. It was quite ironic, that the increased pressure prevented the new wounds from bleeding, as it pressed the blood back into his body, but that was the only good thing about it. The air pressure increased from 17 to a crushing 2700 pounds on square inch in less than four seconds. The whole expedition felt like tossed out of a submarine into a depth of nearly six thousand feet without any preparations.
The sudden increase of pressure made his eyeballs implode and tore his eardrums away, rendering Rodney blind deaf at the same time, but that wasn't the worst thing about it. The same increase of pressure crushed his bones and reduced his body into a pile of jelly-like matter. The tendency of all gases to increase their temperature when compressed would give the IOA an even harder time explaining the deaths to their relatives. Rodney's modification in shield size increased the temperature of the air within the central spire to a level that set their clothes and hair ablaze. The increase in temperature stopped at about 2700 degrees Farenheit – the melting point of the Ancient control crystals.
When the control crystals both in the shield generators and the computers that governed them melted, the shield finally failed and the air exploding out of the central spire took what remained of the expedition members in the control room and threw them like an invisible hand into the frozen depths of space. The entire Atlantis expedition died ten seconds after Rodney pressed the 'Enter' button.
A few minutes later, Atlantis hit the asteroid field. The first few asteroid hits caused all of the six piers to break away from the central structure of Atlantis. Within moments, the central spire hit a large asteroid like a dart hits a target. The impact crushed whatever remained of the central spire and destroyed all remains of the dead bodies within. The debris field that used to be the city of the Ancients stopped after a few more asteroid impacts.
When the Apollo arrived a few hours later, their sensors could see no difference between the asteroids and the pieces that used to be the most advanced city in known universe. Colonel Carter checked the scanners twice – just like she did in every jump that day – but didn't find anything out of the ordinary. A few minutes later, the Apollo disappeared in the hyperspace window in a desperate effort to find Atlantis.
They say that Jurij Gagarin wasn't the first man in space, but the poor guy, who was sent there before didn't have enough faith in the Communist ideology to hold his breath when his life support gave up on him and so he was forgotten. The IOA has decided to turn all members of the Atlantis expedition into their own version of this poor guy. The mere existence of Atlantis and the people who used to work there for three years was buried under an impenetrable layer of statements like 'Top secret' and 'Eyes only' and forgotten forever – like all appalling failures are.
AN: The melting point of the Ancient control crystals is my wild guess, so any intel on that would be most appreciated. Everything else is based on a calculation of actual physical laws.