Resolve
Missing Scene from Grace Under Pressure
The vibration of the jumper deck plates under his feet usually exhilarated John; reminded him he was flying. Early on, he'd thought the absolute lack of motion in spite of high speeds, to be pretty cool, but it didn't take long for him to miss the vibrations, the gees; the feel of power tempered by hair trigger control. He'd dialed down the dampeners, just a little, and never went back, in spite of McKay's unrelenting complaints.
McKay.... Damn it!
Today, he didn't find much comfort in dampeners, gees or anything else.
He'd found himself in the jumper bay, almost without realizing it, minutes after Griffin's mayday blared on Atlantis' communications system. John's command for Lorne and several other pilots to meet him there, was almost instinctive. He'd been in the air first, barely clearing the receding bay doors, Lorne and the rest behind him and scant minutes after Jumper Six had fallen off their radar.
John looked down at the white capped water passing in a blur under the jumper before squinting at the HUD and making a slight course adjustment. They had Jumper Six's flight plan but it was a big damned ocean and if Six had deviated even a little from their projected path….
He sighed and tapped open communications. "Team One, this is Sheppard. Feeding the search pattern to you now." He held his course as the other five jumpers veered off, fanning out over the horizon.
"Jumper One this is Atlantis." Elizabeth's voice came over the radio.
"Atlantis, this is Jumper One. What's the status on that second search team?" John answered, his gaze methodically refocusing back and forth between the HUD and the ocean view behind it.
"In the air now, John," Elizabeth answered. "We're still trying to hail Jumper Six. No luck yet."
John glanced at his watch and guessed the time since the mayday at about fifteen minutes. His gut twisted, but he tuned it out. "Copy that. Let me know the second you make contact."
There was a long pause on the radio and John didn't have to ask Elizabeth what she was thinking, he knew all too well. There was a good chance they'd never make contact and that Griffin and McKay were dead already. He shook his head. They're not, damn it!
"Will do, John," Elizabeth answered finally, "Atlantis out."
John eased forward on the controls, descending closer to the ocean's surface. Through his mental connection, he had the HUD fine tuned to a gnat's hair to look for anything that could be a sign of Jumper Six but his eyes were still what he trusted the most. In spite of all the technical advancements in aviation, both on Earth and what was discovered in Pegasus, to him, his instincts and his senses were his single best assets.
His sharp eyes stayed alert, but his mind was free to wander some. Griffin's tense mayday as it blared over the command channel, echoed in his head, as did the foreboding sound of static that followed it. At that moment, helpless to do anything but run for Ops, he wondered if he could've prevented the crash. That if he'd been piloting, something… anything he'd gained from his experience flying jumpers could've made the difference. Griffin was a hell of a good pilot, that's why he'd been flying, but John had flown jumpers longer than anyone and maybe that ounce of extra experience could've made a difference. He'd flown the damned thing in dozens of circles around the city before authorizing a trip to the mainland and back, but he should've made that trip too. He should've never passed it off to anyone, regardless of how good a pilot they were.
John sighed as he again focused on the HUD. It should've been me.
He pushed away the pointless thought. He could berate himself all day but it wouldn't change what was happening and right now kicking himself in the pants got in the way of finding his friends.
John's racing mind stuck on that thought like glue. Friend. Sometimes, he had to wonder just how he and Rodney had managed to become friends in the first place when there were so many times early on that he just wanted to throttle Rodney to within an inch of his life. But the more they worked together, the more he realized how much of Rodney's blustering was actually a front. John was convinced that for all of Rodney's arrogance, in some ways, the doctor was one of the most insecure people he'd ever met. That realization had shocked John the first time he'd had the epiphany, but he came to understand that if you managed to not kill him long enough to get past the posturing, Rodney had a lot of good qualities too. Sure, he was smart… okay a genius, but he also was incredibly loyal to the few people that gained his trust, imaginative and even funny in his own cynical and scathing way.
Where John had thought Rodney and him… okay Rodney and anyone was like mixing gasoline and matches, he'd come to realize that he and Rodney were actually more like chocolate and peanut butter; good at what they do on their own, but working together they were that much better. John kept Rodney from having an aneurysm from what he swore was the idiocy of everyone around him, and Rodney kept John on his toes. John was never one to tout his MENSA intelligence, but quietly he did relish meeting and working with the rare people that could challenge… really challenge his mind. Doctor Rodney McKay was one of those people.
John scanned the water, as he shored up his optimism. The thought that Rodney and Griffin were dead, was a thought he wouldn't allow himself to have. In a situation where you didn't have anything else to go on, sometimes optimism was your strongest ally. But even his optimism took a beating in the face of the stone cold facts of reality. The jumper could be anywhere and searching for it out here gave new meaning to the phrase 'needle in a haystack.' If they were too far under the surface, not even the HUD was guaranteed to spot them and if the HUD didn't see them, he sure as hell wouldn't see them with the naked eye.
John's brows furrowed. Would the jumper keep sinking? If they had any power, could they stabilize and keep from descending? He shook his head slightly. If they had power, they'd be answering Atlantis' hails. He had to assume that both McKay and Griffin were unconscious or they had no power. Either way, they wouldn't be stopping their descent. The third option: McKay and Griffin were already dead, he still refused to consider, but it was getting harder and harder to push from his mind, as time slowly passed and Jumper Six remained silent to hails.
John adjusted his heading slightly, moving into his next search grid. How much pressure could the jumper stand? How deep could it go before it imploded? His gaze refocused for a moment on the windshield itself. It looked like glass, felt like glass but the geek brigade on Atlantis insisted it wasn't. In fact, they were only beginning to understand the complex alloy used to construct the jumper windshields and most of the city's windows, but it wasn't glass. So how much could it take?
John sighed. How much time did they have?
This time his sigh was deep and loud, frustration evident. The blues of the ocean would be pretty, if the situation wasn't so bad. In so many ways, Lantea reminded him of Earth and the ocean was no different. The breakers off the north side of the mainland gave him killer waves to surf, and they'd even seen sea life along the shores and through the brilliant reefs that bordered the southern tip of the continent. But, little things had a way of reminding him he wasn't on Earth. Things like 29 hour days, 436 day years and some downright dangerous feline predators they'd met, the hard way, on the mainland.
He let his eyes focus on the darker blues of deep water.
Earth was mostly water, but Lantea even more so. Two continents roughly the size of North America, and the rest, water. Frozen at the poles, but still water with oceans that had points deeper than anything Earth had in comparison. Great chasms that their instruments couldn't even get a read on. As far as the depth was concerned, they had to take the Ancients' word for it from the oceanographic records in the database.
With oceans like that, what else lived down there?
For a moment, he thought about The Abyss and given Pegasus' track record, he wouldn't put it past this place to have an entire society of aliens living at the bottom of the ocean. His moment of dark humor passed. In Pegasus, people sometimes died in the weirdest damned ways. It was a fact of life that drove him near crazy sometimes. Guns, bad guys and badass aliens he could handle, but weird shadow beings, experiments gone awry, killer storms and any other crazy, unpredictable hazard kept him awake at nights. Now, he honestly wondered what the crippled jumper would face in the depths of Lantea's oceans. Some sort of funky sea monster that would turn it into a quick meal? If it wasn't the fate of two of his people he was contemplating, John might have found the situation funny… in a weird, off the wall, Pegasus sort of way because only in Pegasus would you get eaten, jumper and all, by an alien Loch Ness Monster.
But nothing about that prospect was humorous to him whatsoever.
His thoughts shifted as his mind turned over the problem. If Six was powerless and disabled, how exactly would they be able to rescue McKay and Griffin? It's not like the jumper could pull itself out and with the Daedalus between galaxies on the way back to Earth, beaming was out of the question. So he'd have to find a way to grab onto the jumper and pull them to the surface.
Crap. They didn't have any sort of set up that was even remotely capable of doing that. Okay, John nodded to himself, time to improvise. It's not like they didn't have a city full of brilliant scientists and all their equipment. John blinked quickly as he mentally started reviewing through what he knew was in the city's inventory. He had no idea what he'd think of, or find in the city stores, or even how they'd get to McKay and Griffin, once they even managed to find them, but he'd think of something. He had to.
In his life, John Sheppard had always been personable. He knew how to be friendly and liked to think he could at least get along with most people. But true, close friends were actually a rarity for him. Somehow, Doctor Rodney McKay had worked his way onto that very short list and John wasn't going to give up on him, not now. Not that he'd give up on Griffin either because he never, ever left people behind and never took them for dead, until someone presented him with a body. Through covert ops and wars, it was an attitude he'd never lost and he wasn't about to let Pegasus steal it from him either. But more, Rodney was – in some bizarre sort of way – his buddy, and John had never had a lot of those.
"Jumper One this is Atlantis!" Chuck's urgent voice pulled John from his thoughts.
"Atlantis, this is Jumper One," he responded immediately.
"We've made contact with Dr. McKay and Captain Griffin. They're twelve hundred feet underwater but alive."
John straightened in his chair, adrenaline sharpening his senses even more. "Give me the coordinates of their location," he demanded.
"We don't have those, John," Elizabeth's voice replaced Chuck. "And… we've lost contact. Our last communication with Rodney was that the windshield was buckling under the water pressure."
John clenched his teeth and glared at the horizon for a moment before banking the jumper into a tight one eighty and gunning it back towards Atlantis. The rear compartment of Jumper Six could possibly withstand the water and if McKay and Griffin made it there, they had a chance. "Find them," he snapped not particularly caring who he was speaking to, and knowing that Elizabeth would take it in stride. "I'm on my way back to Atlantis. Recall the search teams until we know where to look. Sheppard out."
"Copy that, Atlantis out," Elizabeth answered.
The adrenaline fueled his thoughts and as he turned the problem over and over in his head, a plan started coalescing. They were still alive, he wouldn't consider anything else and he'd make sure to get them back.
For Pocus' Grace Under Pressure prompts of:
* My Buddy
* Peanut Butter and Chocolate
*Should've been me
* Time and Pressure
* Sea Monster trouble
Along with the question during a discussion about Grace Under Pressure of:
"The jumper was off the radar for an hour. Do you think there were jumpers already searching the area for them? Was John out there?"
I decided it would be fun to try to incorporate all the prompts, not just a couple of them. They're all in this story. :)