Stargate Atlantis: Jokers Wild
"Colonel Sheppard, copy? Sir? Colonel Sheppard, do you read?"
John Sheppard ignored the summons, the questions. He snarled wordlessly at the voice as he flew the Puddle Jumper higher, higher and higher still until at last he broke atmosphere and was above the planet. Soon the city of Atlantis was lost to him, a mere silver speck on an ocean of blue. It shone like a diamond amid a sea of sapphire until it disappeared from view.
He lost himself in the moment, in the sheer joy of flying and the endless blackness of space. Stars twinkled but they were distant specks against the awesome vastness of nothing that surrounded him and cradled him, as if to separate him from the mournful city beneath him. There were no human emotions up here, no human concerns, only the emptiness of space and the cold, cold stars.
It had only been a few days but the population was still grieving, as what was to be expected. John had needed to get away, if only for a few hours, leaving the burden of command and the mantle of responsibility while he cleared his mind and tried to move past the tragedy.
The tragedy of Evan Lorne's untimely death tainted every thought, every emotion.
A light flashed in the gloom, attracting his attention. His instruments flickered and a warning chimed in the spaceship. John veered towards the strange configuration in the sky, trying to get a reading, any kind of reading but the controls were going haywire. Then it was gone. Darkness resumed and John thought he had imagined it.
Perhaps the guilt and grief were playing tricks on his mind.
The light flashed again, a jagged cut across the vastness of space. Like a solar flare except the sun was on the other side of the planet and there were no other larger stars in this vicinity. Just to be sure John consulted the star chart and found that he was correct. He stared at the light as it grew in intensity, in size, a steak of bright against the darkness.
It made him see double and he had to look away to clear his vision.
He activated the HUD but it was a jumble of algorithms that even McKay wouldn't understand, at first. There were equations and estimations of duration and size and time of all things which made no sense to John. He found himself wishing that Rodney was with him.
As if hearing his thoughts the physicist's voice came over the radio. "Sheppard, do you read? I'm getting a huge spike in energy directly in your path! It's a massive…tearing the space…quantum mechanics like the last…hole in the wall and you need to get away from…" His voice was intercut by static.
"Yeah, I noticed! Trying to veer aft but it's pulling me in like a tractor beam!" John shouted as the ship began to whine in protest. John was grabbing onto the controls in a vain effort to avoid the bright slash across space. The ship was being yanked towards it so hard that John was almost being hauled out of his seat as the g-forces were tearing at the ship's inertia dampeners.
One of the drive pods perilously rattled against the hull.
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"Sheppard! John! OW!" Rodney McKay put a hand to his ear as the static squealed and vibrated painfully on his eardrum. He slammed his hand onto the console. "I need to know what the hell that thing is now!" He fingered his sore ear. It was still ringing.
"It's a massive disturbance of interstellar space," Radek Zelenka informed, fingers flying over the keyboard. A screen was filling with a display of space. A tiny dot that represented John's ship was moving straight towards a large, angled space of white.
"I know that! What is it? No! What is it not?"
"What?"
"What it's not!" Rodney snapped.
"It's not a Hive Ship or a rogue Stargate or any kind of enemy spaceship," Radek stated, now that he understood the question. "I can track them in real time…but time…time is accelerating at the heart of the, the disturbance." Radek adjusted his glasses but the baffling readings remained the same.
"Time or space or both?" Rodney asked, freeing his ear to type commands. "Long-range sensors are going off-line because of the surge of energy output in that one area."
"Do we need to get Jumpers in the air?" Richard Woolsey asked, joining them. "Is the colonel in any danger?" He eyed the screen. It was a jumble of information that he couldn't decipher.
"Not yet, and yes possibly," Rodney answered, moving to another computer.
"There's no danger to the city, is there?" Richard asked. He glanced out the window. The sky was blue, the sun was shining and the waters rolled peacefully.
"No. The spatial distortion is far enough from the planet that it won't affect us," Radek answered. "I'm not sure about the time. Rodney?"
Rodney ignored the question. A suspicion was forming as he scanned the readings and kept glancing at the chart. He kept glancing at the tiny dot that represented John as it got closer and closer to the massive light wave that was about to swallow him whole.
Richard looked from one scientist to the other. "Let's have a rescue team on standby, just in case." He stepped to the comm unit. "Major Reynolds, please report to the Jumper bay with your team and remain on standby." Richard stepped back to stand behind the two physicists. "You're sure it's not a Hive ship?"
"Positive. It's not a ship at all," Radek assured, but he didn't seem relieved by this knowledge.
"Getting readings now…oh damn…damn…" Rodney muttered.
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John swore profusely, trying to use his hands and his mind to slow the ship, to turn just slightly but he was inexorably drawn closer and closer. The light became brighter and brighter. The viewport darkened against it and even so John squinted then shut his eyes against the blinding whiteness of the light.
"Sheppard, veer off! John, don't go into the spectrum! It's not a normal wormhole but an energy rift of the…" Rodney's voice was lost in the whine of static and ship alarms.
"I have to! It's gonna tear the ship apart!" John shouted in reply, shoving himself backwards in his chair as he gripped the controls and tried to keep the ship flying towards the anomaly but angling downwards in a vain attempt to thwart it. If he could just hit the angle right he would relieve the stress on the ship and at the same time avoid being sucked into whatever the hell it was that was trying to engulf him.
A spangle of colors danced on his eyelids and the ship lurched forward as if snapped from a rubber band.
John was thrown forward and he grunted with the impact as he slammed into the controls. A pain flared across his chest where he had hit the console. His muscles tensed as he kept a firm grip on the joysticks and he planted his feet firmly on the floor before he flew headfirst into the viewport. He swore, sitting back in his chair as the ship spun and veered and listed to the left like a boat sinking in the sea.
There was a crash behind him as panels flew open and things fell, things that weren't secured or tied down by the netting that held the important things in place like weapons and the first aid kit. Another whump hit as if he had sped over a bump in the road and he fought to gain control of the ship and its systems.
Luckily he was used to turbulence from flying fighter jets so he didn't lose his breakfast.
The ship was shuddering around him like a vibrating bed, and although that would have provoked enjoyable sensations this was no bed but a ship in space. John tried to keep calm and was trying to calm the ship and stabilize whatever needed stabilizing. The viewport returned to normal and the ship's alarms fell silent at last although the drive pod was still shuddering against the hull.
The knocking sound was both comical and worrisome.
"McKay, do you read? Rodney, copy? Atlantis, this is Sheppard? I've lost lateral controls but I can fly this bird to the water. McKay, do you read?" John demanded. His eyes were on the controls. Lights flashed with warnings in red and green and one dial was spinning round and round. Oddly the dials were frosted over, as if he had gone through a dramatic drop in temperature. He eyed his bruised knuckles, only now feeling a sharp cold on his skin. It bothered him. The Jumper should have automatically compensated for any changes in temperature, and he wondered if there was a hull breach.
"Colonel Sheppard? Sheppard, cloak your ship and land at these coordinates!"
"McKay! What the hell is…" John's words fell away as he lifted his gaze. He eased his grip on the controls and with a thought rendered the ship invisible.
John was flying in the blue sky of a planet, no longer in space. Gently he wafted down through white clouds. There was land beneath him, and he wondered if he somehow had gotten off-course and was now over the mainland. He activated the HUD but the readings were all wrong for the mainland. The dimensions were improbable and instead of one land mass there were several all over the planet.
There were several energy signatures but none matched Atlantis.
The clouds cleared as he reached a lower altitude. The ship was still listing slightly and he adjusted the power and the drive pods to compensate. The control lights were no longer flashing but the dial was still spinning. It was spinning backwards. John frowned at it until he looked up to see the landscape underneath the ship.
He found himself flying over a desert until hills broke up the monotony of sand and scrub and cactus. The browns and reds were dull, marked by drought and scoured by winds and the hot, hot sun. Dry river beds wound their way across desolate terrain until that gave way to farmland, then to settled communities.
"Sheppard, do you copy? Please cloak your ship and land at these coordinates," McKay's voice repeated in his ear, no longer full of static, and no longer anxious. It wasn't the terrain that left him speechless, however.
It was the city that he was flying over now. Streets were ablaze with colored lights and buildings, all kinds of buildings, each more outrageous then the next, towering above the street and exhibiting fountains and fake volcanoes and a Roman Coliseum and a castle. And all of the lights flashing brightly even in the light of day; neon colors advertising and luring customers to their lairs. There was even a giant neon cowboy waving at him.
It was a familiar skyline to him, to anyone from Earth.
He swung round and approached again, but the vista remained the same.
It was the sign that clinched it for him. That confirmed his suspicions and surprise and downright shock at where he found himself. He read the sign again.
Welcome to Las Vegas, Nevada.