Two Weeks; Three Years; In the Blink of an Eye

Chapter One

Eli

Eli stared out from the observation deck, never tiring of the colorful, almost magical, display caused by Destiny's FLT journey. The stars turned into streaks as the ship traveled past them on its way toward the void between the galaxy it was about to leave, and to the next one almost three years away.

How long he sat there he didn't know, and didn't care, but eventually he got up from the padded bench and slowly walked back to the section of the ship where the stasis pods were, and before he realized it he was standing in front of the one that held his beloved Chloe. After a few seconds he put his hand on the glass covering the front of it, wishing he could caress her cheek, feel the softness of her hair, the warmth of her skin.

After a deep breath, he knew he should look at the one pod that wasn't working, the one he had to repair before the two-week deadline ran out. But he wasn't worried, he could fix it. And for once, letting his ego inflate, he admitted to himself that he was smarter than Dr. Rush, smarter than Dr. Volker, smarter than Brody, smarter than all of them!

But for some reason, he found it hard to do anything but try the controls again, not expecting them to respond. So after a few minutes he left and made his way back to the dining hall, one of the few places that wasn't shut down to conserve power. He got the rest of the "stew," for lack of a better word, from the refrigerator, then shut it off as well every little bit helped. From now on, he would open the canned food, heat it up and eat all of it at once. He then went back to his quarters to sleep. He would start on the damaged pod when he woke up.

When he did, Eli had no idea how long he slept, or what time it was. And it didn't really matter. With no sunrise and no sunset, it just didn't seem important anymore. After another meal, he went back to the stasis pod and began to run a diagnostic on it, trying to discover if it didn't work because of damaged wiring, or some other easy repair; or if it was a not-so-easy fix - more damage that was visible, or some other problem, just as elusive. After what seemed like hours, he decided to take a break and went back to the observation deck.

"Well," he said out loud, as he noticed the streaks that were the passing stars seemed to be fewer than before, "it looks like we're getting to the edge of the galaxy."

As he mused, he was thinking back to when Col. Young informed everyone about having to go into the stasis pods for the three years it would take to reach the next galaxy. Eli was surprised that there weren't objections from more of them. Many were worried, and rightly so, that they might never wake up, that Destiny would become so low on power before they arrived, that it would drop out of FTL, and then they would just drift in space until the ship eventually lost all power and they would die.

Even Eli wondered if Destiny could maintain such a grueling, nonstop run on the engines, but as the colonel had pointed out, they had no choice. It was either go into the pods, or end up being destroyed by the drones as they attempted to gate down to a planet to replenish their meager supplies.

Several "days" went by but the pod stubbornly refused to be repaired. It seemed that no matter what Eli did, something else seemed to go wrong. It was as if he were trying to repair a house of cards - when one card was gently replaced, one or two others would fall. Although he sometimes worked, from his own estimations, for hours and hours, his frustrations only grew.

"If I only had more time!" he often found himself complaining. "I know I could get this damned thing fixed. But two weeks? What was I thinking?"

After his latest failure, he once again found himself looking out at the oncoming stars, but they weren't there - the ship had finally left the galaxy and was now traveling through empty space; there was certainly nowhere to stop for supplies now.

But slowly Eli was making progress - a time or two he actually had the stasis pod come online for almost a half a minute before it darkened again. He was getting closer - just a little more time, maybe a few more days would do it; a few more days that he was running out of.

And again he found himself on the observation deck staring at the now almost non-existent colors, there only because of the very few bits of matter and energy the ship was passing. But was he seeing right? Was that a single, solitary streak he saw go by? It had to have been a rogue star, somehow thrown from the galaxy and drifting on its own.

"Oh my god!" Eli exclaimed as he realized what that meant. If he could get Destiny to go through it to replenish the power supply, he would have all the time he would need to repair the stasis chamber!

Eli hurriedly began to work on the calculations - he would have to drop the ship out of FTL, turn the ship back in the direction of the star, put the ship back into FLT, and then drop out again exactly at the right moment to arrive at the star.

But as he began to work on the exceedingly complex equations, he began to doubt, and then to second guess himself. He wished over and over he had the computer he had on earth, the one he built himself, with a three terabyte hard drive and 5 gigabytes of RAM.

"What if I make a mistake?" he asked himself. "One small error, one thousandth of one percent off and Destiny wouldn't have the power needed to reach the next galaxy. I could be killing everyone and I'd be the only one to know it."

He went over his figures time and again, hoping they were right, thinking they were right, but still with that small nagging feeling that there was something he hadn't calculated correctly. If only someone was there to go over his figures; someone intelligent enough, smart enough, to verify everything was right, or to point out a vital, potentially lethal flaw.

Eli thought about the communication stones: Dr. McKay would be the perfect candidate. Eli had to admit that Rodney McKay was one of the few people smarter than he was. But no one would be manning the stones for three years. Rush was out of the question; Eli just didn't trust him. And he knew Volker and Brody weren't up to it.

So, that just left the one person Eli felt he could count on to check and double check, even triple check, his calculations - Chloe Armstrong.

To Be Continued