A/N: I hope that people are enjoying this story! It's certainly got my record number of alerts for a single chapter, so thank you for that :) I'd also really like to know what you think, please do leave a review! :) Thank you very much to those of you who have!

Rodney jerked out of a sleep he had had no intention of taking. "Wake up," he muttered sharply to himself, to emphasise the point. His heavy eyes found the window. Still black space. Still stars shining cold and unwavering.

He was cold, too, now. A bone-deep coldness.

He checked the course again, and reassured himself that the Jumper navigation systems were still locked on target. Then he stood and was alarmed to find that the floor momentarily dipped and slid beneath him. The inertial dampeners… but surely something would have alerted him if key systems like that had been damaged? "Oh no," he growled, as fiercely as possible. "No, no, you are not injured and stuck in your own floating coffin. You are not." The inertial dampeners were clearly at fault, and so was the alarm system. Nothing wrong with him. As soon as he arrived back in Atlantis, he was giving this Jumper a complete overhaul. Zelenka could help… but only after he'd stopped off in the mess hall, of course, for a well-deserved meal.

Now that brought a bitter chuckle from him. Well-deserved. If he got back to Atlantis at all, it would be mostly due to luck.

Cautiously steadying himself with a hand against the bulkhead, he checked his watch and a second wave of alarm swept over him at how much time he had allowed to drift past. "Need to check the cargo hold," he told himself firmly. He took in a breath first, to prepare himself for what he might find, and to give him just a bit more time before he had to look.

John still looked more like cargo than anything. He hadn't moved from where Rodney had arranged him carefully on the floor, on top of a blanket, and packed another around him. He was still and pale, as if made from wax. Sheppard without his characteristic snark was someone else entirely, someone Rodney had almost no idea how to deal with. When missions invariably went wrong and John was injured, Rodney never knew what to do. He just hovered around awkwardly, burying his concern beneath irritation or bad jokes or fussing over equipment, doing anything but actually dealing with him, until he was shouldered impatiently out of the way by Teyla or Beckett. And now he didn't know what to do. He had hoped that John would have woken up during the time he had spent in the Jumper's cockpit, but he showed no sign of it.

"Sheppard!" he said loudly. He hesitated with his hand just above John's shoulder, but he was hardly going to do any more damage now, was he? He shook John, and his head flopped limply from side to side. "Sheppard, wake up!"

No response. But at least his pulse and his breathing were steady. What else would Beckett do if he were here? Aside from insulting him, of course. "It's hardly my fault I'm not a doctor…" he began, and stopped suddenly as he realised he was forming a rebuttal to an argument in which he was the only participant.

Gingerly, he lifted John's head slightly with one hand and used the other to probe with his fingers through his mess of hair. He quickly found what he was expecting – a large swollen knot on the back of his skull. "That's going to hurt when you wake up," he informed John, pointlessly. "You'll probably have a hangover which is bad even for you. And I've seen you after Ronon challenged you to one of his ridiculous Satedan drinking games, remember?

There was still no answer, but talking to Sheppard as if he was actually getting through to the man was helping him focus, Rodney found. He folded down onto the floor, propping his back against one of the benches. His breathing was strangely short from such a mild exertion.

"I hope Teyla and Ronon are alright," he said quietly. "They'll be back in Atlantis, I'm sure. I wonder what they're doing… but there's nothing they can do. The Daedalus is still in the Milky Way, so if I'd waited for them to arrive, we'd both be long dead by then. They'll… they'll probably already think we're dead…" His voice trailed away miserably as it occurred to him the emotions probably running through his friends. "But they're alive. I'm sure of it," he added quickly, and perhaps more firmly than was necessary.

Was it him, or did John's eyelids just flutter slightly? "Sheppard?" he asked sharply. "Colonel! John! You've slept long enough!"

He waited, but any movement there might have been faded into imagination.

Having had the autopilot programmed, the Jumper should have been fine to fly itself for hours. But, of course, Rodney couldn't for long resist the urge to check it himself. "I suppose you'd be calling me paranoid, Sheppard," he conversationally threw towards the motionless figure on the floor. "You know, laughing at me like you always do, and thinking you're so subtle about it. Always conveniently forget, don't you, about how my meticulousness keeps saving our hides, time and time again. Different story then. Suddenly it's all, 'McKay, fix this, I know you can do it.' It'd be nice if you showed a little faith in me at times when I'm not working on saving all our lives. Which is pretty much all the time, actually, now I think about it."

He paused to draw in a breath, and realised that he'd been arguing with a Sheppard who was unconscious, and certainly incapable of throwing out any of his usual snide retorts in reply. "Sorry," he said suddenly, his voice softer, and contrite. "I'm just… stressed, I guess. I know you put up with a lot from me." His apology and admission surprised him. If John had been awake, he would probably have been shocked into speechlessness by it.

What had he been doing before he started talking again? The Jumper. Check on the Jumper. It had slipped his mind during the one-sided argument. "Focus, McKay," he hissed, and pulled himself to his feet with the aid of the nearest bench. Whatever was wrong with the inertial dampeners had gone unnoticed while he had been on the floor but now suddenly made its presence felt again, forcing him to steady himself against the walls several times as he lurched into the cockpit. He collapsed into the pilot's chair with a small groan of relief.

Something twinged, from his body. Something being masked by the adrenaline and lingering shock. He ignored it. There was enough to cope with as it was.

"Display?" he asked, the spoken command unnecessary but helping him feel more in control, of the Jumper and of himself. It was responding sluggishly to him, where it was normally intuitive. Not to the extent that it responded to John, but good enough. This lethargy in obeying his thought commands was new. Maybe it was because his mind felt uncharacteristically sluggish at the moment. "Come on…"

The memory was vivid within him of the last time he had argued with a Jumper, trapped beneath immeasurable tonnes of ocean. Dark water all around, like the darkness that surrounded him now… he suddenly found himself short of breath, his chest locking. "No," he gasped, struggling against the rising panic. "No no no. Not claustrophobia. Not now. Please not now. Wide open spaces… Wide open spaces…"

His eyes were caught by the blackness beyond the window. All the wide open space he could ever wish for, and more, unimaginably more.

His brain seemed to stammer like the needle of an old gramophone, caught between the familiar claustrophobia and a sudden flood of agoraphobia. Only his tongue didn't desert him, and he let himself babble, hoping desperately that he would come up with something that he could latch onto. "I don't want to be here. I really don't want to be here. I'm a scientist, not a space warrior. There isn't even anyone here with me. Sheppard doesn't count. I'm trapped in a metal coffin in a galaxy I don't even belong in!"

He slapped his hand against the edge of the control panel in frustration. "Dammit! Zelenka would be useful. Not that his ideas are as good as mine, but I admit that he has his moments. I'm not fussy, I'm not looking for someone real, a figment of my imagination will do fine!" He paused, as his breathing finally began to slow to a speed approaching its usual rate. "I got Carter last time I was in this sort of situation. She'd be helpful here." He glanced around hopefully, but even his subconscious had apparently deserted him, and stubbornly refused to conjure up a well-timed hallucination.

Suddenly, an alert began flashing on the screen. With something to focus on, Rodney found it surprisingly easy to immediately snap out of his panicked rambling, and concentrate on pulling up as much data as possible instead. His eyes scrolled over the lines of Ancient symbols, and his face paled as he realised the implication. "What?! This is so unfair!"

The space between the stars evidently wasn't finished with trying to make his life harder – and shorter.

The Jumper's radar warned him that an asteroid field lay ahead of him, this lonely orbit far from the nearest sun belted with the remains of an unformed planet, titanic chunks of rock circling the solar system. Too many of them, and too large, for him to simply activate the shield and surf through the debris. "Dammit," he muttered, for the second time in as many minutes. "I need Sheppard for this, not me!" He shot a threatening glare towards the hold, but it didn't appear to have any effect, and he turned back to the screen, placing both hands on the console and taking deep breaths in an attempt to calm himself. "Focus. You can do this, McKay. Just focus." He remained unconvinced by his own pep talk. The only bright side of the situation that he could see was that in the very likely event that he crashed the Jumper into an asteroid and they both died, John would never know about it, and therefore wouldn't have time to yell at him for being useless and screwing up.

Why did the Jumper have to fly so damn fast? Already Rodney was nearly at the edge of the field, according to the display. And after a few minutes more (where did those minutes go?) he could see with his own eyes the individual rocks floating through the blackness, drifting silently along their own trajectories, slowly turning over and over.

The thought flashed across his mind that if he got out of this alive, he was going to pay much more attention whenever John tried to correct him on his flying technique – which was pretty much every time he took a turn as pilot.

An asteroid larger than the Jumper glided above him as he dodged another directly ahead of him, the size of a car. Blips on the display indicated as particles barely more than specks of dust and small pebbles harmlessly impacted the shield. Well, he automatically corrected himself, for the moment they were harmless, but they were still draining power, almost imperceptivity, and the cumulative effect would eventually cause the shield to fail. But he should be out into clear space long before that.

Should.

Again his eyes fixed on the radar imagery. The field stretched out for hundreds, possibly thousands, of miles across and up, but was remarkably thin width-ways, which was the way he wanted to go. Out. It should only take about half an hour to reach the other side. Only. "You can do this," he whispered again, tension tightening his throat. He could hear his pulse thudding against his eardrums, and again wished that the Ancient vessel would just make some noise that could disguise from him the sounds of his fear.

As he carefully guided the Jumper through the debris, Rodney began to feel that he was indeed navigating through a planet's rocky corpse, among shattered shards of bone and the dust of desiccated skin. The asteroids caught the light of distant stars, ghosting around, above, below him. And he was all alone, a tiny speck of life within this unimaginably vast mausoleum.

A near miss with a spinning slab larger than an ocean liner sent his heart hammering into his throat and he swore ferociously, utilising several terms he had picked up from John and the marines. The Jumper half-spun around, skittering and bucking, as he fought to regain control, but the responses were still much slower than usual. A rugged behemoth passed dangerously close to the left drive pod, almost scraping it, and his breath caught in his chest, exhaled suddenly in relief as he finally succeeded in wresting the Jumper back onto its path.

The radar told him that he was nearly through.

And then, emerging from behind a leviathan that could have easily swallowed the CN Tower for breakfast, with plenty of room to spare for seconds, a sight met him that for long moments stole his breath away completely.

Among the asteroids but not one of them, a titanic ship hung before him, its heart punched out by rocks many times over, vicious gashes gouged from its hull, but still instantly recognisable as being of Ancient design. Aurora class. Rodney almost forgot about the danger he was in as he gaped at it, his scientist's brain already calculating the probability that any part of it would be salvageable. His eyes flicked automatically to the display and his eyes widened in surprise.

The vessel was hailing him.

Excitement flooded his system with more adrenaline. Perhaps there were still Ancients on board, sustained through the millennia by stasis pods, as there had been on the Aurora… There was also the possibility that the ship was one of those acquisitioned by the Travellers, or that the hail was simply automated, but he pushed both those possibilities to the back of his mind as he pulled up the message.

"This is the Lantean warship Cygnus," it proclaimed simply. "Transmit your identification code immediately."

It was automated, and he sighed with disappointment. It had probably been playing with no one to hear it for all of ten thousand years. Or else it had been triggered by the Jumper's approach, some still-functioning system recognising either the proximity or the common origin of the two machines. Either way, right now Rodney had neither the time nor the resources to investigate further, however much he was itching to. Maybe once he was back in Atlantis he would be able to persuade Elizabeth and Sheppard to mount a salvage mission, once the Daedalus returned from Earth. To still be operational at all, it must have some impressive power source, and he felt that he could almost see a brightly glowing ZPM through its battered skeleton. All the things I could use that for on Atlantis…

His spooling thoughts sternly reminded him that making plans for what he would do on his arrival in Atlantis was by far the least of his current concerns. Again he examined the data stream from the radar, and this time the readings filled him with a mixture of hope and relief. He was nearly out of the rocky band. Once he had cleared the wreckage of the Cygnus, barely any asteroids remained between him and the emptiness which had previously filled him with terror, but right now, having faced the alternative, he couldn't picture anything more desirable.

The display flashed, indicating that the Cygnus had begun broadcasting a new message, and he brought this one up on screen too. It was, as the last one had been, unemotional and to the point.

"You have failed to identify yourself, and have been classed as a threat. Self destruct sequence activated."

Crap. So definitely triggered by his approach, then.

Cursing, Rodney brought up the sensor array, hoping desperately that the derelict ship was simply making empty threats. Instead, he was horrified to see that power was indeed building up inside the vessel. Of course, that particular section needed for the destruct sequence had to have remained intact. But no way of telling which that section was and firing off a drone to knock it out. And if he gambled and attacked the wrong section, that would almost certainly bring down even more severe consequences upon his head. Possibly, it would fire directly at him, and there was no way he would survive that.

He was streaming options through his brain. The detonation was probably a security measure, implemented when the ship became immobilised, likely with the intent of preventing its capture by the Wraith or any other enemy. And with the hope of taking out the aforementioned enemy too.

That didn't help him now. All he could do was try to get as far away as possible before it exploded, and took him with it. It really was his day for running into races who had left behind over-sensitive security systems which wanted him dead, wasn't it?

He tried. Concentrating furiously, he increased the Jumper's speed, dodging pieces of the rocks which now seemed to be the lesser of two evils by what felt like hairs' breadths. The scanner was bleeping feverishly, indicating that the power build-up within the Cygnus was reaching critical levels. He knew exactly what was going to happen, and pushed the engines even faster, not managing to avoid a football-sized chunk of debris which would have cannoned straight through the window if not for the shield, but the sudden violent blaze as it impacted and incandesced left sparks dancing in his vision.

The Cygnus's power levels were now taking up most of the display, as the Jumper seemed to try to spur him to greater efforts to save itself and him. "I'm trying!" he shouted half-hysterically to it. "Give me something, dammit!"

The display flashed violently, streams of Ancient warning him of what he already knew. No time. He pointed the Jumper towards the nearest area of relatively clear space, and allowed the engines to reach full power, regardless of the danger of smashing into one of the massive asteroids. His eyes flicked between the readings from the Cygnus, the visage before him, and the radar. He was nearly through….

Nearly…

"Fly!" Rodney screamed, both hands pressed against the controls, all his energy concentrated on the single thought of forwards.

He remembered, almost too late, that the Jumper was programmed only to fly at speeds which it considered safe. To hell with that. He jerked upright and yanked open a panel above his head, reaching inside for the crystal which controlled that particular safety protocol. It was charged with electricity and burning hot, searing the flesh of his palm as he grasped it tightly and pulled, screaming with the pain. And the Jumper still answered his thoughts, moving faster, faster…

Nearly through…

Nearly…

The Cygnus exploded.