Day 7
Ronon sank onto the ground in the Stargate room of the Notitia complex, and leaned against the wall with a weary sigh. McKay looked up from his spot a couple of feet away and smiled a weary nod of greeting. Anderson and Corrigan were passed out further down the wall, despite the murmur of technicians and constant chatter of the waiting strike force. Jones was lounging across the room with his team, bandaged up pretty good, but he smiled and laughed along with his buddies.
The technicians were still working on the DHD, and it looked like they might be waiting for a while longer if the disassembled state of the device was any clue. McKay must really be beat if he wasn't in the thick of the repairs, Ronon thought, feeling pretty beat himself. He'd just spent the last twelve hours with Lorne searching every room and corridor in the complex.
They sat in comfortable silence for a while before McKay finally rolled his head against the wall to look at him. "Tell me again how you disabled the self-destruct?" Ronon chuckled.
"Anderson said that the security panel triggered the countdown device, but that the countdown device was the unit that would trigger the detonation. He's clever, that pilot. Once the security panel released the lockdown, the countdown device was the only thing powered up that was still connected to the trigger. Anderson was trying to reroute the panel and intercept the trigger, but I decided to -."
"Blast the connection out of the wall, thereby preventing the countdown device from sending the trigger at all. So we didn't need to kill all those bugs after all?"
"No, no. If we had damaged anything in the control room under lockdown status, the security panel would have sent the trigger. Corrigan thinks that precaution is probably to prevent intruders from doing exactly what we did when we tampered with the countdown device. Normally, we couldn't have gotten away with it. We were lucky we hadn't turned on any other systems."
"Oh. Good. Hate to think we took that risk for nothing."
There was another silence, but this one wasn't so comfortable. When McKay spoke again, his eyes were closed and his voice was sad, even as he sat relaxed against the wall.
"Sheppard isn't here. Is he?"
Ronon thought of every room he'd searched over the past day, wondering as he walked through each door if he'd find his friends and realize that he'd condemned them to death trying to save himself. He scrubbed his face, then rolled his own head back against the wall. He clasped his hands around his knees and closed his eyes.
"No. He's not."