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Chapter 11 – Pep Talks

Things had gone wrong, horribly wrong. He bucked against his restraints in convulsions as white foam leaked out of the edge of his mouth. Carson had leaned over the edge of the gurney and was throwing his full weight against the man's shoulders trying to hold him down as he writhed.

Sheppard's mouth opened a bit in horror and surprise. He had been standing off to the side to observe, but moved forward to try to help. One look from Carson immediately stopped him in his tracks. It was a look that said he had done enough in demanding that they go through with this risky procedure on the one person who might have any idea where Rodney was. He backed out of the way as the staff Carson had called in filed past him to rush to help with the Genii man.

He heard Carson's voice, thick with his Scottish accent shout out, "I need fifty milligrams of benzodiazepine!" The rest of the statement was lost on him as a blond nurse shut the door, silencing the commotion ringing out of the private room.

Damn, he really had hoped for the best here. He sat down on a bench outside the room, leaning forward to let his head fall into his hands before remembering that he wasn't alone. He abruptly sat up stiffly and nodded at the pair of guards that had been stationed at the door to guard their prisoner. There was something to be said with maintaining composure in front of his troops, him showing the wear and tear of a lengthy mission wouldn't go far towards keeping morale high.

He really had messed up here. Carson had told them the risks and he'd ploughed through. Would he do it again though if he had to make the choice again? He absent-mindedly played with the Velcro closure on a pouch of his tac vest. It was Rodney here. How many times had the brilliant man come to all of their rescue?

The next fifteen minutes passed in relative silence. He periodically interrupted the stagnant waiting with a call to the various teams that he was coordinating the search with. Zelenka had taken charge of the engineers; a few were working on that subroutine to keep the renegade jumper from obtaining access to the gate room. He put a call into Bates to see if the man could assign two teams for a search, he would lead a team himself with Ford. Teyla had headed back to the mainland with a small scouting party of Athosians to check on the condition of their settlement so she wasn't available to help or he would have had her along too.

His thoughts were interrupted as the doors opened and Carson came out, throwing his pair of latex gloves into a biohazardous waste container and walked over to stand in front of Sheppard, looking down at him with a haggard, if angry, gaze.

Sheppard was ready to own up, "Uh…How is he?"

Carson narrowed his gaze, "He's barely alive. He overloaded like I told ye he would."

"I, just wanted to say sorry…You were right."

"Damn right I was son. Ye and Elizabeth had no right to strong arm me like that."

"We didn't…It's just Rodney we're talking here. It was partially my fault the Kolya got him in the first place, and then I wasn't even paying attention enough to realize he was sick, and now…"

Carson sighed, the anger bleeding out of him as he slumped down on the bench next to Sheppard. There would be time to chastise the man for his pigheadedness later on, when he wasn't tying himself in knots worrying over Rodney, "I think he'll be ok. We've sedated him for now so his body can rest."

"So he'll be ok?"

"Aye, it'll be a few days before he's talkin,' but the lad'll recover."

"You think Rodney's ok?"

"I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried. I just got his results back from the lab; the strain of infection he got in that arm is a nasty bugger. It could cause some problems if we don't get him back soon."

Sheppard seemed to stiffen at this and Carson immediately set in trying to calm him down before he got worked up, settling a hand on his shoulder. To Carson's surprise, the man didn't shake him off, "Son, we're doin' all we can, all of us. Rodney's brought us all through worse scrapes than this; I've got to believe he could get himself through this until we find him. How are search plans progressing?"

Carson's inquiry worked, shaking the major out of his slump as the mask went back up and he was in charge again. Carson let a small smile play over his lips as he lowered his hand to his side and Sheppard jumped in, "Zelenka's calculated some hypothetical trajectories and has given us some coordinate routes to follow to maximize the amount of land we can cover-"

Beckett swallowed a lump in his throat and chimed in, "I want to go."

Sheppard met Carson with a confused gaze, and cocked an eyebrow, "You sure the exhaustion isn't getting to you? Because if I heard you right, you just asked to pilot a jumper. Normally you're ready to jump ship before going controlling anything Ancient."

A smile again crept over the man's face, "Like ye said, it's Rodney we're talkin' here. The man complains up a storm if anyone besides me dotes on his every need."

"Yeah, he certainly is something, isn't he?"

"Aye, when will we be leavin'?

"Oh, um," Sheppard looked toward the ceiling as he tried to recall the conversation he'd had with Bates. He'd told him a time, he thought? "An hour I guess? I don't know if I'm ready to put you behind the control of a jumper, there was that last time…"

"Gah! It was one time I almost blew up a chopper! Ye think ye'd have forgiven me for that by now the number of times I've patched ye back up."

"If I remember correctly, I was in the chopper…"

"Oh leave off harassin' me, I've got work to do!" Carson said, playfully pushing Sheppard and he went to get off and trudged back into his domain.

Smiling, quite possibly for the first time since he'd returned from Menara, Sheppard rose to his own feet and went off to finalize their plans.

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They'd been out for two hours and it was nearing dark. They had been conducting an aerial search over the mainland but hadn't spotted anything yet. There had been lots of storm damage – downed trees, flooded areas, but no sign of a jumper. He was almost resigning himself that they would have to resume the search in the morning as his radio chirped.

"Major, this is Beckett. Ye there lad?"

Sheppard tapped his radio to respond, all the while keeping his eyes on the land below. He was currently flying along the coastline on the thought that the jumper would have needed to touch down on cleared land, something that was much more difficult to find in the forested inner region of the continent. On the coastline, though, there were ample amounts of beachfront that would fit the description perfectly.

"Sheppard here. What's up?"

"We think we've found something. We're getting a blip on our longer-range sensors, it's not giving off any energy signature, but it's definitely not natural."

Sheppard sat up a little straighter at that, it was the first possibility they had found yet, "What does it look like?"

"We're not there yet son; we're about five minutes out."

"Send me the coordinates, we'll rendezvous there."

"Uh…hang on a sec…these controls are so complicated. Wait, there…go back…no,"

In the background on Beckett's end Sheppard heard someone curse and then a "keep your eyes on flying this thing! I'll find the coordinates!"

Sheppard rolled his eyes in amusement, wondering if Beckett would ever get the hang of the Ancient tech, he wouldn't bet on it, "Take it easy doc, I'll just find you on our sensors and meet you there. Are you in a wooded region?"

"Yes. Some trees have been downed by the storm it looks like, but still a forest."

"Ok, find a clear spot to land as close as you can get to the anomaly and I'll find you."

"Major…there aren't really any areas that clear, maybe if we land on the beach…"

"Doc, if Rodney's there you really want him having to wait for us?"

"No, no. That wouldn't be good. You're right. Sorry if I put a few dents in this thing…"

"Just do your best," Sheppard said as he locked on their coordinates on his console and turned the jumper in a tight arc toward their location, "I'll see you in a few, Sheppard out."

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As soon as the jumper touched down John leapt from his seat, snatched his life signs reader and P-90 from the bench, and chased Ford and his other marine out the hatch to meet up with Carson and his team.

His eyes were glued to the life signs reader as it flickered to life. He saw their six dots, and then began looking at the area around the edges of his screen for any more.

"There's only one son," Carson muttered quietly, "I already checked."

Sheppard didn't look up, demanding to see for himself, and his breath hitched when he saw that Carson was right.

"I wanted to go ahead," he said, leveling a stern gaze at his set of accompanying marines, "but your men seemed to have other ideas."

"Let's go, it looks like it crashed," he said, walking right past Carson and into the woods, "They took some trees down on the way in."

"That was my thought as well, major. We'll find him. If anyone was gonna be there it'd be Rodney. Maybe the Genii fled."

Sheppard didn't have the gall to say it aloud, but he thought it, either they had fled, or two of the three people that had left in that jumper were dead.

"Pick it up guys! That could be one of us in there!" he shouted back as he picked his pace up to a jog as they neared. He took a glance down at his detector to see if it maybe had picked up any weaker bio signs as they neared, but there was no change.

He could hear Carson readjusting his medical pack over his shoulder and breathing heavily as they closed the gap to the jumper, he could see it in between a few trees ahead. The hull was dented in places; one of the rear boosters had been knocked clean off and lay twenty feet away. But the thing that made his breath hitch was the tree branch through the front window, piercing the windshield, where Rodney would have been when he was flying.

"Carson, get up here! This doesn't look good," he threw the statement over his shoulder even as he closed the final yards between the jumper hatch and himself, skidding to a stop as he mounted the ramp.

There was a body on the floor, but it was too dark to identify it, he quickly charted a path around various cases that had split open in the back and kneeled by the person, gun tightly held in one hand even as he lowered a shaky hand to roll the body over. No, he corrected himself, person, not body, still alive, he berated himself. His eyes locked on the face as he rolled him over, only to raise the edge of his lip in disgust and frustration.

Carson had finally caught up and was moving to kneel next to the major, "Rodney?" he asked hopeful.

"Genii," Sheppard hissed.

Carson seemed to deflate noticeably at that, even though his movements didn't stop as he began assessing the unconscious man. Genii or not, he was still in need of a doctor, still his patient.

Sheppard moved away from them as Carson set to work, going to address the rest of his men, "Alright, split up in pairs. We're not seeing any more life signs," he said, pausing for a moment, "but that doesn't rule out that Rodney could be here. Start looking for bodies."

Carson winced at this; he hadn't expected his friend to be so brutally blunt about it. Although he supposed he couldn't blame the man, they'd all had their hopes raised only to have them killed again moments later.

They regrouped a bit later, having found more debris but no deceased. Sheppard stood outside the jumper and observed the scene inside. Beckett was assisting two marines in laying the injured Genii into a blanket that they would use to carry him back on, he still hadn't roused at all, and probably wouldn't be anytime soon as Beckett had topped him off on morphine for a broken leg.

Beckett took one more look at the man before leaving his side to talk to Sheppard. "He's stable, broken leg's his biggest issue that I see right now, but I'll know more once we get him back. We shouldn't delay any longer."

Sheppard sighed, "I was going to send you back and keep my team out to continue looking."

Beckett took his gaze off the marines as they gently raised his patient off the ground, he had told them to be careful. "Major, it's night, sensors are only good for so much and you won't be able to see anything."

"We still don't know where Rodney is! We still don't even know if he's alive!"

Beckett spoke firmly and confidently, hoping to work get through to the stubborn major, "Look at the way the window's smashed in, inwards. Rodney wouldn't have been thrown out of the jumper through the window, but backwards if anything. The hatch has been lowered meaning that someone left the jumper. He's out there, and we can start up first thing in the morning."

"We can't just leave him out there…" Sheppard muttered weakly, losing the sudden energy he had found, his second wind seemed to be finally fading.

"Ye need a good meal and a catnap yourself major, and so do your men and this man needs treatment. Tomorrow."

Sheppard didn't say anything for a moment, considering the points Beckett had made and looking over to his own tired-looking crew. "Ok," he said resigned, "back to Atlantis. But we're back out here first thing in the morning."

"Aye, that'll be fine."

No more words passed aloud as the team silently headed back to their jumpers, loaded off, and flew back toward the city. As the mainland faded from sight below, Sheppard said a silent prayer that his friend was alright and would be until morning.

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