"Did it… work?"
Zelenka's voice in the pitch-black shattered the nerve-pinched silence that had reigned for several minutes. They had both been too afraid to move, lest the spell of apparent calm be broken.
Rodney knew the tablet would be bricked by the imp's arrival, in fact that was a built-in feature of the plan, to prevent the imp from getting back out via the network access. So he couldn't exactly turn on the screen and ask it if the imp program was stuck in there. He needed some other means of testing.
Fumbling around in the dark, climbing over Zelenka, Rodney felt his way blindly to the jumper's control chair, and sank into it. Hesitantly, half afraid nothing would happen, he laid a hand on the navigation controls, and tried to think life into the craft.
He felt its response like blood surging in a vein, even before the panels lit up. A moment later, the interior lights faded on, the engine turned over and began its steady, gentle hum. Rodney was certain he'd never heard a more welcome sound in his life than that. Nor had the interior lights ever been more pleasing to the eye, because it was the sign that Atlantis belonged to them once more.
"Oh," Rodney sighed in relief, the tension of the last… what was it? Sixty-odd hours? Finally being able to drain out of him. He was half-asleep before he knew it.
But Zelenka was unwilling to stop with the small victory, "Come, there is much work to be done."
Rodney wanted to swear at him emphatically, but he knew Zelenka was right. They had gotten rid of the imp, and thus there was no longer a computer program pushing back against them, but they still had a lot of work to do to put Atlantis and the jumpers back in working order. And the first order of business was to get the Stargate up and running, so they could contact the off-world teams.
That alone might take hours, depending on how much havoc the imp had left in its wake.
Particularly, they needed to get the 'Gate working in order to check in with Major Lorne's team, who had flown to the planet the imp was from. Who knew if they were even still alive? Rodney couldn't imagine what might happen to a jumper that had its systems entangled in the imp program mid-flight. That whole team might be dead now.
And suddenly it hit him. He had thought about it earlier, in passing, but now the imp was dealt with, the realization had the time to hit him with such force it stole the breath from his body for a moment. He and Sheppard had lobbied for that mission, hyped its importance. Not only had their actions brought the imp here… they may have -however inadvertently- killed eight people off-world too.
The weight of this realization made standing up impossible. Or maybe that was the fatigue. Either way, he didn't move until Zelenka actually touched his shoulder, whereupon he flinched and yelped his way into the here and now. Zelenka was unfazed by the brief fit of hysterics.
"Stargate Operations?" Zelenka asked calmly, but when Rodney looked up there was an odd comprehension in the eyes behind those glasses, like he understood what had Rodney shaking apart now, but was kindly pretending not to have noticed.
"Uh…" Rodney licked his lips, blinked, and cleared his brain with a shake of his head, "Yes."
The team knew, well before reaching the puddle jumper, that something had happened, and it undoubtedly had to do with whatever Major Lorne had found in those tunnels. They knew because Lt. Reed radioed them, saying that several lights had come on in the jumper. Not having the ATA gene, he had limited ability to use the craft, but he could still see that it had indeed sprung back to life.
Once the recon team reached the jumper for themselves several hours later, they were able to explore its condition more fully, thanks to Marissa Souci's ATA gene.
What they found was both good and bad. The jumper was indeed up and running again, but not at anything like full capacity. It could make a short, low-level flight, but it couldn't possibly break through the atmosphere and reach the Stargate without significant repairs. Repairs none of them knew how to do. But at least they could get its nose out of the mud. That was something to be grateful for.
Rissa didn't know about anyone else, but Major Lorne's little speech about how the only person making her unhappy was herself, with her endless complaining and little digs at Christmas had really struck home for her. More important, his revelation of his own Christmas past told her something about who he was, but more relevantly who she had allowed herself to be. When Lorne looked back on those days, he chose to remember the good, the peace, the love, even though it must have been easier to look back with bitterness, to remember what he'd had to do without. Rissa's endless talking about her ex-husband and Christmas in tandem had probably brought back some painful memories for him too. So not only had she robbed herself of happiness, she'd been unknowingly inflicting pain on those around her as well. It wasn't a nice thing to realize. Especially not now.
She couldn't do much about that at the moment, but she could try, at least a little, to see the good, and to be grateful for it. And a puddle jumper rising out of the bog and leveling off (not to mention turning on its inertial dampeners and climate controls) so its occupants could be relatively comfortable for the first time in days certainly qualified as very, very good. Rissa had never been happier to feel warm.
But when the jumper swung around and began to approach the plateau where the ruins were, all feelings of being warm vanished. Because the ruins had also vanished. Or rather, caved in. There hadn't really been a place to properly land before, but off-loading a rescue team had been imminently doable. In their absence, the karst had fallen in on itself, taking the ruins with it, along with several trees. As the jumper made a low pass over the region, it was evident that the plateau had been turned into a crater.
"Major Lorne," Lt. Reed spoke into his radio calmly, but a glance in his direction betrayed him as Rissa saw the unmasked fear in his eyes, "Major Lorne, come in please."
Janella had come up from to stand between the pilot and co-pilot chairs so she could look through the view port, so Rissa heard her when she whispered, "Oh, Evan… what have you done?"
Reed said, "You don't think this was a natural occurrence?"
Hearing the question, George got up from his seat to look out the port from over Reed's shoulder, and he replied, "No way. The area was nowhere near that unstable. Only something like an earthquake or maybe an explosive charge could've caused it to all cave in like that."
"An explosive charge like C4," Reed said, and that clearly wasn't a question.
"What?" Rissa asked, so surprised she almost made the jumper dip a little in its flight path.
"Major Lorne was carrying C4," Reed answered, "He said you never know when you might need to cause a little destruction. He must've found the device somewhere down there, and decided to destroy it."
"That's idiotic," Rissa declared, "And insane. Why wouldn't he at least wait for us to get back, set a timer so we could all get clear before it went off?"
Aside from the fact that a lot of advanced technology was pretty tough or heavily shielded, meaning that an explosive charge was no guarantee for success. Besides, they had no assurance that the device was actually keeping the jumper deactivated or that destroying it would solve the problem. There might have been an easier way to turn the device off, or they might have needed to study it to figure out how to undo the damage it had done to the jumper… which still wasn't space-worthy. Any number of things would've been smarter than blowing the place to kingdom come in an instant.
What was it with military men and always going for the explosives first?
"Maybe he didn't have a choice," Reed said as they passed over the wreckage again.
"Didn't have a choice?" Rissa practically spat, then swore vehemently before continuing, "Of course he had a choice! He could've waited for us. He could have tried to disable the device manually. He could have stayed home in Atlantis!"
"You're right," Reed admitted, "Nobody ordered him to take this mission."
Rissa blinked in some surprise.
Wilson chimed in, "A couple of days ago he came and talked to us. One on one, you know how he does," she didn't, but chose not to interrupt, "He asked us if we'd mind givin' up our time off, seein' how we only just got here and spent last Christmas at home, while Colonel Sheppard and his team had been fighting for their lives in Atlantis," he glanced at Reed and Coughlin, "I dunno about you guys, but I was more than happy to do that."
"Colonel Sheppard's a good guy," Reed said agreeably, "And he's obviously had a pretty tough run on this Expedition and could use some R&R more than we could. When the Major laid that out, it seemed like the fair thing."
"Speak for yourself," Coughlin objected mildly.
"You're here too, aren't you?" Reed pointed out, "Even money says Major Lorne asked some other guys too. You agreed to this as much as any of us, otherwise he wouldn't have brought you."
Coughlin rolled his eyes, but did not deny this.
"So he really… really didn't have to be here at all," Rissa said quietly, "He actually wanted to be here."
She realized she'd flown in circles over the crater a half dozen times, as if she expected to see something down there on the next pass that she'd missed on the one before. But it was hopeless. Aside from a rising cloud of dust mingling with the cloying fog, there wasn't much to see.
"Hardly," Reed told her, "What he wanted was to make his CO's life a little easier. Otherwise there's no way he would've been volunteering to be working on Christmas."
Reed had obviously volunteered for the same reason, albeit for a different CO. But neither he nor any of Lorne's Team pointed this out, and Rissa didn't feel it appropriate to at this juncture either.
Strangely, despite Rissa's supposedly altruistic reasons for wanting to come here and explore in the hopes of finding a safe haven in the Pegasus Galaxy or uncovering a plant that might help to cure diseases or something of that kind, she now faced that the underlying reason had been far more selfish: she simply hadn't wanted to watch other people having a good time with a holiday that had lost all meaning for her… or perhaps had never really had any to begin with.
The rest of them were no different. They wanted to avoid Christmas, or didn't care about it one way or the other. Their reasons were based on indifference, a selfish intolerance or even unkindness.
But what Lorne had done, he'd done out of love. Love for Atlantis, for its people, and for the spirit of the holiday he believed in. It wasn't fair that he should have had to die for that.
"Why couldn't he have just waited?" Rissa heard herself asking again, "This was stupid. It didn't have to happen this way."
"Anything to get the job done," Reed said, "The mission comes first, even before saving your own life. Major Lorne believed in that more than any of us."
Life.
The word clicked in Rissa's thoughts, and the puddle jumper responded immediately, bringing the life signs detector up on the HUD in front of her before she fully realized why she wanted it.
As they passed over the swamp and trees to arc back in the direction of the plateau, the detector came up with dozens of life signs, indicating creatures of human-size had been all around them even though they'd never seen one the entire time they were down there. But up on the plateau, in the crater itself, the area was deserted. Any large creatures had either fled or been killed. All, that is, except for one.
"There!" Janella exclaimed impulsively, as if they couldn't all see the light on the screen or didn't know what it meant. In fairness, if she hadn't said it, someone else probably would have.
"I see him," Rissa said, though in truth she only saw the location of the life reading the jumper had picked up, "I'm going to ease the jumper down as best I can, but there's not really anywhere to land, so we'll have to see how good I am at hovering."
Coughlin was already collecting the rescue gear and attaching it to his person, "Wilson. Helton, you two with me. We've got some work to do."
Rissa turned the jumper around and slowly lowered it so that it was just a breath above the plateau, near the edge that read on scans as the most solid. Then she pushed the button to open the hatch.
"Make sure you bring the Major back in one piece so I can yell at him for being an idiot and making us think he was dead," Rissa called back to the departing team, keeping her eyes on her instruments.
"Yes, ma'am," Coughlin replied, and she could hear the amused smile in his voice.
"Call us when you're ready to load up," Reed admonished, "Dr. Souci can't keep this thing hovering here for long."
"Will do," Coughlin said, then turned to Wilson and the obviously reluctant Helton, "Well, gentlemen, this is where we get off."
A moment later, they were on the ground, and the jumper was gliding back into the air, away from the worrisome karst and trees. It didn't really want to stay in the air though, and it was listing slightly to the right. Rissa wondered if maybe one of its drive pods had been damaged in the crash. No good worrying about it now. For now they were in the air, and that's all that mattered.