Chapter Seven
Calling it a Day
Sheppard stepped through on the other side of the gate, his foot flowing seamlessly in line from where it had left off on the opposite side of the other gate. The heat gut-punched him, again, and the loud insects and birds quickly confirmed McKay's supposition. They were back at the jungle.
Before he had time to contemplate what that meant, McKay and Beckett arrived. They had that 'deer in the headlights' appearance, like when you were six years old, and sneaking that third cookie from Grandma, and she walks in on you right as you're pulling your hand out of the cookie jar. John frowned. "What happened?"
Beckett took a steadying breath. "Those things showed up after you left."
Rodney had already begun to relax, and was grinning like one of Sheppard's friends after they had replaced his toothpaste with shaving cream. "I've never seen Beckett run so hard in my life."
"Rodney, you beat me to the gate." Beckett said, exasperated. "And you were behind me!"
Sheppard felt a soft trickle, and an itch inside his left nostril that was climbing in intensity. He tried to fight off the sneeze but knew it was a loosing battle. He turned to the side and sneezed so hard he thought his eyeballs had to have shifted an inch foreword in his head. "Damn," he swore.
"Bless you," Rodney said, and conspicuously took a step away from the Major.
His movement wasn't lost on John. "You know, McKay, when someone sneezes, millions of germs are released into the air. Even now, those little guys are floating around seeking a new host."
"That's disgusting." Rodney said, as if someone had just wiped their nose on his sleeve.
"But it's true," Beckett joined in. "Truthfully Rodney, there could be a colony breeding right now in your airways. Cold viruses love the throat."
"Nice." McKay headed towards the DHD, intentionally ignoring Sheppard and Beckett's needling.
Sheppard followed him, peering over his shoulder as he studied the display. McKay worked for a few minutes before looking at John with irritation. "Do you mind?" he asked.
"What?"
"You're contagious." McKay said. "I'm invoking the five-foot rule."
John rolled his eyes, but he did step back a few feet. "You said you had a theory on what's going on?"
McKay nodded, and opened the bottom of the DHD. "I think this planet was some kind of testing ground for gates," he said, poking his head in fully. "Either that, or a zoo," he mumbled.
Sheppard heard his last comment. "A zoo?"
"The Ancient's had a zoo?" Carson spoke up. "Did they do that kind of thing?"
McKay pulled his head out from under the DHD and stared at Carson with a long-suffering look. Carson returned his stare, waiting for an explanation, before his mind wound back through their experiences in Atlantis, and he remembered the captured electrical entity. "Oh. Right," he looked away.
"That doesn't explain why we can't dial home." Sheppard said.
"Actually, it does." Rodney stood up and held a crystal component in his hand. "When I was examining the wolf-gate I noticed there was an extra circuit in the DHD. The Ancient systems are redundant, which is why I didn't think anything of it at the time "
"What's it for?" Carson interrupted.
"I was getting to that." McKay said irritably. "I think it's what causes the gates to only transmit across the planet, and allows them to work like a limited network."
"So if you remove it, we can dial home?" Sheppard asked.
McKay was already nodding. "Exactly."
"Do it," Sheppard ordered.
McKay was already replacing the panel underneath the DHD, and dialing. He pressed each symbol, and after hitting the last designator for Atlantis, waited expectantly for the familiar explosion of liquid.
The gate symbols flashed like blinking lights on a Christmas tree, and it emitted a high pitched squeal before everything shut down, and left the gate looking as dead and cold as a fish caught for dinner.
Sheppard had been watching the whole process, and turned to McKay. "That didn't sound good."
"I think you broke it, Rodney." Beckett said in the still air. He was staring at the gate with some trepidation. Carson had disliked gate travel from the beginning. He didn't trust any process that broke your body up to subatomic particles and reformed them somewhere else. It was too much like something out of Star Trek.
"I didn't break it," Rodney snapped. "Just, give me a minute."
John leaned towards Beckett. "He broke it," he whispered.
McKay's head was back under the DHD. "I didn't break it!" he refuted, his voice muffled.
Sheppard raised an eyebrow at Beckett that said it all, and found a nice spot to toss his gear down and sit. His arm was stinging with every movement, and his throat was starting to feel as if a pack of hens had pecked it raw. "Take your time," he said towards McKay's legs.
Sheppard settled down as well as he could, favoring his sore arm. Fatigue had a way of surfacing long enough to make you realize you were running on fumes, then fading into the background like an annoying mosquito buzzing in your ear. Every now and then the buzzing built to a level that made you smack it away, and you enjoyed a few false moments of peace before it came back.
The ground was sickeningly soft against his back, and he fought to not think about all the things that were crawling everywhere. He never liked jungles. It was one of the reasons he preferred McMurdo, no bugs. His experience with the Tic-Wraith had done nothing to ease that hatred, only increased his paranoia because that thing was a lot worse than many of the bugs that lived on Earth, although, those wolf spiders were pretty disturbing.
Sheppard figured he'd let McKay work till it began to darken, and then they could set up shelter and allot watches. He would've liked to keep guard the entire night, but knew he wasn't up to that, even without the fact that he was sick factored in. The problem was, McKay and Beckett weren't military, and he wasn't thrilled at the thought of putting them in a position that required military training, but that was the situation they had been forced into. He'd have to make the best of it. Close quarters, big fire to scare away potential predators, and strict instructions to wake him at the slightest cause.
"What animals live in a jungle?" Beckett asked from beside John.
Sheppard wasn't sure Carson wanted to know. "Don't ask."
"Too late." Beckett was mentally answering his own question. "Cougars, and snakes. I don't like snakes," he said forlornly.
Sheppard turned his head just enough to look at Carson. "Nobody likes snakes," he stated, "Except, what are those people who study reptiles?"
"Herpetologists." McKay piped from his place under the DHD, indicating he'd been following their conversation.
"Thanks," Sheppard glared in McKay's direction. "Aren't you supposed to be fixing that thing?"
"Don't mention it," Rodney answered, muffled by the walls of the compartment he was shoved into. "And I am."
"I won't," Sheppard said. "Mention it," he clarified. He scrubbed his hands across his face, trying to ease the gritty feeling he felt all over, then rotated his hand trying to see exactly what time it was. Again, he realized with frustration, that he didn't have a watch.
"It's ten-thirty, Major, give or a take a few minutes," Beckett answered before he could voice his question.
"McKay, let's call it a day. It's getting late," Sheppard called. He could see the small fingers of twilight begin to tug at the sky and knew the night would soon grab the daylight in a fist and yank it away. He wanted to have the camp set and the perimeter for watch secured.
"Give me a minute, Major, if I'm right," McKay shoved something into place with a hard shove, "we might get home in time to read you a book and tuck you into bed with your favorite pair of jammies."
Sheppard got to his feet, rolling his shoulders to work out the stiffness that had settled from the damp ground and lack of movement. He stood over McKay's legs and waited for him to notice his presence. He heard the clinking of crystals and waited. Seconds ticked by, and he shifted his foot, almost touching McKay's right pant leg, and still the physicist continued to work without noticing that John was practically standing on top of him. Sheppard cleared his throat, loudly.
The noise stopped, and McKay's arms stilled. John could tell because the slight twitches of his legs stopped when he stopped moving his arms. He slid his body out from the DHD and stared at Sheppard, blinking against the change in light, while his eyes adjusted. "Yes?" McKay asked, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge why Sheppard was there, even though they both knew he knew.
"Do you think it's fixed? If we tried to gate home now, would it work?" Sheppard asked bluntly.
Rodney wanted to go into a long explanation of why he was close. He wanted to explain that if he kept tweaking the systems they did have a shot of being home before nightfall, and maybe they wouldn't have to face a long miserable night camping on the zoo planet of the Ancient's, if that was even a correct assumption, but he looked at Sheppard, and shook his head instead. "No."
"Thank you." Sheppard gave him a hand up. "We'll have plenty of time to work on this tomorrow."
"I wish you wouldn't have said that." Beckett had gotten to his feet and was brushing the clingy brush from his backside. "The prospect of spending another day on this planet is not endearing."
The prospect was made even less so, because no sooner had Carson said what everyone was thinking, than a loud animal roar reverberated in the air, angry and promising trouble. Sheppard thought back to his earlier conversation with Beckett about cougars and snakes. He didn't know of any snake that made a sound like that, but a cougar was a definite possibility.
"Do you get the feeling that we're in an episode of Land of the Lost?" McKay asked, breaking the silence that the animal's call had created.
"Land of the Lost? Did people actually watch that?" Sheppard asked, incredulous. All he could remember of that show was the seventies era sets, incredibly fake looking caves, and the really bad B-movie models of dinosaurs.
"Yes, people really watched it, Major," Rodney snapped. "It was a good show. I never missed an episode."
"If you say so." Sheppard replied in such a way that everyone knew he didn't believe it for a minute.
"Couldn't they send a jumper through?"
"What?" Sheppard and McKay chorused the question together, rounding on Carson in surprise, having their conversation derailed, which was probably Beckett's intention.
"A jumper. We could cloak it, and then we'd be safe from the critters."
Sheppard looked like someone had just taken away his bicycle and replaced it with an '84 Trans-Am. "Beckett, you're a genius!"
"It should work." McKay had been so focused on fixing the DHD that he hadn't stopped to consider an alternative solution.
"What if it routes the Jumper to one of the other gates on the planet?" Sheppard didn't feel like gate-hopping all night trying to track down their safety net.
Rodney was already shaking his head negative. "I don't think it will. From what I've been able to figure out, that wolf-gate is the default gate on this planet. All incoming wormholes from off-world go through there."
Sheppard tried to concentrate. This was important, but he was really getting tired, and he wasn't exactly at the top of his game right now. "Then why did it send us to all these different gates when we dial Atlantis?"
"Keep in mind this is just a theory, but I think that these gates have a design that accepts improper addresses, or maybe each biome is keyed for a certain gate address to represent the zoological basis of that planet. Either way, entering a gate address shuttles you to a specific location on this planet. I think that the Atlantis code matches the wolf-gate, hence why we keep ending back there, but when we dial from the wolf-gate, it doesn't know how to handle it, so it sends us to random locations." Rodney fired his explanation off, trying to condense his thoughts into as little information as possible, hoping they could understand what he was trying to say.
Beckett stood, gaping at McKay, his mind lagging like a slow modem on the Internet, struggling to figure out what Rodney had just said. He gave up, turned to Sheppard, "Did you understand that?"
John was nodding slowly as his mind processed McKay's hypothesis. It made sense. "Yes, I did," he clapped McKay on the back, hard enough to make Rodney lurch forward. "Did you fix it enough to dial Atlantis? We can ask Weir to send the Jumper through so it's waiting for us. Then we make a run for it, and hope those man-eating wolves aren't around."
"I think so." I hope so, McKay thought to himself. If he was wrong they might not live to see tomorrow.
Sheppard knew time was escaping around them. "Dial it up, and it wouldn't hurt to cross your fingers," he added.
"I'll even cross my toes." Beckett promised solemnly.
John stood beside McKay as he began entering the symbols. He was tense, every muscle betraying his fear if this didn't work. As if on cue, that animal sound echoed again around them, and it sounded distinctly closer. If it was one, they'd probably be okay, but the problem was it usually wasn't only one. Cougars tended to be solitary animals but where there was one, there was more.
The gate exploded white-tipped blue waves outward, cresting wide, before falling into the circular frame. John let the lungful of air out that he'd been holding, and turned to McKay with a nonchalant grin. "I knew you could do it."
"Was there any doubt?" McKay replied, equally as confident, but a thin undertone of true relief wasn't lost on John.
Sheppard didn't reply, but sent the IDC and depressed his radio. "Doctor Weir, we have an idea."
"You sure the Jumper is waiting?" Beckett asked. He was regarding the gate with distrust, as if he expected the event horizon to reach out and snatch him up, never to spit him out again.
"I'm sure," Sheppard replied with more patience than he felt. "And Weir said she even sent your pillow."
Beckett continued to hesitate at the threshold. Sheppard hated to do this to the Doctor, but McKay had walked through seconds before, and there wasn't time to waste. He gave Beckett a hard shove, and followed him through.
Time passed in that infinitely small way that a trip through a wormhole dictated. It was a pathway through a world that didn't exist, not as they knew existence to be, and he was relieved when he surfaced on the other side.
"The Jumper's warmed and ready, Sir."
Sheppard smiled, and it was a smile that started at the tip of his head and ran through to his feet. "Lieutenant, good to see you."
"Good to see you too, Sir. Teyla's getting Beckett and McKay settled." Ford took Sheppard's pack and gestured to an area in the clearing where the rear hatch was opening out of thin air.
They made the trek into the safety of the vehicle in short order, and Sheppard wasted no time in finding a soft spot in the rear of the Jumper where Teyla or Ford, or whomever, had laid out sleeping bags over some cushions. He sank down wearily and closed his eyes. Regardless of what it took to get off this planet, for now he could finally relax for the first time in over forty-eight hours. They should be safe inside the cloaked Jumper, invisible to all the eyes of the indigenous life forms.
"Here, Major." Ford handed him a thick book, "Doctor Weir said you'd probably want this."
Sheppard took the thick volume, and pulled out the thin sheet of paper tucked in its pages, reading the message. Come home soon, Elizabeth. He smiled. He set the book down and looked up to find everyone staring at him. "What?" he asked. "I like to read."
