When the darkness finally receded, Rodney found himself lying on the floor. Keiko, her face smudged with dirt, was pressing something against his forehead and crying. He shifted slightly and grimaced. The throbbing in his head grew more intense as she helped him sit up against the wall.

Looking around, he was amazed by what he saw--the lab looked like a war zone. There was dust, debris and broken glass everywhere. Equipment had been managed or completely disintegrated. Most of his staff were covered in dirt or blood, or both. Everyone looked dazed. At least one other person, like Keiko, was crying.

As the ringing in his ears began to diminish, he noticed the sound of static and muffled words and realized his radio was still intact. He ignored it for the moment. "It's okay," he told Kieko reaching up to feel the gauze she was pressing against his forehead. Continuing to look around dizzily, he took stock, trying to get his muddled brain to cooperate. "Go check on Radek," he encouraged her, slipping his fingers under hers to hold the gauze in place. The Czech was leaning painfully against an overturned table, clutching his arm. She nodded and turned to follow his orders. Taking a deep breath, he tried to get his bearings before turning his attention to the radio.

God, his head was pounding. "Elizabeth?" he rasped.

"Rodney! Thank God! What happened?"

"An explosion in the lab."

"What caused it?"

After a moment's thought, he answered tiredly, "A decimal place."

"A what?"

"Nevermind."

"Peter's working on getting the bulkheads to retract. We'll have someone there in a few minutes."

"How bad are things there, Rodney?" asked Beckett, breaking into their conversation.

McKay leaned forward a bit and craned his neck for a better look around. The ambulatory helping the more severely injured and the first aid kit was open but not yet empty. "We're pretty banged up, but it looks like everyone survived." He felt another wave of dizziness and the lightheadedness he was already feeling began to increase rapidly. Leaning back against the wall didn't seem to help much. As the edges of his vision began to blacken, he realized he wasn't going to be able to hang on to consciousness much longer. "Hold on, I'm going to have to give you to Jones." He waved over a dazed but apparently uninjured technician and pressed the radio into his hand. He felt himself sliding back to the floor as darkness overtook him.

The soldier pulls out a knife and Kolya takes a deliberate step nearer. He backs up until the back of his knees hit a chair. A shove from Kolya forces him to sit abruptly. He grabs the arms on the chair, more for comfort than balance. Kolya bends down and quickly clamps his wrists to the arm of the chair. The soldier approaches with the knife.

"Tell me about your plan to save the city, McKay," Kolya says, only an inch away from his face.

He tries again to deny that there is one but can't seem to speak.

Kolya nods at the soldier who rests the knife lightly on his forearm. Without warning, the man slices it across his sleeve. At first, he doesn't think it's passed through both his jacket and shirt, but suddenly he feels a trail of fire across his arm and he knows.

"The plan, Dr. McKay."

He is terrified but clamps his teeth together. He doesn't want to let them down – Weir or Sheppard.

Kolya nods at the soldier again who poises the knife for another strike. "That cut will heal. However, I can easily cause nerve damage that I suspect not even your advanced medicine will be able to overcome. How about it, Doctor? Shall I cripple both your hands, turning them into ineffective claws?"

"I won't be very useful to you after that," he says defiantly, though the tremor of fear in his voice is obvious.

"Perhaps I should just cut out one eye. It would limit your depth perception but you'd still be useful to the Genii." At his nervous swallow, Koyla nods to the soldier who brings the knife to rest between his eyes. "Your choice, Doctor, left eye or right eye."

He breaks. "Alright, fine, I'll tell you, but it's not going to help you."

"I'll be the judge of that."

Rodney jerked awake to see Beckett kneeling beside him and realized the grip on his wrist must be from the Scot's fingers. "Hey, Carson," he said, strangely quiet even as he struggled to calm himself in response to the doctor's concerned glance at his sudden, almost violent, return to consciousness and racing heartbeat. Propping himself up slightly on one elbow despite the physician's protest, he looked around the devastated lab and was surprised to see it full of medical personnel attending to his people. Some were missing. He presumed they were already on the way to the infirmary. "That was fast," he acknowledged before letting Beckett ease him back down.

"Actually, it took us a bit longer than we thought," replied the physician, peeling back the bandage on the scientist's head and probing around the wound deftly before patting the gauze back down. "Gave yourself quite a knock." He drew out his penlight. "Are you hurt anywhere else?"

"I..." McKay winced as the bright light was shown first in one eye and then the other. "I don't think so."

Clipping the penlight back into his coat pocket, Carson gave the scientist a thoughtful look. "Maybe we'd better be sure about that." He ran his hands over McKay checking him quickly and thoroughly for other injuries.

"Aside from some bruises and minor burns, you appear to be in one piece." He pulled out a blood pressure cuff and began wrapping it around the scientist's left arm; head close to the gauge to better read the numbers in the dim emergency lighting.

Reaching out his right hand, Rodney hesitated a moment before tentatively resting it on the doctor's arm.

Beckett flashed him an inquisitive glance at the uncharacteristic behavior as he pulled the stethoscope out of his ears.

"I wanted to say that I was…that I'm sorry about this morning. I didn't mean what I said about medicine being a weapon." At Beckett's speculative look he continued, "Okay, I did mean it but not like that, not…" he paused, afraid he might say the wrong thing again.

"That I was to blame for what happened to the Hoffans?" He sighed. "It's okay, Rodney."

He dropped his hand but held Carson's gaze.

"It's less what you said and more my own guilt that made me react that way," Beckett assured him. The Velcro made a ripping noise as he removed the blood pressure cuff and packed it back into his bag. "I didn't mean to remind you, either," he said, tilting his head towards the scar on the scientist's arm.

Rodney put that reference firmly out of his mind. Closing his eyes against the steadily increasing pounding of his head, he changed the subject to more current issues. "What about my rats?"

Beckett frowned in concern. "Rats?" The biologists had their own lab on an entirely different floor. This floor had been designed strictly for the physicists. He reached for his penlight again.

Struggling to open his eyes, Rodney swung a shaky hand in the general direction of the room, "My lab rats. Always digging into things? Wear white coats? Keep the place running?"

Carson smiled in relief and understanding. "Oh. There are some serious injuries," he said, looking around at the organized chaos of his medical team. "Jameson took the worst of the explosion and we're watching her closely, but I think everyone will recover."

"Good," replied McKay, closing his eyes again. When he opened them this time, he was surprised to find himself looking up at some sort of gleaming medical device poised above him.

"There's no sign of intracranial bleeding."

Beckett's voice, he realized. Gingerly, he turned his head and saw the backs of Elizabeth and Sheppard staring at a monitor as the physician pointed out various things and realized he had been moved to an exam room.

He wanted nothing more than to close his eyes and go back to sleep but something nagged at him. Forcing himself to ignore the blinding headache, he tried to tease it out of his mind. It didn't take him long and he cautiously rolled off the MRI table, struggling to swallow down the nausea and force his rubbery legs to obey.

"Here, now, Rodney." Beckett grabbed his arm and eased him back against the table. "Where do you think you're going?"

"Lab," the scientist managed to gasp.

"The lab's trashed, McKay," said Sheppard. His tone clearly implied that he didn't think the scientist was firing on all cylinders.

"I know that," he snapped in reply. "I'm not brain-damaged or weren't you paying attention to Carson's little presentation? I need to get back there."

"Later, Rodney. In a couple of days," the doctor admonished.

"I need to go back there now!" Raising his voice caused a new wave of pain to shoot through his skull. He closed his eyes and put a hand on his aching head, hissing when his fingers brushed the bandage.

"You're not going anywhere except a bed in the infirmary," Beckett said, still holding the scientist's arm firmly.

"You don't understand." Rodney swallowed down another wave of nausea and leaned back heavily against the table. "I need to check on some experiments."

"It can wait, Rodney," said Weir, stepping in to back up Beckett.

"No, Elizabeth, it can't," he repeated more firmly, annoyance creeping into his tone. "Not unless you want to risk dealing with more of the same. Some of the projects may have been damaged, even unstable. I need to make sure everything's been safely shut down."

Beckett chewed his lip in indecision. "We can send Jones," he decided.

Rodney started to shake his head but quickly thought better of it. "Jones only knows what Jones's team is working on. I'm department head, I know what everyone is working on," he argued. Seeing Beckett weakening, he added, "It'll take ten, fifteen minutes, tops."

"I'll babysit him if it will make you feel better, Doc," Sheppard volunteered.

"Not especially," was the doctor's dry reply.

Pretending to take offense, Sheppard asked innocently, "What you do you mean by that?"

"When the two of you get together, you don't get double trouble, you get trouble squared," the Scot explained.

His patience at an end, McKay lashed out sarcastically. "Carson, while I am truly fascinated by your ability to pull mathematical syllogisms out of your proverbial ass, there's the little problem of…oh, I don't know…another imminent disaster."

Beckett pursed his lips, visibly unhappy at being forced into the decision but unable, at the moment, to see a better option. "Fifteen minutes?"

"Tops," confirmed McKay.

"Alright, wait here a minute." He disappeared, only to reappear a few seconds later with a loaded syringe. Swabbing McKay's arm, he injected the contents. "It'll help with the nausea."

"Thanks."

Each grabbing an arm, Beckett and Sheppard steadied the scientist and made sure he was firmly on his feet. The Scot released him at the door but not before shooting a warning glance at Sheppard before it closed.

"I'm not some helpless granny," snapped McKay as they walked to the lab. He stopped and tried to pull his arm out of the major's grasp but failed.

"You're listing, McKay," said Sheppard patiently.

"I'm what?"

"You're listing," he repeated and leaned slightly to the left to demonstrate. "About twenty degrees or so."

Rodney made a concentrated effort to stand straight. "Better?"

"You're still off by about ten degrees." The major renewed his grip on the scientist's arm as they started back down the corridor.

oOo

Sheppard bounced impatiently on his heels while McKay made yet another circuit around the lab, double and triple checking that everything was accounted for and anything potentially dangerous had been deactivated or isolated. It seemed that Bates had already been through with some techs from the gateroom, making sure that the radiation levels were within satisfactory parameters. He was currently standing by to seal off the area as soon as they finished. John had already done all he could possibly do to speed up the process, man-handling debris out of the way when needed, but Rodney was getting paler by the minute and he could see the scientist's hands were shaking.

"I think that's everything," said McKay after one last look.

"Finally! We've already been gone fifteen minutes and Beckett will have my hide…"

"Major…" came a dangerously low burr over the radio.

"We're on our way back, right now," said Sheppard. Firmly grasping McKay's arm despite the scientist's protest, he steered him through the rubble back into the hallway. Halfway back the infirmary they had to pause when Rodney was overcome by a wave of dizziness, suddenly stopping to lean against the wall.

"You gonna make it, McKay?"

The scientist waved off the question so he could concentrate on keeping his knees from buckling.

"Maybe we should have gotten you a wheelchair?"

"I just need a minute," Rodney replied in a shaky voice.

Sheppard watched for a minute then reached for his radio to call Beckett.

"Don't," said Rodney, pushing himself off the wall. "He's got enough people to worry about at the moment." He didn't resist this time when the major took his arm.

By the time they made it back and Sheppard helped the scientist into a bed, McKay was ashen and visibly shaking. Beckett's eyes shot daggers at the major, and Sheppard took the opportunity to beat a hasty retreat while the doctor was busy reassessing his patient's condition.