Chapter 3

A flustered McKay hobbled into the control room, his crutches abandoned while working on the alien generator for a more manageable cane.

"Rodney, we've got a problem," Weir began without preamble.

"I'm well aware of that," McKay snapped back without breaking pace as he stormed towards her. "It turns out that the interesting new power source Zelenka found for us isn't exactly what you'd call stable. So unless whatever's going on here is of truly overwhelming importance, I'm going straight back there to stop the thing overloading anything else or melting down and taking us all with it!" He paused in his tirade, finally taking in the devastation in the control room and the active gate shield. The righteous certainty ebbed from his face. "Uh… what's happened here?"

In terse sentences, Weir filled him in.

McKay nodded slowly and looked around. He caught sight of one of the technicians who had been on duty in the control room. "Hey!" He clicked his fingers to get his attention while struggling and failing to recall the man's name. "You!" he continued. "Get in contact with Doctor Zelenka. Tell him he needs to make sure that generator he's working on gets fully shut down right now!" The man paused, glancing to Weir for confirmation. "Sometime today would be good if you can manage it!" McKay added in a sarcastic drawl. The technician nodded once and fled.

With that accomplished, McKay walked the control room, stopping here and there to examine areas of damage or to question some of the growing crowd of people Weir had pulled in who were engaged in assessing the extent of the repairs that would be needed. Doctor Carson Beckett and his emergency team were still working on getting the worst of the injured ready to be taken to sickbay, while the handful of marines trained as medics were ably offering first aid to the less seriously wounded.

Five minutes later McKay ended up back with Weir at the main control desk, one of the few intact laptops tucked under one arm. Standing in discussion with Weir was a squat, middle-aged man with a Union Jack shoulder patch. A second man, taller and younger but also sporting the British flag on his jacket stood beside him. "Rodney, you've met two of our engineering team, Captain Roberts and Sergeant Callaghan haven't you?" said Weir covering for the Canadian's occasional inability to correctly remember names.

McKay gave them a cursory once over and promptly ignored them. "Elizabeth, in the time we've got before the first off-world team's due back, I don't have time to even begin to finesse a solution to what's happened to the computers. We need to get the Gate Shield down and we need to do it fast. I've got a schematic of the main power routing in the Control Room." McKay unfolded the laptop and brought up the requisite diagram. Roberts moved closer to study it. "We were lucky: it was one of the things we'd downloaded a while back to work through, and it was on a computer that wasn't hooked up to the city when everything went crazy."

Roberts' stubby finger started tracing the power routing lines on the diagram, pausing here and there to scribble details down in a small notebook. McKay watched him for a few minutes, peering over at his notations, back to the screen and grimaced. "No, no, no, no…" he slapped Roberts' hand from the laptop, pulled over the notepad and started writing over Roberts' pencil scrawl in biro. "That goes there, and connects up with that!"

"That's not what the schematic says…" began Roberts slowly.

"Then it's wrong!" McKay interrupted, then went on cuttingly. "Where did you learn engineering theory? Watching reruns of Bob The Builder?"

"Not quite," Roberts replied mildly in a broad, phlegmatic Midlands accent. "Doctorate in engineering from Imperial College, London, since then fifteen years with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, and more recently the Royal Engineers."

McKay looked at him as if seeing him for the first time: military grunts with doctorates was a concept that really did not fit into his worldview – with the notable exception of certain very attractive blonde astrophysicist lieutenant-colonel… But then looked at Roberts, smirked slightly and went on, "so, fill me in on how much experience have you had with Stargate mechanics?"

"Not too much," Roberts sighed. "I'll defer to your expertise there, Doctor."

"Right!" McKay smirked, satisfied that he had re-established the intellectual primacy of the scientific side of the expedition. "So whose information are you going to trust? Mine or the computer's?"

Roberts said nothing, but from behind he heard in a soft muttered Northumberland burr, "is that a trick question?" When he turned to reprimand his sergeant, Callaghan was already walking away towards Baines and Grodin standing at another console. A glance at McKay showed the Canadian seemed to have been utterly oblivious to the comment, deeply engaged in amending and expanding his notes.

A little under an hour later, laden with scrawled notes and diagrams set out on both McKay's laptop and Roberts' notebook, the two were reporting to Weir with their conclusions. Before Roberts had time to even manage a greeting, McKay announced peremptorily, "I know how to deactivate the Gate Shield."

Roberts raised an eyebrow a little at the 'I', but let it go. Being honest with himself, he recognised that a good 80 of the input into the plan they had come up with had been down to McKay. He had merely streamlined and tidied up aspects of the implementation – that was when he hadn't been struggling to keep up with the astrophysicist's thought processes. The man was without doubt a genius, but not for the first time did he catch himself wondering how Major Sheppard had managed to put up with him as long as he had.

"Since we can't shut down the Gate Shield using the controls, the best alternative we've been able to come up with is to manually disconnect the power from the Shield." McKay pulled up a schematic on the laptop and turned it to face Weir. "This is the route of the main power cable to the Gate," he indicated, "supplying both the Gate Shield and acting as a power regulator for the Gate itself, which as you know is largely independent of the city's power source… except of course when it needs to be boosted by a ZPM to enable intergalactic travel. If we disconnect that, it should automatically divert to the back ups. Those are more difficult to access, but we think we've located the routing for the gate shield back up power supply, so if we cut that too, it will deactivate the shield, but leave other gate functions intact and running on their own back up."

Weir looked at the plans and schematics then at McKay. "From this it looks like you'll need to cut through these layers of ducting to get to the power cables. Do we have the equipment to do that and disconnect both power supplies before Major Sheppard's team is due back?" she asked.

McKay winced slightly and looked over at Roberts. "Uh… not quite… um, that's to say we can cut through to them, but…"

"Rodney!" Weir said warningly, "what is it you're not telling me here?"

McKay opened his mouth to speak, but the engineer pre-empted him. "We don't have access to the kind of equipment we would need to do it quickly, and the cutting tools we do have access to here won't be able to cut through both the ducting and the power cables in the required time frame," Roberts explained calmly. "In my opinion the only reliable way that we're going to be able to disrupt the power supply to the Gate Shield before the Major's team is due back is to use explosives to break the connections."

"So you're saying in effect, we're sabotaging the Gate Shield?"

Roberts straightened to a parade brace. "Yes, ma'am, I'm afraid that's exactly what I'm saying."

"How repairable is this bit of sabotage likely to be?" Weir asked. "Assuming we get through this, there's no question we're still going to need to be able to use the Gate Shield."

"If we just get the power cable, we can replace the damaged length using redundant material from elsewhere in the City. It would most likely take a few hours; a day at the outside. If there's more collateral damage than we're predicting… that might make things a little more difficult," Roberts admitted.

Before he could say anything more, McKay cut in sharply, "yes, right, whatever, but right now we need to get the Shield down and Sheppard's team and the others safely back!"

Weir nodded slowly. "So the bottom line is we have to sabotage the City ourselves? This is the only viable option we have?" She glanced over at McKay who grimaced slightly at the terminology but did not contradict the appraisal. "Set it up," she ordered.

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