Chapter 9

"Oh no…" McKay whispered as he lunged for the tangle of cables. He made to grab at a bundle of wiring looped around a crystal which he had only moments earlier reconnected, wanting to pull it free and break the circuit. As soon as he touched the wires, he yelped. Even that brief contact had felt like lines of fire were being drawn across his palm and he hissed in pain, teeth gritted, and pulled back cradling his hand against his chest but a glance upwards showed that Sheppard was still in trouble and McKay was the only one who could do anything to help him.

He looked at the Naquada generator, thinking to just turn it off, only to see flickers of the same energy dancing across its casing as well. Urgently, he scanned the room, looking for something to use before settling on the assortment of tools they had brought with them. With his good hand he scrabbled through the box, searching for one that was insulated. "No… no… no…" Tools were pulled out and just as quickly thrown aside. "Yes!" His hand landed on a pair of plastic handled wire cutters and shook them free. Jaw clenched in determination he stabbed them into the tangle of cables, twisted and savagely jerked his hand backwards, tearing them free. On the Chair Sheppard slumped bonelessly, like a puppet with its strings cut, the only movement the occasional involuntary twitch as overloaded neurons fired random messages through his body.

McKay's tremulous hand reached out, searching for the pulse in Sheppard's neck, sighing in relief when he found it. It was weak, fast, worryingly arrhythmic, but at least it was there.

He smiled weakly, the pounding of his own heart only now beginning to calm. If John Sheppard had been killed through my ineptitude… It did not bear thinking about. Rodney McKay was aware he did not make friends easily, and if a few short months ago someone had told him that a snarky Air Force Major with really bad hair would have been at the head of that very short list, he would have laughed in their face.

An unaccustomed pang of worry laced with an uncomfortable degree of guilt nagged at him as he looked searchingly at Sheppard's unconscious form, checking for any obvious signs of new injury but finding none. He was unsure what damage the chair might have inflicted, but to his eyes it had looked like he was being electrocuted. He could not help but wince as he considered how much internal damage the Major's own convulsive movements might have inflicted upon himself given he knew the man already had at least one broken rib, however much he had tried to pass the injury off as something trivial, but there was nothing he could do about that. His gaze tracked to the mess of cabling spread over the platform the Chair stood on, mercifully clear of the filth on the floor, then to his watch. Only a couple of hours to go… okay… no pressure, then…

With a lack of histrionics that might have surprised some of his former colleagues, he dug out the field medical kit Beckett had insisted they take with them. A wry smile acknowledged the Scots Doctor's foresight. Though, perhaps on reflection, it wasn't so remarkable, McKay decided. Our team does seem to spend an inordinate amount of time in the infirmary so Carson can get us patched up. He found the burn salve and unwrapped a light dressing. A few minutes of awkward work later he was finished, pulling the final knot tight between his teeth and his good hand. No awards for neatness, he felt forced to admit, but it does the job.

He flexed the hand cautiously. It was uncomfortable, but now the salve had numbed the worst of the burning pain, at least he could still use it. He checked Sheppard's condition once more. The man's heart rate had steadied somewhat and the disconcerting twitching had faded, but despite the chill air he was warm, probably too warm to the touch. While he was taking his pulse again, a low groan gave him a stab of hope that he might be coming to. "Major?" he tried, his voice taut with worry. "Major Sheppard?"

Eyes flickered open and peered owlishly at him, shuttered in pain. "Rodney?" The word was hardly loud enough to even be termed a whisper.

"Yeah. Uh… sorry about that, Major," McKay said, looking away for fear of seeing the accusation he was sure he would find in the Major's gaze. "I think I'm going to need to recheck things here."

"Time?" Sheppard managed, as if fighting to wrench his jumbled thoughts into some semblance of order.

McKay took a deep breath, forced a grin and worked on smothering the cough that was nagging at the back of his throat. "Not to worry, Major. It's all under control. I'll have this sorted out in no time."

Sheppard's eyebrows crawled upwards in disbelief. He knew that particular McKay grin, that 'trust-me-everything's-fine-I-know-exactly-what-I'm-doing' grin when the reality was anything but. Over the months they had worked together on Atlantis, he had grown too familiar with it not to recognise it now.

Under Sheppard's entirely too knowing regard the grin faltered. "Okay, I'll need to take some time to run down some of these circuits. There are a number of differences between this and the other Chairs I'm familiar with. I don't want to risk making assumptions again," he said. The words: because last time I tried that, it nearly killed you, went unspoken.

"Work quickly," Sheppard urged, his voice a pained whisper. "We're running out of time, Rodney."

"Thanks so much for pointing that out," McKay grumbled as he started the delicate task of teasing apart the chair's mechanism. "I had no idea we were on a schedule here."

"Just get it working, McKay" came the Major's quiet, terse response and in the laboured tone McKay could hear the effort it had cost the man to speak and the audible hitch in his breathing whenever he tried to take anything like a full breath.

At that he frowned, pausing in his work on having such proof of how much the chair had hurt the Major. It was so notably unlike him to let slide the opportunity for a snarky come back, even at the worst of times. He wanted to say something to him, to apologise, to offer reassurance, but try as he might, he could not find the right words and the moment passed. Knowing the right thing to say to comfort a friend in pain was something, he knew, that he was not particularly good at, and for a rare instant he keenly felt the lack. Then the habit of years took over from the unfamiliar impulse and he contented himself with concentrating his efforts on getting the chair repaired. Saving the day, he decided quietly, was so much easier than trying to talk to people.

With that thought in mind, he settled down to study the chair, mentally putting together the detail of its functioning in his mind. As he did, curiosity took over and everything else became slipped back to secondary importance. The racking cough was soon all but ignored; the weariness that had almost become a part of him faded into irrelevance and pain from injuries, new and old, was sidelined as his mind settled into the challenge of deciphering the logic underlying the function of this older, more perplexing version of the Control Chair.

He traced circuit after circuit, checked the power capacity of the cables and the condition of the embedded crystals which were still intact, always referring back to the schematics and diagrams of the Antarctica Chair he had downloaded onto his PDA. The more he discovered, the more a disturbing picture was taking shape in his mind. The last set of readings taken, he inputted the final string of numbers into the PDA and waited for the machine to process them. Moments later, a series of statistics scrolled across the tiny screen, confirming his suspicions. For once, he had truly hoped he was wrong.

An expression of appalled realisation crossed McKay's face as he read the last figures on the screen of his PDA, and he knew in that moment why the Ancients had abandoned this chair.

And with that knowledge, his fear for the maverick Air Force Major who somewhere along the way had become his best friend returned tenfold.

"Major," he began haltingly, "there's something you need to know…" The words tailed off as he tried to think through how best to describe his findings and the danger they revealed.

"Rodney…" The unutterable weariness that he heard in Sheppard's tone made McKay wince even as the Major urged him to continue. "Talk to me."

If Sheppard had at that moment looked at the Canadian, the glimmer of anguish that he might have caught in the man's face would surely have explained his silence and hinted at the reason behind it, but instead he remained still, laid back in the Chair, eyes closed conserving his energy while he tried to recover what remained of his strength.

"Right, um… it's about the Chair," McKay prevaricated clumsily. "We already knew it's different from the Antarctica Chair and the one that's upstairs. For a start, it's a lot older, maybe by thousands of years. The other two are essentially identical in their set up from what I can tell. This one's… not. It's much less sophisticated; almost crude by Ancient standards. Compared with this one, there's a lot of stuff that's in the other Chairs that's, well, different - really fundamentally different, if we're going to make an issue out of it. But what's vastly more relevant right now is there's a whole lot more stuff I've seen in the other Chairs that just isn't here," McKay paused in his rambling then went back to poking around in the innards of the platform the Chair stood on then continued talking. "I'm guessing it's probably why, according the data we pulled from the records, this Chair's got so much lower energy requirements than the others – fewer systems to power, so lower overall power requirement ."

Sheppard noted with detached interest that as McKay got more involved in the technicalities of his subject, some of the jitteriness ebbed from his voice. "And I need to know all this, why?" he pressed gently, trying to get McKay back on the subject before he got too carried away by the physics.

The interruption pulled him up short, and McKay continued, his voice quieter, less confident with only the merest hint of his usual snarkiness. "Well, it's kind of important because a lot of the stuff that's not here are things like primary and secondary energy buffers, the finesse control interfaces, that sort of thing."

"In English, Rodney," Sheppard muttered.

"Okay," McKay extricated himself from the Chair's innards to talk directly to the Major, "back when you were using the Antarctica Chair, you weren't actually directly telling the system what to do; it was more like you were giving instructions to the control interface built into the Chair, and to explain it in excessively simplistic terms, that was in a way acting like an intermediary, transmitting your directions to the Chair's operation system, then receiving data from the system and converting it before transmitting it back to you."

"So, what you're saying is sort of like it's easier driving a car with power steering than without?"

McKay winced. "If you're going to put it in even more simplistic terms, I suppose at a pinch you could take that as a valid parallel, but given the differential we're talking about, a better simile would be to say it's more like the difference between a flying a single engine Cessna and a 747 with a broken hydraulic system," he amended absently. "But that's not the point. The one safety feature, the only thing here that kept the operator at even one remove from the huge amount of power running through the Chair was this regulator." He pulled free a cluster of once silvery wires, embedded in which were a couple of cracked, blackened crystals, and lifted it high enough that the Major might see it.

Wearily Sheppard cranked open his eyes and turned to look. "I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess it's not supposed to look like that?"

McKay let it drop back to eye level and sighed, studying the burned out component he held. "Oddly enough, no," he admitted, matching Sheppard's dry tone.

Then in a flat, far too controlled voice Sheppard asked the question McKay had known and dreaded he would ask given what was at stake, the question he dreaded having to answer. "But can you still make the Chair work?"

Responses flew through McKay's brain. Not a chance! No way! What are you thinking? That's too idiotic a thing to even suggest! The first attempt we made was when what laughingly passed for a safety feature was still working, at least until the power surge hit it, and even so the attempt nearly killed you!

He looked up, his gaze met Sheppard's and he saw in the Major's eyes his absolute comprehension of what he was asking McKay to do, mirrored by a determination frightening in its intensity.

"I can make it work," McKay promised.