Part Ten: Pod People
Tired of the taste of coffee, Zelenka had switched to tea for sustenance. He reminded himself for the millionth time to request a better blend for the expedition, Earl Grey perhaps or a good orange pekoe. Also kolaches to go with it.
On the city-wide sensors, he noted four life sign dots—Colonel Sheppard's recon team—moving at a good clip towards the northeast pier, where the brief flash of activity had occurred the second McKay and the rest had vanished from the city.
His headset vibrated with the sound of Col. Sheppard's lazy drawl.
"Zelenka, how close are we to the source of your little blip?"
Checking the previous scan that showed the tell-tale burst of power, Zelenka responded. "You are approaching the area right now. Do you see…"
"Holy cow!"
Stiffening, Zelenka listened, eyes wide with anxiety. Until now, he had been moderately concerned but confident that whatever was happening with McKay and the rest was relatively benign, if quite mysterious. Now he wasn't so sure.
"Colonel Sheppard?" he ventured, trying to stop the tremble in his voice.
"Colonel, what's going on?" This was Elizabeth, who had been monitoring Sheppard's reconnaissance mission from her office.
"…pack them up carefully. Doc, we've got some weird little…I guess you'd call them pods…down here. Five of them are glowing rather nicely. The rest don't seem to be active. Can't tell what's making them run. They're not attached to anything, just sitting on a shelf. So… What are you talking about?"
He paused to speak to another member of his team.
"Colonel, is there a problem?"
"Just that two of the pods stopped glowing all of a sudden. The rest seem okay. Hope we didn't, you know, kill anyone."
As the pods on the northeast pier ceased their activity, Zelenka noticed two life signs return to one of the sleeping quarters. He let this new event settle in his mind for a few seconds.
"Colonel, you will bring all of these, uh, pods to the lab, yes?"
"Sure thing, Doc."
"Elizabeth, come to the lab as well, please. I have something else rather interesting to show you."
…..
Lorne awoke in his bed. Right next to Dr. Leslie Steward. He sort of remembered making love to her, not that science geeks were his type. He also kind of, almost, remembered kayaking. And also being the last real man left on Atlantis. Or something like that. He was very, very tired, though, as if he had been up most of the night. Falling into a slumber, he had time to utter a quick, "Huh?" before sleep captured him. Neither he nor Steward heard the various well-meaning rescuers prying open the door to his room.
…..
McKay lay on the floor of his laboratory, trying to remember…something. Something about pens and cotton balls.
"Huh," he said noncommittally, frightened for his body, concerned about hypoglycemia, about a heart attack or a stroke. He worried about these things all the time, that they would incapacitate or kill him. He'd willed his notes—the unclassified ones—to Rutgers, and it scared him to think what that institution might do with them. Letting his mind wander, he half-heartedly considered whether the Hopkins Applied Physics Lab might be a better place, except that they were lightweights on the theoretical side of things. Yes, if he died…
He sat bolt upright. Checking to ensure that he still owned all of his limbs, he jumped to his feet. McKay didn't remember dying per se. He recalled the idea of dying, the last thought-flinch of "Oh, shit" before parts of him flew in various directions. He had read somewhere that people are unable to remember pain as a concrete thing. The concept of pain lingers, however, and in McKay's case, this concept felt pretty freaking concrete.
Now he was alive. Again or still, he could not tell.
Atlantis seemed to enjoy surprising him, tempting him with tiny eyeblinks of joy and wonder, followed by gut-wrenching horror. While at Northeastern, he'd met a woman who enjoyed pulling at his chest hair after making love. After sex, actually, since there wasn't much love shared on either of their parts. Their affair lasted several weeks, something of a record for McKay. But this woman… He gave her up when she began pulling at his chest hair during sex, which made the whole thing more painful than erotic.
Could he honestly say that Atlantis was behaving any different? Not today, certainly. She had killed then revived him. Was this her way of making him choose between pleasure and pain? The tease.
McKay noticed the city-wide map was still up on his laptop. The southeast pier now showed a life sign, a single glowing ball of hope. He raised his head to address his mistress.
"Are you shitting me?" he asked her. "Someone's down there?"
He waited several moments for a reply that he knew wouldn't come. Multiple attempts to hail the dot's owner failed.
This time, he would be prepared. Grabbing his laptop, McKay stuffed it into a large "go bag," which contained such basic necessities as prescription drugs, energy bars, bottled water, a toothbrush. He paused for a moment, recalling the terror he now associated with everyday things, then pushed those thoughts away. Someone was out in the southeast pier. This time he wouldn't touch the naquadah generator. No, siree.
…..
The southeast pier resembled every other sea-level part of Atlantis—damp hallways, disheveled rooms the purpose had yet to be determined, the smell of stale air and a bit of mildew. Approached the most distant part of the pier, McKay spotted the generator room. In the quiet emptiness he noticed the hum, which he now believed was a grounding problem with the unit, nothing particularly urgent but something to keep in mind. It annoyed him that he had rationalized the unit here to begin with, since the plain fact of the matter was that there…was no fact at all. He operated four naquadah generators and none of them was located in the south pier.
Therefore, this one was a figment of his imagination.
Still…
"I am a stupid genius," he said to his dripping surroundings. The lack of response irritated him. Certainly, simple common sense should have told him to leave the generator alone, but here, in this lonely place, he doubted his ability to think of consequences. With a sigh, he ambled on. The portable LSD indicated the presence of a lone life form in the generator room.
"Who's there!" he hollered through the doorway, trying to sound imperious rather than terrified. "I know you're nearby, so answer me. Steward? Lorne? That you?"
He hoped that the barefoot woman would poke her head out and respond, but silence prevailed. Moving forward slowly, he again allowed his comforting litany to accompany him. "No surprises. No surprises." Steps from the doorway, he considered that the very act of expecting the unexpected could, in fact, help him keep it together when the shit began hitting the fan.
Entering the room, McKay realized that he had brought his 9 mm to bear without even thinking about it. He hoped that it would suffice to protect him.
But he was so, so wrong.
"One minute to self-destruct."
"WHAT!"
Letting a few seconds evaporate around him, McKay felt his heart practically fibrillate in his chest.
"SELF-fucking-DESTRUCT?"
This was improbable, impossible. It took two individuals with high-level clearances to initiate the self-destruct protocol. He was, as far as he knew, the only one still in the city who possessed the authority to do this. Checking his LSD, McKay noted that the glowing dot in the generator room had disappeared. Quickly flipping open his laptop, he looked about for some way to interface with Atlantis. As if reading his thoughts, a small console appeared to his left. Not questioning this bizarre materialization, McKay connected his computer and opened up the city-wide scan, once again. Two life forms appeared in the main control room. Someone must have come back!
"Forty-five seconds to self-destruct."
He tapped his headset. "This is McKay to control. Talk to me!"
His headset shrieked in response, the sound piercing his eardrum like a hot wire. Pulling the headset from his head, McKay shouted into the mouthpiece.
"I'm on the south pier. Tell me what's happening!"
No one spoke, at least not in a language that McKay could understand. His ears rang with the echoes of the drilling whines and with the pounding of his overworked heart. He threw down the headset in disgust.
"Thirty seconds to self-destruct."
Typing furiously, McKay attempted to override the self-destruct process. He knew all the tricks, had stayed up late into the night tickling Atlantis under the chin to get the talk-around codes to extract her deepest, darkest secrets. He had been only partially successful then, but maybe, just maybe, he'd acquired enough of the good stuff to make this work. Taking a deep breath to still his shaking hands, he worked and worked to get to that level where his city would save itself just for him, because it wanted him so.
"Ten seconds to self-destruct."
Typing, typing, typing, thinking of what to do now, what to do next.
"Bitch! You're killing me!"
He ignored the rest of the countdown. Focused on his goal, Atlantis's last and best hope closed his eyes at the last moment, when he felt the first explosion, felt the south pier and himself within it capsize into the dark ocean, which, considering everything, seemed like such a stupid way to die.
