Thank you all so much for the prompt review responses! A couple people asked if Sheppard was going to get whumped eventually, being as he's back on Atlantis and all. It's a long story and a lot can happen, so don't think anybody's getting off easy. (grin)

Impact plus 0 hours 7 minutes

"Oh shit ... Radek!"

The only light in the Daedalus's engineering room came from the fires -- tongues of orange and blue flame, eating the insulation in the bulkheads and filling the room with toxic smoke. By that flickering, lurid glow, Rodney had initially thought Zelenka was unconscious, slumped against the wall on the gently slanting floor -- until he got a good look at the piece of twisted metal protruding from Radek's chest, pinning him to the wall like a butterfly in a collector's case.

"Radek ... God ... Zelenka, can you hear me?" He heard himself speak, felt himself kneeling on the floor, all with a detached sense of unreality. This couldn't be happening. It had been such a straightforward project -- just a quick jaunt to the nebula and back in time for dinner. And then they'd crashed, and he still wanted to know why ... but would never know, because now he was going to asphyxiate, could already feel the bands of suffocation constricting across his chest ... and Radek was dead, nailed to the wall.

This was a stupid way to die. Around him, he sensed a bustle of frantic activity and knew that he should be helping try to extinguish the flames, but his horrified attention was still fixed on Zelenka's pale face.

"Doc! Hey!" Someone was shaking his shoulder -- Caldwell's chief engineer, a big guy, with arms like tree trunks, whose name Rodney had never bothered to learn. "Somebody found fire extinguishers, Doc -- we need all the hands we can get."

Rodney nodded numbly, let himself be helped to his feet. When the Daedalus had come to a stop and he'd finally grasped the idea that he wasn't going to die -- at least, not immediately -- his first reaction had been to snap into immediate action, giving orders to the handful of scientists he could find. This had lasted until he'd gotten his first good look at Zelenka, and then it had all come crashing down. He couldn't think anymore. Turning around as a fire extinguisher was shoved into his hands, he tripped over a pair of legs, and his eyes followed them up to the once-beautiful face of another scientist -- Greta or Girda, he thought her name was ... something Norwegian, anyway. She was very clearly dead. The back of her skull had been crushed, and her eyes were open.

This wasn't supposed to happen.

"Doc!" It was another of the engineers, a lanky blond guy with a weather-beaten face. He gripped Rodney's shoulder, shook him gently. As Rodney came slowly out of his fugue state, the engineer released him with a reassuring smile and turned to help someone else before Rodney could even protest the invasion of his personal space. Putting a sleeve over his face to shut out the smoke, he gritted his teeth and tried to drag his brain back to the here-and-now. It was extremely difficult to stay upright; the deck tilted underfoot, and his head swam from the fumes pouring from the fire. His entire body felt like one giant bruise -- he'd been shaken around in the crash like dice in a cup, and for all he knew, the growing headache was because of internal bleeding. He'd probably keel over any minute. Couldn't that happen after an accident, where you thought you were okay and then turned out to be bleeding inside and --

Novak came running into the room, coughing. She went straight to the chief engineer, but Rodney could hear her: "Bad news, sir. We're blocked in. The passageway is crumpled -- it looks like it was rammed by something huge."

Claustrophobia surged up in Rodney. Better to have died in the crash than to suffocate or burn to death here. A coughing fit doubled him over, and as he straightened, he felt something bump against his foot. Looking down, he saw that Zelenka's leg had twitched.

"Radek!" The fire extinguisher and even the threat of painful fiery death were forgotten. Rodney dropped to his knees beside the Czech scientist. "Radek -- Zelenka -- hey!"

Zelenka's head rolled to the side; he coughed wetly and mumbled something in Czech. Rodney gripped his shoulder, started to shake him, then thought better of it; he just left his hand there. "Radek?"

A flicker showed beneath Zelenka's eyelids. His glasses had been knocked off in the crash and he looked -- fragile. Breakable. He spoke again, snatches of words that were not English, then his head slumped onto his shoulder.

Rodney gave up. "It's, uh, it'll be all right," he attempted, inanely, and gave Radek a pat on the shoulder before letting go and straightening up with the fire extinguisher clenched in his hands like a weapon.

The air was getting thick -- Rodney had to take small gasps, and tried not to think about what the searing stuff was doing to his lungs. And it was hot. "Damn fire's inside the bulkheads -- I don't think we can get it," one of the engineers said. He laid a hand against the wall and then jerked it away with a hiss.

Rodney cast an anxious glance at Radek. Noting flames creeping uncomfortably close to the unconscious scientist, he sprayed them with the extinguisher, driving them back for the moment.

Novak was holding a flashlight for Hermiod. The Asgard did not appear to have been injured in the crash, and had been completely ignoring the fire while frantically working on one of the consoles, muttering softly to himself in his own language. Rodney joined them. "Can you actually fix that?" he demanded, incredulous.

The Asgard gave Rodney an unreadable stare from his large dark eyes. "I do not have time to answer stupid questions." He ducked back under the console, ignoring Rodney's spluttering.

"He's trying to get the fire suppression systems up and running," Novak explained, shifting the flashlight. Rodney noticed that she was holding it with her left hand; the right was tucked up against her body.

Rodney started to reply, when a blast of frigid air startled him and made him turn. Everyone else reacted as well; there was no way you could avoid feeling it, with the air turning to an oven around them. The breeze was coming from the far end of the slanting deck, disturbing the smoke and pushing it out of the way in lazy swirls.

"Found a way out!" The lanky blond engineer with personal-space confusion issues appeared from the smoke, with a broad grin on his tanned face. "There's a big hole in the side of the ship, right up that way. It looks like we got ripped open on some kind of gigantic rock -- that's what buckled the corridors outside. Had to wiggle through an air conduit to get to it, but it's not too tight a fit."

"We can't abandon the engine room, Armstrong, not if we want to get home," the chief engineer protested.

One of the scientists -- Dr. Westlake, Rodney thought it was -- cried out, "If it's that or our lives, we sure as hell can! You really think this ship is going anywhere?" A couple of people were already making moves in that direction, as cold air flowed into the room and began to dissipate some of the smoke.

The utter frigidity of the breeze made Rodney's stomach sink. Clearly it was cold outside. On the other hand, they were getting air in, not venting it out, so at least they hadn't crashed on some airless moon somewhere.

"We could at least get the wounded out," Novak said, looking sympathetically towards Radek and the handful of others who were huddled on the floor, unconscious or moaning.

This gave them something to do, and under the chief engineer's direction -- Rodney finally overheard someone use his name; it was Dewey -- began moving the wounded towards the air vent. The smoke was getting thicker and as Rodney ducked past one of the bulkheads, he saw to his horror that it was starting to develop glowing red hot spots.

"Dr. McKay!" Novak beckoned him. She was assisting a thin, blond woman who was doubled over and whimpering in pain. Reluctantly Rodney offered a shoulder, trying not to get bled on.

Between the two of them, they lifted the woman up to the hole in the ceiling, with Novak pulling and Rodney pushing from underneath. Then Rodney scrambled up after them and helped Novak pull her along what must once have been a nearly vertical ventilation shaft. Now it canted at a steep angle, difficult to navigate but not impossible. And the air, though cold, was clear of smoke; Rodney gulped it down in huge lungfuls, tasting plastic on the back of his tongue.

Novak gave a small, startled cry and vanished. Rodney caught hold of the blond woman and kept her from being dragged after, then peeked out, and his jaw dropped.

He was looking down the side of a sweeping expanse of snow-covered mountain. Snow-encrusted boulders and pointy, piney trees fell away into a steep valley which then rose to become another impossibly tall mountain. These were Himalaya-class mountains. A low gray ceiling of clouds hid the tops of the mountain peaks, hid the sun and made it impossible to tell what time of day it was.

A wind skirled the snow around the base of the Daedalus, and Rodney shrank back from the cold. Looking down, around the shoulder of the half-conscious blond woman, he saw that Novak had fallen a meter or so. She was sitting in the snow with her legs splayed out and her injured arm drawn up to her chest, hiccuping softly in pain.

"Hey, uh ... you okay down there?"

Novak sniffled, nodded and struggled to her feet. The snow was churned up in great heaps around the bulk of the Daedalus, mixed with car-sized boulders and splintered pine trees. She teetered from one great block of snow to another until she steadied herself on the side of the ship and helped Rodney hand down the blond woman. One of the engineers took custody of her. Looking along the sweep of the ship's hull, Rodney saw that another tear in the hull, some way down, was being used as an entry point by the straggling refugees from the engine room. He turned his head to look the other way and his jaw dropped at the mind-boggling swathe the ship had torn down the side of the mountain.

"Dr. McKay." Novak hesitantly broke in on his thoughts. "I need to get back in -- the fire --"

"Oh. Right, right." Awkwardly, Rodney wriggled backwards down the ventilation shaft and dropped out into what felt like a furnace. A stifling, smoky furnace. Novak scrambled out after him.

All the wounded had been evacuated except for Zelenka and a Daedalus engineer with a crushed pelvis who was too badly injured to risk moving her. The remainder of the Daedalus crew and Rodney's own scientists moved like silent ghosts through the smoke, hopelessly battling the fire and trying to assist Hermiod.

Rodney glanced at Novak and saw that her eyes had gone to Zelenka.

"I don't see how we can move him," she said softly, voicing Rodney's own thoughts. "It's going to take a cutting torch to get him free."

Which meant that Zelenka's life was wholly dependent upon stopping the fire. Assuming that Zelenka was still alive to save. Rodney had never seen anyone who looked that dead and wasn't actually dead. Even Sheppard with the bug on his neck hadn't looked that bad.

------

Impact plus 0 hours 14 minutes

The bridge of the Daedalus was dark, but calm. Caldwell and the less injured among the bridge crew had performed a quick triage, assessing injuries and binding wounds as best they could with only their single first-aid kit. One of the technicians had been killed when his console blew up on his face on impact; otherwise the most severely wounded on the bridge were a security officer, Airman McKinney, whose leg had been severed at the knee ... and Elizabeth Weir.

She was buried in debris. One look with a flashlight let Caldwell know that digging her out by hand wasn't really an option, at least not without a lot of strong men and a lot of time -- and he'd want a medical team standing by in any case. Several large beams from the ceiling had pinned her, and then further debris had completely buried her. Perry had found her accidentally by stepping on one of her hands, which hadn't even drawn a twitch. The hand was the only part of her that was visible at the moment. Perry hadn't been able to find a pulse at first, and in fact wasn't even sure if the hand was still attached, but after trying a few times he said that he'd gotten something, and when he squeezed her hand she'd squeezed back, very weakly. Caldwell thought that this might just be wishful thinking, but he didn't say anything.

Reports were coming back from the rest of the ship, and they weren't good. The fire in Engineering was out of control, and they had two dead bodies down there, along with two people -- Dr. Zelenka and Sgt. Packee -- who, from the sound of things, would be dead soon if they didn't get medical help. No deaths had been reported in the sickbay, but there were some pretty bad injuries, and the medical staff couldn't get out at the moment to help anyone else -- they'd suffered a hull breach in the crash and the computers had slammed shut the emergency doors throughout the ship, before going down along with the power. Now the ship was divided into compartments and they had no way to undo it. Caldwell and his flight crew were stuck on the bridge; some people were trapped in hallways; one unlucky tech was locked in a bathroom and apparently panicking.

They had cutting torches on board, but getting to them was going to be next to impossible, and even if they could, the torches required electricity to work ... which made them useless unless Hermiod could get the power back on.

Unable to do anything else, Caldwell paced and tried to keep people calm over the radios, while brainstorming with the rest of his bridge crew -- those of them who were coherent enough, anyway -- on possible strategies for opening up the sealed sections of the ship.

"I hate to say it," Perry said, "but I think we're basically looking at explosives. There's nothing else that'll get those doors open, considering what we have to work with and the time frame we're looking at."

Caldwell had more or less come to the same conclusion himself. The idea of blowing up parts of his own ship was galling -- he'd rather cut off his own hand. But slowly suffocating behind the bulkheads didn't seem like much of an alternative. They weren't out of oxygen yet, but with the life support down and the air hazy with smoke from minor electrical fires, it was already getting a bit stuffy.

"How many demolitions experts do we have?" he asked Perry. "There's Sgt. Theodore in Weapons ..."

"And Lt. Cadman," Perry supplied. The Lieutenant was currently on the Daedalus at Sheppard's request. It wasn't often that they took this sort of short trip within the galaxy, and Sheppard wanted some of his regular people to get experience on a starship. He figured that he might have to outfit his own starship crew on short notice -- between hiveships and Ancient ships littered around the galaxy, you just never knew when you were going to suddenly find yourself in possession of a ship. "I imagine most of us can set C4 if we have to, though, sir."

"It wouldn't necessarily be C4 ..." One thing about the Daedalus: it had no shortage of things that went 'boom'. Caldwell tapped his radio. "Cadman? Where are you?"

"In the mess, sir." Her frustrated voice came back immediately.

"Are you hurt?"

"Ankle's a bit twisted, sir, but I'm fine, I think."

"I have a job for you, Lieutenant," Caldwell began, and then broke off at the sound of a very small moan from under the pile of debris at his feet. He gestured frantically to Perry, who came over and knelt down to take Elizabeth's hand while Caldwell discussed explosives and timing and routes around the ship with Cadman. By the time they got that sorted out, the moaning had stopped. Caldwell leaned down by Perry, who looked up at him with his long, thin face half obscured by shadows. "She's passed out again, sir," he said.

"I guessed." Caldwell frowned down at the small white shape of Elizabeth's hand. She was his responsibility, goddammit. All of them were. He hated this, and he still wanted to know what had happened to his ship and his people. Not that he didn't have an inkling.

"Need to talk to you for a minute, Perry." His XO released Elizabeth's wrist and got up to follow him to a quiet corner of the bridge, where Caldwell leaned unobtrusively against the wall. His head was still throbbing; he didn't think he was actually concussed, but he kept getting dizzy when he moved too quickly, and the slanting deck didn't help at all. Lowering his voice so that he couldn't be heard in the rest of the room, Caldwell said, "Did you get any signals before we dropped out of hyperspace -- any readings that were off, any strange radio transmissions, anything at all?"

"No, sir. But then, I wasn't looking for anything, either." Perry frowned. "Do you have a theory, sir?"

Caldwell knew full well what he was asking, and that Perry knew why his CO had taken him aside, where they couldn't be heard. "I certainly don't have a suspect. I trust my crew. Then again, I trusted me until a few months ago." Most of the Daedalus crew, particularly the current crew, didn't know what had happened to their captain with the Goa'uld -- all they knew was that he'd been wounded somehow on Atlantis. The officers were aware of the situation, though, and particularly Perry, who was close to a friend. "It could easily have been a hyperdrive malfunction -- although if so, I sure as hell want some heavy-duty testing done before I take this ship back into space."

Perry said nothing about the odds of this ship ever flying anywhere again. "Hermiod would probably know if the hyperdrive was functioning normally before our ... accident."

"Hermiod's a little busy at the moment. But, yes, as soon as we have the survival problem nailed down, I do intend to ask him. In the meantime, stay alert, Major. If this was deliberate, I have no intention of letting the individual, or individuals, responsible get away with it. Stay alert and be careful."

---

TBC

I don't have a clue about any of Caldwell's regular crew aside from Novak. I'm pretty much assuming that a lot of the Daedalus crew changes from mission to mission anyway, so I'm just making most of them up for this story. You'll see what I mean...