A/N: Thanks for the comments about Air Force crew rotation; I've slightly rewritten little bits of dialogue here and there in later parts of the story. Also, just FYI, I rewrote something in the last chapter after uploading it -- the explanation for Cadman being on the Daedalus is a little different now. Again, thanks very much for the reviews! You guys are great!
Impact plus 0 hours 21 minutes
"Rodney, get out of here," Zelenka managed to say in a hoarse whisper.
"Did I ask you? I don't remember asking you," Rodney snapped, stepping quickly across him with a fire extinguisher.
The engine room was an oven, wrapped in a haze of smoke. They seemed to be able to contain the spread of the fire in the room itself, but they could do nothing about the fire behind the bulkheads, and it was slowly baking them alive.
Novak brought Rodney a bottle of water before darting back to help Hermiod at the console. He drank half of it without thinking, astounded at how thirsty he was, then knelt down beside Zelenka. "Here. Drink."
Zelenka tried to swallow, but ended up coughing most of it back up; water dribbled down his chin to mingle with sweat and blood. Even in the reddish light, his face was pale. "What happened?" he asked softly.
"We crashed."
Though white as a sheet and too weak to raise his head, Zelenka managed to look annoyed. "I do know that much, Rodney."
"What kind of answer are you looking for, then? Do I look like some sort of federal spaceflight disaster investigator to you? Maybe Hermiod can't fly straight and ran into a planet. I don't know."
The corners of Zelenka's mouth twitched. "You need to calm down, Rodney. Stress is not good for you." His eyelids fluttered shut.
"Stress? Gee, I wonder why I'm stressed! We're all about to burn to death and you've got a fucking steel beam sticking out of your chest!"
The soft eyes opened again. "Rodney, I am serious. Don't stay on my account. Get out when you have to."
"When did I ever say I was sticking around because of you? I'm here because if the engines go up in flames, we'll end up eating each other's frozen corpses on this rock. That's assuming that we don't all perish in a giant fireball within the next few minutes, considering the quantity of various exploding elements within close proximity of where we now sit."
Zelenka just smiled a little bit and his head flopped over to the side.
"Quit passing out, would you? It makes you very difficult to talk to," Rodney muttered. After a moment, he shrugged out of his jacket and rolled it up against Zelenka's shoulder, to prop up his head.
Without the jacket, it was a little less oppressively hot, but, paradoxically, he shivered in the searing blasts of icy air that swirled around the room each time the wind blew outside. Some of the engineers had had the idea of bringing in snow from outside to try to extinguish the fire or at least cool down the wall, which had resulted in the floor on the downslope side being awash in sooty water, and his shoes were soaked ... just another little bit of misery. Coughing on burning plastic fumes, he sloshed out of the puddles to the main engineering console, where the only visible part of Hermiod was his feet. Rodney had tried several times to offer assistance -- well, "offer" wasn't really the best word, more like "impose" -- only to be firmly rebuffed. However, standing around waiting to burn to death while other people fixed the problem was simply not in his nature. Also, the sheer idiocy of not taking advantage of his intellect at a time like this floored him ... especially since he was probably losing brain cells by the thousands due to the fumes; they'd better use his brain while he still had it!
"Hermiod--" he began.
The feet stiffened. Novak opened her mouth to say something, then stopped and reached for her radio. And there was another thing -- they hadn't given him a radio. All the crew had them; however, the civilians on the Daedalus did not. He'd actually contemplated taking one from a dead engineer, but couldn't quite bring himself to do it.
Feeling annoyed, worried, ignored and useless, Rodney glowered balefully at Novak while she talked to Caldwell in a soft urgent voice. Occasionally she glanced at him and then her eyes skittered hastily away as he continued to glare. As soon as she finished talking, he demanded, "Well? Now what?"
"They're planning to use explosives to blow the sealed emergency doors in the rest of the ship. But they can't get to the cargo holds where the explosives are kept -- we, however, can."
"We can?" He glanced automatically towards the corridor leading into the rest of the ship -- which had been crumpled and blocked in the crash. "No, we can't."
Novak gestured towards the ventilation shaft, then winced, as she'd used her injured hand. "From outside. That's where we took the wounded -- into one of the cargo bays."
Oh, right. The other big hole in the hull. "And they want us to go dig out explosives for them?" Rodney demanded, incredulous. "We're a little busy here, considering that the ship's on fire!" Then, reflecting back on what he'd said, he paused and his mouth dropped open.
"All the more reason to blow the emergency doors so everyone can get out," Novak said. Then she noticed the look on his face. "What is it?"
"Explosives! Fire!" Rodney snapped his fingers. "That's how they extinguish oil well fires -- with dynamite!"
Novak stared at him. "You want to blow up Engineering to put out the fire?"
Hermiod's bald gray head popped up from behind the console. "That does not sound like a prudent course of action."
"Oh really? Well, it seems to me that at the rate things are going, we're all going to burn to death while we wait for you to fix the fire suppression system!"
The Asgard's dark eyes narrowed dangerously.
Novak pointed nervously towards the ventilation shaft leading outside. "I have to, er, go find explosives for Col. Caldwell ..." She scuttled off in great haste.
Rodney and Hermiod continued to glare at each other. Rodney lost; he had to look away when he dissolved into a coughing fit because of the smoke. Hermiod, muttering to himself in Asgard, vanished beneath the console again.
"Coward," Rodney grumbled. Privately, he sent annoyed vibes in Sheppard's general direction for corrupting him so badly that he now found the whole idea of deliberately blowing things up to be an eminently sensible response in a crisis.
He wondered, briefly, what Sheppard was doing right now, and if anyone on Atlantis had any idea of their plight.
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Impact plus 0 hours 27 minutes
As far as Sheppard could tell, nearly half an hour after losing contact with the Daedalus, they still didn't know any more than they had at first: namely, that it was gone without a trace, taking over 200 people with it ... not the least of them, from Sheppard's point of view, being Elizabeth and Rodney.
The scientists, along with the gateroom staff, were plotting out the ship's hyperspace course to try to figure out where it might be. And Sheppard paced, frustrated and angry and unable to do anything.
He looked up when Beckett barreled into the gateroom at a near run. The doctor paused, looked around, zeroed in on Sheppard and made a beeline for him. "Colonel, there's a rumor running around the infirmary that something's happened to the Daedalus."
That was what he got for speaking on an open channel. All of Atlantis probably knew by now. "We're having some kind of communication problem, Doc; we don't know if it's worse than that yet."
"I see." Carson sat down in the nearest available chair and clasped his hands on top of the console. Sheppard remembered belatedly that not only were Elizabeth and Rodney on the Daedalus at the moment -- probably Carson's two closest friends -- but Lt. Cadman was as well. Damn. No wonder he looked white.
Simpson looked up from her displays. "We have an estimate for the approximate location of the Daedalus, Colonel, based on its speed, trajectory and the time that we lost contact. Assuming that the Daedalus dropped out of hyperspace when it stopped broadcasting, there are a few different Stargates in systems in the area that we could try dialing to see if we can get a signal from them."
Sheppard nodded. "Do it."
As one of the other technicians began dialing the gate, Beckett asked quietly, "What if they're still in hyperspace?"
"Then they'll have to contact us, because we have no other way of locating them. They're too far out for the long-range scanners to pick them up. We've been hailing them for the last half hour and haven't gotten a response."
Sheppard sat down on the edge of a console. "And if they dropped out of hyperspace sometime between when we lost contact and now?"
Simpson's face darkened. "Then they could be anywhere within a few hundred light-years of their last known position. We'd probably never find them."
Sheppard looked up at the gate as the familiar burst of blue light ka-whooshed and settled into steady rippling. "Then I guess we better hope that's not the case, Doc."
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TBC