Impact plus 0 hours 30 minutes

"Rodney, I'm telling you how to do it; it isn't my fault you keep refusing to listen to me."

"I'm listening dammit!" Except that he kept tuning her out by sheer habit. Having Laura Cadman's voice speaking in his ear, even if it was only into a radio, brought back memories that he'd rather not dwell on. And having her tell him what to do, especially when he was perfectly confident that he could have figured it out on his own if he'd just been allowed to sit still for a moment without annoying blond Lieutenants yakking at him ...

Novak had provided him a radio, and Cadman, still trapped in her own section of the ship, was talking them through the process of setting the explosives to contain the fire.

"As soon as they go off, you'll need to be ready with extinguishers. This should put out most of the flames, but you'll still have hot spots and they can easily re-ignite. You don't really want to do this twice ... or more."

"We get it, we get it," Rodney muttered.

"Are you ready?"

"Yes, yes -- ready." Retreating from the bulkhead, he paused to untuck his jacket from under Radek's neck and threw it over the unconscious scientist's head and torso, in the hopes of shielding him from debris. If they got a backwash of flames -- which Cadman had told them was a possibility -- there wasn't a damn thing he could do to prevent Zelenka from becoming scientist flambe-on-a-stick, but at least he could prevent him from getting rakish scars that would attract every eligible woman in the labs.

Cadman spoke over the general channel in a calm, businesslike voice. "We're setting off explosives in the engineering section. All nonessential personnel need to clear out. As soon as we get the all-clear, Colonel, do we have permission to proceed?"

"You have permission to do whatever you need to do in order to ensure the safety of the people on this ship, Lieutenant," Caldwell retorted brusquely.

"We're clear," Novak's voice came over the radio.

"Okay, Rodney. Like we talked about. Go."

Rodney tried to figure out just how, exactly, he'd ended up being the one setting off the explosives. Well, maybe because it was his idea, but still ...

Sheppard would never let him live this down.

He hit the button.

There was a muffled WHOOMPH and a concussive wave of air momentarily blew the smoke out of the room. As the haze rushed back, the designated fire brigade of relatively-uninjured engineers and scientists sprang into action, using extinguishers and snow to eliminate what was left of the fire.

"Dewey, McKay, report," Caldwell ordered.

Rodney promptly opened his mouth to object that Caldwell had no authority over him, but the chief engineer spoke first, with fervent relief in his voice. "I think that got it, sir. We're still cleaning up the hot spots, but I think that did it."

"Well done, you guys!" Cadman chirped cheerfully, and then turned her attention to the next priority -- blowing the doors in the sickbay. Rodney tuned her out as he sank against the wall with a long sigh of relief.

Novak edged up next to him. "Nice work," she said quietly.

"Um, thanks." He glanced sideways at her -- smoke, dirt and blood had made a mess of her face, and he suspected that he probably didn't look any better. She was still holding her arm tucked up to her chest, the awkward posture making him think of a wounded bird, and he felt as if he should say something. "Uh, are you -- is that, eh, broken, do you think?"

"I'm trying really hard not to think about it. At least," she added with a nervous laugh, "I was until you asked me about it."

"Oh. Sorry." He still couldn't get his brains together. He felt as if something vital to his intellectual integrity had been lost, left behind in space, and now he was just scrambling to keep up with everyone else.

"Were you hurt, in the crash?"

"I ..." This was the first time he'd realized that he'd never really taken inventory. He was bruised, he knew that, and from the feel of things he had one gigantic bruise over his right thigh that he didn't even want to look at. It amazed him to find that he wasn't all that worried about internal bleeding, crushed-limb trauma or any of the other things that he would normally be worrying about. Hypochondria, too, had been left behind, submerged in the much greater crises of the people around him. "Not really," he managed to say.

Novak nodded as if she understood.

------

Impact plus 0 hours 34 minutes

Caldwell could tell when they began blowing the doors. The muffled vibration of explosions elsewhere in the ship was transmitted up through his feet and through the hand that he'd rested against a wall. It was hard, so hard to accept the necessity of damaging the ship even more than it had been damaged in the crash. But the ship was only plastic and steel. There were lives at stake.

"We're through the sickbay doors, sir," Cadman reported. "There are still at least two sets that are going to have to be blown before they can make it to you, though."

"Do what you need to, Lieutenant."

It was hard, too, to stand here doing nothing. He wanted to be out there, helping them.

"Dewey, what's it looking like down in Engineering?"

The engineer's voice sounded strained. Major Brian Dewey was a quiet man with a cool head in a crisis, definitely the sort of person you wanted running your engines in a combat situation. Caldwell had never seen him ruffled, even with Wraith ships bearing down on them and circuitry exploding everywhere. The fact that he sounded so stressed was a strong indication of how bad it was. "The fire's out, sir, but we're still assessing the extent of the damage. At the very least, we're not going anywhere anytime soon."

Understatement of the year. "Any chance you can get the power back online?"

"Hermiod's working on it, sir, but honestly ... I doubt it. There's just too much damage, and we don't dare bring the power core back online without extensive repairs."

"Understood." Which meant they were stuck here. "You people have access to the outside, right? What's it look like out there?"

There was a brief hesitation. "I haven't actually been out there yet, sir. I'm going to turn you over to someone who has. Lt. Armstrong? You're outside, right?"

"Here, sir."

Armstrong. Native Minnesotan, Caldwell recalled, and a skilled outdoorsman who'd been stationed in both the Arctic and Antarctic. "Lieutenant, report. Where've we touched down?"

"We're on a mountain, sir." There was a pause and he could hear crunching sounds -- boots in snow, he guessed, even before the lieutenant said, "It's winter, sir -- either that or we're very high up, or it's a very cold planet, or both. High, sharp mountains all around us. Glaciated. No sign of habitation that I can see anywhere. Lots of snow. Actually, if it wasn't for the snow we'd probably have taken a lot more damage to the ship. I can only imagine that it helped cushion our landing a bit."

"Guess Lady Luck works in mysterious ways, Lieutenant."

There was a short laugh. "Yes, sir. You want me to explore a little?"

"Negative, Lieutenant. Nobody goes anywhere until we get everyone together and take care of the wounded. It looks like we're on our own, so our first priority is assembling in one place and taking stock of our supplies."

"Yes, sir."

Caldwell signed off and leaned against the wall for a moment. Captain Kleinman, who was bent over one of the darkened consoles with a flashlight, said without looking up, "Did I hear correctly? Ice planet?"

"Or something like it. You like the snow, Captain?"

Kleinman grinned. "I'm a city boy myself, Colonel. You?"

"Grew up on a farm, actually. But I'm not much for snow. Guess you can always teach an old dog new tricks, though." He gestured at the equipment. "How's that coming?"

"I think our emergency beacon is transmitting, sir, though it's hard to be sure. But otherwise, without power, our external communications are totally down. And we can't boost the signals on the radios without it, either, which means we're very limited in how far we can go while staying in touch with each other."

Perry asked from nearby, "What about the F302s?"

There was a point. Caldwell tapped his radio. "Anyone got a status report on the hangar bay?"

After a moment, Dewey responded. "I can't tell you firsthand, sir, but looking at the way the ship is situated and what it looks like outside Engineering, I wouldn't be surprised if it's completely inaccessible. A lot of the access corridors on that side of the ship are crumpled."

Cadman's voice came on to ask, "Is that a priority, sir? I can divert --"

"Negative, Lieutenant. Only if there are people trapped there, and nobody's reported back from that section." He refused to consider what that might mean. "People first. That's your top priority."

"Yes, sir. Cadman out."

"Sir?" one of the bridge security crew -- Airman Seavey -- called from her position next to the pile of rubble burying Elizabeth Weir. "You wanted to know if she woke up, sir. I think she's awake."

Caldwell knelt beside the young Airman, and laid his hand in Weir's cold palm. Immediately the fingers responded, curling around his own. They felt like ice. "Dr. Weir? Seavey tells me you've decided to rejoin us."

There was a soft, dry cough, then Elizabeth's voice said softly, "The flight was very enjoyable, but I can't say I think much of your landings, Colonel."

Caldwell smiled in the dark. "Yes, I'll have to speak to someone about that." Another dry cough came from under the pile of rubble, and he asked, "At the risk of sounding like a bit of an idiot, Doctor, how do you feel?"

After a moment's silence, Weir said, "Strange."

"In what way?"

"Disconnected." Her voice did, indeed, have a sort of dreamy quality to it. "I can't move, really, but nothing seems to hurt. Well, it hurts, but not in an ... urgent sort of way."

He wished he could see her, because it was damned hard to gauge a person's physical health when all you had to go by was some rambling from under a pile of rubble. "We'll have a medical team up here fairly soon." As if to emphasize his words, the deck trembled slightly as another explosion shook the ship.

Something groaned and shifted in the pile of debris covering Elizabeth. She gave a small, startled gasp, and her hand on Caldwell's flinched.

"Dr. Weir?" he asked sharply.

"I'm ... I'm here." After a hesitation, she said, "I felt something move."

"I know, but I think the pile on top of you is fairly stable -- it just shifted a little. Just relax; we'll have you out of there as quickly as possible." He gave her hand a final squeeze and straightened, allowing Airman Seavey to move in and take his position. Looking around, he saw Perry meet his eyes across the heap of debris, and picked his way around its edge, climbing over a beam, so that he could speak to his XO out of Elizabeth's earshot.

"That's very bad," Perry murmured.

"I know. But I can't exactly tell Cadman to stop blowing doors. We can't stay trapped in here forever, and there really isn't any other way." He knew that he was trying to justify his decision to himself, even knowing that it was the correct one. They had wounded people up here, including Elizabeth herself, who urgently needed medical attention. And without more manpower and equipment, there was very little chance that they could get her out alive anyway. As he'd said, there was no other way -- the risk of accidentally crushing her was one they simply had to take.

Didn't mean he had to like it. Didn't mean he liked being the one to make the call, either.

"I don't just mean her situation," Perry murmured. He gestured around them. "Who knows how stable the whole thing is? And there may be others buried like she is."

Caldwell sucked in his breath through his teeth, thinking, hating the conclusions he was coming to. "I know. And there's still no choice. What else can we do, try to cut ourselves out with hand tools?" He tapped his radio, and said, "Cadman. Channel 6, please."

"Sir," Cadman said after a moment over the relatively private channel.

"Lieutenant, we've had a concern arise over possibly bringing down some of the badly damaged sections of the ship with the vibrations from the explosives."

"I don't think it's that badly damaged, sir, and we're taking that into account."

"That may be, but we've noticed a bit of shifting up here. And we have one badly injured person who's trapped under debris, who may not be the only one. I'm not telling you to stop, Lieutenant, because we need what you're doing. But use the absolute minimum charges that you can, and if you don't absolutely have to blow something to rescue a trapped person, then don't do it."

"Oh." She sounded subdued. "I take it we're using a private channel because this isn't public knowledge, sir?"

"You'd be right, Lieutenant. Be discrete, be careful, and keep blowing things up."

"Yes, sir."

------

Impact plus 0 hours 39 minutes

"It's not really through his chest so much as it's through his shoulder," the medic explained. She was a petite strawberry-blond woman who had introduced herself as Cora something-or-other. At any other time, Rodney wouldn't have been able to keep his eyes off her, but at the moment, all he could do was jitter nervously from foot to foot as she checked over Zelenka from a portable medical bag and began setting up an IV.

As she straightened up and began calmly entering numbers into a clipboard, Rodney finally lost mouth containment. "But -- but -- you're just leaving it there? Isn't that some kind of clear violation of the Hippocratic Oath? I don't care if it's in his shoulder, his thorax or his left ventricle -- it's still definitely not supposed to be in any part of a human body!"

Cora Somebody-or-Other marched up into Rodney's personal space, her neatly plucked brows drawn together with a fine line between them. "Mister McKay, we have no electricity, no heat, no way to move any surgical equipment from the sickbay if it's not small and portable, and only one person on the ship who has a medical degree. We are not performing any surgeries at the moment unless we absolutely have to ... and your friend is not bleeding that badly."

"But ... metal! In his chest!"

"Shoulder," the medic corrected grimly. "Now, I'm giving him fluids, antibiotics, painkillers and a mild sedative. If you want to help him, you can head down to sickbay or one of the supply bays and get some blankets. He may be here for a while, and it's going to get cold. But first, let me take a look at you."

Rodney, a bit dazedly, allowed her to flash a light in his eyes and slap a blood pressure cuff on his arm. "I'm fine," he said.

"I'll be the judge of that. We have people walking around here with so much adrenaline in their bodies that they're telling us they're perfectly fine while dragging broken limbs." She tore the cuff off his arm. "Any pain? Deformity? Dizziness? Trouble walking?"

"I told you. I'm fine. Quit that!" he snapped as she stuck a thermometer in his ear.

"You do seem to be fine -- thankfully, because I'm sure you'd be a delightful patient if you weren't. Now go make yourself useful and bring your friend some blankets."

"Your bedside manner sucks!" Rodney told her retreating back as she headed towards Novak.

He had to pity the medics, though. There weren't very many of them, and they had to tend to nearly 200 people, many of whom appeared to have major injuries. But still ... metal! Stuck in Zelenka's chest! There had to be something wrong with that. It made him feel ill just looking at it. All he wanted to do was get as far away as possible. Surely there had to be something useful he could be doing elsewhere in the ship ... Nonetheless, he couldn't explain why he found himself crouching down next to the injured scientist. "Hey, Radek. You in there?"

The light eyes cracked open. "Rodney," he acknowledged, and rolled his head to the side, peering up at the IV.

"You feel any better? Someone who is not a doctor, and not really much of a nurse, gave you this." Rodney twitched at the IV line with his fingertips. "Supposed to be some happy drugs in there."

"Cold," Zelenka whispered.

"Yes, well, that would be because we're on some kind of ice planet. I'm off to pick you up some blankets, doctor's orders. You want anything else? Water, food, hot and cold running nurses? I'm taking requests." He tried to smile. This was somehow easier with Sheppard, even in situations like this -- and heaven knew they did get into a lot of situations like this. Well, not exactly like this ... but the whole "waiting for a friend to live or die" thing -- with Sheppard, he was sort of getting used to it. And he felt responsible for Zelenka, in a lot of ways, not the least of them being that Zelenka wouldn't even be here if he hadn't pitched this stupid idea to Caldwell in the first place.

In fact, none of them would be here. "Oh God," Rodney murmured as realization dawned. "I've killed us all, haven't I?"

"I see that your ego is as large as ever." Zelenka's eyes drifted shut. "Somehow you have missed the part where we are adults and doing things of our own free will."

"Girda's dead," Rodney said, around a choking lump in his throat. He hadn't even really known the woman, but damn, he was tired of his staff dropping dead because of his mistakes. At this rate he wasn't going to have any scientists left by the New Year.

"Her name is ... was Greta ... Greta Estvaag." Zelenka blinked sleepily up at Rodney. "And yes ... yes I know. I saw her die. She was in front of me. She has two sisters ... and a cat ..."

"God, Radek, I'm so sorry," Rodney whispered. "For all of this."

Zelenka's eyelids slid shut. "If you're truly sorry, then how about some blankets ... and maybe that nice lab by the transporters, when we get back to Atlantis."

"The lab -- you mean the one where I run spectrographic analysis?"

"Where you used to run spectrographic analysis." His voice faded, trailing into sleep. "I have been thinking it would be very nice for spreading out jumper circuit diagrams ... and repairing broken control crystals ... very nice indeed ..."

"Radek?" Rodney nudged at him lightly, felt for a pulse, almost panicked when he couldn't feel anything and then realized it was because he didn't have his fingers anywhere near an artery. "Blankets," he said to himself, "blankets are good," and straightened up, wincing a little as his bruises twinged at him. Maybe he'd spoken too soon to whatsername, Cora, about being fine. Maybe she had Tylenol or something.

It was definitely getting colder in the engine room. As he made his way to the ventilation shaft that still provided their only way in and out of the room, Rodney looked over at Hermiod and wondered how Asgard dealt with the cold. Could you put a parka on an Asgard? Would it wear it? For that matter, did they have any parkas on the ship? We'd better, he thought, and remembered to retrieve his jacket before climbing up the shaft's diagonal slant.

Dropping out of the opening in the side of the ship was like plunging into ice water. He may as well have left the jacket where it was, covering Zelenka's legs, because the wind went straight through it. They'd better have cold-weather gear, or they were all going to be a bunch of popsicles by the end of the day.

The region alongside the hull of the Daedalus was like an avalanche zone, huge broken chunks of ice and boulders and frozen ground. Rodney slipped and slithered his way to the big rip in the hull that apparently, judging from what he'd heard, led into the cargo bays. Unfortunately the opening didn't reach all the way to the ground, so he had to grab hold of the jagged edges of the metal and pull himself up ... not really his forte even on a good day. Fortunately, someone inside noticed his difficulty and a warm hand closed over his half-frozen one, hauling him up. It was the big blond guy -- Armstrong -- and Rodney couldn't help noticing he was wearing a parka.

"We have coats?" he asked, feeling pathetic as he tucked his hands into his sleeves.

Armstrong nodded and pointed deeper into the wide-open space. Rodney saw lights farther in, and trekked that way, hoping that the presence of light meant that some kind of electricity had been turned on.

It turned out that the light came from a variety of non-electrical sources -- glowsticks and Coleman lanterns which had been set on top of crates or spread around to illuminate a large area. This was immediately evident as the ship's impromptu center of operations. There were already fifty or sixty people assembled, opening crates and arranging supplies under the watchful eyes of several officers, and more bedraggled-looking refugees kept trickling in. Cots had been set up for the wounded. Due to the way that the ship had twisted during the crash, the floor was very nearly level here, which made a nice change of pace.

Rodney looked around for any of his people, and soon located the remaining scientists besides Zelenka and Greta, all huddled in a knot near a big pile of crates. Obviously, no one had given them anything to do and they were feeling isolated and scared. He forged towards them through the mass of soldiers, and they came to meet him, looking pathetically overjoyed to see him. He was a lot more accustomed to being greeted with fear or at least a hasty scramble to look busy. Abject gratitude made him deeply uncomfortable and he tried to brush them off.

"How's Rad -- uh, Dr. Zelenka?" asked one of the Russian physicists.

"Impaled," Rodney said shortly. "They tell me it's not as bad as it looks. I suspect they're right, because if it was, he'd be dead. What are you all standing around for? Isn't there anything you can do to make yourselves less useless?" Strange how having people to order around helped him to shake off his own lethargy and fear.

He soon had the scientists scrambling off to help the military contingent in various ways, and he'd gotten himself a parka and an armload of blankets. Why in the world the Daedalus carried Arctic survival gear was beyond him; he'd also seen a couple of rubber rafts and wetsuits in the same area, so maybe they just hauled survival equipment for all conceivable conditions as a general rule. He could tell by looking, though, that there weren't very many parkas -- which meant it was a good thing he'd managed to grab one early. No way he was letting his valuable brain freeze, and Caldwell had better see it that way too, because now that he was in his parka, they would have to pry it off his cold dead corpse.

Hmm. Bad thought.

He added a couple bottles of water from another crate to his Radek care package, then slithered down into the snow and scrambled back to the ventilation hole. This time he paused for a moment to study just how, exactly, a completely enclosed ventilation shaft had become an opening to the outside. It wasn't a pretty picture -- the skin of the Daedalus had actually been peeled back from that part of the hull like the lid of a tin can. Rodney shuddered as he threw the blankets into the opening and climbed in after them.

Zelenka was unconscious and unresponsive when he got back to the engine room. Rodney hoped that it was because of Cora's promised drugs and not because of something more sinister and lethal. He carefully tucked several of the blankets around the too-still scientist, then set a bottle of water by his hand and went off to give the blankets to one of the medics.

Having done that, he made a beeline for the main engineering console where Hermiod and Novak had their heads together ... because, dammit, his brains were totally going to waste on playing gofer, Radek was dying in the hands of people who clearly had no medical qualifications whatsoever, and they had to get off this frozen wasteland before he went crazy.

Novak was murmuring something in an undertone. She broke off abruptly when Rodney walked up. She and Hermiod shared a look.

"What?" he demanded. "I'm here to help. And I'm not taking no for an answer this time."

"That's not it," Novak said. She looked at Hermiod again. He blinked his large eyes and gave her a small, slow nod. She smiled a little and reached into a pocket of her BDUs with her uninjured hand, while Rodney watched with no attempt to conceal his impatience.

"Well? What?"

"I believe I have learned the reason for our mishap," Hermiod said quietly, tilting his head to one side.

Novak dropped a small object into Rodney's palm. As soon as he got a good look at it, he tried to recoil from the greasy-smooth feel of semiorganic circuitry. Raising his eyes, he saw both of them watching him, Novak with a certain eager hope and Hermiod with his usual inscrutability.

"This is Wraith."

Hermiod nodded and spoke very quietly. "We were sabotaged."

------

Impact plus 0 hours 45 minutes

"Trying the seventh gate address, sir."

They were going through Simpson's list of possible Stargates as quickly as possible: dialing the gate, sending signals on all the radio frequencies used by the Daedalus, listening for a reply, then shutting the gate down and dialing another. As Simpson pointed out, they could easily be missing a signal, especially if it was weak -- but if the Daedalus was in trouble, time might be of the essence. They could do a more thorough investigation of each gate if the initial sweep found nothing.

Beckett sat very quietly at the side of the room, not interrupting, just watching. Teyla and Ronon had also joined them; Sheppard realized that he had no idea when the pair of them had turned up in the room. They were just there, Ronon leaning on a wall and Teyla sitting lightly on the top of the steps leading down to the gate. Just watching, all of them watching.

"How many more to go after this one?" Sheppard asked.

"Twelve."

Sheppard whistled. "That's a lot." But not a lot, not total, not when those gates could be the only chance to find their missing people. Still, knowing how spread out the Stargates were, it seemed to cover an alarmingly huge area. Using the jumpers to search the same area would take them hundreds of years, he thought, feeling slightly ill.

"Hyperspace is fast," the scientist replied tersely, eyes on her screens as she typed quickly. "We're dealing with rough estimates here, too, regarding their speed and course heading. I'm starting with what I consider the most likely possibilities and expanding out --"

"Sir!" The Canadian technician swiveled back around, looking torn between joy and worry. "We're getting a signal from this one. Just a second, I'm boosting it ... It's the emergency distress beacon from the Daedalus. We've found it!"

Sheppard caught his breath. From the corner of his eye, he saw Teyla smiling and Ronon sitting up with an alert expression. Yes, they had found it ... but the ship was clearly in trouble, or it wouldn't be broadcasting a distress call. "Hail them," Sheppard said.

"Daedalus, this is Atlantis. Come in, Daedalus, do you read?"

He repeated it a few more times before shaking his head. "No answer. They either can't receive us or can't broadcast."

Sheppard swallowed against the dryness in his throat, then turned when one of the other technicians made a startled sound. "There's something else broadcasting in this system, sir."

"Oh my God," Simpson whispered, bending over his shoulder.

Sheppard looked, but the readouts meant nothing to him. "What is it?"

The tech looked up at him, all color drained from his face. "It's a Wraith distress beacon, sir."

------

TBC