Impact plus 15 hours 22 minutes

Caldwell had been standing at the doors to the F302 bay with Perry and Cadman when Ling contacted him about Elizabeth. At least, he'd been as close to the hangar bay as he could get. There were several layers of barricades between himself and the ships they so desperately needed.

"It doesn't look good, sir," Cadman admitted, running her hand down unyielding metal. "The shielding in this part of the ship is a lot sturdier than the rest -- most of the other doors I blasted through were just designed to prevent decompression, but these are actually meant to stop explosions. The amount of force it would take to blow through these doors, especially from this side, might actually destroy the 302s themselves ... or bring down some of the corridors in this area, blockading it even further. And there's also the danger of starting an avalanche on the mountain with the vibrations."

"We've got a bay full of 302s, Lieutenant, each one with its own self-contained power supply and heat. We need those ships to save lives. Between you and Dewey, see what you can come up with."

"Yes, sir," Cadman said uncertainly.

"Ling just let me know that Dr. Weir's awake." He saw Cadman's head come up at this news, her eyes shining in the flashlight's reflected glow. The loyalty that these people had for their leader was truly impressive. "I'm heading back there now. Keep working on this."

"Yes sir."

He arrived at the sickbay area a few minutes later, with Perry behind him, and pulled back the curtain from the corner where he remembered that Weir had been taken. Approaching her, he saw that she was lying still with her face turned away into shadow. Apparently she had fallen asleep again; he sighed, disappointed. Sleep would probably be the best thing for her, though.

Caldwell knelt next to her. She was so very still -- too still, he thought. Something was wrong. And, laying a hand on her chest, he knew what it was.

"Damn," he whispered, rolling her head towards him. He placed the back of his hand against her lips, feeling no breath. "Damn it, Weir!" Pressing his fingers against her neck, he could just feel a pulse -- a very slow, irregular heartbeat.

"Hey!" he called over his shoulder at the two corpsmen in sight -- Cora Ludwick and Eric Stepovich. "Medical emergency! I need help over here! Perry, call Dr. Ling, now!" Not waiting for an answer, he tilted back Elizabeth's head and began rescue breathing.

Then Ling was there, pulling him out of the way and shouting instructions at the corpsmen. Caldwell stepped back, catching a glimpse of the expression on Cora Ludwick's face -- sheer terror, quickly concealed. The strain of their situation was probably starting to get to the poor kid. In Elizabeth's death, Cora might well see her own if they didn't get out of here.

"Adrenaline," Ling snapped, holding out her hand to Ludwick as the other corpsman, Stepovich, settled an Ambu-bag over Elizabeth's face.

The girl drew off a syringe and handed it back. As Ling moved to inject it, Stepovich, looking at the open case of medications in Ludwick's lap, gave a sudden yell of shock. "Jesus Christ, Cora! That's morphine!"

Ling spun on her assistant. Cora, white-faced, looked as if she was about to cry. "I-- I'm sorry, they're right next to each other, oh God I'm so sorry, I could have killed her --"

"You're exhausted. Go lie down, Airman Ludwick -- now! That's an order. Colonel, please see that she does." Ling's hands moved with almost preternatural speed as she spoke, sorting through vials and getting what she needed.

Caldwell took Ludwick by the upper arm and led her away. She was trembling like a leaf in the wind, and he mentally kicked himself for not paying closer attention to the toll that the strain of their situation must be taking on the younger, less experienced crew members.

"Am I in trouble, sir?" Ludwick stammered, shivering.

"No. You're tired; you made a mistake. Lie down." He helped her settle down, got her out of her coat and wrapped up in blankets. She was a mess, pale and shivering. After combat, he'd seen young men and women in a similar condition after they'd just had to kill another human being for the first time. It was one thing to think about the possibility, another thing entirely to experience the reality -- and he thought that prescribing the wrong medication and accidentally killing a patient might well be a medic's worst nightmare. "You were tired," he repeated. "You made a mistake."

The look she gave him, before rolling over and wrapping the blanket around her, was almost venomously resentful -- and that, too, he'd seen from other young soldiers, fear turning to anger under battlefield conditions. "Thank you, sir," she muttered with her back to him. "I -- I think I'll feel better after I sleep a little."

"I'm sure you will, Airman."

He returned to find that things had gotten quiet. Stepovich was rhythmically squeezing the hand ventilator, while Ling clipped a battery-operated oxygen monitor to Elizabeth's finger. Even Perry had been pressed into service, collecting scattered vials of medicine from Cora's case and packing them away.

"How is she?"

"Alive." Ling nodded to Stepovich, who continued to squeeze the ventilator as she stepped away with Caldwell, Perry following them quietly at a discrete distance. "For now. It was very close. If you hadn't arrived when you did ..." She shook her head

"What happened?"

"I only wish I knew. She was doing much better, much stronger." Ling wiped her hair away from her face with one hand. She'd been going nonstop since the accident, too. She looked exhausted. "I wish I had the facilities to get a toxicology report on her, Colonel. It is possible for patients to simply crash. It's possible that she has an internal bleeder, for example, or that she tried to move too much and went into shock. But what I'm seeing is not consistent with that. She acts as if her body functions have been depressed, as by a narcotic or similar drug."

Caldwell stared at her. "Are you saying she was poisoned?"

"Not necessarily on purpose, sir. In a situation like this, it's entirely possible for a patient to receive too much pain medication or sedative for their condition. You saw what happened just now with Cora. My corpsmen are good people, but most of them are young and tired and under a lot of stress." Ling looked away from him, staring off into the shadows. "To the best of my knowledge, the last person to give her anything was me -- a dose of morphine. But it still should have been well within the levels that she could handle. It is possible that I miscalculated --"

"Don't blame yourself." Empty words, he knew. He'd always resented hearing those words from his own commanding officers when people under his command died.

But an ugly suspicion had appeared in the back of his head, and it was growing. As Ling stared into the shadows with guilt-ridden dark eyes, Caldwell debated whether or not to trust her. This is Carol Ling -- you've known her for fifteen years. She's got a spine of steel and she says exactly what's on her mind; look at how she's been dealing with McKay. If anyone on this ship is unlikely to be a Wraith worshipper, it's her.

And right now she is beating herself up over something that may well be the desperate act of a madman.

"Sit down, Doctor." Caldwell hooked a steadying hand under her elbow and guided her down onto one of the crates. He unhooked his radio and let it dangle; reaching over, he did likewise to hers. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Perry follow suit and then sit down within earshot.

Ling drew her head back with a puzzled frown. The furrow between her brows deepened as Caldwell looked around the room, making sure no one else besides Perry was close enough to hear him. Pitching his voice low, he said, "I believe someone may have tried to kill Dr. Weir."

Speaking quickly and softly, he filled her in on the sabotage and Seavey's story of Wraith worshippers. When he was done, Ling said, "But why Dr. Weir?"

"Isn't it obvious? If this started on Atlantis, then these people have a vested interested in quieting her. Now that she's regained consciousness, she may be able to unmask the culprit." This cemented his suspicion: the saboteur had to be one of the Atlanteans, maybe more than one.

Ling's eyes flew wide, and she raised a hand to her mouth. "Oh, my God. Colonel. I think I might know who it is. There's only one person who's had unsupervised access to Dr. Weir within the last half-hour. If someone poisoned her, it has to be him."

Caldwell raised his eyebrows. It couldn't be this easy. "Who?"

"Dr. Rodney McKay," Ling said.

For a moment, Caldwell just stared at her. His initial reaction was a laughing That's absurd. But then he asked himself why he felt that way. He knew McKay, and while they weren't friends, he didn't believe the scientist was capable of such a thing -- if nothing else, because he'd seen firsthand that McKay and Dr. Weir were close friends. But, how well could you really know another person? How could he say, really say, that McKay's friendship with Elizabeth wasn't a sham to fool observers? The only thing he had to go on was a gut-level feeling that McKay was innocent ... and hunches had never been admissible as evidence in court.

"Tell me what happened."

Ling pressed the back of her hand against her mouth and took it away, as if steadying herself. "He was talking to her when I came in and found her awake. I only heard the end of their conversation -- I believe that Dr. Weir was defending you against some sort of accusation from Dr. McKay. He became very agitated when I asked him to leave, almost violent, and he was particularly interested in what I was injecting into her IV when I gave her morphine. He could easily have seen where I got it ..." Scrubbing her hands through her hair, she made a soft sound of frustration. "And yet still I left her alone with him!"

"Dr. Ling ... calm down." Caldwell reached out and gripped her arm. "The evidence is entirely circumstantial. Don't jump to conclusions. You and Dr. McKay have been at odds since he's been on the ship -- I've seen it. Don't let that color your judgment."

"But that's it exactly -- I've had a bad feeling about him from the beginning," she protested. "All he ever seems to do is stand around complaining when others are working. I've hardly seen him show any concern over people he claims are his friends. The man has no compassion ... no soul. If anyone on this ship is a Wraith worshipper, Colonel, it's him."

Perry spoke up. "He worked hard on the bridge to help rescue Dr. Weir, Colonel." He frowned, thinking. "It's possible -- assuming we accept him as a suspect -- that he was only acting from self-interest, however. If Dr. Weir could truly finger him as the saboteur, he would have had every reason to try to get close enough to keep others from talking to her until he could ..." He hesitated, watching his CO, gauging Caldwell's reaction.

The trouble was, Caldwell didn't know what his reaction actually was. He was surprised to find that he trusted McKay quite deeply. On a personal level, he wasn't very fond of the man -- but then again, who was? McKay's genius for alienating people was almost as well-developed as his genius for ... well, everything else. But you didn't have to like a person to work with them, and he'd been working with McKay, off and on, for a number of months. He'd gotten the impression that the Atlanteans trusted him implicitly, as Caldwell found himself doing on an instinctive level.

On the other hand ... there were the SGC reports on the man. McKay had been shipped off to Siberia in part because he'd been willing to leave a man to die in the gate. More recent reports showed that an alarming number of the scientists under his command had died on missions with him. And while that wasn't unusual in and of itself -- the SG teams lost people too, as did Atlantis's military contingent -- the circumstances were often suspicious. People died around McKay when they were alone with him. Including James Griffin, a good man who had supposedly sacrificed his life to save McKay's when they were trapped under thousands of feet of ocean water. Caldwell could believe that Griffin would have done such a thing; he'd been that kind of person. On the other hand, his body had never been found to confirm or deny McKay's story.

People around Rodney McKay tended to die, and die suspiciously. It was a fact. And here was another one for the list -- Dr. Elizabeth Weir, last seen in McKay's company, and now fighting for her life.

No matter what his gut said about McKay, he couldn't afford to ignore the evidence. Two hundred lives, military and civilian, depended on him to make the right decision.

Caldwell rubbed his eyes wearily. "I don't want him arrested. Not right now. For one thing, we have no evidence against him, and assuming we get off this rock -- an assumption I am currently holding -- this will need to be able to stick in court. If we have the slightest hope of seeing justice done, regardless of whether it's McKay or someone else who eventually turns out to be behind this, then we have to proceed as cautiously as possible."

"Sir, you can't intend to simply leave him to his own devices when there's a very real possibility that he may be a killer," Perry said in disbelief.

"No, of course not. I want him watched ... but discretely. Very discretely. Perry, I want a guard on him -- but even the guards don't need to know the real reason why they're watching him. I don't want word of this to spread. Ling, I'd like a guard on the sickbay stores."

"We do guard them, sir."

"I know. Guard them better. Under no circumstances is Dr. McKay allowed anywhere near weapons, the sickbay or the engines. As much as possible, I want him allowed to go about his normal activities without realizing that he's being monitored, but if there's any chance that he may cause harm to anyone, he's to be neutralized. Without hurting him, if possible."

Perry frowned. "Keeping him in the dark isn't going to be at all easy, sir. He's a smart man."

"Do your best, Major." And Caldwell hoped to God he wasn't making a terrible mistake.

------

TBC