Impact plus 20 hours 8 minutes
Cora was terrified.
At every moment, she expected to feel a bullet slam into her back, to hear the rising howl of the giant wolves the enlisted crew members had been talking about nonstop. Several of the airmen had seen them, creeping around on the hills, huge and white with burning gold eyes. And Stark ...
But she did not want to think about Stark. He'd had to die for the cause -- he knew too much, he talked too much -- and she was blameless in his death. She hadn't pulled the trigger. It wasn't her fault.
She kept telling herself that.
Luckily Rodney McKay's unceasing chatter helped keep her mind off her own problems -- and made it far more tempting to just shoot him and have done with it.
"... cold as all hell, you know that? Not the least reason being -- because you're wearing my coat. My coat. I gave it to you out of the goodness of my heart, you know that? I could have kept it. And now you're using it to kidnap me. Is that gratitude? I don't think so --"
She should just shoot him. It would almost be a relief. And yet ... she couldn't. Couldn't do it, couldn't pull the trigger.
How could it be so hard? She'd been trained to kill people! But she had never been in combat. The idea of squeezing the trigger and watching another person's life dissolve in a spray of blood made her hand shake so hard that she had to steady it with the other one.
It was one thing if someone was trying to kill you. But to fire a gun on an unarmed person ... something in her balked at that.
A sudden wailing sound rose from the woods, somewhere off to their left. It shrilled above the roaring of the wind and trailed away in a series of barks.
Rodney stopped in his tracks.
"Keep moving," Cora told him, shoving at him roughtly. There was her answer -- the wolves. She'd just take him far enough out in the woods that he couldn't possibly get back, and leave him for the wolves. She didn't have to pull the trigger. Her hands would be clean.
She just wished they would stop shaking so.
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Impact plus 20 hours 15 minutes
Cadman waited in the snow outside the Daedalus, her back to the wind and her face burrowed into the hood of her parka.
Two indistinct figures emerged from the blowing snow. She tensed, instinctively bringing up the assault rifle resting in the crook of her arm, then lowered it when she recognized the round face of Airman Keisha Seavey. The shape behind her resolved into Lt. Armstrong's rangy form.
"Visibility's lousy out here," the lieutenant said, squinting against the driving snow. His hood was down, the wind whipping his short blond hair around. Cadman didn't know how he could stand it. All her exposed skin seemed to go numb as soon as the wind hit it. Armstrong, though, seemed to revel in the cold. She recalled talking to him about his boyhood in Minnesota, about winter weekends spent camping in the woods. Right now, she would have given her left arm for a warm couch in front of a roaring fire and a hot cup of cocoa.
"Do you actually think you can track them in this?" she asked.
"If we get moving soon." He stared down the hill. "They'll make deep tracks in this snow. It'll take a while to fill in. But the wind is really blowing -- we need to catch up." Turning to look at her, his eyes found hers, questioning. "So ... you think he did it? McKay?"
"No," Cadman and Seavey chorused, then looked at each other in surprise.
"Thank you, ma'am!" Seavey said, sounding surprised. She had obviously thought hers the minority opinion.
"Well, he didn't," Cadman said defensively. "I know he didn't. Rodney and I have been in --" the same body, she almost finished, until realizing just in time how bizarre that would sound to someone who wasn't used to the daily absurdity of the Pegasus galaxy. "In some tough situations together," she finished, a bit lamely. "It wasn't him."
"Well, I don't know him at all," Seavey said. "But I saw how he was on the bridge, with Dr. Weir when she was trapped, and with his other friend too. He seems like a nice man. He wouldn't do something like this."
Cadman didn't think she'd ever describe Rodney as "nice." But ... sabotaging a ship full of people? Threatening the life of a young woman? Hell, no about summed it up.
Caldwell joined them just then, with another airman in tow -- Cadman recognized him as Mike Warner, another member of the bridge security team. He was a solid, dependable guy and a good choice. Caldwell was generally, in Cadman's experience, a good judge of people.
He couldn't really believe that McKay had done this ... could he? She looked at him, but his eyes were unreadable.
"Visibility's getting worse, sir," Armstrong said. "We need to move out."
"Then let's go, Lieutenant."
They set out down the hill -- Armstrong leading and the rest strung out behind. Cadman took the rear-guard position, scanning the hills ... or what she could see of them. Although it was still technically daylight, the light had gone gray and the whiteout was closing upon them fast.
Even if they found McKay and Ludwick, she wondered if they could ever find their way back to the Daedalus in this mess.
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Impact plus 20 hours 28 minutes
"We're beginning our approach to the planet," Sheppard informed his passengers, somewhat unnecessarily, as they were all staring at the HUD as well. "Thank you for flying Puddlejumper Airlines. Please return your seat backs and tray tables to the fully upright position -- What?" he asked Beckett, who was giving him a look somewhere between amusement and annoyance.
"You're not fooling anyone, Colonel. You're worried as hell."
Sheppard snorted. "Thanks for the psychoanalysis, Doc. I knew we should've brought Heightmeyer instead. She's better looking, for one thing."
Beckett gave a small laugh and returned his gaze to a study of his white-knuckled hands, gripped on the sides of his seat. It was entirely obvious that Sheppard wasn't the only one who was worried ... for a variety of reasons.
"I can't give you the exact location of the Daedalus until we're under the clouds," Simpson reported. "There's a gigantic storm down there. It's an absolute mess. I doubt if they can pick up any of our signals."
Nevertheless, Sheppard tried. "Daedalus, this is Atlantis. Daedalus, do you copy?"
Static was his only answer. He drew a deep breath and fixed his hands tightly on the controls. "Simpson, any idea what we're going to encounter down there?"
"It'll be rough, Colonel. Why don't you try taking it down under the edges of the storm and we'll see if we can get a precise location on the Daedalus. You're going to have to be very careful; there's a pretty major mountain range under that storm, from the look of things. You'll have to fly on instruments only, and we already know that the electricity in the storm is messing with our ability to take accurate readings."
"In other words, Doc ... we could smack into a mountain before we even know it's there."
Simpson tried to smile, but there was no humor in it. "That's about what we're looking at, Colonel."
Sheppard reached for his radio. "Lorne? We go in first. You follow only after we've established a safe route for you."
"Sir --"
"No buts, Major. That's an order." Sheppard grinned. "You were the one who pointed out the risks of losing our puddlejumpers. Well, we're only risking one at a time. Wait to hear back from us, Major."
"What if you can't contact us from under the storm, sir?"
Sheppard looked at Simpson. The engineer replied. "I think we'll be able to overcome the interference in the storm by boosting our signal. The fact that the Daedalus doesn't seem capable of contacting us seems to indicate that their power's down."
It could indicate much worse things than that, but Sheppard wasn't considering those possibilities right now. "All right. Wait in orbit to hear back from us, Major. If we disappear for an unreasonable length of time -- say, more than an hour -- you can send a jumper down to search. But only one at a time."
After a pause came the Major's reluctant reply. "Yes, sir."
"Sheppard out." The Colonel's voice became quiet. "Going down, lady and gentlemen," he murmured, and took the puddlejumper down into the roiling white clouds below.
------
TBC