Sorry about the long delay, all! I'm finally back on track, at least for now.
Impact plus 21 hours 0 minutes
Almost exactly twenty-one hours to the minute after the Daedalus dropped off Atlantis's sensors, rescue arrived. And a lot of worried people stopped counting minutes.
But the search for the missing ship was only the first skirmish in a much longer battle -- and that battle had only just begun.
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Despite the winds buffeting the jumper, Sheppard set it down feather-light beside the hole in the side of the Daedalus's cargo bay. As he stepped out of the lowered bay door, the wind hit him like a solid wall of distilled cold. Damn ... Simpson hadn't been kidding; it was freezing out here. He looked up to see the rest of the jumpers break through the storm, coming in formation to land around them. Realizing that he was mentally critiquing their landing skills, he looked instead at the small group of people who had come out to meet them.
"Colonel? We've met before, on Atlantis; I'm Major Perry, acting commander of the Daedalus, and this is Major Ling; she's our CMO."
Sheppard returned their salutes. Beckett appeared at his elbow, and wasted no time. "Hello again, Carol. You said you have wounded?"
She just nodded and led him towards the ship. Sheppard fell into step with Perry, while Ronon loomed quietly behind him. "What's the situation here, Perry? How many wounded?"
"About half the crew are injured in some way, sir. We have eight fatalities and a few people in critical condition ... including your Doctor Weir."
The knot of tension in Sheppard's stomach gave a sudden, hard twist. "Is she ...?" He trailed off, realizing that he wasn't sure what he wanted to ask. Dying?
"She's in a coma. We've been hand-ventilating her. I'm sorry ... I know that's not what you wanted to hear, sir."
"I didn't exactly come out here expecting good news, Major." Sheppard forced down the part of him that was screaming, the part that wanted to run to Elizabeth's side, the part that wanted to grab Perry and shake him and demand to know if Rodney was one of the eight dead. He was in crisis mode -- cool, contained, efficient. Elizabeth would have approved. Elizabeth ... Rodney ... "What about the rest of our people? Are they all right?"
"There are some minor injuries. One of your engineers was killed -- a Dr. Estvaag -- and another is badly injured: Dr. Zelenka, I believe."
Radek. Hell. But he hadn't listed Rodney among the dead. That was something, anyway. "What about McKay?"
Perry took a deep breath, and began, "He wasn't injured in the crash --" Then he was interrupted by Ling as she gave him a hand up into the cargo bay. But something in Sheppard had gone limp in relief. He allowed himself to be helped up next. Perry clearly had more to say, and Sheppard needed to hear it -- for one thing, he wanted to know why Rodney hadn't been there to greet the jumpers with the rest of them. Before he could get his thoughts together enough to ask, though, Ling pulled back a curtain and he saw Elizabeth.
He spoke her name before he knew that he was going to; the word was torn out of some private place deep inside him. He couldn't believe how fragile she looked, how broken and small. Standing beside her, feeling dazed, he watched her chest rise and fall with the rhythmic squeezing of the ventilator. Ronon's bulk was warm and reassuring behind him -- maybe the only thing, he thought, that kept him from falling down.
After a moment's frozen shock, Carson was in motion. He gave Carol Ling a single glance, and she returned a slight nod -- Yes, you're in charge, do what you need to do -- and then he was giving orders with a firmness that belied his normal unassuming manner, that gave the lie to the pain in his blue eyes. After only a slight hesitation, the military people around him scrambled to obey his commands, hastening out to the jumpers to fetch power cables, portable heaters and lights.
Sheppard backed away quietly, understanding now how small his part in this thing really was. He'd delivered the doctors and would help take them and their precious cargo back to Atlantis, but from here, there was little that he could do. When he looked around for Perry, he saw his own feelings mirrored on the Major's face. Perry, he realized, must have been in nonstop crisis mode ever since the Daedalus crashed. Now, suddenly, the crisis had been handed off to someone else.
And there was something that Sheppard needed to know. Crossing the jumper bay back to the tear in the side of the hull, he asked, "You were saying something about McKay. Where is he?"
Rather than answering, Perry glanced up at Ronon. "I think we should talk about that privately, Colonel."
The knot in Sheppard's belly twisted tighter. "There's nothing you can say to me that Ronon can't hear, Major."
Perry said nothing until they had climbed down, once again, into the blowing snow. The wind snatched away voices and made the perfect privacy screen. In that bubble of white noise, Perry turned to face Sheppard and spoke in a soft, deadly-serious voice. "It was sabotage that caused the ship to crash, Colonel. Dr. McKay is currently the prime suspect. He is also suspected of the murder of a Daedalus crewman and the attempted murder of Dr. Weir."
Somehow, Sheppard wasn't as shocked as he thought he should be. He'd felt earlier, in a way he couldn't explain, that they hadn't had enough bad yet -- that worse was on the way.
"Liar." Ronon's voice was a growl. Sheppard sensed his teammate moving forward, and raised his hand, just a little. Ronon stopped.
"So, where is he? In custody?" Oh, heads were going to roll for this.
Perry shook his head. "He took a crew member hostage and took off into the blizzard. About an hour ago."
Now all Sheppard could do was stare. He felt as if he'd accidentally stepped into some kind of Twilight Zone episode. "You're kidding, right? Rodney? Took a hostage? Are you sure you don't mean he was taken hostage?"
"We have a witness who saw him holding a gun on a young woman, sir -- Airman Cora Ludwick, one of our medics. Colonel Caldwell has taken a search party to track them down."
He couldn't understand it. Something else had to be going on here ... something that scared the hell out of him. "You said they've been out there for an hour?"
"Give or take, sir."
Rodney. In a blizzard. For an hour. The man had the survival skills of a depressed lemming; it would be a miracle if he hadn't fallen off the side of a cliff or pissed off a polar bear or something. He'd turned and was already halfway back to the jumper before a powerful hand settled on his shoulder and stopped him as implacably as an iron bar to the chest.
"I can track 'em," Ronon said.
Sheppard turned to face him. "In a blizzard? After an hour? I don't know much about tracking, but it sure doesn't look like good tracking weather out here to me."
"Worth a try."
"The jumper's a better bet, and a hell of a lot faster."
"You're needed here."
Sheppard looked around. "I don't see for what. This is a medical mission now, Ronon. It's Carson's show. Lorne and Perry can handle directing people around." He tapped his radio. "Lorne, I need to see you for a minute."
The snow was falling so thickly now that he couldn't identify Lorne by shape from a distance, until one of the figures turned towards him and slogged over. "Colonel?"
"Lorne, Major Perry's just informed me that both Caldwell and McKay, among other people, are somewhere out in that." He jerked a thumb to indicate the white-out that had drawn a hazy curtain across the nearby trees. "While we prep people for transport, I'm taking out a jumper to search for them."
"Sir, I can --"
"No. I'll be flying it. You're in charge here, Major." He thought about explaining his decision to Lorne -- and that was a measure of how much time he'd spent around civilians lately, that he thought he had to explain. But he didn't say anything. Because as hard as he rationalized it to himself -- and he really was the best pilot they had, possibly the only one capable of flying through mountains in this sort of storm -- what it came down to was that he simply couldn't sit here and wait. Couldn't. Wouldn't.
The snow kept falling around them. Thicker. Faster. Wiping away every trace of the fugitives' tracks, until they might never have been.
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"They're funny things ... snowflakes."
"Snowflakes? Why?"
They were walking, walking ... had been walking for some time through a still, white world. The thickly falling snow made it seem as if they were the only two people in the world, like explorers on a distant planet and not two children walking home from school on a city street.
"Look up." The small, mittened hand was warm in his, and he couldn't help thinking, This is wrong. She shouldn't be here. Why is she here?
Out of habit, he rolled his eyes. "Can't you just tell me?"
"Look up," she said in the same impatient tone that he had used on her. Little blond girl, in a pink snowsuit with a teddy bear on the sleeve ... She shoved him, that little blond girl, and he shoved her right back as another thrill of wrongness went through him. She shouldn't be here. But he did look up.
"Well?" Jeannie asked. "Do you see what I mean?"
He didn't answer immediately, because he was strangely transfixed. He knew that he was looking at little falling bits of ice, no more mysterious and magical than so many chunks of concrete. Yet there was something fascinating about the way they dipped and swirled, dark against a white backdrop of clouds. It felt as if he could fly loose from the world and fall up into that void.
"Do you see?" Jeannie asked, her voice echoing down the halls of memory.
"Yes, I see," Rodney said aloud, and licked his lips, tasting blood. He blinked as he stared up into an infinity speckled with tiny dark stars. Snowflakes. They looked very like the ones that he remembered from his childhood, the ones Jeannie had loved on those long-ago walks through the snow.
He twisted his head to the side, still caught up in the memory and half-afraid to see Jeannie sitting next to him with her blond curls and that silly pink snowsuit she used to wear. But of course, there was no Jeannie, just a broken expanse of snow and uprooted bushes. And he hurt. All over. He swallowed the taste of copper, and gagged a little. Good God, he was bleeding. From the mouth. That really couldn't be good.
"McKay?"
"Here," he tried to say, but choked on a mouthful of blood. He rolled to the side, coughed and spit and nearly threw up from the horrid, thick saltiness of it. After a brief moment of pure Oh God I'm dying panic, he raised a hand to his face and touched tender, bruised flesh. Stripping off a glove, he felt his face, found that he'd bitten his tongue and his nose was bleeding.
"You okay?" Caldwell's voice sounded strained, and a bit muffled.
"No!" he snapped, spitting more blood. Talking hurt his bitten tongue, which just irritated him more. "Why do people always ask me that after something catastrophic has happened which basically guarantees that anyone in the vicinity will not be okay? Sheppard does that too. Do you people learn it in basic training or something? Along with the stock responses -- 'Why yes, old boy, I'm perfectly fine, just collecting my limbs over here.' And how are you, Colonel?"
There was a brief silence -- what Rodney tended to think of, with Sheppard, as a "hit him or laugh at him" silence. Then Caldwell made a sound that might have been a brief laugh. "Pretty much the same."
Moving was probably bad, very bad, because he might have hurt his back -- but lying here and not knowing if Armstrong was even now standing two feet away from his head was even worse. Slowly, painfully, Rodney pushed himself upright. He was partly buried in snow, and found it surprisingly heavy as he scraped it off his legs with aching arms. Between getting knocked around in the crash, and now this, he felt like one gigantic human-shaped bruise. On the other hand, all his limbs worked, and he supposed that was something.
Looking around, he saw that they had come very close to being swept into the river. Even at this time of year, it was not entirely frozen -- it was too savage for that, frothing over rocks that jutted like teeth out of the black water. The sides were skimmed with ice that grew treacherous towards the center before vanishing completely in a twisting cascade of open water. In some places the spray had created fantastic ice sculptures rearing outward from its overhanging banks and low-lying tree branches. Rodney supposed that some people might consider it beautiful, but he wasn't given to appreciating the beauty of something that could have killed him if he'd slid another twenty feet. No one could fall into that ice-cold torrent and live.
One advantage to being down at the bottom of a ravine was that they were now cut off from the worst of the wind. The snow still fell, though, swirling down thickly as Rodney crawled over to Caldwell. The Colonel was sitting up and struggling to extricate himself as Rodney had done, but was hampered by having only one hand to do it with. His other arm was held stiffly against his chest, and his lips were compressed into a thin white line. He did a double take when he saw Rodney's face.
"Oh what, what? What do I look like? I broke my nose, didn't I? They never go back together straight, you know." Rodney tried to imagine himself with a crooked nose. The effect might be kind of rakish ... on someone else. On himself, it would probably just look kind of lumpy and make women laugh at him even more than they usually did.
"You definitely look like you tangled with the wrong end of a tree branch." Caldwell kicked some more of the snow off himself. Rodney gave him a hand with some of the bigger, icier chunks.
"You didn't answer me. About the nose."
"No, it doesn't look broken, McKay, for crying out loud, although it's difficult to tell with all the blood..." After that entirely unreassuring statement, Caldwell began running the fingers of his good hand through the snow around him. "Damn it, I lost the P90. You don't see it anywhere, do you?"
"No, but I don't see Armstrong either. Maybe he thinks we died in the avalanche and left."
"I sincerely hope he thinks that." Caldwell climbed shakily to his feet; Rodney thought about offering a hand up, but he'd already gotten there on his own before the decision could be made. "But I'm not holding out a lot of hope that he won't come back to make sure. He was always very thorough, very conscientious."
"Correct me if I'm wrong here, but he's some kind of Daniel Boone wannabe too, isn't he?"
"Of all the people on my crew, Armstrong's the best in the outdoors ... that I know of, anyway."
"Of course he is," Rodney muttered.
Caldwell reached into his coat and drew out a stubby .9mm pistol. It looked very small and not very efficient. Sometimes Rodney thought that ignorance was bliss when it came to guns, because now he was remembering Sheppard's lessons about how effective at long distances those things weren't.
Snapping off the safety, Caldwell said, "Come on."
He started walking upriver. After a moment, Rodney followed him, with a plaintive, "Where are we going?"
"Back to the Daedalus, where else?" The footing down here was terrible -- uncertain and treacherous, even without the added debris field from the avalanche. They were probably walking over gravel bars and driftwood, covered with snow. The way the river wound around, it might even be flowing under their feet sometimes, and that idea made Rodney shudder. He still had a horror of drowning, especially now that he'd cheated fate twice on that score.
"And that's the way we're going?"
"I assume so. At least indirectly." Caldwell paused to struggle over a fallen pine tree, with one hand tucked into his coat and the other occupied with the gun. "The Daedalus is pretty high in the mountains, and rivers flow downhill, so the uphill direction is most likely to get us closer ... or at least not too much farther away."
"That's great," Rodney muttered. "They're all frikking Daniel Boone. Excuse me if I missed the course on following rivers while I was studying advanced astrophysics. And, by the way, aren't we going to climb out of here at some point?"
"If you want to tangle with Armstrong and the wolves, be my guest."
"On second thought, it's rather nice down here. Cozy. Sheltered. Hey, why are you stopping?"
Caldwell had paused to stare at the pine tree he'd just crossed. It was a big one and went all the way across the river, its feathery tip resting securely in the snow on the opposite bank. "I was just thinking that Armstrong has no way to cross the river, not from up there. And the wolves might stay on the other side as well. We'll be a lot safer if we cross."
Rodney looked down at the churning dark water, and swallowed. "Yeah, but we won't be safer if we fall in."
"Then we don't fall in." Caldwell put away the gun and mounted the tree once again.
"We're going to have to cross back, you know!"
"We're heading upriver; it should be narrower there."
"Says you," Rodney grumbled, but he grabbed hold of branches and pulled himself up.
Nerve-wracking as the crossing was, it really wasn't terribly difficult to stay anchored on the tree trunk, with so many close-together branches to hang onto. The only part where Rodney did fear for his life was near the end, when the thinner top of the tree began to bend under their feet. Caldwell jumped off into the snow and Rodney hastily, gratefully, followed suit, gasping in relief.
Caldwell unholstered his gun once again and looked behind them. Rodney looked, too, but there was nothing to be seen except for snow. The tops of the cliffs were hidden in the blizzard. If Armstrong was up there, they couldn't see him, and he couldn't see them.
"Now what?" He hated deferring to Caldwell's leadership in this way, but it wasn't as if he had the slightest clue where to go.
"Now we find a place to climb out, and get up top." Caldwell forged ahead, and Rodney had no choice but to follow. "We're leaving a trail down here, and it'll take the snow awhile to cover it up, but once we get up there where the wind is blowing, I'm thinking that even Armstrong isn't going to be able to track us. Then we get away from the river a bit, and find somewhere to hole up until this passes; then make our way back to the Daedalus."
"I don't believe it," Rodney said, slogging along after him. "You actually have a plan. And it sounds like a halfway decent plan."
"This is unusual?" Caldwell inquired.
"For the sort of missions I'm used to, namely those involving Sheppard? Yes."
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TBC