Reminder:
"This is spoken English."
"This is spoken Czech."
This is a thought.
A/N: ... Whoops.
Previously: We lost Rodney… probably in the ocean somewhere. But Anna gets to go on a search team, so that's fun. Except that Major Lorne asks a lot of questions (sort of in regard to chapters 91-92).
Chapter 101. Grace Under Pressure.
Anna knew Major Lorne better than most military members of Atlantis, except the majority of their interaction had revolved around a sort of mutual distant apathy. He let her join him when he was shooting targets in the shooting range sometimes. He'd brought her flowers when she was injured from a fall off a mountain. Beyond that, she watched him eat lunch alone and wonder what kind of tells he had in poker.
Major Lorne waited for her outside Jumper Nine. Anna could only imagine he engaged in every last of his day-to-day activities dressed in that uniform. Well, Radek was also pretty much always in his uniform.
"Sorry," Anna said breathlessly as she ran up into the Puddle Jumper.
"Just got here myself," Major Lorne said, walking into the Jumper behind her and closing the door.
Anna leaned on the control console to watch the two other Jumpers lift off to exit through the opening hole in the roof. She glanced to Major Lorne as he slid past her and into the pilot's chair.
"You take sensors, then…?" His tone clearly communicated discomfort with this whole arrangement. Maybe he wasn't sure that Anna was capable of working the sensors, or at least not capable of doing it very well.
Maybe he just didn't like babysitting.
Anna regretted asking to come already.
She sank into the seat next to Major Lorne and laid her hands on the controls in front of her. She knew that somehow—she didn't know—the Puddle Jumper could tell the difference between the person sitting in the pilot seat and in the copilot seat. It was convenient that it was the side of the Jumper that she would consider the driver's side, too.
"Mainland in twelve minutes," Major Lorne said as they zoomed over the ocean, away from Atlantis.
"Okay." Anna couldn't see Coughlin's Jumper anymore, as it sped away toward another spot to start the search. Reed's Jumper was just a speck against distant clouds.
Major Lorne took a breath. Then paused. "Uh, so, Zelenka tells me that you'll be going to the mainland again tomorrow. Visiting the Athosians?"
Anna frowned. "He told you that?"
"Well, I asked."
"Oh." Anna's answer was quieter than she expected. "Yeah, I am." She knew that she was an easy topic for people outside Radek's usual social circle to start up a conversation with him. A convenient subject to fill uncomfortable minutes between two people in the transporter. People probably asked questions about Anna all the time.
"Should I have not asked?" Major Lorne wondered.
"It's not that… uh… what did he say?"
Major Lorne smirked. "Mostly that you were going to the mainland tomorrow."
There was a long pause while Anna tried to figure out what to say next.
"Should he have said something else?"
Anna supposed she basically asked for that question. No need to be cagey with the major. Radek probably still considered him something like an unfortunate necessity. Major Lorne probably thought of Radek the same way. Yet Anna practically held the door open for him to ask these searching questions.
"No. But he might have said something else. I don't think he wants me to go."
"Oh, I see…" Major Lorne said. It didn't take long for him to guess, "Boyfriend?"
Anna shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe. Radek just worries. All the time."
Major Lorne chuckled as he made a minor adjustment to go through some turbulence. "I guess I'd worry all the time, too, if I had a pretty daughter."
Why she was blushing, Anna had no idea. "Is it so hard to believe that all I want to do is go hiking?"
Major Lorne nodded. "Not a lot of mountains on Atlantis."
Anna doubted she would be in this position if Radek hadn't caught her and Iskaan kissing in the back of the Puddle Jumper. Yeah, that basically couldn't have gone worse.
Finally, she sighed. "Maybe it is a little hard to believe…"
Major Lorne shrugged, like maybe he didn't know whether it was or not. Maybe he didn't care, either. Why should he?
"Can I ask you a question?" Anna said softly.
"Sure." Major Lorne didn't sound too certain, but by the time he'd said it he apparently accepted that it was his answer.
Anna was no longer certain she wanted to ask the question. But, in many ways, it was better than asking Radek. Radek cared too much to give a straight answer, to give a real answer. With any luck, Major Lorne wouldn't care very much at all.
"I like Iskaan, and I think Iskaan likes me. Well… no, I mean, I know he does."
"The Athosian kid?" Major Lorne interrupted.
"Yes. But how… how do you know that somebody's sincere?"
Anna looked over just in time to see Major Lorne stare at the screen in front of him like he'd been caught in a very uncomfortable spotlight. He sighed. "Oh, god; I don't know, kiddo."
Anna hesitated. "Kiddo?"
"Um. Yeah…" Major Lorne didn't sound too sure about that, either. "It's a nickname. Like sometimes 'doc' is for 'doctor' or 'Ev' is for 'Evan.' 'Kiddo' is for 'kid.'"
"I'm not a kid," Anna pouted without thinking. "Why does everyone treat me like a child?"
Major Lorne apparently found that funny. "Because you are?" Major Lorne glanced at her, maybe to see what effect his answer had. He looked back ahead to the ocean flying beneath them after about a half-second. "It's not a bad thing. In fact, it's a good thing. I call my sister 'kiddo' and she's thirty. Hell, I wish I were a kid still."
"No, you don't," Anna muttered, wondering why adults bothered saying things like that. "Nobody ever trusts you to make your own decisions. In fact, most of the time people assume that you don't know what's going on at all."
"Okay, maybe that's a little unfair," Major Lorne allowed. "But I definitely bucked the system just like you are. I didn't get where I am now by following every last order I was given. But I sure didn't get where I am now by ignoring every last order I was given, either. You'll be taking orders from somebody the rest of your life. That's just how it is. Right now, you're just taking orders from people who love you. That's what being a kid means."
Anna took a deep breath. That was true, at least. "That doesn't mean they're always right, though. Radek doesn't know anything about Iskaan."
"He may not know exactly what he's talking about… but he probably knows what he's talking about," Major Lorne said. "But there are certain things about that age that are sort of common no matter who or where you are. I was mostly interested in basketball. But you can't be in a locker room for thirty seconds without knowing that for a lot of guys, the prime interest was girls." With that, he looked at Anna, as if somehow apologizing for the behavior of his entire gender. "And not many of the guys I knew were in the game for marrying their high school sweetheart, if you know what I mean."
"You mean they aren't sincere?" Anna asked.
"They are. Probably," Major Lorne said. "But probably not the way you mean it."
Anna stayed quiet. He was right. She hadn't understood what anyone around her was saying at all lately. She had been angry, sometimes for perfectly legitimate reasons, but she wasn't the greatest at putting herself in another's place to correctly figure out what they were thinking. Much less what they were feeling.
She didn't know what she was feeling half the time…
"Listen… Anna." Major Lorne took a deep breath like he wasn't sure what to say, but he was going to say it anyway. "When your dad tries to remind you that you're a kid, he's not just talking about you."
They stayed quiet for a while until the mainland showed as a thin ribbon on the horizon. She thought about the Jumper's sensors for a second and they pulled up in a little box in the corner of the windshield. Maybe Major Lorne was right, and Radek didn't mean anything personal about her being a child.
Radek did mean it that way. He wasn't interested in knowing what kind of person Iskaan was at all.
Maybe that was okay, though. Knowing what kind of person anybody was…? That wasn't in Radek's job description. Maybe he wanted Anna to make that decision herself, and he just had to remind her that Iskaan was, deep down, a kid just like Anna.
"Thanks, Major Lorne."
"Call me Evan."
Anna glanced at him, and he glanced back. Smiled. "Okay. Thanks, then, Evan."
"Anytime, kiddo."
#
It wasn't time to give up. He'd only been at this for about an hour or so. But his brain was slowly turning into mush as he stared at his equations for calculating where Jumper Six might be if it crashed into the ocean. With any luck, the transponder had just shut off, though, and McKay and Griffin set down somewhere on the mainland to make repairs. Radek would get an earful if that was the case, but not as much as he'd get if they ended up drowned in the ocean.
Rodney's ghost would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Radek shut off the recording he'd set on loop and said, "Griffin, McKay, come in please." He sighed. "Jumper Six, come in please. Griffin, McKay, come in please."
"Yeah, we're here."
Radek stood up, his hand to his headset. "Rodney—thank god! We thought you—I've been trying to get a hold of you for over an hour." Radek turned to Chuck. "Find Elizabeth, tell her I've made contact."
He listened to Rodney talk to Griffin, asking him if he was okay. Griffin answered in what amounted to a negative. It occurred to Radek that he didn't know if Rodney was okay.
"Are you alright?" he asked.
"I think we could both use an extended stay in the infirmary," Rodney snapped. "What the hell happened?"
"The Jumper dropped off our screens," he said. "It crashed into the ocean."
He could almost see Rodney rolling his eyes. Of course, Rodney could probably see that he was in the ocean. He wasn't blind. Radek could only imagine the scolding he'd get for that.
"Yes, yes, yes, we're under water…" Rodney's voice trailed off.
"Yes, you are." There he was, offering only the most obvious insights again. But what else was he supposed to say? He didn't exactly have any good news to relay at this point. He sat back down and set to triangulating the signal.
Rodney didn't hesitate for long. "Then how are you going to find us?"
"We've determined the direction of your radio signal, but not the range." Radek cringed, and waited for Rodney to yell at him that his information was about as good as saying at least the Jumper was still on the same planet.
"How deep are we?" Rodney asked instead. Apparently to Griffin, since Radek had no idea.
Griffin answered something, muffled by the distance between Griffin and Rodney's mic.
It obviously wasn't a great answer. Rodney groaned. "Radek, you're gonna have to hurry it up. We're already twelve hundred feet and sinking at a rate of about, uh, twenty feet a minute."
Radek found himself frowning and saying, "Very impressive," before he could stop himself.
"Excuse me?" Rodney screeched in his ear.
"Well, we always theorized that the Jumpers could be utilized as submersibles…" Radek offered weakly. It was sort of exciting. Horrible, obviously, because twelve hundred feet was really deep.
"Yes, yes, yes!" McKay snapped. "I theorized it!"
"That's almost the maximum depth of a nuclear-powered submarine," Radek said.
"Any more observations you want to make?" Rodney growled, and then he stopped and gasped. Griffin said something, to which McKay asked, "Can you move?"
Radek didn't speak in case Griffin said something important, and he didn't even have to ask what was going on.
"Radek," Rodney said a moment later, "the windshield's giving way under the pressure of the ocean!"
"Move into the rear compartment—the seal should be able to hold." Should? He could almost hear the objections now, but they never came.
Instead, Rodney said, "One step ahead of you." Not two second later, Rodney shouted, "No! No, no, no, no, no, no!" Radek heard Griffin's voice, saying who-knew-what. Rodney was panicking… The door probably wouldn't shut. The Jumper had to have been damaged in the crash into the ocean, because it was in perfect shape. Before it crashed.
Why'd it crash, then?
"Maybe," McKay snipped a second later, "if you were more focused on flying than enlightening me on the history of tomatoes…" He paused, maybe for Griffin to speak. "Yeah—because it's not my fault!" Another pause. "What are you doing?"
No, that was panic.
"No, what are you doing? Griffin?" Rodney shouted, apparently ineffectively. "Griffin!"
"Rodney, what's happening?"
It was too late. The signal went dead, and Radek could only guess as to what happened. Maybe they'd managed to shut the door in time. Maybe not.
Radek stood up. "Elizabeth…!"
No, no, no, Rodney did not die of drowning in a Jumper crash. Especially not a Jumper that Radek had just finished repairing.
Rodney was fine.
Work with that assumption for now. Life support would keep them alive for a while, maybe long enough to figure out how to save them.
But how were they supposed to do that? They were already deeper than the Jumpers could go.
He took a deep breath as Elizabeth came into the room, making for his console in a straight line. "You're fine," he muttered to Rodney, even though the headset was long since dead. "You will be fine." Rodney had to be fine. He'd always been before.
But all those times before, none of that had really been Radek's fault.
What was he going to tell Elizabeth…? He looked down at his calculations for triangulating the signal from the Jumper coming up frustratingly short. "You'd better be fine," he finished before Elizabeth could start throwing down the questions. "Or I'm never going to forgive myself."
Next time: Something's gotta give.
