A/N: Set in mid-late season two, and contains spoilers for both Atlantis and SG-1 episodes aired prior.
This story is completely written. I will be uploading one chapter per day.
This is my seventh annual Christmas fic and, as with all previous stories of its kind, all the chapter titles are taken from lyrics of Christmas songs. If you want to know more about these stories, see the "Annual Christmas fic" section of my profile. If that doesn't leave you feeling properly filled with knowledge of the subject, feel free to drop me a message.
Thank you for your time, and I hope you enjoy the story.
Rodney McKay watched sulkily from the control room as the puddle jumper slowly eased down from the bay above and settled itself in front of the Stargate. Somehow, no matter how many times he watched it happen, Rodney always expected something to go catastrophically wrong. And, when it inevitably didn't, he felt oddly cheated in some way he didn't understand, as if this marvel of engineering should malfunction, probably leading to the deaths of several people in the process, just because he expected it to. It was certainly an ungenerous view of things, but Rodney didn't feel particularly generous right now. He should have been on that jumper, and the fact that he wasn't was like a thorn in his side. Well… maybe not quite that bad, but still not pleasant.
"Major Lorne, you have a go," Dr. Elizabeth Weir informed the team aboard the jumper, "Good luck."
"Thank you, ma'am," Lorne's voice replied cheerily, "But this is just an exploration mission of an uninhabited planet. Shouldn't need much luck."
Designated M6S-868, the planet's Stargate was in orbit around it. The UAVs had encountered no trouble, and found no sign of a current or recent civilization residing on the planet. It was being explored primarily as a possible evacuation planet, as it seemed those were in short supply and were more necessary for various reasons than expected by the Expedition in its first year.
"Nevertheless," Elizabeth persisted, trying to look stern even as a reluctant smile played across her features, "Be careful. And stay in regular contact. Come home in one piece."
"Yes, ma'am," Lorne said.
A moment later, the jumper glided smoothly through the event horizon and was gone. The Stargate shut down almost immediately. It was still amazing to Rodney that something that powerful, and which generated so much ruckus in spinning up in the first place could snap right off, just like that. Rodney knew how and why it did that (kind of), but it was still… still awe inspiring.
He was in no mood to be awed today, however.
"That's odd," Rodney swung around to look at the Gate Tech who had made the remark.
"What's odd?" Elizabeth asked before Rodney could.
The Gate Tech took a moment, checking his systems, "No. Never mind. I just… for a second, right before the 'Gate deactivated, I thought I saw an energy spike. I must've imagined it."
Elizabeth was unsatisfied by that response, "You've been losing a lot of sleep lately, working with Carson on his holiday party. I'm sure you could use a few hours rest. I'll call in one of the people on stand-by," there were always a few extra people floating around, working on minor projects, but ready to be assigned to an important city operations function at a moment's notice.
The Tech shook his head, "I'm fine, ma'am. I'll sleep through New Year's for sure though."
"You have that time off coming," Elizabeth reassured him as Rodney was walking away.
Why couldn't people just relax in their off-time instead of make more work and social pressure for everybody else? Rodney really wondered. Didn't they have enough to do here on Atlantis and off-world during missions without creating the extra nuisance of putting up decorations they'd just take down next week because it was impractical and undesirable to keep them up longer? Wasn't it enough to breathe a sigh of relief about being alive and move on? This was a city full of socially awkward science geeks and military personnel. Artificially imposing a social gathering on them based on a season that didn't even exist on Lantea had to be recognized as a form of torture somewhere in the galaxy, Rodney was absolutely sure of it.
And where did Sheppard get off, practically at the last minute giving Rodney's ticket to escaping this holiday nightmare to Major Lorne's team anyway? He fully intended to ask, as soon as he could find Colonel John Sheppard, who was probably hiding somewhere if he knew what was good for him.
Lorne's team was probably having a great time right now, not being tormented by thoughts of having to endure Christmas carols being sung over the ZPM by the Anthropology department, whose delusions of musical competency were about on par with Ra's delusions of godhood.
It would not have pleased Rodney at all to know that Lorne's team was not having a great time, or even a passably good time. In fact, they could be said to be having a very bad time.
As an air force pilot born with the ATA gene, flying puddle jumpers had literally come naturally to Major Lorne. The swift little crafts didn't look very aerodynamic and by all appearances should have wallowed like an overloaded bus, but they were actually quick, agile and highly responsive to their pilot's requests and demands, even under adverse conditions or after taking heavy damage. Jumper pilots were rapidly spoiled by these luxurious and sensitive crafts, making the idea of going back home to fly the comparatively slow, clumsy jets sound mundane and extremely undesirable.
But on exiting the Stargate, Lorne found himself at the controls of a jumper that quite suddenly didn't want to listen to him, as if it had gained a mind of its own, and not in the "auto-piloting through the 'Gate" kind of way. The puddle jumper jinked and lurched as it exited the Stargate, the steady thrum of its quiet engine becoming a harsh stutter as it did so.
Lorne could feel a faint vibration of the navigation panel under his fingertips, and through the neural interface he got the faint impression that something or someone was trying to take over the jumper. Unexpectedly, he was in a battle for control of the Ancient craft.
It was a battle he couldn't win entirely, though he had scored some points in redirecting the craft from its initial course for one of M6S-868's moons, and swinging it back towards the planet surface.
The thought to go back where they'd come from flitted through Lorne's mind, but evaporated just as quickly. He didn't want to bet the lives of eight people on the chance that the autopilot would function properly. If it was even a fraction off, they'd crash into the 'Gate instead of slipping through. Once on the other side, if it didn't stop on a dime, it would wreck itself in the Central Control room and the fallout of such a crash in terms of loss of life and systems damage was incalculable.
Several people in the back were talking and shouting and crying out as the jumper bucked, but Lorne wasn't paying enough attention to tell which people were doing what, much less discern whether or not anything being said was useful. He had to pretty much tune them out and focus on the job of not dying (or killing anyone else) in what was now clearly bound to be a crash landing.
Entering the atmosphere was generally something that Lorne barely felt, but this time it was akin to smacking concrete. False lightning flashed across the HUD, half-blinding Lorne. For several moments he was flying by the erratic instruments because he couldn't see. Then the HUD cut out entirely, revealing that the jumper was on course to impale itself on a brutal looking cliff range.
Cloaked in deep greens of densely growing scrub, dark, almost blackish brown soil, and rich smoky gray of slate-like slabs of rock which jutted sharply upwards like the spikes of a bear trap, the straight, high walls of the cliffs were forbidding; cutting rocks and loose soil would defy even a skilled climber's ambition. The short, rugged vegetation was bent, likely due to bitter northern winds, hugging the ground as if to protect itself from the cold. The tops of the cliffs were almost invisible behind a veil of mist. One of those sharp points scored a hit on the jumper's underside that ran from one end of it to the other. Only the jumper's tough exterior spared it further damage.
And that was pretty much the end of Lorne's control over the craft.
The puddle jumper had crash-landed at a forty-five degree angle, its nose buried in the ground up past the view port. The twenty-six foot long, cylindrical body sat with its rear half in the air, its natural soft gray color splashed with blackened mud and stray swamp fronds hanging from the twin drive pods that had failed to retract on landing.
It had landed in a bog. That was the simplest, shortest description.
The land outside and surrounding the jumper was unpredictably but persistently lumpy. Sometimes it was rock under the nondescript lumps, but more often it was mounds of decomposing plant matter, over which new plant matter had ruthlessly grown.
For yards, even miles in some directions, the site was surrounded by wet, marshy ground, punctuated by puddles, ponds and little streamlets. Everywhere, everything, every boulder, every dead log, every mound of decomposing plant matter, was covered in deep green moss. The dirt itself was dark, the scant trees were short, bare-branched and black. Weirdly twisting orange-yellow fungi thrust up from the ground unexpectedly, delivering the point that this was an alien land. Strangely stiff plants with pods at the top which looked sort of like sea-green pine-cones grew in thickets. Purple edged sedges grew near the clearer water.
The back of the jumper was aimed northward. In that direction the lumps in the ground gradually became larger, until they were proper hills, over which the streams could not run. In the grim protection of the moss-cloaked hills, trees of a conifer type dared to grow sparsely. Miles on, they gradually thickened into a true forest, though the jumper's occupants didn't presently know or care about that.
To the west lay the cliffs. Near their base, especially towards the south, the cliffs broke formation, and offered a slope that gradually grew gentler as it ran to meet ground level. Deeply carved into the land, a wide, slow river wound its way along, its waters looking brackish and cold even from a distance as it flowed ever southward, perhaps towards a distant sea through the mountains. Unlike the nearby streams of the bog, the river's banks were broad, and composed of smoothly worn stone, bleached a startling white. The southern mountains could not be clearly seen, in part due to distance, but mostly due to persistent fog and mist. Their shadows loomed mysterious and unwelcoming.
A cold wind blew, not quite frigid enough to freeze the bog, but enough that frost lay at the edges of the pools and streams, and collected on the outside of the puddle jumper.
However, the interior of the jumper was still quite warm. Though the power was out, the jumper was well-insulated and had eight warm Lantean bodies to keep the temperature up. Well, four airmen and a team of researchers who had taken up residence in Atlantis anyway. The jumper's occupants hadn't yet taken notice of the exterior conditions. In fact, the combination of no power and mud covering the view port meant the jumper was completely dark inside and nobody could see a thing.
The inertial dampeners had cut out shortly before the jumper awkwardly introduced itself to the ground, and the occupants of the craft had been flung unceremoniously to the front when it hit nose first. There followed a period of complete stillness and silence, as those who had retained consciousness took a few moments to assure themselves that they had not, in fact, died.
Then one of them spoke, loud and sarcastic, "Well, Merry Christmas, everybody. I hope you're all having a fabulous time. I know I am."
"Shut up, Wes," retorted a slightly hysterical feminine voice, "And get your elbow out of my ribs."
"Does anybody have a working flashlight?" this was Major Lorne, his tone one of calm and command, "Nobody move around too much until you can see who you might be stepping on."
Some grunting and necessary shifting around followed, as everyone tried to find something to light the darkness. Even though they should all have had a small flashlight attached to their flak vest as part of their standard gear, civilians often had their own way about them, and some of them hadn't even put their vests on, saying they saw no reason to do so until after the jumper landed.
Well, the jumper sure had landed, hadn't it?
Finally, a dim and flickering light was produced. Someone had a flashlight, but it wasn't properly screwed together, meaning it had only intermittent contact with the batteries. That needed to be addressed, or a better light found… but first thing was first.
"Right, show of hands, who's up and mobile?" this was Wes Helton again.
Helton was actually one of four doctors on board, but he was the only one with a doctorate in medicine. The other three were Janella McMains the botanist, George Armstrong the geologist and Marissa Souci the ecologist. Helton also happened to be the youngest of them. Though in his twenties, Helton looked every inch the teenager, right down to the lanky frame and acne. His approach didn't lend any sense of maturity to him either, almost as if he didn't want to be taken seriously. However, he was currently the one in authority, at least until injuries were assessed.
Obediently responsive to his query, several hands went up.
Somewhat muffled, another response came, "I can't move, but I'm good."
"What's that supposed to mean, Coughlin?" Lorne inquired.
"Means I'm being sat on, sir," Lt. Coughlin replied.
"Oh!" Janella gasped in evident surprise as she realized where he was, "Oh, I'm sorry."
"Wasn't your idea," Coughlin mumbled reasonably, for they had been thrown out of their seats and it just so happened that Janella and Souci had ended up on top of him when they landed. The women moved just enough so that Coughlin could get out from under them and, perhaps more importantly, so he could breathe properly again, "Ooh, that's better."
"Right then," Helton was saying, "You lot wait your turn. I'll get to you when it's convenient, yeah?"
He didn't wait for a response, instead climbing awkwardly over the pile of people and equipment that had been jolted loose and crawling his way across the co-pilot's chair to reach Lt. Reed, who had been thrown up onto the control panel itself and now lay with his back against the view port. Reed was among those who hadn't raised a hand, which seemed to be primarily because he was unconscious.
Though Helton had clearly prioritized Reed, Lorne twisted around in the pilot's chair to see about the two people he hadn't heard a word from yet. Lt. Wilson had managed to keep his seat at the cloaking sub-station and he raised a thumb to reassure his TL that he was more or less in one piece. George also appeared to be semi-alert, though too preoccupied with a bloody gash over his eye to notice Lorne, or indeed anybody else for the moment.
Lorne exhaled a sigh of relief. He might have crashed the puddle jumper, but at least everybody was still alive. Any landing you could walk away from, right? In fact, maybe it wasn't even that bad. Assuming he could fix the jumper and disable whatever interfering system had made them crash to begin with, they could still complete their mission.
Okay, so they were currently stuck several feet deep in mud and even the DHD panel wasn't lit so they couldn't contact Atlantis to let them know that (a) the team was alive and intact and (b) not to send another jumper through in case the same thing happened to it. And also nobody on board was an engineer or other technology expert, and only two of them even had the ATA gene, which could prove to be a problem in ways Lorne hadn't even thought of yet. Not great news.
But they were alive. That was a start. And the rest… well… he'd have to work on it.
I can't believe I requested this mission, Lorne thought, I could be home in Atlantis, enjoying my time off, helping prep for the first ever Atlantis Christmas party, but no… me and my dumb ideas.