John was typically more than happy to leave the tech problems to the tech people, especially if it was something as minor as a flickering light. But seeing as his alternative was to continue hanging garlands with Ronon and Teyla, or else act like a complete Scrooge, John decided to follow Rodney and Zelenka. He didn't really expect to be able to help, but he could at least make a show of trying.
Arriving in the control room, Rodney demanded, "What the hell is going on up here?"
The personnel at their stations stopped and looked over at him. Chuck was on duty as the Gate Tech, despite the fact that the guy had spent the night before helping Dr. Beckett resolve scheduling conflicts and find last-minute volunteers for the final preparations. He looked exhausted, but was nonetheless the quickest off the mark in responding to the belligerent inquiry.
"Uh… nothing, Dr. McKay. Not since Major Lorne's Team left for M6-"
"Don't give me that," Rodney interrupted sharply, "You noticed something wrong then, and now the lights are flickering. You want to tell me those two things aren't related somehow? That it's pure coincidence that you get a power fluctuation and now the city's malfunctioning?"
John suspected that Rodney was going to blow this little technical glitch all out of proportion in order to focus on fixing it rather than being dragged into the holiday spirit against his will. And John wanted to be right there along with him, getting lost in literally anything that didn't involve facing the problem of hanging wreaths on doors that slid into the wall, which had been the next task after the garlands.
It was also the perfect opportunity to not think about his own Christmases past, the ones where his father would tell him all about the future that had been planned for him, and spend hours on Christmas Eve telling family members not only about John's accomplishments, but the expectations his father had for him. John was favored over his brother, but in a way that was always uncomfortable. All the attention only served to remind him that his father had things in mind for him that he didn't want.
Finally breaking free of that hadn't made Christmas any better, because he usually spent it alone. Even his brief marriage had offered no respite, as his wife had used the holidays to beg him to stay home, to ask him why he wouldn't talk to her anymore, and finally to announce that their marriage was over because he wasn't even part of it, so she might as well go too.
"Uh..." Chuck began, darting a brief, frantic glance at John and seeing no help there, "All systems have been running smoothly since you left. We don't know about any… flickering lights."
A tough, steady-nerved sergeant, Chuck was also a Canadian who properly fit the stereotype for being of a polite and mild temperament, and he never seemed to know what to do with Rodney. Chuck was stable under pressure from Elizabeth or John, but somehow the fact that he and Rodney were Canadian, but Rodney had a personality more commonly associated with Americans seemed to unsettle Chuck in a way that few things did. As usual, Rodney had no sympathy.
"You, be somewhere else," Rodney said, taking over the power control system station from a startled tech who scurried to get out of his way.
Rodney plugged in the tablet he'd been carrying, and seemed to compare something on it with the main screen for the power systems. Zelenka moved in alongside him, and opened a laptop that was already plugged into the systems via an adapter. John merely shrugged when the techs looked to him to offer some sort of explanation for what was happening.
Not much to do but stand around and wait for them. It still beat hanging garlands and wreaths though.
The fact of the matter was, John had massively overstated his perception of the importance of reconning M6S-868, specifically because he had wanted a graceful way to avoid the holiday buildup. A way that didn't leave people feeling like he was the Grinch wanting to take their happiness away because he had none of his own at this time of year. The portion of the planet they'd looked at with the UAVs seemed like a livable but unoccupied area. Worth a closer inspection, right?
Frankly, he'd been amazed that Elizabeth Weir had bought his argument.
Of course, now it all made sense. Rodney hadn't exactly admitted it in so many words, but he'd pretty much confessed to John that he too had been hyping up the M6S-868 mission, and for the exact same reason John had, the same reason they were now trying to track down an erratic lighting glitch as if it was the most important thing in the world. Hearing separate private arguments from both John and Rodney must have really convinced Elizabeth there was something to this planet.
He wondered what Rodney's argument had been.
"Looks normal," Zelenka reported after a little bit.
"I know. That's what worries me," Rodney replied, "Let's check the record of the power readings from just before the Stargate deactivated. Maybe there's something we missed."
Zelenka offered a grunt of agreement. John clearly had no part to play here either.
The plan had gone off course when Major Lorne had unexpectedly asked to go, this after John and Rodney had put in all the work on it. It briefly crossed John's mind that Lorne too had made a pitch to Elizabeth. But he seriously doubted it. Lorne and Elizabeth had been on rather noticeably stiff terms to start with, which didn't come as a surprise, because Elizabeth clearly hadn't wanted Major Lorne here on Atlantis, certainly not serving as John's second-in-command.
Considering the way she had often clashed with Sgt. Bates, whose duties Major Lorne had also taken over, and the way she and John had initially jockeyed for position as the ultimate authority over Atlantis, it had been entirely reasonable for Elizabeth to be wary of Lorne, pegging him as a probable troublemaker. But there had seemed to be more than that.
An Air Force Major with the ATA gene and training as a pilot, already with several years of experience with the Stargate Program had been something Elizabeth couldn't turn down, even though she seemed to want to. However, she had objected to John choosing Lorne as military second-in-command, and tried to talk him out of it repeatedly. Elizabeth had accepted John's choice in the end, but he felt her approval was tenuous. He'd never understood why, but he had warned Lorne to be on his best behavior with her, before Lorne had the first opportunity to make a misstep and tick her off.
Maybe she'd let Lorne's team go on this mission as a sort of olive branch. He hoped so. It was important for those two to get along, as had been repeatedly demonstrated in the last few months.
Whenever John was incapacitated or kidnapped or worse, Elizabeth and Lorne had to cooperate closely. A good working relationship between them was essential, and supporting that was worth having to hang around Atlantis, trying not to show his disdain for the festivities he was helping prepare for.
But that was the sort of thing that Rodney wouldn't get. For Rodney, arguing and belittling his subordinates was just a feature of waking up in the morning. It was how he worked, and his people either got with the program or got out of his way. Anyway, John only told Rodney the part of his reasoning that it seemed likely that Rodney would understand. And that had seemed to more or less satisfy him. Or maybe he'd just found a convenient distraction.
"There!" Rodney exclaimed, utterly derailing John's train of thought, "Right there."
Zelenka grimaced, "That is a very small fluctuation."
"But it's there," Rodney replied, "Right where the Gate Tech said it was."
Chuck looked surprised, though John couldn't imagine why, seeing as Chuck was the Gate Tech in question, and therefore shouldn't have been too startled by the revelation.
"Maybe we looked in the wrong place," Zelenka offered.
"My thoughts exactly," Rodney agreed, "Instead of looking for a hiccup in the power to the Mess Hall, let's see if we can't find it somewhere else. The blinking adapter may have been a-" he broke off suddenly, eyes widening as he found what he was looking for, "Hello."
"What is that? Is that a transporter?" Zelenka asked, peering at Rodney's screen.
"The one nearest the Mess Hall," Rodney confirmed, "No wonder the adapter light was blinking."
"That fluctuation does not seem significant enough to have interfered with the power flow to the adapter," Zelenka disagreed with a frown.
"That depends on what's causing it, doesn't it?" Rodney snapped.
"To the transporter?" Zelenka guessed.
"To the transporter," Rodney nodded, unplugging his tablet and turning abruptly on Chuck, to whom he spoke more harshly than seemed necessary, "You guys keep tabs on every screen you have. If there's even a slight variance in any system, I want to hear about it."
"Yes, Dr. McKay," Chuck replied, and looked relieved when Rodney blew by him without so much as a pause, pulling Zelenka along in his wake.
"Shouldn't we inform Dr. Weir?" John inquired as he followed them, more to gauge how genuinely serious Rodney considered this problem to be at the moment than anything.
"Please," Rodney scoffed, "If we informed Elizabeth on the spot every time we had a minor mishap, she'd never get any real work done. And neither would we. Until this problem grows or we have a better idea about what it actually is, it's better that we mind our business and let her mind hers."
"So this isn't really that big of a deal," John assessed.
Rodney sighed, coming to a halt so he could turn and face John directly with his annoyance, "Don't you have some sort of garland you should be hanging right now?"
"I've always been more of a lighting guy than a set decorator," John replied.
Narrowing his eyes, Rodney grumbled flatly, "Funny."
He spun back around without another word and continued down the hall.
"I thought it was," John muttered.
"It really wasn't," Zelenka offered, though no one had asked his opinion.
You didn't find the Stargate Program, it found you. You had to be outstanding to attract their notice.
That had a tendency to give one an inflated sense of their own importance. That had certainly happened to Major Lorne when he had first been approached to join the Stargate Program. But a few off-world experiences had knocked some sense back into him, and by the time he got to Atlantis a couple years later he'd accepted the fact that he wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed.
He was here because he had the ATA gene, knew how to fly and was already part of the Stargate Program, meaning he had training and experience off-world already. He also knew he was damn good at his job, though it had taken him a while to actually understand what his job really was.
However, there were some in the Stargate Program who were the sharp tools, and their job was to be clever. Unfortunately, when one's job is to be a clever problem solver, sometimes one gets the idea that they are the only one around and everyone else is too simple to realize anything on their own.
Such seemed to be the case with Souci, for Lorne had barely begun to speak before she had interrupted him and gone off on a tangent of her own. Like many of her type, Souci was clearly accustomed to the idea that she had all the answers and other people (especially military personnel) were as dumb as a bag of rocks. That's what came of selecting the best and brightest for the Atlantis Expedition. They all knew how smart and special they were, and that tended to go to their heads a bit.
"We came here to explore, Major," she explained as if to a child of five instead of a trained field operative, "We're a research team. We already didn't know what was out there. Nothing has changed, except for the fact that we're a long way north of where we were planning to land and our ride out of here has been disabled. Which only makes it all the more important that we be allowed to do our jobs. We're trained for this, Major. This is what we do."
"You done?" Lorne asked patiently when she stopped for breath.
Her blue eyes snapped fire, displeased that he had apparently not so much been listening as simply waiting for the noise to stop. Her annoyance didn't bother him a great deal. He was pretty used to getting that from all quarters, especially when missions went askew. What she didn't seem to understand was that he had heard her, but nothing she was saying came as news to him.
Nor did she seem to understand (or care) what Lorne's job was. His job was to protect those best and brightest people of Atlantis. To make sure they had the time they needed to accomplish what they had to. And to make sure that anybody they met out here knew the Lanteans were not here to make war, but that they weren't pushovers either, and should be taken seriously. The Lanteans were here to make friends and establish trade, but they were ready and able to fight like hell if anyone gave them a reason. That was his job. To serve his people's needs to the best of his ability.
"You're all right," Lorne said finally, when it was evident Souci was going to keep her mouth shut long enough for him to get a sentence in, "We need to fix the jumper. But we also need to get the lay of the land. This isn't a question of either/or. It's a question of who does what."
Wilson and Coughlin glanced at each other, and Lorne knew they'd be complaining among themselves later. Souci looked unnecessarily smug. George's mind was clearly already running ahead, thinking about what came next. Janella looked decidedly uneasy as she glanced at the back hatch of the jumper, on the other side of which might lie almost anything. Helton… well he always looked pleased with himself, and even in the shaky illumination of the flashlight, it was clear this time was no different.
Lorne continued smoothly, "Coughlin, Wilson, take Armstrong, Souci and McMains to recon the area. You can split into two teams if things seem quiet. Helton, you stay and keep an eye on Reed. I'll see what I can do about the puddle jumper."
"I should stay," Souci objected, "I'm the only other one here with the ATA gene."
"You know anything about fixing jumpers?" Lorne asked.
Souci's silent frown was sufficient answer.
"Then your skills are better utilized out there," Lorne said, "Especially if you do find trouble."
"What do you mean?" Souci asked innocently, but Lorne could tell she knew exactly what he meant; she just wanted to hear him say it.
He humored her, "I'm the one who trained you in the handling of firearms, remember? I've seen you on the range. You're better than average with an M9. Hopefully we won't need that skill of yours, but I'd rather have you out there and the team not needing your skill with firearms than the reverse."
Lorne did not add that he preferred that she be somewhere away from him. Better she was out there doing her job than in here giving him a hard time about one thing or the other.
Besides, Souci and Janella McMains were friends, and Janella could use the confidence boost of having Souci with her. It also gave George someone to keep in line, which would hopefully keep him and Wilson from going at it again. Especially if Coughlin took Lorne's hint and split the team at some point so that Wilson and George were not in shouting range of each other.
"Keep in regular radio contact," Lorne admonished, "And don't go more than five klicks out without letting me know why."
"You sound like my ex-husband," Souci remarked a little sourly, "Always dithering over me any time I went out like a worried mother hen."
Souci's remark wasn't well placed. It was Lorne's job to give instructions even on the obvious. If everything slid sideways and somebody had to disentangle what had happened, Lorne didn't want anybody to be able to say he hadn't been clear on his orders. If he got in trouble due to a failure on his part, it wasn't going to be because of unclear or insufficient instructions.
So he replied brightly, "Be sure to wear a warm sweater and bring a snack," for which he was gifted a cold glare that amused him perhaps more than was entirely kind.