The little transporter investigation party was suddenly brought to a screeching halt by a series of invectives issued loudly by a badly startled Rodney, who backed up so abruptly he bumped into John and almost knocked them both down.
"What?" John was instantly on the alert, looking for what had set Rodney off.
"I don't know," Rodney replied quickly, "I don't know. Something… something brushed my leg. I think it went that way," he pointed to the left, down a branching hallway.
"Are you sure? What did it look like?" John asked, not at all eager to take off down a hall after something he knew nothing about, particularly not without stopping by the armory first.
"I saw nothing," Zelenka supplied unhelpfully.
"I don't know, I didn't see it. I just felt it," Rodney shuddered, clutching his tablet like a security blanket, "It felt like it was about the size of a cat. But I've had a cat before, and that was not a cat."
"Okay, alright. Calm down, take a breath," John insisted evenly, for Rodney was beginning to hyperventilate, "We'll find it."
Rodney was given to a variety of phobias and imagining worst case scenarios, but he didn't generally leap directly from slightly annoyed concern to full on panic without some sort of trigger, and he didn't tend to imagine creatures roaming the halls at random. Especially not in broad daylight.
Anywhere else, John might have assumed Rodney had seen a rat or some equivalent, but Atlantis did not lend itself to creature infestations of that variety. So he treated whatever Rodney thought he had seen with a bit more seriousness than he otherwise would have.
"This is Sheppard," John spoke into his earwig, "Not to alarm anybody, but we may have a potential small creature situation down near the Mess Hall transporter."
"I saw nothing," Zelenka repeated, shaking his head, which caused some of his more erratically inclined hairs to wave in a distractingly wild manner.
"Well if you'd felt it, you'd know it was real," Rodney hissed back angrily, but his eyes were still wide and his breath too rapid; facts which had John more than casually worried.
This was their second year in Atlantis. Something unseen the size of a cat brushing by shouldn't toss Rodney into a frenzy of terror so easily. Not when he'd faced down Genii, Wraith and a plethora of other scary things, some of which didn't even have names until he'd given them one.
"What's the problem?" John asked, remembering only too well asking that a few minutes ago and wondering how many times he might be going to say those three words today.
"I… I think it hates me," Rodney replied hesitantly, "I don't know… why I think that. But that's… it just felt… it felt hateful. Like if it'd been big enough, it would've killed me."
"You say that about every alien life form we encounter," Zelenka said dryly.
"I do not!" Rodney snarled back.
John opted to let them fight it out while he called in some teams to search for this… creature, or whatever it was, asked Elizabeth's permission to issue a stay-in-your-quarters order to nonessential personnel, and tried not to think too much about how unknown things loose in Atlantis usually turned into unknown things killing in Atlantis.
As it turned out, the remark about the sweater wasn't as much of a joke as Lorne had thought. Until the moment the jumper was open, they'd had no concept of how cold it was outside. But as soon as the hatch was cranked open, the temperature dropped noticeably. At the same time, humidity flooded in.
"Okay, yeah, I'm not sorry to be missing out on that," Helton remarked.
Lorne said nothing, but silently agreed. He half-wanted to call the team back, but he knew they were equipped for the elements, even if they didn't feel like it. Besides, their job was anything but trivial, regardless of what Coughlin and Wilson thought about it.
It was entirely possible that whatever knocked the jumper out of the sky wasn't down here. It could be parked on one of the planet's two moons. Hell, it could be the two moons. But if that was the case, Lorne knew they were screwed regardless, so they had to assume some sort of device.
He figured (or maybe only hoped) that for practicality it had to be on the surface of the planet somewhere. Admittedly, that didn't mean it was anywhere near where they'd landed. However, Lorne had noticed where the interference had been coming from (at least, he thought that's what it had been) just as the jumper was starting to die, and had tried to aim for it when he realized it was going to bring them down, anticipating that it was a problem they would have to deal with before they would be able to leave or be rescued. But that didn't mean he'd actually succeeded.
At the end, with his instruments blind and the jumper fighting him for control, Lorne hadn't been able to do much but try not to hit the ground so hard they died on impact.
But even if the device was nowhere around, there was other useful intel to be gathered. Such as finding out what dangers lurked out there. And, depending on how bad things got, what might be edible, which was the primary reason he had sent the obviously unwilling Janella. Plants could be dangerous in myriad ways, but Souci's broad range of knowledge combined with Janella's would hopefully cover that angle. Lorne didn't know much about plants and plant testing, but he figured a botanist would be best suited to determining if any of the plants out there were good for eating. Certainly she was equipped with more plant-specific knowledge than an ecologist with special interest in marine biology.
The blast of cold wet that came in for the brief time it took the team to climb out of the jumper was enough to make Lorne doubt there was any chance of pitching a habitable camp outside, which was a little bit disappointing to him. Though the jumper was well insulated and provided some protection from various hazards, it was landed at such a miserable angle that trying to sleep in it was likely to be a lost cause. It was a problem for sure, one he hoped to avoid facing.
Unfortunately, leaving this spot hinged on his ability to get the jumper to fly again. Lorne had worked on his share of cars, particularly during his high school and college years, but a puddle jumper's power supply didn't look anything at all like a car's engine.
Lorne took a deep breath, and reminded himself that he had volunteered for this.
Not just this mission itself, but the Expedition as a whole. In fact, he'd put in a request as soon as he'd heard about Atlantis. But Colonel Sumner had been in charge of selecting military personnel at that time. Sumner was a Marine, and doubtless preferred his own kind. However, he was also a friend of Colonel Edwards', Lorne's then-CO. Lorne couldn't help but think that had something to do with why his initial request had been rejected. In fact, he had a pretty strong suspicion that, had he not later tested positive for the ATA gene, he still wouldn't be here.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew he was trying to prove that Edwards had been wrong about him, that Sumner had made a mistake not bringing him on as part of the original Expedition. As the military second, and leader of an off-world team, he really had nothing left to prove. But he still felt like he did more often than not. And crashing a shuttle off-world just a few days before Christmas was no way to go about proving anything. Not if he couldn't get it airborne again.
When a quick search failed to reveal the creature, Sheppard had everyone restrict themselves to certain areas (Elizabeth had been unwilling to go along with a full-on restriction to quarters at this stage), and do a headcount while they were at it to make sure no one had gone missing, then asked the techs to run a scan to look for life signs. They didn't find any they didn't expect to.
"It was small," Rodney said defensively, seeing the doubt cross Sheppard's face, "Atlantis is designed to look for Ancients, Wraith… people-sized life signs. Not cats. We have no idea if it's even set up to notice smaller life forms, or to recognize them in the same way."
"Rodney, we haven't got the manpower to search every inch of this city," Sheppard said, "Especially not for something we can't even prove exists."
"It does exist!" Rodney insisted, noticing the slightly hysterical tone entering his voice but unable to stop it as he too-clearly remembered the malevolence of the entity that had touched him so briefly.
More than anything, he knew he had to convince Sheppard that this threat was real, even though he had no proof of it, nor any reason to suspect it was dangerous other than that he'd felt it.
"I believe you," Sheppard reassured him, but Rodney heard the edge of annoyance at having his time wasted creeping into his tone, "But what do you want me to do about it?"
"I want you to find it and kill it," Rodney said flatly, though they had just established that Sheppard couldn't do the former, which made the latter a challenge as well.
Sheppard looked at Rodney with obvious irritation, but before he could answer, his earwig chirped. The teams he'd dispatched a second time into the area of search were checking in, reporting nothing, just as they had reported the first time. Rodney knew the search would be called off if he did nothing.
But what could he do?
"Dr. McKay?" Rodney half jumped out of his skin hearing his own name in his ear, though he recognized the voice of the Gate Tech and belatedly remembered asking for an immediate report of anything unusual; which was why he himself was tuned to a different channel from Sheppard.
"McKay here," he responded, pleased to find that his voice didn't squeak too much or otherwise betray the moment of panic fright the Gate Tech had unintentionally inflicted.
"Dr. McKay, I realize you're looking for a creature now, but I thought you might still want to know. We've got a very slight sensor glitch up here," the Gate Tech said.
A new sharpness entered Rodney's voice, "What kind of sensor glitch?"
"It's very minor..." the Tech began, but Rodney interrupted.
Harshly, he repeated, "What. Kind?"
"Well, it seems we're getting… a slight echo on the life signs reading," the Tech replied.
"An echo?" Rodney repeated, not sure he'd heard correctly, "What's that supposed to mean?"
"We were only asked to scan while everyone was in one place, but I figured, why not keep scanning as long as the search was in progress? And… well… every time a search team moves, the blips that represent them move on the screen, but we are also getting a brief blip of where they were a moment before... almost like a... a ghost image," the Tech explained a trifle nervously.
Rodney was pretty sure there was a Ghost of Christmas Present joke in there somewhere, but neither he nor the Gate Tech tried to find it, and it was a sure bet the Gate Tech didn't sound nervous because he thought any actual spirits were involved. Rodney certainly didn't, though his mind absurdly recalled to him all of the Christmas Ghost Stories out there, stories his father had preferred to read because apparently he hadn't had enough of Halloween by the end of December.
Rodney shook his head, refocusing on the matter at hand.
First the 'Gate surge, then the lights, then the creature, now scan glitches? In Rodney's view, there was no chance that this was some kind of coincidence. And if the creature could affect the power systems in Atlantis… well no wonder the scans couldn't detect it. But was that enough proof for Sheppard to recognize the existent threat and keep searching for it? Did he really need to? Rodney's mind had already raced along to another possibility, that he himself might be able to track the creature via the tech malfunctions it apparently left in its wake. That would save Sheppard's team a lot of time and effort… and potentially save Atlantis from something far worse than a minor inconvenience.
"Colonel, we have a new problem," Rodney said, interrupting the check-in reports.
"We do?" Sheppard inquired a trifle coolly, which was likely because he felt like he was spinning his wheels on this thing, which he wasn't even convinced was an actual thing.
"I just talked to the control room," Rodney replied, undaunted by Sheppard's rising temper, "They're having trouble with the sensors."
Normally, he would go through an exhaustive explanation of what his mind had put together, from the fact that four unusual occurrences, at least three of which could be confirmed by sources other than himself, was too many to take lightly. He would have explained that malfunctions could get worse, that they might even eventually cripple the city if not stopped in their tracks. He would have explained… well, a lot of things. But he paused for only a second and a half, waiting for Sheppard to catch up.
"Which is probably why they can't track the creature," Sheppard concluded intelligently, he sighed, "So you probably did feel something."
Rodney was too preoccupied to gloat about his rightness or be incensed that Sheppard had not only doubted him, but also lied about it mere moments ago. He thought about saying, 'We need to track this thing down before it has a chance to do any real damage.' But he didn't as it would be mere statement of the increasingly obvious, and right now he wasn't in the mood for that.
"I need to go," Rodney said absently, turning away and heading back towards the transporter that would return him to Stargate Operations.
"Go? Go where?" Sheppard asked, mildly alarmed.
"To see if I can track this thing by the malfunctions it leaves behind," Rodney called back, "Keep looking. Whatever this thing is, I think it's getting bolder."
As the doors of the transporter slid closed, he heard Sheppard mutter, more to himself than to Rodney, "That's not very reassuring."