Chapter 4 – Escape Plan
Sheppard and Williams entered the fourth room side by side. As the door shut the temperature suddenly plummeted. The shock of cold, especially with their still sweat-dampened clothes and hair, was intense and they immediately began to shiver.
"Far door," said Sheppard, his breath pluming into the air.
They moved to the far end of the room, once again desperate to be as close to escape as possible.
Shanice could see frost beginning to form on her eyelashes. She put a hand up to her hair and could feel it freezing into stiff spikes. She felt the cold penetrating her body, a bone-deep pain making her thoughts slow and her limbs feel heavy.
Sheppard adjusted his P90 so it hung behind him, swearing as the freezing metal stuck to his hands. "Come here," he said, moving her weapon out of the way too. They huddled together as close as they could trying to share what little warmth they had left.
Rodney ran to the next room in the sequence, plans forming in his head. Plans that were quickly dashed when he saw the next room: double thickness walls so that the view through both layers of the one-way window was indistinct. Peering down into the room he could just see the doors were different too - a raised threshold and some kind of extra-secure door seal like in an air-lock. We'll never get through that! he thought.
On to the next room; it looked the like the others. Here was where they would try to blow Sheppard and Williams a way out.
Rodney tapped his comm-link.
"Ronon, Teyla!" he called urgently.
"It didn't work, McKay," came Ronon's deep voice. "Hardly dented the wall."
"Never mind that now. Just get back here. Bring whatever C4 you have left, round up Martinez and Phillips and get theirs too! Just hurry!"
He went back to the freezer-room and saw Jennifer running towards him, datapad in hand. "Rodney, what's happening?" She looked down into the room and her mouth fell open. "That's... that's barbaric! They're hypothermic, they need to get out of there!"
The door at the far end of the room slid open, but Sheppard and Williams didn't move.
"Sheppard!" called Rodney.
Jennifer joined in. "Colonel Sheppard! John! Get out of there!"
At last their words penetrated Sheppard's frozen mind and he shuffled towards the door, pushing Private Williams ahead of him. The door closed behind them and they were, for the moment, lost to sight.
In the passageway, Williams fell against the wall and slid down to curl up in a shivering heap. Sheppard fell forward heavily on to his knees; his head hung down.
He realised that Rodney was speaking to him again.
"Listen, Sheppard! We're behind the wall in the level above you. We're going to try to blast through, but we can't do it in the next room, it'll have to be the one after. Can you hear me Sheppard? John?"
"Yeah, I hear you," he replied tiredly, the shivering beginning to abate.
"You have to get through the next room and then listen to what I want you to do. OK?"
"Yeah, OK."
In the viewing gallery Rodney rapidly explained his plan to Ronon, Teyla, Jennifer, Martinez and Phillips.
"We need to blast a hole in this window and we need to do it as soon as the door opens but before they enter. The materials this place is made of are tough - very high security, to keep angry Wraith contained. We need a concentrated blast making the best use of our limited C4."
"I can handle that, Sir," said Martinez, who had proved particularly skilful in deploying high explosives during her training.
"Good," said Rodney. "Get started on that. Next thing, I predict that further security measures will come into effect as soon as the system detects that the wall's been breached. That means the doors within this facility will seal, which means we need to wedge anything strong and rigid into all of the doors before that happens or we'll be trapped."
"I'm on it McKay," Ronon said, but Rodney stopped him.
"Look for some way of getting them out too. We don't know what's going to happen in the next room, but," he paused, swallowed and continued resolutely: "I doubt if they'll be in any condition to climb out."
Ronon nodded grimly and sprinted off, taking Phillips and Teyla with him.
Sheppard had crawled over to where Williams lay and was shaking her shoulder.
"C'mon, Williams." He shook her again. "C'mon. Shanice! Up and at 'em. You wanted excitement, you got it!"
She slowly raised her head and gave him a small, brave smile.
"I'm up, quit hassling!"
"Now, is that any way to speak to your Commanding Officer, Private?" Sheppard joked.
They made it to their feet, leaning heavily into each other for support.
"One more room, then we're out of here," said Sheppard, firmly. "Do you hear me, Williams?"
She nodded her head. They stood, side-by-side once more, waiting for the door to open, noticing it's raised threshold and extra-strong construction and wondering what it could mean.
Rodney was also wondering, and hoping it wasn't a space for testing how Wraith could stand up to a vacuum. Ten seconds of that would be enough to kill them, let alone ten minutes, he thought.
He saw the door open and Sheppard and Williams step over the threshold. And immediately they fell to the floor as if pressed down by a giant weight. So, gravity, not vacuum, he thought, somewhat reassured.
He could see Sheppard and Williams struggling desperately to crawl to the far door, and then suddenly they began to drift away from the floor, arms and legs scrabbling for purchase. They rose to the height of about six feet and then were ruthlessly slammed into the floor once more by the returning gravity. Williams' head hit the floor and Rodney could tell she was immediately unconscious. Sheppard's weight hit the floor on his out-stretched right arm and Rodney could see the grimace of pain on his face as his head was forced into the floor by the pressure.
In the corridors surrounding the Wraith-testing facility it looked like a furniture auction room. Phillips had pointed out rooms where there were sturdy desks and benches and Ronon was using his considerable strength to fling them out into the corridors and carry them, upside down on his head, to slam them into the door-spaces that could potentially lock closed when the security measures were triggered. Phillips and Teyla moved a bit more slowly, one at each end of their desk. They had taken some right into the viewing gallery where Ronon said he would drop them down into the room and help Sheppard and Williams to climb up and out.
When Sheppard hit the floor he immediately felt the snap of his collar bone and the pain in his wrist. Of more immediate concern, however, was the fact that Williams was unconscious. He needed to protect her from further knocks or her head injury could become very serious, if not fatal.
With his experience as a pilot, Sheppard knew a lot about functioning in high-G conditions and he knew that lying horizontally on his back was the best way to avoid any ill effects. He forced his heavy body over and reached, sliding his left arm over to Williams and grabbing the back of her vest.
When the g-force began to lessen he used the opportunity to pull her over on top of him so that her back was to his front. He pushed as much as he could with his legs towards the far door until they left the floor completely and he found, as he had hoped, that he was still drifting in the right direction.
The shock of another sudden huge increase in gravity was intense. Sheppard felt his back hit the floor hard but managed to curl forward slightly so that his head didn't hit first. With his left arm he kept Williams' weight on top of him, protecting her at the expense of the sudden increase in pressure on his ribs. His already injured arm hit the floor and he gasped with pain and tried to slide his hand into the straps of his thigh holster to protect it.
Rodney watched with horrified fascination as Sheppard and Williams were repeatedly subject to wildly varying gravitational forces. He checked with Martinez, who was confident that she had arranged the C4 in such a way as to concentrate the force of the blast on a small area of the window.
Ronon knew his job was to break away as much of the window as they needed to effect a rescue as soon as the explosion had cleared and then drop desks through into the room below to form a makeshift stair.
Teyla and Phillips were ready to put their uniform jackets over any jagged areas of the blast sight and help their friends out of the window. And Jennifer was more than ready to put her skills into action.
All five of them watched, tensely as the gravity room finally wound down and Sheppard dragged Williams painfully over the threshold and into the connecting corridor.
"What d'you need me to do, McKay?" Sheppard's strained voice came over the radio.
"I need you to wait, away from the door," explained McKay. "We're going to blast a hole as soon as the door opens and Ronon's going to drop things in for you to climb up."
There came the sound of a pained gasp. "Williams is unconscious, and," there was a pause, "well, I'll manage, but I can't carry her."
"That's OK, we'll come and get you." McKay then said, urgently: "I need you to have your P90s ready. When the blast goes off the door might shut and trap you in. You need to be ready to wedge them in the door to keep it open!"
"Will do."
"Right, we need to get back, round the corner," Rodney directed. "Sheppard, as soon as the door opens, shout out!"
"OK, I'm ready."
"Martinez? You ready with the trigger," asked Rodney.
She held it up and nodded.
"And don't bother with any of that 'Fire in the hole' stuff," he said. "Our signal to keep our heads down is Sheppard's yell!"
They were ready.
Sheppard's voice came urgently through the radio: "It's opening!"
Martinez' thumb came down on the trigger. There was a deafening roar. It was time to get their people out.