AN: Updated Jan 2012. I didn't change too much — still irreverent as ever.
Synopsis: McKay's bad day is multiplying. Can McKay stop the new stargate from hiccupping and cranking out another McKay every 38 minutes? Or is he too tickled with his growing numbers to realize it's dooming the expedition?
Genres: General Fiction (no ships); SciFi/Comic Tragedy
Rating: T for language
Setting: Events occur during Season 5 after The Lost Tribe, the epi that they blow up the control tower.
Disclaimer: Contains recycled material.
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Murphy's First Law: "All things work toward decay."
by Fandomatic
•
Murphy's Law of Probability:
"Whatever hits the fan will not be evenly distributed."
Thud. SQUISH! Thud. SQUISH!
Miserable, Rodney shot a glare at Sheppard's smug face and felt the slime ooze in his left boot. He lifted his chin and headed into the event horizon.
As soon as Dr. Rodney McKay stepped through the Atlantis gate and his feet hit hallowed ground, he wanted nothing more than to find a more receptive target for his frustration.
He could envision the sight he made for the amused gate room with his blue paint covering his exposed skin. The blue shade just couldn't be a normal blue that faded into the background. No, this blue was a bright vivid color that coated his face all the way down to his neckline and all the way up to his armpits. The blue almost matched the color of his shirt, which just made it that much worse since the effect carried over to his chest under the tac vest.
His knuckles flexed around his ceremonial stick and a thought flittered at the edges of his mind that it would make a good bludgeoning tool for anyone that dared to cross his path. It was heavy, black, and carved from a solid branch with a wicked-looking bulbous tip.
McKay's second step into the staging area brought out a resounding squelch as his muddied boot protested its abuse. A deathly silence settled over the room.
Clomp. SQUISH! Clomp. SQUISH!
The astrophysicist halted and his jaw worked as he glanced around the spotless embarkation room and his nostrils flared. Spotless except for the muddied boot print he left behind him. The new stargate sat pristine in the center of a completely repaired gate room and he couldn't see any evidence of the explosion left. That possibly made him madder.
It was proof he hadn't been needed.
Behind him, the gate discharged the rest of team Sheppard, immaculate as the day they left Atlantis. A titter traveled up to the control room as technicians, without anything better to occupy them, drifted to the rail for a peek at their painted leader. For anyone else, it would have been the final humiliating nail in the coffin.
Bent on damage control, Woolsey hurried down the central stairs clutching his precious computer tablet. "How were the Gerratians?"
"Geriatric," he heard Sheppard snort behind him.
"Oh, please! You'd need valium to liven them up," Rodney instantly derided.
"What, no room for enlightenment, McKay?" the big Satedan gorilla grinned and thumped McKay's blue noggin.
"I wouldn't exactly call a monastery of moaning monks an epiphany!" McKay tried to drop his pack, but the straps caught on the tac vest and he ended up fumbling over them because of the stupid black stick he'd been forced to accept. "You don't need more than two seconds to see the entire show. Moan, groan, sway to the left. Moan, groan, sway to the right. I didn't have to sit there for days! I have important projects I could have been doing here, like rebuilding the control room from that nasty explosion, and I put them all on hold for the moaning monk initiation! And for what? Next to nothing. That's what!" He waved the carved scepter at them in disgust and Woolsey backed up a step looking to Sheppard for protection.
The colonel just shrugged and unclipped his own pack.
Teyla took pity on Woolsey. "The Gerratians graciously allowed Dr. McKay into the inner sanctum when they confirmed his ancestral gene. Their invitation for Atlantis to return remains intact. Dr. McKay was very … accommodating."
"Ha. Inner sanctum is what it's not!" McKay snarled. "They have a paltry garbage collection of broken ancient gizmos, doodads and crappy ceremonial sticks." He thrust out the price of his soul as evidence that Woolsey had sent him on a wild goose chase.
"It didn't blow his skirt up," Sheppard summed it up cheerily.
McKay shot him a murderous glare.
"Nothing there to blow up," Ronon added.
McKay fumed and considered shooting Conan murderous glare number two. He was fairly certain that comment had been aimed at him and not the quality of the monks' collection. But he wasn't ready to challenge that theory yet.
John crossed his hands over the butt of the P90 and gloated over his cranky scientist. "The reports of ancient technology fell a bit short. But the Gerratians had quite a lovely three-day ceremony planned for Rodney. And … they gave him a stick."
Rodney felt the flush rising under his paint and he gripped the implement in question just a little tighter. He grumbled under his breath, "Utter waste of valuable resources. You'd think everyone was struck by the 'Stupid' Fairy—"
"Mr. Woolsey!" Amelia Banks interrupted his churning thoughts of verbal revenge. The gate room grew quiet as she continued, "We can't shut down the gate!"
"What?" McKay's surprised blue face echoed the hue of the glowing blue event horizon behind them. The 'Stupid' Fairy must have been hyperactive if they couldn't even do that without him.
As he hurried up to the control room with his ruined condition forgotten, he heard Sheppard ask if they had a shield yet. When Woolsey responded that the installation was scheduled for tomorrow because it had something to do with system dependency, Rodney rolled his eyes. It had nothing to do with dependency and everything to do with the control panel that had to be cannibalized from auxiliary control with some assembly required. The Lord Protector didn't have a gate with a shield in their tower. They had a space gate.
McKay gazed around at the cobbled together brand new control consoles with burn scars still evident over the floor surfaces and walls around them. It hit him how vulnerable Atlantis really was. He should have never let Woolsey talk him into taking an inventory of the moronic monk hoard.
Of course at the time, he didn't know the monks had zilch, as in Zilch-PM. Everyone should be grateful for the depths he was willing to sink — nay, rise — to bring home a fully charged zero-point module.
The gate room below had more or less been repaired. Most of that was paint and glass installation with a little gate harvesting on the side. But the control room was the heart of the city. McKay had made remarkable repairs in the short amount of time that had passed. Quite a few of the control platforms had been lifted straight from the Lord Protector's tower. At the sight of the new consoles in place, Rodney had to admit his little minions had been busy finishing up his rebuilding project.
But they couldn't finish it without him. Dr. McKay's tension radiated from his shoulders as he hurried up to the DHD and pushed the reset button.
"I tried that a dozen times already, Dr. McKay." Amelia Banks gestured toward the active gate pointedly.
"Hmm," McKay frowned at the event horizon and turned to Chuck, not bothering to respond to her quaint little observation. The ATA gene had made no difference. "Did you bring up DHD diagnostics, yet?"
"It's running. Nothing yet."
"Well, tell me when it's done. And start a secondary diagnostics on the primary conduits, the gate protocols, and primary commands." McKay had already pulled off the panel and crawled under the console. An "Mmm" and grunt suspiciously reminiscent of the monk ceremony wafted up to them.
"Well, what's wrong with it?" Richard Woolsey prompted impatiently.
"Even I, a genius, and veritable giant of galactic knowledge," Rodney's muffled voice grew clearer as his blue face popped out to glare pointedly at the balding Atlantis commander, "need more than a few seconds to diagnose a problem that probably cropped up due to my extended absence to partake in a pointless and, dare I say, primitive ritual that left me painted up like a tart on estrogen! Clearly the ignorant monkeys were in charge of gate installation when—"
"Rodney." McKay's blue face with the red undertone took one look at Sheppard's flat expression and he clamped his mouth shut. "Take your time. It's not like the gate's gonna explode again…, is it?"
"Oh." Rodney glanced up between Woolsey's anxious face and Sheppard's and rolled his eyes. Yes, he was surrounded by idiots. "No! Look, there's no radiation bombarding the stargate. The alarms would've gone off. It's not as bad as it looks. It'll automatically cut off in thirty-eight minutes anyway. Meanwhile, it's not like the Geriatrics and their atrophied muscles are going to invade Atlantis while I chase down the anomaly in the new systems." He knew what Sheppard was worried about.
John met Woolsey's eyes and assured, "I'll double the guards."
Richard cleared his throat. "Protocol states…"
John planted his hands on his hips and Rodney's smile cracked the drying paint on his face. Sheppard hated that word.
"Right…" Woolsey sighed and lifted the tablet. "Keep me posted." He retreated toward his office with a stiffened spine and Rodney scooted happily under the console again. Sheppard had bought him time away from the post-mission checkup and he was going to use it.
As he looked for obvious red flags, he waggled his blue fingers at the computer tablet Amelia held. "Hey you, er, pony-tail, get me one of those…" He grabbed the tablet from her hands and continued as he pulled up the interface program. "Get Zelenka up here and get me a diagnostic kit, coffee, plus a couple of wet towels, and go fetch my shoes and socks — in that order, thank you."
•
Twenty minutes later, McKay managed to wipe most of the blue paint from his face, arms and hands, changed into tennis shoes, and dug out his Atlantis jacket from his pack. Meanwhile, he delegated all but the most critical tasks to everyone under him. Dr. Zelenka took his place under the DHD with a diagnostic kit and the ancient diagnostic program had finally come up with something for him to digest.
Instantly, the information caused more questions than answers to crop up. But it was too late. Pony-tail had already notified Woolsey they had something. The Atlantis commander and Sheppard started toward his control station.
McKay picked up his cooling coffee and sipped it as his brain took off in four directions at top speed and came up with stall, more hot coffee, oh crap, and how much time do we have left?
"Well?" Richard prompted as he approached McKay at the center console. "What's wrong with it?"
Rodney straightened from his computer screen and pointedly looked at his watch. "It's been exactly twenty-two minutes. I recommend we disengage the ZedPM and don't dial the gate until I fix this."
"What? Why?"
"First of all, there was an unexplained energy spike when we first gated in." McKay set down the cup and crossed his arms. "And when I say energy spike, I mean massive energy spike channeled directly from the ZedPM. We're lucky we're still here." His eyes shot to Zelenka's feet. "It happened on our end of the gate, so I think it's definitely a problem generating from the new gate and consoles which leads me to believe we're employing a bunch of grease monkeys that don't have any idea what end of the—"
"McKay."
Zelenka's indignant voice rose from under the console. "There is nothing wrong with installation!"
"If there was nothing wrong, then why did the gate draw an excessive amount of power from the ZedPM? Hmm?" He asked the ceiling.
"I have installed dozens of stargates, McKay, and this was no different—"
"Except for the fact that it's tied into the ZedPM!"
"Yes. Yes. Yes, it is. And we matched the ancient connections down to microscopic conduits!" Zelenka dropped his probes and came out of the console with his fists balled. "I triple checked them myself. Everything went like timework!" His thin hair stuck out in several directions.
"Its clockwork, Dr. Ludovico!" McKay also rose and retrieved his ceremonial stick from the console to make his point. Of course, his witticism was way over the Czech's short stature. "I never should have left! You almost killed us!"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" John reached out and grabbed McKay's arm, stepping between them. "What do you mean killed us?"
McKay glared at Zelenka behind John and his face was livid. "The energy spike is the reason the gate is still active. The ZedPM almost overloaded the buffer and the stargate is simply bleeding off excess energy. Another energy spike of that magnitude in close succession could very well detonate the gate!"
"Connections do not generate energy spikes! Programs do," Zelenka snapped.
"Once again, proving I never should have left the interface installation in your hands!"
"You wrote it!"
"And it was working perfectly before today."
Woolsey's clearing throat broke the awkward silence settling between them. "If we disengage the ZPM, how are you going to repair the system?"
Rodney crossed his arms and wondered if incompetence could actually compound if exposed to equal incompetence. "We have naquadah generators!"
"McKay," Sheppard's warning reminded him to play nice with the boss.
McKay frowned and reined in his foul mood for John. Obviously only he was qualified to fix this. "Look, it's not ideal, but we can operate on the Mark Two generators. The stargate is a primary system so it will take priority. We'll just lose a lot of other equally necessary systems, like secondary diagnostics and, uh, lights…"
•
"Transporters?" Sheppard's flashlight attached to the P90 rail illuminated the zillionth staircase ahead of them as they climbed the last flight to the control room. "You could've mentioned transporters."
Rodney paused to gasp out, "Yes, well … I thought it was more important to … to disengage the ZedPM and save the planet." He held up a finger and glanced at his watch. "Whereas patching in the Mark Two … to run the transporters—"
"You forgot."
"I was going to say … the generator that runs the transporters … are nowhere near the transporters … and there wasn't enough time." McKay started after the colonel again with his computer tablet tucked under his other arm. The damn thing got heavy and awkward after sixty-something flights of stairs.
"You forgot."
Okay, maybe he had overlooked it, but he wasn't going to admit it to the gloating energizer bunny. Rodney arrived in the control room and bent over to catch his breath for a moment. The pores on his pores were sweating and his legs were firing off pins and needles.
"Next time … I'm sending Zelenka." Rodney groaned and arched his back. Getting back in time had been close enough.
"Right," Sheppard smirked, "if you can bring yourself to trust him not to blow up the city."
"Okay, not one of my more brilliant moments," the doctor conceded. "But consider his track record." Dr. McKay headed off toward the consoles where the wild-haired Czech ran the primary system diagnostics in an effort to chase down the power anomaly. As he neared the station, he mopped the sweat from his face with his sleeve. Climate control had also shut down when they pulled the ZPM. It was starting to get warm.
"Anything yet?" He asked Radek. The radiant blue light from the gate flickered in a pattern on the ceiling, illuminating it and leaving the control area in twilight. Once he shut down the gate, he'd get the other generators online and bring back up the muted lights along with the transporters.
"No. I told you we ran this yesterday."
"Let me see." He peered over Dr. Zelenka's shoulder.
Annoyed, Dr. Zelenka gave up his chair and crossed his arms as Rodney scooted in to check over the report. So far, the problem remained elusive and the little engineer's reputation intact. Once the gate shut off, he'd be able to inspect the installation more thoroughly. That unexplained power surge remained a mystery.
"Huh. Carry on." Rodney rose and spotted Sheppard next to Woolsey by the control room rail. He joined them and stared at the active event horizon below them.
Below, a dozen marines guarded the gate with some heavy artillery. They had built a barricade across the central stair to the control room. On opposite causeways over the gate room, Ronon and Teyla had taken up defensive positions.
Just having a stargate opened them up to invasion, but they couldn't bring in parts to repair the control room in a timely manner without it. He had solved that with a mined space gate from the old galaxy bridge. It had hung in geosynchronous orbit for a few days while they ferried control consoles back from the Lord Protector's tower in puddle jumpers.
After five days of selfless devotion, he'd completed the groundwork for the final gate installation. The space gate became their stargate with one spectacular beam of Asgard technology — which he of course supervised and in no way diminished the importance of his crucial groundwork with its instant cheese-whiz appearance.
eHUnfortunately, the gate shield was the hardest repair to make since everything related to the gate had been fried and stargate shields just weren't that common in Pegasus.
"Any progress?" Richard Woolsey immediately asked.
"Well, with the ZedPM pulled, the gate can't draw another power surge from it, so we're safe from annihilation. I'd call that progress. The Mark Two is hooked in and we could dial out in an emergency, but until I find out what's wrong with our new gate, that's a bad plan. And the buffer in the gate has bled off enough power that it should shut down in, uh, another minute or so."
"Great." Sheppard's edginess took him by surprise. The lieutenant colonel looked a bit tense.
"Then I'll be able to test the systems independently. Chuck's giving us a T minus countdown."
"Good work, Dr. McKay." Woolsey made a notation on his computer pad which irked John.
Rodney folded his hands behind his back and couldn't repress the crooked smirk as they waited for the gate to shut down. John had named the tablet 'Woolsey's avalanche of bureaucracy.' It had been quite poetic of the colonel at the time.
"Five!" Chuck interrupted his musings.
"Four.
"Three.
"Two.
"One.
"Mark." And exactly nothing happened.
"What? Why didn't it shut down?" Woolsey looked at him.
"McKay?" Sheppard looked at him.
"I'm receiving an IDC!" Banks cut in and looked at them. "It's Colonel Sheppard's—"
During moments like this, he missed Sam Carter.
"This is Sheppard," the colonel's voice echoed over the control room communications systems. "Nobody shoot. We're coming through with a harmless Smurf."
For the second time that morning, McKay shot Sheppard's astonished face a murderous glare as a sense of déjà vu upset his tummy.
"Rodney!" Radek's panicked voice rose over the shocked room. "I'm reading an energy surge!"
McKay glanced toward the gate in time to see a blue-faced man emerge from the puddle as a deathly silence settled over the room. His jaw dropped as the next step into the staging area brought out a resounding squelch from a muddied boot protesting the weight it was subjected to.
Clomp. SQUISH! Clomp. SQUISH!
The second blue-faced McKay halted at the sight of the arsenal pointing at him and froze. He squeaked in terror, dropped his ceremonial stick and raised his blue hands. "Don't shoot the Smurf!"
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TBC
Next chapter…Law of Friction