Disclaimer: I don't own 'Stargate Atlantis' or any related concepts or characters; you know the drill by now. Also, the basic details of the plot were inspired by 'The Phantom of the Opera', although I have naturally put my own spin on things; hope it meets with your approval
Feedback: Always appreciated, trust me
AN: OK, just to clarify, this chapter takes place approximately three months after the last one, during which time the events of "Childhood's End", "Poisoning the Well", "Underground" and "Home" have all taken place, with this chapter beginning with a brief look back at how those episodes turned out here before the events of "The Storm" begin. Also, anything you don't see here happened pretty much the same way that it did in the original episode, with the obvious exception of Sumner replacing Sheppard
The Phantom of Atlantis
As she sat in her office, staring reflectively out at the gateroom below her, Elizabeth sighed slightly as she reflected back on the events that had taken place since the expedition's arrival.
All in all, in her opinion, while the situation hadn't been as bad as she might have expected- after all, they had come through so far with a fairly minimal amount of casualties and learned some potentially useful information about their new adversaries in this part of the galaxy-, it definitely could be going significantly better. Given their general lack of resources such as medical supplies, forming alliances with other civilisations wasn't proving as easy as it had been for Earth; they might have access to the technology of the Ancients, but they were still learning so much about it that they were reluctant to give anyone else access to it before they were certain they wouldn't give them something that could be harmful in the long term. Their recent experience with the Genii was evidence enough of that; the Genii might have achieved a technological level of culture approximately equal to Earth's abilities in the 1950s, but their lack of knowledge about the dangers of radiation had left most of their people in a potentially dangerous medical situation that Elizabeth doubted they could recover from on their own.
Admittedly, the fact that the Genii had attempted to steal a gateship and various quantities of C4 explosive from them simply because a mission to gather data from a Wraith hive-ship went wrong due to outside influences and found it easier to blame the expedition for the mistakes limited the amount of pity Elizabeth felt for them, but she still saw it as wrong that the entire race should suffer because of the mistakes of their leaders. If only the Genii had been willing to work with them rather than trying to take what they wanted, they could have acquired a valuable ally, but their determination to take control and their inability to accept that the expedition causing the Wraith to wake up early had only been an accident rather than a deliberate act of malice- coupled with the death of one of their men simply because he and Teyla had disagreed over what to do about one of the Wraith prisoners- had driven a wedge between their cultures that Elizabeth wasn't sure anything could effectively repair.
Still, as far as Atlantis's trading prospects went, things really weren't going as badly as they could have turned out, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the Athosians. After their recent discovery of a major continent only a few minutes' flight away by gateship, most of the Athosians had moved to the continent to start farming once again, with only a few such as Teyla and Halling, who had already accepted positions among Atlantis's offworld teams, remaining on Atlantis in order to continue working with their assigned offworld teams and help the expedition establish trading relations with some of their old allies before Athos had been culled. Despite their efforts, however, it would take at least another couple of months before the Athosians had anything like enough crops to provide something to trade with, to say nothing of being able to provide the expedition with sufficient food supplies for their own uses. In the meantime, the food packages they had received from M7G-677 after enhancing the force field that protected them from the Wraith had helped their food situation on at least a short-term basis, and Bates and Halling's subsequent efforts with the Manarians had also provided them with an at least partial supply of food while they waited for the Athosians' crops to grow (The rapid breakdown of relationships with the Genii had been somewhat disappointing, of course, but Elizabeth's previous attempts to negotiate with the Goa'uld- looking back on her days as the temporary commander of the SGC, she couldn't believe how naïve she'd been back then- had shown her that sometimes it was just impossible to make the other side see your point of view even if you could see theirs).
Elizabeth just wished that she could get over the more… personal issue that had been bothering her for the last couple of weeks; ever since their encounter with the mist creatures when they'd thought that they'd found a way back to Earth without having to worry about the shield activating when they tried to dial from Atlantis, to be more precise.
During her recent 'visit' to Earth- it might have been an artificially-generated hallucination, but it was still as close to being real as she was ever likely to achieve given their continued inability to dial any address in the Milky Way without activating the shield over the Stargate-, when she'd been 'reunited' with Simon, even when she'd been told that Atlantis was going to be militarised in response to the threat posed by the Wraith, her thoughts had never been totally on the man she'd once planned to marry, or even the city that had become her home…
Even when the illusionary Simon had offered to finalise their relationship at last, Elizabeth had found herself unable to stop thinking about the Phantom.
Admittedly, after she'd 'learned' about the plans to militarise Atlantis in the hallucination, her thoughts had been mainly focused on if he would remain safe with that many soldiers available to hunt him down simply for apparently wanting to remain secret, but the fact remained that, even when she'd been with Simon, a part of her had always wondered how the Phantom was faring back on Atlantis, if Sumner's forces had caught him by now, if someone had discovered the shield device he'd given her where it remained hidden in her room…
She just couldn't understand her own train of thought on this specific issue at times; even when she had been reunited with Simon in the hallucination, all her thoughts had remained focused on the Phantom. She had tried to focus on being back with Simon, of course, but no matter how hard she'd tried to remind herself that she was back on Earth and the issue of the Phantom was no longer something she needed to worry about, she kept on starting to worry about him once again.
It was ridiculous; even if she'd been on Atlantis, it was unlikely that she would have actually been able to do anything to help the Phantom if he'd been captured without having Sumner or the military commanders accusing him of having influenced her actions somehow. Besides, he'd lasted this long without her taking any actual action to try and help him; what were the odds that he'd need help at this stage when he hadn't needed it beforehand…
There were so many reasons why she shouldn't have been worried about the Phantom when she 'got back' to Earth, and none of them had made her feel any better; she simply couldn't shake the concern she'd felt whenever she thought about him while she was in that hallucination. If only she had something else to occupy her attention…
"Doctor Weir?" a voice suddenly said from her door. Glancing up, Elizabeth was greeted with the rare sight of Peter Grodin looking almost afraid as he stood in her doorway, swallowing slightly as though trying to gather strength to tell her whatever he had discovered to leave him in that condition.
"Doctor Grodin?" she replied, standing up to look curiously at her assistant. "What's the problem?"
"We just received an urgent message from Sergeant Stackhouse when he was taking Teyla and Halling to the mainland for a visit," Grodin replied. "It would appear that we have a large- extremely large- storm heading right for Atlantis."
Elizabeth blinked.
She would have been the first to admit that she was nowhere near a science expert, but if Grodin was looking this anxious about a storm, she had a strong feeling that it wasn't going to be anything like a simple one.
"How large is 'large'?" she asked, as she stood up to look at her assistant better.
"Large enough to cover apparently twenty per cent of the planet, hit the entire continent, and then move on directly to Atlantis," Grodin replied grimly.
Elizabeth swallowed.
She didn't need degrees in meteorology to know that something that big could never be good…
The question was, how bad would it turn out to be?
An hour later, with Stackhouse, Halling and Teyla having returned to the city, Elizabeth had called the three of them into the conference room, where they were discussing the implications of this latest discovery along with Colonel Sumner, Doctors McKay and Zelenka, and Lieutenant Ford.
"Is it actually possible for a storm to get that big?" Sumner asked McKay, looking slightly critically at the gateship 'crew' who'd discovered the problem; evidently, while Sumner might believe what the Athosians thought they had seen, he wanted to confirm whether it was possible in the first place. In the past Elizabeth might have considered such a concern excessive, but given what they'd already learned about the Wraith's apparent telepathic abilities she supposed that it only made sense to make sure that they weren't getting in a fuss over something that might not even technically be there; nothing could be taken for granted when facing an enemy who could influence what you were looking at.
"Actually, it is… well, theoretically, anyway," McKay replied, having taken a few moments before the meeting to go over the discovery with Zelenka and prepare a display that was now presented on the screen behind them; Elizabeth assumed that it showed weather graphs, but she would be unwilling to swear to it.
"You see," he continued, as he walked away from the screen to sit back down, "this planet is basically the same size as Earth. Now, hurricanes on Earth never get as big as this bad boy because once they hit the shore, the brakes get put on. Without as much landmass to slow it down here, it's just, uh, gaining momentum."
"Both of them are," Zelenka added, raising one finger where his hands were clasped below his chin.
"Yes," McKay confirmed, nodding briefly at the Czech.
"Both of them?" Elizabeth repeated, looking at Zelenka as she hoped she'd heard him wrong even as she knew she hadn't.
"We saw only one," Halling said, looking at McKay in confusion.
"It only looked like one," McKay answered briefly, his attention still on his laptop as he continued to speak. "Now, according to the Ancient database, every twenty or thirty years the sea gets unseasonably warm. Now that, for reasons too boring to get into, means that hurricanes are much more likely to occur."
"Well," Zelenka began, pushing his glasses slightly up his nose as he spoke, "like El Nino, the ocean-"
"Like I said, too boring to go into," McKay interjected.
"Focus," Elizabeth said briefly; whatever else happened here, she was not going to allow the two men to start an argument in a situation like this.
"Well," McKay continued, as though neither she or Zelenka had never spoken, "basically, if you have a situation where there are a bunch of hurricanes out there, the likelihood of two colliding is greatly increased; that's what's happening."
"It's more like a merger than a collision," Zelenka clarified, hand gestures emphasising his points as he spoke. "They are intersecting and combining their power."
"And," McKay added, finally drawing the matter away from the meteorogical details of the problem and back to their more immediate issue, "it's headed right towards us."
After exchanging glances with the rest of the people in the room to ensure that they understood what they had just learned, Elizabeth decided to tackle the most obvious question first.
"You just said the Ancients experienced these storms every twenty to thirty years," she said, as she looked at the scientists. "Atlantis must have some sort of precautions put in place."
"Well, in the past, when they weren't submerged so far underwater that surface conditions weren't an issue, the Ancients tended to use the shield to protect them…" McKay said, before trailing off as he looked uncomfortably at the group of people around him
"By your tone, I take it there's a problem with using that option now?" Sumner replied.
"Yes; whenever the Ancients had to deal with these storms, they were using three ZedPMs at potentially full power to operate the shield," McKay replied, nodding at the commander. "We have one ZedPM with maybe twenty percent of its full power capacity- maybe even fifteen; I can't be entirely sure- and what data I've managed to gather from the database suggests that three ZedPMs working in tandem proportionately use less power than one at a time- there's all this stuff about them working together to reduce entropy, very scientific and we don't really have the time to go over it-, so-"
"Can you get to the part that explains why our only having one ZPM is a problem in this situation?" Sumner asked, looking critically at McKay. "I get that we'd be using less power than they'd have, but if three of them can keep this place going for ten thousand years-"
"During which, as far as we know, the city was totally uninhabited- except for maybe this 'Phantom' guy we've been hearing about, and even if there's any truth there the presence of one man would cause such a minimal drain on the power that it barely matters either way- and the shield was expected to do nothing but keep the water out; right now we're expecting it to provide power and comfort facilities for around a couple of hundred people and endure some seriously powerful severe weather conditions," McKay countered. "We can get the shield up, no problem, but I really can't be sure if it'd last long enough to sustain the shield against the kind of torrential bombardment we'd be dealing with here."
"The city lasted for ten thousand years underwater-" Elizabeth began.
"As I already pointed out, the water was just there; it wasn't actually battering against the city at gale force speeds while maybe even hitting it with several thousand volts of lightning in the process," McKay countered as he looked over at her. "The high wind alone would cause some serious structural damage, and then there's the potential for tornadoes and electrical activity as a result of the thing passing over a landmass before it reaches us…"
He shook his head. "I'm not saying that the ZedPM won't be able to generate enough power to protect us; I'm just saying that I can't guarantee it can protect us for the whole storm."
"And, even if it did, it would be so drained that we'd lack the ability to raise the shield when the Wraith finally find us after using so much power to protect us from this threat," Sumner concluded, nodding grimly at the scientist. "So, with that in mind, do you have any way of guaranteeing that the shield will last for the duration of the storm?"
McKay simply looked blankly back at him.
"Not… really, no," he said, evidently trying not to look embarrassed at the admission. "The problem is that the people who built this city knew they had a forcefield capable of holding back anything Mother Nature or, for that matter, the Wraith could throw at them, and they had ready access to the power supply the city needed to create that forcefield. Without that protection, Atlantis is remarkably fragile."
"Even our conservative calculations project widespread structural damage if the city's exposed to the worst of the storm for more than a few minutes," Zelenka added.
"Flooding could sink the city entirely," McKay added- just to show that he still had more to add to the situation, a part of Elizabeth's mind thought.
"How could something as big as Atlantis just… sink?" Ford protested, looking incredulously at the scientists.
"Ask the Titanic construction team; it's possible," McKay replied briefly.
"Titanic?" Halling repeated, looking curiously at the scientist.
"Supposedly unsinkable ship back on Earth that hit an iceberg on its first voyage; not really relevant to the current problem except as an example," McKay replied briefly.
"So…" Sergeant Stackhouse said, looking uncomfortably between his assorted superiors, "you're saying that if Teyla, Halling and I hadn't discovered this, we-"
"We would be in even bigger trouble," Elizabeth said briefly; as much as she understood the man's train of thought- how often had she wondered if there wasn't something she could have done by this point to make Sumner think better of the Phantom (And why could she not get her thoughts away from him?)- this wasn't the time to start thinking about what they could have done differently to deal with this situation.
"All right," she continued, as she turned back to look at McKay and Zelenka, "what's the plan?"
"By my calculations," McKay began, glancing over at Zelenka as he spoke, "we have just under, what, twelve hours until the storm hits, so…" he trailed off slightly as he spoke, "uh… we plan to have a plan…"
"Yeah," Zelenka confirmed.
"…by then," McKay concluded.
Elizabeth wondered briefly if it was possible to get away with being angry at someone for not being arrogant; couldn't McKay have made himself appear a little more confident than he was?
A couple of hours later, with the scientists still pouring over possible ideas in the briefing room and the rest of the expedition preparing to evacuate the Athosians from the mainland and packing their bags to move to Manaria for the night, none of them were aware of the black-clad figure crouched in the maintenance tunnel above Elizabeth Weir's office, watching the expedition members through a small hole he'd created in the wall years ago as they rushed desperately to salvage what personal belongings and equipment they could before the storm forced them out of the city.
He supposed that this situation was at least partly his own fault- if he'd stored his entire ZPM supply here the expedition wouldn't even have this problem- but after he'd first realised the potential destructive power of the ZPMs he'd thought it inadvisable to keep too many of them in the city. If the Wraith had ever managed to infiltrate the base, all it would have taken was one of their number to find his ZPM stockpile and the Pegasus Galaxy's ultimate nightmares would have practically unrestricted access to a near-unlimited power supply, and that was if the Wraith who'd discovered them in that theoretical scenario had been smart.
If they'd been stupid, on the other hand…
All it would have taken was one bad shot from a Wraith who had no idea what he was looking at, and he'd have been left with, at the very least, some significant damage to Atlantis, and at most the entire planet and a significant portion of the solar system would have been destroyed. He'd run a few computer simulations to work out what might happen in the event of a worst-case-scenario- in this case a full-scale Wraith invasion- a long time ago, and while none of the results had been encouraging, the ones where he kept the ZPMs on Atlantis rather than on the abandoned moon where he'd hidden them invariably turned out to be the worse ones.
While he might want to ensure the Wraith never managed to gain access to Earth, he was equally reluctant to put himself in a position where he would have been forced to destroy Atlantis. Given the gene-sensitive equipment, the Wraith were incapable of using most of its technology, and with the shield protection system he'd erected all those years ago it was equally impossible for them to ever gain access to Earth, so destroying Atlantis would accomplish nothing but deprive the universe of the Altereans' crowning glory…
Whatever his reasoning, the facts remained; the expedition was currently facing a potentially serious threat from the storm that was currently bearing down towards them, and at the rate things were going the only way Atlantis was going to definitely survive (McKay might be a pain in the neck but he had his facts right; there was no way to know for sure if the current ZPM would have enough power to keep the shield up for the duration of the storm) was if he provided them with the location of his ZPM 'stash'.
He wasn't happy about it, but it wasn't like he had many alternatives available to him; the city couldn't be allowed to fall, and given the Manarians' connections to the Genii he was extremely reluctant to leave the expedition dependent on them for more than a place to rest for the night (Just the thought of them doing that much made him uncomfortable, but he consoled himself by reminding himself the Genii would hardly be daring enough to attack almost the entire expeditionary force- to say nothing of the Athosians- just to try and get some explosives; any kind of attack on a group that large would inevitably cause heavy casualties for the Genii, and whatever else those people were, they weren't suicidal).
Maybe if he left Elizabeth another note with the 'gate coordinates for the moon where he'd left the ZPMs, she might be able to-
The sound of hurried footsteps hurrying through the control room broke off that train of thought, prompting him to turn around and look in the direction of the control room as Doctors McKay and Zelenka hurried towards Elizabeth, where she was currently studying a laptop with a couple of the technicians (That was something he really liked about her; she was willing to stay in touch with all levels of the expedition staff). Reaching up to his ear, he activated the radio he'd taken from the supply storage all those months ago and tuned it in to Elizabeth's frequency; he wouldn't normally listen in on her conversations, but if McKay and Zelenka had a plan to save Atlantis he wanted tohear it before he made any rash decisions.
"What is the one thing keeping us from having a shield?" McKay said, almost sounding as though he was continuing an old conversation rather than beginning an entirely new one.
"That would be-" Elizabeth began as she turned to look at the two scientists.
"Sufficient power," McKay replied simply, cutting Elizabeth off before she could finish (The observer always hated it when people did that; why ask a question if you were just going to answer it yourself?). "And what does the mega-storm from hell have lots of?"
"Power," Elizabeth replied again, her tone slightly uncertain but still evidently fairly sure that she knew where this conversation was going.
"In the form of…?" McKay asked, waving a hand promptingly.
"You want to build a windmill?" Elizabeth said, her tone evidently questioning the sanity of the people before her as she stared at the scientists (Not that the man in the shaft could blame her; the idea of them whipping up a windmill to try and power the shield was ridiculous, even if they'd had enough time to get everything together…).
"Electricity," McKay corrected after a moment's pause; for a moment his implied Are you dim?, even if nothing personal had been meant by it- it was just McKay being McKay- was enough to make the man watching the conversation from above want to hit him.
"Atlantis is designed to withstand substantial lightning strikes," Zelenka explained. "There are lightning rods all over the city."
"All those rods are channelled into four main grounding stations," McKay continued.
"In turn, those grounding stations discharge electricity back into the ocean, keeping Atlantis safe from massive electric shocks due to lightning strikes," Zelenka added; really, for two people who argued as much as these two they could be almost unnervingly in sync with each other when they had some major discovery or theory to explain.
"Now," McKay said, picking up the explanation once again as though he'd never even stopped talking, "many of the hallways are lined with a superconductive material that allows a safe, low-voltage transfer of power throughout the city-"
"Which, of course, means-" Zelenka began.
"Yes, I'm getting there, I'm getting there," McKay said dismissively, cutting Zelenka off mid-sentence before he refocused his attention on Elizabeth, excitement evident in his voice at the possibilities of what he was currently discussing. "Let's say the grounding stations weren't around. Every time lightning struck the city, those halls would become supercharged."
As soon as their silent observer had heard that sentence, he wondered whether he should classify McKay as a genius or an idiot for thinking of something that crazy.
It could work, of course, but the odds against them managing to channel and gather that much natural power in the time available were almost ridiculously against them…
"So, wait," Elizabeth began, apparently- he couldn't quite make out the expression on her face from where he was currently located- looking at the two men as though she was wondering what drugs they'd taken (Not that he could blame her; the plan sounded absolutely demented from where he was crouching), "you want-"
"If we were able to disable the grounding stations-" McKay continued, apparently unconcerned about Elizabeth's reaction.
"Which we think we can," Zelenka added.
"-every time lightning struck the city, Atlantis would experience a momentary massive power surge," McKay concluded.
"Now," Zelenka continued, "that energy, if it's channelled correctly-"
"Yes, of course if channelled correctly," McKay said briefly before continuing, "–could conceivably be used to charge up the shield generator instead of the ZedPM. Now, the more severe the storm, the more energy's produced, and the longer we can keep the shield running without forcing us to resort to the ZedPM."
"It's an ingenious plan, really," Zelenka said, turning to McKay as the two of them seemed to relax more now that the
"I'm inclined to agree," McKay added, nodding in agreement at the Czech scientist.
"The only downside is we have no way of storing all that energy after the storm's over, and really, why worry about that right now?" Zelenka said casually.
"True; even if the Wraith did send any ships this way, we'd have plenty of warning to prepare and see about finding a new ZedPM…" McKay mused.
"Gentlemen," Elizabeth said, drawing their attention back to her. "The city would survive without use of the ZPM?"
"Mmm…" McKay mused, his tone casual as he folded his arms and looked briefly upwards in a reflective manner, "it might give us a better than ninety percent-"
"Seventy," Zelenka corrected.
"Eighty percent chance," McKay concluded.
"OK, so we should still evacuate," Elizabeth said,t he statement partly a question as she looked at the two men.
"Yes, but not just because of Zelemka's pessimism," McKay interjected.
"Zelenka," the Czech corrected- really, why couldn't McKay get the guy's name right; it wasn't that hard- before he continued. "If the plan works, the city will become highly charged with electricity. Really, the only safe place to be once the lightning begins to strike is in the Control Room."
"Mmm," McKay nodded. "We need to evacuate everyone offworld until the storm passes and execute the plan with the smallest team possible.
"OK, good," Elizabeth said, nodding at the two men. "Get on it."
"Right," McKay replied, just before the listener terminated the connection; he'd heard everything that he needed to hear.
As far as plans went, McKay and Zelenka's idea seemed to have everything covered; the city's sole remaining ZPM could be kept in storage until the time came when they had no viable alternative available, the shield could be successfully maintained for the duration of the worst part of the storm, and the expedition members themselves could remain safe on Manaria until the time had passed.
In other words, he was almost certain that something was going to go wrong that none of the expedition could have predicted. The Manarians might not hand the expedition members themselves over to the Genii- as he'd reflected earlier, there were simply too many people, both expedition members and Athosians, for them to be captured without the Genii sustaining such serious losses as to make the mission's success, assuming it happened, a pyrrhic victory at best- but with Atlantis left with only a few people to defend it in the event of an attack…
It might just be paranoia; after all, the Atlantis expedition could offer the Manarians far more in the way of weapons and protection than the Genii ever could, even if they weren't willing to share everything with them at the moment…
On the other hand, as the old saying went, "Even paranoids have enemies"; just because it benefited the Manarians more to side with the expedition in the long term didn't mean they wouldn't think more about the short-term benefits of siding with the Genii instead.
That was the problem with forming alliances, really; most people in the Pegasus Galaxy were more focused on their own personal survival rather than the survival of anyone else. If they'd only see what idiots they were being by not thinking of anything more than their own skins, if they collaborated with each other on a more long-term basis than just the occasional trade for food they might have actually been able to make a dent in the Wraith's hold on this galaxy before now…
Well, the situation was what it was, and complaining about it wouldn't change anything; all he could do was keep an eye on the situation and be ready to get the vital equipment somewhere safe if he found himself in a worst-case-scenario situation.
He'd promised her a long time ago that he'd keep the expedition safe, and he was going to keep that promise even if Colonel Sumner continued to try and hunt him down afterwards.
