Author's Note: Now that I'm rewatching the series, I realize I have events out of sequence. Whoops! So I'm going to take creative license to bend things to my needs. So please excuse my deviations from canon. Hope that doesn't ruin the story for anyone.
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Chapter 6: A Rock & A Hard Place
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Rodney would have had a total freak out at John's lack of motion after his seizure, but his best friend's eyes were open, his blown pupils looking up at him. Ignoring the din of the fire fight, Rodney cupped John's cheek, had to shout to be heard over the gunfire, "You did good, you did good. We found them…there are trying to kill us but you found them." As a bullet zipped into the ground near his hand, Rodney leaned over John further, rested his head on the other man's, praying that he could shelter him.
Rodney felt that time forgot to move as bullets zinged by, striking the gate and some thunking into the trees of a forest that was yards back from his position. He wished he wasn't pinned down, that their assigned Marine hadn't left them to go have fun shooting people, that there was someone there to help him drag John back to the trees' cover.
Vainly hoping maybe John was able to help in that venture, he raised his head from its position against John's forehead. The Colonel's eyes were now closed and Rodney could barely tell if the man was breathing. "Sheppard?" he frighteningly called out above the gunfire and Major Lorne's shouted orders. When he gently patted John's cheek, Sheppard blinked a few times before his gaze settled on Rodney.
John jerked when the gunfire registered with his sluggish brain. Wheezing hard for his every breath, his every word, he ground out an order to Rodney, "Leave me..get safe."
"You just woke up and you're giving delusional orders already. I'm not leaving you, you moron!" Rodney growled down at the man too weak to barely keep his eyes open but self-sacrificing enough to want to be abandoned to lie around defenseless during a fire fight.
John was trying to raise himself up on his elbows, opened his mouth to say something but collapsed back against Rodney, his body's remnants of strength blown on the small energy he'd spent. Swallowing hard, his mouth desert dry, he was going to repeat his order but something caught his eye behind Rodney. Before he could get his eyes to focus or think a warning call was appropriate, an arm coiled around Rodney's throat and a gun was jammed into Sheppard's gut.
The man who had snuck up from the woods located behind the stargate was sporting familiar black ninja wear, black mask included, marking him as one of their thieves. "Cease fire or these two are dead!" he shouted above the gunfire's din.
Major Lorne's head whipped back to the gate, saw the disheartening sight of a mask wearing man crouched behind McKay, effectively using the scientist for cover as he held him in a chokehold. And if that wasn't bad enough, he had a gun jammed into Sheppard's gut. There was nothing to do but order his team to stop firing. Noted that the similar black clad thieves who were taking cover in the ditch and behind a ship readily obeyed the man's order too. It clearly signaled him out as their leader.
At this newest kink in his day, Evan grumbled to himself, 'Good going, Evan! Let a weakened Sheppard get taken hostage.' Calling from his position behind a tree, Evan negotiated aka stalled as he saw Rodney's hand was reaching down for his gun, "We can call more backup to support us. You know our numbers. You want to survive then you walk through that gate right now without any more bloodshed and without the ZPM."
"Doesn't really sound like there's much in that tradeoff for me," the thieves' leader called back. Then he dropped his voice to whisper close to Rodney's ear, "You want me to pull the trigger, put your comrade here out of his misery, then go ahead and pull your gun or maybe reach for his." Dug his gun muzzle harder into Sheppard's stomach to prove his point.
John groaned at the abuse to his gut, only half a theatrical overture. "Do that again only if you don't mind I puke all over your boots."
As for McKay, his trembling hand had frozen scant millimeters from his gun. Found it not awesome having to speak with the man's arm circling his throat and cutting off his windpipe, but he managed a squeaky demand/plea, "Don't hurt him…well worse than he already is!"
Major Lorne was shouting something back in answer to the thief's cynical criticism of his proposed tradeoff, but Rodney didn't hear it, only heard the thief's insidious whisper by his ear. "You want to use your gun so badly, go ahead. Pull it out and point it at your other teammates."
Whatever Rodney thought the man's demands would be, it wasn't that. "What?! Why would I do that?!"
"Oh, I don't know…to save this man who you clearly value. I'm guessing he's the strongest of your egotistical kind, hate to lose his talents on a no name planet to a bunch of thieves, right?" contempt soaking each of his words. Before Rodney could reply or put together the man's full meaning, the leader was raising his voice to answer Major Lorne's negotiation rhetoric.
"Oh, I like my chances right as they are now. My team has possession of your precious cloaking power source while I have the lives of two valuable members of your little cult in my hands. I don't mind killing them here and now. Won't take more than a few seconds, pull of a trigger, snap of a neck." Though his eyes were on Lorne's position, he didn't look down when he shifted his gun muzzle to John's throat, said lowly, his words for John's ears. "I think your gun is better with me, huh. Put it in my waist band, slowly."
John silently cursed himself for telegraphing his moves. But his arm had felt like it was made of lead, was all effect for him to move it to his leg gun holster. Then his badly shaking hand nearly dropped to the ground under the weight of his gun. "Stop!" John choked out when the man gave a merciless yank on McKay's throat, making Rodney emit a squeak and gasp for the breath he wasn't getting, the fingers of his free hand clawing to loosen the choking grip.
"I know you're thinking it'd be so easy to swivel that gun around, shoot me in the gut," the thief drawled, his eyes dropping to John's for the first time, read Sheppard's thoughts like a fellow professional soldier. "So yeah, easy to execute, maybe. But shortsighted. My team has orders to either return that power source to our people or destroy it. If I fail in this little negotiation we're having, they will destroy the devise and neither of us will benefit from it."
"Fine," Sheppard gritted out, not happy with complying or the ultimatum that was on the table. Slowly, if obediently, he put his handgun into the man's waistband. "There, happy?" he grumbled, dropping his hand to his chest because honestly he was too weak to even get it back to his side again. True to his word, the thief loosened his grip on Rodney's throat.
Rodney inhaled deep gulps of air trying to make up for his lack of oxygen. But his mind had snagged on a point, just like Sheppard's had, "What do you mean "return" the ZPM? You stole it from us!"
"For living as long as you Lantians do, you have short term memories!" the thief growled, for once not checking his emotions at the door.
"We don't liv.." McKay started to dispute the insult lodged at them but Sheppard talked over him, giving him a sign he was about to, once again, put his foot in his mouth and say either too much or the totally wrong thing. Sure, he could keep talking, yes, if open violence was the desired end game.
"You kill us or destroy the ZPM, then things will not end pretty for you." John growled up at his hostage taker, proud of himself that he was able to string all his words together, even sound menacing. But all his bravado was undone when he coughed up blood after his well-executed threat. Choking on his own blood even as Rodney rolled him to his side, he cursed his weakness, that he wasn't doing a good job of protecting Rodney, was in fact a big liability for Lorne and his team.
The thief's lips turned up in a cruel smile of knowing. Using his gun barrel under John's chin, he forced John's head up and back to meet his eyes. Reading an adversary's eyes wasn't a textbook taught trait, it was a life lesson of a man who had to judge how far an opponent was willing to go to win. Looking into this man's eyes, John knew the thief didn't mind at all dying for his cause, whatever that cause was. Might even relish the idea.
Eyes crinkling as his hostage seemed to read him correctly, the thief drawled like they were talking over a card game and not in the middle of an armed standoff, "Talking about not pretty…" his smiled then, a flash of white teeth that wasn't reassuring to John, at all, "…I didn't think any of your kind could track our jumps through this many stargates. Guess I was right, you can't. Honestly, I kinda feel foolish…threatening to kill a man who is dead already."
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"For the last bloody time, I didn't LET him take the gene serum! He did it all on his own!" Carson's voice rising loud enough to echo down the hallway.
"You said you were right there when he injected it," Ronon growled menacingly, taking a step closer to the doctor.
"Ach but I can't outfight the man, now can I?! And Rodney was there too. Why aren't you blaming him!" Carson readily threw his friend under the bus.
"I am!" Ronon hissed, hand reaching out for Carson but Dr. Weir intervened.
"Enough! We have to concentrate on securing Atlantis," she commanded. Ronon respected her enough to postpone his beat down of the doctor and take a step back to stand by Teyla. Turning to the other person in their huddle, she asked, "Dr. Zelenka, our cloak is down. How long can we stay vulnerable like this and remain undetected by the Wraith?"
The harried scientist shook his head. "There's no way of knowing. Though we haven't detected any Wraith ships in our general area, we have one on the long-range grid. They have been known to do a fly by. McKay and I assume they are hoping to catch some of our allies trying to come to Atlantis, not knowing it's supposedly been destroyed."
"And if they made one of those fly bys now, they will know we faked our destruction," Teyla surmised what they were all thinking.
"But we have an immediate problem," Zelenka agitatedly announced. "Without the third ZPM, we are taxing our remaining power sources trying to maintain the entirety of Atlantis operational. Our initial ZPM, which we brought with us when we came to Atlantis, could conceivably give out with this higher drain on it."
"Meaning we have to shut down parts of Atlantis. Now," Weir assessed. But she gave the scientist a long look, he was giving her that nervous, 'I have more bad news that I don't want to tell you about look' while Rodney would be going 'Let me tell you why we're even more screwed'. She missed Rodney's emotional antics about now. "Ok, out with it. What's the other problem we're having with only two ZPMs?"
Zelenka fidgeted on his feet. "The second gate… I don't understand how but it shut down our Stargate. Our main one. Whenever we had one of those supposedly false intruder alarms this past month, there were always power fluctuations to the Stargate. Yes, now we know that must have been the thieves activating that second stargate, testing the waters before they made their move today. My theory is that when they fully opened that second stargate and left it open, it rerouted the remaining ZPM power sources. Maybe due to a security program in place, that initiated a shutdown of the main Stargate. We've been working to get our Stargate up and running but so far..we've not been successful."
Elizabeth tensed. "Our stargate is locked down?" Zelenka nodded. "This second stargate, does it have the same dial in as our Stargate?"
"It's highly unlikely," Zelenka supposed. "If this second stargate was part of a security program, as we suspect it was, it was there to offer a backdoor escape if enemies came through Atlantis' Stargate. So it would be counter initiative if it this "escape gate" had the same dial in code as the main gate."
"Wait? You don't know the address code to this second gate?" Elizabeth tersely cross-examined, hated where all this was leading up to.
"Not yet," Zelenka answered, his mind formulating a grim conclusion that, by her unhappy expression, Dr. Weir was drawling closer to also.
"Meaning our away team tracking the ZPM thieves can't come back through our main stargate and wouldn't know the second gate's address code to dial into it."
Zelenka ran a hand through his fly away hair. "As things stand, they have no way to come back to us or even contact us."
"We do know where they went. I memorized the address John put in," Teyla supplied. "We can use the second stargate to go for them."
"But we have no idea where their chase after the thieves led them. If the serum did as Colonel Sheppard intended, he could have tracked the thieves through numerous stargates," Carson pointed out, didn't appreciate the dark looks shot his way. "Hey, don't shoot the messenger."
"The gates aren't revolving doors," Ronon frustratedly pointed out the problem he'd face if he went after Sheppard as thing presently stood. "If we did send a team through to that first address, they'd have to close the gate behind them so Sheppard's team could gate back there."
Elizbeth finished Ronon's thoughts, "Which would leave more away teams trapped with no way home until we get our main stargate working." Turning to Carson and Zelenka, she hoped one of the men had a plausible answer to her next question. "Could Sheppard use that stargate's dial to figure out our second gate's address? Recall the second to last number dialed from that stargate?"
"Third. Third number dialed," Zelenka corrected her. "Our thieves used it to dial into Atlantis. Then, in theory, when they returned, they possibly dialed to another stargate. Then our team would have gone through and possibly dialed to the other gate to follow them, making the times dialed out of that gate three times. Can Colonel Sheppard recall the third number dialed on the gate?" Zelenke posed to Carson.
"Oh for Pete's sake! All this conjecture is hurting my brain!" Carson exclaimed. "We don't even know if Colonel Sheppard got the right address of the gate the thieves went to or if he had to follow them through another gate, or if he'd be able to hopscotch his way back to the initial gate they followed the thieves through!"
"No, we don't," Elizabeth bleakly agreed.
"We can't sit here and let Sheppard's team be stranded off world until we get the other gate working! We don't know what they walked into, what forces they might be up against." Ronon growled, bitterly regretting that he hadn't done what McKay had and gone into that gate after John. Regardless of Sheppard's order for him to stay behind.
"That is exactly what we have to do: Wait," Dr. Weir decided. "We can't strand more of our people off world in a rescue attempt." Seeing Ronon's protest written in his features, she pointed out, "Even if Sheppard's team engaged the thieves in that first address and we sent a second team to help them AND left the wormhole open so they could get back to Atlantis, they'd be on the clock."
"Why?" Ronon growled. "Why would we only have a limited time to pull our teams out?"
"Because the wormhole would close after.."
"Thirty-eight minutes," Weir, Zelenka, Carson and Teyla said in synch. None of them would ever forget that increment of time, thanks to the one time a jumper got stuck in the gate and would have gone up in flames along with its passengers when the gate automatically closed after thirty-eight minutes. To add to the fun of that time, John's life had been in danger from forces other than the stargate crushing them.
And Carson's professional opinion said John's life was in danger this time too. That Sheppard being stranded off world might be the least of his friend's problems. The only bright spot was that Rodney had gone with John, would do all he could to help their friend.
"The best thing we can do is get our Stargate working so that when they are ready to come home, they can." And Elizabeth admitted, even if it was just to herself, she wished McKay was there. She found she had faith that he would be able to solve their current stargate problem. The man had a way of pulling miracles out of his keyboards…not unlike John's ability to pull miracles out of his smart alecky, spiked haired head. They were quite the team, along with Ronon and Teyla.
It was ironic that her command team's tight bond was the reason McKay wasn't there to save the day. She wasn't oblivious to the cold hard fact that McKay had put his fealty to John Sheppard above his loyalty to Atlantis, his responsibility to their mission, and maybe even their entire survival.
A quote from E. M. Forster sprang into her mind: "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." It wasn't the most reassuring thing to pop into her head, nor did it make her uneasiness about their current situation any better. Especially considering the away team was cut off from Atlantis and that always meant hard choices had to be made. And if John was not well, as seemed the case, she feared what steps Rodney would take to help his best friend that might have far reaching, even determinantal consequences for Atlantis.
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TBC
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Yikes! Sheppard's team are on their own for awhile and that isn't going great.
Love to all my awesome reviewers! You make my day! And thanks to all of you silent readers out there!
Have a great day!
Cheryl