Reminder:
"This is spoken English."
"This is spoken Czech."
This is a thought.
Previously: Radek and Atlantis are looking for Sheppard and his team (since chapter 74). Since that time, Anna has very well learned the perils of mountain climbing. Well. Mountain hiking.
Chapter 81. One Hive.
Theoretically, the Jumper was perfectly safe. Better to not think about the Wraith hive ship out there. They weren't here to fight, just here to get Sheppard and the rest of his team.
Lorne seemed pretty at ease about the whole thing. He leaned back in his chair and looked at Radek.
"You alright, Doc?" He chuckled when Radek just shot him a glare. "The reason I ask is because you're white as a sheet."
"There are many things that could go wrong," Radek said.
Not the least of which was that they wouldn't get Rodney's team back. Rodney had been working closely with Sheppard and Teyla for as long as Radek had been working with Rodney. Radek hadn't been working with Lorne for very long, but he knew he would rather not let Lorne, Coughlin, and Reed die in a Wraith hive ship. It was stupid, but Radek had already arrived at the point where he even missed Rodney when he was gone just because he was always there.
Imagine if he actually liked Rodney, like how Rodney, ostensibly, liked Sheppard, Teyla, and Ronon.
"Yeah, I guess," Lorne was saying. "But, with any luck, we'll raise them on radio and beam them out."
"You haven't been here long," Radek said. "Maybe you don't know our record with luck."
Lorne apparently found that funny. Because he obviously had no idea what their record with luck was like. "Whatever happens is going to happen."
Radek arched an eyebrow at him. Didn't know he thought that way, that things were set in stone and they were just atoms moving other atoms in completely predictable ways. Radek didn't know if he believed that.
Caldwell spoke over the comm at them. "Jumper One, you have a go."
"Hold on," Lorne said to Radek with a half-grin.
"Very funny," Radek muttered. He swore he felt the Jumper lurch out of the bay despite inertial dampeners.
Lorne directed the Jumper out into the blackness of space. "On our way," he reported to Caldwell. "Engaging cloak."
Radek watched the systems diagnostics he could pull up rise and fall as Lorne engaged the drive pods and set them soaring past the planet. Radek watched out the window for a moment, considering how large planets were and how strange it was they could have circumnavigated it in a matter of minutes.
Radek glanced at the Jumper's radar for a moment. "Oh no…"
"What is it?" Lorne asked as the Jumper rounded the planet enough to give them a good view of the planet they were bound for. "Crap."
There wasn't just one hive ship. There were two.
Lorne looked at Radek accusingly. "You said there was only one!"
Why was Lorne yelling at Radek? It wasn't as if Radek was the one who said there would only be one hive ship waiting for them. He was just like Lorne, working off information Rodney gave them. "Já ho zabiju; * I don't know," Radek muttered as he opened the radio to try to contact Colonel Sheppard. "Maybe there was only one before."
"Well, now there's two."
"I can see that."
Lorne sighed in a growl. "I guess fighting is out of the question."
"It was in question before?" Radek demanded.
"Well, it isn't now. Look, try and hail Colonel Sheppard."
"Right, right." Radek went back to the radio and asked it as politely as he could, "Jumper One to Colonel Sheppard. Jumper One to Colonel Sheppard, come in, please?" He waited and then tried for Ronon and Teyla. He glanced at Lorne.
Lorne's expressions were but a series of minute changes to his eyebrows, and that was about it. Probably wondering why Radek was being so polite on a life-and-death rescue mission. "Keep at it, Doc. Both ships. I'm going to get us a bit closer. See if that helps."
Radek didn't see how it could, but he kept trying. For all they knew, Sheppard and his team were dead. They might have been dead before the ship got here. They might have just been captured, but captured was arm's reach from death. Maybe the Wraith just needed a little snack to get them there…
That was morbid. He knew these people. He didn't want to think for half a second that they'd had the life drained out of them, but here he was.
"Jumper One, what's your status?" Caldwell ordered what felt like only seconds later.
Lorne sighed. "We're unable to establish a radio link with Colonel Sheppard or the others on either of the hive ships."
"But that doesn't mean they're dead or not on the hive ship," Radek put in quickly. "If they're captured, it makes sense the radios would have been taken from them." He glanced at Lorne for half a second to try to ask, That does make sense, right?
Lorne nodded a little.
"We can't make that assumption," Caldwell said, anyway. "Return to the Daedalus immediately."
Lorne nodded and said, "Almost there."
"Good," Caldwell said. "We need to take those ships out before they start culling."
The link between the Daedalus and the Jumper was cut off. Radek glanced at Lorne helplessly. What were they supposed to do? What did Radek do wrong? If Rodney were here, they wouldn't have stopped looking for Colonel Sheppard's team until they found them.
Now the plan was to return to the Daedalus and nuke the hive ships without any questions.
Why did all the military personnel think that nuking was something one did without any questions? There were always questions, especially when nuclear weapons were involved.
"Should I have argued, what?" Radek wondered.
"We can't let them cull that planet," Lorne said.
Like hell they couldn't, Radek thought. But he didn't say it. They knew about a half a dozen or more cullings about to take place every week thanks to deep space sensors. As terrible as it was, as morbid, as unfeeling, they couldn't save everyone.
And some days, days like today, it seemed like they couldn't save anyone.
"Aren't Sheppard and his team a priority?" Radek asked.
Lorne seemed to consider that. "Yes," he said finally.
"Nó, tak co mně zbejvá, no?" he mumbled. He looked at the sensor readings and the dead radio signal. He willed it to come to life, for Sheppard or Teyla… even a Wraith could use the radio to contact them right now and he'd be okay with that. "Tohleto né." **
Lorne sighed as though he understood exactly what Radek was saying. "Yeah."
"No, you don't understand," Radek said. "Rodney is going to kill me if we don't bring them back."
"You did everything you could, Doc."
Radek leaned back in his chair and watched the stars fly by. Impressive how little he was thinking about it since he was so concerned about getting Sheppard and his team back… "I'll be sure to tell Rodney that when I tell him that Colonel Sheppard and the others either had the life sucked out of them or they were incinerated by a nuclear blast. I did everything I could."
"This was a longshot to start," Lorne said.
That didn't help, either.
The Daedalus was going to have to come out of its hiding place behind the planet to beam its nuclear warheads anywhere, and that assumed that the Wraith ship wasn't equipped with their beam-jamming technology. If they were, Radek would no doubt be called upon to help Hermiod to find a way around that, and they would have about five minutes to do so.
Daedalus was a powerful ship, though, so at least it was unlikely they'd be left as little crisps in space when this was all over.
Lorne pulled the Jumper into its slot in the bay and stood from his chair as the back door lowered to let them out. "Come on, we gotta get to the bridge."
Radek didn't get to say he'd rather be in engineering before he was following Lorne. The bridge was on the other side of the ship, but it didn't take much time to walk down the long hallway to get there. They came into the room just as Colonel Caldwell ordered one of his officers to put max power to the shields and tell him whether they were in transport range.
Radek could tell just by looking that they must have been. The weapons officer confirmed they had locked coordinates on some spot in the hive ship.
Caldwell spoke with gravity, like he knew the odds that he was killing Sheppard, Ronon, and Teyla were high. "Deploy warhead."
The weapons officer glanced back. "The enemy has engaged countermeasures blocking transport."
"They're jamming us again," Radek mumbled, walking past Lorne to one of the consoles he knew for sure what to do with.
Ah, but who was he kidding? Radek could probably do that weapons officer's job better than he could.
Radek moved to the secondary weapons and shields console on the wall. It was more complex, with more readings and functionality than the streamlined information fed to the weapons officer's console. Working on these things for months and years didn't give him much of an edge when the ship lurched beneath his feet.
Caldwell ordered the forward rail positions to return fire.
The firing rail guns had no discernable impact on the amount of fire the Daedalus took. There were two hive ships out there with only one target.
"How much more of this can we take?" Lorne asked, stumbling to Radek's side since he was apparently more useless on the bridge of the Daedalus than Radek was.
"Not much," Radek answered, and the ship shuddered again with more blasts from the Wraith energy weapon. He turned toward Caldwell, and said loud enough for him to hear, "Shields down twenty percent." This wasn't the time to cut their losses, but they had barely touched even one of the hives yet.
"Retreat isn't an option," Caldwell barked. "Our people have been in Wraith hands for too long. We have to assume they've been compromised and the Wraith know that Atlantis wasn't destroyed."
Damn. Radek hadn't even thought of that. Just another reason he wasn't sitting in that chair.
"We need to win this," Caldwell finished.
Radek fiddled with the controls for a second to pull up the radar at his console. Lorne leaned in to look, but it was difficult to tell what was going on. It was easy to see there were hundreds, if not thousands of darts out there. The cloud of darts reeled and circled in the space between the hive ships and the Daedalus for half a second before racing toward the Daedalus at top speed.
"To je ono… jsme mrtví." ***
Wait just a second… Without thinking much about what he was doing, Radek pointed to the screen.
Lorne looked for a second, then at Radek. "What?" He glanced between the screen and Radek a few times, but still didn't seem to see what Radek saw.
Radek barely saw. "Do you see that?" He squinted, and then spun to look out the forward window. There was no way he should be able to see that single dart out there in the cloud of others, but he could swear he did. "What is that?" He pointed, but he knew no one else could possibly see it, either. "Look, do you see that?"
"What?" Caldwell demanded impatiently.
"It's a dart—it's firing…" He couldn't finish his thought before a second thought asserted itself over that one. "To snad né, **** it's Sheppard."
"What?"
Radek found his tongue again a second later. "That dart is firing on one of the hive ships." They watched as the swarm of darts turned inward, firing on each other. The hive ships directed their fire off the Daedalus almost immediately.
"I don't believe what I'm seeing," Caldwell said.
Delight swept through the bridge as everyone took notice that the Daedalus no longer shook with weapons fire. The hive ships continued to pound each other for three, four, five seconds. Radek had barely enough time to realize this was really very bad. Very bad…
One of the hives suddenly lit up and winked into a blinding explosion.
The second hive followed a second later, and the shockwave rocked the Daedalus. Radek turned back to his sensors and shook his head in disbelief. "I don't—the shockwave, it's destroyed everything in a fifteen thousand meter radius."
"Did any darts—?"
"Everything," Radek repeated. Rodney was going to kill him. "Everything, everything is gone."
"Keep looking," Caldwell ordered anyway. "Bring us closer to the wreckage."
Radek stared at the screen. He couldn't have done anything. There was nothing he could have done to save Sheppard. Sheppard just did what Sheppard always did… put his life in danger to save the rest of them.
"But we were so close," Radek growled, pounding a fist on the console. "K čertu s ním." *****
Lorne looked at him, but Radek couldn't figure out what he meant to communicate right now. Radek crossed the bridge to the sensor console, but it was pointless. They were gone; they were dead. They killed themselves. What was Radek supposed to do about that?
#
Anna would have jumped off the hospital bed if she could, but she couldn't. She settled for waving, and shouting, "You're alive!" as if Sheppard, Ronon, and Teyla didn't know that they were.
Sheppard grinned and walked toward her. Doctor McKay actually did jump off his bed and stood in front of John, speechless, for a few seconds. John gave McKay a well-meaning slap on the shoulder when he didn't say anything. "Good to see you, too, Rodney."
Ronon greeted Doctor McKay with a nod and Teyla did her best to answer his question of why they weren't dead. He was glad they were alive, of course. But why weren't they dead?
Sheppard stood next to Anna's bed and stared at her ankle. "Looks like you had some fun while we were gone," he said, turning his eyes up to hers.
"Mountain climbing… sort of." Anna blushed, more for her tears brimming from happiness and relief than for her ability to climb down a cliff without any problem and then fall down a hill. "Where have you been? Are you all okay?"
"Oh, yeah, I'm fine. Might have gotten a dart for all the trouble, too." John looked ultimately pleased about that before turning his attention to the rest of his team. "Ronon and Teyla are here to get checked, though. They've been on the Wraith enzyme for a couple of days... like Rodney. He seems fine."
Anna nodded and glanced at Doctor McKay. He was smiling.
"How did you do it, though?" Anna asked.
John shrugged like it was no big deal. "I'll tell you all about it." He looked around. Seeing Doctor Beckett chasing Teyla and Ronon off to change into white scrubs, he nodded in satisfaction.
"The Daedalus thought you were dead until a couple of minutes ago," Doctor McKay said.
"Yeah, well, who could blame them?" John grinned and jumped up on the bed next to Anna's. "I'm about to tell Anna the whole story. Care to join us, Rodney?"
McKay nodded, maybe a bit more enthusiastically than he might have under other circumstances. He took a seat on the bed next to John.
"You can tell us what happened to you after we left," Sheppard said.
"Uh… yeah," Doctor McKay said tentatively. "Maybe."
John looked amused, and then looked at Anna. "Alright, well, it started with Rodney complaining that our covert ops never happen on beaches filled with beautiful women…"
"Seriously?" Doctor McKay interrupted. "That's where you start?"
Czech Things
Another "all the Czech" chapter! Fun times. This time almost all from Stargate, though.
* I'm gonna kill him. (Courtesy of Tao of Rodney.)
** Well, so what else can I do, huh? / This sucks. (Courtesy of Quarantine.) (Though, putting that first sentence in Google translate (what? I don't have many Czech friends. In any case, those I may or may not have probably don't want to be constantly bombarded with questions like "What does this mean?" at all hours of the day) yields "Yeah, what's wrong with me?" which surprisingly works even better in this context, in my opinion...)
*** This is it… we're dead. (Courtesy of Thirty-Eight Minutes and Google.)
**** I don't believe this. (Courtesy of Quarantine.)
***** Damn him. (I hope. More like "to hell with him" I think. Anyway. Courtesy of Google. I can't believe Radek never said something to this effect onscreen.)
Thank yous & etc.
MissMeow1968 - Thanks, I'm glad you like it! Rodney really does have a tough time with... yeah, people, I think. He has a hard time with people. It looks like Anna is in for a little bit of excitement in her future. Another planet may or may not be involved. But the planet isn't exciting.
KeianaLunae - Ah, thank you so much! I'm glad you're still enjoying the story and it means the world to me when people say that the characters seem real to them. I'm also glad that including Lorne in the story has been entertaining. I am hoping to continue developing the story where he is involved. Also: yes, orange crystal rocks! At the very least, they lead fun places. Fun places that must be handled delicately in the grand scheme of things... See you next week!
Next time: And by that you mean I need to get a job...