by Graham, Jo
“And start a war with the Genii,” Teyla said.
“I didn’t say keeping it was a good idea,” Sam replied. “Just that it looks pretty sweet.” She grinned at John. “Race you there?”
“You’re on, Carter.”
Chapter Twenty-seven: Below Decks
Eva Robinson glanced up at the burst of laughter from the nearby table, the coffee stirrer in her hand. Colonel Carter, the commander of the George Hammond, seemed to be good friends with a number of the senior staff in Atlantis. The relaxed humor at the table occupied by Carter, Colonel Sheppard, Teyla Emmagan and Carson Beckett spoke of long friendship. She hadn’t known Carter well at the SGC, despite the fact she’d heard it was Carter who recommended her for this job, but of course she knew of her. Who didn’t? At that point, Carter had been in her tenth year with SG-1, the flagship gate team, the pride of the SGC. She was extraordinarily hard to miss, and incredibly difficult to know.
Eva had learned a lot from having worked as a consultant at the SGC about the breadth of bizarre things that could happen that nobody had ever learned about in school. Gender swapping. Mysterious alien agencies in one’s mind. Time dilation. Mind probes. Ancient devices that dropped databases full of knowledge in one’s head. She’d learned that you had to stay on your toes, keep an open mind, and above all listen to the people. Some of the things that really did happen were unimaginable.
And she’d learned that everyone had a different face from their official persona. How well people coped with both the bizarre happenings and the not so bizarre griefs and stresses had a lot to do with how supported that private face was, with how well equipped they were to process things. And so her job description evolved. One of the most important things was helping people find that private face, helping them to develop the things in their lives that allowed them to cope, and to endure the worst the universe could throw at them. It was a lot more proactive than the job description had been, a lot less to do with mulling over the latest reason why Dr. Jackson was curled up in a fetal position mumbling in a dead language and more to do with encouraging people to actually have lives.
Friendships were a good thing. Emotionally isolated people were more vulnerable, more likely to make deadly mistakes. It was easy for people in positions of great responsibility to become isolated. They had few peers, and friendships within a supervisory position or up and down the chain of command were always fraught. Colonel Sheppard was hardly going to pal around with a second lieutenant twenty years his junior, or Dr. Beckett with a new medical assistant. Carter couldn’t be chummy with anyone who served on the Hammond. Not only were those friendships rendered complex if not actually inappropriate by the supervisory relationships, but they were unlikely because of age and life experience. Teyla stood outside the chains of command, but surely being the only Athosian besides her son currently living in the city was isolating enough. Seeing the four of them laughing and talking over the breakfast table was a good thing.
The milk jug was empty. Eva tilted it all the way up, but only a couple of drops fell out. And coffee without milk was like a morning without…she would say sunshine, but the high windows of the mess hall showed nothing but an expanse of purplish gray sky heavy with snow.
Milk. The serving line was open, but the two young soldiers were busy helping people. She might as well go refill the pitcher. Her coffee cup in one hand and the thermos pitcher in the other, Eva ducked through the kitchen door.
It was immediately obvious why the original Atlantis expedition had chosen to use this room as the kitchen, though it wasn’t like any kitchen she’d ever seen. It was high and airy, a ceiling fully two stories high, with broad windows in a curved wall looking out onto a panorama of other towers, a Fortune 500 CEO’s office view in New York or London. Down one wall ran what appeared to be a long bronze trough, but on closer inspection was one long, slightly tilted sink, a dozen faucets and buttons providing water of various temperatures. The opposite wall had several heavy doors in it, freezers or supply lockers or something else. And in the middle was set up a modern stainless steel field kitchen, stoves and prep surfaces and deep fryers and a steam table.
It was an interesting juxtaposition. Boxes stacked neatly for easy access identified themselves as Chicken and Gravy Meal, use before 10/22/2012, property of Strategic Air Command, Nellis AFB. Next to it was Hot Dog, Lunch, Sausages and Condiments, ship to NORAD Lot number 7475. An open case beside it proclaimed itself MREs (Kosher and Halal) Florentine Lasagna with a hand-lettered sign on it that said, “Please do not take more than two at a time unless you have permission. Our quantities are limited.” A sign below it read, “For permission talk to Sgt. Pollard.” Another sign below that one read, “And he really really means it.”
Eva couldn’t help but smile. She looked around, wondering where milk would be.
“Need something, doc?” A man her own age, his graying hair cut in a buzz so severe he looked almost bald, came around the corner of the steam table, drying his hands on his apron. Beneath it he wore the red shirt of Atlantis support services.
“Sergeant Pollard?” Eva asked. She waved the pitcher around. “I was just looking for some milk.”
“That’s me.” He snagged the pitcher from her. “Over here.”
“How did you know I was a doctor?” she asked.
He grinned at her, his face seamed with premature lines. “You’re not military, so you’re a doctor. Doctor something.”
“Dr. Eva Robinson, the new psychologist.”
“Oh.” He filled the pitcher from a nearby tin jug. “Got your work cut out for you, don’t you?
“People keep saying that,” she said.
He shook his head. “I came out here with the second deployment. Third, if you count Colonel Everett’s. He lasted four days, God help him! I came out on the Daedalus with the second bunch, right after the siege. Been in the United States Marine Corps nearly thirty years, and it was one of the damndest things I ever saw! And I’ve been some interesting places, let me tell you. It runs you pretty crazy around here. So if you’re looking for crazy, we’ve got our own special brand of Pegasus crazy, right here.” Sergeant Pollard handed her the milk back. “That’s what I tell these new Air Force kids. At least we’ve got a proper support unit now. We didn’t, back in the old days.”
“It seemed like there were a lot of new people,” Eva said. “And I had no idea there were kosher and halal MREs.”
“Oh yeah. They’re pretty good. They’re always available as alternatives to the main meal, whatever that is, though most folks keeping kosher or halal usually go down the line and just try to avoid certain foods.” He looked with some pride at his kitchen set up. “We’re only serving 200 breakfasts, though there’s 417 in Atlantis, well, plus the baby and Teyla and Ronon, and right now the crew of the Hammond. So it varies. But a lot of people don’t eat breakfast, or they just want coffee or something. So we only make 200 portions.” Pollard grinned. “Today it’s pork sausage links, creamed beef, hashbrowns, coffee cake, grits, scrambled eggs with salsa, orange juice, and instant Irish cream cappuccino. Not that the eggs are really eggs, but the salsa helps disguise that some. Also sliced Sila fruit and teosinte cakes with sour cream.”
“Excuse me?” Eva blinked.
“We’re supposed to supplement the A rations with local fresh food. Which sometimes is easier said than done.” Pollard reached for what looked like a knobby yellow potato. “This is a sila. They grow on a lot of planets around here. Tropical fruit, high in vitamin c, taste something like a tangerine. We got these guys from Pelagia last week.” He gave her an encouraging nod as she smelled it. “You can keep it. The teosinte cakes…” Pollard put his bullet head to the side, thinking. “I guess you’d call it kind of an heirloom corn. Dr. Parrish says that when the Ancients brought stuff from Earth before the war they brought a lot of domesticated and semi-domesticated plants that they liked. Teosinte is maybe kind of like corn was ten thousand years ago. Little bitty ears as long as your
finger, reddish brown kernels, like the ornamental corn people use for flower arrangements and stuff on Earth. Anyhow, people here grow it for food and as animal feed, just like they do at home. Most of it’s ground up for grain. Grain’s always one of our problems here. We get a certain amount of flour from Earth, but it doesn’t even begin to touch what we use. So we trade for a lot of it here, stoneground and all. Makes kind of crunchy corncakes. You ought to try them.”
“I’ll be sure to,” Eva said, fascinated.
“The biggest problem is always milk,” he said. “We always need milk, and it’s hard to get.” He gestured to the pitcher in her hand. “That’s Athosian goats milk, from those pygmy goats they keep. Jinto brought eight gallons the other day, so we’re set for the rest of the week.”
“I had no idea,” Eva said. “What did he trade them for?”
Pollard leaned back on his counter. “Well, the Athosians are our oldest trading partner, so it’s a long running agreement that Teyla and Halling keep track of, who owes who what at any given moment. They trade fresh food for a variety of things — plastics, metals, stuff they can turn around and trade through the gate to other folks. Plastic is worth a lot, since it doesn’t seem like anybody can make it here anymore. Ronon’s people used to, but they’re gone now.”
“You must know a lot of people from Pegasus,” Eva observed.
“Oh yeah!” Pollard grinned again. “They say the gate team is the tip of the spear and all that, but I’m the one spends tons of time talking to people, trying to figure out how to cook this stuff, dealing with everybody who supplies stuff on a weekly or monthly basis. I handle the established trades and the regular merchants, check out the markets of allies who have them, make sure we’ve got what we need.”
“That’s…incredible,” Eva said. So many networks, so many contacts. And such unique experiences for a tech sergeant, a cook who didn’t on the surface have a very interesting job. “You’ll have some stories to tell when you get home.”
Pollard’s face fell, and his voice dropped. “I hope not,” he said. “I’m trying to figure on that.”
“You don’t want to go home?”
“Not if I can help it,” he said quietly. “I’ve got a friend, you see… Her name’s Osalia, one of Halling’s cousins that got rescued from Michael. She’s the one who makes the goat cheese. I’ve been thinking that if I had my druthers I’d retire to New Athos. She says she could use me about, with those two teenage boys of hers and twenty two goats. But I’m not thinking the Marine Corps would like that.”
“Maybe not,” Eva said. But wasn’t that always the case? There were always people who didn’t want to come home, people who made a home where they hung their hats, who made new lives. What was the policy about people staying in Pegasus? Had anyone tried it yet? Or tried taking home a bride from another galaxy? A whole kettle of fish, a whole new series of questions…
“Anyhow.” Pollard straightened up with the air of a man who’s said too much to a suspect psychologist. “Got lots to do. Stop in anytime, doc.”
“Thanks,” Eva said, and made a retreat with her milk in hand, wondering who the proper person on Earth to put these questions to was, or if questions would in themselves create problems. Often something wasn’t officially prohibited until it was brought to the attention of authorities. She would have to tread very carefully indeed.
* * *
“So, what’s the sensor situation looking like?” Lorne asked, coming up behind Zelenka to look at the code scrolling across his screen. It was meaningless to him, but at least it suggested that progress of some kind was being made.
“We are still having problems,” Zelenka said. “Now that we have cleared some of the ice off the external sensor arrays — thank you for that, by the way — ”
“No problem,” Lorne said. He’d spent the day before towing the baby iceberg out of range of the city where the Marines could practice their demolitions skills by blowing it up, followed by painstakingly supervising ice removal by teams in climbing gear. “Next time we move the city, though, how about somewhere tropical?”
“If only to stop everyone complaining, yes,” Radek said. “We are getting better short-range data, but the sensors directly below the city are still showing blind spots.”
“Kind of inconvenient if we’re going to keep getting chunks of ice jammed down there.”
“And there is the part that is really a problem.” Radek’s fingers moved swiftly across the keyboard. “This is what we are picking up from the short-range sensors, and by that I mean the ones that tell us about the surrounding ocean, not about things happening in space. This is themal imaging, showing the temperature of objects in the surrounding water — ”
Lorne whistled. “That is a lot of ice,” he said.
Radek nodded. “It is. Dr. Bryce has set up a subroutine for the sensors that will alert us when objects of alarming size approach the city. For example, here — ” He pointed to one of the larger spots of icy blue on the display. “This we suspect is on course to hit the city. It will have to be diverted.”
“Well, we can do that,” Lorne said. “It’s going to be a pain having to spend our time going out and towing icebergs around, but as long as we have plenty of warning, we should be fine, right?”
“In the sense that we are unlikely to be struck by an iceberg the size of a tall building without warning, yes,” Radek said. “The problem is that there are so many smaller pieces of ice in the water. We think this is a result of the high seismic activity in the area. There are many small earthquakes,” he added when Lorne looked quizzical. “Ice breaks free from the ice sheets on land, and so we get many small chunks of ice striking the city. And by small here I mean maybe the size of a car.”
“Which would be okay, except that there’s stuff under the city that’s apparently getting banged up.”
Radek nodded. “You were right, by the way. According to the Ancient database, the city was once equipped to reshape itself if it was in cold water to prevent ice from being swept under the city. It is a fairly low-tech solution, a network of spikes and gridwork that is supposed to extend below the piers.”
“I guess even if the Ancients could have run the shield all the time, they didn’t want to waste all the power it would use if it had ice hitting it all day long.”
“We do not think they planned to run the shield all the time, even when they had easy access to ZPMs,” Radek said. “It uses a tremendous amount of power. Whatever their process was for making ZPMs, it was not likely easy or cheap.”
“Okay,” Lorne said. “Can we turn this thing back on?”
“In a way, it is on,” Radek said. “The subroutines that are intended to trigger the extension of defenses against ice are running. The trick is, they think that there is no need for the defenses.”
“Because the underwater sensors aren’t working right,” Lorne said.
“Yes. If we were on land, trying to extend the defensive mechanisms would probably damage them. Not to mention that anything that happened to be under a five-meter spike when it extended would get skewered. The built-in safety protocols are trying to save us from ourselves by insisting that we cannot modify the city’s shape in areas of the city where sensors are not operational.”
“Don’t we keep having that problem?”
“I think the actual builders of the city did not much trust those who ran it to make good judgment calls about its technology,” Radek said. “This is not an attitude unique to the Ancients, believe me. There is a tendency to assume when building any mechanism or program that your users will be idiots.”
“Which in our case might be a good thing.”
“Most of the time I think it is,” Radek said. “The safety protocols kept us from doing serious damage to the city or to ourselves many times when we did not know what we were doing. But this one is not helping.” He ran a hand through his disheveled hair in frustration. “If we had Rodney, he could maybe interface with the part of the ci
ty responsible for modifying its structure and make this work. It will not work for me.”
“Which leaves what?”
“We will have to repair the sensor inputs below the city,” Radek said. “It is impossible to tell if they were damaged by ice or by the battle with the hive ship that attacked Earth or years ago when we first moved the city, but they have been damaged by something. I have a team building replacements that should work. The entertaining part will be installing them.”
Lorne didn’t have many illusions about who was going to wind up taking a team to do that. “I don’t suppose we can fit a jumper with remote manipulators so that we don’t actually have to get out in the water?”
“It is a good idea, but, no,” Radek said. “The connections required are delicate, and I doubt you can keep the jumper stable enough in the water in these currents.”
“The currents and the water temperature are what I’m thinking of when I’m thinking about doing this as a dive,” Lorne said. “Not to mention all the ice.”
Radek shrugged apologetically. “Yes, I know. I wish there was another good option, but I think this is it. Once the sensors are back online, the city’s own defense mechanisms should keep ice from being swept under the city, and we will only need to worry about very large pieces of ice.”
Lorne rubbed the back of his neck. “Okay. If we set up a video feed, can you walk a team through what needs to be done?”
“Yes. I hope this is the only time you will have to go diving.”
“Knock on wood,” Lorne said. “Just out of curiosity, how big do very large pieces of ice get?”
“A couple of hundred meters in length we would say was very large,” Radek said. “Hopefully we will not run into anything bigger than that.”
“Great,” Lorne said. “How big are the ones we’re hoping we won’t run into?”
“Closer to the size of a city,” Radek said reluctantly. “But that is very rare, so I would not worry about it too much yet.”
