"Can they get it done before we drain the ZPM?"
In any other situation, Radek's expression would have been comical. "As much as it pains me to sound like Rodney, it will be very, very close."
"As always. Do it "
While Radek spoke to Sergeant Stackhouse's squad over the radio, outlining their new duties, Elizabeth retreated to her office, helpless once again. Infinitely more so this time. Of course there was a chance that John and the others might still succeed in placing the exogenesis machine. But that hideous scream still echoed in her mind, forcing her to accept the possibility that the team-no, not the team, but individuals: John and Rodney, Teyla and Ronon, people who had come to mean more to her than she had ever thought possible-were dead.
There had been days in the past when her confidence had faltered, but she'd never lacked for hope, believing that the latter often led to the former. Hope had kept her going for so long now, almost since the moment she'd first heard Ea speak with Carson's voice. But that hope had been frayed under the growing weight of imminent catastrophe, and now it felt threadbare and fragile. She'd been brought to the Stargate program to be a negotiator, and with Ea, obsessed or not, she'd failed in spectacular fashion. Her shortcomings would doom not only Atlantis but also possibly the entire Pegasus Galaxy.
Elizabeth thought back to a five-minute conversation in the Oval Office seemingly a lifetime ago. She'd told the President then that she had never trained to negotiate with aliens. At the time, even though she'd known his offer to be serious, it had felt a bit surreal. She'd had no idea her decision would lead her here-and she had to wonder now, as it all came crashing down, what might have happened if she'd said no.
"Atlantis, this is Polrusso." Lome's voice swiftly brought her back to the present, and she touched her earpiece. There was still work to be done. And still hope.
"Go ahead, Major."
"Ma'am, we've explained the situation to Nabu's people, and they've started collecting as many as they can with the Darts. They all want to come with us."
"All of them?" Elizabeth could only imagine General Landry's reaction to an influx of thousands of Pegasus refugees in need of a new planet to call home.
"As many as we can manage, yes, ma'am." Lome paused. "I'm prepared to pull the ZPM from the lab on your order."
Gripping the edge of her desk with a force that made her fingers ache, she weighed the awful choice. As soon as they took the ZPM for the trip to Earth, the remaining hundreds of thousands of people on Polrusso, conceivably the galaxy's best long term hope for a future defense against the Wraith, would be lost under the planet's new oceans. But if they waited too long and the nanites spread beyond Atlantis, the Polrussons were dead anyway, along with the Wraith and everything else in the galaxy.
She could hope that the Stargate would be destroyed along with the rest of the city, but hope had limits, and this was a risk they couldn't take. If Radek's plan worked...
In an instant, a realization washed her despair away. She knew exactly how to save the expedition, confine the nanites to this planet, and leave the people of Polrusso unharmed. They just needed one small bit of luck.
"All set," came Stackhouse's voice through her earpiece. "This is really going to power the city?"
"It will," assured Radek. "This is the rare instance where we have previous experience to draw upon. All of you must now take shelter on the Daedalus. It and the control room are shielded against the electrical surge."
"We're on our way."
The exhilaration Elizabeth felt must have showed on her face when she rushed out of her office, because Radek looked at her as if she'd lost her mind. Not bothered, she skidded to a stop in front of him. "I have an idea."
A squid thing that bore an uncanny resemblance to Cthulhu had also tried to ingest the jumper, freaking Rodney out a second time, but that was only a hint of the weird encounters to come. Thousands of sea creatures flashed as dots on the HUD and in the flesh beyond the jumper's shield, lighting up the ocean like a star-filled sky. John was intrigued by the sight and more than a little alarmed. All of them were heading away from the direction in which the jumper was traveling.
"They are fleeing the gray goo," Teyla observed. "The animals on the mainland did likewise, although then we were all traveling in the same direction."
"It makes sense that we're swimming upstream, so to speak." Rodney gestured toward the route map on the HUD, clearly doing his best to pretend the creatures weren't flying past the windshield behind it. "We're coming up on the shallow section-and what a surprise, it's already gone gooey."
Meaning they'd have to go through that muck. John knew Teyla had done it before, but he still didn't like it. "How are we doing on shield power?"
Before he'd finished asking the question, Rodney had already moved to the rear of the jumper. "There'll be some needle-threading involved. I'll hook up each power cell as the prior one falls below the ten-percent level. The water pressure on the hull is no longer a factor, so I'll reduce power to a minimum. But if the shield is compromised at any point, the temporal field that breaks through will age us so fast the Wraith would weep with envy."
"Then let's get this over with." John twisted around to face the rear compartment. "Are we ready?"
Rodney didn't look ready, but he gave a jerky nod. "Go for it "
Expecting to have to rise into the goo, John was surprised to see the gray shroud descending with such speed. He needed only to wait a few seconds before the jumper was enveloped. The points of light provided by the last of the sea creatures winked out, leaving them in darkness.
A few more seconds passed before Rodney's voice broke the tense silence. "Power consumption is steady. Fast, but steady."
When the thick curtain of nanites caused the HUD to stutter and eventually stop updating entirely, John started to get the now-familiar sensation of losing his bearings. On Earth, flying on instruments, he'd always had gravity and a seat-of-the-pants sense to help tell him which way was up, but the jumper's inertial dampeners had shot those instincts to hell. All he could do was stay on the course the HUD had marked before it fritzed out, keeping a mental image of where he wanted to go. Come on, you sweet little mind-reading ride, don't let me down.
From the back, Rodney cursed. "Down to fifteen percent on the second cell."
"Already?" John didn't like the sound of that. "I thought you said-"
"Given my complete lack of experience with this situation, it's possible my estimate was only marginally accurate." Rodney connected the third power cell.
"So we're down to how many spares?"
"One.,,
That had to be a joke. Except Rodney was obviously not in a joking mood. "One?" John pressed.
"Look, don't shoot the messenger, all right?"
They'd have to head down sooner than the original route suggested, just to escape the goo. Not too soon, of course, or they could pop out of the goo only to run smack into a not-yet-converted underwater mountain. It wasn't the kind of thing John liked to guess at, but, given no other choice, he checked their last known speed and position, did a quick-and-dirty rate-of-descent calculation in his head, and aimed the jumper's nose downward.
Before long, he could hear Rodney starting to connect the last power cell. Fabric rustled, repeatedly, and John suspected that the scientist was wiping sweaty palms on his pant legs.
Abruptly, they broke out from the goo, and darkness gave way to an ocean jam-packed with marine life. Every living thing that had managed to outrun the goo had been pushed down to the remaining water at depth. Some of the fish-type things were huge, snapping at each other, adding to the chaos. Not all of the critters had survived the rapid pressure change, either- and the victims were quickly being devoured by the survivors.
The frenzy quickly encompassed the jumper. "Holy-" Returning to the front seat, Rodney flinched as a school of massive barracuda-like animals swarmed over the shield, bumping and jostling the craft. The space that Jumper One pushed through seeme
d to be filled with more fish than water. Fortunately, the HUD came back to life once the nanites' interference was gone, and John could see the trench that was their objective not far away. "Teyla, you're on deck."
Encased in the HAZMAT suit, Teyla pulled her hood on and, nodding, held her hand out to Nabu to take the machine. "I am prepared."
Just as John aimed them into the trench, Rodney cursed. "Power level's dropping. The goo's coming down on top of us!"
"How does it keep getting faster like that?" Ronon wanted to know.
"It is an exponential expansion," Nabu explained from the rear of the jumper. He was still holding the exogenesis machine. "The more of the gray substance that exists, the faster it can spread."
"Well, I can't make us go any faster, so pick a vent, quick." John flung a hand toward the windshield, where streams of thin bubbles and roiling yellowish clouds of what the HUD described as sulfur trailed from a series of chimney-stack pipes on the ocean floor, and up into the goo above. He had no idea what was lighting the trench, but right about now he didn't much care.
"Just a second." Studying the sensor readout, Rodney showed an uncharacteristic level of anger by pounding a fist into the armrest. "None of the vents are big enough to drop the machine into!"
At last, something he could solve. "Then we'll make one big enough," John growled, reaching for the weapons panel.
"Okay, good. For once, your propensity for shooting things is in no way misguided."
On command, the weapon bay door opened on the side of the jumper, deploying a drone into the water. The projectile found its mark- and then some.
Huge bubbles of superheated gas erupted from the point of impact, roiling upward. The force of the rupture caught the jumper and lifted it, thrusting it into the goo above.
A bleak sense of failure descended over John as swiftly as the darkness fell. They were out of time, water, ideas, and about to be out of power. There was nothing left.
He wasn't normally the praying type, but he offered a silent, fervent wish to anyone who might listen that Elizabeth and the others had made it.
ait!" Inspiration struck, and Rodney leaped to his feet and snatched up the exogenesis machine. Stumbling as the jumper tilted, he was steadied by Nabu. "We don't need the planet's heat to drive the machine," he asserted. "That was necessary at the beginning, but the spread of the nanites has demonstrated that the reaction is self-sustaining. We just have to get the machine into the gray goo."
"Of course!" Nabu latched onto the idea immediately. "I have set the machine to reprogram the nanites, which have an elastic memory, to return everything to its original state."
"And because the event will occur in a temporal field half a million times faster than the field in here, the effect will be virtually instantaneous. Could take a few hours to spread around the planet, but it'll be much faster than dropping it in a vent"
"I did not consider that." Nabu looked at him with admiration. "Your intellect-"
"No feeding the ego, please" Sheppard quickly worked to expand the shield around the jumper. "Should be able to open the hatch now."
Ronon took that task, and the large plate swung downward to reveal the goo rolling and oozing all around. It would have been mildly nauseating even if the stuff wasn't threatening to wipe out all life in the galaxy. Rodney watched Nabu heave the machine out into the nanites-and felt his stomach sink as the device came to rest inside the jumper's shield.
Well, that was infuriatingly predictable.
"Crap." Sheppard summed it up from the pilot's seat. "Can we close the hatch and try to move away?"
Rodney shook his head. "Won't matter. The machine will still get pulled along within the shield, no matter what we do-and we have about two minutes of power left."
"Change the shield settings to allow the machine to pass through," Teyla suggested, "as we did to keep the goo out in the first place "
"As soon as we do that, the goo will get in here!" Even as he said it, Rodney realized that they were heading inevitably in that direction, no matter what. Their power level was dropping like a stone. The shield was about to fail-and although the machine would then be able to do its work, everyone inside the jumper would be long dead.
Trying desperately to think of something, he almost didn't notice the determination written on Nabu's face. "Weaken the shield in a localized area," the Polrusson said, stepping to the edge of the hatch and indicating a place about the size of his hand. "Here."
Rodney processed the man's intent and stared at him. "Are you-?"
"Yes. Do it quickly." Nabu reached outside, seized the machine and tweaked some settings.
This wasn't going to be pretty, and Rodney badly wanted to devise another solution, but they had run out of options. At the exact moment he adjusted the shield, the Polrusson plunged the machine, and his arm up to his elbow, into the gray goo.
Instantly, the goo vanished, leaving clear ocean all around them. "Oh, hell, yeah!" Sheppard yelled, sounding about twenty years too young for his rank. "It's moving like crazy. The HUD says we've got nothing but water for ten miles already!"
Relief draining his earlier adrenaline, Rodney sank down into his seat, readjusted the shield one final time, and connected the all but depleted power cells in series. That would get them back to Atlantis, at least. Ronon helped Nabu back into the jumper and closed the hatch. The Polrusson's hand showed more wrinkles than it had only moments before, but otherwise appeared unharmed.
Nabu caught Rodney staring at him and smiled. "It is a comfort, in a way," he said, examining the back of his hand. "It has not always been clear to me that my body is aging."
"Atlantis, this is Jumper One," the Colonel said into his radio. "You guys still there?" Silence answered him. "Atlantis, come in, please."
Rodney checked the time, and the sick feeling returned in a jolt of agonized realization. "It's been over three hours." Why couldn't he have come up with that most straightforward of solutions even ten minutes sooner`? It wasn't just Atlantis, but Polrusso. He risked a glance at Nabu and saw that he also had understood.
"We do not know," the Polrusson said. "There is no point wondering until we return and see for ourselves."
Radek would have figured it out. Really, it was simple enough.
Sheppard's expression was guarded as he set a course for the city-or at least where the city had been when they left it-and voiced the inevitable. "I wouldn't blame Elizabeth if she'd set the self-destruct."
"Assuming she got to do it before the nanites " In either scenario, given the little remaining power available to them, they would be permanently marooned on this planet. He'd live out a short and meaningless existence with nothing to contemplate but his own failure and the void that Turpi's absence had created. Death by gray goo might just have been preferable.
"They got your message about the lightning," Sheppard said firmly. "We'll be there in a few minutes, and you'll see how well Radek works under pressure"
"Of course." Rodney was certain the Colonel was right, and, though he would never admit it, he was reasonably confident in Radek's abilities. As long as the message had gotten through, life would go on.
No problem.
Right?
Jumper One skimmed low over the surface of the water, glittering under the golden light of dawn. The sea at last was quiet again, and John could just see Atlantis sitting on the horizon, stable and serene and still in one piece. After the anarchy that had ruled over the past few days, the tranquility of it all was an incredible relief.
Teyla leaned on the back of John's seat and pointed to a school of flying fish skipping across the low waves. Not far away, the tail fins of a few whale-like creatures broke the surface. "How did they survive the nanites?"
"Hey, Rodney, your whale buddy might have made it after all "
"Not if there's any justice," Rodney groused. "One of those damned things led us to the stasis pods that started all this." To Teyla, he replied, "Either they outran the goo long enough to
outlast it, or Nabu's accelerated temporal field gave them a shot at being re-created. Either way, it implies that the mainland may still have animal life as well." If the hint of optimism in Rodney's voice was distinctly artificial, John chose to let it slide.
"My people will be gratified."
"There were settlements on land?" Nabu asked.
John glanced over his shoulder at Teyla. The Athosian nodded, her features solemn but her eyes clear. "There will be much rebuilding to be done. But we have overcome far greater obstacles in the past."
Keying his radio, John called again, "Atlantis, Jumper One." Again, no response was heard. "Atlantis, how do you read?"
On approach, Atlantis looked every bit as elegant and powerful as it had before the activation of the exogenesis machine. The city shield and stabilizers had obviously been strong enough to prevent any major structural damage. Now if only someone would answer them.
"Maybe they used up all the power and can't operate the radios," Ronon guessed.
"Not if Radek managed to disable the grounding stations and feed the shield using the charge differential, like I told him. More likely they were able to get away in the Daedalus " Rodney gestured downward as they flew over the empty pier that was the ship's usual parking place. "Everyone's probably at the Alpha site."
Another possibility existed; one that had occurred to John only after the goo had begun to recede. It would have been pointless to mention it at the time, so he'd kept his fingers metaphorically crossed in the hope that someone in the city had thought of it as well.
The jumper bay doors opened for them, ruling out the no-power theory. "Atlantis, anybody home?" John tried one more time, just in case. Nothing. "All right, here comes the part where we check the control room and hope we don't find the self-destruct counting down from ten."
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