SGA Fic: Cold around the Edges (Part 2/2)
Dec. 19th, 2005 05:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
out_thereTitle: Cold around the Edges
Fandom: SGA
Pairing: McKay/Zelenka
Rating: R (more adult themes -- death -- than actual smut)
Summary: "We're the ones who do the impossible. We're the ones that find the solution when there is none. We're the ones that fix this."
Disclaimer: The boys, Wraith and technology don't belong to me. Really.
Notes: Originally meant to be written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ekaterinn (for the SV & SGA Flashfic Challenge) who requested "Zelenka and McKay discover time travel" (before I had to drop out due to real life and bad timing). This probably isn't what she meant. Thanks to monkeypumpkin for betaing and seperis for advice.
Continued from Part One
***
The program brings up forty-three references. Given the size of the database, it's a miniscule fraction of the whole. Given that they will need to translate each page to make sense of it, the problem remains daunting but Radek gets lucky. Within an hour, he's able to identify seventeen entries as historical or mythical stories, recorded in a section focusing on the culture and society of the Ancients. (The anthropologists would have had a field day with that. They didn't even know that section of the database existed.) After another two hours, he's managed to translate enough fragments to discount three more pages. Only twenty-three to go.
By the time McKay's snuffling into the pillow and waking up, he's down to nineteen. McKay whines about Radek not waking him, and complains about Radek's methods, reliability and general level of intelligence, then commandeers the laptop and starts translating the next page. Because McKay is McKay -- and fate doesn't favor fools, but reckless optimists -- that page is precisely what they're looking for: notes and detailed schematics for time-travel. It is so typical of Radek's life in Atlantis that he can't even muster the appropriate level of annoyance.
This is McKay. Half of his arrogance comes from his intellect -- impressive in its own right -- and the other half from his ridiculous luck. Answers fall into his lap moments before catastrophe strikes. The random combination, the one-in-ten-thousand chance, will work for him.
As with everything in Radek's life, there is an easy part and a hard part. The easy part is the prototype, since there are meticulous instructions -- "This must have been a personal diary," McKay says as he leans over Radek's shoulder and tries to fumble with Radek's translations, "it was probably buried within the main database," -- detailing where it was hidden. It is on the second floor, on the east side, directly beside the room housing the last naquadah generator, the one they had to leave here to power the Stargate. Radek had rolled his eyes and thought, of course the one last hope would be a few steps away from the main power source; after all, he was working with McKay.
The hard part is trying to translate the power needs. The prototype seems to be almost finished, but it doesn't follow any Earth-based hypotheses. Between them, they can barely follow the calculations, let alone the underlying theory.
It is frustrating, like trying to navigate through an over-furnished room by the glow of one lone LED clock. He knows where he wants to go, but he can't see where he's going or where he's been, and every time he turns around he stubs his toe on an unexplained variable or bruises his shin tripping over another confusing equation. McKay doesn't have the same problem, doesn't find it quite as painful. But that could be because he throws his metaphorical arms wide and grasps his way through the darkened room; he stumbles and complains, and makes his way one small millimeter at a time.
McKay is making progress -- sitting and kicking his foot against the wall, sometimes stopping to click his fingers, muttering, "Yes, yes, of course, that's obvious, I should have seen that. But this, here. Why?" -- so Radek leaves him to work through it.
He planned to sleep but his mind is too awake. Thinking of possibilities, of probabilities. If they could make the prototype work, if they could travel back in time and prevent the current circumstances, they could fix this. Fix the impossible. All with a simple application of effort and intellect, and they could save so many lives. It seems too easy. Too convenient. There is a small knot of dread sitting halfway between his stomach and his lungs, a clench of tension that tells him not to believe in blind faith, not to think that he alone can change the universe. He tells himself that he is with McKay -- McKay and his luck; McKay and his bullying, belligerent genius; McKay and his earnest compulsion to do what is right (when he knows what that is) -- but he cannot force himself to believe.
He can distract himself with more pleasant thoughts, though. Like the bottle of Zubrovka found in the labs, having been accidentally packed with the botany supplies. Like the expression on McKay's face when Kavanagh checkmated him within thirty-six moves. Like the way McKay falls asleep on the lab benches with one hand curled beneath his cheek and lips slightly parted.
Or the way those lips would feel against his. It was something he'd thought about, but not something he ever expected to know. Now he does. "You kissed me."
"No, I didn't." McKay doesn't look up from the laptop. "'I've been sitting here working on the power requirements."
"Not now," Radek says with only a touch of annoyance. "Before. During the self-destruct."
"Oh. That."
"Yes, that."
"And you're bringing this up now, because…?" The question hangs in the air, sounding irritated enough that Radek almost misses the red creeping up the back of McKay's tense neck.
"Because you kissed me. Because it's not something you usually do." Radek doesn't say 'because I want to know why'. They have both built careers on asking the reasons behind objects; McKay should be able to infer the question.
"I was in a sudden, certain death situation," McKay mutters. "It seemed like the thing to do."
"Kissing me seemed like the thing to do?" Raked wonders aloud, and McKay spins around to glare at him.
"It was a distracting, life-affirming kiss! When you're about to be blown up in a fiery explosion -- and hopefully die a short, pain-free death, as opposed to the lingering, pain-filled kind -- any type of distraction seems like a good idea."
Radek ignores McKay's flailing arms and outraged voice. He wouldn't have lasted on Atlantis if he'd reacted to those dramatics. "And you didn't think of, maybe, reciting pi to yourself instead?"
"That lacks certain life-affirming qualities," McKay says tersely, and apparently, he sees that as the end of the conversation, because he turns back to the calculations. He huffs, but he doesn't actually do anything.
"Typical," Radek says, not quite under his breath.
"What? What's typical?" McKay demands, jumping up like a jack-in-the-box. "That human beings seek a source of comfort and self-delusion during times of crisis? I am perfectly happy to be typical in this case."
"Typical that you would only act when we have seconds left to live."
"Hey, it's not--" McKay's voice stops, but his jaw keeps moving, opening and closing like a goldfish. "Wait a minute. You."
"Yes?"
"You have a thing for Elizabeth. It's common knowledge."
"I admire her," Radek says, following McKay's lead and using the present tense, "and I am attracted to her, yes."
The corners of McKay's mouth pull down and he juts his chin forward, refusing to be wrong even when he clearly is. "Which makes it somewhat unlikely that you'd be interested in me."
"No, of course not. How could I find someone attractive because they are intelligent and decisive, because they refuse to be daunted by social codes, because they can be brave and scared, and brilliant and ruthless, all at once. Of course, these are merits I would only find attractive in Elizabeth." Radek rolls his eyes and pushes his glasses up. "Really, Rodney. How binary can your mind be?"
McKay opens his mouth, blinks twice, and then sits at the desk. "I need to work on this." There's a moment of silence, where McKay doesn't type, meaning that he isn't thinking about their power concerns at all. Then, softly, he says, "You think I'm ruthless?"
"I've seen how you treat your staff."
"Yeah, but--"
Shrugging, Radek smiles. "I find it an attractive quality."
"Huh. Well," McKay says, in a strangely flat tone, "okay."
***
Radek wakes up to find McKay burrowing close to him -- the temperature controls are still set a little too low -- and yanking the one pillow out from under his head. "I was here first," he complains, groggily grabbing back.
McKay has the advantage of being awake and alert, and also fighting dirty. He lands an elbow in Radek's chest, and Radek's sudden need to stop and try to breathe allows pillow-theft to occur.
"It's my pillow," McKay says, settling the pillow under his head, and wrapping both arms around it. "My room, my pillow."
Rubbing at the centre of his ribcage, Radek spits back, "It's only here because you stole a second one from the medical station. This one was not yours to begin with -- you had no right to it -- and you have no right to it now. The pillow is mine because I am supposed to be sleeping. You are supposed to be working on the blueprints."
McKay had demanded that he work on them -- regardless of the fact that Radek's circuitry design was frequently cleaner, that he knew almost as much as McKay about Ancient power systems and slightly more than him when it came to boosting naquadah generators -- so Radek had slept.
"I've worked on them," and for the first time, Radek heard the emptiness in McKay's tone, "and now I'm going to sleep. On my pillow."
"Wait, wait. You worked out the power requirements?" Radek doesn't sit up, doesn't reach for his glasses, but it's only because the lights have turned off. They must be responding to McKay's will, which bothers him a little -- annoyance that he does not have the same control -- and worries him more. "How to use the generator?"
"I'd say it was relatively simple, but it wasn't. It would require someone with a vast wealth of experience in circuitry, electrical engineering and twisting the laws of reality to truly understand the genius of what I did. Luckily for us both, you have that, so you can look over my calculations in the morning."
The unsubtle compliment worries Radek even more. "Why shouldn't I look at it now?"
"Because it's right. I've calculated it three times, started from scratch, and each time, I get the same answer. I know how to hook it up, I know how much energy it will take, and there's no point in you looking at it now," McKay drags in an unsteady breath, his shoulders jerking as he does so, "because I'm *right*. There's nothing you can do to change it."
"What are you right about?"
"You can't fix it." McKay sits up, the pillow forgotten. The lights glow slightly, enough that Radek can make out the bowed profile, can see how McKay's broad back hunches over. "We can't fix it. I can barely follow the theories, barely understand how it folds the time-space continuum and what the technology needs to physically do. I can't correct it. I can't take it that next step."
"The device, the time-travel engine, it is not completed?" Radek has an arm around McKay's back before he realizes it. For a moment, McKay is tense under his hand, but then his head drops, and he doesn't pull away. It's hard to resist physical comfort when your entire world has dwindled to two people hiding in the shadows of closed curtains.
"Whatever Elizabeth traveled in, it wasn't this design. This might have been the basis for it, but there's no way that it required this level of energy. It would have needed two full ZPMs to take an entire puddlejumper back in time. He must have found a way to minimize the energy consumption, to maximize the usefulness of every volt." Another shaky breath. "And I can't do that."
"Given what we do know, what can the device send back?" Closing his eyes tightly, Radek waits for the bad news.
"Nothing," McKay whispers, and it's even worse than Radek had guessed. "Absolutely nothing. We don't have the energy to complete the transfer permanently. Even if we sent a paperclip back, it would still revert back to this timeline in a matter of minutes. It's a complete wash-out."
When in shock, time is meant to move slowly: adrenaline should flood the body and distort a person's responses. That has never happened to Radek. Time has never stretched into an infinite loop of nanoseconds; time has always kept moving, kept demanding, and it's not until the crisis is overcome that Radek's thoughts have bloomed without clear purpose, like watching mitosis under a microscope.
Right now, his first clear priority is to get through to McKay -- who is muttering under his breath and shaking apart -- because Radek knows he will not survive this alone. Get McKay through the night, and tomorrow, they can try to solve the impossible again. Sometime after that, he will feel and hurt and know what this means, but that won't be tonight.
Radek turns McKay towards him and the man flops against his shoulder like an abandoned rag-doll, saying, "We can't go back. We can't get out of here. There is no 'Get out of Jail Free' card for this. It's just us. It's us, trapped in a city of Wraith, with the option of starving to death or being eaten alive. There is no second chance here."
"Rodney." He curls a hand around the back of McKay's neck, strokes his thumb along the pulse behind McKay's ear. "We will think of something."
"We won't. We won't because there's nothing left. There's no one left. They've all been burnt to cinders, because I had to double back for my second spare laptop. There are Wraith gaining control of this city, there's nothing to stop them in this galaxy. And because of me, they may be on their way to Earth, to conquer the biggest smorgasbord they've ever dreamed of." McKay's breath hitches, blowing warm against Radek's neck. There is moisture against his shoulder, but Radek will never ask McKay about it. Instead, he tightens an arm around McKay. "And I'm not ruthless at all. I'm brilliant and useless and scared. This is too much."
The dim lights brighten slightly, and Radek pulls back, trailing a hand along McKay's neck, lightly across his Adam's apple, and then cupping his jaw. "It is only too much now. In the morning--"
"It will be worse," McKay says, his wide mouth flattened and his eyes flickering down. Radek leaves his hands where they are, the warmth of McKay's skin bleeding through his fingertips. McKay leans, drifting immeasurably closer, and again his eyes flicker from Radek's eyes to his lips. "I'm smart enough to know precisely how screwed we are. At least give me that much credit."
"In the morning, we will look over it. Maybe one of your underlying assumptions was wrong, maybe you transposed two numbers. We're working round the clock in the most basic of conditions." Radek smiles, nodding to himself as he lifts his other hand and slowly rests it on the curve of McKay's hip. "It does not make for accurate thinking."
"No, not accurate." McKay swallows, looking down at Radek's hand. His lashes look dark and luxurious in the half-shadow. "But that doesn't mean I'm wrong."
Radek leans in, stopping a bare inch from McKay's lips. "Doesn't mean you're right either." Then they're kissing like atoms colliding -- like desperation and distraction brought to life -- and the room blankets them in darkness.
***
Radek dreams of being nine years old, and the first day of winter when the air was already chilled and the city was sugar-coated in snow. He had loved winter: loved trudging through the dirty, icy slush; loved the way that it crackled and crunched under his feet; loved seeing the plume of his breath in the frozen air, even if it fogged up his glasses. But that was when he was young, when he could run through the streets to warm up. The cold is not as much fun when you're stuck in a lab for twelve hours straight.
Now he is traveling through Poland to Minsk, an earnest post-grad student headed to the Belarusian State University, specifically, to the National Centre of Particle and High Energy Physics. The view from the train window is monotonous and reassuring. Green fields, laced with the dry brown of scrub, stretch towards the mountains. The sky is cotton-wool layers of grey and silver, beautiful and dour, sharply cut by the purple-olive silhouette of distant hills. The light is muted, glaring and colorless, leaving no shadows. Under the trees, there are vague blurs where the ground looks darker, but they are mere ghosts of shadows: places where shadows should be but aren't.
Radek is cold around the edges: fingers and toes chilled; the end of his nose dry-iced and numb. He crosses his arms, huddles and shivers for warmth, and snaps awake.
The air around him is cold, leaving his bare skin crawling with goosebumps. On the other side of the single mattress, McKay lies on his side, curled possessively around the pillow. His jacket -- and Radek's own -- is draped over his shoulders like the worlds smallest blankets. Trousers sit low across McKay's hips -- still unfastened from last night, Radek suspects -- and the few inches of exposed skin are pale and pebbled. Also soft: Radek knows that from personal, grasping, experience.
Instead of reaching out to touch, to anchor one recollection to reality, Radek slinks out of bed and into the shower. The hot water sluices through the saliva and sweat caking his skin.
Water surrounds him, from the crash of distant waves against Atlantis' supports to the warmth cascading over his shoulders, raining down against his scalp and soaking his fine, and thinning, hair. Resting his forehead against the cool glass, Radek tries to tune out the physical sensations and listen to the chaos of droplets hitting glass and ceramics. There is a pattern, a calculateable probability, behind the sounds. If he had the data -- the rate of flow, the direction and size of the showerhead's jets, the precise mass and position of his own imperfect body -- he could plot the trajectories and predict the spray. He could understand it instead of merely observing and knowing it must be there.
But he does not have that perfect data. He could estimate and assume, but his results would be imprecise, unreliable. Wrong.
Rate of flow, the dimensions of the shower stall: those are easy. It is the human side of the calculation that makes it difficult. Mass and shape that can change by the hour, scars and idiosyncrasies that cannot be graphed or theorized. But if you remove the human figures…
…the calculations become easy. Become reliable. Useful!
Radek feels like a fool, an incompetent, for not seeing it sooner. He rushes out of the shower and in is haste, stubs his toes painfully. Which is of no consequence because McKay's calculations are incorrect, unusable. Two uncertain human figures? No matter how good McKay's theory, the results would still be futile. They need to recalculate, to use a reliable mass. He can hear himself babbling in Czech, trying to explain, while he hops on one foot and rubs his injured toes.
Chortling, McKay sits up on the bed. "Early morning slapstick. I never knew you were such a comedian."
"Yes, yes, very funny." Radek sits down and rubs his foot with a little dignity, very little dignity in point of fact. "And now you are awake, let us discuss how wrong you are."
McKay's sniggers stop and one fair, practical hand tightens into an impotent fist. "My conclusions were right."
"They couldn't be." Radek waves at McKay, want the man to be quiet for once; this is important. "You tried to calculate the power needed to transport two people. Human bodies. Bodies with variable mass, bodies that move and breathe--"
"Elizabeth traveled--" Sitting up and interrupting, and of course McKay could not simply listen.
"Elizabeth was in the jumper." Radek outlines a cube using both straight hands. "Contained, within a specified area. The device did not factor in human variables, only the mass contained within the jumper."
"Oh," McKay huffs softly, understanding. "Even if we could produce that level of power -- which we couldn't, not even for a nanosecond -- it wouldn't have been safe. We could have gone back and left parts of us behind. Important parts, like skin and blood, and possibly bone."
Radek closes his eyes and sees the smoking gateroom and that grotesque disembodied arm lying amongst the rubble. He wonders if the grey sleeve was actually edged in red, or if that detail was invented by his nightmares. He opens his eyes to the small room, to the closed curtains and bare single bed, to the animated scientist beside him.
McKay is still talking. "Painful and terrifying as that is, it doesn't solve our problem. We have a time machine and nothing to send back."
Shifting on the bed, Radek's gaze falls on the laptop. "Not nothing," he says slowly, almost laughing at the obviousness of the solution.
"What do you mean, not nothing-- oh." Then again McKay says, as if the blatancy of the answer needs more emphasis, "Oh."
Radek nods. The answer had been under their fingertips, quite literally. "We send it back--"
"--and leave a message on it--"
"--a warning--"
"--details of the Wraith attack." McKay snaps his fingers repeatedly. "A timeframe of the attack, the correct estimates of their hyperdrive and this time, when we get the weapons satellite online, there'll be something to aim at."
McKay goes from lounging across the bed to pacing the room in a matter of seconds. Then he is waving his hands, one corner of his mouth grinning as the other shoots ideas into the air. "We can blow up the hive ships before they even arrive. We don't save the evacuation attempt, we save the whole city. Without a direct fight, a casualty free win!"
Radek feels his jaw drop. He is staring at McKay, knows he must look like the village idiot, but he's too mesmerized by McKay's sharp blue eyes and rising enthusiasm to truly care.
"In fact," McKay turns sharply towards Radek and freezes, "that answers our energy deficiency, too. We don't need to send the laptop back permanently. We only need to send it back long enough to connect to the network and transfer the data files. We only need to power the time travel for a few minutes."
The laptop has wireless capabilities, so they could send it back anywhere within the powered sections of Atlantis and McKay's crazy ideas would work. "Yes, we could--"
"You should work on the power requirements. No, scratch that. I'm the one who understands why the equation works and there's no point wasting time with you fumbling and muddling up the arithmetic. I'll work out how much power we'll need to transport the laptop." McKay nods his head at his own command. Radek isn't too surprised, or offended, that McKay only trusts himself to do it. "You should work on the power output. What's the maximum amount of power we can get from one naquadah generator? Can we leech any power out of the city itself?"
McKay opens his mouth, ready to bark out more orders, but then he closes it again. He blinks and swallows, then says, "But first, you should put some clothes on."
***
Radek has twelve pages of calculations: equations stretching over two or three lines, asterisks and arrows notating ideas for further evolution; big circles around the answers that simply won't work, that don't match established data (the ones that feel wrong). His fingers are cramped and cold enough that his fingernails are no longer seashell-pink but a creeping violet.
This would all be much easier if he was working on the laptop but McKay's taken it, the desk and a notebook, and claiming them back is not worth the effort. Not yet, at any rate. None of his answers are encouraging but he does have one idea that may -- possibly, if they are extremely lucky -- work. The naquadah generators have safety measures to stop overloads but if they could bypass the self-protection devices, the generator could be run at a far higher output. It is a good chance -- at the moment, it looks like their only chance -- but he is not McKay. He won't suggest a radical plan while ignoring the difficulties and risks. He would not try to convince others with an unsupported assurance that he can make it work. He would rather calculate the risks first; find a workable solution before he presents his ideas. So for the moment, he will wait until McKay sleeps to graph his calculations.
The difficulties are only partly mathematical -- how much power? How long can it be stabilized? -- because there is also the problem of tools. They only have pens, toothbrushes and MREs, which are not the best tools for rewiring safety protocols on sensitive generators. He hasn't worked in such under-funded conditions since he was a student.
"I did my doctorate at NC-PHEP." Radek rests his pen on the page and shifts the pillow between him and the wall. Through the curtains behind his head, he can feel the unkind glass of windows they fearfully keep covered.
"Hmm."
"In Belarus," Radek adds, as if it makes a difference.
He doesn't expect McKay's attention but there's a flash of interested blue eyes when McKay glances over his shoulder. "The high energy physics place, right? In Minsk?"
Radek nods.
"I was there for a few weeks in the late 90s. I was working in Russia -- this was the first time I got traded over there, before Area 51 -- and they were supposed to correlate and support my calculations. Every time they ran the experiments, the results undermined my entire hypothesis. It took me two weeks to find the moron who couldn't carry a decimal place. A digital oscillograph shouldn't be handled by someone still mastering the Etch-A-Sketch." McKay's shoulders are slumped and he's slouching in the chair, legs stretched out straight in front of him. He talks without eye-contact, without basic courtesy, with the self-assurance of someone who expects to be listened to, who knows the value of his thoughts. "It seemed like a miniature USSR: 'market socialism' and a republic that only had one real choice of leader. Why would you choose to go there?"
"They offered me a research position. I was twenty-six, I had my Masters qualifications and was, let's say 'eligible', for eighteen months of conscription."
"So fleeing to a country where you could live fairly well on a researcher's salary was a solution?"
"A workable one, yes," Radek says, making himself comfortable on the bed. His current problems are overwhelming and the answers are hiding from him, buried somewhere within his pages of notes. He can afford to soak in memories for a little while. "When I got there, they were still reorganizing from communist control. It was a new market economy."
McKay snorts.
"I was there when they voted in Lukashenko, when he was a bold leader who would shape the republic for the new millennium. I saw the free market economy become water painted communism. Saw the cost of living drop under 'wealth redistribution' schemes." He had stepped out of his lab, out of his relatively safe University campus, and watched the country change: all small insidious changes that felt too familiar. "I grew up with that at home, in Orgava. As soon as I graduated, I left for the United States."
"Attracted to the Land of the Free?" McKay has stone-hard views on America -- and Canada's clear superiority -- but Radek doesn't want to listen to the memorable rant again.
"The plane to America, it was so different from the train to Minsk."
"I'd suggest it was more comfortable, but those economy seats are a subtle form of torture. They're designed by sadists."
"The difference was how it felt. I was traveling to an opportunity in Minsk, to possibilities, to new knowledge. When I left, part of that hope, that idealism, was left behind." Along with Dmitri's grin, his warming stews, his naïve certainty and careful fingers. He'd almost forgotten those things. "It was a retreat. The journey itself was a retreat, not an exploration. That was the difference."
And that is the difference now. McKay wants to think of this as a rescue mission, but it's a calculated defeat. They are rats fleeing the sinking ship: fleeing the Wraith, fleeing the deaths, fleeing the loss of their dreams of adventure and discovery. The most they can hope for is to leave the city as blackened, shattered debris on the ocean floor.
"It was hours cramped on public transport with strangers," McKay says, lazily hitting the enter key. "I don't see how one was any better than the other."
"I mourned for what I lost. It wasn't until I was crossing the ocean that it became clear to me. I would never walk down those streets again, never huddle against the spring winds or complain about the summer heat. The distant acquaintances -- the girl at the local café, the couple who lived below me, the lecturers from other faculties -- I would never see them again, never pass them in the street, in the corridor, never say 'hello'."
"You mourned for dirty streets and people you didn't know," McKay says, like he lacks the depth of character to understand Radek's point. It's a lie. Radek has seen the picture that sat beside McKay's bed -- before they all cleared out their rooms, before they made sure that only sterile furniture and closed curtains would be left to explode with the city -- the overgrown ginger tabby that McKay would have traded his personal coffee supplies to bring. "If you're going to be uselessly sentimental, shouldn't you mourn Orgava more? Your hometown, leaving the place of your birth and all that rubbish?"
For an instant, Radek's surprised. They've spent the better part of a year discussing quantum physics and wormhole mechanics. He doesn't think he's ever mentioned his place of birth. Then it hits him: McKay has access to personnel files. That explains how he knows, but it's oddly touching that McKay remembered.
"I spent hours sitting on cheap, rough wool, staring out the window and waiting for the landscape to change. I suffered the indignity of trying to balance on a tiny, moving, shuddering toilet. I lived on cold stew and packed sandwiches and when the train finally stopped moving, when I finally walked down those narrow aisles of nearly empty seats and disembarked, it was only to get on another train and start moving again. I spent the night too excited to sleep, my chin propped on my hand as I ignored the bright reflection in the window, looked past it into the undefined dark. I huddled in my coat, mesmerized by the rail line beside us, twin rows of midnight metal, carriage lights glinting and streaking the blackness. The wooden -- slats? Beams? -- between the rails were a blur. It was a constant companion stretching beside us, sharing the most thrilling trek I had ever taken."
McKay spins around and the tilt of his head makes his chin sharp and prominent. "You really like trains, huh?"
"You have a skill for taking a deeply personal moment and stripping it like hydrochloric acid."
"I'm not the one who started reminiscing about train-trips of my youth. I'm the one who's still -- oh, what's the word? -- *working*." McKay's hands wave once, twice, and then hover in the air. "Why did you bring this up?"
He is trapped in a small room with one man and his overwhelming ego. Outside the door, there are monsters waiting in the dark, waiting with the ghosts of possibilities. The moments that shaped his life -- that made him feel, yearn and grow into the man he is now -- these moments will die with him. He wants someone to understand why they meant so much.
Instead he says, "My fingers are turning blue. That's how cold I am. The last time I was this cold, I was traveling across Eastern Europe in a draft-ridden train."
"Oh," McKay says, and then, "Hmmm. There must be something wrong with the environmental controls."
Pulling his legs up on the bed, Radek palms his bony knees. The material of his trousers feels painfully thin. "Insufficient power?"
"We should have enough. Most of the secondary systems were disabled. Half the primary systems were shut down to make sure we'd be able to power the gate."
"And the self-destruct, which was never used--"
"So we should have the power sitting there." McKay starts saving and closing programs. The screen flicks over to diagnostics, looking for physical damage.
His view of the laptop is obscured by McKay's shoulder, so it's pointless trying to squint and read it. "You think it was damaged in the invasion?"
"The main controls are nowhere near the jumper bay," McKay says, half-dismissive and half-annoyed at an unknown problem. "But we can safely assume the jumper bay now has a gaping hole above it. Maybe the environmental systems are trying to compensate and have overloaded something."
"Unlikely." Leaning his head back, Radek stares at the ceiling, trying to visualize the electrical circuits of Atlantis. In his mind, the power conduits are red, the weapons system's yellow, the database is blue, and the environmental system's green. There are secondary controls in the jumper bay but those parallel circuits should have been destroyed, eliminated, without affecting the rest of the city. "If the residential areas are suffering extremes, there must be a programming error. Perhaps the extra shields around the database have interfered?"
"Not unless your computer skills have suddenly devolved to Nguyen's level." Nguyen, if Radek remembers right, was the botanist who tried to adjust the botany lights and ended up burning half the hydroponic plants, and the reason that McKay had required all future maintenance reprogramming be requested in writing and only completed by the assigned technician.
"Last I checked, you still understood the difference between--" McKay stops, wide mouth snapping shut like a bullfrog. He puffs up his cheeks -- increasing the amphibian resemblance -- and Radek is up and off the bed, leaning over McKay's shoulder to read the bad news for himself.
"Oh."
McKay's fingers scurry across the keyboard and the screen flashes 'accessing control systems' in it's fine, red font. "You protected the database. We re-routed control and you set up extra shields around the database."
"It was the biggest risk--"
"You only protected the database." McKay's face flushes, his voice getting louder. "Not the environmental systems, not the master controls. How could you be so completely, utterly stupid?"
"Rodney--"
"And the weapons system. That's what they're accessing: our weapons system! There are Wraith sinking their greedy talons into weapon controls for my city, all because you were too short-sighted to protect it."
"*McKay*." This was not his fault alone, this was not a careless, negligent oversight. He does not like losing his temper, losing control, but at this moment, he is close. McKay must hear it because his eyes widen and his mouth finally closes. "The database was a more immediate threat. The weapons system had no power."
McKay swallows, and Radek appreciates the man's attempt to control his natural urge to rant and rave and blame everyone around him. "Now it does," he says, almost civilly.
"How?"
"They've minimized life support and cut power to the ventilation systems, which implies that the Wraith don't need the same levels of oxygen as humans. Carson would be fascinated. It explains-- never mind, not important now. The important thing is to get control back."
After hours of programming -- of debating and counteracting and undermining the Wraith without leaving obvious evidence of their existence -- they stop to eat. They open their MREs and McKay silently slides across his single sachet of coffee. Radek takes it as an apology.
***
They get control, but it's a temporary measure, a plaster pressed over the gash cutting to the bone. It won't protect them for long. It clarifies the situation.
They don't have time to be cautious, to be careful about unknown dangers -- not when the known dangers are so close, so unstable -- so Radek tells McKay about his ideas for power. McKay splutters about suicidal idiots, about how overloading the generator like that will result in a nuclear explosion that would wipe out the Wraith, them and most of Atlantis -- as if Radek didn't know about elementary physics, as if he'd never heard of Newton's actions and reactions -- and after the waving arms stop, the shrillness gets swallowed by silence, McKay nods.
"You really think this is the only way?" McKay asks, shocked and sad and disbelieving.
"I would not suggest it otherwise."
"But…" Here, McKay drifts off, silenced by the weight of this plan. "This isn't-- We won't walk away from-- Are you *sure*? You have to be sure about this."
"The only way we can produce even half of the power requirements you calculated is by doing this. The generator has to be overloaded. And for the time-travel device to work, we have to be there to set the connections. There will be an explosion, it will destroy most of the city, but it is the only way--" He tries to say it slowly, to make it sound like the logical, rational choice (which it is), but his voice wavers. "The only way to fix it."
McKay takes a step back, his mouth a slack, worried line of parted lips. Then he gives his head a quick shake, takes a breath and says, "Then we have to do it. And we will, because this is what we do. We fix the impossible."
Then he's grabbing at calculations, at the laptop, and they're moving onto the next problem.
They can power the time-travel engine. With one variable gone, they know how long they can send the laptop back: a fraction of a second. They need a way to compress the data, to be able to transfer it in that time, and McKay's half-completed compression codes are their best chance.
Again, there are flapping hands and loud objections from McKay: it's impossible, impractical, and unwieldy; he's already devoted hours to it and if it was possible, he would have completed it, they would have already contacted Earth. Radek doesn't argue -- doesn't waste his breath -- he simply takes the laptop and starts accessing McKay's notes, working through it from the beginning. It doesn't take long for McKay to lean over his shoulder, warm and annoying, and start suggesting new approaches.
By the time they complete it, by the time they polish it and test it enough to know it will work, there is no daylight creeping under the curtains. The window is dark, and Radek desperately wants to open it, to peer outside at the alien constellations. To see them one last time. He doesn't dare.
***
They pack McKay's rucksack without speaking, neatly piling the remaining MREs next to the disconnected laptop, everything moving as fast as McKay's mind. The room is cleared, they know the route to the generator and McKay only speaks when they're standing at the closed door. "We have to do this right."
Radek nods. He knows the risks. "I know the plan."
"We can't afford to get caught. It's a danger to every-- to everyone. Everything." McKay's fingers clench around a strap, and his thumb brushes the material slowly. "And I don't deal well with torture."
Until that moment, that was the one horrifying thought that hadn't crossed Radek's mind. "Rodney--"
"And, um, if anything happens," McKay's saying, looking distinctly uncomfortable as he hoists the bag onto his back, "you know what to do? I mean, you should--"
"I take the backpack. I send the laptop back."
"And don't stop. Don't come back for me. If something happens on the way there, stick to the plan." Then McKay twists his shoulders, settling into the weight of the straps, and opens the door.
The trip to the generator is uneventful, ordinary, apart from the threat of being shot, stunned, and drained of all life that hangs above their heads. Radek watches his feet and tries not to think about it, tries not to think about anything. He doesn't want to think about what's roaming the darkened city; doesn't want to wonder if it's a lack of sleep, lack of circulation, that's chilling his neck and numbing his fingers, or if it's getting colder as they walk. He doesn't want to think about the plan, doesn't want to think about the protocols he'll need to disable on the generator while McKay finds and prepares the time-engine.
He would rather count out his steps, time them to a beat of four as they move through this corridor, around the corner, and down another. They debated using the transporters -- it would save time, but might alert the Wraith -- but now Radek wishes they had. He wants this march to be over. He is almost too terrified to be frightened: it's too much, far too much to understand in any way but the intellectual. His soul feels frozen, unfeeling.
He wants the next two hours of his life to be over, before he has a chance to object, to fail, to ruin McKay's attempts to salvage the situation. McKay is right. Even if this doesn't work, even if they can't change the past, the explosion will destroy a sizable portion of the Wraith population. The suffering in the Pegasus Galaxy will not be solved, but it will be eased.
That is the thought Radek clings to, through another identical corridor, through halls that used to be filled with science and discussion and movement. Whether they fail or succeed, they will help others. Their deaths will be anonymous, unrecorded, unremembered, but they'll mean something. There is value to their actions. Two lives is a small cost when compared to an entire galaxy in danger (especially considering that they awoke the danger in the first place).
It is a worthy sacrifice.
Radek keeps those words in his head, keeps them repeating around his brain. Eight syllables, in time with his steps. Repeated until they stop walking, until he's standing in front of the generator with a tiny toolkit in his hands -- "I kept it with the generator. For emergencies," McKay said, like it was obvious, "and for the times I was too lazy to go back to the lab for a simple screwdriver." -- rewiring circuits as McKay hums and huffs over a football-shaped device of silver curves and amber screens. Then he's too distracted by keeping his hands steady, keeping his mind focused on the metal in front of him instead of the creaking sounds of an empty city, to remember the mantra.
The circuitry cover snaps shut with a tiny click. Radek's eyes are bleary, gritty with lack of sleep. His arms and legs feel sore, cramped, but he gets out the laptop, doing what needs to be done. He opens their makeshift program. It's a simple one that continually transfers the data files onto the main system, sending them over and over, so that when the laptop is ferried to the past, the files will automatically downloaded.
They had discussed sending a letter back, explaining what had happened, but McKay had paled sharply and Radek couldn't stomach the idea of writing this, of making every loss, each death, real by committing it to words. Instead, they had decided to send it to McKay's personal folder, where all work done after midnight is saved and checked for logical fallacies and punch-drunk insanity in the morning. McKay claimed that sometimes he didn't even remember what he'd worked on the night before, until he found the finished notes waiting for his perusal the next day. It was the perfect place to hide new information like corrected timeframes and new compression codes, and have McKay assume it's his own work (and another example of his genius).
Radek sets up the laptop and stands back as McKay fiddles with the generator, double-checking Radek's work, and then connects it to the time-travel engine in a messy, inelegant way. He hits a few invisible buttons, fingers tap-dancing across the glowing symbols until the device is humming, waiting for the energy burst to send the laptop back.
"I'm not good with farewells," McKay says, rubbing his palms against his jacket like a child with dirty hands. "I'm not really sure what to say."
"Say that you did as well as you could. Say that you tried to do things well and that more often than not, you succeeded." Stepping closer, Radek wants to leech the nervous bravery out of McKay's bones. He desperately wants to be brave enough to do this. "Say that the sacrifice is worth it."
"It is," McKay says, one warm settling on Radek's shoulder and the other pushing the generator's switch-top into place. Then he pulls Radek's lips against his, squandering these last seconds hungrily sucking at Radek's tongue. Radek's knees tremble, like his stuttering pulse, and he can't help tensing, knowing what's coming. For a moment, he almost believes it's a reaction to McKay's mouth. Burying his hands in McKay's warmth, Radek closes his eyes.
The explosion is blinding white, and it sears stars on the back of his eyelids.
Fandom: SGA
Pairing: McKay/Zelenka
Rating: R (more adult themes -- death -- than actual smut)
Summary: "We're the ones who do the impossible. We're the ones that find the solution when there is none. We're the ones that fix this."
Disclaimer: The boys, Wraith and technology don't belong to me. Really.
Notes: Originally meant to be written for
ekaterinn (for the SV & SGA Flashfic Challenge) who requested "Zelenka and McKay discover time travel" (before I had to drop out due to real life and bad timing). This probably isn't what she meant. Thanks to monkeypumpkin for betaing and seperis for advice.Continued from Part One
***
The program brings up forty-three references. Given the size of the database, it's a miniscule fraction of the whole. Given that they will need to translate each page to make sense of it, the problem remains daunting but Radek gets lucky. Within an hour, he's able to identify seventeen entries as historical or mythical stories, recorded in a section focusing on the culture and society of the Ancients. (The anthropologists would have had a field day with that. They didn't even know that section of the database existed.) After another two hours, he's managed to translate enough fragments to discount three more pages. Only twenty-three to go.
By the time McKay's snuffling into the pillow and waking up, he's down to nineteen. McKay whines about Radek not waking him, and complains about Radek's methods, reliability and general level of intelligence, then commandeers the laptop and starts translating the next page. Because McKay is McKay -- and fate doesn't favor fools, but reckless optimists -- that page is precisely what they're looking for: notes and detailed schematics for time-travel. It is so typical of Radek's life in Atlantis that he can't even muster the appropriate level of annoyance.
This is McKay. Half of his arrogance comes from his intellect -- impressive in its own right -- and the other half from his ridiculous luck. Answers fall into his lap moments before catastrophe strikes. The random combination, the one-in-ten-thousand chance, will work for him.
As with everything in Radek's life, there is an easy part and a hard part. The easy part is the prototype, since there are meticulous instructions -- "This must have been a personal diary," McKay says as he leans over Radek's shoulder and tries to fumble with Radek's translations, "it was probably buried within the main database," -- detailing where it was hidden. It is on the second floor, on the east side, directly beside the room housing the last naquadah generator, the one they had to leave here to power the Stargate. Radek had rolled his eyes and thought, of course the one last hope would be a few steps away from the main power source; after all, he was working with McKay.
The hard part is trying to translate the power needs. The prototype seems to be almost finished, but it doesn't follow any Earth-based hypotheses. Between them, they can barely follow the calculations, let alone the underlying theory.
It is frustrating, like trying to navigate through an over-furnished room by the glow of one lone LED clock. He knows where he wants to go, but he can't see where he's going or where he's been, and every time he turns around he stubs his toe on an unexplained variable or bruises his shin tripping over another confusing equation. McKay doesn't have the same problem, doesn't find it quite as painful. But that could be because he throws his metaphorical arms wide and grasps his way through the darkened room; he stumbles and complains, and makes his way one small millimeter at a time.
McKay is making progress -- sitting and kicking his foot against the wall, sometimes stopping to click his fingers, muttering, "Yes, yes, of course, that's obvious, I should have seen that. But this, here. Why?" -- so Radek leaves him to work through it.
He planned to sleep but his mind is too awake. Thinking of possibilities, of probabilities. If they could make the prototype work, if they could travel back in time and prevent the current circumstances, they could fix this. Fix the impossible. All with a simple application of effort and intellect, and they could save so many lives. It seems too easy. Too convenient. There is a small knot of dread sitting halfway between his stomach and his lungs, a clench of tension that tells him not to believe in blind faith, not to think that he alone can change the universe. He tells himself that he is with McKay -- McKay and his luck; McKay and his bullying, belligerent genius; McKay and his earnest compulsion to do what is right (when he knows what that is) -- but he cannot force himself to believe.
He can distract himself with more pleasant thoughts, though. Like the bottle of Zubrovka found in the labs, having been accidentally packed with the botany supplies. Like the expression on McKay's face when Kavanagh checkmated him within thirty-six moves. Like the way McKay falls asleep on the lab benches with one hand curled beneath his cheek and lips slightly parted.
Or the way those lips would feel against his. It was something he'd thought about, but not something he ever expected to know. Now he does. "You kissed me."
"No, I didn't." McKay doesn't look up from the laptop. "'I've been sitting here working on the power requirements."
"Not now," Radek says with only a touch of annoyance. "Before. During the self-destruct."
"Oh. That."
"Yes, that."
"And you're bringing this up now, because…?" The question hangs in the air, sounding irritated enough that Radek almost misses the red creeping up the back of McKay's tense neck.
"Because you kissed me. Because it's not something you usually do." Radek doesn't say 'because I want to know why'. They have both built careers on asking the reasons behind objects; McKay should be able to infer the question.
"I was in a sudden, certain death situation," McKay mutters. "It seemed like the thing to do."
"Kissing me seemed like the thing to do?" Raked wonders aloud, and McKay spins around to glare at him.
"It was a distracting, life-affirming kiss! When you're about to be blown up in a fiery explosion -- and hopefully die a short, pain-free death, as opposed to the lingering, pain-filled kind -- any type of distraction seems like a good idea."
Radek ignores McKay's flailing arms and outraged voice. He wouldn't have lasted on Atlantis if he'd reacted to those dramatics. "And you didn't think of, maybe, reciting pi to yourself instead?"
"That lacks certain life-affirming qualities," McKay says tersely, and apparently, he sees that as the end of the conversation, because he turns back to the calculations. He huffs, but he doesn't actually do anything.
"Typical," Radek says, not quite under his breath.
"What? What's typical?" McKay demands, jumping up like a jack-in-the-box. "That human beings seek a source of comfort and self-delusion during times of crisis? I am perfectly happy to be typical in this case."
"Typical that you would only act when we have seconds left to live."
"Hey, it's not--" McKay's voice stops, but his jaw keeps moving, opening and closing like a goldfish. "Wait a minute. You."
"Yes?"
"You have a thing for Elizabeth. It's common knowledge."
"I admire her," Radek says, following McKay's lead and using the present tense, "and I am attracted to her, yes."
The corners of McKay's mouth pull down and he juts his chin forward, refusing to be wrong even when he clearly is. "Which makes it somewhat unlikely that you'd be interested in me."
"No, of course not. How could I find someone attractive because they are intelligent and decisive, because they refuse to be daunted by social codes, because they can be brave and scared, and brilliant and ruthless, all at once. Of course, these are merits I would only find attractive in Elizabeth." Radek rolls his eyes and pushes his glasses up. "Really, Rodney. How binary can your mind be?"
McKay opens his mouth, blinks twice, and then sits at the desk. "I need to work on this." There's a moment of silence, where McKay doesn't type, meaning that he isn't thinking about their power concerns at all. Then, softly, he says, "You think I'm ruthless?"
"I've seen how you treat your staff."
"Yeah, but--"
Shrugging, Radek smiles. "I find it an attractive quality."
"Huh. Well," McKay says, in a strangely flat tone, "okay."
***
Radek wakes up to find McKay burrowing close to him -- the temperature controls are still set a little too low -- and yanking the one pillow out from under his head. "I was here first," he complains, groggily grabbing back.
McKay has the advantage of being awake and alert, and also fighting dirty. He lands an elbow in Radek's chest, and Radek's sudden need to stop and try to breathe allows pillow-theft to occur.
"It's my pillow," McKay says, settling the pillow under his head, and wrapping both arms around it. "My room, my pillow."
Rubbing at the centre of his ribcage, Radek spits back, "It's only here because you stole a second one from the medical station. This one was not yours to begin with -- you had no right to it -- and you have no right to it now. The pillow is mine because I am supposed to be sleeping. You are supposed to be working on the blueprints."
McKay had demanded that he work on them -- regardless of the fact that Radek's circuitry design was frequently cleaner, that he knew almost as much as McKay about Ancient power systems and slightly more than him when it came to boosting naquadah generators -- so Radek had slept.
"I've worked on them," and for the first time, Radek heard the emptiness in McKay's tone, "and now I'm going to sleep. On my pillow."
"Wait, wait. You worked out the power requirements?" Radek doesn't sit up, doesn't reach for his glasses, but it's only because the lights have turned off. They must be responding to McKay's will, which bothers him a little -- annoyance that he does not have the same control -- and worries him more. "How to use the generator?"
"I'd say it was relatively simple, but it wasn't. It would require someone with a vast wealth of experience in circuitry, electrical engineering and twisting the laws of reality to truly understand the genius of what I did. Luckily for us both, you have that, so you can look over my calculations in the morning."
The unsubtle compliment worries Radek even more. "Why shouldn't I look at it now?"
"Because it's right. I've calculated it three times, started from scratch, and each time, I get the same answer. I know how to hook it up, I know how much energy it will take, and there's no point in you looking at it now," McKay drags in an unsteady breath, his shoulders jerking as he does so, "because I'm *right*. There's nothing you can do to change it."
"What are you right about?"
"You can't fix it." McKay sits up, the pillow forgotten. The lights glow slightly, enough that Radek can make out the bowed profile, can see how McKay's broad back hunches over. "We can't fix it. I can barely follow the theories, barely understand how it folds the time-space continuum and what the technology needs to physically do. I can't correct it. I can't take it that next step."
"The device, the time-travel engine, it is not completed?" Radek has an arm around McKay's back before he realizes it. For a moment, McKay is tense under his hand, but then his head drops, and he doesn't pull away. It's hard to resist physical comfort when your entire world has dwindled to two people hiding in the shadows of closed curtains.
"Whatever Elizabeth traveled in, it wasn't this design. This might have been the basis for it, but there's no way that it required this level of energy. It would have needed two full ZPMs to take an entire puddlejumper back in time. He must have found a way to minimize the energy consumption, to maximize the usefulness of every volt." Another shaky breath. "And I can't do that."
"Given what we do know, what can the device send back?" Closing his eyes tightly, Radek waits for the bad news.
"Nothing," McKay whispers, and it's even worse than Radek had guessed. "Absolutely nothing. We don't have the energy to complete the transfer permanently. Even if we sent a paperclip back, it would still revert back to this timeline in a matter of minutes. It's a complete wash-out."
When in shock, time is meant to move slowly: adrenaline should flood the body and distort a person's responses. That has never happened to Radek. Time has never stretched into an infinite loop of nanoseconds; time has always kept moving, kept demanding, and it's not until the crisis is overcome that Radek's thoughts have bloomed without clear purpose, like watching mitosis under a microscope.
Right now, his first clear priority is to get through to McKay -- who is muttering under his breath and shaking apart -- because Radek knows he will not survive this alone. Get McKay through the night, and tomorrow, they can try to solve the impossible again. Sometime after that, he will feel and hurt and know what this means, but that won't be tonight.
Radek turns McKay towards him and the man flops against his shoulder like an abandoned rag-doll, saying, "We can't go back. We can't get out of here. There is no 'Get out of Jail Free' card for this. It's just us. It's us, trapped in a city of Wraith, with the option of starving to death or being eaten alive. There is no second chance here."
"Rodney." He curls a hand around the back of McKay's neck, strokes his thumb along the pulse behind McKay's ear. "We will think of something."
"We won't. We won't because there's nothing left. There's no one left. They've all been burnt to cinders, because I had to double back for my second spare laptop. There are Wraith gaining control of this city, there's nothing to stop them in this galaxy. And because of me, they may be on their way to Earth, to conquer the biggest smorgasbord they've ever dreamed of." McKay's breath hitches, blowing warm against Radek's neck. There is moisture against his shoulder, but Radek will never ask McKay about it. Instead, he tightens an arm around McKay. "And I'm not ruthless at all. I'm brilliant and useless and scared. This is too much."
The dim lights brighten slightly, and Radek pulls back, trailing a hand along McKay's neck, lightly across his Adam's apple, and then cupping his jaw. "It is only too much now. In the morning--"
"It will be worse," McKay says, his wide mouth flattened and his eyes flickering down. Radek leaves his hands where they are, the warmth of McKay's skin bleeding through his fingertips. McKay leans, drifting immeasurably closer, and again his eyes flicker from Radek's eyes to his lips. "I'm smart enough to know precisely how screwed we are. At least give me that much credit."
"In the morning, we will look over it. Maybe one of your underlying assumptions was wrong, maybe you transposed two numbers. We're working round the clock in the most basic of conditions." Radek smiles, nodding to himself as he lifts his other hand and slowly rests it on the curve of McKay's hip. "It does not make for accurate thinking."
"No, not accurate." McKay swallows, looking down at Radek's hand. His lashes look dark and luxurious in the half-shadow. "But that doesn't mean I'm wrong."
Radek leans in, stopping a bare inch from McKay's lips. "Doesn't mean you're right either." Then they're kissing like atoms colliding -- like desperation and distraction brought to life -- and the room blankets them in darkness.
***
Radek dreams of being nine years old, and the first day of winter when the air was already chilled and the city was sugar-coated in snow. He had loved winter: loved trudging through the dirty, icy slush; loved the way that it crackled and crunched under his feet; loved seeing the plume of his breath in the frozen air, even if it fogged up his glasses. But that was when he was young, when he could run through the streets to warm up. The cold is not as much fun when you're stuck in a lab for twelve hours straight.
Now he is traveling through Poland to Minsk, an earnest post-grad student headed to the Belarusian State University, specifically, to the National Centre of Particle and High Energy Physics. The view from the train window is monotonous and reassuring. Green fields, laced with the dry brown of scrub, stretch towards the mountains. The sky is cotton-wool layers of grey and silver, beautiful and dour, sharply cut by the purple-olive silhouette of distant hills. The light is muted, glaring and colorless, leaving no shadows. Under the trees, there are vague blurs where the ground looks darker, but they are mere ghosts of shadows: places where shadows should be but aren't.
Radek is cold around the edges: fingers and toes chilled; the end of his nose dry-iced and numb. He crosses his arms, huddles and shivers for warmth, and snaps awake.
The air around him is cold, leaving his bare skin crawling with goosebumps. On the other side of the single mattress, McKay lies on his side, curled possessively around the pillow. His jacket -- and Radek's own -- is draped over his shoulders like the worlds smallest blankets. Trousers sit low across McKay's hips -- still unfastened from last night, Radek suspects -- and the few inches of exposed skin are pale and pebbled. Also soft: Radek knows that from personal, grasping, experience.
Instead of reaching out to touch, to anchor one recollection to reality, Radek slinks out of bed and into the shower. The hot water sluices through the saliva and sweat caking his skin.
Water surrounds him, from the crash of distant waves against Atlantis' supports to the warmth cascading over his shoulders, raining down against his scalp and soaking his fine, and thinning, hair. Resting his forehead against the cool glass, Radek tries to tune out the physical sensations and listen to the chaos of droplets hitting glass and ceramics. There is a pattern, a calculateable probability, behind the sounds. If he had the data -- the rate of flow, the direction and size of the showerhead's jets, the precise mass and position of his own imperfect body -- he could plot the trajectories and predict the spray. He could understand it instead of merely observing and knowing it must be there.
But he does not have that perfect data. He could estimate and assume, but his results would be imprecise, unreliable. Wrong.
Rate of flow, the dimensions of the shower stall: those are easy. It is the human side of the calculation that makes it difficult. Mass and shape that can change by the hour, scars and idiosyncrasies that cannot be graphed or theorized. But if you remove the human figures…
…the calculations become easy. Become reliable. Useful!
Radek feels like a fool, an incompetent, for not seeing it sooner. He rushes out of the shower and in is haste, stubs his toes painfully. Which is of no consequence because McKay's calculations are incorrect, unusable. Two uncertain human figures? No matter how good McKay's theory, the results would still be futile. They need to recalculate, to use a reliable mass. He can hear himself babbling in Czech, trying to explain, while he hops on one foot and rubs his injured toes.
Chortling, McKay sits up on the bed. "Early morning slapstick. I never knew you were such a comedian."
"Yes, yes, very funny." Radek sits down and rubs his foot with a little dignity, very little dignity in point of fact. "And now you are awake, let us discuss how wrong you are."
McKay's sniggers stop and one fair, practical hand tightens into an impotent fist. "My conclusions were right."
"They couldn't be." Radek waves at McKay, want the man to be quiet for once; this is important. "You tried to calculate the power needed to transport two people. Human bodies. Bodies with variable mass, bodies that move and breathe--"
"Elizabeth traveled--" Sitting up and interrupting, and of course McKay could not simply listen.
"Elizabeth was in the jumper." Radek outlines a cube using both straight hands. "Contained, within a specified area. The device did not factor in human variables, only the mass contained within the jumper."
"Oh," McKay huffs softly, understanding. "Even if we could produce that level of power -- which we couldn't, not even for a nanosecond -- it wouldn't have been safe. We could have gone back and left parts of us behind. Important parts, like skin and blood, and possibly bone."
Radek closes his eyes and sees the smoking gateroom and that grotesque disembodied arm lying amongst the rubble. He wonders if the grey sleeve was actually edged in red, or if that detail was invented by his nightmares. He opens his eyes to the small room, to the closed curtains and bare single bed, to the animated scientist beside him.
McKay is still talking. "Painful and terrifying as that is, it doesn't solve our problem. We have a time machine and nothing to send back."
Shifting on the bed, Radek's gaze falls on the laptop. "Not nothing," he says slowly, almost laughing at the obviousness of the solution.
"What do you mean, not nothing-- oh." Then again McKay says, as if the blatancy of the answer needs more emphasis, "Oh."
Radek nods. The answer had been under their fingertips, quite literally. "We send it back--"
"--and leave a message on it--"
"--a warning--"
"--details of the Wraith attack." McKay snaps his fingers repeatedly. "A timeframe of the attack, the correct estimates of their hyperdrive and this time, when we get the weapons satellite online, there'll be something to aim at."
McKay goes from lounging across the bed to pacing the room in a matter of seconds. Then he is waving his hands, one corner of his mouth grinning as the other shoots ideas into the air. "We can blow up the hive ships before they even arrive. We don't save the evacuation attempt, we save the whole city. Without a direct fight, a casualty free win!"
Radek feels his jaw drop. He is staring at McKay, knows he must look like the village idiot, but he's too mesmerized by McKay's sharp blue eyes and rising enthusiasm to truly care.
"In fact," McKay turns sharply towards Radek and freezes, "that answers our energy deficiency, too. We don't need to send the laptop back permanently. We only need to send it back long enough to connect to the network and transfer the data files. We only need to power the time travel for a few minutes."
The laptop has wireless capabilities, so they could send it back anywhere within the powered sections of Atlantis and McKay's crazy ideas would work. "Yes, we could--"
"You should work on the power requirements. No, scratch that. I'm the one who understands why the equation works and there's no point wasting time with you fumbling and muddling up the arithmetic. I'll work out how much power we'll need to transport the laptop." McKay nods his head at his own command. Radek isn't too surprised, or offended, that McKay only trusts himself to do it. "You should work on the power output. What's the maximum amount of power we can get from one naquadah generator? Can we leech any power out of the city itself?"
McKay opens his mouth, ready to bark out more orders, but then he closes it again. He blinks and swallows, then says, "But first, you should put some clothes on."
***
Radek has twelve pages of calculations: equations stretching over two or three lines, asterisks and arrows notating ideas for further evolution; big circles around the answers that simply won't work, that don't match established data (the ones that feel wrong). His fingers are cramped and cold enough that his fingernails are no longer seashell-pink but a creeping violet.
This would all be much easier if he was working on the laptop but McKay's taken it, the desk and a notebook, and claiming them back is not worth the effort. Not yet, at any rate. None of his answers are encouraging but he does have one idea that may -- possibly, if they are extremely lucky -- work. The naquadah generators have safety measures to stop overloads but if they could bypass the self-protection devices, the generator could be run at a far higher output. It is a good chance -- at the moment, it looks like their only chance -- but he is not McKay. He won't suggest a radical plan while ignoring the difficulties and risks. He would not try to convince others with an unsupported assurance that he can make it work. He would rather calculate the risks first; find a workable solution before he presents his ideas. So for the moment, he will wait until McKay sleeps to graph his calculations.
The difficulties are only partly mathematical -- how much power? How long can it be stabilized? -- because there is also the problem of tools. They only have pens, toothbrushes and MREs, which are not the best tools for rewiring safety protocols on sensitive generators. He hasn't worked in such under-funded conditions since he was a student.
"I did my doctorate at NC-PHEP." Radek rests his pen on the page and shifts the pillow between him and the wall. Through the curtains behind his head, he can feel the unkind glass of windows they fearfully keep covered.
"Hmm."
"In Belarus," Radek adds, as if it makes a difference.
He doesn't expect McKay's attention but there's a flash of interested blue eyes when McKay glances over his shoulder. "The high energy physics place, right? In Minsk?"
Radek nods.
"I was there for a few weeks in the late 90s. I was working in Russia -- this was the first time I got traded over there, before Area 51 -- and they were supposed to correlate and support my calculations. Every time they ran the experiments, the results undermined my entire hypothesis. It took me two weeks to find the moron who couldn't carry a decimal place. A digital oscillograph shouldn't be handled by someone still mastering the Etch-A-Sketch." McKay's shoulders are slumped and he's slouching in the chair, legs stretched out straight in front of him. He talks without eye-contact, without basic courtesy, with the self-assurance of someone who expects to be listened to, who knows the value of his thoughts. "It seemed like a miniature USSR: 'market socialism' and a republic that only had one real choice of leader. Why would you choose to go there?"
"They offered me a research position. I was twenty-six, I had my Masters qualifications and was, let's say 'eligible', for eighteen months of conscription."
"So fleeing to a country where you could live fairly well on a researcher's salary was a solution?"
"A workable one, yes," Radek says, making himself comfortable on the bed. His current problems are overwhelming and the answers are hiding from him, buried somewhere within his pages of notes. He can afford to soak in memories for a little while. "When I got there, they were still reorganizing from communist control. It was a new market economy."
McKay snorts.
"I was there when they voted in Lukashenko, when he was a bold leader who would shape the republic for the new millennium. I saw the free market economy become water painted communism. Saw the cost of living drop under 'wealth redistribution' schemes." He had stepped out of his lab, out of his relatively safe University campus, and watched the country change: all small insidious changes that felt too familiar. "I grew up with that at home, in Orgava. As soon as I graduated, I left for the United States."
"Attracted to the Land of the Free?" McKay has stone-hard views on America -- and Canada's clear superiority -- but Radek doesn't want to listen to the memorable rant again.
"The plane to America, it was so different from the train to Minsk."
"I'd suggest it was more comfortable, but those economy seats are a subtle form of torture. They're designed by sadists."
"The difference was how it felt. I was traveling to an opportunity in Minsk, to possibilities, to new knowledge. When I left, part of that hope, that idealism, was left behind." Along with Dmitri's grin, his warming stews, his naïve certainty and careful fingers. He'd almost forgotten those things. "It was a retreat. The journey itself was a retreat, not an exploration. That was the difference."
And that is the difference now. McKay wants to think of this as a rescue mission, but it's a calculated defeat. They are rats fleeing the sinking ship: fleeing the Wraith, fleeing the deaths, fleeing the loss of their dreams of adventure and discovery. The most they can hope for is to leave the city as blackened, shattered debris on the ocean floor.
"It was hours cramped on public transport with strangers," McKay says, lazily hitting the enter key. "I don't see how one was any better than the other."
"I mourned for what I lost. It wasn't until I was crossing the ocean that it became clear to me. I would never walk down those streets again, never huddle against the spring winds or complain about the summer heat. The distant acquaintances -- the girl at the local café, the couple who lived below me, the lecturers from other faculties -- I would never see them again, never pass them in the street, in the corridor, never say 'hello'."
"You mourned for dirty streets and people you didn't know," McKay says, like he lacks the depth of character to understand Radek's point. It's a lie. Radek has seen the picture that sat beside McKay's bed -- before they all cleared out their rooms, before they made sure that only sterile furniture and closed curtains would be left to explode with the city -- the overgrown ginger tabby that McKay would have traded his personal coffee supplies to bring. "If you're going to be uselessly sentimental, shouldn't you mourn Orgava more? Your hometown, leaving the place of your birth and all that rubbish?"
For an instant, Radek's surprised. They've spent the better part of a year discussing quantum physics and wormhole mechanics. He doesn't think he's ever mentioned his place of birth. Then it hits him: McKay has access to personnel files. That explains how he knows, but it's oddly touching that McKay remembered.
"I spent hours sitting on cheap, rough wool, staring out the window and waiting for the landscape to change. I suffered the indignity of trying to balance on a tiny, moving, shuddering toilet. I lived on cold stew and packed sandwiches and when the train finally stopped moving, when I finally walked down those narrow aisles of nearly empty seats and disembarked, it was only to get on another train and start moving again. I spent the night too excited to sleep, my chin propped on my hand as I ignored the bright reflection in the window, looked past it into the undefined dark. I huddled in my coat, mesmerized by the rail line beside us, twin rows of midnight metal, carriage lights glinting and streaking the blackness. The wooden -- slats? Beams? -- between the rails were a blur. It was a constant companion stretching beside us, sharing the most thrilling trek I had ever taken."
McKay spins around and the tilt of his head makes his chin sharp and prominent. "You really like trains, huh?"
"You have a skill for taking a deeply personal moment and stripping it like hydrochloric acid."
"I'm not the one who started reminiscing about train-trips of my youth. I'm the one who's still -- oh, what's the word? -- *working*." McKay's hands wave once, twice, and then hover in the air. "Why did you bring this up?"
He is trapped in a small room with one man and his overwhelming ego. Outside the door, there are monsters waiting in the dark, waiting with the ghosts of possibilities. The moments that shaped his life -- that made him feel, yearn and grow into the man he is now -- these moments will die with him. He wants someone to understand why they meant so much.
Instead he says, "My fingers are turning blue. That's how cold I am. The last time I was this cold, I was traveling across Eastern Europe in a draft-ridden train."
"Oh," McKay says, and then, "Hmmm. There must be something wrong with the environmental controls."
Pulling his legs up on the bed, Radek palms his bony knees. The material of his trousers feels painfully thin. "Insufficient power?"
"We should have enough. Most of the secondary systems were disabled. Half the primary systems were shut down to make sure we'd be able to power the gate."
"And the self-destruct, which was never used--"
"So we should have the power sitting there." McKay starts saving and closing programs. The screen flicks over to diagnostics, looking for physical damage.
His view of the laptop is obscured by McKay's shoulder, so it's pointless trying to squint and read it. "You think it was damaged in the invasion?"
"The main controls are nowhere near the jumper bay," McKay says, half-dismissive and half-annoyed at an unknown problem. "But we can safely assume the jumper bay now has a gaping hole above it. Maybe the environmental systems are trying to compensate and have overloaded something."
"Unlikely." Leaning his head back, Radek stares at the ceiling, trying to visualize the electrical circuits of Atlantis. In his mind, the power conduits are red, the weapons system's yellow, the database is blue, and the environmental system's green. There are secondary controls in the jumper bay but those parallel circuits should have been destroyed, eliminated, without affecting the rest of the city. "If the residential areas are suffering extremes, there must be a programming error. Perhaps the extra shields around the database have interfered?"
"Not unless your computer skills have suddenly devolved to Nguyen's level." Nguyen, if Radek remembers right, was the botanist who tried to adjust the botany lights and ended up burning half the hydroponic plants, and the reason that McKay had required all future maintenance reprogramming be requested in writing and only completed by the assigned technician.
"Last I checked, you still understood the difference between--" McKay stops, wide mouth snapping shut like a bullfrog. He puffs up his cheeks -- increasing the amphibian resemblance -- and Radek is up and off the bed, leaning over McKay's shoulder to read the bad news for himself.
"Oh."
McKay's fingers scurry across the keyboard and the screen flashes 'accessing control systems' in it's fine, red font. "You protected the database. We re-routed control and you set up extra shields around the database."
"It was the biggest risk--"
"You only protected the database." McKay's face flushes, his voice getting louder. "Not the environmental systems, not the master controls. How could you be so completely, utterly stupid?"
"Rodney--"
"And the weapons system. That's what they're accessing: our weapons system! There are Wraith sinking their greedy talons into weapon controls for my city, all because you were too short-sighted to protect it."
"*McKay*." This was not his fault alone, this was not a careless, negligent oversight. He does not like losing his temper, losing control, but at this moment, he is close. McKay must hear it because his eyes widen and his mouth finally closes. "The database was a more immediate threat. The weapons system had no power."
McKay swallows, and Radek appreciates the man's attempt to control his natural urge to rant and rave and blame everyone around him. "Now it does," he says, almost civilly.
"How?"
"They've minimized life support and cut power to the ventilation systems, which implies that the Wraith don't need the same levels of oxygen as humans. Carson would be fascinated. It explains-- never mind, not important now. The important thing is to get control back."
After hours of programming -- of debating and counteracting and undermining the Wraith without leaving obvious evidence of their existence -- they stop to eat. They open their MREs and McKay silently slides across his single sachet of coffee. Radek takes it as an apology.
***
They get control, but it's a temporary measure, a plaster pressed over the gash cutting to the bone. It won't protect them for long. It clarifies the situation.
They don't have time to be cautious, to be careful about unknown dangers -- not when the known dangers are so close, so unstable -- so Radek tells McKay about his ideas for power. McKay splutters about suicidal idiots, about how overloading the generator like that will result in a nuclear explosion that would wipe out the Wraith, them and most of Atlantis -- as if Radek didn't know about elementary physics, as if he'd never heard of Newton's actions and reactions -- and after the waving arms stop, the shrillness gets swallowed by silence, McKay nods.
"You really think this is the only way?" McKay asks, shocked and sad and disbelieving.
"I would not suggest it otherwise."
"But…" Here, McKay drifts off, silenced by the weight of this plan. "This isn't-- We won't walk away from-- Are you *sure*? You have to be sure about this."
"The only way we can produce even half of the power requirements you calculated is by doing this. The generator has to be overloaded. And for the time-travel device to work, we have to be there to set the connections. There will be an explosion, it will destroy most of the city, but it is the only way--" He tries to say it slowly, to make it sound like the logical, rational choice (which it is), but his voice wavers. "The only way to fix it."
McKay takes a step back, his mouth a slack, worried line of parted lips. Then he gives his head a quick shake, takes a breath and says, "Then we have to do it. And we will, because this is what we do. We fix the impossible."
Then he's grabbing at calculations, at the laptop, and they're moving onto the next problem.
They can power the time-travel engine. With one variable gone, they know how long they can send the laptop back: a fraction of a second. They need a way to compress the data, to be able to transfer it in that time, and McKay's half-completed compression codes are their best chance.
Again, there are flapping hands and loud objections from McKay: it's impossible, impractical, and unwieldy; he's already devoted hours to it and if it was possible, he would have completed it, they would have already contacted Earth. Radek doesn't argue -- doesn't waste his breath -- he simply takes the laptop and starts accessing McKay's notes, working through it from the beginning. It doesn't take long for McKay to lean over his shoulder, warm and annoying, and start suggesting new approaches.
By the time they complete it, by the time they polish it and test it enough to know it will work, there is no daylight creeping under the curtains. The window is dark, and Radek desperately wants to open it, to peer outside at the alien constellations. To see them one last time. He doesn't dare.
***
They pack McKay's rucksack without speaking, neatly piling the remaining MREs next to the disconnected laptop, everything moving as fast as McKay's mind. The room is cleared, they know the route to the generator and McKay only speaks when they're standing at the closed door. "We have to do this right."
Radek nods. He knows the risks. "I know the plan."
"We can't afford to get caught. It's a danger to every-- to everyone. Everything." McKay's fingers clench around a strap, and his thumb brushes the material slowly. "And I don't deal well with torture."
Until that moment, that was the one horrifying thought that hadn't crossed Radek's mind. "Rodney--"
"And, um, if anything happens," McKay's saying, looking distinctly uncomfortable as he hoists the bag onto his back, "you know what to do? I mean, you should--"
"I take the backpack. I send the laptop back."
"And don't stop. Don't come back for me. If something happens on the way there, stick to the plan." Then McKay twists his shoulders, settling into the weight of the straps, and opens the door.
The trip to the generator is uneventful, ordinary, apart from the threat of being shot, stunned, and drained of all life that hangs above their heads. Radek watches his feet and tries not to think about it, tries not to think about anything. He doesn't want to think about what's roaming the darkened city; doesn't want to wonder if it's a lack of sleep, lack of circulation, that's chilling his neck and numbing his fingers, or if it's getting colder as they walk. He doesn't want to think about the plan, doesn't want to think about the protocols he'll need to disable on the generator while McKay finds and prepares the time-engine.
He would rather count out his steps, time them to a beat of four as they move through this corridor, around the corner, and down another. They debated using the transporters -- it would save time, but might alert the Wraith -- but now Radek wishes they had. He wants this march to be over. He is almost too terrified to be frightened: it's too much, far too much to understand in any way but the intellectual. His soul feels frozen, unfeeling.
He wants the next two hours of his life to be over, before he has a chance to object, to fail, to ruin McKay's attempts to salvage the situation. McKay is right. Even if this doesn't work, even if they can't change the past, the explosion will destroy a sizable portion of the Wraith population. The suffering in the Pegasus Galaxy will not be solved, but it will be eased.
That is the thought Radek clings to, through another identical corridor, through halls that used to be filled with science and discussion and movement. Whether they fail or succeed, they will help others. Their deaths will be anonymous, unrecorded, unremembered, but they'll mean something. There is value to their actions. Two lives is a small cost when compared to an entire galaxy in danger (especially considering that they awoke the danger in the first place).
It is a worthy sacrifice.
Radek keeps those words in his head, keeps them repeating around his brain. Eight syllables, in time with his steps. Repeated until they stop walking, until he's standing in front of the generator with a tiny toolkit in his hands -- "I kept it with the generator. For emergencies," McKay said, like it was obvious, "and for the times I was too lazy to go back to the lab for a simple screwdriver." -- rewiring circuits as McKay hums and huffs over a football-shaped device of silver curves and amber screens. Then he's too distracted by keeping his hands steady, keeping his mind focused on the metal in front of him instead of the creaking sounds of an empty city, to remember the mantra.
The circuitry cover snaps shut with a tiny click. Radek's eyes are bleary, gritty with lack of sleep. His arms and legs feel sore, cramped, but he gets out the laptop, doing what needs to be done. He opens their makeshift program. It's a simple one that continually transfers the data files onto the main system, sending them over and over, so that when the laptop is ferried to the past, the files will automatically downloaded.
They had discussed sending a letter back, explaining what had happened, but McKay had paled sharply and Radek couldn't stomach the idea of writing this, of making every loss, each death, real by committing it to words. Instead, they had decided to send it to McKay's personal folder, where all work done after midnight is saved and checked for logical fallacies and punch-drunk insanity in the morning. McKay claimed that sometimes he didn't even remember what he'd worked on the night before, until he found the finished notes waiting for his perusal the next day. It was the perfect place to hide new information like corrected timeframes and new compression codes, and have McKay assume it's his own work (and another example of his genius).
Radek sets up the laptop and stands back as McKay fiddles with the generator, double-checking Radek's work, and then connects it to the time-travel engine in a messy, inelegant way. He hits a few invisible buttons, fingers tap-dancing across the glowing symbols until the device is humming, waiting for the energy burst to send the laptop back.
"I'm not good with farewells," McKay says, rubbing his palms against his jacket like a child with dirty hands. "I'm not really sure what to say."
"Say that you did as well as you could. Say that you tried to do things well and that more often than not, you succeeded." Stepping closer, Radek wants to leech the nervous bravery out of McKay's bones. He desperately wants to be brave enough to do this. "Say that the sacrifice is worth it."
"It is," McKay says, one warm settling on Radek's shoulder and the other pushing the generator's switch-top into place. Then he pulls Radek's lips against his, squandering these last seconds hungrily sucking at Radek's tongue. Radek's knees tremble, like his stuttering pulse, and he can't help tensing, knowing what's coming. For a moment, he almost believes it's a reaction to McKay's mouth. Burying his hands in McKay's warmth, Radek closes his eyes.
The explosion is blinding white, and it sears stars on the back of his eyelids.
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Date: 2005-12-23 04:22 am (UTC)I loved the chance to really explore what makes them tick, especially since they are both incredibly brave. I mean, they've left their world behind (on a possible one-way mission) and risk *everything* on a pretty regular basis. I find that inspiring.
That whole rant is very much Rodney!
Rodney can't help it. He's a ranter.
(And, um, I've also friended you, if that's okay. Seems like we may have things in common.)
Welcome!