The flickering tongues of greedy flames engulfed him, licking longingly at his clothes, tasting his skin with fluttery caresses of pain. The smoke was slowly choking him, both with threatening asphyxiation and with fear as the smell of burning flesh registered sluggishly in his brain. Oh God! He was going to die! This time, no miraculous rescue for him to pull off, no ingenious plan to dazzle his captors, only the rapidly fading spark of a brilliant consciousness…
And as the pain clouded his senses, his mind turned inward, and unbidden, he was trapped in the clutches of memories.
Pulvis et Umbra
-
1
-
“This is good!” Ford said with all the youthful exuberance of a child feasting on chocolate. He munched his way through the fruit happily, and shot a questioning glance at his neighbour. “You not gonna eat this, doc?”
McKay managed to exude utter disdain by merely raising an eyebrow. “Evidently not, Lieutenant.”
“Why not? They’re delicious!” Ford helped himself to another one from the sulking scientist’s plate.
McKay frowned in disgust, his expressive face making it obvious to even their primitive dish mates that he truly despised their food servings.
“Doctor not pleased with food?” The village leader asked stricken in his broken version of English.
“Not pleased? Not pleased! Obviously your society is beyond primitive as …” McKay’s further words were unintelligible as they were grumbled from underneath Major Sheppard’s strategically placed hand.
“It has nothing to do with you guys. This is great, really, we are very pleased. He just doesn’t like fruits that much…” Sheppard smiled his best disarming crooked grin.
“You wouldn’t either if you’d look like a puffer fish every time you accidentally swallowed a sip of citrus juice!” McKay mumbled barely audible, cross-eying the offending hand as if he was seriously contemplating to bite it.
Sheppard hastily pulled his at-risk limb away, giving his most obnoxious team member the stern ‘we need to be diplomatic or else we’ll get our asses kicked’ stare, with the implied ‘and then you might not be able to get any non-fluid food for a week when recuperating in the infirmary’.
McKay shut his mouth with an audible snap.
Teyla smoothly diverted the topic of conversation to the rich crop and while praising their agricultural capacities, smoothed the ruffled feathers neatly back down.
McKay just sat petulantly staring at his drinking bowl. Just his luck to end up on a planet where citrus fruit consisted a ridiculously dominant portion of the food pyramid.
Suddenly, the earth lurched.
Silverware rattled and tinkled. Ford dropped the fruit he’d been eagerly devouring in surprise and Sheppard’s hand instinctively crept towards his P90. The villagers, who had been chattering happily amongst themselves, immediately quietened and quickly left the benches around the party tables to throw themselves down on the mossy grass. The village leader started chanting, and many voices joined in on a haunting, pleading prayer to their Moon goddess for sparing their lives from the wrath of the god of the Underworld.
Sheppard cocked one eyebrow at his team mates. Ford gave him an unsure look, clearly uncomfortable with the villagers’s reaction. Teyla looked as stoic as ever, her head tilted slightly as she listened to the chanting. And McKay… Well, McKay surprised him by not responding in any way, be it imparting scientific explanations, freaking out or even ranting at silly voodoo rituals. The scientist was still staring intently at his drinking cup.
“Found the Fountain of Knowledge in there yet, McKay?” Sheppard whispered as he nudged the unresponsive Canadian. McKay huffed and glanced up briefly. “It shouldn’t take a genius to realize that thát was just an aftershock to the earthquake we’ve experienced earlier. Yet, obviously it does…”
He went back to contemplating his drink, tuning out Sheppard’s response. The tremors of the earthquake had caused the spoon to fall in, the silver cutlery now completely hidden underneath the murky red fluid that passed for liquor on this world. Rings of waves that had started from the point where it has disappeared slowly expanded concentrically until they were broken by the cup’s edge. Like a pebble thrown in a pond. And the waves interfered. Constructive interference…
“Hey!” McKay’s shout effectively shut up the praying villagers, and prompted dirty looks to be thrown at him for his blatant disrespect for the godly powers. Ignoring them easily, the scientist snapped his fingers in an impatient command: “Get me a map! Now!”
-
2
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“How far still?” Ford still sounded like a child, albeit now a very petulant one. McKay imagined him throttling the young lieutenant for currently experiencing every parent’s “Are we there yet?”-nightmare. While it was very satisfactory imagery, it did little to diffuse his frustration.
“Shut up!” He hissed. “I’m solving a particularly difficult set of equations here; accounting for so many different variables even my brilliant mind finds it staggering!”
Although he didn’t look up from the old, crumbling map one of the villagers had provided him with, he was fairly certain Ford did an eye roll. The giggling of the twelve children who were trailing along was a death give-away.
Fine, if the Lieutenant felt comfortable communicating with others of his level of maturity, who was McKay to intervene. He had more important things to do, such as finding the source of the earthquakes that seemed to be increasing alarmingly in strength lately, terrorising this god-forsaken planet inhabited by citrus-addicted primitives.
“Ford, McKay, come in.” Sheppard’s voice effectively cut through his carefully constructed framework of equations, sending it tumbling like a house of cards. He swore not quite under his breath, making sure his radio was transmitting as he did so.
“Ah!” The grin in Sheppard’s voice was obvious “Seems our favourite geek is accounted for.”
“Present, sir.” Ford also reported in, albeit in a more traditional way.
“How’s it going?” The team leader seemed anxious for some progress, perhaps hoping for some horrible disaster to happen to them in order to have a legitimate reason to leave the boring negotiations he and Teyla were currently conducting. Well Teyla did most of the actual conducting really, the Major just sat there looking pretty, directing his most winning smiles to the female villagers present and getting bored out of his mind.
“Well, sir, doctor McKay seems to have made little progress. We’ve wandered around seemingly randomly for hours now…” Ford started to complain, only to be venomously cut off by one very irate astrophysicist.
“Seemingly being the operative word here. Major, we are approaching the epicentre. I cannot narrow it down to less than a 10 km range, given these Neanderthals’ horribly inaccurate descriptions and the hopelessly prehistoric maps I have to work with.” McKay snapped frustratedly, not at all pleased that his ingenuity was questioned.
But as usual, Sheppard knew exactly which of McKay’s buttons to push to expertly defuse the volatile scientist. “Good job, McKay. I’m amazed you’ve managed to narrow it down to 6 miles, given all the possible variables you’re looking at. Make sure you check every inch of it!”
McKay calmed visibly. He briskly tapped his radio: “Will do, Major.”
“Good luck. Ford, keep an eye on the Doc.”
“Yes, sir.”
The young soldier quirked an eyebrow as McKay suddenly perked up with a distant dreamy look in his eyes, and he easily imagining the lamp bulb appearing above the scientist’s head.
“Have fun.” The boredom in the major’s voice was unmistakable. “Sheppard out.”
McKay yet again pulled out the rumpled map to study it intently, once more off in his own world. While waiting for the scientist to start walking again, Ford pulled funny faces at the children who had decided to stick close to the person who had given them the lovely gooey brown stuff they had quickly learned was called chocolate. The fact that they had to bear with his less than amiable, constantly frowning and muttering companion was a small price to pay.
Loosing his patience quickly, Ford peered over the scientist’s shoulder as the latter started fumbling with his hand-held scanner before drawing some more lines on the already heavily scribbled on parchment that had once been a neatly reproduced ancient old map.
Ford prayed whole-heartedly that the village’s wise man wouldn’t be too pissed off when he would discover that his precious ‘divine’ artefact now resembled a child’s miserably fouled up attempt at drawing a spider’s web.
Although McKay had explained – in his usual overbearing self-important lecturing mode – the ‘basic idea vulgarized for the scientifically challenged’, Ford had to admit he hadn’t quite gotten the gist of it. Nothing at all, actually. But he wasn’t so much interested in understanding hów they would get there, but rather whén they would get there. Which prompted him to ask the Canadian, who was still busy alternating between looking at his scanner and adding more squiggly lines to the map: “So, if we are within a 6 mile range, why don’t we start searching?” McKay came crashing down from geek cloud nine, snapped up his head and frowned darkly:” Lieutenant. Might I refresh your elementary 6th grade maths? A 10 km range equates a surface of 314.2 square kilometres or 121.3 square miles. That would be a little under 487 011 million square inches to search ‘every inch of’… So unless you like spending your undoubtedly valuable time looking for the proverbial needle in the hay stack, I suggest you let me narrow it down to looking for something far less trivial than a white sheep in Scotland...”
Ford looked completely unrepentant. “Fine, Doc, just hurry it up a bit. These little lambs are getting hungry…” He grinned at the children, who giggled eagerly back. “I am going to check the perimeter.”
And without even as much as a backward glance, the young soldier walked away, twelve happily chattering and munching children traipsing along.
McKay allowed himself one long self-suffering sigh before focussing his sole intention again on the readings his scanner was displaying eagerly. Frowning at the numbers, his quick mind instantly filling them in in the appropriate equations, he grabbed his pen and drew yet another line in the spider’s web.
To be continued...
Disclaimer: I don't own anything. Stargate Atlantis, its characters and all related entities are the property of MGM/UA, Double Secret Productions, Gekko Productions and The SciFi Channel. Story created for entertainment purposes only. No copyright infringement is intended and no money is being made.