SGA-16 Homecoming - Book 1 of the Legacy Series Read online

  From the chair room he could feel the rumble beneath his feet as the massive thrusters fired, all power on full, slowing their reentry. The vibration increased, the engines straining. Even as big as they were, Atlantis in the grip of gravity possessed incredible inertia.

  “Your angle’s too shallow,” Rodney said from above.

  Trails of light tore past the cameras, superheated gasses flaring against the shield.

  “Sheppard, your angle’s too shallow!” Rodney was more emphatic this time. “We’re not descending fast enough. We’re going to skip off the atmosphere like a stone.”

  The corners of Sheppard’s mouth turned down, but he didn’t respond, fingers twitching on the interface pads.

  “Sheppard?” Rodney said again. “I said the angle is too shallow!”

  “I do not think he can hear you,” Radek said. Lost in the interface, how would he? And surely he was as aware of the city’s angle of entry as Rodney.

  On the screen before him the angle was correcting, a little deeper, but without picking up additional speed. He had bled off speed with the shallow angle, not quite enough to skip, but enough to slow them considerably. Yes. No doubt that was how it was supposed to be done, not precipitously as it had been the previous two times they had landed the city, falling like a meteor across the skies.

  The city shook, but it was not as bad as before. He could keep his feet easily enough, hanging on to the edge of the console.

  The cameras fogged, vapor streaming past. A high cloud layer? Possibly. Probably. All systems were still green. The ZPMs’ power level was ticking downward, but not quickly. Fifteen per cent…fourteen per cent.

  Thrusters fired again, tilting the city slightly, increasing the drag. The shield pulled more power to compensate. And the city slowed.

  Ice. The cameras showed ice below, thousands of feet down to the north polar ice cap. They were wrapping around the world in a high polar sweep, bleeding speed as they went. Ice. Nothing but ice. Surely they would start seeing water now. He didn’t know how high they were. It all looked the same, sixty thousand feet or thirty thousand.

  “You need to course correct,” Rodney said.

  Mountains. Glaciated mountains. The planet’s largest landmass was embedded beneath the polar ice cap. Dark peaks streaked with snow.

  Surely they were too low. Surely…

  Ice again. Endless plains of ice. Perhaps it was sea ice, but if the city landed on it instead of open water…

  Darkness beneath. Gray water rolling in great waves, low enough to feel a sense of motion. An island reeled by, a chain of them, bright against dark water.

  “Sheppard!”

  He would have to remember that Rodney was a backseat driver. Yes. Never drive with Rodney.

  11 per cent. 10 per cent. The ZPMs’ power gauge was changing more slowly now. The shield had less heat to dissipate.

  The city shivered for a moment, changing pitch again, stardrive down, like a jet putting its flaps down hard as the runway skimmed by beneath it.

  Islands. Water. Water.

  It didn’t look as close as it was. He was surprised as it slammed him to the floor, laptop crashing down on top of him. Atlantis shook, heaved, bouncing in deep water, wallowing, water flooding over the lower third of the shield, then righting and coming to rest on the waves.

  “We are down,” Radek said into his headset unnecessarily, scrambling to pick himself up. He’d fallen on that bad leg and it took a moment to get the knee to work right.

  Beneath the floor the rumble died away, the engines dying.

  “Rodney?”

  “Finding my headset,” Rodney said. He sounded a little shaken too. But it would take more than this to get Rodney away from his board. “Shields are holding. Structural integrity is intact. We’ve got a few minor things blinking, but nothing bad. ZPMs at 9 per cent.”

  That was a better case scenario. They had feared it would take all their power. This gave them a little leeway. Not enough for everything they would wish, but enough to run the shield if they needed to. Enough to dial Pegasus gates, if not enough to dial Earth whenever they wanted.

  “Checking external sensors,” Radek said, doing so. “Atmospheric mix as we saw before, perfectly sustainable if a little oxygen poor. Negative eight degrees centigrade. Lovely.” Not warm, but not polar either.

  “Sheppard?” Rodney sounded irritated.

  This time the chair tilted up. Sheppard opened his eyes. “Yeah, Rodney?” He looked a little groggy, as a man awakened from a deep sleep.

  “You got us off course,” Rodney said. “Equator. How hard can that be? We’re eighteen degrees north! Do you realize how cold it’s going to get? How hard can it be to hit the equator?”

  “Want me to take her up and try again?” Sheppard demanded. “You said within twenty degrees of the equator.”

  “I said it was habitable within twenty degrees of the equator. I said to land on the equator.”

  “It’s not like there’s a big line around the planet, Rodney! And there are things like weather, you know. I had to compensate for the updrafts over the landmasses,” Sheppard said. “We’re down and we’re in your zone.”

  “We’re going to freeze our butts off,” Rodney said.

  “Better than hitting an island, don’t you think?”

  That was of course inarguable. But Rodney would argue it anyway.

  Radek put his laptop back on the console. “Nice landing,” he said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  New World, New Challenges

  “How is it coming?” Woolsey asked, leaning over Radek’s shoulder in the control room.

  Radek cast a surreptitious glance at the clock in the bottom corner of his laptop screen. Twenty two minutes. It had been all of twenty two minutes since the last time he’d asked. “It is coming,” Radek said. “Slowly, but it is coming.”

  “It’s not like this is easy,” Rodney said from the upper tier of computers. He was examining something on his screen, leaning over a scan Miko Kusanagi was doing. “Since this planet has apparently never had a Stargate, we’re essentially making up a gate address. That is a little more complicated than just aligning to an existing one, like we did in California. That was a piece of cake. Carter did it in five hours. But then, presumably she knows where Earth is.”

  “It was simply a matter of adjusting the coordinates of the Cheyenne Mountain gate a very small amount to compensate for the distance between Colorado and California,” Radek said, as Woolsey appeared unenlightened.

  “And this is more complicated,” Woolsey said.

  Rodney straightened up, his back stiff. “Why yes. This is just a little more complicated. We are creating a gate address in the middle of nowhere based on astronomical data that we have to gather before we can use it, and then we have to get a ten thousand year old alien computer system to accept our coding. And if we make the smallest mistake, even to the fraction of thousandth of a decimal point, instead of calling Earth we’ll be calling somewhere else in the Milky Way. Like the middle of a sun, or a gate controlled by one of our innumerable enemies. So yes. This is a little more complicated.”

  Radek gave Woolsey a small shrug as Woolsey lapsed into silence. “He is like this,” Radek said. “But we will get it done.”

  Woolsey frowned. The obvious question was how long, but he wasn’t going to ask it now.

  “Several days, I should think,” Radek said. “Dr. Kusanagi is running a full-spectrum astronomical scan right now. That has about…” He glanced down. “…Sixty four minutes to run. Then we can start comparing the positioning data to the thirty six standard symbols in order to work out a dialable address. We have to do that first—the gate has to know where it is before it can dial anywhere else.” Woolsey blinked again. “Like getting a telephone number and being connected before you try to make a call,” Radek said.

  “If you’re through with Stargates 101, would you mind doing some work?” Rodney asked testily. “Radek, I need you to work o
ut the code for the reassignment of the unique point of origin symbol.”

  “Yes, of course,” Radek said. Miko glanced up at him from down the board and gave him a half-smile. Oh yes. They knew Rodney very well.

  * * *

  Eva Robinson slipped quietly into the back of the room, the door sliding silently shut behind her, and went up the two steps to stand beside Dr. Keller. The mess hall had been rearranged classroom style to fit in the number of people required for the briefing—two hundred and sixteen—all the military personnel in Atlantis. Of that number, more than a hundred were new Air Force and Marines assigned to Atlantis in that last crazy week on Earth, when General O’Neill had been pulling in people to fill gaps.

  And there were enormous gaps. Since Mr. Woolsey had been forbidden to hire anyone since the first days on Earth, when contractors like her had come aboard on a temporary basis to deal with the transition, he hadn’t been able to fill the spaces of anyone who left. Vital specialties had been left vacant from the infirmary to the control room. Five Air Force nurses and a Physician’s Assistant with a specialization in ophthalmology had been transferred from Cheyenne Mountain to bring the medical team back in the green, if not to full strength. Sergeant Taggart had been a night technician on Earth’s Stargate and had been transferred into the control room at the last second. She’d been moved so late, the day of departure, that she and her duffel bag had been beamed to Atlantis by the George Hammond. A plane from Colorado to California would never have made it.

  Unlike the original expedition members, many of the new military personnel had not volunteered for this assignment. This was a deployment like any other. In outer space. Except for the ones coming through the SGC, many of them had never heard of Atlantis or a Stargate more than two weeks ago. They were cooks and HVAC specialists, mechanics and computer technicians, no doubt dreading a year in Baghdad. Instead, they were doing something straight out of a science fiction novel, battling aliens in a distant galaxy.

  Needless to say, there would be an adjustment.

  All of them, new and old personnel alike, were crowded into the mess hall for a general briefing. Eva thought she could see the fractures between new and old hands even from here—the tilt of a head, an incredulous expression, a vaguely superior way of sitting. They might all be wearing uniforms, but they didn’t look the least alike.

  She was sure an effort would be made to get them all into Atlantis uniform, or at least to issue them. Most of them didn’t have them when they arrived, and so now they were a sea of colors—the blacks and charcoals of the Atlantis uniform standing out as badges of pride on the old hands, among Marine camo and Air Force blue. It didn’t make for solidarity. It made for rivalry, like a crowd wearing colors of different teams. But then, she imagined Sheppard knew that.

  He was at the front of the room, waving around a long pointer at one of the Ancient viewscreens that someone had moved in for the presentation, in Atlantis uniform of course, but absolutely pressed. His BDUs were crisp. She hadn’t known there was an iron in Atlantis. Eva made a note to herself to find out who the iron belonged to so she could borrow it.

  “That wraps up the briefing on our new planet,” Sheppard said, his voice carrying easily without a microphone. “I’ll take questions relating to the general briefing. Or if you have questions to direct to Major Lorne, this is an appropriate time.”

  Lorne nodded sharply, standing three feet from Sheppard with his hands clasped.

  There was the pause one expects, as everyone waits for someone else to go first.

  A hand went up in the first row—Airman First Class Salawi, her black curling hair buzz cut like a man or a supermodel. She’d come from the SGC, and presumably was less intimidated than some. Eva made mental note that Ayesha Salawi had initiative. “Sir, if this planet appears uninhabited, do we know for a fact that it’s free of hostiles?”

  “No, Airman, we don’t,” Sheppard said, swinging the pointer at his side. “We don’t know that at all. We do know that there aren’t any permanent dwellings or structures, any kind of town or base. We don’t know that this planet is never used as a stop off point for anyone.”

  “The Wraith?” Salawi asked.

  “Could be. It doesn’t have any resources they need, meaning food of the two-footed kind, or any unusual or valuable mineral resources. It’s off the beaten track in the middle of nowhere. That doesn’t mean they never come here. We also don’t know if any humans periodically stop on this world.”

  “I thought you said that humans here all use the Stargate,” a voice said from the middle rows. Eva couldn’t quite make out who the speaker was.

  “There are some humans with extrastellar craft,” Sheppard said. “There are people who’ve been forced off their worlds and who travel the galaxy as kind of a gypsy caravan in space. They’re called the Travelers, and we’ve had mixed relations with them. They have no central government, just ship groups, and they scavenge a lot, staying out of the way of the Wraith. They’re to be treated with caution, but not as enemies. This is the kind of world they’d like. It’s a good place to put down and repair without being bothered. So we’ll keep one eye out for the Travelers. If they turn up, we can probably work something out with them.”

  In the front row, Salawi nodded.

  A hard thing, Eva thought, looking around at faces, to adjust to the idea this was all real. Some faces had tightened up. This was weird, uncomfortable. Others looked solemn, like Salawi, determined to learn it all today. And a few were transformed with interest, as though transfixed by the idea that every fairy tale was true. She knew how that felt.

  A young blond Marine in the back, shaved so close his cheeks were pink, raised his hand. “Sir, what are we doing first?”

  “Our first order of business is to get back in touch with our allies,” Sheppard said, lifting his chin to make eye contact all the way in the back. “My team and Major Lorne’s will go out as soon as the gate is ready to visit our best friends and gather some intelligence. We’ve been gone nearly six months. A lot can happen in six months. Circumstances can materially change. So our first task is intelligence gathering. To that end, we may need subsequent teams to assist with various missions, including escorting allies and providing security for offworld operations.” He broke into a smile. “So you’ll get offworld soon enough, Lieutenant.”

  The Lieutenant didn’t look away. “It’s pretty amazing, sir.”

  “It is.” Sheppard swung the pointer again, and Major Lorne stepped back. “And pretty amazingly dangerous.”

  Beside Eva, Dr. Keller looked grim. She leaned sideways and whispered, “You know, in five years here we’ve only had a few Marine lieutenants finish their tour without being seriously wounded or killed. Or being MIA. We have a couple of those.”

  Eva blew out a long breath. “Not good odds.” But someone made it. Someone always did. It was always worthwhile to see what the survivor brought to the table, luck or skill or simple resilience. “Who finished?”

  “Lieutenant Laura Cadman,” Keller whispered. “She did a two year tour and went home in one piece.”

  “Someone always does,” Eva said.

  “What about the Genii?” The questioner was somewhere in the middle of the room, Atlantis uniform with the yellow medical shirt beneath it, an old hand most likely.

  Lorne glanced at Sheppard, who answered. “When we left the Genii were our allies. But as a lot of you know, that’s kind of a tricky thing. We don’t know what’s up with the Genii, or even if Ladon Radim is still in power. That’s one of the first things we need to find out.”

  Lorne shifted from one foot to another. “Rest assured, we’re not going to let our guard down with the Genii,” he said.

  Keller leaned in again. “A three hour briefing. All You Need to Know About Pegasus! It’s crazy.”

  “It’s a start,” Eva said. “We’ve all got to start somewhere.”

  * * *

  “It would be more prudent,” Radek said, toying with
his pen.

  “Of course it would be more prudent,” Rodney agreed. “But we’d have to do two connections that way. One to send and then notify them we’ll dial in again to receive at a certain time.”

  “Yes, but that is still less power than leaving the wormhole open for fifteen or twenty minutes,” Radek said, pushing his glasses up on his nose.

  “What are we talking about?” John slid into his chair next to Rodney around the conference table.

  No one was here yet for the 5 pm meeting but Teyla and the two scientists, who presumably had just come from their three hour afternoon orientation with all the new science personnel, following the morning one for all military personnel. Ronon and Lorne were conducting the first of half a dozen small group classes introducing Wraith stunners and other technology to the new military personnel, and probably wouldn’t make this meeting at all. Carson and Keller had a different small group for Safety in the Pegasus Galaxy 101, or as Carson preferred, Don’t Touch the Glowing Fungus. Banks had all the new people who had been assigned to the control room going over gate protocol. Kusanagi had all the new engineers and technicians out performing a post-landing visual inspection of the city’s superstructure, a really fun assignment in the dropping temperature. Oh, and the new Air Force cooks were getting their first run through Atlantis’ kitchens, getting dinner on the table for four hundred and seventeen people. Exactly who was going to be at this meeting besides them was a good question. Presumably Woolsey, or he wouldn’t have called it.

  “They are discussing whether to recommend leaving the gate open and talking with General Landry at the SGC, or whether to send a databurst with all our information and dial back in tomorrow at the same time to receive a reply,” Teyla said. She was sitting next to Radek on the other side of the table cradling a cup of coffee between her hands.

  “I don’t see that it helps much to talk to Landry,” John said, leaning back in his chair. “He can’t make the decision to divert Daedalus to our new position. That’s got to go through Homeworld Command. It’s going to have to be O’Neill anyhow, and he’s not going to be sitting around Cheyenne Mountain. So we might as well dial in, tell them what’s up, and then call back 24 hours later to give them a chance to bat it around the office.”