“That’s a matter of opinion.”
“In this case, it’s the only opinion that matters.” The Satedan folded his arms. “You should have let me ask Angelus where he came from. Would have been a lot quicker than this.”
“I don’t think torturing the guy was really an option.”
“Who said anything about torture?”
“You didn’t need to.”
“Okay, you two! Knock it off!” Sheppard put his head in his hands, briefly, then straightened and shook himself. Either Dex or McKay, alone, might have been tolerable companions for the duration of the mission, but together they were making his head hurt.
“Rodney,” he said firmly. “Straight answer time, okay?”
“Er, sure.”
“Do we have to turn around and go home right now?” Please say yes, he thought silently. Please, please say yes.
“No,” McKay replied.
Dammit. “What else can we do?”
“There’s two more planets on the initial list. We can check out either one of them before we need to head back and recharge.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Well, as sure as I am of anything. I mean, this hyperdrive is hardly standard equipment. I’m not entirely sure why is doesn’t blow up every time we try to use it, let alone how much power it eats. But so far, it’s been consistent. As long as it stays that way, then yeah, I’m sure.”
“‘No’ would have been quicker,” Dex told him.
“But it wouldn’t have been as accurate.”
“Guys,” warned Sheppard. “Come on, I don’t want to be out here any more than you do. Probably a lot less. Let’s pick our last planet and get going, yeah?”
“Sounds good,” Dex replied. “What are our choices?”
McKay had a laptop jacked into the jumper’s systems. He hit a control and a stylized star map appeared on the HUD. “Here,” he said, pointing. “M1Q-432. And here, M7Y-119.”
Dex snorted. “You people chose the galaxy’s most confusing way of naming worlds.”
“Hey, come on,” said Sheppard. “There’s a lot of planets. All the good names get used up really fast, and then you have to visit some colony and tell them you’ve called their planet ‘X’ or ‘New New Jersey’.”
“Still beats naming them after… What are those things on cars?”
“License plates,” said McKay. “And trust me, I know what you mean. Back in the Milky Way we at least started them with P for planet and M for moon, but somehow even that got screwed up.”
“Fine,” said Sheppard, pointing at the two planets in turn. “Chunky Monkey and Rocky Road. Which one do we go for?”
McKay leaned close to the HUD, rubbing his chin. “Rocky Road’s closer to the biozone sweet spot. If I was an Ancient, that’s the kind of temperature range I’d want to be living in.”
Dex blinked lazily. “The Monkey’s closer to us.”
“Sorry Rodney.” Sheppard grabbed the controls and concentrated on the jumper’s engines. The boards lit up under his hands. “Chunky Monkey it is.”
“Banana and walnuts?” McKay screwed his face up. “Please.”
He was wearing the same expression all the way into hyperspace.
Conventionally, puddle jumpers were not hyperspace-capable. Their engines were as efficient as any other piece of Ancient technology, but they had never been designed to bridge the gap between universes. If it hadn’t been for one very important feature, the jumpers would have remained nothing more than rather cramped shuttlecraft.
The feature that transformed the puddle jumpers were their cross-section. With the engine pods retracted, the ships were just small enough to fly through a Stargate.
Obviously, that had been enough for the Ancients. They had possessed armadas of starships, after all, each of them fitted with hyperdrives among their many wondrous technologies. There had never been a need for them to upgrade the jumpers to handle superlight velocities. It would have been like fitting a rowing boat with wings.
However, for the members of the Pegasus expedition, a hyperspace-capable puddle jumper was nothing short of a holy grail. It was just a pity there was only one.
And that it didn’t work very well.
The jumper-scale hyperdrive had been designed by Rodney McKay. Unfortunately, he had not been himself while designing it — an encounter with a piece of Ancient technology had caused a massive acceleration of his mental capacity, among other powers. Luckily, he had been able to reverse the process before it killed him, but it left him with several new designs that he could barely understand. He had been so much more intelligent when he had created them.
Out of those designs, the engine presently hurling the jumper through hyperspace was one of the more comprehensible, now that his intellect was back within human ranges. He had even made it work, after a fashion. But despite continually tinkering with the hyperdrive, McKay still had little faith in it. As a result, neither did anyone else.
If Carter had been able to contact Apollo, she would not have entertained the idea of sending anyone out in the jumper. But Ellis had missed his deadline, and Apollo could not be raised on subspace comms.
That, to John Sheppard, was a cause for concern. Ellis wasn’t the kind of man who missed things if it could possibly be avoided. There could be any number of reasons why he might not have reported in, and for why the ship could not return communications hails. But for both of those circumstances to arrive at the same time required reasons that were far more rare.
Sheppard couldn’t think of any good ones.
His first thought had been to take the jumper out and use it to look for Apollo, but Carter had vetoed that immediately. There was no direct evidence that Ellis was in trouble, for a start, and of course no indication of where the battlecruiser might actually be. That, coupled with the more immediate threat of Angelus and his project, was enough for Carter to requisition the jumper for a recon mission.
And so Sheppard found himself piloting a ship no bigger than a compact Winnebago through the silver-blue vortices of hyperspace, in search of a planet named after a flavor of ice-cream, while Dex and McKay did their best to bicker throughout the entire length of the trip.
Sheppard had a bad feeling about Chunky Monkey as soon as he saw it, and when McKay came forward from nursing the hyperdrive, he said so.
“Well,” McKay replied, “I’ll admit it’s not pretty.”
“Not pretty?” Sheppard squinted down at the planet, trying to see something appealing about the surface. “I’ve seen prettier Wraith. What the hell’s wrong with it?”
Once again, he was sure they had not found Eraavis. The planet seemed ill-equipped to support life of any kind, let alone Angelus and his subterranean children. And while it was ugly, the world did not show any obvious signs of heavy orbital bombardment. On the contrary, rather than being attacked, it looked more as if it had been left alone to rot.
What he could see of the land masses were a roiled, greyish brown. There didn’t seem to be any surface vegetation at all, which of course would rule out a breathable atmosphere. Oxygen is a highly reactive gas, and left to its own devices will bind to other chemicals as fast as it is able. In order for a world to sustain breathable air, there needs to be something keeping the oxygen in circulation. On most worlds, that was green plants.
On Chunky Monkey it was vast, slimy mats of sea-borne algae.
“Pretty small diameter,” McKay read, staring at his laptop screen. “Gravity’s a shade higher than Earth normal, though, so it must have a dense core. Atmosphere is… What do you know? You could breath it.”
“I’m not sure I want to.” From altitude, the seas looked sludgy and toxic. Only the country-sized algal colonies gave them any color at all, and that color was a sickly, phlegmy green. “Look, Rodney, this place is a dump. Angelus wouldn’t have come from here, would he?”