pretty much the worst winter ever
Man, you know, this was absurdly fun (and quick) to write after having slogged through that GM fic for months. I guess I'd forgotten how enjoyable it was to write in a fandom where you can just make crazy shit up if you want to and not have it be 100% crack.
I think Pudge's face in the icon here sums up what I was doing while writing this.
For the "fucking freezing" challenge over at sga_flashfic. Stargate: Atlantis, Sheppard/McKay, me having fun writing fic.
It was by far the coldest winter they'd seen since coming to Atlantis, and although Sheppard had expected a Canadian-- a hockey-loving Canadian, no less, who had spent significant time in Antarctica-- to enjoy the cold weather, all it really did was give McKay more reasons to freak out.
First it was the city-wide heating system. McKay wasn't convinced it could handle the extreme cold and still maintain Atlantis' internal temperature, and he had said so, loudly, to anyone within hearing distance. Sheppard had told him he was being paranoid, as usual, because surely the Ancients were prepared for something simple like cold weather, but McKay had ranted on about 100-year weather cycles and stresses on aging materials and something about relative biomass and heat output that John had almost completely ignored. Who could blame him? McKay was paranoid, and the Ancients weren't stupid enough to skimp on the heating for a city that could fly through the frozen expanse of airless outer space.
How was Sheppard supposed to know that the heating control systems were some of the oldest in the city? How was he supposed to know that the materials used to make them were the most susceptible to oxidation?
They were lucky that they had enough power to run the shield the night the heat went out, and they were lucky that they were able to keep the shield powered up long enough for McKay and Zelenka to replace the very rusted-out system controls and get the heat back on. Sheppard knew that. He knew it because McKay made sure to tell him several thousand times.
"And what if we hadn't had enough power for the shield? I would have frozen solid in my bed and let me assure you that although my brain will be very valuable to future generations, premature cryogenesis is only depriving this generation of the full use of my genius, not to mention the fact that improper freezing might negatively impact the integrity of my cells so even if they thawed me out 500 years after we froze like one giant collective Atlantean popsicle I might have brain damage and where would the human race be then?"
"We'd be fucked," Sheppard had said, rolling his eyes. "C'mon. How was I supposed to know that system was gonna go out?"
McKay had waved his hands over his head, sputtering, like he couldn't even vocalize the extent of his exasperation. "You could start by maybe listening to me when I warn you that these things are going to happen!"
"McKay. If I listened to you every time you said we were all doomed and were going to die, I'd have every man, woman, and child in Atlantis outfitted with a personal shield and a bubble-wrap vest. And I'd hafta hang "Do Not Touch" and "Touch this and die, mortal!" signs on every wire in sight."
"You get on that, Colonel, it'd save us plenty of moronic, easily preventable accidents," McKay had snapped, before turning on his heel and stomping back down to the labs.
Sheppard was pretty sure he wasn't joking.
----
Next it was the windows. One of the structural engineers had made the mistake of talking to McKay about the expansive and contractile properties of the material the Ancients had used for most of the exterior-facing walls, and McKay had become convinced that the cold was going to contract the window frames faster than the Ancient equivalent of glass that was in them, leading to cracked panes and flying shards of danger and all sorts of things that would basically make life miserable for Dr. Rodney McKay whenever he had to spend time in a room with windows.
This time, Sheppard felt, he was well within his rights to call McKay a paranoid freak. Colonel Carter backed him up, although she left off the freak part, and said "unnecessarily concerned" instead of "paranoid," but it meant the same thing.
Then one of the big windows in the gateroom exploded, putting two Marines in the infirmary with a very large number of very small cuts and scaring the crap out of everyone, including an engineer who jumped in fright and came down with her hand on a console, doing something to the Stargate address locking system that took Zelenka three days to undo.
There was no simple fix for this one, because there was no one system to replace. McKay had to work on it mostly by himself, having loudly dismissed all of the structural engineers as incompetent fools unfit to design a toilet, and Zelenka couldn't help at first because he was trying to get the 'gate up and running again.
Sheppard brought McKay coffee three times a day to apologize for calling him paranoid. Without the 'gate, it hadn't been like he could go offworld anyways.
Two weeks and 16 shattered windows later, McKay had managed to program a very stripped-down nanite that, when released, fit itself into the interstitial spaces in the wall material and compensated for temperature-related contraction and expansion.
"Nothing to worry about," McKay had said. "I cleared the nanites of almost all their usual protocols and the programming has absolutely no loopholes. They can't even replicate-- only the nanites that we've manufactured will go into the city's superstructure." Zelenka had nodded fervently at this. Groupie, Sheppard had thought, only a little irrationally.
"I hope you're right, Rodney," Carter had said, but she said it quietly. "We wouldn't want any accidents with those things loose in the walls."
"Couldn't we set up a dummy wall somewhere, blow that up?" Sheppard had interrupted, steering the conversation away from Elizabeth. He wasn't upset about using nanites, not if they were the only way, and he was sure McKay had exhausted every other possibility, but it was impossible to talk about the fucking things without getting back to Elizabeth at some point, and he just hadn't felt up to going there that day. Or any day, really. Carter had raised an eyebrow, and he had grinned lazily back. "If they rebuild the wall, we'll know McKay left a loophole and we'll send him back to the drawing board."
"You just want to blow something up," McKay had said. "You're not fooling anyone."
"It'd test your bugs out, wouldn't it?"
"Well, we'd have to mimic one of Atlantis' walls pretty closely, and I'm not sure how effective a test it would be on a free-standing wall as opposed to a connected one like on the city itself and I'm not sure how effective it would be if we had the test wall up on the mainland or an island or anything other than the city..."
"... but it might be worth a try."
McKay had eyed him suspiciously. "It might be worth a try in the name of science, not in the name of you getting your rocks off by making loud boom noises."
Zelenka had almost choked into his coffee, and Sheppard had tried to look as innocent as possible, but of course McKay was right. Sheppard really wasn't fooling anyone.
They set up a couple of nanite-impregnated walls on a remote part of the mainland and Sheppard got to blow them up as creatively as he could imagine. Two of the guns he wanted to use wouldn't work in the cold, and the C-4 froze up and crumbled, but he still managed to shoot, blast, and otherwise maim the walls in a happy, happy variety of ways.
After the last shockwaves had died away, he had pulled off his goggles, not even caring that the wind was making him tear up, then freezing the tears to the corners of his eyes. His hands had just been starting to shake pleasantly from the adrenaline rush.
He had watched as the pile of scorched, shattered material remained exactly where it was. The gentle repeating beep of a scanner next to him didn't change in frequency. The pile, he noticed, was smoking beautifully in the cold air.
"I am a genius," the indistinct clump of coats and hats and gloves and other cold-weather-gear to his right had said, somewhat muffled. It had turned its scarf-swaddled, goggle-fronted face to his. "You, however, are not. Put your goggles back on before you go blind."
"Whatever you say, Rodney," Sheppard had said, grinning like crazy. No more exploding windows, and he'd had an excuse to go out and blow the shit out things. Really just a banner day all around. He would have hugged McKay if McKay wasn't so bundled up that he was too bulky for even Ronon to get his arms around.
----
After the windows it was the city's propulsion system. The problem was that part of the propulsion system sat below the city, which in their current position, without enough power to run the shield 24-7, meant that it was sitting in the water. McKay only started worrying about the propulsion system two days before it went out, so John only had time to tell him that he was sure all the important bits were protected and that it wouldn't be a big deal before he was proven completely wrong.
"Look," Sheppard had said. "I don't see why this is such a big deal. I mean," he had hastily added, in response to the worryingly wild-eyed look McKay had turned in his direction, "trust me, I want them up and running as much as the next guy, but at least they're not putting anyone in the infirmary right now, yeah?"
"Why is this a big deal? How is this not a big deal? Should I put it into simpler terms for you? Oh, how about the fact that we can't move the city. We're basically sitting ducks right now!" McKay's voice had risen a little at the end of this-- not quite shrill, but getting there.
"Sitting ducks for what?" Carter had asked. "With all due respect, Rodney, I agree with Colonel Sheppard here. We're not actively under attack, and even if we were we probably wouldn't be moving the city."
"Just you wait," McKay had muttered darkly. "Now that we can't move, something will come up."
----
"Something" turned out to be icebergs.
"Icebergs. Can you believe this? Fucking icebergs." McKay sloped up next to Sheppard at the biggest gateroom window, looking glumly out at the white mass, fuzzy on the horizon still, but definitely bigger than it had been a week before. Long-range scans had made no pretense about its size; apparently it had been brewing on the far side of the planet for quite a while. Fucking icebergs was right. "I told you," McKay said. "I told you, we were going to need to move the city as soon as those thrusters shorted out."
Sheppard went to lean on the wall, then remembered the nanites and shifted his weight back to his feet. Just to be safe. "Can we fix them?"
"The thrusters? Trust me, I've been working on it, I haven't slept more than an hour at a time in days, not that you would notice the difference, and if we can fix them it's going to have to be remotely, I don't know, a giant robot arm or something, there's mechanical damage so it's not like I can just reprogram them, and we can't send a diver down, not with the water the temperature it is right now, and I wouldn't trust a 'jumper down there either, not with the track record we've got going lately." Sheppard opened his mouth. "Don't ask about the nanites, I've tried everything I can and there's just no way to give them that complex a behavior set without retaining too many of their replicator functions."
Sheppard closed his mouth.
"What?" McKay turned to look at him, maybe the first time Sheppard had looked him full in the face in weeks, since McKay was usually riveted to a screen or a machine or pages of numbers, and it was obvious that he hadn't been sleeping. His eyes had a reddish, twitchy, over-caffeinated look to them, and his hair was starting to look like a softer, much less intentional version of Sheppard's own. It made Sheppard want to order him to go take a nap, but McKay would just say something snide about not being military and go inject himself with pure espresso to prove a point.
"Nothing. Look, let's..." McKay had turned to stare back out the iceberg, looking tired and forlorn and like it had personally stolen his breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner, snack, and midnight dinner, and it was in that moment that Sheppard had an idea. Possibly a terrible idea, definitely not a McKay-caliber idea, but an idea nonetheless. "Let's go check out the iceberg."
"Check out the iceberg?" McKay blinked at him, redly. Sheppard grinned. He couldn't get McKay to sleep if McKay had sufficient things to freak out about, but he could at least get McKay out of the labs for more than an hour.
"Check out the iceberg! We think it's headed for the city, but maybe it's not, maybe it's got some... some property or other that makes it blast-able, maybe we can knock it off course, and--"
"--and maybe Lantean ice isn't exactly the same as Earth ice, it might have different crystallization patterns, that would be an amazing discovery, and I'll bet the microbiologists would kill to get their hands on some cores," McKay said, getting into the spirit of it and starting to perk up a bit.
"Wait, wait, microbiologists? We are talking about ice here, McKay, right?"
McKay waved a hand, airily dismissing everything about the general ignorance of John Sheppard in a single gesture. "Glacial ice on Earth has tons of bacteria and microorganisms in it too, they make for fascinating study if you're into that kind of... wriggly biological thing. That's not exactly a new discovery, you know, unless you've been living under a rock." McKay brightened further. "Under a rock, I guess that's what you call 'the military', though, isn't it?" Sheppard bristled; how the hell was he supposed to have heard about micro-ice-bugs? It wasn't like that was general fucking knowledge-- but McKay was looking better, more alert and less slumped.
He tightened his jaw and reminded himself that this was his idea, and returning McKay to happy, bouncy, frenetically paranoid, miracle-working form was, after all, the point. "I'll go warm up the 'jumper, then?"
"The puddlejumpers don't need to be warmed up, their starting system is an on-off current channel, there's no gradation in essential on-ness..."
"Figure of speech, Rodney."
McKay looked around from the window and blinked. "I knew that. An completely inaccurate figure of speech, was my point, given our current favored mode of transit."
"See you in the 'jumper bay, Rodney. Go get your snow pants."
He had been about to ask about the nanites. He wasn't about to tell McKay that, though.
-----
Sheppard didn't even try to take off his goggles this time. Out on the open water, the wind was terrible: sharp and biting and whipping into every tiny opening in his clothing. He hadn't been flayed alive by knives (yet-- in Pegasus it generally paid to end sentences describing things that hadn't happened to you with 'yet'), but he imagined it would feel something like this.
McKay was doing his giant stuffed blob impression again. He couldn't even put his arms down by his sides properly. Sheppard had thought that he looked a lot better, in the 'jumper-- he was wearing what he considered heavy-duty cold weather gear, and he could still put his arms down, at least as much as he normally could in his tac vest. Out on the iceberg, he was starting to rethink that. McKay might look like he'd been comic-book inflated, and he might be waddling around like an unusually spherical penguin, but he also wasn't making any noises like he was being flayed alive. And the comms were on; if McKay felt like he was getting sliced up, everyone within comm distance would be well aware of how he felt about that. He would probably be blaming Sheppard.
But no, McKay was babbling happily to one of the damn microbiologists about core sampling techniques while they drilled something that looked like a Pringles can braced in orthodontic head gear down into the big fucking chunk of ice underneath them.
Sheppard set his jaw and folded his arms and tried to look handsomely windswept, instead of how he felt, which was fucking freezing.
----
One of the best things about Atlantis was the way that the hot water never ran out. Serious hot water tanks from heaven or something. Zelenka had explained it once; it was something to do with conduits in the floors capturing excreted human body heat and converting it to energy that was used specifically to warm the water. Very green, so far as Sheppard could tell. Hippies back on Earth would probably love to get their hands on the tech. All he cared about was the fact that the hot water never ran out on him. Never.
Except, of course, when John Sheppard wanted nothing in the Universe more than a hot shower. When he had already stripped down and gotten into the shower and turned the knob, then there was no hot water.
Obviously.
Shower freeze-outs were a favorite prank of the scientists. In fact, so far as Sheppard knew, they were the only people in the city who had the ability to turn the hot water on and off.
He was going to kill McKay.
----
He started ranting before he even got into the labs. It was best to make your approach loudly, so that McKay didn't have a chance to get up to full volume before you did.
Zelenka and two other scientists looked up in alarm, but McKay didn't even grace him with a twitch. He was bowed over the head gear, now sans Pringles can and instead securing a cloudy white column. Sheppard was able to stomp right up to look at the scanner over his shoulder before McKay noticed him, and that was only because he happened to drip on McKay's head.
"Hey! Busy! Doing research, making historical discoveries, what are you--" McKay turned and looked up at Sheppard, stopping in the middle of his sentence with his mouth hanging open. This was so un-McKay-like that Sheppard had to automatically reach up to feel his own face, worried that he was bleeding or something. His wet face. Oh.
He folded his arms over his bare chest and tried to act like he wasn't standing, dripping wet, in the science labs, wearing only his uniform pants and probably catching his death of cold if he hadn't done so already. "I didn't appreciate your little prank there, McKay."
McKay's eyes narrowed. "What prank?"
Two things became immediately clear. For one, McKay's attention was pretty thoroughly absorbed by the core. They had determined that the iceberg was too big to be blasted apart or shifted off course, even if they could get the C-4 to work, which didn't seem likely in this weather. The situation was still pretty bad, and McKay was putting all his energy into it. He wasn't just running simulations or simultaneously testing 5 equations or anything else that left him enough free time to bother pranking people. Also, if he had cut the heat to Sheppard's shower, he would have been the first one gleefully crowing when Sheppard came storming down to the labs.
"There's no hot water in my shower," Sheppard said, sheepishly. "I thought..."
"Oh, my god, call the Marines, the Colonel's been thinking." McKay was already turning back to the core sample. "Maybe somebody flushed, I don't know, I don't care, better things to do, cities to save, time is money and lives. Why don't you go make yourself a tenth as useful and productive as I am on a second-by-second basis?"
Sheppard turned around and slunk out, silently daring Zelenka to say something. Zelenka rolled his eyes and turned back to his computer.
----
Two hours later, his shower water was still cold. So was the water from the faucets. Dry and dressed, if not exactly clean, Sheppard decided that a tactical reappraisal was necessary and set off to brave McKay and the labs again.
"Congratulations, Colonel," McKay said, glancing up as he walked in. "You were the first of 34 people to make their way down here to personally deliver the news that their hot water was out. It's city-wide. Also, thank you for respecting the 'no shirt, no shoes-- no civil conversation' rule of the labs this time around. I know it's such a strain for you." The core sample was gone, hopefully to a freezer somewhere, and all the scientists were working at a pace that Sheppard recognized as 'not quite panicked, but revving up to it'. The fact that McKay was still cracking jokes wasn't necessarily a good sign; it seemed that McKay's mind moved fast enough to generate annoyed wisecracks at approximately the speed of light, regardless of the situation.
And jeez-- forget your shirt one time, under really very trying circumstances, and McKay acted like you forgot your shirt all the time.
Since nobody was screaming or rending their clothes in horror just yet, Sheppard sauntered over and glanced at the computer screen over McKay's shoulder, recognizing a schematic overhead view of Atlantis. There were red lines all over it. "What the hell, McKay?"
"Power from non-essential heating systems is being siphoned off. The heat in the 'jumper bay is way down, we think because it's not a living area. A number of empty sections and storage areas have lost heat altogether. Most of the hallways have lost several degrees of ambient temperature and are dropping slowly, although main rooms are holding steady so far. And no hot water."
"I beg to differ," Sheppard muttered, trying to follow the red lines with his eyes. "Hot water is not a non-essential system." He gave up on the schematic. "Where's all the power going?"
"That's what we're trying to find out. It's not as easy to track as you might think, not when it's pulling from everywhere at once and these sensors don't tell us anything about the direction of power flow and people keep interrupting you to tell you that they can't take a shower."
"This isn't just the heating system going out again?"
McKay shot him a Look. "No, that was a mechanical malfunction. This is very clearly a power drain. The heating system itself is fine, thank you, and likely to stay that way, thank you again Rodney you genius where would we all be without you."
"We'd be fucked," Sheppard said. "Keep on it. I'll check in."
Although McKay's eyes remained on the computer screen, the eyeroll was implied clearly enough in his voice. "Keep on it. Yes of course, Colonel, I never would have bothered without your orders."
Sheppard thought that there should definitely be some kind of limit on the number of times a guy had to slink shamefacedly out of the labs in one day.
----
He tried to go to sleep, but somehow the knowledge that there was a huge fucking iceberg bearing down on the city-- his city-- managed to keep him awake. He stared up for a while, the immense craggy white face of the iceberg scraping slowly across his ceiling. It had probably been a mistake to go look at the fucking thing. Sure, it was nice to know the face of your enemy and all that, but not when the face of your enemy decided to haunt your waking dreams.
He was starting to replay that scene from Titanic in his head, the one where he was clinging to a scrap of boat in the water and promising he would never let go while McKay was sinking below the waves (it probably didn't mean anything that he was in the Kate Winslet position in this particular scenario. Probably). This meant that it was time for drastic measures of distraction. It was 3 am, which limited his options, but he had an idea of who else would be awake at this hour.
He almost forgot to pull on a tshirt before leaving his room, but remembered just in time.
----
The lights were off and at first he thought the lab was deserted, but a blue glow led him to a corner where McKay had rigged 5 screens together so that he could blow up the schematic and look at it in detail. He was tracing red lines with his finger and muttering to himself. Sheppard folded his arms quietly and watched. It wasn't that he wanted to watch McKay work or anything; he just thought it would be prudent to wait for McKay to take a breather and not risk disrupting the process of his genius and losing the Unified Field Theory or whatever.
Eventually McKay sat back and stretched his arms out over his head, flexing his shoulderblades. Sheppard noted (militaristically and professionally, of course) that all the offworld missions had been doing him some good. He coughed lightly.
McKay made an embarrassing yipping noise that Sheppard immediately planned to imitate the next time the team all had lunch together. It was worth the glare that followed.
"Said I'd be checking in."
McKay looked pointedly down at his watch, then back up, still glaring. Sheppard leaned a hip against a nearby table and looked down, arms still folded. McKay had the patience of a goldfish; he could wait.
Sure enough, McKay broke first and replaced the glare with his usual half-amused, half-annoyed expression, softened a bit by the fact that he obviously still hadn't been sleeping. The blue light of the computer screens highlighted the edges of his hair, making the mess of it look even crazier. He was in the same tshirt that he had had on under his uniform shirt when they came out of the 'jumper with the bits of iceberg.
"So. Any luck?" Sheppard nodded at the screen.
McKay half turned in his chair and dragged a finger along one of the red lines, going all the way out to the edge of one of the piers and stopping in a large circular room with a slightly smaller circle inside it. "I think all the power's being diverted here. No one's explored that part of the city, so no, I don't know what it is or why it would need so much power, or why it would need it now. I was going to wait until morning so we could take a full team down to examine it, obviously I need to go check it out but we have no idea what it is and it could be dangerous, we should have a Marine escort and probably a full medical team just in case, and--"
"--and let's go, Rodney." McKay stared. Sheppard held up both his hands. "Hey, why not? Someone needs to go check it out. It's still draining power, time is, uh, of the essence. Y'know. Stuff. You're here. I'm here. We're both awake. Let's go."
"You're a crazy idiot who's going to get me killed," McKay said, but he said it while he was grabbing a scanner and getting out of his chair, so it was every bit as good as a 'yes'.
----
It was a long way out to the room indicated on the schematics, even with the transporters. The hallways were definitely cooler than the labs had been, and Sheppard was exhausted-- and he knew McKay was too; if anything, McKay should be more tired, because McKay was much less suited to running around on an iceberg all day long-- but it was an oddly pleasant walk. The city was quiet except for a low, constant hum, more something he felt than heard. The only real sounds were his and McKay's footfalls, and the quiet mutterings McKay made when he consulted the schematic or the energy readings on his portable scanner.
The door, when they reached it, looked like any other door in the city. There wasn't any indication that some giant power-sucking machine lurked inside. Sheppard waved his hand at it, making it swoosh open, and looked at McKay, who was staring fixedly at his scanner. "Hey. You want me to go in first?"
McKay shouldered around him distractedly and wandered into the room. Sheppard stared up at the ceiling briefly-- please, Atlantis, give me the strength I need to not kill my best scientist if you don't do it first-- and followed.
In the room was a gun.
At least, that's what it looked like. A really, really, really big gun, almost filling the entire room and raised up off the floor on a little platform. There was what looked like a seat-and-console station on the top and back of it, about where the hammer would have been on a handgun, with a clear bubble around it.
Sheppard lost track of McKay for a minute because he was so busy staring at the gun. It was bigger than an entire tank. It was also humming on a slightly different frequency from the rest of the city, a low seismic thrum that spoke of energy and violence and really awesome things. He put his hand on its muzzle, feeling a slight vibration and definite warmth through his fingertips. He instantly forgave the thing for sucking up so much power. Just that light touch to its side, feeling what it might do, was amazing, almost sensual, and he had to take a deep breath and remind himself that getting wildly turned on by a giant Ancient vaguely-gun-shaped machine was both really Freudian and really inappropriate.
"Of course!" McKay's voice was echoey in the round space. Sheppard immediately tore his gaze away from the gun (the beautiful, beautiful enormous gun) and spotted a window on the other side of it, where McKay was silhouetted, pressed up against the glass.
"What's up?" Sheppard circled around the gun, carefully staying away from what looked like its business end. He stepped up to McKay's back and looked out the window, but all he saw was an ocean-level pier extension with little chunks of ice floating on the water lapping at its sides.
McKay was practically quivering with some strong emotion-- happiness, or relief, Sheppard hoped. "God, it's so obvious, I don't know why it took me so long to-- look at the pier!"
"Rodney, I'm looking at the pier."
"See the sensors?" Sheppard looked harder. There were flat blocks of color along the sides of the pier, touching the water, but they looked decorative. It wasn't obvious. McKay turned around, not giving Sheppard time to back up, and they were way too close, but McKay was grinning. McKay was grinning, and Sheppard had no idea what was going on but he was grinning too. If McKay was grinning, they were going to be OK.
"I see colors, Rodney."
"You really are astoundingly dense, you know that? It's like... you know those cars with the automatic windshield wipers that turn on when it starts raining? You know how those work?"
Sheppard thought carefully, folding his arms and pretending that he didn't in any way notice how close he was to McKay. He could almost smell him. McKay smelled like coffee. "I would guess that they work by... sensors."
"Yes, usually one sensor, and it turns on when a drop of rain hits it. It's a, a probability thing, it might be raining for a few minutes before your wipers turn on because drops of rain are hitting all around but not on the sensor, but the system works because in all probability if you're in rain strong enough to make you need the wipers you're going to get your sensor hit sooner rather than later." He paused for a breath. "Ice sensors. When the water got cold enough to crystallize little areas of it, they bumped up against the sensors, and the machine turned on automatically. I would guess that it needed to collect a certain amount of energy to work, so it had to turn on automatically to give it enough time to warm up. Unlike the puddlejumpers, which do not need to be warmed up, ever."
"Rodney. Tell me it's a gun."
One of the corners of McKay's mouth quirked up. "It's a gun. A heat gun. A super-concentrated emergency heat gun. It's an ice-cutter."
Very, very deliberately Sheppard reached out and put both of his hands on McKay's shoulders. "Can I use it?"
"Well, I only just saw it, you know, obviously I don't know exactly how it works yet, but I would guess that you sit in the chair, and the platform raises you up through the roof, which presumably opens as you'll agree if you look up and check out the spiral grooves in the ceiling, and you get up high enough to see all around the city and then you aim the gun and. Yes. Shoot icebergs."
"Shoot icebergs. With the really big gun."
"With the ice-cutter--"
That was when Sheppard leaned in and kissed him. Because he was going to get to fire a gun bigger than most vehicles he had piloted, and he was going to blow the shit out of a fucking iceberg, and this was a banner day times ten.
I think Pudge's face in the icon here sums up what I was doing while writing this.
For the "fucking freezing" challenge over at sga_flashfic. Stargate: Atlantis, Sheppard/McKay, me having fun writing fic.
It was by far the coldest winter they'd seen since coming to Atlantis, and although Sheppard had expected a Canadian-- a hockey-loving Canadian, no less, who had spent significant time in Antarctica-- to enjoy the cold weather, all it really did was give McKay more reasons to freak out.
First it was the city-wide heating system. McKay wasn't convinced it could handle the extreme cold and still maintain Atlantis' internal temperature, and he had said so, loudly, to anyone within hearing distance. Sheppard had told him he was being paranoid, as usual, because surely the Ancients were prepared for something simple like cold weather, but McKay had ranted on about 100-year weather cycles and stresses on aging materials and something about relative biomass and heat output that John had almost completely ignored. Who could blame him? McKay was paranoid, and the Ancients weren't stupid enough to skimp on the heating for a city that could fly through the frozen expanse of airless outer space.
How was Sheppard supposed to know that the heating control systems were some of the oldest in the city? How was he supposed to know that the materials used to make them were the most susceptible to oxidation?
They were lucky that they had enough power to run the shield the night the heat went out, and they were lucky that they were able to keep the shield powered up long enough for McKay and Zelenka to replace the very rusted-out system controls and get the heat back on. Sheppard knew that. He knew it because McKay made sure to tell him several thousand times.
"And what if we hadn't had enough power for the shield? I would have frozen solid in my bed and let me assure you that although my brain will be very valuable to future generations, premature cryogenesis is only depriving this generation of the full use of my genius, not to mention the fact that improper freezing might negatively impact the integrity of my cells so even if they thawed me out 500 years after we froze like one giant collective Atlantean popsicle I might have brain damage and where would the human race be then?"
"We'd be fucked," Sheppard had said, rolling his eyes. "C'mon. How was I supposed to know that system was gonna go out?"
McKay had waved his hands over his head, sputtering, like he couldn't even vocalize the extent of his exasperation. "You could start by maybe listening to me when I warn you that these things are going to happen!"
"McKay. If I listened to you every time you said we were all doomed and were going to die, I'd have every man, woman, and child in Atlantis outfitted with a personal shield and a bubble-wrap vest. And I'd hafta hang "Do Not Touch" and "Touch this and die, mortal!" signs on every wire in sight."
"You get on that, Colonel, it'd save us plenty of moronic, easily preventable accidents," McKay had snapped, before turning on his heel and stomping back down to the labs.
Sheppard was pretty sure he wasn't joking.
----
Next it was the windows. One of the structural engineers had made the mistake of talking to McKay about the expansive and contractile properties of the material the Ancients had used for most of the exterior-facing walls, and McKay had become convinced that the cold was going to contract the window frames faster than the Ancient equivalent of glass that was in them, leading to cracked panes and flying shards of danger and all sorts of things that would basically make life miserable for Dr. Rodney McKay whenever he had to spend time in a room with windows.
This time, Sheppard felt, he was well within his rights to call McKay a paranoid freak. Colonel Carter backed him up, although she left off the freak part, and said "unnecessarily concerned" instead of "paranoid," but it meant the same thing.
Then one of the big windows in the gateroom exploded, putting two Marines in the infirmary with a very large number of very small cuts and scaring the crap out of everyone, including an engineer who jumped in fright and came down with her hand on a console, doing something to the Stargate address locking system that took Zelenka three days to undo.
There was no simple fix for this one, because there was no one system to replace. McKay had to work on it mostly by himself, having loudly dismissed all of the structural engineers as incompetent fools unfit to design a toilet, and Zelenka couldn't help at first because he was trying to get the 'gate up and running again.
Sheppard brought McKay coffee three times a day to apologize for calling him paranoid. Without the 'gate, it hadn't been like he could go offworld anyways.
Two weeks and 16 shattered windows later, McKay had managed to program a very stripped-down nanite that, when released, fit itself into the interstitial spaces in the wall material and compensated for temperature-related contraction and expansion.
"Nothing to worry about," McKay had said. "I cleared the nanites of almost all their usual protocols and the programming has absolutely no loopholes. They can't even replicate-- only the nanites that we've manufactured will go into the city's superstructure." Zelenka had nodded fervently at this. Groupie, Sheppard had thought, only a little irrationally.
"I hope you're right, Rodney," Carter had said, but she said it quietly. "We wouldn't want any accidents with those things loose in the walls."
"Couldn't we set up a dummy wall somewhere, blow that up?" Sheppard had interrupted, steering the conversation away from Elizabeth. He wasn't upset about using nanites, not if they were the only way, and he was sure McKay had exhausted every other possibility, but it was impossible to talk about the fucking things without getting back to Elizabeth at some point, and he just hadn't felt up to going there that day. Or any day, really. Carter had raised an eyebrow, and he had grinned lazily back. "If they rebuild the wall, we'll know McKay left a loophole and we'll send him back to the drawing board."
"You just want to blow something up," McKay had said. "You're not fooling anyone."
"It'd test your bugs out, wouldn't it?"
"Well, we'd have to mimic one of Atlantis' walls pretty closely, and I'm not sure how effective a test it would be on a free-standing wall as opposed to a connected one like on the city itself and I'm not sure how effective it would be if we had the test wall up on the mainland or an island or anything other than the city..."
"... but it might be worth a try."
McKay had eyed him suspiciously. "It might be worth a try in the name of science, not in the name of you getting your rocks off by making loud boom noises."
Zelenka had almost choked into his coffee, and Sheppard had tried to look as innocent as possible, but of course McKay was right. Sheppard really wasn't fooling anyone.
They set up a couple of nanite-impregnated walls on a remote part of the mainland and Sheppard got to blow them up as creatively as he could imagine. Two of the guns he wanted to use wouldn't work in the cold, and the C-4 froze up and crumbled, but he still managed to shoot, blast, and otherwise maim the walls in a happy, happy variety of ways.
After the last shockwaves had died away, he had pulled off his goggles, not even caring that the wind was making him tear up, then freezing the tears to the corners of his eyes. His hands had just been starting to shake pleasantly from the adrenaline rush.
He had watched as the pile of scorched, shattered material remained exactly where it was. The gentle repeating beep of a scanner next to him didn't change in frequency. The pile, he noticed, was smoking beautifully in the cold air.
"I am a genius," the indistinct clump of coats and hats and gloves and other cold-weather-gear to his right had said, somewhat muffled. It had turned its scarf-swaddled, goggle-fronted face to his. "You, however, are not. Put your goggles back on before you go blind."
"Whatever you say, Rodney," Sheppard had said, grinning like crazy. No more exploding windows, and he'd had an excuse to go out and blow the shit out things. Really just a banner day all around. He would have hugged McKay if McKay wasn't so bundled up that he was too bulky for even Ronon to get his arms around.
----
After the windows it was the city's propulsion system. The problem was that part of the propulsion system sat below the city, which in their current position, without enough power to run the shield 24-7, meant that it was sitting in the water. McKay only started worrying about the propulsion system two days before it went out, so John only had time to tell him that he was sure all the important bits were protected and that it wouldn't be a big deal before he was proven completely wrong.
"Look," Sheppard had said. "I don't see why this is such a big deal. I mean," he had hastily added, in response to the worryingly wild-eyed look McKay had turned in his direction, "trust me, I want them up and running as much as the next guy, but at least they're not putting anyone in the infirmary right now, yeah?"
"Why is this a big deal? How is this not a big deal? Should I put it into simpler terms for you? Oh, how about the fact that we can't move the city. We're basically sitting ducks right now!" McKay's voice had risen a little at the end of this-- not quite shrill, but getting there.
"Sitting ducks for what?" Carter had asked. "With all due respect, Rodney, I agree with Colonel Sheppard here. We're not actively under attack, and even if we were we probably wouldn't be moving the city."
"Just you wait," McKay had muttered darkly. "Now that we can't move, something will come up."
----
"Something" turned out to be icebergs.
"Icebergs. Can you believe this? Fucking icebergs." McKay sloped up next to Sheppard at the biggest gateroom window, looking glumly out at the white mass, fuzzy on the horizon still, but definitely bigger than it had been a week before. Long-range scans had made no pretense about its size; apparently it had been brewing on the far side of the planet for quite a while. Fucking icebergs was right. "I told you," McKay said. "I told you, we were going to need to move the city as soon as those thrusters shorted out."
Sheppard went to lean on the wall, then remembered the nanites and shifted his weight back to his feet. Just to be safe. "Can we fix them?"
"The thrusters? Trust me, I've been working on it, I haven't slept more than an hour at a time in days, not that you would notice the difference, and if we can fix them it's going to have to be remotely, I don't know, a giant robot arm or something, there's mechanical damage so it's not like I can just reprogram them, and we can't send a diver down, not with the water the temperature it is right now, and I wouldn't trust a 'jumper down there either, not with the track record we've got going lately." Sheppard opened his mouth. "Don't ask about the nanites, I've tried everything I can and there's just no way to give them that complex a behavior set without retaining too many of their replicator functions."
Sheppard closed his mouth.
"What?" McKay turned to look at him, maybe the first time Sheppard had looked him full in the face in weeks, since McKay was usually riveted to a screen or a machine or pages of numbers, and it was obvious that he hadn't been sleeping. His eyes had a reddish, twitchy, over-caffeinated look to them, and his hair was starting to look like a softer, much less intentional version of Sheppard's own. It made Sheppard want to order him to go take a nap, but McKay would just say something snide about not being military and go inject himself with pure espresso to prove a point.
"Nothing. Look, let's..." McKay had turned to stare back out the iceberg, looking tired and forlorn and like it had personally stolen his breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner, snack, and midnight dinner, and it was in that moment that Sheppard had an idea. Possibly a terrible idea, definitely not a McKay-caliber idea, but an idea nonetheless. "Let's go check out the iceberg."
"Check out the iceberg?" McKay blinked at him, redly. Sheppard grinned. He couldn't get McKay to sleep if McKay had sufficient things to freak out about, but he could at least get McKay out of the labs for more than an hour.
"Check out the iceberg! We think it's headed for the city, but maybe it's not, maybe it's got some... some property or other that makes it blast-able, maybe we can knock it off course, and--"
"--and maybe Lantean ice isn't exactly the same as Earth ice, it might have different crystallization patterns, that would be an amazing discovery, and I'll bet the microbiologists would kill to get their hands on some cores," McKay said, getting into the spirit of it and starting to perk up a bit.
"Wait, wait, microbiologists? We are talking about ice here, McKay, right?"
McKay waved a hand, airily dismissing everything about the general ignorance of John Sheppard in a single gesture. "Glacial ice on Earth has tons of bacteria and microorganisms in it too, they make for fascinating study if you're into that kind of... wriggly biological thing. That's not exactly a new discovery, you know, unless you've been living under a rock." McKay brightened further. "Under a rock, I guess that's what you call 'the military', though, isn't it?" Sheppard bristled; how the hell was he supposed to have heard about micro-ice-bugs? It wasn't like that was general fucking knowledge-- but McKay was looking better, more alert and less slumped.
He tightened his jaw and reminded himself that this was his idea, and returning McKay to happy, bouncy, frenetically paranoid, miracle-working form was, after all, the point. "I'll go warm up the 'jumper, then?"
"The puddlejumpers don't need to be warmed up, their starting system is an on-off current channel, there's no gradation in essential on-ness..."
"Figure of speech, Rodney."
McKay looked around from the window and blinked. "I knew that. An completely inaccurate figure of speech, was my point, given our current favored mode of transit."
"See you in the 'jumper bay, Rodney. Go get your snow pants."
He had been about to ask about the nanites. He wasn't about to tell McKay that, though.
-----
Sheppard didn't even try to take off his goggles this time. Out on the open water, the wind was terrible: sharp and biting and whipping into every tiny opening in his clothing. He hadn't been flayed alive by knives (yet-- in Pegasus it generally paid to end sentences describing things that hadn't happened to you with 'yet'), but he imagined it would feel something like this.
McKay was doing his giant stuffed blob impression again. He couldn't even put his arms down by his sides properly. Sheppard had thought that he looked a lot better, in the 'jumper-- he was wearing what he considered heavy-duty cold weather gear, and he could still put his arms down, at least as much as he normally could in his tac vest. Out on the iceberg, he was starting to rethink that. McKay might look like he'd been comic-book inflated, and he might be waddling around like an unusually spherical penguin, but he also wasn't making any noises like he was being flayed alive. And the comms were on; if McKay felt like he was getting sliced up, everyone within comm distance would be well aware of how he felt about that. He would probably be blaming Sheppard.
But no, McKay was babbling happily to one of the damn microbiologists about core sampling techniques while they drilled something that looked like a Pringles can braced in orthodontic head gear down into the big fucking chunk of ice underneath them.
Sheppard set his jaw and folded his arms and tried to look handsomely windswept, instead of how he felt, which was fucking freezing.
----
One of the best things about Atlantis was the way that the hot water never ran out. Serious hot water tanks from heaven or something. Zelenka had explained it once; it was something to do with conduits in the floors capturing excreted human body heat and converting it to energy that was used specifically to warm the water. Very green, so far as Sheppard could tell. Hippies back on Earth would probably love to get their hands on the tech. All he cared about was the fact that the hot water never ran out on him. Never.
Except, of course, when John Sheppard wanted nothing in the Universe more than a hot shower. When he had already stripped down and gotten into the shower and turned the knob, then there was no hot water.
Obviously.
Shower freeze-outs were a favorite prank of the scientists. In fact, so far as Sheppard knew, they were the only people in the city who had the ability to turn the hot water on and off.
He was going to kill McKay.
----
He started ranting before he even got into the labs. It was best to make your approach loudly, so that McKay didn't have a chance to get up to full volume before you did.
Zelenka and two other scientists looked up in alarm, but McKay didn't even grace him with a twitch. He was bowed over the head gear, now sans Pringles can and instead securing a cloudy white column. Sheppard was able to stomp right up to look at the scanner over his shoulder before McKay noticed him, and that was only because he happened to drip on McKay's head.
"Hey! Busy! Doing research, making historical discoveries, what are you--" McKay turned and looked up at Sheppard, stopping in the middle of his sentence with his mouth hanging open. This was so un-McKay-like that Sheppard had to automatically reach up to feel his own face, worried that he was bleeding or something. His wet face. Oh.
He folded his arms over his bare chest and tried to act like he wasn't standing, dripping wet, in the science labs, wearing only his uniform pants and probably catching his death of cold if he hadn't done so already. "I didn't appreciate your little prank there, McKay."
McKay's eyes narrowed. "What prank?"
Two things became immediately clear. For one, McKay's attention was pretty thoroughly absorbed by the core. They had determined that the iceberg was too big to be blasted apart or shifted off course, even if they could get the C-4 to work, which didn't seem likely in this weather. The situation was still pretty bad, and McKay was putting all his energy into it. He wasn't just running simulations or simultaneously testing 5 equations or anything else that left him enough free time to bother pranking people. Also, if he had cut the heat to Sheppard's shower, he would have been the first one gleefully crowing when Sheppard came storming down to the labs.
"There's no hot water in my shower," Sheppard said, sheepishly. "I thought..."
"Oh, my god, call the Marines, the Colonel's been thinking." McKay was already turning back to the core sample. "Maybe somebody flushed, I don't know, I don't care, better things to do, cities to save, time is money and lives. Why don't you go make yourself a tenth as useful and productive as I am on a second-by-second basis?"
Sheppard turned around and slunk out, silently daring Zelenka to say something. Zelenka rolled his eyes and turned back to his computer.
----
Two hours later, his shower water was still cold. So was the water from the faucets. Dry and dressed, if not exactly clean, Sheppard decided that a tactical reappraisal was necessary and set off to brave McKay and the labs again.
"Congratulations, Colonel," McKay said, glancing up as he walked in. "You were the first of 34 people to make their way down here to personally deliver the news that their hot water was out. It's city-wide. Also, thank you for respecting the 'no shirt, no shoes-- no civil conversation' rule of the labs this time around. I know it's such a strain for you." The core sample was gone, hopefully to a freezer somewhere, and all the scientists were working at a pace that Sheppard recognized as 'not quite panicked, but revving up to it'. The fact that McKay was still cracking jokes wasn't necessarily a good sign; it seemed that McKay's mind moved fast enough to generate annoyed wisecracks at approximately the speed of light, regardless of the situation.
And jeez-- forget your shirt one time, under really very trying circumstances, and McKay acted like you forgot your shirt all the time.
Since nobody was screaming or rending their clothes in horror just yet, Sheppard sauntered over and glanced at the computer screen over McKay's shoulder, recognizing a schematic overhead view of Atlantis. There were red lines all over it. "What the hell, McKay?"
"Power from non-essential heating systems is being siphoned off. The heat in the 'jumper bay is way down, we think because it's not a living area. A number of empty sections and storage areas have lost heat altogether. Most of the hallways have lost several degrees of ambient temperature and are dropping slowly, although main rooms are holding steady so far. And no hot water."
"I beg to differ," Sheppard muttered, trying to follow the red lines with his eyes. "Hot water is not a non-essential system." He gave up on the schematic. "Where's all the power going?"
"That's what we're trying to find out. It's not as easy to track as you might think, not when it's pulling from everywhere at once and these sensors don't tell us anything about the direction of power flow and people keep interrupting you to tell you that they can't take a shower."
"This isn't just the heating system going out again?"
McKay shot him a Look. "No, that was a mechanical malfunction. This is very clearly a power drain. The heating system itself is fine, thank you, and likely to stay that way, thank you again Rodney you genius where would we all be without you."
"We'd be fucked," Sheppard said. "Keep on it. I'll check in."
Although McKay's eyes remained on the computer screen, the eyeroll was implied clearly enough in his voice. "Keep on it. Yes of course, Colonel, I never would have bothered without your orders."
Sheppard thought that there should definitely be some kind of limit on the number of times a guy had to slink shamefacedly out of the labs in one day.
----
He tried to go to sleep, but somehow the knowledge that there was a huge fucking iceberg bearing down on the city-- his city-- managed to keep him awake. He stared up for a while, the immense craggy white face of the iceberg scraping slowly across his ceiling. It had probably been a mistake to go look at the fucking thing. Sure, it was nice to know the face of your enemy and all that, but not when the face of your enemy decided to haunt your waking dreams.
He was starting to replay that scene from Titanic in his head, the one where he was clinging to a scrap of boat in the water and promising he would never let go while McKay was sinking below the waves (it probably didn't mean anything that he was in the Kate Winslet position in this particular scenario. Probably). This meant that it was time for drastic measures of distraction. It was 3 am, which limited his options, but he had an idea of who else would be awake at this hour.
He almost forgot to pull on a tshirt before leaving his room, but remembered just in time.
----
The lights were off and at first he thought the lab was deserted, but a blue glow led him to a corner where McKay had rigged 5 screens together so that he could blow up the schematic and look at it in detail. He was tracing red lines with his finger and muttering to himself. Sheppard folded his arms quietly and watched. It wasn't that he wanted to watch McKay work or anything; he just thought it would be prudent to wait for McKay to take a breather and not risk disrupting the process of his genius and losing the Unified Field Theory or whatever.
Eventually McKay sat back and stretched his arms out over his head, flexing his shoulderblades. Sheppard noted (militaristically and professionally, of course) that all the offworld missions had been doing him some good. He coughed lightly.
McKay made an embarrassing yipping noise that Sheppard immediately planned to imitate the next time the team all had lunch together. It was worth the glare that followed.
"Said I'd be checking in."
McKay looked pointedly down at his watch, then back up, still glaring. Sheppard leaned a hip against a nearby table and looked down, arms still folded. McKay had the patience of a goldfish; he could wait.
Sure enough, McKay broke first and replaced the glare with his usual half-amused, half-annoyed expression, softened a bit by the fact that he obviously still hadn't been sleeping. The blue light of the computer screens highlighted the edges of his hair, making the mess of it look even crazier. He was in the same tshirt that he had had on under his uniform shirt when they came out of the 'jumper with the bits of iceberg.
"So. Any luck?" Sheppard nodded at the screen.
McKay half turned in his chair and dragged a finger along one of the red lines, going all the way out to the edge of one of the piers and stopping in a large circular room with a slightly smaller circle inside it. "I think all the power's being diverted here. No one's explored that part of the city, so no, I don't know what it is or why it would need so much power, or why it would need it now. I was going to wait until morning so we could take a full team down to examine it, obviously I need to go check it out but we have no idea what it is and it could be dangerous, we should have a Marine escort and probably a full medical team just in case, and--"
"--and let's go, Rodney." McKay stared. Sheppard held up both his hands. "Hey, why not? Someone needs to go check it out. It's still draining power, time is, uh, of the essence. Y'know. Stuff. You're here. I'm here. We're both awake. Let's go."
"You're a crazy idiot who's going to get me killed," McKay said, but he said it while he was grabbing a scanner and getting out of his chair, so it was every bit as good as a 'yes'.
----
It was a long way out to the room indicated on the schematics, even with the transporters. The hallways were definitely cooler than the labs had been, and Sheppard was exhausted-- and he knew McKay was too; if anything, McKay should be more tired, because McKay was much less suited to running around on an iceberg all day long-- but it was an oddly pleasant walk. The city was quiet except for a low, constant hum, more something he felt than heard. The only real sounds were his and McKay's footfalls, and the quiet mutterings McKay made when he consulted the schematic or the energy readings on his portable scanner.
The door, when they reached it, looked like any other door in the city. There wasn't any indication that some giant power-sucking machine lurked inside. Sheppard waved his hand at it, making it swoosh open, and looked at McKay, who was staring fixedly at his scanner. "Hey. You want me to go in first?"
McKay shouldered around him distractedly and wandered into the room. Sheppard stared up at the ceiling briefly-- please, Atlantis, give me the strength I need to not kill my best scientist if you don't do it first-- and followed.
In the room was a gun.
At least, that's what it looked like. A really, really, really big gun, almost filling the entire room and raised up off the floor on a little platform. There was what looked like a seat-and-console station on the top and back of it, about where the hammer would have been on a handgun, with a clear bubble around it.
Sheppard lost track of McKay for a minute because he was so busy staring at the gun. It was bigger than an entire tank. It was also humming on a slightly different frequency from the rest of the city, a low seismic thrum that spoke of energy and violence and really awesome things. He put his hand on its muzzle, feeling a slight vibration and definite warmth through his fingertips. He instantly forgave the thing for sucking up so much power. Just that light touch to its side, feeling what it might do, was amazing, almost sensual, and he had to take a deep breath and remind himself that getting wildly turned on by a giant Ancient vaguely-gun-shaped machine was both really Freudian and really inappropriate.
"Of course!" McKay's voice was echoey in the round space. Sheppard immediately tore his gaze away from the gun (the beautiful, beautiful enormous gun) and spotted a window on the other side of it, where McKay was silhouetted, pressed up against the glass.
"What's up?" Sheppard circled around the gun, carefully staying away from what looked like its business end. He stepped up to McKay's back and looked out the window, but all he saw was an ocean-level pier extension with little chunks of ice floating on the water lapping at its sides.
McKay was practically quivering with some strong emotion-- happiness, or relief, Sheppard hoped. "God, it's so obvious, I don't know why it took me so long to-- look at the pier!"
"Rodney, I'm looking at the pier."
"See the sensors?" Sheppard looked harder. There were flat blocks of color along the sides of the pier, touching the water, but they looked decorative. It wasn't obvious. McKay turned around, not giving Sheppard time to back up, and they were way too close, but McKay was grinning. McKay was grinning, and Sheppard had no idea what was going on but he was grinning too. If McKay was grinning, they were going to be OK.
"I see colors, Rodney."
"You really are astoundingly dense, you know that? It's like... you know those cars with the automatic windshield wipers that turn on when it starts raining? You know how those work?"
Sheppard thought carefully, folding his arms and pretending that he didn't in any way notice how close he was to McKay. He could almost smell him. McKay smelled like coffee. "I would guess that they work by... sensors."
"Yes, usually one sensor, and it turns on when a drop of rain hits it. It's a, a probability thing, it might be raining for a few minutes before your wipers turn on because drops of rain are hitting all around but not on the sensor, but the system works because in all probability if you're in rain strong enough to make you need the wipers you're going to get your sensor hit sooner rather than later." He paused for a breath. "Ice sensors. When the water got cold enough to crystallize little areas of it, they bumped up against the sensors, and the machine turned on automatically. I would guess that it needed to collect a certain amount of energy to work, so it had to turn on automatically to give it enough time to warm up. Unlike the puddlejumpers, which do not need to be warmed up, ever."
"Rodney. Tell me it's a gun."
One of the corners of McKay's mouth quirked up. "It's a gun. A heat gun. A super-concentrated emergency heat gun. It's an ice-cutter."
Very, very deliberately Sheppard reached out and put both of his hands on McKay's shoulders. "Can I use it?"
"Well, I only just saw it, you know, obviously I don't know exactly how it works yet, but I would guess that you sit in the chair, and the platform raises you up through the roof, which presumably opens as you'll agree if you look up and check out the spiral grooves in the ceiling, and you get up high enough to see all around the city and then you aim the gun and. Yes. Shoot icebergs."
"Shoot icebergs. With the really big gun."
"With the ice-cutter--"
That was when Sheppard leaned in and kissed him. Because he was going to get to fire a gun bigger than most vehicles he had piloted, and he was going to blow the shit out of a fucking iceberg, and this was a banner day times ten.