new fic ( Blinding Light (Stargate Universe/SG Atlantis part 6 of 6)
Title: Blinding Light
Author: karrenia
Fandoms: Stargate Universe/SG Atlantis
Rating: PG
Prompt: #68 lightning
Disclaimer: Both shows belong to their respective creators and producers. They are not mine.
"Blinding Light"
Sheppard was in the dojo sparring with Teyla when the urgent summons from Dr. Weir came through the city’s communication system.
He immediately dropped the staves he’d been holding up defensively in front of his exposed left flank, flashing her an irrepressible grin and trying not to notice the throbbing in that area that was slowly spreading to the rest of his body.
For her part, Teyla simply responded in kind, her own held in a loose grip, saying, “Go, we were almost finished here, anyway.”
Moving at a near trot, but not yet a run, Sheppard covered the distance between the dojo and the command center in record time, he was worried, her message had been crisp, yet urgent, and he had not known what to expect upon his arrival.
“What’s up?” he asked.
Dr. Elizabeth Weir stood near to Major Lorne and the other technicians who were on duty during the late night shift, her head bent and her eyes intent on whatever was currently showing on the screen, but glanced up just long enough to acknowledge his arrival. “Glad you could make it,” she said.
“Wouldn’t miss it, what am I supposed to be looking at?” he asked
“See for yourself,” she replied.
Looking at the screen with the array of red and blue and green blips scattered across it that looked to him like the drop cloth or the sketch pad that would not have been out of place in Jackson Pollock’s art studio, he cursed under his breath.
That many blips usually meant only one thing, and all bad. “Wraith?” he grimly asked.
“It’s too soon to know for certain,” Dr. Elizabeth Weir answered calmly. “But what are the odds?”
At that point, Major Evan Lorne spoke up, to say, “Long range sensors are not picking up the typical energy signatures given off by the Wraith vessels, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. They could be masking them, by running silent.”
“He’s right,” Sheppard said, with a grim nod. “But why now, and why so many? This isn’t like them, one of things that have worked so well in our favor, is the divisness between the hives; the more they fight amongst themselves, the more we don’t have to mess with them.”
“He’s right,” Major Lorne added.
“I think I’m going to need a score card to keep track of all the players,” remarked Young pointedly, then offered Dr. Weir a wry grin, “but until then, can you break it down for me?”
“That briefing will have to wait, I’m afraid,” she replied, and would have gone on but whatever she might have said was lost in a resounding heavy thud of something massive slamming into the city’s energy shields repeatedly.
“What the hell was that?” exclaimed Major Sheppard.
“I don’t know, but I want to find out, and I want to find out now!” Weir ordered. “Mister Lorne, do we have anything within visual range?”
Lorne and the other technicians in the command center rapidly bent down to their instruments and panels and input various instructions into the computers to sort through all of the random signals and images that were being picked up by the long and short range sensors, trying to formulate them up into a coherent whole.
When the images finally appeared on the screen, what they all saw was nothing like anything any of them had expected. What they saw were not ships, but they had a vague impression of some kind of space-worthy vessel, with bristling armaments on their noses and underbellies. They were shaped much like the disturbingly familiar dart shape of the Wraith, but there were differences as well.
For one, they were much smaller, quicker and apparently with no room for more than one pilot.
“Where the hell did they come from?” Young muttered to himself.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Sheppard remarked, absently sweeping one hand through his hair, the other rapidly opening and closing into a clenched fist.
“Try to hail them,” Weir ordered.
“This Atlantis, attention to unknown vessels, your approach is in dangerous proximity to our outer defenses, you are hereby ordered to pull back!” Lorne said, over the city’s communication network.
Over the two-way communication channel the only response they received in return were high-pitched whines and radio static.
“No response, Sir,” one of the technicians stated.
“Continue on all open channels, and in all known languages,” Weir stated.
No sooner than that was done; the earlier thud was repeated, this time tripled over a hundred times as the initial wave of the unknown vessels began to converge on at least more than a dozen points of the city’s energy shield.
“This attack makes no sense,” Young observed. “Their attack is concentrated all over the place, there’s been no attempt to make contact with us, or reply to our hails, and there seems to be no overall strategy, just battering over and over again at random points along the shield.”
“How do you want to play this?” Sheppard asked, turning to Dr. Weir.”
“I don’t know. The city’s shielding has taken worse poundings than this, it might be the better course of policy to simply wait them out.”
“You figure that they’ll get tired and go back to wherever it is that they came from?” Lorne asked wryly.
“Is the Daedalus within range?” Sheppard asked.
“Caudwell took it out for maneuvers over an hour ago, his flight-log said they would be gone for at least seventy two hours,” Lorne replied.
“We have the Destiny, but it’s still in dry-dock,” remarked Young.
No sooner than the words were out of his mouth when a trio of disheveled, flushed, and excited scientists rushed into the Command Center with Eli Wallace trailing on their heels, all of them carrying their laptops and seemingly talking over each other in their haste to make themselves heard.
“What is it, Rodney,” Elizabeth asked.
“You need to see this!” Rodney replied, when he finally got his breath back and ignored Radek Zelenka’s knobby elbow jarring him in the side.
“We’ve been studying the drones attack patterns and have come to the conclusion that they are not as random as they at first appeared, in fact, it is their belief that the drones are drawn to attack the city because of the energy signal put out by city and Destiny.”
“Let me see,” Sheppard stated.
Radek stepped forward and with Eli’s help set it down on one of the consoles so everyone could have a good view of the screen. Leisurely rotating on the screen was a series of images of a mathematical parabola, its curving lines describing degrees of arc and speed, and movement.
“A u-shaped curve with certain specific properties." Formally, a parabola is defined as follows: For a given point, called the focus, and a given line not through the focus, called the directrix, a parabola is the locus of points such that the distance to the focus equals the distance to the directrix,” Radek explained.
“If the shields fail the drones will get into the city proper and worse, if they fail completely they are sitting atop metric tons of water…” Rodney paused to draw in a much needed breath and then turned to glance meaningfully at both Weir and Sheppard.
“Parabolas can open up, down, left, right, or in some other arbitrary direction. Any parabola can be repositioned and rescaled to fit exactly on any other parabola - that is, all parabolas are geometrically similar,” Rush added quietly.
Young, for his part, not familiar with either of the two scientists, waited to see how it would play out, but from the looks on the faces of both Dr. Rush and his young protégé, Eli Wallace, he could only conclude that the odds added up in one of two columns, and it wasn’t good.
“So what do we do?” Weir asked.
“The chair?
“What chair? What are you talking about?” Colonel Young demanded.
“That’s right, I don’t recall if we show you the Ancient Chair when we took on you the formal tour of the place, but unless we go out there and take our ‘guests’ head on, the Chair might be our best bet,” Weir replied.
“I’m all for the head-on approach,” Sheppard remarked.
Weir, no stranger to making rapid decisions when the occasion demanded it stated: “No, we need you to remain here, so you’ll begin a counter-offensive, by fighting fire with fire. Our drones against those who seem so determined to get in.
Just then another resounding thumping shook the city, and the technicians began to rattle off damage reports that came flooding in from the other sections, all reported minimal damage, and only Doctor Beckett reported that he’d been treating anyone who suffered bruises or scrapes from falling down or the like.
“This gone way past the point of annoyance, let’s get to it,’ Sheppard exclaimed.
“Go,” Weir replied
***
Sheppard did not quite run to the chamber where the Ancient’s device known familiarly as the Chair was located, but it came close. And it wasn’t because he didn’t try, this wasn’t his first time facing unknown and perhaps extremely dangerous odds, no was anyone else stationed at Pegasus Base, whether they be civilian, soldier, or even Athosian.
John Sheppard arrived at the chamber and sat down, and immediately the sensation of being connected with the City’s awareness enveloped; it was an extremely heady feeling, but one he could not afford to dwell overmuch upon, but time was of the essence.
In his mind’s eye Sheppard saw the parabolic arcs of the drones as the swooped and swarmed upon the city’s shields, battering against them one at one time here, in groups of a dozen elsewhere, and almost a hundred strong near the docking bays.
Offering a feral grin of determination in response, Sheppard focused his concentration and sent a command that would launch the city’s own remote-controlled drones in response, as they collided and beat the attacking opponents back.
Soon the attacks came fast and furious and if he hadn’t known any better, it almost seemed as if the attacks became even more frenzied than they had been before.
It was as if, whatever intelligence or computer programming that guided them sensed the counter-offensive and either were attempting to compensate, or even that if they had, they simply did not know how and were beginning to panic.
***
Elsewhere, Rush stood in front of the Destiny’s engines along with Dr. Rodney McKay, Radek Zelenka and Eli Wallace were debating whether or not they should shut down the ship’s power supply, if that would help serve to divert the course of the alien drones’ attack.
Meanwhile, Sheppard was so intent on what he was doing that the appearance of Rodney in the room, tapping on his shoulder and talking into his air, saying how it was over, that he could stop now, that it was all right.
Sheppard blinked and appeared to very gradually come out of the highly concentrated level of attention and slumped forward, sensing, but not really registering on his consciousness when Rodney caught him in his arms before he slumped to floor.
“You did it! It’s over, although I must say if it had not been for my brilliant calculations we never would figure out that they were been drawing to the Destiny’s engines,” Rodney preened.
“Did we get them all?” Sheppard muttered under his breath, leaning on Rodney’s shoulder, for a heartbeat or two, before he gently but firmly shrugged away and forced himself to stand upright, taking several ragged breaths before he was fully able to be attention to what was going on around him, or what the other man was saying.
“Oh, I’d say about ninety seven, ninety six percent, the rest is pretty metal confetti out there, which we go and collect with the puddle jumpers once everything settles down around here.”
“When does that ever happen?” John Sheppard joked.
“Now that often,” Rodney replied jovially, smacking the taller man good-naturedly on the shoulder.
“You okay?”
“No, but I will be,” Sheppard replied. “Let’s go talk to Elizabeth and the others, and see how they’re faring.”
***
Conclusion
Everett Young was in his assigned quarters, sort of focused on getting his belongings unpacked and sorted out, and deciding where to stash them; the normally simple task made more difficult by the fact that his thoughts kept wandering and he felt emotionally drained by recent events.
When he finally moved to open a drawer and carefully place his folded uniform slacks inside the pinging of the electronic door chime interrupted his admittedly meandering thoughts. “Come,” he automatically said.
Whoever it was that had come to see him in his quarters after hours, cleared his throat and did not say anything right away. When Everett
Young turned around, he could not help but twist his facial muscles into a grimace of distaste, but immediately schooled his expression into a polite mask.
“Dr. Rush, to what do I the pleasure?” he asked, perhaps, in his own mind, a bit more harshly than he had intended.
If Rush noticed that slight inflection in either his voice or demeanor he chose not to mention it.
“Believe I wouldn’t be here at all, if not for the, shall we say, the change in our shared circumstances,” the other man quietly stated, looking up from where he stared at those long elegant hands that could fly across the console or write such complex equations. Nicolas
Rush was also well aware of the bad blood that flowed between them, as well as the acrimonious and often extremely harsh words that they had exchanged in the past, for both personal and professional reasons.
For whatever set of circumstances had conspired to bring him to this point in time; he no longer held as much desire to see the older man suffer for the order he had given to exile him on that remote planet.
Nor did he wish to see the other man come harm, at least, not as much as he had in the past. It was not that he no longer cared to exact any kind of revenge, and the fate of the crew of the Destiny was perhaps a bit much for any one person to assume full responsibility for.
After all he knew his own reputation, brilliant, outspoken, arrogant, and extremely difficult to work and get along with. And he could even be a bit of an ass, if he were being honest with himself, when you came right down to it. While Doctor Nicholas Rush knew himself to be many things, he was not an entirely unreasonable man.
For his part, Everett Young, also knew himself to be stubborn, a by the book type of seasoned commander, and while he had never personally liked the arrogant bastard, he had to admit that we clearly very good at what he did.
Neither had ever be willing to back down, and Rush was all that the fault for their long-standing feud, if one could call it that. In any case, he had given the matter a great deal of thought, weighed the pros and cons and added his own turmoil of emotions into the equation; and had come to the inevitable conclusion; it was time to bury the proverbial hatchet.
“What do you want?” Young asked.
“I want many things, some attainable and some not as much, “ said Rush softly, as he removed his hands out of the pockets of his slacks and held them out in the gesture commonly recognized as the universal gesture of good will.
Young shook his head and sighed, “I don’t know, I honestly don’t know, what you mean by that. But that hardly matters at this point, do it?”
“It means that I’ve come to realize that it’s high time that the two of us ceased to butt heads and, try and attempt at arriving at some kind of reconciliation.”
“It’s interesting that you would be the one to come to me rather than the other way around, I wonder why that is,” Everett Young mused.
“Perhaps, it’s perhaps while you’ve been understandably preoccupied with matters such as keeping the ship and its crew intact through our, transition, it gave you very little time to think of such matters in the grander scheme of things,” Rush stated, offering one of his infrequent, but sincere half-smiles.
“I suppose so. I don’t mind telling that, this, whatever it is that we have here,” said Young seriously, and then trailed off, half-turning on his heel to steal a glance out the window of his quarters, and then returned to Rush, “Its’s not everything I expected it to be, but again, I honestly don’t know what I was expecting.”
“Neither did I, but I think we owe a great deal to learn, and I for one intend to take full use of any and all experiences and opportunities that come my way,” Rush said emphatically.
“I would expect any less from you,” Young replied, and despite his initial reservations and his own preconceived notions, the iciness and brittleness gradually seeped away and quite being aware that he was doing so, extended his hand to the other man. “A truce?”
Rush extended his own hand, and then sealed the bargain. “A truce, and one that I intend to keep. You have my word on that.”
“Duly noted, and you have mine as well,” said Young in return.
“Nor would I expect anything less than your best, Colonel,” said Rush quietly.
Author: karrenia
Fandoms: Stargate Universe/SG Atlantis
Rating: PG
Prompt: #68 lightning
Disclaimer: Both shows belong to their respective creators and producers. They are not mine.
"Blinding Light"
Sheppard was in the dojo sparring with Teyla when the urgent summons from Dr. Weir came through the city’s communication system.
He immediately dropped the staves he’d been holding up defensively in front of his exposed left flank, flashing her an irrepressible grin and trying not to notice the throbbing in that area that was slowly spreading to the rest of his body.
For her part, Teyla simply responded in kind, her own held in a loose grip, saying, “Go, we were almost finished here, anyway.”
Moving at a near trot, but not yet a run, Sheppard covered the distance between the dojo and the command center in record time, he was worried, her message had been crisp, yet urgent, and he had not known what to expect upon his arrival.
“What’s up?” he asked.
Dr. Elizabeth Weir stood near to Major Lorne and the other technicians who were on duty during the late night shift, her head bent and her eyes intent on whatever was currently showing on the screen, but glanced up just long enough to acknowledge his arrival. “Glad you could make it,” she said.
“Wouldn’t miss it, what am I supposed to be looking at?” he asked
“See for yourself,” she replied.
Looking at the screen with the array of red and blue and green blips scattered across it that looked to him like the drop cloth or the sketch pad that would not have been out of place in Jackson Pollock’s art studio, he cursed under his breath.
That many blips usually meant only one thing, and all bad. “Wraith?” he grimly asked.
“It’s too soon to know for certain,” Dr. Elizabeth Weir answered calmly. “But what are the odds?”
At that point, Major Evan Lorne spoke up, to say, “Long range sensors are not picking up the typical energy signatures given off by the Wraith vessels, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. They could be masking them, by running silent.”
“He’s right,” Sheppard said, with a grim nod. “But why now, and why so many? This isn’t like them, one of things that have worked so well in our favor, is the divisness between the hives; the more they fight amongst themselves, the more we don’t have to mess with them.”
“He’s right,” Major Lorne added.
“I think I’m going to need a score card to keep track of all the players,” remarked Young pointedly, then offered Dr. Weir a wry grin, “but until then, can you break it down for me?”
“That briefing will have to wait, I’m afraid,” she replied, and would have gone on but whatever she might have said was lost in a resounding heavy thud of something massive slamming into the city’s energy shields repeatedly.
“What the hell was that?” exclaimed Major Sheppard.
“I don’t know, but I want to find out, and I want to find out now!” Weir ordered. “Mister Lorne, do we have anything within visual range?”
Lorne and the other technicians in the command center rapidly bent down to their instruments and panels and input various instructions into the computers to sort through all of the random signals and images that were being picked up by the long and short range sensors, trying to formulate them up into a coherent whole.
When the images finally appeared on the screen, what they all saw was nothing like anything any of them had expected. What they saw were not ships, but they had a vague impression of some kind of space-worthy vessel, with bristling armaments on their noses and underbellies. They were shaped much like the disturbingly familiar dart shape of the Wraith, but there were differences as well.
For one, they were much smaller, quicker and apparently with no room for more than one pilot.
“Where the hell did they come from?” Young muttered to himself.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Sheppard remarked, absently sweeping one hand through his hair, the other rapidly opening and closing into a clenched fist.
“Try to hail them,” Weir ordered.
“This Atlantis, attention to unknown vessels, your approach is in dangerous proximity to our outer defenses, you are hereby ordered to pull back!” Lorne said, over the city’s communication network.
Over the two-way communication channel the only response they received in return were high-pitched whines and radio static.
“No response, Sir,” one of the technicians stated.
“Continue on all open channels, and in all known languages,” Weir stated.
No sooner than that was done; the earlier thud was repeated, this time tripled over a hundred times as the initial wave of the unknown vessels began to converge on at least more than a dozen points of the city’s energy shield.
“This attack makes no sense,” Young observed. “Their attack is concentrated all over the place, there’s been no attempt to make contact with us, or reply to our hails, and there seems to be no overall strategy, just battering over and over again at random points along the shield.”
“How do you want to play this?” Sheppard asked, turning to Dr. Weir.”
“I don’t know. The city’s shielding has taken worse poundings than this, it might be the better course of policy to simply wait them out.”
“You figure that they’ll get tired and go back to wherever it is that they came from?” Lorne asked wryly.
“Is the Daedalus within range?” Sheppard asked.
“Caudwell took it out for maneuvers over an hour ago, his flight-log said they would be gone for at least seventy two hours,” Lorne replied.
“We have the Destiny, but it’s still in dry-dock,” remarked Young.
No sooner than the words were out of his mouth when a trio of disheveled, flushed, and excited scientists rushed into the Command Center with Eli Wallace trailing on their heels, all of them carrying their laptops and seemingly talking over each other in their haste to make themselves heard.
“What is it, Rodney,” Elizabeth asked.
“You need to see this!” Rodney replied, when he finally got his breath back and ignored Radek Zelenka’s knobby elbow jarring him in the side.
“We’ve been studying the drones attack patterns and have come to the conclusion that they are not as random as they at first appeared, in fact, it is their belief that the drones are drawn to attack the city because of the energy signal put out by city and Destiny.”
“Let me see,” Sheppard stated.
Radek stepped forward and with Eli’s help set it down on one of the consoles so everyone could have a good view of the screen. Leisurely rotating on the screen was a series of images of a mathematical parabola, its curving lines describing degrees of arc and speed, and movement.
“A u-shaped curve with certain specific properties." Formally, a parabola is defined as follows: For a given point, called the focus, and a given line not through the focus, called the directrix, a parabola is the locus of points such that the distance to the focus equals the distance to the directrix,” Radek explained.
“If the shields fail the drones will get into the city proper and worse, if they fail completely they are sitting atop metric tons of water…” Rodney paused to draw in a much needed breath and then turned to glance meaningfully at both Weir and Sheppard.
“Parabolas can open up, down, left, right, or in some other arbitrary direction. Any parabola can be repositioned and rescaled to fit exactly on any other parabola - that is, all parabolas are geometrically similar,” Rush added quietly.
Young, for his part, not familiar with either of the two scientists, waited to see how it would play out, but from the looks on the faces of both Dr. Rush and his young protégé, Eli Wallace, he could only conclude that the odds added up in one of two columns, and it wasn’t good.
“So what do we do?” Weir asked.
“The chair?
“What chair? What are you talking about?” Colonel Young demanded.
“That’s right, I don’t recall if we show you the Ancient Chair when we took on you the formal tour of the place, but unless we go out there and take our ‘guests’ head on, the Chair might be our best bet,” Weir replied.
“I’m all for the head-on approach,” Sheppard remarked.
Weir, no stranger to making rapid decisions when the occasion demanded it stated: “No, we need you to remain here, so you’ll begin a counter-offensive, by fighting fire with fire. Our drones against those who seem so determined to get in.
Just then another resounding thumping shook the city, and the technicians began to rattle off damage reports that came flooding in from the other sections, all reported minimal damage, and only Doctor Beckett reported that he’d been treating anyone who suffered bruises or scrapes from falling down or the like.
“This gone way past the point of annoyance, let’s get to it,’ Sheppard exclaimed.
“Go,” Weir replied
***
Sheppard did not quite run to the chamber where the Ancient’s device known familiarly as the Chair was located, but it came close. And it wasn’t because he didn’t try, this wasn’t his first time facing unknown and perhaps extremely dangerous odds, no was anyone else stationed at Pegasus Base, whether they be civilian, soldier, or even Athosian.
John Sheppard arrived at the chamber and sat down, and immediately the sensation of being connected with the City’s awareness enveloped; it was an extremely heady feeling, but one he could not afford to dwell overmuch upon, but time was of the essence.
In his mind’s eye Sheppard saw the parabolic arcs of the drones as the swooped and swarmed upon the city’s shields, battering against them one at one time here, in groups of a dozen elsewhere, and almost a hundred strong near the docking bays.
Offering a feral grin of determination in response, Sheppard focused his concentration and sent a command that would launch the city’s own remote-controlled drones in response, as they collided and beat the attacking opponents back.
Soon the attacks came fast and furious and if he hadn’t known any better, it almost seemed as if the attacks became even more frenzied than they had been before.
It was as if, whatever intelligence or computer programming that guided them sensed the counter-offensive and either were attempting to compensate, or even that if they had, they simply did not know how and were beginning to panic.
***
Elsewhere, Rush stood in front of the Destiny’s engines along with Dr. Rodney McKay, Radek Zelenka and Eli Wallace were debating whether or not they should shut down the ship’s power supply, if that would help serve to divert the course of the alien drones’ attack.
Meanwhile, Sheppard was so intent on what he was doing that the appearance of Rodney in the room, tapping on his shoulder and talking into his air, saying how it was over, that he could stop now, that it was all right.
Sheppard blinked and appeared to very gradually come out of the highly concentrated level of attention and slumped forward, sensing, but not really registering on his consciousness when Rodney caught him in his arms before he slumped to floor.
“You did it! It’s over, although I must say if it had not been for my brilliant calculations we never would figure out that they were been drawing to the Destiny’s engines,” Rodney preened.
“Did we get them all?” Sheppard muttered under his breath, leaning on Rodney’s shoulder, for a heartbeat or two, before he gently but firmly shrugged away and forced himself to stand upright, taking several ragged breaths before he was fully able to be attention to what was going on around him, or what the other man was saying.
“Oh, I’d say about ninety seven, ninety six percent, the rest is pretty metal confetti out there, which we go and collect with the puddle jumpers once everything settles down around here.”
“When does that ever happen?” John Sheppard joked.
“Now that often,” Rodney replied jovially, smacking the taller man good-naturedly on the shoulder.
“You okay?”
“No, but I will be,” Sheppard replied. “Let’s go talk to Elizabeth and the others, and see how they’re faring.”
***
Conclusion
Everett Young was in his assigned quarters, sort of focused on getting his belongings unpacked and sorted out, and deciding where to stash them; the normally simple task made more difficult by the fact that his thoughts kept wandering and he felt emotionally drained by recent events.
When he finally moved to open a drawer and carefully place his folded uniform slacks inside the pinging of the electronic door chime interrupted his admittedly meandering thoughts. “Come,” he automatically said.
Whoever it was that had come to see him in his quarters after hours, cleared his throat and did not say anything right away. When Everett
Young turned around, he could not help but twist his facial muscles into a grimace of distaste, but immediately schooled his expression into a polite mask.
“Dr. Rush, to what do I the pleasure?” he asked, perhaps, in his own mind, a bit more harshly than he had intended.
If Rush noticed that slight inflection in either his voice or demeanor he chose not to mention it.
“Believe I wouldn’t be here at all, if not for the, shall we say, the change in our shared circumstances,” the other man quietly stated, looking up from where he stared at those long elegant hands that could fly across the console or write such complex equations. Nicolas
Rush was also well aware of the bad blood that flowed between them, as well as the acrimonious and often extremely harsh words that they had exchanged in the past, for both personal and professional reasons.
For whatever set of circumstances had conspired to bring him to this point in time; he no longer held as much desire to see the older man suffer for the order he had given to exile him on that remote planet.
Nor did he wish to see the other man come harm, at least, not as much as he had in the past. It was not that he no longer cared to exact any kind of revenge, and the fate of the crew of the Destiny was perhaps a bit much for any one person to assume full responsibility for.
After all he knew his own reputation, brilliant, outspoken, arrogant, and extremely difficult to work and get along with. And he could even be a bit of an ass, if he were being honest with himself, when you came right down to it. While Doctor Nicholas Rush knew himself to be many things, he was not an entirely unreasonable man.
For his part, Everett Young, also knew himself to be stubborn, a by the book type of seasoned commander, and while he had never personally liked the arrogant bastard, he had to admit that we clearly very good at what he did.
Neither had ever be willing to back down, and Rush was all that the fault for their long-standing feud, if one could call it that. In any case, he had given the matter a great deal of thought, weighed the pros and cons and added his own turmoil of emotions into the equation; and had come to the inevitable conclusion; it was time to bury the proverbial hatchet.
“What do you want?” Young asked.
“I want many things, some attainable and some not as much, “ said Rush softly, as he removed his hands out of the pockets of his slacks and held them out in the gesture commonly recognized as the universal gesture of good will.
Young shook his head and sighed, “I don’t know, I honestly don’t know, what you mean by that. But that hardly matters at this point, do it?”
“It means that I’ve come to realize that it’s high time that the two of us ceased to butt heads and, try and attempt at arriving at some kind of reconciliation.”
“It’s interesting that you would be the one to come to me rather than the other way around, I wonder why that is,” Everett Young mused.
“Perhaps, it’s perhaps while you’ve been understandably preoccupied with matters such as keeping the ship and its crew intact through our, transition, it gave you very little time to think of such matters in the grander scheme of things,” Rush stated, offering one of his infrequent, but sincere half-smiles.
“I suppose so. I don’t mind telling that, this, whatever it is that we have here,” said Young seriously, and then trailed off, half-turning on his heel to steal a glance out the window of his quarters, and then returned to Rush, “Its’s not everything I expected it to be, but again, I honestly don’t know what I was expecting.”
“Neither did I, but I think we owe a great deal to learn, and I for one intend to take full use of any and all experiences and opportunities that come my way,” Rush said emphatically.
“I would expect any less from you,” Young replied, and despite his initial reservations and his own preconceived notions, the iciness and brittleness gradually seeped away and quite being aware that he was doing so, extended his hand to the other man. “A truce?”
Rush extended his own hand, and then sealed the bargain. “A truce, and one that I intend to keep. You have my word on that.”
“Duly noted, and you have mine as well,” said Young in return.
“Nor would I expect anything less than your best, Colonel,” said Rush quietly.