Chapter Text
Water dripped from the ceiling, plopping onto banks of Ancient equipment slimed with the algae and barnacle-like crustaceans that had made themselves at home in this section of the city during the long years it had been flooded.
The gaggle of scientists paused in the doorway, surveying the mess without venturing any closer — until the sound of impatient snapping got them moving.
"Yes, yes, people," Rodney McKay barked, scattering underlings out of his way. Ignoring the drips and the slime and the pervasive smell of old dead fish, he marched to the middle of the room, dropped his laptop on a console — also ignoring the squelching sound it made as it landed — and whirled to face his demoralized staff. "It's a half-flooded Ancient lab. That's something you don't see every day. Except, oh wait. Yes, we do."
The science team dispersed through the room without comment. It was a large space, even by Atlantis standards, and empty except for banks of computer consoles and the room's most distinguishing feature — a wall of what looked like multicolored glass, backed by bubbling water. Watery portholes dotted the other walls, giving the illusion of an undersea view.
The Ancient database had contained frustratingly little information about the room. Intrigued by the layout, McKay had bumped it to the top of the "to-explore" list, as soon as the water had been drained from this section of the city. Unfortunately, due to the swiss cheese nature of the damage to the exterior walls down here after the Wraith siege, it had only just been patched up enough to allow depressurization. Two and a half years is a long time to wait for something this interesting.
Humming tunelessly to himself, McKay booted up his laptop and prepared to jack into the nearest control panel. He flicked off a tiny orange clam that had taken up residence on one of the control crystals. Say what you will about the Ancients—their technology could take a licking and keep on ticking.
A gusty sigh interrupted his happy reverie. He turned to find what’s-his-name, one of the computer techs, wiping slime off a neighboring console with his face screwed up in an expression of disgust. He was balding, a little pudgy, and looking thoroughly annoyed.
"Doctor McKay," what’s-his-name huffed. "Couldn’t we have waited until the room was dry, at least?"
McKay blinked in honest confusion. "What difference would that make? It's not hurting the equipment." He hit the command key on his laptop and beamed as the room glowed to life around them.
"It's hurting us," another minion piped up from across the room — the blonde Brit with the braids, this time. She lifted a soggy shoe and waggled it at him. "We're going to have trench foot by the end of the week at this rate."
McKay planted his hands on his hips and glared at his mutinous crew. "In the first place, we are not going to be at this long enough to get trench foot..." His gaze darted nervously toward the inch or so of standing water soaking his boots. Curling his toes inside his soggy socks, he made a mental note to schedule a quick check-up with Carson at the end of this shift. He plowed on. "And second of all, suck it up, people, it's just one day."
"Just one day, this week," another voice piped up. Rodney stiffened. Et tu, Nguyen? Make someone a department head and suddenly they get uppity.
"Last week, it was back-to-back shifts in sub-zero temperatures, tracing a glitch in the cooling system." This time is was the tech guy — seriously, what was his name? Some kind of bird. Duck? Pigeon? Grouse?
"Look, Goose—" McKay began.
"Gos!"
"Whatever. We are an intergalactic science team, exploring strange new worlds. So, yes, sometimes we're going to get our feet wet and sometimes we're going to be cold, and sometimes we're going to have to dangle off the North Tower in rope harnesses to repair a sensor array—"
"Whaddaya mean, 'we'?" Nguyen interrupted. Next to him, the dark haired Dr. Hardaway smiled crookedly.
"I have an inner-ear thing," McKay began airily, gesturing toward his ears, then caught himself. "And why are we even discussing this? Me boss, you minions. Get to work! Chop, chop before our toes really do rot off."
"So..." He surveyed the room, and focused on the three people whose names he knew—the ones who weren’t newbies. "Nguyen, Hardaway, Goose—"
"Gos!"
"—I want you running diagnostics to make sure a few years marinating in seawater hasn't damaged any of the room's systems. You and you," he continued, pointing to the blonde Brit and the pudgy, short man, not even bothering to try to come up with the wrong names. "Start searching the data on these machines, see if you can figure out what this room was used for. And," he pivoted to study the final member of the team – a tall, blond Nordic fellow who smiled brightly at him. McKay’s eyebrows lifted. "Are you even in my department? Never mind. Get on the radio. Ask the control room to send down some mops or something, and then get started on an inventory of the contents of this room. Go!"
Around the room, the whining of the scientists subsided and each turned to their assigned tasks.
Satisfied, McKay turned his attention to a large control panel set into the glass wall. He paused, head tilted quizzically as he studied the crystals inside. They were blinking in an erratic pattern. "That's odd—" he began.
Whatever else he was planning to say was cut off when a jet of water shot out of the access panel and hit him full in the face.
====
Alarm claxons blared, echoing crazily off the dank, warped walls. John Sheppard rounded the corner at a flat run, cursing as his feet skidded on the scum-slicked flooring.
On the long list of priority repair projects on Atlantis, mopping up miles of waterlogged corridors was nowhere near the top of anyone's list. As Sheppard skidded again and went down hard on one knee, nearly triggering a five-Marine pileup in the corridor behind him, he decided that maybe there was room in the duty roster for a mop brigade or two after all.
He accepted a helpful push from behind and was back on his feet, pelting down the hallway with one hand cupped to his ear. He could barely hear the radio transmission over the din of the alarm.
"Well, you must have touched SOMETHING!" McKay's voice rang with equal parts fear and outrage. "You! Receding hairline! Stop doing whatever it is you think you're doing and--glub!" McKay's tirade ended in a pathetic gargle as splashing noises filled the airwaves.
They were getting closer to McKay's position now. Close enough to see a pool of water seeping down the hallway to meet them. Sheppard swore and picked up the pace. Rising water inside a floating city was never a good sign.
He rounded one final corner and skidded to a halt at the laboratory door.
His jaw dropped.
The room was going off like a lawn sprinkler. Jets of pressurized water were shooting out of the walls, the floors, the ceiling — oscillating and turning on and off like some bizarre children's fountain in the park. Some were shooting out with the force of a fire hose, some in playful little arcs.
McKay's team was scuttling around the room like so many drowned rats, trying to stem the flow. As Sheppard watched, a bedraggled McKay twiddled something on a console that cut off a ceiling downpour directly above his head -- only to whirl with a yelp as a fresh jet of water shot out of the floor and smacked him squarely on the behind.
"Gah!" the scientist howled, flailing in a frustrated half-circle. His eyes widened as he caught sight of the onlookers.
"This situation is under control," he hollered, pounding another command into the console, with no apparent results. He pushed sopping-wet hair back from his forehead, causing it to stick up like a broom, and blinked to clear his vision.
Sheppard's eyebrows shot up. "I can see that," he called out. "But you're the one who called in a citywide alarm, Rodney."
"Well..." McKay made a vague gesture around at the waterworks. "The situation seemed fairly alarming. At the time."
Both men winced as a powerful geyser erupted from the colored glass wall and caught a pretty brunette scientist off-balance. She went skidding across the room on her backside, like a kid on a giant Slip-N-Slide. At a glance from Sheppard, the Marines waded into the room to try to help the science team keep their heads above water.
Grumbling and pounding the side of his head in an attempt to shake the water out of his ear canal, McKay splashed over to the glassed-off water wall at the back of the room, where one of his scientists appeared to be trying to stop a jet of water with his finger. The blond man was hunched over, but he was still taller than McKay.
"What are you, Dutch?" Rodney yelled at the blond, bumping him aside as he yanked open another control panel.
"As a matter of fact, yes," the bedraggled man shouted back. The spray of water between them cut off as McKay made one final adjustment to the crystals. The Dutch scientist threw up his hands and splashed off to rescue the team's laptops from the deluge. Rodney continued to call out orders to his minions as he moved to another panel.
Sheppard glanced down at the ankle-deep pool of water eddying around his boots and took a cautious step back into the hall.
"Control room?" He tapped his earpiece, tuning out McKay's sputtering commentary in mid-complaint. "Just how far underwater is this part of the city? Just in case we need to, oh, swim for our lives?"
Zelenka's bewildered voice crackled over the headset. "That is the odd thing. Although you’re beneath the waterline, Rodney told us it's fresh water, not seawater. Whatever is going wrong in that room, it appears to be a...plumbing problem. Maintenance crews are on their way."
There was a shriek and an enormous splash from the laboratory, followed by the sound of watery cursing. Sheppard keyed the radio again. "Better send along a medical team while you're at it."
And then everything shuddered. The movement in the room halted as everyone stared around themselves at the walls and ceilings. Only Rodney was looking down at the floor—the first to make the connection.
The reason for the wide, empty space in the middle of the room was suddenly abundantly clear.
The floor was moving, splitting down the middle and retracting with disturbing speed into the walls. Scientists and Marines went scrambling, hopping across the widening gap toward the exit.
Sheppard backpedaled to the solid, unmoving floor near the door – a broad ledge that supported the banks of computer consoles.
“McKay!” he hollered, waving his arms to try to catch the scientist's attention. “What the hell happened?” He leaned forward, frowning as he glimpsed a wide expanse of water in the widening gap between the floor edges.
McKay ignored the question, and the calls from the other scientists, urging him to take a running leap and jump to dry land while he still could. “I can fix this!” he insisted, fiddling with the access panel in the glass wall.
Sheppard turned to the bedraggled science team. "What happened?"
A diminutive fellow with a shock of curly hair plastered to his head spread his hands and shrugged. "Nobody touched anything. The floor just started...sliding."
"Right," Sheppard said, not taking his eyes off Rodney. "Just like the water turned on by itself."
The little fellow — what was his name again? He vaguely remembered Rodney calling him some sort of bird name — started to protest, but Sheppard cut him off. "We'll sort this out later, Goose."
"Gos!"
A crow of triumph from McKay cut them off. “Almost got it! One more minute…There!”
Just like that, the water in the room cut off, like someone had turned off the spigot.
The floor, however, kept moving.
The delight on McKay’s face faded, as he registered the growing gap between him and the rest of the group. Sheppard moved to the edge on his side and peered down. It was a yawning space, opening into the flooded deck below. Wait, not a flooded deck -- the underwater jumper bay.
He looked up and locked eyes with McKay. “Oh crap,” they said in tandem.
On McKay’s side, there was less than three feet of floor left between the wall and the water's edge. Rodney retreated until his back hit the glass wall and grimaced at the thick green blanket of algae floating on the surface of the pool below.
The floor glided closer to his toes. McKay closed his eyes and pinched his nose shut, braced for the plunge.
With a resigned sigh, Sheppard shucked out of his jacket and bent to unlace his boots.
And then the floor just…stopped.
Everyone in the room let out a collective breath. Sheppard started to stand up again.
“What’s all this then?” Carson Beckett’s sudden voice at his shoulder nearly startled Sheppard into falling into the water. The doctor snagged him by the collar and pulled him back, leaning out himself to study the muck below. He let out a low whistle and beamed across at the bedraggled form of McKay, who was still splayed against the far wall. “Rodney? What are you doing all the way over there, man?”
But McKay was staring down at the motionless floor beneath his feet, a slow smile spreading across his face.
“Of course!" he said. "They’d need something to stand on to access to the controls on this side of the room. Why didn’t I think of that?”
Before anyone could frame an answer to that, a strange groaning vibration filled the room. McKay froze, eyes widening with a terrible suspicion.
Then water exploded out of every nozzle in the room – including the massive jet immediately behind McKay. The force of the spray swept him off the narrow ledge and into thin air. He hit the water in a spectacular belly flop and sank like a stone.
====
Three slime-covered figures slumped miserably on the beds in sickbay.
Carson Beckett sneezed violently, but mustered a wan smile for the nurse who was holding out a package of wet-wipes to him — at arm's length. The stench of three grown men covered in algae and brackish seawater was enough to clear the room of all but essential medical personnel — and a few highly amused spectators. The rest of the scientists and soldiers had been checked over and sent back to their quarters, wrapped in towels and blankets.
"I said I was sorry!" McKay croaked, holding out a hand for the steaming mug of tea Elizabeth Weir had just brewed in the electric kettle in Carson's office.
Carson glowered at his friend. "You pulled me into that cesspool," he said, again.
"I don't know what you're complaining about," Sheppard mumbled from the third bed, holding an icepack to his swollen jaw. The algae had done fascinating things to his hair, which now stuck up in corkscrews and spikes and even more improbable angles than usual.
McKay huffed, adjusting the ice pack on the golf ball-sized lump on the top of his head.
"I'm not apologizing to you. I was doing just fine until you decided to jump on my head." He coughed, shuddering at the lingering taste of the water he'd inhaled in shock as he hit the pool. He sank then, stunned for an instant, until instinct kicked in and he managed to kick weakly back to the surface — just in time for the top of his head to meet the bottom of John Sheppard's jaw with a resounding crack. "Nice rescue, Captain America."
That got a snort of laughter out of Ronon Dex, who was leaning against the wall between their two beds. Teyla shot him a quelling look and gave the rest of her teammates an encouraging smile, without moving any closer than necessary. "From what I have heard, you both did an admirable job of supporting each other until you drew close enough to—"
"To bloody well pull me in with you!" Carson said, reaching greedily for his own mug of tea from Elizabeth.
Weir stepped back quickly, her nose wrinkling slightly.
"I think a shower should be the first order of business, don't you?" she asked sweetly. "Then, if you're feeling up to it, I'd like to schedule a debriefing to discuss exactly what went wrong out there today."
"What," Sheppard cackled. "You mean besides Rodney mistaking an Ancient car wash for the scientific breakthrough of the century?"
"Oh, shut up," McKay grumped. "We're in a city that's thousands of years old. A city, I might add, that gets blown up and flooded on a regular basis. And you're surprised that we run into the occasional technical glitch?"
Dex snorted again. "Room tried to drown you, McKay. I'd call that more than a glitch."
McKay rolled his shoulders uncomfortably. "Yes, well. My staff can just finish the inventory, collect what data they can and then seal the place up. Would that satisfy everyone?"
"Suits me," Sheppard said, fingering his jawline again.
Weir nodded. "I think that would be for the best, Rodney. We don't want a repeat performance of today's waterworks." Her eyes twinkled. "I have to admit, I'm almost sorry I missed it."
"Don't be," Radek Zelenka said, entering the medlab with a pleased smile and a computer disc. He waved the disc at Weir, Teyla and Ronon. "The city's surveillance system captured everything. We're burning copies now."
The three swimmers glared as their erstwhile friends vanished into Beckett's office to watch their latest home movie on his laptop. At the first shriek of laughter from the office, Beckett hastily set his mug aside and hopped off the exam table with a squish.
"Shower," he grunted, trudging off toward his quarters.
Sheppard followed suit, grimacing at his sodden uniform began to chafe him in disturbing places. McKay stayed where he was, staring off into space.
"You heard the doc, Rodney," Sheppard said, surprised McKay hadn't already bolted for the showers with a gallon of antibacterial soap. "Shower. You need one. You smell like week-old sushi."
"Huh?" Rodney looked up, blissfully unaware of the insult he'd just missed. "I was just thinking I should take a quick swing through that lab, on the way back to my quarters. There was something a bit odd about—"
Sheppard grabbed him by the collar and hauled him off the exam bed. With a gentle shove, he sent him shuffling toward his quarters. "Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it's the oddest Puddle Jumper wash on Atlantis. Let it go, McKay. Not every room can be a ZPM warehouse."
McKay allowed himself to be propelled along. "What was that you were saying earlier about sushi? Want to grab something in the mess hall after we clean up? I'm telling you, I could really go for some seafood..."