Free STARGATE ATLANTIS: Dead End by Chris Wraight

freezing air took his breath away. He stood in front of the stricken Jumper, slapping his hands together in a vain attempt to keep them warm.
    “Looks pretty bad,” said Sheppard.
    McKay fixed him with his most withering stare. “Well, that’s an astute comment, if ever I heard one,” he said, acidly. “Why don’t you take over the repairs? Perhaps I could hand you a wrench from time to time and make the coffee?”
    “Maybe you should,” Sheppard said, dryly. “Might get this thing fixed a damn sight quicker.”
    The Jumper looked as if it had been through an inferno. The curved sides were blackened and scored. Many of the Ancient-designed patterns on the flanks had been razed from the superstructure. There were several places where it seemed as if explosions or heat had nearly penetrated the shielding. The windscreen, remarkably, had remained relatively unscathed. Clearly, the damage had been done as the Jumper had careered into the edges of the wormhole anomaly. There were no lights working. The vessel lay nose-first in a snowdrift, its cockpit buried deep. Fresh snow from the storm had piled up around the open rear bay, obscuring any footprints from their hasty exit. The door had been frozen in place, leaving the innards of the vessel open to the elements.
    The Stargate had been the same. It looked like had been burned, and badly. There hadn’t been a flicker of life from the chevrons, and some of the inner panels were cracked. That alone was worrying. It was naquadah, for God’s sake. That stuff didn’t crack easy. What was worse, there was no sign of a DHD, nor the MALP. If a dial home device had existed in the past, it sure didn’t now. As for the MALP, there was no telling where it had ended up — probably destroyed, or buried deep in a snowdrift.
    McKay sighed; once again, the entire galaxy had conspired against him.
    “Well, I suppose we’d better make a start,” he said.
    The two men ducked into the Jumper. Soon McKay had pulled out an array of transparent panels. He looked at them in disgust, tutting to himself as he carried out basic diagnostic tests. “Well, this is shot. So’s this. That’s totally zeroed, and I don’t even know what that does.”
    Irritation began to boil inside him. The cold was part of it. Having to exist on a diet of pure meat was another factor. It seemed that whatever situation the team got itself into, it was always he who had to perform the necessary magic to get them out. And yet, who emerged with the plaudits? Most likely Sheppard, or perhaps Weir. Without McKay’s in-depth knowledge of Ancient artifacts and power systems, virtually every mission they had ever been on would have ended in failure. And the few times he got it wrong, such as the unfortunate business on Doranda, were never quite forgotten. It was unjust, and irritating, and constant.
    He sighed, and stomped through the open bulkhead to the cockpit. Sheppard was sitting in the pilot’s seat, aimlessly trying a few controls.
    “Nothing,” he said. “Nada. Zilch. This baby’s going nowhere.”
    McKay gave him a wintry smile. “This endless positivity is really helping. Honestly, you should think about becoming a motivational speaker or something. You’d be a blast.”
    “Hey!” Sheppard swung around in the seat and scowled at him. “Just what is it with you this morning? You’ve been even more grouchy than normal, which is saying something.”
    “
Grouchy?
”
    “You heard me.
Grouchy
.”
    “Oh, let me see,” McKay snapped. “We’re stuck on a god-forsaken rock on the edge of the galaxy with no supplies and no power. We can’t send as much as a shopping-list back through the gate to Atlantis because the gate’s been served-up well-done and we’ve got the only DHD on the whole damn planet and that’s toast too. The people here are about to freeze themselves to death because they’re too stupid to look for somewhere else to live. It’s freezing cold. And I’ve got massive