Stargate Atlantis: Darts

Flight

It was hot on the balcony. Hot, still and very bright.  Sheppard took his aviators from where they were tucked in the top of his T-shirt and put them on.  There was no cool sea breeze and the warm, briney scent of the ocean filled the air.  Very faint and far away there was the sound of laughter and ukulele music.

It had taken a while to get McKay away from his lab. Sheppard had swiftly folded his darts and given them to Rodney to 'paint', but Rodney's design and construction process had taken much longer.

He was very impressed with the qualities of the Pegasus-paper: "This stuff's great!  It holds the sharpest creases, it's really strong, it'll be able to take much more thrust than  ordinary paper, really smooth, so signicantly less drag, lighter too so..." John zoned out, every so often registering the words 'drag', 'lift', 'gravity' and 'thrust' in various permutations, but when Rodney began to draw equations on the whiteboard and started muttering about "a small portable forcefield to minimise drag," he had called a halt.

They had set off, carrying the darts in a crate, stopping by the mess hall to load a tray for their Carter-diversion and, plan successfully carried out, had arrived on the gateroom balcony.

John was beginning to wonder if this was such a good idea and felt his time might be better spent crashing the archeo-linguistic beach party.  He would take along a few beers and get on board with the whole lei and grass skirt thing. That would guarantee him a welcome.

McKay was fiddling with his tracker display. He looked up. "Ready," he said. "Who's going first?"

"I'll do it," replied John easily.

He picked up his first dart from the crate: the Todd Mark Ten.  He stood against the railing and looked out at the cityscape of Atlantis, his home.  The view was misty with heat haze and the far towers and piers shimmered in the light. John took a step back.

He closed his eyes and drew a deep breath, drawing the arm holding the dart back over his shoulder, the other arm before him, balancing his weight on his toes. He paused, feeling the stillness of the air, sensing the vastness of the void. It needed to be exactly right, too much force and the dart might waver and plummet, too little and it would soon falter.  A little longer, sensing the air by instinct as a bird feels the wind beneath its wings; and then his arm came forward in one motion, powerful and true and he launched the dart out into the air.

It flew; and John almost felt that he flew with it, out over the towers and spires of the city that he loved, cleaving through the torrid air like a sliver of ice. It flew onward and down toward the lower city further and further until it was out of sight.

John turned, hands in pockets, shrugged, his mouth quirking up at one corner.

"I'd call that successful!" he chirped.

Rodney's mouth drooped at one corner, his chin jerked up in defence.

"We'll see," he said, gesturing with his tracker.  His eyes fell, studying the display.  John looked over his shoulder.  Rodney hunched his shoulder, trying to turn away. A small blip appeared in the screen.

"There!" said John excitedly. "What does that mean? How far'd it go?"

"All results will be collated at the end of the experiment!" said Rodney, tightly.

"Very far, then," said John, smugly. "And it's a competition, not an experiment."

"Humph," Rodney grumped. "My turn."

He picked up his first plane, stood exactly where John had stood, raised his arm and with all his strength, hurled the dart over the railing.

The nose tipped up, rose several metres and then plummeted.

"Oh." Rodney began to bluster," Well, that, that was just a test, the next one's going to be the winner!"

John said nothing.  He picked up his next dart, and launched it with the same infuriating mixture of absolute concentration and casual grace.

Rodney had been studying John's technique with a sharp, scientific eye.
His next launch was far more successful. It sailed off into the air. "A thing of beauty," thought Rodney and allowed himself a small fist-pump.

The two men studied the tracker screen again. John's two darts could be seen and Rodney's failure, close to the edge of the display, presumably in a depressing heap at the bottom of the tower.

They waited.

Out of the corner of his eye, John caught a small flash down in the lower city. Then there was a distant, but distinct: 'bang'.