CROSSFIRE - Atlantis DSV - New Cape Quest

Sarah Cunningham was halfway down the port side access way when Rogers caught
up with her. She walked with a fast step that Rogers knew to be uncommon, and he stepped
up his pace. “Hey, Sarah,” he called.
She didn‟t stop, and continued to push through the oncoming crowds of flight deck
crew before throwing a hard turn and disappearing through a door that rapidly closed behind
her. Rogers stopped only for a moment to look up at the signage above the hatchway. It was
the pilot‟s locker room. Drawing a breath, he pushed his way through the door and no sooner
had he entered the room did he turn away.
Cunningham wretched in to the basin as tears ran down her cheeks, her hands firmly
planted like pillars on either side of the frame. Like the other pilots of the sea wing, she‟d
attended virtually every memorial aboard the ship since she‟d arrived, and at first it had been
hard. It was true that to lose five pilots in a single sortie was extreme, but with worse days on
record – including the one where they themselves had nearly lost their commanding officer –
it had to be said that Rogers had never seen Cunningham lose her composure so
comprehensively since they‟d still been in the academy. Over an extended period of time,
combat had a way of making death a simple fact of life... but this time something had shaken
Cunningham to her very core.
Rogers slowly walked to where she stood, shaking but unmoving over the basin, and
slowly put a hand to her shoulder as she splashed her face with water and then tried in vain
to clear her eyes. “Hey,” he managed – for lack of absolutely anything else to say. Slowly, he
pulled her back so that she was almost leaning against him. “That‟s it, steady...”
“Rogers, I don‟t know what to do,” she rasped, her eyes staring through the mirror in
front of her.
He drew a hesitant but sharp breath as he wrapped his hands around her waist. “Just
take it easy. What‟s wrong?”
“Anderson...” Cunningham recalled, as memories came flooding back. “She...”
Rogers had little earthly clue where Cunningham‟s mind had gone. “Slow down.”
Cunningham pulled away from Rogers slowly, and leaned against one of the lockers
beside her with a loud clatter. “It could have been us, Sam,” she said, her eyes still vacant
and lost. “She was us. I remember it clear as if it was yesterday... sitting in that briefing
room.”
“When? Where? What are you talking about?”
“On the Atlantis!” she cried. “Anderson stood up and... She never wanted us there.
The way she looked at us during that briefing was like she knew this was going to happen.”
Rogers stopped as he remembered what it was that had so taken Cunningham.
Nearly two years before, they had sat for the first time in a briefing room aboard the Atlantis
DSV as little more than cadets, and Lieutenant J.G. Brooke Anderson had been the only
pilot in the entire Dark Angels squadron to stand up to stare Corinn Roderick in the eye to
tell the commander she was wrong. Later that day, three cadets had left on a sortie that
would make history, and only two would come home...
“Oh,” he said, the realization now hitting him. “No, Sarah, no... Of course she didn‟t.
We‟ve been over this.”
“Then how do we? How do I know that tomorrow you won‟t be in one of those
caskets?”
That stopped Rogers for a moment, but before he‟d even had a chance to get his
thoughts in order, he was thrown back against the locker, out of sight of the rest of the room,
and suddenly felt the soft, warm lips of Sarah Cunningham against his. That is, he would
have, assuming her attempt to ram her tongue down his throat hadn‟t almost knocked out his
teeth.
Rogers held her back for a split second only long enough to manage a futile “what?”
before she started to unbutton his shirt. “I‟m not losing you,” she gasped angrily, her fingers
fumbling as they worked to remove his clothes.
“Sarah, what the hell are you... Wait, stop this.”
She glowered at him as his hands met hers and he flipped her around to pin her
against the wall, her eyes burning in to his. He met them, and spoke slowly. “Stop it.”
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