by Jo Graham
“All right, then,” John said. “Now let’s check out the site.”
Every crackle of burned grass underfoot made everyone twitchy as the team made their way through the remains of the underbrush toward the door of the metal structure, but there were no signs of the bird-creatures, and with the grass burned to stubble, it would certainly have been easy enough to see them coming.
“They’ve probably moved off to butcher their catch,” he said. “I wonder if they were already using tools when the Ancients left
—
it hasn’t been very long, although they did refer to them as ‘wildlife’ rather than a native civilization.”
John looked skeptical. “You really think they invented tools since the Ancients were here?”
“Honestly, no,” Daniel said. “Wildlife or pre-agricultural tool-users, I don’t think the Ancients cared. They were specifically interested in seeding worlds with humans, because they knew humans had the potential to evolve into something like them. Putting humans here would have meant they’d have to compete with our friends back there. I expect that’s why they abandoned their outpost here. After all, they had a whole galaxy to choose from. They didn’t need to bother with worlds that turned out to be less than ideal. “
Rodney crouched down to examine the door, and Daniel ran his hand down one edge of it; it was warm toward the bottom but not hot, which meant there was a reasonable chance that opening it wouldn’t make everything inside burst into flame. He resisted the urge to elbow Rodney out of the way to get a better look, and instead squinted at a rectangular patch of bared connectors and sockets.
“It looks like the original control panel is gone,” he pointed out.
“I can see that,” Rodney said.
“I’m sorry, I’m just making an observation about my site.”
“All right, given that the control panel is gone, how do we get in there?” John said.
“Somebody may have figured out a way to get in there already,” Daniel said. “Those pry marks at the bottom of the door.”
“You would think that’s how they got in,” Rodney said. “If you didn’t notice that someone’s wired their own controls to the original fixture.” He finished digging the angular control box out of the dirt, and held it up.
“Please don’t actually dig things up before I even get a photograph,” Daniel said, snapping a picture.
“I’m sorry, I thought we were trying to get in.”
“We are, but… ” Daniel clenched his jaw. “All right, you’re right, we have limited time, and this isn’t the part that matters most. So if that box was wired to the door panel, where’s the wire?”
“Wires burn,” Rodney said. “Especially in a high-oxygen atmosphere, which, hello. Actually I’m impressed that our scavengers managed to wire this thing up and run current through it without setting themselves on fire. Either they knew what they were doing, or they got awfully lucky.”
“Many people who make their living scavenging culled worlds know something about technology,” Teyla said. “But few would have the ability to measure the oxygen level in the atmosphere.”
“Wraith?” Ronon asked.
Rodney shook his head. “This isn’t a Wraith design.”
“The Travelers could do it,” John said.
“This could be theirs,” Rodney said. “I mean, pretty much anything could be theirs. Still, this is… weird.” The control box was heavier than seemed reasonable in his hand. “If the Travelers scavenged this, I’d like to know where they got it.”
“Weird how?” John asked sharply. “Weird as in it’s going to blow up in our faces?”
“No, the interesting kind of weird.”
“Like I said.”
“It’s not going to blow up,” Rodney said, reconnecting it to the door panel with a twist of insulated wire. “All it’s going to do is… ” He pressed one of the two triangular buttons, and was rewarded by seeing the door slide jerkily open. “Open the door.”
“That’s what you always say,” John said. He shone a light inside cautiously, and then stepped inside. On the other side of the door, another of the angular door panels was connected in place of the original Ancient controls.
“They pried the door open first, and then they rigged these controls,” Daniel said.
Rodney nodded slowly. “I hate to say it, but he’s right.”
Daniel gave him a sideways look. “You mean you hate to say it because that suggests that the site was used as a base by scavengers long enough for it to be thoroughly stripped?”
“No, I… never mind.”
Daniel was already shining a flashlight around the entry room. Stairs descended from the rear of the room further down; at least part of the installation was underground, then. The stairs were typically Ancient in design, with decorative cutouts in the railings.
Rodney waved a hand at the nearest lighting fixture, but it remained stubbornly dark. “Sheppard, can you turn the lights on?”
“Nope,” John said after a minute.
“Or the light switch might work,” Daniel said, thumbing a control panel.
Rodney squinted at it in the abruptly bright light. “Okay, yes. Clearly that’s a later addition to the site, too.”
“Similar design.”
“It is, isn’t it?”
“What are we thinking?” John said.
“Not Wraith,” Teyla said.
“Definitely not,” Daniel said. He shone his flashlight around the room and walked a slow circuit of it, stopping once or twice to brush dust away from markings on the wall, all of which proved to be geometric and probably entirely decorative in function. It was mildly interesting as an example of Ancient decorative arts, but they had enough of those. He stopped at the top of the stairs and shone his flashlight down them toward the still dark lower level. “If there was anything in this room but the walls, it’s gone now. Let’s go see if they left anything downstairs.”
The stairs led down into darkness. Rodney took them cautiously, listening for any sound that might have been something large and taloned preparing to launch itself out of the shadows. The only sounds were mechanical, the soft thrum of water running through pipes and the occasional clunk of metal on metal.
He shone his light toward the noise, intrigued, and revealed one end of a long bank of pipes and metal tanks. “What have we got here?”
“You tell me,” John said, as the rest of the team came down behind them. Daniel was already investigating the machinery.
“Don’t touch that,” Rodney said.
“You know, this isn’t my first rodeo,” Daniel said. “I know not to press buttons.”
“Everyone says that, and yet they always press buttons.”
“So do you,” John said. “Let’s focus. What is this thing?”
“I can tell you right now it’s not Ancient,” Rodney said.
“Janus’s records didn’t say anything about experimental machinery,” Daniel said. “He said this was an observation post for a settlement.”
“I told you, it’s not Ancient. Believe me, I have seen examples of just about everything they ever built, and they didn’t build this. Between this and the lighting controls upstairs, which I’m pretty sure are incorporating high levels of neutronium… ” Rodney looked the machinery up and down, and couldn’t come to any different conclusion. “I’m pretty sure this was built by the Asgard.”
“The fact that it has Asgard writing on it might be a clue,” Daniel said.
“I would have noticed that in a moment,” Rodney said, craning his neck over Daniel’s shoulder to read. “It’s, okay, something about the settings
—”
“Do not alter settings without authorization,” Daniel said. “Basically, ‘don’t press buttons.’”
“I knew that.”
“I thought the Pegasus Asgard didn’t leave their own planet,” John said.
“Well, they haven’t for a long time,” Daniel said. “Not since the Wrait
h went after them and they retreated to a single world.”
“A single toxic and unpleasant world,” Rodney said.
“Before that, though, they were exploring the Pegasus galaxy just like we are now. I’d guess they found this installation abandoned by the Ancients, and moved in.”
“It’s a lot cooler down here,” Ronon said, leaning back against the metal wall.
Teyla nodded. “We are some distance underground.”
“All right,” John said. “You two check this thing out. We’re going to keep an eye out upstairs in case our friends come back.”
Rodney settled down to examining the machinery, while Daniel took pictures of the various inscriptions along its length, most of which seemed to be warnings not to tamper with the device. “Like we’re doing right now,” Daniel said warily, shining his flashlight into the depths of the machinery but carefully not touching it.
“I’m not tampering. I’m examining. This looks like the original power supply,” Rodney said.
“Original?”
“Yeah, it’s dead, but this thing is still doing something. Ronon’s right that it’s cooler down here than it ought to be, and that’s not just being underground or the water running through these pipes. Feel the air coming out of these vents.”
Daniel held his hand very gingerly six inches from the air vent. “It’s blowing cold air.”
“Some kind of air conditioning effect.”
“Is that possible without electricity?”
“You can build an evaporative cooler, but I think there’s a backup power source somewhere in here. Enough to run the air conditioner, but not to activate the other functions.”
“What other functions do we think this thing has?”
Rodney sat back on his heels, considering the long bank of machinery. “I think what we’re looking at is some kind of climate control device.”
Daniel shone his flashlight down the length of the machinery, illuminating its curves and angles. “It’s a lot more primitive than most of the Asgard equipment we’ve seen.”
“It’s a lot more basic. This isn’t their nuclear power plant, it’s their camping equipment. It beams down and
—” He pointed out the locking seams between pieces of equipment. “—
snaps together. Turn it on, plug it into a water source, and you get a comfortable atmosphere. There are probably some kind of controls for adjusting the temperature to suit you.”
“‘Do not adjust settings.’”
“You don’t have to tell me. But… okay, so I’ve worked in some places where people had fights over the thermostat.”
“The SGC, for one.”
“At Area 51 they ended up putting a lock on the air conditioning controls. Although you could open it with a paper clip if you really
—
never mind that. My point is, does it make sense to build an air conditioner and then warn your end users not to adjust the temperature?”
“For the Asgard it might,” Daniel said. “They tend to be pretty sure that there are right ways and wrong ways to do things. The device might not need setting if it was already preset to adjust the temperature to whatever its designers felt was ideal for Asgard health and comfort.”
“So I wonder what the other settings do?”
“Adjust other aspects of the climate to some ideal? Either on a local level or… this power cell would have been serious overkill for running your basic window air conditioner. And this is the Asgard we’re talking about. They could probably affect the entire planet’s climate if they wanted to.”
“Yep,” Daniel said. He took another step back from the machine. “We’ve seen a device that could control the climate on a planetary scale before, although it wasn’t Asgard. The NID grabbed it and brought it back to Earth. That turned out… badly.”
“We can deactivate it,” Rodney said. “I’m pretty sure this is the auxiliary power pack.”
“How sure?”
“Considering the amount of time I’ve spent studying Asgard power generation systems, actually fairly sure.” He pulled the power pack out, and was rewarded by feeling the flow of air through the machine stop.
“So what have we got?” John said, coming halfway down the stairs and looking skeptically at the machine.
“Weather control device,” Rodney said.
“You think it might be a weather control device,” Daniel said.
“All right, it’s a local climate control device that, given it’s designed to have enough power run through it to air condition the Sahara Desert, looks to me a lot like a weather control device. I’ve deactivated it so we can take at least part of it home to study without any chance of making the rotten weather on our new planet any worse.”
“The weather’s not that bad.”
“Are you kidding? The city stays so cold these days that I have to wear three pairs of socks just to feel my feet.”
“My quarters aren’t cold,” John said.
“The city likes you.”
“There’s a small problem with taking this thing back to Atlantis,” John said. “If you’re sure you’ve deactivated it
—”
“I’ve seen all that I want to see of attempts to control the weather gone very wrong,” Rodney said. “If I say it’s deactivated, it’s deactivated. Believe me when I say that working in the Pegasus galaxy has given me a lot of practice in how to turn things off.”
“It’s not going to fit in the jumper. In fact, I’m pretty sure the jumper would fit in that thing.”
“We’re going to have to take it apart. I’m pretty sure it’s designed to come apart in pieces. Maybe not exactly easy pieces to get up the stairs, but that’s what we have you and Ronon for, right?”
“Those pieces are the size of refrigerators,” John said.
“Hey, it’s not my fault that the Asgard probably beamed it down here.”
“You’re going to help carry it.”
“I’d like to finish documenting the find before you take the whole thing apart and start experimenting on it,” Daniel said.
“Finish up,” John said. “I’ll go get the jumper. At least we can park it close enough that we don’t have to hike.”
Rodney looked at Daniel as Sheppard’s footsteps receded upstairs. “Not going to argue that he shouldn’t land the jumper on the archaeological site?”
“I think the huge brush fire probably killed any chances of finding something just lying around on the surface,” Daniel said. He sat on his heels to investigate another panel covered in Asgard writing.
It grated on Rodney’s nerves. “You know, the brush fire wasn’t our fault. Blame that on the terrifying bird creatures that tried to set us on fire so they could roast us and eat us.”
Daniel looked up at him over the rim of his glasses. “Did I say that the brush fire was your fault?”
“No, of course you didn’t say that.” He examined the machinery, trying to identify a chunk of it that would be reasonably practical to remove. It was possible that they were going to have to leave the biggest pieces of the machinery in place, but the idea of not being able to study them without returning to a remote site full of homicidal ostriches who set things on fire was unattractive.
“I have to ask. What is your actual problem with me?” Daniel asked conversationally after a while.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah. Is it just… see, I don’t even actually know. Because being professionally jealous of me
—”
“I am not professionally jealous of you.”
“See, I know you’re not, because what I do is so completely unrelated to what you do that it would be like me being jealous of Ronon. It’s not like you want to be the world’s best archaeologist.”
“Please, archaeology isn’t even a real science.”
“I’m not even touching that one right now. You’re not still bitter about the time Sam got you sent to Siberia, are you? Because th
at was her, you know
—
well, her and General Hammond
—
not me.”
“I’m not still bitter. I was never bitter, it was a very productive opportunity to learn about naquadah power systems.”
“I just thought that since you don’t like the cold… ”
“And Sam has really come to appreciate me. You know, after her initial desperate crush turned into a more collegial respect.”
“Right.”
Rodney could hear the skepticism in his voice, and he didn’t think it was just for the idea that Sam was pining after Rodney. It stung unreasonably much. He’d put a lot of distance and time between him and the guy he’d been before he went to Atlantis. He understood all too well why people hadn’t liked that guy, but he’d also put distance and time between himself and most of the people who’d only ever known that guy.
“Let’s just figure out the best way to take this thing apart,” he said.
Daniel shook his head. “Fine, let’s do that.”
SGA-22 Unascended
INTERLUDE
“Come in, Ms. Weir.”
Elizabeth took a deep breath and pushed open the door of the senator’s office in the Dirksen Building. It was very seventies, with orange carpet and bucket chairs, which seemed behind the times in this brave new world. The Cold War was over and even the New York Times had proclaimed the End of History.
But for her it was a beginning, a highly competitive internship on the Hill with the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. In the first ten weeks she’d done the usual things
—
answering the phone when irate constituents called, stuffing envelopes, printing name tags for various events. She’d gone to committee hearings, standing among the other young people in their black suits listening to testimony which, for the most part, was unenlightening. She’d eaten in the Senate cafeteria and once she’d seen Senator Kennedy looking just like he did on TV. Oh, and she’d checked in Tipper Gore at a luncheon and had refrained from saying a word about rock music lyrics.
None of these things used her degree, but that wasn’t to be expected at this point. And then she’d been asked to write this white paper