As ready as we’re going to be, anyway. Jack swallowed the words, and looked at Sheppard.
“You heard Colonel Carter.”
“Yes, sir.” Sheppard bit his lip. “Look, sir, wouldn’t it make more sense to come through to the alpha site with the expedition? We can give the Wraith a week or two to check things out while we get set up and Colonel Carter has more time to work out how the thing works — maybe even find some more replacement crystals. Dex says he thinks there are a number of them in museums on his homeworld. It’s only a quick trip through the gate.”
“If this doesn’t work, we’ll end up doing exactly that,” Jack said. “But trying it now is the least risk to everyone. You know that, Major.”
“Yes, sir,” Sheppard said again. He paused. “It doesn’t mean I like it.”
“You don’t have to,” Jack said, with a grin. “Hell, I’m not sure I like it. But it’s what we’ve got.” He held out his hand and Sheppard took it, startled at first, and then with a grin of his own.
“Good luck, General,” he said, and stepped back with a salute.
Jack returned it, more moved than he would have expected, and walked into the inner chamber. Teal’c shoved the chamber door closed behind them, and Jack took a breath. “Ok, Carter. Let’s start her up.”
“Yes, sir.” She moved to take her place at the central console. “Ok, I’m connecting the generator.”
Daniel was already at the secondary console, frowning over half a dozen screens that suddenly ran with Ancient lettering, while Teal’c waited beside Carter, his expression as impassive as ever. Jack felt something rumble beneath his feet, against his skin, too deep for hearing.
The radio crackled, and McKay’s voice came through, cutting over a hiss of static. “The circuit is open. The power’s flowing as predicted. Everything’s smooth on this end.”
“Everything reads good here,” Daniel said.
“I am getting a backflow warning,” Zelenka announced.
“Nothing,” Daniel began. “Oh. No, wait, it’s showing up here, too.”
“More power, McKay,” Carter said.
“That is exactly the wrong thing to do,” McKay said.
“Direct subspace tap,” Carter said. “Different rules.”
“Fine. Increasing power.” McKay moved to another console, touching keys.
“That’s fixed it,” Daniel said.
“Seventy percent charged,” Carter said.
The hairs on Jack’s arms lifted in the electric air. This was where it had all started to go wrong the first time.
“Seventy-five percent,” Carter said. “Eighty. Eighty-five, eighty-eight —”
There was a crack and a puff of smoke from the central console. Carter flung back a cover, and Jack flinched from the sight of the tray of crystals bathed in weird blue-purple light.
“Crap,” Carter said. “I can’t — there’s nothing I can do about them.” Another crystal shattered. “Daniel! What’s it doing?”
“Everything still looks good here,” Daniel answered. “I show ninety-two percent.”
“Ninety-five,” Carter said. Two more crystals exploded.
“Hey!” Jack said.
“We have to let it run, sir,” Carter answered. “And hope enough of them hold.” She looked back at her screen. “Ninety-six percent.”
On the back wall of the chamber, the snake’s eyes were glowing again. A ball of golden light formed behind its head, began to move slowly around the curve of its body.
“Ninety-seven.”
Another crystal shattered, but the light kept moving.
“Ninety-eight.”
Two more crystals blew in quick succession, and this time the light seemed to falter, not quite to eleven o’clock.
“Sam,” Daniel said. “I’m starting to see stress —”
“Ninety-nine,” Carter said. “Come on, hold together…”
The light was moving again, almost to the snake’s mouth, blue-white and painfully bright. Jack caught a last glimpse of Sheppard behind the glass, shading his eyes, McKay further back, his mouth open, Zelenka still busy at his console. And then there was a flat snap, concussive as a door slamming, and the chamber vanished.
Daniel lifted his head, wincing as he adjusted his glasses. The ouroboros device had worked, all right; he was in another chamber remarkably similar to the one on Atlantis, a smudged and blackened ouroboros on the wall above him. And he was unharmed, and so apparently were the others, dragging themselves back to consciousness around him.
“You know,” Jack said, peevishly, “only Janus would think that it was a good idea for a transport system to knock you out on the way.”
“Indeed,” Teal’c said.
Daniel sat up, studying the room again. It really was a lot like the one on Atlantis, smooth, pearl-gray walls, the shallow platform beneath the damaged ouroboros, the tall doors in the corner of the room. He looked at the ouroboros again, trying to remember the pattern of the marks before. “Sam…”
“Yeah, I know.” She lurched to her feet, wincing a little. “Sir, I think we may be back on Atlantis.”
“Underwater? Turning things on just by being here?” Jack looked even less pleased than before.
“It’s possible, sir.”
“Assume we are,” Jack said. “What do we do?”
“We need to find someplace to access the city’s systems,” Sam said, her voice grim. “As soon as possible.”
Teal’c cocked his head to one side. “The transport chamber? It was not far from here.”
Sam nodded, already moving toward the door. “I wish there were something closer, but we can’t waste time looking.”
Jack waved his hand at the door’s sensors and it slid back. “Let’s go.”
Even knowing where they were going, it seemed to take forever to get to the heavy doors and the transport chamber that lay behind them. Sam went instantly to the console, slinging off her borrowed pack.
“Everything’s already initialized,” she reported. “I think we are back where we started.”
“That’s not very helpful,” Jack said. He was staying well away from any sensors, trying not to touch anything that might become active.
Daniel moved to join her, frowning at the screen. “This says everything’s stable —”
“Yeah.” Sam nodded, her hands busy on the controls. “It looks as though we didn’t turn too many things on yet, and I think — yes, that’s got it. I’ve told the city not to activate anything automatically. It should only bring systems on line in response to a direct command.”
Daniel touched keys, hunting through the status screens for information on the shield. “Ok, the shield is still holding, and covers what looks like the entire city. Power levels are low, but steady. I don’t see any big draw anywhere except the shield.”
“Can we dial out of here if we have to?” Jack asked.
Sam nodded. “Yes. Anyplace in Pegasus.”
“Well, that’s something.” He hooked his hands in his belt. “If there’s a problem, we dial the alpha site. Everyone got that address?”
Sam and Daniel nodded. Teal’c said, “Yes, O’Neill.”
“Ok.” Jack looked around the city as though he had a personal grudge against it, which Daniel had to admit was not entirely unreasonable. “So why the hell are we back here, Carter?”
“That’s a good question, sir.” Sam was poking at the controls again, but shook her head. “I think that’s better answered from the control room.”
Daniel glanced at the transport chamber. “Do we want to turn that on?”
“No,” Sam said. “We walk.”
It took almost two hours to make the trek from the transport chamber — which proved to be two levels below what Jack insisted on calling the deck — to the control room. The climb into the tower seemed interminable, and Daniel’s legs were burning by the time they finally reached the gate room floor. It was still dimly lit, the light that came through the long windows blu
ed by the glass and the weight of the water overhead. The broken pieces of the champagne bottle lay where he had dropped them, final proof that this was indeed the same Atlantis they had reached before.
Sam climbed to the control room, moving from console to console until she found the one she wanted. She touched keys, and a few small lights came on, driving back the shadows. “That’s all I dare do right now,” she called.
It was better than nothing, Daniel thought. He followed her up the stairs, trying to make sense of the various consoles, and after a moment Jack and Teal’c followed as well.
“Any ideas?” Jack asked, after a moment.
Sam settled herself in front of what seemed to be a master control board, and called up a search routine. She plugged in Janus’s name and squinted at the rapidly flashing lines of type. “Right now, I’m working from the hypothesis that this timeline’s Janus designed the ouroboros system to go between Atlantis and various outlying stations — you couldn’t go from one station to another, the way you can with the Stargates. If you want to use ouroboros to get from one world to another, you have to go through the hub here on Atlantis.”
“It doesn’t seem like the installation on P6T-847 was set up that way,” Daniel said.
“It wasn’t,” Sam answered. “There were controls for entering a destination using a variation on the gate addresses. But we never entered an address.”
“But this isn’t even our timeline,” Jack said. “Why didn’t it just send us to our Atlantis?”
“I’m not sure,” Sam said. “Right now, I’m going with the theory that it has something to do with tapping directly into subspace energy. Subspace — well, theoretically it’s outside normal spacetime, so it’s not part of any timeline, or, more properly, it’s potentially part of all possible timelines —”
“Carter,” Jack said.
“Sorry, sir. Essentially, I think this is probably the only Atlantis that’s set up as a hub, but because it’s tied into subspace through Janus’s experimental power system, any ouroboros in any timeline that fires without having a destination set ends up here.”
“So if we’d entered a destination, we’d have gone there?” Jack said. “In our own timeline.”
“Assuming it still existed,” Sam answered. “The thing I’m hoping is that the ouroboros has other similarities to the Stargate system, and that it keeps the most recent addresses in memory somewhere. If it does, we may be able to get back home — well, to P6T-847, anyway.”
“But the power requirements,” Daniel began, and Sam gave a little shrug.
“The ouroboros seems to be powered entirely separately from the rest of the city. We should be able to start the subspace tap without drawing more than the ZPMs can handle.”
Jack nodded. “What’s your next move, Carter?”
“Well, once I’m sure power consumption is safe and stable here,” Sam answered, “I want to go back to the ouroboros chamber and see if it’s intact and if it’s preserved the original address.”
“Jack should go with you,” Daniel said. “In case there are things that need to be initialized. Teal’c and I can stay here and monitor the systems.”
Sam nodded. “That would be a help.”
“I don’t like us splitting up,” Jack said.
“I’m not crazy about it either, sir,” Sam said. “But Daniel’s right, there may be things attached to the ouroboros that will only respond to the ATA gene. And somebody does need to watch the power consumption here.”
“Are you sure you want to trust me around Ancient stuff?” Jack asked.
“I’ve told the system not to activate anything unless it’s done directly through the consoles,” Sam answered. “That should hold it. If the city does try to bring anything on line, Daniel can stop it here, at this screen. And the sooner we can find a way to dial out, the more stable the situation will be.”
Jack studied the screen. For all his disclaimers, Daniel thought, the man was no fool when it came to Ancient technology. He hated the stuff, but he understood it well enough. “All right, Carter. We’ll do it your way.” He looked at Daniel. “We’ll stay in radio contact. Let us know immediately if there are any problems.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Daniel said, and slid into a chair in front of the console.
There were controls in the ouroboros room after all, hidden behind almost invisible panels. They didn’t respond to the ATA gene, and it took both her and Jack to lever them open, but the panels and displays they revealed were at least familiar. They weren’t identical to the ones on P6T-847 — that would have been too easy — but there were enough similarities that she was able to find the basic diagnostic and run that.
And there it stuck. The program ran through its first seven steps and then crashed, without even achieving an error message. Sam ran it a third time, shook her head as the same flashing error-abort message appeared. “It’s as though the system isn’t on-line at all.”
Jack peered over her shoulder. “But it has to be, right, or we couldn’t have come through it?”
His voice trailed off, as doubtful-sounding as she felt, and she typed another inquiry string. Characters flashed, filling the screen and scrolling off, and she waited for them to finish before scrolling back, picking her way through the unfamiliar words. It seemed to be saying that the — annunciator? emitter? — couldn’t speak without the reed, but she thought that probably meant there was something missing from the outgoing circuit. It certainly looked as though the diagnostic checked the outgoing system first. Sam scrolled through the rest of the display, seeing nothing else helpful, and looked around the room again. “All right, it says that there’s something wrong with the emitter, and that should mean we need to open up the main control console. Except it’s hidden, too.”
“If you were an Ancient mad scientist, where would you put it?”
“Janus wasn’t a mad scientist.”
Jack gave her a crooked smile, and Sam grimaced.
“Well, ok, maybe he was. But that’s not the point.” She turned through a full circle, frowning. “Well, if he put the secondary consoles in the wall — maybe under the floor?”
At first glance, it seemed unmarked, but a closer look revealed a web of slightly darker lines woven through the warm brown surface. And some of them seemed to mark out a shape that matched the control console.
“Maybe here?” she said, and went to one knee beside the most likely set of markings.
“Nice going, Carter.” Jack crouched beside her.
Seen up close, some of the marks looked like Ancient letters, spelling out the command to push, and she spread her hands to fit her fingers into the gaps between the letters. For a moment, nothing happened, and she looked over her shoulder. “Sir?”
Jack spread his hands, fitted them into the spaces where her fingers had been. The floor shivered and split, the console rising with a shriek of unoiled metal.
“Nice,” Jack said again.
Sam touched her radio. “Daniel. We’ve opened up the control console. Any problems with the power?”
“Not here.” Daniel’s answer was reassuringly prompt. “Everything’s steady.”
“Good. Thanks.” She stood back to study the console. All its indicators were dark, except for a single pinpoint of red glowing from the center of the upper arch. Probably that meant there was power, but it wasn’t getting past some primary blockage — maybe a burnt-out crystal. She found the access hatch and pried it loose, pulling out the tray of crystals.
“That doesn’t look good,” Jack said.
“Not so much.” Sam bent over the tray. On second glance, most of the smaller crystals seemed to be intact, though some of them showed scorch marks; she pulled and reseated them, and their sockets seemed to be undamaged. There were half a dozen larger crystals that showed signs of stress. The first she pulled had a hairline fracture running the full length of the shaft. The others were all in better shape, but they showed faint scarring and a couple had chips take
n out of their long edges. At least the central crystal, the one that she was guessing was analogous to the master control crystal on a DHD, was intact and in place, but there was an empty socket beside it, and even at first glance she could see that the other circuits fed through it. “Damn.”
“Looks like something’s missing,” Jack said.
Sam nodded. There was something familiar about the socket, though — the shape and size matched the key crystal Daniel had taken from the Wraith hive. She reached into her pack, carefully unwrapped the long shape.
“That’s the thing Daniel found?” Jack moved closer.
“Yes, sir.” Sam checked the socket and the connectors, decided they were close enough, and carefully eased the key crystal into place. It didn’t quite fit, almost as though it was a slightly different model, but she wiggled it in until she had full contact. More lights sprang to life on the main console, and she straightened, looking at them. Power was flowing now, though the whole system was still on standby, and she slid the tray back into place. The lights flickered, but steadied. “Let me run the diagnostic now —”
“Sam!” Daniel’s voice crackled from the radio. “Sam, I’m getting a cascade of systems trying to engage. I’m shutting them down as fast as I can, but I can’t seem to get them to stop.”
Sam grabbed for the tray, hauled it open again. Nothing seemed to be happening, but she pulled the key crystal anyway, stood back to check the console. The new lights vanished, replaced by the single red light, but nothing else happened. “Did that make any difference?”
“No. Not at all. It’s speeding up.”
“We need to get back there,” Jack said.
“I know!” It was more than an hour away, even if they ran, and that was too long —
“The transport chamber,” Jack said. “Come on, Carter!”
“But the power —”
“Doesn’t matter if the shield collapses.”
He was right, she knew, and hurried after him. “Daniel! Can you cut power to everything except the shield?”
“Sam, I can’t cut power to anything! It just keeps coming back on.”
“Keep trying!”
STARGATE SG-1-19-23-Ouroboros-s08 Page 28