Casualties of War

by Elizabeth Christensen

  "Well, it's open now, and we're still here," John said reasonably. "And we didn't come all this way just to take pictures for Better Homes and Gardens."

  "I'll stand guard." Ronon took up a post by the door. As always, Teyla appreciated his instincts. The fleeting life signs Rodney had noted earlier had not strayed far from her mind.

  Activating the flashlight on his P-90, John eased forward, Rodney close behind. Teyla entered the building last, her vision adjusting gradually. Some sunlight filtered through the damaged roof, but Rodney switched on a flashlight to improve matters.

  As the light beams played over the room, Teyla felt a pang of disappointment. If there had been anything of value in this place, surely it was beyond recovery now.

  Laboratory equipment and computers similar to the ones found in Atlantis were strewn across the floor in pieces. Long countertops had been ripped from the walls and splintered. One corner held a number of warped, sagging cabinets which must have been consumed by a fire.

  John let out a long breath. "Damn," he said quietly. "I guess it was a long shot, but-"

  "Don't start moping just yet." Rodney was still taking readings. "If this place is dead, why is my scanner going six kinds of crazy right now?" He crossed the room, stumbling only once over the rubble while continuing to track the elusive signals. "Aha-what do we have here?"

  The back wall, which appeared to Teyla to be flush against the hill behind the structure, nevertheless contained two more doors: one with a standard handle, and one with no handle and a familiar-looking panel mounted beside it.

  "At the risk of opening myself up to more Monty Hall jokes, there's something behind this door." A trace of excitement crept into Rodney's voice as he edged closer to the panel door. "I should have known. Why build a critically important facility out in the open if you don't have to?"

  "You're saying there are more labs built into the hill?" asked John, his dejection fading.

  "Significantly more, I suspect. Come here," Rodney told their team leader, jerking his head with an air of impatience. "Make yourself useful and give me some light. I only have two hands."

  John rolled his eyes and acquiesced, each step crushing shards of glass under his boots. He took Rodney's flashlight and held it in one hand, directing the beam from his P-90 with the other. "I gotta say, nothing makes a guy appreciate his position on the Atlantis food chain like being ordered to hold a flashlight."

  "Many people with more postgraduate degrees than you have gotten me coffee, Colonel Uppity." Rodney reached for the panel next to the first door. Before he could attempt to pry it open, the panel responded to his touch, sliding back to reveal an illuminated map.

  "It still has power," John noted, turning off the flashlight and stuffing it back into Rodney's pack as the scientist studied the map. He reached for the handle of the other door and found it locked. "What do you suppose is behind this one?"

  "A closet." Rodney dismissed the idea, focused on the panel. "Nothing technological. This one, on the other hand..."

  "Is it possible this facility houses a ZPM?" Teyla wondered. Even though they had come in search of weapons technology, a ZPM would be a truly fortunate find.

  "Not according to the scanner, but at this point I don't completely trust the scanner." Rodney's face split into a satisfied smile. "The extent of this place is incredible. There must be ten times more lab space concealed in the hill. If the structure was built into the hill purposely, rather than having ten millennia of dirt accumulated on top of it, the labs very well may have escaped the Wraith attack unscathed."

  "That map looks like it belongs in a transporter." John leaned closer to inspect it and received an elbow to the ribs.

  "Don't crowd me. I think that's precisely what this doorway is. It's just designed differently than the ones on Atlantis. Apparently here you have to choose your destination before you get in." Rodney considered his options carefully before touching his fingers to a location on the map.

  Teyla waited for the door to open.

  It did not.

  "Perhaps it sustained damage," she suggested.

  "It was working well enough to open the map for me." Rodney sounded mildly put out as he turned to John. "You try-see if it likes your blueblood gene any better."

  With a half-shrug, John tapped the same area of the map Rodney had pressed, then another, and another. There was still no response. "Maybe putting the map outside the transporter instead of inside was a security feature. It'll only let you in if you're on the cleared list."

  "That's...not an altogether ridiculous theory. In that case..." Fumbling in his pockets, Rodney retrieved a multifunction tool and ran his fingers down the wall below the map. He must have located an access point, because the tool slipped into a groove, and a neatly-organized rack of crystals and wires slid out toward him.

  Cautious, Teyla watched from a few steps away as he reached toward the rack without hesitation. "Are you confident in your knowledge of such systems?" At his indignant stare, she explained, "You did say that this transporter is designed differently than those on Atlantis."

  "The underlying principles are identical. Relax, Teyla. I'm fully confident."

  "So what else is new?" muttered John, only to adopt an expression of innocence when Rodney spun toward him.

  "Everyone's a comedian. Get that light down here."

  Evidently choosing to withhold any further comment for the time being, John trained his weapon's light on the rack as Rodney reached into a mass of wires at the rear.

  "It's really not brain surgery," Rodney commented as he worked. "Disconnect the power supply, remove the crystal that controls the security protocol, reconnect the power supply."

  "And we know which crystal controls the security protocol?" John inquired.

  "In fact we do." Rodney tugged a bundle of thick wires loose from its housing. The map immediately went dark. "Our transporters back home don't have this security feature, and I've memorized its crystal set. This set is identical-except there's an additional one here." With surprising dexterity, he rotated the dissimilar crystal and slid it free. Slipping it into a pocket on his vest, he then replaced the wire bundle, and the map lit up again. "There. What did I tell you?"

  His faint smugness was lost on Teyla as she stared at the map panel with increasing concern. Seeing her reaction, John glanced down. "Uh, Rodney. . .that thing was glowing blue before, wasn't it?"

  "Of course it-" Rodney paled as he took in the map, now blazing red. "Crap."

  An incandescent flash assaulted her, and then there was only darkness.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ell, he wasn't dead, so that was a start.

  The bright streaks in Rodney's field of vision required some time to identify. At last he recognized them as the holes in the roof of the Ancient research facility. Some kind of power surge had knocked him flat, and whatever illumination the transporter map had provided was now gone.

  A few meters away, a focused beam of light rose from the cluttered floor, as Teyla came up out of a crouch with her P-90 raised. "John, Rodney, are you injured?"

  "Ow," answered a muffled voice from somewhere nearby. Rodney took a moment to assess his physical state. He'd landed on his back amid some rather uncomfortable rubble, but aside from the painful bruises-

  The door banged open, adding more light to the scene. Ronon barreled in, weapon at the ready. "You guys all right?" he demanded when it became clear that no immediate threat existed. "Where's Sheppard?"

  Under Rodney's shoulder, the rubble shifted, and he scrambled to his feet. "Sorry!" he stammered upon realizing that his team leader had been pinned underneath him. "Sony, very sorry."

  Rolling over with a wheezing groan, Sheppard glared up at him. "What the hell do you have in that pack of yours? Did Radek stow away in there, or what?"

  Rodney met the glower with one of his own but offered the Colonel a hand up, which was accepted. "You could have said something."

  "I said `ow'."

 
; "Something more descriptive."

  "I didn't have the lung capacity." Upright once again, Sheppard picked a few shards of glass out of his sleeve.

  "What happened`?" Ronon wanted to know.

  Rodney wasn't entirely sure, but he wasn't about to say so. "The power requirements of this transporter must be handled differently than what we've seen on Atlantis."

  "That, or disabling the security feature triggered another security feature," Sheppard guessed.

  Their Satedan teammate didn't smile often. When he did, Rodney considered it an alarming display. "McKay, you didn't `carefully consider the possibility of a boobytrap'?"

  Just what Rodney needed: someone else on his case. "Discover the wonders of irony some other time. This was a power surge, not a failsafe trigger."

  "How can you be certain?" asked Teyla.

  "Because if the Ancients had intended to seriously discourage trespassers by that method, they'd have built it to do more than just knock us over." He bent down to reexamine the slightly singed access panel. "Somebody want to give me some light again?"

  With a grumble that sounded like `I must be nuts,' Sheppard stepped up next to him and reactivated his light. "Maybe it's just well and truly broken, then."

  "If it has a viable power source-and all indications up until two minutes ago suggested that it does-there's no level of `broken' that I can't fix. It might require a call home for some specialized tools, but I'm hardly going to let a door hold us back for long."

  The scanner had fallen to the floor a while earlier. Rodney retrieved it and aimed it into the open access port. The handheld device was an Ancient gadget he'd appropriated during an early exploratory trek through Atlantis's labs, and as such was shielded from the effects of electromagnetic interference. It detected the presence of EM just fine, however, and right now it was blinking like mad. The field strength was off the charts-and yet the readings didn't make sense.

  "Something behind this door is emitting an energy pattern I've never seen before," he reported to the group. "It registers as an electromagnetic field, but it's not interfering with our Earth-made equipment the way an EM field should."

  A short burst of static issued from their radios; Sheppard had keyed his microphone experimentally. "On the kid world, M7G-677, we couldn't even use these while we were under the EM shield," he recalled. "How is this different?"

  "I don't know yet. It's as if there's a positive intermodulation effect, although I'd be surprised if it could be predicted by a standard Taylor series..." Behind him, Rodney could almost hear his teammates' eyes glazing over. Too bad for them-he did some of his best thinking aloud, and they could just deal with it. "In any case, the energy running through this thing is amplified somehow. When I removed that crystal, I may have altered the conductive paths through the rack, and the circuit couldn't handle the load when the power was reconnected."

  "You're saying we blew a fuse?" Sheppard summarized.

  Still facing the panel, Rodney rolled his eyes. "Yes, that's precisely what I'm saying, except my version wasn't painfully simplistic and utterly superfluous to the point."

  "So what is the point?" Ronon seemed to be in a lowtolerance mood.

  "That this transporter is-or was-drawing power from something nearby. And while that something is not a ZPM, it has the equivalent energy output of one. It's likely that whatever development occurred in this facility was focused on that energy source." What had begun as a faint nudge of theoretical interest blossomed into genuine excitement. Standing up, Rodney turned toward the others. "We might get more than a weapon out of this. We might be able to, if not end, at least cut back our dependence on ZPMs."

  Sheppard gave a low whistle. "You really think that's possible?"

  "Possible, yes. Probable, not so much, or we'd have seen the technology in wider use elsewhere in the galaxy. But I won't be able to learn anything more until we can get into that lab and see the extent of the research."

  Teyla adjusted her vest. "What do you require?"

  Good question. Rodney had no idea how this energy source operated; it might have any number of unstable characteristics. He needed the transporter working, but not at the risk of causing another, perhaps larger, overload.

  "A naquadah generator," he replied. "Just a small one, to provide power to the transporter when I bypass its primary power system. And a couple of other odds and ends. If we start back to the gate now, I can have the equipment here in two hours and a functioning transporter in four."

  "All right, I guess we're headed back the way we came." Sheppard picked his way through the debris toward the entrance, climbing over a fallen countertop in his path.

  Once outside, where he didn't have to concentrate on trying not to trip, Rodney allowed himself to mentally skip ahead a few steps. Any power source capable of sustaining itself throughout the Ancients' ten-thousandyear absence clearly had longevity comparable to a ZPM. Could it have a similar capacity? If it did, what was the tradeoff? Why weren't there wonder batteries like this all over Atlantis?

  None of the answers his brain supplied to the latter questions filled him with confidence. Doranda, among other missions, had given him plenty of reasons to be wary of Ancient experimentation. Although their intentions may have been noble, the devil was in the details, and they were unequivocally lousy at cleaning up their messes. Some days he found it hard to believe that the word `hubris' hadn't been coined specifically for them. Other days he was thoroughly convinced that it had.

  Still, they'd come up with some damned impressive gadgets in their time, he had to admit. And if any of their technology would help him stave off the mortal peril that seemed to lurk around every metaphorical corner in this galaxy, then he'd do his best not to appear ungrateful.

  The team started up the incline that led to the gate. Teyla walked with Sheppard, listening to his muddled description of a movie he hoped the Daedalus had brought to add to the city's DVD library. Ronon hung back beside Rodney and said, unsurprisingly, nothing.

  It didn't occur to Rodney to wonder why his team mate looked so watchful until a commanding voice from behind them shouted, "Go no further!"

  Then he remembered the brief glitch of a life sign he'd spotted amid the trees upon their arrival. Not such a glitch after all, apparently.

  The foursome spun around, weapons at the ready, only to be met by twice as many angry locals and twice as many weapons.

  So much for that whole `not dead' thing.

  Ronon studied the newcomers over the barrel of his gun. A squad of eight men and women had fanned out to surround the team, all dressed in fitted tunics of coarselooking fabric. Each brandished a coil of unfamiliar material in a manner that identified the object as a weapon. Long and thin, it gave the appearance of metal, but he'd never before seen metal move like a snake.

  "Hi there," Sheppard greeted, his pleasant tone belied by his grip on his P-90. Ronon could see the tension in his leader's stance even from the corner of his eye. "We're-"

  "Do you have no respect?" spat one of the men, slightly built with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. "Does the Hall mean so little to your kind that you would defile it this way?"

  "Our kind?" Ronon repeated, standing as tall as was possible in a shooting stance. He had a size advantage over all these people, and if he had any chance of intimidating them, he was willing to give it his best effort.

  "Hang on a minute." Sheppard took a step forward. His motion prompted a flurry of activity from the guards, or whatever they were. They released their metal coils, each now holding the weapon only by a rigid handle at the end, poised to strike.

  Lifting one hand in a conciliatory gesture, the Colonel tried again. "Listen, I don't know who you think we are, but it's a good bet that we're not them."

  Another guard, a willowy female, examined McKay from head to toe. The scientist squirmed a little under her probing gaze. "They do not resemble Nistra, Kellec," she said finally. "No raider I have ever encountered has worn clothing of this type."<
br />
  "How does that matter, Merise?" The one called Kellec kept his gaze trained on Sheppard as he spoke to his comrade. "They are raiders, Nistra or not." Addressing the team, he demanded, "Where is your ship?"

  "We didn't bring one," Sheppard replied evenly. "We came through that big ring up the hill."

  Kellec's eyes narrowed as he considered that piece of information. Before he could offer any judgment of its truthfulness, McKay became emboldened. Studying the weapon in the woman's hand, he raised his eyebrows. "What are those, whips?" A trace of a superior smile appeared on his face. "People, I hate to break up your fun little threat-fest, but if you really want us to capitulate, you'll have to do better than -"

  His haughty statement ended there. The woman, Merise, moved before Ronon could react, her whip flying out to snatch the scanner from McKay's hand and fling it to the ground.

  McKay gaped at it, yet he still managed to summon a bit of outrage. "Excuse me, that's delicate-"

  The end of the whip struck his wrist with a stinging slap and wrapped itself into a succession of tight loops around his sleeve. Throughout the display, Merise barely moved.

  McKay's gaze darted back and forth between his ensnared wrist and the less-than-amused whip wielder. "You know what?" he offered weakly. "Forget I said anything."

  That felt like provocation enough to Ronon. He took a menacing stride toward the nearest guard.

  "Worthless scavengers," the man sneered, brandishing his whip.

  "Hey!" Sheppard's voice carried over the group. "Let's calm the hell down." He cast a warning glance in Ronon's direction. "Everyone."

  The two apparent leaders regarded each other for a long moment. There were no further acts of aggression, but neither were there any signs of resolution. The standoff was beginning to grate on Ronon's nerves.

  "Please." Teyla spoke in calm, measured tones. "We are not familiar with your people and customs. Tell us what offense we have caused, and we will atone for it."

  With a short bark of disbelieving laughter, Kellec echoed, "What offense? You disgrace the Hall of Tribute with your weapons, you plunder its riches-"