And that, plain and simple, was the reason Sheppard needed to track down Elizabeth once all this blew over and ask for his stupid letter back.
"Got your gear?" the Colonel asked, fastening his vest. They'd brought stun weapons in place of P-90s, which seemed reasonable given the low probability of running into anyone to whom they might need to do permanent harm. All the same, it made Rodney feel a little exposed.
"Yes. Let's get this statistically improbable show on the road."
When he'd warned his team that Earth-built technology would be his only tool in this search, he hadn't been strictly truthful. `Earth-built' and `non-Ancient' were not fully interchangeable terms. The Asgard, for instance, had a portable device that acted as a more accurate version of an X-ray fluorescence scan, identifying a sample's component materials almost instantaneously. During a recent Daedalus visit, Rodney had badgered Hermiod into leaving one of the units on Atlantis, contending that the ship's inbuilt diagnostics made it redundant to keep such a unit onboard. The SGC hadn't been pleased-something about circumventing the requisition process. In any case, they hadn't tried to fire him, so he'd claimed victory.
The scanner could be programmed to search for particular materials or combinations thereof. He'd calibrated it with the constituents of the naquadah alloy that powered Atlantis's dialing computer, minus those substances which would have combusted under the heat of reentry through the atmosphere. Now he was faced with the rather daunting task of determining where to start.
"On the plus side, we've already got a grid laid out to keep us from losing track of where we've looked." Sheppard crouched to study one of the many branches stuck into the hard ground at relatively constant intervals.
Rodney made a mental note. He wasn't the type to heap praise on people for exhibiting common sense, but Teyla and/or Ronon deserved credit for devising the marking scheme.
The duo moved methodically over the debris field, disturbing as little as possible in the course of their search. On occasion a muted crunch under Rodney's boot would elicit a wince, and a few fragments crumbled into ash at the slightest touch. He told himself that anything truly critical to their cause would have been constructed more sturdily. Sometimes these situations called for a little judicious self-delusion.
He also tried valiantly to ignore the literal and figurative weight of the Stargate looming over them. The ring couldn't possibly be stable in its current cockeyed position, no matter what the physics said.
They'd been sweeping the scanner's beam over wide swaths of ground for the better part of an hour when the unit signaled a hit. "Hmm. Not exactly the right material makeup, but close enough to check out. Under here." Rodney beckoned Sheppard over to a heap of deformed metal. "Help me lift this piece."
The piece in question probably had been a structural support, long and unwieldy. After a couple of fruitless attempts, Sheppard got his shoulder under one end and managed to shift it far enough for Rodney to get one arm awkwardly into the piled wreckage and drag a briefcasesized chunk of something out.
Wiping away sweat with his sleeve, the Colonel plunked himself down next to the beam he'd displaced. "What've you got?"
"Chiefly, a strained back."
"Yeah, yeah." Sheppard peered at their find as Rodney brushed dirt and char off the casing. The surface was badly scratched and even gouged in a number of places-
Hold on. Those marks were too uniform to be accidental damage. Rodney scrubbed harder at the burn residue, eventually resorting to the use of his shirttail. When he'd at last gotten the casing as clean as it would ever be, he got out his flashlight and examined the indentations. Aha. Familiarity.
"Doesn't look like part of a DHD," observed Sheppard.
"It isn't. But it might do us some good anyway. See those three larger slots across the end?" Rodney played the light beam across the object's surface. "They match up with the connecting hardware of the download device we use to do maintenance on the jumpers. I think this might be some kind of flight data recorder."
"From the space station?"
"Of course from the space station. If we can get an idea from the records contained in here about what really happened to the station, it'll likely be more productive than fishing around in this junk."
With a shrug, Sheppard climbed to his feet. "All right. Guess we'll head back and plug this thing into Atlantis."
After her latest check-in, Elizabeth felt her first flicker of hope in quite some time. "Gentlemen," she called, stepping down from the stairwell. "I have some information that may help us make progress."
Neither Cestan nor Galven looked terribly impressed by the announcement. Still, they gave her their attention. "Recently, access to the Stargate has emerged as a point of contention," she began. "Minister Galven, there is an Ancient ruin in the foothills of your territory. It once was a station that orbited this planet, and it crashed to the ground hundreds of years ago. Are you familiar with it?"
"I have heard of such a thing," the minister answered, "though we were not aware it fell from the sky. It is little more than rubble, so it has not been of much interest to us.
"You may change your mind about that. The ruin contains another Stargate." Elizabeth had to smile at both leaders' evident surprise. "It doesn't have a dialing device, but my people are already working to rectify that. Once it's functional, there will be no need for the Nistra to share the Hall gate, since you'll have one of your own."
Although Galven might have been caught off-guard, his expression quickly became unreadable. "If this is the case," he said, "and I will need to verify that it is, I am not fully prepared to concede the Hall gate. The Hall itself is to remain neutral, and that may be difficult to maintain with the Falnori controlling the nearby gate."
"We can discuss that," Elizabeth allowed. "There is a more important aspect of the second gate, however. Because it's somewhat hidden and mostly unknown to your people, it's open to use by others-like the raiders. That gate is what gave them the means to terrorize both the Falnori and the Nistra. My people have captured some of them. They're called the Cadre, and they come from off-world."
She waited to gauge their reactions. Cestan sat back in his chair, adjusting his cuffs. "So it is as I have said before. The Nistra declare themselves to be victims of these raiders, and by labeling us as the aggressors they have free rein to act against us without cause."
Galven opened his mouth to counter as one of his messengers appeared on the stairs. He motioned to the young man, who hurried over to deliver his report quietly and urgently.
"The leader of the Cadre told us that his group isn't allied with either of your peoples," said Elizabeth. "It's an independent-"
"Without cause, you claim, Governor?" Galven sprang to his feet, leveling a blazing glare on Cestan. "Word has just reached me that a Nistra hunting party was attacked this very day by your Cadre!"
"My Cadre?" Cestan echoed, casting an incredulous glance at Elizabeth. "Do you see how they persist in this delusion?"
"There were dozens of them, with weapons that burn," insisted the minister. "This time they came to do violence on my people without even the facade of stealing goods."
Elizabeth had a fairly good idea she knew what incident Galven was referring to, and she suspected that the tale had been embellished along the way. "Minister, two of my people were there. That's not exactly how they saw it. 11
She realized her miscalculation when Galven turned his frigid gaze on her. "Do not presume to tell me what happens on my land, Doctor."
"I apologize," she said immediately. "I overstepped my bounds. Please don't allow that to distract you from the issue at hand: the Cadre is an off-world threat taking advantage of the gate in your territory. We should focus on resolving that, and I'm telling you that we can resolve it. 11
"It does not matter what the raiders call themselves, only that more blood has been shed." The news of the latest attack had seemingly forged Galven's resolve in steel. "This will not stand. If the Stargate is b
eing used to invade our land, we will defend it. But we also are prepared to finish what the Falnori have begun."
As he turned to his messenger, Cestan beckoned for one of his own. Feeling Carson and Lorne's eyes on her, Elizabeth reached for the bottle of water she'd brought and wished fleetingly that it held something stronger. Troops on both sides would soon receive marching orders, she was sure. Time was now a much more limited resource, and she was running out of ideas.
As it turned out, hooking up the download device in the Jumper Bay to the Ancient version of a `black box,' as the Colonel insisted on calling it, wasn't the complicated part of the task. The complicated part was sifting through the massive quantities of data the recorder promptly spat out. The system status reports alone, taken at eight-hour intervals over a span of decades, would have crashed Rodney's laptop in seconds. Eventually they resorted to rigging up a buffer program that would only allow the information Radek specified to pass from the maintenance terminal to the laptop.
"Can't we start at the last recorded data and work backward?"
The lieutenant in charge of jumper maintenance no doubt thought he was being helpful. For that reason alone, Rodney refrained from snapping at him. "We can, and in fact we have. Unfortunately, and some might say predictably, the last recorded data is a series of null sets broken up by the occasional gibberish. The unit obviously continued to function long after the station it was meant to monitor was destroyed."
"We're working on the first set of meaningful data now," supplied Radek, sitting cross-legged on the floor while the laptop cranked through the translation algorithm a few lines at a time. Every twenty seconds or so he leaned forward to tap a few keys. "This set appears to contain information on emergency procedures."
The doors slid open, and Sheppard joined them in the bay. "Hate to rush you guys," he began, "but Dr. Weir just checked in from 418. Things are falling apart over there. Nobody bought her description of the Cadre, for one thing. Galven got word that a Nistra hunting party had been attacked-probably the one the Cadre hit in order to get Ronon and Teyla-and he didn't take it too well."
The maintenance lieutenant must have been a newcomer, because he'd leapt to his feet at his commander's approach. When Sheppard noticed, a few seconds later, he waved distractedly at the young man to relax and leaned back against the extended engine pod of Jumper Three. "Sounds like he's getting a lot of rumors and static from his people. Regardless, he doesn't like the idea of a gate in his territory that he can't control, and he still seems convinced that the raiders are in league with the Falnori. And Elizabeth's not sure what Cestan's up to, except that his posturing is starting to get more serious. So anything you can give us would be useful sooner rather than later."
Of course. Because they'd been on such a loose schedule thus far, and he'd missed the pressure. "We're digging into the recorded emergency procedures right now." Rodney left the black box and scooted over to look at Radek's screen. The schematic that appeared took him a few seconds to parse. Once the scale of the diagram became clear, he gave a low whistle. "Okay, I need to rethink my estimation of the wreckage on 418. This station must have been quite a bit larger than I anticipated."
"How large?" Sheppard wanted to know. "Are we talk ing `That's no moon, it's a space station' large?"
Rodney grimaced; he'd really left the door wide open for that one. "Not hardly. Orbital mechanics alone would preclude that. Larger than the Daedalus, though."
"Sure didn't get that sense from the area around the gate." Sheppard frowned. "There was a lot of debris, but not that much. And I didn't see any huge craters or anything."
"What you saw may have been only one segment of the station." Radek pointed to the lines of text scrolling rapidly across the screen of the maintenance terminal.
After half a decade on the Stargate program, Rodney was no longer impressed by much in the way of technology. When something did impress him, he gave credit where due. "Huh."
"Well said." Sheppard craned his neck to look, his eyes nearly crossing at the frantic pace of the text.
In the interest of expediency, Rodney described it to him instead. "The station consisted of three segments, each with its own dedicated operations and life support systems. In a contingency situation, for instance an attack, the segments could be detached and maneuvered into different orbits."
"Split up to present multiple smaller targets, or even send noncombatants out of harm's way. Makes sense."
"Especially if you're trying to protect the gate." Rodney traced a line on the schematic with his finger. "See where the structure closes off and disengages? The gate's in one segment, and the control console for the dialer and shield are in another. That's why the database labeled the station gate as inoperative. The dialer simply wasn't available to be connected to the gate for use."
"Wait a minute. The dialer's on a different segment?" The Colonel cautiously glanced back and forth between the two scientists, as if he doubted he'd gotten the message right. "And we think only the gate segment crashed on the surface?"
"Only the gate segment crashed in the area we investigated," Rodney corrected. No reason to get carried away with unwarranted optimism. "If the station's geosynchronous orbit was destabilized, the other segments could have crashed centuries later on the other side of the planet."
"Or they could have been part of the space junk we spotted in orbit on our first trip to 418," countered Sheppard. "Question is, how can we find out?"
Radek lifted his head. "Miko's database project. We can search the battle records for specific references to the station."
"Now we're talking. Get Miko on itASAP. Lieutenant, prep Jumper One with three spacesuits and whatever tools these two want." At Rodney and Radek's twin stares, Sheppard offered a wry smile. "I can dodge floating junk to get you there, but finding and removing the dialing computer is all up to you."
Although Rodney wasn't terribly enthused about repeating his one and only experience in a space suit, he understood. No matter what Miko found in the database, nothing could guarantee that the required station segment would have a stable, breathable environment after ten thousand years of drifting. If they even managed to locate it.
Sheppard, though, seemed to be taking a favorable search result for granted, striding toward the stairway to the control room. Rodney called after him. "What makes you so sure we'll be able to find the segment we need intact, let alone the dialing computer?"
"Sometimes what looks like confidence is actually a lack of options." The Colonel's pace slowed as he spoke, but he didn't turn back. "If we don't give Elizabeth something, Galven and Cestan are going to order their people to start killing each other. Certain or not, I'm going to go tell her to promise the Nistra a gate shield."
Elizabeth sat alone, both literally and figuratively, at the negotiating table. The past few hours had seen progressively less debate, polite or otherwise. Instead, Cestan and Galven had retreated to opposite sides of the room and formed tight huddles with their advisor-bodyguards. Every so often one of the lackeys would leave or return to the Hall, evidently performing messenger duties.
It would have been the height of naivete to ignore the likelihood that troops were assembling in both territories. Still, Elizabeth wasn't packing it in just yet. Lieutenant Cadman had just come down the stairs and was reporting quietly to Lorne. The Major listened for a minute before dismissing the Marine and crossing the room to approach the table. From his place against the back wall, Carson leaned in to hear the latest update.
"Ma'am, Colonel Sheppard says Drs. McKay and Zelenka have a lead on the second gate's dialing computer and shield controls. They think it's still on a section of a station in orbit, and they're going up to retrieve it now. They plan to take it directly to the second gate for installation. The Colonel suggests you assure Minister Galven that they'll have the gate secured within a day and invite him to travel back to the gate to witness it."
"And if they aren't able to get the apparatus they need?" Carson
asked quietly.
Lorne kept his voice low and his gaze on Elizabeth. "According to Lieutenant Cadman," he answered, his features utterly inscrutable, "Colonel Sheppard promised to come up with a Plan B and asked that we convey his limitless faith in your ability to bluff."
The situation wasn't amusing in any rational way, yet Elizabeth found herself smirking ruefully. Nobody could pull off a truly deadpan delivery like Lorne. "All right, if that's the extent of what we've got to work with, we might as well get started." She cleared her throat. "Excuse me, Minister."
Though the talks had all but disintegrated and trust was hardly the order of the day, the leaders continued to conduct themselves with the decorum befitting their positions. Small favors. Galven broke off his conversation when addressed and gave her his full attention. "Dr. Weir?"
"I've just received word from my people. They've located a device to dial and operate the shield on the Stargate within your territory." At that, Cestan started listening as well. Elizabeth went on. "It will take a few hours to deliver the device and get it working. As soon as that's completed, you'll have total control of the gate. We'll supply you with code devices to operate the shield so that only people you choose will be able to come through."
The older man looked interested, if unconvinced. "We appreciate the effort. However, closing off the gate will only prevent raids by off-worlders. It cannot stop the raids originating from this world."
"Minister, I assure you that the Cadre is very much an off-world threat, one that has nothing to do with the Falnori. All this will become clear when the adarite raids stop after the shield control is installed. I'm simply asking you to give us the time to demonstrate that."
"And in the meantime?"
Try not to start any battles. "If nothing else," Elizabeth replied, "you'll have a functional gate all to yourself. If you'd like, you can find more trading partners without needing to use the gate here."
She'd assumed that to be a reasonable concept. Apparently she'd assumed wrong. Galven's face darkened. "You propose that we surrender this land to the Falnori? What of the Hall?"
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