STARGATE ATLANTIS: Dead End

by Chris Wraight

  “You got all that,” asked Sheppard, raising an eyebrow, “from that?”

  “I’ve had longer to look at it than you,” replied McKay. “And, no offense, I really am a whole lot smarter.”

  Weir looked unconvinced.

  “So why the elaborate defense mechanism in that chamber?”

  Rodney rolled his eyes.

  “You want me to work out every last detail of this? Oh yes. Of course you do.” He thought for a second. “I don’t know. Maybe it was for Lantean eyes only. Something to stop the Wraith reading the message, in case they ever got down there.”

  “Or us,” said Ronon.

  “Quite. But thanks to Colonel Sheppard’s acrobatics, we got something out. And now we can use it.”

  Weir held a warning hand up.

  “Whoa. You’re going too fast here, Rodney. So far, all we’ve got is a sealed chamber and a message we can barely understand.”

  “With respect, Elizabeth, we’ve got more than that,” said McKay. “We’ve got a gate address, and we’ve got a theory. We know the gate network isn’t perfect. Some destinations seem to require more power to get to than others. The obvious example is the inter-galactic route, which needs huge amounts of juice. But even in the Pegasus galaxy we find some destinations are harder to reach than others. Maybe there are ways around this. My guess is that we stumbled across an attempt to refine the gate technology.”

  He looked from one member of the team to the others, searching for agreement.

  “Interesting,” said Weir. She turned to Sheppard. “You got a note of the gate address in the chamber?”

  “Oh, I got it. Those little squiggles are pretty well stuck my mind.”

  “And?”

  “I can show you,” said McKay, bringing up a galactic map on the display. The map started to zoom. “Here we are, home sweet home, on the galactic rim.” The map continued to zoom out. “Any minute now…”

  The animation concluded. A red triangle marked Lantea, and a green circle the location of the gate address. The dotted line between them ran the width of the screen.

  Weir shook her head. “My God,” she breathed. “It’s basically out of the galaxy.”

  “How far is that?” said Zelenka.

  “In technical terms?” said McKay. “A really long way. Further than we’ve ever been in Pegasus. I looked at the stellar cartography. It’s off the scale. The power requirements to get there are pretty scary.”

  “Yes, but it can’t drain more than dialing back to Milky Way,” scoffed Radek.

  “You know, normally I’d agree with you,” said McKay. “But we don’t know everything about gate travel, and something’s odd about this setup. And there’s another thing. Most locations on the Stargate network are accessible from anywhere else. If you know the address, and have some means of dialing, you can jump from anywhere to anywhere. The exceptions are the long hops, like between galaxies. Here’s the trick — I think this one’s exactly the same. From the database, it seems clear that this node is only accessible from one other place.”

  Weir let out a deep breath. “I think I know what you’re going to say.”

  Sheppard grinned. “I love it when you’re ahead of us.”

  Weir pursed her lips. She had come to like and respect John in their time serving together on Atlantis, but his endless flippancy could get wearing. She knew that exploration was part of the brief, but it would be nice, just for once, if her senior officers could think about something other than scooting off on a fresh mission as soon as the last one had ended.

  “OK, so we have an address, and a mystery device designed to access it,” she said, carefully. “What are we going to do about it? Can we access this planet from the regular Stargate? Even if we can, do we want to?”

  McKay shrugged. “We’d need to do some work,” he said. “I’ve been thinking of ways to increase the power to the gate mechanism anyway. I’d bet it’s possible. As for whether we should. That’s a different proposition. It’s an opportunity to find out what the Ancients were up to in that room. And if it was that heavily shielded, it must be important.”

  Weir frowned. “We’ve got our hands full with the Wraith right now,” she pointed out. “I can see that there’s something interesting going on here, but I’m not sure I’m going to give the green light to this.”

  Sheppard interjected, looking a little embarrassed to be doing so.

  “Er, I know you’re not gonna believe this, Elizabeth,” he said, “but I reckon Rodney could be on to something here.”

  She gave him a quizzical look. McKay just looked startled.

  “Our situation here’s still kinda precarious,” he said. “But a gate address on its own, with no other way to get to it? Sounds like a perfect Alpha site to me.”

  Zelenka shook his head. “This is all still just supposition. We don’t really know what that room was used for, and in my experience, gate addresses hidden behind layers of steel tell you one very clear thing: don’t go there!”

  “Yeah, well that might not be such bad advice,” said Sheppard ruefully. “But we did it anyway, and now we’ve gotta decide what to do with what we found.”

  Weir turned her attention to Teyla. The Athosian had been uncharacteristically quiet. “What do you think, Teyla?” she said. “You’ve never heard of this place?”

  “No,” Teyla replied. “My people have no knowledge of anything that far away. I am not sure whether the risks of going there outweigh the potential benefits.” She glanced at the shard still protruding from McKay’s laptop. “But we have heard the words of the Ancestors. Though their message was not complete, it seems obvious that they had some important purpose there. I do not think we can ignore that.”

  Weir saw Sheppard looking at Teyla approvingly. It was what made her so valuable to the team, her willingness to take risks. But the commander had to balance those with the needs of the entire mission. Yet again, the choice was a fine one.

  “OK,” she said at last. “You can look into this. But we’re not going to hurry, and we’re not going to get it wrong. McKay, take Zelenka with you and see how feasible it would be to reach this place. Once we know a little more, we can make a decision on what to do next. But if we can’t do this safely, we’re not doing it at all. Period.”

  She rose, and the rest of the room did likewise. She could see Zelenka’s look of concern, and Sheppard’s expression of eager anticipation. They were cut from very different cloth, those two, and Weir just hoped she’d chosen wisely.

  The screen filled with numbers, filtering downwards rapidly, before the red lines appeared again. The terminal issued a perfunctory bleep, then shut down the relay.

  “Damn!” hissed McKay.

  He was sitting at a computer in the Operations Center, directly over the gate room. Zelenka was down by the gate itself, wrestling with thick cables and a battery of routing equipment. They had been trying for a couple of hours to get the Stargate to accept the mystery address, but the power requirements were too large. Every time it was entered, the system shut down.

  “I’m guessing this was why the Ancients decided to use a replacement!” shouted Zelenka from the bay below.

  McKay scowled. He could swear Zelenka was enjoying this. Despite the best efforts of a dozen technicians, they were still nowhere near getting the beefed-up Stargate mechanism to work and the ideas had started to run dry.

  “OK, let’s try again with the re-routed backup supply,” said McKay over the intercom. “It’s all about timing. We only need a short burst.”

  The figures on his monitor reset themselves, and down in the gate room the technicians set about arranging the equipment again.

  McKay looked at the schematics one more time. The issue wasn’t just raw power — now that the ZPM was installed, they had plenty to spare for the operation of the gate. The problem was the efficiency of supply, ensuring that the Stargate’s complex and subtle mechanics were fed what they needed when they needed it. Opening an event horizon
was an art that the Atlantis team still barely understood, and it was clear that the existing Stargate had definite limits. Trying to keep everything within the necessary parameters was like trying to herd cats. In the dark. With oven gloves.

  “OK, Rodney,” came Zelenka’s voice over the intercom. “We’re done. Run the sequence when you’re ready.”

  McKay took a deep breath and looked carefully at the command scripts he’d developed. He made a few minor alterations, changing the order in which certain items were run, and then packaged the lot for execution.

  “Get your people out of the way,” he told Zelenka. “Here we go again. If this doesn’t work, we’ll have to start over.”

  The gate room cleared. Once the area was sealed, McKay hit the Enter key on his terminal, and the power sequence activated. Lights danced across the monitor as data was relayed back to the command center. Huge amounts of energy surged down the power cables, each burst timed to what McKay hoped was perfection. A few nanoseconds apart, the carefully placed units powered up. For a moment, very little happened. Then the red lines appeared on the monitor again.

  “Oh, please…” groaned McKay, feeling the empty sensation of failure in his stomach. “This should be working.”

  Then the red lines cleared. There was activity in one of the compensators and a series of lights flicked on across the control terminal. With a shudder the gate stuttered into life, the familiar watery surface of the event horizon tearing across the circular aperture. Strange readings lurked at the edges, but those could be tweaked. It had worked!

  “Yes!” McKay punched the air in delight. “I knew we were getting close! Oh, I’m good. I’m really good.”

  “Congratulations, Rodney,” said Zelenka over the intercom. He sounded genuinely impressed, albeit grudgingly. “I didn’t think we’d squeeze that last bit out.”

  McKay did his best to calm down. Victory was always sweet; there was no point milking the moment too much.

  “Oh, ye of little faith,” he said. “Now we need to tie this down and do a few more tests. We’ve shown it can work, but Elizabeth will want a repeatable demonstration. I don’t want to let her down.”

  “Very good,” said Zelenka, his voice breaking up slightly over the comm link. “I just hope all of this is worth it. You still haven’t convinced me we should be going there, whatever Elizabeth thinks.”

  “Well, thankfully you’re not in charge of this installation, and she is,” said McKay impatiently. “Is the MALP in position?”

  “It is. Sending it through now.”

  Zelenka and his team stood clear as the cumbersome MALP crawled towards the shimmering gate, servos whining as it disappeared into the event horizon. Immediately, more red lights flashed across McKay’s console.

  “What’s that?” said Zelenka, concerned. “We’ve got some strange readings down here.”

  “Ignore it,” snapped McKay, concentrating on the data stream beginning to emerge from the wormhole. “It’s just the power drain from the extra mass in the gate buffers. It’ll clear up.”

  The MALP was gone, sucked into the wormhole and hurled thousands of light years distant in a fraction of a second. The readings on the monitor went back to normal.

  “It’s through,” said McKay over the intercom. “We’ll be getting telemetry any second.”

  He swiveled in his chair to look at the monitor assigned to the video feed. The screen was a snowstorm; clearly the MALP hadn’t begun relaying yet.

  “What a mess!” said Zelenka, suddenly appearing at McKay’s shoulder.

  “Don’t worry,” said McKay, starting to get worried. “We’ll get something through soon.” It would be just his luck, after all this effort, that there was a problem with the MALP’s transmitters.

  Zelenka clapped him hard on the shoulder. “Look again,” he said, enjoying the moment. “That’s a real snowstorm.”

  McKay screwed his eyes up and studied the feed more closely. The lines of white and gray were momentarily broken. There was an fleeting image of a vast, open space. A glacier, or perhaps a snowfield of some kind. Then the streaks of snow and ice returned. The camera was rocking badly. The MALP had been sent into the middle of a storm. It looked absolutely filthy.

  “Atmospheric readings?” asked Zelenka.

  “Usual oxygen/nitrogen mix. Within standard Ancient parameters. Perfectly breathable.”

  “And the temperature?”

  McKay took a look down the screen at the flickering figures being transmitted by the MALP. He let out a low whistle.

  “Cold. Very cold. That’s odd.”

  Zelenka gave him a quizzical look. “I don’t see why. The Czech Republic is cold. Everywhere the Ancients seeded doesn’t have to look the same. These are planets we’re talking about, not movie sets.”

  McKay gave him a withering look. “Yes, but the similarity we’ve noticed between most of the places we’ve been to is no accident. Surprisingly enough, the Ancients didn’t want their populations freezing to death within a generation. So they made their homes as pleasant as possible. And this is way outside the normal envelope.”

  Zelenka sucked his teeth thoughtfully. “But habitable?”

  McKay studied the readings.

  “Yeah, I’d say so. Just chilly.” He looked suddenly worried. “I’m really not that good in the cold. It’s a family thing. My circulation’s bad.”

  Zelenka ignored him. The signal from the MALP began to break up. “You’re not the only one. We’re losing the MALP.”

  “We can’t be losing the MALP,” snapped McKay, frowning. “Those things are tough. It’s got to be a transmission problem. In fact, now I look at them, there’s something really strange about these wormhole integrity indicators…”

  The video feed sheered into nothing, and the data readings gave out soon afterwards. McKay looked at the empty screens, suddenly perturbed. The euphoria of getting a MALP to the mysterious gate address had dissolved into a nagging worry about what it had found.

  “God, that place looks horrible,” he breathed, half to himself.

  “Then good luck!” said Zelenka, grinning at him. “You’ll need it. This is one mission I’m happy to miss.”

  Chapter Two

  Sheppard digested the information on the screens carefully. There were a lot of numbers he didn’t understand, but he could read a temperature gauge. The planet they’d all started to refer to as “Dead End” didn’t sound that inviting. Teyla and Ronon looked similarly thoughtful. Weir was downright skeptical.

  Having finished his demonstration, McKay leaned back in his chair and looked at the others clustered around him in the Operations Center. He looked genuinely torn between his desire to see what the Ancients had been up to and his dislike for the expected conditions.

  “It might work,” he said, giving Weir a sidelong glance. “It’s going to be cold. Very cold. And we’ll need the proper gear.”

  The mission commander looked back at him sternly. “If I authorize this mission, then you’ll get all the equipment you need,” she said. “But I’m not sure I’m there yet. We’ve seen the footage from the MALP. We don’t know if there’s any settlement on this planet, or even if the Ancients actually did anything much there at all. For all we’ve discovered, this experiment might never have gotten off the ground. I’m all for exploration, but are we taking a sensible risk here?”

  Sheppard shot her a winning smile.

  “So it’s a little chilly,” he said. “It’s not gonna to be a picnic, but we’ve experienced worse. Cold weather gear, some extra rations, and we’ll be fine. Ronon might have a problem standing up to it, but I’m sure McKay’ll show him the way.”

  Teyla smiled, and looked over at the Satedan, who remained impassive. McKay just rolled his eyes.

  “Seriously, we’ve got to remember why we’re here,” continued Sheppard. “If we’re gonna turn down missions because they look borderline, then we may as well head back to the clubhouse for good. There’s something weird about that
place, or the Ancients wouldn’t have rigged up their magic back-door to it.”

  “Something weird? That’s your reason to go?” asked Weir.

  “Well, I’m not best qualified on the science stuff. But yeah, that’s about the size of it. Rodney’ll give you the technical side.”

  All eyes turned to McKay. He looked uncomfortable.

  “Look, I don’t like cold. Or hot, come to think of it. But especially not cold. And I get chilblains easy,” he said. “But we could certainly use a way to travel around without relying on the Daedalus. If there’s new gate tech working here, then I’m not going to sleep well until I know how it works. If we can crack it, we could even get the backup link to Earth you’ve been trying to get me to build since we got here. So that’s a reason for checking it out. Not that I’m keen on going myself. I’d be happy to monitor things from here, really I would. But we can’t just ignore it.”

  Sheppard turned back to Weir. “You heard the man,” he said. “Now we’ve got two reasons for going. It’s weird, and it’s useful.”

  Weir turned to the other members. “Teyla?”

  “I agree with Dr McKay,” the Athosian said. “The Ancestors have spoken. If they had come back to Lantea, they would have completed whatever it was they were doing there. There was urgency in their message. We cannot ignore it.”

  “Ronon?”

  The Satedan shrugged. “I’m up for it,” he said in his usual expansive way.

  Sheppard grinned, feeling things going his way. “You’re gonna have to find a reason for us not to do this, Elizabeth,” he said. “There’s a case for a recon, and that’s really our job.”

  Weir looked at him for a few moments, evidently weighing up her options. “I still don’t like it,” she said, at last. “There’s way too much we don’t know.”

  Still she paused. The team waited, saying nothing.

  “But I’m mindful of the Ancients’ message,” she said at last. “They felt it was important, and we have to take that seriously. So take the Jumper — that’ll give you some protection. We’re breaking new ground here and I want you all back safely.”