Disclaimer: The Stargate universe belongs to MGM et al. - this is for fun, no copyright infringement is intended.
Author's note: Special thanks to Sarah and Claudius for their invaluable help with the math. Without them this story would never have been written.
Post Season 5, Atlantis has returned to Pegasus.
Patience was never an attribute people readily listed among Ronon's virtues. As a matter of fact, it wasn't something he would have named himself. What was … kind of ironic, considering.
Ronon pulled the top crystal and exchanged it with the one second to the left in the fourth row then switched the last two in the second row. He connected the generator. Waited ten seconds. Disconnected the generator. Moved the marker on the laptop screen on to the next graphic and saved the file carefully.
It wasn't that he was incapable of being still. With his build he had discovered at an early age that looming silently and staring your opponent down was much more effective than any verbal threat. Being on the run for seven years had taught him further that sometimes your ability to remain motionless made the difference between catching your game and going hungry.
He switched the two middle crystals in the second row. Connected the generator. Waited ten seconds. Disconnected it. Moved the marker on, hit save.
Or, a bit more extreme, the difference between dying and living to fight another day. Point was, in all this waiting, being still, carefully twisting fiber of plants into a rope for a sling – it served a certain purpose, were a means to an end, usually close at hand and always clearly defined … but had little to do with actual patience. And that was kind of ironic, too.
He switched the new pair of last two crystals in the second row. Connected the generator. Waited. Disconnected. Moved the marker, saved the file.
In a way, Ronon felt as if he had lived four different lives already – and that although most cultures would still consider him young of years. It amused him sometimes. At other times it only hurt. A lot. Especially when he thought about the first of these lives. That he had lived, of course, in the home he was born into, Sateda, with his parents and relatives and comrades-in-arms and most of all Melena, his wife. It was the one where he had thought about having children. The one that had ended in fire and blood and death for a whole world.
He swapped the two new middle crystals in the second row. Connected. Waited. Disconnected. Moved the marker, saved.
His second life he had lived as a Runner; a hunted beast with nowhere to go, no place to stay, bringer of death to anyone who took him in and offered help. He still wasn't sure why he held out for so long. Did not simply let the Wraith catch up and end it all, just as they had ended everything he held dear. Maybe it had been merely stubbornness. Maybe the wish for revenge because as long as they hunted him he had opportunities to kill them. Maybe he had seen it as an apt punishment because he still lived while so many were dead. But then the people from Earth had come and that had been the start of another, his third life.
He exchanged again the new last two crystals in the second row. Connected. Waited. Disconnected. Moved one graphic on and saved the file.
A life where he once more found a place to call home, a place worth fighting for. Atlantis. And, even more important, once more found friendship and courageous hearts slowly filling the desolate places in his soul, left by the destruction of a world and seven years on the run. It had not been a life without pain, though. Without the loss of friends. Carson. The real one. Elisabeth Weir. Still. It had been a good life. Fighting against the Wraith. Defeating the Replicators. Helping others worlds in the Pegasus Galaxy and even Earth, occasionally. Until it, too, fell apart in a flash of white light.
He exchanged the first two crystals in the second row. Connected. Rubbed his neck, rolling his head left and right. Disconnected. Moved the marker, saved.
One span of a hand. That had been all. One span of a hand he stood closer to the entrance of the cave they explored than Teyla, less than that just out of reach of the shrill culling beam shooting out of a wall and sweeping up her, Sheppard and McKay. Only for the wonky alien power source to die in a spectacular explosion that sent him right through the opening and down the steep scree slope McKay had complained so incessantly about while climbing it up.
He switched the last two crystals in the second row. Connected. Waited. Disconnected. Moved the marker and saved.
He did not remember much after that, not even the rescue party that eventually found him there at the bottom. He had not been exactly unconscious, just, well, somewhat out of it. Not that he wasn't entitled with that concussion. His next clear memory was of Jennifer Keller looking down on him in the Atlantis infirmary. And her obviously forced smile. He had known immediately: the worry was not for him or his injuries.
He switched the middle crystals in the second row. Connected the generator. Waited ten seconds. Disconnected it. Moved the marker on, hit save.
They knew nothing about the race who built the facility in the cave. They were not even sure they had been human since no other traces of their civilization were found on the entire planet. The only thing they knew was that the aliens had somehow managed to merge components of Wraith as well as Ancient technology and hold it all together with something completely their own. Unfortunately the parts most affected by the violent demise of their power source were of the last kind. Leaving Zelenka and the other scientists nothing to work with.
He switched the new pair of last two crystals in the second row. Connected. Made sure the markings on all crystals were still secure. Disconnected. Moved the marker on the laptop, saved the file.
The Czech tried. Two whole months he tried, writing miles of code, using any trick they had, DHD control crystals, a whole Wraith interface they squeezed out of Todd... But in the end he stood almost empty-handed. There was simply nothing THERE to reconstruct the programs controlling culling beam and storage device. Where the Ancients had used crystals to save their data and the people from Earth worked with things called "hard drives" or "CDs" or "USB keys" these aliens seemed to have used a strange gelatinous mass. Most of which had dried out and fallen apart a long time ago while the rest had short-circuited and been blown to pieces in the explosion. The only thing they could tell was that the storage still had backup energy and still held some kind of content.
He swapped the new middle crystals in the second row. Connected. Waited. Disconnected. Moved the marker, saved.
There was one last glimmer of hope. The aliens had used an ancient crystal panel between the Wraith device and their own computer console. Eleven identical crystals arranged in rows of one–four–one–four–one identical slots. And ancient crystal technology was incredibly redundant. So, while there was no way to recreate the virtual command to release the contents of the storage, the crystals, physically rearranged in one specific pattern would – with a probability of ninety-eight percent – serve the same purpose. The problem was finding that one specific arrangement.
He once more switched the last two crystals in the second row. Connected. Waited. Disconnected. Moved the marker, saved.
Thirty-nine million nine hundred and sixteen thousand eight hundred. 3 – 9 – 9 – 1 – 6 – 8 – 0 – 0. That many times eleven identically shaped crystals could be arranged differently in eleven identically shaped slots. No, Ronon did not calculate that figure himself. McKay could have done it. Sheppard probably. For him, Zelenka did, in Woolsey's office, and he bore it remarkably well when Ronon smashed his laptop against a wall before storming out when he finally understood what this dry number meant.
He exchanged the first two crystals in the second row. Connected, waited and disconnected. Moved the marker. Saved.
39,916,800 possibilities. 39,916,800 minus 1 possible changes to the pattern they had found the crystals in. If you managed to do 3 arrangements a minute, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year you would need 25 years and 115 days to go through all possible combinations. However, realistically you needed to calculate about 7 hours a day for sleeping, eating or taking care of body hygiene what left only 17 hours a day to work. 3 arrangements a minute, 17 hours a day, 365 days a year made 35 years 269 days and just under 12 hours to complete every possible combination. Theoretically. Of course, the arrangement they sought could be within the first hundred. Or number 39,916,798.
He switched the last two crystals in the second row. Connected the generator. Waited. Disconnected it. Moved the marker. Saved.
Contrary to appearances, Ronon did not usually jump into action without thinking about it first. He just tended to think more linear than most people. He was also not quite as monosyllabic as most on Atlantis believed, the years on the run had just buried his words in silence. And so "I'll do it" was all he said when he, after some hours of contemplation on a lonely balcony, walked back in Woolsey's office.
He switched the pair of middle crystals in the second row. Connected. Took a sip of water. Disconnected. Moved the marker, saved the file.
They tried to dissuade him, of course. And he appreciated that. Then they gave him all the help he could have asked for, and for that he was grateful. Zelenka wrote a program that mapped out all arrangements in a logical order and designed a means to mark the crystals. Woolsey granted the use of a Naquadah generator – and only the Ancestors knew how he sold that to the SGC and the IOA. Lorne and his Marines helped moving stuff to the cave and setting up camp. And then he sat down in front of the crystal panel for the first time and his next, his fourth life truly began.
He switched the new pair of last two crystals. Connected. Waited. Disconnected. Moved the marker, saved.
After the first hour he was cautiously optimistic how fast he became adept in switching around the crystals and how much he had already done. After the first day he discovered with surprise how many unknown muscles you needed to kneel, sit, squat or crouch for hours on end in front of that hip-high panel. After the first week he got an inkling what he had gotten himself into. After the first month he no longer thought about it.
He once again switched the two new middle crystals in the second row. Connected. Waited. Disconnected. Moved the marker one graphic on, hit save.
Four or five times a month people from Atlantis came by. They usually hiked the two hours from the Stargate to the cave, brought a backpack of supplies and the latest gossip from the city. They also usually took over for a while, so he could get a bit extra sleep or other dearly needed time for himself. Amelia did regularly. Zelenka and Chuck and a handful of McKay's other scientists, switching crystals with nimble hands and academically trained endurance. Lorne. Beckett, every now and again. A couple of Marines he would never have thought the type. Jennifer. That always felt kind of strange.
He swapped the last two crystals of the second row. Connected. Rolled his stiff shoulders, rubbed his eyes. Disconnected. Moved the marker on, saved.
The first winter surprised them all with a blizzard showing wind speeds of a category five hurricane and arctic temperatures. It also almost killed Amelia. Knocked flat on stepping through the Stargate and driven endless feet across the icy ground she somehow managed to keep her head, wrap her parka around her face against the shrapnel-like hail of ice particles, orient herself, find the DHD, dial the Alpha Site and crawl back through the Gate before it could shut down again. But the cruel bite of frost had already done terrible damage. By the time the storm finally let up two weeks later and Ronon was able to make contact again, she had already been sent back to Earth.
He exchanged the first and the last crystal in the second row. Connected. Waited. Disconnected. Moved the marker and saved.
Lorne and the Marines built a radio relay station halfway between the Stargate and the cave after that since not even a jumper could fly safely in that kind of wind. Unfortunately the second blizzard blew it right away. As it turned out the first storm of the season was also the mildest. It took two more tries before they found a construction capable of withstanding those destructive conditions.
He once more switched the last two crystals in the second row. Connected the generator. Waited. Disconnected the generator. Moved the marker, saved.
Winter turned to spring, spring turned to summer, summer slowly reached the edge of fall when the visits from Atlantis suddenly stopped. At first Ronon didn't notice. Time had become meaningless in his world and the usual tales of smaller or larger disasters in the galaxy had in the end become just that: tales, only remotely of his concern. When he finally hiked down to the Stargate he discovered that the address of the city wouldn't lock. Dialing the Alpha Site instead he then slowly prowled through the abandoned camp, noting the signs of hasty retreat, the left equipment and personal things. When no ship ever showed up above his planet he knew.
He swapped the two middle crystals in the second row. Connected the generator. Waited and disconnected. Moved the marker. Saved.
Now, only the Athosians came to see him. Mostly Halling or Jinto, his son. They had learned from trading partners across the galaxy that Atlantis had suddenly recalled its gate-teams but no one knew why. Though, of course, speculations were running wild. There was talk of a new attack of the Wraith. Of the return of Micheal's creatures. Of a new enemy race, hiding in the shadows. Even of an intervention of the Ancestors who finally came and destroyed the defilers of their city. Traveler ships only reported of an empty planet. In the long run it didn't matter. There was nothing Ronon – or the Athosians – could do.
He switched the new pair of last two crystals in the second row. Connected. Checked the wires and their connections. Disconnected. Moved the marker and hit save.
For Ronon things got more complicated without the regular supply-runs from the city. The Athosians shared freely and generously but he still needed to cook instead of just opening an MRE or hunt to stretch his supplies when they couldn't spare a pair of hands in harvest season. He had lost a lot of muscle mass in the past year and a half – even on the run he had exercised constantly whenever possible, something he had not bothered wasting time with now – and his stamina was lacking painfully.
He exchanged the new pair of middle crystals in the second row. Connected. Waited. Disconnected. Moved the marker, saved.
Winter was an even more serious problem too, now. At first the Athosians still had the radios provided from Atlantis but even with strict restriction of use batteries finally ran out. Since the risk of landing in a storm was too great without radio-contact beforehand, Ronon had no other choice than interrupt his work whenever supplies ran low and go on the exhausting trek to the Gate, always keeping a nervous eye out for weather changes.
He switched the last two crystals in the second row. Connected. Stretched his back. Disconnected, moved the marker and hit save.
Once a year in summer Kanaan came to the cave, bringing Torren with him. Arriving before sunrise he lit a candle in front of the panel and then sat down with his son on his lap and slowly, meticulously worked the crystals until the sun sank back behind the horizon. Then he rose, calmly touched his forehead to Ronon's and left under the early stars of dusk; a quiet, erect figure, sometimes carrying his sleeping son on his back, melting silently into the night. And those nights when he was lying on his simple bed Ronon would reflect that they both had their burdens to bear – and there was no telling who carried the greater. Kanaan who had to live on for his son and ultimately leave behind the woman he loved … or he, Ronon, who gave up his life for his teammates because he had nothing else to live for.
He pulled the top crystal and exchanged it with the third one in the fourth row then switched the last two in the second row. Connected the generator. Waited ten seconds. Disconnected. Moved the marker and saved the file.
And so the years passed slowly. Jinto married. The Athosians beat back an attack of the Bola Kai. The Wraith continued to haunt the galaxy and harvest their human cattle. The Genii became the leader of the coalition. Torren learned to work the crystals. Ronon slept, woke up, ate something and sat down before the panel. On a good day he still managed up to three-thousand two hundred combinations. When he got too tired, and the risk of mistakes too great, he ate and dropped onto his bed to sleep. Then it all began anew. 39,916,800 possibilities. 39,916,800 minus 1 possible changes to the pattern they had found the crystals in. One would command the storage to re-materialize its cargo. One would make it delete its contents and shut down for good. One way or another, he would release his friends from their prison.
Ronon switched the middle crystals in the second row. Connected. Waited. Disconnected. Moved the marker, saved.
Because, while patience had never been one of his virtues, persistence certainly was. In abundance.
The end.