Chapter 2

It was seventeen minutes of travel in normal space to get to Mars. Samantha Carter spent that time standing at the front of the bridge of her ship, staring through the forceshield protected transparent steel that looked over the long dorsal neck of the Hammond, and beyond to the new star light reaching them. The navigation computers had had to be adjusted somewhat but it was a simple mathematical progression forward in time to achieve it. Her mind was on something completely different, however.

The people left behind in their original universe.

Earth had been gifted with another chance to reach for the stars, on their own terms this time. She wished it hadn't come at such a horrible price. All members of the Stargate Program who had been offworld at the time of the ISOT event had been left behind in another universe – a full quarter of all available field personnel, their commanders, staff and scientists conducting research deemed too dangerous to do on Earth. All their families were going to have to be brought in and explanations given. It was a task she didn't relish performing.

In fact the coming months were looming before her like a spectre of dread. She had never felt like this in the darkest hours of the Stargate Program, facing the direst odds, the most unspeakable enemies. To the IOA and the Stargate community it was grimly known as D-Day…Disclosure. It was the day they played dice with civilization on Earth. 'Will the truth destroy us, or set us free?' she thought grimly.

She always remembered speaking to Alec Colson on Alpha Site, when the Aviation billionaire had through his own contacts and ingenuity been able to put two and two together about the Stargate program.'But in the end, we have to believe in humanity,' he had said. 'If a truth of this magnitude, about the very nature of human existence, could lead us to destroy ourselves? Then I'd say we would deserve it. Wouldn't you?'

The IOA's eventual plan for disclosure would obviously be amended, to fit current circumstances, but it was still a real gamble. She really didn't want to think about the Plan B they had concocted if the world seemed likely to descend into complete anarchy, it was reprehensible and vile, but it was something they would use if necessary. Hope for the best, plan for the worst, as the old truism went.

Someone walked up to stand beside her. "I wonder if there will be any differences in this Mars, in comparison to the old one."

"Besides the odd energy signature, it doesn't seem there is." Sam turned to Daniel Jackson with a wry grin. "We've detected the Mars Rovers and the Mars surveyor satellites, so it's clear that the Earth we seemingly replaced in this Universe did have a NASA as well."

He nodded in acknowledgement of that fact. "If that's the case, then there was a U.S. and most likely other similarities, it's too bad we'll never know for sure what differences there are though."

Sam laughed. "Given the amount of times we've dealt with alternate realties, the differences could be negligible; someone decided to turn right instead of left, or there could've been a different President."

"You know, I just can't imagine General Landry being..."

"Amazing!"

Sam looked to the side where the main plasma screen display for the Bridge was, and standing in front of it at its control pedestal was Dr Rodney McKay. Five years in the Pegasus Galaxy fighting the Wraith had done wonders in deflating that near legendary ego, somewhat, and even a girlfriend of all things in the form of the Atlantis CMO had smoothed over his rough edges. He was still wearing his Atlantis Expedition uniform and was staring with near awe at the scans he was taking of Mars. 'It's rare to see him speechless,' Sam thought.

"Colonel, approaching Mars…" the Hammond's helmsman announced.

"Put us into a polar orbit," Sam ordered, walking over to Atlantis' Chief Scientist. "What've you got Rodney?"

"Take a look," Rodney tapped on the controls and brought up a micro-resolution scan display.

"That's…" Sam blinked, her eyebrows shooting through the roof. "Is that an element with no protons whatsoever?"

"Good, you're seeing it too," Rodney sighed with relief. "I thought I was going nuts or something. Yes, there's an element down there on Mars that has neutrons and electrons orbiting it, but the Z count is zero."

"If I didn't know that my ship was in perfect working order I would've ordered a diagnostic on the sensors," Sam declared, staring with fascination at the dancing real-time diagram of the element. "Have you got any theories yet?"

"It's something we definitely haven't seen before, but I've referenced the Asgard database and our little grey friends have…they call it something unpronounceable, but I'll just call it elzed."

Sam inwardly flinched at the horrible name. She recalled Colonel Sheppard mentioning once that he'd barred Rodney from naming anything new. "According to this..." she squinted at the database entries that were popping up very helpfully. "Elzed is something they used in their very early spacefaring history."

"It's created by the energy of a star going supernova interacting with normal matter," Rodney read thoughtfully. "They mined it from the asteroid debris around neutron stars and pulsars. Then after refinement they induce an electrical current into the material and it releases dark energy of all things."

Sam's mind spun at the possibilities and potential applications immediately blossomed in her brain.

Daniel coughed pointedly. "Uh, for those of us without astrophysics degrees, what's dark energy?"

Sam explained. "It's the fifth fundamental force of the Universe, the others being gravity, electromagnetism, weak nuclear and strong nuclear. The repulsive effects of dark energy are the primary reason the expansion of the universe is gradually accelerating."

"Okay," Daniel nodded, "and I assume finding an element that can generate it is good?"

"Very good," Sam nodded.

"Certainly not from a FTL perspective," Rodney pointed out continuing to read. "Which is what the early Asgard used it for; they manipulated the dark energy to form a field around their ships which essentially dialled down its mass artificially into 'negative mass', their engines could then accelerate the ship to beyond lightspeed."

Sam did a few guesstimates in her head. "I can't imagine that would be very fast in comparison to Hyperdrive."

"It's practically pedestrian, according to the database; the best the Asgard could achieve was twenty light years in a day, before the invention of their first Hyperdrives made this form of FTL obsolete." Rodney shook his head. "The Elzed FTL drives also had the problem that the ships would accumulate an electrical charge after an extended period of operation. They'd need to either discharge into a planet's magnetosphere or land the ship. And if neither was available, it would eventually discharge into the hull, killing the entire crew and destroying all the systems on board.

"Where this is revolutionary, is in weaponry. How would you like to carry a Rail Gun miniaturized to the size of P90? Or for that matter, enhance our current ship-mounted rotary Rail Guns to fire projectiles at fractional-C velocities."

"Okay, that's nice," Daniel declared dryly. "But I'm more interested in the 'who'. Clearly if this stuff's only supposed to be found around neutron stars, it was put here on Mars by someone other than a human."

Rodney nodded and a few taps on the controls later, the screen projected a scan of Mars. "The signature is coming from here, a mile or so from the Deseado Crater, on the Promethei Planum."

"Perform a deep penetration scan," Sam instructed.

What resolved on the screen was amazing. "We've got a subterranean structure…I'm also detecting composite alloys and materials; that could be indicative of starships in one of the chambers. There are concentrated elzed signatures coming from these and from what looks to be adjoining cargo bays."

Daniel's face lit up with excitement. "What are conditions like down there?"

"Whatever Life Support the facility had, it has long since failed. I'm reading minus eighty seven degrees and only point eight kilopascals of atmospheric pressure."

"And structurally, is it safe to beam down?"

"The upper levels could do with some shoring up, but I think it's relatively safe, as long as there is no shooting, explosions or other assorted mayhem. And since there are no lifesigns, alien or otherwise, not to mention no power signatures indicative of automated weapons, I doubt we'll have to worry."

"Okay Rodney, take Colonel Sheppard, Ronon and yes Daniel," she raised a hand to stop the archaeologist from objecting, "You can go too, since this is a completely alien complex and a linguistic specialist will be clearly needed. We'll keep a constant transporter lock on you in case something goes wrong."

Sam watched the two men walk excitedly off the Bridge and dearly wished she could be going along with them. That was the price to pay for being the CO of a starship though.

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EVA Room 1, USSS Hammond

Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard could boast many things; that he had visited every continent on Earth, was qualified to fly Apache, Black hawk and Cobra helicopters, as well as a V-22 Osprey and an F-16 fighter. He had taken and passed a MENSA test, but declined membership of the intellect elitist organization as it smacked too much of hubris. This was only his terrestrial resume; his offworld accomplishments in the Pegasus Galaxy added a nice few extra pages to it. He was the person who essentially wrote the book on the Atlantean Puddle Jumper; a small armed scout craft that used the Stargate network as its FTL capability. He had successfully landed an alien version of a Space Shuttle, and he was one of only two humans who had flown Atlantis itself. He could also add a pages long list of planets that he had scouted and explored with his AR1 team in Pegasus.

Mars was the one planet he had never expected to ever add to that list. He had thought that even after five years of experience in Pegasus that he had a pretty thick skin for the weird and the spectacular. Earth and its Moon getting sucked into another Universe…

He had no words in his head to describe that level of weird, perhaps the Ancients had one.

Now he was trying to absorb another surprise. It was roughly closet-sized and looked very high tech and futuristic with a shiny exterior, and even hovered a foot off the floor. It even had his name on it. In fact, there was one of these things for each of them. John looked with amusement as Ronon just stared quizzically at his own high tech closet. The big Satedan with his long dreadlocks disliked climbing into spacesuits and avoided them whenever he could.

"Okay listen up," Rodney began the hopefully short introduction on exactly what these were. "These are the new Mark 1 HES for Hazardous Environment Suit. They are essentially an improved Earth built analogue of the Goa'uld Kull Warrior suit." The scientist opened his own closet and it hissed open automatically to reveal a pure white and grey suit that seemed both rigid and flexible at the same time. The helmet was completely made of transparent steel that conformed to the back of the head, but became a dome over the front which didn't cut off your peripheral vision. It had also clearly been personalized to their individual body forms.

Daniel opened his own. "I've worn a Kull suit before…what improvements?"

"They're rated to pure vacuum, unlike a Kull suit. There are also no solid bits as you can see…giving extra flexibility. Now normally you'd need a huge LS Pack strapped to your back to maintain internal pressure and oxygen, but as you can see it's much smaller now, barely noticeable."

"Do these also give us the protection that those things had?" John asked with a grin of anticipation.

"Unfortunately no," Rodney looked irritated. "It'll give you the ability to absorb maybe three or four staff plasma blasts and .50 cal bullets at long range. The team working on it has assured me that Mark 2 will be on par with a Kull warrior's durability. The Energy Sink Technology is proving difficult to master."

Getting into the suits was surprisingly easy too, after putting on the thermal undersuit and connecting the plumbing, it was like putting on a dive suit. The HES was apparently made of a smart material capable of sensing when it was supposed to flex or become rigid. Once everything was sealed up he was also surprised to note that he had a HUD in his helmet that displayed his own vitals back to him and suit system status.

After gearing up; and everyone indicated that they were ready, John tapped on his suit's wrist controls. "Bridge, this is Sheppard. We're ready."

"Understood, stand by to beam."

John, Rodney and Daniel hefted their P90s and Ronon raised his Pulse pistol in readiness. Sensors showed nothing down there, but sensors had been known to be wrong before.

The familiar feeling of discontinuity enveloped him and the world dissolved into a white haze.

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CO Quarters, USSS Hammond

It was their third day of exploration of the alien ruin on Mars. As she sat behind her desk and staring at the data being brought back on the alien ships, not to mention the find of what seemed to be a partially functional alien computer system, it was becoming clear that the information here would be eminently useful to Earth despite already having access to Ancient and Asgard technologies.

They had managed to copy the data from alien system on a pure machine code level, but translating everything into an understandable format would take time. Earth and the Stargate program had actually had it quite easy in terms of languages and being able to communicate with 'alien' cultures, since all of them were essentially human and the Goa'uld language had been a dominant force in the old Milky Way. Now they were confronted with what was essentially a 'true alien' civilization, which had no terrestrial basis in Earth history whatsoever.

They were now forced to return to the theoretical First Contact precepts devised by the Sagan Institute. The only true universal language was mathematics, and from that basis they were slowly brute-forcing the alien language with a combination of pure computer processing power and the Asgard Core.

Sam was engrossed in the scans of the alien ships found down there. The level of materials science inherent in them was breathtaking. She had never imagined that alloys not based of the Big Three of Refined Trinium, Naquadah and Neutronium; could approach these levels of tensile strength and durability. Of course, they were still light years behind the super-hull of an Asgard O'Neill class, but it was still an impressive achievement.

The alien sublight drives were essentially Anti-matter drives. The thrusters injected antiprotons into a reaction chamber filled with hydrogen. The matter-antimatter annihilation provided motive power. It didn't come close to the Hammond's STL Gravitic Ion Drive, but this indicated that a reliable method for anti-proton generation and control was contained within the alien computers. It would be just the ticket for removing Earth's reliance on liquid naquadah to provide the necessary power for Hyperdrives. It was still an open question if Naquadah was present in this new Universe.

She had heard over channels that Odyssey was being made ready to launch. It would take a covert journey using its Cloaking device to this Universe's Abydos, Alpha Site and PXY-887 Systems to verify the presence of Naquadah and Trinium. If it wasn't there, then they would check other systems known to have the metals naturally present. If there was nothing, it wasn't the end of Hyperdrive as she had heard the scientists in the SGC worry about.

She had already concocted a scheme that would solve it, and even if it proved unnecessary the benefits it would provide long term would be worth it. It involved constructing what was known as a Dyson Ring around the sun. Solar energy collector stations would be placed at exactly one AU out and would wirelessly transmit that energy via a microwave beam to a central point; this would power an Asgard energy to matter molecular constructor. She had done the math and it would easily be enough to generate tons of whatever element they desired per hour, and still have more than enough energy left over for other uses.

If they wanted to solve energy supply problems forever on Earth, it simply involved constructing another Dyson Ring. Working out the orbital mechanics would be a headache, but well worth it.

Her mind returned to the alien ships and the weapons they bore. While only one looked to be built in any way to function as a warship, it was analogous to the role of a frigate. It was small, fast, manoeuvrable and armed with two spinal Rail guns that made use of the elzee element to reduce the mass of the slugs it fired, allowing a forty kilogram slug to be shot out at five hundred kilometres per second! This was according to simulations done and using the Asgard's own data on such weaponry.

'Sam'. She startled at the voice intruding into her earpiece, and tapped it to enable the link.

"Yes, Daniel?"

'I know it's late but…"

"You knew I wouldn't be sleeping with all this new data we have…"

'Yeah, uh, anyway, I'd thought you'd like to know we've finally managed an incomplete and partial translation program, and I think we can put a comparably pronounceable name to the aliens and what their purpose here was."

"And?"

"They called themselves 'Prothean' and this complex was an Observation and Biosciences station, they were studying life on Earth and especially Cro-Magnon humans."

"Interesting, have you found out anything about their motives for doing this?"

"No, the data on the Prothean computer is very fragmented, it's taken all this time just to yield this much information. McKay is confident that he can defrag everything eventually though. Going by what I saw down there, Sam, I think we can assume their motives were benign and driven by scientific curiosity. The base had a small armoury of personal weapons and only one of the ships we found had any weapons at all. It feels like it was only a lightly armed scientific expedition."

"Feels?'

"Gut instinct."

"The IOA's going to want more than that, but I'm sure you're right, Daniel."

"We really need a semi-permanent expedition team down there, Sam. It's not as if the SGC has a Galaxy spanning Stargate network to explore anymore…"

"True, I'll make sure to tell Jack that."

"How much longer are we staying here?"

"We'll be breaking orbit tomorrow after beaming up the Prothean ships that can fit into our hangar bays. We'll drop them off on Earth and then on to Charon."

"What do you think we'll find there?"

"Now that we know what to scan for, Atlantis' deep space sensors have registered a massive amount of the refined elzee element present within an even more massive artificial structure buried in a layer of ice orbiting Pluto."

"How massive?"

"It's forty seven kilometres long and ten in height. It's made of an incredibly strong alloy of Neutronium and Carbon, which is good news as it means the chances are good we'll find naturally occurring Naquadah out there. As to what the structure's function is…the presence of elzee means it's either an FTL device of sorts or the largest rail gun, ever. Close range scans and exploration of the interior will determine that."

"I personally hope for the former."

"Yeah, I agree it's more likely."

"Oh well, better get some sleep. Goodnight, Sam."

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Charon Orbit

Hammond kept station just two hundred kilometres from the presumably Prothean artefact. The powerful sensors on the ship had no problems penetrating through the ice encrusted surface of the construct that obscured it somewhat visually, which on some spots measured hundreds of meters thick. Sam turned from the lopsided shape of dirty ice, and towards the Bridge's plasma display. It virtually peeled away the ice and revealed what was beneath. Her first thought was that it looked remarkably like a tuning fork that had been turned on its side. It also showed subspace antenna masts poking out of the circular end of the construct. There seemed to be also living space inside, judging by the lines of 'windows' along the straight sections. The elzee core centrally laid within the arms of the construct was the only thing free of ice, and it had multiple rings that were ever so slowly spinning around the blue-ish mass of dark energy.

She tapped on the controls going over the various readings that she could discern from the inside. As unbelievable as it looked…there was life, of sorts, still going on within despite the fact that it was emitting no heat or EM radiation relative to the backdrop of space; this was being accomplished by internal dampening fields, much like an Asgard ship was capable of. The lifeforms inside were completely alien yet there was also mechanical and electrical energy at work within them – indicating cybernetics.

Could these be 'Protheans', living in some sort of artificial colony on the edge of the Solar System? No, she couldn't imagine that any alien race, who had built such a massive structure, would reside within it, and simply just let it gather ice over fifty odd millennia.

Then something struck her, the Prothean ships she examined on Mars...none of them had subspace or dampening systems. The sensors she had seen, while very advanced, only worked at light speed, same for the communication system. The ships also had heat management issues. Why would they put their best technology on the structure but not on their ships?

It was a conundrum that could only be solved by interfacing with a computer on board the construct. But there was a problem; her scans showed not a single physical entry or egress method. The entire hull was one solid piece, not a single hull plate or seam was evident. The message that sent was rather clear.

It seemed a prudent idea to undertake a covert recon. A few Merlin inspired Phase Shift devices would do just the trick. She had in any case received strict orders from the IOA and confirmed via the Air Force that there was to be no 'First Contact' with any alien race encountered in this new universe, unless they first gave the okay.

If she was interpreting the intention of the brass and bureaucrats correctly, it would perhaps be a very long time before that green light was ever given.