Lorne had advised Dorsey of the current situation while on the way back to the 'Gate. Dorsey had in turn informed Atlantis. When Lorne's team was close, Dorsey and his team met them to help transport Sheppard's team to the 'Gate. Then they dialed the 'Gate, Lorne sent his IDC and they went through to Atlantis, where a medical team was waiting, along with some strapping marines ready to help restrain Sheppard's team should it become necessary before they were tied down.

"Best come along and let me look at that," Dr. Carson Beckett said, immediately noticing the bruising on Lorne's neck.

"I'm okay, Doc," Lorne assured him, "Take care of Sheppard and his team."

"That wasn't a suggestion, Major," Dr. Beckett told him, "And besides, it goes for the rest of yer team anyhow. You were all affected by somethin' out there, were ye not?"

Lorne had to admit that was true, and reluctantly followed Dr. Beckett back to the infirmary. His team trailed after him, and Dr. Weir followed them, evidently wanting an immediate firsthand report, which Lorne briefly attempted to provide until his voice failed him and Reed took over.

"There certainly seems to be a pattern to these... visions," Dr. Weir observed when Reed finished.

"Aye, if ye consider things going from bad to worse a pattern," Dr. Beckett agreed.

"Did Sheppard say anything before he attacked you?" Dr. Weir inquired.

Lorne shook his head, managing to say, "No, but... it looked like he recognized me."

"But did he see you or something in his head?" Dr. Weir wondered.

"I don't know," Lorne admitted.

By this time, Dr. Beckett had managed to run several tests.

"How are they?" Weir inquired.

"Well, I'd like to run a few more tests to be certain," Dr. Beckett said, "But Major Lorne's team appears to be fine, though I expect the Major may be a wee bit on the quiet side for the next week or so."

"And Colonel Sheppard's team?" Dr. Weir persisted.

"Aye," Dr. Beckett sighed, "Well, so far we've not come up with much, except..."

"Except?" Weir prodded when he trailed off.

"Well, it seems to be some type of radiation I'm unfamiliar with. But it's just barely registering on our scans, so I can't be sure of that," Dr. Beckett answered, then he shook his head,"Otherwise, they all seem to be perfectly healthy," he paused and glanced at McKay's bed, "Well... as healthy as they were to begin with... Give me some more time and I'll give ye a full report."

Weir nodded her ascent.

"Can we go back to work now?" Lorne inquired of Beckett.

"Not until I've finished with you," Beckett replied in his attempting to be stern voice.

Even at his most serious, Beckett was about as intimidating as a teddy bear, but Lorne didn't buck his authority. In fact, nobody did. Beckett might not have been able to intimidate a skittish cat, but the authority he wielded as CMO of Atlantis was quite real. And besides, everybody was fond of him not only because he routinely patched up cuts and bruises and also occasionally saved them from deadly diseases, but because he was one of the nicest people who'd ever existed. If he had a fault, it was that he was afraid of his own genes, which were what had landed the reluctant doctor on the expedition in the first place. He'd technically agreed to come here apparently of his own volition, but -from the way he complained about 'Gate travel- everyone suspected there'd been an amount of coercion involved.

And anyway, Lorne wasn't exactly eager to go back to listening to scientists whine like petulant children about to throw a temper tantrum. Let somebody else deal with that for awhile.

He and the rest of his team sat patiently and quietly while Dr. Beckett and his team did their thing.

There was a certain unspoken understanding between Lorne and Beckett. In Beckett's infirmary, the man was king, and what he said went. Out in the field, the roles were sometimes reversed, with Beckett following Lorne's lead. It was mutually understood between them that neither knew how to do the other's job, but it was their common goal to save as many lives as possible.

After a few minutes of sitting around, something started to bother Lorne.

"Hey, Doc," Lorne said, "How come we're awake and Sheppard's team isn't?"

"Well, son, you and yer team were some distance from the device, and ye only took the one hit, so that might have somethin' to do with it," Beckett replied, "Sheppard and his team took Lord knows how many hits from up close. Since we don't rightly know what the device does, it's impossible to say for sure what kind of effect that might have."

Lorne nodded thoughtfully and left Beckett alone after that.

That made sense, and he wasn't sure why he hadn't thought of it for himself. He wondered if maybe he was still a little out of it somehow. He felt fine though, except for being kind of tired from hauling Sheppard's team all that distance back to the 'Gate, but that would pass.

After several more tests which both Lorne and his team submitted to without protest, Beckett sighed.

"Well, it looks like you and your team are perfectly healthy," Beckett pronounced, "I'm fairly certain you took a dose of that radiation I detected on the others, but I can't find a trace of it. Ye're good to go."

"Thanks, Doc," Lorne said, hopping off the bed he'd been sitting on.

He didn't get much further than that, because Ronon abruptly regained consciousness and seemed to be pretty angry about it. He sat up, and discovered the restraints at his wrists and ankles. Their presence did nothing to reduce his anger, in fact they appeared to upset him more. Like the rest of Sheppard's team, Ronon had been restrained to prevent him from hurting himself or anyone else.

Unfortunately, whoever had tied him down had underestimated how pissed off he would be.

Ronon began to tug at his restraints while the nearest members of Beckett's team moved towards him. Halfway across the room, it took a precious few seconds for Beckett to make it to Ronon's bedside. Actually, he never made it because Ronon tore the restraint on his left wrist. One of the doctors moved in to stop him, and he lashed out, striking the man across the face and knocking him back.

This momentarily intimidated the rest of the medical staff, who hesitated to approach. It gave Ronon time to remove his other wrist restraint. Once he had done that, none of the doctors or nurses dared to approach him. Ronon was normally a friend to the people of Atlantis, but everyone knew him well enough to be afraid if he was pissed, and apparently the medical staff enjoyed having bones that weren't broken a little too much to block Ronon's bid for freedom.

Except for Beckett.

"Now, there's no call ta get all bent outta shape, son," Beckett said, moving towards Ronon slowly with his hands raised in a pacifying gesture, "We're just tryin' to help ye."

Ronon glared at Beckett, still working to free his right ankle from its restraint.

"I have to get out!" Ronon finally snarled, "I can't be here!"

"Why not?" Beckett asked, not missing a beat.

Instead of answering, Ronon tore free of his final restraint.

"Get outta my way, Doc," he growled, and lunged from the bed.

Beckett knew a thing or two about keeping patients calm and under control, but since coming to Atlantis he'd learned it was unwise to persist in standing in the path of the big, angry ones. Beckett had the heart of a lion in terms of courage, but he had no taste or ability for violence. Thus he allowed Ronon to bolt past him. As Ronon fled the infirmary, Beckett turned to Lorne.

"I'm afraid we'll be needin' him back," Beckett said calmly.

Lorne understood. He tapped his earwig, contacting Dr. Weir to inform her of the situation.

"Ronon took off," he said.

"Was anyone hurt?" Dr. Weir asked.

"Hit one of the Docs on the way out. You might want to warn people to stay out of his way."

"I understand."

Lorne cut communication, then nodded at his team before turning to Beckett.

"Don't worry; we'll get Ronon back for you."

"I have a better idea," Beckett said.


By the time Lorne and his team caught up with him, Ronon had made it to the control room. In fact, he'd already had several altercations with security and removed the 'Gate technician from his station, and he'd already dialed out and activated the Stargate.

Reed managed to leap on Ronon just as he was heading for the stairs to get to the Stargate, and the scuffle resulted in their both rolling down the steps. Reed caught an elbow to the face at the bottom of the stairs and lost his hold of Ronon, who ignored him in favor of going for the Stargate.

The remaining security men raised their weapons to stop Ronon, but Lorne held up a hand to stay them. He'd been just a beat behind Reed, but he still had to run to overtake Ronon.

Reed was comparable in size to Ronon, but Lorne was much smaller, and certainly wasn't foolish enough to think for a moment that he could actually overpower or outmatch Ronon in a straight fight. Fortunately, he didn't have to. He only had to buy time.

He tackled Ronon from the side, slamming his shoulder into a point just above Ronon's hip and grabbing at the larger man's legs in an attempt to compromise his balance. It was like slamming into a concrete wall, and Lorne felt the impact shudder through him. Ronon staggered, but kept his feet for a moment, before Coughlin and Decker finally caught up and added their weight to him.

Catching on to the plan, the security guys piled on, and Ronon toppled slowly like a felled tree. Lorne repositioned himself at the first opportunity, getting hold of one of Ronon's arms and holding it out as best he could while Beckett moved in. Beckett managed to inject the sedative he'd prepared, but of course the effect wasn't immediate and staying on the thrashing Ronon was a bit like holding down a large crocodile. Immediately after the sedative was injected, Ronon broke loose of Lorne's grip briefly. In the process of recapturing the arm, Lorne took a pretty solid elbow to the ribs that stunned him for a moment before he was able to finally regain his hold on Ronon. Ronon bucked and tossed and attempted to strike at anyone and everyone, and nearly managed to escape despite the overwhelming manpower devoted solely to the task of keeping him on the ground.

At one point, he even tried screaming at them, demanding to be released and saying over and over that he had to leave, that he couldn't stay, that it wasn't safe if he stayed here. Whatever reasons he had for wanting to leave, he kept them to himself, but that in itself was hardly unusual. Ronon was a man of relatively few words, and almost none of them were ever explanations for his actions.

When the Stargate deactivated, the fight seemed to go out of him. He seemed to know that, even if he got free, the sedative would stop him before he could reactivate the Stargate and go. He was beaten, he knew it, and he seemed to accept that the only thing further struggle would accomplish was potentially hurting someone for no particular reason.

Ronon lay there, seemingly defeated, and let the sedative take hold...


...If Rodney had been having a bad day before, it got that much worse when Zelenka discovered that he actually had been responsible for activating the device, which had pulsed a couple more times in the last hour while they'd been working on it.

"That's not possible," Rodney asserted, "We wouldn't have been able to track it if it hadn't been powered on."

"Come look at it for yourself then," Zelenka said impatiently.

Zelenka put up with a lot, and Rodney knew it; he usually took his frustrations out on the Czech physicist, and also tended to pin blame on him whenever possible. Zelenka put up with it, probably because he thought it was worth it just to be on the Atlantis team, and possibly because he found being around Rodney's brilliance to be worth the abuse he took. Rodney had never really been a team player, and Zelenka's ability to work with him was a testament to both the man's own intelligence and his tremendous patience. But today he seemed just as fed up with Rodney as everybody else.

Rodney couldn't blame him for that. So far, Rodney had failed to connect his tablet to the device properly, managed to cause it to increase its power buildup and even set off some electrical sparks. He'd also tripped over the cable link up and yanked the tablet connection. He'd misread the readings he was taking, forgotten terminology he'd been familiar with since he was eight and -to top it all off- lost his grip on a power bar he was unwrapping and wound up launching it at the back of Zelenka's head in a truly spectacular display of clumsiness which Zelenka seemed to take as a temper tantrum.

Rodney obediently went and looked at what Zelenka had found. The man was right. The device had been all but inert, but now it was getting more active by the second.

"But where's it pulling power from?" Rodney wondered.

"The real question is: how do we shut it off?" Zelenka replied.

"We don't even know what it's doing," Rodney reminded him, "It may not need to be shut off."

"If it is a weapon as you suspect, then that power buildup has to mean something," Zelenka said, "Knowing our track record with such devices, I'd say something bad."

Rodney mulled that over. He decided Zelenka was probably right.

"Okay, well we know how we powered it up," Rodney said.

"Do we?" Zelenka asked.

"Yes," Rodney replied, "I plugged my tablet in, the device powered up. That simple."

"It could have been activated by proximity," Zelenka countered, "Or touch."

"And it could have been activated by telepathic whales too, but there's no reason to assume that."

Zelenka just stood there, staring at him oddly.

"What? Oh. Right," Rodney deflated a little, "Never mind."

This just wasn't his day.

Rodney wanted to attribute it to being tired, but he knew better. He'd gone days at a time without sleep, working constantly to save Atlantis, to protect it from some enemy force or another, functioning as both lab scientist and field troubleshooter, sometimes switching back and forth between the two roles at a moment's notice without break or pause or ending in sight. If he could do that, what was wrong with him now? Then it dawned on him.

"It's the device," he announced, seemingly out of the blue.

He realized he'd been standing stock still for several minutes, staring a nothing, his brain in overdrive.

"It is a device," Zelenka replied sarcastically, "Good job, Rodney."

"No, no, no!" Rodney shook his head, "I mean it's the device. That's why I can't think!"

"What are you talking about?" Sheppard demanded.

Sheppard had been standing out of the way, looking alternately bored and concerned by the science project. Unlike most of the people whose supervision Rodney had to tolerate, Sheppard could actually understand what was going on at some level.

"I can't think, I can't move, I can barely remember my own name," Rodney explained proudly, feeling he was at last on the track of something, at last doing something right, "It all started when the device went off. You were affected too."

"No I wasn't," Sheppard said.

"Yes you were," Rodney insisted.

"No. I wasn't."

"But you were."

"Alright. Fine. How?" Sheppard asked.

"You got spooked by this place. You couldn't wait to leave, even though we hadn't done what we came here to do and there was no evidence of danger."

"I did not," Sheppard said, "I still think this is a waste of time."

"Well you didn't think that this morning when we left Atlantis."

"Yes, Rodney, I did," Sheppard replied coolly.

"Then why did you agree to this mission?" Rodney asked.

"Because it seemed like it was a big deal to you," Sheppard said, "I decided to humor you. I did that, and now I'm done, but we're here anyway because Elizabeth thinks it's worth checking out."

"Oh," Rodney wasn't sure whether to feel good that Sheppard was willing to do that for him, or hurt that Sheppard didn't think it was actually important.

He didn't let that stall him out, and instead hurried on.

"The point is: something changed. In an instant, we were all different. It's the device. We need to shut it off. And we need to shut it off right now."

"That's what I have been saying," Zelenka asserted.

"Yes, but you didn't have a reason for why," Rodney shot back.

Zelenka stared at Rodney with what looked like an expression of disbelief. Then he suddenly turned and stalked away, throwing up his hands and letting out a stream of Czech that Rodney was pretty sure consisted entirely of epithets and insults. But languages had never interested him, except as a means of figuring out how to make alien technology do his bidding, so he couldn't be sure.

Rodney thought about waiting for Zelenka to come back, but then he decided to return his attention to the device. Then it struck him: maybe they didn't need to shut it off. Maybe they should just leave.

As he was starting to turn to Sheppard with this idea, fully aware that it was what Sheppard had wanted to do in the first place, he became aware of Zelenka breaking off his tirade mid-sentence. He turned around to find out why. The why was a squad's worth of people who looked suspiciously like the Genii, especially the weapons they had drawn and pointed at the team.

He started to go for his pistol as Sheppard had taught him to do, even though his reflexive response was to cringe and raise his hands. But a glance at Sheppard told him that it was too late, they'd been caught unaware and surrender was their only hope of survival. Before Rodney could change from trying to unholster his pistol to raising his hands, one of the newcomers fired a shot.

The shot was clearly meant for Rodney, but the shooter's aim was bad, and instead he clipped Zelenka in the side. The Czech dropped with a cry that tore through Rodney as surely as if he'd been the one who was shot. That bullet had been meant for him.

Hands raised, Rodney nonetheless moved forward and knelt beside Zelenka. Sheppard was shouting something along the lines of how that hadn't been necessary, but Rodney was paying attention only to the blood that was all but pouring out of Zelenka's side like a bucket that had been overturned.

All he could remember was putting pressure on the wound, so he did, but he was shaking badly, and the blood just kept on coming, and there was so much of it. Faintly, Rodney was aware that he was actually talking to Radek, babbling in fact, but he had no awareness of what he was saying, and there was no indication that Radek was paying attention either. He was too busy drowning in his own blood. Drowning on dry land. Drowning, one of the ways to die that Rodney was most afraid of. Drowning.

"Radek, you're okay. You're gonna be okay, you're gonna be fine," Rodney vaguely heard himself say, even though it didn't take a doctor to know that was patently untrue.

He didn't hear what Sheppard and the leader of the newcomers said to each other. He didn't dare look up from Radek, didn't dare divide his already compromised attention. Thus he wasn't aware of the enemy soldiers until they grabbed him by the arms and hauled him to his feet.

"No!" Rodney protested, struggling against them, "No! Radek! He'll die! Let me go!"

The soldiers grabbed him all the more firmly. They held him tightly enough that it hurt, and began to drag him away, despite his hysterical protests and futile thrashing.

"Radek!" Rodney strained against his captors, managing to keep Radek in view even as they turned him around and dragged him away from the clearing, the device, and the fallen Radek, "Radek!"

The blood pool was spreading. All Rodney could think was that there was more blood by the second. He knew exactly how much blood Radek could lose before he died. He knew that limit was fast approaching. His last view of Radek as he was dragged forcibly into the forest told him that the limit had been exceeded.

Radek Zelenka was dead.