Rodney's hopes for a quiet day of tinkering were dashed as soon as he stepped off the transporter and heard raised voices spilling into the corridor from the open door of a lab half-way down the hall. He'd already checked in with Volkov and his team working one floor above him. Parrish was happy as a clam in one of the rooms near the top of the tower, and Corrigan's team was busy sorting through what looked like a trove of artefacts in the large room below him. He'd been tempted to claim a corner of the room for himself but changed his mind when he remembered what the large engineering lab held.
Rodney hadn't been paying much attention to Zelenka when he explained the assignments for the tower inventory. Now he realised Radek had assigned three of the new scientists to the room next to his. A not-so-subtle bit of payback for leaving Zelenka alone to deal with the chaos the day before, he was sure.
The bickering was getting louder, and Rodney was half-tempted to just ignore them until he heard something crash to the floor. Did they think these things grew on trees? he fumed as he stormed over to the lab.
"Now look what happened," he heard a female voice with a French accent snap. "I told you not to pick it up that way."
"I'm sorry, I thought you were a chemist, not an engineer," a second voice, this one male, sniped back. "This design makes no sense anyway. How was I supposed to know the top would come off?"
"I am not sure all of this stuff is even Ancient," another voice said, and Rodney heard the slight lilt of an Indian accent. "Look at this, for example, this does not look like the Ancient script from Doctor Jackson's notes."
Rodney dropped his pack, stopped in the doorway, and found three people, a man and a woman, roughly his own age, standing near a set of cluttered shelves, while a third, younger man, stood near a desk in the corner cradling some sort of egg-shaped object in his hand.
Something about the object in the man's hand tickled something in Rodney's brain, but he pushed it aside to deal with the immediate issue of three supposed scientists acting like idiots.
It didn't take long for the three people in the room to stop bickering and to turn to stare at him.
"Funny I thought I was hiring scientists for this project, not a bunch of squabbling school children," Rodney snapped as he walked into the room. He took a quick look around and saw a small room with no windows. The shelves, however, were crammed with objects, and Rodney had to agree, none of them looked like Ancient devices.
"It's not -" the woman started to say.
"I didn't -" the man standing next to her said at the same time.
Rodney noticed the young man in the corner sat down and turned the egg-shaped object over in his hands, ignoring the other two. At least one of them was doing his job, Rodney thought to himself as he turned toward the door.
"If you can't figure out how to work together, I'll make sure you're shipped back to Earth the next time Daedalus drops off supplies."
The two so-called scientists near the shelf glared at each other before nodding at Rodney.
Rodney gave them both a hard look, waited for them to go back to work, and left the room.
Who knew the Ancients were such junk collectors, Rodney thought to himself as he picked up his pack and walked to the end of the hall. How many of the other rooms of the tower would they find packed to the rafters with Pegasus galaxy knick-knacks? Corrigan and the archaeologists would be happy for a few months at least.
Rodney touched the door control for the lab he'd been itching to explore, eagerly stepped inside, and stopped in surprise. Tsao's report hadn't said anything about the floor to ceiling windows along one wall looking out on the ocean.
"Wonder who worked here before to rate the corner office," Rodney muttered to himself as he set his pack on the work table near the windows and stared out at the view. Too bad it looks like it's going to rain, he added silently, and watched the thick heavy clouds pile up in the near distance. On a nice day, the view would be amazing.
"Maybe I could convince Elizabeth to let me move my lab out here," he said with a tiny smile.
After a few more minutes, he turned away from the windows and surveyed the rest of the room. This room was larger than the one he'd just left with the bickering scientists. Thick metal support beams ran from the floor to the ceiling, and the ceiling itself was crisscrossed with thin metal rods. It took Rodney a moment to realise the rods were there for aesthetic reasons and had nothing to do with the structural integrity of the ceiling itself. Two other work tables sat on the opposite side of the room from the windows with a line of shelves and cabinets along the wall behind them.
The shelves were cluttered with objects, but unlike the ones in the other room, these were clearly Ancient in origin. What had Rodney so intrigued as soon as he read the report on the tower was that many of the objects seemed unfinished. If what Rodney suspected was right, he had stumbled onto an engineering lab for Ancient tech.
Rodney forgot all about the scientists in the next room as he pulled out his tools and the computer, set them on the work table near the windows, and went over to the nearest shelf. He ran a finger along the shelf, careful not to actually touch any of the devices and selected a small hand-held device that looked promising. He studied the device sitting on a metal stand from several angles before he decided it was safe to touch, and picked it up.
It was surprisingly heavy for its size. The small device sat in the palm of his hand, the dark metal cool to the touch. There was a tiny dial and two buttons on one side of the device while the other side was smooth except for two thin grooves worked into the metal. Looking at it, it didn't take a genius to realise it probably fired something out the short, stubby barrel, the question was what.
He carried the object and its support stand back to the table near the windows, found a chair pushed into a corner, and settled at the table, quickly losing himself in the details of the device in front of him.
Even with the gathering clouds, the sunlight coming in through the windows provided ample light for him to see what he was doing, but he also felt himself getting uncomfortably warm. He shed his uniform jacket, carelessly tossed it on a corner of the table, and glanced at the windows behind him with a frown. He idly wondered if the glass had been treated with something to prevent ultraviolet radiation from passing through the windows. 'You can get just as bad of a sunburn on a cloudy day as a sunny one,' he remembered someone telling him once. Maybe his usual lab wasn't so bad after all, he concluded, and went back to work.
Sometime later he heard the door whisper open and looked up ready to tell whoever it was to leave him alone but stopped short when he saw John stroll into the room with Dex looming behind him.
"How did you find me?" he asked shortly, and went back to studying the inner workings of the device.
"Hello to you too, Rodney," John replied, unfazed by the less than enthusiastic greeting.
Rodney watched John walk over to the work table while Dex prowled the room.
"Zelenka told me where you were. I'm taking a jumper up this afternoon, thought I'd show Ronon some of the planet. Maybe head into space for a few orbits. Give him a chance to really see Atlantis."
Rodney wasn't fooled by the innocent expression on John's face. "You don't fool me, you know. You just want an excuse to go flying."
John grinned. "Maybe. What do you say? Wanna come along?"
Rodney shook his head and gave Dex another wary look as he stalked over to the windows and looked out on the water. "Can't. We need to get this survey done, and Zelenka set up the work teams so that I'm the only one on this floor with a bunch of so-called scientists fresh off the Daedalus who can't seem to get along. Someone has to be here in case the idiots get into another fight over their toys."
John laughed "Told you you should have helped Radek with the lab assignments yesterday."
Rodney glared at the wall separating him from the lab next door. "I'm sure I'll think of some way to thank him for this."
John grinned and started to say something else but stopped and tapped his earpiece instead.
"Sheppard here."
Rodney watched as John listened for a few seconds then frowned when Sheppard's expression changed from relaxed to serious. "Was anyone injured?" John asked, and listened for a few more seconds. "All right, I'll be right there. Sheppard out."
"What's happened?" Rodney asked, standing up from his chair.
"Thompson's team ran into trouble off-world." John glanced over at Rodney. "Daley was hurt, but it doesn't sound too bad. I need to meet with Thompson, find out what happened, and if our status was compromised."
Rodney swallowed and tried not to think about a fresh horde of Wraith descending on the city.
John stood next to the work table and glanced first at him then over at Dex.
Rodney could see the wheels turning, and he knew what Sheppard was going to say next. He started to protest, but John merely talked over him.
"Ronon, why don't you stay here. Hopefully, this won't take long, and then we can head out."
Dex studied John for a moment then glanced at Rodney.
Rodney could see the moment Dex came to the same conclusion he had, Sheppard was leaving them alone in the hope they would start to get along. Rodney could also see Dex wasn't any more happy with the idea, or Sheppard's thinly-veiled manipulation, than he was.
"Whatever," Dex finally said, and wandered back over to one of the smaller work tables and sat on the edge.
"Give him a chance," John whispered to Rodney before he turned toward the door.
Rodney glared at John's back as he left the room then went back to working on the device in front of him. He tried to ignore Dex when he stood and started pacing on the other side of the room. The problem was, every few minutes Dex would touch something or make some noise that distracted Rodney from what he was doing.
After the third time Dex broke his concentration, Rodney grimaced and tried to hold his temper as he remembered Dex didn't want to be stuck in the lab any more than Rodney wanted him there.
"You know what he's doing don't you?" he asked as he watched Dex peer into the far corner of the room. "Sheppard wants you to stay in Atlantis."
"So he said." Dex glanced around the room, and Rodney wondered if it was merely curiosity, or if he was looking for a way to escape.
"Do you want to stay?" Rodney asked, curious to know what Dex thought of the idea. Sheppard acted as though it was a foregone conclusion Dex would be staying and joining the team. But was it? Rodney learned a long time ago not to assume.
"I owe Sheppard for getting Beckett to remove the tracker," Dex stated and continued his survey of the room.
Rodney thought about that for a moment. He was sure John didn't see it that way. Sheppard wanted Dex to stay because he thought the Runner was a good fit for their team, nothing more.
"This is Lorne all over again," Rodney muttered and picked up a screwdriver. "And things went so well with him."
"Who's Lorne?" Dex asked. He walked back to the two work tables and examined the devices on the shelves behind the tables.
Rodney glanced up. "You met him on the planet. Air Force Major just arrived from Earth, he's Sheppard's new second-in-command." He saw Dex reach out to one of the items in the shelf and added, "Don't touch anything."
Dex turned and glared at Rodney, but pulled his hand back from the shelf. "What happened to Sheppard's last second?"
Rodney swallowed and stared out the window. "You met him on that planet too."
He sat, lost in thought, and forgot about Dex as he remembered Ford flipping from the young, eager man he knew, excited to learn Sheppard had been promoted, to the hard, cold, suspicious man threatening, and almost succeeding, to kill him.
Rodney was brought back to the present when Dex bumped into the work table, knocking the device he'd been working on off the metal stand.
"Hey, be careful! I have no idea what this does yet." Rodney picked up the little device and checked it for damage. How does someone that big move that quickly and quietly? he asked himself as he set the device back on its stand.
Dex glanced at the device. "It's some kind of energy weapon," he said matter-of-factly, and looked out the windows.
"Yes, I know it's an energy …" Rodney retorted impatiently then stopped and looked up when he realised what Dex had said. "Wait, how did you know it's an energy weapon? More likely a directed energy beam similar to a laser cutter rather than a weapon, but still, how did you know?"
Dex pointed to a thin cylinder inside the housing. "That's the power source. We had blaster rifles on Sateda that had the same thing. Part of our training was stripping a blaster, and repairing it under battle conditions."
Rodney glanced down at the little device. "With weapons like that I can see why the Wraith attacked your planet," he said thoughtlessly as he poked at the cylinder with his screwdriver.
His only warning was a low growl right before Dex grabbed him by his shirtfront. Rodney felt himself bodily lifted out of the chair, his back slammed against the windows, and his feet dangling six centimeters off the floor. He felt the window vibrating against his back, and for a moment wondered if the glass would break.
"You think my people deserved what happened to them?" Dex growled, his expression stony.
Rodney suddenly found it hard to breathe as Dex's hands twisted in the fabric of his shirt.
"What?" he squeaked. "No! Not what I meant." Rodney started pulling at one of Dex's hands to get him to let go. "Can't breathe," he muttered as he started to struggle harder.
Dex glared at him for a moment longer, then let go and stalked away.
Rodney dropped to the floor, his still sore ankle sending out a jolt of pain when it twisted under him, and spent a few seconds trying to get his breathing back under control. He looked over at Ronon standing near the door with his arms crossed over his chest glowering at Rodney as he slowly climbed back to his feet.
"All I meant was the Wraith don't seem to allow any planet to get so advanced," he tried to explain. "Most of the people we meet barely have any sort of gun at all. The fact your people had advanced to the point they had energy weapons made you a significant threat to them." He sank into the chair behind the table, alternately rubbing his leg and his throat.
Dex's glower never changed as he paced to the other side of the room. "For your sake, you better hope Sheppard gets back here soon."
Rodney silently agreed. His second encounter with Ronon Dex was worse than the first. Sheppard's idea that they could work together on a team seemed less likely than it had that morning.
Rodney spent the next several minutes working out how the power source for the laser worked. He reached forward to make a few notes about the device on the computer and winced as his shoulder twinged.
Can you get bruises on bruises? he wondered, and looked up as Dex stalked across the room to the door.
A moment later he heard yelling coming from the hall, realised the three scientists next door were at each other's throats again, and growled in frustration.
All he'd wanted was a nice quiet day to tinker with a few new Ancient devices and try to forget about Ford and what had almost happened on P3M-736. Instead, he was stuck with someone else who apparently hated him, and three scientists who, he promised himself, would be shipped back to Earth at the first opportunity.
Rodney stood from the table and wandered back over to the shelves, edging around Dex who stood glowering near the door. He was halfway between the windows and the shelves when Dex yelled something at him at the same time the wall between the two labs disappeared in a roar of noise and a wave of heat. He heard the crash of breaking glass behind him and felt himself thrown to the floor.
Just before he lost consciousness, he had two thoughts. Where was Dex? And why had the Ancients stored a Wraith grenade in the same room with a bunch of strange artefacts?