Teyla raised her chin and turned to serenely face Colonel Murgia. Two chairs over, she watched Ronon out of the corner of her eye as he slid his chair back a good two inches and slapped his hands on the table, leaning forward in an expression of eager readiness. She knew that Ronon resented the Earth commanders for scrutinizing Sheppard's decisions. She also knew he agreed with those decisions and was eager to tell his side of the story. Their lives had been saved, after all, and they would not be here to give their testimony if John had not fired on the power generator. Idly, she realized that there would be no hearing at all if John had simply allowed them to die.

But Teyla was not so certain in her own feelings. She was grateful for her life, but she would never ask so many in exchange for it. John was a practiced warrior, and as a warrior herself who had seen much death and fought many battles in her young life, she understood the concept of collateral damage – to use Sheppard's own term. But as the leader of a people that had only barely escaped extinction time and time again, she could not so glibly sacrifice any life for any reason – especially when she was prepared to lay her life down.

John Sheppard was not without compassion, in fact, he was a man of deeply felt emotions. But Teyla had once before seen the warrior Sheppard coldly dismiss the lives of her family in the name of his mission and from a reluctance to get involved. That side of Sheppard frightened her, and it was that man that had made the decision to save her life over the lives of an entire community.

She was disappointed and confused and deeply saddened by the rift that now existed between them, the distance she herself felt the need to put between them until she sorted out her feelings. Or until he was taken away by his own people to suffer the punishment she couldn't bring herself to believe he didn't deserve.

"Miss Emmagan," Colonel Murgia spoke to Teyla first, either because she was sitting in the first seat or because the Colonel was reluctant to allow Ronon the chance to make his protest he so obviously wished to make. "Will you please describe the events for us as they unfolded on E4E-C12."

"Of course, Colonel. After I began packing the jumper for the away mission, Colonel Sheppard, Dr. McKay and Ronon joined me in finishing the preparations and we left for the Ancestor's outpost. Once we arrived, John took the jumper to stealth mode and we began the trip to the manufacturing facility…"

---------------------------

"Ok kids, camp is an hour away so everyone settle in, and stay out of the marshmallows until we get there."

Teyla just smiled as Ronon grunted at John's exuberant nonsense and flung himself onto a back bench, again feigning sleep. Teyla had a suspicion that Ronon held in his heart some deeply personal anniversaries, and occasionally a morning would find him sullen and reclusive. In her experience, the mood would fade as the challenges of the day presented themselves.

"Are you scanning as we go?"

Rodney sat at the co-pilot's controls busily doing whatever he did. "Of course I'm scanning. This place is amazing. I'm reading gold deposits, silver, traces of Naquadah, diamonds... You know, if I wanted to set up a little black-market minerals operation, this is where I'd do it."

"Dread Pirate Meredith. Has a nice ring to it."

"Hmm, funny. If I were going to go pirate, I'd need some slaves to mine the stuff. You could be my slave driver. You've got enough practice cracking the whip on those grunts you call Marines."

"Those are highly trained and very scary grunts, McKay. I'd show a little more respect. And I don't want to be slave driver. I want to be the gun runner."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Car chases, high-speed-death-defying escapes from authority… that's the life."

"I guess that is more your style."

"Definitely. Except I'd totally steal a jumper and skip the high-speed death-defying part…"

Teyla listened to them banter on for a while, none of it making any more sense to her than the comment about swamp pillows, or whatever John had said earlier. When the light filtering in through the jumper's windshield began to fade into a whitewashed paleness as John turned off the stealth and took them into low orbit towards the other side of the planet's landmass, Teyla closed her eyes and let her mind relax. There was an issue in the Athosian settlement that she wished to meditate on, and as odd as it might seem, she found the pleasantly annoying bickering of her teammates a relaxing background for her thoughts.

True to John's estimate, when nearly an hour had passed and the jumper had fallen into a comfortable silence – John and Rodney having finished planning the best way to run their illicit fantasy empire – they began to descend to the surface again and John called them all forward and to attention.

"We're almost there. McKay, you getting anything on the sensors?" John asked, managing to concentrate on his course, the controls in front of him and the conversation all at the same time.

"Yeah, there's definitely a massive power source at the sight where we estimated the outpost to be. And the atmosphere is getting more and more polluted as we approach."

"Polluted? You mean as in smog and acid rain?"

"Polluted as in chemicals I've never even seen before, charged free energy, and some really disturbing airborne accumulations of unstable molecules."

"So… smog and acid rain."

"I sure wouldn't want to live here, this place is an industrial disaster waiting to happen. Hey, should we go back for hazmat suits?!" Rodney looked suddenly alarmed and John just grinned.

"Let's look a little closer before we turn around."

Teyla understood enough to understand that the Ancestor's outpost had somehow caused the problems that were alarming Rodney. Her faith in the race that her people believed were the source of life in their galaxy had already been tested to the breaking point, and she felt another stab of sadness as the Ancients once more proved themselves only too human in their capacity for destruction.

"So the Ancient Outpost is the cause of this pollution?" she asked, almost hoping there was another explanation.

"Most likely," Rodney answered, still scrolling through page after page of information on the heads up display. "But I don't think it's supposed to be. All of these pollutants are byproducts that the Ancients knew how to scrub or render inert – Atlantis does it all the time. No, I think either the plant is not functioning properly, or we're about to discover a second Los Angeles out here.

"You don't mean currently functioning, do you? You said the outpost was unpopulated. This is old pollution, right?" John's puzzled question was tinged with annoyance and Teyla almost smiled. John disliked being surprised, especially when it probably meant their job would become more difficult – there was a laziness about John that was inexplicably charming.

"No, it's recent. Any…smog… the Ancients might have produced would have dispersed in the last 10,000 years," Rodney mumbled still reading quickly. A sudden blink brought up a screen covered with white dots that overlayed precisely with the landscape seen through the jumper's window. "And look: I'm reading multiple life signs. The outpost is populated after all…"

--------------------------

"Excuse me, Miss Emmagan." Major Mackey smiled and interrupted her politely. "I find this an important point, here. As you approached the Ancient Outpost, even at that early stage in the mission, Dr. McKay had already determined that the environment was polluted and dangerously unstable?"

Teyla nodded and turned her head to address Mackey directly, all too aware of John's tense presence next to him. "Dr. McKay called it 'a disaster waiting to happen,'" she answered.

Zelenka suddenly squirmed and raised his hand in a small fit of excitement. Mackey didn't miss a beat and next looked at the fidgeting scientist and said, "Dr. Zelenka, what has the science team learned about the atmospheric conditions as they existed before the firestorm incident?"

Zelenka looked pleased to be allowed to speak and, pushing his wire-frame glasses further up his nose, he answered in an excitable rush. "The emissions from the outpost over several years had built up a kind of…chemical bubble… over a radius of several hundred miles within the troposphere. One compound in particular, which is quite an interesting by-product by the way – worth analyzing in greater detail due to its potential uses as a binding agent in the field of geo-chemistry…"

Major Mackey coughed politely and Zelenka blushed, fussing with his glasses again. "In any case, this unusual compound, when released in combination with the other emissions, acted as a binding agent, combining them into heavier compounds and preventing them from dispersing as they otherwise would. The resulting concentrations had reached a highly volatile state."

Zelenka stopped and there were blank stares all around, he shrugged and added, "It's actually quite interesting."

"And dangerous," Colonel Caldwell, muttered, pointedly audible.

"Most certainly," Zelenka agreed, forgetting he should probably wait to be formally asked. Then he gulped and glanced sheepishly at John. "The longer the buildup, the more risk there would be of a combustible event. At some point, the generator itself or even an electrical storm could have similarly ignited the atmosphere."

General Landry shook his head and spoke for the first time that morning, looking perplexed. "What is your point, Major Mackey? Are you really trying to reinforce the evidence that Colonel Sheppard was well aware of the atmospheric conditions that amounted to a planet sized powder-keg?"

"No, sir." Mackey replied firmly. "My point is that the volatile conditions were a pre-existing condition not of Colonel Sheppard's making, and a danger that would have eventually resolved itself destructively anyway." The lawyer looked at John, then held the eyes of each of the judges. "When working near a 'powder-keg', General, there's always a higher risk of getting burned."

Teyla shot a glance at John to see him smiling slightly at the Major's rather dramatic summary. But the smile was not smug or hopeful. Rather, she thought he seemed simply amused – as if he were watching an entertainment video with the rest of them but he already knew the ending. When he next sighed and bowed his head again, she suddenly, shockingly, realized that John sat there without hope. He already knew the ending – he would be punished and taken away. This proceeding was merely a step down the path he'd already foreseen. And accepted.

Her eyes suddenly stung in frustration, and she had to blink rapidly in an effort to return her concentration to the hearing at hand and Colonel Murgia's question.

"If you're through, Major Mackey. Miss Emmagan, please continue and describe for us the settlement you discovered at the base of the Ancient Outpost…"