The front glass had to be blacked out because the light from the accretion disc would be too bright for him to look at. If he were able to see outside, he'd probably see the blue stars ahead of him passing to red at an impossible speed. The ship groaned slightly, the tidal forces pulling harder on the bottom of the ship than the top. The forces at this distance wouldn't be too strong for the jumper's structure to handle, but it would be enough to rip him apart if he were outside in a space suit. That was enough to make him jittery. He thought of bringing a book along or something, since he'd have to be here for about a day according to his clock, hurling around the black hole again and again. Then again, he was too nervous even to think about one thing for any length of time.
He'd accomplished a few firsts in Earth's space exploration. He was used to taking huge risks and long-shots, but this was the first time he'd ever done it alone.
...
"What do you mean, he's stuck ten thousand years in the past!" Sheppard insisted.
Radek raised his hand slightly before adding something. "But he's in Atlantis, that's probably the safest place in the galaxy to be at that time."
"Security personnel to the gate room, unscheduled off-world activation," the gate operator said over the public com frequency.
"What teams to we have off-world?" Radek asked. "I thought..."
"Nobody at the moment," Sheppard confirmed, he and Ronon jogged away, and Radek scrambled around a bit, trying to turn off and secure his equipment before running off to see what was going on.
He almost entered the transporter on his level before Sheppard called him on his personal com frequency. "Radek, get up here."
"I'm almost there," he said annoyedly. He exited the control room transporter, seeing Sheppard and Ronon, as well as Weir gathered near the communications operator.
"What's going on?"
the communications operator answered. "We're not recieving an IDC, but we did receive a radio signal. A repeating frequency modulated sequence at forty two megahertz."
"Send it through the signal analyzer, see if we can get a pattern," Radek suggested.
"It's already working," she replied. The computer displayed a sequence of numbers, seventeen digits long.
"What does it mean?" Weir asked.
"Seventeen digits is the same length as an IDC code," Radek said.
"Cross reference that with the GDO controls." Sheppard said.
The com operator pushed the wheeled chair over a few feet to the GDO console. "It's Doctor McKay's IDC number," she said after typing in the number.
"Do you think it's really him?" Weir asked.
"I'm inclined to think so," Radek said. Our secure radio transmitters operate at forty two megahertz, and that is the correct IDC."
"Lower the shield," Weir said. "Open a channel please." The com operator nodded. "Rodney, if you can hear this, it's safe to come through."
All eyes turned toward the stargate. There was a tense pause before the gate room exploded in a cloud of mist emanating from the gate, filling the whole room with steam.
"Is this some sort of attack?" Radek shouted.
"Get everyone out!" Sheppard shouted. There was a mad scramble, the stairwells and the transporter backing up in a line. Radek turned his attention away from the log jam back to the gate room, where the silhouette of a puddle jumper was appearing out of the mist.
If this was some sort of gas attack, they'd likely already been too far exposed. Radek walked over to the railing, where the gas cloud was almost all the way dissipated, leaving the shape of an ice covered puddle jumper in the middle of the gate room floor.
"Wait a minute," Radek said as he began descending the steps toward the ship. He approached it, seeing the surface collecting ice before his eyes. He felt the heat being drawn away from his skin as he neared, meaning that the surface of the ship was very very cold. He heard the sound of ice crackling near the rear, and the sound of the door actuators whirring. Radek rounded the side of the ship to the rear hatch to see none other than Rodney stepping out the back.
"Rodney?" Radek asked, hardly believing his appearance. There were a multitude of footsteps behind him, and he was almost jolted out of the way by security teams aiming weapons at Rodney.
"Woah, woah hold on." Sheppard shouted above the ruckus.
"Rodney?" Sheppard asked, looking completely astonished.
"Yes, yes, it's me. Gee, I'm so glad to be home, I did so miss having guns pointed at me." Sheppard signaled the men to lower their weapons.
"Where the hell have you been?"
"Better to ask when the hell have I been. Did you get my message?"
"Uh, yes we did." Radek confirmed. "Sorry, but how did you manage to return to this time?"
"Solar flares, black holes, a planet covered in liquid nitrogen." Rodney said stepping down the ramp. "I don't know, I'll tell you all about it after I take a shower and a nap."
Sheppard touched the side of the ship. "Aggh," he exclaimed, promptly retracting his hand.
"Yeah, it's going to be a bit cold." Rodney taunted.
"It's a jumper," Sheppard stated.
"Yeah," Rodney said, "Obviously."
"Yeah, but I mean, this is a new jumper."
"Well... Yeah I guess it is." Rodney said. Now he remembered that empty parking space in the jumper bay they had seen when they first arrived in the city. Apparently it wasn't just extra after all.
"Does it have drones?"
"Yeah, all of them."
"Allies of the Lanteans?" Weir asked, sifting through the pages of Rodney's mission report.
"That's what the message said," Rodney explained.
"Any idea who it was?" Sheppard asked.
"She wouldn't explain it to me, and the message was equally vague."
"It's rather chilling to think how narrowly an Ori invasion was averted." Weir said.
"I suppose so," Rodney said halfheartedly.
"You don't agree?" Teyla asked.
"Well, that's the one thing that hasn't ceased to bother me. The Ori invasion was thwarted, job well done; but I couldn't stop the Ancients from being driven out, and I couldn't stop the wraith from becoming a threat."
"You wanted to do more." Weir guessed.
"Yeah," Rodney said, fidgeting with the pen attached to his mission folder.
"You don't now what could have happened if the Ori had taken over this galaxy." Sheppard added. "From what I've heard, they would be just as bad as the wraith, if not worse."
"Did you guys ever find the secret facility I was talking about? The one on the mainland."
"Yes and no," Weir said. We found the closet which housed the transporter. We found evidence that the transporter was there at one time, but it had since been removed."
"So there won't be any data left to study." Rodney said, taking his hands off the table.
"Is it possible there were others within the Lantean council who were working with the Ori agents?" Teyla suggested.
"Maybe," Rodney said. "I think it's more likely they were covering their asses."
"Well whatever the cause, all the data and evidence was cleaned out pretty quick." Weir said.
The room was silent for a moment, Rodney running out of things to add, and Weir apparently running out of questions to ask.
"All right," Weir said standing up, "Thank you Rodney, meeting dismissed."
"Doctor Weir," Beckett said just as the shuttered doors of the conference room opened. He walked in, his demeanor showing his excitement.
"What is it Carson." Dr. Weir addressed.
"I've been going over some of the data that Rodney brought back with him, and I think I figured out what the purpose of the machine Rodney described was."
He looked to all in the room, possibly expecting one of them to say 'what.' "It's for manipulating DNA."
"Thank you," Rodney said, standing up. "I think we already knew that."
"Aye, but I bet you didn't know it was programmed to alter the natural functioning of a wraith's immune system."
"What's the significance of that?" Weir asked.
"Well, it's still early, and there's so much more information to sort through, but from what I've read so far, among other things, it couples the functioning of the immune system with the feeding mechanism. But from what we've already studied about wraith, we already know that's how it functions naturally."
"So..." Sheppard said, trying to coax the point along. Rodney was already ahead of them, putting the pieces together.
"So why change their physiology to do something it already does?" Rodney asked.
"Exactly," Beckett said. "If that's how they functioned naturally, why make any change at all?"
"So you're saying that the wraith being manipulated by the machine were different from the wraith we know today." Weir said.
"It's all just conjecture," Beckett said. "But I think that's a pretty good bet."
"What was the purpose of this change?" Teyla asked.
Rodney already had a pretty good idea. "It was to make certain that they terrorized humans; making sure they couldn't survive without feeding. They were meant to be such a terror to the galaxy, that the people would just fall in line and beg the Ori to stop them." The entire conference room was silent as they absorbed what he just said. "That was after they drove out the Ancients," he added to clarify.
"These Ori sound pretty bad," Ronon said, making an unusual comment.
Rodney sat still for a minute, fidgeting with the pen. He waited until everyone had left, then stood up, walking to the transporter. He stepped outside on the north pier, and walked for a few minutes straight to the point.
The bright sun shone directly down and the salt air of the sea blowing past him He turned slowly around in a circle, taking everything in about the city, every visual detail. It put new perspective on everything. His view of the city had changed. It put new perspective on it to know just how long it had been around, and how little it had changed. As far as he knew, almost no time at all had passed.
He thought of Gero, knowing that he surely would be gone by this time. And yet, he couldn't get the idea out of his mind, that somewhere, at sometime, he was right where he had seen him last; walking out into his field, or stoking the fire in his kitchen. He felt that he could just as easily travel back to that planet in the jumper and find him there, even though his rational mind knew that everything he'd seen was surely different now. He thought of Gero's son, realizing that he hadn't learned his name. Perhaps he would still be alive after all this time, maybe.
He wasn't even sure how his view of the wraith had changed. Was it their fault that they became what they were? He didn't know, Syntyche would probably be able to judge that better than him. The Ancients, the Lanteans. How could they have let that happen right under their noses, right in their own city! It was unimaginable. It seemed that toward the end, they had become almost apathetic, completely uninterested in paying attention to the state of affairs in the galaxy, even of their own government. Lack of vigilance perhaps, had made it so easy for the Ori to infiltrate.
Svard had seen what was happening. In the end he warned them of what was going on, but it cost him his life, and the warning was almost too late. There were few people Rodney would consider a friend, which is why Svard's death was affecting him like it was; he had been a friend.
Seventy years had passed for Syntyche. He could only imagine what had transpired for her during that time. He still didn't know very much about her history, her people. How she came to be in Ori captivity. He figured it was a story anyone would be hesitant to relate. He wasn't even sure he wanted to hear it.
He wasn't sure how and if all he had learned had changed things, but he felt his that in some small but important way, his thoughts and decisions toward the wraith, the Lanteans, and this city would be forever different from the past.
