"As we are originally from another time, once on the surface of the planet, we will all be open to temporal degredation."
"What's that when it's at home?"
"It means that every moment Ran approaches her goal, we are slowly being written out of existance. Teal'c has offered to carry the generator with us, and while the device is still active, we will remain mostly corporeal."
"And not for the first time, I ask, why am I here?"
Blue could hear the underlying bitterness in Harry's voice as he slipped into his vest and began to systematically check his equipment.
"I'm ASIO. I've had weapons training but I've never trained for combat. So why am I here? Then I remember that I was beamed up by a vastly superior alien who is yet again strangely absent from this piece."
"He'll be back." Max said vaguely.
"Yes, probably just in time to warn us about the next intergalactic catastrophe and making sure we're so deep in it that we can barely see daylight before buggering off to whatever rock he crawled out of under."
For a moment Blue thought about defending the Furling, and then decided it wasn't worth the effort. The gigantic alien had turned their lives upside down and then vanished as abruptly as he had first appeared. Something that Max would like to do right now, actually.
"How's Jackson?" Blue asked as General O'Neill entered the bridge. The archaeologist was still in the infirmary, recovering from injuries sustained in the explosion.
"Oh, you know. Cheesed off that he can't come with. Something about the archaeological find of the century."
"Strictly speaking, the planet actually hasn't been lost yet."
"That's what I said."
The both of them were about to join the rest of the team when something rocked the Daedalus with such force it almost knocked all those standing off their feet.
"What the hell was that?" Harry demanded.
"Shields down to eighty percent." The bridge technician said. "Weapons on the surface of the planet preparing to fire again."
"If you're going to do something, now would be a good time." Colonel Caldwell commanded.
"I thought you said they were technologically backward?" Carter shot at Max.
"I said the majority of the people believed in the arcane. I never said they were technologically backward."
"We should hail them," Colonel Mitchell suggested.
"No time." Blue disagreed.
"Too many Colonels." O'Neill shook his head mournfully. "Get us down on that planet now."
"We'll await your orders, sir." Caldwell said.
"You'll be waiting a while." Max murmured, loud enough for Blue to hear.
"Sir, how do we know that the mission has been a success?"
"You don't." Jack said flatly.
Blue had been materialised and dematerialised more times than she could remember over the last few years. She'd been Gated into the middle of space battles and beamed into war zones more times than she'd care to remember. Her atoms had been broken down and juggled around so often that she was actually quite surprised that her insides hadn't liquefied yet.
Never had she beamed quite like this.
Her head had smashed against something hard and she had dropped her P90 upon impact. "Ah." Blue rubbed the back of her neck. Her hand came back with red fingers, but she had not time to lie still and hope she didn't have a concussion.
She was hardly the only one picking themselves off the ground.
"What the hell was that?" Mitchell hissed.
"I do believe the Eyeless Ones fired upon us a second time." Teal'c said calmly.
Colonel Carter raked the hair out of her eyes. "The missiles must have hit the beaming array just as we were being reconstituted."
Jack looked at her a moment. "Oh."
Out of the corner of her eye, Blue could see Max gearing up to make a scathing remark about the way the humans were using Asgard technology, and she stepped on his foot.
"We've got company." Harry was crouching halfway up the rise, being his usual sneaky self. Blue scrambled up to join him, tugging a pair of binoculars out of a vest pocket. Max had said the primitive Ancients had been a warlike race, and she wasn't disappointed.
The man in front seemed to be a leader of sorts. He was bare-chested and battle scarred, an assortment of sharp-looking weapons slung across his person. Standing beside her, he would have seriously dwarfed her in size. The other men and women with him looked equally tough. True to Max's word, only a small percentage carried guns or laser weapons of any kind.
The procession came right up to the edge of the spot where SG1 and their additional members were hiding, so close that Blue could have reached out of the bushes and touched the fine gossamer wraps the women were wearing.
And they walked straight past.
"Best hunters in the galaxy." Blue commented quietly.
"Who's going to be mad enough to attack them on their own turf?"
"Well, there's nothing else to do... but follow them." General O'Neill lightly leapt down to the woodland path. "What should we be looking out for, Maxie?"
Max shrugged. "The usual."
"That's very helpful."
"I'm relying on old stories and history lessons from when I was twelve which I didn't pay much attention to anyway. Quite a bit more has happened to me since then."
"I bet."
Max wrung his memory for any information they could use. "Before fleeing Delos, the Eyeless Ones were heavily influenced by magic and believed that periodical sacrifices gave them strength." He said slowly. "But we don't know the customs here, so let's just try to stay out of trouble."
"Trouble? Us?" Mitchell said innocently.
Blue stepped into the road dust that the convoy had left behind.
"Daedalus, we have reached the planet's surface. Do you read?"
The radio noise seemed to loom out at them ominously. It seemed that Max's diagnosis was correct. From the Daedalus's point of view, SG1 no longer existed. O'Neill abandoned the radio. As Colonel Mitchell, General O'Neill and Teal'c scouted ahead, Blue dropped slightly behind to eavesdrop on the conversation between Harry, Max, and Sam.
"At this point in time, actually how advanced are these people?" Carter asked. Blue felt an irrational twinge of jealousy over the fact that Max answered all the Colonel's questions in a straightforward manner and not in that arrogant-and-superior way of his.
"Forget about technology. Did you see the knife on that bloke? You could gut a small child with that!" Harry exclaimed. He blinked up at the primordial suns. "DJ would be pissing himself with excitement 'round about now."
Carter seemed only mildly shocked at Harry's colourful expression. Spending most of her time in the company of men was beginning to rub off on her. "I know you talk about DJ like he's some kind of genius, and when he was in the lab he seemed to be just that, but he's... just a kid."
"How old were you when you joined the military?" Harry asked pointedly.
Carter smiled ruefully. "Just a kid."
"So, how advanced?"
Max's look clearly said how should I know?
"I know I've lived a long time, but I'm not that old." He said. Then his eyes brightened. "I do know that about two years after Delos is destroyed, their engineers begin their decent into science and begin to manufacture the first of the Atlantis-standard cruisers."
For a moment Sam was enthralled with the idea of witnessing firsthand the designing and building process of other ships like Atlantis.
"Max?"
"Yes?"
"Exactly how many Atlantis-standard cruisers did the Ancients manufacture?" Carter asked curiously.
"At the height of out power, we had a fleet of half a million, excluding fighters and support vessels."
"So there could be... other lost cities out there?"
"I suppose so."
"And there's a possibility that not all the cities would have been evacuated? There could be others like us, descendants of the Ancients."
"I guess."
Eyes filled with new possibilities, Carter dropped into a pensive silence as Blue took her place in the lineup.
"I've got a question." Harry said.
"Yes?"
"You built Atlantis?"
"Part of it, yes."
"Right. So whose clever idea was it to call a spaceship something wanky like Atlantis?"
"Oh, you know, we just put a bunch of names into a hat and drew lots."
"Really?"
"No."
Blue rolled her eyes, a small grin playing across her lips.
"The name comes from the archives." Max said slowly, as if he wasn't sure he should be telling them, but he still blundered on. "Atlantis was a name from our histories..."
Sensing something potentially apocalyptic, Blue tuned fully back into the conversation.
"Or, well, among the academic circles there was always debate on whether it had ever really-"
"Max." Blue's eyes narrowed.
"You're going to be terribly disappointed." He warned.
"Talk."
"We decided to name Atlantis after a mythological city of the ancestors."
Blue almost fell over.
"You named Atlantis after a mythological city?" She hissed. "But we - Do you have any idea what you've just done to the validity of the whole Pegasus expedition? For the last five years I've been stuck in a sci-fi extravaganza, and now it's 'oops-by-the-way-you-never-really-made-it-to-Atlantis'? Way to make a girl feel cheap."
"You discovered a Atlantis." Max offered.
"Yeah, I'm not really comforted by that."
There was a building in front of them. Blue's first thought was of a medieval castle, but the watchtowers and gothic fortifications spoke differently. She looked back to Max, just in time to see him glance away from the Ancient personal shield he had taken from the Daedalus lab, his brow creased in worry. As soon as he noticed her watching, his expression was neutral once more.
Not one of the villagers glanced their way, which Blue found slightly disturbing. But, she reasoned, Harry was probably right when he said they didn't expect an attack from within the ranks.
"What now?"
"We hope that we've arrived in the right time to stop Ran." Max murmured.
"Hope." She said dully. "I could use a little bit of that."
He reached out a hand and touched her shoulder. "It's not your fault."
Blue thought of all the people still in the infirmary, of Major Lorne who would never walk again if she failed.
"Oh, I think it is."
"Cake." Jack said suddenly, snapping everyone out of their moods. "Do you smell cake?"
Inside the fortified walls there seemed to be a festival of some kind going on. She could hear singing and laughter. Blue indeed could smell cake. And roast. And the outer-space equivalent of potatoes. Suddenly she realised that she hadn't eaten since... forever. Maybe longer.
She was standing with Max and Harry when she noticed the exact reason for the celebrations.
The same man she had seen earlier climbed atop a dais to address his people and spread out his arms in welcome. He seemed to be wearing the entire contents of the Eyeless Ones' armoury, and the blades caught the glare of the sun.
He spoke. The dialect had a similar ring to something Blue had heard before, but she was no linguist. Almost instantly, every member of SG1 turned to look at Max.
The Ancient looked pensive for a moment and Blue could actually see as he sifted backwards in his memory, looking for the exact language he needed.
"Um, he's welcoming all his people and thanking them all for being here today, and going on a bit about the glory of the Eyeless Ones, look how fabulous we all are..."
"As you do." Jack said.
"...glory of the Empire, and... oh."
"Oh?"
About as soon as the words were past his lips, none of SG1 needed to hear why Max was suddenly concerned, as a man was marched up to face the altar. He seemed completely calm with his lot in life, and wore a cloak of many shifting colours.
"We're just in time for the dusk sacrifice."
"The dusk sacrifice? How many sacrifices do these guys have?" O'Neill stepped forward involuntarily.
"A great empire is primarily built on fear." Teal'c said. "The people are controlled by believing that they may die at any moment."
"All right." Jack readied his weapon.
"No! We can't interfere in anything other than stopping Ran!" Max protested. "Doing anything else could dramatically alter the timeline in ways that we can't even begin-"
O'Neill looked at him warily. "I'm guessing that you're going to need a distraction." He said. "We need you in that building." He indicated the Citadel. "Jones?"
"Yes, sir?"
"Take Maxie and the spy and get yourselves into that building. Finish the mission."
"Yes, sir. What about once the mission's complete? We'll still... be here."
"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Get going, soldier."
"Sir."
The general gave a series of hand signals and SG1 fanned out. Blue dragged Max under the cover of the shadowy merchant stalls, Harry coming up behind, casually nursing his gun. The three of them lent against the stone walls as Teal'c fired a shot at the altar. Almost as one, the people moved away from the strangers, desperate to prove to their leader that they were not at fault for interfering with the sacrifice.
SG1 was left standing in the centre of hostile glares where each villager carried a knife.
While everyone else was otherwise occupied, Blue snagged a bolt of heavy material from one of the stands and wrapped it around herself, instantly becoming another part of the crowd. Harry followed suit. Max didn't bother; he would have looked like just another bloke no matter what planet he was on.
He stopped to stare at the personal shield again. Blue was tempted to march right over and snatch the device off his chest. Instead she pursed her lips and marched onwards, always onwards. She watched as SG1 broke formation and scattered, imperial guards on their tails, leading them on a merry chase.
"Will they be alright?" Harry asked.
"They're SG1. They do this kind of thing all the time." Though Blue wished she could dismiss her own anxieties as easily as she dismissed his.
"Stay sharp, boys." She ordered. The guards were maintaining the line to the Citadel as best they could, but now and then Blue spotted gaps in the formation as the melee began. The townsfolk, hardly meek to begin with, began to bay for blood now that they had missed the dusk sacrifice. Whose blood it was didn't seem to matter to these people.
For a moment it horrified Blue as she wondered what would happen if Delos wasn't destroyed, if the loss of the planet and most of their people didn't cause the Eyeless Ones to re-evaluate their views of life. Would they have become the new Goa'uld?
Would the human race, or whatever would become of it, be out there now, forcing the inhabitants of the universe to bow down before their Gods? The human race, with several billion years' worth of weapons tech on the backs of half a million Atlantis-standard cruisers.
It couldn't be allowed to happen.
