"You guys don't have to follow me around, you know," John said, a trifle impatiently.
"You have not slept for nearly two days, and these creatures have targeted you repeatedly," Teyla disagreed in one of her more diplomatic tones, "It would appear that they know you are responsible for organizing the security of Atlantis. Perhaps they believe that removing you will make their work easier."
"They've gone after Rodney too," John reminded her, "Why don't you go hang out with him?"
"Rodney's still in the infirmary," Ronon grunted, "He's got plenty of people lookin' out for him."
"Yeah I'm sure a couple of nurses will be real good in a fight," John retorted, "You're forgetting, I train civilians in self-defense in my spare time. Beckett's team is not only inept, most of them are unwilling, because as doctors they don't believe in doing harm, even to the enemy."
"You emptied your weapon into the center mass of one of those things," Ronon pointed out, "Unless we find some other way to hurt 'em, I don't think shooting's gonna do it."
It was clear the admission pained him, as shooting was undeniably his favorite answer to any problem.
"So you admit there's no real point to you guys following me around?" John queried.
Before either Teyla or Ronon could answer that, the conversation was interrupted by the sound of someone or something running in the hallway up ahead. They stopped to listen, and shortly thereafter, both Ronon and John had drawn and raised their firearms in response to what came around the corner.
John didn't know how a Wraith had gotten into the city without anyone noticing it. He didn't know why it was here. But it suddenly made perfect sense to him. The city malfunctioned, gremlins started tearing things apart, and now a Wraith suddenly showed up out of nowhere. He was fully prepared to believe that these things were all related and added up to the intended destruction of Atlantis. It wouldn't be the first time, would it? Besides, what race aside from the Wraith would hate the Ancients as much as the gremlins appeared to hate those with the ATA gene?
The Wraith skidded to a stop, gasping. It looked from Ronon to John and back again. John hadn't ever seen a Wraith look particularly breathless and panting, but he supposed even Wraith must do that after enough running around, probably unleashing additional gremlins.
"Stop!" Teyla intervened unexpectedly, laying a staying hand on John's arm, "That is no Wraith."
"What do you mean? I sure looks like a Wraith," John said, briefly glancing at her out of the corner of his eye, then snapping his focus back on the Wraith, which stood where it had halted, hands raised, eyes flicking between John and Ronon, unsure which was the greater threat to its existence.
"Yet it is not. I do not sense the presence of a Wraith here," Teyla persisted fiercely, "Therefore, this is not a Wraith, whatever it may look like."
John faltered at this. Had Teyla ever been wrong about the presence or absence of the Wraith before? If she had, John failed to recall it now. But still… he blinked, looking for any excuse to discharge his weapon instead of lowering it, yet the Wraith did not advance, looked only frightened and… even confused about the situation. But mostly frightened. More than any Wraith John had ever encountered. He had more than once doubted Wraith could feel fear at all.
Seeing she had made her impression on John, Teyla removed her hand. She turned to Ronon, but did not actually touch him, merely placed her hand above his and gestured for him to lower his weapon.
"Ronon, it is not a Wraith," glancing at the Wraith for the first time since addressing John, she nodded reassuringly, "Believe me, Ronon. You do not wish to do this. You will regret it if you do."
Uneasily, John lowered his own weapon. He looked at Teyla, then back at the Wraith, wondering what she was seeing that he was missing, trusting her yet still full of doubt.
The Wraith squeezed its eyes shut, and in that moment, John knew Teyla was right. Too many things didn't add up. Too much about this didn't make sense. Once the logic center of his brain started to actually chew on what he was seeing, it was blatantly nonsensical.
And then, after a blink, the image of the Wraith evaporated, disappearing as though it had never been. As before, when the gremlins saw they couldn't turn one against the other, they retreated, and disappeared, revealing the truth of the situation.
"Rodney!" the shock hit so hard that John practically shouted the name.
Tensely frightened, Rodney took a moment to decompress, and waited for Ronon to put away his magnum, before lowering his hands and sighing with relief, "Oh thank God."
"What the hell?" John asked immediately, "I thought you were a Wraith."
"I'm not surprised," Rodney said, his voice cracking as his alarm slowly subsided, "I wasn't… exactly sure what it would try to do to me… but I figured it had to be something."
"One of the gremlins did that? They can make people hallucinate?" John fired off the questions with such vehemence that Rodney winced a little.
"Not 'they.' It," Rodney corrected, his breathing gradually becoming easier, "Come on, we need to get up to the Control Tower."
"So let's assume that some Ancients decided to come here," Souci said, "As far as we know, the Ancients were usually too busy with various enemies and other issues to be chasing after their own for no reason. The individual or group that came here would have known that. So the only reason they would have needed to erect an Ancient-specific defense was if they were experimenting with something that the other Ancients disapproved of so strongly that they might come and put a stop to it."
"Usually a bad sign," Helton remarked.
"It also begs two questions," Janella replied, "One, what were they building? And two, why aren't their descendants here now?"
Almost as one, the team took another look around at the gathered darkness, as if they expected a Replicator, Wraith, or something equally horrible yet totally different to leap out of it at them. And then heads swung east, in the direction of the as yet unseen city. Generally, an entire people didn't simply vanish or die off without cause. It was usually because something else obliterated them.
"It could've been the Wraith," Lorne suggested reassuringly, "If the Ancients who came here were careless or poorly equipped, the Wraith might have culled them. Possibly before they ever finished what they were working on."
Assuming, of course, that it had been Ancients, a fact Lorne thought was very much in doubt, but didn't want to say aloud, partially because he didn't want to appear foolish, but mainly because he didn't want to inspire a new panic about what might have been here. The known, however terrible, was far less scary than the unknown. The belief that it had been some stray Ancients was reassuring, despite all the experiences the Tau'ri had under their belt saying that stray Ancients inventing random things that had not been sanctioned by the majority of their people was usually very, very bad.
It was still better than an unknown race of mysterious character, whose purposes might be impossible to understand. In reality, from what little they had seen, there was hardly even a suggestion of humanoid characteristics. One might say plinths and columns and a readable map etched in stone were likely to be of humanoid design, but anyone with sufficient off-world experience knew those things meant little enough, for aliens of many shapes built structures passably similar to those of humanoids.
Right now, Lorne counted fear as the biggest threat to be found on M6S-868. Keeping fear in check was the most important thing. Because fear led to so many problems. Not just panic or paranoia, but anger and despair as well. Anger left unchecked would destroy a person faster than fire, and despair would sink them more effectively than even Hollywood's idea of quicksand.
But while the others consoled themselves with the idea that they were going to be dealing with Ancient technology (possibly not even gone awry as the theory of these Ancients being wiped out by the Wraith instead of themselves had been presented, and the team found it comforting to believe), Lorne looked out at the darkness, suspecting a far greater menace, one that might not be as over and done with as the neat little explanation the others had come up with suggested.
Everything in the SGC's history said that nothing was ever really over completely. No race or enemy was ever as totally gone as they seemed. Something always remained. And sometimes that something was extremely dangerous, often all the more so because it was the last or near-last of its kind. What were the chances, really, that Lorne's team would find Ancient tech, totally abandoned and completely free of menace, disable the device and then fly their merry way home in time for the tree lighting back home in Atlantis? Nothing had ever come that easy for an SG-team cut off from a Stargate.
"Now hang on," John ordered, surprised (and alarmed) by Rodney's willingness to jog to his destination, "Slow down. What are you talking about?"
With clear reluctance, Rodney dropped his pace to a brisk walk so he could speak, "I figured out what we're dealing with. Well, kind of. The imps are just a distraction, like everything else. I don't think they're even physically real."
"Such as the ghost projections used by the Wraith?" Teyla asked.
"No, not at all," Rodney replied, "No, I think it's using the capabilities of Atlantis itself. We've only begun to scratch the surface of what this city can do. And one of those things is that we think it can project holograms anywhere in the city."
Which explained how Rodney had appeared as a Wraith to them… but John wasn't sold just yet. In fact, it struck him as highly questionable, "Rodney, how could you feel a hologram? And how could one of those throw things around Elizabeth's office?"
"I haven't quite figured that part out," Rodney admitted, "But it could have been done with the environmental controls. A properly concentrated burst of warm air could feel like an animal, and enough of that same wind could relocate objects. Atlantis is capable of that."
"And what of the food stores?" Teyla inquired gently.
"I don't know!" Rodney replied, "Maybe there's some other system it's using we haven't even learned about yet. Or maybe what Dorsey thought he saw wasn't what was really there at all. Maybe it had only made food storage look like the place had been ransacked. I mean, did anyone really do more than a visual inspection?"
"You keep saying 'it,'" Ronon observed.
"That's because there's only one," Rodney replied with anxious surety, "And it's not a creature. Not as such. It's more… more of an intelligent computer virus, one that Atlantis doesn't know how to recognize. It's the only thing that makes sense."
"Does it make sense though?" John queried, still dubious.
"You tell me what else could get into Atlantis through an out-going wormhole!" Rodney snapped, "Which one of us is the expert on wormhole theory again? Oh right, that would be me!"
Seeing as he'd almost filled Rodney with bullets just a moment ago, John decided to let that one slide.
"So you're tellin' me that the things we've been killin' ourselves tryin' to find-"
"-aren't really there," Rodney interrupted excitedly, "Exactly."
"That seems to make you happy," Ronon grumbled, "Why does that make you happy?"
"Because," Rodney said, stopping so he could turn towards Ronon, "Knowing what the problem is means I'm a step closer to fixing it. And now that I know all I'm dealing with is some kind of advanced computer virus, I have a point of focus."
"But who could have designed such a… a virus as you describe?" Teyla wanted to know, "Surely not the Wraith, or else they would have conquered Atlantis long ago."
"Yeah, and hardly anybody else around here is advanced enough for cyber warfare," John observed.
"Do I have to have an answer for everything to be right?" Rodney exclaimed, then sighed and started walking again, rolling his eyes, "What am I saying? Of course I do. Any number of races could have aligned themselves against the Ancients. Small players in the cosmic scheme, who got wiped off the face of the galaxy thousands of years ago. It's not always technical inadequacy that wipes out a culture or species. Just look at the Asgard."
"The little gray guys?" John asked with a frown, "What's wrong with them?"
Rodney shook his head, "A lot. More than a lot. We don't have time to get into it right now," he waved a dismissive hand and started walking faster, "The point is… whoever designed this computer virus was advanced enough to challenge the Ancients, but for whatever reason wasn't a big enough player to warrant a lot of library space. But!" he stopped so suddenly John almost stepped on him, "I found them! Barely a footnote, but enough to know that they existed, and had technology that could theoretically be used in exactly the way that we're seeing now."
"Lemme guess, M6S-868 was their home-world," John said when Rodney started walking again.
"Bingo," Rodney replied, then auto-corrected, "Well… it was actually more of a small research colony. The Ancients didn't seem to know for sure where they were from-"
"Rodney," John interrupted gently.
"Right, right… anyway. They weren't strictly enemies of the Ancients, but for whatever reason they hated them. Feared them like no other race in the galaxy, even the Wraith. So the Ancients mostly left them alone to avoid increasing hostilities."
"Why?" John asked.
"What am I, a psychologist?" Rodney complained, "How would I know why?" he didn't wait for a response, "Anyway, it doesn't actually matter. What matters is that they obviously developed technology that targeted Ancients or Ancient-technology specifically, otherwise we would've seen a power surge when we sent the UAVs instead of after the jumper went through."
"So you're sayin' that if we hadn't sent a jumper-" John began.
"Or hadn't sent Lorne," Ronon grunted coldly.
"-We wouldn't be having this problem right now?" John finished the sentence, ignoring Ronon.
"Just think, you could be hanging festive wreaths right now," Rodney commented.
"Well thank God for small mercies," John remarked sardonically, "How do we fix this? And how much danger is Lorne's team in if they're on the world this thing is from?"
"Don't know, and probably a lot," Rodney said with transparently fake good cheer.
"Wonderful."
"The most wonderful time of the year."
Wilson was still casting frequent looks at the sky, which had cleared somewhat after sunset, just enough to give them a brief glimpse of stars before the clouds closed over them again.
"Jumpers are well-insulated, Lieutenant," Lorne said aside to Wilson, "And they're as sturdy as they look. Anyone who landed here will be fine without us for a few hours."
Wilson didn't have the ATA gene, so his education about jumpers had been mostly skipped. But it was soon evident that wasn't what he was worried about. Lorne was having a tough time getting a bead on this kid, it seemed he was always thinking along a different line than he appeared to be.
"Yes sir," Wilson said, keeping his eyes on the sky overhead, "But I was just thinking… you tried to aim for the source of the interference, didn't you?"
"Why?" Lorne asked.
"That's what any pilot would do under the circumstances. So, anyone coming after us should've aimed for the valley. The area where we crashed is the only good landing site anywhere around, so any pilot coming in low enough would aim for that too. But we've a clear view for miles, except where the mountains and trees collect the fog. And if Reed had seen anybody, he'd've radioed us," Wilson paused uneasily before concluding, "If anyone had come after us, we should've seen them. Or at least heard them. So… why didn't we?"
Lorne opened his mouth to answer, and realized he didn't know. Worse, he couldn't decide which was less reassuring: that there was a rescue team stranded out there somewhere (or that had gone up in a blaze after crashing somewhere far worse), or that no one had come looking for them at all.
He felt strangely guilty just thinking about it, but the thought had flitted through him before he could stop it, leaving an acidic feeling of dread in its wake: What if they had been abandoned?
Again, he was a hair too late in his response, "We're going to be fine, Wilson. Worse case, we have to survive here for awhile until a ship can come looking for us. It's happened before to SG-teams."
Still looking at the sky, Wilson said without conviction, "Yes sir."
Lorne took hold of Wilson's arm, prompting the lieutenant to look at him, "Atlantis will find a way to come for us. You know how many times we were sent out to look for Sheppard's team a few months back. There was barely a chance we'd find them, and we all knew it. But we kept looking. Because we don't leave our people behind. Not ever."
"Yes sir," Wilson replied.
But he didn't sound convinced, and returned his attention to the uncaring sky.