Two days of hiking a much colder, wetter area than they had been prepared for had taken a toll on both teams, especially when coupled with two very bad nights of sleep. Though less cramped than the jumper, sleeping in the open came with increased chill and a steady state of low-key alarm because there was nothing between them and the sounds of the night.
Not to mention the sights.
Sometime after the first moon set, Lorne had been stirred into wakefulness by an indistinct sense that something in his environment had changed in an unexpected way. It had taken him a few seconds to realize that it was the water surrounding them. Something within it glowed. Maybe a fish, maybe an algae, maybe something far stranger. Lorne didn't investigate to find out. Whatever it was, flitted along in numbers or was carried by the current, blue-white sparks of light appearing and disappearing, giving the ultimate impression that they were on their way somewhere and were in something of a hurry about it. Not all that reassuring, as the lights were headed in the opposite direction from Lorne and his team.
If Lorne had believed in signs, he might have suspected this of being one.
Whatever they were, they were either gone come morning or rendered invisible by daylight, which was when Lorne learned he hadn't been the only one to see them. Over breakfast, Souci and Janella discussed the phenomenon, but were not agreed as to what it was.
"They certainly don't correspond to any plant life I know of," Janella patiently insisted.
"Isn't a lot of plant life bioluminscent?" Souci inquired, though she undoubtedly knew the answer.
"Well yes, but it doesn't move like that. In fact, most plants don't move at all. Not to travel under their own power, anyway," Janella said.
"What about that algae I showed you an article about? The one that lights up when animals move through it, making them look like they're glowing and leaving trails?" Souci challenged.
"And what about the research paper I showed you discussing the debate over whether algae are truly plants or not?" Janella returned evenly.
"Oh don't be pedantic, it doesn't suit you," Souci said, with a dismissive wave of her hand that provoked a tolerant smile and head shake on the part of Janella.
Clearly, the team was in much better spirits than they'd been the night before. Some sleep, however poor, was better than none, and they were rapidly adjusting themselves to their situation and each other.
At its core, the Atlantis Expedition was all about teamwork, a shared sense of curiosity and wonder about the universe, and the desire to protect humanity's little corner of it against all comers. It was a good foundation for building friendships and cooperation, even among people who would otherwise be impossible to work with. Everyone had that extra bit of motivation to make it work for the good of all.
While Souci and Janella good-naturedly argued over algae, Helton had gone back to bemoaning his fate in missing out on the undoubtedly very fun Christmas party in Atlantis for this, and George was attempting to make him feel better by recounting the tale of a particularly bad Christmas party he had been to which had, rather unsurprisingly at this point, involved a great deal of alcohol and George wearing a Santa suit that fit rather better than he would have liked.
Coughlin and Wilson had drifted away from the main camp. It was quite usual for teams like Lorne's to maintain some distance from the civilians. This was partially because the civilians were irritating to them, mostly because they were typically not welcomed into the civilian circle, and a little bit because they often wanted to register concerns without being overheard by anyone liable to take panic.
That the both of them were periodically casting looks skyward told Lorne that the discussion from the night before was no doubt continuing, only now Wilson was bringing up his unease with Coughlin. Possibly he merely wanted to bring Coughlin into the loop. More likely, he was looking for a second opinion besides Lorne's, and thus would not welcome his CO's intrusion.
Lorne decided to leave them alone for the moment.
If they decided between them that there was a potential issue being overlooked, they wouldn't hesitate to bring it to him. Lorne often cheerily dismissed concerns, but he did listen to his men, and didn't come down on them for bringing his attention to such matters. If they were worried about something, he wanted to hear about it, and they knew it.
"Well that makes absolutely no sense," was Zelenka's assessment, "To deploy such a weapon against the Ancients… it is laughable. Clearly the Ancients had information in their archives that they could have used to nullify the effect. The threat would seem to be minimal at best."
"Oh really? Being mistaken for a Wraith and almost getting shot is a minimal threat to you?" Rodney retorted, "You think that was fun for me?"
"No. No I do not," Zelenka acknowledged, "But surely you realize that the Ancients would see through such a ruse almost immediately. This was their city. They knew what it was capable of. And they knew this other race existed. The virus could not pose a genuine threat to the Ancients. It simply could not."
"And one Air Force Major with a life signs detector couldn't take out an army of invading Genii forces either," Rodney shot back.
"That was an entirely different circumstance and not remotely comparable. Rodney, you're being very irrational right now," Zelenka said.
"Less opinions, more helping," Rodney insisted sharply.
They were in the jumper bay, and Rodney had ripped off several of the jumper's interior panels, exposing the guts of the thing. In the meantime, Sheppard had gone off to give Elizabeth an update. Teyla and Ronon observed Rodney and Zelenka from an uneasy distance. There wasn't really enough room in the jumper for Rodney's project and more than two people, but they were unwilling to let him entirely out of their sight, lest another attempt be made on his life.
Rodney was less concerned, as he had by this point accepted that there wasn't much the imp could ultimately do to him now they were onto it. Anyone would second guess anything they thought they saw or heard now, asking questions first and shooting later. The jumpers themselves were dead, so Rodney could not become entrapped in one by the imp, and the imp seemed to have very limited environmental controls, otherwise it would have tried to cook everyone in the city, not just Rodney by himself in the transporter. Possibly if it tried to take over that much, Atlantis' defense systems would kick in. Essentially, the imp was limited to trying to goad them into damaging themselves and each other. It really hadn't been designed for much more than chaos generation and scare tactics.
He supposed there was a certain irony in the imp's attempt to kill him to prevent its destruction being the very thing that tipped him off on how to destroy it… assuming this actually worked.
"It is difficult to help when I do not understand what you hope to accomplish," Zelenka said with slightly frazzled patience, "I have spent many hours attempting to restore power to even one jumper; entirely without success. What makes you think you will achieve a different result?"
Pulling out one of the power crystals, Rodney frowned at it, replying, "Well power isn't the issue, is it? You wanted to restore power or remove something blocking the power from getting where it needed to be. But that was never the problem. The entire purpose of the imp is to get everyone looking for it in the wrong place," he put the crystal back, pulled out another, regarding it with apparent disapproval as he absently continued, "What better way to keep the military occupied than with an intruder that wasn't really there, and the technology division distracted with a problem that didn't actually exist?"
"Rodney," Zelenka was reaching the end of his ability to remain civil, "I may lack the ATA gene, but even I can tell when a jumper is without power. Even were that not the case, someone on my team would have noticed. You yourself have been in here many times to look at the jumpers."
"But I was looking in the wrong place," Rodney said, replacing the crystal and slowly dragging himself out from under the navigation panel, feeling every groaning protest of his body as he did so.
Zelenka stepped back to give Rodney space, yet he continued to express doubt, "You really believe that Atlantis has systems capable of doing everything the creatures have been accused of?"
"Think about it," Rodney replied, "Holograms, transporters, the PA system, the way the air conditioning functions, all of it. Put it together, and tell me that we couldn't rig the system to move objects, to feel like a small animal rushing by, to conjure up some sort of nonexistent creature and mimic a human voice if we had a deep enough understanding of how those systems worked."
He pushed past Zelenka to get to a panel near the back of the jumper. Zelenka, poorly imaginative at times, had been rendered inert by Rodney's insistence on his thinking the possibility through. Rodney ignored him. Zelenka would be back in the argument after he'd had a few seconds to work the notion around and find fault with it, or else he would become a reluctant convert to Rodney's view.
"Okay," Zelenka said abruptly, "But what does that have to do with the jumpers?"
"Why were they taken out first?" Rodney asked, "Before we ever knew there was a problem, the jumpers were disabled. Why?"
"To keep us from leaving Atlantis," Zelenka replied cautiously.
"Obviously," Rodney said, narrowing his eyes in some disappointment, not really wanting to slow down for Zelenka right now, but knowing he had to because he couldn't do this by himself and Zelenka was pretty much the only one who had a hope of keeping up and being useful, "But why start with the jumpers?"
"Because a jumper came through the Stargate?" Zelenka guessed, "Wait. How do we know the jumpers were affected before Operations?"
"Because that's the only way it could have happened!" Rodney exclaimed, then wiped a hand down his face in a vain attempt to drain some of his frustration, "It's like talking to a wall with you sometimes."
"This would be much easier if you would simply explain it," Zelenka retorted hotly.
"No, because you need to actually understand it if you're going to be remotely useful. I need to be there," Zelenka moved aside in response to the last; Rodney knelt and removed a floor panel before he went on, "Think less about what this thing has done, as the order of incidents and, most importantly, the timing of them. Ah," Rodney had found what he was looking for at last.
Finally -finally- the lights came on. Figuratively, that is.
"No two incidents occurred at the same time," Zelenka realized, "As if the running program can only handle so many tasks at once. The jumpers had to be disabled first because they each have their own operating system that is separate from the main computer. Before inhabiting the main network, the imp had to disable the isolated systems."
"If it did anything else, we would have a better chance to stop it," Rodney concluded, "Exactly."
"All of that being the case," Zelenka said, leaning forward to look over Rodney's shoulder, "Why are you disassembling a jumper?"
"This is clearly an intelligent virus. It's learning, adapting, growing and so on. But it still has a set of priorities. And-" Rodney paused.
He sighed in relief when Zelenka finished, "-And its first priority is to see that we do not activate the Stargate, because that is how we might best escape, bring in reinforcements, or prevent invasion."
"Exactly," Rodney said, "They couldn't get a truly effective virus through the security sensors of Atlantis, so they sent something that was like a gnat. Something the computers noticed but didn't care about. Rather than immediately attack the main system, it hopped to the less protected jumpers, gained a working understanding of Atlantis' operating system and then started doing the real damage. But nothing so big that the city would sound an alarm, not until it had more control."
"But it was never meant to complete the work on its own, merely buy time and pave the way for an invading force," Zelenka was on the same page as Rodney now, "It still thinks it is doing that. But it has been forced to escalate matters because it has been here unassisted for so long."
"Imagine a force invades, and your own city starts turning on you. Like with trying to cook me in the transporter. We just stopped using the transporter, but in the chaos of a pitched battle, who knows how many people could have been hurt or killed before anyone realized what was happening."
"This was their planned solution if the Ancients ever entered their space," Zelenka concluded, "They did not want to begin a war, merely to finish it. And they were more than prepared."
"Except for the part where thousands of years passed and they died out," Rodney pointed out, "Leaving the automated system trying to do more than it was designed for."
"You want to redirect it into a jumper," Zelenka realized, "And then isolate it there."
"No," Rodney said, "I want to trick it into trying to get into a jumper, and trap it before it gets there."
"Won't it realize what we are doing?" Zelenka asked.
"Probably it already knows. But I don't think it can reprogram itself at the base level. It will have to answer to the first priority in its program, which is stopping us from using the Stargate. Everything else it's done has been built on top of that. The fact that it tried to kill me suggests that the only way it can stop itself is to prevent that priority from being triggered."
"If we don't fix the jumper, it doesn't have to leave the main computer."
"The riddle it gave Sheppard was a dead giveaway if only he'd understood it," Rodney said, "In essence, it told him that it was working completely alone, and that it was actually less than what we thought it was. I'm betting that we're dealing with a program that can't leave a copy of itself behind, one bound by the perimeters originally set for it, no matter how smart it gets otherwise."
"That is a bit of a leap," Zelenka suggested.
"Yeah, well… I haven't slept much the last two days," Rodney replied, "Making a leap is kind of all I've got left at this point."
Zelenka nodded, almost to himself, and then said, "Then let us make this leap."
Lorne had moved north of the camp, up onto a knoll. The fog was thick this morning, and getting a more elevated view was not particularly helpful. But it did confirm the impression he'd had even in the sheltered camp area. The wind had died down, leaving the damp air cold but still. The fog seemed to deaden sound as well as sight, muffling the voices below.
It was then that he became aware of a small vibration in the ground, as if it was being shaken by a vibration, a sound too low pitched for human hearing to detect. He was at a loss to explain what it was, but it at once set him on edge, and gave him a strong impression that they should go.
Decided on that, Lorne climbed down from the knoll, announcing, "Pack up, it's time to move."
"But we haven't even finished breakfast yet," Souci protested.
"Take it to-go," Lorne said calmly, but he locked eyes with George, hoping to convey the sense of urgency he felt without having to spell it out.
George, experienced in off-world travel and the quirks of airmen, took the cue.
"The sooner we get to the city, the sooner we can get out of this damned swamp," George said, "Daylight Savings wasn't the only thing I was trying to avoid by spending most of my life in the Arizona desert."
"And yet you signed on for Atlantis, which is completely surrounded by water," Souci commented briskly, but she was obediently starting to pack up her bedroll.
"Yeah well," George said, "I didn't know it was underwater at the time."
"The name 'Atlantis' didn't give it away for you, huh?" Souci asked with a raised eyebrow.
George laughed, "I suppose it should have at that. Guess I was too excited at the prospect of exploring a whole other galaxy to think on it too much."
"You and everyone else," Souci replied lightly.