Reminder:
"This is spoken English."
"This is spoken Czech."
This is a thought.

Previously: Anna's playing around with a thing that looks like a ZPM since Iskaan gave her a necklace (in chapter 68) and she went with him to get one of her own (in chapters 75 and 76). Radek's got a problem of his own to sort out (since chapter 83). Or maybe that's not really a problem. Hard to tell with these things.


Chapter 85. Of Course He Did.

He ran out of colorful things to call the crystal panel before it finally got back at him. "Do prdele—what is wrong with you?" Radek shook his hand out as he pulled it back from the tight space in Puddle Jumper Six's crystal panel. How he'd managed to pinch his finger—and on what—was a mystery.

"That bad?"

Radek glanced toward the Puddle Jumper door in slight embarrassment while he shook the sting from his finger. He really had to keep in mind that he was no longer the only one on Atlantis who understood the myriad vulgarities he threw at the nearest target when he was frustrated. The computers usually only suffered his wrath when McKay was away.

"Probably not…" he mumbled. "Sorry."

"I don't mind." Anna shrugged and walked into the Jumper, her hands in her blazer pockets. "I'm not a baby, you know. Mom stopped censoring herself ages ago."

Radek nodded. Probably for a few of their later arguments, too, now that he thought about it. He'd forgotten to feel bad about that. It was one thing to call the OS names… On the other hand, he'd noticed that she didn't really swear all that often herself. That was… weird. On the other hand, it wasn't as if vocabulary was genetic inheritance. It was social inheritance, and she'd only been with him for a few months.

Damn. A few months? No, check your calendar, Radek. Almost eight months, now.

That meant that the year anniversary of Eliška's death was fast approaching. He wasn't sure exactly when, but it was less than a month away, by now. He didn't know an appropriate response for that day, either for him or Anna.

For him, especially not now. Somehow he held some insane delusion that he'd go back home a different man. Miraculously, he'd convince Eliška of that, and they'd get back together. He wasn't held to some mistaken fantasy anymore. He couldn't be: it didn't exist.

He preferred thinking all the other women he'd dated in the interim weren't… "his type"? And Elizabeth was?

Radek cut off his thoughts and glanced at the crystal panel for a moment. Then he looked at Anna. "What are you up to?"

Anna looked around the Puddle Jumper and picked up his tablet connected by long wires to the panel. "Nothing," she answered. "Need help?"

Radek hummed in indecision for a moment. "Yes. If it's not too boring, you can go outside and identify all the fried circuits for replacing." He pointed at the Ancient device that read power.

"Real work is boring sometimes." Anna looked at him as she picked it up.

Radek was about to say, yes, that was true, but he didn't get the chance immediately. Rodney's voice, sounding slightly panicked, blared in his ear. He might have winced from the grating reminder that there was probably something he wasn't doing right now that he should have been.

"Zelenka?"

Anna gave him an unappreciative frown as soon as he touched the radio in his ear.

"Yes, what is it, Rodney?"

"No time to explain," he prefaced. That usually meant they were in the sort of trouble that would bear hours of explanation, but under a sort of deadline that only offered a sentence: "Sheppard's stuck in an Ancient time-dilation field. We can't penetrate the field with scans to find out how much faster time is going for him or how to turn it off."

Radek caught his breath and nodded, like everything Rodney just said made sense. "Oh… alright…" He paused and looked down at the tablet in his hands, like something there might help him out. "So we need a way to scan inside the field?"

"Yes?" Rodney snapped. "I just said that, didn't I?"

Radek didn't answer that, since time was of the essence. "What configuration is it?"

"Well, gee, you know, I didn't think I had the time to set up a lab near it, seeing as how Sheppard is in the field right now," Rodney went on in exasperation. "Look, beyond the Jumper's scanners I didn't have any more complex scanning equipment than a camcorder, so we have no idea how much faster time is going for Sheppard."

Radek rolled his eyes. "I mean—Rodney, you haven't told me any useful information."

"What's there to tell?" McKay snapped. "Sheppard got himself stuck in a time dilation field."

"Of course, he did," Radek muttered. "I'll meet you in the lab."

"Yeah, yeah, soon. Did I mention Sheppard is in the field?"

Radek decided to just ignore that, but pick up his pace anyway. He tapped the radio off, jumped back down from his step stool, and looked at Anna. "Sheppard is stuck in another time, apparently. So, I have to go help Rodney come up with something clever."

"Like time travel?" She smiled, as if it were a joke. Ah, innocence. "I didn't know we could do that."

"Um…" Radek didn't know really how time travel could be accomplished consistently, if it could. Not currently, anyway, so he just said, "No. Not really. He's just in another field of time, which means we have to hurry here. Days could be passing for him while minutes do here."

The joking look disappeared. "Oh. I'll… stay here?" She looked at the Ancient device she held. "Good luck."

Radek was already headed out of the Jumper Bay. He felt bad walking away in the middle of her sentence, but time was of the essence. Radek thought hard about all the different ways a time dilation field could possibly be arranged. Obviously, it was just lying out in the middle of nowhere, and Sheppard must have accidentally stumbled inside. Radek had a hard time believing that was the sort of thing someone did on purpose. The field would have to expand over a reasonable distance in order to make living inside tenable. Which meant, it probably included a good amount of the lower atmosphere above, too.

Rodney would have scanned beyond the field's horizon if he could have. He didn't. So he couldn't. They needed to break through it. While staying outside of it.

Radek walked into Rodney's lab. "I have an idea."

Rodney glanced up, looking surprised. "You do?"

"It's a miracle, considering I have no idea what it looks like." Radek paused, and held his hands out like he was just shoving his idea at Rodney. "A descent probe." It was the best he could come up with until Rodney gave him more information.

"A descent probe…"

"Yes, like we use for—"

"Gas giants." Rodney stood up, gathering the equipment he'd piled on his desk in his arms. "Yeah, yeah, okay, go get one on the Jumper. Right now." Rodney ran out of the lab.

He didn't even get time to object that he was going to have a hell of a time getting the probe into the launch compartment by himself. Maybe he'd grab a couple of techs on his way. He'd just never seen Rodney run like that… Never seen Rodney just accept one of his ideas without a well-placed insult, either.

Radek decided he'd better run, too.

#

"Anna, good, you're still here."

Anna leaned around the Jumper's drive pod, busily scanning each crystal diversion and circuit in there to see which ones were blown. Or, rather, to see which ones were still working. It was a much lower number to keep count of the ones that were working, so she flagged those with green, instead of the ruined ones with red.

In front of Radek, on an enormous cart, was a metallic gray thing, shaped a little bit like an egg. He struggled with the cart for a second to direct it over to Jumper Two. Anna put down her equipment and went to help.

"I need to load this in the launch compartment, but everybody else is busy."

"The launch compartment?"

Radek nodded, like she somehow knew exactly where that was. He pulled his cart up alongside the Jumper and looked at her for a second. "Could you go open the drive pods, please? It will be faster than if I use the panel."

Anna darted inside. As soon as she landed in the pilot's seat, the console before her lit up obediently. Trying not to panic and accidentally lift off or something, Anna focused on the opposite Jumper Bay wall and thought about sliding the drive pods out of their nest in the Jumper's sides.

She must have succeeded, because she heard Radek shouting to her a second later to come out and help with the drones.

A Puddle Jumper was really compact. Anna hadn't realized until she helped Radek pull the yellow contraptions from their launch compartment, laying them one aside another on the bottom of Radek's cart. She knew there were still more of these things under the floor of the main part of the Jumper, occupying the whole bottom of the Jumper except where additional computer systems took up space, along with the mechanism to slide the drive pods in and out of the Jumper.

Anna held the last drone in her hand for a second. "These really look like squid."

Too busy with the probe to give anything more than a smile, Radek looked at the size difference between the Jumper's squid-launchers and the probe.

"How the hell is this going to work?" Radek muttered.

Stepping up next to Radek, they both looked at the drive pod and the launch mechanism.

While they looked, techs spilled into the Jumper Bay toting all sorts of supplies in crates and bags. They all rushed around the back of the Puddle Jumper and started loading all their things, adding a new sense of urgency to their work with the probe.

Anna had no good ideas, but she didn't say anything in case it drew Radek off his train of thought. She approached the drive pod carefully, and opened one of the side panels. Looking at the probe, and back again, she couldn't figure out how that huge thing was going to fit in here.

"Aha." Radek brushed her aside and started to work.

Anna watched, only feeling a little like deadweight on Radek's project. Finally, he stepped aside and pointed at the launch mechanism, rigged to a space just wide enough to hold the probe. "Think it will work?"

Anna didn't know why he was asking her, but she looked anyway. Shrugged. "Probably. Doesn't look like it will be all that secure, though."

"No, it doesn't…" Radek frowned at it and then shrugged. "We don't have time. Help me with this."

The probe wedged into the open spot with little difficulty. A couple of the techs came to their assistance as soon as they'd finished loading all of their things in the Jumper.

Radek finished out the job by stepping back next to Anna and looking at their handy work for half a second. He squeezed her shoulder. "Good work. Thank you."

She smiled at him, but he was already moving away to his next task.

Anna wandered off to Puddle Jumper Six, but was too distracted watching Doctor McKay, Doctor Beckett, and Doctor Weir load themselves in the Puddle Jumper. If anyone noticed her watching them, they said nothing. The Jumper just as soon descended through the hole in the floor to the 'gate room.

Anna dashed over to the opening to look down before it closed, jumping out onto one of the wedges spinning to close the hole. The floor of the 'gate room below was mostly obscured by the Puddle Jumper until it disappeared into the Stargate. Then the floor closed all the way, leaving Anna kneeling in the middle of the Jumper Bay, alone since everyone had left.

If this was like all other times that Sheppard got himself into trouble, it was going to be a long day.

Anna closed up Puddle Jumper Six, since it seemed like everyone else had forgotten about it, and Anna had done more than half of the circuits and crystals inside, she figured she'd done a good chuck of work for somebody. It was almost lunch time, anyway.

That meant that Sheppard had probably been gone for three or four hours already.

Without knowing what the ratio was, Anna couldn't guess at how long Sheppard thought he'd been gone. Anna spent a good twenty minutes, wandering the halls and wondering how it would be if Sheppard was many years older, with virtually no time having passed in his native time-frame. Would he feel cheated? It wasn't as if he didn't get to live all that time, but he hadn't lived in the right time, so…?

Anna pulled out her tablet as she walked, and contemplated her geology results. As she suspected… the crystal was sort of like a ZPM. It was possible that the Ancients only used the very best, most organized crystal structures to house their little subspace layers. She didn't know how many she wanted to collect to bring back in order to test that theory. Assuming she even found the room responsible for making ZPMs.

She found herself in the infirmary, mostly because it was a very easy place to end up. It was in a perfect location, almost as if all hallways sort of led there.

"Hey, Anna," Jennifer called from her position between two medicine shelves. She held a tablet in one hand, maybe taking inventory. "Do you need something?"

Anna shook her head and walked over to her. No harm in showing her the geology results. Odds were, Jennifer would have no idea what she was looking at, even if Anna gave her a picture of a ZPM and a schematic of the crystal-chip lab.

Jennifer squinted at the tablet. "Homework?"

"Sort of." Anna shrugged.

"That's a ZPM, isn't it?" Jennifer guessed.

Anna raised an eyebrow at the tablet, then at Jennifer. So, she was wrong. Wrong on both counts. Jennifer did know what a ZPM was, and maybe this crystal was closer to an actual ZPM than Anna thought.

"Does it look like one?"

"From what I remember." Jennifer smirked and arranged a line of pill bottles. "It's been a long time since I crammed on the required reading."

"They even make doctors learn this stuff?" Anna huffed. "Seems like a waste of time."

"It was a very brief overview. But I do remember the pictures," Jennifer said with a quick grin. She went back just as quickly to her pill arranging.

Anna looked at the picture. It was remarkably close to the molecular structure of a ZPM, wasn't it? But it wasn't close enough, probably. Artificial layers of subspace probably needed very specific rocks to live in.

That sounded so stupid, she was glad she wasn't talking out loud.

But she wouldn't know exactly what kind of rock she needed until she found the place to make the subspace layers. And she was sure it was around here somewhere. She didn't know where, but she was sure it was here.

"I hear there's some excitement offworld," Jennifer said conversationally a moment later.

Anna glanced up, nodded, and went back to her tablet. "Yeah. I think Colonel Sheppard is missing again."

Jennifer looked into the middle distance, not nearly as concerned as the situation warranted. "I'm not sure… but I feel like that happens often."

"Judging by the past month or so, it seems like it is." Anna couldn't help but giggle a little. She felt bad about it. It was a very serious situation, after all, but there wasn't anything that she could do about it. "At least Doctor McKay is here to fix it this time."

At least, that's how Anna hoped it worked out.

#

Elizabeth sat on the bench, waiting for him with her book in hand. The moon was not quite full, but reflecting bright off the chopping waves and catching on the green in her eyes.

"Good evening," he said. Or maybe it was morning. It was one o'clock, so…

"Dobrý večer."

Radek couldn't help his smile. She obviously spent a lot of time making certain her pronunciation was right, or at least passable. It was always pretty near perfect. He bent to kiss her forehead before sitting next to her.

"How was your day?" he asked.

She looked amused, but he couldn't figure out why. Oh, maybe Sheppard. He had about six months' worth of hanging around today, if Radek understood the report correctly. After some quick mental arithmetic, Radek decided that the almost-seventeen hours of fretting today would approximate to almost six months.

Ah, Pegasus galaxy. Life is never boring.

"Oh, fine. I heard you had a good idea today?"

A good idea. How generous. "Didn't work though." He couldn't imagine that sort of thing broke the floor of what passed for a good idea next door to Rodney's lab.

"It was better than anything else we had at the time."

Radek didn't know the bar was set that low. But time was short. Given another few days, Sheppard would have died of old age. Time two hundred and fifty times the speed of normal was nothing to mess with.

"I'm glad I could come up with something, I guess," Radek said. "Even if it didn't help." All well as ended well, anyway. "Long day, though."

Elizabeth sighed. "Rodney is exhausted."

"Twenty-four hour works days aren't easy on anyone." Radek was fairly tired, too, but he tried not to show it. He was sick of saving and worrying over Sheppard's team. Sometimes it seemed like every time he turned around there was an emergency involving them. "Rodney may just sleep all day tomorrow." He had the feeling he involuntarily brightened with this statement.

Elizabeth smiled. "I might, too. I couldn't have planned my day off any better."

Radek chuckled. "I think a lot of people would need a day off after Sheppard being mostly missing for seventeen hours."

Elizabeth arched an eyebrow at him. "Was it really that long?"

Radek nodded. More or less. "That long."

Then, silence. Radek worried when this happened, when neither of them said anything. He personally preferred silence many times, but right now it was an ominous sign. Maybe they'd reached the end of their conversation. Maybe they'd exhausted all their mutual areas of interest. This was it, the end of this dream. Radek was just not an interesting person to talk to, because who cared about what happened to light in a vacuum?

Elizabeth glanced at him. "I was thinking of some tea. Would it be okay if we went to the mess hall?"

Radek nodded, even though it was a little late for coffee. The only time he tolerated tea of any kind was during illness. Maybe he would indulge in a cookie or a bunch of grapes. It had been a while since his days of midnight snacking.

They walked through the hallways in quiet, Radek's mind racing with subjects to speak on.

They parted ways in the mess hall, Elizabeth to prepare her tea and Radek to browse the snack options. They came back together, and fortunately Elizabeth must have been thinking of the same thing.

She had something to say about some offworld trading partners, the acquisition of Pegasus-grown sugar and potatoes and some sort of fruit that was like a cherry but with incredible nutritional value. Since transportation from the plantations to the 'gate was part of her concern, Radek offered a few suggestions about optimizing the space in the back of a Puddle Jumper.

Then he wondered if he said something wrong, because Elizabeth sighed. "But I'm avoiding the real issue."

Oh, a "real issue." Radek braced himself.

"It's not really slavery," Elizabeth prefaced. "Well, if you really step back, I guess… what is slavery?"

Was that a real question? She looked sincere, but Radek had no idea how to answer. "I guess, um…" Radek paused a long time to think. It seemed like a simple enough definition, except now that he was asked to put words to it.

"It's a question I never thought I'd have to answer, either," Elizabeth said.

Radek hummed contemplatively, partially to hold back a chuckle. His training was in physics and she thought she'd never wonder what slavery was? Social constructs weren't even neighboring Radek's usual sphere of thought. Still, he nodded sympathetically. He supposed he'd never thought he'd have to ask the question of how to measure two sides of a temporal differential, either, but then today happened.

"This society… their leaders went out of their way to distinguish that they do not own their workers. They provide them with protection from the Wraith… and that's all they provide."

"Are conditions very bad?" Radek wasn't sure why, but it seemed like an important thing to know. He'd read books about modern utopias in which the populace had no choice and no freedom, but had everything they could ever want or need. Of course, one man's view of utopia could be tantamount to another man's hell. This was wholly unfamiliar mental territory. He also wondered what a well-traveled woman like Elizabeth thought bad conditions were.

Radek supposed he'd term bad conditions as crushing hopelessness… He wondered if he would have preferred physical bad conditions—breathing in carcinogens, eating food that led to heart disease—to bad psychological conditions. He always thought that was what killed his father in the end... Nothing would ever get better for him, so perhaps it was easier to give up at the first convenient illness. It hadn't been conscious, though, and that was probably the worst thing... to think it would be better to die, but not realize it?

Radek could see how crushing hopelessness was a mode of existence in the Pegasus galaxy, though. There would always be Wraith. Finding a place where there were none would be a suitable definition of better.

"Oh…" Elizabeth shrugged, her eyes tracing along the edge of their table. "I don't know. It looked fine to me, but you know they only show outsiders the best their society has to offer."

Radek smirked, remembering similar stories told in modern days of visitors to places like East Berlin, Prague, Moscow… those stories were decades old by now, but some days it seemed like only yesterday. Some days it seemed nothing in the world had changed at all. Old problems moved, grew up, and had children. Eyes were easy to deceive.

"So they showed us a housing district, near the 'gate. We spoke to some of their workers, who were very enthusiastic about how great their lives were. They have food and space and they are free from the Wraith. And, really, what else could you want?"

Radek couldn't tell if she was being serious about the question or not. It sounded like a reasonable deal to him, though, not that he would ever want to be a day laborer. But it beat the alternative.

"As far as I can tell, they all have access to the Stargate, but… it's guarded. Against the Wraith, they say, but isn't that what they all say?" Elizabeth looked at him pointedly. "The guards are for the citizens' protection, but the guns are usually pointed in, not out."

"I suppose," Radek allowed. "But the people on Earth do not have access to the Stargate, either." He wasn't sure what that had to do with anything. He wouldn't call the whole of Earth slaves. Some directed their own lives, for better or worse. Some didn't. There wasn't anything Radek could do about any of it.

But they were all scurrying about for want of material wealth, oblivious to the vast mystery less than 500 kilometers above their heads. Held to ideals that may not have been theirs, kept in the dark when the sunlight was so close. Wasn't that a sort of slavery? An unknowing slavery, maybe, and only to themselves.

He hated philosophy.

Elizabeth seemed to take his comment about Earth's Stargate to heart. She thought about that for a while.

"I'm not saying that Stargate access… or, lack of access, I guess, is what makes slavery," he said. "Slavery is being owned, yes? But this is difficult to differentiate in a society where Humans are raised like cattle. They may want to go somewhere else, but where do they have to go?"

"Freedom without opportunity isn't freedom at all?" Elizabeth said with a smile.

Good, maybe he sounded intelligent. But he wasn't sure he liked his supposed definition. He wasn't even sure he liked "freedom," whatever it was, all that much. It depended too much on what the free did with it.

He never had the time or inclination to think about it. One man's hell was another's utopia. "I guess."

They sat in silence for a while as Radek contemplated his contribution to the conversation, if he contributed at all. It might have been a selfish thought, but he had to consider this now or never again: could he talk to Elizabeth about things like this for more than a couple of weeks?

He thought about it while he picked a grape from the bunch and the possibility that Atlantis would soon be making its own potato chips. Maybe Atlantis had a chip-room. Not a crystal-chip room like the one Rodney discovered… if that was what it was. Radek had his doubts. But maybe Atlantis had a deep-fat-fryer-chip-room. He looked up when he realized he couldn't really follow his own train of thought at two in the morning.

As soon as Elizabeth's tea had emptied, Radek suggested a walk through the lower levels of the Central Tower, the little-touched labs that were once important to some Ancient some time ago. Radek had no idea what most of them did, but he answered Elizabeth's scattered questions as best as he could. He usually ended up running off on some tangent about some marvelous or particularly weird piece of technology they found inside.

Before he knew it, they were back on Elizabeth's topic again, and he wasn't sure how they got there.

"There isn't anything else I can do about it, anyway," Elizabeth said suddenly as they entered a transporter.

Radek didn't know where they were going when Elizabeth touched the map on the wall and the doors swept open again.

"Even if Atlantis explicitly doesn't trade with these people on the sole basis of their treatment of their workers, they will continue to operate in the same way they always have."

"That's true."

Elizabeth shot a look of disbelief at him, but she should have known by now that he was pragmatic enough to be heartless sometimes. All of them were, after all. They left planets to Wraith culling on a regular basis on the simple statement of fact that there was nothing they could do about it. Elizabeth recognized the importance of practicality… but she was the heart of Atlantis. Sometimes it seemed like she was its only heart, the only one concerned with the good of people.

He shrugged. "If it will make no difference, then we do what we can. No need to dictate how others treat their property. If it is property."

She heaved a sigh. "I'm not trying to dictate, it's just…" Elizabeth looked at him helplessly. Maybe that was the effect he hoped to have. "It's the principle of the thing."

"I know. And so do you." Radek hesitated, realizing where they were standing outside Elizabeth's quarters. So, that was the end of the night. On the one hand, he was sad, but… on the other hand, thank goodness. He'd run out of things to say on the subject. And he was exhausted. "I think you just needed to hear yourself say it."

She smiled a little and glanced around the empty hallway. "Maybe," she said softly. She looked around, and opened the door with a wave of her hand. "Would you like to come in?"

Radek peered into the dark of Elizabeth's quarters, his voice catching on his tongue for a moment. So much for sounding intelligent…


A/N: All that to say, I really wanted to do this whole episode in one chapter. Because no one would know what it is to have six months pass in seventeen hours. And also...? I have no idea what I'm doing. I just ramble sometimes.

Thank yous & etc.

Erikstrulove- Hello, and thanks for the review! I'm glad to hear that you've been enjoying it enough to stick around for a while.


Next time: Would you like some exposition because, daaaang, this next chapter though… Sorry.