Previously: Adventures be happening. There are skeletons and planets and treasures and stuff. It may have been useful if Anna had been around for Before I Sleep (SGA: 1.15). But then again, not really. It's not like she's the only Anna in the universe.


Chapter 104. Two Faces.

As usual, the society was barely functioning on the oppressive monarchy and tributes paid in wheat and beans. The roofs were thatched and the people were dressed in leathers and abrasive homespun. Even though it didn't appear to have rained recently, the dirt roads were muddy. Radek didn't want to think about the precise mixture of fluids and solids that made up this mixture oozing up the sides of his boots.

Just think about the new city. The other-Atlantis. They'd started calling it "Agartha" at the behest of one of Atlantis's linguists. Radek didn't know what it meant, but it was better than calling it the "other-Atlantis."

Reed chuckled, drawing Radek's eyes off the ground around him. "Just don't think about it, Radar."

Major Lorne scoffed. "What did you just ask him to do? Not think?"

Radek was momentarily gratified—he was very proud of his ability to solve problems. Or at least not stop thinking about his problems…? On second thought, that didn't seem like a quality he wanted to have.

"Just a second," Major Lorne went on. "Hey, Doc. Five-thousand eleven."

As if by reflex, Radek answered, "Prime." Then he paused, Major Lorne going on with his chiding completely oblivious to Radek's eyebrow raised in his direction. Major Lorne… knew five-thousand eleven was a prime? Who was this person and what had he done with Lorne?

That wasn't fair, actually. Radek knew little to nothing about Major Lorne. He just hadn't anticipated this.

"Like asking a fish not to swim, I get it." Reed's response to whatever Major Lorne was saying seemed to make Coughlin laugh, but as soon as McKay and Sheppard approached up the side street they went back to their standard military issue straight-faces.

"Alright," Sheppard said when he stopped in front of Major Lorne's team. "Teyla, Ronon, and I still have some negotiating to do. We've got a few of the research team already set up in quarters in the main floor, but it'll be up to your team to go with McKay and his team down to the lower levels."

"Yes, sir," Major Lorne said.

Radek noticed he didn't look too happy about following McKay into the depths prone to cave-ins. Radek just didn't know if he was more wary about the cave-ins or McKay.

"There are multiple entrances; the way I went through before is, unfortunately, covered in rocks and rubble." McKay sighed, looking over his shoulder toward the forest they'd inevitably be tramping through in only a few minutes. "But given that I was personally able to count no less than sixty-one points of commonality between their city and ours while I was down there… it should be a breeze."

Major Lorne nodded, and announced, "Prime," like that was just something someone said as an agreement in normal conversation. As if prime were a synonym of sounds good or okay.

"Excuse me?" McKay asked.

Radek raised an eyebrow at Lorne, apparently the only one (besides Lorne, of course) to have caught that sixty-one was, indeed, a prime number. "Who are you?" he asked, half a joke mixed in with his complete bafflement.

Major Lorne offered no response except for a grin and a nod off toward the woods. "Baldric's waiting with the others."

"Right."

As Major Lorne, Coughlin, and Reed walked off toward the woods, he heard Coughlin comment that Baldric was a pretty antsy companion to be leading them off toward the unknown. Might flee at the first sign of a chipmunk. Reed made some sort of jab about how Radek was typically no different, except he handled explosives on a regular basis.

Radek didn't see the point in defending himself, especially since he would never describe himself as antsy. Besides, Rodney was talking.

"And I think there is probably a lot of salvageable parts down there," he said.

"Oh, I'm sure," Radek agreed, feeling an old enthusiasm rise up. For some reason, he felt like he did on their first days in Atlantis, exploring the newness and coaxing a functionality out of systems left to languish for thousands of years. "It will be good to have backup crystals where we can."

"Especially since we might be able to modify them now," Rodney agreed. "With that chip room, it seems to have a lot more capability than we originally thought."

Using information from a Jumper's quick sweep of the area, a map of Atlantis, and an educated guess about where a good entrance would be, Major Lorne's team met up with McKay's scientists and found a distant entrance to the sister city that was only covered by a thin layer of dirt and rocks. As Lorne indicated, Baldric was nervous, but they descended into Agartha's dark depths without a problem and lit their flashlights.

The scientists, outnumbering the military in this particular group by a ratio of two to one, were giddy with excitement. Excitement and speculation hurried their steps along strangely familiar corridors. Were there more ZPMs here? Agartha appeared older and more used than Atlantis… perhaps it was a firmly established city once, perhaps it hid even more treasures than Atlantis had.

Atlantis was still showing them treasures they never thought to imagine. This place might show them treasures in duplicate, even if not things completely new and unheard of.

Major Lorne split his team to follow the scientists around as they poked and prodded this ancient and buried piece of architecture. He assigned himself to follow the team including Rodney and Radek, probably to save either Reed or Coughlin the torment of having to deal with McKay all day. The self-sacrificial gesture didn't go unnoticed by his men.

If only Radek could be spared the same irritation… Major Lorne would be his hero.

"Radek." McKay cut into Radek's quick attempt at translation work for a sign next to a sealed door. Rodney stood a short distance down the hallway, his tablet in one hand and wires in the other. "This way. Come on." A short pause and he added, "I don't know why we don't just keep you on Atlantis."

"What about this?" With one hand, Radek pointed to the door in front of him, the tiny plaque next to it. With the other, Radek consulted his tablet for the translation for said plaque. He didn't bother moving.

"Aren't there interesting things behind every door?" Major Lorne wondered nearby. He flicked one of the protruding edges on his gun idly with a self-satisfied grin.

"Exactly! Hear that, Radek? Your leader has spoken," Rodney said.

Radek held up one finger to ask him to wait. He knew this word.

"Come on," Rodney groaned. "We don't have time for you to open every door. The ZPM room is this way. It's possible there might be one there that isn't completely depleted. There's residual power readings down this way and—"

Radek glanced up as he tapped his tablet. "Yes, here, too."

"Yours, too?" Suddenly interested, Rodney walked over to glance at Radek's mystery room and then at his tablet. "You have something? I don't get it, I depleted the ZPM of all power."

"Maybe this particular Ancient city is fitted with… something like batteries. To keep the city from shutting down completely should power be cut off. Or possibly to help with surges…"

Rodney frowned and consulted his tablet. Radek hurried to find the Ancient word he was looking for. He was pretty sure he knew what it was, but… well, it paid to be 100% sure.

"I'm pretty sure Atlantis doesn't have something like that."

"Maybe it's a new feature?" Major Lorne wondered. "I mean, just look at the difference between the '66 and '67 Mustang…"

Rodney paused for a few seconds. Radek wondered if Rodney had even heard Major Lorne, and was only aware on the outside of his knowledge that Major Lorne was talking about a car. Some sort of American car. Radek knew absolutely nothing about…

Then Rodney said, "Yeah. Totally obvious!" sarcastically.

"Yes. Yes, very obvious." Radek glanced up from his hackneyed translation job, unable to help his smile. "The, um… the '67 Mustang, you said?" he asked, putting a little more emphasis than necessary on the number.

Major Lorne looked at Radek sideways, like he wasn't exactly sure about the game they were playing. "Prime," he said.

Rodney took a step back to put the two of them into his vision at the same time. "What the hell are you two doing?"

"Nothing." Radek finally had it; his stalling had paid off. This door. It was like a passageway into his past as much as his future. He flipped the tablet around so Rodney could see the Ancient-to-English dictionary he'd pulled up. "The sign says 'armory.'"

#

Iskaan had wisely pointed out that they probably shouldn't go right into the room with the decayed corpse without it getting cleared by Atlantis's medical team first. Anna had grudgingly agreed, and they went directly to Elizabeth. Elizabeth went to Doctor Becket and Doctor Kusanagi, both of whom gathered large teams to descend upon the lab and go over it with every scanning device they'd created and catalogued.

Mention anything about a skeleton, and the entire expedition comes running. At least, that was how it felt. It took every shred of Anna's willpower to not remind every scientist that came into the room that she was the one who figured out the puzzle and found the secret lab. Iskaan and Panin helped, of course. But she'd found it.

It was very important that they knew, but she also didn't want to say it out loud. Because they all knew.

Iskaan and Panin had to leave before anything exciting happened, though they made Anna promise to tell them all about it when they got back.

Doctor Beckett had been kind enough to set up a transmitter on one of the consoles inside to allow access to any information stored on the computers in there. They were all free-standing, and not at all connected to the Ancient database, which meant that none of it had ever been seen before by Humans. That also meant none of it had been translated.

Anna perused it on her tablet anyway.

"Well, it appears he didn't die of anything contagious," Doctor Beckett said after a good half hour in the lab with the skeleton and his team, the latter of which were dressed from head to toe in environmental suits. "No deadly viruses or bacteria in that lab. At least not that we can detect. I'm going to give Doctor Kusanagi the all clear."

"Fine, thank you, Carson," Elizabeth said with a smile. "Tell me when you know anything more?"

"Aye." Doctor Beckett nodded and looked like he was about to move off to join his team before turning back one last time. "Oh, I do have a guess as to how long he's been there."

"Ten thousand years?" Elizabeth guessed.

"Now how did you know that?" Doctor Beckett joked, and motioned for his team to bring the skeleton, now wrapped in a white sheet, out of the room.

The door to the lab was under one of the sconces, opened when Anna had entered the correct key in the window. When she entered the key again, the wall had returned to its ordinary state. The doctors inside said that they could see out whether the wall looked like a wall or not, like one-way glass. Anna guessed that if she were going to die in a huge city like Atlantis, alone, she'd want to be looking out at the ocean, too.

"Can I go in?" Anna asked as Kusanagi and her team gathered their things.

Elizabeth didn't look convinced. "Best to not be in their way, don't you think?"

"But I discovered it," Anna said, pouting even though she had been trying very hard this whole time not to. Elizabeth smiled patronizingly, and Anna objected again. "I did!"

"I know. But this is their job. We literally pay them for this."

Anna sighed and looked back at her tablet. She was able to search the computers inside for specific words, and found an entire file called "records" or something like that. She was looking at it now, and realized after translating a few of them by hand using the database that many of the words here were personal pronouns. Perhaps their skeleton had left them a letter. A very, very long letter. Like a diary or journal or something.

"I think his name is Janus," Anna said.

Elizabeth looked up at that immediately. "Janus?"

The other scientists seemed interested immediately as well. Anna held up her tablet to show them the author of the notes she was reading. None of it was in English and most certainly none of it was in Czech, but she'd determined that this one had to be a name. And since it was next to the Ancient word for "author," she figured it was as good a guess as any.

"Janus." Anna pointed to the name.

Elizabeth shook her head. "The Elizabeth that went back in time to save this expedition met Janus. She said he went back through the Stargate to Earth…"

Anna frowned, and decided to double check her translation of the word she'd thought meant author. "You're not the only Elizabeth in the world." Besides… didn't that make sense? If mythology was more like history, then… "Isn't there a Janus in mythology?"

"Yes," Elizabeth answered absently, maybe following another line of thought.

"What if they're almost the same people? I mean, if the Ancients are like the Romans? Because they're the road-builders, like Doctor Jackson said. Then doesn't Janus have…?" She couldn't say it. It sounded stupid.

Partially because she didn't know anything about Roman mythology. She hadn't really taken to heart the fact that she was supposed to be treating mythology as if it were some perverted version of history.

Elizabeth glanced at Anna. "Janus has two faces."

"That's what I thought."

The other scientists seemed to accept the idea. Because mythology wasn't just a myth anymore. It was like history, but also like hearsay. Stories got blown out of proportion and metaphors saw liberal use.

"He has one face looking forward, and the other looking backward," Anna said.

"But what does this have to do with anything?" Doctor Kusanagi asked.

"Well, this Janus is clearly not the Janus that the Weir from the past knew," Elizabeth said. "But maybe there was another Janus. Two that were, in a way, counterparts of each other."

Doctor Picardo nodded knowingly. "Like Edison and Tesla."

"Hm…" Elizabeth nodded, and Anna had little idea what they were talking about. Edison and Tesla would have both been looking forward, wouldn't they?

It didn't seem to make much a difference.

Elizabeth continued, "The Janus Weir described was a bit of a black sheep among his fellow scientists. He was always making new things, pushing the limits of what the Lanteans considered possible or ethically responsible. He made the time-machine that brought Weir, Sheppard, and Zelenka from that timeframe to the past in order to save us here. Maybe that Janus the forward-facing Janus…"

Somehow it didn't sound stupid when Elizabeth said it.

Wait, a Zelenka from another timeframe went back in time to Atlantis? When Lanteans were living here? Why hadn't she heard about that before?

"So this Janus is looking backwards." Robert looked around the room for a moment, nodding to himself. Then he paused. "What does that mean?"

Elizabeth shrugged. "I think that's for you all to find out."

"And me?" Anna jumped in as Elizabeth was about to leave.

Elizabeth smiled at her, and then looked at Kusanagi. "If you don't get in the way, I don't see why not."


A/N: And, I guess, we're just going to overlook the first time around when Zelenka died in a time-travelling Jumper wreck. Can I say right here and now how miraculous it is that this guy survived the whole show? I'm still a little salty he's not on the balcony, though.

Okay, maybe more than a little.


Next time: I don't think she's interested in sharing…