Young spent the next three days spending most of his time at Homeworld Command, recruiting specialists with Brody. He was most pleased at managing to negotiate the loan of Radek Zelenka who appeared to get on excellently with Brody. Young had high hopes that if Zelenka had managed to work successfully with McKay for several years, he would manage to work with Rush also.

In even better news, Gutierrez had been temporarily reallocated to back-fill Zelenka's post while he was away. The flip side to these arrangements was that several of the currently less useful civilian and military members of the crew were going to spend some extended periods on Earth. Young hadn't forgotten the conversation with Rush about the skills he needed, and a large part of the negotiations had been arranging intensive training sessions for certain crew members.

A rotating schedule of crew members visiting Earth for advanced first aid and field medicine training was agreed, as well as five crew members who would be forming the basis of an Earth Sciences team led by Dr Inman. Airman Graham had survived and recovered being shot by the Lucian Alliance but wasn't really fit for full duties and Young was going to allocate him full time to hydroponics as he had shown an interest. Graham, Peece, Manze, Garcia and Lee would be undertaking intensive courses of study with specialists made available by the SGC, and in their downtime spending time with their family who were being flown in specially.

Telford, true to his word, was on leave, which made the time spent at Homeworld Command much less stressful, even if Young could not completely lose the nagging feeling that Telford was with Emily. Young even took some leave time, going out for dinner and taking in a movie. It was not quite the same doing it on your own though, he reflected.

His final meeting was a complete surprise. The SGC had spent some considerable time on the communications issue, working with the long range communication device to see if it was possible to provide a better level of communication. So far their success was limited, however, one very junior but enterprising military scientist had realized that activation of the stone on and off could be used as morse code. From that point, creating a binary interface was reasonably straightforward and low density data communication between two devices had proved successful.

The down side of the arrangement was that they would have to sacrifice the use of one of the stones for periods of time in order to do this. He was not really comfortable about that. They were one stone down already due to Rush and the blue aliens, and having only three in use for most of the time would put a serious crimp in the plans for training staff. Still, it would mean that they could send a large number of text based documents across quickly.

He agreed to the exchange for four hours a day on the basis that, despite the arguments from the earth-based scientists wanting data, the data transfer time would be split with Destiny receiving data no less than 60% of the time. This would allow the texts and training manuals he was being told were essential to be sent across to Destiny, balancing the loss of some of the training time. In the unused time some more fiction and less vital texts would be sent, which would be a morale booster for the crew. He ensured that the first four books sent would be the medical manuals that Susannah had recommended and left instructions he would return with a list of requested texts.

xxxoooxxx

"Doctor Rush?" Barnes stood in the doorway to the small conference room.

"Yes?"

Rush tried to keep his voice to a minimal level of brusqueness. He was insanely busy, as always, but so far Barnes had yet to disturb him without good cause, which was not something that could be said for any of his official science and engineering team members.

"Come in," he added, when she hovered momentarily in the doorway.

Not her usual behaviour, he noted. He gestured at a stool at the table, but she walked directly to one of the consoles and started pulling up data.

"I think I found something interesting, ah, two things," she told him as she typed, "and I think you're going to find them interesting."

Barnes paused and looked up, obviously expecting him to say something cutting. When he did not reply, she turned back to the console and continued.

"It's pretty good. Well, I think so. So I guess you know I was doing a sensors shift on the Bridge a couple of nights ago..."

"Of course," Rush said sourly, but when she looked back over her shoulder at him, he softened it a little with a tilt of his head and a wry look. He walked over to her side, looking down at the systems she was accessing.

She pulled up the communications array on the screen. "I found something that looks interesting." She shot him a slight grin. "Calvos and I, we've been trying to look at the data and what Destiny's doing to it. When it's quiet, late at night. We've been making notes and sharing them with Chloe and Eli."

Rush nodded. He had seen some of the notes already.

"Calvos is mostly interested in the in-system sensor data though."

Rush recognize the data she was now pulling up as the record of the sensor data and the communication stream from the incoming seedship.

"After we found the signal from the seedship, I started going through other systems, looking for what pinged to that signal." She looked up. "What else reacted to those data streams," she clarified, "not what they were doing, just anything that was reacting to them."

"I guessed what you meant," Rush said, looking at the displays she was scrolling through.

He was already well aware that the incoming seedship was interacting with several of Destiny's systems, even from its quite extreme distance. It had been updating the navigation and science systems, had logged its cargo into the resource management, noted its own repair status and other minor issues.

"I was pretty certain you know most of these," she told him, continuing to scroll, "but I found two things I hadn't seen or heard anything about before."

She opened the stellar navigation system, the programming that had shown them Destiny's course when they had first arrived on the ship, all those months and years before. The display showed a reasonably wide ranging map of the galaxy they were currently traversing. She cast the map from the screen over to the three dimensional holographic display where it then hovered over the table.

"And when I was looking at the data recordings it was submitting, I found it was updating this specific map in the stellar cartography records."

With two, just slightly dramatic, swipes she brought up a further layer of data and red dots appeared, spattered throughout the map in what appeared a reasonably well spread but rather messy arc.

"I think this is a map of all of the seedships that are close enough to talk to the seedship, that's talking to a seedship, that's talking to Destiny."

Rush stared at the map, actually speechless for a moment.

"It's not exactly real time, obviously," she said, slightly apologetically, "I haven't managed to establish the map's criteria for current enough data or how many steps of comms there are between ships. Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and all that."

Rush snorted, but took over the console and started to scan through the data.

"Alright," he admitted, "you've impressed me."

She grinned. He grinned back at her. This was- his brain skipped a moment as he allowed himself to take in all of the beautiful new data she had unlocked for them.

"I can beat that," she offered.

Rush gave her a sidelong look, but stepped back smartly to allow her to access the console again.

"When I was looking into the degrees of separation," she explained, "the inter-seedship comms, I discovered the map, the data feeding it comes mostly from a series of subroutines."

She left the star map up on the 3D display, but dropped out into the raw data streams on the screen.

"You're getting good at that," Rush noted.

The small compliment seemed to surprise her more than any other reaction he had previously given in this conversation. She shrugged, gave a small smile and indicated a series of commands on the screen.

"I don't understand all of these," she admitted, "but I'm pretty damn certain this is a data or software update routine for the seedships. They send data back through word of mouth to Destiny, seedship to seedship, and Destiny sends this data back out the same way."

Rush was staggered.

"If I'm right," she said, "if we could actually understand and fully use it, this system would allow us to push out a software update or data packet like a computer virus, ship to ship across the whole network."

xxxoooxxx

Young's first duty when he arrived back on Destiny was a handover briefing with Lieutenant Scott, which he was just finishing up when Rush walked in looking animated. Young did not think he looked annoyed, but certainly intent and more than a little impatient for Young to finish with Scott.

"I'll go then sir?" Scott picked up his laptop.

Young nodded at Scott. "Let me know how it goes, tomorrow."

Scott nodded politely at Rush and left.

"What's up?" He asked Rush.

Rush hit the door closure and stalked over to Young's desk.

"I need Barnes full time," he said, "permanently."

Young furrowed his eyebrows, realized he was squinting and took off his reading glasses. He refocused on Rush.

"Why?" He asked calmly. "You've got her on loan for the duration of the forward reserve project."

"Because she just found the system that sends software updates out to all the seedships because she was bored and looking at maps!" Rush snapped. "Because she just presented me with a map of the location of every seedship in this quarter of this galaxy!"

Young blinked at him. "Why'd she come and see you?"

"I tell you that we can locate over a hundred seedships and that's what you ask?" Rush demanded incredulously. "Why she told me ? Because I'm the Chief Science Officer of course and it's a science breakthrough."

Young shrugged. "I can't see a problem," he agreed, "it's not like I have a military need for an explosives expert while we're stuck dead in the water here."

"Good," Rush said, and sat down opposite him abruptly.

"What can you do with this information?" Young asked him, pouring a beaker of water. He gestured at the second beaker and Rush nodded and accepted the water Young passed over to him.

Rush rubbed his jaw. "Nothing yet," he admitted and took a sip of water before continuing. "Long term it's potentially huge. Summon individual ships, direct them to collect specific resources." He shrugged. "Potentially take control of a whole fleet of seedships from Destiny, or at least make major changes to their priorities and programming."

It was Young's turn to goggle at him. Rush shrugged again.

"It's a long way off, I don't have access to that control system or the specific code." He put the beaker down on the table with a click. "I need to get Barnes up to speed on everything we know about Destiny's code. She and Calvos, and Eli," he added sourly, "have the best grasp on Destiny's code of anyone except me." He shook his hair off his face. "And they all think differently to the rest of us and to each other. Different training. I wouldn't ha' been looking at the systems she was in in that way at all," he admitted.

"What do you think they can do?" Young asked.

"If we need to get the computer systems in the Forward Reserve running in order to manage the resources and power transfers, someone has to actually be able to identify what those systems are and have some idea of how to send them commands. Considering the information Barnes has found just from tracking outwards from the comms stream from the incoming seedship, I want to set those three loose on the systems for a few days, to do the same thing over again, but with a much wider range of systems."

"You think that they can identify the right ones?"

"I don't know," Rush said with an expansive gesture of his hands, "but I'm pretty damn sure that they'll come back with a whole bunch of information on which of Destiny's systems talk to each other and to the seedship even if we can't actually affect it, and hopefully some more specific information on what some of the non-navigational systems are doing."

Young shifted in his chair, rearranging his splinted leg so the bands did not dig in so much.

"Don't you need the three of them for the actual repair work?"

Rush shook his head. "I suggest we get the Bridge shifts covered, without them at all. I'll need to cycle people on and off the work parties, downtime between the EVA work shifts. If they aren't doing Bridge shifts, that'll free up their time to do some research. It's not as if I can keep them out of the damn systems," he noted sourly, "at least like this they're actually doing something useful."

"Sounds like you have a solid plan," Young agreed, "I'll look at the Bridge schedule. I've already told the rest of the senior staff they'll be taking up more Bridge shifts to cover the repairs. When will you start the work?"

"Brody has requested we start in no less than six days time, to give him time to assimilate new specialists and data. If I had the capacity, I'd start sooner, but I've got a meeting with him tomorrow to review the data and people he sourced on Earth and consider his suggestions."

Young nodded. "On a related note, I have some good news."

Rush tilted his head and gave him a rather cynical look.

"Seriously," Young assured him with a grin. "Good news."

He paused and let it hang, awaiting Rush's reaction.

"Well? What is it?" Rush demanded.

"I've managed to get rid of Gutierrez for a bit," Young told him smugly, "he's been replaced."

Rush gave him a look of genuine shock. Young tried not to let his feelings of superiority show on his face.

"Only for a fortnight," Young qualified, "but I've managed to arrange the loan of Radek Zelenka."

"Huh!" Rush huffed, but his pleased expression gave the lie to his voice.

"He's specifically going to be working on the forward reserve issue rather than the repairs," Young said. "Brody got in touch with him while we were on Earth and started up a conversation. Zelenka thinks that some of what we are looking at might be the predecessors or possibly prototypes for things that were eventually built into Atlantis as standard items. Zelenka is coming back to Earth for a fortnight to exchange with us and Gutierrez is getting a fortnight on Atlantis."

Rush rested an elbow on the table and rubbed his chin with his knuckles thoughtfully. "I'm sure he and McKay will have a lovely time together," he suggested with a vicious grin.

Young smiled back. "O'Neill also signed off on putting a Logistics Department under Camile," he said. "I'm going to speak to Camile tomorrow first thing, get her to arrange some one to one meetings that day, then schedule a full staff briefing for a few days time."

"What did O'Neill say about the salary issues?" Rush asked.

"Track performance for three months, then submit any promotion or regrading requests to him personally."

"Sensible." Rush pursed his lips.

"There's more news," Young said, leaning back in his chair, "the SGC have worked out a method to send binary code between two of the communication stones by turning them on and off very fast. They want you to send someone back to see how they've connected it up at their end, and we'll need to sacrifice use of one of the stones while communication is happening, but we'll be able to send text based data back and forth at a reasonable rate. Pictures possible but slow." He smirked. "We're apparently talking dial-up speeds."

Rush tilted his head and frowned. "They want us to send back more reports, just get us punting them back data all the time?"

"The data stream will be no less than 60:40 percent weighted between us and them, with us getting priority data reception. Four hours per day total," Young clarified, "and based on the need for cross training that we've already agreed with O'Neill, the priority will be sending us copies of training manuals and other information, but any additional time we're allocated they will dedicate to sending us more leisure reading materials. They're going to set up an automated transfer list based on our requirements."

"As long as they aren't expecting me to be wasting my time cueing up masses of data to send back to them, it sounds like it'll be useful," Rush acknowledged, grudgingly. He stood up abruptly. "Okay, I need to see Brody now ."

He nodded at Young and walked out, leaving Young watching the door close behind him.

xxxoooxxx

Both Camile and Barnes were pleased by the staffing changes. Barnes' permanent reassignment to the science staff also seemed to have given the whole science team a little of a morale boost and Young was pleased to see them sitting together in varying iterations in the mess hall over the next couple of days, evidently getting on well. Even Rush had been with them on some occasions.

Young had held a further discussion with Camile and she had sat down with Calvos to help him write a request for refugee status. Regularizing his status would allow him to be legally employed as a member of the science staff and allow him some supervised time on Earth to undertake the training Rush was pushing them to arrange for him.

Four days after his return from Earth, Young sat down with Camile, Inman and Becker for a discussion about supplies, line management and the general staff meeting. That meeting led to a hands on review of their food stores, and further explanations of their food preservation methods and resources.

Appropriate containers permitting, canning and pickles were apparently the next things on the horizon. Becker was also requesting that either one of the science team or the - fluctuating in title, but currently named - ' Make-It-Fix-It-Bodge-It ' club that met on a Thursday night in the mess hall, be requested to build a food dehydrator. Young told him to chalk it on the "suggestions wall", as there was no way Rush would allow any of the science team to be distracted from the Forward Reserve work.

Courtesy of their previous extended stops, they were generally in a very good position in terms of food. Their ability to obtain more was currently somewhat limited, but they were quite well stocked for the moment. Becker and Inman had noted that several of the plants brought back from the last stop seemed to be growing well on the ship. Their hydroponics may still be growing back up to its previous extent, but there were now additionally some quite effective 'houseplants' growing in various places around the inhabited area, although it remained to be seen if they could be taken through to fruiting.

Later on, sitting in his quarters and reviewing the written reports from Camile, Becker and Inman, Young thought that things could be a lot worse. Plans were also in hand to review the gates available by gate hopping from the existing available gates, which might increase their options if any of the gates were at all safe.

He replied to Camile's message, approving her request for a party to follow the general staff briefing. She had pointed out that the reallocated crew members' new roles, sure to be seen as promotions to specialist roles, were the first real promotions since they had arrived on Destiny and it warranted recognition. The news of the text communication system was also sure to result in the crew wanting to celebrate the arrival of new entertainment.

Young agreed, they had little enough to celebrate a lot of the time, and now while they were well stocked, and fitting it in before the major push on repairs, it was good timing all round. He added a request for her to consider how the cover for bridge shifts could be fairly managed and hit send.

He pushed the laptop away and rolled his shoulders. Despite the kino chair and crutch, a whole afternoon of moving around and reviewing supplies however, had done him no good at all. The kino chair was unwieldy in tight spaces and he ended up twisting from the waist and craning around to see things. His back and core muscles were telling him in no uncertain terms, he'd done too much. Sitting hunched over the laptop was not improving his pain levels at all either. He gave up and closed the laptop.

xxxoooxxx

The hatch hissed and Young looked up as Rush walked into his room where Young was seated on the bed. Rush lifted the tub in his hand.

"You've been twisting around in that chair all day," Rush said flatly.

Young looked up at him, flexing his arms and shoulders gingerly, and realizing it was the medicated cream Rush was brandishing at him.

"Take your shirt ,." Rush said.

Young blinked at him.

"I can rub the tension out of your muscles," Rush said irritably, "at least loosen you up enough that we can both get some sleep tonight."

Young unbuttoned and pulled at his shirt awkwardly but before he could get any further, Rush was moving behind him and taking the shirt from his shoulders. Young let Rush pull his t-shirt over his head, the man carefully moving it up and forwards so he didn't have to lift his arms. Both were placed over the back of the chair before Rush returned, gently manhandling Young to lay down.

Young balked a little when Rush undid his fly button, but the man was simply rolling the top of his pants down a little. He watched as Rush sat back on his heels.

"I'll do the front of you first." Rush told him.

The cream was surprisingly warm as Rush smoothed it over Young's shoulders and chest. Rush started to rub firm circles into Young's pectoral muscle with the heel of his hand and Young wasn't sure whether to cry in pain or sigh in relief as the abused muscle slowly began to warm and loosen. Rush worked both sides of his chest and shoulders, his rubbing moving to harder and deeper manipulation with fingers and thumbs.

Once Rush was satisfied with his work so far, and Young was a virtual puddle on the bed, he manhandled Young onto his front and went to work on his neck, shoulders and back. Young lost track of time as he drifted in the pleasure of being touched and massaged. Finally when Rush had worked all of the way down his back, he finished with several final long strokes down all the way down Young's spine.

"How d'you feel?" Rush asked him.

"Good," Young mumbled, "better."

That got him a chuckle in return. Rush moved down and started removing his pants, but he was really too relaxed and sleepy to care though. The covers were pulled out and over him, and he was asleep before Rush had even turned out the lights.