Act Four
Rodney hiked for a couple hours before he really started to run into trouble again. It wasn't long before he was constantly moving among the thicker bushes and using trees and rocks as breaks to line of sight. The Wraith were getting thicker in the area and every direction he turned, he eventually would run into one.
Presently, Rodney had his back pressed up against a particularly large tree, heart once again thumping in his chest, as a couple of Wraith wandered in the area a little less than a quarter mile away. He held his purloined stunner in hand, clutched tightly to his chest.
Apparently, they didn't know he was there, however. Soon, they began to move off in opposite directions, each continuing some sort of pre-arranged search pattern.
The power readings were still further beyond the Wraith. He needed to get through, somehow. Once again, Rodney began to formulate a plan.
Far above the planet, hovering right at that magical distance which kept an object directly over the same spot on the planet's surface, the Wraith hive ship lazily orbited. It remained blissfully unaware of the hyperspace window that opened directly opposite it, perfectly placed in the planet-shadow of its sensors.
The Daedalus exited hyperspace and the window closed behind it. In short order, it, too, was orbiting the planet, staying directly opposite the hive ship to avoid detection.
Aboard the ship's bridge, Colonel Caldwell studied the HUD for a moment, his eyes quickly scanning the readouts.
"Any indication that they've seen us?" he asked his XO.
The officer shook his head. "No sir, they're not making any moves. Looks like all their attention is on the planet."
"That's both good and bad," said Sheppard from his place near Caldwell's shoulder.
Caldwell nodded in grim agreement. "Let me know the instant that there's any change," he instructed his XO as he stood up from his chair to face Sheppard and his team. He tapped the earpiece of his radio. "Engineering, are we ready?"
"I believe we're as ready as we can be, sir," came the tremulous voice of Lieutenant Novak, "but Hermiod would like to stress again that stretching the transporter this far is still a significant risk." There was a rush of air from her microphone and Sheppard could picture her cheeks blowing out in apprehension. "I mean, we have never pushed the limits on line of sight like this. This really might not be-"
"Colonel Caldwell," came the otherworldly contralto of the ship's resident Asgaard.
"Hermiod?"
"As Lieutenant Novak said, we are as ready as we can be."
"Roger that. Stand by. Okay, Sheppard, you have four hours. Either find McKay or get the stargate up and running again. If you can't do either one in that time, we need to be done, here."
"Any reading from Rodney's subcutaneous transmitter?" Sheppard asked, directing his question at the Daedalus' XO.
"No sir," came the reply, "there's all sorts of energy spikes from the area that are messing with sensor readings from down there."
"Worth a shot," Sheppard said with a grimace, "okay, sir, we'll keep in radio contact as long as we can. Get us as close to the 'gate as possible. We'll start looking from there and maybe get some answers as to why it's been shut down."
Caldwell nodded, then keyed his earpiece again. "Hermiod, we're ready up here. Put them down as close to the stargate as you can manage."
"Understood," the alien replied.
And then, Sheppard and the rest of the team were surrounded in a bright flash of light and were gone.
He had circled all the way around the thing, by now. Rodney was certain of it. As the Wraith had become more and more numerous in the area, he had switched to a intermittent use of the scanner to get an idea of where the power readings were coming from. The Wraith weren't being terribly quiet, so he had found that he could hear them coming, anyway. And why risk the power output from the device if all he needed to do was triangulate?
He had taken enough readings, so he now knew which way he needed to go. Getting there was the kicker. He needed to get through, somehow, and hope that the Wraith had not already found the place, first.
Rodney was low on resources. That was, after all, the sort of annoying thing that happened after being left alone, unprepared, for an entire day. He had tried to come up with a plan, but all he really had at his disposal was the Wraith stunner and the last clip in his Beretta.
The only thing for it was to divide and conquer.
And so, he had spent the better part of an hour looking for a likely target. And by "likely target" the best he could hope for was "alone." Because, really, none of them were terribly likely to go down easily. They were Wraith, after all. Ultimately, he decided on using the stunner for no other reason than it had more shots. It wouldn't kill his target, but he knew it would at least go down. And if he missed, it wasn't a waste of a bullet.
And, yeah, he would probably miss. Stupid planet. Stupid Wraith. Stupid stunner.
It was about an hour before he found the best candidate; a Wraith wandering the woods alone, engrossed in a scanning device of some kind. Rodney watched him as he crouched in the midst of a stand of shrubs, holding his breath as the Wraith came closer. Careful to keep it out of any stray rays of sunlight, Rodney poked the muzzle of the stunner out through the shrubbery and took aim at the Wraith. When the alien seemed to take no notice of him, Rodney took a slow breath and squeezed the trigger.
The gout of blue energy jumped forth and sped toward his target at break-neck speed. The Wraith barely had enough time to look up before it hit him in the chest. The Wraith stumbled and moved sluggishly, but did not go down. Gritting his teeth and letting out a terrified whimper, Rodney pulled the trigger again. And again. And again.
Finally, the Wraith went down. Rodney wasn't sure how many of his shots had actually hit the Wraith, but he sort of didn't give a crap. He was in motion right away, stooping down just long enough to grab the scanning device that the Wraith had been consulting and the stunner from his holster.
And then Rodney was running again. It wouldn't be long before the Wraith recovered, so he had a narrow window of opportunity.
He knew the direction. He just had to reach that power source.
Sheppard hadn't been able to help but count his fingers and toes when his team had materialized on the planet. He wasn't an expert on the tones of voices of aliens, but there had been something very unsettling about Hermiod's voice right before they had teleported down.
However, all four of them managed to come out in tact in the middle of the woods about an hour or so walk from the stargate. They had gotten their bearings and started hiking at once.
Sheppard had expected to have to let Keller set the pace. She wasn't out of shape, by any means. Being a doctor, she clearly knew staying in shape was important. But she also wasn't a soldier and wasn't usually in the field. However, he found now that he was actually having to keep a good pace to keep up with her. As much as he wanted to find McKay and leave as rapidly as possible, he was dubious as to whether or not she could keep the pace for long.
Thankfully, they reached the village where the stargate was located without incident. Ronon scouted the town and quickly found that the Wraith had moved on from it over the course of the day. After he returned to retrieve the rest of the team, they made straight for the 'gate.
"Well, that explains that," said Sheppard surveying the downed ring.
"Safety protocols," Ronon stated, tossing an errant stone into the center of the ring, "won't activate if there's no where to exit."
"Rodney explained that once," said Keller with a shudder, "said that anything coming into a hard surface would get vaporized by the impact."
"Can it be righted?" Teyla asked.
"Probably," said Sheppard, "but not in the time we have and probably not without Rodney."
"Planet's deserted anyway," Ronon said, his tone shifting darker, if that was even possible, "not fond of grave-robbers. I say we leave it."
"Whatever makes ya happy, big guy," Sheppard agreed, "we got three hours left. Start tracking our egghead. See if you can find any sign of him." Ronon nodded and wandered off to try and start sorting out all of the various tracks and prints in the area.
"He may attempt to return to the 'gate," suggested Teyla, "after all, it is the last place where we knew where he was."
"What if he can't return?" said Keller, "if he's running from the Wraith, he might be cut off. Or he could be hurt. We should go find him."
Sheppard nodded. "I tend to agree," he said, reaching for his radio, "Daedalus, this is Sheppard."
"We're having trouble hearing you, Colonel," came the broken and static-ridden reply from Caldwell, "still getting a bunch of energy readings in the area."
"Understood, sir," Sheppard replied, "the stargate is face-down, here. There's no way we can get it upright in the time we have. We're gonna track McKay from here. Any sign of his transmitter yet?"
"None," Caldwell answered.
"What about those energy readings? Can you localize them?"
"Give us a minute." Sheppard imagined Caldwell nodding to his XO. "What for?"
"If I know McKay, that's where he'll head. I think it's our best bet."
"Understood." There was a long, static-filled pause. "Ten degrees Northwest, about 4 klicks from you. Best we can do."
"All right, got it. I'll check in again every klick as we're able." He thumbed his radio off again and motioned Keller and Teyla along. "Hey Chewie!" he yelled to Ronon as they began moving again. "Let's get a move on!"
Ronon was already ahead of them and fell into step as they came up along side. "McKay's tracks head this direction by themselves. He left here alone."
"Then he left here alive!" Keller said with excitement.
"Let's hope he stayed that way," said Sheppard.
There wasn't a damn thing in the area! All that hiking, all the evading the Wraith for an entire day, all to reach the center of the energy readings and find nothing at all. Zero. Zilch. The big null set.
"This is so not fair," Rodney muttered to himself, sourly punching the controls on his scanning device again, a little bit harder than was strictly necessary. "I'm practically standing on top of whatever this thing is. Where is it?"
He looked up at the small, bald hill that was nearby, poking its crown up out of the tree line. He had already circled the thing twice and now it was the only place in the area that he hadn't checked. He didn't like the idea of leaving the cover of the trees, especially since there were so many Wraith in the area, but it was the last thing left to him. Keeping in a somewhat comically low crouch, he crept up the shallowest side of the hill and made his way up to the top.
Once above the tree line, he took a cursory glance around. There seemed to be nothing but grass in all directions, matted together by a few hundred years of undisturbed history. The ground was springy under his feet because of it. There were mountains in nearly every direction, shot through with sharp valleys and crumbling cliff faces; Ronon's fjords. Rodney looked about at each mountain, curiously, wondering again what could have caused them to form.
And then, something strange caught his attention; the out-of-place fjords were all pointing roughly the direction of the bald hill.
"Huh," Rodney said thoughtfully, turning again to all directions to confirm. "What would do that?"
And then, he nearly stumbled as the nature of the ground changed beneath one of his feet. It was suddenly firmer, less springy.
"The hell?" he asked aloud, kicking at it with his toe. Whatever it was had a discernible edge. He crouched down and began to pull the grasses away from it. It wasn't long before his fingers hit metal. He worked faster, uncovering the object with excitement.
When all was cleared away, he found there, sticking out of the grasses, the unmistakable form of an Ancient door trigger. It was dark and one of the control crystals had been broken, sheared off right at the edge of its socket.
"And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I bring spares," Rodney said to himself, taking the pliers out of his tool kit and removing the remains of the damaged crystal. Those, he pocketed. Then, he took out one of his spares and slid it into place, hoping that by some miracle the trigger was still getting power. Immediately, the trigger lit up the three crystals, glowing a cold blue-white in the warm light of late afternoon. "Okay. We're in business." Rodney put his tools away, then waved a hand over the trigger.
Instantly, the ground fell away beneath him, sending him tumbling into darkness. He didn't plummet straight down, but rolled uncontrollably along a rough slope. Finally, he came to a halt, face down, on a flat surface. He groaned, a new myriad of aches and pains adding themselves to the long list Rodney had been accruing over the course of the day.
"This sucks," he said, slowly pushing himself up into a kneeling position. "Who the hell would put a door there, facing down?" After a quick pat-down to make sure nothing was broken, he found his flashlight and thumbed it on. "Huh," he said, looking around.
He was kneeling on a landing between two flights of stairs. The one he had tumbled down led straight down from the opening above. The other one led further down into the darkness. It reminded Rodney quite a bit of a storm cellar, in a lot of ways, or a bunker. The geometric shapes in the grating of the stairs were unmistakably of Ancient design.
"Okay," said Rodney, climbing painfully to his feet, "nothing of interest outside. Which leaves only dark, old and god-knows-what-ahead down that way. Just my luck. Okay, no problem. Done this sort of thing before. Just, go on in and find the lights."
Shining his flashlight ahead, Rodney went down the stairs and into the darkness. The light from the open door above grew dim the further on he went. The stairs weren't very long, only enough to account for a story or so, and dumped him out in a large room. As he shined the flashlight about, Rodney came to the realization that it was laid out not much unlike the control room of Atlantis.
"Finally, a break!" he sighed, making his way to the console that he presumed was power control. It was covered in dust which he blew away. He instantly regretted doing so as the dust rose about him in a cloud, setting off his allergies and making him sneeze and cough. He waved a hand back and forth in the air, trying to clear it. When it did, he gave the console the once-over, checking for any obvious damage, then chose the control he figured was the "on button."
The room lit up obligingly, making Rodney squint for a moment. With the place powered up, he had a clearer picture of the room. For all the world, it looked like the layout of the Atlantis control room. However, in the front row of consoles, in place of the DHD, was a curious looking set of controls. And in front of that, where there should have been a large window, it looked like some sort of metal shielding had been placed. Rodney glanced around its edges and noticed some scrapes and scuffs indicating a tight fit, but shielding that moved.
"Okay, that's a little different. The Ancients had energy shields. Why make something out of metal?" Curiously, he made his way down to the first row of consoles. The weird interface he left alone for the moment as he looked for a control for the shielding. And, since he knew it was incredibly stupid to remove shielding without an indication that it was safe to do so, he looked for whatever readout might indicate that it was. The only thing he found was some sort of heat indicator, but he needed to convert it to Celsius or Kelvin in order to be certain it was safe. There didn't seem to be any other indicators, so this was the crystal that he jacked his tablet into.
It was pretty hot behind the shield, not really a vacation spot. But it was within an acceptable level so as not to fry him instantly. Rodney decided to risk lifting the shield. He found the control and pressed it.
The metal shielding wrenched free of the place it had been sitting for thousands of years with a horrendous metal-on-metal whine. The room began to warm as soon as it was opened, revealing a red-orange glow. Rodney grimaced and squinted back against the heat, but peered out the newly-revealed window none the less. His mouth fell open.
In the place where a gate room should have been, there was a massive hole in the ground, glowing red-hot around its edges. The glow increased in brightness as Rodney's gaze descended into the hole, finally ending in a soft yellow-white as far off as he could see. He doubted that even that was the bottom. The pit had quite obviously been artificially dug and a network of pipes and conduits lined the sides, all glowing with heat.
"Ah," said Rodney, "that's why the metal shielding. It's in case something goes wrong with their geothermal power supply." He gave a wry grimace. "No ZedPM today, I guess."
Ronon couldn't help but marvel at it. The smartest man in two galaxies was also both the dumbest and the luckiest he had ever known. How could a person function like that? It just wasn't right.
This he pondered as he stared down at the three energy bar wrappers and rough wood shavings that littered the floor of the small cave he was standing in. The man had actually left evidence of his presence behind in the middle of what was most likely a situation where he was being pursued. He had also failed to re-camouflage his hiding place after he had left it, though he had clearly hidden it while he had been there.
Shaking his head and dreading the extra wilderness training sessions with McKay that were likely to follow this fiasco, he reached down and scooped up the wrappers, then kicked the wood shavings into a dark corner of the cave. He then crawled back out of the cave and unfolded himself back to his full height, Teyla and Keller flanking him to either side of the cave entrance. Sheppard was further ahead, keeping watch.
"He was here, all right," he said, handing the wrappers to Keller.
"This place wouldn't have been my first choice," Sheppard said, anxiously surveying the high, rocky hills on three sides of them, "he must have had a pretty good reason to come this way."
"From the looks of it, he spent the night in there," Ronon added, reaching down to place the make-shift camouflage over the cave entrance again. He decided to let Sheppard continue to be the one to voice the disbelief he himself was feeling. If it had just been Sheppard and Teyla there, he might have said something. But with Keller along for the ride, saying anything about how exceedingly dumb her boyfriend and his own former rival for her affections was might not be such a good idea.
Ronon at least had common sense. McKay? From the looks of it, not so much.
"If he ate these last night, then he's probably getting low blood sugar by now," said Keller, inspecting the wrappers. "How many of these did you say he usually carries with him?"
"It varies," said Teyla, "I have seen him carry as many as ten on longer missions. I doubt that he had more than five or six for today. And I doubt that he would have risked eating anything that grows here."
"With half his food gone last night, he's probably not firing on all cylinders by now," Sheppard said, "Ronon, do you still have the trail?"
Ronon sighed deeply, surveying the ground quickly. "Looks like he went out and back in a couple times." He pointed to another, heavier set of footprints at the edge of the clearing. "And at least one Wraith was here at some point. I'll sort it out."
"Make it fast. If he was here last night, I figure we're still twelve hours behind him," said Sheppard.
Rodney wasn't sure if he had turned out to be incredibly lucky or incredibly screwed. If he was a betting man, he would have said "screwed." Ultimately, the place was nothing special and completely useless to the expedition. This entire fiasco had been a complete and total waste of time and resources. On the other hand, given his current situation, it might just turn out to be a lucky find.
For whatever reason, the entire Ancient facility was one, gigantic shield generator. It could help protect him for now, of course. But Atlantis already had shields. Nothing special. Everything ventured and nothing gained.
That said, Rodney wasn't above using a simple shield to help save his ass.
Thus, he got to work. He was familiar enough with Ancient systems in general that it wasn't too much of a stretch to apply the same basic principles of Atlantis' systems. Within about a half an hour, Rodney had his tablet hooked into the main controls and the system ready to accept his command to power up.
But, there was a catch. The system was the same, yet different. The data he was getting suggested some sort of a secondary system and try as he might he could not bypass it. It was tied into the very programming that governed the use of the shield. With only two and a half hours of battery left on his tablet, he didn't have time to program a work-around, so he was stuck working with it.
Bottom line, he had to find out what it was.
Another ten minutes of work and Rodney tracked the strange secondary system back to the odd set of controls that he had seen earlier; the ones that were in the place of the DHD in Atlantis. It was a more-or-less rectangular panel of four rows of interlocking triangles. There were fifteen triangles in each row and the ones on the outer edges defined a sort of "saw-tooth" edge to the sides of the console. Most of the triangles were lit, each inscribed with a symbol in Ancient that Rodney had never seen before, the same symbol in each corresponding triangle of each row. The first triangle in each row was dark and had the numbers one through four inscribed on them. The fifth and last triangles in each row were also dark and did not have any symbols at all.
"What the hell is this thing?" he mused aloud as he transferred the connectors for his tablet to the new console.
A new display popped up on his tablet, a grid labeled in polar coordinates. The readout indicated that frequency was one of the axes. Rodney's brow furrowed as he considered this new bit of information. Another few minutes of poking around in the code showed that the controls were supposed to plot polar coordinates on the grid.
"Seriously? It's the most complicated oscilloscope toy ever?" Rodney marveled aloud. "What does that have to do with shielding? Unless..."
It occurred to Rodney that the shield around Atlantis was circular along the surface of the ocean. If the origin on the grid represented the facility, or more specifically the shield emitter, then maybe the oscilloscope was meant to plot the edge of the shield.
There was really only one way to test the theory before his tablet ran out of juice.
Cautiously, as if the control was going to shock him, Rodney reached down and hit the bottom-left-most triangle that was lit. He deeply hoped that he wasn't way off base and wasn't about to blow up the facility. Such was the risks of working with Ancient technology, though.
A tone sounded from the speakers in the room and the oscilloscope lit up with a wave bent into a circle.
"Huh. Low C." As Rodney said this, he heard the familiar sound of a shield activating outside the facility. The power conduits in the pit beyond the window hummed with activity. Several of the consoles around the room rattled momentarily.
Curiously, he reached for the console again and pressed the next triangle over in the same row. A new tone sounded on the speakers, one half-step higher.
"C sharp," Rodney realized. He looked to the oscilloscope again and found that the peaks of the waves had gathered slightly closer. The consoles rattled again. "Wait a minute. Is this...?"
Unheeding of the fact that he was speaking to an empty room or that he could not seem to finish a complete sentence, unheeding of the lightheadedness that was beginning to grow behind his eyes, unheeding of his personal safety or that the room continued to shake, Rodney continued down the line of triangles on the bottom-most row until he came to the first dark triangle. Three more notes sounded, each a half-step higher than the last. He skipped over the dark triangle and pressed the next lit one in line and it, too, was a half-step higher.
"It's a piano!" he realized. "But why would...?" Eagerly, he grabbed his tablet to check the oscilloscope. The wave crests had again moved closer together around the circle. An F continued to sound from the room's speakers.
The room had stopped rattling again and Rodney was suddenly struck by it. There weren't any working displays showing the shield itself, so there was really only one way to confirm what was actually happening outside.
Leaving behind the consoles and his tablet, Rodney raced back up the stairs to the entrance. He squinted in the warm-colored daylight of late afternoon as he cautiously poked his head up out of the hatch to look around.
Sure enough, there was a shield around the facility. Its bottom edge raced along the ground, moving inward toward the facility and outward again in a perfect wave pattern. It looked exactly like the readout on his tablet. Overhead, peaks and valleys radiated outward from the hill in spikes.
"Huh," Rodney said with an amazed smile, "it's variable shielding! Using sound waves to define its boundaries! But why not just a simple wave equation? Why use a piano to control its changes?"
As if to somehow answer his question, Rodney heard the sound of two Wraith darts grow from somewhere behind him. He turned to look and saw them heading straight for the facility. Several other specks behind them indicated that more were on the way.
The sound of a Wraith stunner striking the shield suddenly burst into existence. Rodney dropped to the metal stairs, reflexively putting an arm over his head. Several more bursts hit the shield.
"Oh crap," he said.
The Wraith had found him.
