It had been hours since the beginning of the mission. Sheppard had checked in with Elizabeth a few times just to let her know they were still alive, and Ronon and Teyla had gone to scope out the land out of sheer boredom. Rodney kept taking different readings of things and occasionally calling out his findings. Lieutenant Cooper didn't pay attention, studiously cracking the code on the panels before her.

She liked her job in the military, but she was thrilled to have been brought specifically for this purpose. If she'd had the means, she might have become a scientist herself, but life and circumstance had gotten in the way. Here, she could pretend she was an archeologist like Dr. Jackson. She wondered, if she managed to do something important with this, if he would ever hear of it.

Then she frowned. She checked her translations again, shaking her head. Even if she had made a few mistakes, some things weren't adding up.

"Problem?" Sheppard asked, having looked over and noticed her expression.

"I don't know if this was the Ancients' style, but this is the most redundant thing I've ever seen," she said.

Rodney snorted. "Trust me, don't put redundancy past the Ancients. It wasn't one of their better qualities."

"But this is downright stupid," she said bluntly. "It just keeps repeating the same message over and over in varying ways."

"What do you mean?" Sheppard said, stepping closer.

"You know how in school, when you wrote a paper that needed to be a certain length, you filled it with fluff just to meet the word count?"

Rodney snorted piously. "Absolutely not."

"I remember," the colonel said, obviously losing some of his patience. "What about it?"

"It looks like that's what they were doing. The first line here basically says that technology was the heart of the Faloans, who must have inhabited this planet. But instead of explaining the point, it just keeps saying stuff like, 'The Faloans were born to engineer' and 'Their technology far surpassed that of other systems.'"

"So they had an ego. Wouldn't be the first time it happened to a smart guy," he said, looking at Rodney pointedly, who made a face in return.

"Yeah, but this doesn't make sense. Why build three panels like this just to inform people about your technology? And if it's so great, where is it?" She gestured around her, to the open, grassy plains and treeline a few yards away.

"Let's see if Teyla and Ronon found anything." He tapped his radio, turning away. "Hey, you guys see anything interesting out there?"

"No. This planet is full of nothing," came Ronon's blunt voice.

"Ronon is correct. We have not seen anything but trees and grass for miles, with nothing to interrupt it."

Sheppard made a face. "Alright, then, head on back. Cooper worked out the translation, but it's not exactly what we were looking for."

The lieutenant ran her hand along the stone, looking closely at the writing. "I think... this isn't what was originally here," she said slowly.

"What?" Rodney asked.

"There are grooves between some lines of text, but not others. I think, maybe, somebody tried to write over what already existed."

"And why would they do that?"

"I have no idea. But none of this array makes sense."

"Is there any way to find out what was on it before?" Sheppard asked.

She shook her head. "No, it's stone, not paper. Whoever did this did it well, so that you can't see what was there before."

"But you can't just erase stone carvings," Rodney protested. "The Ancients were pretty heavy-handed; even if someone managed to scratch out the letters there, you'd be left with a pretty deep indentation, which would be a dead giveaway that these had been tampered with."

"Which is another mystery," she sighed. She could hear Ronon and Teyla returning, their footsteps hissing in the grass. She continued to stare at the panels, crouching down to examine the sides in case she missed some writing somewhere. Then she saw something. A crack in the panel, like a seam, just below the surface. Biting her lip, she removed her survival knife from its holster and wedged it into the seam.

"What are you doing?" Rodney exclaimed.

"There's a... thing," she grunted, managing to get the knife far enough under the stone plate to prize it free. A three-line section of the panel came loose, and when she removed it, they could see different, shallower writing underneath.

"Well, what do ya know?" Sheppard said, patting Cooper on the back. "Let's get these panels apart. Teyla, Ronon: Knives."

For another several hours, the panels were dismantled (much to Rodney's discontent) and Cooper resumed her translation. Much more headway was being made now, but McKay continued with his line of questions.

"This just doesn't make sense, why would somebody want to cover up the writing? With something as unimaginative as this? Who's gonna be fooled?"

"Someone who didn't understand the language?" Ronon guessed. "Maybe whoever made the panels thought something unwelcome might come to use them."

"So even if they do manage to find a translation, they still won't get anything valuable," Sheppard said.

"But that just brings us right to the situation we're currently in," McKay said.

"I don't think so. You'd have to know what you were looking for," Ronon said. "The only reason we're still here is because the Colonel couldn't let it go."

"It is a hastily employed disguise," Teyla said. "Perhaps they were running out of time."

"So they hastily carved new directions into stone? I'm not buying it. Why not just completely destroy the panels if they were in that much of a rush?"

"Maybe they were planning on coming back," Sheppard suggested.

Just then, they heard sounds like stone scraping against stone. Sheppard whipped around to see Cooper pressing down on sections of writing like buttons. "Hey, hey, what are you doing?"

"It's a lock," she said, hitting two more buttons and moving to the next panel.

"And how did you figure that out?"

"Because the panel said it. It's directions for accessing this wonderful technology the Faloans were apparently so good at." She finished at the second panel and moved to the third.

Rodney was not to be outdone. "How can you just assume this will release the locking mechanism?" he demanded. "I told you, there's no power here."

"Do you need electricity to unlock your front door?" she shot back. She hit the final button, then stepped back.

Nothing happened.

"See? What'd I tell you?" he said with a self-satisfied smirk.

"Does the device need power?" Teyla asked.

"It shouldn't. It's just a locking mechanism," Cooper said, staring at the array in confusion. "Maybe I didn't-"

The rest of her sentence was lost to a massive grinding noise as the panels began moving away from each other. Stone tracks buried under a thin layer of topsoil revealed themselves.

"Move back!" Sheppard barked as the a large hole began to appear. The grinding lasted for a full five minutes, the panels inhibited by the overgrowth. A rush of excitement was shooting through the lieutenant; just wait until Daniel Jackson heard about this. Finally, they stopped, and there was silence.

"So," Sheppard said as they all leaned over the hole. "I vote McKay goes first."