Terminal Velocity

Part Two

There were very few times in John's life when he wanted to sleep the day away, when he hoped his slumber would relegate all that had happened to nothing more than a bad dream.

John tried to push away the agonizing pain, tried to banish the memory of being torn apart. But the flight from hell had entrenched itself in his mind. The claws had cut fissures in his grey matter and packed the wounds with replays of the torment. Every rerun shredded and mangled his body once again. The healer had been right the first day. It had been for the best not to remember. So, John devised a way to escape the madness of the memories. He slipped into a quiet, dark place within his mind where he could be untouched and undisturbed, where he could survive, until his team rescued him. And he knew they would. Even as he sat, keeping his mind separate, disconnected from his body, there were hands moving him, lifting him, cups of water pressed to his mouth, and healing powders pushed past his lips. And food. They wanted him to eat. Sometimes his muscles would obey their requests and he'd chew and swallow. But mostly he'd end up gagging and spitting it all back out. He endured it all while the rescue team dug him out.

The sun rose and set two, maybe three times. And then a voice filtered into his awareness.

"Oh, no! No, no, no, no, no. This is bad. Very bad. Crap! We're doomed."

Those words tugged at John in a way that hunger and thirst didn't. The message dragged him away from the cocoon in his mind. He felt an urge to…to do something. There was danger and… His team. He needed to know if they were in danger. He needed to make a plan. He… He pried open his eyelids and blinked away his blurred vision.

John felt a dip at the side of the bed as Ronon's dreadlocks swung into view.

"Hey, Sheppard. Thinkin' of joining us today?"

"R-R-R'on…" John coughed and drew in a few breaths that scraped like sandpaper over his raw throat.

Ronon eased John up off the pillows while Teyla tipped a cup of cool water to his mouth. He thought for a minute that he should try to hold the cup by himself, but he couldn't seem to figure out how to make his arms move.

"How are you feeling, John?" Teyla placed the remaining water at the bedside, concern etched into her face.

Not so good, was what John thought. It was what he tried to say. But what came out was more like, "N-n-n…uh."

McKay's face appeared, hovering just behind Ronon's shoulder. "Good, you're awake. Look, I hate to rush you right now, but we've got a problem. A big one. I've been going through the data — and let me say that finding anything of relevance to the current situation was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Anyway, we're in trouble."

Teyla turned to McKay. "Rodney, I do not think that John—"

"Didn't I say 'big problem' and something about 'doom?'"

John made another attempt at moving. His limbs felt as if they were far away, as if they were much too far away for his brain to command. He couldn't quite find his way back into his body. Frustration and panic welled inside. Exhaling, he made a few garbled sounds, unable to form the words that were in his mind.

"Sheppard, you're going to have to do better than that," McKay badgered.

"Rodney!" Teyla gave him a stern look.

McKay was undeterred. "He's going to have to pull himself together…and fast."

Ronon stood up, his body language indicating he would escort McKay back to the laptop if need be. "Come up with something else."

"Genius that I am and all, I might be able to come up with something if I had, oh, say a few years to solve the problem, but I have three days."

Taking McKay's tendency to yield to pessimism and panic into account, John still recognized genuine fear in the man's voice. The need to look for his team pulled harder at his mind than the remembrance of the violation of his mind. He sucked in another painful, rasping lungful of air. "Wh-what…prob-lem?"

McKay stepped around Ronon and closed in on Sheppard. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out, his eyes widening as he looked at John. "Shit. You really don't look good." He turned back to Teyla and Ronon, appearing to lose his certainty about pushing John into action.

Teyla pursed her lips for a moment, studying John. Then she sighed and nodded at McKay. She took Ronon's spot at John's side, checking his pulse again and adjusting the blankets.

"Okay. First of all, this outpost was built for defense," McKay began.

"Against Wraith?" Ronon quirked one eyebrow.

"No," McKay shook his head, "although it does that, too — when it's working, that is. But, no. This facility was designed for damage control. There was a mistake. A huge one. Project Arcturus was not the only weapon of its kind. There was another one. Here. In this solar system."

"Was another one?" Ronon caught the implication.

"Yeah… Fools seldom differ and all that…"

McKay thrust out his chin with defiance, but John saw regret flash in his eyes.

"It…uh…it blew up." McKay scrubbed one hand over his face for a minute. "For a technologically advanced race that aspired to ascension, you'd think the Ancients would have had more interest in preventing others from repeating their mistakes than in hiding records that would tarnish their image," McKay complained. "This wasn't in the Atlantis database." Then he babbled on about the destructive effects of vacuum energy on solar systems.

John's body may have checked out, but his mind was flooding with questions now. Unfortunately, even imminent disaster wouldn't dissuade McKay from reveling in a captive audience for his scientific discourse. In a crisis, John wanted to hear the bottom line first. A fleet of Wraith ships on the way. A glacial melt. A rebel Genii faction.…whatever. He'd get the specific details that he needed after that. He hated having the information exchange play out before him as though he were watching a movie, waiting for the final climatic scene.

McKay was still on a roll. "So, with the destruction of the larger mass planets—"

John suddenly felt himself hurtling over the edge of a steep ravine. He gasped as his limbs jerked spasmodically for a second – sort of like the sensation of landing when he'd occasionally dreamt of falling, but ten, fifty, a hundred times more unpleasant.

"John?" Teyla placed a hand on his arm.

The tingling had started again. He could feel it flowing from his head to his extremities, burning its way along his nerves, leaving tracks of fiery pins and needles wherever it touched. "F-f-feeling's c-coming back." He moaned as his body curled in on itself. It hurt to move and it hurt not to move. His mind flashed back to the flight from hell. God, no! He couldn't let his mind go there. "G-go on," he urged McKay, wanting to use his friend's words as an anchor.

McKay stammered for a minute, unable to get his focus back as John writhed on the bed.

"So, doom…" Ronon prompted as he sat down beside Teyla, making sure John didn't injure himself as he tossed and turned.

"What? Okay. Ah…yes. The system lost the gravitational effects of those planets and…" McKay trailed off and stared at John. "Are you gonna be okay?"

Violent tremors ran through John's body, making a reply impossible. Not that he actually had an answer to that question.

Teyla responded on John's behalf, unable to hide the unsteadiness in her voice. "He is progressing just as Melkus described. We will continue giving him the medicine as instructed."

Teyla had avoided promising that he was going to be okay. John felt his heart stutter in his chest. He remembered being given some sort of powder in the last few days. They were letting Gandalf medicate him after all. The situation must have been desperate. Crap. John would have given anything to be in the infirmary on Atlantis at that moment.

McKay took a deep breath. "Okay. So the asteroid belt in the system along with the debris from the explosion began to drift. This planet, which was uninhabited at the time, would have been the first casualty of the fallout. But the Ancients thought it would be the perfect test ground for a new defense system and installed it here. That's what the outpost is. Before you ask, no, I have not figured out how this undersized post ever had that capability, but apparently it did — a planet-wide force field. 'Did' being the key word here because it doesn't now. In three days, this planet's orbit will take it back into the asteroid field and everything here will be wiped out."

The room was silent as the team absorbed the news.

McKay headed back to his computer. "So, yeah, doomed…"

~~~~oooo~~~~

John kept his focus on the immediate problem. The more he kept his attention on the task at hand, the more he was able to keep the remaining flashbacks down to the level of background noise.

McKay paced.

That was a bad sign, John knew, because it meant he'd given up on his security blanket of databases and calculations. He'd abandoned his scientific talismans and was seeking miraculous inspiration. Not that McKay hadn't pulled that off before, because he had. Many times. It was just…bad.

McKay paused and turned to John. "By the way, did I mention that being stuck here wasn't your fault?"

John shifted his hand, steadying himself as he sat, listing at a forty-five degree angle on the bed. "No, but thanks. I feel so much better now, knowing that."

McKay spluttered for a moment. "We are beyond screwed and you're wasting time with snarky remarks?"

"You work better when you're riled up. And besides, there's nothing else to do on this planet that's on my bucket list."

McKay paled.

With his free hand, John rubbed his eyes. "Just keep working. I'll deal with guilt later."

"You've interrupted my entire line of thinking on the initial sequence of events and the contributing variables." McKay tossed his hands in the air.

"How about just skipping to the final sequence of events?"

"Death?" McKay squeaked.

"No, the dramatic last-minute escape," John said with a wry twist of his mouth.

"Oh. Well, since you don't seem to have lost too many of your coulda-been-Mensa brain cells in this fiasco, how about you work on the daring escape plan?"

"I'm thinking 'to hell with interplanetary relations.'" John gave a cavalier wave of his hand and then had to fight not to tip over. "We steal a jumper and hightail it out of here."

"The garage door's offline, too."

"We can blast a hole in it."

"And then what? Die drifting in space? There are no habitable planets near enough. We'll last maybe two weeks in a jumper and the Daedalus still won't be here." McKay's voice was rising, bordering on panic.

"We could land on this planet again."

"Which will not be compatible with life by then."

"So we have to get the gate online." John clenched his teeth, finding McKay's rebuttals hard to tolerate, even if he was right.

"Which can only be done from the chair and it's not working."

"Well, repair the goddamn chair then!" John snapped.

"You're the only one who can do that. The system will only respond to your input now." McKay fixed his stare on John.

John didn't back down. The two locked eyes. But neither of them had the time or the energy to waste on the standoff.

"Fine. There's the plan then." John forced a more reasonable tone into his voice. "Teyla and Ronon will be back from the village any minute now. We pack up our gear, head to the outpost and stay there until it's fixed. Then we get outta here."

"Yeah…" McKay appeared to deflate.

"We are going to fix this."

"Have you ever, you know, considered there might be a time when we just can't pull it off?" McKay twisted his fingers together.

"No. Never."

"Huh. And people say I'm arrogant."

John smiled.

~~~~oooo~~~~

The team ate with haste, knowing the clock was ticking.

John had to force himself to swallow each bite. Every time he thought of the task ahead, he had to clamp his teeth together and fight against the urge to gag. He would have skipped lunch altogether except that he knew he needed to eat in order to get through the next couple of hours…maybe days. He hoped not.

After lunch, the team packed with efficiency, preparing to head to the outpost. Melkus had drawn his cart up near their accommodation. John was relieved about that. If the man hadn't done that, John's other choices were to admit out loud that he couldn't make it to the edge of town, or use up what little energy he had left — energy that might be needed for the task ahead — to pretend he could make it. Both options sucked. John suspected his team would handle his admission of weakness better than he would handle hearing himself say the words.

Once in the back of the wagon, John collapsed on the floor. He thought about trying to sit up, but even thinking about that sapped him. Conservation was his best strategy. He closed his eyes, avoiding the looks he knew passed among his teammates in the ensuing silence. Teyla crawled over beside John and pulled his head onto her lap, protecting it from jarring against the blanketed floor.

Predictably, the ride did nothing for the dizziness already plaguing John. Neither did McKay's moaning that he was going to be sick. John heard Ronon threaten to stun McKay if he said that one more time. McKay begged Ronon to stun him right away and put him out of his misery for the trip. John thought it might not be such a bad idea.

The closer they got to the facility, the harder it become to suppress flashes of the sensation of his muscles ripping apart. He tried to draw in deep breaths of fresh air to reassure himself that he couldn't actually smell his own flesh burning. Groaning, John curled up tighter, unable to stop shaking, feeling chilled despite the warmth of the sun overhead. He felt Teyla pull some of the blankets around him.

John thought back to all the times he'd been in pain or felt ill, but tried to talk Carson or Keller into letting him leave the infirmary. He'd always been convinced he'd feel better once he got back to his quarters or got back to work. That had turned out not to be the case when he rescued Teyla from Michael's ship. But it was still what had to be done. He'd always do what had to be done.

Now that John thought about it, maybe the healer's mélange fell into the category of something that had to be done. He'd refused the stuff at lunch. In spite of the earlier errors in dosage, he suspected the medicine actually worked to a degree. But it seemed odd that there should be a specific treatment for the effects of an Ancient malfunction.

The journey through the outpost to the chair room was almost as much of a challenge as the wagon ride. John tried to convince himself he was walking with assistance from Ronon and McKay. He was pretty sure that if his friends were asked, they would have said they dragged him through the hallway.

When they got to the chair room, McKay grabbed some duct tape from his pack and marked out a square on the floor against the wall near the door.

"Sheppard, sit there." McKay pointed to the designated area. "Ronon, if he moves so much as an inch outside that square without my say-so, stun him."

"Okay." Ronon fingered his weapon.

"Excuse me?" John managed to inject a faint note of indignation into his voice. "The last time I looked, I was the team leader."

"The last time I looked, you still looked like crap," McKay retorted. "And the last time you were here, you couldn't keep your hands off the chair. So…"

McKay had a point.

Melkus placed a worn canvas satchel on a workbench and began setting up his apothecary. He pulled out various vials, dishes and instruments for measuring.

McKay glanced at the healer as he headed over to set up his own workstation. "Your wing-of-bat and eye-of-toad don't seem to be doing any good."

"I have neither of those ingredients," Melkus stated without pausing.

McKay pressed on. "It doesn't require sophisticated technology to see that Sheppard isn't cured. And we are going to need him working at full-capacity."

Melkus stopped then and turned around. "I do not believe I said this would cure him. It will merely maintain him."

Teyla's eyebrows arched. "Maintain?"

"Yes, until the task is done."

"And then what is to happen?" Teyla persisted.

"Maintenance will no longer be required."

"What does that mean?" Ronon loomed over the concoctions looking as though he thought they might explode at any minute.

"Your Sheppard will no longer be taxed by the chair."

"Are you certain there is no one else here with knowledge of the Ancestor technology?" Teyla inquired. "One who might assist us in conducting the repairs?"

Melkus lifted his head, studying John for a moment, and then he added a pinch of an orange powder to his compound. "Only the Guardian of Latira knows of the technology of the Old Ones. But had he been able to carry out the necessary repairs, he would not have invited you here."

"Who's the Guardian?" Ronon demanded.

Melkus paused in his activity and turned to the team, looking flustered for a moment. "Kelore is our current Guardian. I thought that was clear."

"No, that wasn't made clear." John was pleased that his voice sounded a little steadier than he felt — steadier in comparison to the way he was sitting slumped against the wall. "It seems that there are a lot of things about this mission that weren't made clear."

"The Guardian invited you here to examine our defense system and make repairs. What is not clear about that?"

"You said you'd had other travelers here before, right?"

"Yes. Two in my memory, but there were others before that."

"What happened to them?" Even as he asked the question, John had the feeling he didn't want to hear the answer.

"They completed the necessary adjustments."

"And then?"

"They were weakened as you are. But the knowledge of ministering to the Old Ones has always been passed down through the healers as it has to me."

"See now, this weakening of the Old Ones, was one of the things that wasn't made clear."

"Kelore evaluated your suitability for the task. You would have to speak to him about that."

"My suitability? What do you mean my suitability? Where is Kelore?"

"He will meet with us again shortly. Save your questions. Now, I must concentrate." Melkus turned back to his work.

McKay also set to work, pulling enough of an assortment of wires and clips and grey metal tools out of his backpack that John was reminded of Mary Poppins.

John wrapped his arms around his stomach when it started to churn again. He took slow, deep breaths, willing the nausea and dizziness to subside. He suspected he had zoned out for a few minutes, because he realized Teyla was crouched in front of him, offering him the medicine he had turned down at lunch. The thought of ingesting anything at the moment made his stomach cramp. "Gimme a couple of minutes."

Teyla placed a hand on his forehead. "John, you need—"

"I'll take it…in a few minutes. I don't think it's gonna stay down right now."

John wasn't sure what happened after that. The next thing he knew, he was resting with his head on Ronon's shoulder and Teyla was assisting McKay with some of the equipment. The room felt hot and airless and it appeared to be tipping to one side. The nausea hadn't abated one bit. If anything, it was worse. John thought he should have tried to force down medication earlier. "Ronon?"

"What's up?"

"I need some fresh air." As John pushed himself upward, Ronon grabbed his arm. John had the impression that Ronon didn't know whether to haul him to his feet or push him back to the floor.

At that moment, the door began its erratic process of opening. John fumbled for his sidearm but couldn't coordinate his fingers to unholster it. Ronon had him covered, shielding him with his body.

"It will be Kelore." Melkus waved at the team's weapons which were now trained on the door.

No one lowered their guns.

Kelore entered, looking paler and more aged than the last time. Tremors wracked his body.

"Are you sure he isn't contagious?" McKay was the first to drop his guard as he fumbled in his backpack for the hand sanitizer. "He looks like death warmed over."

John didn't hear the answer. He'd broken out in a cold sweat, trying to fight the surge of bile at the back of his throat. He still wanted fresh air. At the very least, he wanted to cut down on the number of spectators if he threw up. When his stomach clenched again, John staggered past Kelore and out into the corridor.

"Sheppard!" Ronon was close on his friend's heels.

"Dammit! I said not to let him move," McKay shouted.

Anything else McKay might have had to say was lost as the door slammed shut. John fell to his knees, retching. He felt Ronon's hands on his shoulders, steadying him. In between bouts of sickness, John was vaguely aware of hearing pounding noises and muffled voices on the other side of the chair room door. By the time his gut had quieted down to occasional dry heaves and hiccups, there was silence beyond the door.

Ronon guided John down to a cleaner portion of the hallway and lowered him to the floor. Then he vaporized the mess with his blaster.

The air in the corridor was fresher and cooler. John's stomach settled. Then he started to shiver.

Ronon stood over John. "I'd give you my jacket, but I left it in the room."

"'S'okay." John waved his hand weakly. "Gotta get back in there. I have a little inquisition of my own to conduct with Kelore. Help me up."

Ronon pulled John to his feet and led him back down the hall. "It is kinda cold out here."

"Yeah. R-really cold." John's teeth started to chatter. He palmed the door controls. Once. Twice. On the third try, the door opened. "What the hell…?"

McKay, Teyla, Melkus and Kelore were gone. The equipment and the chair were gone. But what stood there instead was an even greater shock.

~~~~oooo~~~~

It only took a few seconds after the door had opened before areas of exposed flesh stung with the cold. John had spent enough time in the Antarctic to estimate it was more than thirty degrees below zero. If he and Ronon stepped into the room and the door shut… There was no movement in the room, no immediate sign of McKay or Teyla. He palmed the controls, closing the room off.

John leaned against the wall in the hallway for a minute, his mind reeling. The new room had been more like a corridor, stretching far into the distance. The walls to the right and left of the door were lined with stasis chambers. Most of the ones John had glimpsed were empty. But the ones that were not held humans in various states of decay. Terror-filled eyes bulged from sightless sockets; gaping mouths twisted in a rictus of death. Stasis gone awry. John wondered how long their slowed metabolic processes had allowed them to suffer before they died. John squeezed his eyes shut against the afterimage of the smaller ones… To be trapped like that, awake… He blinked, struggling to pull his thoughts together, not sure what to do next.

"Sheppard!" Ronon was pulling on John's arm. "Move it!"

John looked at his teammate, startled to see the blue tinge to his face and lips and ice crystals forming around his mouth.

Ronon jerked his head towards the far end of the hall. "Come on." Stumbling every few steps he tugged John towards the stairs and pushed him up in front of him.

John palmed the controls to access the control room. "D-dammmit." His voice shook and the moisture from his breath froze in the air. He tried to pry the control panel open but his fingers, still bandaged and now rigid from the cold, couldn't even curl around the edges. In desperation, he pounded it with his palms. When his legs couldn't hold out any longer, he dropped to the stairs, feeling the sharp edges smack against his spine.

Ronon blasted the door, the energy from his weapon crackling in arcs across the unyielding panel. Ronon thudded to the floor a few seconds after John, but he kept firing. The hot metal door now offered some warmth even if it didn't open.

John pulled his knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them, trying to conserve heat. He didn't think it would buy much time, but every second he hung on was always one more second of opportunity for a rescue.

Time passed. A few seconds, a minute maybe. It was hard to think. John didn't feel the cold quite so intensely, but that wasn't necessarily a good sign. Maybe he was beyond feeling the cold...

Ronon stopped firing. He blew out a deep breath experimentally. John noted that the vapor cloud no longer crystallized around his friend's face. Ronon closed his eyes, breathing heavily. Then he struggled to pull himself semi-upright and ready his weapon once again as the door at the far end of the hall began to open.

John sagged with relief, seeing Teyla and McKay burst through the opening.

"Where the hell have you two been?" McKay demanded, the panic in his voice unmistakable. "You left us locked in that little room. I had to override the control panel."

Teyla sprinted along the hall, reaching John and Ronon first. She asked questions, her touch firm and gentle as she examined them, but John couldn't figure out what she was asking. McKay palmed the door hatch open, rushing out as Teyla shouted instructions to bring blankets from the cart.

John felt himself being shifted to the control room… Then he and Ronon were outside in the warm sun… And then…nothing.

~~~~oooo~~~~

John woke up outside the facility in time to see the last few warm rays of the day's sun. He wasn't exactly sure what had happened, but he was sure he'd woken up wondering what had happened more than enough to last him a lifetime of missions.

He felt Teyla's strong grip on his arm, supporting him as he pushed himself upwards. The dizziness and nausea were mercifully gone. John suspected the healer had been at work again.

John spotted Ronon tending to a roaring campfire. "Hey."

"I'm okay," Ronon responded before John even spoke the question aloud.

John nodded and stretched his hands closer to the warmth of the flames, hoping no one noticed the tremors in his arms.

McKay sat on a boulder, hunched over the world on his laptop screen. Lifting his head, he glanced over his shoulder at Kelore who was watching him with interest. "Could you defrost someplace else? I can't work with someone looking over my shoulder."

"Can you fix the stasis room?" Kelore asked, sinking to sit on a grassy patch.

"Do I look like the refrigerator repairman to you? I have bigger things to attend to — like saving your entire planet, which by the way, doesn't seem to have much worth saving." McKay glanced at the squat tower, shaking his head. "Well, besides our lives, that is."

John sipped at the canteen of water Teyla handed to him, resisting the urge to quench his thirst with deep draughts. "So, where were we?" he asked, his casual drawl masking his cat-about-to-pounce-on-a-mouse mindset. "Oh, right. We were speaking of things that weren't entirely clear about this mission." John threw a pointed look at Melkus, and then turned to his team. "Did anyone bring marshmallows 'cause I was thinking the story behind the stasis chambers would make a nice campfire tale."

Kelore huffed. "I apologize. I did not intend for you to encounter the stasis chambers."

John waited a minute. "That's it? I was hoping for a longer story."

Kelore tightened his lips for a moment. "You need not concern yourself with the activities of the Latiran people beyond repairs to our systems."

John quit toying with Kelore and narrowed his eyes. "Now see, I thought playing a greater role in the day-to-day affairs of the Pegasus Galaxy was exactly why we were here."

"Your provision of the needed assistance is appreciated. Nothing more is required."

"What do we get out of it then?" John challenged.

"I do not believe Mr. Woolsey's offer specified that you 'get something out of it.'"

"We do not require repayment," Teyla interjected as she assembled provisions for the evening meal. "But it is customary for us to become better acquainted with the life circumstances of our friends and allies."

"And a tiny bit of technology would also be appreciated," McKay added.

Ronon sat down beside John as Teyla handed out the dinner MREs. "McKay already figured out how we got to the stasis room." There was a note of pride in Ronon's voice.

McKay looked downright smug about it. "Now, that part is pretty cool." McKay ripped open his MRE and dug in, as only he could, to dinner in a foil pouch. "I went over the readings I took yesterday. It's not a hallway. It's a really, really big transporter."

John looked around the barren field surrounding the outpost. "So there's more underground? Like on that other planet…uh…"

"The one where that woman had the hots for you?" McKay supplied.

"That could be any number of planets," John retorted.

"Funny." McKay pulled up another set of data on his computer. "No, I don't think there's anything else here in this area."

"Very well." Kelore spoke as though the words were being dragged out of him. "There is another outpost on the planet."

"There isn't by any chance a second gate?" John asked.

Kelore eyed the contents of the pouch Teyla had distributed to him. "No. But you do not need to worry about the gate. It will function again once you complete the repairs to the system."

"If you're not going to eat that, I will," McKay offered, pointing to Kelore's MRE. Then he turned to John. "Remember I said the gate wasn't your fault? I found out that using the chair automatically triggers the shutdown. It's preprogrammed."

"So, we're prisoners again? Is that it?" John's voice was tight with anger.

Kelore chewed a small portion of his MRE and then twisted his mouth as though he'd swallowed a bug. "There is much at stake. You would do best to get on with the work and repair the shield system."

"Don't tell me what Ishould be doing." John stabbed at the air with his the fork. "In fact, why don't you tell me what you're going to be doing."

"I am not able to do anything."

Melkus bobbed his head. "I did say that."

"You say far too much," Kelore snapped.

"Exactly why are you here?" John asked, resuming his line of inquiry.

Kelore sat in silence for a minute and then sighed. "I am a scientist. My people, 'Old Ones' as they are called here, were all scientists. Scientific research and development can take a great number of years. Scientists often do not see the fruits of their own labors. We constructed a stasis system that would allow scientists to make periodic observations, living out their lives in prescribed blocks of time over hundreds, even thousands of years. Unfortunately, our system failed. I am the last scientist."

"You're one of the Ancients?" McKay gaped. "One of the original scientists?"

"I am one of their descendants. As I said, they lived out their lives, normal lives, including…procreation. Life was merely lived in discrete intervals."

Teyla's eyes widened. "Even the offspring used the stasis chambers?"

John ground the heels of his hands against his eyes in a futile attempt to erase the memory of the smaller figures in the failed chambers.

"Why do you need our help to fix your own system?" McKay asked.

"That was not the area of study for which I was trained."

"And that area was…" McKay prompted.

John held up one hand. "Wait a minute, if you're the only one left, why not just save the data and take it with you when you leave the planet. You could have asked us to assist in the evacuation of the people."

Kelore shook his head. "There are too many people."

John glanced in the direction of the village. "We've evacuated villages of this size."

"There are other villages."

"How many?"

"Several. I do not know the exact number at the moment."

John gritted his teeth in frustration. "How many…approximately?"

Kelore took even longer to reply to that question. "There are three million inhabitants on this world."

"Three mill…" John needed a minute to reframe his thinking.

"The shield has served well to conceal the existence of the colonies. Our scientists took in refugees from a great many cullings over the years. They are widely dispersed, unknown even to one another."

"That hardly seems like the typical Ancient endeavor." John said, working to swallow another mouthful of beef-whatever. "Their scientific innovations kinda overshadowed their charity work, I guess."

"Just a minute." McKay crumpled up his foil pouch and pushed his garbage into Teyla's hand. "If the people are 'widely dispersed' you must have transported them around the planet when they arrived. So, approximately how many outposts are there?"

"Several hundred." Kelore pulled himself to his feet, his movements looking arthritic and painful. "But we are wasting valuable time here."

John got up on his knees, resting there for a minute before standing. "What if we can't fix this?"

"Do not worry. I have evaluated your suitability. You can fix it."

John stood up and staggered to the side. Ronon grabbed him, but John shrugged him off. "I got it." He fixed Kelore with a hard stare. "We need to talk about this evaluation and my 'suitability.'"

"And anything you might know about how to repair the system would be nice," McKay added. "Not that I couldn't figure it out all by myself, but, you know, asteroids on the way and all."

All eyes turned skyward at that, sweeping the starry night sky. One of the three days was over.

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On to Chapter Three

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