The Forever Burn:

Chapter 1:

Part II

Morning came, faster than sleep did. By the time first light hit, everyone had already been awake and was briefed on our situation. Which was, no word from command, and one of our team members had went missing during the night. I couldn't stop myself from thinking what the hell was going on. Not even a month on Atlantis and already, running into something weird and unexplained, but that was what I lived for, danger.

Now that I think about it, things could have been a lot worse, I suppose.

We packed our things, and headed toward the area of forest that the scientist had gone off toward during the night. It was not long after that, when one of the scanners started to work again. A single life sign showing up less than a half klick south of us. It had to have been the scientist that went missing.

As we approached the spot where the life sign had been, we began to see what looked to have been ancient buildings and structures. Something was different about these though. One of the scientist began rattling on about how these building had been different, unlike the buildings of the Lanteans, and how they looked to be much older. At the time, I was not interested in a bunch of old buildings that looked as if they would collapse in on each other at any moment. But one thing did catch my attention, the fact that there seemed to be hardly any vegetation growing on the buildings.. even though there we were, right smack dead in the middle of the densest forest I had ever been in.

We followed the scanner to the life sign, and there he was, hunched over a piece of equipment with his laptop beside him. I grabbed his shoulder, and turned him around, being that he seemed completely oblivious to the fact that we were there. When I saw his face, he must have been seventy years old.

Now, not to say that older people could not do the work that other scientist could do, but I had yet to see anyone that was over the age of sixty, and this man here, was definitely was not that man that left the base camp the previous night.

His face stared into my own, as if he had not seen another person in ages. Come to find out, that exactly had been the case. According to him, he had been there for well over thirty years, with no contact with anyone, not from Atlantis, no one. According to what he could remember, he left that night because of a scanner that was going off, and he had to see what it was, something like he had never seen before. Apparently when he got to the source of the signal, a bright light flashed and after that he tried and tried to find us, but each time only getting lost, and barely finding his way back to the long forgotten city. He went on and on, about how much he had done, how much he had learned. About how the Lanteans were more like us than we had originally thought, and that they had, in their very early stages, had used technology very much the same way that we had been doing with ships, and cities that we had found. That there was a much older civilization that had existed long before they had, and the Lanteans had used their technology to gain ground faster than what would have been normal.

Ok, so the ancients stole some technology, and used it to further their own advancement, so what, isn't that what we were doing in the Pegasus galaxy in the first place? I'm sure that the official word from the IOA would be no, that is exactly not what we were doing, and I would be willing to bet that most of the people working with the Stargate Programs would also say that, but the cold hard truth is that we are.

Alright, here I am, with my team, sitting here with this old man, who just the night before, was younger than my older brother. All I could do was think; what the hell did I get myself into? But the truth is, I was also very excited. This was what it was all about. Now wasn't the time to let my emotions get the best of me, I was, well for lack of a better word, lost, in the middle of a far off galaxy, with very little chance of getting back home.

As the old man led us to his living area, which in all actuality, was nicer that what I had on Atlantis. The hallways began to light up, much like they did in Atlantis, my whole aspect of things changed. That place was huge, and as we walked underground we began to see this place as it truly was. There was a massive central chamber, that looked as if it were one giant dome, in the middle of this dome, there were massive trees. Birds flew around the trees, and I could see from where I was what looked to be dinosaurs type creatures walking around at the very bottom of the chamber. To put things into a ratio, Atlantis could have fit into this center chamber with no problem. The chamber was sealed with what seemed to me to be a very think type of glass, but when I touched it my hand went through it. I do not believe that I have ever seen an old man move so fast, he pulled me back so fast, that I flew across the hallway, hitting the wall opposite of the center chamber. His strength was not that of an old man, but of someone that lives on in the imagination. My ribs hurt, and I had the wind knocked out of me. But just as fast as he threw me, he was over by my side aiding me up. "What the hell was that?" I asked him. All I got in return was "Sorry, I suppose I don't know my own strength." Damn right he didn't. I got to my feet, and asked "How.." and before I finished, he said, "after so many years, a man gets bored." I wouldn't know what that meant until later on.

My ribs still hurt as we walked into what seemed to be a large meeting room. The old man offered everyone something to eat and drink. I needed something, so I said sure. To my surprise, he asked what I wanted, like we were at a freaking bar or something, so laughingly I said "rum and coke" he said nothing to me and walked over to what looked to be a telephone booth and spoke into the front of it, "rum and coke" and poof, like magic, appeared a glass with brown liquid in it. Everyone was well, I don't know about everyone, but I was stunned. To see something like that here, I mean come on. I stood up, as did the other scientist in the group, and walked to the machine. "What else can this machine make, Doc?" "Anything you can imagine" He replied.

So that night we sat there, eating what we wanted, and talking about what had been doing to pass the time. And then, like I knew it would, we got to the part about how we get home. So quick, and I was just getting used to that place too. Apparently there was Stargate on this planet. But how the heck did we get there if there was not a Stargate here? According to the old man, it was a roaming gate, every few times that gate address is dialed, it transports itself to a random planet and therefore gave us no chance to make it back home through the gate. We were stuck there. Well for the time being. And then it got really confusing. He started to explain that the facility that we were at was abandoned long ago, far long before the ancients even began their explorations of space, and that it was actually never intended to be a manned operations center, just a seeder facility. The people that lived there had only been meant to oversee the day to day operations while the seeding began. But they had left before full seeding could begin. Ok, if you are like me, then you need to understand what seeding is. This place would launch probes into this galaxy. The probe would contain everything needed to produce life. Once the probe hit its destination it would release whatever it was carrying and then the planet would produce life. How did he know all of this?

There were many questions I had, but the only one I wanted to know the answer to, was how we were going to get back to Atlantis. So I asked him. He told us all that he thinks that time goes by differently here, than in the rest of the universe, so it could be that Atlantis did not even exist anymore. That our families would may not even be alive on Earth anymore.

It had only been a few days after getting to the Seeder facility, when one of the other scientist came into the meeting room where Franks and I were planning a recon mission to explore the facility in full, and informed us that there in fact was a gate on this planet, and it was in this facility. That he had found logs inside of one of the facilities data terminals detailing where it was. So, the old Doc happened to be lying to us, Franks was convinced that he was hiding more things and that he was up to something sinister. Things seem have gotten to everyone, making people scared, paranoid. Given, that I myself was a little upset, I wanted to go home just as much as anyone here, but I knew that there had to be a good reason for the old man to be lying to us. But that also means that he lied to us about more things as well, being that the ancients were supposed to be the ones that built the gates, and if this place had a gate, then it meant that it was built by the ancients. And not the Mother race, as he so called them.

As the scientist led us to where he said the gate was, we were interrupted by the old man standing at the door that led to the where the gate was. He was standing there, with his arms crossed and a look on his face like we had caught a child with his hand in the cookie jar. "now look here, we just want to see what is on the other side of that door, if it may be a chance that we can find a way back in there, then we need to get in there." Franks told him. At that moment, the old man jumped for Franks, hitting him and knocking him out. I fired my machine gun at Him, hitting him twice in the abdomen.