III

The buzzer went for the end of class, and Ted didn't bother trying to recapture his students' attention. "Don't forget, test next Friday," he called over the hubbub, then paused, tapping his pen, and staring at the homework assignment in front of him.

Should he, or shouldn't he?

Oh, hell, he had to say something.

"Jon, could you stay behind a moment?"

Jon hung back from his small group of associates, looking every inch the bored and slouching teenager. Of course, Ted didn't need to have been teaching high school science for twenty-two years to recognise that such appearances could be deceptive. However, Jon O'Neill was a trickier customer to pin down than most.

He'd transferred in from nobody was quite sure where in the middle of the school year, and at first, most of the faculty had believed they'd quickly got the measure of him. Typical loudmouth and class clown - actually funny, which was something of an unusual bonus, but still, just another one to check off on the ever predictable roster of types.

Except that Jon wasn't a type. He was a chameleon.

Put him in different situations, and he was different people. Call on him in class and he was always ready with a quip, but in less public surroundings he let the act drop a little and one hell of a work ethic shone through. And the first time he'd had to work as part of a group had been an eye-opener. As the new kid, he'd been shuffled off to join a trio of those Ted would vote most likely to turn in a torn sheet of scrap paper with two paragraphs on, but somehow O'Neill had marshalled his forces and got them working together.

The thing about Jon was that no matter what situation you dropped him in, he was always, always comfortable. He had a rock solid self-confidence - and not the usual kind you found in a sixteen-year-old, the swaggering "I'll do what I want and the world can't hurt me," brand of empty bravado, but something deeper and more enduring. Ted had more than once had to fight off a disconcerting urge to defer to the kid himself. The boy was a born leader.

And then, of course, there was... this.

"Sir?"

Jon had a certain way of standing in this sort of one-on-one conference; Ted wasn't the only one to have noticed it. It was Jenny Watkins, Jon's math teacher, who'd first put a finger on it. "He's like some kind of miniature soldier," she'd said, chuckling faintly. "I keep wanting to salute and tell him to stand at ease."

The football coach, Bob Dyson, had coughed into his coffee. "Soldier? Kid thinks he's a goddamned officer. Damned if he doesn't have the airs and graces for it, too. I will eat an entire week's worth of leftovers from the cafeteria if that boy's daddy was anything less than a Colonel."

And considering the state of the food that the cafeteria actually served, that was no vow to make without the weight of certainty behind it.

Whatever its origins, it was a stance that made you want to sit up, clear your throat, and generally act like you were a person worth paying attention to. Ted straightened up and nervously flattened out the sheet of paper before him.

"Ahem. Um. Jon, about this physics homework..."

"Did I not do it right?" Jon's brow wrinkled pensively. "I had some trouble with the gravitational forces - I've never got on so well with gravitational forces-"

"Ah, the work is fine," he said hastily. "Very good, you just need to pay more attention to the numbers. Your calculations are fine, but you're making some careless mistakes in the working. No, it's about this... these notes in the margin."

"Sir?" Jon looked honestly perplexed. But then, he could give you that look for using words of more than two syllables if he decided he felt like having a dense day. Still, Ted thought he caught an edge of genuine confusion in there somewhere. He turned the paper round and tapped it with his pen.

"These calculations here."

The scribbles in the margins were also equations, but a far cry from the relatively simple balancing of forces and velocities that took up the rest of the page. These were the kind of equations that Ted could look at with his university level education in physics, and understand just enough to know that he didn't understand a damn thing. He was pretty sure from the values of some of the constants in use he was looking at astrophysics, but beyond that... It wasn't work he recognised from standard texts, or even the more popular cutting-edge journals.

And yet here it was, scribbled down on the edge of a homework assignment in what Ted was prepared to swear blind was Jon O'Neill's handwriting, as if he'd been absently jotting down the math to make sure he had it straight in his head.

Jon stared at the paper for some time, with what appeared to be a completely blank expression. Ted only realised that it wasn't when the shutters went down behind his eyes a moment later, and he closed himself off so neatly and completely that he might as well have been a granite statue.

"That isn't anything, sir," he said lightly. "It's not real math, I, um... copied it off a computer screen in this TV show I was watching." He gave a perfectly judged little 'aw, shucks' grin of faint embarrassment. "Well, uh, you know me and science fiction."

As a performance, it could have been put up for an Emmy - and probably would have lost because no one would have believed it was actual acting. Certainly, if Ted hadn't had very good evidence of Jon's previous history of pretending to be much less bright than he was, he wouldn't have known what to think.

He still didn't, and Jon's steady, piercing gaze was impossible to hold for any length of time. Ted used clearing his throat as an excuse to look down. "Well. Looks like somebody involved in that show took the time to do their research. Thanks for clearing that up, Jon." He deliberately shuffled the paper back into a pile of other assignments to forestall any attempt to reclaim it.

"No problem, sir." Jon nodded and sauntered away. Ted watched him all the way to the door, and only suppressed the impulse to scurry over to it and peer out because he was sure Jon wasn't dumb enough to drop the act that quickly.

Ted sat and tapped his fingers for a while. Then he pulled the assignment back out of the stack, and picked up the phone. He dialled the number of his old Alma Mater, where a distant associate of his still taught astrophysics.

"Hi. Can you put me through to Doctor Visnadi? Tell him it's Ted Rasmussen from Colorado. I have something here I think he might want to take a look at..."

Four hours later, Brand and Sorvino were still geeking over their find. Of course, Brand and Sorvino could comfortably geek for weeks at a time over interesting rocks, but in this particular instance, Casey was doing little bit of internal geeking himself.

It was a ship. Or rather, part of one. They'd stumbled upon the Ancient Tacha's underground lab, where he'd been doing what every self-respecting engineer did in his leisure time: tinkering with engines.

Based on Sorvino's first skim-through of his notes, it seemed that Tacha had gone to ground on this planet to avoid the plague that was wiping out his people, and hence also missed the boat when the survivors took off for the Pegasus Galaxy. Seeking to rejoin them, he'd spent decades of his life trying to create an intergalactic hyperdrive from the primitive parts and materials available to him. By the end of his life he'd reached the point where he believed it would work, but he'd died before he'd been able to procure a ship to test it in.

"So why didn't his buddies hook it up themselves after he'd died?" Casey wondered aloud. "I mean, the thing's finished, right?"

"I don't think any of the others were Ancients," Sorvino explained. "I was wrong about the inscription up above - it's not a dialect we haven't encountered, it was made by people who weren't very familiar with the language. They wanted to leave a message in case the other Ancients came looking, but it's the sort of translation you'd get by looking things up in a dictionary without really understanding how the parts of language go together."

"Ancient, Babelfish style," Casey said. Sorvino smiled.

"Pretty much. Tacha's notes are much easier to read, although the content is a little cryptic - he's writing for his own reference, after all. I'm guessing that after he died, his companions just sealed up the laboratory and left the inscription - they wouldn't have had the first clue how to install the engine in a ship themselves."

Casey grunted. "What are the odds that we do?"

Lieutenant Brand straightened up from his inspection of the hyperdrive, eyes shining. "I think we could do it, sir," he said optimistically. "It looks like Tacha kept fairly comprehensive notes, and our people do have experience interfacing our own tech with Ancient devices. It wouldn't power a ship as big as the Prometheus, but maybe something about the size of a tel'tak..."

Casey didn't pretend he'd be able to follow any more of an in-depth discussion than that. "Okay. You guys keep at it. I'm going to rejoin Hertzberg."

His 2IC gave Casey a nod of acknowledgement as he made his way over to the Stargate to join him. Despite Hertzberg's outwardly brash and impulsive nature, the two of them were more alike than they were different, career military men comfortable in silence in a way their two excitable young scientists weren't. Spending a decade or two being shot at in a variety of unpleasant locations taught you to really appreciate those moments when everything was still, silent, and blessedly boring.

After a while, the Major shot him a sidelong look. "You gonna dial home?" he asked neutrally.

"It's still six hours 'til our next scheduled check-in," Casey said, equally noncommittal.

"They'll want to send a bigger science team," Hertzberg said.

"Yup."

"Brand'll get pissy about it."

"Brand'll have to learn to share his baby." Technically, a find this big more than justified dialling home ahead of schedule, but Casey was willing to let his scientists have a little more time to play yet. They'd earned it, and besides, the more chance they had to familiarise themselves with the site, the less chance they'd get it lifted straight out of their hands and be sent on to another planet while a different team took over. SG-6 was primarily an exploration team, and they seldom got to stick around to see their discoveries fully unearthed. Brand would be a whole lot more than pissy if he was forced to abandon this one.

Both men went onto higher alert at the sound of the first chevron engaging. They exchanged a glance, then took cover behind the nearest ridge as the dialling sequence completed and the wormhole whooshed into being.

"Our guys?" Casey murmured almost silently, as Hertzberg peered over the top of the rise. His 2IC dropped back down and grimly shook his head.

Casey risked a glance of his own, and felt his heart sink. Crap. Too many Jaffa for one team to take out - and as if that wasn't bad enough, they were accompanied by their Goa'uld master.

It was Baal.

"Major." Teyla came jogging toward him with a smile. John smiled back automatically, struck again by how the humans in this galaxy could be so alien, and yet so... not. Teyla's culture was not much like any he knew from Earth, and she sometimes gave him some very funny looks, and yet some aspects of body language seemed the same all over. Just how much of the way people talked and looked and acted had been pre-programmed into their evolution by the Ancients? It was a thorny question, and one that could lead to days of dwelling on biology, theology, and the meaning of life.

Fortunately, he'd never been much of a one for the dwelling.

"Where's McKay?" he asked.

"I believe he went to see Doctor Beckett for a second examination."

John rolled his eyes dramatically. "He's not still going on about that puffball thing from that jungle planet we visited?"

"It was an alien lifeform, Major." McKay gave him a sharp glower as he came puffing up to join them. His fitness had improved since he'd joined the field team - constantly running for your life had a way of doing that - but he was never going to be built for poetic motion. "The number of possible contagions - toxins - allergens..." He interrupted himself with a bout of suspiciously timed coughing.

Ford arrived, and eyed the spluttering McKay before raising an eyebrow in John's direction. Interesting how McKay's 'condition' had mysteriously vanished until he was back in the gate room about to embark on another mission.

"You were as healthy as a horse when you were demolishing that meatloaf a few hours ago," John pointed out. McKay's death glare resumed, although it was somewhat diminished by the accompanying watery eyes.

"Yes, well, I was greatly aided by the fact that I've lost all sense of taste and smell. What kind of animal produces meat that colour, anyway? And are we sure the biologists cleared it for human consumption? Because I'm pretty sure-"

"Major Sheppard." Elizabeth Weir emerged from her office, bringing a welcome early end to the diatribe. "Is your team ready to depart?" John gave her a nod.

"Yes, Ma'am. We're keen and ready to sample the many delights of..." He fumbled.

"Iaerona," Teyla supplied.

"Yes. Iaerona." He smiled winningly. Elizabeth gave him a look.

"Just try not to give away the planet this time," she suggested. John showed her his most innocent shrug.

They moved out, McKay continuing to cough sporadically. John listened with half an ear just in case it was actually something, but the coughs were shallow and squeaky, more like a tickle in the throat than an incipient chest infection. Most likely it was McKay's own state of panic closing up his throat.

"What are the odds the Iaeronans are going to want to trade with us?" Ford asked, as they made their way cautiously through the idyllic surroundings. The Stargate was situated in a meadow, and they were wading through knee high bluish grass. Teyla seemed untroubled by it and appeared to know where they were going, so John remained in a state of medium wariness.

He never hit the low end of that scale off-world. Too many pretty landscapes, friendly natives, and cute fluffy animals had turned out to be homicidal for him to relax until they were back on Atlantis.

Funny how quickly a partially explored ancient alien city that could have housed just about anything had turned into home.

"It is difficult to say," Teyla said, shrugging philosophically. "The people of Iaerona do not covet material things, but they are dedicated to the study of history. They believe that all things are part of the Cycle, and that it is right to be hunters of lesser creatures and prey to the higher. They do not believe it is our place to destroy the Wraith, only to evade them as best we can."

"Great." John wrinkled his nose. "The Zen approach to genocide."

"How are we going to convince them to give us the crystals if they won't want our technology and they aren't interested in fighting the Wraith?" Ford wanted to know.

"We'll just have to use our charm," John said sagely.

For some reason, that perfectly reasonable suggestion earned him two snorts and one of Teyla's knowing smiles.

"Colonel Carter!"

Sam paused in the middle of the hallway, on her way to a long overdue date with a hot shower, and wondered if it was too late to cultivate a bear with a sore head reputation to rival the General's. Regrettably, it probably was. She managed a polite smile and turned back.

"Colonel Carter." Doctor Lee came hurrying up to meet her. Something of a scientific jack of all trades who could be relied upon to have read some journal article somewhere about any obscure topic you cared to name, Lee pulled his fair share of fieldwork assignments, but had never really physically adapted to fit the role. He was a little round man who always gave the impression of scurrying about even when he wasn't.

At this particular point in time, he was. As he caught up with her, he produced a dog-eared square of folded paper from one of his many pockets. "Colonel. I just received a fax from one of the astrophysicists who helped us with the black hole data."

The classified nature of the Stargate project meant that very little of their scientific data ever travelled outside the mountain, but occasionally something would come up that matched closely enough to their cover story of Deep Space Radar Telemetry that they could afford to let other leaders in the field take a look at it. Sam took the proffered sheet of paper and scanned it.

"What is this?" she had to ask a moment later. It looked, at first glance, to be nothing more than a handwritten set of very basic physics exercises. But the equation casually scribbled in the margin was completely unrelated to the rest of the work - in fact, it was light years ahead of it. Sam raised her head to stare at Doctor Lee.

"We have no idea where it came from," he said, ruefully shaking his head. "Doctor Visnadi says it was forward to him by an old friend, who claims to have got it from one of his high school students. He passed it on to us because he thought it was remarkably similar to some of the theoretical work our scientists shared with him."

Sam frowned in disbelief. "This is way beyond high school. This is wormhole physics!" Accurate wormhole physics. Outside of the SGC, the only work in the field was by necessity strictly theoretical. It was possible for someone working independently to have made enough correct assumptions to write equations that described a genuine wormhole...

It just wasn't very likely.

"I know. And here's the thing." Doctor Lee gave her meaningful look. "Turns out this physics teacher friend of his works at Mountain Springs High School. Right here in Colorado."

Sam's stomach clenched in dismay. "We've got a leak," she realised grimly.