Maj. John Sheppard: That's her!
Dr. Rodney McKay: That's the Wraith?
Maj. John Sheppard: Yeah.
Dr. Rodney McKay: Wow... She's hot! I mean seriously hot!
Maj. John Sheppard: Rodney, you're drooling over a Wraith!
Dr. Rodney McKay: I know, I... disgust myself sometimes. ~~ Stargate Atlantis.

Chapter One – It's a lovely day today

It was going to be one of those days; he could feel it in his bones. One of those days where he was heading towards yet another spectacular lapse of judgement. Not that he'd had much of that commodity since coming to Atlantis, instead he seemed to bounce from one disaster to another and most of them brought on by the reckless decisions he often made. Someone had to do the dirty stuff and make all the risky calls, right?

He pursed his lips, perhaps it was just the fact that the past few days hadn't brought any disasters with them. Off-world visits had been uneventful; there was no sign of anyone trying to destroy them or the city... it wasn't right and it was making him very nervous. His stomach rumbled as if in agreement with him. The mess hall and breakfast were calling and if there was any justice in the universe, he would get there before McKay snagged all the bacon.

The subject of his musings was already seated at one of the tables near the long picture windows that looked out over the ocean surrounding the city of Atlantis. Sunlight struck in strong shafts through the windows and the turquoise surface of the water glittered with sparkling silver lights like diamonds. Rodney McKay, head scientist of the expedition force was busy ploughing his way through a tray so filled with food that only the upper part of his face was visible, which was probably a good thing, thought Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard, military commander of the Atlantis expedition. Rodney masticating massive platefuls of food while gesticulating and talking about his various projects wasn't the best eating experience or conducive to a good appetite.

On this occasion a very reluctant Dr Radek Zelenka was keeping him company, stolidly plodding through his morning muesli or whatever it was while Rodney alternately waxed enthusiastic, while waving his egg smeared fork around, and kept up his usual jibes about him being the most intelligent man in Atlantis if not in the entire universe. Sheppard winced and tried to look as though he hadn't seen them sitting there; mentally he was busy marching to where Major Lorne and some of his Marines were sitting laughing uproariously at some mindless military joke. Specialist Ronon Dex, another member of Sheppard's team was with them and even as Rodney hailed him loudly, Sheppard looked longingly at them.

Crap, he's seen me, Sheppard pasted a wide grin on his face and tried for an ingenuous expression. "Morning Rodney." He sat down and nodded at Zelenka who offered him an amused grin; he had seen the reluctant look on Sheppard's face.

Rodney dove straight in without a greeting. "I've figured out why the naquadah generators haven't been pushing out enough power and I may have a power solution to the lack of zed pee ems." Sheppard watched in fascination as another forkful of bacon and egg was shovelled into McKay's mouth and admired, with a certain amount of horror, the expertise that was displayed as he managed to talk around the food.

"That's zee pee ems Rodney. I need coffee," he said relishing the idea of annoying the Canadian born McKay for at least a couple of seconds. He got up to get himself a cup from the pot that was constantly bubbling away on the hot plate, but Rodney managed to grasp a handful of his BDU trousers.

"Wait, wait, wait! I haven't explained yet!"

Sheppard looked down at him. "I know, which is why I need coffee before you start gibbering, so I can stay awake."

McKay sat back and folded his arms. "Oh that's nice...gibbering? I give you the benefit of the massive amount of brain power, knowledge and information I possess and you call it gibbering? Like I was some kind of chimpanzee or something!"

Zelenka gave something like a snort of laughter which he turned into a cough and Rodney glared at him. "Don't you have an elsewhere to be Zelenka?"

Sheppard took the opportunity of practically running to the coffee pot while Rodney was engaged in sniping at Zelenka but Richard Woolsey, head of the expedition, had got there before him and just poured the last drops into his mug. He smiled apologetically at Sheppard. "The early bird catches the worm, or the coffee pot, Colonel Sheppard."

Sheppard deflated against the hot plate. "I really need..."

But whatever it was that Sheppard really needed remained unfulfilled as klaxons sounded throughout Atlantis. "Unscheduled off-world activation!" A detached voice announced over the tannoy system. "Mr Woolsey and Colonel Sheppard to the control room please!"

Woolsey touched his earpiece. "We're on our way."

Sheppard cast a longing look at the brimming new pot of coffee that the chef was putting on the hot plate, cursed under his breath and followed Woolsey. "This had better be good," he muttered to no-one in particular. As he strode up towards the control room, he could hear Rodney skittering after them probably waving the last of the bacon and egg stuffed between two slices of Tava bread, still pontificating away to anyone who would listen. Sheppard heaved a deep sigh; he still hadn't had either coffee or breakfast and it was going to be a very long day.

Teyla Emmagan, another member of Sheppard's team and a native of the planet Athos, was waiting patiently in the control room, calm and seemingly as completely at home amidst the Ancients' technology as she was in a tent. She smiled and inclined her head towards Woolsey and Sheppard.

The gate's blue chevrons were lit up and the iris was up. Sheppard forgot for a moment that Woolsey was in charge. "What have we got? Any ID code? Maybe it's the SGC, we don't have any teams off-world at the moment."

"No code sir," the operative frowned at the console. "At least not any code that we recognise, but they keep trying it and it isn't Stargate Command."

"Let 'em try to come through then. It's obviously somebody up to no good, Wraith maybe," growled Sheppard. "The iris will take care of them, but we have a big problem if they have a hive ship up there in orbit."

"It can't be the Wraith," Rodney objected. "Firstly they don't know that we moved the city to Earth or where we moved Atlantis to when we came back to Pegasus, and secondly they wouldn't have a code to try in the first place! And there is no hive ship in orbit around the planet, the long range sensors would have detected it, or them." He sat down at another console and started to tap commands into the system. Eventually he looked up and looked around at them. "Aha!"

"Aha? What the hell does that mean Rodney? Wraith? God, I hate it when he does that." Sheppard groaned in an aside to Teyla who hid a smile.

Woolsey calmly took control. "Have you found something Dr McKay?"

"It's an old code," Rodney declared triumphantly. "I thought it looked familiar. Remember when we first got here there were some codes in the command line? Well they were the original codes to open the iris, input into the gate system to recognise returning Lanteans and let them into the city. We changed them all and, by the way, the detectors are showing that it's a single small craft outside, bigger than a jumper, probably a cruiser of some kind, but definitely Ancient in technology. There are six life signs aboard."

"Are you telling us that there are six Lanteans out there knocking at the gate to come in?" Sheppard demanded.

Richard Woolsey sighed. After all this time he still hadn't managed to instil into Sheppard that while he might be the military commander on the base, he wasn't the boss. Sheppard was a nice guy and a good commander in most areas except in the one area that really mattered. Like most military, he didn't give credit to non military people when it came to decision making and leadership.

It was the one issue that had been constantly repeated over and over again in Dr Elizabeth Weir's reports. Eventually, as leader of the expedition, she had succeeded in getting a certain measure of respect and affection from Sheppard by sheer force of will, but in spite of that, he had still tried to override her on many occasions sometimes to disastrous effect and also over-protected her to a very large degree. It had irritated her a great deal, and she'd had to use a great deal of her diplomatic expertise in order to make him listen to her without there being a loss of temper on both sides.

Eventually he had capitulated on many matters, at least on the surface, only for her to find that he had done his own thing anyway, usually getting him and his team and often the whole of the expedition and the city into massive amounts of trouble. The one piece of advice that General O'Neill had given him before he took over from Colonel Samantha Carter as leader of the Atlantis expedition was that Woolsey would have to be very firm with Sheppard and not give him his head just because he thought that he knew better.

A task that was proving more and more difficult than either of them had imagined. Sheppard's tendency to jump first and ask questions later, coupled with Rodney McKay's almost insufferable arrogance, however technically justified it might be, was proving to be a lethal combination. Out of all the Atlantis teams, SA1, Sheppard's team, would generally be the one in trouble; more often than not, life threatening sorts of trouble. The fact that his team had been incredibly lucky in getting themselves out of impossible situations only added to the notion that they were invincible and somehow right no matter what the situation was.

"Colonel Sheppard... please." He turned to Rodney. "Dr McKay, how possible is it that these people are Ancients from Atlantis and not just another race managing to use Ancient technology, and if so, where have they been during the last ten thousand years of the city being shut down and submerged? More importantly, how did they manage to find us? We are now far from the original planet that Atlantis rested called home."

Rodney put his fingers up to his temples and frowned in apparent concentration. "Gee... let me see. No...no...nothing's coming." He flung his hands up in irritation. "I don't know, okay? It...it's possible that there are more Ancients out there ambling around, we've got no way of knowing how many or where they might have been. We've had experience before of Lantean warships floating around with their crew in stasis; we've even had Replicators posing as Lanteans and trying to take over Atlantis... and ….oh...let's not forget the actual Lanteans who came here, took over the city, kicked us all back to earth with the exception of you and General O'Neill and then proceeded in their extreme arrogance to ignore all of the warnings we gave them about the Replicators because apparently their huge genius frontal lobes had put a code into the Replicator base line systems which meant they were incapable of harming any Lanteans! Remember them? The Lanteans who ended up dead at the hands of the Replicators?"

Woolsey marvelled at the fact that Rodney had come out with his diatribe apparently all in one breath, but before he could actually reply Sheppard once again jumped in.

"All right," Sheppard said as patiently as he could. "Let's say that these beings trying to enter are Lanteans, we have no guarantee that they won't try to do the same thing do we?"

"Sir?" the technician at the gate console looked up uncertainly at Sheppard, then at Woolsey.

"What is it Mr Lawrence?" Woolsey hastily spoke before Sheppard could draw another breath in order to interrupt again. The gate was still open, but the insistent attempts to enter the old code had stopped.

"Sir, they've stopped trying the code, we're now being hailed."

"Can we get it on screen or is it just voice?" asked Woolsey, Sheppard opened his mouth to say something, but Woolsey cut him off with a sharp gesture.

"It's both Sir."

Woolsey pursed his lips. "On screen Mr Lawrence." The technician input some commands and the screen above them crackled into life.

ooOoo

"Atlantis has returned our hail Captain Akantha," the young officer seated at the comms console turned around to face the tall, fair haired woman standing just to the rear of the main controls.

Akantha frowned slightly. "Good, perhaps now we can get some explanations. I feared that the city had somehow been compromised by the enemy, although this does not explain why the city is no longer on our original planet. The Wraith would have been unable to fly it. It has taken us far too long to find them, we have lost one battleship and this cruiser has taken too much damage, we must access the Atlantis repair bay. We cannot afford to waste time, our life support systems will fail in just under two hours."

A tall, thin and rather stooped man, dark-hair shot through with silver placed his hand on her shoulder, trying to calm her anger down. "Peace child. We do not know what exactly has happened. It is more than possible that our people have altered the codes for good reason, just as they moved the city. Indeed, it could be that the Wraith found them and forced them into such drastic actions. Let us see what they have to say first before we accuse."

Akantha forced a smile onto her face and shrugged his hand away. She did not know why she disliked High Marshal Phoros, but his touch made her shrink inside. It wasn't just because he was a representative from the Alterran planet Ixos, there was just something rather slimy about him, but then politicians tended to seem like that to the military. She had to admit that on the various worlds that they had visited looking for assistance in the form of their own technology which had often been abandoned on those worlds when the Wraith became too powerful, his considerable abilities in negotiating had kept matters calm when the natives of those worlds protested at them utilising various items of Ancient technology. Items which had often provided protection for those people and which they removed, leaving the planet vulnerable to culling by the Wraith and attack by any other enemy who chose to land there.

His efforts had kept their Aurora class battleship working for a long time before it finally became irreparable; long enough to visit Ixos and realise that the planet had been razed to the ground. She had never forgotten the look on the High Marshal's face when he saw the devastation of his planet and its people.

Now, he was the only Ixian left, as far as they knew. They had seen for themselves the destruction waged by the Wraith, their own genetic construction, as they travelled from the edge of the Pegasus Galaxy towards the only place that they could think of to flee to.

Atlantis, the sunken city, submerged for its own safety until the return of the Lantean people. It was their beacon of hope and now they were locked out and forced to plead for help like refugees at their own door. She gritted her teeth with frustration and looked at the young Lantean lieutenant.

"Open a channel Timos, let us hear what they have to say for themselves," she said stiffly.

Phoros sighed, they were all Alterrans or Ancients as they had come to be known in the galaxies they travelled to, but each planet they had settled on in the Pegasus galaxy had formed its own little group. Akantha was originally from Atlantis, as were the other four. The Lanteans from Atlantis had always set themselves apart and tended to be rather smug. He just hoped that whoever had found the city and woken it up were up to dealing with that kind of arrogance.

"This is Captain Akantha of the Lantean Triton class cruiser Eurybia, to whom am I speaking?"

A face appeared on the screen, not a Lantean. Akantha felt a shock ripple through her and knew that all of the others had drawn in a collective harsh breath. Human, to be sure, but definitely not Lantean. The city had been compromised and entered. She could barely speak through stiff lips and her growing anger.

"Who are you and what are you doing in our city?" she demanded.