Dr. Rodney McKay: Seriously, am I the only one creeped out by that guy?

Maj. John Sheppard:They're politicians, Rodney - they're all creepy.

Dr. Rodney McKay: Margaret Thatcher wasn't creepy. OK - well, maybe a little.

In fact, she was like an aunt of mine - same hairstyle, facial structure, only my aunt

was much taller, and remarkably hirsute. Oddest thing: she had to shave twice a day.

Chapter Two – Deja Vu

"That went well."

The entire group of people in the control room looked at Rodney who shrugged. "I told you they would say that, in fact that Ancient woman Telia or whatever her name was said exactly the same thing the last time. Although we do have the advantage of knowing about their secret lock out console now."

"Which is deactivated," Sheppard said firmly.

There was a slightly uncomfortable silence after his comment and Sheppard marched over to where Rodney was sitting with a smug look still on his face and his arms folded.

"It is deactivated, right Rodney?"

Rodney shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "Well... everything was up in the air and th.. then we had to rescue Mr Woolsey and General O'Neill...a..a..and there was fixing the damage the Asurans did to the city systems and cleaning up the bodies ..."

"Rodney!"

Rodney shrank into his seat and winced as Sheppard loomed menacingly over him. "It...it.. may have slipped my mind in all the commotion and relief and stuff. You know, the relief we were all still alive and..and not dead?"

"Rodney!"

Rodney slunk off the chair and slid behind another larger console at the back of the control room. He tapped in some frantic commands. "I can fix it, all I need to do is re-route the power couplings from the main power grid to the console and that should stop it from being activated or at least should prevent them from accessing the main power grid." Teyla and Ronon who had appeared in the control room with Major Lorne in tow exchanged a grin as the 'secret' lock-out console suddenly kept magically appearing out of the floor in the main gate room, disappearing back down and then back up again as Rodney tapped in command after command.

Woolsey raised an eyebrow. "Should? You mean you're not sure that this will stop them from using it to lock us out?"

Rodney looked up indignantly. "Of course it will, I just have to...oh no! Oh no... oh no...oh no!" He lifted his hands off the keyboard and stared in horror at the screen.

Sheppard strode over to where he was sitting. He bent over McKay and looked at the screen. "Should it be doing that?"

"I don't know! I was just... oh no!"

Sheppard restrained himself from slapping McKay upside the back of his head. "What did you do Rodney?" Rodney opened his mouth to protest and Sheppard forestalled him."And stop saying 'oh no', that isn't helping. What did you do?"

Rodney's face was white. "I...I think I just gave control of the console to the Lantean ship." The mouths of everyone in the control room dropped open and Rodney jumped out of the seat and went to look at the gate room floor where the console was busy rising up again and this time, he could see that the controls were flashing.

"Oh no..." he whispered.

Sheppard grabbed him by his shoulders and pushed him in the direction of the stairs going down to the gate room. McKay stumbled halfway down the stairs and then stopped and looked back pleadingly at Sheppard and everyone else who were now at the top of the stairs. Sheppard pulled him down the rest of the stairs and firmly dragged him over to the console. McKay stood in front of it. "Oh no!"

That was the last straw, Sheppard, bereft of breakfast or even a cup of coffee, lost the last tenuous hold on his temper. "Can you deactivate it from here, preferably before they come waltzing in through the gate in their super duper cruiser and throw us all out bag and baggage...again? Can it even get through the gate? Perhaps we should get Zelenka down here to help you since all you seem to be doing is saying 'oh no'?"

"Puhlease, I don't need Zelenka's help to do this." At the threat of dragging a scientist who Rodney considered to be his subordinate down to fix his mistake, he got on his knees and ripped off a small panel at the back of the console. "If I just take this control crystal out that should..."

"I don't care what you do, just fix it Rodney, I don't want to move my belongings to the next galaxy every time a Lantean ship shows up, however small, to evict us! I thought all of the consoles in the gate room and the control room had already been analysed when we first got here."

Rodney sat back on his heels and with an aggrieved look on his face; a look that Sheppard and most of the expedition it had to be said, were more than familiar with. "Oh...so it's my fault? I have to do everything around here? Fix it Rodney...make it work Rodney...what does it do Rodney. What am I, the great Atlantis oracle or something?"

Sheppard looked up to the balcony of the control room where Woolsey was standing with his shoulders hunched, watching events. He gave Woolsey a 'can I slap him?' pleading look. A small understanding smile stretched Woolsey's lips, but he gave a small, regretful shake of the head.

Sheppard kept the stripped remnants of his temper under control with great difficulty."The clock is ticking Rodney. You keep telling us how great you are...how much more intelligent and qualified you are, it's what the IOA pay you the big bucks for, so earn your money. Stop them from getting control of Atlantis...oh...wait... they already have control of Atlantis! Can we get control back please? You messed it up, you sort it out Rodney. Tick tock!"

He stomped over to the stairs and sat down, his furious gaze on that blasted console which was still blinking away to itself and the figure beside it busy pulling out control crystals one after the other and then replacing them in a different order. Lights in part of the city were winking out and others were coming on, in places that the expedition hadn't even fully explored yet. Sheppard could hear the city's usual hum change, become deeper, different. He wasn't sure how efficiently this Akantha person could control the city from her ship, but she was certainly trying her damnedest.

Radek Zelenka had come up to the control to see what was happening, since none of his requests for information had been answered over the radio system. He quietly sat down on the stairs beside the enraged Sheppard. "What has he done now? We are losing control of systems all over the city."

Sheppard's scowl grew deeper. "I know. He gave the Lanteans who are hammering at the gate to come in, control of Atlantis. He's trying to shut the lock out console down."

"Why did he...? Do prdele!" " Zelenka sighed and pushed his glasses up his nose. "Never mind, I have a feeling I do not want to know."

"There!" Rodney sat back on his heels and grinned in triumph. The lock-out console did indeed stop blinking, but the lights in the gate room and the control room went out leaving them in complete darkness. The emergency lighting came on after about five seconds and bathed the area in a spooky, bluish light. Klaxons blared. Sheppard groaned and buried his head in his hands. Zelenka patted him reassuringly on the arm.

"I think I know what he has done," he announced and trotted over to where Rodney was standing near the console, looking confusedly around him and input a command into the console.

The gate started to dial.

"Dr McKay!" Woolsey barked from out of the darkness.

Rodney looked up. "I didn't do that! Zelenka touched it! It was his fault!" he protested wildly, stabbing his forefinger vehemently at Zelenka who had calmly walked over to the opposite side of the room and stooped down beside a small control panel in the side of the gate room wall. He opened it up and fiddled with the control crystals. The lighting system came on in full and the console made a small innocuous humming sound, switched itself off and sunk back into the floor. The seventh chevron locked on the gate and the blue event horizon kawooshed outwards.

"We have control of the city again Mr Woolsey," the young technician, Bob Lawrence, said excitedly.

"Iris up Mr Lawrence," ordered Woolsey. "Let's see what our Lantean friends have to say this time."

ooOoo

Akantha stared at the console in shock, she'd established a link between the lock-out system in the Atlantis gate room as if by magic; like someone handing it to her on a plate, but because of the damage to the Eurybia she had not been able to fully get a lock on it and by the time they had re-routed some systems on the small cruiser, the link to the lock-out console had just literally winked out of commission.

"What did they do?" she seethed. "I had it, I had the link, we could have accessed Atlantis at our leisure and ousted the usurpers." She slammed both of her fists onto the console and Phoros winced a little as the lights shivered, went out and then came back on again.

"Akantha...being violent with the cruiser controls will not help. We need assistance, we have wasted too much time with these attempts to take over control of the city. Let us do what we should have done in the first place. Let us ask the humans for assistance; let us negotiate some peaceful terms with them and perhaps they will allow us to repair the cruiser."

Somehow the calmness and rationality behind the High Marshal's suggestions only served to enrage her more. "This is our city," she shouted. "They do not have the right to bar us from entering and I will not ask permission to enter my own home!"

"It has not been your home for almost ten thousand years Akantha," Phoros said softly. "A great deal has obviously happened since you first set out from the city to patrol the outer regions and you had been in stasis on the battleship for many thousands of years before the Wraith attacked you and before you rescued me. We were lucky that any of us managed to get out of stasis alive at all."

Akantha blinked away angry tears. "Do I need to remind you how many of my people I lost? We lost nearly an entire battleship crew, trapped in stasis, some of whom I had served with for a long time; they were family." She turned away from him in disgust. "Why should you understand? None of your family or close kin were aboard." The last was said with a certain amount of venom and Phoros drew back.

"No indeed, Captain, none of my family and close kin were aboard your ship, but I did witness the destruction of everyone on my planet, including my wife, my daughter, my son and my grandchildren all taken and murdered by the Wraith." He drew his robes around him and left the command section of the cruiser, his expression was unreadable.

The other officer cast a look at Akantha, who set her shoulders and pulled a mutinous face. "That was ill done of you Captain," he said quietly. "Shall I open a channel and hail them? High Marshal Phoros is right, we need to ask them for help, bursting in there and demanding things of these people will give us nothing and we only now have twenty five minutes until life support dies and we die with it. They seem like reasonable people and obviously have the right gene to operate the city systems. Perhaps they are descendants of our people who left for earth in the Milky Way galaxy and at least they are not Wraith."

Akantha snorted. "As if those creatures would have the ability to activate Atlantis! Very well, we will...negotiate with them, but only because we have no choice. When we get into the city, I will not promise anything and there are many ways to gain control scattered throughout the city."

The officer's gaze was inexorable. "Shall I hail them Captain?" he persisted, his facial expression wooden.

She flung herself into one of the seats. "Do what you will."

The officer sighed and opened a channel.

ooOoo

Akantha had not been the Captain of the battleship all those thousands of years ago; she had merely been a very junior officer and also very young in years and experience. It had actually been an act of desperation hat she was brought out of stasis before any of the senior command crew; the medical officer had been brought out of stasis automatically by the computer in order to see to recovering everyone else. The command crew were meant to be recovered from the Captain down before any others, since the Captain and the officers had the command codes to activate the ship properly. However thousands of years of degradation had left the Captain and all of his officers, but one, dead in their stasis pods. They recovered Akantha, but she was now an officer in possession of the command codes among many non-officer crewmen and women. So she took command and promoted many of the senior crewmen to officers. She needed their expertise and when she was younger, she had listened to their advice and become a seasoned officer, although she was very shaken and enraged at the deaths of those she considered to be family. Things had changed since then.

Many others had been subsequently lost in the ensuing battle with a Wraith hive ship which had tracked them using a distress beacon which had been activated because the Battleship had taken some damage in an asteroid belt. With no crew awake to shut it down, the Wraith had picked it up on their long range sensors and headed swiftly for the area in space the battleship was. They had detected no life signs aboard, but to find an almost intact Alteran battleship lifeless in the middle of space was too good an opportunity to pass up. The technology alone was worth the journey.

Then they detected the life signs.

Young Captain Akantha had a major battle on her hands within an hour of waking up and taking command; inexperienced and unseasoned in battle, she had to rely on the others for strategy. Shields were only at sixty percent, which would hold for a while, but the weapons platform was damaged and their one technician battled to get the chair online. Even then they did not have a full complement of drones. Once the Wraith detected the life signs they redoubled their efforts to reach and take the ship. The Alterans were badly out-gunned and out-numbered; they had lost all but five personnel in the brief fire-fight and there was only one thing they could do. They set the self destruct, boarded a gate-ship, cloaked themselves and fled.

The massive explosion from the battleship knocked them into the orbit of the planet Ixos, an Alteran world reduced to rubble by the Wraith thousands of years earlier, where they found a small diplomatic cruiser in a slowly decaying orbit around one of the planet's two moons. The only life sign on board turned out to be diplomat and politician High Marshal Phoros in stasis. Originally en route for Atlantis, he remained in the cruiser while the crew had gone to the surface in the cruiser's only gate-ship to try and help the beleaguered planet or at least bring some survivors on board.

Phoros had remained cloaked and watched in horror as he planet was razed to the ground and his people sucked up into the darts as food for the hive ship. Among those people were all of his family. The cruiser's gate-ship did not return and he assumed it was destroyed. He knew that he could not pilot the cruiser through a space filled with Wraith on his own. All he could do was hope that one of the other Alteran ships would come to his rescue. He dared not send a sub-space message asking for help in case the Wraith picked it up.

There was only one option for him. The cruiser was equipped with ten stasis pods, enough for the crew of the cruiser. He set the cloaked cruiser in a low orbit around one of the moons of Ixos and put himself into one of the pods. Only his grief and rage would keep him alive now. Eventually an Alteran ship would find him and if the Wraith were still alive, he would find them and destroy them all.

He was found, but thousands of years later by the small gate ship from the battleship fleeing the Wraith. The cloak around the cruiser had long since failed and they had detected the one life sign which was Phoros. They boarded the cruiser and parked the gate-ship in the loading bay; they then woke Phoros out of stasis and immediately headed to a small backwater planet which had a cloaked and automated repair facility still intact under the surface. The fact that there were no living things on the planet had meant that the Wraith had ignored it; there was simply nothing to see and therefore nothing to cull.

Akantha took command of the cruiser Eurybia and set course for Atlantis.

ooOoo

"Open a channel Mr Lawrence," Woolsey said quietly. The screen lit up, this time is showed an older male Lantean with a worried and harassed expression on his face.

"It's not the same crazy lady as before," Sheppard wisecracked out of the corner of his mouth. Ronon snickered.

Woolsey suppressed a smile and faced the Lantean. "What can we do for you?"

The Lantean seemed to struggle for the right words. "My apologies for the earlier misunderstanding Mr...Woolsey? I can assure you that we mean none of you any harm and we do not have the numbers to force control of the city. We are just grateful that Atlantis is under the control of people like yourselves rather than a sworn enemy." Akantha snorted loudly in derision, but the Lantean male smoothly cut back in. "Captain Akantha has been under a great deal of strain in her attempts to bring us here safely. Shem and indeed the rest of us, need to rest and recuperate. We had hoped that the city would be a refuge for us. There are only six of us and we have travelled long to get here; longer than we intended, but there were many Wraith hive ships along the way. Our ship is damaged, we now have under twenty minutes left before our life support fails. I ask...no I plead with you for help. We can fix our ship using the facilities on Atlantis and then we will go on our way."

"Didn't look much like a misunderstanding to me," Sheppard said in a low voice. "The crazy lady looked like she understood the situation just fine."

Woolsey sighed. "Colonel Sheppard," he said in a warning voice; and then in a lower voice, "We can't turn them away Colonel, we're not just a military expedition, we are also here to make diplomatic overtures to the people of this Galaxy and if that has to include helping the 'crazy lady' as you call her, then so be it."

"If you're gonna let them into the City, they have to be guarded," Sheppard insisted in a louder voice.

"And we would expect nothing less Colonel," the Lantean man interrupted.

"Can your cruiser fit through the gate?"

The Lantean smiled ruefully. "Alas no, we were relying on our code letting us through the city shield and into the cruiser bay."

"Wait! Cruiser bay? There's a cruiser bay?" Both Sheppard and McKay spoke together and then looked at each other.

"I thought we explored everywhere." Sheppard said. There was a gleam in his eye at the thought of perhaps a cruiser bay with fully equipped and operational cruisers.

Rodney rubbed his chin. "There's that shielded area in the north pier. We've been working on getting past the shields but so much else has been going on we left it on the back burner."

"Well let's get it back on the front burner Rodney!"

They both turned to the Lantean who was waiting patiently for an answer. He nodded. "Yes, our fellow Lanteans must have shielded the bay in order to protect the remaining cruisers and used the personnel carrying warships to take everyone into the Milky Way galaxy. If you let me through the city shield I will land the ship and show you."

"Now that's what I like to hear." Sheppard to turned to Bob Lawrence. "Let 'em through." Lawrence looked at Richard Woolsey who looked irked at having the command decision taken away from him.

"You may let them through Mr Lawrence, but first, let's have a team of Marines waiting outside the bay doors please."

Sheppard looked shamefaced. "Yeah, that too, Major Lorne?"

Woolsey looked at the relieved Lantean, exhaustion was etched into his face. "And we can discuss you all moving on once you have all rested, this is your home after all." He signalled for Lawrence to let them through the shield and then cut the connection between Atlantis and the Lantean cruiser. "Now let's see just see what happens from here. Rest assured Colonel, I am not just going to give them the run of the city. We still don't know what many of the control rooms scattered through the city actually do, there could be many ways for them to override us. I suggest you get to the north pier as part of our welcoming party."

"On my way." Sheppard left the control room followed by a complaining Rodney, a calm Teyla and a Ronon prepared for anything, energy weapon at the ready as always.

ooOoo

The Lantean man leaned back in the control chair and smiled at the disgruntled and glowering Akantha. "There is a saying... you catch more flies with honey than vinegar Akantha."

"We shall see," she said coldly. "Once we are in the city, I will make no promises, we will take control of the city as soon as we are able. Even though we are few, once we have changed the command codes, they will be able to do nothing."