Episode Three- The Ruins- Chapter Seventeen

Posted on August 23, 2013 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Seventeen

Teyla steps through the gate and onto the fertile soils of her people’s new planet.  The forest, emerald rich with ferns growing fresh and young from the end of spring, mosses finally free from the threat of frost or cold dew, and the leaves of the trees both pine and otherwise, stretches out on either side of the coffee-colored path of turned soil.  The DHD sits nicely in the middle of it all like a welcoming sentinel.  Kanaan steps out beside her, bouncing their son in his arms.  The gate shuts down behind them.  She looks back at the empty space where the wormhole had once been.  The same friendly sight welcomes them on the other side although with a wider greeting of soil as the forest path widens on the other side.  She feels it, this place surrounds her with warmth and welcome.  She clutches the long, black, rectangular box to her stomach just a little bit closer then looks forward again.  Colonel Sheppard and the rest of her friends, Ronon, Rodney, and Jennifer, part before the small family.  She nods at them then her and her family start off towards their village.  The journey is long and quiet except for the gurgling of her young son, Torren.  A comforting sound.  She glances at him, tends to his wanting voice, his curious mind, with Kanaan.  Her child.  Named for her father.  She reaches up and gently strokes Torren’s cheek with the side of her finger as he shows his father a leaf that the breeze had drifted down onto the top of Kanaan’s head.  Kanaan smiles.  She smiles.  And they continue to walk.

As they near the village, she can hear it, the sounds of a simple village life.  Children running through fields screaming with laughter, their parents tilling the soil or washing clothes or arranging hunting parties or cleaning fresh kills.  The simple life she had grown up with, the life her father had given her before she lost him and the life her mother gave her before she too was lost to the wraith.  Or perhaps not, but Teyla knows now that that is not possible either.  Let alone had Lieutenant Kenmore brought back with her the very thing Teyla has been keeping so desperately close to her ever since the moment Major Lorne had passed it to her, but the headstrong Lieutenant had also brought back with her four small portable servers full of information she had downloaded from every level of that despicable place as she had set charges around it.

Teyla had read the Lieutenant’s account of her return actions.  In the morgue, the Asgard had followed the Lieutenant.  She had managed to ‘jerry-rig,’ as she put it, the transporter’s controls in an attempt to stall the soldiers pursuing her.  During that time she had downloaded the morgue’s database onto one of the servers and set charges inside the room, on the computers, and outside the room, wherever the lifesigns detector’s map indicated structural integrity.  When the Asgard finally managed to ‘break in,’ as she again put it, Lieutenant Kenmore took the only other out she had in that area.  She jumped onto the metal slab, pulled the lever, carefully avoided both the machine’s blade and the Asgard’s fire, and let the slab throw her into the chute it deposited the bodies of what Teyla believes are its many victims.  Apparently the chute led to furnaces that led to the Asgard’s generators.  Lieutenant Kenmore had described the sight using a phrase that meant nothing to Teyla but had given both John and Rodney grave pause:  ‘Soylent green is made of people.’  She also described it as a ‘gold mine’ for planting explosives.  Then she used another transporter to carry her along the rest of her dangerous journey through the Asgard outpost.  Downloading databases and planting explosives and escaping run-ins with the Asgard in their formidable armored suits as she went and finally enduring that torturous chair and its operator again before returning to Athosia and subsequently Atlantis with the prize Teyla now treasures in her arms.  She glances at her son once more.  Her father’s legacy.

The trees part before Teyla and she sees the fields and her village.  Smoke is rising from some fires cooking meals or heating water for the day’s wash.  People are pushing or pulling large carts of firewood.  A few minutes later and she and her family and friends are being heralding back into the village by children dancing around them, laughing, and walked in by some of the farmers Teyla has known all her life and known her father before then.  She smiles to be back in their warm and loving arms and tears touch her eyes to know she is bringing what remained of her father back to their warm and loving arms as well.  Many of those who had come out to greet her knew and remembered him well.  As she approaches the heart of the village, she sees Halling talking to Major Lorne who she is surprised to see has apparently come before them and, as a villager moves, Teyla sees Lieutenant Kenmore standing beside him with her son standing in front of her, her hands on his small shoulders as the boy looks around him.  Teyla stops and stares.  It is the first time she has seen the Lieutenant since she was being urgently tended to by Jennifer and her staff.  Teyla watches Halling and the Major converse as Kenmore and her son look on then Halling reaches out his hands to Major Lorne, clasps his shoulders, and leans forward.  The Major accepts the traditional Athosian greeting between friends.  Halling then turns and offers Kenmore the same greeting, she looks to Lorne, he nods, and then she allows Halling to complete his sentiment again.  Halling then kneels down and repeats the ritual with her son who does not hesitate to return the sentiment peacefully meant.  Then Halling rises.  Major Lorne bows his head and they part from Halling’s company.  The Major walks pass Teyla with a polite acknowledgement of his head that Teyla returns with a simple smile and a nod of her own but the Lieutenant does not look over as she walks on Lorne’s other side with her son beside her.  Teyla watches her go, desperately wanting the Lieutenant to look over at her, all she wants is to be able to tell the Lieutenant ‘Thank you,’ but the Lieutenant does not, her son does, but the Lieutenant does not.

Reluctantly giving up, Teyla turns back around to see Halling walking towards her with a serious solemn expression on his face, Jinto, his son, at his side.  And Teyla allows her tears to flow free as she walks forward to meet them, her light green-colored, flowing dress shifting silently around the glide of her feet.  When she performed the Ring Ceremony for her dear and old friend Charin’s burial, she had always known she would wear it again but she had never dreamed she would ever wear it again to bury her father.  But as Halling had pointed out when she first contacted him with the news, as well as the rest of what remained of her people, Teyla’s father, Torren Emmagan, did not die at the hands of the Wraith but had lived beyond their malevolence.

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Episode Three- The Ruins- Chapter Sixteen

Posted on August 16, 2013 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Sixteen

Six and a half  hours after running into the blissful surroundings of Atlantis and her ‘Incoming travelers’ warning klaxons and her plethora of armed guards lining the perimeter of the gateroom and the bottom of her stairs leading up to the command center, Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard casually strolls through the blissfully quiet hallways of Atlantis.  He’s enjoying just strolling through the silence of the hallways.  He doesn’t mind these hallways being empty and not running into anybody.  This is home.  It’s nice just being in some place that doesn’t look like big ole goons are going to come around the corner any time now, tackle him to the ground, and wrap him up in a nice little white straightjacket and take him back to his cell.  And when he did walk past some people in the more frequented primary hallways, he enjoyed listening to the random snippets of conversations he’d catch as they passed each other and he either nodded or said ‘Hi’ to each and every single one of them with a heartfelt smile on his face.  He caught some weird looks for that from time to time but he didn’t let that shake him from continuing doing it anyway.  He’d been doing this ever since Doctor Jennifer Keller released him from the medical wing.  John hadn’t told anybody but he’d been afraid that that torture chair had messed them up in more ways than just the obvious one and then there was the little case of what those Asgard might have done to Kenmore and he while they’d been unconscious in that cell for all those hours.  But according to Keller, nothing is wrong in them.  The chair’s effects had apparently dissipated as soon as they went through the wall.  Those spider leg needles’ marks had already healed up which Rodney had attributed to the chemical cocktail they’d injected into their brains anyway, that no one not even an Ancient could sustain putting up with that sort of damage no matter how minute to their brain repeatedly without suffering long term tissue damage.  Without having anything else to go on but acknowledging that aside from Kenmore no one else could heal the way something like that would require, Keller agreed with McKay; she wasn’t finding anything wrong with them.  And so they’d all been released with a clean bill of health, even Kenmore although she’d been held back about an hour longer than the rest of them.  Without any injuries to tend to, the doc had had to content herself and her idling staff with taking numerous samples of and running tests on whatever those bodily fluids were that that arm had splattered all over Kenmore, but even with that, she wasn’t finding anything initially wrong.  The Ancient computers weren’t detecting anything either.  Lord knows Atlantis’ hyper-sensitive quarantine protocols would have kicked in almost immediately.

He’s lapped the city four times now, soaking in every facet of the place from the farthest extent of the open-air piers, which he had particularly enjoyed walking dangerously close to the edges of, to the top of the jumper bay, which he’d actually stopped and sucked in as much fresh Lantean air as he thought both his lungs and his mind could handle before coming back in to the city, to the crowded comfort of the mess hall, where he initially spooked people with his smiling nods and hellos, to the contented, familial quiet of the living quarters in the outer areas beyond the gateroom, where he heard all manner of things coming from the other side of the walls like laughter or music and stumbled across Teyla with Kanaan playing with Torren in one of the recessed resting areas in those hallways.  They were showing some sort of Athosian spinning top game which seemed to be delighting the little guy to no end and his laughter was infectious with happiness and pure joy.  John had intentionally stayed out of their sight and had just listened for a few minutes to the joys of familyhood, Teyla’s sanctuary.  His grin couldn’t have gotten broader and then his nods and hellos to the people he passed in the halls really started freaking them out and John just kept brushing it off.

He sighs again, happily to himself.  This hallway looked the same as it had the last three times he’d walked it.  Empty but not suspiciously so…quiet but not disturbingly so…full of color and the naturally good sunlight that pours in through the windows.  He admires the city’s warm, endearing lighting bouncing off its copper-toned walls, textured and not smooth, rustic not stark, inviting and comforting in its hominess, when suddenly the warning klaxons of Atlantis ring out and the Technician’s voice comes on over the city-wide speakers…

“Unscheduled incoming wormhole,” Chuck announces.

A knot forms in his stomach.  Sheppard picks up his pace to a trot then rounds the corner at a run.

 

 

John comes onto the disembarkation floor at a run.  He looks around, whatever action had been there is done.  A few marines are retaking their positions guarding the floor’s perimeter.  On the floor are the signs of an emergency medical team that had been called:  bloodied gauze pads, medical supplies wrappers, everything not good.  Two gloved and masked nurses are cleaning it up, one is throwing the pads and wrappers into a bright orange hazmat container, the other is using disinfectant and disposable towels to clean up some blood on the floor, actually there’s a pretty good amount of blood she’s wiping off the floor.  Sheppard walks around the nurses then takes the stairs two at a time up into the command center.  He heads straight for Chuck.

“What the hell happened?”

“She came in hot, Sir,” Chuck answers him, innocently, “Mister Woolsey and Doctor Keller rushed her to the infirmary.  But it’s okay, Colonel Sheppard, Major Lorne is taking care of it.”

Sheppard is missing something.

“Wait, who’s ‘she’?”

“Lieutenant Kenmore, Sir.”

Without a word, Sheppard turns and runs back out of the command center.  He skips the stairs, opting for the fastest route he knows to the infirmary.  He runs past people and through their groups.  No more smile, no more nodding, no more hellos.

“Major Lorne to Colonel Sheppard, please come in,” the voice comes over his earpiece.

As Sheppard runs, he reaches up and activates it, “Sheppard here.”

“I need you in the medical wing.”

Sheppard’s stomach drops.  It’s bad, it’s always gonna be bad with this kid.

“I’m already on my way.”

Sheppard rounds the corner, increasing his speed.  He plows through a group of scientists standing in the middle of the hallway, knocking three over and he doesn’t stop for a moment or say anything back to them over his shoulder.

 

 

Major Evan Lorne, in full gear, paces outside the door to the medical wing with a long, narrow, black rectangular box in his hands.  He listens to Keller barking orders inside.

“Lorne!”

The shout comes from down the hall behind him.  Lorne turns around and Sheppard runs up to him.  The Colonel’s boots squeaking a little with his putting the brakes on them so harshly.

“What the hell happened to Kenmore?  Why wasn’t I told she was going offworld with your team?  And why the hell did you make her the last one through the gate?”

“First of all, Sir, she didn’t go offworld with my team.  She went offworld by herself.”

“Where,” John snaps the demand.

Lorne doesn’t say anything, he just holds up his freehand like he’s calling for silence from a rowdy crowd.  Oh, Sheppard doesn’t like that all.  Teyla, Ronon, and McKay run up to them from behind Lorne.

“What is it, Major,” Teyla asks urgently, “What has happened?”

Lorne turns and steps back to face all of them at once.

“Lieutenant Kenmore went back to Athosia,” he announces.

Sheppard stares, his shoulders tense and he feels his eyes start wanting to slip away from looking at Lorne.  He is horrified.  Oh dear God.  McKay’s jaw drops from his own horror.  Oh God.  Even Ronon looks stunned.  She had walked right into the arms of the enemy, knowingly.  Teyla’s mouth slackens.  Her mind stalls in her emotions, not even she had been sure she ever wanted to return there again, and for the Lieutenant to…

“But why,” the stunned Athosian leader breathes.

Lorne extends the box out to her.  She looks at it then at him, confused.  She starts to shake her head at him, shrug her shoulders, but he keeps it held out to her.  She takes the box and opens it.  Her eyes widen and her jaw actually drops.  She looks back up at Lorne.  Teyla lets the box’s hood fall back to reveal the arm Kenmore had freed and used to get them into the Ancient transporter.

“The DNA results came back on those fluids that splattered her half an hour after she was released from the infirmary,” Lorne says, “Teyla, they were your father’s.”

Sheppard’s team stares at the decaying arm in the box in her hands.  Teyla tries to find the words but Lorne speaks up before she can even begin to tame her mind enough to think of them…

“She believes you would have wanted this.  She said she knew what it felt like to not have anything to bury except memories.  She said she knew what it would mean to you to be able to put anything to rest no matter what it was.”

Teyla can’t speak.  None of them can.  Standing in the doorway to the medical wing, Teyla turns her head to see inside.  The others look with her.  Woolsey looks on from the other side of the room while Keller and a team of nurses run around Kenmore sitting on the edge of a sickbed.  They’re cleaning cuts like the deep one she has on the left side of her lower lip and patching up other ones, tending to bruises and the one hell of a shiner she had going over her right eye.  It’s practically swollen shut and the skin around it is so bruised it has actually turned genuinely black with a jaundice greening around it’s edges but even as they stand there watching, the blackening is starting to turn to a deep, deep shade of plum purple and the green is starting to pinken and the swelling’s subsiding enough the area is starting to look like it has an eye in it again.  Teyla closes the box and holds it close.  She had it.  Sheppard and his team watch on.  Sheppard shakes his head a little, Damn if the kid isn’t good.

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Rest in Peace Our Wonderful Girl

Posted on August 9, 2013 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

This is not Stargate related, but it is very dear to me and I beleive it needs to be posted.

A couple of days ago a dear family friend, a good friend of my niece’s for over ten years was killed in a head on collision with a drunk driver.  With a many, many, so many tears, I dedicate this entry to our beloved Brittany Babinski, age 21.

brittany+babinski

Brittany and her little sister Courtney

Brittany and her little sister Courtney

Brittany and my niece met in Scottish Highland Dance Class taught by Liz when they were in elementary school and remained friends every since.  They weren’t the only ones.  We, as dancers’ families, referred to their class group as ‘The Girls’ because when you’re a family member to one dancer, you’re family to them all.

Courtney with Katie, Liz, and Megan

Courtney with Katie, Liz, and Megan

Now we’ve lost one of our Girls.  It won’t be the same at the summer picnics or Christmas parties or at dance competitions or at dance practice.

She came from a family of seven brothers and sisters, a mother, a father, and a grandmother.  She worked as a counselor to troubled children ranging in ages from nine to twelve.  As you pray for her family and her, please pray for them.

Bye, bye Sweetie, we love you and we miss you.

Brittany-Babinskijpg

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Episode Three- The Ruins- Chapter Fifteen

Posted on August 9, 2013 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Fifteen

Inside it is dark but clearly Ancient.  There aren’t any designs on the floor in a darker shade to match the paneling like there is in Atlantis and all the russet coloring that signified Atlantis’ transporters is darker here giving it the starker appearance of dried blood.  The raised paneling is so darkened that it looks almost black in the shadows of the transporter adding to the effect of being surrounded by old blood.  It’s door remains open providing at least some ease from how stifling it could be with five people, three geared up, one with his own sort of geared up, and one with basically nothing but her attitude crammed in such a small space.  In Atlantis, it normally seemed packed with just two people in there at once with no gear on and maybe a computer tablet in hand.  Rodney and Kenmore are closest to the blue button with Sheppard and Teyla pushed to the transporter’s round sides and Ronon’s enduring mass guards the opened door just in case the Asgard or at least that crazy one actually managed to find a way in.

As if it isn’t crammed enough, Rodney’s busy fidgeting with the numerous schematics of the circuitry connected to the teal-colored button he’d brought up on his lifesigns detector.  And John thought it was torture watching Rodney do the same thing in his lab with a regular computer.  John made the mental note to clearly avoid being around the astrophysicist when they happened to be near transporters the next time the city had a power failure or an accidental lockdown.  There is no way in hell he was going to go through this for hours and hours with no end in sight.  Suddenly Rodney shifts again, calling up another schematic while simultaneously jamming his elbow back into John’s back.  John takes the hit again with another heavy sigh and roll of his eyes.  Okay so that’s three times he gets to slap Rodney up-side the back of his head when they get home.  But at least Rodney’s chirping happily now, so that at least might be indicating that an end to this torture might be in sight.  Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Rodney hold up a finger as he stares intently at the new schematic he’s brought up on the detector.  Thank God there is the finish line.

“Okay, I think we’ve only got one chance at this so is everybody rea—“

Tired of McKay’s talking, Kenmore reaches out and pushes the button.  The door slides closed, making it even more cramped, how wonderful, just before…They disappear without a sound and without a light, the typical highly understated and kinda freaky Ancient way of transporting.

 

 

The team and Kenmore appear, again without a sound or flash of any sort of light, in the middle of the real, life-size lab the miniature had showed them at the top of the shaft.

“—dy,” Rodney finishes.

He freezes for a moment.  He can’t believe she did it again.  He turns to Kenmore and before he can say anything…

“Look, I’m covered in I really don’t want to know what exactly and if pushing the button gets me home then I’m pushin’ the button.”

Rodney stares at her as she starts to walk away from him looking around the room.

It’s round and the same size as the room with the horror show display cabinets except there isn’t a transporter shaft running through the middle of the room.  It’s open which only makes it seem larger, which was also disturbingly comforting.  The first thing they notice is that it looks frankly like just another lab they could’ve found in Atlantis, except for the coloring of course.  It’s still that spooky, gleaming silvery white that seems to show off the Ancient design aesthetic while simultaneously reminding them of exactly where they were and what Hell extended below their feet.  There are raised panels creating the image of the rank wedges of the Army in what John figures is once again the four compass points of NE, NW, SE, SW.  Couldn’t the guy at least have an obsession with N, S, E, W?  Something normal?

The second thing they notice is how naturally well and comfortably, not really bright or starkly, lit the room is which is mostly due to the fact that the hole in the domed ceiling that the button had revealed on the miniature has actually really opened the domed ceiling of the room.  The sky above them is solid white.  The air is clean, crisp, fresh and cold.  It would feel so wonderful really if you didn’t remember the house of horrors extending below your feet.  Kenmore shivers then walks over to one of the small upside down by Atlantis standards, semi-rectangular-shaped windows topped with clear glass and bottomed with some ornate stained glass in those trademark autumnal oranges and golds, the kind in the windows dotting the walls of Atlantis.  She stands on her tiptoes to see out through the clear glass.

“Well that explains it,” she lowers back down on her heels, rubbing her hands together to warm them up, “we’re on an ice planet.”

Sheppard walks up beside her, he doesn’t have to lift up to see out.  Yep, it did.  Outside there are huge snow-covered mountains, part of a range in the distance, and this outpost is on a plain of nothing but snow.  They’re probably on a frozen solid lake or some other frozen-over massive body of freshwater.  Ironically, like a lighthouse guarding a harbor…a very phallic lighthouse.

He looks back at the room.  And for once he can see his breath float out from his nostrils like a puff of quickly condensing then quickly dissipating fog.  The cold has finally reached them and it only took it a couple of seconds.  In between the compass points are great big Ancient computer consoles the sort of which are used in the gateroom’s command center to operate either the gate or oversee the daily operations of the city, equipment some of which looks like Ancient interpretations of weird sort of grandfather clock-looking lava lamps formed from what looks to be the same metal as the walls and filled with what John can see through the clear glass is absolutely nothing, and supplies for operating said equipment line the round walls.  It looks like the Ancient answer to a college chem lab, or at least that’s what Rodney referred to them as when they found these sorts of rooms in Atlantis.  Their panels and control crystals aren’t glowing, signaling their up and running, yet, but McKay can have that little problem fixed in no time.  Those freaky tall sort of accordion-seeming lamps that usually accompany an Atlantean lab hold guardian positions right in front of the wedge-shaped panels on the curvature of the wall.  They aren’t on either but, with all the “sunlight” coming in from the white, clouded-over sky above, they really didn’t need to be.

“Is there anything here that tells us how to get home or at least anywhere but here,” Sheppard asks.

Rodney walks up to the nearest and largest of the computer terminals and tries to activate it.  For the first time in this place, his touch manages to activate something but like all the other times, it doesn’t help them as easily as either John or he hoped or wanted it to.

“He has the computer coded,” he announces, “It’ll take me some time to break it and gain access to its contents.”

Sheppard nods at him and Rodney pulls out his computer tablet, plugs it in, and starts to go to work, leaving the rest of them to pace around and get a chance to look everything over a bit better.  Teyla walks over to one of the many pieces of equipment, a giant clear ball hovering a couple of inches over a raised platform.  Inside it is a clamp, like the sort used to hold a glass vial over a Bunsen burner in class, holding a small medallion of what looks like steel with a weird shape that sort of looks like the number 4 carved into the middle of it.  Sheppard and Kenmore walk over to Teyla and look over the object as well.

“What is it,” Teyla asks.

Sheppard shrugs.

“Ancient jewelry making,” he offers.

He looks over at McKay.

“McKay, how’s it coming?”

“Slow.  I’ve cracked his code, but so far I can’t find a thing telling us how to get out of here.”

“Great, we’re stuck here,” judging by Ronon’s tone, John can tell that he blames Kenmore for it.  It really wasn’t going to help matters if Ronon decided to vent a little steam—or anxiety but John knew that the Satedan would never admit to something like that other than perhaps to say ‘I don’t like just standing here like this’—by flexing his trigger finger and perhaps just so happening to be aiming at Kenmore when he did so.

“Well, what does it tell you,” John asks McKay.

“That he was experimenting with gaseous chemicals and how they influence the molecular structure of steel.”

Well that explains the medallion but it really doesn’t offer them much help.  Perhaps Rodney’s wrong, it wouldn’t be the first time.  The first time cost a solar system five-sixths of itself and had also temporarily cost Rodney John’s trust.  Rodney gained back John’s trust with a simple apology, which was huge for the self-absorbed, egocentric astrophysicist, but it had also left John realizing that there were going to be times when Doctor Rodney McKay was going to be wrong or not genius enough to save them and there was going to be the chance that that could cost them dearly.  Sheppard starts looking around again.  Right now that was indeed looking true.  They’re stuck up here in the relative—John can’t stress that enough to himself—safety of an exposed Ancient lab but only until one of two things happened—well three, but John really didn’t want to think of three happening right now.  First, the Asgard mobilize on a ship and come up here and get them.  Second, no one comes to get them and they just suffer and die up here either from starvation, hypothermia, at least for Kenmore, or shooting each other, again at least for Kenmore.  And the third, well that’s the more likely one right now, which is why John was trying to keep it as far from the front of his mind as possible:  they do something really, really stupid by messing with the equipment up here and end up blowing themselves sky-high for the Asgard anyway.  But he had, he had really thought that coming up here had been the only answer.  That whatever was up here would be their way home—at the very least a friggin’ puddlejumper—but no.  John was about to ask McKay what the hell experimenting with gaseous chemicals and the molecular structure of steel had to do with genetics and the anatomy class horrors downstairs just on the off chance that it might take them somewhere when he notices Kenmore looking around again too except with a slack jaw, wide eyes, and a look of ‘Oh my God’ on her face.  That’s usually Rodney’s light bulb moment face and Sheppard is already becoming familiar with it meaning generally the same thing when it comes across the Lieutenant’s face as well.

“What?  What is it,” he asks her urgently.

The others look over at her too.  Kenmore points at McKay and starts doing what is usually his trademark snappy-finger thing at him.

“Which things contain the gases and which gases,” it was an order and a very ‘hurry up and answer me’ one.  Not attitudinal, just think I might have got it.

McKay, dumbstruck, points with his thumb at the three fat grandfather clock looking things coming up to Ronon’s height, which John had presumed to be empty, directly across from her.

“Over there.  Left is oxygen, middle is hydrogen, right is nitrogen.  They’re pretty basic.  Why?”

Kenmore rushes over and starts examining them.  Looking over every inch of them she can and being careful not to touch any part of them just in case they might react to her Ancient genetics.

“How do you turn them on?”

“From here, why?”

She rushes over to McKay.

“What is it,” John wants to know.  He hated being left out of the loop and the last time she looked like this she and Rodney had gotten them away from the Asgard, just in the nick of time according to Rodney.

“Alchemy.  He was experimenting with Alchemy,” she tells him in a rush.

That is it, all hope shifts in John.  He can’t believe this.  He keeps staring at her.

“Fairy tales,” the crest-fallen ridicule comes out in his voice, “You think he was conducting experiments on fairy tales?”

Rodney suddenly gets her look and snaps his fingers, “No she’s right.  He was combining the gases in a way so that when they’re introduced to steel in a controlled environment, they would be able to change the molecular structure of the metal at the atomic level.”

Rodney turns back to the computer and starts furiously working.  John’s brain stalls for a moment, Wait, what?  You mean this is real?  Suddenly the clear glass globe behind Teyla, lowers and seals itself over the platform with a hiss indicating that all the air had been sucked out of inside of it.  Hissing sounds start coming from the cylinders across the room.

“Rodney, what are you doing,” Sheppard asks warningly, suddenly teetering on the scary side of ‘on edge’.  An exploding solar system suddenly at the forefront of his mind as he eyes the hissing globe suspiciously.

“Following the recommendations of the last experiment he conducted.  I think that’s how he got out of here.  It only makes sense that the Ancient here would create a way for him and only him to get out of here in case the Asgard found out he was holding out on them or his own experiments in genetics were proving more useful than theirs,” he answers him.

“By changing water into wine?”

“No, by changing steel into the transporting mechanism.  All the transporting mechanisms back in Atlantis are made of gold, solid gold.”

“What?”

“Look, that’s all I’ve got.”

John doesn’t argue with the frantically working scientist.  If any one of them knew what the inside of an Ancient transporter looks like, it’s Rodney McKay.

“Okay, I think that should do it.”

Rodney unplugs his tablet, abandons the computer console, and rushes over to Sheppard and Teyla.  Kenmore follows him.  Ronon joins them too.  They focus on the clear, glass globe quickly filling with smoky gas.  After a few moments, the gas is so dense inside the globe they can’t see anything except that there’s a slowly yellowing blur in the middle of it as the gas engulfing the medallion starts to condense and literally change the steel metal into gold.  When the cloudy interior seems to be illuminated by a bright yellow core, the globe’s seal breaks and it lifts completely off its base, releasing the gases to quickly dissipate in the open air, and revealing the medallion to be completely gold now.  Sheppard can’t believe it.  It really did work.

“Okay, everybody hold on to each other.  We’ve only got one chance at this,” Rodney informs them.

Sheppard nods slightly dazed as he and Teyla each put a hand on Rodney’s shoulders.  Kenmore doesn’t hesitate to put a hand on Teyla’s, the Athosian glances at it for a moment, and Ronon puts a confident hand on Sheppard’s shoulder.  It is comforting John thought to have his friend’s grip there ‘cause…There’s a pretty good chance that this thing is going to kill us.  It was an at-least-I-know-I’m-not-dying-alone sort of thing.  McKay’s hands fidget as he reaches out to the clamped medallion.  And John had tried so hard to suppress the thought of that third option.

“Here it goes,” Rodney says.

He touches the medallion.  The group disappears again, no sound, no flash.

 

 

As soon as they arrive, it only takes a second for Kenmore to realize where they’re at.  The crunching of their boots grating dust against stone.  She starts throwing the team into the entrance way before they can really process where they’re at.  She’s going to be damned if Will Robinson isn’t gonna take the hint again.

“Go.  Go.  Go,” she urges them.  After their experience, it doesn’t take much for them to heed her warnings.

They all bolt down the entrance way, turn, and break into the open wooded daylight of Athosia.  They had transported back into the collapsed cave that had sent them to the Asgard outpost in the first place.  And, hopefully, they just fled before the Asgard could try and transport them back out.

As they run through the woods, not entirely knowing whether or not the Asgard have managed to mobilize quick enough to be able to follow them back to the cave and definitely not wanting to wait and find out, Sheppard barks out orders…

“Whoever gets to the gate first dials, whoever’s second send your IDC, and everyone else—“

“Just run through the damn gate,” Kenmore snaps, finishing for him and frankly Sheppard could’ve cared less who gave that particular order.

Ronon quickly outpaces them all with his long strides and Teyla’s natural ease in her native surroundings starts to pull away too.  They’re the first to break across the open ground and past the Athosian leader’s home village.  It flashes through her mind:  Yet again I am running for my life among family and friends, from my home.  They disappear from sight of the village as the trees once again surround their path.  It is a strange response Teyla did not think to expect in herself but she feels her body push itself to its limits.  She was running away from her home out of consideration for more than just the Asgard that might be following them but the ghosts that still haunt these grounds for her.  Her mind floods with all the bad memories this place can muster for her.  For a moment she actually thinks she’s a little girl again and her father is running beside her.  She even hears his words of encouragement:  Teyla run…Run fast Teyla, with all the strength the Ancestor’s have blessed you with…Run daughter, Run!  Teyla’s lungs feel like they’re on fire as she strives to match Ronon and pass him.  All around her phantoms, like those the Wraith can conjure, run with her, screaming.  Cullings.  From her past.  From her home’s past.  Tears threaten to blur her vision.  For her father’s sake, for the sake of his words she can still hear, she runs.  It seems like forever.  Finally Ronon reaches the DHD and starts dialing.  As soon as the gate activates, Teyla dials her wrist IDC and transmits it.  It’s a ten second count before she passes Ronon, standing by the DHD guarding the rest of his team and Kenmore from anything that might be coming after them, and runs through the waiting undulating pool of the Stargate’s connected wormhole.  She hopes that is enough time for them to lower the iris.  A tense twenty second count later and Sheppard blows past Ronon and runs full tilt into the pool with Kenmore right behind him.  An extra fifteen and McKay scrambles past Ronon, Ronon follows his heels, and they enter the wormhole.

Posted in Season Six- Episode Three | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Episode Three- The Ruins- Chapter Fourteen

Posted on August 2, 2013 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Fourteen

Ronon collapses hard onto the floor.  The loose hair between his dreadlocks is wet and sticking to his forehead where it can.  He struggles to get to his feet, gritting his teeth.  His labored breathing coming out like seething slushes.  A hand reaches over and touches his shoulder blade and, with an adrenaline rush born of the horrors of his past suddenly rekindled by the helplessness from that torture chair, Ronon flings himself backward, slams his back against the solidified door now behind him, and drew his weapon, fully charged.

“Ronon,” Teyla warns.

He barely manages to stop himself from pulling the trigger.

Teyla sits on her knees a few feet away from him with Sheppard partially lying on her lap.  Kenmore is the closest to him and had apparently slid back from him at his sudden movement.  Her arms are raised in the universal gesture of ‘I am unarmed and I’m not going to hurt you.’  She must have been the one that reached out to him.  She’s lucky Teyla spoke first otherwise he would have shot the Lieutenant without a second thought.  And right now he’s never felt she’s deserved it more.  That was not an experience he ever, ever, wanted to repeat again.  They all three are staring at him.  Waiting.  His eyes dart between them then, slowly, from Sheppard’s look alone, the Satedan slowly lowers his weapon and just sits there trying to get a grip on himself.  Sheppard’s eyes go from his friend to Kenmore.

“Where are we,” he pants, still recovering from the after-effects of the phase-shift chair.

Kenmore rolls back off her tip-toes onto her feet and stands up.

“I believe it’s the real Doctor Apotherias’ quarters.”

Sheppard reaches out to her.

“The real Doctor,” he asks.

Kenmore takes his hand and helps him up with Teyla’s aid.  Kenmore points at a picture hanging on the wall next to the alcove bed with a collection of written documents hung up in their own frames around it.  The picture is of a man, looked to be in his early- to mid-forties maybe, wearing what John has come to understand as the typical outfit for an Ancient scientist, basically a cream-colored, highly tailored labcoat.  The man isn’t smiling.  In fact, his expression and pose remind Sheppard of the same expression and pose Rodney had put on flags and paintings of himself all around a village the astrophysicist had inadvertently created for real from one of a pair of computer consoles in Atlantis both he and John had thought were merely gaming consoles for something vaguely akin to the Sims.  Every self-important genius scientist must have that sort of blatant ego at birth, probably helped with the all-nighters.

“That is the real Doctor Eraen Apotherias and those documents are his credentials.  Apparently Docs displaying their diplomas was an Ancient thing we just inherited.”

“What was he doing here with the Asgard?”

“He was a geneticist.”

John stares at her, he needed more than that.

“What was he working on here with the Asgard,” he rephrases more sternly.

Kenmore gestures him over to a desk located against the wall behind he and Teyla.  The Ancient designed ones always look like architects’ desks, just coppery, art deco ones with inlayed panels of teal-colored lighting.  McKay is working at it.  They walk over.  There is a computer screen built into the desk’s surface and displayed on it are records, the personal notes of this Doctor Apotherias on this whole disgusting experiment.

“Basically the same thing the Asgard are,” Rodney answers Sheppard’s question, “trying to preserve his race.  Apparently when the Ancients were fighting the Wraith, they were already encountering the first signs of the plague that would eventually wipe them out when they moved back to the Milky Way galaxy.  The Asgard’s research proved that human DNA could help supplant the DNA they lost from their centuries of cloning and because of their Alliance, the Ancients got that information too.  Clearly they thought it could help them too.”

“But did not the Ancients seek to protect humanity,” Teyla offers.

“At first, but apparently facing their own imminent demise changed some things for a few of them.  And thus, Project ‘Veritas’ was born.  A group of scientists were appointed to look into whether or not the success these Asgard were getting from their experimentation with human DNA could be duplicated for the Ancients.  They all believed that they could manipulate stem cells into creating the perfect human DNA to use to save their own lives because apparently plain, good old fashioned Human DNA just isn’t good enough for them.  Hence, only pregnant women were brought up here to be experimented on.  And from what I can gather, that was all just research into whether or not human DNA could handle Ancient genetic structure and that research ultimately led them to believe that their best chance at survival was to create the perfect human being, the perfect cattle DNA, by blending the two.  Hence the egg harvesting and fertilization.  As far as they were concerned, they only needed one perfect person to cure their entire race.”

John doesn’t know whether or not to nod or be repulsed when suddenly something Rodney had said finally sunk in enough to hit him—although broadside him would be more like it…

“Wait, a group?  There was a group of Ancients doing this?”

Rodney touches the screen in the middle of the desk’s top, the computer opens another window on its screen, and starts displaying what to John looks like Ancient e-mails.  Corrsepondence.

“Yes.  This place is only one of four.”

Sheppard and Teyla stare at him.

“Four,” the Athosian asks breathlessly.

“Yes, four.  There are three more of these places out there still taking people and experimenting on them just like this place,” John caught the look in Rodney’s eyes, “We have to stop them.  We have to get out of here now.”

“Did this thing tell you how?”

“No, the computer, which is protected by the phase-shift which explains why he felt comfortable enough to start using one, only holds his records.  But this on the other hand does.”

McKay walks in between John and Teyla and past Kenmore over to a built-in niche.  John, Teyla, and Kenmore follow and Ronon, finally up on his feet, joins them.  And John stares down at what Rodney introduces him to.

“This is a mock up of apparently what this outpost, oh and it is an outpost, looks like.”

The Colonel fought the sudden urge to through his hands over both women’s eyes or at least avert them.  It is the most phallic thing John has ever seen and he has one.  If people threw fits over the Little Mermaid’s palace, they’d just faint at the sight of this thing on a poster.  A domed central ‘spire’—yeah, I’m going to go with spire—stood straight up in the middle of the whole thing then only extending about a third of the spire’s length up and standing on either side of it were two large domed, rounded installations.  All manner of transmitter or receiving antennae poking out from the levels about halfway down the rounder side domes on down to the ground where John could identify grounding stations although they definitely didn’t look like the ones on Atlantis.  They look more like humans ones found on Earth, boxy little outhouses although John could tell by the size ratios that they had to be anything but little.  Also, rather oddly to him, are about a dozen balconies going up the middle of the central shaft—spire, John, spire—at a nice equal setting one right above the other indicating that each belonged to a requisite level of the complex.  Then when the balconies run out, they’re replaced by the smooth sprouting of a rounded ‘vein’—dammit John, don’t go there—that continues up the central ‘spire’ for a bit then it too ends absorbing back into the ‘spire’.  That had to be where the transporting pads where on their prison levels cause Sheppard sure as hell didn’t remember something as easy or as inviting as open-air balconies to help them identify where the hell they’d been taken to.  Sheppard’s eyes retrace the vein—dammit John.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Sheppard finally manages to say.

“Oh and it gets worse,” Kenmore squeaks, “Push the little button.”

Sheppard glances at Kenmore, she’s looking off to her left, not even able to meet his eyes, and she’s fighting back laughter.  In this place, laughter?  Oh God this was going to be bad.  John looks back at the miniature.  At the base of it where normally would be a plaque telling you what this thing was exactly if it were a sculpture is a glowing, teal button.  Sheppard presses it.  His eyes widen as the tip of the domed, central ‘spire’ slides back.  Oh my god, it’s circumcisized.  John bows his head and pinches the bridge of his nose between his fingers.  He didn’t know what comment to make to himself now.

“It doesn’t end there,” Kenmore tells him, mildly regaining some semblance of composure, “I can’t believe I’m actually about to say this but…look inside…the tip.”

She ends on a bordering-on-hysterically-uncomfortable-with-this squeak.

Sheppard looks back at the miniature.  God, did he really have to do this?  He really didn’t want to have to do this, but he starts to lift up on his tiptoes and, thankfully, Kenmore did the same.  Thank God he didn’t have to do this alone at least.  Embarrassing as it is though, the opening of the domed tip reveals the miniature replication of a lab inside of it.  Well at least it’s rewarding.

“Where is that,” he asks.

Rodney doesn’t say anything, he just gestures back past their little assembly to an opened doorway.  John looks back at it then back at McKay, why hadn’t the scientist mentioned that earlier, then he walks over to it with his team and Kenmore.  On the other side is another round room, much smaller, definitely indicating the central spire, with its floor covered in metal grating, and at its center where in the other round levels they’d been on had a great big gapping maw, this room has a shaft like a round elevator’s.  In the shaft, right in front of them, is a door with another one of those crystalline grid panels that had denied the Ancient gene possessing members of the team but had allowed Teyla access to that torture room beside it.  The panel is broken like something had hit it with impact and has smatherings of long ago dried blood and torn wires coming out of it.  It looks like someone had tried to hotwire their way out of here but had been caught in the process.  That didn’t bode well.  John imagines some poor soul after making it out of a cell somehow and getting all the way up here or perhaps was already up here—he didn’t want to think that way, only the pregnant women were brought up here—going through that chair, finally making it into this room only to get attacked.  His mind flashes a very crime scene investigation recreation through his head of someone desperately reaching out for that pad only for some unseen assailant to come up behind them and probably shove them or pull on them enough that the escapee’s forehead slams into the already broken glass panel, killing them, and leaving behind the dried blood only fresh and saturated.

For a moment Sheppard’s mind strays to that crazy Asgard still sitting quietly in that adjacent anteroom where that opened doorway in the torture chamber had led.  They found ‘her’ sitting in a corner playing with some stain on the walls and floor there, rocking back and forth.  Rodney had scanned the stain with his detector.  It had been organic at one point in time…female…Ancient.  Apparently this guy had had an assistant that had gotten left behind and ended up dying in that corner or murdered in it.  That Asgard had seemed to have more than a little fun sending each member of his team through that chair, Ronon last by his own pig-headed stubbornness and flat out refusal to let Sheppard be the last one in.  John had finally uttered the frustrated word ‘Fine’ and sat down in the chair himself knowing if he didn’t do it now neither of the two men would have sat down because Ronon sure as hell wasn’t going to go before him.  According to Rodney, that crazy Asgard couldn’t get into here.  ‘No way not in a million years or at least ten thousand,’ he’d said, ‘it would only figure that she had tried in the time since the Ancients had left the Pegasus…so…they were safe, relatively speaking, weren’t they?’  Sheppard starts for the shaft door and immediately Kenmore’s hand comes up and slaps him in his chest, stopping him.  He looks at her maintaining her focus on the door.

“Wait.”

She reaches into her shirt once again and pulls out her dog tags, slips them off, then chucks them at the broken grid.  There’s the resonating clink of metal hitting glass and suddenly an explosion of bright, blue-white streaks of electricity and sparks surge over the grid and shoots the dog tags like a bullet back at their heads.  Kenmore, Sheppard, and Teyla, the front line of their observing little assembly, duck and Ronon, behind Sheppard, easily reaches up and catches the tags in mid-flight.  The trio straightens back up.

“Holy crap,” Sheppard exclaims.

“Yep,” Kenmore agrees, “I’m bettin’ that thing can fry anything that touches it.”

Kenmore turns to Ronon who not exactly nicely tosses her tags back at her face.  She catches them, barely, slips them back on, and buries them underneath her shirt again.

“Is there anything in there that can help,” Sheppard asks.

“Nope.”

He hears Teyla’s quiet sigh beside him.  John looks over at her and sees her expression, he looks up at Rodney behind her who seems just as frustratedly displeased and keeping quiet about it like he had had this argument before and run into a great big stubborn brick wall about it.  And John thought he could pretty much guess who that wall is…

“We haven’t actually been in there yet,” Rodney fesses up.

“Why not,” John asks irritably.  He can’t believe he has to ask his team something like this.  They of all people should know better than to let something get in their way like this.  They should have just steamrolled over her.

“Lieutenant Kenmore…would not let us,” Teyla confesses as well, obviously uncomfortable with the job of tattle-tale.

Sheppard looks over at Kenmore.  She’s clearly tense, he’d describe it as ‘protective’ actually.

“Are there any booby traps in there,” he asks her.

“I scanned it, no,” Rodney answers.

“Trust me,” Kenmore tells Sheppard, her eyes not wavering from his for a moment, “you don’t need to go in there.”

Ronon’s grunt of derision comes from behind him and he agrees.  They didn’t have time for this.  Ignoring Kenmore, John starts for the doorway, she tries to throw herself in his way, but Ronon brings his gun up again.  This time right in her face and very close.  John can see her breath fogging up the tip on the barrel of Ronon’s gun.  Oh that was it, that’s how she managed it.  Teyla and Rodney, no matter how irritating someone was, would never have done that.  That was a Ronon, and occasionally a Sheppard, thing.  Kenmore backs off and slips off to the side again as Sheppard and his team move into the room.  As soon as they’re in, Ronon withdraws his gun from Kenmore’s face and, with a sigh and a roll of her eyes, she follows them in.

 

 

Their boots crunch and clang on the metal grating underneath their feet.  Lining the roundwalls are diagram after diagram of the human body and further explorations of its various systems and internal structures.  Okay, just an Anatomy class, nothing really creepy yet.  John decides to go left and it only takes a few steps and a startling look to the right, to the exterior walls of the elevator shaft, before he freezes in his steps, staring.  Teyla, concerned, comes up behind him and looks at what spooked him, she barely manages to stifle and choke off a scream.  Rodney comes up behind her and his horror and disgust overwhelm his expression to the point where he actually greens a little and looks like he wants to barf but is too shocked to.  Ronon walks past his friend’s backs and up to Sheppard’s free side, looks at the new horror, and immediately looks anywhere but in its direction.  Kenmore comes up behind them all crowded in front of a glass window revealing a cabinet-sized stasis pod designed to look like the one they had found a ten thousand year old Elizabeth Weir in in the bowels of Atlantis during their first year in the city.  Inside, like it’s floating in mid-air, there’s the skeleton of a baby, a couple of months old at most, in the fetal position clutching a rattle.  Each bone held perfectly in place by long, thin, silvery-white metal wires.  Next to the window is another button-plaque.  Rodney reaches for it.

“Don’t,” Kenmore begs.  There’s a level of pain in her voice that tests John’s adrenaline’s flight response.

“We have to get it out of there,” Rodney says and John whole-heartedly agrees with him.

Rodney presses the button.  The cabinet issues a crack and buzz of running electricity.   Suddenly the baby skeleton starts wriggling causing the rattle to shake.  Immediately Rodney dives off to the side and pukes at the wall underneath a diagram of the human brain.  Teyla looks away, obviously distressed by thoughts of her own son moving like that, perhaps with a rattle of his own to shake in her mind’s dangerously horrific image, at that age.  Ronon catches her fighting her emotions back as he moves over to look after Rodney still bent over.  He places a hand firmly, kindly on the scientist’s hunched back.  Anything useful to distract himself.  Sheppard swallows hard…

“These people are sick.”

“Really?  What was your first clue,” Kenmore retorts.

She lets out a disgusted sigh that tells John he should have listened to her back on the threshold of this room and looks down at her boots.  Rodney returns wiping his mouth with his jacket sleeve with Ronon giving him a buddy’s slap to the back and John decides to move them on.  He slowly walks four or five steps further and finds another stasis pod-cabinet.  Suspended inside of this one is an arm severed at the elbow, starting to show signs of a really slowed decaying process.  Probably due to the pod, after all these things only slowed down the aging, or in this case decaying, process, they didn’t stop it.  Again, Rodney reaches up for the button.  The electricity flows through the pod and makes the arm flex its fingers and move.  Okay that was nearly as disgusting.  They move on again.

John notices Kenmore stays behind this time, staring down thoughtfully.  Looks like she can’t quite handle going back pass the baby.  John can’t blame her, after all she had a kid of her own back in Atlantis, and it’s clear she already knows what else is in here.  Okay, she had been right to keep them the hell away from what the rest of this room looked like, he would give her that.  As they continue around the bend, just before losing sight of her, John watches Kenmore look back up at the window display then back down again and take off her BDU shirt.

They come upon another stasis pod this time with a headless, armless, legless torso in it.  Rodney reaches for the button again.  John grabs his wrist and yanks his hand away from it, but too late.  The electrical current flows.  The torso starts moving, the stumps twitching like it was a full-bodied person again fighting against an unseen foe.  John stares at Rodney, even the scientist seems horrified by his own actions.

“Sorry…I can’t help it…I keep hoping it’ll open up the glass or something.”

John gently let’s his friend’s wrist go.  He can understand that.  What was it his mom always said, usually when John and his father had been fighting again and had gone to their separate corners, John to the horse pastures attached to the family estate but still comfortably far from the main house where his father hid in his study/office fawning and sorting through more of the family business’ papers or on the phone with one of his business partners orchestrating another deal, and she kept nagging either one of them to make peace?  John called her on it once, asked her why she always tried to convince them to kiss and make-up, when she’d tracked him down consoling himself stroking the bridge of his favorite horse’s, Cranberry’s, nose and she simply responded to him:  Hope blooms eternal.  John nods at Rodney, Hope blooms eternal.

 

 

Kenmore slips off her BDU shirt then stares the arm down as she wraps the olive drab garment around her clenched fist.  As soon as she’s got a big enough ball of protection around it, she pauses, still staring at the decaying monument of human flesh, then slams her fist through the glass with as much force as all her rage at this place can muster.  The glass, thick as it is, shatters a hole the same size as her balled up fist easily enough but not any more than that.  Apparently the glass on Ancient stasis pods works more like the bullet-proof stuff than the fancy stained, relatively flimsy stuff they decorated with.  Of course, she’s lucky.  The same sort of pods only full-sized in Atlantis usually had a sort of ice as their contents’ protective barrier not glass.  She pulls her fist back out carefully and starts knocking the rest of the glass in as the others come running back around the bend, shocked and maybe scared at what might have happened.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing,” Sheppard asks her and not for the first time, probably not the last either.

Kenmore keeps silent and focuses on the arm.  As soon as she’s got a bigger hole broken through, Kenmore unwraps her BDU shirt, shakes the glass out of it, and puts it back on.  Then she reaches through the hole and grabs the arm.  It feels clammy and cold, basically exactly the way she thought it would but had hoped to God it wasn’t going to.  Eww.  She gingerly picks it up off the bottom of the cabinet and slips it out of the vandalized pod.  She silently walks in between Rodney, who quickly slams himself back against the outer wall in a desperately grossed out attempt to keep what he obviously believed must be some plague-ridden, decaying limb away from himself, and Ronon and heads back around to the door with the electrified broken grid panel.  The two men watch her for a moment then look back at Sheppard.  Rodney never lost his gapping Sea Bass, open-mouthed shock for a moment.

 

 

Kenmore walks in front of the shaft’s door.  She holds the arm out in front of her.  She takes a few moments to really decide whether or not this is an entirely good idea let alone if it’ll work.  Again, Eww.  Sheppard’s team walks up to her.  It only takes a moment for McKay to catch on to what she’s about to do while the others still remain in the dark for a fraction of a second longer.  Teyla’s eyes go wide, so do Sheppard’s.

“No,” Rodney starts, “no, no, no.  You cannot do this.  You don’t know what’ll happen.  It could—“

In his mid-sentence, Kenmore jabs the arm forward as the rest of McKay’s team try to reach out and stop her.  They didn’t stand a chance of it.  The decaying arm’s limp fingers touch the lit grid.  The electricity surges through it.  Kenmore instantly let’s go of the arm.  It remains levitated in the air by the sheer power of the electrical current.  Blood and some other bodily fluids that Kenmore really did not want to know what were suddenly shoot out of its severed end and splatter her.  Kenmore gasps and twitches for a moment as though she’d just gotten splashed by cold rain water that a passing car had thrown up at her.  The arm’s fingers twitch and make direct contact with five of the broken wires.  The panel lights up the same lavender the inlays of the chair had then the panel goes dark.  The electrical current dies.  The arm drops.  The door to the shaft’s interior splits apart and slides open.  Then they stare at Kenmore.  The Lieutenant, temporarily frozen by disgust, slowly comes out of her stupor and looks at the sickening stuff now on her body.  Left with nothing else to do, she gives her arms one good shake.  Then stares into the shaft.

“Well, at least, that was worth it.”

It’s not exactly an enthusiastic endorsement.  The team step forward into view of the shaft’s now opened door.  Sheppard was right, the inside of it is no bigger than your average human elevator and it’s yet another taste of home:  an Ancient transporter with a single, teal destination button the size of a fingertip glowing on its back wall.

Posted in Season Six- Episode Three | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Episode Three- The Ruins- Chapter Thirteen

Posted on July 26, 2013 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Thirteen

Kenmore falls hard on the floor.  She’s sweating buckets, she can feel the wet on her skin like a smooth damp layer that every inch of her clothing and hair wants to be plastered to but for some strange reason isn’t, and panting…Wait, she’s panting, out of breath but still breathing.  Thank God, she gulps in a massive swallow of air while the side of her face is planted against cold flooring.  Her lungs are fine again, she opens her eyes, and furthermore her vision isn’t distorted anymore and there isn’t any more purple around the edges either.  Kenmore leans herself up on her hands and looks around.

The room looks almost exactly like the quarters they live in on Atlantis.  What was it that Dorothy said, there’s no place like home?  Except that this isn’t home.  There’s a bed built into the right wall, which Atlantis didn’t have anything like that she’d seen so far but according to reports Kenmore read recently, the flying city’s original planet’s mobile mining platform did so she guessed some things were kind of like home.  The whole room is decorated in the same rich, beautiful copper color with accenting tones of oceanic blues and greens and honey creamy light that she had come to get use to and identify as Lantean design.

“Kenmore,” Sheppard’s muffled voice comes from behind her.

Suddenly there’s a buzz sound.  Kenmore looks back at the door.  Only…It’s just solid wall now, no warble, just an Ancient doorframe like wall molding with solid wall in the middle of it.  Through it she hears Sheppard hiss, or was that a curse, then…

“Kenmore,” he shouts, clearly worried that she hadn’t answered him yet.

“Yeah,” she asks loudly.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Where are you,” Doctor McKay asks through the wall.

“In a room,” she looks around her again.

“Let us in.”

Kenmore stands up, her legs operating and supporting her perfectly fine now.  She touches the wall inside the door frame.  It’s cold and thoroughly solid.  There isn’t even a hint of warble.

“I can’t.  There’s no door.  It’s just a wall.”

 

 

McKay gives a hiss of triumph and snaps his fingers at Sheppard.  Self-satisfied glory crowning the smug grin on his face.

“It’s in phase-shift,” he proclaims proudly.

“What,” Sheppard asks.  He looks the warbly door over.

“That’s why they needed eight ZPMs.  To phase-shift anything requires an enormous amount of power.  You remember Lanna-what’s-it, that planet that phase shifted their entire civilization in order to keep it hidden from the wraith?  You remember Weir went there, there was a civil war between the haves and the have-nots, she almost got eaten by a Wraith?  Anyway…Their shield required power the equivalent of three ZPMs to cover a relatively small area.”

“So three ZPMs cover a city, why eight to torture one person?”

“Because the door is that thick.  This was meant to keep out the Asgard just in case they managed to figure out a way to get access to that crystal that let us come up here or they managed to figure out a way to get up here without the crystal entirely.”

McKay pulls Sheppard’s lifesigns detector out of its pocket on his vest and hands it to him, “Look, see for yourself.  That door is too powerful for anything even remotely of the same physical structure as the Asgard.  But,” McKay starts heading back towards the ZPM room, holding court as he goes, “a human can withstand it with the right balance of chemicals and the right amount of energy to properly activate them,” he stops right in front of the doorway to the ZPM room and points inside it.  The others walk up and assemble on either side of him.  They see he’s pointing at the chair, “which means that in order to get out of here, we have to sit in that thing,” he finishes.

The team stares at the chair.  It’s a daunting prospect.  The still fresh and vivid memories of Kenmore strapped into that horrific thing suddenly flash through their minds.  The usually so calm and collected, at least for her, Lieutenant sweating like she was drowning in her own body and crying and screaming.  Finally Sheppard turns to Rodney.

“Are you crazy?”

“Look there’s only two ways for a non-Asgard to get out of this place so either we go downstairs and face an entire outpost full of really angry Asgard and most certainly die like every human that’s come through this place or we sit in that thing and see how an Ancient tricked the Asgard and got the hell away from here alive because as far as I can tell he’s the only one that has,” McKay confronts him.

John stares his friend down.  He really didn’t want to do this, he really didn’t want to watch the rest of his team members, his friends, people he definitely loves and cares about a hell of a lot more than Lieutenant Kenmore sit in that thing, be tortured then stagger out of here like frightened monsters, and fall through a messed up doorway.  No, there had to be some other way, Rodney just wasn’t looking hard enough.

Posted in Season Six- Episode Three | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Episode Three- The Ruins- Chapter Twelve

Posted on July 19, 2013 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Twelve

The others waste no time following McKay, Kenmore bringing up the rear.  Almost as soon as they’re in the room, they halt in a sporadic formation, gripping the new walkway’s rails.  Their boots clang on the grated flooring of the railed walkway leading to the solid platform that consists of the room’s working area.  Kenmore almost runs into half of Ronon’s back.  The team has parted in their staggering halts and left a small narrow path between all of them down the middle of the walkway.  Revealing an Ancient chair at the end of it in the middle of the work area.

Except it doesn’t look exactly like Atlantis’ operations chair or what had been Earth’s Antarctica chair before a Wraith dart’s kamikaze run had destroyed it last year.  It is the same aesthetic design of those chairs, but it looks to be made out of the same gleaming, shiny metal as the walls and the floor of the platform.  And rather than having the stained glass inlays that the other Ancient chairs had, this one has inlays of the same solid metal it seems to be made of.  It looks like a chair frozen in polished, brushed steel.  At the top, above the headrest, is a headset made of a simple metal band with four pinned clamps positioned at the compass directions of NE, NW, SE, and SW.  On either side of the headrest, rigged to it by spider leg-like appendages that look like the bigger siblings of the ones that had pulled that head down onto that spike downstairs, is a collection of three really long needles, again like the bigger, and longer, siblings of the ones Keller stuck in your arm to take your blood or hook you up to an IV.  The whole thing looks like something out of the Saw movies.  And John Sheppard had never wanted to be in one of those movies…

He can’t help but say it, “Holy crap.”

The team and Kenmore walk slowly up the rest of the walkway.  Their boots clanging even louder than they had before on the grating then moving into silence as they finally step foot on the solid platform.  On the other side of the work area, towards its back corner and proportionately opposite the other ZPM, is another raised dais with a snowflake podium on top of it with another ZPM sitting upside down on the middle of its top.  Well, if it didn’t rain, it poured, two ZPMs.  John can’t help but ogle just a little before he continues looking around like the rest of his team, although he notices Rodney is pretty much ignoring everything else around them that isn’t roughly triangular in silhouette, glowing orange, and sitting upside-down atop a podium like an idol to be worshipped.  And Rodney was certainly more than willing to worship.

A few feet in front of that left side podium is a table, like the Ancient medical beds in Atlantis’ infirmary only without the not really all that comfy padding, shining and gleaming, looking like it’s made out of the same metal as the chair.  John falters at the sight of it, the last time they saw a medical bed anywhere near like the ones found in Atlantis in this place it didn’t have a good reason for it, until he notices that there’s no trace of blood on it or anything to indicate there was any place for blood to drain from it nor were there restraints or any signs that any had been there before and had just been removed over the years.  Sheppard takes that as a good sign, certainly a different one.  And a few feet in front of that, nestled in the front corner of this platform, is a small Ancient work desk with files, papers, and books on it and an Ancient-looking microscope.  Now John certainly recognizes one of those regardless of its all-silvery metal material but he stares at it anyway, he didn’t remember seeing paper or real books or real files paired with anything Ancient in Atlantis when they’d first arrived in the city.  Of course the place had been mass evac-ed in order to sink it, perhaps they simply took the real papery stuff with them.  It’s what the Expedition does in Atlantis now when they feel the whole city needs to be evacuated too.

Rodney walks over to the ZPM on that side of the working area and starts scanning it with his lifesigns detector.  Teyla trails a step behind him staring at the table, not believing her eyes.  Sheppard right beside her.  Ronon stops right in front of the chair, staring it down.  Kenmore wanders over to the desk.  She starts looking through the papers kind of lazily then she looks into the microscope and, after a few seconds, she refines its parameters.

“I do not want to meet the Ancients who reside here,” Teyla tells John.

“No, you don’t,” Kenmore speaks up from behind them.

Sheppard and Teyla look back at her.  Kenmore steps away from the microscope.

“Look,” she gestures at it.

Sheppard steps forward, hesitates a moment to analyze whether or not this is going to be a stupid dangerous mistake, then looks into the microscope.  He sees a little round thing, yellow in its outer ring and at its core is a dark circle, black.  Other than that there’s nothing.

“And what am I supposed to be seeing here?”

“That’s a dead embryo.”

Sheppard’s head shoots back from the scope, he stares at her.  What the hell?  Didn’t they teach you something called warning back at the SGC?

“It was fertilized but got left in the dish and died.  I was right.  Not all the captured were used by the Asgard,” she picks up a batch of the papers lying easily on top of the rest of the desk, “The…pregnant women were sent here…to be experimented on by an Ancient.  He used paper so the Asgard couldn’t gain any access whatsoever to what he was doing up here.”

“And what was he doing,” John asks, not entirely sure he wants to hear the answer she’d either come up with or discovered.

She hands him the papers, “He was experimenting on the fetuses inside of them and he would also extract the women’s eggs and fertilize them.”

“With what,” Sheppard asks, taking the papers; not that he could read them of course, not that he wanted too either, but Kenmore didn’t need to know that he couldn’t really read Ancient beyond what the jumper could tell him just yet.

“With himself.”

John stares at the microscope, and he thought the ghoulish work with the spider legs and the severed head had been gross.

“Apparently it was all part of a genetics project called ‘Veritas’,” Kenmore continues, “it means ‘life’.”

“What life could be here,” Teyla begs to ask, disgusted.

Kenmore shakes her head.

“Yeah the Ancients always did have a sick sense of humor.  Something tells me this lost it’s funny at concept—tion, sorry no pun intended,”  Kenmore looks back at the rest of the papers still scattered across the top of the desk, Teyla stares at the microscope.  Okay, John had had enough of this place, not that he wasn’t already fed up with the freakiness before this room.  But bad guy Asgard are one thing, bad guy Ancients are another…

“Rodney, what’s the verdict on that ZPM?  Can it get us home?”

“It isn’t just one.”

“Well I can see that, there’s one over there too,” John gestures towards it.

“There’s eight here.”

The rest of the team and Kenmore stare at the scientist.

“Eight,” John gapes at him.

McKay nods and begins, “Each one of these podiums is like the ZPM podium in Atlantis.  Contained inside of them are three ZPMs, but unlike Atlantis, they have another ZPM on top.  These things are putting out enough power to keep Atlantis in full operation with the shield up constantly and flying around between galaxies for at least, at least ten thousand years.”

“You mean it requires that much power to run this place,” John can’t imagine something, someplace, any place, requiring that much power.

“Not exactly,” Rodney says, “It requires that much energy to power this room.”  He gestures around the room.

Their jaws drop as they look around the cavernous room again.

“What,” Teyla exclaims.

“This rest of the facility is being powered by Asgard resources, but this part is powered by the ZPMs exclusively.  In fact, a predominate amount of their energy is being channeled into that chair.”

“How predominate,” Sheppard asks.

“Exactly ninety percent.”

They look at the chair.

“All of that,” Sheppard gestures at the chair, “for that?  But our chair doesn’t require nearly that much?  I mean we had a MACH II generator powering it at one time.  We only needed the ZPM to power the shield, not the chair.”  What sort of weaponry did this thing release?  And worst yet, considering what the Asgard are using this place for, who are those weapons pointed at?

Rodney nods, “I haven’t got a clue what this thing does, but whatever it does, it doesn’t do anything like what our chair does.”

Sheppard feels individual goose bumps raise the hairs on his arms.  Usually whatever Rodney doesn’t know can get them all killed.

“Do you need more time to figure it out,” Sheppard asks.

“Maybe, but—“

“You could ask,” Ronon interrupts.

The rest of his team and Kenmore look up at him.  The Satedan is pointing with his gun at an open doorway across from them so seamlessly finished it blends in with the wall so that only the shine on the more textured metal betrays its presence.  They tense up, like Teyla said they didn’t want to meet the Ancient that could live here and that was before they discovered what he was doing up here.  Kenmore cautiously walks behind Ronon to the other side of the chair and steps closer to the door.  Ronon doesn’t stop her, doesn’t even try; he steps back closer to his team.  If any of them were going to get attacked by anything that suddenly came out of that door, he wanted it to get Kenmore first.  He’ll protect his team.

“Hello,” she calls out, “is someone there?”

There’s no answer.  She looks back at the team.  Neither of them know what to do.

“Oh visitors.”

Kenmore suddenly looks back at the door for the source of the surprisingly feminine voice and ends up looking down at the tiny Asgard figure wearing a wig of human, shoulder length, strawberry-blonde hair lopsidedly on its head.  Kenmore stares at it.  Okay that is new.

“Do you have an appointment,” the Asgard asks them in its decidedly female voice.

The Asgard stares at the Lieutenant, blinking.  Kenmore doesn’t know exactly how to approach the situation, Asgard didn’t usually look like that let alone sound like they had a distinct gender specification like that.  Kenmore glances back at Sheppard.  Sheppard meets her eyes and she reads the same thing she already knew was in her own, so, Kenmore looks back at the Asgard.  She tries what’s usually the best thing in these sorts or situations.  She takes a casual, bouncy step towards the Asgard…

“Uh, hi, my name is—“

“Did you schedule an appointment,” the Asgard calmly asks again in its feminized voice.

Kenmore freezes.

“What?”

“Did…you…schedule…an…appointment,” the Asgard repeats slowly like it thought Kenmore perhaps had not understood what it had said.

Kenmore looks back at Sheppard again.  His eyes tell her to keep going, but frankly with what, she didn’t know.  She looks back at the Asgard.

“Um, no, we didn’t schedule an appointment,” she answers.

“If you didn’t schedule an appointment, I’ll have to check and see if the doctor can fit you in today.”

Doctor?  Oh that is bad.  Nobody said anything about the Ancient still being around.  Rodney didn’t say the Ancient is still here.  As John looks on, the Asgard walks over to the ZPM podium behind it and starts working as though it’s accessing a computer but nothing’s happening.  There isn’t even any signs of a computer console of any sort underneath its small, lithesome fingertips.  Kenmore looks back at Sheppard’s team.  They look to McKay.  He already has his detector up, scanning what the Asgard is doing.  Sheppard leans over to him.

“What is it doing,” John whispers.

“Nothing, it’s faking it,” Rodney whispers back, “There’s no computer there.”

Sheppard straightens back up and, still tense and more than a little freaked by the prospect of maybe running into the Ancient, nods at Kenmore, she returns her attention to the crazy Asgard calling up a computerized day planner out of its imagination.  After a few moments, the Asgard turns to Kenmore.

“You’re very lucky,” it chirps happily in its feminized voice like a deranged ‘50s Betty Crocker housewife, “He can just fit you in now.  Please, sit down.”

The Asgard gestures at the chair.  Kenmore glances at it.  There is no frickin’ way in of or out of Hell I am sitting in that thing.

“Um, no, thank you,” she answers politely instead.

The Asgard suddenly lunges at Kenmore, jutting one of its bony hands at the chair, and roars with a sharp ferocity that none of them had ever heard come out of such a peaceful race as the Asgard before, frankly none of them thought any of the Asgard could produce such a voice…

“SIT DOWN!”

Kenmore jumps back from the psychotically, super-aggressive Asgard, trips over the chair’s jutting footrest and falls into it.  Suddenly a teal-colored force field activates all the way across the platform separating the team and that desk and ‘examination’ area from Kenmore.  Clamps come out of the chair’s footrest and pin down Kenmore’s ankles.  Sheppard starts.

“Rodney!”

The scientist is already taking out his computer tablet.

“I’m working on it.”

Kenmore reaches down and tries to pry the clamps off of her ankles.  Her fingertips start to dig successfully underneath the cold and, of course, smooth metal of the clamps and between it and the rugged, worn leather of her combat boots.  The crazy Asgard looks on as it calmly reaches out to its ZPM podium and presses down on what on Altantis’ ZPM podium was simply an ornate geometric shape.  The chair suddenly tilts back into its deep awkward reclining position.  The movement suddenly tosses Kenmore back against the rest of the chair.  The chair’s headband clamps down around her forehead.  Kenmore reaches up frantically, “No.  No.”

Oh dear God, Sheppard slams his fist against the force field as Ronon looks for a way to bring down the thing from either the floor or the railings, as Teyla and Rodney rush over to the desk to see if it has any mechanism that might help.

“Rodney,” Sheppard shouts again.

“I’m trying,” the scientist snaps back while frantically searching the desk for at least anyplace to plug in his computer.

Suddenly the Asgard puts a cold, clammy hand over Kenmore’s wrist and leans over her.  The lieutenant freezes and stares at the alien.  They all do.  John watches intently.

“I’m Doctor Apotherias and I’m going to give you an examination you’ll never forget,” it says in that sweet, calm Betty Crocker tone of voice again.  Stepford Wives.

Kenmore’s eyes go wide and she starts screaming.

“No!”

She starts trying to rip the headband off.

The Asgard calmly heads back for its door.  As it passes back by the ZPM podium, it reaches out and presses what was presumably just another geometric decoration.  Suddenly the ZPMs of both podiums start powering up with a sound like the meanest table saw ever heard revving up fast to cut through God-knows-what.  The team stares at the ZPM podium on their side, just out of reach on the other side of the force field.

“Rodney what’s going on,” Sheppard snaps.

“All the ZPMs are coming online.”

“Why?  What are they going to do?”

The mean looking spider legs suddenly stab their needles into Kenmore’s head with a sickening clean pop of pierced skull.  Kenmore screams in a way John honestly believed no one not even a Wraith deserved to scream like.  Her grip on the band is fierce.  She’s straining.  Sweating.  Tears are streaming down her cheeks from her squeezed shut eyes.  And suddenly Rodney’s voice sounds behind John, quiet and horrified…

“Oh God.”

The ZPMs’ glows brighten and the chair suddenly electrifies.  Its inlayed paneling changes from metal to glow a bright lavender purple.  Lavender sparks and lightning ripple over and through the spider legs and into Kenmore’s skull.  And John thought her agonized screams couldn’t get any worse.  Even Ronon starts slamming his fists into the field, trying to overload it and get at her.  After eight seconds, it’s over.  The ZPMs rev down, the legs snap their needles out of Kenmore’s head, the headband releases her skull, the footrest clamps retract, and the chair shifts back into its regular upright position, pitching Kenmore out of it.  She stumbles to stay up on her feet instead of crashing to the floor then starts staggering down the grated walkway leading out of the room, disoriented and trying like hell to get away.  Sheppard watches her struggling and he itches to run through the field and help her.

“Rodney, tell me you’ve got something.”

“Look I’m trying, okay, I’m trying.”

Sheppard watches Kenmore stagger then stumble, slamming her shoulder brutally into the left side of the doorframe.  He winces with her.  Then she slides across the inside of the frame, slips onto its outside wall, and out of the room.  John moves his fingers around in his clenched fist.  He can’t help her—Dammit—he can’t help her.

 

 

Kenmore staggers, stumbles.  Her legs feel like jelly.  Her vision is distorted.  It keeps warbling like someone is taking her eyeballs and stretching and pulling their sight like it’s flubber.  And there’s bright lavender at the edges.  Her lungs feel like they’re being squeezed to death.  She gulps air, trying to get them to refill, but it’s not working.  Kenmore reaches out ahead of her to try and keep herself from doing too much damage to herself.  It’s odd how well her mind is working despite what just happened.  Hard as it is to get her body to move properly, she keeps trying to get away as fast as she can.  If she could draw that crazy Asgard after her, it might give the others a chance to get the hell away and not be subjected to that thing.

 

 

When John didn’t think he could take it anymore and was about to grab Rodney by the collar and start screaming in his face to get a fu**ing move on, the field suddenly deactivates with the same flare it had activated with.  Ronon charges out first without hesitation, John’s a heartbeat’s lag behind him, then Teyla, and Rodney quickly unplugs his computer and brings up the rear.

“Good job, Rodney,” John calls back.

“It wasn’t me.  It shut down automatically.”

John really didn’t care who did it as he ran out of the room.

They can see Kenmore further down the perimeter walkway near that warbly door, staggering with her arms out in front of her like Frankenstein’s monster.  They all bolt for her, Ronon easily outpacing the others.  Sheppard calls out…

“Kenmore!”

Ronon catches up with her as she was trying to turn around and she almost staggers into the railing.  John could only imagine that fall and immediately wishes he hadn’t yelled after her.  Ronon reaches out and touches her hand as she tries to continue to turn around to face the rest of them coming after her.  Even though the Satedan hates the girl, his concern is gentle and touching the same way he had consoled Rodney’s sister when they thought that their friend was dying of an organism embedded and growing in his brain and putting him through something like Alzheimer’s.  John wishes she looks like Rodney had then.  Her eyes are wide and her blinking is exaggerated like there’s something wrong with her sight and she’s gulping for air like a fish suffocating on land.  God he hopes she doesn’t start going into convulsions.  Instead she catches her boots on each other, suddenly losing her balance in mid-turn.  She stumbles back.  John’s eyes go wide…No…And she falls through the warbly door.  Ronon reaches out for her, tries to follow her.  John calls her name again…like that could bring her back.

Posted in Season Six- Episode Three | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Episode Three- The Ruins- Chapter Eleven

Posted on July 12, 2013 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Eleven

The first thing they notice is there are no deafening sirens splitting their ears.  Then they notice, as they look out in the shortened hallway that opens up, the perimeter walkway on this level is railed.  Really unlike all the other levels of this place they’ve been on even though everything still appears to be made out of the same shiny, silvery metal.  There are no precisely spaced out red lights flashing from the smooth pristine walls like the level they had just left.  They all stay frozen for a moment and when nothing further happens, Sheppard takes a step forward.  Suddenly the arm comes out of nowhere and its hand clamps down over his mouth.  He freezes and almost immediately the sound of his muffled distress brings Ronon’s gun back to point at Lieutenant Kenmore’s head.  Teyla thankfully holds her gun where it is and simply looks back at the semi-silent commotion.  Kenmore stares straight ahead and a little up, John keeps muffling, and Kenmore, using her other hand, brings up a finger to her lips and shushes him.  It’s so close to John’s ear, it’s so quiet, such a smooth hiss that Sheppard falls silent and eyes her out of the corner of his eye.

“Quiet.  The walls are different,” she whispers.

She let’s go of Sheppard’s mouth but only lower’s the offending hand to his chest, actually John kind of likes the feel of her hand on his chest, it’s…pleasant, but he sets the thought aside as she points the finger that had been against her lips a few moments ago straight ahead and up to where she had been staring, to where the bright lights of the area picked up the curve and smooth shine of the metal walls.  Sheppard looks, they all look.  He can’t see it.  Then…

“The light,” Ronon says in a low volume.

“What,” Sheppard whispers.

“No, he is right,” Teyla whispers, “The light on the walls…it is like Atlantis.”

Sheppard looks again.  He strains to see what his friends and the Lieutenant see.  All the other levels they’d been on in this place had walls polished so smoothly their figures were reflected in them but here…The light is stark where it directly hits the wall, showing the texture of the metal.  Every flaw in it like the occasional knick that’s so tiny there with just the barest reflection off of it that it shows up to them as this tiny speck of light all its own.  And where the light didn’t directly hit, it diffuses into a hazy glow the way a car’s headlights light up fog.  It was like Atlantis; there the light, multi-colored or not, caught every texture of the city’s walls but from a distance it became this foggy, smooth glow, practically heavenly.  It gives the area, although it looked exactly like the other areas below it at first glance, a feeling of a clean home rather than sterile death.

Kenmore edges silently past him, slipping her hand gently into his holster and drawing his pistol.  Like a cat, she smoothly skims down the middle of the hallway floor, keeping down low.  Her eyes intent on the wall ahead of her, as she moves more of it comes into view, then, with two large steps to go, she makes one quick, smooth slide into the open while simultaneously straightening up.  Her arm extends with the pistol aimed to her right while she stares intently to her left.  There was barely a flush of hair and no sound.  Sheppard stares at her, God she is a weapon.  Then every part of her body untenses, she lowers the weapon, and sighs.

“Clear,” she tells them.

With all due respect—or perhaps not, Sheppard still gives the silent cue to Ronon’s waiting eyes and, at the Satedan’s movement, his team stalk slowly up the hallway until they themselves come into view of the railed-perimeter area.  Kenmore was right, it’s clear.  They come out into the open with her.

This area is almost exactly the same as the areas below it.  Except for a railway following the round perimeter, there is a great gapping maw in the middle of the area leading all the way down to a darkness that nothing seems to pierce, doors, and ceilings that extend…McKay looks up—Well apparently there was another difference here than the levels below.  The texture of the walls was hiding it, tricking the eye to think the ceiling extended out of sight, but it doesn’t.  About three stories above them the walls finish their curve upward and cap themselves off in a dome.  The diffusion of light and the glitter of stark light are hiding it.  He wonders if the same could be said about the maw at the center.  McKay looks down at the darkness beyond the perimeter’s edge.  Yep, it too is designed to look like it extends out of sight like the levels below it but really it just tricks the mind into thinking that when in fact it curves off and ends thirty feet down.  Making this level an entirely closed-off environment all its own.  Great, just great, maybe we can slide down into the bowl and blend into the dark when they come to get us.  Even snakes have a barrel.

McKay looks around again.  There’s a single door, closed, and unlike the others they’ve encountered so far, this one is not right ahead of them.  It’s on the opposite wall and it’s so far off to the left that from the hallway’s narrow confines, they couldn’t have seen it till they were out here in the open like this.  Rather spooky and convenient all at the same time.  And the only other door is a little off to the right and again out of the direct view from the hallway.  Actually, Rodney isn’t sure he would define it as a door anyway.  It is door-shaped but the more he looks at it the more he sees the average-human height rectangle wave and shift and warble, bend and stretch, shrink, bulge.  It never stops moving.  Rodney walks up to the railing and put his hands on it, it feels familiar.  It hits him almost immediately, it’s just like the ones in the outer levels of Atlantis.  A top level T-bar with periodic flat rods that look like a flat strip of metal sandwiched between a lightly shorter and fatter strip of metal folded in half with lines of thick metal rope running in three equidistant lines between the rods bottoming in a four-inch tall toe-kick.  Rodney looks over at the closed door, because the warbling one didn’t seem to have a frame, it was just it and watching its movements was starting to get a little seasick-making.  The closed door’s frame is exactly like the ones in Atlantis except no side panel of crystals.  It is so strange to see deco here with what they’d seen of this place so far.  He looks back at the rest of his team.

“I think this place is Ancient.  I think this part of this place is Ancient.”

Sheppard takes a step towards the railing, looking around too.

“Are you sure Rodney?  I mean,” he gestures at the shifting door with his hand still holding his P-90, “I’ve never seen a warbly door in Atlantis or any other Ancient place we’ve come across.”

With a sigh, turning the pistol over in her hands, Kenmore slaps it against Sheppard’s stomach.  Sheppard grudgingly takes it and with another sigh turns her back on the railing and the maw and flails her arms in frustration.  All of that with the head and still no way out.  The moment her right hand passes in front of the right-side wall, even though she’s steps away from it, a panel where and what would be equivalent to the panels next to the doors in Atlantis reveals itself.  Kenmore jumps back with a yelp and stares at the panel.  Rodney walks over, still maintaining a safe distance from both the panel and Kenmore, and holds up his lifesigns detector sets it to scan the panel.  It’s just like the panel Kenmore had put her hand over to get a floor podium to display a map of Atlantis for her the first day she arrived in the city but this one has a crystalline grid behind it’s pretty white circular lines indicating where it wanted her hand to go.  Kenmore takes a step towards it as McKay scans.  It lights up with sounds that Teyla remembers the ghost of an Ancient woman wandering the halls of Atlantis speaking to her in when whales were trying to save the city from what Rodney had called a “mass coronal ejection.”  Kenmore steps back and glances at the others.  They keep silent but as soon as the Lieutenant’s attention returns to the panel, Teyla raises her eyebrows knowingly over at Sheppard.  Kenmore steps closer, it sounds again, and she leans in and peers at the panel to see what the grid might be telling her.  Suddenly a beam of Atlantean oceanic blue light shoots out of the center of the circle, causing the whole panel’s grid to light up the same color, scans her eyeball then retreats back into the circle.  Kenmore straightens up, the panel continues to sound its strange warbling language, then the whole thing lights up red and the circle displays a short scrawl of Ancient language in its center.  Rodney steps cautiously forward, angles his body a little to stay out of the little panel’s range and reads it.

“Access denied.”

He looks at the others.  They stare back at him.

“Maybe I’m not the right sort of Ancient,” Kenmore wonders.

Without hesitation, McKay pushes the Lieutenant out of the way and steps into the panel’s range.  It sounds, lights up, scans his eye, and lights up red again and displays the same thing it told Kenmore.  He looks over at Sheppard.  Although Sheppard doesn’t like it, the fact that constantly-scared-as-hell, freaked-out-by-anything-that-could-possibly-destroy-us-if-we-sneezed-wrong-around-it Rodney McKay didn’t think anything of letting this thing scan his eyeball, Sheppard figures maybe he can give it a try without too catastrophic a set of consequences thereafter.  John walks forward and steps in front of the scanner, lets it do its thing, and it comes back with the same results it gave Kenmore and Rodney.  John looks over at his teammate and shrugs, rising on his toes slightly and lowering.

“Well so much for your God’s gift to Atlantis gene,” McKay snips.

Sheppard was about to say something when…

“Or the IOA’s gift of a bioweapon gene,” Kenmore says.

Sheppard glances back at her, she’s still staring at the panel, before returning his gaze to his team.  He saw the same sentiment he’s thinking aimed back at him:  Well wasn’t that awkward.

“Miss Emmagan,” Kenmore suddenly pipes up, “come here.”

Teyla takes one look at Sheppard then politely walks over to Kenmore’s blindly beckoning hand and Sheppard gives her credit every step of the way.  Either one of the guys of Teyla’s team would have had to think twice about killing the Lieutenant before going, maybe not Rodney right now.  But if it had been Ronon Kenmore ordered like that, he would have shot her without thinking.  After all, John’s noticed the extra time’s the weapons specialist’s been spending on their makeshift firing range back in Atlantis.  John figures his big Satedan best friend has already relegated the combination of the urge to kill the Lieutenant and his physical capability to do the act to muscle memory.  He’s just waiting for the chance whenever it may present itself to release the coil and let the spring do its thing.

“Yes,” the Athosian asks in a patient tone.

Kenmore, still staring intently at the panel as though she sees something just out of her eyesight’s range in its circle, points at the panel.  Teyla peers at her for a moment, the Lieutenant is unflinching, then Teyla peers at the panel alongside of her.  Suddenly the beam shoots out, scanning Teyla’s eye with startling swiftness before retreating again.  The Athosian woman straightens up with a gasp.  Apparently it’s one thing to see it happen to someone else, it’s another thing entirely to experience it yourself, John figures, judging by his friend’s reaction.  The panel makes its sounds again, but this time they’re different, they’re saying something else.  The rest of her team tense slightly, ready to come to her defense, but the panel remains blue with a single Ancient word in its middle and suddenly the closed door on the other side of the maw slides open.  They all look back over at it.  Sheppard’s stomach drops.  Every fiber in his being tingles.  He points.

“Is that,” he asks.

Through the doorway, they can see a brightly lit room with the same coloring and aesthetics as this area but so familiar it looks like home.  There’s a small raised dais with just enough room for one person to stand around a large podium that’s top seems to bloom into a three pronged snowflake, just like Atlantis’ piers bloomed from the city’s center, and where Atlantis’ spire resided, in the center of the podium’s top stood a single lit, active vessel of glowing orange light, upside down by Rodney’s reckoning.  Its tips’ jagged angles making it look even more like Atlantis’ central spire.  Rodney nods and starts bolting around the perimeter towards the door…

“It’s a ZPM.”

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Not the usual, but still important!!!

Posted on July 5, 2013 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Although I’ve already posted this week’s chapter of story, I just checked my e-mail and found some disturbing news for anyone who’s a Stargate fan.

It’s heartbreaking to report to the fandom that comes to this site that Creation Entertainment has announced that this year’s (2013) Stargate Convention will be it’s second to last.  Next year’s (2014) will be it’s last Stargate Convention ever!

It’s a sad day for the fanbase.  To lose our favorite franchise on television and in the movies, and now to lose our convention as well…

Why?  I don’t know.  We’ve always been incredible at keeping the flame alive.  Now we have another depressing countdown on our hands.

To all the many, many friends I’ve made at the conventions.  Please contact me.  I know this means we most likely won’t be able to see each other anymore, but please, please let’s stay in touch.

Please everyone, comment your hearts out here and at Gateworld.net.  I think upon hearing this we all need to vent.  The main thread is in the General Stargate Discussion (aka “The General’s Office”) part of the Forum, but you can also comment in the Forum’s of your favorite Stargate shows in their News sections.

Trust me, we’re all hurting now.

P.S.- “All good things must come to an end” sucks!!!!!

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Episode Three- The Ruins- Chapter Ten

Posted on July 5, 2013 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Ten

In another flash they were in another transporting area and…nothing.  There’s no one waiting for them again.  Sheppard doesn’t believe it and neither do Ronon or Teyla.  McKay comes out of his cringe behind the Athosian leader.  Even Kenmore eyes the entrance warily.  Another heartbeat of silence passes.  Kenmore slips a toe out beyond the circle of the transporting pad.  Sheppard sees it and hisses at her.

“Just giving them something to shoot at,” she whispers to him.

A smile hints at the corners of Ronon’s mouth; if she wanted to get her foot blown off that was fine with him, although he had wished he’d be the one to shoot some part of her first.

“I thought we might be too far back for them to see us.”

But nothing shoots at her.  A discreet smile lifts the corners of his lips, he just might really get that chance to shoot her first after all.  She takes the full step forward, still nothing, then another and still nothing.  Sheppard actually untenses then Kenmore sucks in a sudden intake of air…

“What?  What is it?”  His shoulders knot again.

…and runs.  Sheppard curses and runs after her with the others on his heels.  As soon as he breaks into the open of the perimeter, he sees exactly what she’s headed for:  the open door to a room directly across from them.  Kenmore quickly makes the round with Sheppard and the others racing to keep up while simultaneously trying to make sure the area is clear.  She runs into the room, again without thinking that such an invitation might be a big freaking booby trap.  John’s pissed-offness returns once again but again he’d take it up with her later considering he wasn’t hearing ammunitions being unloaded into her brainless body nor had the room exploded…yet.  And she still had that head that the Asgard wanted so badly with her…which meant, Damn it, that they still needed her half-Ancient DNA for whatever might be coming up next that might require it.  With a quick glance around the rest of the perimeter, just in case, John ran into the room after her.

He stops beside the Lieutenant standing in the middle of the lab, looking around.  It looks pretty much like what John suspects is the normal Asgard lab.  Computers practically everywhere except that all the computers are displaying holograms of either diagrams of the human body or of the human brain.  John imagined the regular Asgard hadn’t displayed stuff like that images of worlds or complex mathematical equations, maybe diagrams of their own bodies but not human ones.  There are exposed cords snaking over the floor everywhere which John likewise figures wouldn’t have been normal for the other Asgard he’d met either.  All the cords, some running underneath his and Kenmore’s boots and undoubtedly for rigging up aging, dilapidated equipment over the course of the past ten thousand years, ran from the computers and connected back to what seemed to be the crowning glory of the whole lab:  some sort of yet another contraption Sheppard doesn’t really want to know what it does or what it’s for.  It’s a circular platform about two inches deep with an about seventeen-inch circumference with these spider leg-appendages coming up out of it.  God, the whole place looks like some really sick anatomy class to John.  Perhaps this isn’t what he should consider the typical Asgard lab to look like but rather the typical bad guy Asgard lab.  It’s dark, lit not by any actual lighting, but by the neon indigo blues and pinks of the holographic displays.  It is sort of like being in the darkened fish aquarium section of a pet store and they were the fish.  Sheppard doesn’t like that at all.  The others file into the lab.

“What is this place,” Teyla asks, slightly slack-jawed and slightly wide-eyed as she takes in the new room.

Sheppard doesn’t have an answer for her as his eyes trail around the room to the further off shadows that no light seems able to illuminate.  They seem to be asking that a lot in this place.  It just seems to keep getting worse every time they walk into a room.

“Hell,” Rodney answers her, “This is what Hell looks like.”

John frowns at him.  There’s no need to bang the negativity gong so hard just yet but he has to agree.  This is what Hell looks like.

“Well how about you figure a way out of this,” John says instead.

“Of course, the scientist to the rescue.  Why doesn’t that surprise me,” Rodney walks over to one of the computers, whips out his computer tablet again, plugs it in, and starts going to work.

It’s only a few seconds when he harrumphs.  Sheppard’s head shoots to McKay.

“What?”

“Well, I found out why we haven’t met any guards yet and probably aren’t likely to until we really, really don’t want to.”

“Why,” Ronon asks.

“They’ve been watching us.  Actually, you two,” he gestures at Sheppard and Kenmore, “I’m looking at orders and computer routines specifically designed to let you guys work your way through everything.  They lit up this room when you two broke out of your cell. They’ve been intentionally holding back.  Signaling each other.”

Sheppard looks over and meets Kenmore’s eyes.

“Well that explains the flashing red light.”

Kenmore nods at him.

Although he had no idea what that moment of one-to-one interaction between Kenmore and Sheppard meant, he doesn’t have to.  Ronon knows his own feelings on the matter.  Ronon gives a disgruntled semi-growl as he looks outside the door at the transporting area directly across the maw from them, “I don’t like the enemy letting me do anything.”

Sheppard silently nods his agreement and looks back at McKay.

“Is it telling you anything else?”

“Yeah, they showed particular interest in us when we entered the morgue.  Like you could hear a pin drop interest.”

“So this man did know something important,” Sheppard was about to agree with Teyla when…

“They couldn’t get in,” Kenmore says distantly.

Sheppard and Teyla look at her.  The Lieutenant’s staring straight ahead of her at the contraption but beyond it, like she’s in a daze.

“What,” Teyla asks.

“They didn’t have the Ancient gene,” Kenmore answers still distant, “They couldn’t get in.  They couldn’t get,” she looks down at the head in her hands, “him.”

Sheppard and Teyla stare at the head as well.  But John’s more worried by Kenmore’s behavior.  Usually going all spooky on a mission was a bad thing and coming from Kenmore, who had since shown herself to treat missions of any sort as old hat, it seems even worse than bad.

“Well that explains a lot,” he tries to bring her back from wherever her mind has gone out of focus, “They probably took scans of us when we were out.  Checked our DNAs, found out how Ancient we both are.  They’re letting us do their dirty work for them.  And we are.”

“But why,” Teyla asks, “What is so important about this man that he was kept so protected from the Asgard?  What did he see?”

“The Ancient,” Rodney offers.

“Oh eww,” Kenmore suddenly exclaims.

Their heads all snap to her.  She’s standing in one spot cringing and bouncing almost like she’s doing a potty-dance, her face contorted in distress.

“What,” Sheppard asks her.

“I need the head.”

For a moment Sheppard gaps at her, A bathroom break?  Now?  Seriously?  Then Kenmore holds out the head, her fingers twitching against it like she doesn’t want to hold the thing anymore.  Sheppard stares at her.  Great, and he thought she was back in the here and now even if it was with the idea of a potty break.  What a time for her to go nuts.  He looks back at Teyla and Rodney and they continue their conversation.

“But if they were working with an Ancient, would they not already know what he or she looked like,” Teyla points out.

“Oh eww, eww, eww.  Gross,” Kenmore continues to freak out.

McKay ignoring the Lieutenant, “No, I mean a lab.  The last time, well the first time, we encountered these type of Asgard it was because we found Janus’ secret lab hidden in the bowels of Atlantis.”

“And you messed with something in it,” Ronon adds.

McKay glares at him before he continues, “Look, all I’m saying is that it wouldn’t be totally out of the realm of possibility for another Ancient to have a secret lab.  Maybe not secret so much as he gets to enter and nobody else does.”

Kenmore finally works up as much Dutch courage as she can without the Dutch part and rushes the contraption.  McKay catches her.

“Oh my God,” as McKay complains, Kenmore shoves the head, neck down, on the spike in the middle of the contraption’s platform.

Instantly a single bright overhead light shines down on the head, Kenmore jumps back, and the spider legs reach up and pull the head the rest of the way down on the spike then hold it in place.  The machine starts emitting a humming sound.  Sheppard stares in shock and horror, and he’s had enough of this too.

“What the hell is your problem!  What do you think you’re doing!”

“The dirty work.”

Sheppard shoves a finger in the Lieutenant’s face again, “You don’t respond!  You shut up!  And you don’t move till I say so!  And if I have to I will shoot—“

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” McKay interrupts the Colonel’s rant.

“What is it Rodney,” Sheppard snaps.  He wasn’t done yelling at Kenmore yet.

“They’ve gone silent again,” he looks up from his tablet, “Their watching us and I mean really watching us.”

Sheppard looks back at Kenmore.

“We have the leverage,” she says, “We have the head and the Ancient gene.”

“You mean we had the leverage.  You just stuck the head on a spike and our genes can only carry us so far.”

“They’re not moving,” McKay interjects, “They’re waiting.  She’s right.  Whatever they want from us, we haven’t done it yet but we are going to.  They’re not going to touch us until we do but when we do, their response is going to be massive.”

John looks back at Kenmore.  They were stuck doing things her way.  He rolls his eyes in frustration but steps in position beside her.  Teyla falls in on Kenmore’s other side.

“Well,” he asks the Lieutenant.

“I don’t know.”

“Rodney,” he asks.

“I don’t know either but I’m getting a power reading off of whatever that is.”

“How big a reading?”

Wouldn’t it be just their luck to find a flesh and blood bomb?  Hadn’t they already had a mission like that?  Hadn’t it killed Carson?  Suddenly the tips of the spider legs pierce the head with a sickening pop as they break skull and shove themselves up to their first joint into the man’s brain.  Then the head’s opened eyes close, slowly and smoothly.  Sheppard, Kenmore, and Teyla stare.  Oh that is just gross.

“Well Rodney,” John swallowed, “I think we found your reanimator.”

Rodney grimaces, clearly he’d been thinking it’d look a lot different than this.

“So,” John continues, “now what?”

“I don’t know,” Kenmore repeats.

She looks around their immediate area.  There has to be something here that can help her.  This can’t be just it.  There’s a hologram display of a brain glowing right next to the machine, which wasn’t unusual considering how the rest of the room looks except that it’s now showing labeled tags written in Asgard indicating different parts of the brain.  Kenmore bites her lower lip and glances at the head as she slowly reaches towards the display and puts her fingertip through a tag.  Suddenly the head’s eyes shoot open and he has an expression other than death on his face, he screams.  Kenmore jumps back with a yelp and a gasp, putting a hand over her chest.  Jesus Christ.  The head says something in a different language then starts crying and Teyla stares at it.

“I know that language.”

That was the thing John had been waiting for someone to say:  that they had an answer.

“Well what did he say?”

“That he is afraid.”

Sheppard stares at her, “Is that it?”

She nods at him but the head suddenly gasps dramatically which causes Kenmore to yelp again then the head starts whispering then just as suddenly goes silent and it’s eyes close again.  They wait but nothing happens.

“He said that ‘they’ were coming.”

Sheppard glances at the Athosian.

“Whoa,” McKay says which draws Sheppard’s attention.

“What ‘whoa,’ Rodney?”

“The Asgard are listening.  I mean a pin would sound like a sonic boom right now.  The head may have stumbled onto something here.”

Ronon looks on from his position by the door, “Like what?”

McKay keeps working on his computer, suddenly a bright light snaps on from the ceiling off to the left side of the middle of the room.  It draws the team’s attention.  The light is shining down on a bed, actually a table, a metal slab of a medical table like an extremely unfriendly version of the ones found in Atlantis’ infirmary.  It is the same silver color as the walls outside and that hideous guillotine thing had been—or once had been—down stairs.  There is no comfy cushion like the medical beds in Atlantis had and it’s slightly elevated at the head.  And there were metal restraints built into its sides and at its foot.  There isn’t a single bed like that in Atlantis except for the gurneys that they had brought with them from Earth, but John doubted very highly that this was a gurney.  Gurneys aren’t bolted to the floor.

“Like I think we’re in the room he died in. And,” Rodney works some more, “Well isn’t this more than a little disconcerting.  They’re still waiting for us.  They’re listening and waiting.  If this were a movie, I’d say we’d be hearing the start of the theme song to JAWS right about now.”

Suddenly, without hesitation, Kenmore presses another label on the holographic brain.  The head’s eyes open again and it starts talking, it throws in a couple of laughs and after a few words Teyla’s eyes widen at it as it keeps talking, laughing liltingly at Kenmore.  The Lieutenant backs up with a disgusted cringe and leans over to Teyla…

“He’s coming on to me, isn’t he?”

Blushing violently, Teyla nods while averting her gaze from the head then it puckers up at Kenmore and makes smacking kissing sounds before he goes silent and his eyes close again.  Kenmore stares up at the ceiling…

“Why do all the dead guys hit on me?”

“Let’s keep it moving here,” John intervenes, frankly just as disgusted by the head’s behavior as Kenmore is, “Rodney?”

“I’m trying but every time she does something it’s like they go into a feeding frenzy.  All I can say is that the sharks are circling the cage and about all I can do right now is stall them.  And even that is losing its touch.”

Ronon growls from the doorway.

“I hate cages.”

Kenmore sighs, does a shivering little dance to shake off the gross, and presses another label.  The head opens its eyes again and its expression is fear but he doesn’t scream this time, he starts whispering.  It’s the sound of the guy’s voice that unsettles Sheppard.  He looks to Teyla.  She senses the cue even though she’s focused intently on the head.

“He says he is in a room.”

“Oh is that all,” McKay snarks.

“Rodney,” Sheppard warns.

“He is on a bed,” Teyla continues, “It is quiet and dark except for a bright light over him.  He can see lights of many different colors in the darkness around him.  He is very frightened.  He hears voices near him.  He is trying very hard to stay still.  He believes they are Wraith but they do not sound like Wraith.  He opens one of his eyes wider very carefully and sees a man and a woman, they are Ancestors.  They are looking at a picture floating in the air, the male Ancestor touches it and the picture changes.  The man leaves the image and the woman takes his place.  The man walks into the shadows.  Then in the darkness there is a blue light and he can see the outline of the man,” Teyla falls silent as the man keeps talking, her brows furrow at the head.

“What,” Sheppard wants to know, “What is it?  What’s he saying?”

“I do not know.  Something about a fish crying and then a fence and a, a, a crown and I believe he just said a ruin?”

McKay rolls his eyes.

“Great, our only way out of this mess is a talking head and it just went nuts.  How wonderful.  Shall I just shoot myself now or—wait, wait, wait.”

“What,” Sheppard snaps.

“They’re mobilizing.  Holy crap,” he looks up at Sheppard, “They’re coming for us.  They are all coming for us.  We’ve got to get out of here now and I cannot stress how now I mean.”

Ronon’s attention and fully charged weapon retake their position aiming out the door at the transporting area.  He’s ready.  The head keeps talking and suddenly gasps, the panic in his voice becomes crystal clear.

“The woman changed the image then suddenly looked back at him.  She has realized he is awake and alert.  She is telling the male Ancestor.  They know he has been watching them.  He has closed his eyes but he can hear their voices getting closer.  They are agitated.”

Suddenly the head screams, horribly, then goes silent again and closes his eyes.  John looks to Teyla as Kenmore starts looking around them.

“I believe they had just killed him,” Teyla confirms.

Sheppard looks at Rodney.

“Get us the hell out of here Rodney.”

McKay stares at his comrades.  Flabbergasted yet again.

“What part of ‘all I can do is stall them’ and ‘even that’s losing its touch’ did you not understand?”

“You said ‘about’, Rodney, now I’m telling you to do the ‘about’ part.”

McKay sighs at him then Kenmore bolts for the wall and a panel, a circular screen the size of Kenmore’s face with an unlit console of nine buttons underneath it, in the shadows of the room rendered not quite so dark by the extreme overhead light of the examination bed behind McKay.  She passes her hand over the panel.  Suddenly the panel comes to life saturated with the same ocean blue light as most of Atlantis’ equipment is.  Immediately the screen displays writing John’s never seen before but he feels like he should have in all sorts of ways that are confusing him.

“What the hell is that,” he asks.

“I don’t know.  I mean I think it’s Ancient—“

“But it looks like the Asgard language too,” Kenmore finishes for McKay.

Then he and Kenmore look at each other with a shocked expression on their faces then both suddenly turn and start yelling and gesturing at Teyla…

“Get over here now, now, now,” Kenmore urges.

“What was the first one,” McKay snaps.

Teyla and Sheppard rush over.

“What ‘first one’,” he asks.

McKay ignores him, addressing Teyla while Kenmore focuses intently on the button grid, ready and waiting.

“What was that first thing he said when he was going crazy?”

“He said he saw a crying fish.”

Rodney looks back at Kenmore, his breathing puffs her hair, she nods.

“I got it,” she presses a button and suddenly an image shows up on the screen, a hieroglyphic, of a fat diamond with an open tail and a series of dots lined up in front of it like a crying fish.

Suddenly bright red lights like the one that had flashed back in Sheppard and Kenmore’s cell room starts flashing along the tops of the walls along with blaring sirens.  Rodney’s panic-mode hits overdrive.

“Next,” he shouts.

“A fence,” Teyla yells above the noise.

Kenmore nods, pushes another button, and another image of three lines that look like railroad spikes appears on the screen.

“A crown!”

Another image appears of a circle of dots.

“And ruins, he said ruins!”

Kenmore searches.  McKay stares at her.

“What?  What is it?”

“I can’t find it!  There’s nothing here that looks even remotely like ruins!”

McKay looks then points.

“Try that one.”

“Are you sure?”

McKay looks at her exasperated.

“No, I just thought waiting here for our imminent deaths would be a nice change of pace.  Yes, I’m sure,” he snaps.

Kenmore pushes the button and Sheppard can see what she’d been worried about, it is another circle of dots except some of the dots seem to be either missing or are elongated into sort of bar shapes.  It just didn’t look right.  It didn’t look like ruins at all.  Except for maybe an aerial shot of Stonehenge?  But even then it looks like a stretch.  The panel slides sideways into the wall and reveals a bright, glowing blue interior with a line of three crystals embedded in a panel just like the wall crystals to Atlantis’ doors.  Rodney immediately reaches in and grabs the top one.  He runs back and yanks his laptop’s cord out of the supposedly Asgard computer he’d hooked it up to then starts for the door.  Teyla, Kenmore, and Sheppard start to follow him, but after a few steps Kenmore stops, blocking Sheppard.  She looks back at the panel then back at McKay.

“But what about those?  Shouldn’t we take them with us?”

Rodney shakes his head, holds up the crystal and gives it a shake as he runs.

“No, this one is the key.”

Kenmore looks back at the crystals then back at Rodney.  Sheppard doesn’t have time for this.  He tries to go around her but she suddenly grabs the P-90 clipped to his vest, brings it up, aims it at the open panel of crystals, and opens fire.  Everyone freezes and looks at her, shocked.  The autofire shatters the blue box of crystals and its lights go out.  She looks back at McKay standing on the perimeter walkway just in front of the doorway with Ronon right in front of him and Teyla standing on the threshold of the room.

“Can they fix that?”

McKay, slack-jawed and wide-eyed, shakes his head at her.

Kenmore cocks her fist back as she hikes her knee up, “Yes.”

The others continue to make their run for it.  Once again Sheppard and Kenmore head for the door.  Sheppard moves around Kenmore so as not to get caught behind her again when suddenly she skids to a halt in the doorway with a hiss then turns and runs back into the room.  Sheppard skids to a stop just on the turn of the perimeter, turns, and yells after her.  God, he did not have time for this.  And if their heading into the Ancient part of this complex, he needed her genes.

“Kenmore!”

She comes back out with the head in her hands, she runs up to the walkway’s edge, skids to a stop her tip-toes just at the edge, and lets the head go flying out of her hands in a gesture of an entirely uncontrolled lobbing throw.  Sheppard runs up to his edge of the perimeter and they both watch the head plummet into the darkness below.  Kenmore waves and calls after it.

“Sorry!  You’re taking your secret to the grave with you if that’s any consolation!  Thank you!”

Kenmore tries another smile and wave at it.  Sheppard stares at her like she’s crazy then Kenmore finally starts around the perimeter like everyone else has already done and Sheppard follows her.  Hopefully if she stops again, he can just shove her where he needs her to go.  In the transporting area, McKay’s already plugged into the panel, typing like a madman, with the key crystal placed neatly into a small slot apparently revealed by a part of the panel that was designed to come open when one of the buttons on top of it was pressed, it would have been nice if Rodney’d told him about that before, and Teyla and Ronon are covering the sides of the area’s entrance/exit just in case the Asgard manage to beam into another part of this level.  Kenmore and Sheppard run onto the pad.  As soon as they slam into the back wall of the area, the Asgard beaming flash happens.

Then another happens as a whole group of Asgard soldiers suddenly beam in, missing the team by splits of seconds.

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