Stargate Atlantis: Halcyon

by James Swallow

  "Yield!"

  "I will not!"

  There was a commotion at the cloister, and then Ronon darted from the shadows, his pistol in his hand. "Didn't you hear her? She said no!" Mason and Bishop trailed behind him.

  Vekken stepped away and gave Teyla a gracious bow. The glint of anger in his eyes was gone. "Of course. Forgive me. I sometimes become too caught up in the moment." He smiled at Dex. "Just a little good-natured sparring, Runner, nothing else. I did not intend to cause you undue concern."

  Ronon gave Vekken a hard look, and then with exaggerated care, he holstered his particle magnum. "You okay?" he asked.

  Teyla collected herself. "I am uninjured." Although that wasn't precisely true; she would have some interesting bruises by tomorrow.

  Vekken replaced the staff on the rack. "Perhaps you might also consider a match of skills, Ronon Dex." He was casual with the offer. "I would be interested to see if you are as quick to defend yourself as you are the honor of Teyla Emmagan."

  Ronon took a warning step toward the adjutant. "Any time you like-"

  She put a hand on the Satedan's arm. "Ronon," she said firmly, "did you want something?"

  Dex threw Vekken one last glare and then nodded. "Sheppard's back."

  "Oh," noted the adjutant. "I shall have the conveyor station notified to have a train ready for him."

  Ronon shook his head. "He's brought his own ride."

  Teyla looked up as a familiar high-pitched whine reached her ears. Bishop pointed into the morning sky. "There he is, two o'clock high."

  From out of the blue came the drum-shaped form of the Atlantean shuttlecraft. It circled overhead and then came to a halt before dropping gently to a landing in the middle of the training square. Teyla's mouth curled in amusement at the obvious surprise on Vekken's face.

  Sheppard left Beckett to his people and stepped from the back of the ship. He instantly caught the vibe of dissipating tension in the air and glanced at Staff Sergeant Mason. The SAS soldier made a small gesture with his hand, and the look on his face said no problem, everything's cool.

  Vekken was peering at the striated hull of the craft. "I've never seen an aerodyne like this. It has no rotors or engine intakes." He considered the ship for a moment. "This is Precursor technology, yes? Rescued from the ruins of Atlantis, no doubt?"

  "Something like that," Sheppard replied, refusing to be drawn. "We call it a Puddle Jumper. We use it to travel through the Stargate when we don't feel like walking."

  "Puddle... Jumper?" repeated Vekken. "That seems a curious appellation. For a vessel that travels through your Stargate, would not Gate-Ship be a more fitting name?"

  "Have you been talking to McKay?"

  Teyla looked over at him. "How did you get the Jumper out of the Gate Hangar?"

  "I asked nicely," said Sheppard. "We had a little moment when they pointed all those gun turrets at us, but eventually they retracted the roof and let us go."

  Ronon nodded at Beckett and his medical team. "What are they doing here?"

  "A fine question indeed," said Muruw, approaching with a pair of guardsmen at his flanks. "I receive word via telekrypter that you have brought your own warship into our territory, and then discover it here, inside the very walls of the Magnate's home!"

  "It's not a combat vessel," the colonel replied, "not exactly, anyhow."

  "I see no weapons clusters," admitted Vekken, "and I am sure Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard would not be so foolish as to return to Halcyon with violence in mind."

  "And yet he brings more soldiers with him," snapped Muruw.

  "We're not military!" said Carson, stepping down from the Jumper. "Far from it! I'm Dr. Beckett, chief medical officer of... Of our team."

  The minister's face crinkled in bewilderment. "Healers? Why have you brought healers? Is someone unwell? I assure you that the Fourth Dynast has excellent apothecaries in service to its courtiers."

  "I'm sure that's true," said Beckett, "but we're not here for you and the rest of the lords of the manor."

  Sheppard stepped forward. "What Dr. Beckett is trying to say is, we'd like to offer some help to your people. The folks down in the lower city."

  "The commoners?" Muruw blinked.

  "That's right. Carson here is about the best, uh, healer, this side of the Pegasus Galaxy. He might be able to assist with this `bone-rot' problem of yours."

  `That aliment is no problem of mine," retorted the minister. "Only the dissolute, the lower orders suffer from it."

  "Aye, well," broke in Beckett, "perhaps I can do something about that."

  Muruw was about to protest further when Vekken spoke out. "What a generous offer, Lieutenant Colonel. I'm sure the Magnate would see the value in such an altruistic gesture. Don't you agree, First Minister?"

  Something in Vekken's tone brought Muruw's protests to heel. "Yes. Yes, of course. The Magnate has the best interests of the common folk at heart."

  Beckett looked to Sheppard. "I'd like to take the Jumper down into the lower city, then? Set up a temporary clinic, do some tests?" He shot a glare at Muruw. "If that's okay with your lordship here?"

  "I will allow it," said the minister haughtily, and prodded the soldier standing next to him. "You men, go with them. See that nothing untoward occurs."

  "Great," Sheppard replied. "Staff Sergeant Mason, why don't you and Private Bishop tag along too?"

  "The military skills of your troopers will not be required," said Vekken.

  John fixed a rigid smile on his face. "I don't doubt it, but Mason and Bishop here are, uh, fully qualified medical... guys. They're going to help Beckett."

  "Indeed?" The adjutant seemed unconvinced.

  Mason directed Bishop into the back of the Jumper. "Oh, yes, sir," said the gruff sergeant. "I'm well known for my sensitive bedside manner."

  Beckett threw the colonel a nod. "I'll check in with you once we're set up."

  "Sure you're okay flyin' that thing?" Sheppard called, as the drawbridge hatch began to close.

  "Nae problem," said Carson, his face pale as he took the pilot's chair.

  Teyla beckoned the assembled group. "We should stand back."

  With a sudden trill of noise, the Jumper leapt up into the air, rising like an express elevator. It wobbled for a second, and then drifted away, out of sight.

  "He breaks it, he bought it," said Sheppard from the side of his mouth. John looked around to see Vekken and Muruw both eyeing him with unmasked suspicion. "Thank you. Lord Daus won't regret this."

  "Not unless Beckett crashes into a building," muttered Ronon.

  "You may tell him that in person," said Muruw. "I came to inform you that His Highness has called you to an audience aboard his air-yacht. He is touring the enclosure forests at Carras over luncheon."

  "Another war game?" Dex snorted. "I'll pass."

  "Far from it. The Lord Magnate wishes to speak with you on issues of trade and treaty. He has decided that matters between your people and ours must be decided once and for all."

  Vekken nodded. "I will have a gyro-flyer prepared immediately."

  Sheppard hesitated. Suddenly, everything was going in the direction he wanted it to; so why was his gut telling him something different? Diplomacy, he told himself, it's a different kind of battlefield, John. Adapt to it. "I'll need to let the rest of my team know-"

  "If you are referring to Dr. McKay, there is no need," Muruw interrupted. "While you were on the other side of the Great Circlet, he accepted the Lady Erony's invitation to view the site of the dolmen. Duke Kelfer is conducting him personally."

  John looked at Teyla. "You know about this?"

  She nodded. "Rodney was eager to go, so I agreed in your absence. Corporal Clarke and Private Hill went with him."

  Sheppard clapped his hands together. "Okay. I guess we got a lunch date, then."

  "Yeah," said Ronon in a voice that only John could hear, "but what's on the menu?"

  "Oh, my." Rodney McKay blinked and ambled to a halt, his head tilted
back to sight up along the length of the tall stone obelisk. Abruptly a thought occurred to him. "Ah! Pictures!" He fumbled in a pocket on his gear vest and removed his compact digital video camera, snapping open the viewfinder to shoot footage of the site.

  Erony studied the device. "That... That is a kinescope?"

  "A camera? Yes," McKay said, distracted. "This is interesting."

  From behind them came Kelfer's voice; a bored drawl. "Really? It clearly takes little to hold your attention then, Doctor."

  Rodney ignored him, using the camera to get close-ups of the text that patterned the sides of the memorial. The script was Ancient, all right, thousands of words of it, going all the way up to the top.

  "How big you reckon it is, Doc?" said Clarke, resting his hands on his rifle's frame where it hung on its webbing. "Looks like that monument you Yanks got in Washington."

  McKay gave him an irked look and pointed at his own face. "Canadian," he said, "not `Yank'."

  Clarke didn't seem to hear him. "Wrong color, though. This one looks like its made of slate."

  "Washington Monument," offered Hill. "My sister sent me a postcard of it once."

  Rodney turned on them both. "Yes, thank you both for that astute piece of architectural analysis. Perhaps you'd both like to assist me further by shutting the hell up? I'm trying to concentrate here."

  "Sorry, Doctor," said Clarke, and then added sotto voce; "Plonker."

  "It really is quite breathtaking in its own way," said Erony. "I confess, I have visited here before and walked the circumference of the grounds and still found nothing to express its purpose." She took in the wide circular stage of gray stone on which the dolmen stood. "My father once spoke to me of records from the chaotic years, which spoke of the pillar's function, but I have never seen them."

  "It is a burial marker, nothing more," insisted Kelfer. "Some remnant of the primitive people who came before Halcyon's current civilization, doubtless their vain attempt to signal some mythical sky-gods for salvation."

  "Primitive? Not likely." Rodney gestured with his free hand. "Look closely at the cut of those stones, the precision of the inscriptions. Some caveman didn't carve those with a flint chisel. Whoever built this had to be an engineering genius just to make it that tall in the first place." He pocketed the camera and replaced it with a hand-held scanner, similar to the kind found aboard the Atlantean Puddle Jumpers. Wreathes of exotic radiation shimmered on the small screen, shifting and changing as McKay panned it over the landscape. "I was right..." He whispered. "The energy readings are so much clearer here. I'm detecting a power source, but there's more. I think this thing..." He paused and glanced up at the top of the monument. "I think this obelisk is actually broadcasting some kind of radiation."

  Clarke's face paled. "Please don't tell me my hair's gonna start falling out."

  "Not like that," said Rodney. "The pattern looks familiar, but I can't place it." McKay moved to where a low stone wall created an inner barrier around the dolmen and pulled his laptop from his backpack. "Let me hook this up."

  "What are you doing?" asked Erony, but he waved her into silence. The scientist felt it; that old, familiar tingle of some thing coming together in his mind, the giddy little rush of prediscovery. There was nothing like it, that unexpected headswim that came when you cracked a thorny conundrum, when all the pieces of a problem suddenly went click and slotted into place. He'd tried to explain it to other people, to non-genius people like Sheppard and Weir. They didn't really get it, not like McKay did. Maybe Zelenka understood. Maybe. Just a little bit. But this sort of thing was what Rodney lived for, the days when science was better than sex.

  Or so he liked to believe.

  The laptop had an encrypted copy of much of McKay's own personal research database, terabytes of data stored on a modified hard drive, packed with every last bit of information it could hold about the Ancients, the Pegasus Galaxy, everything. He'd created an interface program that let the human tech of the computer talk to the comparatively godlike tech of the Atlantean scanner device, and as they communicated, he saw the answer a split second before the laptop found it as well.

  "Yeah, that's it!"

  "What's what?" said Hill.

  "I knew I'd seen the energy waveform being transmitted from the dolmen somewhere else, so I cross-referenced the signal with the records database from Atlantis, and I was right," The words spilled out of him with barely a pause for breath. "There's a low-level interference pattern emitting from this thing, it's on a shallow band but the power output behind it is enough that its radiating out across most of the planet."

  "Interference? You talking like electronic countermeasures, or something?"

  McKay snapped his fingers. "Exactly, go to the top of the class. It's a jamming field. A dampening effect." He grinned. "And this is the cool part. The frequency it's operating at? It's only a hair's breadth from these readings Carson took of Wraith brain activity!"

  "So, what, it's like a Wraith dog whistle, or something?"

  "No, no, wrong wrong, dunce's hat for the corporal. If you want a bad analogy, it's more like a... A white noise generator, creating static on their psychic network."

  "Dr. McKay, you really are the limit!" huffed Keifer. "These wild theorizations you spout have no basis in fact!"

  "That's why the Wraith you have here are docile...." Rodney gulped, looking at the Halcyon scientist. "Well, relatively speaking. The Ancients obviously made this and left it here as a passive defense system for the planet. It affects the functioning of the telepathic ability of Wraiths." He halted, thinking it through. "It must work on their higher brain functions, which explains why your pet Hounds are so animalistic in nature." McKay glanced at Erony. "But it doesn't seem to effect humans, or people with Wraith DNA like Teyla or Vekken."

  "I am so glad we have had this time to let you indulge your flights of fancy," grated Kelfer, gesturing to their armed escorts. "But now, I think the day is done. Take your kinescope images and make an end to it, McKay. Your tour is concluded."

  "Oh no," Rodney waggled a finger in the scientist's face. "I didn't come this far just to take some stills and get a brass rubbing. We're going inside." He strode quickly to the dolmen and ran his fingers over the carvings.

  Kelfer threw up his hands. "Inside? It is a solid stone pillar, you fool! How do you possibly expect us to get inside it?" The man broke off as he realized what McKay was doing.

  Rodney found the right glyphs exactly where he expected them to be. Trust the Ancients to be precise and thorough in everything they created. It was a simple enough matter to push here, press here and there...

  "For blade's sake, what-" The rest of Kelfer's words died in his throat as stone ground on stone, and a thick slab at McKay's feet shifted back into the structure of the dolmen. Puffs of age-old rock dust gusted into the air.

  The look of utter smugness on Rodney's face was total and complete. "Oh look," he said condescendingly, "there's a doorway."

  The entrance led down a shallow incline to an open area beneath the dolmen's base. It was a hexagonal room, lit by soft glows from consoles that still operated, thousands of years after they had been activated. McKay noted how Kelfer's face had taken on the shocked cast of a man utterly out of his depth. Hear that, Mister Chief Scientist? That's the sound of your preconceptions coming crashing down around you!

  Lights in hidden recesses came on as they approached them. Clarke took point, having left Private Hill and the other Halcyon troopers outside. Rodney had seen the expressions of the riflemen; the dark tunnel into the obelisk frightened them. He glanced at Erony; her face was quite the opposite, lit from within by wonder and awe.

  "The Precursors made this..." she husked.

  McKay nodded. "Yup."

  Corporal Clarke trained around the flashlight clipped to the muzzle of his assault rifle. "Looks just like Atlantis down here," he said quietly as Rodney came closer. "Built from the same kit."

  He nodded again. "A lot of Ancient tec
hnology seems to be modular in nature. My guess is they could re-purpose hardware for whatever task they had at hand." There were dust covers of plastic-like fabric over a central podium in the room, and he pulled them aside. On the far wall, a glass screen reacted by illuminating a display of power curves and energy output gradients. The waveforms shown there matched the scans Rodney had taken outside. He touched a few controls experimentally and called up pages of blocky Ancient hieroglyphics. "Huh. These are Wraith biometrics. A full physiological work-up, it looks like."

  "You were right, Dr. McKay," said Erony, from the far side of the room. She was examining a metallic pillar that included a bubbling liquid component. "You did not exaggerate that day in the Terminal."

  Kelfer finally managed a huff of derision. "How is it that you are such an expert on the Wraith, then?"

  "I've been inside their ships, I've been zapped by one of their culling beams," he said off-handedly. "I know more about the Wraith than any sane man should." Rodney bent over the con sole. "Believe me, it's not by choice."

  The Halcyon scientist made the same noise again. "The... The dust in this chamber is clogging my breath. I will wait for you outside, after you have completed your little diversion, My Lady."

  "Yeah, `bye," McKay spoke without turning. The hand-held scanner was drawing in streams of data from the dolmen's control system. He touched a combination of glassy keys and crossed to where Clarke was standing. "Step away from the panel." He threw a glance at Erony; she was entranced by a scrolling computer screen.

  At a touch, a cylindrical compartment in the far wall grew a seam down its length and parted. Inside there was something that looked like a large g-clamp and nestled in its jaws was a roughly conical construction of rough-hewn crystalline rods. The object bathed the two men in a warm orange glow.

  "Pay dirt," whispered Rodney. "A Zero Point Module. I love it when I'm right."

  Clarke squinted at the ZPM. "So that's a space-alien superbattery then, is it? Oh."

  "Oh?" McKay repeated. "You're looking at a controlled bubble of space-time feeding vacuum fluctuation energy from m-brane differential states, a device containing the power of a minor sun. What did you expect? Something with a coppercolored top?"