Casualties of war

Chapter nine

She heard the birdsong first, a low-pitched, melodic chatter not unlike that of the canyon gulls on Athos. Gradually she became aware of other sensations: a cool breeze across her face, a trace of moisture in the air, and pain.

Teyla stirred minutely, halting when the motion roused an insistent ache at her temple. A hand closed around her shoulder, and she forced her eyes open. Once her sight became focused, she found a concerned Satedan looming over her.

"You okay?" he asked.

"I-believe so." Aside from the vicious pounding in her head, a few cuts and scrapes appeared to be her only injuries. She began to push herself up to a sitting position, soon aided by Ronon's arm at her back. "And you?"

He shrugged. "Coat protected me from most of the flame." Crouching next to her, he pulled at his hair and examined a couple of dreadlocks that looked slightly singed at the ends. In spite of his indifferent response, she could see a patch of reddened skin on the side of his neck. "And like Sheppard keeps telling me, I have a thick skull."

It occurred to Teyla that she had no idea where they were. A rocky forest of some type, unfamiliar to her. "What happened?"

"You remember the raiders?"

Unfortunately, she did. "We were firing at their ship as it went through the gate."

"They left us a present-an explosive. Probably trying to keep us from following them. I tried to get you out of the way before it blew." Ronon's expression was rueful. "Wasn't fast enough."

"Obviously you were, since I am alive. Thank you."

He deflected her gratitude by continuing. "The blast must have knocked us through the gate just behind the raiders. Don't know if they made a mistake when they dialed, or if this was a halfway stop for them, or what, but there doesn't seem to be much of anything around. I never even saw the ship again after we got here."

Teyla scanned the area. She observed a number of massive boulders interspersed with evergreen trees, and little else. "I do not see a gate."

"It's a few paces away, on the other side of these rocks. I figured we should get out of sight in case anyone came back. It hasn't been long, but there's been no gate activity yet." He stood and stretched, his spine cracking. "Your radio got lost somewhere, and mine's broken."

"You thought it better to stay here than return to Atlantis?"

Ronon grimaced. "You're not going to like this part."

It would have served no purpose to ask what aspect of this mission she was meant to like, based on events so far. Rather than explain, he held out his canteen and a packet from the small medical kit in her vest. She swallowed the pain tablet and permitted him to pull her to her feet. "Show me."

The walk was brief, as promised, and served to clear her head somewhat. The air had a crisp, clean scent, and the continuing birdsong accompanied them. She caught sight of one of the birds at last, a blue-gray animal much more diminutive than its voice suggested.

Rounding the side of the rock face, which towered at least ten times as tall as Ronon, she drew up short in surprise.

Debris littered the ground in a wide swath that extended as far as she could see. Most of it appeared to be metal, the remnants of a great structure of some type. Unlike the Ancient facility on P7L-418, the destruction here was total. She could identify large beams among the vast spread of smaller fragments. Under a thick layer of forest growth that obscured many details, the pieces were badly warped. Clearly it had been many years since the building had collapsed.

Amid the rubble, wedged in a ravine that split the rock face, stood the Stargate. Teyla amended her mental description immediately, for `stood' was hardly an appropriate word. Despite having traveled to countless worlds, this was a circumstance she had never before witnessed. The huge gate was overgrown with so much vegetation that it was barely recognizable. She could see that it was cocked at an odd angle, tipped precariously forward-about twenty degrees off vertical, Rodney would have said. Little wonder that their arrival had been less than comfortable; the orientation of the gate must have caused the wormhole to pitch them onto the ground.

"The gate does not look like it was intentionally placed in this position," she said, choosing her footsteps with caution as she made her way through the wreckage.

"More like thrown," Ronon agreed. "I think all this junk used to be a building that housed the gate. A large one, maybe ten floors high. The gate could have fallen when it the building was destroyed and ended up like this."

With only the sides of the ravine to support the ring's considerable weight, she worried about the likelihood of somehow dislodging it. "It may not be stable."

"It's fine. I checked."

Teyla did not care to know how he had performed such a check.

"Besides, it looks like the building came down a long time ago. If the gate's stayed in place this long, it's stable."

What might this facility have been? A laboratory like the one on 418? Had it succumbed to a Wraith attack as so many others had?

There was a more immediate issue to address, Teyla realized. "Where is the dialing device?"

"Can't find one."

Her head snapped toward him, perhaps an ill-advised motion given her headache.

"I haven't covered the whole area yet." Ronon adopted a defensive tone. "I needed to make sure you were okay first."

Teyla softened her gaze. "I understand. I did not mean to question your actions." Still, the fact remained. They needed a dialer to get home, and none was apparent. "The raiders were able to dial the gate from within their ship."

"Yeah." He didn't say what he surely must have been thinking: since the structure was little more than a ruin now, there was no guarantee that a working dialer still existed. "Let's start our search over here."

They paced off a rough grid in order to ensure that they wouldn't overlook any areas. Nearby trees donated medium-sized branches to the cause; after a section of debris-strewn ground had been thoroughly searched, the pair stabbed a branch into the dirt in each of the section's four corners to mark its boundaries.

Hours passed while they combed through the wreckage, clearing tangled vines and mosses away from any surface that did not look naturally formed. Ronon took charge of moving the largest pieces, but both felt the strain. On occasion a smooth, curved piece of metal would snare their attention, only to raise false hopes.

With each branch placed, Teyla's dread became more acute. Often, out of increasing desperation more than anything else, they would err in their measurements and allow the sections to overlap so that they searched some areas more than once. All of it was to no avail.

The sun inched closer to the mountains. Ronon sat down hard, wiping sweat from his brow onto his sleeve. Resigned, he shook his head. "If there ever was a dialer in that building," he said, "there's nothing left of it now."

Teyla closed her eyes, unable to ward off the despair any longer. Without a device to dial the gate, and with no way to even identify their location, they were stranded.

"I appreciate you finally gracing us with your pres„ence.

"Keep your shirt on, Rodney. Janczyk's on his way with the scanner." Carson glanced around the laboratory as he entered. He rarely had cause to visit many of the areas Rodney's team had devoted to Ancient technology research; his skills were required chiefly when someone touched something they shouldn't have. The directed energy lab was more austere than most. Other sci ence sub-teams had personalized their respective labs with posters and photos from home. No such individual touches were visible in this room-only intimidating machinery separated by bulky metal and polymer shields, along with a neatly hand-lettered sign that read `Don't screw up.

Charming.

"You've got the sample in the airlock chamber?" Carson asked.

With an impatient gaze cast toward the ceiling, Rodney answered, "Yes, although the airlock feature itself is not of great use to us, since energy of this form can be transmitted through many types of solid boundaries. It's a wave, put plainly, not altogether different from a sound wave. Though I'd rather blast hip-hop music through my skull at top volume than hang around this stuff too long. Our somewhat optimistic theory is that the chamber's protective shielding will block enough of it to allow us to take some measurements before we start to forget why we're here."

"Are all physicists as naturally cheerful as you are, Rodney?"

Focused on initializing a machine that resembled an oscilloscope, Rodney frowned distractedly. "What?"

"Forget it." Carson turned as the lab door opened and Janczyk wheeled in a diagnostic imaging scanner, Earth-made because of the interference adarite induced in Ancient technology. "Jan, there's room for that over here."

As Janczyk wheeled the scanner past him, Rodney paused, and Carson could almost see the wheels turning in the scientist's head. Rodney never seemed to know how to act around Janczyk. He might have been one of the more socially awkward members of the expedition, but in this particular case he was hardly alone.

Before becoming one of Carson's more diligent research assistants, Karl Jancyzk had been a lance corporal in Atlantis's Marine detachment. He'd been in the city about a year when an off-world encounter with a Wraith had accelerated his twenty-two-year-old body to the physical age of almost seventy. The quick actions of his teammates had allowed him to become one of the few people to survive a feeding.

With only the barest notion of how the Wraith feeding process worked, Carson had despised the fact that he could do nothing to give the man back his stolen youth, so he'd listened when Jan confessed his dread of returning to Earth. The military had planned to give him a new identity to match his apparent age, and security concerns would have prevented him from reuniting with his family. Instead, Carson had suggested that he be retrained and allowed to stay in Atlantis. Colonel Sheppard had pulled up Jan's personnel file and noted his high test scores in the biological sciences, and Jan readily accepted Carson's offer of a research post.

The Marines, to their credit, still counted him as one of their own, and everyone had seen far stranger things in their time with the Stargate program. Even so, it couldn't be easy for a man not long out of high school to look and feel twenty years older than anyone else in the city, to say nothing of the mortality questions that must have blindsided him. One of Pegasus's everyday injustices.

The equipment was readied, and immediately a faint vibration could be detected on the pseudo-oscilloscope.

"Does that frequency happen to ring a bell?" Rodney asked. "No pun intended."

"Funny." Carson studied the readout. "It's in a harmonic range that could certainly be disruptive to neurological function. Neurons fire in specific patterns; in the hippocampus they fire almost in circular chains. If the adarite emits a wave that's on exactly the right frequency-or, rather, the wrong one-it's possible that it could un-sync that pattern and prevent the transmission of signals to other parts of the brain."

"And what a lovely thought that is." Rodney reached for the airlock chamber control pad. "I'm going to increase the pressure in the chamber to confirm whether or not this frequency is related to the energy discharge."

"Don't take it up too far," Carson warned. "This material is incredibly powerful."

"Thank you, Sherlock. I thought I'd just kick it up to three atmospheres and see if our brains short-circuited." Glaring derisively, Rodney tapped out a command on the keypad. "Increasing to 1.2 atmospheres."

Almost instantly, a spark lit the chamber, and the readings on the screen spiked. Rodney swore under his breath and brought the pressure back to one standard atmosphere. "Well, that was conclusive. The release of energy is correlated with the output of this frequency."

"So if we found a way to dampen the frequency, the adarite would no longer produce any power."

"Infuriatingly, yes."

A mild clatter sounded behind them. Carson turned to see Janczyk backed up against a shelving unit, holding his head in his hands. "Jan?"

It took two more calls before his assistant glanced up, confusion clouding his eyes. "Sony, Dr. Beckett. I just, uh, got this wicked headache all of a sudden."

"Did it coincide with the energy spike?" At Jan's blank expression, Carson traded a look of alarm with Rodney. "Jan, do you remember seeing Rodney increase the chamber pressure a minute ago?"

The ensuing silence spurred Rodney into action. "The chamber's shielding isn't effective," he deduced, slamming a thick metal cover down on the transparent lid of the chamber. "We just smacked ourselves with a level of brain-scrambling energy that was magnitudes higher than what Radek and Wen received."

"Infirmary. Now." Carson grabbed Jan's arm and steered him out into the corridor. Following close on their heels, Rodney locked the lab door behind them.

As soon as the trio arrived in the infirmary, Carson directed Jan onto the scanner bed, trying not to get ahead of himself. He didn't feel any different than he had earlier. Maybe there was more at work here than they yet realized.

Rodney paced the room, clenching and unclenching his fists at his sides. "I can't believe I was shortsighted enough to subject myself to that risk," he fretted. "What if I just destroyed my memories of my entire postdoctoral year? The loss to quantum mechanics research alone-"

Already Carson had had his fill of the scientist's brand of hypochondria. "Are you experiencing a headache and disorientation?" he asked, matter-of-fact.

The query only marginally slowed Rodney down. "Well, not yet, but my brain's always worked on a different level from those of other people, so who knows…"

"Short-term memory, Rodney. It disrupts the forma tion of new neural pathways, not existing ones. If you can remember the reason why you think you're screwed right now, you're not in fact screwed."

Occasionally logic had its perks. Rodney closed his mouth while he considered the theory.

"It's because I'm old, isn't it?"

Caught off-guard, Carson brought his gaze down from the dimmed neurological areas displayed on the screen to Jan's wizened, worried face. "That's why the adarite affected me first, or most, or whatever," continued the young man-Carson insisted on thinking of him according to his actual age, not the fragile husk the Wraith had left him. "I'm halfway to Alzheimer's anyway, and this just pushed it even further along."

"There's no reason to think that." Carson kept his voice firm. "The scan isn't showing any greater effect than Radek's and Wen's did earlier. You just happened to get your exposure in a shorter, heavier dose."

A moment later, it hit him. Both he and Rodney felt fine, while Jan's scan looked just like the results from Radek and Wen. What did Carson have in common with Rodney that the other three men did not?

"Rodney, your turn," he said suddenly, patting the diagnostic bed. Rodney blanched, evidently interpreting the order as a cause for concern. Carson threw up his hands. "I just got through telling you not to worry, didn't I? If it'll make you feel better, I'll have someone run the scan on me as well. Later. Right now I just need your results to act as a baseline for comparison against those who have shown symptoms."

"Oh. Say so next time, will you?" Rodney scooted onto the bed and lay down.

With an anxious Jan at his shoulder, Carson watched as a new neurological map was drawn on the screen. The activation in the hippocampal regions was diminished ever so slightly relative to a normal brain, but the effect was almost negligible compared to the scans of the other adarite-exposed scientists. He stood back, his suspicions confirmed.

As soon as he was free of the scanner, Rodney sat up, drumming his fingers on the bed in a staccato rhythm. "Well?"

"It's the gene," Carson replied simply. "It has to be."

For all his arrogance, Rodney really was every bit as intelligent as he claimed. The light in his eyes suggested that he was already working through the implications. "Of course. Why else would the Ancients have developed adarite technology? They were unaffected."

"And perhaps that's the reason for their eventual abandonment of the research. Their lab assistants would have had difficulties when exposed."

"It's so hard to find good help these days," Rodney said dryly. "Elizabeth needs to know about this. Turns out there's a more direct reason why the Nistra are worse off than the Falnori."

"Aye." Carson glanced at Jan. "How are you feeling, lad?"

"Relieved, Doc." Jan pushed a hand through steel-colored hair and pointed over his shoulder at the door. "I'm gonna get back to work. On something else."

"Go right ahead." After a moment, Carson turned back to Rodney. "Does this change anything for us? If your scan is representative, and it should be, there's still an effect on those with the ATA gene. It's minor, but it's there. Over time-"

"It could be harmful. We have no way of knowing, and I'm certainly not volunteering myself or anyone else as a guinea pig. Not to mention the fact that we'd have to keep the adarite somewhere remote, who knows how far from anyone not in possession of the gene." Rodney's face had reverted to its earlier grim state. "Sheppard's going to be pissed. Although that would hardly constitute a change from the status quo."

Carson considered telling Rodney about the rumor going around, the one where Atlantis's military commander had walked into Elizabeth's office and handed her his resignation. He decided against it. Rumors could be quite wild in the city. It was usually best to ignore them-even the troubling ones.

Instead, he said, "The Colonel's not had an easy time of it lately, Rodney, and he's as human as the rest of us."

"Speak for yourself." The remark fell flat, and Rodney stared at the floor for a beat or two. "The memorial service is going to be on the mainland. Elizabeth convinced the Athosians to wait until she wrapped up the debacle on 418 so she could participate."

With a nod, Carson started toward the door. "If she's headed back to the planet tomorrow, we'd better go explain this new development."

Many hours had passed since either Ronon or Teyla had last spoken. They had chosen to make camp near the gate ruins in the hope that Atlantis had some knowledge of their location and would be sending assistance. Ronon had taken the first watch and had dutifully woken her at regular intervals, as Dr. Beckett had instructed them to do when dealing with a possible head injury.

In spite of their meager supplies-two canteens and a few meal bars-it was not a difficult night. Both were accustomed to a somewhat nomadic existence, and, if Teyla was truthful with herself, she often missed the wind when sleeping in the sterile, re-circulated air of Atlantis.

When morning came without word from their teammates, however, her outlook grew less optimistic. Her head no longer ached, but they would run out of provisions before long, and the immediate area did not seem likely to offer any food or water.

The low rumble of Ronon's voice broke the stillness, echoing her thoughts. "We can't stay here forever." He'd been perched atop a rock nearly his own height, and now jumped down to ground level.

"I agree." Teyla rose from the cool ground and slipped back into the jacket she had used as a pillow. "Have you seen any sign of life-either animals to hunt or a settlement?"

He shrugged. "There are some faint tracks over there." Facing away from the gate, he pointed toward a stand of trees. "Looks like pretty small game, but I'll take what I can get."

Although she knew it would be prudent-necessary, even-to search for food and assistance, she found herself reluctant to stray too far. "We will need to take care to mark our path. This area is secluded, and we must not lose our way back to the gate."

The look of disbelief Ronon gave her in response was almost comical. Belatedly she recalled that for seven years his life had depended on being able to fall back to a planet's gate without delay. "I meant no offense."

"Didn't take any." He adjusted his holster, and she spared a moment to be grateful that they at least were armed. Wandering through the nearby debris, he gathered up an armful of small rocks and chunks of metal. "Remember how Sheppard signaled us when he was stuck in that time portal?"

She did. When they'd stuck Rodney's camera into the time dilation field so many months ago, they'd discovered a large arrow on the cave floor, fashioned from rocks and pointing in the direction John had gone. "We can leave a similar sign by the gate for the Atlantis team to find. It will confirm our presence on this world." She kept the next thought to herself. If Atlantis has any idea where we are. She trusted Rodney's resourcefulness and John's resolve, but such traits were not always enough. "Good idea."

"Took me half the night to come up with it." The admission was offered freely, which Teyla thought admirable. Nothing ever seemed to embarrass Ronon. He trusted his friends to accept him as he was, and he remained unconcerned about what anyone who was not a friend thought of him.

With a small smile, she moved to assist. Together they cleared debris from a three-meter square section of ground and then assembled the collected pieces into large, rough letters: `R' and `T'.

"They can't miss that," Ronon asserted. "Let's go."

He chose an exploratory route that wound through the trees. Teyla allowed him to lead, keeping a sharp eye on their surroundings. As they walked, she noticed a gradual incline to the forest floor. It was difficult to judge distances while the trees obscured her view, but there were mountains not far off, and they were approaching the foothills.

Bending low, Ronon examined a scuff mark in the dirt. "More animal tracks," he said quietly. "Pretty recent."

After nearly an hour of hiking, the forest thinned, and the terrain dipped to form a cave of sorts in the side of a hill. Before Teyla could take more than a cursory look, she heard a soft noise, as if branches had brushed together. She lengthened her stride and signaled for Ronon to listen, causing him to halt in mid-stride.

The noise repeated, and she caught a tiny blur of motion off to her right. Both she and Ronon dropped into a crouch to avoid giving away their presence. A creature ducked around the hill and sniffed at the moss on the trunk of a nearby tree. It appeared similar to a game animal her people had hunted on Athos — but smaller, standing only as high as her waist. She considered it a blessing; if luck had deserted them completely, they might have found this planet barren of any food sources.

Ronon advanced into the clearing without a sound, drawing his blaster from its holster. He took careful aim and-

"Stop! Name yourselves."

Instinctively the Satedan brought his weapon to bear as he whirled toward the voice. Teyla extended a calming hand. A local populace could be an even greater blessing to them. "We are lost travelers," she called into the woods.

To her surprise, a group of eight men and women materialized out of the trees, emerging from behind boulders and climbing down from branches. She identified them as hunters upon seeing the spears and bows they carried.

Ronon looked impressed that the group had escaped his detection, though not impressed enough to lower his blaster. Fixing him with a pointed stare, Teyla laid her hand on his arm until he relented. "We mean your people no harm. Rather, we ask your assistance," she continued in a measured tone.

The hunters' response was to raise their bows. "How simple-minded do you believe us to be?" sneered the leader. "Your kind is well known among us, marauder. We refuse to be deceived."

Marauder? Sharing a glance with Ronon, Teyla began to get a sense of what her Earth-born teammates called deja vu.