Brimstone

Chapter Twenty-one

Dr. Zelenka leaned over the console, his hands on the desk, gripping it until his knuckles turned white. With a deep breath he punched in the coordinates for Admah and stared at the readout. Everything seemed fine. The circuits were aligned and calibrated — none of the diagnostics showed any anomaly — but he knew in the pit of his stomach it wasn’t going to connect.

There was a hesitation in the system, as if it might actually break through whatever confounded it this time. Then it shifted. The coordinates changed and suddenly they were connected to a different gate on a different planet. There were no symbols in common between the address he’d dialed and the one that connected.

“Damn!” he growled. “I thought I had it that time.”

Commander Woolsey, who’d been watching from a few feet away, pushed in closer. “Did it disconnect? Again?”

“Not this time,” Radeck sighed. “This time, it shifted to another address completely. I have no idea what world these coordinates lead to, but it has an operational gate.”

“Close it down,” Woolsey said. “Could it be the DHD? Is it possible that the error is on our end?”

“I’ve dialed three separate known addresses,” Zelenka replied. “All of them connected without errors. Whatever it is that’s blocking us, it’s only associated with the Admah gate.”

“There’s nothing else you can try?”

“Let me see.” Zelenka turned back to the console. His fingers worked furiously at the keys and he squinted at the console readout. “I keep thinking that maybe with a change in the modulation of the signal I might overcome whatever it is that’s preventing the gate from locking on and opening. It’s as if the dialer connects, and then something shifts the signal just enough to prevent a lock.”

He pushed the symbols for the Admah gate carefully and waited. The wormhole shimmered and began to form. “I’ve got it!” he cried. “I’ve…”

The shimmer faded. Just that quickly, it disconnected again. “For the love of all that’s holy!” Zelenka exclaimed. He ran his hands back through his hair and stared at the console. Halfway back, he gripped tightly in frustration and pulled the hair taut.

“They’re using some sort of phasing signal. When someone dials the coordinates for their gate, it’s detected and a phase shift occurs. I don’t know how but it redirects the signal, reconfigures the address that’s been dialed. The coordinates to the gate change every time somebody tries to access it.”

“But,” Woolsey said, confused, “why would they do that? And why did it connect the first time and allow our team to pass through?” His brow was deeply creased, and he looked for all the world like he’d just bitten into a lemon. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Zelenka shrugged. “Maybe they don’t want anyone coming through the gate? Perhaps there is a problem on their end and they don’t want to endanger anyone else? I suppose Rodney is capable of creating such a shift…”

“We have to contact them. ” Woolsey began to pace, biting into his lip as he went. “Is the Daedelus in range, or anyone we could relay a signal through?”

“I have tried. No one is close enough”

“So, our team is stuck there and we can’t even contact them? The gate is broken, and as far as we know they can’t open it from their side either. Not to mention that the moon they’re on is on a collision course with a sun. Wonderful.”

“Perhaps we can connect with the phase modulator and disable it?” Radek offered with raised eyebrows. “It’s theoretically possible, but I’d have to be very accurate. Trying to reverse the signal might send it into a loop that would prevent the gate from ever working again.

Besides, even if we could get a signal through, we’d have to hack into the system they’re using and shut it down before the phase signal closed the gate again.”

Woolsey nodded and tapped one finger on his chin. “You’re right. There’s too much risk.”

Radek groaned. “Well, we have to do something. We can’t just leave them there.”

“Oh, we’re not. Believe me.” Woolsey sighed and nodded, more to himself than anyone else. “I’ll be in my office. If we can’t connect to Admah through the gate, we’ll have to pay them a little visit in person. I’m going to see if I can contact the Daedelus.”

“I’m going to stay here and work on this signal phasing a bit more.” Zelenka smiled then, but it was a hollow gesture. “There’s something here, something I’ve never seen before, and it’s bothering me. If I can isolate it, maybe I can figure a way through the shift.”

“Keep me posted.” Woolsey said. He turned and strode off down the hall.

Zelenka watched him go, his mind already shifting back to the problem at hand, running over data he’d been over enough times to give himself a headache, and looking for what he’d missed. He knew he’d missed something, because there was always an answer. His life was science, and next to Rodney he knew more about Ancient technology than any man alive. Somewhere in the signals he’d already recorded, he’d find what he needed. It was just a matter of separating it from what he didn’t. His fingers worked at the keys as he thought out loud.

“There are only so many gates to be dialed. Eliminate the ones that have already been contacted, and the number drops significantly. Since almost nothing in the universe is truly random, there is a pattern, and if that pattern can be spotted, even a seemingly random frequency modulation can be predicted.”

He pushed off from the table, rolling the chair along its periphery until he reached the second table and an even better equipped console.

“All right, then. If I dial up the gate one hundred times and log the results, then I should be able to write a program that will predict exactly where the signal phasing will connect with a gate, based on those results. Unless of course, against all the odds, the signal is random. Then…”

He began dialing Admah, logging his results as the gate randomly disconnected and re-connected with other gates. When these first one hundred attempts yielded nothing in the way of a pattern, he dialed some more. After nearly three hundred attempts to dial up Admah, he felt that he had enough data, so he began feeding it to the computer and compiling a program that would track the signal phasing.

As he worked, he tried several more times to dial through to the planet, mostly to keep his fingers busy and to distract his mind from waiting on results. He was about to call it a night, and let the program search for the pattern while he rested, when he saw something different.

Moving quickly, he recorded the most recent signal. He dialed Admah’s gate again, and got the same result. The same phase-shifting signal was present as he’d seen on all his previous attempts, but this time there was something more. Riding on the signal, he detected a small burst of static, or signal — something that had not been present in the signal all the three hundred plus times he’d recorded it before.

“What’s this?”

The only way to find out exactly what he had found was to develop a filter that would remove the phase-shifting carrier from the static. If it was static. Somehow, he didn’t think so. It was a little too coincidental that the new signal would show up — and repeat — after he’d attempted the same connection more than 300 times without a sign of it. If Rodney had managed to get into the system on the other side, it would be like him to find a way to use the very thing preventing the gate from opening to send a message. If there was a message, no one else but Zelenka himself was likely to decipher it. He leaned in close and focused. There was no way to know how time sensitive the information would be. He wanted to give himself, Woolsey, and the team themselves as much time as possible. It might save lives.