Casualties of war

Chapter six

T'he Marines fanned out, directed by Major Lorne to take up sentry positions around the gate area. Cestan had demonstrated how far out from the Hall the noweapon boundary lay, and they would follow it strictly. Elizabeth zipped her jacket higher against a cool breeze and watched the arrival of the two leaders and their parties.

On her right, John leaned in and commented, "Does it say something disturbing about me that I feel naked without my gun?"

"I'm more disturbed by your use of the words `gun' and `naked' in the same sentence," she returned under her breath. "Now be good."

"Yes, ma'am."

From the woods emerged a tall, navy-robed man who must have been Governor Cestan, flanked by four guards. One carried a banner attached to a pole: the flag of conference, she presumed.

A similar quintet approached from the direction of the mountains, alighting from an animal-drawn cart. Elizabeth was mildly startled by the appearance of the Nistra delegation. The older man-Minister Galven, no doubt-had the grooming and deportment of a leader, but his guards didn't look nearly as strong and fit as the Falnori. They were lean from ill health rather than conditioning. Already, it seemed, there was more to the situation than she'd known.

The delegations stopped a few yards apart and regarded each other without speaking. Elizabeth took that as her cue. "Gentlemen, thank you for agreeing to these discussions," she greeted. "My name is Doctor Elizabeth Weir. My team and I are visitors to your world, and we have not come to tell you how to lead your people. Rather, it's my hope that by acting as a third party mediator, with no alliance to either side, I can help you to reach an arrangement that will be equitable to all and promote understanding between your two societies."

Neither side made any overt response to the introduction. Undaunted, she continued, "Shall we move to the Hall of Tribute so we may begin?"

Stepping forward, two of Cestan's guards detached their whips from their belts and handed the coils of ore and leather to their comrades. Apparently both sides planned to leave personnel at the gate, because two of Galven's guards did likewise. Trust, obviously, was in short supply here. Ronon, who had shocked no one on his team by choosing to stay outside with the Marines, took custody of his teammates' relinquished P-90s.

"Give a yell if anyone approaches the perimeter," John instructed, tapping the radio affixed to his vest. "From any direction. And keep an eye on your new pals."

"Will do," said Ronon.

The motley crew started toward the damaged outer building. Cestan and Galven both kept their gazes focused directly ahead, neither acknowledging the other during the walk. John, Lorne, and Teyla stayed between the two parties, maintaining a subtle separation, just in case. Elizabeth could see Rodney practically humming with anticipation beside her. He had brought two of the city's power specialists along to dig into whatever technological treasures lay within the Ancient facility, and he obviously didn't care to waste any more time.

The interior of the structure was every bit as demolished as its exterior suggested. Flashlight in hand, Lorne helped Elizabeth climb over a splintered table as they followed the Nistra guards into a back corner. Behind a fallen section of roof lay two doors. The guards approached the second door and manipulated its handle this way and that. Eventually the door opened to reveal a nondescript stairwell.

When he caught sight of it, Rodney's cheer dimmed, and he grumbled a complaint about information that would have been helpful earlier.

The stairs led them down about two stories, depositing them in a room that caught Elizabeth off-guard. No evidence of any attack was visible here. At one end of the expansive room sat a V-shaped table and easily enough chairs for the proceedings. The rest of the space was lined with Ancient equipment, leading to a hallway at the far end that must have continued into the rest of the facility. All of it was clean, orderly-and lit.

Her surprise must have shown, because Cestan spoke for the first time. "Our scholars are permitted to study and reflect here. A group visited earlier and prepared the Hall for our use."

Already bouncing from console to console, trying to determine the optimal starting point, Rodney managed to quash his curiosity long enough to ask, "May I infer that we're free to look around?"

The governor cast a pointed gaze at Galven, as if challenging him to disagree.

"I have no objection to the furtherance of knowledge," the minister replied calmly.

"Excellent. Good luck with the treaty and all that. We'll check in." Rodney made an impatient come-here gesture at John, who fixed him with a withering look before crossing the room to join him.

"Not the warrior," Galven said sharply.

John paused in mid-stride. "I'm sorry?"

The Nistra leader studied him with a glacial expression. "You are a warrior, not a scholar. As such you are not granted access to the works of the Ancestors. You will remain here."

A humorless chuckle came from Cestan. "Do you make this claim honestly? After your raiders have stolen so much from within these walls?"

"My people have done nothing of the sort," Galven snarled. "Does your hypocrisy know no limits?"

"Gentlemen, please." Elizabeth could feel the tension building, and they hadn't even begun negotiations yet. "For the moment, let's concentrate on the issue at hand."

"Which is absurd," Rodney declared, making little effort to defuse the situation. "Colonel Sheppard's not a-well, he is, but isn't that oversimplifying things? I mean, in his defense, he can calculate pi to twenty significant figures before you can say-"

"I watched you relinquish your weapon earlier," Galven said to John, who still stood uncertainly in the center of the room.

Rodney frowned. "Of course you did. You saw me do the same thing. I'm certainly not a warrior."

"No, you are not." Galven kept his eyes on John as he answered. "But a weapon does not make a warrior."

A message of some sort seemed to pass between the older minister and the younger colonel, making Elizabeth wonder if Galven had once been a warrior himself.

After a moment, John dropped his gaze and turned back to Rodney with a half-shrug of acceptance. "He's right about me. Kinda tough to deny it."

"And that would be one of the reasons why I'd rather have you with us," Rodney persisted, his voice almost too low to be heard. "Can't we work something out?"

In truth, Elizabeth wasn't wild about the idea of letting anyone wander off unescorted, either. She deferred to her military advisor, however, and said nothing.

John shook his head. "We can't afford to jeopardize this. And these guys have been poking around in here for thousands of years. You'll live. Go find cool stuff."

With a huff of irritation, Rodney acquiesced. "Like I said, we'll check in." The trio of scientists headed for the corridor.

Taking the initiative, Elizabeth walked over to stand at the head of the table. "Governor, Minister, if you please."

The leaders moved to opposite sides of the table without argument, the other representatives of the three groups filling in around them. There was a refreshing lack of formal ceremony. Elizabeth wasn't naive enough to believe that the full proceedings would be nearly as civil and sensible.

"I'd like to begin by hearing the terms of the current agreement from each of you, in order to ensure that there is no ambiguity or misinterpretation," she announced. "And I'll have to ask, out of respect for all involved, that each side be allowed to present a complete statement without interruption. There are no time limits here; no one will be denied an opportunity to be heard on any topic." She folded her hands atop the table. "Minister Galven, since some of my people have spoken previously to Governor Cestan, I suggest that you speak first."

"Very well." Galven's close-cropped hair was snow white, but his piercing blue eyes gave the impression of someone much younger. "The accord has changed many times. The most recent version was struck seven generations ago. It calls for a trade meeting each year, after the harvest, held outside this Hall. The Nistra contribute one carriage of ore for every three carriages of grain and fruit provided by the Falnori."

Elizabeth turned to Cestan. "Do you dispute that explanation?"

"I do not," the governor acknowledged. "However, it is incomplete. The total amount of goods to be exchanged is determined at a conference held three days before the trade. Each year for the past ten, the Nistra have offered smaller and smaller amounts of adarite. It has gotten to the point where we must ration our use of lamps."

"Enduring the darkness is less difficult than starving." Galven's tone was laden with scorn. "My people would gladly offer more adarite if we could. But many are in poor health and unable to work in the mines as well as before. Even so, we honor the accord to the best of our ability-something the Falnori apparently no longer feel honor-bound to do."

Cestan's eyes narrowed. "In what way have we supposedly broken the accord?"

"By your repeated incursions into our mining territory, and your egregious theft of large quantities of adarite."

"That is untrue!" Cestan came out of his chair, clearly incensed. "You had no legitimate claim to the mountains in the first place, and yet we refused to contest your misappropriation in the name of peace."

"In the name of peace, or of cultural purity?" Galven sneered.

"Gentlemen!" Elizabeth raised her voice. She hadn't expected her no-interruptions rule to hold for long. Still, they were already dragging up ancient history only ten minutes into the talks. "As I understand it, the division of lands occurred generations ago. I don't believe we can resolve any questions surrounding the legitimacy of that process here. Let's instead focus on the current situation. Governor, you deny the minister's assertion that your people have stolen adarite from the Nistra?"

"I deny it in the strongest possible terms." Regaining his composure, Cestan sat down again. "The Falnori hold their honor paramount. We are not thieves. The audacity of such a statement is only compounded by the recent behavior of the minister's own people. Or is it considered acceptable if the raid is perpetrated on a neutral site-for instance, this Hall?"

This time it was Galven who sprang to his feet. "Ludicrous and insulting," he spat. "And a blatant diversion from the heart of the matter."

As the volume in the room escalated, Elizabeth shared a glance with John, then with Teyla and Lorne. None of them appeared any more hopeful than she felt. This was shaping up to be a long day.

"You have got to see this."

"Obviously. Not at this particular instant, how ever.

"But it-"

"Kendall, it's been here for ten thousand years. Nothing in this facility is going to blink out of existence in the next ten minutes." Sitting on a low storage cabinet-had the researchers taken all the chairs with them when they left, or what? — Rodney jabbed at a few more buttons on the nearby console. Every so often he came upon an Ancient lab that used a different computer protocol than Atlantis did. He was starting to think they'd done it intentionally to challenge him.

"Like switching from Mac to Windows to Unix," he muttered to himself before raising his voice. "Look, peace talks don't come together in an hour or two. We may have days to explore this place. Let's just get a basic idea from the database about what's here, and then go room-to-room later."

When he glanced up from the screen, though, he found Kendall and Wen crouched on the floor beside an unidentifiable piece of equipment. They'd apparently pried open a panel on the side and detached some sort of battery for examination.

"Oh, congratulations on that headfirst dive into the shallow end of the pool!" Rearing up from his makeshift seat, Rodney glared fiercely at them. "Did it occur to you at any point that removing that power supply might have affected other equipment in the room-like, say, the computer I'm working on?"

Wen raised his head. "Did you lose power?"

He hadn't, but… "So not the point!"

The two electrical engineers looked only faintly chastised. Kendall shrugged. "No harm, then. This one wasn't active, anyway."

Some people, Rodney decided, didn't have enough sense to know when they were being told off. Gritting his teeth, he went back to his console. "Fine. Fill me in on what your blind flailing has accomplished so far while I work on a more prudent plan."

"This appears to be an adarite power cell," said Wen. "We know that the ore produces energy when subjected to pressure. Here, a casing tightens around the adarite when activated by a mechanical linkage in the machine. The contact between the adarite and the casing completes the circuit, as it were."

Briefly, Rodney wondered if he'd tripped such a linkage when he'd first attempted to get the transporter in the ruins working. Traditional Ancient design, but adarite-powered… a Franken-transporter. Lovely.

"It's remarkably simple," Kendall put in. "The efficiency losses are very low, too. I guess, if you could run your whole facility with this stuff, you wouldn't be too worried about gadgets powered by traditional Ancient sources being unusable. And even after sitting dormant all this time, it cranked up immediately."

Rodney didn't have to watch them to know that they'd reconnected the power supply and were monitoring its output. He was more interested in the readout in front of him. "Give me a file directory, you overgrown abacus," he threatened the Ancient computer, typing every obscure list prompt the expedition's programming team had divined, one after another. At last the recalcitrant terminal gave up the goods. "Aha-victory is mine."

Within seconds, Kendall was at his shoulder, peering over at the screen. "Is that a map of the labs here?"

"Complete with descriptions of the projects to which each lab was devoted." Rodney aimed a finger at the hallway diagram glowing on the screen and grimaced as his back complained. Sitting sideways on a damned cabinet was in no way an ergonomically sound practice. "Clearly the Ancients had big plans for adarite before the war with the Wraith monopolized their time and resources. They were trying to apply it to everything from toasters to trains."

"Think of what this planet could have been if they had completed their work," Wen wondered.

A surprisingly insightful observation. What would this civilization's history have been? The Wraith still would have shown up off and on, but the Falnori and Nistra might have had more of a chance to develop as a society between cullings. For all anyone knew, the populace might never have split down the middle.

There was nothing useful to be found at the end of that little rumination, though. "Well, since Colonel Sheppard is likely to revoke my dessert privileges if I don't come back with something that goes kaboom, let's narrow our focus to the weapons lab."

As Rodney examined the readout, a spatial orientation issue occurred to him. If they were located where he thought they were on the map, the facility extended further than he'd realized-conceivably further than even the locals realized. The area designated for weapons research was on the extreme edge of the map, not far from what appeared to be-

"There's a second entrance to this place," he said suddenly.

Kendall's forehead wrinkled. "Are you sure that's what that symbol means? Nothing was visible from outside."

"Which might very well have been intentional. Much of the work being done here would have been under heavy security; no doubt that was the reason for the facility being built under a hill like this. It's possible the Falnori and Nistra don't even know the alternate entry point exists. Perfectly logical, though. Having only one way in or out would be against any fire code ever written."

"So let's go check it out."

The urge to roll his eyes was strong enough that Rodney didn't bother to fight it. "You don't get offworld much, do you, Kendall?"

"What?" the engineer said, getting defensive.

"You want to do everything and you want to do it all right now. These things require some consideration, some flexibility. A soft touch-"

Kendall's disbelieving laugh cut him off. "Have you met yourself?"

Rodney barely blinked. "Yes, respond to constructive criticism with personal insults. Very helpful."

"Are we going or are we not?" Wen had reattached the panel and stood up. "Your squabbling gives me a headache."

It galled Rodney to have to acknowledge Kendall's viewpoint, but he could be the bigger man. "The weapons lab is reasonably close to the alternate entry point. Probably because the weapons researchers would have been the ones most likely to need a rapid escape route if something went wrong with their projects. In any case, we might as well head in that direction."

The trek turned out to be longer than it had looked on the innocuous little screen. Rodney's near-eidetic memory-he'd always believed true photographic memory to be a myth-kept them on the correct route, even after he bypassed the locking mechanisms on two sets of doors and all signs of recent activity disappeared. He was willing to bet that the transporter they'd found earlier led to this higher-security area, which might be a possibility worth investigating later, because the endless walking wasted a lot of potential research time.

Clearly none of the locals had been this far into their vaunted Hall, or they would have tidied up. Past a certain point, many of the lamps that lined the walls were inoperable, their transparent sheaths smashed on the floor.

"Could these areas have been damaged in the Wraith attack?" Wen asked, switching on his flashlight. "We must be closer to the surface than before."

Rodney had noted the slight incline of the corridor, but it wasn't a steep enough gradient to have brought them anywhere near the crest of the hill. He'd lost any sense of where they were in relation to the gate ages ago. "If the alternate entrance is located on the side of the hill, maybe." Which was possible. The entrance they'd used had been on what he considered to be the back of the rise, nearest the Falnori forest and opposite the land leading to the Nistra mountains. Neither group would have had any reason to go looking for a hidden entrance in their version of a demilitarized zone.

Slowing his pace, Rodney aimed his flashlight into a lab along the way. The room did bear some resemblance to the ruined building on the surface, with equipment strewn across the floor. Something about it all didn't quite fit, though.

"The walls and ceiling are completely intact," he said, mostly to himself. "Nothing in here shows any fire damage. I don't think the Wraith did this."

"Someone else came in here and trashed the place?" Kendall didn't appear too pleased by that concept.

"Well, Cestan did seem rather ticked off about some alleged Nistra break-ins. Maybe he was telling the truth."

The trio moved with a little more caution after that. Rodney told himself that the odds of anyone else poking around in here at this particular moment were so low as to be negligible. For one thing, a half-dozen Marines and a really intimidating Satedan were patrolling the gate area. Granted, the alternate entrance was, in all likelihood, some distance away from the gate area… Oh, hell, was that a noise?

He whipped around to look at Wen and Kendall, whose alarmed expressions confirmed his suspicions. And just when had he ended up in front of them?

Flattening himself against the wall, he shut off his light and listened intently. Voices could now be heard reflecting off the smooth walls, weak reverberations making the words indistinguishable.

Rodney inched forward, trying to view the situation objectively. If they needed to contact anyone for help, using the alternate entrance would be more practical than going back the way they'd come. It was closer, and it might enable them to use their radios, which didn't transmit well through so much rock and reinforced structure.

That, of course, presumed they could get to the alternate entrance. When he summoned his courage to peek around the next corner, he spotted faint light emanating from two sources: the doorway to another lab, and an opening at the far end of the corridor. The opening had to be the alternate entrance; it appeared to be a large hatch set high in an inward-angled wall, positioned at the top of a three-meter ladder. The people who had left it ajar were almost certainly the owners of the voices he heard coming from the illuminated lab.

Crouching low, Rodney risked a quick glance into the room. He counted at least five people ransacking its contents, holding up items for inspection and stuffing some of them into oversized packs. Every so often someone would offer an opinion on a device's value, occasionally prompting an argument. Judging by their well-made clothes and the pistol-style guns at their belts, they had some experience in this arena.

Rodney turned to instruct Kendall and Wen and found them well within his personal space. Deliver me from amateurs. A decisive shoving motion conveyed his irritation, and they shuffled backward. The military had hand signals for these things. Unfortunately, the military wasn't here. Damn it, why had they picked today to cave in to unreasonable native rules when the natives themselves weren't playing fair?

If these pirate rejects were natives, a fact of which Rodney wasn't at all certain. He hadn't seen clothes or weapons like that on any of the Falnori or Nistra rep resentatives, to be sure, but it would be the height of naivete to presume that he'd seen every charming facet of this planet. And how likely was it that someone had gotten through the gate without alerting the guards? Of course, these people could have arrived days ago, for all anyone knew. Reports of the scavenging gang once led by Colonel Maybourne came to mind.

In any case, he had precious little time to wonder about it. Feeling ridiculous, Rodney pointed at the hatch, mimed a running action with two fingers, and jammed one of those fingers against his lips to emphasize the need for silence. His companions nodded vigorously, wide-eyed.

It wasn't so hard. All they had to do was get past the doorway without being seen and then up the ladder without being heard. The Marines could take it from there.

Rodney ineffectually willed his pulse to quit racing and waited until the raiders got themselves embroiled in another argument. As the dispute grew louder, he bent as low as his knees would allow and hustled across the doorway. Wen and Kendall weren't far behind.

No one seemed to have noticed, if the ongoing insults inside the lab were any indication. Exhaling a long-held breath, Rodney grabbed hold of the ladder and climbed toward the hatch. For all their faults, the Ancients built things to last, even ladders. His ascent was accompanied by not a single squeak. Two more rungs and-

The barrel of a gun greeted him almost as quickly as the daylight. Behind it, a raider eyed him, looking amused.

In his head, Rodney cursed his lack of foresight. What self-respecting bunch of thugs wouldn't leave a guard outside to stand watch?

"Crap!" hissed Kendall below him. "Sergeant, we're close by and we need help-"

The attempted radio call was aborted when the raider hauled Rodney through the hatch, tossed him aside, and aimed at Kendall instead.

That settled it. Local customs be damned. From now on, assuming he survived the day, Rodney wasn't going as far as the bathroom without a sidearm.