Cleaning Up After The Ancients - Chapter 99

Chapter 99 - Moving On Again

“And you're really okay just leaving the place to them?” Vala inquired in an odd tone as she watched the last of the marines pass through the moon base's Stargate.

“For safety reasons I sanitized the database of everything but the historical files.” Eventus admitted with a shrug. “So unless there's another secret lab hidden away somewhere inside this secret lab, it’s not like there’s really anything of value left here outside of the ZPM I'm leaving behind to keep various systems running.”

Which, like the two he was taking with him, had been sabotaged with an annoyingly persistent bit of code to overload if someone attempted to connect them anywhere but Janus's secret lab.

Daniel turned away from the small group he was talking to and walked over with Cameron Mitchell and a short balding man in a lab coat following alongside.

“Eventus.” He began, motioning to the two following him. “This is Lieutenant Colonel Cameron Mitchell and Doctor Lee.”

“Hey.” Mitchell offered, giving a casual two fingered wave.

“It's, ah, well, an absolute honor to meet you, sir.” Doctor Lee stammered awkwardly as he offered forward a hand.

“It's nice to meet you too, Doctor Lee.” Eventus returned, smiling as he shook the man's hand.

“Doctor Lee is going to be supervising the setup here.” Daniel explained in an apologetic tone.

Doctor Lee gave an embarrassed nod. “I certainly didn't foresee my day going like this when I woke up, but when an emergency order comes down from the President of all people you can't exactly say no.”

He paused and cocked his head slightly in thought. “Well, I guess you could since we're not a dictatorship or anything like that. But it really wouldn't be good for my future career prospects.”

“But anyways.” The Scientist went on with a small cringe. “I know Doctor Jackson said you were going to leave us a list of do's and don'ts for the place. However I was kind of hoping I could pick your brain on a couple things before you fly off?”

“Go ahead.” Eventus said.

“Okay.” Doctor Lee began, holding his hands apart in front of him. “So the Stargate here, it can't be dialed normally period?”

“That's complicated.” Eventus admitted as he glanced over at the currently inactive structure. “Janus actually had the gate connected fully to the gate network and designated as the primary connection point for the solar system. However he also set it to only accept incoming seven point addresses in a sort of give and take manner from destinations he had left this location to visit.”

The sole exception had been incoming connections from an address that matched up with the old network control hub, but it was too risky for Earth to learn about that given the various hostile groups still roaming around the galaxy.

“I reset the gate to normal operations and designated it as a secondary connection point. So while you needed the nine point address to dial in from Earth, it will now also connect to wormholes utilizing the standard seven point address for Earth so long as the current Earth gate is inoperable.”

It was honestly careless of Janus to utilize such a security system given a wormhole jump could bypass it completely.

“And we can just dial out as normal?” Doctor Lee inquired cautiously. “Because this place is really kind of like… Well… Have you seen the movie Event Horizon yet?"

Eventus shook his head, mildly curious where the man was going with this.

“Well.” He repeated with a frown. “It's about this experimental FTL ship that passes through a sort of psychic fear dimension corrupting the ship and driving the investigative team sent to figure out what happened murderously insane.”

“Oh.” Eventus exclaimed as he realized what the man was suggesting. “Yeah, I can fix that, just give me a second.”

Walking over to one of the nearby control panels, he accessed the facility settings and switched the lighting from the night mode Janus had left it set on to the standard day mode Atlantis used.

“Is that better?” He asked as he returned to the now rapidly blinking quartet.

“Surprisingly, yes.” Doctor Lee mumbled.

“Hold on.” Vala suddenly interjected, the bodyswapped woman sounding more than a little annoyed all of the sudden. “You’re telling me we’ve been walking around in the dark for the past five hours because you forgot to turn on the lights?”

“Technically?” Eventus corrected with a grimace as he acknowledged his small mistake. “It’s more that I forgot that my people’s night mode would be a lot darker to you regular humans then it is to us.”

“Moving on.” Daniel said, silencing Vala with a glare that left the woman pouting. “General Landry was hoping you wouldn’t mind if Colonel Mitchell came along as an escort for the rest of this trip?”

“An escort?” Eventus repeated, glancing over at the Ben Bowder lookalike with a raised eyebrow.

“Yeah, I'm just gonna be frank with ya here.” Mitchell began with an apologetic shrug. “When this whole thing began nobody thought you were going to find anything more than a few old ruins out here. Now that you've shown there's active stuff around however, the people in charge want someone who actually knows how to shoot a gun going along to watch your back.”

Looking at it from the General's perspective, Eventus could certainly understand the reasoning for wanting an actual SGC combat officer to be on the Jumper with them. And while he personally didn't care either way, it felt like it would be bad form to just go along with things without giving them at least a little hard time about the choice.

“I suppose Doctor Jackson does have a bad habit of dying without someone around to watch over him.” He mused as he pretended to consider the issue.

Daniel visibly twitched.

“You know.” Vala muttered, pursing her lips as she stared consideringly at the Archeologist. “I think that's the third time I've heard someone mention that.”

“He's kind of known for it.” Mitchell shrugged. “Though to be fair I think the only member of the old SG1 that hasn't been dead at least once at this point is Colonel Carter.“

“It happens.” Vala agreed with a bob of her head. “Dear old Qetesh got herself killed at least a dozen times while possessing me.”

She wasn't exactly wrong, even Eventus himself had died a few times over the centuries. It was kind of just one of those accepted perils of living a moderately dangerous lifestyle when medical technology existed that could actually do that particular job.

“Please don't treat that as if it's normal.” Daniel whined, looking oddly defeated at the pronouncement. 

“Moving away from Doctor Jackson’s history.” Eventus continued. “I suppose there wouldn’t be any harm in Colonel Mitchell coming along.”

He considered the seating arrangement for a moment before giving a self acknowledging nod. “Though of course he’ll have to sit in the back since all of the front seats are currently spoken for.”

Mitchell frowned at that, glancing around the now well lit gate room for a moment in seeming search of something. “Speaking of which, where’s the Elf?”

“Poking various walls in search of secret passages.” Eventus admitted. “I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Janus wasn’t really the type to put secret rooms inside his already secret labs.”

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Author’s Notes: Cut to Rayla returning with a wild story and the gold Indiana Jones idol while trying to explain to everybody about the giant underground temple that she found.