Cleaning Up After The Ancients - Chapter 14

Chapter 14 - Step Two

“She shot you.” Weir repeated as if she couldn’t quite believe what Eventus had just told her.

He shrugged, not particularly bothered by it given he’d had his personal shield on. “She thought she could prove I wasn’t one of the Ancestors by shooting me. Not really sure how that would have worked given we’re just as much flesh and blood as you all. But she seemed pretty surprised when the projectile just hit my personal shield and stopped.”

Shepherd gave him an odd look. “You know, you could have told us you had one of those.”

“You didn’t ask.” Eventus pointed out as he held back the urge to chuckle at the slightly annoyed look Shepherd shot him in response. “And it’s not like you gave me a complete breakdown of your equipment either.

“We usually try to make sure everyone is checked out on our standard equipment before going out into the field.” Shepherd pointed out with a quick glance across the desk to where Weir was now giving him an apologetic look. “But we weren’t really expecting you to come along on the scouting mission.”

That was fair enough, especially given a big part of why Eventus had ambushed them like he had was a desire to avoid those types of normally sensible precautions that might have slowed things down.

“We can go over them tonight if you want.” He offered since there wasn't really anything else pressing he needed to get done. “At the very least it would probably be a good idea to calibrate my communicator to operate on the frequency you use before we head out to Taranis tomorrow. Because that place is a giant maze of corridors and underground docking bays, some of which can interfere with communications if you aren't hooked into the facility's internal systems.”

Not his people's, because they only really kept radio capability around as a useful legacy system. But for people who did use it, the place was an absolute nightmare to keep an active communications link going.

“About that.” Weir put forward hesitantly as she clasped her hands together in what Eventus was coming to suspect was a minor nervous tic. “We sent a MALP through to check out the planet while you were out retrieving the ZPM. And apparently there are people living there.”

Eventus had known that beforehand of course, and he was moderately interested in finding out how that had come about given he couldn’t see the Wraith just leaving humans there alongside a relatively intact drydock facility.

“That’s moderately unfortunate for them.” He offered with a frown. “I really hope they weren’t planning on staying long term.”

The look on Weir’s face turned moderately cautious at his words. “From the brief conversation we had, they appear to be hoping to. Is there a problem with that?”

“Yes.” Eventus admitted as he shuffled to get a bit more comfortable in his chair. “But it requires a bit of a history lesson. You see, by the last twenty or so years of the war there were several timegates preventing the rapid production of what you call Zero Point Modules. To get around this we started utilizing alternative energy sources for our various offworld facilities.”

“So you started switching everything to those cold fusion generators?” Shepherd asked in interest.

“A few things.” Eventus told the man as he made a so-so motion with one of his hands. “But in a lot of cases it was more efficient resource wise to just find a geologically active planet and plop down a base there to utilize the abundance of geothermal energy we could tap from their cores.”

Wincing slightly, he looked away from the pair and took a moment to study one of the wall fixtures. “The Tanais Drydock facility in particular was placed in the caldera of a large supervolcano that should be due to erupt sometime in the next ten-thousand or so years.”

“Or a lot sooner if they’re pushing the generator since our geothermal generators utilize a system that actively increases the heat flow to more easily facilitate drawing energy from the magma.” He finished with a grimace.

“So you’re saying running the generator too long can cause the base to explode?” Shepherd asked incredulously as Weir turned a look of warning to him. “Who’s genius idea was that?

“Teyla’s ancestors.” Eventus answered in wry amusement, having always found the explanation to that question morbidly humorous once he’d discovered it. “That particular heat flow acceleration system was originally invented for use in securing the city of Emerge on the planet Athos.”

Shepherd leaned forward slightly in his chair. “Big city a couple miles from the gate?”

“That would be it.” Eventus confirmed as his mind wandered back to the various times he had visited. “Spent a couple years there once cleaning out an infestation of electrical rats after someone's science project escaped and they neglected to report it. The best natural hot springs I ever visited, you should ask Teyla to take you some time when we're not under imminent risk of Wraith attack.”

“I feel like we're getting a bit off topic.” Weir interjected as she let out a tired sigh. “Bringing things back, when I spoke to Chancellor Lycus he became very defensive when I floated the idea that they might have something that could help us fight the Wraith. So I'm afraid if they do have the ship, it will take a significant amount of diplomatic work before they are willing to provide us with access to it.”

Eventus got up from his chair, holding back a frown as he did because he'd really been hoping to put this conversation off for longer than Weir was allowing.

“The Wraith are two weeks out, Atlantis has exactly eleven drones left after shooting down that dart, and the pulse weapons are more likely to explode than actually fire if we tried to use them. That means even with a fully charged ZPM our only options are for me to either submerge the city again, or engage the city's stardrive and pilot it back to the home galaxy.”

The distasteful look on Weir and Shepherd's faces at the last suggestion told him all he needed to know about their opinions on the choice. Though the sad truth was with Atlantis's current less than stellar state, it was the one he would pick if it came down to a choice between the two since he'd never be able to perform a full repair with it at the bottom of the ocean.

“So while I would normally be willing to support the idea of coming to a diplomatic solution, in this case we just straight up don't have the time if we want to get that ship operational and back here before the Wraith arrive and force the issue.”

For a moment Weir looked like she would aquaice, but then her face firmed and she stood up and stared him directly in the eye. “While I understand the dire nature of our current situation, the Taranian Chancellor made it clear that he has no interest in dealing with us at the moment. So I can't condone my people effectively invading their planet in hopes of seizing a ship that may or may not even be there.”

An annoyingly firm moral stand given they were dealing with the equivalent of squatters, but Eventus didn’t think pointing that out to Weir would do any good given they were talking about squatters that had probably been there for longer then the country she had been born in.

“Then I’ll do it myself.” He said simply.

He’d have to grab a hazard exoskeleton before heading out, since as useful as personal shields were, they could be depleted with enough work. And that wasn’t even getting into the risk of gas and lava intrusion if the Taranians really had been running the shield non-stop at full power like he remembered.

“You know we wouldn’t be able to protect you if you do that?” Shepherd asked as he joined them in standing. “Not that you necessarily need it, but still. Are you sure it wouldn’t be easier to just fix up that old defense satellite and use the puddle jumpers to drag it into orbit over the planet instead?”

“I don’t actually know which defense satellite you're talking about.” Eventus lied as he ran some quick mental math on whether that would actually be a feasible thing to do. “But if you found one of the new SDS-7’s still in moderately operational condition, as long as you utilized the pre-installed anchor points you could move one half way across the system in a little under a week with only five puddle jumpers working at it.”

“As to fixing one of those up.” He continued with a shrug. “I’d have to know the level of damage to make an estimate. But again, this is a situation where if I attempt that and find out three days from now it's too long of a repair to finish in the time remaining, I won't have the time left needed to fix the Hippaforalkus and get it back to Atlantis.”

“So tomorrow I’m going to Tanais.” He finished as he turned to walk out and begin preparing for that, only to pause and turn back to Wier with a somewhat sheepish look on his face. “Ah, thanks again for taking in the Daganian’s.”

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Author’s Notes: Sadly Weir is stuck between the rock of her morals and the hard place of practicality. And given they now have a ZPM they can plug in, the force of practicality is a lot less urgent than it once was.