Cleaning Up After The Ancients - Chapter 8

Chapter 8 - Off we go

The gateroom guards had been shooting annoyed glares at Eventus on a rather consistent basis since he’d returned from picking up his general ‘away team’ equipment. Most of which, with the exception of the weapon, interface pad on his belt, and the personal shield hidden under his vest, was now held in the satchel slung over his shoulder.

He didn’t really blame them for it, after all, it was their job to keep everyone safe and here he was basically bypassing all their security to just go where he wanted like he owned the place.

Which he sort of did, but he didn't want to blatantly announce if he didn't have to since then there would be arguments and expectations.

“To je píčovina!” Zelenka suddenly exclaimed, drawing Eventus's attention to the manual sensor station interface just in time to see the man make a strangeling motion at the machine.

The Ancient walked over, moderately interested to find out what had made the other man so annoyed only to have to hold back an amused snort at seeing that the laptop they had interfaced to allow easier interpretation of the data had caused the console to end up hung between processes.

“Need some help?” Eventus asked, knowing someone who got the short end of the stick when he saw them. 

Not even looking up at his words Zelenka waved him off. “Not unless you know how to fix whatever it was these nemotorní neomluvení herci messed up when they spilled their coffee.”

Eventus pointed to one of the clear input keys. “Hold that down for three of your seconds. It'll cause the system to prioritize it's self correction algorithms which should allow it to overcome the hang up.”

Zelenka loomed over at him at that, only to blink in surprise as he registered Eventus's rather recognizable ancient outfit. 

“I… Ah… Thanks.” He finally got out as he reached over and, almost as if he might break it, held down the indicated key.

Three seconds passed, and then the display screen flickered before a visual of the city's long range sensor returns came up showing a Wraith dart on an intercept course with the planet.

“That's certainly unfortunate.” Eventus muttered as Zelenka squinted at the information now being displayed on his laptop in concern.

“So you mind if I?” He continued, motioning to the control console.

“Go ahead.” Zelenka returned distractedly as a worried look slowly began to make its way across his features.

Eventus slid into the chair, and used the console's neural interface to push through a few of the basic safe mode limits to set up an automated drone intercept when the vessel got in range.

“Wait… What are you doing?” Zelenka asked in sudden concern as Eventus pulled his consciousness out of the interface.

“I just set the city to shoot the Wraith ship down with a drone when it reaches lunar orbit.” Eventus explained, moderately annoyed his people had left such a limited supply of the weapons behind since that meant yet more things he would have to replace when the time came.

“Oh.” Zelenka muttered in surprise. “I didn't know that was a thing that could be done.”

Eventus gave an apologetic shrug. “I'd have set the pulse canons to engage it instead, but they're a lot more power hungry then a drone, and I don't know how well they held up in the face of all the damage to the city.”

“Also the controls are spill proof.”He added with a grin. “My people drank liquid stimulants too. And spills were a frequent enough occurrence that it only made sense.”

Could they have just used spill proof cups instead, absolutely, but why bother with the minor loss in personal convenience when you could just engineer the consoles to be liquid resistant and self cleaning instead.

Zelenka was giving him an odd look now, and Eventus let out a sigh before walking back down to the gate platform to continue waiting for Weir to finish her talk with the Shepherd and his team.

Less than five minutes into his wait Zelenka ran off towards the meeting room, and Eventus let out another sigh as he walked over to the step and took a seat, knowing he was likely in for a longer wait with the man no doubt having figured out about the three Wraith hive ships on slow approach to the city.

He wasn’t particularly concerned about it himself, as even assuming they couldn’t retrieve a potentia from one of the two remaining worlds on the list, he recalled that one would be delivered from Earth with more than enough time to spare. At which point it would be a simple matter to just set Atlantis to submerge again till he could get the Hippaforalkus operational and fly over to blow them up.

Though he should probably try and start working on that last before the hive ships arrived, just in case something had happened to prevent Earth from showing up for the last minute rescue. Since at a minimum they could probably transfer enough drones over to Atlantis from the drydocked ship to knock out the attacking hives with only a moderate level of damage to the surface portions of the city.

The distinctive sound of the gate being dialed rang out from the circular structure, and he looked over to the dialing console to see Shepherd’s team walking down with worried looks on their faces.

“You really think you can help us find a ZPM?” Shepherd asked moments before the woosh of an unstable vortex forming filled the room. 

Eventus got back to his feet, not even deigning to answer that directly as he pulled the interface pad off his belt and entered a quick command. In response, a circular cylinder about eight inches in diameter rose out of the floor a little to the left of the stargate itself, and all but immediately a number of softball sized spheres began to float out from the open side of the structure.

“Mark MDCCXV probes.” Eventus explained as the last of the sixteen devices positioned themselves in front of the open Stargate. “Their scanners can penetrate up to thirty meters of rock, and in semi-autonomous mode each can cover about one point three square kilometers an hour.”

Shepherd turned an annoyed glare to McKay as everyone else in the room seemed to be glancing between the dispenser and probes with various degrees of confusion on their faces. “You couldn’t have figured out we had those six months ago, McKay?”

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Author’s Notes: To be fair to McKay these things were purposefully hidden to make the room more aesthetically pleasing.