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.