"Assuming we find something down there, repairing a broken DHD or shield control would be easier than building new ones, right?"
"Wouldn't you expect that to depend largely on the condition of the pieces we find?" Abruptly, Rodney stood up, giving them his real answer. "If we're going to investigate the possibility, we'd better get moving."
"I'll go with you for backup. Since we might be hanging around some adarite deposits, we need to keep this an ATA-only crew." John rose as well. "Teyla, dial 418's main gate while we're prepping the jumper and tell Elizabeth what we're up to. With any luck she can stall Cestan and Galven for a little while. We'll be back in a couple of hours."
He had Jumper One preflighted and all set to go by the time Rodney lugged his scanners aboard. The scientist plopped down in the copilot's seat with a grunt. "Although I complain about Ancient equipment on a regular basis, let me state here and now that their designs are nearly always lighter and more compact than ours."
"Noted." John closed the hatch and powered up the craft. "Control, Jumper One is ready to depart."
"Acknowledged," came the gate tech's response. "Safe trip, Colonel."
As the jumper descended into the gate-room, John got the unnerving sense that Rodney was watching him a little too closely. He glanced over at his friend and immediately deduced the reason. "Don't start," he warned.
As expected, Rodney ignored him. "So how does that brilliant resignation of yours look now?"
Just what he wanted to talk about; he didn't even want to think about it. Sure, Ronon and Teyla were safe, and that meant a hell of a lot, but… "Nothing that's happened today changes the lousy decisions I've made lately." Which now had to include the decision to leave his teammates for dead-probably the worst choice of them all.
"In my experience," Rodney blandly observed, "the military in general, and the SGC in particular, is often willing to accept a focus on results over methods. Sometimes I think it's even encouraged."
John sighed. "Let's just get through this, all right?"
The jumper slid through the event horizon, and the wormhole gave him the last word.
Chapter thirteen
In spite of his teammates' assurances that the Nistra generally left the second gate alone, Rodney planned to keep an eye out for suspicious activity throughout his stay on the planet. He was all for trying to head off a war, but he had no desire to be assaulted by a whip, arrow, bullet, or anything else in the process. Especially not another damned arrow. Besides, he had no guarantee that other members of this Cadre group wouldn't show up just to make life miserable.
Sheppard cloaked the jumper upon arrival and performed a low-altitude pass over the surrounding wreckage to gain some visual references. The contrast between the rocky slopes here and the thriving Falnori farmlands nearer the Hall was striking. Short of someone actually mentioning one group or the other by name, there would have been no way for Teyla and Ronon to recognize this place as PM-418.
Rodney had a more immediate concern, however. "Oh, no.
"You know, someday you're going to have your very own fable," Sheppard commented from the pilot's seat. "The Boy Who Cried `Oh, No.' Or, more accurately, The Boy Who Cried `We're So Screwed."'
"You're rarely as amusing as you think you are. And what makes you so sure I didn't just notice an urgent problem, like something about to blow up?"
"No abject terror in your voice. So what's the issue?"
"The sheer size of the debris field." Rodney waved at the long trail of wreckage beyond the jumper's windshield. "The station must have impacted the atmosphere at a fairly shallow angle and disintegrated, scattering fragments across miles of the planet's surface. Remember how long it took to recover even a majority of the pieces of the space shuttle that broke up over Texas? And that effort involved hundreds of people."
"So," the Colonel summed up with his usual eloquence, "needle in a haystack?"
"An entire field of haystacks," Rodney corrected unhappily. "We can't possibly find every last scrap of that station, let alone examine it all."
"We'll just have to make a few WAGs, then."
Although Rodney had worked for the U.S. military for years, there were elements of its acronym-laden lexicon that had escaped him. Such omissions weren't wholly accidental on his part. "I don't want to know how WAG translates into standard English, do I?"
"Wild-Ass Guess." With a grin so brief it barely blinked across his face, Sheppard attempted to access the head-up display, only to watch it flicker twice and then display wildly inaccurate data. "Huh. It was worth a try. I'm pretty sure we're not traveling at twice the speed of sound right now, though." Shutting off the HUD, he brought the jumper around in a lazy U-turn. "Looks like the most concentrated area of wreckage is around the gate.
"And that would be the most logical place to find a DHD, in any case." Rodney started to look for a suitable landing site when a warning flashed on the control panel.
Sheppard slapped at it. "Well, crap."
And he had the nerve to snark Rodney for saying `Oh, no.' Hypocrite. "What?" Rodney demanded. "Something dangerous? Some of us don't read voices as well as you claim to do."
"We just lost our cloak," Sheppard reported. "Guess the sensors aren't the only system affected by proximity to adarite. I'm gonna set us down under those trees, give the jumper whatever cover we can manage."
Rodney was under no illusions; any Nistra who stumbled on the ship would assuredly draw the conclusion that it belonged to a raiding group.
As it turned out, the drooping evergreen branches obscured the jumper rather nicely. Sheppard located camouflage netting in the storage compartment and dragged it over the hull, just to be on the safe side. Not for the first time-although he'd be damned if he'd admit it-Rodney appreciated the officer's instincts. A two-person mission might not be his idea of a fun outing, but in this case the other person was Sheppard, and he trusted Sheppard above anyone else to watch his back when it mattered.
And that, plain and simple, was the reason Sheppard needed to track down Elizabeth once all this blew over and ask for his stupid letter back.
"Got your gear?" the Colonel asked, fastening his vest. They'd brought stun weapons in place of P-90s, which seemed reasonable given the low probability of running into anyone to whom they might need to do permanent harm. All the same, it made Rodney feel a little exposed.
"Yes. Let's get this statistically improbable show on the road."
When he'd warned his team that Earth-built technology would be his only tool in this search, he hadn't been strictly truthful. `Earth-built' and `non-Ancient' were not fully interchangeable terms. The Asgard, for instance, had a portable device that acted as a more accurate version of an X-ray fluorescence scan, identifying a sample's component materials almost instantaneously. During a recent Daedalus visit, Rodney had badgered Hermiod into leaving one of the units on Atlantis, contending that the ship's inbuilt diagnostics made it redundant to keep such a unit onboard. The SGC hadn't been pleased-something about circumventing the requisition process. In any case, they hadn't tried to fire him, so he'd claimed victory.
The scanner could be programmed to search for particular materials or combinations thereof. He'd calibrated it with the constituents of the naquadah alloy that powered Atlantis's dialing computer, minus those substances which would have combusted under the heat of reentry through the atmosphere. Now he was faced with the rather daunting task of determining where to start.
"On the plus side, we've already got a grid laid out to keep us from losing track of where we've looked." Sheppard crouched to study one of the many branches stuck into the hard ground at relatively constant intervals.
Rodney made a mental note. He wasn't the type to heap praise on people for exhibiting common sense, but Teyla and/or Ronon deserved credit for devising the marking scheme.