The duo moved methodically over the debris field, disturbing as little as possible in the course of their search. On occasion a muted crunch under Rodney's boot would elicit a wince, and a few fragments crumbled into ash at the slightest touch. He told himself that anything truly critical to their cause would have been constructed more sturdily. Sometimes these situations called for a little judicious self-delusion.
He also tried valiantly to ignore the literal and figurative weight of the Stargate looming over them. The ring couldn't possibly be stable in its current cockeyed position, no matter what the physics said.
They'd been sweeping the scanner's beam over wide swaths of ground for the better part of an hour when the unit signaled a hit. "Hmm. Not exactly the right material makeup, but close enough to check out. Under here." Rodney beckoned Sheppard over to a heap of deformed metal. "Help me lift this piece."
The piece in question probably had been a structural support, long and unwieldy. After a couple of fruitless attempts, Sheppard got his shoulder under one end and managed to shift it far enough for Rodney to get one arm awkwardly into the piled wreckage and drag a briefcasesized chunk of something out.
Wiping away sweat with his sleeve, the Colonel plunked himself down next to the beam he'd displaced. "What've you got?"
"Chiefly, a strained back."
"Yeah, yeah." Sheppard peered at their find as Rodney brushed dirt and char off the casing. The surface was badly scratched and even gouged in a number of places-
Hold on. Those marks were too uniform to be accidental damage. Rodney scrubbed harder at the burn residue, eventually resorting to the use of his shirttail. When he'd at last gotten the casing as clean as it would ever be, he got out his flashlight and examined the indentations. Aha. Familiarity.
"Doesn't look like part of a DHD," observed Sheppard.
"It isn't. But it might do us some good anyway. See those three larger slots across the end?" Rodney played the light beam across the object's surface. "They match up with the connecting hardware of the download device we use to do maintenance on the jumpers. I think this might be some kind of flight data recorder."
"From the space station?"
"Of course from the space station. If we can get an idea from the records contained in here about what really happened to the station, it'll likely be more productive than fishing around in this junk."
With a shrug, Sheppard climbed to his feet. "All right. Guess we'll head back and plug this thing into Atlantis."
After her latest check-in, Elizabeth felt her first flicker of hope in quite some time. "Gentlemen," she called, stepping down from the stairwell. "I have some information that may help us make progress."
Neither Cestan nor Galven looked terribly impressed by the announcement. Still, they gave her their attention. "Recently, access to the Stargate has emerged as a point of contention," she began. "Minister Galven, there is an Ancient ruin in the foothills of your territory. It once was a station that orbited this planet, and it crashed to the ground hundreds of years ago. Are you familiar with it?"
"I have heard of such a thing," the minister answered, "though we were not aware it fell from the sky. It is little more than rubble, so it has not been of much interest to us.
"You may change your mind about that. The ruin contains another Stargate." Elizabeth had to smile at both leaders' evident surprise. "It doesn't have a dialing device, but my people are already working to rectify that. Once it's functional, there will be no need for the Nistra to share the Hall gate, since you'll have one of your own."
Although Galven might have been caught off-guard, his expression quickly became unreadable. "If this is the case," he said, "and I will need to verify that it is, I am not fully prepared to concede the Hall gate. The Hall itself is to remain neutral, and that may be difficult to maintain with the Falnori controlling the nearby gate."
"We can discuss that," Elizabeth allowed. "There is a more important aspect of the second gate, however. Because it's somewhat hidden and mostly unknown to your people, it's open to use by others-like the raiders. That gate is what gave them the means to terrorize both the Falnori and the Nistra. My people have captured some of them. They're called the Cadre, and they come from off-world."
She waited to gauge their reactions. Cestan sat back in his chair, adjusting his cuffs. "So it is as I have said before. The Nistra declare themselves to be victims of these raiders, and by labeling us as the aggressors they have free rein to act against us without cause."
Galven opened his mouth to counter as one of his messengers appeared on the stairs. He motioned to the young man, who hurried over to deliver his report quietly and urgently.
"The leader of the Cadre told us that his group isn't allied with either of your peoples," said Elizabeth. "It's an independent-"
"Without cause, you claim, Governor?" Galven sprang to his feet, leveling a blazing glare on Cestan. "Word has just reached me that a Nistra hunting party was attacked this very day by your Cadre!"
"My Cadre?" Cestan echoed, casting an incredulous glance at Elizabeth. "Do you see how they persist in this delusion?"
"There were dozens of them, with weapons that burn," insisted the minister. "This time they came to do violence on my people without even the facade of stealing goods."
Elizabeth had a fairly good idea she knew what incident Galven was referring to, and she suspected that the tale had been embellished along the way. "Minister, two of my people were there. That's not exactly how they saw it.
She realized her miscalculation when Galven turned his frigid gaze on her. "Do not presume to tell me what happens on my land, Doctor."
"I apologize," she said immediately. "I overstepped my bounds. Please don't allow that to distract you from the issue at hand: the Cadre is an off-world threat taking advantage of the gate in your territory. We should focus on resolving that, and I'm telling you that we can resolve it.
"It does not matter what the raiders call themselves, only that more blood has been shed." The news of the latest attack had seemingly forged Galven's resolve in steel. "This will not stand. If the Stargate is being used to invade our land, we will defend it. But we also are prepared to finish what the Falnori have begun."
As he turned to his messenger, Cestan beckoned for one of his own. Feeling Carson and Lorne's eyes on her, Elizabeth reached for the bottle of water she'd brought and wished fleetingly that it held something stronger. Troops on both sides would soon receive marching orders, she was sure. Time was now a much more limited resource, and she was running out of ideas.
As it turned out, hooking up the download device in the Jumper Bay to the Ancient version of a `black box,' as the Colonel insisted on calling it, wasn't the complicated part of the task. The complicated part was sifting through the massive quantities of data the recorder promptly spat out. The system status reports alone, taken at eight-hour intervals over a span of decades, would have crashed Rodney's laptop in seconds. Eventually they resorted to rigging up a buffer program that would only allow the information Radek specified to pass from the maintenance terminal to the laptop.
"Can't we start at the last recorded data and work backward?"
The lieutenant in charge of jumper maintenance no doubt thought he was being helpful. For that reason alone, Rodney refrained from snapping at him. "We can, and in fact we have. Unfortunately, and some might say predictably, the last recorded data is a series of null sets broken up by the occasional gibberish. The unit obviously continued to function long after the station it was meant to monitor was destroyed."