Weir looked unconvinced.
“So why the elaborate defense mechanism in that chamber?”
Rodney rolled his eyes.
“You want me to work out every last detail of this? Oh yes. Of course you do.” He thought for a second. “I don’t know. Maybe it was for Lantean eyes only. Something to stop the Wraith reading the message, in case they ever got down there.”
“Or us,” said Ronon.
“Quite. But thanks to Colonel Sheppard’s acrobatics, we got something out. And now we can use it.”
Weir held a warning hand up.
“Whoa. You’re going too fast here, Rodney. So far, all we’ve got is a sealed chamber and a message we can barely understand.”
“With respect, Elizabeth, we’ve got more than that,” said McKay. “We’ve got a gate address, and we’ve got a theory. We know the gate network isn’t perfect. Some destinations seem to require more power to get to than others. The obvious example is the inter-galactic route, which needs huge amounts of juice. But even in the Pegasus galaxy we find some destinations are harder to reach than others. Maybe there are ways around this. My guess is that we stumbled across an attempt to refine the gate technology.”
He looked from one member of the team to the others, searching for agreement.
“Interesting,” said Weir. She turned to Sheppard. “You got a note of the gate address in the chamber?”
“Oh, I got it. Those little squiggles are pretty well stuck my mind.”
“And?”
“I can show you,” said McKay, bringing up a galactic map on the display. The map started to zoom. “Here we are, home sweet home, on the galactic rim.” The map continued to zoom out. “Any minute now…”
The animation concluded. A red triangle marked Lantea, and a green circle the location of the gate address. The dotted line between them ran the width of the screen.
Weir shook her head. “My God,” she breathed. “It’s basically out of the galaxy.”
“How far is that?” said Zelenka.
“In technical terms?” said McKay. “A really long way. Further than we’ve ever been in Pegasus. I looked at the stellar cartography. It’s off the scale. The power requirements to get there are pretty scary.”
“Yes, but it can’t drain more than dialing back to Milky Way,” scoffed Radek.
“You know, normally I’d agree with you,” said McKay. “But we don’t know everything about gate travel, and something’s odd about this setup. And there’s another thing. Most locations on the Stargate network are accessible from anywhere else. If you know the address, and have some means of dialing, you can jump from anywhere to anywhere. The exceptions are the long hops, like between galaxies. Here’s the trick — I think this one’s exactly the same. From the database, it seems clear that this node is only accessible from one other place.”
Weir let out a deep breath. “I think I know what you’re going to say.”
Sheppard grinned. “I love it when you’re ahead of us.”
Weir pursed her lips. She had come to like and respect John in their time serving together on Atlantis, but his endless flippancy could get wearing. She knew that exploration was part of the brief, but it would be nice, just for once, if her senior officers could think about something other than scooting off on a fresh mission as soon as the last one had ended.
“OK, so we have an address, and a mystery device designed to access it,” she said, carefully. “What are we going to do about it? Can we access this planet from the regular Stargate? Even if we can, do we want to?”
McKay shrugged. “We’d need to do some work,” he said. “I’ve been thinking of ways to increase the power to the gate mechanism anyway. I’d bet it’s possible. As for whether we should. That’s a different proposition. It’s an opportunity to find out what the Ancients were up to in that room. And if it was that heavily shielded, it must be important.”
Weir frowned. “We’ve got our hands full with the Wraith right now,” she pointed out. “I can see that there’s something interesting going on here, but I’m not sure I’m going to give the green light to this.”
Sheppard interjected, looking a little embarrassed to be doing so.
“Er, I know you’re not gonna believe this, Elizabeth,” he said, “but I reckon Rodney could be on to something here.”
She gave him a quizzical look. McKay just looked startled.
“Our situation here’s still kinda precarious,” he said. “But a gate address on its own, with no other way to get to it? Sounds like a perfect Alpha site to me.”
Zelenka shook his head. “This is all still just supposition. We don’t really know what that room was used for, and in my experience, gate addresses hidden behind layers of steel tell you one very clear thing: don’t go there!”
“Yeah, well that might not be such bad advice,” said Sheppard ruefully. “But we did it anyway, and now we’ve gotta decide what to do with what we found.”
Weir turned her attention to Teyla. The Athosian had been uncharacteristically quiet. “What do you think, Teyla?” she said. “You’ve never heard of this place?”
“No,” Teyla replied. “My people have no knowledge of anything that far away. I am not sure whether the risks of going there outweigh the potential benefits.” She glanced at the shard still protruding from McKay’s laptop. “But we have heard the words of the Ancestors. Though their message was not complete, it seems obvious that they had some important purpose there. I do not think we can ignore that.”
Weir saw Sheppard looking at Teyla approvingly. It was what made her so valuable to the team, her willingness to take risks. But the commander had to balance those with the needs of the entire mission. Yet again, the choice was a fine one.
“OK,” she said at last. “You can look into this. But we’re not going to hurry, and we’re not going to get it wrong. McKay, take Zelenka with you and see how feasible it would be to reach this place. Once we know a little more, we can make a decision on what to do next. But if we can’t do this safely, we’re not doing it at all. Period.”
She rose, and the rest of the room did likewise. She could see Zelenka’s look of concern, and Sheppard’s expression of eager anticipation. They were cut from very different cloth, those two, and Weir just hoped she’d chosen wisely.
The screen filled with numbers, filtering downwards rapidly, before the red lines appeared again. The terminal issued a perfunctory bleep, then shut down the relay.
“Damn!” hissed McKay.
He was sitting at a computer in the Operations Center, directly over the gate room. Zelenka was down by the gate itself, wrestling with thick cables and a battery of routing equipment. They had been trying for a couple of hours to get the Stargate to accept the mystery address, but the power requirements were too large. Every time it was entered, the system shut down.
“I’m guessing this was why the Ancients decided to use a replacement!” shouted Zelenka from the bay below.
McKay scowled. He could swear Zelenka was enjoying this. Despite the best efforts of a dozen technicians, they were still nowhere near getting the beefed-up Stargate mechanism to work and the ideas had started to run dry.
“OK, let’s try again with the re-routed backup supply,” said McKay over the intercom. “It’s all about timing. We only need a short burst.”
The figures on his monitor reset themselves, and down in the gate room the technicians set about arranging the equipment again.
McKay looked at the schematics one more time. The issue wasn’t just raw power — now that the ZPM was installed, they had plenty to spare for the operation of the gate. The problem was the efficiency of supply, ensuring that the Stargate’s complex and subtle mechanics were fed what they needed when they needed it. Opening an event horizon was an art that the Atlantis team still barely understood, and it was clear that the existing Stargate had definite limits. Trying to keep everything within the necessary parameters was like trying to herd cats. In the dark. With oven gloves.