Something in Vekken's tone brought Muruw's protests to heel. "Yes. Yes, of course. The Magnate has the best interests of the common folk at heart."
Beckett looked to Sheppard. "I'd like to take the Jumper down into the lower city, then? Set up a temporary clinic, do some tests?" He shot a glare at Muruw. "If that's okay with your lordship here?"
"I will allow it," said the minister haughtily, and prodded the soldier standing next to him. "You men, go with them. See that nothing untoward occurs."
"Great," Sheppard replied. "Staff Sergeant Mason, why don't you and Private Bishop tag along too?"
"The military skills of your troopers will not be required," said Vekken.
John fixed a rigid smile on his face. "I don't doubt it, but Mason and Bishop here are, uh, fully qualified medical… guys. They're going to help Beckett."
"Indeed?" The adjutant seemed unconvinced.
Mason directed Bishop into the back of the Jumper. "Oh, yes, sir," said the gruff sergeant. "I'm well known for my sensitive bedside manner."
Beckett threw the colonel a nod. "I'll check in with you once we're set up."
"Sure you're okay flyin' that thing?" Sheppard called, as the drawbridge hatch began to close.
"Nae problem," said Carson, his face pale as he took the pilot's chair.
Teyla beckoned the assembled group. "We should stand back."
With a sudden trill of noise, the Jumper leapt up into the air, rising like an express elevator. It wobbled for a second, and then drifted away, out of sight.
"He breaks it, he bought it," said Sheppard from the side of his mouth. John looked around to see Vekken and Muruw both eyeing him with unmasked suspicion. "Thank you. Lord Daus won't regret this."
"Not unless Beckett crashes into a building," muttered Ronon.
"You may tell him that in person," said Muruw. "I came to inform you that His Highness has called you to an audience aboard his air-yacht. He is touring the enclosure forests at Carras over luncheon."
"Another war game?" Dex snorted. "I'll pass."
"Far from it. The Lord Magnate wishes to speak with you on issues of trade and treaty. He has decided that matters between your people and ours must be decided once and for all."
Vekken nodded. "I will have a gyro-flyer prepared immediately."
Sheppard hesitated. Suddenly, everything was going in the direction he wanted it to; so why was his gut telling him something different? Diplomacy, he told himself, it's a different kind of battlefield, John. Adapt to it. "I'll need to let the rest of my team know-"
"If you are referring to Dr. McKay, there is no need," Muruw interrupted. "While you were on the other side of the Great Circlet, he accepted the Lady Erony's invitation to view the site of the dolmen. Duke Kelfer is conducting him personally."
John looked at Teyla. "You know about this?"
She nodded. "Rodney was eager to go, so I agreed in your absence. Corporal Clarke and Private Hill went with him."
Sheppard clapped his hands together. "Okay. I guess we got a lunch date, then."
"Yeah," said Ronon in a voice that only John could hear, "but what's on the menu?"
"Oh, my." Rodney McKay blinked and ambled to a halt, his head tilted back to sight up along the length of the tall stone obelisk. Abruptly a thought occurred to him. "Ah! Pictures!" He fumbled in a pocket on his gear vest and removed his compact digital video camera, snapping open the viewfinder to shoot footage of the site.
Erony studied the device. "That… That is a kinescope?"
"A camera? Yes," McKay said, distracted. "This is interesting."
From behind them came Kelfer's voice; a bored drawl. "Really? It clearly takes little to hold your attention then, Doctor."
Rodney ignored him, using the camera to get close-ups of the text that patterned the sides of the memorial. The script was Ancient, all right, thousands of words of it, going all the way up to the top.
"How big you reckon it is, Doc?" said Clarke, resting his hands on his rifle's frame where it hung on its webbing. "Looks like that monument you Yanks got in Washington."
McKay gave him an irked look and pointed at his own face. "Canadian," he said, "not `Yank'."
Clarke didn't seem to hear him. "Wrong color, though. This one looks like its made of slate."
"Washington Monument," offered Hill. "My sister sent me a postcard of it once."
Rodney turned on them both. "Yes, thank you both for that astute piece of architectural analysis. Perhaps you'd both like to assist me further by shutting the hell up? I'm trying to concentrate here."
"Sorry, Doctor," said Clarke, and then added sotto voce; "Plonker."
"It really is quite breathtaking in its own way," said Erony. "I confess, I have visited here before and walked the circumference of the grounds and still found nothing to express its purpose." She took in the wide circular stage of gray stone on which the dolmen stood. "My father once spoke to me of records from the chaotic years, which spoke of the pillar's function, but I have never seen them."
"It is a burial marker, nothing more," insisted Kelfer. "Some remnant of the primitive people who came before Halcyon's current civilization, doubtless their vain attempt to signal some mythical sky-gods for salvation."
"Primitive? Not likely." Rodney gestured with his free hand. "Look closely at the cut of those stones, the precision of the inscriptions. Some caveman didn't carve those with a flint chisel. Whoever built this had to be an engineering genius just to make it that tall in the first place." He pocketed the camera and replaced it with a hand-held scanner, similar to the kind found aboard the Atlantean Puddle Jumpers. Wreathes of exotic radiation shimmered on the small screen, shifting and changing as McKay panned it over the landscape. "I was right…" He whispered. "The energy readings are so much clearer here. I'm detecting a power source, but there's more. I think this thing…" He paused and glanced up at the top of the monument. "I think this obelisk is actually broadcasting some kind of radiation."
Clarke's face paled. "Please don't tell me my hair's gonna start falling out."
"Not like that," said Rodney. "The pattern looks familiar, but I can't place it." McKay moved to where a low stone wall created an inner barrier around the dolmen and pulled his laptop from his backpack. "Let me hook this up."
"What are you doing?" asked Erony, but he waved her into silence. The scientist felt it; that old, familiar tingle of some thing coming together in his mind, the giddy little rush of prediscovery. There was nothing like it, that unexpected headswim that came when you cracked a thorny conundrum, when all the pieces of a problem suddenly went click and slotted into place. He'd tried to explain it to other people, to non-genius people like Sheppard and Weir. They didn't really get it, not like McKay did. Maybe Zelenka understood. Maybe. Just a little bit. But this sort of thing was what Rodney lived for, the days when science was better than sex.
Or so he liked to believe.
The laptop had an encrypted copy of much of McKay's own personal research database, terabytes of data stored on a modified hard drive, packed with every last bit of information it could hold about the Ancients, the Pegasus Galaxy, everything. He'd created an interface program that let the human tech of the computer talk to the comparatively godlike tech of the Atlantean scanner device, and as they communicated, he saw the answer a split second before the laptop found it as well.
"Yeah, that's it!"
"What's what?" said Hill.
"I knew I'd seen the energy waveform being transmitted from the dolmen somewhere else, so I cross-referenced the signal with the records database from Atlantis, and I was right," The words spilled out of him with barely a pause for breath. "There's a low-level interference pattern emitting from this thing, it's on a shallow band but the power output behind it is enough that its radiating out across most of the planet."