"Interference? You talking like electronic countermeasures, or something?"
McKay snapped his fingers. "Exactly, go to the top of the class. It's a jamming field. A dampening effect." He grinned. "And this is the cool part. The frequency it's operating at? It's only a hair's breadth from these readings Carson took of Wraith brain activity!"
"So, what, it's like a Wraith dog whistle, or something?"
"No, no, wrong wrong, dunce's hat for the corporal. If you want a bad analogy, it's more like a… A white noise generator, creating static on their psychic network."
"Dr. McKay, you really are the limit!" huffed Keifer. "These wild theorizations you spout have no basis in fact!"
"That's why the Wraith you have here are docile…." Rodney gulped, looking at the Halcyon scientist. "Well, relatively speaking. The Ancients obviously made this and left it here as a passive defense system for the planet. It affects the functioning of the telepathic ability of Wraiths." He halted, thinking it through. "It must work on their higher brain functions, which explains why your pet Hounds are so animalistic in nature." McKay glanced at Erony. "But it doesn't seem to effect humans, or people with Wraith DNA like Teyla or Vekken."
"I am so glad we have had this time to let you indulge your flights of fancy," grated Kelfer, gesturing to their armed escorts. "But now, I think the day is done. Take your kinescope images and make an end to it, McKay. Your tour is concluded."
"Oh no," Rodney waggled a finger in the scientist's face. "I didn't come this far just to take some stills and get a brass rubbing. We're going inside." He strode quickly to the dolmen and ran his fingers over the carvings.
Kelfer threw up his hands. "Inside? It is a solid stone pillar, you fool! How do you possibly expect us to get inside it?" The man broke off as he realized what McKay was doing.
Rodney found the right glyphs exactly where he expected them to be. Trust the Ancients to be precise and thorough in everything they created. It was a simple enough matter to push here, press here and there…
"For blade's sake, what-" The rest of Kelfer's words died in his throat as stone ground on stone, and a thick slab at McKay's feet shifted back into the structure of the dolmen. Puffs of age-old rock dust gusted into the air.
The look of utter smugness on Rodney's face was total and complete. "Oh look," he said condescendingly, "there's a doorway."
The entrance led down a shallow incline to an open area beneath the dolmen's base. It was a hexagonal room, lit by soft glows from consoles that still operated, thousands of years after they had been activated. McKay noted how Kelfer's face had taken on the shocked cast of a man utterly out of his depth. Hear that, Mister Chief Scientist? That's the sound of your preconceptions coming crashing down around you!
Lights in hidden recesses came on as they approached them. Clarke took point, having left Private Hill and the other Halcyon troopers outside. Rodney had seen the expressions of the riflemen; the dark tunnel into the obelisk frightened them. He glanced at Erony; her face was quite the opposite, lit from within by wonder and awe.
"The Precursors made this…" she husked.
McKay nodded. "Yup."
Corporal Clarke trained around the flashlight clipped to the muzzle of his assault rifle. "Looks just like Atlantis down here," he said quietly as Rodney came closer. "Built from the same kit."
He nodded again. "A lot of Ancient technology seems to be modular in nature. My guess is they could re-purpose hardware for whatever task they had at hand." There were dust covers of plastic-like fabric over a central podium in the room, and he pulled them aside. On the far wall, a glass screen reacted by illuminating a display of power curves and energy output gradients. The waveforms shown there matched the scans Rodney had taken outside. He touched a few controls experimentally and called up pages of blocky Ancient hieroglyphics. "Huh. These are Wraith biometrics. A full physiological work-up, it looks like."
"You were right, Dr. McKay," said Erony, from the far side of the room. She was examining a metallic pillar that included a bubbling liquid component. "You did not exaggerate that day in the Terminal."
Kelfer finally managed a huff of derision. "How is it that you are such an expert on the Wraith, then?"
"I've been inside their ships, I've been zapped by one of their culling beams," he said off-handedly. "I know more about the Wraith than any sane man should." Rodney bent over the con sole. "Believe me, it's not by choice."
The Halcyon scientist made the same noise again. "The… The dust in this chamber is clogging my breath. I will wait for you outside, after you have completed your little diversion, My Lady."
"Yeah, `bye," McKay spoke without turning. The hand-held scanner was drawing in streams of data from the dolmen's control system. He touched a combination of glassy keys and crossed to where Clarke was standing. "Step away from the panel." He threw a glance at Erony; she was entranced by a scrolling computer screen.
At a touch, a cylindrical compartment in the far wall grew a seam down its length and parted. Inside there was something that looked like a large g-clamp and nestled in its jaws was a roughly conical construction of rough-hewn crystalline rods. The object bathed the two men in a warm orange glow.
"Pay dirt," whispered Rodney. "A Zero Point Module. I love it when I'm right."
Clarke squinted at the ZPM. "So that's a space-alien superbattery then, is it? Oh."
"Oh?" McKay repeated. "You're looking at a controlled bubble of space-time feeding vacuum fluctuation energy from m-brane differential states, a device containing the power of a minor sun. What did you expect? Something with a coppercolored top?"
The soldier shrugged, unruffled. "I dunno. I thought it might have electricity sparking off it, maybe." He fluttered his free hand. "You know. Bzzzt!"
Rodney made a face. "You watch too many movies, Corporal. Back off a little." He touched a control pad next to the ZPM.
"Wait. You're not going to unplug it, are you?"
McKay blinked. "Well. Yeah."
"Would that not be a bad idea, Doc? If you're on the money about this Wraith brain-jammer, then switching it off is going to make every one of those bozos on this planet go out of their heads, right?"
He had a point; in his excitement, Rodney hadn't stopped to consider the consequences. Certainly, if the dolmen was anything like Atlantis's systems, it would have enough juice in the system to run for a short while without a ZPM, but once it ran down… What then? "Ah, nuts." For all the hateful things he had seen on Halcyon since they arrived, McKay couldn't even begin to contemplate the thought of turning the Wraith loose on the planet.
Clarke frowned. "You reckon his lordship back in the palace knows how this thing works?"
"If he does, then even if I disconnected the ZPM, he'd never let us take it. I was hoping we might find more than one here, but…"
Erony came toward them. "Rodney? What are you doing?"
He pressed the control to close the compartment. "Nothing. Just checking." He paused, and then looked the woman in the eye. "Erony, I need you to be honest with me about something. Don't give me any of that Jane Austen circumlocution. Does your father understand how the dolmen works, yes or no?"
She opened her mouth to speak, but a sharp crackle of noise threaded into the chamber, silencing her.
McKay's gut twisted in sudden fear. "That sounded like…"
Clarke raised his rifle. "Gunfire."
Linnian was there to greet them as Vekken's pilots docked the chattering gyro-flyer down with the Magnate's air-yacht. Sheppard felt a nasty little kick of dej i vu as they made their way across the landing pad. He glanced out over the canopy of green that stretched out for miles either side of the huge airship. It was shades away from the barren, broken ground of the war zone where the blues and tans had gone at it; the forest below was rich and lush, and were it not for a couple of barrage balloons tethered out in the distance, he might have been forgiven for thinking this was a wilderness untouched by human hands. John peered into the trees, looking for signs of movement and saw none. Was there another little war going on down there somewhere? He found himself thinking of Bryor and the other bluecoat conscripts he met on the battlefield. Had they survived to the end of the game, were they now somewhere else, dying in an equally pointless skirmish?