Five steps from the gate, Sheppard paused and sniffed deeply. The air was redolent with a sharp, pungent scent. "Cedar trees?"
McKay looked up from his hand-held sensor long enough to blink around at the tall columns of the forest surrounding them. "Hmm. A close analog, anyway." He effortlessly dismissed the temptations of botany in favor of the sensor's display.
"It is unusual for a gate to be so closely surrounded," Teyla commented. "Although settlements may be some distance away, typically the area immediately around the gate is clear."
"No recent Wraith activity, then?" Sheppard asked her.
"Or anyone else," Ronon's voice came from behind the group, and they turned to find him contemplating the smoking stump of a good-sized tree that had evidently been vaporized when the wormhole had formed.
"Right." So if anyone had been here in years, they sure hadn't used the stargate. "Rodney? Any life signs in the area?"
"No, but there is a power source." The scientist turned back and forth in a semicircle briefly, then pointed. "That way."
"Worth checking out, do you think?"
McKay lowered the sensor for the first time since their arrival. "No, I just figured out where it was to make conversation."
"Well, then, let's go have a look." Sheppard made an extravagant after-you gesture, and McKay looked put-upon and stomped off. A more subtle gesture sent Ronon ranging ahead to take point; "no life signs" did not necessarily mean "safe". The Pegasus galaxy had taught Sheppard that, the hard way.
The power readings must have been fascinating, because McKay didn't even complain about the length of the walk. Eventually they came to a complex of buildings, half-overgrown with vegetation and apparently deserted. They pulled away some of the vines and brush, exposing a matte gray wall that looked like some strange combination of steel and plastic. It curved upwards so subtly as to appear flat, but there were no sharp angles where it met the roof. "What is this stuff?"
"Some kind of advanced ceramic," McKay said, sounding almost impressed.
"What, like pottery?" Sheppard tapped the convex surface with a knuckle.
"Mmm, more like the heat-shield tiles on the Space Shuttle," McKay corrected. "Though I doubt this was built by the lowest bidder. It's amazingly well preserved."
"For how long?"
"According to these readings? At least ten thousand years."
Sheppard blinked. "That's as old as Atlantis."
"Actually, Atlantis was only deserted for ten thousand years. The Ancients lived there for quite some time before the Wraith drove them out. And before that, remember, the city was actually on Earth, probably for millennia. The fact that the Ancients could build a city that would even last that long, never mind that it's also an intergalactic spaceship, is just one of--"
"Rodney."
"Right, yes. Concentrating on this incredibly old example of advanced alien technology, now."
"Does it have an advanced alien door?"
"I'm looking."
"Colonel Sheppard?" Teyla called from a little way further down the wall. "I think this may be a way in."
He and McKay hurried over to her, while Ronon continued his study of the surrounding flora and anything that might jump out at them from it. There was a panel of the same material slightly inset from the rest of the wall; the seam was just shy of invisible.
McKay scanned all around the door, without luck. "No sensors or controls," he mumbled half to himself. Sheppard wedged his fingernails into the seam and pulled. "Oh, like that's going --" The door slid open. "-- to work," McKay finished lamely.
The room beyond contained a darkness of stygian proportions, and not much else, as far as the lights from Sheppard and Teyla's P90s could discover. The corridor beyond was a little less black, thanks to widely-spaced skylights that hadn't entirely been obscured by dirt and plants, but just as empty.
"Which way?" Sheppard asked softly. Far from echoing, his words were swallowed up by the featureless walls that stretched away to either side.
"The power source is... that way," McKay replied, pointing at a forty-five degree angle through the wall.
"Of course it is," said Sheppard, and led the team down the half of the hallway that came closest to the direction McKay had indicated.
They eventually found a cross-corridor, then another, and slowly worked their way toward McKay's power source. Along the way, they found a lot of dark, empty rooms, and little else. A few rooms contained low platforms that might have been intended for sleeping or sitting -- or ritual sacrifice, for all Sheppard could tell -- but nothing with technology worth investigating. Any writings, artifacts, or cool alien gizmos had evidently left with their owners. There were no more closed doors, and the fact that everything in the building had been left standing open and stripped bare was raising the hair on the back of Sheppard's neck.
"In here," McKay finally said, and they entered another unilluminated room. This time their flashlights revealed a blocky console, almost as tall as Teyla, that squatted in isolation in the middle of the otherwise empty room. It looked to be made of the same material as the walls, with a very few irregularities that might have been controls, input jacks, or perhaps some ten-thousand-year-dead alien's idea of decoration.
"This is definitely the source of the power readings," McKay confirmed.
"Ever seen anything like this?" Sheppard asked the rest of the team.
"I have not," said Teyla. "This whole complex is of a design unfamiliar to me." Ronon just shook his head.
Sheppard circled around the object once, just in case there was an Insert Batteries Here label on the back. A low rectangular block of the same dull gray, a little longer than the main section was tall, jutted out from one side of the almost-featureless central cube, and that was it. No power cord, no convenient access panels, and not so much as a discarded paper clip in the rest of the room. "All right. Rodney, see what you can do with this. Ronon, Teyla, let's have a look around, but stay within earshot. I've got a bad feeling about this place."
Fifteen minutes of exploring yielded only more empty rooms. They heard, saw, and found nothing. Sheppard was on his way back to check on McKay when he saw Teyla going in ahead of him, apparently with the same idea. Her shout brought him and Ronon running.
The gray not-metal had retracted from the secondary rectangle on the side of the device, revealing a clear enclosure. McKay lay inside it, unconscious and unmoving.
"What the hell?" It looked like a -- well, it looked like a glass coffin, actually, but Sheppard forced himself to think about cryogenic chambers and the like instead.
Teyla had crouched down to peer through the glass. "He is breathing," she reported with relief.
Sheppard scanned the floor, but whoever had built this place must have had amazing air filters, because after ten thousand years there was still no dust to show footprints. The scanner lay on the floor near the device; he snatched it up, but the only life signs registering were the four of them. One, presumably McKay's, was fainter than it should have been, but at least it was steady. "Did either of you see any sign that someone else might be in here?" They both said no. "Because I don't see McKay deciding to take a nap in there on his own."
Ronon tried prying at the edges of the enclosure, but his fingers just slipped off. "It's a solid piece."
Sheppard prodded at the controls on the front of the console, if in fact that was what they were. Nothing happened.
Teyla was examining where the transparent casing joined the main block. "I see no way to open it."
"Well, we can't just leave him in there!"
Ronon drew his sword. "Stand clear." He reversed the blade, took a firm two-handed grip on the hilt, and slammed the pommel into the side of the glass.
Sheppard opened his mouth a second too late to warn him to aim away from McKay's face, but he needn't have bothered; whatever the material was, it sure wasn't glass. It took half a dozen powerful blows before a crack appeared, and Ronon had to keep hammering at it to widen the fault enough for Sheppard to wedge his survival knife in. After much banging and prying, they managed to get hold of a good-sized piece and pull; it finally snapped off like heavy-duty plastic. They were able to wiggle McKay's body out through the resulting hole and lay him out on the floor.
A quick once-over revealed nothing to explain McKay's unconsciousness. "No injuries," stated Sheppard.
"He does not look well," Teyla said. McKay was unresponsive, and his breathing was growing more labored. "We should get him to Doctor Beckett as soon as possible."
"I've got him," Ronon volunteered, and hoisted the scientist's limp body with a grunt.
"Let's go," Sheppard ordered, and they headed for the gate at the best speed the burdened Satedan could manage.
As Sheppard was dialing the gate, Ronon suddenly said, "He's stopped breathing."
"Damn!" Sheppard slammed his hand down on the central control, and the wormhole whooshed into existence. "Atlantis, this is Sheppard; we're coming in," he yelled into his radio. "Medical team to the gateroom!" They barely waited for confirmation before racing through the gate.
The door to the infirmary slid open to admit Elizabeth. "Any news?" she asked.
Sheppard shook his head. McKay looked terrible, with a respirator tube stuck down his throat, and another machine beating his heart for him. Sheppard had lost track of how long he, Teyla and Ronon had been loitering around waiting for Beckett to come up for air and give them a status report, but the amount of medical equipment bleeping and blinking in the semi-private alcove did not bode well.
At last, the doctor stopped fiddling with monitors and came over to them. "He's physically stabilized, for now, anyway. But I don't like the look of his brain waves."
"In what way?" Elizabeth asked.
"His autonomous nervous system is failing rapidly. As for the higher level functions, there's much less activity than there should be, and what there is is distorted almost beyond recognition."
"Are you saying he's brain dead?" Sheppard protested.
"No. Not in any conventional sense, at least. But these brain patterns are not normal. Not even for a man in a coma."
"What's causing it?"
"Honestly? I have no idea. I've never seen anything like this before."
Weir frowned past him toward the alcove. "Is there anything you can do?"
"Right now, it's all we can do to keep his body functioning." He turned to Sheppard. "Perhaps if we knew more about what that machine you found him in was meant for, we might be able to counteract its effects."
Sheppard straightened. "I'll take Zelenka back to have a look at it." Teyla and Ronon moved to join him, equally grateful for something to do besides wait.
"Take some back-up with you." Meeting his eyes, Elizabeth added, "I don't think Rodney climbed into an alien machine by himself, either. Be careful."
"We will." Flanked by the remainder of his team, Sheppard headed out.
"I hate going off-world," Dr. Zelenka muttered as the gate shut down behind them.
Sheppard caught his glance up into the trees, and smiled in spite of the situation. "No treehouses, Doc. We checked."
"Hmph."
The door still stood open where they'd raced out of the building. Sheppard left two Marines to guard it, with strict if vague warnings about unknown alien menaces. He led the rest of the group through the grid-like hallways to the room with the console. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed since they'd left; the cracked enclosure was still uncovered, and the console face was just as indecipherable as before. Zelenka made the same circuit around the device that Sheppard had, while the two technicians he'd brought along set up work lights and looked in vain for something to attach input leads to. After several minutes of scanners failing to bleep encouragingly and brilliant insights not being spouted, Sheppard prodded, "Well? What do you think?"
"I think this is going to take a while," said Zelenka. At Sheppard's impatient look, he added, "This is completely unfamiliar technology, Colonel. Right now we do not even know how to turn it on."
"I'm not asking you to turn it on. Just figure out what it's for."
"That is what we are trying to do. It will go faster without interruptions."
"Okay, okay." Sheppard went to join Ronon and Teyla on another patrol of the building, leaving the other two Marines to guard the room. Behind him, Zelenka said something in Czech to his assistants; he chose to take that as a positive sign, and not a personal commentary.
When they returned after another half an hour of fruitless searching, he found the transparent cover removed from the -- he wasn't going to think "coffin", damn it -- and Zelenka with his head half-inside the central block.
"Hey!" He yanked the scientist back out by his shirt. "Are you nuts? You know what that thing did to McKay!"
"It is all right, Colonel Sheppard. We have found a way to interface with the device. The circuits are just," he straightened the glasses Sheppard's unnecessary rescue had dislodged, "a little hard to get to."
"Hello? Is somebody there?" came a sudden, familiar voice.
They all stared at each other. It was Sheppard who finally said, "Rodney?"
"Sheppard? What happened? Where are we? Have you got a flashlight?"
"The lights are on, Rodney," Sheppard answered slowly. He touched his radio, but nobody believed the disembodied voice was coming from there.
"What? I can't see a thing! Oh my god. I'm blind!" There was a brief pause, while the listeners looked around at each other as though hoping someone had suddenly manifested a talent for ventriloquism. "Wait -- I can't feel my legs. Or my arms, either. Oh god, I'm blind and paralyzed!"
"Rodney, focus!"
"On what?!" the voice screeched.
"Rodney," Teyla said firmly. "Concentrate on the sound of our voices."
"Teyla?"
"Yes. Can you describe where you are?"
"How would I do that? I can't see, remember?"
"Rodney," Zelenka said thoughtfully, "what is the last thing you remember?"
"Radek?! What, did all of Atlantis come to mock the blind man?"
"Just answer question, please."
"I don't know! I was examining that device on M3X-972, and... and everything went blank."
Zelenka was now staring very hard at the device.
"Rodney... we are with the device now. However, your body is back on Atlantis."
"Then how am I-- wait, what? My body? You mean I'm dead?!"
Sheppard was now staring very hard at Zelenka.
"Fascinating," the Czech breathed.
"Fascinating?! It's fascinating that I'm dead?"
"Beckett has you on life support," Sheppard threw in, then blinked at the extreme surreality of saying that.
"Oh, that makes me feel so much better! Wait -- if I'm on life support, how am I talking to you? You're just a hallucination, aren't you? Oh god. I'm dead and insane, too!"
"Hey!" Sheppard snapped. "We are not hallucinations. We're really here, and somehow, we're really talking to you."
"Then why aren't you really doing something?"
"We are working on it--" Zelenka began.
"Oh, great! The last time you said that, you ended up with Mice McNuggets!"
Zelenka gave the console a dirty look. "Well, this time you have managed to get yourself trapped in something even more bizarre than a Wraith dart."
"What?!" said Sheppard and the disembodied voice simultaneously.
"It's only a theory --"
This time the voice was just a wordless scream of frustration. Sheppard settled for making a speed-it-up gesture at Zelenka.
"I think that McKay's brain was somehow linked into the device. When you disconnected his body, his consciousness remained in the device's circuitry."
"I'm dead and in Hell! Ten thousand year old, alien machine Hell! Do something!"
"Rodney, just calm down!"
"I'm a brain in a jar! If there was ever a situation that did not deserve calm, this is it!"
"Technically, you are engrams imprinted on a very advanced set of crystal circuits," Zelenka interjected.
"It's an expression!" Despite its non-standard means of production, McKay's voice seemed to have no trouble ratcheting up half an octave.
"Why would someone build a machine to suck out somebody's consciousness?" Sheppard asked.
"Oh, thank you for that imagery!"
Zelenka partially turned his back on the console. "This device appears to be the nexus of a highly complex control system. I can't be sure without further study, but it seems to be designed so that whoever goes into the machine can maintain this entire complex," his gesture took in all the surrounding buildings, "purely by controlling the equipment with his mind."
"So you're telling me Rodney is controlling this whole city?"
"No, I'm not!"
"He's right." Zelenka shook his head. "I suspect the transfer process was not completed. Or possibly human brain waves are not entirely compatible. In any case, he might eventually develop some ability to control the systems, but I doubt it would ever be more than a fraction of the device's potential."
"Great. I really am in alien machine Hell."
"And you will continue to be there if you do not stop interrupting," Zelenka told the console sternly. Taking a hint, Sheppard glanced aside to where the two technicians were pointing something out to each other on one of the laptop screens, then retreated back to where Ronon and Teyla were loitering by the doorway.
"This is very strange," Teyla said.
"You've got that right," Sheppard agreed fervently.
Ronon was not-smiling in that way that meant that, inside, he was laughing his head off. "It's not funny," Sheppard snapped.
"Really?" The not-smile diminished, but didn't leave.
Sheppard considered for a second. "If we get him out okay, then it'll be funny." Proper command training and his own natural inclinations dictated that he should say when, not if. The Pegasus galaxy had taught him better.
Ronon sobered. "True."
The technicians called Zelenka over to show him whatever they'd gotten worked up about. McKay's voice demanded, "What? What is it?"
"Colonel Sheppard, we have a new problem."
"Hey! It's not polite to ignore the disembodied brain!"
Zelenka's mouth pursed in irritation. "Fine. Rodney, we have a new problem. The power level in the device is dropping."
"Dropping how?" Sheppard asked warily.
"How, I do not know. How fast is another matter."
"It was fine before! What did you do?"
Zelenka glared at the console. "If the drain continues at the current rate," he said pointedly to Sheppard, "the power will fail completely in a little over two hours."
"And what happens when the power fails? I'll disappear, won't I?"
"Not necessarily. It is possible you are ROM, not RAM."
"It's not a PC, for god's sake!" the intangible McKay yelled. "What do you think this is, the latest Windows bug?"
Zelenka said something very rude in Czech. Sheppard didn't speak the language, but then, he didn't need to.
"Okay, settle down!" Both the corporeal and non-corporeal scientists subsided. "When we first got here, this thing was giving off enough energy for McKay to pick it up all the way from the gate. Is it using that much power just for him to talk to us?"
Zelenka shook his head. "As far as we can determine, the device was operating in a kind of standby mode. Once a living being became... involved, it switched to a more active status. It seems to have actually been drawing the majority of its power from the body itself. By removing McKay, you interrupted that circuit, but the original power source is now dormant."
McKay's voice said something about "ten thousand year old mechanical alien energy vampires." The others did their best to ignore him.
"Are you saying we need to stick him -- well, his body -- back in there?"
Zelenka pushed up his glasses. "I think it would be a wise precaution. Besides, we will need his body back here in order to try to return his consciousness to it."
"You can do that?" Sheppard and McKay said simultaneously.
"Perhaps. If we can keep the machine going long enough to try."
The next trip back from the gate included a portable generator and a parade of medical equipment that nearly obscured the stretcher on which lay McKay's alarmingly still form. Another batch of Marines doubled as corpsmen and moving crew.
"I don't like this," Beckett said for what had to be the tenth time.
"None of us like it," Sheppard responded. "But Zelenka thinks he can put McKay back together, once all the parts of him are, well, together." Privately, he hoped he wasn't exaggerating Zelenka's state of mind too badly, but it had been hard enough to get Beckett to take his patient on this field trip. He wasn't going to mention how much potential there was for this to go horribly, horribly wrong.
It was just as well that Zelenka and company had managed to remove the transparent cover; Sheppard didn't think trying to wriggle McKay's body back through the hole they'd made with half of the medical unit attached would've worked. He found something else to look at while Beckett and a couple of the burlier Marines horsed the limp figure onto the block of the device that apparently was supposed to be a bed.
Zelenka and the techs had a lot of charts and graphs and equations up on the laptop screens, and were discussing them enthusiastically in two or three different languages. "Got something?" Sheppard asked.
"We think so," replied Zelenka. "Unfortunately, there is no way to test it first."
"Of course there isn't," McKay's voice sniped. "I'm just an electronic guinea pig to you, aren't I?"
"Guinea pigs are much less obnoxious," Zelenka said, and Sheppard decided to leave them to it. The medical equipment was battling the scientific gear for most of the space in the room, so he joined Teyla and Ronon against the wall, as out of the way as possible.
"He's stable for the moment," Beckett reported from where he hovered over McKay's corpus, "but I don't know how long this portable equipment can keep him that way. Whatever you're going to do, I suggest you hurry."
"Agreed." Zelenka nodded. The techs made a couple of final adjustments. "Rodney, we are going to need your help for this."
"Well, of course you are!"
Zelenka rolled his eyes, but continued, "The device must initiate the interface with your body. We can stimulate the circuits, but you will need to direct them."
"I thought you said he couldn't do that," Sheppard reminded.
"He is going to have to learn. It could take months to figure out how to control this process externally."
"Fine, fine, I'll figure it out! Just get on with it!"
"Activating first circuit." Zelenka tapped his keyboard briefly. There was a long pause. "Rodney?"
"What? I'm trying! There isn't exactly a manual in here, you know!"
"Activating second circuit," was Zelenka's only reply.
Another pause, then, "Oh, that's really weird."
One of the techs pointed at a blip on a chart. "Yes," Zelenka nodded. "Rodney, it appears you have the circuits synchronized with the biofeedback actuator. Just continue like that, and you should be fine."
"Easy for you to say. It's like pins and needles, only without, you know, the pins or the needles."
"Activating third circuit."
"Ow!" Several more blips appeared on the chart. "Okay, this is officially not fun!"
Beckett twitched toward his patient, but stopped as he apparently realized that the part he could give a painkiller to was not the part complaining.
"Unfortunately, this may become quite uncomfortable," Zelenka apologized to the doctor as much as to the subject. "Neither the human brain nor our interface is entirely compatible with the device, and that incompatibility may register as pain."
"Yeah, no kidding!"
"Activating fourth circuit."
"Ow! You're doing that on purpose, aren't you?!"
"Just hang on, Rodney," Beckett soothed. "We'll have you out of there as soon as we can."
"You hang on! I don't have any hands, remember?"
"They're working as fast as they can," said Beckett.
McKay's voice muttered something about sheep, then swore loudly as Zelenka said, "Fifth circuit."
"Ow!"
"Sixth circuit."
"Ow!"
"Seventh."
"Ow ow ow!"
"Eighth."
"Ow, damn it!"
McKay's hand twitched.
"Yes!" Zelenka crowed. "That's it! Rodney, you have connection now. You should be able to transition back to your own body."
Another pause. "It's not working!" McKay's panicked voice squawked.
"Try visualizing the energy flow from the machine to your body," Zelenka suggested.
"Visualize? What, are you an amateur psychologist now?"
Zelenka tapped his keyboard again. The voice yelped. "You did do that on purpose!"
"Yes, I purposefully increased the power flow to the circuits you are supposed to be controlling. If you don't like the feeling, perhaps you should concentrate on doing your part."
"Oh, very funny! Do you want to try being stuck in here?"
"No, thank you," Zelenka said with maddening serenity.
"It'll probably stop hurting once you're back in your own body," Beckett said encouragingly.
"You think?!" McKay snarled, but the point must have struck home, because after a moment light began to glow from inside the central block of the console.
The light spread, surrounding McKay's head in a gentle halo. All the conscious occupants of the room waited anxiously, but nothing happened.
"...need more power...." McKay's voice managed breathlessly -- well, how else? But he sounded like he could barely spare the concentration to form words.
"Increasing power," Zelenka confirmed, typing swiftly. "There. That is all we have."
The light flickered, brightened, then glowed steadily. McKay's hand twitched again. Several of Beckett's monitors beeped excitedly, and he glanced up from them to grin at the onlookers. "I think it's working!"
The light went out, and McKay's whole body twitched like a landed fish.
"Rodney? Can you hear me?" asked Beckett
"Unnghh..." McKay groaned. It was almost bizarre to see his lips move in time with his voice.
Beckett wielded his stethoscope for a moment, then gave McKay an injection. "Come on now. Wake up and talk to us."
McKay groaned again. One eyelid peeled open briefly, gave it up as a bad job, then rallied as the other one joined in. The resulting slit-eyed expression was woozy and vague, but indisputably McKay.
"How are you feeling?"
"Like I've just had my brain sucked out by an alien machine," McKay slurred. "And stir-fried. Ugh. Aspirin? Coffee?"
Beckett beamed at Sheppard. "I think he's going to be fine. But I'd like to get him back to Atlantis right away."
"Absolutely." Beckett started packing up his gear. "It's good to have you back, Rodney."
"It's good to be back." McKay pressed a wobbly hand to his forehead. "Or it will be, anyway."
The Marines shoveled the moaning scientist back onto the stretcher. As he was carried past, McKay looked at Zelenka. "Thanks," he said quietly. Zelenka nodded back, smiling.
They all watched the medical entourage leave. Then Sheppard shook himself and turned to Zelenka. "So, now what do we do with this wonderful device?"
"Study it," Zelenka answered promptly. "It is like nothing else we've found in the Pegasus galaxy."
"Definitely not Ancient, then?"
"Not even close. But just as advanced."
"Okay, we'll hang around for a little while longer. But be careful. We still don't know how McKay ended up in there."
"Yes. That would also be good to find out." Zelenka turned back to his equipment.
Sheppard wandered around the room for a bit, periodically checking the life-signs detector but unwilling to leave the scientists alone with the console. Ronon lurked against the wall. Teyla briefly looked over the shoulders of the techs as they ran more programs. Zelenka attached various probes to the insides of the device, then poked at the still-inexplicable patterns on the face of the console. For quite some time, nothing much happened.
Silently, a thin, multi-jointed rod extended itself from within the central block, angling through the opening lately occupied by McKay's head. It bent and crooked through the air as though questing with the tiny suction cup on its end. Then, with startling speed, it shot around the corner of the console and planted the suction cup smack in the middle of Zelenka's forehead. The scientist's face abruptly went blank, and he took a step toward the machine as though the rod were drawing him in.
"Hey!" Sheppard sprang forward and slapped at the rod, knocking it loose, and pulled Zelenka back from the device. The techs jumped. Ronon's blaster was instantaneously up and aimed at the console, Teyla's P90 only a beat behind it.
"You okay?" Sheppard asked.
Zelenka's eyes were very wide behind his glasses. "I think so. Thank you, Colonel."
"No problem."
Zelenka reached for a laptop as though it were a security blanket. "I think we will cut power to that circuit now."
"Good idea." Sheppard stepped back again, but kept a suspicious eye on the console. Neither Ronon nor Teyla lowered their weapons, and he didn't have a problem with that.
Nothing much happened for another few minutes, though this time the atmosphere in the room was much less relaxed.
"Oh no," Zelenka said suddenly.
"Oh no what?" asked Sheppard with a sinking feeling.
"I think we should leave now."
"The original power source is back on-line," one of the technicians said, watching the device warily from the corner of her eye.
"And is overloading," Zelenka added.
"What happened?"
Zelenka was disconnecting control leads as he answered. "Possibly we cross-circuited something in recovering McKay, or possibly is fail-safe, to prevent tampering."
Of course it was, Sheppard thought. What alien race would leave a dangerous brain-sucking device lying around without rigging it to blow away the next poor sucker who found it? "Let me guess. Big boom?"
"Very," said Zelenka.
Sheppard had learned to recognize that we're-all-going-to-die-now calm in the Czech's voice. That, and the fact that his assistants were already scrambling to pack up their equipment. "Right." He grabbed his radio. "Everybody, get out of the building, now! Back to the gate, top speed!" He shooed the scientists out of the room ahead of him. They raced through the maze of hallways, diving right and left at Sheppard's command. His prayers that he was remembering the way out correctly were answered when they skidded to a halt and dodged through the door to the outside.
A quick head-count of the other running figures relieved Sheppard's other worry; all personnel accounted for, and making tracks. Halfway back to the gate, he caught Zelenka's arm and slowed enough to pant, "Just how big a bang are we talking about, here?"
Zelenka rolled white-rimmed eyes at him. "Bigger than this," he gasped, waving back at the distance they'd already covered. His face was flushed and sweaty, but he didn't look like he wanted to stop.
"Keep running!" Sheppard shouted at a couple of Marines who'd slowed when he had. "Whoever gets there first, dial home!" Teyla, who could probably outrun anyone on Atlantis, looked back at him, then legged it ahead of the rest. She had the wormhole waiting for them by the time they caught up. Bringing up the rear, Sheppard and Zelenka stumbled past the last of the trees and toward the glimmering puddle.
The shock wave blew them both through the gate.
Going ass-over-teakettle through the gateroom wasn't so bad, Sheppard thought, unless someone else was doing it too and ran into you. Then, you were likely to catch a nasty bang on the head before coming to rest on the nice flat floor. He closed his eyes against the glare of sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows.
When he opened them again, Elizabeth was staring down at him. He took the look on her face as sufficient evidence that no one was hurt worse than he was. "Let me guess," she said with charitably little sarcasm. "Big boom?"
"Everyone's a critic," Sheppard groaned, and slumped back onto the floor to await the arrival of Beckett and, hopefully, a jumbo bottle of aspirin.