“Nothing so far,” he said into the radio, and Radek answered patiently enough.
“Understood.”
William shone his light along the top of the tilted shelves, looking for anything that might have been caught between, that might have survived, and a pale object by his feet caught his eye. He swung the light down, his breath catching as he recognized the bones of a human hand. He let the light play further, picked out a sleeve and a shoulder, the fragments of a skull beneath a fallen case. A soldier, he guessed — the remains of the clothes looked like a uniform, complete with badges and what were probably rank stripes ringing the sleeve. And there was carrying case, almost invisible in the shadow of the tilted shelves, lying as though the soldier had dropped it when the crates fell on him. On her, he corrected, assessing the size of the hand. A woman, or a very young man. He wouldn’t know for sure unless he could examine the rest of the skeleton.
He shook that thought away, pulled the case free. It was rounded at the corners, with an extra set of straps to keep the lid in place. He picked them loose, pried open the lid, and peered inside. Nestled in the padding was a narrow crystal pyramid, its jagged edges seamed with darker color. “Oh.”
“Lynn!” Radek sounded distinctly out of patience, and William grimaced.
“Sorry. It’s here. I have it.”
“The ZPM?”
“Yes.” William closed the lid, relieved that the case seemed solid, refastened the straps.
“Does it have power?”
“I don’t know. It’s not glowing, does that mean anything?”
“Not really.”
“There isn’t any obvious damage,” William said. He looked back at the body, wondering if the Satedans had known what they had, if that was why she’d been trying to retrieve it, or if she’d just been trying to save one more piece of her people’s past. And that was gross speculation. All he could say for certain was that she had died trying to get the artifact out of the Museum. “The case was undamaged, and it seemed to be well padded.”
Radek sighed again. “We must get it out right away.”
“All right,” William said, and moved back to the debris-choked doorway.
It took them almost ten minutes to work out how to fit the case through the gap, Radek swearing in Czech the whole time, but at last it was through. William squatted against the wall, feeling the sweat trickling down his spine, and after a moment, Radek spoke in his ear.
“It is intact, at least. It is not at full power, but I can’t tell any more than that until we get it out of here.”
“Go,” William said. “Ronon?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve also found a body.”
There was a little silence. “Yeah?”
“It’s mostly buried, but I can see sleeve marking — unit insignia, maybe, or rank? I’ll photograph them, but do you want me to bring the actual sleeve end?”
This time the silence was longer, and William winced, hoping he hadn’t inadvertently offended. The Air Force people he’d known, the Marines, they would have wanted that tangible memory, but maybe Satedans, the Satedan military, didn’t work that way.
“Yeah,” Ronon said. His voice was just a little hoarse. “That’d be good.”
“Right,” William said. He fished in his pocket for his knife, sawed carefully through the tough fabric just above the rings that looked like rank stripes, freed it gently from the skeleton. In spite of his care, he dislodged a couple of the smaller fingerbones, the tendons too far gone to hold them, and he nudged the bones back into place.
“Sorry,” he said, softly, and turned back to the blocked door.
He worked his way through the gap, emerged gasping and sweating in the fossil room. Ronon extended a hand, hauled him to his feet, and William nodded in thanks.
“Here,” he said, and held out the cut sleeve.
Ronon took it, held the scrap of cloth into the beam from his light. His face was shadowed, but William thought his voice was unnaturally controlled. “University Brigade. A corporal.” He tucked it into his own pocket. “I’ll give it to Cai.”
William nodded, suppressing unworthy regret. He had the photos, he didn’t need the actual artifact.
“What happened, could you tell?”
William shrugged. “A crate fell on her — from the size of the hand, I think it was a woman — and my guess would be that she was trying to rescue something from the shelves. The ZPM, it looks like.”
Ronon nodded in turn. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
Several people were looking over the edge of the hole, and William climbed back into his harness, let himself be hauled to the surface. Ronon came after, hand over hand up the rope, and looked at Radek, who had the ZPM lying on a worktable, cables snaking to it from his laptop.
“Well?”
“Well.” Radek glared at both of them. “It is a ZPM, and it is intact and undamaged. But. There is only minimal power.”
“How small is minimal?” Ronon asked.
“Too small,” Radek said. “We might be able to power the shield for a few minutes. We might be able to launch drones. I will not know for certain exactly how much power is available until we go back to Atlantis, but it is not enough. Not enough at all.”
“Bugger,” William said.
Chapter Twenty-one
Obstacles
“Dr. Keller?”
Jennifer pulled off her exam gloves and thumbed on her radio. “Keller here.”
“Ma’am, you wanted me to tell you when Colonel Sheppard and his team returned,” Airman Salawi said.
“I did, didn’t I,” Jennifer said. She felt the knot settle back in the pit of her stomach, the one she’d managed to distract herself from while checking out Dr. Altman’s sore throat. “So how did it go with the Satedans and the Genii?”
“All right, I think?” Salawi said, in tones that suggested that she wasn’t sure whether she was supposed to have been listening to whatever post-mission conversation had gone on in the control room. “No injuries to our people, anyway.”
“Well, that’s what we like from a diplomatic conference,” Jennifer said, although given the Satedans and the Genii, it probably hadn’t been a foregone conclusion.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m not in the Air Force,” Jennifer pointed out. “You don’t actually have to call me ‘ma’am’ all the time.”
“Sorry, Dr. Keller.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jennifer said. She glanced at her computer screen again, wondering if she should run one more set of the simulations of Rodney’s recovery. It wasn’t as if using the same data and the same computer models was going to give her different results, but there was some part of her that stubbornly hoped that it would.
She picked up her laptop instead and headed up to Woolsey’s office, which was now at least temporarily Sheppard’s office. The first few times she’d had to make these kinds of reports, it had been in Elizabeth’s office, sparely but beautifully decorated with the artifacts of half a dozen worlds. Woolsey’s was more a stubborn little oasis of Earth, as if asserting his own personality over the space was his small act of rebellion against the weight of people’s expectations.
It was hard to imagine what Sheppard would do with it if it turned out to be his office on a more permanent basis. He had an office of his own, but he was hardly ever in it, and as far as Jennifer could tell it wasn’t much more than an oversized closet full of paperwork and spare clips of ammunition.