“Sensible of them.” McKay took a deep breath. “All that aside, I had an idea. If we find the ’gate is actually locked against any destination except Atlantis, we can transmit a message with the MALP. If you can convince Dorane that you want to join him, he may open the shield for us. Then when we get there, you can shoot him. We’ll still have to do something about all the Koan, but if he’s not there to control them, it should be a little easier.”
John lifted his brows. It wasn’t exactly the best plan ever, but they didn’t have a lot of options. “Okay, so he figures I’m due for a psychotic break around about now and believes me. But suppose he doesn’t care how his experiment on me turned out. He’s got plenty of Koan already; what do I tell him I have that he might want?”
Rodney smiled, a weird combination of his normal smug expression and a look of resignation and terror. “Me.”
Any stairs or ramp that had led up to the Stargate platform had been a casualty of the bombing, and the scramble up the resulting pile of rock and rubble was not made any easier by the ZPM. John and McKay reached the top without dropping it or breaking their own necks. The MALP still sat to one side of the platform, coated with a layer of blown sand but otherwise unharmed.
McKay went immediately to the hole in the platform where the DHD had been. He poked around at the remains of it for a few moments, then sat back, shaking his head. “I was right, this DHD wasn’t destroyed by an energy weapon, there was some sort of internal overload. Which means that maniac was out here trying to get around whatever control inhibition the Ancients placed on the crystals and blew the damn thing himself.”
John chewed his lip, thinking about it. “He would have still tried to dial manually. Maybe he tried it a lot.”
McKay had followed his thought. He snorted. “You think he killed two ZPMs manually dialing a ’gate? It’s impossible. It takes comparatively little power to initiate a ’gate, which is probably a safety feature to keep travelers from being stranded. The outside power source isn’t creating the worm-hole, it’s just unlocking the inner ring and then locking in the chevrons for the address. He would have to dial…” McKay frowned.
John lifted his brows. “Over and over again for ten thousand years? In between stasis chamber naps?”
“And I thought I was obsessive-compulsive,” McKay muttered, diving back into the hole. “I find the fact that he must have been unsuccessful all this time mildly terrifying.”
John wasn’t thrilled with it either. “Maybe he wasn’t unsuccessful. Maybe he went there after the Ancients left for Earth. Which means—” He hesitated, not liking where this was going. “It’s not the city he wants, it’s us. He wants to keep experimenting.” He took a frustrated breath, looking out over the bright plain. “Why didn’t the Ancients just kill him? All these tricks with the ’gate, it’s like they wanted him to squirm around trying to escape.”
“Or as if they wanted something from him,” McKay said quietly. “They didn’t touch his inner sanctum lab complex. Or they searched it, didn’t find what they wanted, and left it intact hoping the answer was just hidden too well. That they could force him to reveal it eventually.”
Antidotes, John thought. For the Thesians, for whoever else Dorane had managed to infect. He didn’t want to say it aloud; he didn’t want to sound that hopeful — as if it would tempt the universe to conspire against him.
McKay was quiet for a moment, then he said, “You look like an alien biker,” and started working again. He poked and prodded at the DHD’s remnants, dug tools out of his pack, and muttered to himself. The day was getting hot, the sun reflecting off the stone platform, and the brightness was giving John yet another headache. Then McKay connected in the ZPM, and John felt a sudden shiver travel down his back. It was not an unpleasant sensation.
He stared up at the Stargate, which still looked like an inert hunk of naquadah, but something in John’s head told him it was now powered up, ready to be dialed. “You did it,” he said, just as McKay sat back from the ragged hole in the paving and said, “I did it.”
“What?” they both said at the same time. John waved for McKay to shut up. “I felt it. Like it was an Ancient gene thing. Except I’ve never felt a ’gate before. And ZPMs have never talked to me.”
“I actually didn’t think you had been holding out on us all this time, Major.” McKay stared at the Stargate, then at John. “Maybe that’s what the spines are for. Maybe they’re meant to enhance reception of Dorane’s alternate mental technology activation, and they also function that way for the real ATA.”
John caught himself trying to roll his eyes back to see the spines in his brows. “Like antennae?” It did make a sort of sense.
McKay rubbed sweat and dust off his face with his shirtsleeve. “Can you dial the ’gate mentally, by any chance? Because that damn thing looks heavy.”
“Let’s see.” John concentrated on the first symbol for Atlantis, then for a few other destinations he had memorized. Nothing. The inner ring just sat there, making a deep metallic purring noise that John could feel in his back teeth. He felt like it was staring accusingly at him. Or possibly laughing. “Guess not.”
“Of course.” McKay pushed to his feet, stumbled, and John stood, giving him a hand up. “That would be too easy.”
They decided to test the theory that all destinations except Atlantis had been locked out to keep Dorane here. If they could dial another destination, that meant they could use Plan A, which was to try to dial into Atlantis from another ’gate address, and trick Dorane into letting them in by pretending to be traders or something else unspecified that they hadn’t quite figured out yet. “Let’s try the Hoffans,” McKay suggested, leaning tiredly on the gate. “They were nice people. Hopefully a few of them are still alive.”
“It’s worth a shot,” John agreed. The Hoffans put a high value on fighting the Wraith with science, and were advanced enough to understand genetics. If any of them were still around, they would probably be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and listen to McKay’s explanations, instead of shooting the freaky alien creature who had just come through their ’gate (i.e. John) on sight.
They wrestled with the ’gate’s inner ring. It was heavy, like pushing a loaded truck up a hill. But while it would rotate all around, it stubbornly refused to lock in the first symbol in the Hoffans’ gate address, no matter how hard they both shoved at it, or how hard John mentally begged it. John swore. “It’s going to have to be Plan B.”
McKay stepped back, eyeing the ’gate with weary disgust. “You know what you’re going to say?”
John had no idea what he was going to say. He thought he would be better winging it. “I can sound crazy and desperate, how’s that?”
“Crazy and desperate is standard operating procedure.” McKay went to his pack, rooted around in it for a moment, and pulled out something that looked like a little PDA, but John could tell it was Ancient technology. It buzzed with a low note, a minor key compared to the bass orchestra of the Stargate, but much friendlier. “Major, I’m going to put this in the MALP. I assume if this goes hideously wrong, we’ll both be searched and I don’t want Dorane to find it.”
“Okay.” John blinked, distracted, as the little device sang that it had lots of data but was ready for more. “Uh… What is it?”
“A download from Dorane’s database. He thought he had it adequately protected, but let’s say his system security skills don’t match his Frankensteinian expertise in biochemistry. The Ancients must have been able to get this data too, so I don’t know how useful it might be, but it’s still worth saving.” Rodney tucked it into one of the MALP’s code-locked compartments. The metal muted the little device’s song, and it settled into quiet. McKay dusted his hands off on his pants. “Now, this has got to look good. We need some stage dressing. I have to look like your prisoner.” Covered with a sticky combination of sweat, dust, and sand, and turning red from incipient sunburn, McKay already looked like he had been dragged to the Stargate by the ankle. He patted his pockets and handed over the 9mm to John. “You should tie me up,” he added, looking absently around. “Better use my belt. There’s some cable in the MALP’s compartment, but we’ll need that to hang ourselves if this doesn’t work.”