The return to Atlantis could have been called routine if not for two facts.
First: the city-ship's population had exactly doubled. After giving her "deputies" detailed instructions, Teyla decided to come with us to the "City of the Ancients." To immerse herself, so to speak, in the cultural heritage.
Hmm... Asking Emmagan directly if her people would collapse without their leader felt awkward. But at the same time, she'd done something similar in the events I knew. The Athosians managed perfectly well without her direct presence. Besides, they let her go with us without excessive whining, tearful goodbyes, or other separation scenes. And they knew she wasn't just "visiting." Teyla is something between an Athosian diplomat, an advisor on local cultures and planets, and a Pegasus-style soldier Jane.
Given that I didn't want to deal with snot, tears, pity, and sentimentality in the future, recruiting Teyla as something like a "first squad" here on Atlantis wouldn't be prudent. Because although she's the leader of her people, she's more of a diplomat on the line of agreements. If it came down to abandoning a dozen peasants in a moment of danger to save ourselves or taking a deadly fight and falling into Wraith hands, I'd have to ditch Teyla. After shooting her first.
Just kidding, of course. If she died, we'd have major complications with the Athosians. But the fact is, this lady and her idealism will cause problems.
Alvar Jensen also followed us. After all, I need him and Teyla to form a reconnaissance team for the worlds of the Pegasus galaxy.
They know some of the local civilizations, and with others they can introduce us through the "handshake" tactic. It works like this: you know someone who knows someone else useful, and that someone knows another... and so on. The main problem is ensuring those "someones" are genuinely useful, not dead weight that you have to defend at every sneeze.
All the way to the gate, and then to the jumper hangar, Chaya and I were silent. Jensen, though he restrained his enthusiasm unlike Teyla, still asked occasional questions about us and the city. Trivial ones, like "I hope you don't have soft mattresses?!" or "To flush after myself, do I have to call one of you, or can I handle it myself?"
Teyla was more interested in whether her unfamiliarity with Ancient technology would hinder her stay in the city. She asked for a small room and a training area. Jensen seconded the latter.
Fine, they'll both get everything — there are plenty of empty rooms in Atlantis. Just need to sort out a few issues.
At first I thought there would be only one issue. And it was based on the cargo we had in the jumper's hold. Fruits, vegetables, meat, greens... Not enough for five hundred people, of course, but enough for the four of us for a while. Not to mention there were several ready-made dishes, including aromatic smoked meat that looked more like meat chips. Very tasty, by the way. Teyla even said what animal the smoked meat came from, but I didn't remember. The main thing I understood: it wasn't rodents, snakes, or birds. Some kind of pig or cow equivalent...
Anyway, the issue itself was about who would cook all this.
The second arose during the approach to the gate: "Do we have a place and equipment to cook?" Seriously, I never wondered if Atlantis had a kitchen, kitchen furniture, plates...
And after we surfaced through the gate, rose into the jumper hangar, and Chaya continued to remain silent even after leaving the ship, a third question arose.
"What's going on?" I asked the girl, holding her back after our guests went to put their things in the rooms allocated to them in Atlantis's residential sector.
The girl looked at me with a hint of pain and hatred.
"Other Ancients?" she blurted out. "There are other Ancients in Pegasus?"
"Yes, and what does that change?" I asked.
"Everything!" she even stomped her foot. "Even if I don't have those memories, I can definitely say that I must have done what I did out of the thought that even if you escape alone, you won't be able to work! Because you need help with Ancient technology!"
Okay, I get it. One psychological trauma after another.
"Follow me," I ordered.
Interestingly, she obeyed.
When we returned to the control center, I mentally thanked Chaya for creating that translator program, and brought up readings from a sensor on the monitor.
"Remember what this is?" I asked, pointing to the dots on the galaxy map. Very few dots, honestly. Hell, let's be honest — just one.
"The latest data from the Lantean warship tracking system," Chaya answered mechanically. "That's the Aurora. You ordered the system shut down as soon as we decided to cooperate."
"Yes, that and a bunch of other systems that could only cause us trouble," I explained. "But there's no guarantee that the Aurora's signal wasn't detected by the Wraith, who — surprise — not only fly 'darts' to planets but also cruise their hives between worlds."
"I don't think they could have," Chaya said. "The ship is far out in space, and not that many Wraith are awake. They might have missed the signal. Especially since they don't know for sure whether the Lanteans are alive. So they've probably stopped monitoring our subspace transmitter frequencies long ago."
"That would be good," I agreed. "So I take it you looked into the ship's details?"
"Yes, and besides, I checked Atlantis's logs," Chaya replied, as if not hearing me. "It says the Aurora was sent on a top-secret reconnaissance mission. Deep into enemy territory. That was still in the early years of the war, so she's most likely heavily damaged in battle, otherwise she would have returned to the city. Other ships like the Aurora were destroyed or captured by the enemy."
Well, well, well... Here are the missing puzzle pieces.
"According to my information, the crew might have survived on board the Aurora," I explained. "The ship is heavily damaged, so it's drifting toward Atlantis on inertia."
"Ten thousand years?" Chaya raised an eyebrow. "You have a rather wrong idea about the lifespan of the Ancients. Even the Lanteans didn't have such an extended lifespan. Although there was speculation that the Lanteans, due to a series of mutations and interbreeding with other races, lost some of their genetic advantages, there was no evidence for that."
Uh-huh... That's just because they didn't know that one Ancient woman spent millions of years in the ice of Antarctica on Earth. As soon as the humans warmed her up, she came back to life.
"Stasis pods," I prompted.
"Nonsense," Chaya shook her head. "The Aurora is a warship, not an exploration vessel. They didn't install..."
The girl fell silent. She thought for a couple of seconds, then pushed me aside from the console, switched the system to Lantean, and started searching for something.
I found out what exactly a few seconds later.
"I apologize," she said. "The Aurora is the lead ship of the first starships of this type. They were built as exploration vessels for studying remote corners of the galaxy and beyond, where there were no Stargates. Its hyperdrive was outdated, and travel from one end of the galaxy to the other could take months, and between galaxies, years. Preserving the crew in hibernation was necessary. A stasis system connected to virtual reality was provided on board."
"And...?"
"That was done so that the brains of those in stasis wouldn't be damaged by the sleep duration. The Ancients were always few, so conditional months in stasis could always be spent productively."
"For example, could they control the ship from stasis?"
"I'm not sure," admitted Chaya. "It was a very imperfect system, so it was abandoned even before the war with the Wraiths began. I can say for certain that they could interact with each other in virtual reality. But influencing the ship... No, I don't think so. It would require a far greater amount of energy. Orders of magnitude more."
"Is the virtual reality system resistant to hacking?" I asked.
"As much as the programming allows, but it's not the most secure system — it's auxiliary, after all," Chaya said, looking at me suspiciously. "You're asking strange questions."
"Based on what I know." The girl seemed to have forgotten her grievance, her attention now on this story. "In the events I know of, the ship also responded to Atlantis's call. And the Wraiths discovered it. They killed a crew member and replaced him to uncover the secrets of the hyperdrive."
"Pointless," said Chaya. "The Wraiths' hyperdrives during the war were analogous to the ones on the Aurora."
"Yes, but not the intergalactic ones..."
"Oh," the girl flared up. "That is a problem. We need to get to them as quickly as possible and neutralize the Wraiths."
"I completely agree," I nodded. "But there are several problems. The first is the closest Stargate to the ship. It's far from the ship, unreachable."
"You already checked the maps?" Chaya asked in surprise, switching to her console. A couple of seconds of techno-wizardry, and data on planets with Stargates appeared overlaid on the location data of the Aurora. "A problem... But we could take a shuttle from the nearest one, accelerate to maximum speed and drift. In a few months," she squinted, "correction, in forty-seven days, we'll reach her. But that's an approximate time, since I can't calculate the Aurora's speed from here. I think it's within five..."
"Leave Atlantis to our new friends for a month and a half?" I clarified.
Chaya's expression fell. It seemed that, as a person, she had the innate trait of a mad scientist — diving headfirst into solving one problem while forgetting about the others.
"Don't forget about the stasis," I said. "And the ten thousand years they've spent in it."
"That's a big problem," Chaya darkened.
"That's exactly why I didn't tell you until I had at least some kind of plan," I had to clarify my position.
"And what is it?" asked Chaya. "Ask the Ascended for help?"
"Do you really think that would work?" I grinned good-naturedly. "We need a ship with a hyperdrive."
"What's the argument about?" The Athosian woman appeared on the lower level of the Gate Room, and... Hmm, I keep forgetting to ask Alvar the name of his home planet.
"Come on up," I gestured with my head.
It took a couple of minutes to briefly outline the crux of the problem.
"Living Ancestors?" Teyla's eyes went wide. "I believe we must save them. They know and can do so much. Their help would be invaluable in the fight against the Wraiths!"
"Their bodies are too old to be awakened now," said Chaya. "Despite their enhanced physiology, they probably won't live longer than a couple of days, maybe a week."
"Isn't it possible to get them back on their feet in that time?" asked Alvar. "It's your technology, there must be a solution."
"Stasis wasn't designed for people to stay in it for millennia," Chaya objected. "I'm afraid we have very big problems."
"Then again," I took the floor, "there is a way. Without any guarantees, of course, but... It's better than having a refrigerator stuffed with slowly dying Ancients."
"Interesting," Chaya said, intrigued. "And what do you have in mind?"
"A little later on that," I sidestepped the dangerous conversation. "For now, we need to figure out where to get a starship with a hyperdrive."
"Build one," Jensen suggested. "You've got a whole city packed with all sorts of Ancient gizmos. Surely there are suitable parts for ships?"
Chaya and I exchanged glances.
"If only it were that simple," she sighed.
* * *
"The last one," Jensen announced, dragging a bag of... well, I'll call it purple potatoes. Although it looks like a carrot and smells like an onion, you just need to know how to cook it. "Pretty big vegetable storage you've got here, though."
"They built it with a surplus," I agreed, glancing at the room. It looked more like a small hangar, filled with metal containers that once held food. Now it was just traces of decomposed organic matter. "Teyla promised to help get this place in order."
The room was the size of a football field, two stories high, and divided into two levels connected by a metal staircase. Shelving units occupied every inch of space from floor to ceiling, and on each shelf sat a universal food storage container. Made from the same polymer as the scanner casings, each container had a built-in climate control system. Like most of the equipment, such as the scanners themselves, these devices had integrated wireless charging systems.
Just think... If the Ancients had turned off all the unnecessary equipment in the city, maybe the flooding wouldn't have happened. According to Chaya's estimates, if this bunker and its equipment had been inactive for the last ten thousand years, we would have an extra week of power on the old ZPM. And that's just one compartment, dammit!
There are thousands of them all over Atlantis.
Chaya was currently working on identifying the places with the highest energy consumption and starting to shut down the sectors of the city we didn't need. Which meant most of Atlantis.
In the parts of the city-ship we don't use, emergency lighting would suffice — just a couple of lamps in the corridors so we don't break our legs in the dark. It would be great to turn those off too, but that would require digging through half the city's operating system. And unfortunately, that particular nut was too tough for Chaya to crack — she'd never even seen many of the protocols, despite being a top-tier physicist. Even though she wasn't a Lantian.
The same went for the life support systems — you couldn't just shut it down in the unused areas of the city. At least, Chaya couldn't. She claims it's "for now," but...
"So, how many people can live here?" Jensen asked. Of course, he was talking about the city.
"Several thousand," I shrugged. "Atlantis has been rebuilt many times, the layouts densified, new buildings erected in place of the old. So, if you wanted, a lot of people could settle here."
"If you wanted," the former runner noted. "I've already noticed that your girlfriend isn't much of a match for you in an argument."
"I don't know what you mean by 'girlfriend,' but 'partner in misfortune' fits better here."
"Well, I don't know... Living in a city like this, having weapons and technology like this — it's more than almost anyone in the galaxy has," Jensen helped me pour the vegetables into containers we'd already cleaned of old residue and put them back on the shelves. Just two dozen crates out of several hundred, maybe even a thousand... And that's just on the first level. And that's not even mentioning the huge bins for the most frequently consumed products. We didn't need those at all right now — we didn't even have that much stock of vegetables or fruits.
Actually, the food supply system in the city was set up in a very peculiar way. First of all, there were six rooms like this one — one in each of the piers and in the central spire. There was also the same number of mess halls. Chaya explained that it had always been that way, as long as she could remember — there was no point in gathering the whole city in a single mess hall. It was much simpler and faster to create several smaller ones.
It doesn't really matter now, anyway. I know for sure that the city will never have such a large population, now or later. Because I'm not going to let just anyone in here. It's plainly dangerous to leave someone with the technological level of the Athosians, or others like them, near the city's potential technical secrets.
Hell, it'd be one thing if they just broke something... But what if they turned it on?
We already had to work hard enough to find the lab with the nano-virus that kills everyone except the carriers of the Ancient Gene. Disabling those pests was no easy task either. But give the girl a little time, a bit of advice, and you get a one-shot EMP generator that deactivates all nanites across the entire city.
And there are thousands of such unfinished, unneutralized traps — experiments, really — in the city.
"But just having this city won't solve all the problems," I said.
While Chaya dealt with the technical side, literally tearing herself apart between the city's various systems demanding her attention, Teyla helped with the aftermath of the flooding and Atlantis's long period of disuse.
She couldn't help much with the repairs, but, say, cleaning up the kitchen (and yes, it has everything we need, and it's not even that different from the equipment and utensils I'm used to), organizing the kitchen stores, throwing out the dead plants and potting new ones — she could handle that easily.
Most of the plants were dead, but some had gone into a dormant state. Though there was no guarantee they could be revived under improved conditions. After all, ten thousand years without water or light.
But Chaya figured out their origin, and along with Teyla, she flew to the mainland and dug up some suitable plants. As it turned out, the plants in Atlantis weren't just decorative bushes. They were special genetically engineered species that didn't need sunlight. They were more oriented towards heat, which served them for photosynthesis. Atlantis, it seemed, had been preparing for a siege, and so had developed the necessary oxygen-producing plants that could ease the load on the life support system in the absence of light from the local star. Well... Pretty clever.
"I'll bet millions of people across the galaxy would give anything to live in a city underwater with the ability to block the Gate and keep the Wraiths out," Jensen snorted.
There was no point in arguing with that.
Atlantis is equipped with an energy shield to protect the Stargate from unwanted guests materializing. Immediately after the Gate activates and the energy vortex calms down, an energy barrier can be activated around the Gate. It's projected a tiny distance from the Event Horizon. Because of this, the Gate's automation can trigger to materialize an object, but due to the shield, the full "assembly" doesn't occur. And the uninvited guest disintegrates into atoms, harmless to us.
People, Wraiths, weapon blasts, bombs, and more — everything is destroyed without a trace. So yes, it's a solid defense against invasion through the Gate. And given that we're hidden underwater, which disperses Wraith energy weapons fire — at least, that's what the Atlantis records say — we probably don't need to fear an orbital bombardment, either.
On most other planets in the galaxy, such defenses were, naturally, unheard of.
Interestingly, the Ancients, before leaving the city, locked the Gate from accepting any address except one involving the Ancients themselves. Remarkably, in the events I'm aware of, Anubis used a similar tactic, cutting off a planet he was interested in from random visitors by requiring an access code. Any biological matter was sent to a random Gate address in the galaxy if it didn't have the correct access code. Handy.
I was damned lucky to have the Ancient Gene — otherwise, my flight for the ZPM would never have happened.
In our case, no one can get through the Atlantis Gate except me and Chaya. And also anyone traveling with us on the same trip.
The Gate doesn't teleport cargo and passengers in real-time. First, it dematerializes everyone who entered during a specific session, and then it materializes them in strict sequential order. First in, first out.
For now, this security system suited us. However, we had to understand and accept the fact that there were ordinary people in the Pegasus Galaxy who possessed the Ancient Gene. There was a high probability that they could accidentally walk into the city. And as long as that probability existed, absolute security was out of the question.
Chaya was working on that too — I gave her a few ideas, but with the workload that had fallen on her shoulders, she couldn't do everything at once. But, interestingly, that didn't stop her from thinking about solving one problem (or several at once) while working on another. And she still managed to chat with Teyla.
Seriously, I saw them chatting amiably in one of the empty labs Chaya had taken over for her own needs. While Teyla told her about her people, the Wraiths, and the various other peoples she knew about, Sar calmly worked on adjusting the Jumper charging program and remotely interfacing with a defense satellite on the borders of the Lantian system.
And all while talking to Teyla, asking her questions about her people's past, about Athos, and so on.
I had a suspicion about the reasons for this interest, but I preferred to keep quiet for now and just observe the Ancient's curiosity.
The Jumper charging system really did need to be fixed.
The thing was, in their typical grand-scale approach to their own comfort, the Ancients had equipped Atlantis with wireless charging systems for small craft. Every landing pad in the upper hangar — above the Gate Room — and the lower hangar, under the central spire, was a charging pad for the Jumpers.
We had a dozen ships of this type available, but only half of them would be operational after a "cosmetic repair." The rest needed spare parts we simply didn't have. At the same time, the city didn't care about such formalities — it kept trying to charge all its ships. And that was a problem, because it wasted precious energy.
Sure, we had a ZPM, and its energy reserves were enormous. However, it was a finite source of power. And the more unnecessary "consumers" we had activated, the more of our power reserves we lost. As it turned out, the city's database had no records of which planets might have ZPMs. Moreover, even with the help of an Ancient, we couldn't figure out how, where, or by what means ZPMs were manufactured.
Chaya didn't belong to the titular race of the Ancients, the Lantians. And, like most of the assimilated peoples, she only had access to the basic knowledge of the Ancients. As for all the secrets... If they were in the Atlantis database at all, they were securely encrypted. The only way for us to find the precious energy was to start exploring planets. The four of us, without any kind of reliable rear base, made that a huge problem.
That's why we were trying to save power on literally everything. The shield's power supply was the main consumer. We could, of course, try to surface and work on the city-ship's cloaking systems based on the technology on the Jumpers. It was a good thing we had some completely "dead" craft, only good for spare parts. But then again, the question of the city's defense on the surface arose.
The Wraiths roaming the galaxy, who might know about our arrival, weren't the friendliest neighbors. I was surprised that after Sudaria, a few hive-ships hadn't already shown up in orbit around Lantea, Atlantis's mother planet. Just to check if everything was still the same here.
Which meant it was high time to think about the city's defenses.
Atlantis, like the outposts and ships of the Ancients, was equipped with offensive and defensive systems, namely three launching bays for homing missiles known as drones. They could be launched via a mental command given through the Ancient control chair, which the city also had. And with the ZPM, we could actually do it.
An Ancient Drone.
The Jumpers had similar weapons, but only a dozen each. In total, between the damaged and operational ships, we had about a hundred of them, and we'd already stripped the ammo from the Jumpers that would never fly again, along with the spare parts we needed to repair the others. Chaya mercilessly dismantled any other Jumper parts suitable for repairing the city and integrated them into the damaged systems.
For example, we managed to restore control of the lower hangar, the main subspace transmitter, and brought Atlantis's short-range scanners back online. Small victories achieved in our five days in the city.
But it didn't help our defense at all.
The problem was that the city had almost no ammunition. We had more drones on the Jumpers than in Atlantis's arsenal. And even if we transferred all of them to the city's defense, it would be enough to destroy maybe one, maybe two to five Wraith ships. But the moment we did that, every Wraith in the galaxy would flock to Lantea. Because the dying ones would undoubtedly tell everyone what killed them. That's the kind of animals they were.
So, Atlantis was that "deus ex machina" big, impressive, everyone's in awe of it... But in reality, it was a pain.
The city's numerous damages prevented us from using it as a ship for our own purposes. The lack of weapons meant we couldn't even think about facing the enemy head-on. The hyperdrive needed spare parts, the sublight drives needed repairs, the hull needed welding, new wiring, new crystals — which the Ancients and their tech-based devices used instead of the usual circuit boards, energy accumulators, relays, and so on.
Not to mention what I kept saying: almost every lab in this city contained a dangerous, and in most cases, lethal technology or experiment. The lab for "mechanical Ascension," whose activation in most cases turned a person into photoplasma or gave them extra limbs, was a direct example.
There's a saying for moments like this: "decayed grandeur." And I was inclined to agree. Atlantis was a hemorrhoid if you didn't know how to fix it.
And "healing" the city with just four people, three of whom had no idea what was going on or how things worked, was impossible. We needed more technically competent specialists. At least people familiar with Ancient technology on the level of understanding the general principles, the laws of physics, science in general...
The most obvious solution was the Stargate command on Earth. Those people had been dealing with Ancient technology for a few years and had learned to understand it pretty well.
But the situation with Earth was unclear. And even if we got there, it didn't mean we could come back. Plus, I wasn't exactly eager to get dragged into the problems of the Milky Way. That they were the size of Everest there was obvious even without any special superpowers.
Besides the Aurora with its crew of Ancients, there was another starship — the Tria. It was outside the galaxy, heading towards the Milky Way. The Ancients there were more alive. And on the surface, they seemed like the most preferable option. There were a little over a hundred of them there, I think... But to get to them, we'd need a ship with a hyperdrive. And then try to find them in the interstellar void. Quite a task.
And now for the shittiest options.
I hadn't told Chaya yet, but in the galaxy were the machines created by the Ancients to fight the Wraiths that didn't live up to expectations — the Replicators. They looked like people, acted like people, but... they were made of nanorobots. And they strongly disliked anything related to the Ancients. They considered ordinary people to be nothing more than biomass. The only ones they feared were the Lantians. They wouldn't harm them a priori. But there was a catch.
Neither I, nor Chaya, and certainly not Jensen or Teyla, were Lantians. This meant it was highly unlikely that the Replicators' "do no harm" protocol would work on us.
Honestly, I didn't even know if the crews of the Aurora and Tria were Lantians or also from assimilated peoples. Chaya said the second option was more likely, since the Lantians didn't stoop to open brawling with their enemies.
Another extremely dangerous option was cooperating with the Wraiths. In the events I knew, that had happened before, but... Every time, it turned into a huge mess. It was hard to think of it any other way.
I didn't even want to think about the other races in the galaxy, like the Genii. Cooperating with them openly would be foolish. At least for now.
Maybe when we gathered enough strength...
"You frozen, or what?" A friendly slap on the shoulder from the former runner snapped me out of my thoughts.
"Just some things to think about," I replied vaguely.
"I bet," Jensen grinned. "Like, how to snatch the minerals you need for repairs right from under the Wraiths' noses?"
"Among other things."
Atlantis could be fixed. But we needed spare parts.
The city had no factories, nothing like them. But there were small workshops where simple devices could be produced in small quantities. The same crystals, for example. Or hull plating, wiring...
But for that, we needed resources. Simply put, materials from which to make the parts. And as it turned out, the city had only a very tiny stock of the ores we needed. Chaya had already used them to restore a few damaged systems. Now we needed more.
But, whether by accident or design, the planets with the resources we needed, which the Ancients had used, were under Wraith occupation. We flew a reconnaissance mission to a couple of worlds and came back empty-handed. We only confirmed that the target planets had Wraith ships in hibernation. But the mines... They were completely destroyed. And that was a huge problem.
We needed to find a new place to get raw materials. And then, hopefully, Chaya wouldn't have to repair Atlantis by switching power from main systems to backup, auxiliary, or emergency ones. She was doing that because some wiring was overheating, some crystals were failing, there were short circuits in some places... We needed spare parts, and a lot of them.
Even better, we needed an external power source for the city, leaving the ZPM to power only a few essential functions. For example, the city shield, the chair, the drones...
I knew where to get one, but... The short-range sensors hadn't been able to find what we needed just yet.
But there was progress in another direction.
"Mikhail, Alvar," a voice sounded above our heads. Chaya had turned on the city's intercom too. "I need you in the lab."
"We'll be there soon," I replied. Damn, it was strange talking like this, into the void. It felt schizophrenic. Jensen wasn't too fond of this city-wide communication method either. He kept dreaming of going back to his home planet and looking for more of the technology he was used to.
But for now, we weren't going there. Not until Chaya finished what I'd asked her to do. I hoped this summons was what I thought it was.
"Looks like the girls want to take us on a date," the runner chuckled. After Chaya managed to use the Medbay's technology to remove the overgrown Wraith subspace tracker from his body back on Atlantis, Jensen had become less tense. And more sympathetic towards the Ancient.
"We won't know until we go," I shrugged.
Still, we needed proper human communication devices. The voice "from above" echoing through the empty corridors of Atlantis, bouncing off the walls with a distorted echo, scared the shit out of me.
Especially because I couldn't do it myself.
It seemed Chaya knew that and was taking the opportunity to get back at me for... something. A woman was a woman, even among the Ancients. Just more inventive.