STARGATE ATLANTIS: Dead End Read Free

worked on in that room need to be revisited. Perhaps they didn’t have time to finish off whatever they started.”
    “You got all that,” asked Sheppard, raising an eyebrow, “from
that
?”
    “I’ve had longer to look at it than you,” replied McKay. “And, no offense, I really am a whole lot smarter.”
    Weir looked unconvinced.
    “So why the elaborate defense mechanism in that chamber?”
    Rodney rolled his eyes.
    “You want me to work out every last detail of this? Oh yes. Of course you do.” He thought for a second. “I don’t know. Maybe it was for Lantean eyes only. Something to stop the Wraith reading the message, in case they ever got down there.”
    “Or us,” said Ronon.
    “Quite. But thanks to Colonel Sheppard’s acrobatics, we got something out. And now we can use it.”
    Weir held a warning hand up.
    “Whoa. You’re going too fast here, Rodney. So far, all we’ve got is a sealed chamber and a message we can barely understand.”
    “With respect, Elizabeth, we’ve got more than that,” said McKay. “We’ve got a gate address, and we’ve got a theory. We know the gate network isn’t perfect. Some destinations seem to require more power to get to than others. The obvious example is the inter-galactic route, which needs huge amounts of juice. But even in the Pegasus galaxy we find some destinations are harder to reach than others. Maybe there are ways around this. My guess is that we stumbled across an attempt to refine the gate technology.”
    He looked from one member of the team to the others, searching for agreement.
    “Interesting,” said Weir. She turned to Sheppard. “You got a note of the gate address in the chamber?”
    “Oh, I got it. Those little squiggles are pretty well stuck my mind.”
    “And?”
    “I can show you,” said McKay, bringing up a galactic map on the display. The map started to zoom. “Here we are, home sweet home, on the galactic rim.” The map continued to zoom out. “Any minute now…”
    The animation concluded. A red triangle marked Lantea, and a green circle the location of the gate address. The dotted line between them ran the width of the screen.
    Weir shook her head. “My God,” she breathed. “It’s basically out of the galaxy.”
    “How far
is
that?” said Zelenka.
    “In technical terms?” said McKay.
“A
really long way
. Further than we’ve ever been in Pegasus. I looked at the stellar cartography. It’s off the scale. The power requirements to get there are pretty scary.”
    “Yes, but it can’t drain more than dialing back to Milky Way,” scoffed Radek.
    “You know, normally I’d agree with you,” said McKay. “But we don’t know everything about gate travel, and something’s odd about this setup. And there’s another thing. Most locations on the Stargate network are accessible from anywhere else. If you know the address, and have some means of dialing, you can jump from anywhere to anywhere. The exceptions are the long hops, like between galaxies. Here’s the trick — I think this one’s exactly the same. From the database, it seems clear that this node is only accessible from one other place.”
    Weir let out a deep breath. “I think I know what you’re going to say.”
    Sheppard grinned. “I love it when you’re ahead of us.”
    Weir pursed her lips. She had come to like and respect John in their time serving together on Atlantis, but his endless flippancy could get wearing. She knew that exploration was part of the brief, but it would be nice, just for once, if her senior officers could think about something other than scooting off on a fresh mission as soon as the last one had ended.
    “OK, so we have an address, and a mystery device designed to access it,” she said, carefully. “What are we going to do about it? Can we access this planet from the regular Stargate? Even if we can, do we want to?”
    McKay shrugged. “We’d need to do some work,” he said. “I’ve been thinking of ways to increase