Mathématique: Chapter 21

“Local Math Professor Who’s Never Seen a DHD Thinks It Looks ‘Wrong’,” McKay said, like he was workshopping headlines for a satirical newspaper.

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Grief. Physical injuries. Mental health challenges. Pain.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 21

Rematerialization was something like being slapped.

In the face.

Scratch that.

Everywhere.

Shocked, perhaps, by a current of medium voltage?

He was cold.

Rush shook his head and tried to snap his mind into a functional state, tried to force a reconciliation between his vanished perception of the gate room and the immediacy of a variegated gray and green tableau. It took him a moment to parse the colors into what they were.

Sky and land.

The sky was a uniformity of pale slate clouds that hung claustrophobically over tangled green vegetation. The gate was set in a clearing that gave way to a snarl of bracken that yielded with bad grace to a forest where the trees grew close and dense and dark.

“It’s rough the first time, but it gets better. Your brain learns to forget the reintegration process after a few trips, kind of like how, in an ideal world, you don’t remember a head injury. Probably shoulda mentioned that.”

“What?” Rush breathed.

Sheppard stood in profile against a clouded sky. His fatigues, supernaturally black, drank the light of the wild alien landscape. 

“Atienza. Reaves. Fan out and sweep the trees, but keep line-of-sight on the gate.” Sheppard scanned their surroundings, then turned his attention to Rush. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.” Rush brought his fingertips to his temple.

“You sure?” Sheppard’s tone was calm, his stance was relaxed, but he held charge like a capacitor, deep and quiet.

“Yes,” Rush said.

The gate shut off behind them with a sound like the rending of field lines.

The air was thick with the smell of rain.

“Come on,” Sheppard said. “Standing on platforms against a sky like this is a great way to get shot.”

Rush followed the man down steps of dry, flecked stone, inlaid with Goa’uld inscriptions.

“I thought this planet was classified as ‘friendly’,” Rush said.

“So is west Baltimore,” Sheppard replied lazily, “but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna stand on a corner and wave my phone around.”

Greer had taken up a position between McKay and the tree line, but at Sheppard’s comment, he turned. “You from Baltimore, sir?”

“Nah.” Sheppard unclipped his radio. “California.”

“He’s been watching The Wire.” McKay sent a withering look in Sheppard’s direction that did nothing but slide past the man. “Will we be doing actual science here, or just talking about all the Earth TV we’ve missed?” 

“Usually both those things happen.” Sheppard turned to watch Reaves and Atienza pass through the bracken with deliberate, thorough arcs.

Rush approached the DHD through a blustery wind (not exactly ideal for delicate mechanical work). The thing had concentric rings of depressible panels and a central (gratuitously) red button. He stopped a few meters away to consider the dark solidity of the thing, his hand hooked over his left shoulder.

McKay moved to his side. “Did they give you the standard briefing?” he asked, with an air of unmistakable scientific commiseration. “They must have. It’s the only thing they ever think to give consultants before going in. Going out. You know what I mean. I find it odd that ‘dialing the gate’ seems to be the one, standardized thing they expect of the science staff. As if there’s anything even remotely difficult about it. A trained monkey could do it. You know that’s the reason they brought Dr. Jackson along on the first gate trip? Literally so he could push the buttons for them on the other side? Turned out, it wasn’t actually that trivial, but, uh that’s a story for a guy with higher security clearance than yours. No offense.”

Rush studied the DHD in silence.

“You should consider losing the glasses and getting contacts,” McKay continued. “You’ll find it helps a LOT when it comes to being taken seriously by anyone with a gun, whether that party be friendly or not so friendly. We all do it. Except for Zelenka. Radek Zelenka? He’s something of an admirer of yours. You might’ve heard of him, he did some minor work on applications of Savitch’s Theorem, kind of a side project, but he got a nice paper out of it, so, like I said, you might be familiar? Anyway, he hasn’t lost the glasses and he rarely goes offworld. This is more than correlative, if you know what I mean. So. Contacts or surgery, either way, lose the glasses. That’s a tip. Circling back to my original point, despite the idiocy inherent in the scientist-dials-the-gate mentality, there is something to be said for being able to dial quickly. Personally? I like to portion out the DHD like a unit circle and then pair each symbol with a degree in radians. Like, chevron one, three-pi halves. Chevron two, pi over six. Makes it easy. That’s another tip.”

The DHD looked (and somehow felt) like a violation of Ancient design aesthetic—a crystalline array locked into a primitive outer casement that wasn’t simple, like the gate, but offensively simplistic. Its symmetries were distorted by an oblique angle. Its solid, directional base dictated an avenue of approach to a device that was circular in shape and therefore suggested accessibility from all angles. Worst of all was the central depressible element: large, red, and graceless.

“I know what you’re thinking,” McKay said.

“It looks wrong.” Rush unhooked his hand from his shoulder.

McKay stared at him in silence. The wind toyed with the edges of his hair.

“Odyssey, this is Colonel John Sheppard,” he heard from behind him. “How’s it goin’ up there?”

“What do you mean ‘wrong’?” McKay asked. “Have you ever seen a real DHD? Before now?”

“Colonel Sheppard, this is Colonel Emerson,” the radio crackled. “You’re a long way from home, John.”

“No,” Rush admitted.

“Eh, it’s all relative,” Sheppard said into the radio.

Rush and McKay glanced at Sheppard, then at each other, then away.

“It’s a device that performs a function,” McKay said with a physicist’s assertiveness. “By definition, if it’s functioning as it should, it can’t be ‘wrong’.”

Rush drew his fingertips over the concentric rings of panels, right hand above, left hand below. A brief antiparallel sweep.

“Mmm hmm.” McKay patted the DHD with proprietary approval. “This is the most sophisticated chordophonic instrument in the galaxy.”

Rush pulled his hands back and scowled at McKay.

The other man stared back at him, uncowed.

“Everything’s quiet up here.” Emerson’s voice hissed into static at the edges of his words. “There’s a storm front moving up on your position from the southeast, but you should have a six-hour window before the rain hits. Maybe another two hours after that before it gets ugly.”

“Thanks for the heads up,” Sheppard said. “We’ll be in touch.”

Rush paced around the DHD, drawing away from McKay as Sheppard turned to the pair of them.

“‘Wrong’?” McKay demanded, making air quotes with his fingers.

“Wrong?” Sheppard echoed.

“Local Math Professor Who’s Never Seen a DHD Thinks It Looks ‘Wrong’,” McKay said, like he was workshopping headlines for a satirical newspaper. 

“Incomplete,” Rush corrected. “And, perhaps, obfuscated?”

“‘Perhaps obfuscated’,” McKay said, with more air quotes. “That’s great. I’ll just be over here, quantum entangling your SGC-issue laptop with the control panel.” The other man turned and began to uncrate the equipment. “Unbelievable,” he muttered, the word carried on the wind.

Sheppard sauntered over to stand next to Rush. “He gets sensitive.”

Rush quirked an inquisitive eyebrow.

“Math’s at the top of the quantitative hierarchy,” Sheppard said, casual and amused. “He knows that.”

“Doesn’t usually stop physicists from trying to kick us into philosophy,” Rush replied.

“They’re just jealous.”

Together, they contemplated the DHD in silence.

Sheppard swiped a hand through his hair, then drummed his fingers over the strap of his rifle. “Like a picture,” he said.

“What?”

“Like a picture,” Sheppard repeated. “Hung at a slant. The DHDs in Pegasus aren’t like this.”

“Intriguing.” Rush gave Sheppard a significant look, then went to join McKay.

Three hours later, Rush was on his back, losing thermal energy to the ground as he stared into the crystalline lattice on the underside of the DHD. They’d removed the exterior paneling that encircled half the base, and he was buried up to his wrists in a building web of trailing wire created as he soldered Perry’s leads to control crystals with a low-melt alloy.

“This is a pain in the ass.” McKay, tied to Rush’s laptop, mapped inputs to outputs and manually configured the entangling Hamiltonian while Rush linked crystals in real time.

“Yes well,” Rush snarled, inarticulate around the small flashlight between his teeth.

“You’ve got a cold joint at crystal six,” McKay said.

“Fuck,” Rush said.

“What was that?”

“I said fuck,” Rush clarified.

“Ah,” McKay said. “Hang on.”

Rush couldn’t see anything from beneath the DHD, but he heard McKay raise his voice to call to whomever was within shouting distance at the moment. “Hey. New guy. Nope. Other new guy. Can we stop patrolling the abandoned planet long enough to get some work done before we’re rained out? We need another set of hands here.”

“Take it up with the colonel,” Greer replied, unimpressed.

“Which is ‘crystal six’?” Rush asked McKay around the penlight in his teeth.

“I’m flattered,” McKay replied, “but you're not my type. If I went for unkempt math guys with accents, I'd already be taken.”

Rush clenched his jaw, glared at the wiring above, transferred his soldering iron to his left hand, and pulled the flashlight out of his mouth.

“Which crystal,” he said (with a staggering amount of vitriol) “is. Crystal. Six.”

Silence.

“Uh. Right. Should be the one at four pi thirds,” McKay replied.

Rush replaced the flashlight in his mouth and shot a dark look at the circuitry above.

“McKay, don’t harass the civilian consultants,” Sheppard drawled.

“Right. That’s your job. I can’t be held responsible for the communication difficulties that arise as a consequence of short-staffing this mission. We need another pair of hands.”

“All right, all right,” Sheppard said.

Greer dropped into a crouch next to Rush, eyed the space beneath the device, and sighed. He laid on his back and wormed his way into position. When he was shoulder-to-shoulder with Rush, he clicked his flashlight on.

Rush turned his head and spit out his own light.

“You soldering?”  Greer asked.

“Yes.”

“Overhead?” Greer asked pointedly.

“It’s an atypical alloy. Low melting point.”

“Doesn’t do much for ya if it gets in your eye.” The sergeant slipped sunglasses out of his jacket pocket and slid them into place.

(True.)

“Feel free to propose an alternative.” Rush fixed the interface between his wire and crystal six. “Shall we dismantle and rebuild the thing with an inverted orientation, y’think?”

“No need to be a dick about it,” Greer said mildly. “Your soldering technique is shit.”

Rush huffed. “I’m aware. Think you can do better?”

“Probably not, no.” There was a short pause. “What’s the point of all this?” Greer asked.

(You have one job, Rush considered saying. Please do only that job. But there was something about the sergeant that rubbed him the right way, for a change.)

“Bit of a high tech lock-pick,” Rush admitted.

“Nice,” Greer said.

“Okay, we’re up and configured,” McKay called. “Go for the center, then we’ll start the spontaneous parametric down conversion.”

Rush grabbed the final wire and affixed it to the central crystal, melting the alloy into a solid joint. The array above flared to life with a pleased hum, and the device lit up in a radial pattern.

He pulled his hands back.

Greer clicked off his flashlight.

“What’d you do?” McKay shouted over the wind, annoyed and alarmed in equal parts.

“McKaayy.” Sheppard pulled the other man’s name into something vaguely threatening.

“It’s okay,” McKay said. “I think it’s okay. This is what’s supposed to happen. Probably. Actually, maybe you guys want to get out from under there? Just in case?”

“Greer,” Sheppard said, closer now. “Out.”

Hands closed over Rush’s ankles, and he was dragged from beneath the DHD. Sheppard reached down, snagged the front of Rush’s jacket, and pulled him up and back in one smooth motion.

Rush staggered and tried to get his feet beneath him.

Sheppard steadied him, clapped him on the shoulder, then brushed grass off Rush’s sleeve.

“This is a novel subroutine,” McKay said. “A novel novel subroutine. When we set up our connection, it activated—well I’m not sure what it activated, but the control crystal is communicating with something. Something that’s not us.”

“What kind of something?” Sheppard asked.

“If I knew, I wouldn’t have said ‘something’, would I?”

“McKay.”

“We’re not broadcasting indiscriminately, if that’s what you’re asking. This is targeted. I think. Ask the Odyssey to point their sensors at us and sweep the spectrum.”

Rush dropped into a crouch next to McKay and eyed the screen of his own laptop.

Sheppard pulled out his radio. “Odyssey, this is Sheppard, come in please.”

“We read you, John; what do you need?”

“We’re requesting a sweep of the EM band in our local vicinity. McKay thinks our DHD is broadcasting.”

“Commencing scan,” Emerson responded.

“Any idea what this is likely to be?” Rush asked McKay, his eyes never leaving the stream of data onscreen.

“No.” McKay spared a quick glance at Rush. “You?”

“What made you choose the word ‘communicating’?” Rush asked.

“There’s a protocol that allows DHDs to talk with one another to perform correlative updates that correct for stellar drift,” McKay said. “We’re seeing activation in some of those protocols. Not all. We didn’t actually trigger a correlative update by interfacing this way, but we triggered something that uses those communicative subroutines.”

“Any idea what we’re communicating?” Sheppard asked.

“Are you running the entanglement protocol?” Rush asked.

“No and no. Look.” McKay favored Rush with a radioactive glare. “We’re communicating via an unknown means with an unknown device external to this DHD. This is possibly, though not necessarily, bad. Everyone stop talking and let me think about this before something really awful happens and we—”

“It’s the gate,” Rush said.

Sheppard and McKay stared at him.

“It’s very likely the gate,” Rush repeated. “Run the entanglement protocol.”

“Okay, so, Mr. No-Evidence-Required isn’t worried,” McKay said. “I on the other hand—”

Sheppard’s radio crackled, cutting off McKay. “Colonel, we’re not picking up any EM signals in your immediate vicinity other than what the MALP’s putting out. If you’re broadcasting, it’s not getting far,” Emerson said.

“Understood,” Sheppard replied.

The three of them looked at one another. McKay spoke first.

“Fine. So it’s likely the gate we’re communicating with, based on what we set out to do and what the Odyssey’s reporting, but I’m not discounting the possibility there’s something else going on here. This absolutely has the feel of the initiation of an Ancient algorithm that inevitably ends up with someone not having a good time. That person is usually me and—”

“The only way to gain any additional information is to run the entanglement protocol,” Rush said.

“Hey. New guy.” McKay fixed Rush with a galvanic glare. “Pro tip: when you do the wrong thing, Ancient devices will kill you.”

Rush looked at Sheppard.

“It’s true,” Sheppard confirmed, philosophically nonchalant.

Rush looked at the gray sky. Variations in cloud texture and color suggested tropospheric turbulence to the southeast.

The urge to be alone with this problem was overwhelming.

“Yes well, what would you suggest?” Rush asked, turning back to McKay with (extreme) effort.

“It’s your call,” Sheppard said to McKay. “But we probably won’t get another crack at this.”

McKay sighed with the kind of put-upon theatricality that suggested the man had spent time on a stage. “All right. Fine. But if I get forced into ascension, or poisoned, or transported back in time, or shifted out of phase, or infected with some weird alien virus that wipes my memory, or exchange consciousnesses with someone in another galaxy, or—”

“We get it,” Sheppard said with a wrap-it-up hand gesture.

“I’m gonna be extremely unhappy.”

“Why don’t I run the protocol?” Rush asked dryly.

“NO,” Sheppard and McKay said, in perfect synchrony.

Rush quirked an eyebrow at McKay, then made an ostentatious after-you sweep of his hand toward Perry’s waiting program.

McKay grimaced, but turned back to the screen. He hesitated, his finger hovering over the return key.

“You want me to do it?” Sheppard asked.

With a dramatic wince and a quiet click, McKay initiated the program.

Lines of code blurred over the open terminal window. Perry’s crystal-to-computational adaptor lit up with a green glow and a quiet whir.

“You still you?” Sheppard asked.

“I think so,” McKay said.

“What’s your first name?” Sheppard drawled.

“Very funny.” McKay glared at Sheppard, then looked to Rush. “How long—”

The laptop pinged quietly.

“That long,” Rush said, with gratuitous poise. 

The pair of them looked deeply impressed.

“My god,” McKay breathed. “It actually worked. Math never works.”

Sheppard rolled his eyes.

“Pure math never works,” McKay said. “Or, more accurately, pure math guys never make stuff that works. No offense.”

With a wordless glare, Rush not-so-subtly angled his laptop away from the other man.

“Ignore him,” Sheppard whispered.

Rush settled himself on an Air Force crate and began working the problem. At a first approximation, it seemed data was being sent by another party to the DHD, processed, then returned. He watched the informational loop run.

Receive, process, send.

(Receive, process, send.)

 

Rush fired up a modified network analyzer designed to capture and decompile communications to and from the DHD’s control crystal. His screen filled with scrolling Ancient text detailing the data transmission.

“Please tell me you’re logging this,” McKay said, peering over his shoulder.

“Obviously,” Rush replied.

They watched the flow of Ancient code.

“So,” McKay said, “presuming you’re correct, and the gate is sending data to the DHD, which, for the record, is still one hell of an assumption, your theory is that if we can intersperse ourselves between the gate and the DHD and get the gate to recognize us as a separate entity sophisticated enough to achieve quantum entanglement, then it’ll—what? Give you your chevron key if you’re not stupid enough to try and collapse the quantum state by actually reading what’s encoded?”

“That’s the hope.” Rush queued up his ZKP.

“Hope,” McKay repeated, full of Physics Hubris. “With pure math, that’s all you’ll ever have. Hope and opinion. Maybe a little artistry.”

“Oh c’mon,” Sheppard said.

McKay cleared his throat. “The pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty; the applied mathematician and physicist discover their pre-existing harmonies in the actual world.”

“You don’t quote Bertrand Russell,” Sheppard muttered sulkily. “I quote Bertrand Russell.”

Not much enamored of being reminded of the connection between mathematics and music (as though he’d ever fuckin’ forget) Rush initiated his program.

As expected, it inserted itself between the native protocols of the DHD and the gate. His monitor flared with a new burst of data, followed by—nothing.

“Huh,” McKay said.

Rush studied the screen.

“Maybe it’s waiting for you?” McKay murmured. “Run the last round of output through your program.”

Rush sent the data back, only to have the process repeat. His output returned as input. 

“Well,” McKay said, ramping up for a speech, “we’ve achieved manual control, so that’s something. Always the first step in interfacing with an unknown technology, unless it’s something like, oh, I don’t know, the life support system for an underwater city, say, as a hypothetical example? Where if you press the wrong button you kill everyone? There you’ll want to be a bit more cautious. That’s another tip. Always tread carefully around life support if you’re not immediately about to die. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here, fortunately for us. Unfortunately for us, we’ve got manual control of what amounts to basically the most boring game of telephone in this part of the galaxy, so unless you want to sit here until—”

Rush narrowed his eyes, his gaze fixed on the monitor. He was on the right track. He almost had it. He could sense the nearness of the solution; its component parts revolved and aligned in his mind. He’d interfaced with the crystals in such a way as to trigger a novel protocol within the DHD. Likely the exact protocol he’d wanted. The one that’d get the fifth chevron for him. He’d interspersed himself between the DHD and the gate, he’d gotten the gate to interrogate him, and he’d successfully elicited the default behavior.

He’d thought that would be enough.

(He was delighted to discover it wasn’t.)

“Wait,” McKay said. “Wait just a second. I don’t believe this.”

The key was to look at the default behavior, which was, of course, not to yield the chevron.

“Even when I’m flippant, I’m brilliant,” McKay breathed. “It is a game of telephone, it’s exactly a game of telephone—”

It stood to reason that the gate was waiting for him. Waiting for him to do something other than send back the code unmodified. Likely he was meant to demonstrate he had a conceptual understanding of the fundamental nature of quantum phenomenology. 

Decoherence. 

Quantum noise.

“Quantum error correction,” Rush murmured. “It wants not what it sends me, but the original encoded state, obtainable by correcting decoherence-induced errors which minutely corrupt each signal.”

“Yes,” McKay said. “QEC. You may thank me later.”

“For what?” Rush asked absently.

“I—for—for what? I just—”

“I wasn’t listening.” Rush called up his logs to manually compare the two different versions of what had been sent to him. “Did y’have some kind of conceptual breakthrough?”

“Telephone?” McKay said. “The children’s game? Cumulative error’s most famous teachable moment?”

“Never heard of it.” Rush was unable to stop himself from stealing a quick glance at Sheppard, who stared resolutely at the tree line, trying not to smile.

McKay sighed. “Unbelievable. Can you code fast enough to pull the original quantum state out before the storm hits?”

“Of course I can,” Rush replied.

An hour later, the sky had turned dark with threatening rain. The wind picked up, whistling around corners of equipment and susurrating through the surrounding trees. Rush sat on a crate, stared down his laptop, hooked a hand over his shoulder, and did his best to ignore McKay’s superfluous science commentary.

“How we doin’?” Sheppard dropped into a crouch next to them.

“We’re about to crack this thing wide open,” McKay said, with audible relish.

“Good,” Sheppard replied. His eyes flicked to the darkness approaching from the southeast. “We’ve got maybe another hour before we’re rained out.”

“Queue it up when you’re ready.” McKay’s sky colored eyes shone with genuine enthusiasm. There was no trace of the put-upon caution he’d displayed earlier.

Caught in the momentum of the moment, the drive toward discovery that was quite literally at his fingertips, Rush didn’t hesitate. He input the corrected quantum state data and transmitted it.

“Any chance this—” Sheppard began.

A sound split the air.

Multitonal.

Dissonant.

And Loud.

McKay shot to his feet. Sheppard hauled Rush up and off his crate.

McKay was speaking, Sheppard was shouting, both of them drowned out by the noise. A few paces away, Greer whirled, his weapon in his hands. Rush pressed his palms to his ears, trying to block the sound. Radio useless, Sheppard swept an arm toward the gate, looking first to Atienza, then to Reaves both stationed at the edge of the clearing.

Rush did his best to think through the intolerable sound. He leaned over McKay’s shoulder as the man navigated running programs with one hand, the other clapped to the ear nearest the DHD.

Sheppard rejoined them. “Shut it down,” he shouted, but the words were lost in sound.

With a shift in tonal frequency, the paneling of the DHD cracked apart.

Rush flinched and froze, watching as metal pieces opened and fell away. Depressible panels detached, flaked back like scales, and hit the grass. Beneath the metal casing was an airy work of crystal and circuit filigree. It gleamed under the coming storm, as though full of ready lightning.

Sheppard grabbed Rush’s jacket and hauled him back.

The tonal frequency shifted higher. Turned piercing. Obliterated thought. Gained a key signature. The cold wind on his face, Sheppard’s hands in his jacket, the ground beneath his feet, all of it was subordinated to a D-minor scream of transformation.

Sheppard shouted at McKay with so much force that Rush felt the vibration of the words.

McKay shut the laptop and threw himself down behind a heavy plastic crate, motioning to Greer, shouting uselessly into the sound, his hands cutting through the air. Fast, repetitive, emphatic.

Rush lost track of his body, of what it was meant to be doing. All he was was a D-minor chord. He hit the ground, Sheppard atop him, and the only thing in his line of sight was Reaves, running toward them, plowing through thorned bracken that caught in her uniform, her skin.

Sheppard shifted, pushed himself up, motioned Reaves down. She threw herself into the tangled vegetation and disappeared from sight.

Rush looked to the DHD, watching a red-white energy signature burn and build meters from his position until Sheppard forcibly turned his head away.

The man was speaking. Not to Rush. John Sheppard stared at the device, reflected alien light in his eyes, forming soundless words with shapes Rush didn’t recognize. His expression was fierce, and the wind was in his hair. He didn’t look like a man at prayer. He looked like he was staring down the universe and didn’t intend to lose.

The tone crescendoed.

It took everything with it as it crested into a clear, shattering chime, akin to the breaking of glass, but not the same. Thought left him, then sensation.

The world was a tableau of green and gray and supernatural black. He couldn’t hear the sound that was everywhere, unmaking reality.

The chime faded.

The world descended into order and structure in the after-rung echo of a cosmic bell.

Sheppard shifted, his hands coming over Rush’s head as a hissing rain of shattered crystal hit them, their uniforms, and the surrounding grass in a quiet patter.

Silence descended, loud with the aftertones of vanished sound.

Sheppard shifted, the quiet scrape of cloth-on-cloth unnaturally normal in quality and decibel range.

Rush tried to feel the pain of embedded glass, the stinging of exposed skin, but nothing came.

“Hey,” Sheppard said, low and quiet. “Rush.”

He looked up.

The grass glittered with tiny fragments of red crystal. He pulled a small piece from his hair and examined it. Its fracture planes had been blunted. It was the approximate size of the head of a pin. He shook more of it out of his hair.

“You were not kidding about breaking a DHD,” Sheppard murmured, with a hint of a smile. Louder, he called, “Everyone okay?”

He received a smattering of “Yes sirs,” and, “You mean other than the five years of my life I just sacrificed to pure panic?” from McKay.

Rush brushed more blunted crystal off his fatigues and out of his hair. Sheppard helped him to his feet, and they approached the glowing filigree that’d been the DHD. The thing was only vaguely recognizable. Its dark paneling surrounded it on the ground like a discarded husk. The internal support structure stood with a laced metal elegance wrapped around a glowing crystal matrix. Where two concentric circles of depressible panels had been, the blue glow of glyphs themselves remained—clear, illuminated, and connected to the metal ring that housed the crystals by graceful silver stems.

“Eat your heart out, Samantha Carter,” McKay breathed into the quiet air.

Sheppard snorted.

McKay eyed Rush. “I’m guessing this now looks ‘right’ to you?”

“Yes,” Rush said breathily.

Sheppard clapped his shoulder.

McKay paced radially around the DHD as he examined it. “Sam Carter,” he looked up at Rush, “not sure if you’ve heard of her, but she’s kind of a big deal? We’re friends. We used to have a little bit of a—” McKay made a confused motion with his hands.

“No they didn’t,” Sheppard whispered, trying to keep a smile off his face.

“Anyway,” McKay continued, “she’ll be unspeakably, just unspeakably envious when I tell her about this.”

Rush stepped closer to the DHD. Delicately, he placed a finger against the glowing glyph that corresponded to the first cypher he’d unlocked. The lights flared subtly, but there was no other change in the state of the device.

“Oh yeah,” McKay said. “Definitely touch it. Great idea.”

Rush pulled his hand back. McKay reopened the laptop.

The wind whistled through and over the exposed crystal.

“You want a cypher key that corresponds to a chevron outta this thing, right?” Sheppard asked, still at his shoulder.

“Right.” Rush traced another glyph in the nine chevron address. One for which he hadn’t yet solved. There was another flare of blue-white light.

“Sometimes,” Sheppard said, “Ancient tech will give you what you want if you just sorta—“ he brushed the edge of the spun naquadah structure, generating a radial sweep of lights, “—think about it. Not in words. Raw concept.”

“Hey,” McKay snapped, his eyes on his laptop. “Lantean Dream Team. What are you doing?”

Rush thought of the chevrons he’d unlocked, thought of cyphers, thought of keys coded to each, thought of the concept of unlocking with a mental spike of determination and—

His vision was subsumed by white as the DHD lit up with a blinding flare.

The sky was pale and cloudless above a sea of silver-green grass, which bent in sinuous patterns that extended as far as his eye could trace the liquid sweep of windblown stalks. The day was cold. The sunlight fell like the radiation it was, bleaching the upper surfaces of the long grass and transitioning dramatically to shadow in the places it couldn’t touch.

The air felt thin and oxygen poor.

Sheppard stood beside him under the wide and washed-out sky. They were at the center of an open-air metal structure, no taller than waist height. It was built like a radially symmetric maze into which the DHD fit like an elegant centerpiece. Its layout suggested fairy circles or the standing stones of Celtic civilization.

There was no sign of McKay or the others.

No sign of a stargate.

“Well,” Sheppard said, philosophic and resigned, “this is bad.”

Before Rush could reply, a transparent projection flickered to life. The image of a woman shone faintly above the DHD. Her hair was dark and her eyes were dark and she was dressed in a white gown that bled into the pale sky and shifting grass.

“Welcome home,” she said.