dancing stones

John tugged his tac vest straight, picked up the P90 and clipped it onto the sling, then strode out of the gear room.

"New world, new adventure," he declared with false enthusiasm as he reached the gate room where Ronon and Teyla were waiting. "Dial it," he shouted up to Chuck in the control room.

They didn't dial the gate until the teams were ready to go through or hold it open a moment longer than necessary any longer. Not since Rodney gave everyone the 'standing with the refrigerator door open and letting the power out' lecture.

New adventure didn't fit the way John felt, but he faked perky good humor and headed through the wormhole the instant it stabilized. Atlantis hungered for power the way her inhabitants did supplies. They needed to find both and were going out almost every day they weren't down with an injury.

In this case, it was just the three of them, because Rodney had dislocated his knee on the last mission. He was in the labs, working non-stop on some new kind of shielding that wouldn't leave Atlantis literally dead in the water after draining the their sole ZPM. That on top of handling all the work he usually did late into the night after they made it back through the stargate. A long way from taking a break, but at least his knee might get some rest.

Teyla and Ronon stepped through the stargate behind him and it shivered away while they peered at the overcast afternoon sky and the rutted road leading from the stargate past a shanty that sheltered two men who were either guards or customs officials. Teyla did the talking and they were waved by. The guards weren't interested in finding out how billy clubs compared P90s or stirring away from the tiny brazier they had going inside the shack to keep their hands and feet from freezing.

John's bare hands were already reddening and achy, so he sympathized with the gate guards desire to stay warm. He fumbled and zipped his jacket tighter against the chill and wished for gloves.

"We going?" Ronon demanded impatiently.

"Give me a minute," John grumbled and pulled the scanner Rodney had sent with him from his vest. He switched it to broad scan and turned a slow circle, watching the readout for a power spike. Should have stuck Evan and his team with this mission; it was the one Parrish had been hot for, but the rumor that there might be something besides interesting plants had switched it onto AR-1's schedule.

Nothing.

"The sentries said that there is an Ancient ruin perhaps an hour's walk from here," Teyla said.

"Yeah?" John asked. "They tell you which direction? Because I'm getting nothing."

The database hadn't mentioned any installations on M3C-RD1. If they found something it would be luck; they were chasing a rumor brought in by a Gadese refugee, a trader's story about a place where the Asuran had built something before they began their campaign of specicide. Since the Asuran had had no difficulty manufacturing their own ZPMs, a mission to make sure they hadn't left one behind had seemed worth while.

"West over the hills," Teyla answered.

John squinted at the cloud cover, picking out the pale disc of the sun, just past zenith. "Okay. Let's go."

He hung back long enough for Teyla to take point, pretending he needed the time to put away Rodney's scanner, before stretching his stride to catch up with her. He'd known that was west. Unless it turned out to still be morning on this world. He heard Ronon chuckle behind him.

"Friendly sorts?" he asked Teyla as he came even with her.

"They seem to be...neutral," Teyla answered, pausing before settling on the best description. "Wokova has been culled many times. The survivors are very accepting, I think you might say."

"Accepting," John repeated doubtfully.

Teyla glanced his way.

"Those who were angry mostly left."

He nodded that he understood and flexed his fingers, wishing he could stuff them in his pockets or even his armpits. He felt a little better when he caught Teyla shivering a couple of times. Ronon just acted like it was another day at the beach.

The westward track they took had a steady grade that couldn't have been natural considering the straightness of the path. John would have expected switchbacks. Instead, when he studied the way the land rose around them and fell away in ravines parallel to the track, he realized he was seeing the evidence of serious roadwork, but done far enough in the past the original road had disappeared and a new path had sprung up to take advantage of the grade.

It took them up far enough John started noticing a dusting of snow holding out in the shadowed hollows of the ravines and then even in the cover of the sere and brittle grass growing alongside the track. He peered toward the horizon but the rise and the heavy cloud cover obscured any sense of distance. Beyond the grade they were climbing – it was climbing, he felt it in his thighs and calves and his knee joints – there was just infinite gray.

Then between one glance down and the next stride, when John looked up, they were at the top. It wasn't a mountain at all. They had reached the nearly flat top of a mesa or maybe a plateau. There were mountains to the north and west, but they were faded and far, silk-screened blue against the sky.

There were buildings clumped together at the crossroads between fields and orchards all lain out precisely over the nearly flat land. None of it looked even faintly Ancient. John dug out the scanner again and checked for energy readings, trusting Ronon and Teyla to handle defense while his hands were too busy to stay with his P90.

"Nada, nada, nada," he said in disgust when the scanner remained stubbornly blank. It didn't even register any stray electricity in the air; the clouds above them were unstirred by any wind or weather.

"Good thing McKay stayed in Atlantis," Ronon commented.

"Any idea where this Ancient thingammy is?" John asked Teyla.

"The Moving Stones of the Ancestors."

"Stones?"

"Yes," Teyla answered with grave patience. "The sentries called it that." She pointed toward the south, where the fields of grain mostly gave way to winter barren orchards. "There, I believe."

John caught Ronon's eye and Ronon shrugged. Why not? They'd come this far, it looked like for nothing, they might as well finish the stroll, check out the ruins or whatever they were and then maybe check in with some of the farmers, see if they had any surplus to trade. Maybe they'd need some metalwork: plows, harrows, all that sort of stuff that most worlds traded through the stargate to get. Even stone work sometimes paid; they'd used high tech laser saws to cut the sweetest set of millstones for a grist mill on one world and brought back five wagon loads of wheat to Atlantis in exchange. Someone in supply had had to figure a way of grinding it to flour, though.

The drum beats were distant enough John didn't realize he'd begun marching to their beat until they were halfway through the fallow orchard.

"Platra trees," Ronon remarked.

He smacked one big hand against a rough gray trunk.

"Nuts."

John missed whatever snotty thing Rodney would have said in response. He almost spoke himself, to fill the emptiness, hitched his stride when he caught himself instead and then caught the sound of a drum.

He stopped. Ronon and Teyla stopped too. Without the sound of dry and brittle grass crunching under their boots, the next beat sounded clear. Ronon nodded acknowledgment. He sniffed the air and John waited.

"Smoke," Ronon said.

Without speaking again they started forward once more, but with caution, listening between steps, moving out of rhythm and watching.

John caught a whiff of smoky incense eventually, by then able to glimpse the flicker of torches set on poles beyond the trees.

The three of them stopped at the edge of the orchard and studied the scene before them. The day had steadily been darkening as they walked, cloud cover thickening as the hours ran toward a long blue dusk. Torches burned on poles planted around an open space the circumference of a mall parking lot. They painted sharp shadows between the trees, on the snow swept to the edges of the open oval at the center of the orchard, and flickering on unseen air currents. Massive stones paved open space, squares and rectangles between a half meter and a whole meter in size, set in an uneven but definitely deliberate pattern of black and white like a giant's checkerboard maze.

Drummers sat around the perimeter, beating out the insidious rhythm that had drifted through the trees, assisted by old men blowing through horns longer than their bodies and robed women with double-reed flutes that had a small air bladder. The bladder-flutes possessed a hair-raising tone, a cat squall reverb that wouldn't have been out of place in the highlands of Scotland, while the long horns' bass tones hummed down into John's bones like a didjeridoo.

There were Wokovans scattered across the space, each of them dancing in place on a single stone. At first John thought the movement he detected came from the flickering torchlight and the dancers, then he realized the stones were moving up and down in places and when they did, the dancers would move to another, still motionless stone. They stayed on the same color though and always one dancer to one stone.

The deep rumble and scrape of the moving stones threaded through the music and the moving bodies. The dancers and the drummers, the horn and flute players, all their attention had turned so far inward no one saw the three newcomers for long moments.

"I believe this is a religious ceremony," Teyla whispered.

"Maybe we should just get out of here," John whispered back. There had to be three or four hundred more people along the perimeter. Enough to overwhelm the three of them with sheer numbers.

Too late to back away, he realized, because someone had seen them now. A powerfully built man with long gray hair tossed loose on his shoulders approached them. He had on leather moccasins that laced up his calves and a leather breach-clout that hung to his knees. His bare chest was painted in a bastardized version of Ancient. His dark eyes took in the three of them, hitching at the obvious weaponry and then looking beyond them, as if to judge their numbers.

Three to three hundred meant that their weapons would run out of ammo before the other side ran out of bodies.

"Why have you come here?" he demanded.

"We were told an ruin of Ancient history could be found here," Teyla answered smoothly.

"The shrine is not a ruin."

"Sure, okay," John said in a hurry. "Look, obviously, that's just what we were told and someone somewhere got things twisted up. We certainly didn't mean to interrupt anything." He hoped that sounded mollifying enough. "By the way, I'm John Sheppard, this is Teyla Emmagan and the big guy's Ronon Dex."

"I am Sulda," their new acquaintance answered. "I speak for the Ancestors."

John shared a look with Teyla over that, but hid the face he wanted to make. If Sulda started channeling some Princess from the Fourth Dynasty though, he was going to lose it. Teyla looked similarly unimpressed; not that it showed, but John knew her.

As usual, Ronon didn't bother with diplomacy. He stared past Sulda at the dancers instead and asked bluntly, "What are you doing?"

"Four times a year we come to the Moving Stones. When our worship is perfect, the Ancestors will open their shrine to us and offer their protection against the Wraith."

"Huh."

Which summed up John's estimation pretty neatly too, though Teyla would kick him if he ever let himself be that honest in a contact situation.

Sulda gave them a calculating look and said, "All here must worship or the Ancestors will not hear us. Come." He caught John's arm and pulled him forward a step.

John jerked away from him. "Watch it."

Sulda just pointed at a black stone. "Worship until it shifts, then proceed. Whe you have crossed and returned, you may leave"

John cringed. He hated dancing. He glanced back at Teyla and Ronon, hoping for a rescue. "Ah, I'm really not with the worshipping thing..."

"You must follow the path of black," Sulda said. He glanced at Teyla and Ronon. "For you, the white. And bare your feet." Sulda was doing the talking but plenty of others were watching them, ready to make them if they didn't cooperate. A glance showed John they were surrounded. Refusing would mean a fight.

"How long do we dance?" Ronon asked.

"We will dance until the shrine opens or sunrise," Sulda replied. "You may go, as I said, after you have crossed from one side to the other and returned."

Fuck me, John thought. His feet would be frozen and blistered by then. He kept his silence though and reflected that at least Sulda hadn't demanded they disarm themselves.

Teyla removed her boots gracefully, while Ronon took his off fast, leaving John standing there glaring at them both. With a sigh, he bent and unlaced his own. Dancing and cold feet would suck, but it beat a shooting people and whatever the ones they didn't shoot would do to them afterwards. He could go along to get along and get home without any casualties on either side.

"These better still be here when we're done," he told Sulda.

Ronon stepped onto a still white stone square and began a stomping dance that probably had its origins on Sateda, matching his moves to the rhythm of the drums with ease.

Teyla took her place and began moving too.

John gave Sulda a dirty look and stepped onto the black square Sulda had indicated. The stone was cold and rougher than it looked.

The instant the sole of John's foot settled onto it, the black stone began to sink. Sulda gasped, but John was already skipping onto the nearest black square. He didn't bother making any dancing moves, because the grumble of the moving rock couldn't obscure that internal buzz he got from Ancient equipment keyed to the ATA. The whole thing was one huge combination lock, but John had a genetic skeleton key.

The stones groaned and shifted for him as he moved across the chessboard-like area. They weren't just shifting up and down now either, but sliding sideways, realigning themselves to allow John a path of black stones that sank down a step each time. The path assembling itself before him became a maze-like stairway downward.

John flipped on the sight-light on his P90 and called, "Teyla, Ronon, behind me."

Dancers were skipping and sometimes nearly tumbling in their efforts to keep up with the moving stones.

"Out of the way," he heard Ronon say behind him, then sensed his and Teyla's presence at his back as they made their way downward.

Once, John glanced back and saw that Sulda was following too, along with a line of dancers, all of them watching him with dark, amazed eyes. It had begun to snow and tiny flakes were drifting down and dusting their hair and bare skin. The whispers matched the drum beats, he is come, he is come, it is, the prophecy spoke, it is him, and John shivered.

It took ten minutes to reach the bottom and John kept imagining what would happen if the stones started closing in on them like something out of an Indiana Jones' movie. Sort of like sticking a steak between the millstones they traded to that world a month back or squeezing juice. Blood bubbling up out of the cracks. John had a good imagination, but usually he kept it under better control, because with Rodney around, crying gloom and doom, he needed to focus on calming Rodney down. Doing that kept him grounded as a side effect.

He heard Teyla suck in a harsh breath behind him. "Teyla?" he whispered.

"I sense..."

"They coming?" Ronon asked in a low voice meant only for the team.

At the bottom, a final huge black stone making up an entire wall sank down into the floor, line after line of Alteran script disappearing and leaving them facing a very Atlantean style door. John stepped up and waved his hand over the sensor at the side and waited as it too opened for him. He wished Rodney had come with them. He needed to get the scanner out but really didn't want to let go of his P90. It and the lights from Ronon and Teyla's were the only light they had.

"The Wraith are coming," Teyla moaned. "They are through the stargate."

"Okay," John said, exhaling a whooshing breath, before stepping in. He looked around, hoping there would be some kind of room or cover.

Ronon and Teyla followed and then Sulda and then there came a cry from above, a terrified wail of, "Wraith!" and even so deep John heard the shrieking whine of darts.

"Shit," he muttered. "Everybody in! Everybody get down here and inside!"

The dancers and the drummers, all the players come rushing down the black steps in a panicked, sweating horde, steam drifting from some of them, and they were all crying and whispering, clutching at each other in the dark and watching John and his team.

"It is as I foretold," Sulda declared when they were all jammed in together and John had closed the door behind them.

"Yeah, what?" John asked.

The installation hadn't powered up beyond letting him in, which indicated Rodney's scanner hadn't missed anything. This place was likely dead as a stump and now he was stuck in it, in the dark, with a couple of hundred over-heated religious fanatics while the Wraith flew around. John didn't like the situation and it made him snippy.

"When our prayers were sufficient, the Ancestors would open the sanctuary to the Devout," Sulda said. "They sent their Chosen One to us to save us from the Wraith."

Oh crap.

John did his best to ignore the whispering that followed Sulda's pronouncement. He padded over to Teyla and asked her, "How long do you figure?"

Teyla, little more than a silhouette and the glisten of one eye in the dark above the light from her P90, shook her head. John had leaned close enough the ends of her hair brushed over his sleeve. "If they are culling this world, then four or five days. If they are scouts...a few hours." She caught his sleeve in her fingers to hold him in place and lowered her voice. "John, I am concerned by the timing."

It didn't seem like a coincidence, that John had activated some kind of Ancient lock and the Wraith arrived in short order.

He leaned in closer and whispered back, his lips brushing the hair over her ear, "You figure they had this place rigged with some kind of transmitter to tell them if anyone got in?"

"Or something like my necklace, that your gene activated," Teyla agreed.

"Let's hope you're right."

Because if John was, the Wraith already knew about this place and would be knocking at the door now that he'd unlocked it real soon.

John flicked off his sight-light to save the battery and let the sling take the P90. Batteries were one more thing they were rationing, though chemistry had begun manufacturing their own. "I'm going to check the scanner."

Ronon crowded in close a moment later and deigned to hold a penlight for John while he went through the routine Rodney usually handled. He did a good job of shouldering a clot of Wokovans away from the console John wanted, too, and kept the light steady while John hooked the scanner – it was more of an all purpose device than that, but Rodney wouldn't let John call it a tricorder – into the console.

Sulda followed them and peered past Ronon.

"What are you doing?"

"Seeing what this place has to tell us," John replied. He had to hunt and peck over the scanner's controls, which were set up according to Rodney logic and hard to make out in the dark anyway. "That's what we came here for." He already knew there was no ZPM. The installation was running on the last trickles of emergency power. He was surprised that had lasted so long. The scanner beeped and he checked the readout and received an explanation: the emergency power ran off heat energy from a hot spring. From what John could make out, it actually acted as a venting mechanism in addition; the entire installation had been put in place to stabilize the geology of the plateau so that it wouldn't crack off a giant chunk of granite and bury the stargate.

He began downloading everything from the facility database that he could. The geologists in planetology might find ten thousand years of data on tectonics interesting at least, even if the rest of the mission had been a total bust. It took a while, since he had to keep switching in new memory crystals as they filled. It was something to do, a mindless task that let him not think about how those darts would look and sound as they ripped through Atlantis in a little more than a week.

The single chamber with the control console warmed up fast thanks to all the bodies jammed inside and a ventilation system kicked on with a cough and a drift of dust and deadened air. Eventually, John imagined he could smell a hint of snow from up above. He managed to find some topside sensors and got them to show him any air craft, which let him watch the darts swarming over the plateau like frustrated wasps. Most of the dancers and the musicians succumbed to the mixture of fear, exhaustion, darkness, and warmth and fell asleep.

John traded off resting with Teyla and Ronon after running out of memory crystals to fill. If there was anything useful in what he'd already got, they'd send back a team to strip the facility to the bone. They might want the control crystals, but he suspected they wouldn't touch the installation for fear of upsetting the balance it had maintained for so long.

He watched the tiny screen on the scanner unspool the record of what was happening above and felt melancholy. The Ancients' sensors don't give a picture, but the seismic spikes coming in from all over the plateau provided all the information he needed to infer what was happening: the Wraith were angrily destroying every hint of human civilization above them.

The night slid into morning, late enough John knew Atlantis would be trying to dial in and find out why the team hadn't returned or checked in. Woolsey would be advising caution and Rodney would be lobbying to limp along with Lorne's team and nothing would be happening because the stargate wouldn't lock as long as the Wraith had it tied up. So John chose not to worry about that.

The Wokovans woke and he had to tell them the Wraith were still topside. Sulda led them in a chant praising the Ancestors in lieu of dancing and one of the drummers had a hand instrument that set it all to a beat.

Midday the last dart signature disappeared through the stargate. John watched, but there was really no point wasting more time. If the Wraith had left drones on the ground they'd still be there an hour later and he really wanted to get away from Sulda and the Devout.

They made their way out and up top without difficulty, but John had to stop and stare. The snow that had been falling when they went below had continued, but hadn't kept the orchard from burning. Seared stumps and shattered limbs thrust through the cover toward the pale sky while red embers still glowed within fallen trunks burnt to charcoal. The wet ground steamed in places and dark smoke curled upward from dozens of locations, black scarves fraying on the chill wind

As the last Wokovan reached the surface, the stones began grinding, closing up the stairway and sending everyone skittering to the edges. Ronon cursed volubly over the cold snow melting around his bare feet and John joined him.

They found their boots eventually, under a covering of snow.

John was grimacing over the stiff and freezing footwear when his radio crackled in his ear. "Colonel Sheppard? This is Atlantis, please respond. Over."

He tapped the activation key and replied. "Atlantis, this is Sheppard. Over."

"What is your status? Over."

"Five by five. Please keep the stargate open as long as possible then dial back in. We've had Wraith here all night. It's going take about an hour to hike back to the stargate and the cover has been burned off. Over."

The Wokovans were recovering their own clothing and shoes too and dressing, talking as they did, but their voices muffled except when fright turned them sharp.

"Roger, Colonel. Thirty-eight minutes and dial again. We can send through a jumper if you want. Over."

John looked at the Wokovans.

Teyla murmured, "We cannot leave them here, John. Winter is coming and everything they had has been destroyed. Plus, the Wraith will come back. They are patient and determined."

He knew that, but Woolsey wasn't going to be happy. John wasn't either and he didn't know if the idea of bringing a couple of hundred Devout who considered him some kind of Chosen One of the Ancestors to the City of the Ancestors didn't bother him more than the prospect of finding supplies to feed all of them.

"Scratch that, Atlantis. We can make it on our own. Over." He tapped off the radio and asked Teyla, "You want to tell them where we're going?"

---

(last worked on 11.29.09 - discontinued)