CHAPTER TEN

Daniel was in the office that had been set up for him, neck-deep in translations, when Jack came in.

"Busy?" he asked as he wandered around the room, looking at things.

"Need you ask?"  Daniel studied the colonel.  "Bored already?"

"Well, there's not much for me to do around here, you know."

"Should have brought the paperwork with you."

"I came here to avoid doing the paperwork.  Now, I'm beginning to think I should have stayed in Colorado and just suffered through it."

"I'm sure that Doctor Weir could find something for you to do."

"Yeah, like digging holes in the ice."  Jack picked up some kind of gadget.  "I was going to go get some lunch.  Care to join me?  Maybe we can drag Carter away from her toys and come, too."

Daniel was tempted to refuse, but his stomach had been making noises for the past hour.  "Sure.  Let's get Sam."

The two men found her with McKay, bent over some device and arguing about what it was.

"Hey, Carter," Jack said.  "We're going to get something to eat.  Take a break and come with us."

"I really shouldn't, sir.  There is so much to do."

"Come on, Sam.  If I can drag myself away from my mountain of work, so can you," Daniel told her.

Deciding that a break – particularly from McKay – would be nice, Sam said okay.

They all moved toward the door, but Daniel halted and turned around to look at McKay.  "Oh, by the way, Sam's right about what that thing is.  It is a power regulator."

McKay frowned.  "And how could you know that?"

"I had the entire knowledge of the Ancients downloaded into my brain, Doctor McKay.  Sometimes, things leak back into my conscious mind.  If I had access to it all, I could build everything that's in this outpost, including the Stargate that used to be here before we took it."

Leaving McKay to think about that, Daniel left with his teammates.

"Thank you," Sam said to him.  "He kept insisting that he was right and I was wrong.  Nothing's changed from the last time we worked together.  That time, he almost got us all killed.  This time, he's just being a big pain in the butt."

The three left the outpost and went to the building housing the personnel quarters.  They got themselves some lunch and sat at a table.  As they ate, Daniel told them about what he'd found out from Doctor Weir.

"So, they're already making preparations for the expedition to Atlantis?" Sam questioned.

"Yes.  They have been for several weeks now, ever since we found this place."

"No, you are not going!" Jack said firmly, glaring at Daniel.  "I don't care how much you beg and plead, I'm not letting you go to Atlantis."

The archeologist decided to have a little fun with him.  "But Jaaack," he responded plaintively.

"No.  I don't wanna hear it.  Nothing you say is going to change my mind."

"It's General Hammond's decision, not yours."

Jack glowered at him.  "Daniel, I'm not kidding you.  Don't you go asking Hammond for permission to go.  If you do, while you're in Atlantis, I'll turn your place into a halfway house for homeless ex-cons or something.  I swear I will."

Daniel just looked at him.  The colonel saw a tiny spark of humor in the younger man's eyes.

"You never had any intention of asking to go, did you," he guessed.

The corners of Daniel's lips turned up.  "Nope."

"You were just yanking my chain."

Daniel's smile got a wee bit bigger.  "I liked the homeless ex-cons threat."  He was rewarded with a glare from Jack.

"I will get even, Daniel."

"I'm sure you will."

They returned their attention to the food.

"How come?" Jack asked after a couple of minutes.

Realizing what Jack was asking, Daniel replied.  "Because my place is here, Jack, fighting against the Goa'uld."

The teammates finished their lunch and returned to the outpost.  As Sam went back to her work – and dealing with Rodney McKay – Jack walked with Daniel toward his office.  As they passed by the control chair, Jack stopped to look at it.

"I missed all the excitement when you sat in this again, but I sure did hear about it," he said.  "Also found out about that whole gene thing."

"Want to try it out?" Daniel asked, already knowing the answer.

"No thanks.  I'll pass."

They went the rest of the way to Daniel's office.

"So, what are you going to be up to today?" Jack asked.

"As soon as I finish these translations, I'll be meeting with my staff."

"Your staff?"

"Uh huh.  Doctor Weir has assigned a team to work with me to try and find Atlantis.  It's going to be quite a job.  There is so much information here that it could take months to go through it all."

"You're not staying here that long," Jack stated firmly.  "Though it's sometimes easy to forget these days, we are an SG team, which means that we're supposed to be going through the gate on missions."

"I know that, Jack.  Don't worry.  I have no desire to stay here that long."

"So . . . you're going to be pretty busy, huh."

"Yes, very, very busy."

Resigned to boredom, Jack said, "I guess I'll see you later, then."

Feeling kind of sorry for him, Daniel thought of something.  "Hey, you might want to ask Doctor Weir if you can help out with some of the Ancient technology.  From what I understand, some of it won't work for people who don't have the gene, and there are only a few people here who have it, not counting you."  Seeing the look on Jack's face, he added, "Or you could go back to your room and count the knots in the plywood walls."

"I'll talk to Weir," Jack decided and left.

Smiling slightly, Daniel got back to work.  As soon as he finished the translations he was working on and got them to the people who'd been waiting for them, he went in search of and found the four people who would comprise his team.  The two men and two women had varying backgrounds and training.  The only thing they all had in common was that they could read, write and speak the Ancient language, though not with the fluency that Daniel could.  Of them all Sandra Kensing, a pretty African American woman in her late twenties, had the greatest skill with the language, though Edward Chen, a slender Asian man of thirty-two, wasn't far behind her . . . although hearing Ancient spoken with a Chinese accent was more than a little odd.

Once introductions had been made and Daniel got to know each of his staff a little better, they got to work on the task of finding out where Atlantis was.  Daniel learned that the team had actually been working on finding Atlantis since just a few days after the outpost was discovered, before all the scientists were forced to leave the outpost because of the disagreements going on between the individual nations involved in the program.  Before leaving the outpost, they had taken with them as much data and records as they could so that they could continue their work while waiting for permission to return.  They admitted to Daniel that they hadn't made much headway in finding the lost city of the Ancients.

Every one of the four people had heard about Daniel and knew that he was supposed to be quite brilliant.  They were not prepared, however, for the archeologist's astronomical leaps of logic.  At first, whenever Daniel came up with some idea that seemed to have no evidence to support it, some of them were skeptical, but when his ideas kept leading them in directions that proved to be right, they lost their skepticism.  In the end, they just watched in amazement as Daniel somehow figured things out that none of the rest of them could see.  By the end of the day, the four people were in utter awe of him.

At dinnertime, Daniel told his staff to go get something to eat and relax for the rest of the evening, telling them that he was pleased with how far they'd gotten today.  The four people didn't say that the "we" Daniel used wasn't really accurate since most of the progress was thanks solely to him.

Daniel had been working by himself for about half an hour when Jack came in.

"So, did Doctor Weir put you to work?" Daniel asked him.

"Yes, I spent the day running back and forth, touching this thing and that and thinking very hard about turning it on.  All very exciting, definitely a chapter for my memoirs."

Hearing the heavy sarcasm, Daniel said, "Well, maybe you should consider going back home."

"Been thinkin' about it," Jack admitted.  "There's a supply helicopter that comes in from McMurdo once a week.  I could catch a ride on it, then beg Hammond to send a plane to pick me up from McMurdo.  So, how long do you think you'll be here?"

"I have no idea, Jack.  We only got here today.  We made some good progress in finding Atlantis, but it's still going to take a while, and then there's all the translations they need help with."

"So, you just about done for the day?"

"I'm going to keep at it for a while longer."

Jack got to his feet.  "Just don't stay all night."

"Have no fear, Jack.  There won't be any all-nighters tonight.  I'm still adjusting to the time zone."  He glanced at his watch.  "Right now, it's nearly 2 a.m. in Colorado."

"So?  If you were in Colorado, you'd probably still be working."

"You do have a  point," Daniel admitted.  "See you later, Jack."

The archeologist put in another hour, then went in search of Sam, guessing that she was still working as well.  He found her hard at work on a complex looking device that Daniel couldn't give her any information on.  He dragged her away from her work, and the two of them headed up to the surface.  They discovered that the commissary also acted as the place where off-duty personnel hung out and, after dinner, spent some time getting acquainted with a few people.

The next day was a busy one for Daniel and his team.  They made tremendous strides in finding out where Atlantis was, getting a lot closer than Daniel or any of the others had ever anticipated.

At noon, the team broke for lunch.  Approaching the elevator that would take them to the surface, Sandra and Edward were deep in conversation, paying little attention to Rodney McKay, who was also getting on the elevator.

"I do not understand how he could have figured that out," Edward said as he pressed the button to take them up.  "Even after he explained it to us, and we saw that he was right, I still do not know how he saw it."

Sandra nodded.  "I know what you mean.  He figured it out from, what, three words in a sentence?  I read that sentence at least a dozen times during these past few weeks, and I didn't see what he saw in three seconds.  It's totally amazing."

McKay's curiosity got the better of him.  "What are you talking about?"

The two scientists turned to him.  "Oh, hello, Doctor McKay," Sandra greeted.  "We're talking about Doctor Jackson.  We've been working on trying to find Atlantis, and the man is phenomenal!  He's got to be, like, the smartest guy on the planet, or pretty close to it.  He'd blow you away if you could see him at work."

The comment instantly soured McKay's mood, and he said nothing further to the two people.  When they got to the surface, he changed his mind about getting lunch and went back down, feeling the need to make some brilliant discovery.

For a while now, McKay had been feeling a little jealous toward Jackson, even though he didn't really know the man.  They'd never met before yesterday.  But hehad been hearing things about the archeologist, especially lately.  He didn't know the whole reason why, but Daniel Jackson had become the golden boy of the Stargate Program.  Every time McKay turned around, someone was talking about him.  Apparently, he had saved a lot of lives several times in the past few months and had also been directly responsible for the capture of two Goa'uld.  McKay had heard something about Jackson having some kind of special ability.  He had been tempted to find out what everyone was talking about, but the truth was that he was jealous of the praise and attention the archeologist was getting, so he'd tried to ignore it.  But hearing comments like that one from that woman made it a lot harder to do so.  Okay, so Jackson was smart, but he couldn't be that smart.

It was a couple of hours after lunch when, thanks to some clues Daniel had put together, he and his team found a gate address.

"Is that it?" asked Huge Thatcher, a plump, forty-year-old British man.  "Is that the address for Atlantis?"

"I'm not sure, but, yes, I think it might be," Daniel replied.

"Then we did it," Sandra said excitedly.  She looked at Daniel.  "We could never have gotten this far without you."

"Oh, I think you could have," he responded.  "You guys were heading in the right direction.  You'd have found this without my help."

"Not as quickly," Edward said.  "You probably took weeks off our search, maybe even months."

"Well, let's not get too excited.  We don't know for sure if this is the right address."

"Could we ask Stargate Command to try it?" asked Carlotta Davis, a very tall, thin woman from Boston.

Daniel glanced at his watch.  "It's nearly 10 p.m. over there.  We can call them in the morning.  In the meantime, we should keep at it.  We might find something more."

The team decided to work through dinner.  Huge and Carlotta went to the commissary and got food for everyone, which they all ate in Daniel's office as they continued pouring over the Ancient records.

It was well after eleven when they made another discovery.  Everyone gazed at the symbol for Earth.

"Okay, that makes sense," Sandra said.  "Earth is the point of origin.  This would be the seventh symbol for the address to Atlantis."

"Yes, except that the translation of these words doesn't make sense in that context," Daniel pointed out.  He shook his head.  "We're missing something."  He looked around at the tired faces.  "We should all get some sleep.  Our minds will be fresher in the morning."

Saying good night to his team, Daniel went looking for Sam to yet again drag her away from work.  Finding her in her lab, he convinced her that she should call it a night, and they went up to the surface.  As they passed the commissary, they saw Jack sitting at one of the tables and decided to say hi.

"I was beginning to think you two were going to put in an all-nighter," the colonel said.

"No, we both want to get an early start in the morning," Daniel told him.  "So, what have you been up to today?"

Jack regaled them with tales from his job as "Ancient thingamajig power-upper".  Despite his sarcasm, the two scientists could tell that the colonel thought it was kind of cool that he could do something the majority of the population couldn't.  It turned out that Jack had a greater aptitude for making the Ancient technology operational than anyone else at the outpost, with the exception of Daniel.  That fact briefly put a smile of pride on his face.

Daniel told his teammates about the progress he and his team were making.  "We found a gate address.  We think it might be the one to Atlantis."

"Wow.  That's fantastic, Daniel," Sam responded with a bright smile.  "I knew you could do it."

Jack decided to go off to bed.  Daniel and Sam stayed up for a little while longer, then also headed toward their quarters.  As they walked, Sam glanced at her friend's face.

"Daniel, if we were able to defeat the Goa'uld, if they were no longer a threat, would you want to go to Atlantis?"

"Yes, of course I would.  Finding out all I can about the Ancients has been sort of like the Holy Grail for me.  There's so much that I want to know about their culture, their beliefs, their way of life.  The biggest question of all is how they discovered the secret of ascension."

Sam gave his arm a little rub.  "Well, maybe, someday, you'll be able to go there."

"Yeah.  Someday."

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