"Digging crooked tunnels, an underground clever mole," I chanted a line from a well-known Soviet film. "Normal heroes always go around, normal heroes always go around."
Angering the Ascended is not the brightest idea that can come into the head of the population of this universe.
"Going around is, of course, not all that easy, not all that pleasant and very far to go, not all that pleasant and very far to go."
How many opportunities to complicate a man's fate do beings have who have lived for thousands, if not millions of years and have seen some serious crap? Most likely the same numbers: thousands and millions.
And at the same time they will surely manage to do it in such a way that they do not break their own rules. Even though Melia did hear me out, she did not agree that rules exist in order to be broken.
"But that is how only wise men proceed, that is how only brave men advance," with a heavy sigh I stepped away from the jumper's control console. "That is how only brave men advance."
There is a belief that you can intrigue an idiot by promising to tell him something interesting tomorrow.
"Fools turn themselves into heroes, throwing themselves ahead," I stared at the lit-up instrument panel sitting in the pilot's seat and tried to offset my irritation with singing. Fortunately, no one was around to tell me where I could go with my vocal abilities. "Normal heroes always do the opposite, normal heroes always do the opposite."
Jumper control console. View from the pilot's seat.
The thought that the Ascended might feel a slight burn in their energetic backsides and finally spit on the commandments of their religion to lend a hand haunted me.
"And we will not once stray from the crooked path, and if need be, we will again go by the crooked road, and if need be, we will again go by the crooked road."
But a psychological attack in the style of a singer stepped on by a bear was not helping in the slightest.
And I had no idea how else to solve an equation with such a huge number of unknowns.
The ultimatum I had presented to Melia had been good. Devilishly good.
"If you will not interfere, then do not hinder either." "If you trust, then trust, and do not watch over my shoulder with a finger on the trigger of a big gun." And, for crying out loud, at least give me a Russian–Ancient dictionary.
How is one even supposed to operate the technology of an alien civilization if absolutely everything is written in their language?
From the labels on the buttons to the text on the monitors.
And it is not as if these were static inscriptions either! No! The Ancients used a scrolling line as their basic way of displaying text. So you sit there, staring at the screen—no matter which one—and watch squadron after squadron of pictograms flash past your eyes.
I cannot say my ultimatum worked as intended.
They are not going to trust me, but they will not interfere at every step either. As for the rest of the conditions... Results were mixed there, too. But the main thing I took away was this: at moments of danger there is no point sitting and waiting for someone big, kind, and full of light to show up and save me. They will not intervene. Neither when someone is doing great evil to me, nor if I decide to do it myself. Later, yes, perhaps they will come and punish me if I commit great villainy—break their rules. But that will be later. And, quite possibly, they will not even do it themselves but will send someone else after my soul.
Wonderful allies. I do not trust them, they do not trust me. Whose fault is that? Hippaforalkus's!
Naturally, no one gave me a dictionary. Not even because it would have been against their rules to give me such information. Oh no, Melia assured me that there was simply no need to provide me with those data in principle since, potentially, I would find the answer myself.
Because deep down, I already knew it.
Brilliant?
Of course.
At first I thought she was appealing to the fact that I had once seen something on the Internet about this a long time ago... Turned out that was not it. Not at all.
"To achieve anything, you need to learn," the Ancient said before dissolving.
And that was that.
I did not even have the strength left to curse.
I had already realized that we were playing those very cosmic chess where my move, which had seemed winning, in fact helped my opponent kick me in the teeth. I had thought that since they could not intervene quickly, were afraid and busy, they would meet me halfway. Yeah, right.
The only thing, besides the obvious, that worked directly in my favor was that the Ascended had no intention of disputing my rights to Atlantis or any other of their heritage I might discover.
And that was not a concession.
It was, damn it, a law they had. If something had not been claimed for an extended period of time, and its owner or creator had not asserted their rights to it, then whoever first said, "Mine," became the new owner.
Well, I had said it. I can be proud of myself—Atlantis is mine. Apparently it is even encoded somewhere in her subroutines. All that is left is to find a couple of ZPMs, set a course for Earth, and get a certificate of property ownership through the MFC... Which is where there is a snag. I doubt that the local version of my homeland can issue documents for property in the form of a starship that is also a city and, just a tiny bit, a lab-and-test complex, a sample of advanced technology, and a weapons platform—and that is just the part of Atlantis I know about.
At least from Melia's hints about Moros and how he banned water dispensers in every room, I did figure out that those very water columns from which I had wanted a drink actually carried not ocean water through themselves, but already desalinated water.
It took me about thirty minutes to find the faucet and finally quench my thirst. Great, now I will not die. Of dehydration, that is. When the shield fails—that is when I will definitely be done for.
There is, of course, an option—use a jumper to blow a section of the tower and fly out. The ship is hermetically sealed, which means it can withstand the oceanic pressure and break through to the planet's surface. There is a continent up there; I could plough fields, hunt game... However, there is a nuance.
Two, in fact.
First—the storm that hit the expedition during their first year here and nearly sank Atlantis when it was on the surface. Things on the continent were not all that cozy either.
Second—a solar flare that happened in one of the later seasons. It burns all living things. The Ancients had protected the planet in the past by stretching a shield over it. I am not going to manage that—I do not have enough energy.
No, seriously! More than half my problems would be solved if I had energy! But not a single ZPM in the city is going to help me; looking for them means drawing down even harder on a doomed power source.
Frustrating, but there is an alternative power source on the planet—a drilling platform. Only it is buried at the bottom of the ocean floor... And I have no idea where exactly. I do remember that a Wraith ship crashed near it. And inside that ship is one small problem. One that can create two different problems at once, both threatening the planet's destruction.
And that is without even mentioning that the platform is also controlled in the Ancient language! And there is literally nowhere for me to learn it!
I spent several hours trying to come up with some sort of plan.
I had a hint about how and where to find a ZPM, but... To do that, I needed to leave the city! And in order to do that, I had to know where to go—the planet I sought was somewhere in this galaxy. Getting there without knowing its address was impossible. At least in my current situation.
All in all, it took me several hours to realize the Ascended had not gotten the brightest helper.
I had heard Melia's words about a ZPM, about the water columns... I had just thought her hints had been limited to that. It seemed that lady had used the entire conversation to pass along suggestions I would, hopefully, be the only one to understand.
Learning... I needed to learn if I wanted any success.
And where do they study on Atlantis?
Exactly—in the holographic room. Which was where I came back to.
Yes, the system devoured a lot of already scarce energy. But I simply had no other options. Randomly pushing buttons in the hope something might work out was a bad idea. I would not jump into the past, of course, but I quite could blow up something important. Or open doors in the flooded areas of the city. Or something else.
I had no burning desire to play the monkey with a grenade. Nor to waste time punching in random gate addresses on a "maybe it will work, maybe not" basis.
According to the series, the language of the Ancients, also called the Alteran language, resembled Latin. I did not know Latin either, but surprise—Latin used the same alphabet as many Western languages.
There was even a joke on this subject, about a Frenchman and an Englishman lamenting that they had the same letters but different words.
So I turned to Melia's hologram—the real hologram, not its Ascended copy—and asked her to show me the Ancients' alphabet.
She did. As I had guessed, the city computer adapted its spoken interface to whatever language it heard. I do not know whether the city holds a database of all existing languages or analyzes what is said and learns, like a neural net, but the fact remains.
I obtained the characters of the Ancient alphabet.
And ten digits—from zero to nine.
Then I asked her to show me the symbol of Atlantis's gate and its full address. That element is required to dial any gate address and always appears last in the chain of seven symbols. In general, each symbol is a constellation visible in the night sky and supposedly differs from planet to planet—at least for this local group, where the constellations are similar. But something told me things were not that simple—otherwise, one would have to work too hard to get back to the home world from other ends of the galaxy.
Or, maybe, they did work that hard. I would still have to find out personally.
Is it surprising that the Atlantis dialect of the Ancient alphabet contained twenty-six characters? Exactly as many as the Latin alphabet.
True, there are various dialects where the characters are slightly different and the number differs. But I picked the "basic" one.
Mapping letters and Arabic numerals to analogous symbols from the main Alteran alphabet used on Atlantis was not all that hard. As a result, by means of scientific poking about, I stored the resulting associations in my handheld's memory. It turned out decently, but I had to test my findings in practice. For that I would need the city's control console and its database of addresses.
Lantean alphabet.
Without the numerous laptops, familiar screens, server racks, and handhelds made on Earth, the control center looked empty. The Ancients had not even provided chairs or armchairs for work there.
Atlantis control room. Located in the "right" half of the second tier of the Gate Room.
There was something unusual about absolutely everything in the Ancients' control panels—form, size, texture...
There were no familiar physical buttons, and each "keyboard" was a flat glass (or glass-like) plate inserted into a console slot. They could easily be taken out, swapped for convenience. Yet at the same time there was also a more familiar "button" mode—but that was mostly tied to the gate control console.
Each glass plate had marks for the touch zones—just put a finger on top and you were bound to switch something on. By trial and error, I eventually reached the database I needed.
But that was still its own personal hell. First translating from Ancient into English, then, clawing at my memory, into Russian. It turned out I remembered the language of the potential enemy much better than I thought. Or perhaps the Ancients were playing games again.
The gate database for the Pegasus galaxy that the Ancients had was not just a notepad filled with addresses you could dial and open a wormhole to, say, the other side of the galaxy right from the control room. There was also fairly detailed reference information—provided the Ancients knew anything about what was going on down there.
Melia's hint, transparent as a child's tear, gave me a chance not only to save the city but also, in general, to get a foothold in this galaxy on a very different level. All that remained was finding the planet I needed, which was anything but simple. I only had to sift through thousands and thousands of addresses... And there was no guarantee the database would mention the planet in a manner I could understand.
And there were certainly no notes about what had been found there by the expedition—because there had been no expedition.
Potentially, potential, Potentia...
No, that was not a dirty joke.
There is a planet in this galaxy once ruled by the so-called Brotherhood. In the series, during the expedition leader's time travel episode, the Ancient who aided her, Janus, did not merely save the city but also left a note in the hands of the woman who then stayed in stasis for ten thousand years in deserted Atlantis. It contained five planets. Each one had a ZPM.
One of the planets on that list was the world that was home to the Brotherhood of Quindozium. As I recalled, they were monks, harmless and easily frightened. But they were all killed when the Wraith attacked the planet. The knowledge of where the ZPM was had been lost.
The expedition went there to scout, tested themselves with a host of puzzles, found the ZPM... But could not take it.
The problem was that the locals kept the device exclusively for the Ancients. When they discovered that the expedition members were not Ancients, they took the battery away and hid it again. As far as I know, the Earthlings never again tried to track down that ZPM.
In the Brotherhood's records it was referred to as "Potentia." Which translates as "power" or something similar.
All I had left to do was find the correct address, fly to the planet, grab the ZPM, and return to Atlantis before the city vanished beneath the waves. Easy, do that three times a day and you can forget about cholesterol.
However, there was another problem.
Judging from the chain of cause and effect, the Brotherhood had ended up with the ZPM because Janus had given it to them. And he had done that for the expedition leader who had arrived from the future. Melia had confirmed that not one version of the expedition had ever come to the city. Which meant there was not even a hint that there were those fabled five ZPMs from Janus anywhere in this galaxy. To hell with all five—I would have been more than satisfied with just one. For starters, anyway.
Yes, there were other places where ZPMs had been. But apart from the replicator planet, all the others were almost fully depleted. There was no guarantee I would find even one of them.
What are the odds of guessing correctly once when choosing one address out of a thousand others? Minuscule. Even though there are search and filter functions by keywords in the gate database, they do not actually simplify things much.
So, I had four obvious places to choose from, three of which had clearly seen ZPMs of varying degrees of depletion. In my situation, I did not have much of a choice.
I needed at least some amount of power to prolong the city's agony.
Melia had not been hinting at the last option for nothing. Reasoning logically, Janus would have been unlikely to return to Pegasus after leaving Atlantis in order to plant even a single ZPM. That would have required a colossal amount of energy. And the Ancients who had fled to the Milky Way had been extremely tight on resources. Besides, in the canonical events, when Janus was directly asked by the Council whether the time-traveling heroine had gone through the gate, he lied and said yes.
Right—the Lanteans had not allowed the woman from Earth to return to her own time. They planned to take her with them to Earth.
I think I do not need to mention that once all the inhabitants of Atlantis had gone to Earth and discovered the woman from Earth was not among them, they did not fly back to pick her up. The galaxy had been swarming with Wraith and they had been woefully short on ships.
True, they could have used the gates, since there had been ZPMs in the Milky Way... But they had not. Why? I do not know; all I can do is speculate. But without facts, that would just be a waste of time.
I doubt Janus had sent any ZPMs to the Pegasus galaxy after his departure. Most likely he had given the addresses of planets where they already existed in one form or another. That would have been the most reasonable option.
In any case, the situation in the city was such that I needed a ZPM with at least some charge. An extra hour, a day, a week, or a month was not just important.
Now all that remained was to find the coordinates of the planets I needed in Atlantis's database and take a stroll there in a jumper.
Easier said than done.
Unfortunately, my memory held no coordinates of the Brotherhood's planet. Its name was Dagan, by the way. So I could not use that to search. And working by brute-force...
Wait. If I cannot find Dagan by its coordinates, why not go the other way?
* * *
The option of feeding the planet's name into the search engine seemed extremely interesting. So I used it.
Imagine my surprise when it turned out there was not a single mention of that name anywhere in Atlantis's extensive database. Not only the planet's name—there was not even a single vaguely similar word.
Dagan, Dakan, Dogan, Dagon... I rearranged the letters in every way I could think of—nothing.
Unlike its earthly analogues, the city's search system demanded precise search criteria. So I must have tried to enter the planet's name ten times without moving even a millimeter forward.
A ghost of disappointment loomed on the horizon.
No, we Russians do not give up so easily.
We will enter a different search criterion.
Unfortunately for me, the word "Potentia" had a direct connection to the language of the Ancients, who, as we recall, dabbled in Latin. If I was right, "potentia" in Latin meant "power, might," and about a dozen other things. So the search engine gave me information about planets with powerful volcanoes, strong storms, magnetic fields, hurricanes, and so on and so forth...
Were there cataclysms of that sort on the Brotherhood's planet? The Ancients had not bothered with ordinary volcanoes or something similar. Only super-volcanoes, super-cyclones, super-tides, and super-everything.
I think I would have remembered something of the sort. And since I did not, I could safely drop those worlds from my list. That cut the number of matching planets by about thirty percent.
Now I only had to look at two thousand of the three thousand addresses. Progress, though not as rapid as I would have liked.
For form's sake, I tried a few more times with the planet's name, then gave the gate control console a frustrated kick—as if such a high-tech device could be to blame for anything.
I refused to accept defeat. Not now, when I was so close to saving the city! While Atlantis had belonged to the Ancients, I had not really cared about it. But since it was now mine... No, my grandfather is Belarusian and my grandmother is Mordvin—that kind of explosive mix leaves no chance for passing wonders of the universe.
The approach had to be changed.
Meanwhile, my stomach reminded me of itself with a quiet rumble. As if to say, "Master, solving the Ancients' problems is all well and good, but do not forget about yourself either."
Fine. That damned planet was not going anywhere in the half hour I planned to spend on a meal. I was not even going to leave the control room.
My limited food supply took another hit. After five days in Atlantis, I was heartily sick of my rations. At first I had associated them mostly with hematogen; now they felt exactly like modeling clay. I was beginning to understand Melia.
Time dragged monotonously.
Day after day, I pored over one database entry after another. Some of the city's sensors were still online, so I still got notifications that half of Atlantis had already been flooded.
I had not made any headway. It was a good thing I really had kept my active systems to a minimum and the shield was still holding. I did not believe even for a second that this might be the result of some positive intervention by the Ancients.
A jumper stood prepared and ready, crammed to the brim with everything I had managed to scavenge in my little habitat. A couple of scanners, some trinkets, a few crystals with data in the Lantean language...
Amusingly, I had even found a personal energy shield.
In the series, they had shown it a few times. A small green crystal shaped like a tiny coffin. Once activated, it protected its wearer from any damage: bullets, energy weapons, falling from great heights, and so on...
Lantean personal shield.
The device was activated quite simply—if you had the Ancient Gene, you just had to press it to your body or clothes. It would then shroud you in a practically invisible energy film.
A useful thing, no doubt about it.
Especially because it tuned itself only to a single owner and no one else could take it off—you could only disable it at will. In the series, they had had to drive one of the expedition members to the verge of a hunger faint so that the smart device would shut down. Turned out it had a safety mechanism: since it did not let food or water through (only air, and probably some other gases too), the shield turned itself off whenever the wearer felt he was in mortal danger due to its use.
After long practice over four days, I learned how to switch it off with the power of thought—just by thinking that I would die if it did not turn off. The key was to *really* believe it.
I was sure there was a more adequate "off switch," but I had not found it yet. For now.
Over the days spent studying the gate database, I had even grown accustomed to the constantly flickering symbols and annotations on the Ancients' wall displays in the control center.
Which, by the way, also came in different types. Some screens looked like rectangular pieces of murky green glass suspended from the ceiling. Others were simple insets in the walls. They only lacked the kind of monitors I was used to.
That said, in their pursuit of "ultra-thin" borderless displays, the local manufacturers had surpassed my fellow Earthlings. Just as in many other things.
The city's computer, having apparently realized that Atlantis's only inhabitant was not exactly a genius, showed me a schematic of the city and highlighted flooded areas in red. The lab where I had been "born!" was also underwater. A bit more and the entire city would be swallowed by the ocean.
Once I had chewed down the disgusting bar, I returned to grinding through the addresses.
After a few more hours, I realized my brain was starting to boil. Along with my irritation. A couple of cigarettes would have really hit the spot...
But there was no such good stuff in the city.
There was, however, an open balcony accessible from the control room that gave a magnificent view of the dying city. Whenever I had had enough and wanted to run away, I would go outside "for a breath of fresh air."
If I had even one sufficiently charged ZPM, I could have been admiring not the black silhouettes of distant towers, but the shining, internally lit buildings. Instead... Half the city was flooded and the other half was about to be.
A brilliant case of universe-hopping, I must say...
I found myself wondering whether things would have been easier if I had ended up in that original timeline where Janus had helped save the city... But after two or three "smoke breaks," I had to admit they would not.
The expedition had had its own energy sources, with which they had supported the city's functioning for as long as it had taken them to obtain a ZPM. I had no such generators. And I could not create them—I lacked both the knowledge and the materials.
Consequently, Atlantis, even if it had been on the surface, would have been left without power. Defenseless and alone. Yes, I could have used the gate via a jumper; dialing an address through it would not have drawn power from ZPMs for the ring's activation.
But all of that is pure conditionality... You only begin to think along those lines when total despair sets in... Yes indeed. My good sir, forgive me, but you are clearly unfit for the role of savior of a great civilization.
Staring at yet another skyscraper vent its air and fill with water, I idly thought that the sections damaged by flooding could be repaired later.
Oh, why did the gate database not work on the same principle as jumper control? In the series it had been said that it was as though it read thoughts... And, frankly, that was true. The ship reacted to mental commands just as effectively as to button presses.
In essence, the instrument panel and the control yoke on the ship were just a backup control system for the jumper. The primary one was mental control. But, for example, you could not dial an address mentally... Although, I had not tried that all that often. Just about ten times. And not once did a single address key light up in the jumper. There had been no dialing sound either. Or additional backlighting on the keypad...
"Sir, this job is beyond you," I told myself.
Funny. The balcony might have been quite chilly—the city, after all, was several hundred meters below the ocean's surface—but the mush in my head was already starting to burn at the bottom. I was calling myself "sir" now.
Maybe I should call on one of the Ancients, say, Melia, for a chat? Or, better yet, Ganos Lal. And drive her up the wall with endless forms of address like "most gracious lady," "young lady," "my lady"...
That would be something to laugh at.
A gentleman mocking a lady... Actually, did the Lanteans have some particular form of address for girls and women? Something like the well-known "mademoiselle" and "madame," "Miss" and "Mrs"... I wonder whether the Ancients had the custom of carrying a handkerchief in the breast pocket of their jackets so they could pass it to a lady at the right moment?
There must have been some such form of address, but it was clearly not "my lady," because that had only appeared... in relatively recent history in my world... On Earth... And in this universe, if I remembered correctly, it was not customary to rename... planets...
Stop!
Realizing my mistake, I felt like I was suddenly burning up. Despite the cold around me.
It did not matter anymore—I dashed back into the control room.
Why on earth had I decided that the planet was listed as "Dagan" in the Ancients' database? Given that their language had spawned Latin, "Dagan" did not sound very much like something named in that language! Exactly! I remembered!
In Ancient times, the planet had been called something else!
"My lady"... For God's sake—"Sudaria!"
That was it!
Where do these thoughts even come from?!
Sudaria! That was the planet's name in the old days, not Dagan or Dogan or whatever!
It translated from Latin as "handkerchief" or even "pocket handkerchief." I had not been able to recall that, but the moment I took a break from uselessly brute-forcing addresses and my brain "rebooted," I subconsciously reached out to my memories. An associative chain formed itself and—bang! The planet's name surfaced all on its own!
Standing at the terminal responsible for the gate database and the gate themselves, I mentally thanked the city's creators that this console did not talk directly to the city's central computer. If I had been polluting the most advanced computer in this galaxy with my requests for that many days, I would have drained much more energy!
After a couple of typos, I entered the correct name on the third attempt and... got a result!
Well, I'll be damned!
Sudaria did exist!
The planet was even on the list of addresses I had already gone through, skimming their faint descriptions! Number one thousand eight hundred and forty-seven! That is, about a thousand addresses further than the point where I had stopped.
I wanted to howl with joy when I saw the cherished six symbols of the planet's address. But my elation paled instantly when compared to the realization of how stupidly and pointlessly I had spent so much time.
I could not waste another second.
With my hand trembling from the excitement of my first major victory, I entered the combination on the city's console. With the familiar hum, seven blue crystals on the outer ring lit up. Just as seven coordinate symbols on the inner ring.
With a roar that made me flinch from fright and elation, a vortex of blue energy burst out from the gate's inner circle.
Gate activation process. The moment shown is from the SGC base in the Milky Way—that is where the crystals are orange-red. Milky Way and Pegasus gates differ not just in design but also in functionality. Pegasus gates are "newer" by something like 5–10 million years.
The energy vortex, which I knew could obliterate anything that stood in its path, collapsed inward with a loud splash.
Now the gate's inner circle was filled with "water." It even rippled slightly, as if a breeze were ruffling its surface.
But that was only an illusion.
There was no wind, no water.
It was an energy structure only vaguely resembling the analogies painted by one's imagination. It seemed as if a distant yet powerful light shone at the center of that "puddle"... But that too was just an effect.
Active Atlantis gate.
The white-blue glow pouring out of the gate dispelled the gloom in the room.
For several seconds I simply stood there, looking at that miracle of technology. Because... Well, how else was I supposed to react? For God's sake, these were *working* Stargates! I had just activated them! Me, personally! Without any doctorates or Ancient knowledge in my head!
Eat your hearts out, cheaters!
"You've stared enough," I said quietly. "Time to save the city."
I decided to use the same jumper that had been my home and storage since the Ascended's departure. The accommodations inside were not exactly comfortable, but I had been sleeping there on the side benches with the rear hatch closed, which also served as the ramp. The ship was hermetically sealed and could be used as a submarine. So if I had gotten "flooded" overnight, I would have had a chance to wake up and get out.
Taking the pilot's seat, I placed my hands on the control yoke, made of a transparent plastic-like material. One short mental command to start the engines... And the ship rose from the floor on an anti-gravity cushion. Excellent—it worked!
I had had some concerns that I might accidentally damage the city if I lost control. I carefully made my way to the center of the bay and the apparently solid floor slid apart, revealing the Gate Room below.
One misstep and I could blow the whole place.
But the Ancients had planned for this too. As soon as I angled the jumper slightly forward and down, it switched to autopilot.
The ship slowly descended into the Gate Room and pivoted to face the gate.
A few more seconds of reverent thrill and nervousness so bad that my hands and armpits were sweating... I could only hope there was no shield or defense on the other side that would smear me during materialization.
In the events I knew, there had been none...
In reality... I was not supposed to be here either. Most likely.
I nudged the yoke gently and felt the seatback press against my back as the white-blue "puddle" filled everything my eyes could see.
* * *
On a distant continent of Lantea, the home world of the ancient city of Atlantis, peace reigned.
Night had fallen and taken full possession of its due, yet the cliff-top shore was bright.
Several figures, radiating a blinding white light, stood side by side, looking straight ahead. Any other being of human origin, of the same species as these sapients belonged to, could not have boasted such sharp eyesight.
Because they were looking far beyond the horizon, through many meters of water.
"I think we should consider leaving this galaxy," said the snow-white figure wearing the face of Ganos Lal. "This man is no savior. Hippaforalkus has found someone just as eccentric, awkward, and straightforward as he was himself. A mind without guile and..."
"Enough," another Ascended cut her off. "Your opinion is noted. As is your attitude to what has been done."
"We cannot entrust our fate to him," Ganos insisted. "I believe in people, in their path and self-improvement, but... This Mikhail! He cannot cope even with the simplest of tasks! Melia almost told him everything straight out! And he still did not grasp it at once!"
"I said—enough," the same Ascended repeated in the same emotionless tone. The others, apart from these two, maintained their silence. "It would be irrational not to use this chance."
"It is a mistake," Lal declared. "We should have intervened and eliminated the rules violation."
"And break them once again?" A glow appeared in the air and another Ascended materialized with them. "I am afraid, Ganos, you are projecting your personal thoughts and emotions regarding this man's ancestors too strongly."
"My emotions are in order, Melia," Morgana said. "And this has nothing to do with his ancestors!"
"It does, however, have to do with our survival," the leader of the Ascended reminded her. "The rules have already been broken. All we can do is neutralize the consequences. Which is what we are doing."
"This man will destroy Atlantis!" Ganos Lal said. "Causality will be broken."
"That is possible," the man said. "But the rules violation will be repaired."
"At the cost of our heritage?" Morgana asked in horror.
"This is not the first and not the last city in the Pegasus galaxy," Melia reminded her. "Sooner or later, the others will also be found."
"Only by then we might not exist anymore," Lal pointed accusingly toward Atlantis resting on the seabed. "This man is like a mockery of our general plan!"
"That may be so," the second Ascended pretended to accept. "But I would like to point out that in the past we have shown greater patience for humans and their actions."
"Because back then our own descendants were the ones acting," another figure of light joined them. Unlike the others, this woman had a more striking appearance. "Ganos Lal is nervous because General Hippaforalkus's actions could lead to irreversible changes in the future. And to the strengthening of that branch of our descendants we prefer to forget."
"Oh," Melia's expression took on an empty smile. "Chaya Sar. I thought you had already died."
"You know full well that under normal circumstances that is impossible," the dark-skinned woman answered coldly, joining the gathering last.
"Who knows," Melia tilted her head. "The Ascended in the Milky Way thought the same. Now they are dead."
"Who invited the exile to this meeting?" Ganos Lal asked irritably. She did not even attempt to hide her disgust at the sight of the newcomer.
"I have the right to be among you," Chaya Sar said. "I am just as much Ascended as you are."
"You were exiled and punished," the leader of the Ascended reminded her. "You are forbidden to leave the planet."
"I know. But you lack the energy to..."
"We do not need your help," the Pegasus leader cut in. "You have disobeyed your sentence. Your punishment will last another hundred thousand years."
"Recorded," the other Ascended repeated in unison.
"Another hundred thousand years because I came to help you?" Chaya Sar looked at the other Ancients in confusion.
"You violated the conditions of your punishment," Ganos Lal told her. "You were informed of the sanctions in advance."
"You simply do not want me to be involved in all this," Sar said.
"You are right," Melia confirmed. "Your 'help' usually ends in catastrophe. Under the current circumstances we cannot allow that."
"I suppose I will not receive forgiveness, even if the Ori convert all our descendants in the universe to their faith?" Chaya asked.
"Do not aggravate your guilt," the leader of the Ancients said. "Return to where you are supposed to be. And do not appear among us again."
Melia kept her empty smile and waved demonstratively to their guest.
"I hope you succeed," Chaya said, unable to keep all the pain out of her voice. "If I am needed..."
"You will not be needed," Ganos Lal snapped. "Get back to where you belong!"
The dark-skinned Ascended listened in silence to the insult and then dissolved into the air.
"I have never liked her," Lal said contemptuously. "After what she did, to show up here with that innocent look... It is as though she is making fun of all of us!"
"Or perhaps you should simply calm down," Melia said, casting a glance toward Atlantis. "I would like to say that I feel sorry for Atlantis and Mikhail, but..."
"At least half of that would be a lie," Ganos Lal snorted.
"Exactly," Melia gave yet another of her empty little smiles. "I think the break is over. Time to plan our next move now that this man has failed..."