Chapter 222 - Trinity - Part 2
In the hundreds of years Eventus had been alive he had seen a number of dead planets. Terraforming failures, unusual experiment outcomes, gravitational effects, bioweapons, solar expansions, and of course more recently Mars. The feeling of “dead” Doranda radiated however was different then all of those, and left him with an odd sense of creeping dread that had him rushing just a little to finish cataloging the outposts equipment for removal by the Daedalus and Enterprise.
The outpost’s design was austere in the way of most late war construction with a blocky almost brutalist look that was the result of being built up fast with an eye on maximizing function and survivability in the face of potential orbital bombardment.
They had returned to the planet with what was effectively a triple sized team, so it was him, Silvina, McKay, Zelenka, a couple techs, Sheppard, and three marines since Sheppard had been paranoid about so many scientific VIP’s being outside the city.
Of those, it was only Eventus, Sheppard, and McKay currently in the outposts control room with the remaining groups doing a direct examination of the outpost’s equipment with a combination of scan-orbs and visual inspection.
“Unless the others find a surprise the big thing is probably going to be the weapon,” Eventus finally said as he finished reviewing the weapons design specs at the control room's primary interface console. “We could install it on Atlantis with some moderate modifications, the mobile drilling platform with minimum modifications, or build up a new defensive outpost around it on the mainland.”
“Would the mainland outpost have a shield?” Sheppard asked, clutching his p90 and glancing around the room like he expected something to jump out of the walls and attack them.
“If we went that direction with things we would be repurposing most of this outpost's equipment to build it,” Eventus nodded. “So yes. And to save you the trouble of asking, yes, the shield would be expandable to cover any reasonably sized city that sprung up around it.”
“Might be a good idea to do the second then,” Sheppard said. “The Athosian’s have been talking about building a proper city along one of the coasts. But one of the big sticking points with that has been the hurricanes.”
“How would you power it?” McKay asked from one of the secondary control stations, the scientist having gone directly to reviewing the experiment's logs on arrival. “Because I glanced at the specs, and the power requirements practically require something at the level of a ZPM.”
“Unless you happen to have a moment of profound inspiration and figure out a way to make use of the zero point energy system without killing ourselves we would have to add in a capacitor system no matter what,” Eventus acknowledged. “But as to powering it, naquadah enhanced fusion would probably be the second best of the available options.”
“And the best?” Sheppard inquired.
“Something Naquadria based,” Eventus grinned.
He had gotten a scan of one of their experimental generators while visiting Earth, and while he still had no idea about the process of transmuting the material from Naquadah, it had been enough for him to start running design simulations, and the generating potential of the material was only a few percentage points off from Zero Point energy.
Though of course, the fact that it would decay back into regular naquadah after only twenty or so thousand years limited its usefulness in any long term projects.
“Maybe once we know you a little better,” Sheppard returned in a teasing tone. “And it’s not like you’re sharing everything you know with us either.”
“I suppose I can’t really argue with that,” Eventus acknowledged with an amused grin.
Letting the conversation drop, he spent ten minutes finishing up with the preliminary inventory before switching to trying to solve the burning question about the outpost that had been bothering him for longer than it had actually existed.
“You ever wonder why everything on the planet is still dead?” He idly put forward, flicking through the subsystems in search of the outpost’s exterior sensor logs.
“Whats there to wonder about?” Sheppard asked, starting as he started to walk a slow circle of the control room. “Radiation killed everything.”
“Ten thousand years ago,” Eventus pointed out, frowning at the display as the exterior sensor logs turned up a complete blank. “With a highly energetic burst of non-lingering radiation.”
Sheppard paused in his step and shot Eventus an odd look. “And that's bad?”
“No,” McKay interjected. “That means it's safe for us to run around the planet doing things.”
“It also means the planet's surface would have been safe for a well fed Wraith at about a month, Lanteans and Dorandans at about eight months, and regular humans at about fourteen months.” Eventus added in, bringing up the maintenance logs to try and figure out how the data archiving could have failed that badly.
Pausing in his work, McKay glanced around the room with a confused look that suggested he had finally hit on the problem with that. “Why is everything dead?”
“...Okay,” Sheppard finally said. “I feel like I'm missing something important here.”
“The planet shouldn't still be dead,” Eventus explained, his eyes twitching at the complete blank in the archival maintenance logs. “Because the only way it stays this dead is if nothing living touches the surface of the planet.”
“So no one came down here,” Sheppard shrugged. “You said you were just guessing about how things went after the reactor killed everyone. So maybe the only survivors were on ships and weren't willing to risk coming back to scavenge.”
“And the hive fleet wreckage we flew past to get here?” Eventus put forward. “One chunk of that falling to the planet and you'd have an entire ecosystem springing up in the impact crater. And that's not even counting the Wraith themselves as there is no way they wouldn't have sent something to investigate the destruction of their fleet.
“Wouldnt be the first time,” Sheppard pointed out. “There's that one planet with the EM generator and kids that the Wraith just ignored.”
“They didn’t technically ignore it,” McKay corrected. “They sent a dart with a beacon set up to go off when the EM generator failed.”
“Well yeah,” Sheppard acknowledged. “But I meant that they could have sent people on foot or bombarded the planet from orbit.”
McKay turned a suddenly confused look to Sheppard. “Why didn’t they send people on foot? It took me an afternoon to pinpoint the generator's location. And while yes, figuring it out so quickly was solely because of my genius. It only required basic equipment and math that the Wraith should have been able to duplicate given a couple weeks to work on the problem.”
Eventus pursed his lips and considered the question for a moment. “From what I read in your mission reports, I would guess their population control method kept their population numbers under the point where there were enough people for the Wraith to put in anything more than the bare minimum of effort.”
“And while that reasoning technically applies here,” he motioned to the general area they were standing in. “The Wraith Queens would have wanted to know what destroyed their fleet and killed everything on the planet.”
“Maybe the vibe scared them off?” Sheppard spitballed. “Place does have that haunted house feel to it.”
The words hit Eventus like a runaway drone and a sudden chill went down his spine as several unconnected pieces of the puzzle suddenly fit together perfectly. “Ori's overused teats, this place must have turned into a Death World.”
That wasn't the scientific name for the phenomenon of course, but it was more usable in casual conversation then what the Alteran exodus records had called the phenomenon in the galaxy they had encountered it in.
Sheppard shot him an odd look. “Why does it feel like you capitalized those words?”
“Because it's a name not a descriptor,” Eventus said, dropping his database search and bringing up the facility's architectural records. “Take a planet with at least a couple hundred million psionically marginal people on it. Marinate those people in a combination of terror, despair, and hate for a prolonged period of time. Then wipe them all out in one fell swoop. Do that exactly right and you'll create a shitload of persistent psionic impressions and steep the planet in a type of energy that basically rests on the opposite end of the spectrum from what the Wraith feed on.”
The sparse records the Alteran’s had been able to recover as they passed through the ruins of that particular galaxy had painted a bleak picture of a species that had just started to dip its toes discovering psionics and had decided it was the perfect uncounterable weapon to use against themselves in a civil war.
“And how does that connect back to the Wraith avoiding the place?” Sheppart asked, the soldier ignoring the way McKay was now eyeing the walls as if they might start gushing blood at any moment.
“Long complex explanation simplified, the psychic wavelength of this planet repels the Wraith on an instinctual level.” Eventus explained, and then held up a hand to forestall Sheppard from suggesting the obvious. “And no, that doesn't make the planet a useful location to do anything with because that same psychic wavelength will slowly erode the life force of anything that spends time here.” He turned to McKay. “And yes, that means spending prolonged periods of time on the planet would be bad for us.”
“But to be honest,” he continued, clamping down on the worry he suddenly felt as the architectural search showed the facility lacked the majority of the dispersive design elements most of their buildings tended to have. “I’m more worried about whatever persistent psionic impression tried to jump into the facilities systems.”
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Author’s Notes: Now, I’m not saying the planet’s haunted… But it might be a little haunted… And hey, that means Eventus get's to show off.