I have wanted to do a Stargate story for a while now, and I have begun to develop a fondness for Battlestar Galactica...and then the plot bunnies struck, and refused to move until I wrote at least a little. This is set after the Ark of Truth, so the Ori are no longer a threat, and after the beginning of Season Five of Atlantis so Teyla is back and the team safe. Battlestar Galactica portions will begin after the mid-season finale, but for the moment this is Stargate-centric. Without further ado, we go to the Ancient outpost in Antarctica...

Antarctica was cold, icy and unforgiving. The slightest misstep could send an explorer down hundreds of feet into deep crevasses where bones would splinter and flesh would freeze. The cold was fine until frostbite set in – after that it became a downward slope that led rapidly to death. There was a reason that O'Neill cited the icy wastes as his least favourite continent.

The cracked ice had its odd, pristine beauty marred by the environmental dome that sat in the middle of a wide plain of ice, a few isolated helicopters huddled round it. Antarctica was meant to be the domain of the world, but this little station belonged to the IOA and the IOA only, and they guarded it jealously.

In the centre of the heated dome the hardest ice still stubbornly refused to melt, so grating had been constructed round the massive winch which lowered the lift down into the depths. The ice was radically different on the way down, the hard and packed glacier giving way to what looked as if running water had frozen as it poured down the sides of the perfectly circular bore down into the ice.

Michael Williams craned his neck over the railing set up round the hole as he waited for the lift to make its long ascent up from the outpost down below to the top. The outpost was at least reasonably heated, while the dome itself was a great deal colder than the squat prefabricated dwelling round the lift suggested. He had to focus on something, so he traced the flows of frozen water down the shaft.

The scientists ran a twenty-four hour operation, and being called to operate the control chair outside his shift made Williams distinctly…unhappy. As the strongest carrier of the ATA gene at the outpost he had accepted being the guinea pig for anything involving the chair, but most of the time it could at least wait for his shift. And all the coffee machines were down in outpost itself. The scientist was rapidly graduating from grumpy to downright pissed.

The lift arrived with a long whirr and a clunk, the mesh door sliding open with a clatter. Williams stepped inside and thumbed the down button, the mesh closing again and the lift jerking slightly then beginning a slow descent downwards. In the day filtered sunlight would shed some illumination down into the shaft, but soon only the soft glow of the lights above and below were visible. If it weren't for the cold Williams could have happily closed his eyes and gone to sleep.

It was a long ride. Williams idly wondered how long it would take normal machinery to get down this far. Maybe a couple of months? Half a year? SG-1 did it in about two minutes with a modified set of transport rings in a Goa'uld cargo ship while a firefight erupted around them, no less.

After several more minutes the lift finally made contact with the bottom of the shaft. Taking a deep breath as the door clattered open, Williams stepped into the outpost. The first time he had stepped into it he had been struck by how boring it looked. He had expected strange architecture, pulsing and glowing lights, and maybe some alien weaponry.

As it was, he got all three, but not in any way he expected. The alien architecture was subdued and functional, all steel gray and straight lines. The glowing, brilliant blue lights of the control chair seemed crisp and yet somehow beautiful, and the drone weapons looked completely alien. The squid-like robotic missiles looked perfectly safe until they glowed yellow and shot off at mind-boggling speeds to blow a substantial hole in something large and probably very valuable.

Sighing, Williams turned to the side and hit a button on the coffee maker. The cylindrical and plastic machine looked distinctly out of place next to all the scientific equipment, but it did more to maintain the sanity of the researchers than sleep ever could. The machine started to rumble slightly as it prepared the drink, and the scientist moved towards the chair room.

The outpost seemed quieter than usual. There were usually at least five people working at any one time, but Williams couldn't see anyone. He took one step into the chair room and discovered where most of them were. Three of the researchers were huddled round the chair diagnostic screen and babbling excitedly. Williams cleared his throat.

The conversation instantly stopped as they all turned and straightened up. Williams identified Doctor Langham, who had placed the offending call which dragged him out of bed. He was the resident expert on Ancient computer systems, but had the annoying habit of advertising his latest discovery the second he made it, not matter how insignificant. He found the coding structure fascinating, but everybody else found it irritating.

Langham significantly brightened when he realised who it was and became brushing at his lab coat with one hand in excitement, beginning to babble. He looked completely unremarkable, occasionally pushing up his thin-rimmed glasses when they slipped during his excited lectures. Williams just raised one hand, which silenced the scientist instantly.

"Just…tell me what to do, Langham." The scientist smiled instantly and gestured to the control chair. Williams slowly turned towards it and stepped up onto the dais. The control chair was an interesting piece of technology. From here Williams and anybody with the Ancient Technology Activation gene could operate the various systems of the outpost – which included the fleet-destroying drone weapons.

The chair itself looked intimidating, an odd blend of technology and architecture. It sat on a raised dais of two levels, a little step between the floor and the actual chair itself. The floor was criss-crossed by what looked like silver bars, separating the transparent bluish stone that made up the dais into triangles and other geometric shapes.

As Williams set his first foot onto the dais the floor began to glow with a soft light, blue tendrils of the luminescence growing outwards from the chair, which itself remained dark and lifeless. The chair itself seemed carved from whitish stone, the thick backrest looking stiff and unyielding.

The headrest was incorporated into the back, set with the same bluish stone as the floor of a dais, which Williams knew would light up in a brilliant blue when his thoughts activated the chair. But the odd thing was how it almost seemed like molten quicksilver had been poured over the headrest to freeze in strange, molten patterns which seemed so different from the geometric precision of the general architecture.

It didn't look like a chair, it looked like a throne. Williams turned around and settled into it, the armrests feeling vaguely uncomfortable. At the tips of his fingers were the strange gelatinous half-spheres which seemed to hold motes of multi-coloured light suspended in the gel. They were integrated into the end of the armrests, and apparently played some role in controlling the specific functions of the chair.

Williams didn't know what they were for – thought had always been enough for him. It struck him that they really didn't know how the chair worked. They could use fancy words like 'neural interface' and the like, but it brought the researchers no closer to understanding how it operated. The IOA wasn't going to let them take apart the millions year old device which controlled the most powerful weapons on Earth to see how it worked.

The scientist turned towards Langham, who was tracing his finger down the lines of Ancient scroll on the chair diagnostic screen. The blocky symbols meant nothing to Williams, but to Langham they apparently meant a lot. He regularly spouted the advantages of Ancient over English.

"Doctor Langham, if you brought me down here for nothing…" There was an unspoken threat in those words, but Langham simply brushed them off with a wave of his hand.

"Yes, yes. Could you concentrate on bringing up sensors, please?" Williams grunted and the chair activated, reclining into a slightly more comfortable position, the headrest glowing a soft but crisp blue. Above his head an image of the Earth appeared in all its glory, with a blue circular symbol appearing in orbit. Williams blinked.

"The Daedalus is in orbit? I didn't know that." Langham made a noncommittal grunt, tracing his finger down a line of code again as he replied.

"Could be the Oddysey, the chair doesn't distinguish between ships of the same design." Williams shrugged, the chair beginning a lazy rotation as his idle thoughts had an effect. As idle as he could be while controlling the most powerful technology on the planet.

"What am I doing, Langham? I should be sleeping." It irritated Williams that Langham was taking so long. He had things to do, coffee to drink, beds to sleep in…

"Yes, yes" came the impatient reply. "We have discovered a subset to the sensor coding. I need to isolate it before you activate it. Don't want you activating the drones and destroying that poor ship in orbit, do we?" Williams tried not to glare. He wanted to sleep. Failing that, he wanted his damn coffee.

"Aha, I have it! There, concentrate on turning on the system." Langham's enthusiasm was irritating, and Williams tried to shut it out as he did as he was asked, his collective willpower focusing on the idea. After a few seconds there was a beep from the diagnostic screen and the holographic image above the chair platform shifted.

The view of the Earth rapidly vanished and new stars appeared. One of the other researchers made an interested sound and Williams looked over. He hadn't noticed the others…he was way too tired to be up right now.

"That looks this part of the Orion Arm! We thought the chair might have long-range sensors, but we could never find any…" He dissolved into excited discussion with his astrophysicist colleague about applications and power requirements. The conversation instantly stopped when the hologram beeped and a lot of red dots appeared.

"Those dots all seem rather close to Earth, don't they?" Langham took off his glasses and rubbed at them, as if it would change what he was looking at. Williams scrutinised the image and came to the conclusion that the annoying computer geek was right. Those dots did seem rather close to Earth. With a sinking feeling Williams realised he was going to need that coffee, because he wasn't going to be going back to bed any time soon.

Meredith Rodney McKay was not normally a happy man. He had leagues of scientists bordering on the incompetent constantly bothering him with ideas that would obviously never work, for one thing. Best and brightest? Hardly. Radek Zelenka was tolerable, at least. The Czech knew when to shut up and start working on it himself.

Even worse was that he was constantly working under the threat of death. Not just the average 'the Wraith might attack Atlantis' threat of death but the 'make it work or you will die painfully in the next few minutes' sort of threat of death. The fact that he always made it work was only due to his unmitigated genius.

So it was uncommon to find him in a good mood, but the events of the past year, looking back, filled him with a certain sense of grim satisfaction. The Pegasus Replicators were wiped out(as far as they could tell), the Wraith were falling apart because of infighting over food sources, and Teyla had been rescued from Michael, along with her child. All in all, it hadn't been that bad recently.

He was currently sitting at his usual station in the control room, combing the Ancient database for information on the planet the flagship team was due to visit in a couple of days. It was a forest world, predictably, and the MALP had indicated there wasn't enough space for a jumper, which meant walking. A lot of walking.

He was distracted from his perusal of the database when the Stargate let out the humming and whirring noise on an incoming activation. The symbols of the various constellations of Pegasus lit up in a circle, making a speedy progress along the outer track, blue chevrons locking into place with a low pitched thump when the lit symbols passed them.

The gate lit up in a full circle, the constellations all shining a clean and brilliant white as the final chevron locked. The wormhole formed in an awe-inspiring rush of light and energy, the event horizon rushing inwards to fill the empty space of the ring and bursting outwards like an explosion of water.

It only took a moment for the powerful piece of technology to reign in the immense energies of the forming wormhole, the outward rush of the unstable event horizon stopping then being dragged inwards in less than a second, the shimmering portal smoothing and becoming the gentle ripple commonly associated with the 'puddle', so named for the unearthly appearance of standing water. Not like really water, but how water is imagined, a brilliant blue.

The shield hummed as it activated, forming a seal around the incoming wormhole. The partially transparent energy field would stop anything coming through – it would literally kill anybody or anything trying to come through in an instant, the Stargate unable to reintegrate the traveller in the tiny space between the forcefield and the event horizon.

McKay shot a questioning glance at Chuck, the gate technician on duty. He shrugged. "Only Major Lorne's team is offworld, and they aren't scheduled back for another fourteen hours."

Rodney turned back to his laptop, which then beeped, indicating an incoming transmission had been received. Then the gate shut down and the shield with it, the control room of Atlantis again filled with the normal sounds of everyday use. McKay opened the message and began to read it just as Colonel Samantha Carter came up the stairs.

"I heard the Stargate activate. Who was it?" Rodney leaned back and indicated the screen of his laptop, still displaying the offending message.

"It's from Stargate Command." Sam cocked her head a little, looking surprised.

"They can dial in? Did they find another ZPM?" Rodney shook his head. ZPMs, or Zero Point Modules were Ancient power sources which drew immense amounts of energy from subspace – but the laws of entropy meant they were like a battery, so they could essentially be tapped dry. Three were meant to power the massive City of Atlantis, and had sustained a forcefield protecting the City under the ocean for ten thousand years. It took an awful lot of power to establish a wormhole to another galaxy, which is where Atlantis was located.

"I wish. They probably just took the one powering the Oddysey. Now the Ori threat is gone they probably don't need it. I still say we should have kept that one." Rodney was referring to an incident when Atlantis had been taken over by Pegasus Replicators, who had brought three ZPMs with them to power the city. Atlantis had kept one, while Earth got the other two to power the Ancient outpost in Antarctica and the Oddysey.

Rodney knew perfectly well that both ZPMs were needed elsewhere, and Atlantis technically only needed one to power the city and the powerful energy shield that protected it, but he had protested a great deal at the time.

Halfway down the message, Rodney froze. It couldn't be right. There was no way…he read it again, and the words refused to change to something more accommodating. He spread his hands expressively, with no small amount of irritation and incredulity written on his face.

"I don't believe this…I'm being recalled to Earth. According to this I have to be there within the hour…I don't even have time to pack!" His tone became increasingly high pitched and annoyed, a sure sign he was becoming stressed.

"Well, I'm sure they wouldn't recall you unless it was important, Rodney." Sam laid a reassuring hand on his shoulder and squeezed slightly, then moved to the other end of the control room to a free laptop where she could read the message herself.

Rodney just stared at the message. He liked it on Atlantis. He had things to do, projects to oversee. He was the head of his department! He couldn't just leave that at a moments notice. Gritting his teeth he took a deep breath. This meant only one thing: he needed the Czech.

"Radek! Where the hell is Radek? Get him up here!"

At the moment I don't know whether this is going to be an amusing little plot bunny or whether this will evolve into a full-fledged crossover story. Obviously reviews and interest play a great role in determining which one it is, so if you have an opinion, express it. Constructive criticism is always welcome, and is often the most useful sort of review, provided at least some positive points are thrown in.

I, Sayle, do solemnly swear to review all the fics I enjoy, regardless of the number of reviews, its age, or anything else.