"This is terrible," Teyla whispered when we moved from one ruin to another. "Do they really believe that it is the sacrifices that save their people from the wraiths?"
"Religion," I sighed, looking around. Dozens of people were wandering through the ruins that the locals called the Old City. Mostly the same children, who curiously peered under every bush in search of the device. As best I could, I described to them from memory what an electromagnetic generator looked like. I didn't have much hope that they would find it first and report it. But it's better than searching a huge territory with four people. "What there is."
"This is wrong," the Athosian stated. "Children shouldn't kill themselves so that others can live! They are just children!"
"The younger ones don't touch themselves," Keras, who was passing by, corrected her. He and a couple of other boys had finished examining large fragments of a once-large building. "Only those who have reached twenty-five years of age. They have lived their lives and must fulfill their duty."
"To die?" Keras asked.
"Of course," Keras replied. "Teyla, you are a warrior in your world. And a leader. Wouldn't you go to your death so that your people could continue to live?"
Emagan blushed.
"First of all, I would do everything to ensure they survive without the cost of my or someone else's death," she admitted.
"Unfortunately, we don't have such opportunities," Keras smiled guiltily. "Mikhail, time is approaching. There is nothing in these ruins that you are talking about."
"There is," I assured. "If it were taken from here, our ship wouldn't be experiencing interference. And the wraith's 'arrow,' whose corpses are on your altar, wouldn't have crashed."
"The sacrifices contributed to this," Aries, who had approached us, stated. "Keras, we've searched the old city. There's nothing here. We need to drive them out and return to the ritual. What if we anger the higher powers because of the delay of the ritual and they send us wraiths?"
"And I see you're really eager to become the leader of the village," Alvar, who had approached us, chuckled.
"It is my duty," Aries declared proudly.
"But if there were another way, without sacrifices, would you accept it?" the Ermen asked.
"Of course," the young man confirmed.
"And you, Keras?" I asked. "If we showed you another planet where wraiths don't come, even though there are no sacrifices there?"
"You want us to leave the lands of our ancestors?" Aries was taken aback. "Keras, they are speaking evil! We need to throw them out through the Wraith Ring! Immediately!"
"I will not go back on my word," he warned. "We still have a little time."
"You should be preparing for the ritual, not wasting time on," Aries looked at us with displeasure, "these adults."
"Aries," Keras reprimanded his countryman. "I will fulfill my duty! And you don't need to remind me of it! I gave my word that they still have time. And they still have it! Then they will leave..."
"Or," I took the word, "we could transport all your villages to a world where Teyla's people live. There is a lot of free space there, wraiths don't come there. Your people can live there without any problems and not kill themselves. After all, we are protecting this world..."
"See," Aries drew Keras's attention. "First they talked about some machine that turns off others. Now they demand that we leave through the Wraith Ring. And what will happen tomorrow? Will they say that dying at the hands of wraiths isn't so bad?"
"We won't say that," I stated. "And it's not about your religion."
"Wraiths have held gatherings of people on my planet thousands of times," Teyla echoed. "And for my people, there is no worse fate than to serve them."
"And they destroyed my world," Alvar recounted.
"And nowhere did you make sacrifices to your ancestors to protect yourselves from them?" Keras clarified.
"No, nowhere."
"Maybe you should have," Aries said. "Then they wouldn't have come to you."
"Calm down," Keras said. "They are our guests."
"Unwanted guests!" said the accomplice and successor of Keras. "You should leave!"
"We'll do it as agreed," I cut off. "You're not the elder here yet. And Keras isn't going to change his mind. So, be a useful guy - help us search."
"No need to search anymore," Alvar stated. "We found the device. That's why I came over."
"Now they'll pass off some ancient stone as what they think protects us," Aries snorted, grabbing Keras by the sleeve. "They need to leave!"
"First, I'll look at what they found," the latter gently freed himself from his comrade's grip and walked forward with Alvar. Teyla and I followed a little behind. The local children, mostly very young - up to ten years old, ran around and gathered at the place where a small crowd had already gathered.
Unremarkable ruins on the outskirts, overgrown with branches of a tree very similar to a weeping willow.
"The grass is flattened," I said, drawing Teyla's attention to the fact that several paths in the tall grass led to the ruins.
"Many people have walked here," she said.
"That's the point," I glanced over my shoulder. Aries and about ten other older kids didn't follow us. They stood, talking about something, and cast unfriendly glances at us. "Be on your guard. I don't like all this."
"Neither do I," Teyla said. "Misha... I won't kill children."
"And you won't have to," I assured. "It's unlikely they'll pierce our suits with their stone arrows - they can withstand a knife strike without tearing or ripping. But still, it's not worth the risk. I think a couple of warning shots into the air or at their feet is quite suitable for a warning. In extreme cases, Selisa will be happy to heal another dozen bullet wounds."
"Agreed," Teyla said. "From your story, I can't understand just one thing. If the Epheons worked on this device ten thousand years ago, why did the field and the ritual appear only five hundred years ago?"
"I have the same question," I admitted. "And, I hope, Ihaar can tell us something more substantial. Keras," I addressed the elder. "In other villages, there are no altars with wraiths, like yours?"
"No," he assured. "We have been guarding their peace for many years. All the best hunters and warriors live with us. If wraiths come, we fight. And the trophies are also ours. In those villages live artisans and children. Including mine."
"Do you have children?" Teyla was surprised.
"Of course," the latter said. "And don't you two have any?"
I coughed into my fist, and Emagan looked away.
"We are not a couple," I explained. "We are friends and allies."
"I understand," Keras said. "It started the same way with my wife. The main thing is to send children to other villages so that the blood in your village doesn't stagnate. Mikhail, Teyla is a very beautiful girl. You would have beautiful children. Believe me, I know women."
It seemed Teyla was about to sink into the ground.
Keras, seeing her embarrassment, fell behind and gestured for me to talk alone. Taking a couple of steps aside, we stopped.
"Mikhail, if this is my last day," he smiled sadly, "then, before you leave, hear my advice."
"Of course," I assured. "What?"
"If you don't find what you're looking for here, or my people don't believe you, leave," he said seriously. "Aries is a good friend. But he is very worried about our safety. He won't let you return."
"I think," I pointed to Aries slowly trudging towards us, followed by children. "He's already set on driving us out."
Keras followed my gaze.
"He won't do anything as long as I'm alive," the young man assured. "And I gave you my word - you will leave our planet very soon. But it's better not to return."
"Unless we are right," I reminded.
"Especially if you are right," Keras became serious. "We have hundreds of people. And many are very religious. Sacrifices are part of our heritage. For five hundred years, it has become our essence. And it will not be easy to abandon it."
"The main thing is to start somewhere, isn't it?" I clarified. "I'm sure we'll find a way to overcome this."
"You're an optimist," Keras chuckled. "Let's go, your people are already waiting for us by the ruins."
As we approached the ruins, we had to push through a crowd of children to get inside. Tayla, Alvar, and Ihaar were already inside.
As was a rather massive device.
It was a gear, quite elongated along its longitudinal axis, positioned with its end facing the ground. One end went into the earth, the other consisted of two truncated cones with rectangular faces. The smaller one was the lid of the larger one. And now, seeing us, Ihaar pressed a button on top.
With a slight hiss, the smaller cone slid upwards along with a round metal sheet, supported from below by half a dozen cylindrical struts. And between them, on a panel glowing with a steady orange light, was the MNT.
"Keros," Ihaar, smiling from ear to ear, gestured with his hands at the device. "Allow me to introduce you to the electromagnetic generator that has been protecting you from the wraiths all this time. And scientific and technical progress, by the way, too."
[Image: A frame from the series. Electromagnetic generator.]
Keros looked at the device, then at all of us, and finally said, "I don't understand."
"It wasn't sacrifices that protected you from the wraiths," I explained. "It was this mechanism. As we said, it turns off advanced technology."
"Look," Ihaar showed the screen of his scanner, covered in markings. "See, it's working? I turned off the generator, and now we can use technology. Just a moment," he brought the scanner to the installation, pressed a few buttons, then, with a satisfied grunt and a simultaneous grimace, sighed. "And like this," he walked over to the installation, thought for a couple of seconds, and pressed a few rectangular edges on the cones. With a slight hiss, the MNT sank inside the device, and the engineer again showed an empty screen, "it's not working. I can do this all day..."
"The wraiths' devices, I hope, don't work?" I asked, nodding at his backpack, where we had put the wraith transmitters collected in the village.
"No, I've disabled the power elements," Ihaar explained.
"This... This can't be true," Keros said, stunned. "Everything... Everything we believed in is a lie?"
"Not exactly," I said. "Probably those who created or activated the device five hundred years ago realized they couldn't protect the entire planet from the wraiths. That big yellow thing in the center is the energy source. And it's probably very depleted. Therefore, only a certain territory is protected from the wraiths. The sacrifices helped you regulate your numbers so that you wouldn't be too many and wouldn't go beyond the suppression field. The wraiths could detect those living outside the field and come for them. But inside the field, they had no chance – neither ships, nor weapons, nor other technologies worked with the field on."
"They wouldn't risk coming at you empty-handed," Tayla added.
"And as we can see, not all advanced civilizations can make a bow and arrows," Alvar chuckled.
The engineer winced, turning off the device again. I looked at the MNT, recalling why it had been useless to the Earth expedition.
"Atlantis, the city we came from, is powered by similar crystals," I said. "But it's severely depleted and won't be suitable for our purposes."
"Yes, the charge there is less than one and a half percent," Ihaar admitted, looking at me. "It will only be suitable for us in extreme cases. To raise the shield for seven hours, or to warm up the engines. But it's a drop in the ocean. Although, if things get really bad, we can certainly take it..."
"And for them?" Alvar asked, nodding at the stunned, silent Keros. "Will it help them?"
"It helped all this time, didn't it?" Ihaar reminded him. "However," he took a step forward and approached the generator closely, "I need to study something here. I can probably expand the electromagnetic field several times if I rework something..."
"This is Ancient technology, isn't it?" I clarified. "Can you figure it out?"
"I'll figure it out," the engineer promised. "The problem here is," he deftly pried open a couple of side panels and showed the contents of the installation, "that the generator was damaged at some point. See, some of the crystals and wiring have been replaced. Fibers are spliced with metal wiring. Some things were never restored... I think it broke down and about five hundred years ago someone fixed it as best they could. But," Ihaar took a laptop out of his backpack, connected an adapter cable to the crystals. He was silent for a few seconds, then added, "So, there's good news and bad news..."
"Start with the bad," I asked.
"At its core, as I said, it's Ancient technology," he said. "If I understand the logic correctly, then... Yes, it started working a little over ten thousand years ago, so this is clearly the generator built by the Epheons. So-o-o... Hmm... Curious... Ah, what if I do this? Hmm... Doesn't work... And like this? Oh, this is interesting..."
"Ihaar," I called to the engineer in a grandmotherly tone, but not too loudly. "We're also interested."
"In short," the Ancient put his laptop on the ground and stood up. "The Epheons built this device to jam only wraith technology. It worked in this mode for a long time until it broke. About a thousand years ago, as I understand it."
"Probably then the wraiths attacked the planet, started collecting the inhabitants," Tayla surmised.
"Yes, and they probably destroyed the city at the same time," Alvar theorized.
"But someone fixed the device," I noted. "And that's not easy."
"It's easy, actually," Ihaar sighed. "The generator failed because someone with clumsy hands tried to get the MNT out of here. But they couldn't, and only caused a short circuit."
"Is it really that difficult to get the MNT out?" I reached my hand between the metal struts, took a set of crystals, and pulled them out. "How can that cause a short circuit?"
"That action doesn't," Ihaar confirmed, tapping his finger on the strut closest to him. "But these are actually power field emitters. A fail-safe, so that one can't pull out the energy source if they don't know how. By the way, it was originally delivered here from Atlantis. And it had a little over seventy percent..."
The very MNT that was used to create human bodies, and then exchanged. Janus... Damn it, I hope you're burning in hell, you terrible bastard.
"This wiring," Ihaar pointed to the mess of fiber-optic and metal wires with insulation that was falling apart at the slightest touch, "is a horror... They clearly fixed it on the principle of 'just get it done.' That's why they fixed it wrong. Originally, the field was five times larger, but after this 'repair'... Well, they not only reduced the field but also activated another mode. That's why all technology is shut down, not just wraith technology. This led to energy overuse and rapid depletion. You can see," he mused, "that the Epheons had spare time to invent different modes."
A thought occurred to me, correcting the initial reason for being here.
"Can you get the generator schematics?" I asked.
"No problem," Ihaar knelt down to the computer and pressed a few keys. "Done."
"Can you fix it? So that it works as it should?"
"I'll do what I can," the engineer assured me, pulling his backpack closer. "Give me a couple of hours and something to drink – I'll restore the field to its original state and bring the field size back to its original state. So... If I understand correctly, the field should have covered the gates too."
"That's logical," Alvar said. "If only wraith technology is shut down, then when they pass through the gates, they would immediately shut down. The soldiers would be disarmed and defenseless, the 'arrows' would break..."
"Thousands of planets can be protected with such devices," Tayla said excitedly.
"Only if you have MNT," Ihaar said. "The device works solely on its energy. And not only because it's a powerful energy source. The generator is tuned to this type of energy and with its help it resonates to suppress energy... " Ihaar turned pale. "Oh, no."
"What did you break?" I asked.
"It was done before me," the engineer snapped, pulling out a cracked and soot-covered crystal from the innards. "See this?"
"What is it?" Keros asked.
"Here are recorded algorithms for counteracting wraith energy signatures," Ihaar said. "The main scheme. The mode for disabling any technology is a backup. So, when the device was damaged, the main scheme burned out. And they activated the backup only because there were no other options."
"Can you fix it?" Alvar glanced at Aryes and his people, who had approached us.
They didn't show hostility, but they didn't look friendly either.
"I could if I knew what protocols were used here," Ihaar sighed. "And I don't. And no one knows – I've looked through Atlantis's databases. Only the Epheons worked with electromagnetic fields; others considered the technology too dangerous, as it suppressed Lantian technology as well."
"So you can't make the field the way it was originally?" I realized.
"Maybe someday," but there was no optimism in Ihaar's voice. "In a hundred years, maybe two hundred or even more..."
"Chaya used an electromagnetic pulse to burn the first-generation nanites," I recalled. "Can we use that installation?"
"We can, if we want to burn everything here," Ihaar sniffled. "I've studied its operation. It's even cruder than what's here... It shuts down everything and is very dangerous for biological organisms. No, it won't work for us. Of course, if someone doesn't want to die faster."
Now it's clear why Chaya did it remotely and why that laboratory no longer works and requires repair.
I need to go into more detail, not rely on others.
"So, you broke the device?" Aryes's voice rang out. "And now we are defenseless?"
He spoke with anger. But the fact that he understood from our words that the device was protecting them already said a lot.
"The main scheme was burned out before me," Ihaar repeated irritably. "I can activate the secondary scheme. I can expand the field... Hmm... Well, twofold, but the energy consumption, of course, will increase."
"How long will the field last?" I asked.
"A hundred years, a hundred and fifty," Ihaar said. "But these guys will have more territory to live in if they want to stay here. I would take the installation to Atlantis, rework it under normal conditions and..."
"You won't touch anything and won't take anything with you!" Aryes declared. The children standing next to him raised their bows, aiming at us. "You only bring trouble!"
"Say that to my face, whippersnapper," Alvar raised his rifle and aimed it at Aryes's head. Several bows were immediately aimed at him. And even a semblance of a crossbow. We could, of course, test who would win, we still have decent ammunition. But the children, some of them, were aiming directly at our heads. I don't think anyone wants to spend the rest of their lives without an eye.
Atlantis can enhance tissue regeneration, but not grow a new organ.
Tayla kept another group of children in her sights, who had flanked us. Ihaar looked around in bewilderment. Keros looked around in surprise, trying to understand what was happening.
As for me...
"You really don't want this," since the device is off, it's easy to activate a personal shield. Just like activating the pulse unit.
I took a couple of steps forward.
"Stay put!" Aryes ordered.
"Lower your bows immediately!" Keros commanded. "These people are helping us!"
"They're not helping anyone!" Aryes roared. "They themselves said that their device doesn't work. So we defended ourselves with sacrifices!"
"We didn't say that," I said, stepping even closer.
"Stay put!"
"Make me," I suggested. "We are friends. And we'll fix your installation, it will protect you as before. No need to quarrel with us!"
"Shoot them in the head," Aryes ordered.
"No!" Keros rushed forward, trying to prevent the terrible... Alvar, cursing, grabbed him by the arm and didn't let him make a noble mistake.
The arrows hit the shield, which flashed green. The projectiles fell at my feet, causing no harm.
"Sorcery!" Aryes shouted.
"Technology," I corrected, raising my hand with the pulse unit and aiming it at Aryes's face. "And now one of them can send you to a not-so-good world."
Slightly moving my hand aside, I fired past Aryes and anyone standing near him.
A blue-white energy charge plunged into an old piece of wall, melting it to the foundation. Aryes and the other children looked at the consequences of the shot with extreme astonishment, then turned their gazes to me.
"If I wanted to, you would all die faster than you could remember your mother," Aryes, though frightened, had enough sense to order his rebels to lower their weapons. "Smart boy. But if you try to start an uprising against Keros again – I'll come back and kill you. Shall I remind you what happens to those who die not through sacrifice, according to your religion?"
"They won't go to a better world," Keros said, breaking free from Alvar's grasp. "Enough! No need for malice! These people are our friends! And they will help us so that we no longer need sacrifices! You saw – while this device," he pointed to the generator, "was working, their technologies didn't work. Like any other. And now it's off..."
"Only until I fix the wiring," Ihaar added. "You don't want this mess to explode one day, do you? I wouldn't want to. There's enough energy here to create a crater a couple of kilometers in radius."
"We are friends," I announced, putting my weapon back in its holster. "And I'm sorry that our acquaintance didn't start off well. But everything can still be fixed. You don't like wraiths, neither do we. So why can't we trade, visit each other, for example? I'm sure we have something to offer you."
"At least concrete-811, so you don't live in trees like animals," Ihaar grumbled. "Look," he nodded towards the stone wall. "Even this is better than your wooden houses. And the ruins here are clearly large, a couple of hundred people could settle here without any problems."
"Live under the open sky?" Aryes was horrified. "If the wraiths come, they'll see us..."
"No one will come!" Ihaar said. "Give me time to deal with this generator, and you'll have plenty of territory to live in. Besides, if the wraiths wanted to search for survivors here, they would have come in spaceships. They forgot about you long ago, deciding not to risk it! The electromagnetic field between the gates and the rest of the planet is a good enough buffer. You can live inside the field for at least a hundred years and want for nothing."
"There isn't much land in the forest suitable for fields," Keros said doubtfully. "If we become more numerous, we won't be able to feed everyone..."
"That's not a problem," I declared. "We'll help you cut down some trees, uproot stumps, and tell you about fertilizers."
"My people will help you," Tayla declared. "We'll show you how to cultivate the land, teach you to get more harvest for your needs."
"And why do you need this? Why help us when you have such great technologies that melt stone?" Aryes asked, looking at the generator. "We won't give you this machine."
"We're not the worst guys in this galaxy," I assured him. "And yes, your question is valid. If it makes you sleep better, then perhaps there is something on your planet that you don't need now and for the next thousand or two years. And we will find it useful. Or, when you have more products, we will gladly exchange them for our medicines, clothes, or knowledge. I'm sure you don't know what a plow is."
"I've never heard that word before," Keros confirmed my assumption, smiling. "But my people will definitely be happy to learn many new things from you. Especially if we have to fight side by side against the wraiths."
"In that case, we all need to take a deep breath and talk in a calmer place," I assured him. "Ihaar, will you be able to fix it while we talk with the elders?"
"If no one tries to shoot me in the eye with a piece of stone and a stick," Ihaar grumbled. "And for the atoms' sake, get the children away. I don't want to run around the whole village later and take back my equipment!"