Ladon nodded. “And you were able to get good data?”
“We were able to get data, though I wouldn’t call it ‘good.’” Dahlia sorted through her papers again. “Yes. Here’s the transcript, or at least the best transcription we could manage. As you see, it’s incomplete — power was slowly fading throughout the transmission, and cut out altogether even before the captain’s segment was finished.”
“Can you tell why?”
“I’m not even sure if that’s exactly what’s happening,” Dahlia answered. “It might be a problem with the equipment, or with the power supply; it might even be something as simple as a dust cloud between us and them. But — well, you see that the entry refers to a transmission to us, made shortly after they signed off on Remembrance Day. We never received that.”
“And you would have expected to? Even if they were already having problems?”
“I think so,” Dahlia said. “This is a secondary system, a backup. The main communicators are a priority system.” She hesitated. “Also… It’s been pointed out that main communications is under direct crew control, while the log update is sent automatically. If there were a problem on the ship —“
“Sabotage, you mean,” Ladon said. “Or mutiny.”
Dahlia nodded. “Especially if the people involved weren’t particularly technical, they might not think to disable the log update.”
Ladon leaned back in his chair. It was a possibility — it was always a possibility; that was how Genii politics worked. But he had chosen captain and crew carefully, would have sworn that most of them were loyal to him, and the rest were too eager to be part of the adventure to risk losing their place. “We’ll keep that in mind,” he said, and scanned the transcript again. “This says they were diverting to Inhalt? To investigate Ancient ruins?”
“Yes.” Dahlia grimaced. “We made a mistake in the protocol, I’m afraid. Our transmissions take so much power that we agreed that we would only respond to a request like that if we needed to countermand it. If the Pride received no answer, Bartolan could assume we agreed with the plan.”
“Inhalt.” Ladon reached for the atlas that lay on the sideboard behind his desk. “That has a Stargate, doesn’t it? Yes. We need to send a team out right away, in case the Pride made it there. And we need to let Atlantis know their change of plans.”
“I’ve already asked our communications crew to set up contact,” Dahlia said. “Will you delay the announcement?”
“No.” Ladon shook his head. “We can’t prevent things from going wrong sometimes, and our people mustn’t expect it. What we can do — what we must do — is make every effort to fix it. That they can expect.”
~#~
Bartolan stood in the open side lock of the Pride of the Genii, staring out over the plain where they had landed. Esztli had done a good job to bring them down on the top of this low plateau, particularly when he had collapsed immediately afterward and been rushed to the infirmary. Innyes had diagnosed him with simple exhaustion, which was a relief, and an even greater one when Esztli woke up and proved that his natural ATA gene remained untouched. But that was about the limit of the good news on that front. Esztli, Orsolya, and Innyes were still able to communicate with the ship, and Orsolya had worked out a way to keep the systems activated, but none of the others who had recovered retained more than a shadow of the artificial or enhanced gene. Automatically, he stroked the edge of the lock, the Pride’s hull warm under his fingers. He missed the ship, which he had not expected, caught himself worrying at its absence like a man probing a missing tooth. Worse, three of the crew were dead, and a fourth, a senior technician, hung between life and death, wracked with recurring fevers no matter what Innyes did.
He put that aside and surveyed the field beyond the ship. The gun crew had established a perimeter: the electric fencing glowed faintly even in the daylight, tracing a semicircle that used the ship’s hull as its base. As he watched, a section winked out and a couple of the crew crossed it carrying water containers. They had set up a couple of tents inside the perimeter, as well as building an improvised watchtower. The gun captain, Hajnal, had insisted on hauling out one of the Ancient weapons and setting it on the tower; two members of the gun crew watched with it, along with two more on top of the Pride, but so far there had been no sign of any living things larger than a tree rat. Presumably there were ground rats, but if so, they had fled the landing area never to return. It seemed strange for the planet to be so empty. There were no birds, nor even any insects, though he supposed he should be grateful for the latter.
His watch chimed softly, and he straightened his back. Time for inspection, he thought, and made his way carefully down the ramp. For all that he had considered himself to be recovered, he was breathing hard by the time he reached the medical tent, and paused, leaning on a guy rope, to catch his breath before he ducked through the tent flap.
Inside, it was dimly lit, the air pleasantly cool and scented faintly with healing herbs. Two of the cots at the front of the tent were empty since yesterday, but those were for the crew members who were already almost recovered. At the rear of the tent, translucent panels had been hung to give a half dozen more cots the illusion of privacy, and he could see that Innyes and most of her staff were busy in one of them. That had been where the technician Ennen had been lying, but even as he swallowed hard and started toward them, Innyes came to meet him.
“I’m sorry, Captain. We couldn’t save him.”
“You did what you could.” The platitude was sour on his tongue; from her expression, it didn’t offer Innyes much consolation, either.
“Shall I arrange a burial detail?”
“No.” Bartolan shook his head. It was one thing to leave behind the bodies of men killed in combat; in a firefight, it was often impossible to retrieve the dead, and if you had time to bury the bodies, at least the Stargate offered the remote hope that their bones might one day return home. But here, where there was no Stargate, no way to reach them except by starship — “No,” he said again. “Put him in cold storage with the others for now. We’ll revisit that choice if we have to.”
“Very good.” Innyes moved to the field station, washing her hands to the elbow with the strong brown soap they used for surgery.
“You think this is still contagious?
”Highly.” Innyes flicked water from her hands, making Bartolan take a step back, then dried them vigorously. “It’s been better since we got the sickest people off the ship, but I’m still seeing flare-ups among people I thought were well over it. I can only think they’re being reinfected.”
“So we’re not developing any kind of immunity,” Bartolan said.
“Not that I can see.” Innyes stopped, sighing. “Well, perhaps some, the reinfections don’t seem to be as serious as the original illness, but — I would have expected more people to be completely free of this by now.”
“Any progress on identifying it?”
“Not to speak of. It’s airborne, I’m reasonably sure of that, and it somehow deactivates the artificial ATA gene. But we knew that already.” She shook her head. “I’ve never run across anything like it. And, before you ask, it could be native to Teos, I suppose, but we’ve been trading with them for a hundred years. I’d be surprised if something showed up now. Unless it was a new mutation…”
Her voice trailed off, and Bartolan cocked his head to one side. “Possible?”
“Just possible,” Innyes conceded. “And I’ll pursue that as soon as this lot is out of danger. In the meantime, though, I’d like to run a full decontamination protocol on the Pride.”
That would mean moving everyone out of the ship for at least a few hours. Bartolan grimaced. Yes, it left them vulnerable, but Baidu seemed to be singularly lacking in dangerous lifeforms. “I think it’s a good idea. Talk to Orsolya, have her set it up.”
“Very good.” Innyes hesitated. “With your permission, Captain, I’d like to handle it myself.”
“Any particular reaso
n?” Bartolan kept his voice mild.
“Nothing significant, Captain, it’s just —” She broke off, tried again. “She was one of General Karsci’s people before she joined the ship.”
And there it was again, Bartolan thought, the fear that lay behind all their planning. You could never be entirely sure where people’s true loyalties lay. Especially when they had had to choose his crew not for loyalty, but for the possession or absence of the ATA gene. Trust no one: the message hung before his eyes again, and he dismissed it with a sigh. “All right, you take charge of the decontamination. Have you had any luck reestablishing the gene therapy?”
Innyes sighed. “Not yet. My first attempt caused the patient to have a violent relapse, so I’m waiting until I have someone who I’m sure is completely recovered before I try it again. I’m also investigating whether it would be better to make the attempt on someone who has the recessive gene. In theory, that should be more effective than trying to reestablish the artificial gene once it’s been disabled.”
“Is there a reason you won’t try both?” Bartolan asked.
“I don’t have that much of the viral medium,” Innyes answered. “No one expected anything like this to happen, we never counted on having to re-do the gene therapy on the fly, so to speak. If I can reestablish the gene — and that’s still a big if — I’ll only be able to help the most essential crew.
Bartolan swore under his breath. Still, that was better than nothing — if she could make the therapy work again. “Keep me posted,” he said, and turned back toward the ship.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE JUMPER EMERGED from the wormhole to hang for a moment in Atlantis’s gate room. It was day again, late afternoon by the quality of the light, and Airman Salawi’s voice spoke in John’s ear.
“Welcome back, Colonel. Hold one moment, please, while Jumper Two clears into the hangar.”
“Roger that.” John worked his shoulders. After the encounter with the Travelers, they’d continued on their proposed course, but their scans had picked up nothing of use. He hoped one of the others had found something — or, better still, that Hammond’s hyperdrive was back in service, and she could follow the Pride’s course more closely. “Is everyone else back?”
“You’re the last one in, sir,” Salawi answered. “And you’re cleared to enter the hangar.”
“Thanks, Salawi.”
John gave them a few hours downtime before dragging the teams back into a briefing — he needed a real meal and a shower and a few minutes to get his head together, and rushing things wasn’t going to find the Pride any faster. Still, it was hard not to hurry, and when he returned to the briefing room, he could feel the same tension in the others. To his relief, Carter was there already, and he nodded a greeting.
“Colonel.”
“Colonel.” She lifted the lid on her travel mug, added another packet of sugar. “Before you ask, I’ve got some bad news for you. Hammond’s hyperdrive is still down.”
“Seriously?” That was McKay, looking up from his laptop. “Maybe I should take a look at it.”
“Only if you can pull a few grams of palladium out of your pockets, or if you like watching the 3D printers.” She looked back at John. “We cracked some circuit boards in the repair process. My people are manufacturing new ones.”
“Got you.” If it had been him, John thought, he would have been annoyed at his crew for screwing up what should have been a standard repair, but Carter’s tone was perfectly even.
“On the other hand,” she went on, “we’ve got some more intel from the Genii. It seems they were able to make some sense out of the signal they received.” She opened her laptop, and touched keys to light the main screen. “This is their transcript of the signal — it’s an automated transfer of log data, and unfortunately incomplete. The main thing is, the Pride reported changing course to investigate a planet called Inhalt, P4M-332. Dr. Kusanagi and Dr. Sommer were able to bring up a little more at the end of the signal, but it doesn’t seem to add anything to what the Genii have already given us.”
McKay squinted at the screen. “So they changed course? We’ve been looking in the wrong place all this time?”
“Not entirely,” Carter said. She touched keys again, and a second image appeared, showing the two course lines, one heading for the Genii homeworld, the other headed toward Inhalt. “There’s considerable overlap, especially here at the beginning. I calculate that we’ve effectively scanned about a third of the course.”
The image changed, shading that section in pale blue. Lorne said, “Colonel, can we assume the Genii have already sent a team to Inhalt?”
“They have.” Carter glanced at her laptop. “According to last report, their team was unable to raise the Pride. Inhalt is currently uninhabited, so they’re not getting any help from locals.”
“P4M-332 does not look like a very pleasant planet,” Zelenka said, consulting his own tablet. “A cold desert by the Stargate, scrubland as you travel toward the equator, tundra and glaciers toward the poles. If the Pride were forced down there, there would be no local resources for them to draw on. They could be in serious trouble.”
It sounded a lot like the planet where they had found Avenger in the first place, John thought. He wondered if the Genii were aware of that, then put the thought aside. “How thoroughly can the Genii team search the planet? If the Pride came down on the other side of the planet, say, or close to the poles, do they have sensors that can find her?”
“They’re being cagey about that,” Carter said. “The report says ‘no result.’”
“They could certainly pick up any transmission from the Pride,” Zelenka said. “But if there was no signal — I don’t think the Genii have the ability to scan an entire planet.”
John bit his lip, considering his options. On the one hand, it would be useful to be sure that the Pride wasn’t crashed somewhere that the Genii couldn’t see her; useful, too, to know just what the limits of Genii technology were. The only down side was having to scramble another jumper crew, and they were ready for that. And if the Pride couldn’t communicate, the odds were that her crew was in bad shape, too — all the more reason so hurry. “All right,” he said. “Let’s contact Mr. Radim and offer him the use of a jumper crew to scan the planet. Who’s up next, Major?”
“Oliver and O’Hara. Jumper Six is ready.”
“Have them stand by until we get a go-ahead from Radim.”
“Yes, sir.” Lorne paused. “Do we wait until they’re back before we try to follow this new course?”
“Yeah.” John looked at McKay. “That’ll give McKay a chance to work out how best to cover the areas.”
“Please.” McKay rolled his eyes. “I can do that in my sleep.”
“You may have to,” John said, and saw the flicker of a grin cross the scientist’s face.
“There is something else to consider here,” Zelenka said. “I have been looking at this transcript, and — it’s the download of the captain’s log, yes? An automatic transmission, which cuts out about a third of the way through. But it mentions that the captain asked permission for this course change. I assume, Colonel, that the Genii didn’t receive that request, or we wouldn’t have been sent off in the wrong direction?”
“I asked them that,” Carter said. “No, they did not receive that transmission. They were cagey about that, too, but my impression is that they were worried about it.”
“And that means?” John prompted, when neither one of them seemed inclined to continue.
“I would like to know why that transmission was not received,” Zelenka said. “Or why it was not sent, if that’s the case. And, of course, why the automated signal cut off. It raises the possibility of sabotage on board the Pride.”
“They are Genii,” McKay said. “Well, what? That’s how they do things.”
“Yeah, but we’ve got Radim actually asking for help,” John said. “We don’t want to screw that up if we can help it.” He looked around the table.
“All right. We’ll contact Radim, see if he wants us to send a jumper to P4M-332. The rest of you, get some sleep. We’ll head out again first thing in the morning.”
~#~
Ladon rested one finger on his lips as he stared at the screen. Sheppard stared back at him, familiar crooked smile hovering on his lips as he laid out his offer.
“So we can send a jumper to P4M-332 — sorry, Inhalt — and take a good look around, make sure that the Pride hasn’t crashed somewhere out of reach of your people. We can check in orbit and in the rest of the system, too.”
They’re not in orbit. Ladon pressed his finger more firmly against his lips — there was no point in letting Sheppard know what their capabilities were — then dropped it with a sigh. “Colonel Sheppard. I appreciate your offer, and am glad to accept it.”
He saw Sheppard blink, and visibly swallow whatever argument he had been going to make. “Ok. Right. We’ll send a jumper out and let you know as soon as we have some results.”
“Thank you, Colonel,” Ladon said, and nodded for the technician to cut the transmission.
To his right, Dahlia stirred. “Do you think that’s a good idea? I mean, we are ninety percent certain that the Pride did not land there.”
“You said yourself, if communications were down, our team wouldn’t be able to find them on the far side of the planet.”
“Yes, but I also said that it was highly unlikely that all the communications systems would be down at the same time. If nothing else, they were well supplied with our standard emergency sets, and those would reach the Stargate from any point on the planet.”
“I know. But we need to be sure.”
“We are sure,” Dahlia said. “And we don’t need to owe the Lanteans anything.”
Stargate Atlantis #24 Page 14