by Martha Wells
“You know, I really wish the Ancients had done a better job of getting rid of you.” John didn’t think Five was responding to him at all; the low ambient light in the jumper seemed to be getting even dimmer. Maybe he could get One to launch a drone, to blow Five up. It would probably take out this wall of the operations tower, but surely the heat would be enough to destroy whatever was in the box. He hoped. Into the radio, he said, “Bates, fall back to the corridor and close the blast door.”
“That won’t do any good,” Dorane told him, still eerily calm. He added, “The Lantians didn’t want to get rid of me. They wanted to punish me.”
“Oh yeah, that was so unreasonable of them.” Why hasn’t he opened it yet? John thought. Then he looked at Dorane’s hands again. Those hooked claws were too big to be retractable. “You can’t open that container.”
Dorane smiled, his teeth gleaming in the fading light. “Don’t excite yourself, it’s on a timed release. I really did think of every possibility, including the one that I might be incapable of opening it when the time came.”
It didn’t sound like a lie. The ATA was pressing painfully in on John’s head, and something was changing inside the jumper, but he couldn’t tell what it was. “And I’m guessing I won’t just be able to seal the jumper’s hatch.”
“It will react rapidly with oxygen, becoming corrosive. The ship’s shielding won’t hold it in for long.”
Shielding, John thought. It was still getting darker in here.
Darker because the aquamarine glow of the personal shield device was fading. The shield needed an Ancient gene to work, but Dorane’s genetics were changing as the retrovirus altered his body; the shield must be losing its connection to him. When the shield shut down, the little device would fall off Dorane’s chest. John shifted the P-90 to go for a headshot; he couldn’t afford to hit the explosive.
Dorane blinked suddenly, staring at John. He must have felt the shield giving way or read it off John’s expression. Before the glow faded and the shield device fell, he was moving, moving fast. John managed to fire one burst, then he was slammed back onto the jumper floor, Dorane clawing for his throat.
John grabbed his wrists, barely holding him off, thinking, He’s really fast, and he’s really strong. He knew he had hit Dorane in the chest, but the bullets weren’t even slowing him down. And the explosive still lay on the floor in the jumper’s cockpit. He yelled desperately, “Jumper Five, now would be a good time! Launch!”
This time, responding to his urgency, Five’s interior lights flashed on and the console powered up.
Dorane tried to tear away from him, but John dug in with his own claws and held on. He pushed and rolled, and they tumbled backward out of the hatch.
They hit the ramp, then the walkway, and rolled off, slamming into the bay floor. John landed on top, which probably saved him a broken back, but he was winded and dazed.
Above his head, Five slid out of its rack and glided out to hover over the jumper bay’s launch door, open to the ’gate room directly below. It stopped, and John realized the ramp was still open, that the safeties weren’t going to let the jumper drop into launch position. He shouted, “Ramp close, come on, ramp close!”
Dorane threw him off, pushed to his feet, and bolted for the open ramp. It slid shut, sealing itself for launch with a faint puff of air. Dorane tried to stop on the bare edge of the drop, arms flung up. Then he fell.
John heard the thump and the startled shouts from below. Crap, that might not be enough to kill him. The man wasn’t human anymore. Then, still on automatic, the jumper dropped into the ’gate room to take its launch position.
From below, John heard someone exclaim in horror. Yeah, he thought, that probably did it. The jumper would hover a few feet off the embarkation floor, but the forcefield it was using to support itself… John rolled over and shoved himself up, took a couple of staggering steps to the edge of the opening, leaning out and craning his neck to see. Bates ran up to stand beside him.
Squinting against the glare of the brighter light in the ’gate room, John saw McKay, Peter Grodin, and several others standing on the gallery steps, staring at the jumper floating in front of the ’gate. There was a spreading stain leaking out from under it as it still hovered serenely, waiting for a destination. John fumbled for his headset, but Dorane had torn it off in the fight. He told Bates, “Tell McKay to find a destination—a planet with no atmosphere.”
Bates relayed it, and McKay hurried back to lean over the dialing console. It only took him a few moments to pull an address out of the database, but John was watching the jumper’s port. He saw a bright flash from inside.
Bates swore. “The shielding—”
Watching intently, John shook his head. “He said it was corrosive.” He hadn’t said how fast it was. If they just had a minute for the ’gate to dial… He noticed he and Bates were both dripping blood onto the bay floor, Bates from a bullet wound in the arm, and John from the long scratches Dorane’s claws had left on his shoulders.
Then McKay turned to the dialing console and started to hit the symbols, and John felt like something was squeezing his skull from the inside. For a horrified moment, he thought it was the bioweapon, that it had eaten its way through the jumper. Then he realized it was the ’gate. Uh oh. He thought the automated sequence would take care of it, but just in case, he thought at the jumper, launch. When the wormhole opens, launch.
Then the wormhole initiated with a blast of glassy blue energy, the jumper surged forward, and the world turned to white-hot pain.
CHAPTER TWELVE
John had a last moment of awareness, enough to realize he was lying on the jumper bay floor. The light was blinding, but he knew it was Rodney and Teyla who were leaning over him, and he thought it was Carson Beckett standing next to his head, yelling orders at someone. He grabbed Rodney’s arm and tried to ask about the jumper, but he couldn’t get the words out.
Rodney must have understood anyway. “It’s gone, it went through the ’gate,” he said, his voice thick and barely recognizable. Then he looked up at Beckett and shouted, “My God, Carson, will you get off your fat ass and do something!”
John decided that was a good time to let go.
John really expected to be dead, but being dead felt a lot like being in the hospital. Antiseptic odors, tubes and needles in places that tubes and needles should not be, too-bright lights, quiet serious voices with intermittent flurries of frantic activity and arguing. At some point he knew it was McKay standing over him, snapping his fingers at somebody and demanding to see John’s chart, and Beckett telling him, “I would like to remind you, Rodney, that you are not a medical doctor.” Teyla’s anxious face leaning over him, then Ford’s, then a distinct memory of Elizabeth, sitting nearby, her feet propped up on a stool while she read from a laptop.
He remembered all that as he came to gradually in the half-lit gloom of a medical bay. He was lying on his side on one of the narrow beds in the recovery area, a blanket tangled around his waist. He had loose gauzy bandages on his hands, and his left arm was secured to a rail with a light band, but that was probably to keep him from dislodging the several IVs that were stuck in it. Except for that, he felt mostly okay;
the intrusive tubes were thankfully gone, though there was a lingering ache in his throat. He had had a bath at some point and was wearing clean surgical scrubs. He could see into the next bay, where a couple of the medical techs and Dr. Beckett were working at a table spread with open notebooks, data pads, coffee cups, and laptops.
And it was quiet. John went still, listening intently. No whispers, no alien sound that his brain tried to interpret as music, no white noise. Everything he could hear was homey and familiar: the distant crash of waves washing against the city’s platforms, clicking keys as someone typed, hums and beeps from medical equipment both Ancient and Earth-built. The only voices came from further away in the medlab, and were human. He felt his ear cautiously, then ran a hand through his hair. No spines.
John cleared his throat and said, “Beckett?”
Beckett looked up, brows lifted, then said something to one of the techs as he pushed his chair back. He came over to stand beside John’s bed, pulling a portable scanner out of the pocket of his lab coat. “Ah, Major. Are we coherent today?”
“Is that a trick question?” He squinted up at Beckett. “How long have I been out?”
“Six days,” Beckett said, seeming surprised and pleased. Apparently asking if John was coherent hadn’t been a joke. Beckett set the scanner aside and took out a small pocket flashlight. “Hold still a moment and let me check your eyes.”
Expecting to hear that it had been a day or so at most, John was too floored to try to avoid the light. But it was a relief when it just stung a little and didn’t make him want to punch Beckett and throw himself off the bed. Beckett confirmed it, picking up the chart and making a note. “Very good. I think your eyes are quite back to normal.”
“How is everybody?” John didn’t need to ask if he was still dying; he knew what Beckett looked like when people were dying, and this wasn’t it. “Teyla and Ford, everybody who had the mind-control drug—”
“Everyone who was given the drug has completely recovered,” Beckett assured him. “And poor Masterson was the only death from the fighting. There were a number of injuries from the fighting, but everyone’s doing fine now.”
John pushed himself up a little more. “Hey, I can’t hear the ATA anymore. Does that mean…?”
Carson pushed him back down again. “Yes, all physical symptoms are gone. You had us worried for a bit there. We got you on life support just as your body was in the process of shutting down. But that memory core of Zelenka’s had a good deal of information on the various genetic treatments and how to tweak them back to normal for humans and for the Ancients. They did have to pop back to the planet to pick up that download Rodney took from the bastard’s database to figure out exactly what you were given, but once we had that, I was able to start reversing the process.”
John let his head drop back on the pillow. He wasn’t as stiff and sore as he should be, though he could tell he really needed to shave. “I don’t feel like I’ve been unconscious for a week.”
“Oh, you haven’t been unconscious for the past few days,” Beckett said, making some more notes. “We were able to get you up and walking around. But the Ancient genetic treatments had a bit of a side effect in humans that apparently made you extremely, shall we say, loopy, so I doubt you remember any of that.”
“Okay. That’s…weird.” He tentatively flexed his hands, feeling a little residual soreness. “So what happened with the claws? Did they just fall out during all this?”
“Oh, that. No, that took a wee spot of surgery.” John frowned. Beckett tended to pull out the “wee” bit when he was flustered or trying to be reassuring. It was always only a “wee” seizure, a “wee” dose of radiation, a “wee” chunk of shrapnel in your abdomen. Beckett continued briskly, “But don’t worry about it. I did it when I first initiated the other treatments, so your nails would have time to start growing back before you recovered.”
“Oh.” John suspected he was glad he didn’t remember that. And he kept thinking of things he wanted to know more about. “Did Zelenka figure out what was on the memory core that Dorane was so desperate to get?”
“It was his cure, Major.” Beckett’s face turned grim. “Apparently the Ancients needed antidotes for the victims rescued from the repository, and they needed them fast. So they infected the bastard with a few altered strains of his own retrovirus. It was triggered by the altered version of the ATA that he created, or the absence of it. He couldn’t leave the repository for more than a day or so without the full effect setting in, and killing him.” Beckett lifted his brows. “They made a deal with him that if he produced the information they needed, they would give him the specifics of what they had done to him, so he could develop his own cure. He fulfilled his part of the bargain, but they were still trying to decide what to do with him as a permanent solution. There’s no more information on the core. Rodney suspects they were fully occupied by the Wraith at that point and just let nature take its course at the repository. But the recording did have the specifics for the strains of the retrovirus they used.”
He did say it was a punishment, John thought, considering it. “I would have just shot him,” he said finally.
“I’m not a violent man, but it would have saved a lot of trouble,” Beckett admitted.
John had more questions, but Beckett distracted him with an examination that involved multiple scanners, the Ancient MRI machine, and questions about how it felt to be poked in various places. John ended up falling asleep again when they were changing out the IVs.
John felt a lot more awake by the next day, and while taking the bandages off his hands, Dr. Biro filled in some more details for him about the past week.
Sergeant Stackhouse, returned safely from his trading mission, had taken a large and heavily armed team back into the repository three days ago. They had recovered Kolesnikova’s and Boerne’s bodies, and also let McKay do a brief survey of Dorane’s labs. Now that McKay knew what he was looking for, he was able to distinguish between Dorane’s altered gene technology and the real ATA. He had concluded in disgust that most of the equipment that might have been useful in Atlantis was too tainted with the altered gene to risk using. They had taken the drained ZPMs on the chance that some day McKay might figure out how the things were recharged, collected as many spent cartridges as they could so the techs could use them for making new ammo, and managed to salvage Ford’s P-90 and John’s tac vest from the wreckage the Koan had made of their supplies and equipment. Then they had planted C-4 in several strategic locations and blown up the labs.
Biro also told him that Dorane had never had a chance to send jumpers to the mainland for the Athosians, so they had fortunately missed the whole thing. Teyla was out there now, letting them know what had happened, or what had almost happened.
John had also missed the memorial services for Dr. Kolesnikova, Boerne, and Masterson, the Marine who had been killed in the ’gate room.
McKay stopped by later, either out of genuine concern or because he heard John was getting solid food for breakfast, or more probably a combination of both. This actually worked out for the best, since John could handle most of what the medlab considered food, but he didn’t even want to be in the same room with the powdered eggs, and McKay was a convenient means of disposal.
Tucking into the yellow egg mush, McKay told him a lot more about John’s initial treatment and recovery than Beckett or Biro had. The first few days had been much worse than any of the medical staff had implied. The way McKay described it, it had been all out war: Carson Beckett, Earth’s foremost xenobiologist and the man who had invented the ATA gene therapy, against Dorane, the Dr. Mengele of the Pegasus Galaxy. The first day Beckett had just struggled to keep John alive, while Zelenka had hurried to finish reconstructing the damaged portion of the memory core and McKay had set up a copy of Dorane’s database to get Beckett the information he needed. About midway through the third day Beckett had managed to produce the right drugs, and the lab mice he had tested them on had mostly survived, so he had started John on the full treatment. By that night John was breathing on his own again and the antennae spines had started to fall out, and Beckett had collapsed in the next bed over and snored for eight hours.
McKay also filled him in on what the rest of the city had been up to. “Sergeant Bates had your job for a whole day, during which a petition started circulating in the science team demanding that we hold free elections for the position of acting military commander. Apparently Sergeant Stackhouse was a favored candidate. Then Lieutenant Ford was cleared for duty, so things settled down.”
John decided not commenting on that was best, so he just said, “So everybody missed me.”
“Let’s say they prefer your slacker laissez-faire style to Bates’ ‘guilty
until proven innocent’ strategy.”
“At least you guys didn’t try to form a separatist commune again. I don’t think that would look good on my record.”
Scraping the bowl for the last of the egg mush, Rodney lifted his brows. “And did they tell you about the operation? Personally, I don’t believe in it for cats, but after you shredded a diagnostic bed, we thought—”
“Sorry to disappoint you but yes, Carson told me how I got declawed, and we’ve already made all the ‘Dr. Beckett, Extragalactic Vet’ and All Creatures Great and Small jokes.” John self-consciously tucked his hands under his armpits.
Dr. Biro picked that moment to swoop in, saying breezily, “It really was fascinating. You can see if you like, we filmed the whole procedure.” .
John stared at her. “You’re kidding.”
“Of course she’s not kidding,” McKay assured him.
“Why?”
“Oh, because Biology thought it would be fun to show at the Christmas party.” McKay rolled his eyes. “If we can ever contact Earth again, Carson wants the first Nobel Prize awarded in xenobiology. Do you really think he’d pass up this opportunity?”
John looked at Dr. Biro for help, which was probably a mistake. She smiled winningly. “Oh, don’t worry, you can’t really see your face. You were intubated.”
“Oh, well, that’s good.”
McKay looked at him pityingly. “Right, no one’s going to figure out who ‘Patient X, Major, Acting Military Commander, Atlantis Expedition’ was.”
“Rodney, shut up and go away.”
Ford came by later to see how John was, and to report that the Koan who had fled the fighting after Dorane’s death were more interested in running away than in attacking anybody, so on Dr. Weir’s advice he had implemented a “catch and release” policy where the security details stunned and collected them to toss back through the Stargate to the repository’s planet. He was pretty sure they had found all of them by now, though you never knew. With a regretful shrug, he added, “Dr. Weir and Dr. Beckett talked about trying to give them some assistance, but we don’t have the resources to do much more than throw a few crates of food through the ’gate after them. And Dr. Beckett thinks trying to mess around any more with their genetics would just make it worse, that now that Dorane’s not there to mess with their minds that they’ve got a good chance of being okay.”