by Martha Wells
John had to agree. “I think they’ve had about all the ‘help’ they can stand.”
Ford also wanted to apologize for anything he had done while under the influence. He said there was a lot of mutual apologizing going around the city for things people had done to friends and co-workers during the situation. John said in that case he was dropping the charges, so that was okay.
The next day, John got to say goodbye to all the IV stands and escape from the medlab. He was supposed to go to his quarters and rest, but he didn’t think anybody really expected that to happen, so he headed up to the operations tower. John was willing to admit he needed another day or two to recover and he kind of liked padding around in a t-shirt, sweatpants, and old sneakers while everybody else was in uniform and working. But Beckett didn’t want to clear him for duty for another week, which was ridiculous.
Beckett had also told him that he didn’t think anything that had happened would affect the way John’s natural Ancient gene worked, the way the ATA responded to him. John knew he should go up to the jumper bay and make certain, but instead he found himself stopping off in Elizabeth’s office. And once there it seemed like a good time to talk her out of this crazy off-duty for a whole week idea.
Elizabeth, however, refused to budge. John tried everything from rational and pragmatic arguments to wheedling to the cute but wounded puppy expression that had gotten him the go-ahead to do some really crazy things in the past, but nothing worked.
They were in her office, one transparent wall providing a view over the control gallery. Elizabeth was sitting at her desk, her head propped on one hand, and when John realized she was watching his performance as if this was the most entertainment she had had in a month, he decided to give in for now.
“So how’s Dr. Kavanagh? Is McKay riding him into the ground with this?” John noticed Sergeant Bates standing on the gallery outside with a clipboard tucked under one arm, apparently waiting to talk to Elizabeth. John gave him a she likes me best smirk and settled into the chair a little more comfortably, intending to take his time.
“I’m a little concerned about that,” Elizabeth admitted cautiously, from which John inferred that for the past few days that section of the labs had been like a combination snake pit and bear-baiting show. She eyed him a moment. “I’ve recommended that everyone who was affected see Dr. Heightmeyer.”
Kate Heightmeyer was the expedition’s psychologist; John decided not to take the broad hint. He suggested helpfully, “We could all go together, and do that encounter group thing where we talk to each other with hand puppets.”
“That would make a great threat, wouldn’t it?” Elizabeth looked thoughtful. “By the way, I never bought the story that you were cooperating with Dorane. Neither did Peter.” Lifting a brow, she added ruefully, “For one thing, it was exactly the kind of plan you and Rodney would have come up with, like something out of a movie.”
John was actually kind of touched to hear that, but all he said was, “Which movie? One of those old ones with Sydney Poitier and Tony Curtis?”
Her mouth quirked. “I have no idea. But you’re lucky you didn’t have to fool anyone who knew you well and still had possession of their critical faculties.”
John nodded seriously. “So if you ever decide to take over Atlantis, we’ll have to come up with a new and completely innovative plan to thwart you. I’ll put McKay right on that.”
Teyla walked in then, saying, “Dr. Weir, they said you wished to—” Flustered, she halted abruptly, and started to back out of the room. “I’m sorry, I did not realize—”
By the time John said, “Hey, Teyla,” Elizabeth was already on her feet and at the door.
She took Teyla’s arm, drawing her back inside, saying, “Teyla, I just have to—If you could wait for me here—”
Teyla obviously didn’t want to stay but was too polite to just bolt for freedom. In another moment Elizabeth was out the door and Teyla was left standing uncomfortably in the office.
Bemused, John watched her, trying to figure out what was wrong. Teyla was avoiding his eyes, her brow furrowed and her cheeks flushed with embarrassment. He said, “I thought you were on the mainland, catching up with everybody.” If Beckett was actually serious about this no active duty for a week thing, John was half thinking of going out there himself. Watching the kids play, lying on the beach, getting drunk with Hailing and the others around the campfire let you remember that there were places somewhere in the universe where people lived normal lives, without fear, without being hunted. As far as they could tell, none of those places were in this galaxy, but at least it was nice to think that they existed somewhere.
Teyla frowned at the floor. “I was, but I was told Dr. Weir wanted to see me today.”
John was starting to get an inkling of what this might be about. Though one office wall was transparent, Teyla had come from the direction where the curve of the gallery blocked a full view of the room until the last instant; she obviously hadn’t expected to see John here, and Elizabeth had just as obviously lured her back to the city hoping she would. He pushed to his feet so he could face her, perching on the edge of the desk and folding his arms. “Okay. Would you like to tell me what’s wrong?”
Teyla lifted her chin, saying stiffly, “I thought perhaps you would need time… I did not know how these things were done among your people.”
John sighed. “So you went to the mainland to make it easier for me to be incredibly unfair and fire you for the exact same thing that happened to half the Marines and a dozen or so scientists and techs, who are all back on duty now including Kavanagh, who nearly cracked Ford’s skull?”
Distracted, she asked warily, “Why is it called ‘fire’?”
“It’s a figure of speech.” John shook his head. “Look, that wasn’t you.”
Her voice hardened. “That was me. I could feel myself doing it.” Then she shook her head, her expression turning rueful. “And I did not think you would ‘fire’ me. But… I cannot ask you to trust me if I do not feel I can trust myself.” She gestured a little wearily. “I thought I might want to fire me.”
“But Dorane didn’t give you a choice; none of what happened was your idea.” John noticed Bates again, watching them with a line of suspicion between his brows, as if hoping to catch them at something, like making out in the glass-walled office in full view of half the operations staff. He obviously thinks being on my ’gate team is a lot more fun than it actually is. And Teyla had probably reported in detail what Dorane had made her do, which Bates would file away as material to use against her eventually. John had never been able to convince Teyla that selectively leaving items out of your mission reports in order to make life easier for your team leader was not the same thing as lying. “You didn’t have any control over what you were doing.”
“To my people, leaving a companion in that kind of danger—” Teyla’s lips thinned with disgust. “It is as bad as abandoning someone to the Wraith.”
“My people aren’t real thrilled about that either,” John pointed out.
“And it was my hand that gave you the poison that almost killed you. If I could not prevent myself from doing that—”
“Look, at one point I went nuts and ran off and left McKay alone in the repository. He was just lucky the Koan weren’t around.” John could tell he wasn’t going to be able to talk her through this. It was something she was going to have to get through on her own. “I’m not going to argue with you, because you’re too stubborn and we’d be here all day. You’re not fired and that’s final.” He pushed off the desk, straightening up. “Now come here and do the head-butt thing with me.”
“It is not called the head-butt thing,” she said, but her voice roughened and she stepped forward. The Athosian embrace had different shades of meaning John hadn’t entirely figured out yet, though respect was one of them and mutual forgiveness another, as well as expressing simple relief that you were both still alive. He had also never gotten the hang of who put who
se hands on the other person’s shoulders and in what order and who bent their head to touch foreheads first. He managed to fumble the process enough that Teyla actually snorted in amusement.
John led her outside the office after that, so Elizabeth could have it back and Bates could get on with his life. Teyla asked, “Did Dr. Weir really want to see me or was this a trick?”
Rodney was standing at the gallery railing, looking over the ’gate room with the air of a minor tyrant overseeing his domain. John said, loud enough for him to hear, “Elizabeth probably wants you to guilt McKay into not using this to drive Kavanagh over the edge.”
Getting the hint, Teyla widened her eyes innocently at Rodney. “Surely Dr. McKay would not do that.”
“Surely Dr. McKay would.”
Rodney gave them a superior smile. “It’s amusing when you plot against me. Oh, I want to show you something.” He headed off toward the rear of the gallery.
John hesitated. Teyla had been trying to avoid what had happened to her by avoiding him, and John had just realized he was avoiding something too. But realizing it wasn’t enough to make him stop doing it, and he followed Rodney and Teyla over to a laptop set up on one of the consoles.
Rodney sat down and typed rapidly, bringing up a video program. “Zelenka managed to pull this off the memory core while he was reconstructing the data.”
Teyla took one of the other seats, scooting over to see the screen, and John leaned on the back of Rodney’s chair.
A video clip started to play, and Rodney tipped the screen back so John could see it. “It’s too badly damaged to be significant and we have much better visual images of actual Ancients. The best ones, aside from the photos of the Ancient woman they found frozen in Antarctica, are probably the holographic recordings we’ve found here. But this is interesting for one key factor.”
John frowned at the screen, not sure what he was looking for. He recognized the poorly lit underground corridor leading toward Dorane’s shielded lab area. Then three people came into view, a woman with two men flanking her. They were dressed in black and between that, the bad lighting, and the fact that the image hadn’t been meant to display in this format, it was hard to make out much detail. The man closest to the camera looked directly at it and Rodney hit a keystroke, freezing the picture. John started to say, “So what’s the key factor we’re—What the hell?” The image was grainy but John could see that the man looked like him. For an instant the resemblance was uncanny, then he realized part of that was the light and shadow. It was still a little spooky.
Rodney said, “Because of the poor quality of the image, the resemblance seems closer than it actually is. Fortunately he looks directly at the recording device so I was able to do a point by point comparison with the photo in your personnel file—”
“Oh, well, good to know that’s not actually me.” John dropped into the chair next to Rodney and stared at him, incredulous and indignant. “It’s not like you could take my word for it that I’m not a ten thousand year old Ancient who thought it would be fun to hang out here playing tag with the Wraith and watching you guys scramble for answers. And how many times have I asked you to stay out of my personnel file?”
“I did not think it was actually you,” McKay said witheringly. Under John’s suspicious scrutiny, he admitted reluctantly, “Well, not after the first few minutes or so.”
John put his head down on the console, Kavanagh and McKay, with Dr. Heightmeyer and the hand puppets. I am so going to find a way to arrange that.
“Your resemblance to him is obviously a genetic throwback, like the gene itself. But the point is,” Rodney continued blithely, “that it explains a lot.”
“It does not,” John muttered.
“It does.” Teyla sat up straight, staring at Rodney in startled comprehension. “When Dorane first woke from the stasis container, he looked at the Major, and said, ‘you’re human.’”
“Exactly,” Rodney told her. “We thought he was reacting in surprise at seeing us, but he must have been talking specifically to the Major.” He turned to John. “Even though he was tracking our movements, that must have been the first time he got a good look at you. He may have thought, just for an instant, that he was looking at the man from this recording. Or that you were an Ascendant. According to Dr. Jackson’s experiences, they can appear in their original corporeal forms. Then he realized you were human.”
“It must have brought back the memories of his battle with the Ancestors,” Teyla said thoughtfully.
“It explains why he wanted to kill you at first sight,” McKay added. “As opposed to the usual reasons why people want to kill you at first sight.”
John sat up, admitting reluctantly, “Okay, it does explain that. Is there anything else on the recording?”
“No, it fuzzes out right after this.” Rodney frowned at the screen. “I think he must have blown up the camera with his mind, or something.”
John looked at the screen again, wondering at the motives of those people, so long dead. Or Ascended, or whatever. Maybe part of Dorane’s desire for revenge had come from the fact that the Ancients had left him to rot in the repository. Faced with the Wraith advance, they had just filed him away as not important enough to bother with. Unless making it clear to Dorane that he was a minor irritant at best had been some Ancient’s idea of the ultimate punishment. Considering the effect it had evidently had on him, it just might have been.
John left Rodney and Teyla still searching through the few damaged images from the core’s display. It was time to stop avoiding this.
He went up to the jumper bay. It was quiet and unoccupied, which was perfect. He wanted to do this alone, just in case Beckett was wrong. Half the expedition either didn’t have the Ancient gene or the ATA therapy, and losing it wouldn’t mean he couldn’t do his job. But it would mean he couldn’t fly the jumpers. If they weren’t able to contact Earth, it might mean he could never fly again. It would mean a lot of things he wasn’t willing to give up.
He picked Jumper One for luck; it was the one he had first tried to fly, the one that had gotten him to the hive ship and back when he had barely known what he was doing with it.
But when he stepped into the cockpit and sat down, it happily powered up, adjusted the seat and the lighting for him, popped up several sensor screens when he thought about them and then tried to hand him a life sign detector. It was in its way as big a relief as Jumper Five carrying the bioweapon away through the ’gate; Atlantis still knew him, and everything was all right.
About the Author
Martha Wells is the author of seven fantasy novels, including Wheel of the Infinite, City of Bones, The Element of Fire, and the Nebula-nominated The Death of the Necromancer. Her most recent novels are a fantasy trilogy: The Wizard Hunters, The Ships of Air, and The Gate of Gods, published in hardcover by HarperCollins Eos in November 2005. She has had short stories in the magazines Realms of Fantasy, Black Gate, and Stargate Magazine, and in the anthology Elemental by Steven Savile and Alethea Kontis. She also has essays in the nonfiction anthologies Farscape Forever and Mapping the World of Harry Potter from BenBella Books. Her books have been published in eight languages, including French, Spanish, German, Russian, Italian, Polish, and Dutch, and her web site is www.marthawells.com.
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