by Graham, Jo
“Colonel Carter?”
“Yes?”
This wasn’t where Ronon would have chosen to have this conversation, but he doubted he’d get another chance. “I wanted to thank you. For asking me to join the Hammond.”
“The offer stands,” Carter said, abruptly serious. “All you have to do is say the word.”
Ronon paused. A part of him still hadn’t believed it, assumed it had just been an excuse to keep him close to Atlantis, not running off to do something stupid. But it had been a real offer, a real choice—a real option, to be… someone new. Again. He dipped his head. “I’m going with the city. But—thank you.”
Carter nodded. “You’re welcome.”
* * *
There seemed to be more medical supplies than would fit in the supply cabinets, which wasn’t really a bad thing, but which had Jennifer turning boxes around like puzzle pieces trying to get them all to fit somewhere. At the sound of footsteps she shoved the box she was holding until she could jam it into place, and then looked up. “Yes, what can I—oh, General O’Neill.”
They weren’t exactly in shape for an inspection, and she glanced apologetically around at the clutter. “We’re working on getting all this squared away.”
“In your own time,” O’Neill said. He came over to her side of the room, eyeing the cabinet as if a little worried that it would rain bottles of antibiotics down onto his head. “We had a bunch of stuff brought in when I was supposedly going to be running this place. I hope you can use it.”
“I hope we can’t,” Jennifer said. “But we probably will, so I appreciate it.” She nudged a box with her foot out of the middle of the floor where it was probably creating a workplace hazard and tried to look like they weren’t in the middle of chaos. “What can I do for you?”
“Actually, I was just looking for some aspirin,” O’Neill said. “The IOA gives me a headache.”
“Tell me about it,” Jennifer said. “First we’re not going back to Atlantis, and then Atlantis is going to be a military base, and now ...”
“Now you’re on your way back to the Pegasus galaxy,” O’Neill said mildly. “Which is a good thing, right?”
“It is,” Jennifer said. “And I’m glad things turned out the way they did. It’s just that I’m a little tired of getting jerked around.” She scanned the shelf, hoping that she hadn’t buried the over-the-counter painkillers behind things she was probably never going to use. “You want me to take a look? I could probably get you something better than aspirin.”
“I’m used to this headache,” O’Neill said. “I work with the IOA a lot.” He perched on the end of one of the exam beds while she unearthed what she was looking for. “You should probably get used to getting jerked around,” he said. “That’s politics.”
“I don’t like politics,” Jennifer said.
“I don’t like politics either,” O’Neill said. “But you don’t have to play politics. It’s not your job. It is mine, unfortunately.” He rubbed his temple.
“Better you than me,” she said, handing him two aspirin in a paper cup. “Half the time I feel like they’d like us to sit out there and not do anything, and the other half of the time their ideas about how we should treat Wraith prisoners—”
“That’s not new,” O’Neill said.
“That doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
To her surprise, he looked almost approving. “No, it doesn’t mean you have to like it,” he said. “It’s not your job to like it.”
“It’s my job to figure out something to do about the Wraith.” It was easier at first, when she could think of the Wraith as fairy-tale monsters. It had become all too clear these last few months, working so closely with Todd and his scientists, that they were people. Scary people who had to feed on other people to live. There weren’t any good answers for what to do with that.
“No, it really isn’t,” O’Neill said. “It’s your job to be a doctor.” He considered her. “Not having second thoughts about going back, are you? You’ve done good work out there.”
“Thank you,” Jennifer said. “I really feel like we’ve made a difference. It’s just that there are all these choices that aren’t mine to make, and I never know what I’m going to be allowed to do, or what I’m going to be expected to do—”
“That’s true,” O’Neill said. “There are always people making decisions you can’t control. But you decide what you’re willing to do. What you can live with. At the end of the day, that’s the only thing you can control.” He shrugged. “I don’t think the answer is to not be out there doing anything.”
“I don’t either,” Jennifer said, and she realized as she said it that she actually felt pretty sure of that.
“What?” he asked when she didn’t go on.
“Did you really just tell me to do what I think is right out there, no matter what anybody wants us to be doing?”
“I would never say that,” O’Neill said, climbing down from the exam bed. “Of course.” He headed out, and then stopped in the doorway without turning around. “But I wouldn’t expect anything different.”
He walked out and was gone, and Marie replaced him in the doorway, her arms full of boxes. “Where do you want these?” she said.
“There’s some room in the back corner cabinet,” Jennifer said. “See what you can do.” She looked over the rows of stocked cabinets, over-stocked cabinets. They’d be ready for whatever they found back in Pegasus. At least, they’d be as ready as they were ever going to be.
* * *
John’s headset crackled, Mr. Woolsey’s voice, oddly formal. “Ready, Colonel Sheppard?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be.” John leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes, feeling around him the familiar thrum of power.
Visualize the city, resting on the waves. That was easy. He had looked outside one last time before he came down, a golden summer morning, just shy of ten o’clock. Seagulls turned and fought in the air, and in the distance the hills of Oakland were not shrouded in fog. A perfect day, a beautiful day.
The Earth turned beneath them, the dawn line racing ahead across the Pacific, Hawaii in bright morning, Singapore wrapped in night, glittering with a thousand lights. The moon waxed, almost in opposition to the sun, a bright disk almost full, gravity pulling in the opposite direction. Invisible lines of force surrounded them, charted out in lines of blue fire. Were they made by the city or by him? John couldn’t tell. Was it that he saw it and the city read it, or that the city spoke to him?
This place, it whispered. This moment. This precise second, this tiny coordinate in space. It filled him, encompassed him, as though he stood on the fulcrum of the universe. He was the city and the city was him.
Ready to lift. Engines fired beneath the surface, water rushing away from ducts and vents, simple as moving his hand. The cloak faded and died, the shield taking its place, and for a moment, for all of eight seconds, the City of the Ancients stood like a mirage off the coast of California, shining and brilliant.
There were voices far away, Woolsey and Zelenka, Rodney saying something. They didn’t matter. Engines online, inertial dampeners engaged, and the city began to lift, like spreading his own wings. It was easy, easy as those dreams of flight everyone has as a teenager, when suddenly you can soar effortlessly as a young swallow. Air rushing past his face, sea birds wheeling away in startlement. On the hills cars pulling over, people shading their eyes for a moment at the brightness.
Then they were falling away, people and bridge, hills and city and ocean, falling away swiftly, silent except for the mighty rush of wind. Tiny points, tiny moments in time left behind.
Above, the stars were not a field, but an ocean of infinite depth, millions of bright suns each moving in their extraordinary dance, every point relative. For a moment there was the dizzying sensation of the switchover, as from a microscope to a telescope. The universe stretched out before him in all its intensity, glittering for a moment whole and complete, larger than
the human mind could encompass. His couldn’t. Neither could the city’s. And so it was folders and subsets, a million streaming datapoints broken down into usable information, aggregated and annotated into sense.
Rodney’s voice, in some distant place. “We are in a stable orbit, 536 miles up.”
Below, the Earth turned as they rushed east, dashing through day toward evening. Africa came into view across the broad Atlantic, night following after. India glittered on the horizon, the lights of Mumbai shining into space.
“Goodbye to Earth,” Zelenka said softly.
The stardrive was coming online at his thought, like unfolding his legs to walk after a week in the infirmary, vectors and directions, force points and gravity wells resolving themselves in his mind as a sure and steady path. Within, systems checked and rechecked, power flowing through conduits like the nerves of his own body.
Below, at a lower orbit, Daedalus and Hammond swam like pilot fish following after a whale.
“Godspeed, Atlantis,” Colonel Carter said.
“We’ll see you in twenty days,” Colonel Caldwell said crisply.
John’s voice was rusty, gone, lost somewhere in the depths of what was. Arms and legs and beating heart were only a tiny bit, the smallest part of his body. He was Atlantis. And doing this was like taking a step.
The hyperspace window opened, a bright flash against the stars, and Atlantis stepped through.
Chapter Twelve
Castaways
Six Days Later
Atlantis floated in deep space, a bright point of light among the scattered stars. Here, at the leading edge of the Pegasus Galaxy, the suns were rare and far apart, and habitable worlds more so. Finding one within the very limited range of Atlantis’ sublight engines was like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Zelenka scrubbed both hands through his dirty hair, watching the screen fill and refill with incoming data. There were times now when he even dreamed in English, but at the moment he was so tired that the only words that filled his tongue were Czech. He had to blink hard to summon up even the simplest translation, and he felt as though the air had turned to syrup, dragging at his body. How long had it been since he’d slept? No, that was a dangerous thought, led to how much he wanted to sleep, and that was a very bad thing…
He reached for the mug of coffee instead, ropy with far more sugar than he liked, swallowed fast to keep from tasting it. On the screen, the datafall paused, reformed into an interim analysis, and he leaned forward as though that would help him understand it better. This was the first system—no, the second, the one with the brighter sun, and he frowned, studying the numbers. Nothing new, he thought, but couldn’t shake the sense that he was missing something. He stared at the screen for a moment longer, then typed in the command that continued the scan. There was something, something there that made a difference…
“How’s it going, Doc?”
Sheppard had come up so quietly that Zelenka jumped, a Czech curse escaping before he realized who it was.
“It goes,” he answered, and was annoyed at how hard it was to find the English words. “We are still scanning, assessing the data. And Dr. McKay?”
“Still down in the hyperdrive,” Sheppard answered.
“A waste of time,” Zelenka said, and shook his head, realizing he’d spoken aloud. “Sorry—”
“No, you’re probably right,” Sheppard said. “But you know Rodney.”
In spite of himself, Zelenka smiled. “Yes. He will find a miracle, only it will blow up a small sun, or open a wormhole to another reality…” He was babbling, he thought, and shook his head again.
“When did you last get some sleep?” Sheppard asked.
Zelenka shrugged, pushed his glasses up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “If I worry about that, we will find nothing.”
Sheppard eyed him for a moment, then looked past him to the Air Force sergeant working at the end console. “Taggert.”
“Sir?” She was a raw-boned blonde a good ten centimeters taller than Zelenka, dark roots showing at the parting of her hair. Zelenka stared at her, wondering what she had planned to do about it in the Pegasus galaxy.
“Gimme.” Sheppard held out his hand.
Taggert blinked once, then stood up to rummage in the pockets of her BDUs, came up at last with a small silver tube. “Here you go, sir.”
“Thanks.” Sheppard unscrewed the top, shook a pair of tablets into the palm of his hand, and held them out to Zelenka. “These’ll help.”
Zelenka took them dubiously.
“Caffeine,” Sheppard said.
Zelenka shook himself, and reached for his cup, swallowed the tablets with the rest of the disgusting coffee. Immediately, he felt a headache begin, but knew that was psychosomatic.
“OK,” Sheppard said. “Got a minute?”
Zelenka looked back at the console, but there was nothing he could do until the latest dataset finished downloading. “Yes.”
“Give me an update,” Sheppard said, and gestured for them to move further down the line of displays.
Zelenka sighed, but pushed himself out of his chair, followed Sheppard until they were out of earshot of the skeleton crew still monitoring the displays. He leaned against the nearest railing, grateful for its support, and rubbed his eyes again. “Well. We have scanned the first system thoroughly, and, while we are still processing the data, the planets don’t look so tremendously promising. Air, yes, we think; landmass is present, not so much water. The data from the second system are still coming in, but the sun is very bright, and that means too much radiation—” He stopped abruptly, letting his glasses fall back onto his nose. That was what he had seen, the thing he had missed. He pushed himself away from the railing, slipped past Sheppard without a word and flung himself back into his place at the console, fingers dancing as he called up the first-run analysis.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Yes, yes!”
Sheppard moved warily to join him, but Zelenka ignored him, spinning in his chair to face the other scientists. “Miko, Sergeant Taggert, see if you can move the core analysis to the top of the queue, and get me an enhanced version of the magnetic field scan. And anything else we have on the atmospherics.”
“Got something?” Sheppard asked, and Zelenka couldn’t hold back his grin.
“Yes. Yes, I think so. I said, the sun puts out too much radiation, but there are things that stop that, yes? Even on Earth, we have too much solar radiation if it wasn’t for the Van Allen belts, the magnetic field of the planet. But see here.” He pointed to the screen, to the numbers glowing green at the top of the list, and could have laughed aloud at Sheppard’s dubious stare.
“OK.” Sheppard drew the word out.
“This planet has a bigger magnetic field than Earth,” Zelenka said. “Much bigger. Probably the core is larger or hotter, but we don’t know yet. So the radiation does not matter so much. Maybe not at all. And the planet has seas, big ones.”
“So you’re saying you’ve found us a planet?” Sheppard straightened, a new alertness in his face.
“Maybe.” Zelenka touched keys again, inputting a new set of search parameters. The go pills were hitting him, the exhaustion fading; he felt alive again, bright and clever and able to save the day. “But—yes, I think this one is a possibility. Everything else looks good. And everything on the magnetic field—I think it will be enough.”
He looked up, smiling, and saw the look of relief on Sheppard’s face, before the commander’s mask was back in place. Sheppard smiled back, a real smile, not the wincing grimace that showed up sometimes in meetings, and tapped Zelenka lightly on the shoulder.
“Nice work, Radek.”
“Thank me when I am absolutely sure,” Zelenka said, and turned back to his console.
* * *
There was no sign of the kitten in the main room. Rodney frowned, hoping against hope that Jennifer had closed the animal in one of the bedrooms, but a quick search made it almost certain that he
had felt something brush past his ankle as the door slid back. He groaned—God, he was tired, and there was still so much work to do just to get the city’s power adjusted so that they could get wherever they ended up going… But he couldn’t leave Newton—Schrodinger—roaming loose.
There was no sign of the cat in the hallway, either. Rodney swore under his breath, decided to turn left just because the corridor was longer and didn’t dead end, and he was fairly sure the cat wouldn’t choose the easy way. Maybe he could find someone to help him look—Jennifer, of course, but she was still in the infirmary dealing with what he was sure were purely hypothetical illnesses brought on by being stuck on the edge of the Pegasus Galaxy with no hyperdrive and no obvious place to land unless Zelenka got off his ass and found something. And really, he himself ought to be working on that, only he’d been up for eighteen, no, nineteen hours straight trying to re-route power so that if they did find a planet they would have a hope in hell of landing safely, and finally that annoying Air Force captain, the Ancient technology specialist, what’s-her-name, Mac-something, had told him flatly to go to bed before she called in the Marines. And there was no reason to imply he was taking amphetamines. Not only were they contraindicated for someone with his blood pressure issues, they gave him terrible headaches and they made him irritable.
He had reached the end of the corridor, and there was no sign of Schrodinger/Newton.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he said aloud, and turned through a full three hundred sixty degrees, hoping to see something he’d missed. Not that that was very likely, in the beautiful and entirely uncluttered Ancient corridors, and he hesitated, trying to decide whether he should search the weird little stairhead lounge or the storage hall first.
“McKay?”
That was Ronon’s voice, coming from the lounge, and Rodney turned toward it with some relief. Maybe he could talk Ronon into helping, though Ronon’s ideas of catching small animals probably involved stunners. And roasting them afterwards.