by Jo Graham
They sprinted to the end of the catwalk, and Ronon slowed his pace to let John catch his breath.
“See? Woolsey’s back in charge, and everything’s back to normal,” John said between gasping breaths.
“Yeah. I’m beating you.”
“Like I said, back to normal. Probably to everyone’s relief.”
“You weren’t so bad,” Ronon said. “At least having you in charge means having someone who isn’t completely stupid.”
“Thanks,” John said dryly. “You mean unlike Woolsey when he got here.”
“He wasn’t stupid,” Ronon said, considering more carefully. “But he didn’t know anything about how things work here.”
“He’s learned. We’ve all learned.” John looked at him sideways. “I thought you didn’t like some of my decisions very much when I was running the city.”
Ronon shrugged. “Do you like everything Woolsey decides?”
“I’m not Woolsey.”
“Carter, then.”
“Not everything. I didn’t like everything Elizabeth decided, for that matter. But I liked enough of their decisions that I didn’t mind following their orders.” John shook out his damp hair, and then added in an apparent effort at scrupulous honesty, “Most days.”
“I don’t mind following yours.”
“Most days?”
Ronon shrugged. “Ready to go again?”
“Bring it on,” John said, and Ronon started running again.
The outside seating at the mess hall was deserted in all but the finest weather Atlantis’s new home world had to offer. Daniel took advantage of the quiet, making his way to the rail and leaning against it to look up at the city, his hands in his pockets against the chill wind. The spires stretched for the sky, deliberately impractical, the exuberant creation of people who wanted to impress. Or maybe who just liked beautiful views.
After so many failed attempts to arrive in a position where he could see this particular beautiful view, it was hard to believe that he was actually standing in the city of the Ancients without any immediate disaster ensuing. The last time he’d been here, he’d barely managed to scratch the surface of the city’s mysteries before exploring the wrong laboratory had resulted in triggering a poorly designed Ancient weapon, leading to a disastrous encounter with the Pegasus galaxy Asgard.
He was sure that he’d have better luck this time. It would be hard to have worse luck, anyway.
Teyla came out onto the balcony and came to join him, turning to look up at the city herself.
“Do you ever get used to it?”
She tilted her head to one side curiously. “To what?”
He shrugged. “Living in the city of the Ancients.”
She shook her head, smiling a little. “I do not expect I will ever take living in Atlantis for granted. But after so many years, it has become my home.”
“That sounds nice,” Daniel said.
“It is for many people. But many others eventually wish to return to their own homes. The city is not for everyone,” Teyla said. “I have seen Earth, and it is a beautiful world. And a safer one.”
“I think safer depends on who you are.”
“If you choose to be on a gate team, you will not have a safe life, certainly,” Teyla said, sounding a little amused.
“No. But I wouldn’t rather sit around wondering if the Goa’uld or the Ori or whoever shows up next is going to take over Earth and enslave everybody or blow out all life in the galaxy like blowing out birthday candles. They’re candles, that
—”
“I have seen many birthday celebrations for members of the expedition,” Teyla said, now decidedly amused.
“You probably have. Sorry, I tend to over-explain. My point is that I don’t think I’d feel better knowing that there were huge threats to Earth and not being able to do anything about them.”
“I agree,” Teyla said. “I too would rather act than stand by helplessly and wait for whatever comes. But it seems that many on your world are not aware of their dangers and would prefer not to be.”
“That’s not… ever really been a possibility for me. I keep asking questions until I find out the answers. Even if they’re unpleasant answers. Especially if they’re unpleasant answers. I’d always rather know the truth.”
“Even if it takes you far from home.”
“I’m not really sure I have a home. I have an apartment in Colorado Springs. I have friends there, and I like my job – all right, most days I like my job, although not the days when we get tortured by unpleasant people or have to deal with the IOA – but I’m not sure it’s really the same as having roots somewhere.”
Abydos had been his home, for a brief precious time. He wasn’t sure what it would take for him to feel the same sense of belonging anywhere, or the same sense of optimism and purpose. It was possible that he’d just gotten old enough to know better. But if he was going to feel it anywhere, Atlantis might be the place.
“I hope you find what you are looking for,” Teyla said.
He nodded. “So do I.”
Lorne stretched out his knee for Carson’s medical scanner to examine its internal workings. “How does it look, doc?”
“Better than it has any right to, given what you did to it,” Carson said.
“Hey, I got hit by a jumper. Being piloted by Dr. McKay, who was out of his mind at the time. I hardly think that counts as my fault.”
“All right, maybe not. But try to dodge next time.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Lorne said. “Maybe we need those warning beepers for the jumpers that they put on garbage trucks so you can hear them when they’re backing up. Except that it wasn’t backing up.”
“A warning beeper might not be a bad idea,” Carson said. “It would also help warn everyone about those of us who aren’t the best drivers.” Carson was a perfectly competent jumper pilot at this point – good, even – but he’d resisted learning with all his might in the early days of the expedition.
“Hey, it’s the hot-shot pilots you have to watch out for. They’re the ones trying to set the speed records.” Lorne sobered, swinging his leg off the table. “Seriously, though… ”
“The fracture healed beautifully. You shouldn’t have any long-term problems, although I want you to keep doing the stretches Dr. Keller prescribed.”
“That’s a relief.” He was acutely aware that getting killed and getting promoted weren’t the only ways to wind up sent back to Earth. For all its frustrations, he enjoyed his current job far too much to want to wind up stuck behind a desk back home.
“For someone who essentially got hit by a truck, you got off very lightly.”
“Don’t I know it,” Lorne said. “Have you heard anything from Dr. Keller?”
“She checked in a few weeks ago and sent me some of the results from her first round of tests of the new retrovirus,” Carson said. “Frankly she didn’t have many results yet to report. I think she just wanted to reassure everyone that she wasn’t dead.”
“Well, when you’re hanging out with the Wraith, people do worry.”
“I worry,” Carson said. “But not as much as Rodney does.”
“Are the two of them… I heard they split up. And also that they were on a break. And also that he asked her to marry him.”
“The Atlantis rumor mill never changes,” Carson said. “It’s like living in a small town full of elderly grannies gossiping over the back fence.”
“It’s probably none of my business.”
Carson shrugged. “It’s not as if either of them told me anything about it as their doctor. I don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t think they know what they’re doing. But she’s going to be gone from Atlantis for some considerable time, and maybe that will give them both time to think about what they want.”
“Absence makes the heart grow fonder?”
“Or presents enough distractions that you stop pining after the one you love. One or the other.”
&nbs
p; “Distractions we’ve got.”
“Truer words were never spoken,” Carson said.
John sat in front of his laptop, trying to figure out how to frame the email he was thinking of sending.
Hi Sam, he began mentally. How’s it going? I was just wondering if you think there’s any chance that Elizabeth Weir is an Ascended being, rather than being dead in space because we couldn’t do anything to save her.
That sounded crazy. If he got that kind of email from someone, he’d think there was something wrong with them. Like they were having some kind of guilt complex about not being able to save people they cared about. So, screw that.
Hi Sam, he tried mentally composing again. Hope you’re having a good time on the Hammond. I was just wondering if there’s any chance that McKay is actually onto something rather than just being a little unhinged by having been turned into a Wraith.
He could just imagine Sam’s bemused expression reading that one. “I’m not a psychiatrist, Sheppard,” she would say, with that alarmed look she usually got when she had to deal with problems that involved people’s feelings. It was one of the things they understood really well about each other.
He made himself actually start typing this time. Hi Sam. Hope that you’re having as much fun getting shot at in the Milky Way as you did getting shot at here in Pegasus. A weird thing – McKay has started saying he thinks that Elizabeth Weir may have Ascended and showed up to talk to him in his dreams.
He took a deep breath. Believe me, I know how that sounds. Still, you’ve had some experience with this kind of thing, so I thought I’d ask you if that sounded like something that could possibly actually happen. McKay has this idea that she may have gotten in trouble for helping him and wound up getting kicked out of her higher plane. He keeps saying we ought to look for her, and you can imagine how that goes over with Woolsey. Dr. Jackson probably knows the most about it, but he just says “maybe,” only in a lot more words than that. And I trust your judgment. It’s always been good before. So any advice would be appreciated.
Say hi to the Milky Way galaxy for me,
John
He clicked to send the email before he could think better of it. He regretted it anyway the moment after it was sent, but by then it was too late; he shut his email and resolved not to think about the question any more until he got a reply.
“So what are we supposed to go look for?” Sheppard asked as Daniel came into the conference room, trying to keep his coffee cup from toppling off the top of his stack of books. Sheppard’s team had already staked out one side of the table, with Woolsey at its head. Daniel set down his tablet on the other side of the table, pushing his books to one side, although it made him feel a little like the unpopular new kid in the junior high school classroom.
He cleared his throat. “Well, I’m hoping we can find out more about the early history of Ancient settlement here in the Pegasus galaxy,” he said. “We know they came here after a plague wiped out most of the Ancients in the Milky Way galaxy. At that point, there wasn’t any intelligent life in the Pegasus galaxy. So, the Ancients started seeding planets with humans.”
“And built the Rings,” Ronon said. “We know.”
“Right, because the Ancients left a lot more traces of their presence here than they did on Earth, where we’ve just figured out they existed in the last decade. Okay, decade and a half.” It never ceased to startle him to be reminded that it had been more than ten years since he’d first walked through the Stargate. “Anyway. Various human civilizations developed over time, eventually there was the war with the Wraith, and the Ancients returned to Earth. We know a little bit about that period, but we know almost nothing about what happened when the Ancients first arrived in this galaxy.”
“We know they settled on Lantea,” McKay said. “Which we pretty thoroughly explored for any signs of Ancient installations other than Atlantis itself, and found zip.”
“I know that,” Daniel said.
“I know you know, I’m just reminding everyone.”
“Assume we’re all up to speed,” Sheppard said. “What are we doing?”
“Searching possible sites of very early Ancient settlement in Pegasus,” Daniel said. “In the Milky Way, they settled primarily on Earth and Dakara, but they had outposts throughout the galaxy. It seems likely that when they were seeding planets here with life, they actually spent some time on some of those planets, and may have left enough behind that we can get some idea of what they were doing.”
“Anything in particular we’re looking for?” Sheppard asked. “If they didn’t abandon these outposts in any particular hurry, I’m assuming they wouldn’t have left all their stuff behind.”
“I don’t expect we’re going to find a new super-weapon or a stash of ZPMs, if that’s what you mean. It’s very likely that any very early Ancient sites have been at least partially stripped, either by the Ancients themselves or by the local inhabitants. But even the layout of the buildings can tell us something about how the sites were used. And it’s possible that they left things behind that they considered unimportant
—
considered to be trash, even
—
that will help us understand who they were and how they lived.”
He spread his hands in frustration. “That’s how actual archaeology works. As opposed to treasure-hunting, which, granted, is what we do around here a lot of the time. At best, I’m hoping we may find some surviving records from that era. We’re not likely to find anything you can use to shoot people.”
“I was actually just asking if there was anything in particular we were looking for,” Sheppard said after a moment.
It took Daniel a moment to shift gears. “Umm. Not really. Anything we find is going to increase our knowledge of Ancient settlement in the Pegasus galaxy from nothing to something.”
“I assume, Dr. Jackson, that you have some idea of where to start,” Woolsey said. He didn’t look particularly enthusiastic, but given his history with SG-1, it was saying something that he’d been willing in the first place to lend him Sheppard’s team.
“I actually have a couple of different ideas. First, I’ve been going through Janus’s records. He seems to have taken an interest in abandoned Ancient settlements here in Pegasus, possibly because he wanted to do his unauthorized experiments in places where no one was going to stumble across them by accident.”
“I’m getting a little tired of Janus and his experiments,” Sheppard said, although McKay brightened a bit.
“Janus doesn’t seem to have used any of these sites,” Daniel said. “Maybe he put this list together toward the end and then ran out of time before the Ancients went back to Earth, I don’t know. But it gives us a set of gate addresses to start checking out.”
Woolsey nodded. “You said you had two ideas.”
“I’d like to take a look at planets that show evidence of having been occupied by humans for a particularly long time. The original Athos, for example
—
we know that technological civilization developed there over and over again, with the Wraith knocking them back every time. But even before that, I think it’s clear that human settlement on Athos considerably predates the war with the Wraith.”
He sketched archaeological strata with his hands. “The problem there is that any kind of Ancient site is probably going to be buried under layer after layer of later cities built on top of it. But I’d still like to take a look around one of the Athosian cities and see if there’s any evidence that would support a larger-scale excavation effort. I was hoping that Teyla could get us permission from the Athosians to go take a look around.”
“I have spoken about this to Halling and Kanaan,” Teyla said. “I see the value myself of finding out more about our own past, as well as about the Ancestors. But my people are still debating whether to agree.”
“What’s the main issue?” Daniel asked.
“It is complicated. My people did not enter the rui
ned cities, for fear of attracting the attention of the Wraith. Things may be different now that we have a treaty with the Wraith, but that is very new. Some people are still not comfortable with the idea. And there is the larger issue of what will become of our original world if the treaty holds.”
“Do your people want to go back?” Ronon asked.
“Some do,” she said, and smiled at him. “Hearing that some Satedans have returned to their homeworld has inspired them. Others are worried that whether or not we return, Athos will be overrun by settlers from some other world interested in mining the old cities for their resources.”
“You mean the Genii,” Sheppard said.
“It would not be a surprise. And we must attract people to join us, whether or not we return to Athos. We are too few now to be a viable population alone. And we have always taken in refugees and travelers who wished to become Athosian. But they have always come a few at a time, and some of us worry about what will be lost if many people come who have no interest in becoming Athosian. My people do not want to become Genii.”
“I do see the problem,” Daniel said.
“There are others who are tired of moving from world to world and would prefer to stay where we have made a home, and still others who believe that because the Ancestors sent us to New Athos when they returned, it is where we ought to stay.” She shook her head. “It will take time for everyone to talk and come to a decision. In the meantime, I am afraid that any kind of mission to Athos would be perceived as the Lanteans staking a claim.”
“We aren’t going to jeopardize our relationship with the Athosians,” Woolsey said. “Dr. Jackson, I think you had better stick to the sites on Janus’s list.”
“We’ll do that,” he said. “I want to concentrate first on the sites that Janus has listed as being on currently uninhabited worlds, on the grounds that those are the sites least likely to have been stripped. First up is M4G-877. According to Janus’s notes, both the Ancients and the resident humans abandoned the planet because of hostile wildlife.”
McKay looked up with a frown. “How hostile are we talking about here?”