by Jo Graham
“Huh?”
Teyla tilted her head back, looking up at the ceiling of the cruiser. “You had come among us for a day only, and then there were the Wraith. They had culled our people, destroyed our camp, and even then a second wave came down upon us to seek retribution for the Dart that was destroyed. And what did you do? You did not speak of contamination, or of the importance of allowing our culture to develop on its own. You took them all to Atlantis, Jinto and Charin, Kanaan and all the rest. You took them through the gate to your camp, and you shared your food with them. You were beleaguered yourselves, in fear of the shield failing, cut off from your home. And yet you shared with us all you had. Your limited supplies, your fading power. And then you came for the captives.”
Teyla leaned back against the step. “I expected to die. How not? We were culled. We were the Lost. A few minutes might pass or a few days until we were fed upon. When the Wraith took Colonel Sumner, I knew I would be next.” She shook her head, half leaned against his shoulder. “The last thing I expected was to see you and Lt. Ford sneaking in. You must understand that no one is rescued. No one returns. I stood with my age-mate Halling and knew we would die together. And then you came. Why should I think it would be better if you had not interfered?”
“We woke the Wraith,” John said. “It might have been a lot better if we hadn’t. A lot of people might be alive today if we hadn’t.”
“John, we have been dying for centuries. For thousands of years. You have seen what the Wraith did on Sateda, six years before you came. Once they did the same to Emege and the cities of Athos. That is not something you began.” She shook her head. “It is a conceit to believe our story begins with you, or that before you came we dwelled in an innocent paradise. The myth of your culpability is just one more way of making the story about you.”
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
“Do not be,” she said, leaning against his shoulder. “We know no more of you than you do of us, and is it not human nature to fit those you meet into your story? To find a frame that allows you to reach for understanding? You tell your stories and I tell mine. And both are true, and both are false.”
“That makes a weird kind of sense,” he said. John looked at her sideways. “I don’t know what to do except follow my gut. You know. Do what I think’s right. I never claimed to understand it.” He squeezed her hand, long green claws between his fingers. “I’m not like Carter or McKay. I wasn’t some kid genius who always figured they’d have the weight of the universe on their shoulders. I’m not like Elizabeth, who knew she had what it took to make decisions that affected millions of people. I don’t know what to do with that kind of power.”
“Follow your gut,” she said.
John let out a long breath. “I’m not sure my gut always makes good decisions.”
“No,” she agreed. “Sometimes it makes bad decisions for the right reasons. You are not wise, and you are a hard man, an expedient man who will do anything for those he loves. But you are not selfish. You do not act out of self interest. You do what you think is best, and perhaps you are wrong. But you do not do it for your own profit.” She nudged him sideways. “And you know when to listen to those wiser than you.”
“And that would be you?” She could not tell if he were joking or not.
“I am conceited,” she said, “and like to think so. It is my great weakness to think I understand all, that I am so very clever and that I understand people so well. And yet what a mess I have made of my own life! I destroyed my marriage to Jorrah long before you came to Athos, and you saw what passed with Kanaan. I no longer speak for my people, no longer fit among those who share my blood. I am Bloodtainted, and I sit here with you as a Wraith Queen.” She stretched her hand against his, claws against his skin. “I am Teyla Who Belongs Nowhere, Teyla of No People. I do not know where I can live.”
“Atlantis,” he said, and she turned her head to look at him. “You belong in Atlantis. It’s your home.”
“A place between?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s your home too.”
She looked down at their joined hands, his big and warm, hers tinted green with veins like twining vines about them. She had said nothing to anyone else. What could she say, lacking proof? “Carson thinks the Wraith began as a failed experiment of the Ancients,” she said. “That like the Replicators it was an experiment that went wrong.”
John was quiet for a long moment, his head bent in thought, and she knew he was adding it up, all the things they had seen, the experiments left by the Ancients who had played games with human beings, who had made war on their creations.
“It could be,” he said. “It makes a hell of a lot of sense, really.” He raised his head. “And then they tried to kill them.”
“Only the Wraith are not easy to kill.”
“The Wraith hunted them down instead.” John nodded. “I’ll buy that. It makes a lot of things make sense.”
“It does,” Teyla said. “They are the avengers, seeing retribution from their creators. But you know this is not something people can accept. It is too much. It is too painful. It cuts to the heart of our stories.”
“You can’t expect people to react well when you challenge them like that,” John said. “That’s not how it works. You can’t destroy what people believe about themselves and expect them to thank you.” He shrugged. “Any kind of social change. You’ve got to do it really carefully, or the backlash kills people. Sometimes literally. And you’re talking about something that would rip apart the foundations of every civilization in this galaxy.”
“That is why I have spoken of it with no one but you,” Teyla said. “And why Carson only spoke to me. We have been too hurt. Our scars go too deep. Your people do not have these scars, and so perhaps they can, some of them, bear to see the Wraith as people. But they have not lost loved ones. They have not lived their lives in terror. They have not seen their children fed upon. They are good men both, but can you see Ronon or Kanaan accepting this?”
John blew out a deep breath. “Ronon,” he said. “No, that’s not going to work.”
Teyla’s head lifted at the same moment that a blue light began to blink, and she hurried to her feet.
“What’s that?” John asked.
“Sensor alert,” she replied. “Todd’s hiveship has arrived.”
The island looked like a big chunk of ice. As Eva Robinson brought the jumper around looking for a place to land, that was her first thought. It glittered in the sun like a bright proof of Atlantis, almost too bright to look at as every surface glared in the morning sun.
Automatically the windscreen of the jumper responded to her thought, darkening with a gray tint to dampen the glare. That was pretty neat. She wasn’t sure she’d ever get used to this many features, but she was certainly willing to try. She’d flown the jumper around the city on practice runs, but this was the first time she’d gone on an actual mission, something she’d never anticipated doing.
Very carefully, Eva set the jumper down on a windswept snowfield on a small plateau overlooking the sea. It wasn’t far from where the sensors detected power sources. Nothing on this island was. Maybe it had once been bigger, but it sure wasn’t very big now.
She shrugged on her heavy parka as Laura Cadman opened the back gate. Laura had been in her office a couple of times to talk about Carson. It was a little strange to work with the clone of the guy she’d been involved with who didn’t remember the last eight months of their relationship before his death. She’d mourned him, finished her rotation and gone back to Earth, thrown herself into her work and gotten promoted, been posted to the Hammond. She was over him. And then suddenly she had to work with him. Or with his clone, who didn’t remember everything she did. It was a damn good reason to come talk to her, in Eva’s opinion. Not at all the kind of adjustment issue you were likely to encounter on Earth!
“It looks like Alcatraz,” Laura said, stepping out onto the ramp.
“Alcatraz?” W
illiam Lynn hurried down the ramp after her, putting on his sunglasses against the snowglare. “I don’t see it. This is beautiful.”
“The way it’s situated,” Laura said, gesturing with the muzzle of her gun toward the sea and the shore of a larger island a short distance away, separated by a bay of frigid water. “The rocks. The shape of the island. The sea cliffs. It would be a hell of a place to escape from.”
“Maybe it was a waystation,” Ronon said, clomping off the ramp and into the snow. He sunk to his knees. “If you put the Stargate here, you could control access to it. Nobody else on the planet would be able to use it unless you let them.” He shaded his eyes with his hand, looking out over the sea. “I’d hate to assault this place.”
“It does look quite defensible,” William agreed. “I’ll look for the remains of fortifications.”
“How about we look for the power source?” Ronon said. “That’s what we came to do.”
“Right.” William pulled out his scanner. “I’m reading the energy source in this direction.” He pointed away from the sea, toward a rocky ridge that ran the length of the island, gray stones festooned with snow and sheets of ice.
“In the middle,” Laura said. “That makes sense.”
“This is interesting,” William said. “Very interesting.”
“What is?” Ronon swung around, looking at the archaeologist bent over his instrument.
“I’m picking up a fairly strong trace of naquadah here. Perhaps this was the location of the original Stargate, or where some of the remains of it wound up.”
“Here?” Eva said, looking around. “I don’t see anything.”
“It’s about three meters down beneath the ice,” William said.
“Overrun by glaciers?”
“It makes sense.” William shrugged. “This island could have changed considerably in 10,000 years. As you know, Earth originally had a Stargate in the Antarctic region which was rendered inoperable by glaciation.”
“Do I know that?” Eva said. “How would I know that?”
William looked confused. “I suppose you wouldn’t,” he said. “It came up in the off world trainings I had with Dr. Jackson. A cautionary tale about not getting fixated on a solution.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Colonel Carter — Captain Carter then — found the Antarctic gate by accident when our gate malfunctioned and she and General O’Neill got sent to the wrong one. He was badly injured and nearly died while she tried to figure out how to fix the gate and dial home. Turns out there was nothing wrong with the gate, and if she’d tried dialing any other gate address other than Earth she’d have been home in an hour. But she got stuck on one solution, if you see. She had to make the gate dial Earth. Which it couldn’t, because they were already on Earth.” William shrugged. “As I said, a cautionary tale.”
Laura blew out a breath, steam in the frozen air. “Wow. That sounds like the kind of mistake I would make. I can’t believe Carter did that.”
“Everybody was young once,” Ronon said gruffly, steering William toward the rock formations that towered over the plateau.
“Except you,” Laura said cheerfully. “You’re forty going on seventy five.”
Ronon looked at her sideways, and Eva thought she saw a spark of actual annoyance there. “I’m thirty one.”
“Yeah?” Laura grinned up at him, unabashed.
“Yeah.” He looked at her pointedly. “Now how about you help Dr. Lynn find a way in? Unless you’d just like to blow the cliff up.”
“I would,” Laura said, looking up. “Except I think using explosives would probably start an avalanche. That’s a lot of snow and ice right over us.”
Eva glanced up. It did look a little menacing as well as pretty. “Jinx,” she said under her breath.
Ronon looked over at her as Laura went to join William poking along the cliff base. “Yeah, I don’t like it either,” he said, raising his face to the beetling ridge above. He gestured off toward the cliffs below. “This was not a good scene for somebody.”
“Alcatraz?”
“The Chateau d’If,” Ronon said grimly. “Toss somebody off that cliff and they aren’t coming back.” Eva’s eyebrows rose, and Ronon shrugged. “A book Zelenka loaned me.”
“I’ve read it,” Eva said. “About a man imprisoned wrongly for fourteen years and how he got his revenge, if I remember.”
“Good book,” Ronon said. He gave her a wolfish grin. “True to life.”
“Are you and Dr. Zelenka friends?” Eva asked. That was an odd couple if she’d ever seen one.
“He’s a good man.” Ronon nodded, looking over to where Laura was walking along the cliff knocking on it with her fist like she was planning to find a door. “She’s not going to find anything that way. The Ancients didn’t build like that, like it was some kind of role playing game where you just have to walk up and say the password.”
“Maybe we should try Open Sesame,” Eva said, following him toward the cliff face. She raised her hands up with a smile. “Speak, Friend, and enter!”
Beneath the ice a faint tracery of blue lines appeared, spreading up and down and across, limned not on stone but metal. With a faint grinding sound the ice cracked as the massive doors began to move.
“Oh my God,” Eva said. Chunks of ice the size of her fist fell away as the panels slid back, twice her height and twenty feet wide.
“Good job!” Ronon clapped her on the shoulder.
“Of course it responds to the ATA gene!” William hit himself in the forehead dramatically. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Everyone except Laura refrained from answering. “Because you were fixated on a solution?” she said.
“Very funny.” William turned toward the doors as they ground open. “Now let’s go in and see what we’ve got.”
Chapter Twelve
Son of the Ancients
“You came to me before when you wished to test your retrovirus,” Todd said. He was pacing, and each time he came to the end of the room he swung around, exactly the same number of steps across the control room of the cruiser each time. “Because you needed Wraith subjects, and you needed my help.”
“Yeah,” John said. “But it didn’t work.”
“It did not,” Todd said, “And if it had I frankly doubt that most of us would have been willing to take it, given the diminishment in capabilities it inflicted.” He gave John a look that might have been intended as a mirthless smile, or as something entirely different. “Would you accept a retrovirus that would leave you blind? Or that would make it impossible for you to engage in intimacy?”
“Um,” John said, not entirely sure that was translating right.
“The telepathy,” Teyla said. She was sitting in the only chair in the control room, her ankles crossed, seeming utterly self possessed. “Without it a Wraith cannot emotionally connect normally.”
“Just so,” Todd said.
“It didn’t work,” John said. “We know that. So? Nobody is suggesting we use it again.”
“We have been working on our own retrovirus,” Todd said.
“We?” Teyla’s brow rose. “Queen Death?”
“My own clevermen,” he said, swinging around again.
“The retrovirus that has turned Rodney into a Wraith,” John said flatly.
“And what good would it do us, Sheppard, to have more Wraith? Why should we want to make more humans like us, to compete for already scarce resources?” Todd glowered at him. “Queen Death may find it amusing or even useful to turn one of her enemies into her pet, but it is of no long term strategic value.”
“And yours is,” Teyla said, making it a statement, not a question.
“We hope that ours will solve our problems in the long term, yes.” His eyes met Teyla’s, and John wondered if some other conversation were passing between them, one he couldn’t hear. “But we have reached the point where your cooperation would be helpful.”
“And why’s that?” John asked.
“Ours is intended for humans,” he replied.
“Why would we do that?” John began.
Teyla frowned, shaking her head slightly. “Let us hear,” she said.
“It is not to our advantage to kill our food source,” Todd said. “The process of feeding is almost inevitably fatal for the human, and so therefore it takes an exceedingly large human population to support a hive. It is possible to feed without killing, yes, but only by feeding very shallowly, not enough to sustain one for long, and even so the process is so debilitating for the human that most die anyway, or at least appear greatly aged and are no longer capable of functioning normally.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” John said. He didn’t see how this was going anywhere good, but Teyla was still listening, a little frown on her face.
“Our retrovirus is designed to provide humans with an enzyme that reacts with our enzyme during the feeding process,” Todd said.
“Like the Hoffan drug,” Teyla said.
“Indeed, in conception. But most unlike in practice. What ours does is to provide a strengthening agent for the human, so that the effects of feeding are not traumatic to the human physiology. Being fed upon would leave a human debilitated and weak, but it would not appreciably age them as it does now, and would not, were they healthy to begin with, prove fatal.”
Teyla nodded slowly. “And so, in practice, the same humans could be fed upon many times, rather than requiring fresh prey on each occasion.”
“Provided there were sufficient time left between. We do not know how long that might be. Months, certainly. Possibly years. But even if it were years, if the humans in question could continue to live and reproduce, we would not find that our herds were depleted so dangerously and quickly.” He paced away, turning again at the far end of the room. “A much smaller population of humans could sustain us. We should not have to slay within the populations of our worshippers.”