“That does not concern me,” Dis said.
“I grant you that they probably can’t touch this ship,” John said, “but that doesn’t mean getting shot at wouldn’t be annoying.”
Dis blinked once, and then again, as though it was trying to understand the comment. “That is so,” it said, after a moment. “You may use the communications console. It is now adjusted to function in a way you will understand.”
“Thanks,” John said. Behind him, the door opened, admitting Rodney and Teyla, but he ignored them, concentrating on the console. As Dis had promised, he recognized the Asgard symbols, and was able to find the SGC’s ‘safe contact’ frequency on the second try. “SGC, this is Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard. Come in, please.”
He had to repeat the call twice more before he got an answer, but at last the board sprang to life. “Colonel Sheppard. General Landry advised us we should expect your call.”
“Thanks. We are inbound from Pegasus in a Vanir ship — looks just like an Asgard scout, but it’s a Vanir.”
The SGC’s response was reassuringly prompt. “Copy that, Colonel. We have you on our scanners. Plan has you headed for an island in the Outer Hebrides.”
“Eilean Mhuire,” Jackson interposed, politely enough by his standards, and John nodded.
“That’s correct.”
“You’re cleared for Scotland,” the SGC answered. “Please inform us at once if there are any changes in plan. Oh, and General Landry would like a word with you once you’re back.”
“Copy that,” John said, and knew his voice sounded grim. He forced a smile, knowing it probably didn’t look sincere. “We’ll check in once we’ve resolved this question.”
“Thank you, Colonel. Good luck!”
“Thanks,” John said, and broke the connection.
“Oh, please,” Rodney said. “Landry’s going to call you on the carpet for fixing everything?”
“You’ll be lucky if General O’Neill doesn’t join him,” Jackson said.
“If you will give me the coordinates for this Eilean Mhuire,” Dis said, “I will begin our descent.”
The Vanir ship descended into the dawn above Eilean Mhuire, cloaked and shielded against visual and electronic scanning. They were coming in from the west, skimming the foam-tipped waves, the island looming green and shadowed ahead of them. The rising light just caught the top of the headland, leaving the stony beach below in shadow.
“This is where we are to land?” Dis sounded doubtful.
“Yes.” Jackson leaned closer to the screen. “There are caves in those cliffs, see there? To the right — south — of the broader beach.”
Dis brought the scout lower still, barely thirty feet above the water. It looked as though it were a calm day, quiet, and it took John a moment to remember that it was late winter here, far north in Earth’s northern hemisphere. The headlands were brown grass patched with snow, and in Colorado at the SGC the snow would be deep, hanging heavy on the fir trees — ski season. But it would be spring soon, just as it was in Atlantis, turning toward their first summer on their new world.
There was a narrow strip of rocky beach visible at the base of the cliff, just barely wide enough to allow the scout to land. Dis brought it down with slow care, proximity alarms flashing as the port side nearly scraped the cliff, and hovered for a long moment before letting the ship settle gently onto the rocks. John felt the ship shift under him as the landing gear adjusted to the uneven ground. Dis turned away from the controls without a backward glance.
“Which way?”
Despite Dis’s care, the scout’s starboard edge was in the water, so that they had to wade through the shallows to reach dry land. The waves were cold enough to make John’s breath catch in his chest, and he was glad of his heavy boots. It didn’t seem to bother Dis, though; the Vanir made its way over the rounded rocks as easily as if they were level ground. John offered a steadying hand to Teyla as she splashed through the water — her smile as she took it was amused — and then to Elizabeth, who nodded her thanks and turned back to survey the ship.
“Should we be worrying about the tide?”
“I wouldn’t think so.” John surveyed the beach. It was all rock, not the sandy beaches of his childhood, but he could see strands of seaweed and debris just beyond the reach of the furthest waves. “That’s the tide line, there. It’s either just before or just after high tide, and either way, the ship should be fine.”
“If you can call this a beach,” Rodney said. “Did I ever tell you about my friend who collected sand from every beach he ever visited? He went to Maine once, and all he could find to bring back was a big rock. Just like these.”
“Where’s Ford?” John interrupted.
“He said he wanted to stay on the ship with Atelia,” Elizabeth said.
John gave her a sharp look. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”
“I think it is well,” Teyla said. “I do not think he wants to cause trouble, not here where there are no Wraith. Or where it would endanger his wife and child.”
“And if you’re worrying about him stealing the ship,” Rodney said, “the Asgard were always able to lock down their technology pretty well. Even I couldn’t get into it.”
“That wasn’t what I was thinking,” John said, though in fact it was. But both Rodney and Teyla were right, and that let him relax a little. The truth was, he still wasn’t quite sure what to say to Ford, any more than anyone had known quite what to say to him after Afghanistan. He had found his way back; he would have to believe that Ford could do the same.
Jackson had moved ahead of them, into the shadow of the cliff, and was playing a flashlight along the deeply fissured rocks. The air was chill, and smelled of wet rock and seaweed and, beneath that, the pervasive smell of the ocean. John licked his lips and tasted salt.
“Over here!” Jackson waved a hand, and the others converged on him. He was standing close to the foot of the cliff, shining his light into one of the many vertical fissures. From even a few yards away, it looked like all the others, but then John realized that what he had thought was simply shadow was actually a narrow opening that led into the cliff itself.
“This is the place?” Dis tipped its head to one side.
Jackson nodded. “This is it. The entrance is pretty narrow, but it widens out a couple of meters in.”
The entrance looked more than just narrow, John thought. They’d all have to turn sideways and wriggle through, and it was maybe a good thing Ronon wasn’t with them, because there was no way he would have fit through that opening. He pulled out his flashlight and flicked it on. “Ok. Let’s go.”
They wedged themselves one by one through the gap. It wasn’t so bad for Dis and Teyla, John thought, or even for Elizabeth and Rodney, but Jackson had to struggle, and John himself had an awkward moment when his jacket caught on a projecting rock and he wasn’t able to free himself immediately. And it was long, a good six feet of scraping between rocks until at last the entrance opened out into a stone-floored tunnel that bored on into the rock. The walls were bare, John thought, but Jackson played his light over the right-hand wall for a moment, and settled on a shape like a capital T carved into the wall.
“Thor’s Hammer,” he said. “If you look close, you can see it was painted — looks like the kind of interlacing patterns you see in medieval Celtic manuscripts. There’s, or there was, a shrine to the Virgin Mary on the headland directly above the final chamber.”
“Wasn’t Thor one of the Asgard?” John let his light play over the carved hammer. Sure enough, if you looked hard, there were traces of pigment, reds and blues and ochre yellows, all faded so that they almost blended with the rocks.
“He was.” Jackson nodded. “We’ve seen a couple of his shrines off-world, although we don’t think this one was specifically his.”
“Don’t these things usually have lights?” Rodney turned his light on the ceiling, letting its beam explore the rough-hewn stone. “Are we sure this is stable?”
&n
bsp; “Yes,” Jackson said. “And we don’t get lights until we reach the inner chamber.”
The tunnel led on into the hill, the air dry and cold and clean-smelling. There had to be some kind of ventilation shaft, John thought, but any openings were hidden in the shadows. They’d gone maybe a hundred meters when the tunnel abruptly ended, opening out into a cylindrical space. The floor and walls were smoothed, almost polished, and as they stepped into the room, light flared from the ceiling, as though a clouded sky had suddenly appeared above their heads. There was a circular platform in the exact center of the floor, its surface carved with interwoven lines that seemed to tangle when you looked at them. John reached for his P90, and stopped himself with an effort. This was an Asgard shrine, he reminded himself; Jackson promised it was, if not harmless, at least not actively hostile. Maybe even friendly.
“Astan edhal,” Dis said, for the first time shaken out of its composure. “A — place of passage, you might say? I had heard of such, but did not believe —”
“What do we do now?” Rodney asked. He turned in a slow circle, scanning the walls. “I thought these things were more, I don’t know, decorated. Full of technology. Something.”
Jackson cocked his head as though listening to something only he could hear. “Wait. Just… wait.”
Elizabeth’s head lifted, and then John heard it, too, a faint, soft humming, steady and growing louder. It was like bees in a hive, or a box of kittens, definite but somehow unthreatening, and Teyla took a step back so that she was at his side.
“The Ancestors?”
“I don’t know.” John kept his hands on his P90, in spite of being fairly sure that whatever was making that sound probably wasn’t hostile, and almost certainly had better weapons at its disposal.
Welcome, seekers, you who are of the people.
The words came from everywhere and nowhere, filling the air without vibration.
What do you wish from the Ancient Ones?
The people, John thought. Did that mean all of them, or people with the ATA gene — or maybe just Dis? He looked at Jackson, who was looking at Elizabeth, and swallowed a curse. He’d fantasized about catching Jackson without something to say, but this wasn’t what he’d had in mind.
“I seek my foremother,” Dis said, stepping forward so that it was almost at the edge of the platform. “Millennia ago, one of our people Ascended, stepping outside of time and space and all our knowledge. Since then, we continued to progress, and as we did so, we remade ourselves over and over again. When we could no longer reproduce sexually even with assistive technology, we began to clone ourselves, transferring our consciousness from body to body until those bodies in their turn could no longer be duplicated. Our species is dying, slowly and terribly. Each life lost takes with it knowledge, experiences, consciousness, that will never be again. In this galaxy, our people chose to end their lives as a species rather than risk what remained of their knowledge falling into the hands of peoples who would inevitably use it for destruction, but we in the Pegasus Galaxy are determined to live instead. These bodies cannot be saved, but if we had the eggs of a female born before the cloning began, we could restore ourselves to what we once were. If we could obtain a sample of undamaged DNA — even a scan, a reading — we could, with great effort, rebuild our species. It is for that reason we seek Ran: so that we do not perish utterly from this universe.”
Ran. The word was a whisper than ran round the edges of the chamber, echoless and yet ever-present, the word repeating as though it chased its own tail. Ran.
Light bloomed above the platform, a pale and watery globe that swelled to perhaps a meter in diameter. In its depths, a storm churned, and at the heart of the storm was a shifting figure, wrapped in strands of wave and cloud and rain. For a moment, she seemed human, with a grim face and hair dark and lank as seaweed, a net wrapped around her and clenched in both hands. Then she was a mermaid, noseless and flat-chested, fangs and claws bared, and then a grinning skeletal creature wound with gold like coiling serpents, her net crowded with ships. And then she changed again, the storm fading around her, until she was at once familiar and strange, an Asgard, enormous black eyes blinking slowly in a pointed face, and yet not, an Asgard taller and distinctly female. The sphere began to descend, its edges dissolving while the shape within it grew more and more solid, until as her feet touched the stone of the platform, the sphere faded into wisps of light and shadow.
“Ran,” Elizabeth whispered. “I remember…”
“I am Ran,” the being said, and her tiny mouth curved into what was unmistakably a gentle smile. “I have chosen to assist you in this endeavor, Dis. We have argued long and hard among us, and I have said I will not let the last of my kindred vanish from the universe. Extinction is an evil that overrides many other rules. I may or may not be permitted to return, but I will not be hindered in this.”
Dis stared, eyes wide, mouth slack. “Lady…”
“I cannot promise success,” she said. “It has been a long time, and you have done so very much to yourselves in all these centuries. And I certainly cannot promise that you will be either what you were, or what you most wish to be. But I will attempt to help you live.”
“That…” Dis stopped, and John wondered if and how the Asgard wept. “That is more hope than we have had in a thousand years. We will take that chance.”
“Then I will go with you.” Ran stepped down off the platform. She was a good head taller than Dis, and more sturdily-built, her skin less wrinkled. And she was certainly female, where all the other Asgard had been completely sexless. “Elizabeth. I am so very pleased to see you well.”
“And I to see you,” Elizabeth said. Ran held out her hand, and Elizabeth took it in both of hers, ten fingers encompassing four, pale skin and dark. “I owe you so much.”
Ran smiled again, turning so that she could take them all in a single glance. “You have chosen as I expected. You are not for Ascension, Elizabeth, not yet.”
“No.” Elizabeth released her, tears running unashamed down her cheeks.
“We must go,” Ran said, and took Dis’s hand.
John shook himself, made himself clear his throat. “Um, we have a puddle jumper on board. And some of our people are still there.”
Ran blinked, then nodded. “Your own craft. That was wise of you to bring it. We will unload it for you, and then depart.”
They followed her out, along the tunnel and then back through the narrow gap. The tide had receded, leaving the Vanir ship still tucked against the cliff, but with enough bare beach to land the jumper as well. It was the work of a few minutes to get Ford and Atelia and the baby onto the jumper, and then John brought it carefully out of the hatch, parking it on the stones as clear of the scout as he could manage. He lowered the back hatch and scrambled out to join the others, Ford and his family following more slowly.
“I bid you farewell,” Ran said, from the scout’s ramp. “Do not look for us any time soon. We have much work to do.”
“We won’t bother you if you don’t bother us,” John said.
“I think I can promise you that,” Ran said, and the hatch slid closed behind her. A few moments later, the scout rose silently from the stony beach. It hovered for an instant, balancing on invisible force fields, and then shot up into the air, vanishing with impossible speed.
“We should have asked for more,” Rodney said. “I barely got a chance to look at those engines —”
“Rodney,” John said, and the scientist stopped abruptly. “Let’s go home.”
It was still early morning when they landed in Colorado Springs, the puddle jumper chasing the sunrise around the curve of the planet. Elizabeth had napped for most of the way across the Atlantic, the old habits that let her sleep whenever the chance arose kicking in efficiently, but as John brought them down onto the hidden landing space, she found herself wide awake, and strangely nervous. What if Dekaas had gotten it wrong? What if she really were some weird Replicator time-bomb, programmed to b
elieve herself to be Elizabeth Weir at such a deep level that even people who had known her well would be fooled? She shook herself, annoyed. Ran had saved her — Ran had helped her Ascend, and when she had unascended, she had done so in her own body and as herself. Those worries were pointless.
Jordan was awake, too, and starting to fuss as Atelia and Ford tried to gather their belongings, clearly feeling their nervousness.
“Let me take him,” Daniel said, and swung the boy into his lap, dangling what looked like a particularly complicated key ring in front of him.
“Thanks,” Ford said, hoisting a heavy bag onto his shoulder, and Atelia closed her own satchel with a sigh of relief.
“Yes, thank you.”
“I’ll carry him, if you’d like,” Daniel said, and settled Jordan on his hip with unexpected competence. They trailed out one by one into the bright morning, the mountain soaring above them into a vivid sky crossed by a single contrail. Atelia looked up at it, shading her eyes, and Ford touched her shoulder, saying something Elizabeth couldn’t hear. Rodney and Teyla followed them, and Elizabeth glanced back to see John bringing up the rear, a pair of dark sunglasses hiding his eyes. He saw her looking, though, and smiled. The expression looked odd somehow, and then she realized she had never before seen him smile without reserve.
“It’s good to be home, huh?”
“Very good.” Elizabeth nodded, and then, because he of all people would understand, added, “And more than a little strange.”
“A lot of changes.” John nodded back, and lengthened his stride to catch up with the others, taking his place in the lead. “General Landry!”
There were Marines waiting at the edge of the field, of course, as well as Landry and a knot of officers. Elizabeth found herself hanging back a little, unsure what she wanted to say about everything that had happened, and found herself next to Daniel and Atelia. Jordan was beginning to fuss again, and Atelia reached for him.
“Here, I can take him now. Come to Mama, big boy.”
Daniel made the transfer easily. “Can I carry your bag?”
Stargate Atlantis: Third Path: Book 8 in the Legacy series Page 29