SGA-17 Legacy 2 - The Lost

by Graham, Jo

  “Pull us out,” he said, his voice rough in his own ears. “Carter, do it now!”

  He felt the pull of the transport beam, his stomach twisting as the world changed around him. They were on the bridge of the Hammond, Sheppard sprawling across the deck, Teyla dropping to her knees next to him. His face was pale and streaked with blood.

  “Get a medical team up here,” Carter said. “Franklin, punch it!”

  There was a slight jolt, and the view outside the forward window changed, stars elongating into the azure of the hyperspace field as the Hammond passed through the window, leaving the battle behind.

  “He was hit by a stunner many times,” Teyla said urgently, her hands on Sheppard’s neck, checking the pulse at his throat. “I think he is not breathing as he should.”

  “They’re on their way,” Carter said. “What happened?”

  Ronon didn’t think either of them wanted to say it. It was Teyla who finally answered.

  “He is Wraith,” she said flatly. “Rodney is a Wraith.”

  * * *

  The blue shifted stars of hyperspace slid past the George Hammond, while within the thin envelope of the hyperspace field a spacesuited repair crew swarmed over her surface, conducting a visual inspection of the damaged shield array.

  Master Sergeant Luciano, the Hammond’s chief structural engineer, frowned at his captain through the video link to the station beside her command chair. “It’s not good, ma’am. The shield emitter is basically blown away. There’s nothing left but the twisted backing plate attached to the brackets. We’ve got replacement internal electronic components for repair purposes aboard, but we’re going to need a full machine shop to rebuild the titanium alloy casing.”

  “And until then we’ve got no rear shields,” Sam said, her fingers drumming on the chair arms. “I read you loud and clear, Sergeant. Bring your crew in. We’ll see what we can rig up in Atlantis. They’ve probably got what we’ll need for the casing.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  It wouldn’t be that simple, of course. Rebuilding a major external system was not going to take a few hours. It might — might — take a few days at best. More likely a week or more. Still, it was something well within their capabilities to do. The Hammond carried titanium alloy hull plates for repairing breaches. The problem would be machining the spare hull plates into the proper structure for all the fiddly little parts that made up Asgard shielding. It was a week’s work for skilled people with Atlantis’ facilities to use.

  “Major Franklin, you have the bridge.” Sam stood up, making her way to the infirmary.

  Her people were in pretty good shape. A medical corpsman was treating three or four people for mild electrical burns from the shield control panels shorting, and Sam stopped to say an encouraging word to each of them. If the worst to show for her ship’s first battle was a damaged shield array and some second degree burns that wouldn’t keep people off their feet a full day, you had to call that a win.

  Only it wasn’t, of course. They didn’t have McKay back, and they hadn’t destroyed Queen Death’s hive ship, though Sam thought they’d fairly well crippled it. She thought they’d taken out the hyperdrive and all of the forward weapons systems and done some major structural damage. That wouldn’t be easy to fix either. It would be months before that ship was flyable again. But Death was queen of a big alliance. She’d probably shift her flag to another ship.

  And then there was Sheppard. Sam looked around the screen in the infirmary, where Sheppard was hooked up to monitors and drips. Teyla sat on the metal stool at the beside, her feet up on the rung and her arms crossed over her stomach. Ronon leaned against the wall behind her, his head back against the bulkhead and his eyes closed.

  The doctor came over as Sam approached. “How’s he doing?” Sam asked quietly.

  The doctor glanced back at him. “Not too bad for someone stunned that many times. He’s still out cold. I’ve got him on a drip to replace electrolytes, and a heart monitor because we detected arrhythmia as a result of the amount of electrical current his body absorbed. It’s pretty much the equivalent of being struck by lightning.”

  “Lovely,” Sam said. She looked over at Ronon and Teyla. She’d spent a lot of hours waiting like that.

  “He’ll be ok,” the doctor said. “I think it’s unlikely he’ll suffer any permanent effects. But even a stun beam can be dangerous if you do it over and over. The Wraith don’t usually fire more than necessary to incapacitate a human being.”

  “It was Rodney,” Teyla said harshly, and Sam came over to stand on the other side of the bed. “Rodney did not know us. He resisted. John…” She shook her head, her eyes falling to Sheppard’s face. “I do not think he ever realized what had happened. That Rodney was…not himself.”

  “It’s some kind of medical thing,” Ronon said. “Like Michael. I don’t know. I don’t know what it was. But he was a Wraith.”

  “A retrovirus?”

  “I don’t know,” Ronon said again, shaking his head, anger plain in his voice. Not anger at her, Sam thought. Anger at himself, that he had not somehow parsed the impossible.

  “We couldn’t have known,” Sam said. “Todd may not have known.”

  “Or he was playing some game of his own,” Teyla said, and there was a bitter edge in her voice. “I do not think he serves Queen Death. I do not think he truly serves anyone’s interests besides his own.”

  Sam nodded. “We’ll be back in Atlantis in nine hours and a bit. Sheppard may be up and awake by then, and we can all sit down and debrief. But until then you might want to get a meal and some rest.”

  “I think we would prefer to stay here,” Teyla said. Unsurprisingly. Sam had sat that watch herself way too many times.

  “I’ll have somebody bring you up something,” she said, and turned to go.

  * * *

  Night had come, and the towers of Atlantis glittered through the falling snow. The debriefing was over, and Teyla left the conference room, Woolsey and Carson still talking behind her. Yet everything that could be said had been said and said a thousand times while she and Ronon and Sam and Mr. Woolsey and Radek and Carson and Jennifer had deconstructed everything over and over. There was nothing more to be said. There was no more information to share. There were only empty, gaping questions.

  Through the glass doors of the control room balcony Teyla thought she saw a familiar figure outside despite the cold and darkness. She hugged her jacket about her as the doors opened before her, but the wind hit her like a punch in the chest as she stepped out of the shelter.

  “John? I thought you were in the infirmary.”

  He didn’t turn around, just stood at the rail, his shoulders hunched against the cold. “Keller let me out. I’m not sure she wanted to see me any more than I wanted to see her.”

  Teyla drew a deep breath and came and stood beside him. “How are you feeling?”

  He shrugged. “I still can’t feel my toes. How many times did I get stunned, anyway?”

  “Six,” Teyla said matter of factly. She shook her head. “At least we know so much of Rodney remains. He has always been overkill!”

  John snorted mirthlessly. “That’s true. I suppose I should just be glad he had a Wraith stunner, not a P90. You wouldn’t be bringing much home if he’d shot me six times with that.” He shook his head, looking out into the night. “I don’t know what happened, Teyla.”

  “It all happened very fast,” she said. “I did not have any way to incapacitate Rodney except to shoot him, and if I had tried that I probably would have killed him.” Teyla shook her head. “I could not risk it.”

  “You did the right thing,” John said, and she knew he was thinking of Ford, of the time he had not taken the shot when he might have.

  Teyla took a step closer, her shoulder against his arm, side by side at the rail. “We will get him back.”

  “You know that’s not very likely, don’t you?” John looked at her sideways.

  “In that other
reality, Rodney spent twenty five years trying to find a way to change the past and save me. Do you think I will give up on him?” He was silent, so she continued, lacing her hands together in the cold. “You looked for a long time before you found me when I was Michael’s prisoner, and you nearly succeeded once before you at last did. We did not know what we were up against this time. We did not know that Rodney would not come with us willingly. We had no reason to expect what happened. Next time we will know.”

  “And how are we going to take him down without killing him?”

  “Ronon’s stun pistol.” She shook her head. “We will get a zat gun from the SGC. Something else. We will figure it out. But we are not going to give up. We will get Rodney home.” She nudged him with her shoulder. “You may be sure of that.”

  John looked away. Whirling snowflakes landed on his dark hair, sticking whole and complete. “Teyla, is there something we need to talk about?”

  He sounded so strained, so uncertain. “No,” she said quietly. “There is nothing you need to say. There is nothing you could say to me that your actions have not said a thousand times.”

  His eyes closed, and she thought the faintest hint of a smile played around the corner of his mouth. Or perhaps he was laughing at himself, inarticulate always in the face of so much to say. “Ok,” he said. He lifted his arm and she slid under it, warm against his side as the cold wind swirled around them, his chin resting on the top of her head.

  Beyond, the snow fell soundlessly into the sea.

  Acknowledgements

  A book is never written alone, and this one was very much a team effort. We’d like to thank Melissa Scott who has put so much of herself into this book even though her name doesn’t appear on the cover of this volume. We’d also like to thank Mary Day, who helped immensely with Dr. Robinson, and Katerina Niklova, who translated Radek’s lines into Czech for us. Also, we are indebted to Anna Kiwiel, whose comments and continuity assistance have been invaluable.

  We’d also like to thank our early readers who lived and breathed The Lost for an impossibly short period of time, Rachel Barenblat, Gretchen Brinckerhoff, Imogen Hardy, Anna Lindstrom, Jennifer Robertson, Lena Sheng, Lena Strid and Camy. We live for your screams of “Oh no! What have you done to Rodney!”

  Lastly we’d like to thank our wonderful editor, Sally Malcolm, for giving us this wonderful opportunity to continue the story of Stargate Atlantis.

  Sneak Preview

  Stargate Atlantis: Allegiance

  Book Three Of The Legacy Series

  By Amy Griswold & Melissa Scott

  “Let’s take stock,” Dick Woolsey said, looking across the conference table at the weary team. No one looked very happy, but then they didn’t have much reason to. He wasn’t expecting much good news.

  Everyone at the table had believed that the raid to recapture Dr. McKay from the Wraith would succeed. Instead, not only had the mission failed, with the Hammond sustaining serious damage in the process, but Colonel Sheppard’s team had come face to face with McKay, and made the grim discovery that he had somehow been transformed beyond recognition.

  “What’s our present situation?” he prompted when no one seemed eager to speak up.

  Dr. Zelenka, Colonel Sheppard, and Colonel Carter exchanged glances. He didn’t think any of them were dying for the chance to report first.

  “Not great,” Sheppard said finally. He looked like he’d recovered fully from the series of stun blasts that had left him confined to the infirmary the day before, although he hadn’t apparently managed to shave. “Rodney’s still in the hands of the enemy. We’re not sure what they did to him, but he looks like a Wraith, and he wasn’t acting like he remembered he was on our side.”

  “We have some theories,” Dr. Keller said, glancing at Dr. Beckett beside her. If so, they’d been up early developing them. Dick had called the meeting as early in the morning as he’d thought was reasonable, given that people did need to eat and sleep.

  He wasn’t sure Dr. Beckett had taken the opportunity to do either. “Aye,” he said without enthusiasm. “Go on and tell them all about it.”

  “We’ve been working for some time on a retrovirus we originally hoped could physically transform Wraith into humans,” Dr. Keller said. “That didn’t exactly work out as well as we hoped. We’ve since moved on to trying to find a way to give the Wraith a more human-like metabolism that would allow adult Wraith to survive on normal food rather than feeding on humans.”

  “We know that,” Teyla said, with a smile that was encouraging but not particularly patient.

  “Sorry,” Dr. Keller said. “Just trying to get everyone up to speed, here.”

  “Which those of us who haven’t been here for a while appreciate,” Carter said.

  Jennifer nodded and went on quickly. “It seems pretty likely that the Wraith have found a way to reverse engineer one of the versions of the retrovirus that we tested on live subjects. They’ve created a way to transform humans into Wraith.”

  “As Michael did with his hybrids,” Teyla said.

  “Something like that,” Jennifer said. “But he was trying to create an intermediate form between humans and Wraith. Here...” She looked across the table at Sheppard and his team. “From everything everyone’s said, Rodney didn’t look much like any of the hybrids.”

  “He was Wraith,” Teyla said. “If I had not known his face, I would not have believed he was anything else.”

  “He had a Wraith feeding hand,” Ronon said.

  “That would be necessary for a complete transformation,” Dr. Keller said. “Of course, it could be cosmetic. We’ve faked that ourselves. It would be nice if it is.”

  Dick frowned. “And if it’s not?”

  “Then he probably has the ability to feed on humans. And he may not remember why that would be bad.”

  Sheppard broke the silence that settled around the table. “But that’s not going to happen, because we’re going to get him back. Right?”

  “That’s the idea,” Dick said. He was on his third cup of coffee, but it wasn’t making up for not having had much sleep. “The problem is, he doesn’t remember that we’re trying to rescue him.”

  “That could be a side effect of whatever process they used on him,” Dr. Keller said. “Our first version of the retrovirus produced complete amnesia as long as the dose was kept at a high enough level. Which, when you think about it, may actually be a good thing for us.”

  Ronon gave her a look. “How is that good?”

  Dr. Keller shrugged. “If he was afraid of you when you tried to rescue him because he didn’t remember who you were, then he might not remember his access codes for the computer.”

  “Or where this planet is located,” Sheppard said. “Or the location of Earth. Or how ships using Ancient technology can penetrate our shields. Or—”

  “I get the picture,” Dick said.

  “We are already working on securing the computer system,” Zelenka said. “There are many ways Rodney could access the system officially, and we have already found numerous back doors. We will keep working.”

  “I’d be happy to help if you could use another pair of eyes,” Carter said. “We dealt with a lot of security problems when I was at the SGC.”

  “Yes, please,” Zelenka said before Dick could say that they were grateful for the offer and would take it under consideration. It probably didn’t matter at this point. Any tension between himself and Carter over her help being needed in Atlantis would be beside the point if McKay effectively handed Atlantis over to the Wraith.

  “Sure,” Carter said. “After the meeting, why don’t you show me what you’ve been doing?”

  Zelenka nodded. “It would help if you could also read Rodney’s mind.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Carter said. “But I’ll see what I can do.”

  “As we are speaking of reading Rodney’s mind,” Teyla said, a little reluctantly. “Things happened very quickly, but I believe I was able to sense Ro
dney’s presence as if he were a Wraith. I might be able to make contact with him if I were close enough.”

  “Something to keep in mind when we’re at a point where another rescue attempt is practical,” Dick said. “At the moment, though, we have no idea where Death’s hive ship went after the Hammond entered hyperspace.”

  “We have no clue,” Carter said. “I don’t expect they’re still sitting around at the repair facility waiting for us to come back, though.”

  “I think that’s a little much to hope for,” Sheppard said. “We can check back with the Genii, see if they’ve come up with anything.”

  “I’ll get in contact with Radim,” Dick said. “In the mean time, I want our first priority to be securing the computer system. If the Wraith can lower our shields, or lower the iris, there’s nothing to keep them from dropping a nuclear bomb on us at any time.”

  Carter and Sheppard exchanged glances.

  “They probably won’t do that,” Carter said.

  “We’ve got a ZPM,” Sheppard said, in answer to Dick’s questioning look. “And lots of tasty people for them to snack on. Blowing us up is probably plan B.”

  “I don’t think I like plan A any better,” he said. “Assuming it’s invading Atlantis and taking us all prisoner to feed on later.”

  Radek shifted restlessly in his seat. “You know, the longer we are sitting here talking, the longer we are not working on computer security.”

  “Go,” Dick said. “Colonel Carter, any assistance you can provide would be appreciated.”

  “It’s my pleasure,” she said. “I’ve got time right now while we’re repairing the damage to the Hammond’s shield emitters. By the time that’s done and I can take the Hammond back out, Jeannie Miller will be here to assist Dr. Zelenka.”

  “She is coming out aboard Daedalus,” Zelenka said. “I wish she could have come through the Stargate, but apparently that was not possible to arrange.”