by Martha Wells
Head swimming, he pushed himself up enough to see that there was a half-empty water bottle, a couple of power bars, and the medical kit stacked neatly within easy reach. There was no sign of McKay.
He left. Good, John thought, easing back down onto the hammer-stuffed pack. He remembered ordering Rodney to leave, several times. You got your way. He followed your orders. You can lie here and die alone. Yay for you. It didn't matter. John was history, and Rodney had to stop Dorane from reaching Atlantis.
But was it really a good idea to send an astrophysicist who was an average shot at best and had barely started to learn unarmed combat after a ten-thousand-year-old man who had dozens of genetically-altered Koan to back him up, a puddlejumper, and who was holding a few of your friends as helpless mind-controlled hostages?
You know, if you sent Rodney off to die, you'll never know You'll die and rot or turn into a Koan and spend your short life eating other Koan, because Dorane didn't leave any food. Or maybe the smart ones went off into the woods or learned how to fish in the ocean. He didn't see why they shouldn't.
Then John hazily remembered that they had seen the jumper go through the `gate. Dorane would have to come back for the Koan, but that wouldn't take long. And they were stuck down here, trapped by the Koan Dorane hadn't wanted to take along. And even if they got up there, how could they stop them? McKay had said he only had one extra clip for the pistol. He tried to sit up again and something fell off his chest. He picked it up, realizing it was a folded square of paper.
It took him a while to get his eyes focused well enough to read it. It said, "Back soon," and was signed Dr. Rodney McKay, Ph.D., like John might have thought somebody else had left it. He crumpled the note and dropped back on the pack, groaning. "God, Rodney, don't get yourself killed."
CHAPTER SEVEN
he next time John drifted back to half-awareness, there was a ZPM next to the flashlight. Was that there before? he wondered vaguely. Maybe this was some sort of wish-fulfillment hallucination.
Then he was dreaming about being a kid again, about the time he had been attacked by fire ants. The little bastards crawled all over you, waiting to bite until they had swarmed over as much of your skin as they could reach. Then they sent a chemical signal and all bit at once, and the bites hurt like hell, like little pinpoints of acid in your flesh, and then itched and itched-
"Stop it, don't scratch," Rodney ordered, leaning over him and slapping at his hands.
"Don't hit," John told him, shoving his hands away and glaring. He was lying on the floor, in the little room he remembered, and there was the flashlight and the ZPM, apparently not a hallucination. The itching was real, too. He still felt too hot, but he was sweating now, as if the fever had broken. "What- what are-" He wiggled his fingers, surprised to see them in a pair of slightly oversized lab gloves from the medical kit. "Why am I wearing gloves?"
Rodney looked exhausted. "You were scratching at your skin, leaving marks, I was afraid you were going to hurt yourself," he explained. He brandished a water bottle. "Here, you need this."
John realized his throat was painfully dry. "Yeah." He struggled to sit up, accepted the bottle and took a cautious sip, not letting himself drink as much as he wanted. "This isn't all we have, is it?"
"We have enough for now." McKay nodded toward the pitiful little cache of supplies arranged next to the ZPM. There were now two more bottles.
John handed the water back. He eyed the non-hallucinatory ZPM. "That's a ZPM."
"Very good, Major." McKay was obviously too tired to give the sarcasm the usual bite. "When it was time for sunset on the surface, the Koan temporarily cleared out of Dorane's lab area. I went up there and tried to find any of our supplies. There wasn't much. I found Kolesnikova's pack, but her pistol and ammunition were gone. So I took the opportunity to poke around through Dorane's data storage, and take the ZPM. He had three! Three! But two were at maximum entropy, and that one is almost completely drained." He gave the ZPM a disgusted look, as if it was at fault for being a disappointment.
John still felt distanced from reality. "You went back there alone?" It seemed like a bad idea, even with the detector.
McKay glared at him. "Hello? You were unconscious."
"Okay, okay." John let it drop. He knew McKay had gone for the water because he needed it to keep John's fever down. "How long was I out?"
"About ten hours. It's dark up on the surface now, and most of the Koan are up there, so there isn't much we can do." McKay hesitated, shifting uncomfortably. "At first light, if you feel up to it, we'll have to get moving."
"Ten hours? I feel fine, I just..." John absently ran a hand through his hair and felt something prickle against his palm. Huh? He rubbed his head, baffled, then froze. He stared at McKay. "What do I look like?"
McKay didn't even blink. "I don't think we should discuss that right now. I think we need to talk about what we're going to do at dawn when the Koan come back down here. I've had good luck avoiding them using the detector, and-"
"Rodney..." John said slowly, with emphasis. McKay was way too calm, which meant it was really, really bad. He must have gone so far past panic he had come out on the other side. "What do I look like?"
McKay met his gaze, eyes narrowing in determination. "Major, Dorane has been in Atlantis for more than ten hours. Think about that."
John took a breath and looked away. Everybody in the expedition could be dead. And the Athosians, damn it. Would Dorane find them on the mainland? Oh hell, of course he will. He'll show up in a jumper, with Teyla or somebody else he's controlling to smile and say he s an Ancestor and everything's hunky-dory, and they'll welcome him with open arms. It made John's stomach try to turn.
His face must have shown his feelings because McKay abruptly broke down. "All right, fine! You have those little silver spiny things, like the Koan. They're on the outside of your ears and in your hair and eyebrows. It's not shocking or awful or even particularly unattractive. It's just a little odd. That's the only physical change I've noticed." McKay cocked his head, squinting. "I'm almost certain your ears were always that shape. Of course, if I see you every day and I can't tell, it's probably not a big issue." He added, "I was hoping the spines were sensory organs, and you'd be able to tell how the Koan communicate with Dorane, maybe figure out if they know where we are. Any luck on that?"
"Uh, no, I don't-" John shook his head helplessly. He touched his ear, felt the spines. They were unexpectedly soft, like thick coarse hair. He suppressed a shudder. His body suddenly felt weird and foreign, like an outsized boot he was knocking around in. "Rodney, I'm not just going to look funny here, there's mental changes too. They used to be just like us, and the Ancients apparently thought they could make the genetic changes stable, until Dorane messed with them more and drove them all nuts. I could go crazy and try to kill you, and you could be all Atlantis has left." He took a deep breath. "You've got to go."
McKay rolled his eyes, flung his hands up in irritation. "Will you stop saying that while I'm trying to think?" he snapped.
"I can't stop saying that, dammit! You're the only one left who can do something to stop Dorane. I'm a liability. You have to-"
"No, Major." McKay sounded bitterly angry. "I'm not leaving you to die here. I know what you think of me, but I'm not a coward, and I'm certainly not a quitter."
"Rodney, I don't think that!" John sputtered. "And will you stop trying to make this about you? I'm the one with the problem, and I'm being practical here! Before I go nuts, you have to-"
"Shut up or I'll-"
"Kill me?" John interposed. "Promises, promises."
"Oh, ha ha," McKay snarled. "Morbid humor, still not helping!"
John tried, "Hey, if you asked me to kill you I'd do it."
"No, you would not," Rodney snapped. "You wouldn't give up. You'd do something flashy and heroic and crazy, and you wouldn't give up until you saved my life or got yourself killed too. You don't think I know that? Now stop confusing the issue so we can de
cide what to do!"
John sat back, thwarted. He was also oddly touched, but maybe that was the fever talking. And it was probably incredibly stupid to sit here trying to convince McKay to kill him or leave him when they still needed a plan, whether John was sane enough to participate once it was time to implement it or not. "Okay, okay, fine. At dawn we go to the surface."
"Yes, exactly." Rodney threw him a suspicious glare. "Now, as I've been trying to say for the past five minutes, I've had good luck avoiding the Koan with the detector, so at dawn, if you've recovered enough to walk, that shouldn't be a problem. Then we have to get back to Atlantis."
"Well, yeah, that's kind of the plan's problem area." John rubbed his eyes. "Dorane took the damn jumper, and the Ancients blew up the DHD to keep him from using the `gate." He looked up sharply as a solution occurred to him. "You can't build a new DHD, can you?"
"No, I can't, but thank you for the thought." McKay looked mollified by the suggestion. "But we don't need a DHD, we can dial that `gate manually."
"That's right." John should have remembered that, but his head was intermittently aching, making it hard to think. There had been a few instances where SG teams had dialed `gates manually; it was in the mission reports in the expedition's database. "We can shove the inner ring around like a giant rotary phone. All we need is a power source." He looked at the ZPM. "Which apparently we have."
"Exactly! The first Stargate experiments in the 1940s did it with a generator. And in fact, the Heliopolis in our galaxy had a broken DHD and the gate had to be dialed manually, using a lightning strike for power. We, however, don't need such extreme measures, since we have-" McKay gestured triumphantly "-a ZPM."
So that was why McKay had taken it, plunging the entire complex into darkness. He had probably wanted to conserve its resources, saving them for the `gate. And hopefully for Atlantis, if they could get it there and deal with Dorane. "So we have a plan. Except that if Dorane's taken over the `gate room-which he probably has by now-he's not going to open the force shield for us."
"Yes, the plan has flaws," Rodney admitted.
"The plan's flaws could end up turning us into impact events." If they tried to go through the `gate to Atlantis with the force shield up, it would be suicide. When the Genii had tried to invade the city, John had killed around fifty-five of them by managing to raise the shield while they were in transit through the wormhole. He hadn't had any other choice, and seeing the city that was the only chance of protecting his people from the Wraith about to be invaded had made it an easy decision. He shifted uncomfortably on the hard floor. The itching had mostly stopped, but now he was having weird aches in his hands and arms. "But we can go to another world, some place we have a trading agreement with, then dial Atlantis from there and try to bluff our way in-"
McKay grimaced unhappily. "We can try. But I suspect that the Ancients did more than just blow up the DHD. If they wanted to keep Dorane here, the logical thing to do is to alter the gate's control crystal so it couldn't dial anywhere except Atlantis. They could still `gate back and forth through it using the jumpers, but Dorane would have no choice but to stay here or dial Atlantis and walk into the force shield." He gave a little shrug. "It could also explain why he wasn't too worried about finding me, or making sure you were dead. If the only way off this planet is the `gate, and the `gate will only connect to Atlantis, a place which he would shortly control, there's not much point in hanging around here eliminating pesky survivors. We'll have to test it, but-"
"But you're right, that is logical." John let out his breath wearily. He started to run a hand through his hair and dropped it abruptly when he encountered the spines. Something else occurred to him, and he said, "You know, that holo projector, set off by itself in that room like it is- I bet it was a memorial to the Thesians, the people who died here, that Dorane killed. Whoever they were, the Ancients picked them to help build this place. Their meeting hall, their United Nations of the Pegasus Galaxy. They must have been pretty special people."
McKay's mouth twisted downward. "And Dorane probably developed his control drugs so the Ancients could show up here to check on things, see it all looked normal from the outside, and not have any reason to question anyone's word that everything was fine."
John grimaced in agreement. It would be the same way on Atlantis with the Athosians and any `gate teams who had been out during Dorane's arrival. Everything would look fine until it was too late.
They sat there for a time in glum silence. John shook his head, shifting with a wince. His arms were aching right down to his fingertips. To distract himself, he said, "We'll need to go back up through that main shaft. That could be tricky."
"The one Kavanagh `discovered'?" McKay's expression was sour. "The Koan probably don't use it. It didn't look as if it had been opened in years, and I don't think they could fake that."
John nodded. "We can duck in somewhere out of sight until the detector shows it's clear up on the surface-and hope Dorane didn't leave them another jammer." It wasn't so much a plan as a statement of intent, but it was what they had at the moment. "We need to- Oh, crap-" An intense pain seized John's hands, as if he had thrust both into a wood chipper. He doubled over, tucking them under his arms, trying to curl into a fetal ball against the agony.
After an endless moment the pain receded, and John managed to gasp a breath. His eyes were watering and he was trembling and Rodney was hovering over him repeating, "What happened? What happened? What happened?"
"Just... shut up for a minute. I'll tell you when I know." His stunned brain was starting to process sensation again. Biting his lip, he wiggled his fingers tentatively. Oh, yeah, it's worse. He pushed himself upright, Rodney gripping his shoulder when he nearly swayed over. John leaned back against the wall and took a deep breath. Might as well get it over with. He pulled the first glove off.
McKay made a garbled noise, then coughed and managed to say, "Well, that was... Not entirely unexpected."
John had claws. Short and curved and silvery-gray, they protruded from his fingertips, formed out of what had been his fingernails. He flexed his fingers and they slid back into their nearly invisible sheaths. He knew the Koan had claws, but somehow, whatever Rodney said, he hadn't expected this. He pulled off the other glove to examine that set, wondering what else he should be expecting.
Rodney was staring, fascinated. "That's so-" He reached out, carefully pressed John's fingertip and a half-inch of claw slid out. "It's very like a cat's claws. I wonder-"
"Hey, stop that." Indignant, John yanked his hand back. "That feels weird."
"It looks pretty weird, too," Rodney admitted readily.
John took a deep breath. It had been a really, really long day, and he thought his and Rodney's relationship could benefit from a time-out just at the moment. He used his forearm to rub the sweat off his face. "I don't want to talk about this anymore. Look, you need to get some sleep before dawn. Give me the pistol and I'll watch the detector."
McKay sat up straight, eyeing him narrowly. "No."
"Huh?" John stared at him, then pressed his lips together. Even though it proved his argument, it still pissed him off, which ought be a sign of approaching insanity, only it actually felt pretty normal. "Oh, a minute ago, everything's fine, and now my claws grew out, so you don't want me to have our only weapon. Doesn't that prove my point?"
"No, it does not. Nothing proves your point, because your point is stupid and defeatist. Note that I said stupid first before defeatist, because that's the salient feature of your wholly ridiculous point." Rodney unclipped his holstered sidearm and held it in his lap, staring at it. Then he said, "You have to give me your word you won't shoot yourself"
"What? Oh." John had forgotten about Dr. Gall. A young guy, a super genius like Rodney, with his life mostly sucked out of him by a Wraith, he had put a bullet in his own head so Rodney wouldn't have to stay with him in the downed Wraith ship. So Rodney could go help John. John looked at the ceiling, around at the stained wal
ls, uncomfortable. Would he use a gun on himself? He didn't think so, but then Gall probably hadn't planned on suicide before the Wraith had taken him, either. Feeling incredibly awkward, he finally said, stiffly, "I give you my word I won't shoot myself"
Rodney looked at him for such a long moment that John turned shy and picked up the life sign detector, fiddling with it to make sure he could still make the buttons work. It was a little strange working with the claws when they kept coming out unexpectedly. It was like having extended fingertips with no feeling.
Finally Rodney put the pistol on the floor next to John. He shifted over to pick up the flashlight, saying, "I'm going to turn this off to save the batteries. We only have two flashlights and no spares."
"Good idea." John left the gun where it was. He just hoped Rodney wouldn't have reason to regret asking him for that promise.
In his work area in one of Atlantis' large airy rooms, Radek Zelenka sat in front of three laptops, trying desperately to concentrate on any one of the five diagnostics and two data analyses he had in progress. He had once liked this room very much, but now the bright sunlight visible through the softly colored window panels seemed like a mockery. He hadn't been able to eat lunch, and his ration of the terrible coffee from the pot in the main lab bay sat in his stomach like a pool of motor oil. He couldn't stop thinking about the news Teyla and the others had returned with.
Boerne the Marine he had not known well, just enough to speak to casually in the mess hall, or when someone played a DVD in the evening. Irina Kolesnikova he had worked with over several projects, and his heart hurt for her.
But the worst part was that there was a good chance Rodney and Sheppard were still alive, terribly alive, sealed up in a Wraith hive ship to be drained at their captors' leisure.
Radek winced and rubbed his eyes, trying to banish that image. It was one thing for friends to be killed in a war, to grieve and to know that they were at least safe from further pain and terror. To know they might be suffering for days yet was quite another.
