by Graham, Jo
“Semper Fidelis is the Marines,” Teyla said. She had worked with Marines for five years. She knew that.
“That must be what I’m thinking,” Dick said.
Teyla looked up at the ship. “They are moving in a great deal of materiel.”
“O’Neill is a paranoid man,” Dick said. He shifted from foot to foot as though the topic made him uncomfortable. “Are you going back on the Hammond?”
“I do not know yet,” Teyla said. “I have not decided what I will do.”
“Many of the Atlantis personnel are joining the crew of the Hammond,” Dick said. “Major Lorne, Ronon Dex…”
“Not everyone is going,” Teyla said. It was obscurely irritating that he seemed to be pushing her in a way she would probably have to go soon enough. “Colonel Sheppard has not been reassigned.”
“He can’t be assigned to the Hammond,” Dick said quickly. “He’s too close in rank to Colonel Carter. The only position he could fill is First Officer, and the Hammond already has a First Officer.”
Teyla’s brows knit and she looked at him sharply. It was not like him to know the ins and outs of the Air Force assignments.
“Colonel Carter might have mentioned it,” Dick said, shifting from foot to foot.
“Oh.” She had always had the impression that Woolsey and Colonel Carter barely tolerated one another. She had not thought there was any love lost between them.
“Colonel Carter thinks the world of Colonel Sheppard,” Dick said uncomfortably.
“Good,” Teyla said, mystified. “I suppose he will be assigned somewhere else soon.”
“That’s up to General O’Neill.” Dick drew himself up quickly. “I suppose I’d better get busy. I’ve got a lot of packing to do.”
“Yes, of course.” Teyla watched him hurry away up the pier. She supposed they would probably never speak again.
Chapter Nine
Shadowed
“I got a phone call from Sheppard right before you got home,” Rodney said.
They were sitting at the breakfast counter in the condo, the only place where both of them could sit down to a meal at the same time. There was a dining area, Jennifer had insisted on that, but it was where most of the boxes had ended up, and somehow neither one of them had gotten around to doing much unpacking. It had taken the arrival of the kitten to get the bedrooms and the spare bathroom a little organized, though they were both still living more out of boxes than out of the sleek modern dressers Rodney had found. The kitten seemed to prefer that, anyway, was currently perched halfway up a tower of cardboard, apparently content for the moment to stay there. Jennifer looked back at Rodney.
“Problems?”
“You could say so.” Rodney dug his spoon into the corner of the takeout box, chasing a last piece of the chicken salad. “He said the Air Force had taken control of Atlantis.”
“What?” Jennifer put down her carton of kung pao chicken, startled by her own reaction. The Air Force, the Marines, they all belonged on Atlantis, but it wasn’t theirs…
“Yes. Some kind of political thing.” Rodney spoke without looking up, as though he was focused only on the food, but Jennifer could see the tension in his back. “The IOA declared the city wasn’t going back, so General O’Neill declared it was in U.S waters, and he was taking charge.”
“Can he do that?”
“Mm. Apparently so. At least he thinks he can. Sheppard’s pissed.” Rodney paused. “Maybe literally so, when I talked to him. But he’s really not happy.”
“I can’t blame him,” Jennifer said.
“No, me neither.” Rodney stood up to shove the empty box into the trash. They kept making plans to do more cooking, but neither one of them was used to it; there were times Jennifer thought she really missed the convenience of the mess hall. “See, that’s why I took this job. I knew something like this was going to happen, and I’m not going to waste my time trying to persuade a bunch of military—”
“Rodney!” Jennifer pointed to the cat, who was stretching for a box that was about to overturn onto its head.
“Got it!” He scooped the kitten with one hand, shoved the box back into place with the other.
“That’s another vote for Newton,” Jennifer said, grateful for the distraction. Bad enough that Atlantis wasn’t going back, but to become an Air Force property…
“I’d say it was a vote for Schrodinger,” Rodney answered. “Newton’s gravitational research didn’t nearly get him killed.”
“Schrodinger.” Jennifer made a face. “That’s just—it’s kind of creepy, Rodney.”
“That’s superstition.” Rodney set the kitten on the counter, where it purred and tried to stick its head into Jennifer’s chicken. “Besides, he had to be in two places at once yesterday, or else how could he shred the new curtain and steal my new socks in the three minutes we weren’t watching him?”
“I like Newton,” Jennifer said, moving the chicken. Arguing about the cat’s name was better than worrying about Atlantis. Or about the things that might be happening there.
“Newton’s too easy,” Rodney said, but his heart wasn’t in it.
Jennifer looked up, frowning. Rodney was staring distractedly into the refrigerator, not really looking at the neon-flavored Jello cups he’d found on sale last week. Her frown deepened, but before she could say anything, Rodney straightened, closing the door.
“Look, I think—I want to send some emails.”
“About Atlantis?” Jennifer asked. There was a cold knot in the pit of her stomach that she couldn’t quite explain.
Rodney nodded. “Not that I think it’ll do any good, you just don’t win when O’Neill’s in the game, but—I have to try.”
He turned without waiting for an answer, disappeared into the spare bedroom he’d taken over as an office. The kitten leaped from the counter and scampered after him, scooting past just as he closed the door. Rodney opened the door again, looked back out. “Schroedinger.”
Jennifer smiled in spite of herself, but the expression quickly faded. What would Carson do? He’d made it clear he was going back to Pegasus—and he could still go, on the George Hammond or even the Daedalus, but without Atlantis to back him up, his work would be so much harder… And if Carson went, what would happen to Todd? Sheppard was Air Force, he wasn’t in a position to say no if his superiors insisted he turn over the Wraith. Was there anyone she could email? Anybody in the labs at Area 51 who could help? The thought dwindled and died. She wasn’t sure yet who in the new lab knew about the Stargate project, and she didn’t really have any connections, any favors to call in. And what Rodney had said was true: you couldn’t play politics with General O’Neill and win.
Without thinking, she put a mug of coffee into the microwave, punched buttons to start it heating. The machine lit and whirred, and she wandered toward the sliding glass doors that led onto the narrow deck. The temperature had plummeted the way it always did in the desert, heat no longer radiating from the glass. The moon was rising, just past full, but so bright she could see shadows stretching from each bit of scrub. On Atlantis, there would have been two shadows, and two moons sinking toward the horizon—and on Atlantis there would have been waves and a pleasant breeze, the scent of alien salts.
No, she corrected herself. Atlantis had waves and the sea air still, and San Francisco glittering in the distance. And the Air Force swarming over it, and—
The microwave dinged, and she turned toward it with relief. There was no going back.
* * *
Sheppard hadn’t exactly planned to come this way, but when the beer hit him, the nearest bathroom had been down that corridor. And then he’d heard some of the new guys coming up behind him, transferred in to fill gaps as Atlantis’s personnel began to take reassignment. He couldn’t stand to hear them saying stupid things about the city, or to try to explain why the lights came on for him and not for them, and he’d ducked deeper into a side hallway, Atlantis obligingly closing doors behind him. In fact, there was absolutely no r
eason to come this way, none whatsoever, but now that he was in the neighborhood, sort of…
Sheppard glanced over his shoulder, took a left down the corridor that led to the stasis chambers. Nobody came this way much anyway, what with the draw-down of the military personnel, and the scientists disappearing to better jobs or quitting like Rodney in angry disappointment—and maybe that was as good a reason as any to take a walk through, to make sure that Todd was still safe, securely frozen, or whatever, suspended in his pod. OK, sure, a problem with the chamber would definitely show up in the control room, but there were a lot of new guys there, and they might not get what was happening. It was just good sense to take a quick look himself, just in case.
It had absolutely nothing to do with the dream he’d had the night before, the one where he and Teyla—and sometimes, at the wrong times, it was also him and Holland—were trapped in the Atlantis at the end of time, half buried in the sand, deeper than it had been in reality. If, of course, you could call that reality… He stopped to consider that for a moment, glad of the distraction, the beer tangling his feet so that he had to brace himself against the wall. And that had been part of the dream, too, holding onto the walls while the sand swirled in the corridors, as they struggled to find a way out. Teyla—or Holland—had the life signs detector, which was wrong though he hadn’t noticed in the dream, but they couldn’t find anybody, not even Rodney’s hologram, which at the time had filled him with a grief that made his chest hurt and right now made him want to crack a joke about it at least being quiet, except that Rodney wasn’t there to be annoyed by it. Rodney was in Area 51, picking out furniture—buying a kitten, Teyla said, from some woman in Nebraska—and that hurt worse than he’d expected, and it wasn’t something he was going to think about anyway.
He came out abruptly into the stasis room, the lights flashing on the way they had in his dream, so that he caught his breath, heart racing, the images stark in his mind. Teyla’d been there, P90 at port-arms, sliding off to the right toward the cross corridor that wasn’t yet filled with sand. And Todd had been there, too, a pale green-toned shape behind the chamber’s translucent door. Todd will help us, he’d said in the dream, but Holland—Teyla—had shaken his head and urged them on. John had stopped anyway, throwing off Holland’s hand, and worked the controls. Todd can help us, he’d said again, but the door had opened on a withered corpse, mouth gaping as though someone had fed on him. John had fallen back, and impossibly the feeding hand had reached for him even as the rest of the body crumbled. Teyla fired at it, pumping it full of bullets, but it had kept coming, kept reaching, and he’d dragged himself awake just as the claws pierced his skin. He had lain there sweating and shaken, and finally dragged himself out of bed before dawn because there didn’t seem any point in trying to sleep any more.
That lack of sleep was one reason the beer was hitting him so hard, and it was also a reason he’d had so much of it, and, all right, maybe the dream had brought him down here. But it wasn’t because he was literally frightened that Todd would escape, he knew the difference between dreams and reality; it was more a matter of security, of giving his subconscious the reassurance it needed that Todd was safely contained, and of being absolutely sure everything really was still all right. After all, it was always possible that his subconscious had spotted something important that his conscious mind had missed…
He had made his way to the control console almost without thinking, now stood staring at the rows of flickering checklights. Everything was the way it was supposed to be, even he could see that, but he still had to make himself turn to face the chamber itself. To his embarrassed relief, Todd looked fairly normal, at least for a Wraith, eyes closed, hands lax at his side, the veins that fed the enzyme to the claws of his feeding hand stark against the pale skin.
“Not that I believe it for one second,” John said, and the chamber’s carved walls damped his voice, as though he were speaking only in his own mind. “You’re still dangerous. McKay ought to put one of his signs on you.”
He grinned at the thought, but the smile faded. The Wraith wasn’t just dangerous, he was hungry and dangerous, and that was never a good combination. He’d been getting seriously hungry when he went into the chamber. He’d begun conserving his strength, not that anyone who hadn’t seen him when he was first on Atlantis would have noticed—and that was another thing John didn’t really want to think about, talking a despairing man into the worst kind of suicide… He dragged himself away from the memory, the sensation of Wallace’s body shriveling in his hands, grabbed hold of the console’s edge to feel something solid instead.
“And you never even said thank you,” he said aloud. “It would have been polite.”
For some reason, that made him snicker. Maybe it was the idea of Wraith etiquette, which had to be some kind of sick joke, or maybe it was the frustrated look on the faces of the IOA’s special committee when they’d found out Carson had put the Wraith into stasis. Security, Woolsey had announced blandly, when they’d complained, but everybody knew it was stasis or starvation. Or medical experimentation, which was actually the most likely thing. And that—that wasn’t acceptable. Even for a Wraith.
“I mean, no offense, Todd, but look how that worked out with Michael. You’d look terrible with short hair. Really terrible.” He snickered again at the thought, untangled himself from the console, and moved closer to the chamber, staring up at the figure inside it. “How long does it take your guys to do their hair in the mornings? And, jeez after you hibernate a couple hundred years, the line for the blow dryer has to be something awful—”
His smile vanished again, and he sank to the floor, turning so that he sat with his knees drawn up and his back against the solid surface of the chamber. He could feel the city’s hum through it, through the floor, the faintest of vibrations that told him he was still on Atlantis. But for how long? They were grounded, an Air Force base—at least that ought to mean the city wouldn’t be dismantled, but that wasn’t nearly enough. They had to go back, there were people depending on them, people they’d made promises to—
“And that includes you, Todd. Whatever your name is. If you have names.” John tipped his head back so that it was resting against the stasis chamber. Yeah, the Wraith were used to hibernating, spent hundreds of years suspended in their ships, but that was different, protected by the hive, by the Keepers who watched over them. It had to take some guts to go into stasis here, to voluntarily make yourself helpless, leave it to your enemies to choose when to wake you. If they were going to wake you…
“We had a deal,” he said quietly. “We have a deal. We’re going back.”
And after that? Todd had said that to him once before, and then as now he didn’t have a good answer.
“All bets are off,” he said, but he could hear the uncertainty in his voice. He cleared his throat, spoke more firmly, as though he could convince himself. “We will go back. Somehow…”
* * *
Day four of O’Neill in command. John walked into the gateroom with his head pounding. There were people all over the place, Air Force enlisted springing to attention when they saw him.
John returned salutes bemusedly. They seemed to be manhandling a great deal of boxes and pallets around. Unfamiliar faces. Techs in SGC uniforms. And Dr. Lee was messing with the Stargate, arguing with a couple of guys John had never seen before. What the hell was Dr. Lee doing here anyhow? He belonged in Colorado at the SGC. He sure had no business messing with their gate. He could go mess with his own gate if he wanted to.
John felt his breakfast turn over in his stomach. The mess had been full of Air Force types, all chattering eagerly. He’d flipped open his laptop—orientation for new personnel at 1400. He was supposed to spend the afternoon showing wet behind the ears airmen his city? Only it wasn’t his city anymore. It was the Air Force’s city, and like the rest of these guys he was just passing through.
Teyla came down the stairs, her hands clenched at her sides.
&n
bsp; “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“I trusted him! I liked him!” Teyla was very nearly in tears, something John hadn’t seen very often, and hoped he wouldn’t see again. She looked up toward the office above the gateroom, and if looks could kill Jack O’Neill would be lying dead.
There was a buzz in the control room that the nearly empty city hadn’t seen in months—Air Force personnel at the consoles above. Only Chuck was a familiar face, grimacing as he talked on the radio with a naval tender coming alongside one of the main piers to offload massive amounts of ammunition and other military supplies.
“I thought he was with us,” Teyla said, and John thought her voice actually cracked. “I thought he understood.”
They shouldn’t be talking like this in the gateroom, but John didn’t care. What was O’Neill going to do? Cashier him? It might be a relief. It might be preferable to just get the hell out of here than stay and see Atlantis turn into an Air Force base, nothing special, just one more big weapons platform.
The city quenched, forever lost to him…
“All these weeks,” Teyla said. “He acted like he cared about us.” He knew she meant about her and Torren, about Ronon, about all the people of the Pegasus Galaxy whose faces he had never seen, who certainly weren’t as real to him as they were to John. Sometime, in some moment he hadn’t identified, they’d become his people, his responsibility. You stand by your people.
If he went off on O’Neill now, if he walked in and resigned his commission, this would be the last time he saw Atlantis. This would be the last day.
John glanced up at the soaring walls, the familiar patterns of stained glass making mosaics of light across the floor, the gate glimmering with the cold sheen of naquadah. The last time.
“I thought that he was a good man,” Teyla said sadly, and her grief was the thing that struck him to the core. It might be the last time he saw her as well. She would go back out to Pegasus on the Hammond, go home to her people and Kanaan. He’d never know what happened to her, whether she was having a nice life somewhere, telling stories and raising tava beans, or whether the Wraith…
