“Okay,” Jennifer said. “I can take a look, but he’s a pretty healthy kid, so I don’t expect I’ve got much work here.” She busied herself with the exam, which gave her time to figure out what to say. Teyla smiled at Torren as she tried to coax him to let Jennifer look in his ears, but she didn’t exactly look happy. “How long do you think he’ll be staying there with Kanaan?”
Teyla smoothed Torren’s hair. “At least until we have an iris again,” she said. “It has not ever been perfectly safe in the city, but when we do not even have the iris…” She met Jennifer’s eyes over Torren’s head. “And I would have him have every benefit of this city’s medicine before he goes.”
You mean in case the Wraith nuke Atlantis and he never comes back, Jennifer thought. That’s cheery. She wouldn’t say it in front of Torren, though, and she supposed that Teyla had to think that way; she’d grown up with the knowledge that any community, no matter how strong, could be wiped out by the Wraith.
Jennifer wasn’t sure how anyone could stand to have kids in the face of that knowledge. She was starting to feel pretty guilty herself about having brought the kitten, although at least the Wraith didn’t eat cats —
She cleared her throat, aware that she’d taken too long to reply. “I can go ahead and give him his MMR booster early, and the Varicella — that’s chicken pox. He’s current on everything that’s specific to the Pegasus galaxy.”
“That is good,” Teyla said, her hand curled protectively over the top of Torren’s head again.
Colonel Sheppard came into the infirmary as she was giving Torren the second injection. “What’s the matter with him?”
“He’s getting a measles shot,” Jennifer said. “I gave you one before we left Earth, but you didn’t scream.”
“I thought about it,” Sheppard said. “I came to see if I could talk to Lorne.”
Jennifer frowned at him. “Is that talk as in bother, or talk as in cheer up?”
“Talk as in see how he’s doing and tell him everything’s okay,” Sheppard said as if he thought that should have been obvious. He glanced at Teyla. “For a certain value of okay.”
“All right,” Jennifer said. “He’s conscious, but he has a concussion, okay? Don’t make his head hurt even worse than it does.”
“I’ll use my inside voice,” Sheppard said.
“Speaking of which, could you take Torren for a moment?” Teyla said. “I would like to ask Dr. Keller about Rodney.”
Sheppard grimaced, as if acknowledging that the subject was probably not toddler-appropriate, at least not for a toddler who didn’t need to hear the words ‘Wraith’ and ‘Uncle Rodney’ in the same sentence. “Up you go,” he said, hoisting Torren off Teyla’s lap. “Let’s go see Major Lorne.”
Teyla met Jennifer’s eyes once John had gone around the corner with Torren. “I am sure you may not know anything yet.”
“Carson and I ran some computer models based on our best guess at the structure of their retrovirus,” Jennifer said reluctantly. “We know that whatever they did didn’t affect the ATA gene. That narrows down the possibilities. Still, I want to stress that at this point we have very little actual data — ”
“What did you find?” Teyla’s voice was gentle but insistent.
“Our best computer models right now have Rodney not returning completely to human form, even after he’s no longer receiving doses of the retrovirus. In the best-case scenarios, the lasting effects are essentially cosmetic.”
“Rodney would not like it if his hair were permanently white, but I think we would all learn to live with it,” Teyla said. “But if he remained much more like the Wraith in appearance… it would be a difficult thing for him, and I am sure for you.”
“Right now, I’m not even worried about that,” Jennifer said, although she wasn’t entirely sure Teyla believed her. “If he ends up staying green, we’ll… you know, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” She wasn’t sure what it would mean for him ever being able to go back to Earth, even to visit, but that wasn’t something she was ready to think about at the moment.
“Then…?”
Jennifer began peeling off her exam gloves to give her something to do with her hands. “The big problem is that the worst-case scenario shows him not regaining the ability to survive on human food. That’s… obviously, we’ll figure out how to avoid that, but it’s not a possibility we wanted to see coming up at all.”
“I am sure you and Carson will do everything you can,” Teyla said.
“We all want to fix this,” Jennifer said. “I’ll keep working with Carson and see if we can get a better model. We may be able to use some version of our own retrovirus to complete the transformation from Wraith back to human.”
She was kind of hoping Teyla wouldn’t see the catch there, but she frowned and said, “And when you stopped administering your drug?”
“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, too,” Jennifer said. “Even if he ended up having to take doses of our retrovirus on a regular basis, that’s a result we could live with.”
“Mr. Woolsey would not want Rodney to be sent back to Earth, even if he were dependent on the retrovirus,” Teyla said, as if it were a comforting thought. It probably was, to her and Sheppard.
“No, I imagine he wouldn’t,” Jennifer said. “What would we do without Rodney in Atlantis performing technological miracles?”
“We will have him back to perform miracles again soon,” Teyla said firmly, her eyes on something behind Jennifer. Jennifer wasn’t surprised to see that Sheppard had returned, carrying Torren against his shoulder.
“I think he’s going to sleep,” Sheppard said. “Either you wore him out, or I’m just really boring today.”
“He had an exciting night,” Teyla said. Jennifer wondered what Torren had made of the alarm in the middle of the night. He seemed fine now, content to take a nap on Sheppard’s chest. “I must take him, John. The wormhole to the alpha site will disengage soon, and they will be dialing New Athos for me.”
“I’ve got some medical supplies that it would be great if you could take with you,” Jennifer said. “I was going to go over there myself once we got settled, but since it might be a little while, I’d at least like to send a couple of boxes of antibiotics.”
“I can carry Torren on the way upstairs if you want to get the boxes,” Sheppard said. “I’m headed that way anyway, since I get to sit in the big office now. But if you’d rather take him — ” He sounded like he was trying very hard to sound casual. It hadn’t occurred to Jennifer before that he’d probably miss Torren too, as much time as he’d been spending with him.
Teyla met Sheppard’s eyes for a moment, a wordless exchange that Jennifer couldn’t read and wasn’t sure she was meant to. “It would be a help for you to carry him,” Teyla said gently. “As far as the gateroom. I will take the boxes.”
“It won’t be for long,” Sheppard said. Jennifer hoped he was right.
Dick tried to look like repacking his briefcase was a complicated task, giving the assembled IOA members time to leave the room. He didn’t want to look like he was running away from them, as tempting as that thought was at the moment. Finally he straightened up in the empty room.
“I think that went well,” he said. It didn’t sound convincing even to him.
He stepped outside to the unwelcome sight of General O’Neill waiting in the hallway. It had been an entire day of explaining himself, at great length and repeatedly, and he had hoped that the next few hours would involve nothing but his hotel room and the chance to take his shoes off.
“General O’Neill,” he said, trying to sound more pleased than he felt.
“Woolsey,” O’Neill said. “Having fun?”
“The committee is going to recommend a more thorough review by the full IOA,” Dick said. “In the mean time, they’d like to go over our full inventory list.”
“Exciting.”
Dick wasn’t sure what O’Neill’s agenda here was,
and the fact that he was making smart remarks told him nothing except that this was O’Neill. He squared his shoulders. “What can I do for you, General?”
“I think the question is what I can do for you,” O’Neill said. “Or, more to the point, what I’m prepared to do.”
Dick looked back at the conference room wearily. “I suppose we should…”
“After you,” O’Neill said. He pulled the door shut after him. “All right. What the hell’s going on in Pegasus?”
“I’m sure you’ve read my latest report,” Woolsey said.
“I have. I’m just hoping I haven’t read it right. You seriously gave the Genii an Ancient battlecruiser? Why would you do that?”
It was tempting to say, ‘No, Colonel Sheppard gave the Genii an Ancient battlecruiser, and it seemed like a bad idea to take it back.’ That wouldn’t win him any points with O’Neill, though, and it wasn’t fair, either. He’d known Sheppard wasn’t exactly a diplomat, and he’d sent him anyway, because the Genii were reluctant to negotiate with civilians.
“If you’ve read my report, you know that we were hoping to obtain intelligence about the location of Dr. McKay. Although we didn’t get that information from the Genii, we did preserve our tentative alliance with them.”
“Preserving alliances means sending a fruit basket, not a warship.”
“I don’t think Ladon Radim is very interested in fruit baskets.”
“Ladon Radim is a tinpot dictator with ambitions to take over the Pegasus Galaxy,” O’Neill said. “Are we going to help?”
“He probably can’t even get the thing to work,” Dick said. The moment the words were out of his mouth, he suspected that had been a mistake.
“And according to your reports, we could have!” O’Neill said. “With our engineers and a pilot with the ATA gene, we’d have a functional Ancient battle cruiser. Our only one, since you people got the Orion blown up.”
“That was a year and a half before I took command of the expedition,” Dick said, but it didn’t seem to slow O’Neill down.
“Now, the best case scenario is that it’s a great big paperweight. If we’re not so lucky, Radim will paste the thing together, find a pilot with the gene, and start knocking over the neighbors. What the hell were you thinking, writing Sheppard a blank check like that? I don’t expect him to be sensible when it’s a member of his team who’s missing, but I expect you to be.”
“As long as he’s in the hands of the enemy, Dr. McKay poses a threat to the security of Atlantis — and Earth — that is difficult to overestimate,” Dick said. “More than that, he’s a valued member of the expedition, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to make every effort to find him.” After the silence dragged out for a moment, Dick couldn’t help asking, “What?”
“I’m just wondering,” O’Neill said. “Because I remember sitting — well, not right here, but at a table a lot like this one only not as nice — while you explained that it hadn’t been cost-effective for us to rescue one of our teams. And so now I’m wondering, just because I’m curious, how much do you think an Ancient battlecruiser is worth? More, or less, than the one person you’re looking for?”
“Are you suggesting that if it were a trade, it would be reasonable to sacrifice McKay for the ship?”
“I’m just asking for a simple opinion. A cost-benefit analysis. That’s what all these decisions boil down to, right?”
He wanted to defend himself against the anger in O’Neill’s voice, but he didn’t think there was an answer O’Neill wanted to hear, other than the value of a human life is priceless. And there was a sense in which that was true, and a sense in which it wasn’t, and neither one was the most important point at the moment.
“The real benefit of letting them have the ship is something more important than whether we find Dr. McKay or not,” Dick said. “It’s perfectly clear to me that Homeworld Security has no intention of sending us the kind of firepower we would need to conduct a successful war against the Wraith on our own.”
“I haven’t got it,” O’Neill said frankly. “And if I get it, you can’t have it. The Ori may be out of the picture, but if there’s one thing I know, it’s that there’s always going to be another bad guy. You can have what I can spare, but it says ‘Homeworld Security’ on my door for a reason.”
“I don’t think any of the other member governments of the IOA are any more eager to provide us with what we’d need to win the war singlehandedly, assuming that’s even possible. We need allies in the Pegasus Galaxy, and the Genii are the strongest and most organized force fighting the Wraith.”
“Go on,” O’Neill said, a little more patiently.
“The Genii found the ship in the first place. I think it’s reasonable to say that they had salvage rights. Sheppard did them the favor of flying it in hopes of gaining valuable information, which I will grant you that they turned out not to have. But the ship was never ours.”
“That’s a reasonable argument,” O’Neill said. “I’m not sure the IOA’s going to buy it.”
“Neither am I,” Dick said.
“Nechayev agrees with you about making friends with the Genii,” O’Neill said. “He’s an old soldier, and he’s been around the block too many times to think it’s a good idea to piss off the locals.”
“He may be the only one,” Dick said.
“Dixon-Smythe’s got a stick up her ass. She doesn’t care what happens in Pegasus, because nobody there is British. Shen’s after your job, so you’ll get no love there. Desai might be worth working on. The President hasn’t decided who the new American representative is supposed to be, so that should be interesting.”
“You expect they’ll want you to testify?”
“I expect they will. And you know I just love testifying.”
“What are you planning to say?”
O’Neill ran a hand through his hair. “I would have backed you up all the way on the rescue if it had actually worked,” he said. “Did you have to get the Hammond shot up while the paint was still new? Carter likes that ship.”
“Carter and Sheppard both felt that the mission had a strong chance of succeeding, and that it was the best chance we were likely to get,” Dick said. “You know I’m no tactician. I took their advice.”
“Tell Sheppard not to blow the mission next time,” O’Neill said. “If you’d tried to blame the screw-up with the Genii on him, I’d have said you could go hang, but he’s the one who’s supposed to do the impossible in the field.”
“Doing the impossible isn’t actually a job requirement, is it?”
O’Neill gave him a long look. “Not technically,” he said. “In actual practice, you’d be surprised.”
“Maybe not all that surprised,” Dick said.
“Things look a little different from the other side of that table, don’t they?”
“They do,” Dick said. “For what it’s worth, I wish I’d understood then what it felt like to have to make these decisions. And at the same time, I am still very aware that we don’t have unlimited resources to put into anything. We have to make choices.”
“I have to make choices,” O’Neill said. “They’re not always ones I like. Funny thing, you defeat the Ori, and suddenly people start talking about peacetime dividends and budget cuts. You’d think they’d want to get us something nice.”
“Maybe a fruit basket,” Dick said.
“That would be nice.”
“Backing me up to the IOA is free.”
“You know better than that,” O’Neill said. “But I think you had the right general idea. Some of the details could have maybe used some work.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“So what are you planning to do now?” O’Neill said.
“I was thinking I’d just go back to my hotel and order room service,” Dick said. “It’s been a long day.”
O’Neill just looked at him. “I mean about McKay.”
“Yes, right. Well, obviously we need to find
him. Again.”
“Why don’t you think about coming up with some more specific plans?”
“For when I go back to Atlantis?” He couldn’t keep the skepticism out of his voice.
“You never know,” O’Neill said. “They haven’t made any decisions yet. This party’s just getting started.”
“You know, I’m beginning to understand why they call it an exhaustive review,” Dick said.
O’Neill snorted. “Tell me about it.”
Chapter Eleven
Down Time
Radek looked down at his empty plate, all too aware that this was the first time since the attack that he had had anything approaching a normal day. A day that began with a shower and a shave, and ended with dinner — admittedly one that included tava beans, but that counted as ordinary now — and in which no one had actually shot at anyone. He was still dead tired, and, more to the point, despite spending the day directing teams to search the city, they were no closer to finding enough titanium to make a workable mechanical iris, but at least no one had died.
And it would not help to worry about that tonight. Keeping the gate open was working, would prevent a Wraith attack until they could get an iris built. It would be enough. He sighed, unable to convince himself that it would be that simple, and took off his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose. Without them, the mess hall was a blur, oddly comforting, and he closed his eyes, imagining that his fears were a small bundle, one he could hold in both hands, compress and mold until they were a little ball that he could lock away, seal up tight in a special box with a special key —
It wasn’t really working. He sighed, and slipped his glasses back on. He had felt this way often enough the first year, but then there had been Peter Grodin to keep him company, to talk him out of these moods, or stay awake with him when they were both too tired to sleep.
STARGATE ATLANTIS: Allegiance(Book three in the Legacy series) Page 12
