“Now,” one of the Satedans called, and William stepped gently into the empty air.
He let the light play ahead of him as he descended, grimacing as it picked out the signs of destruction. The floor was strewn with rubble, thick with brick dust, and something had fallen on a pile of crates, shattering the top tier and spilling their contents. He recognized pieces of armature, broken stone, shreds of some kind of packing material. None of that was a good sign. If the Satedans had been trying to move their best pieces to safety, there was no telling where the ZPM or the crystals had ended up.
As his feet touched the floor and the rope came slack, he swung his light in a wider arc, surveying the pile of crates. Teeth glinted among the shattered wood, the smallest as long as his hand, seemingly dozens of them poking from a bony snout. Tusks curled up from the lower jaw, the skull poking out of the wreckage like a dragon half buried in its hoard. He let out a sound somewhere between a yelp and a curse, and Radek’s voice crackled in his ear.
“Are you all right?”
“Fine,” William said. “I — stepped wrong.” The rope slackened further, and he unclipped himself, watching as it slithered up and out of sight. “I think — ” He switched on the camera as he spoke, panning slowly across the threatening skull — one of the incomplete fossils, presumably — and around the rest of the room. “It looks to me as though they’d started to pack things up to move them out of harm’s way.”
Radek’s voice tightened. “Understood.”
William let the camera linger a moment longer on a cracked black case that looked like plastic. More bones had spilled from it, along with another, weirdly crocodilian skull, and his fingers practically itched to examine it more closely. He compromised on a couple of close-ups, then switched off the camera and turned to look for the door.
There were more crates in the way, undamaged ones, and for an instant he hoped the passage might be clear. Then he came around the last crate, and his heart fell. The door was there, and open, too, but beyond it was a tangle of wood and plaster. He swore under his breath and moved closer, letting the light play slowly over the chaos.
At second glance, it wasn’t quite as bad. The debris didn’t look entirely structural, or at least there was only one large beam that looked as though it had come from the ceiling. The rest might have come from the furnishings, might have been shelves and boxes and packing materials. And artifacts, too; he winced at the glitter of broken crystal among the mess.
Still, there was a bit of a gap, and the camera’s light seemed to show more open space beyond. He could probably fit through it easily enough, especially without a pack or any heavy gear — He curbed himself sternly. That was a stupid choice at the best of times, on Earth, say, on an ordinary dig somewhere in Western Europe. Here it was utter folly. He touched his radio instead. “Zelenka.”
“Yes?”
“The door’s partly blocked. I think I can get through without causing any more damage, but I’d like your opinion before I try it.”
“Hell and damnation,” Radek said, in Czech. There was a pause, and he went on in English. “Ronon and I will come down.”
William lifted an eyebrow at that. He hadn’t expected Ronon to be at the dig at all, much less to participate. Especially when he was easily the biggest person around, not at all the sort you’d normally want to have crawling around narrow spaces underground… But it was his planet, his homeworld, and that made a difference, too.
Ronon came down first, as though he was expecting attack, and Radek followed, muttering to himself in Czech. As he landed, his light caught the tusked skull, and he swore more loudly. Ronon turned, amazingly fast, reaching for his gun before he saw the skull and relaxed again.
“That’s Tsuzhur. She used to be in the Great Hall.”
“Is that her name or her species?” William asked, and Radek sighed loudly.
“Nickname,” Ronon said. “Where’s the door?”
William pointed, and followed as they ducked around the piles of crates. Radek studied the debris for a long moment, running his light up and down the one long beam, then examining the frame and the walls.
“Well,” he said at last, and shrugged. “I think it is stable. I am smallest — ”
“But I know what I’m doing,” William said. He unbuckled his harness, not wanting it to catch on anything in the rubble, and Ronon gave him an appraising look.
“He should go,” he said, and Radek shrugged again.
“As you wish.”
William edged into the gap, turning sideways to scrape along what felt like a wall, then went to hands and knees to pull himself through the last low gap. There were sharp things in the debris, and he felt his trousers tear, felt something else jab into the heel of his hand. That he stopped to check, but there was no blood, and he crawled out at last into a larger space. A few rows of shelves were still intact, and several more had been tipped over, leaning against the wall like dominos. Crystal dust glittered on the bare tiles, but the shelves were mostly empty.
“Oh, damn,” he said. He had known better, had known not to hope too much, but he never managed to be sensible about such things, and the barren shelves were like a blow. There had been a ZPM — here, in this room, according to the dataleaves; after everything they’d been through to get it, it seemed unfair to lose the prize.
He swung the light again, focusing more carefully. The tilted shelves were definitely empty, what had remained of their contents broken on the hard tiles, but there were still a couple of boxes in the closest upright shelves. They were made of the same black plastic as the broken cases in the fossil room, only intact, and he lifted the smaller one from its place. The latches had held, though the hinges felt weak, and he opened the lid with renewed hope.
It was an Ancient crystal, all right, long and narrow and pale gold, but a jagged crack ran all along one narrow face. He sighed, closed the lid again, and moved on. The next case had more crystals, dulled and chipped, obviously unusable.
“Lynn!” Radek’s voice sounded in his ear. “What have you found?”
“Sorry.” William stretched to take another case down from the top shelf. “There’s not a lot left, I’m afraid. I did find a couple of crystals that look like the ones you wanted, but most of what I’m seeing is damaged.”
There was a fractional pause, and then Radek said, “Keep looking.” His voice was scrupulously neutral.
William worked his way down the row of shelves that were still upright, and was not particularly surprised when most of the cases turned out to contain only damaged crystals. One small box held what looked like a single Ancient data crystal, and he tucked it, box and all, into the pocket of his jacket. Not that it was likely to be that much help; what they needed right now was power, weapons, ways to defend the city, not random information.
“Nothing so far,” he said into the radio, and Radek answered patiently enough.
“Understood.”
William shone his light along the top of the tilted shelves, looking for anything that might have been caught between, that might have survived, and a pale object by his feet caught his eye. He swung the light down, his breath catching as he recognized the bones of a human hand. He let the light play further, picked out a sleeve and a shoulder, the fragments of a skull beneath a fallen case. A soldier, he guessed — the remains of the clothes looked like a uniform, complete with badges and what were probably rank stripes ringing the sleeve. And there was carrying case, almost invisible in the shadow of the tilted shelves, lying as though the soldier had dropped it when the crates fell on him. On her, he corrected, assessing the size of the hand. A woman, or a very young man. He wouldn’t know for sure unless he could examine the rest of the skeleton.
He shook that thought away, pulled the case free. It was rounded at the corners, with an extra set of straps to keep the lid in place. He picked them loose, pried open the lid, and peered inside. Nestled in the padding was a narrow crystal pyramid, its jagged edges seamed with dar
ker color. “Oh.”
“Lynn!” Radek sounded distinctly out of patience, and William grimaced.
“Sorry. It’s here. I have it.”
“The ZPM?”
“Yes.” William closed the lid, relieved that the case seemed solid, refastened the straps.
“Does it have power?”
“I don’t know. It’s not glowing, does that mean anything?”
“Not really.”
“There isn’t any obvious damage,” William said. He looked back at the body, wondering if the Satedans had known what they had, if that was why she’d been trying to retrieve it, or if she’d just been trying to save one more piece of her people’s past. And that was gross speculation. All he could say for certain was that she had died trying to get the artifact out of the Museum. “The case was undamaged, and it seemed to be well padded.”
Radek sighed again. “We must get it out right away.”
“All right,” William said, and moved back to the debris-choked doorway.
It took them almost ten minutes to work out how to fit the case through the gap, Radek swearing in Czech the whole time, but at last it was through. William squatted against the wall, feeling the sweat trickling down his spine, and after a moment, Radek spoke in his ear.
“It is intact, at least. It is not at full power, but I can’t tell any more than that until we get it out of here.”
“Go,” William said. “Ronon?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve also found a body.”
There was a little silence. “Yeah?”
“It’s mostly buried, but I can see sleeve marking — unit insignia, maybe, or rank? I’ll photograph them, but do you want me to bring the actual sleeve end?”
This time the silence was longer, and William winced, hoping he hadn’t inadvertently offended. The Air Force people he’d known, the Marines, they would have wanted that tangible memory, but maybe Satedans, the Satedan military, didn’t work that way.
“Yeah,” Ronon said. His voice was just a little hoarse. “That’d be good.”
“Right,” William said. He fished in his pocket for his knife, sawed carefully through the tough fabric just above the rings that looked like rank stripes, freed it gently from the skeleton. In spite of his care, he dislodged a couple of the smaller fingerbones, the tendons too far gone to hold them, and he nudged the bones back into place.
“Sorry,” he said, softly, and turned back to the blocked door.
He worked his way through the gap, emerged gasping and sweating in the fossil room. Ronon extended a hand, hauled him to his feet, and William nodded in thanks.
“Here,” he said, and held out the cut sleeve.
Ronon took it, held the scrap of cloth into the beam from his light. His face was shadowed, but William thought his voice was unnaturally controlled. “University Brigade. A corporal.” He tucked it into his own pocket. “I’ll give it to Cai.”
William nodded, suppressing unworthy regret. He had the photos, he didn’t need the actual artifact.
“What happened, could you tell?”
William shrugged. “A crate fell on her — from the size of the hand, I think it was a woman — and my guess would be that she was trying to rescue something from the shelves. The ZPM, it looks like.”
Ronon nodded in turn. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
Several people were looking over the edge of the hole, and William climbed back into his harness, let himself be hauled to the surface. Ronon came after, hand over hand up the rope, and looked at Radek, who had the ZPM lying on a worktable, cables snaking to it from his laptop.
“Well?”
“Well.” Radek glared at both of them. “It is a ZPM, and it is intact and undamaged. But. There is only minimal power.”
“How small is minimal?” Ronon asked.
“Too small,” Radek said. “We might be able to power the shield for a few minutes. We might be able to launch drones. I will not know for certain exactly how much power is available until we go back to Atlantis, but it is not enough. Not enough at all.”
“Bugger,” William said.
Chapter Twenty-one
Obstacles
“Dr. Keller?”
Jennifer pulled off her exam gloves and thumbed on her radio. “Keller here.”
“Ma’am, you wanted me to tell you when Colonel Sheppard and his team returned,” Airman Salawi said.
“I did, didn’t I,” Jennifer said. She felt the knot settle back in the pit of her stomach, the one she’d managed to distract herself from while checking out Dr. Altman’s sore throat. “So how did it go with the Satedans and the Genii?”
“All right, I think?” Salawi said, in tones that suggested that she wasn’t sure whether she was supposed to have been listening to whatever post-mission conversation had gone on in the control room. “No injuries to our people, anyway.”
“Well, that’s what we like from a diplomatic conference,” Jennifer said, although given the Satedans and the Genii, it probably hadn’t been a foregone conclusion.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m not in the Air Force,” Jennifer pointed out. “You don’t actually have to call me ‘ma’am’ all the time.”
“Sorry, Dr. Keller.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jennifer said. She glanced at her computer screen again, wondering if she should run one more set of the simulations of Rodney’s recovery. It wasn’t as if using the same data and the same computer models was going to give her different results, but there was some part of her that stubbornly hoped that it would.
She picked up her laptop instead and headed up to Woolsey’s office, which was now at least temporarily Sheppard’s office. The first few times she’d had to make these kinds of reports, it had been in Elizabeth’s office, sparely but beautifully decorated with the artifacts of half a dozen worlds. Woolsey’s was more a stubborn little oasis of Earth, as if asserting his own personality over the space was his small act of rebellion against the weight of people’s expectations.
It was hard to imagine what Sheppard would do with it if it turned out to be his office on a more permanent basis. He had an office of his own, but he was hardly ever in it, and as far as Jennifer could tell it wasn’t much more than an oversized closet full of paperwork and spare clips of ammunition.
She paused for a moment outside the door of his office, then squared her shoulders and walked in. “Colonel Sheppard? If you’ve got a minute, there’s something we need to talk about.”
“Sure,” Sheppard said. “Is there a problem?” He looked like he hoped the answer was no. “We just got in.”
“I know,” Jennifer said by way of apology. “But, yes, I think we may have a problem. You know we’ve been trying to figure out how the Wraith retrovirus works, so that we can reverse its effects.”
“Yeah, and?”
Jennifer took a deep breath. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “All of our efforts to transform the Wraith completely into humans have involved essentially writing over the part of their DNA that comes from the Iratus bug with human DNA.”
“I know that much.”
“So, what we keep finding is that the Iratus bug’s regenerative abilities — which are also present in the Wraith — make it very difficult to eradicate the Iratus bug DNA completely from someone’s system. It was possible the time when you were transforming into a bug — ”
Sheppard looked sour. “I try not to remember.”
“Sorry,” Jennifer said. “But that transformation left your body in such an unstable state that it was easy to get your body to reject the alien DNA. The Wraith combination of Iratus bug and human DNA is stable, and in some ways almost self-protective. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that somebody had deliberately designed it that way.”
“You may not be wrong,” Sheppard said. “We know that the Wraith are pretty advanced at genetic engineering, given the way they grow their ships — ”
“Yeah,
I try not to remember that,” Jennifer said.
“It would have been pretty cool to have our own hive ship,” Sheppard said, and then, “Joking. That was a joke.”
“Very funny,” Jennifer said. “My point is, I think given a little more time I could work out how to transform a human permanently into a Wraith.”
“If we wanted to do that,” Sheppard said. “Which we don’t, although being able to do it temporarily could be useful.”
“It could be, if we could do it,” Jennifer said. She was aware that she was talking around the point, as if as long as she didn’t say it, it could stay hypothetical, an anxiety to keep her up at night rather than her best professional opinion. “The thing is, I’ve gone through about a hundred computer models, I’ve run simulation after simulation, and… I’m really sorry,” she said. “But I don’t think we can permanently reverse what the Wraith have done to Rodney. I just don’t think it can be done.”
She could see Sheppard’s jaw tightening, see him glance away as if meeting her eyes would betray that he was upset. “I’m sorry,” she said again uselessly. She was aware that she was doing the same thing, shoving her own feelings down under professional distance that left her cold, but she wished he’d say something. It would be easier to play the role of comforter than to watch Sheppard leashing whatever it was he felt about this before he’d meet her eyes.
“All right,” Sheppard said, finally looking back at her. “What can you do?”
“Well,” Jennifer said, trying to assemble her thoughts. “I’m hoping that we can come up with a way to temporarily suppress at least most of the Iratus bug DNA, something that would be safe to use as a long-term therapy. Like Carson’s original retrovirus, but hopefully without global amnesia as a side effect.”
“Yeah, that would be good,” Sheppard said.
“I want to be really clear, though. I don’t know that something like that will work. If not…” Jennifer let out a breath. “I think there’s a pretty good chance that trying out the treatments that we’ve come up with will put so much strain on Rodney’s system that he’s either going to need to feed or… basically, or we’re going to kill him.”
STARGATE ATLANTIS: Allegiance(Book three in the Legacy series) Page 26
