“The gateway,” Amara whispered.
By the looks of it— a little basic, a little rough— it had to be one of the first ever constructed. A true relic, and other than shape and function it bore little similarity to the far more advanced version installed on Atlantis.
Still, the sight, as hopeful as it was glorious, drove a small shudder of delight through her. She would find the Teacher. She would be going home, after all these millennia. Home to an Atlantis freed from the abomination of those who wouldn’t share their wisdom. An Atlantis renowned, wherever it was, as the seat of knowledge and succor. An Atlantis guided by the gentle strength of the Teacher.
She smiled at the gateway as at an old friend, enthralled by the familiar shape, the symbols she had learned by rote as a small child. Six or maybe more of them would take her home. She only needed to learn the correct combination. Then it was simply a matter of—
Her smile died abruptly.
Where was it?
How could the humans possibly possess a gateway but no key for it?
Amara wheeled around, stared up at the scientist-warrior. “Where is it?” she gasped, feeling her hopes shatter around her like glass. What if the humans didn’t know? If they had never discovered the powers of the gateway? If they merely stored it here, a valuable artifact in a secure vault? “Where is the key?”
“The what?” The woman’s eyes widened. “What key, Amara?”
“The clavis!” Daniel exclaimed. “Is that what you mean?”
Amara might have embraced him or wept with relief. “Yes. Yes, the clavis.”
“Which would be what exactly?” came O’Neill’s voice from the gloom of the chamber behind her. How could the gatekeeper, of all people, not know?
“I came across it in several Ancient inscriptions,” replied Daniel excitedly. “Including the one on Ernest’s planet, and I knew it had to be important, though—”
“What does it mean?”
“Key.”
“Daniel!” There was a distinct menace to O’Neill’s tone now.
“I presume it designates what we call the dial-home-device,” the Jaffa said before Daniel could continue his explanation.
“Oh!” Samantha smiled, a hint of embarrassment in her eyes. “That’s a long story. Bottom line is, we haven’t got one.”
“We were able to borrow one from the Russians once,” offered Teal’c. “Unfortunately it was destroyed in the effort to reconstitute my physical body from the Stargate’s matrix.”
Amara raised an eyebrow in amazement. The process he had referred to took considerable skill and insight into the working of the gateway.
But who were those Russians and which planet did they inhabit?
More pertinently, how could the humans do what the Jaffa had described and not have a key?
“You see this computer here?” Samantha pointed at one of the devices sitting on the desk. “This is how we dial the gate. It also has all Stargate addresses we know stored inside it and compensates for stellar shift.”
It beggared belief. Somehow they had contrived to marry their makeshift chip-based data processing units to a crystal-controlled device. Amara couldn’t begin to comprehend how they had achieved it, and once more she wondered whether the Teacher had returned to Earth. Perhaps in search of her. And he hadn’t found her because the island where Atlantis was built had not been an island at all at the time of the city’s departure…
“Colonel Carter!” A new voice made her spin around.
The speaker, a burly man of middle age, was descending a stairway tucked into the back corner of the room, and Amara was not the only one to pay attention to his arrival. The people busy in the room assumed a stiff pose of respect, as did Samantha.
Hank Landry had overheard the tail end of Carter’s exposition on the workings of the gate. It had triggered some serious doubts as to the mental health of SG-1’s current CO. Whom he hadn’t actually met in person yet, so this was going to be one ball-buster of a meet and greet. And never mind that she was taller than he!
For the moment he ignored the rest of the assembly in the control room— he’d get to them in a minute— parked himself in front of the delinquent and barked, “Any other top secret information you’d like to divulge to casual visitors without my permission? Who the hell is this woman?” He stabbed a finger in the direction of the inquisitive civilian who looked like she’d escaped from last Halloween’s haunted house. She’d probably impersonated the Madwoman In The Attic. Wild, gray-streaked hair, barefoot, and clad in a blood-stained shift of some sort. Or maybe it was a toga.
Come to think of it, the colonel didn’t look any more presentable. At least her hair was too short to allow for any serious disarray. Nor was she wearing a toga, though the jeans and shirt were stiff with dirt. And what was that smell?
Carter had the good grace to blush. “Sir, I—”
“Give over, Hank,” drawled a familiar voice, and Jack O’Neill stepped out from the shadows to where people with average vision could see him. He looked every bit as disheveled as Carter. As a matter of fact, if that shirt had contracted its bullet hole while Jack was wearing it, he shouldn’t be alive. “Amara here”— he nodded at the civilian— “is an Ancient.”
“Aside from the fact that it’s rude to refer to a lady’s age in those terms, what’s that supposed mean?”
“Ah,” said Jack. “Didn’t finish reading the instruction manual yet, didcha?”
Landry’s turn to blush, and he heartily resented it. “I was a little busy. Entertaining the delightful Mr. Woolsey, for starters. Not to mention the crisis on—”
“Woolsey’s here?” Jack actually snapped around as if to check whether the man was lurking under a desk somewhere.
“He left half an hour ago. Sends his regards, though. He misses you.”
“I’m touched.”
“You sure as hell are!” Landry exploded. He couldn’t help himself. His personal theory was that shouting prevented ulcers. “You walk out of a meeting with IOA representatives, disappear for days on end on some cockamamie crusade, and then you waltz in here bold as brass with civilians and—”
“It was my fault!” The speaker was female and also civilian, and Landry hadn’t even noticed her until now. Something had to be done about the lighting in this room.
“— teenagers in tow! And while you’re busy doing all the fun stuff, I get to carry the can!”
“Welcome to the SGC, General.” Jack had the nerve to grin broadly. Worse than that, he probably had a point. “Just so you know, by the standards of this command, what we’ve got here is a minor inconvenience. A major disaster would be Dr. Lee inviting you to look at alien plants. If that happens, run for the hills.”
“So you keep telling me,” Landry grumbled, a little annoyed because he could feel that nice, satisfying mad dwindle to a mere grudge, and even that was only half-serious at best. “Now, if it’s not too much to ask, could you fill me in on who’s who, and what the hell is going on?”
“See? All you had to do was ask.” One fine day that big mouth of his would just gobble up Jack… or something. Still, he obliged, introduced Carter, Dr. Jackson, the Jaffa Teal’c, and that teenager. Turned out she was Dr. Fraiser’s daughter, the kid who’d gone missing. “Now, as for Amara here,” Jack continued, “her people, the Ancients— first mentioned on page three hundred and eighty nine of the manual, though I think there’s an earlier footnote— are the guys who built the Stargate system in the first place, so we don’t really have a breach of security here. Carter didn’t tell her anything she couldn’t have worked out for herself within two seconds flat. Which, I guess, just about sums it up.” He leveled a narrow stare at Landry. “Right. Now, what was that crisis you mentioned? Be warned, if it involves any of Lee’s vegetation, I’m out of here.”
For a moment there, Hank Landry was tempted to try him. Then common sense won out. When it came to the Stargate program, Jack had more experience under his belt than just about
anyone else on this base, with the exception of Dr. Jackson. And it just so happened that, right now, Landry could do with a handful of experience. “We lost contact with the expedition two days ago,” he said. “Daedalus was en route on a regular supply run and got turned around by Dr. Weir. I cancelled Weir’s orders and put Daedalus in a holding pattern. Which, incidentally, wasn’t to the liking of the IOA. Won that battle, though.”
“Let’s hope you didn’t lose the war,” Jack murmured, frowning. “They take issue with independent thought.”
“Yeah, I noticed. Anyway, we now know that there’s an outbreak of some sort that affects the expedition. And the city’s quarantine system failed.”
“What kind of outbreak?” Dr. Jackson chimed in.
“When Dr. McKay managed to establish contact with Daedalus, he referred to it as the ‘Ancient bug.’” Landry glanced sideways at Amara. Ancient, huh?
“What?”
“The what?”
Dr. Jackson and Colonel Carter, who’d gone so white that her skin cast back the greenish glow from the monitors, gasped in unison. The only one silent was Teal’c, though he wore an expression that had to be classed as unhappy even by Jaffa standards. All three of them were staring at Jack in a way that suggested someone should phone a mortician.
Their reaction provoked a synapse to one specific mission report out of the myriad Landry had read over the past three days. The Ancient virus. Of course. Damn, this was worse than advertised… “That’s the bug that nearly killed you, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Which was the least of it,” Jack muttered.
“How would they have contracted the virus?” Teal’c finally spoke up.
“We don’t know. To be honest, the information we got is rudimentary to say the least, thanks to their technical problems.”
“Technical problems?” Carter, grabbing hold of her bailiwick.
Landry grimaced. Briefing in someone else threw into relief just how far-fetched the whole situation really was. He wasn’t entirely sure whether Carter would laugh in his face when he continued. “Seems they’ve acquired a computer virus about the same time as the other one, which is—”
“Why Atlantis’s quarantine system never kicked in,” she finished for him. Not only was the colonel quick on the uptake, she wasn’t laughing either.
“That’s the general consen—” The hiss of a sharply indrawn breath cut Landry off mid-word.
Amara all but leaped at him, her fingers clawing at his sleeve. Madwoman In The Attic, and then some. “Atlantis?”
“That’s what she said,” Landry replied very slowly, trying to unhitch her hand from his arm. Damned if he knew how to handle this person without setting off what could well be a psychotic episode. Nice and easy probably was what the doctor would have ordered. “Atlantis.”
“Take me there!” she demanded.
Oh goodie.
Mercifully, Dr. Jackson intervened. “That’s not possible, Amara,” he said gently. “I’m sorry, but—”
“Liar!” She rounded on him, eyes blazing with fury. “You promised you’d take me to the Teacher! To Atlantis!”
“Daniel?” Jack’s tone held a wealth of suspicion and annoyance. It suggested that similar promises had been extended on previous occasions, usually without his knowledge and with potentially deleterious effect, and that the problem had been discussed repeatedly.
“I never said anything about Atlantis,” Dr. Jackson responded sheepishly. If that was the best excuse he could come up with, God help him.
Amara, for one, didn’t seem to care. “Take me there!” she said again. “Take me there or I’ll destroy this place!”
A little counterproductive, if you asked Hank Landry. Unfortunately she wasn’t asking. Instead she closed her eyes, raised her arms. Her palms faced one another, and in the space between them the air began to roil, to glow, and literally burst into flame.
“What the hell!” one of the technicians exclaimed, taking a step back.
Sound idea. “All personnel, clear the control room!” barked Landry. Hopefully this situation would resolve itself without any crispy critter incidents, but he preferred to be on the safe side.
She stood there, that ball of fire hovering above her head, exuding menace. Worked wonders for the lighting, though.
As the technicians gingerly backed from the room, the Fraiser girl seemed to shake off her surprise. “Amara! Listen to me!” There was no response, and the girl moved closer.
“Cassie! Don’t!” Jack had gone a little green around the gills himself.
“She can’t hurt me,” the girl replied with impossible confidence, and inserted herself between Amara and the rest of the people in the room. “Amara, you know I can and will protect them. All you’d achieve is frying a bunch of equipment, which can be replaced.”
Debatable, same as that outrageous claim about protecting them all, but Landry let it slide when he saw the fireball dim from white-hot to orange. If normal physics applied, DEFCON had just been reduced from ‘Cocked Pistol’ to ‘Fast Pace.’
A shudder ran through the woman’s sparse frame. The fire reddened. “I need to go.” She sounded plaintive. Plaintive and unimaginably tired. Homesick. “Don’t you understand? It’s my home. The Teacher is there.”
What teacher, for heaven’s sake? Somehow he didn’t think it was Gabe Kotter she was after, and nobody else seemed to know either, including Dr. Jackson. Landry was beginning to appreciate Jack’s irritation with the archeologist. Meanwhile, Colonel Carter addressed the practical problem.
“Amara, we can’t take you there,” she said gently. “Not right now, anyway. We’d have to wait for a spaceship to return and take you there.”
“Why?” The woman’s eyes popped open in genuine surprise, and it doused the fire like a bucketful of water. Thank God for small favors. Her arms dropped in slow motion. “You have the gateway.”
“True, but we don’t have the key, remember? It means the, uh, gateway needs to be powered by the energy we provide, and we can’t provide enough to dial any gate address outside our own galaxy. The current location of Atlantis is in the Pegasus Galaxy.”
“That is wrong,” the woman breathed. “It can’t be—”
“Believe me, it’s not. Atlantis is on a planet called Lantea in the Pegasus Galaxy.”
“It was supposed to return. Once my people had prevailed, Atlantis was to return to this galaxy.”
“Amara, I’m sorry, but when we found it, Atlantis was deserted. Your people lost the war with the Wraith and abandoned the city thousands of years ago.” Perhaps cold, hard fact was the way to go. Carter seemed to be getting through.
Or maybe not. “Who are the Wraith? I don’t understand…” Amara shook her head as though that could clear away her confusion. Then something else seemed to occur to her and she rallied. “I could open the gateway for you.”
“I doubt that. There isn’t enough power. And even if we could take you to Atlantis now, it would be too dangerous. Our expedition there is fighting a disease that almost wiped out your people.”
The Ancient woman jerked back as if slapped. “A disease?” She turned pale. “It went wrong,” she whispered again. “It all went wrong. And this is my fault.”
“Oh crap,” Dr. Jackson said very softly, digging a dingy lump from his back pocket. It turned out to be a crumpled, tightly wadded piece of paper, which he unfolded carefully until Landry could make out a kind of writing he’d never seen before. Jackson held it out to Amara. “What you’re telling us wouldn’t by any chance have anything to do with this, would it?”
Chapter 29
Dr. Weir was back in the infirmary. Not good, Ronon Dex decided. Then again, he was back, too, and he had a pretty good idea of how she felt. After all, they were in the same boat.
Useless.
It wasn’t just the dislocated shoulder; his right arm was in a sling, for the proper cripple look, and hurt like hell. Dr. Beckett had wanted him to eat pain killers to help
relax the muscles, but Ronon refused. Damn things made him woozy. Good enough reason to hate them. And to stay away from them, because rumor had it that the Wraith might pop in for a visit.
He almost hoped for it.
Anything was better than sitting here and doing nothing, because there was nothing he could do. He wasn’t a medic, and he wasn’t a scientist. He was a runner and confined to fighting enemies he could actually see.
Same thing for Dr. Weir.
Not the fighting part, unless you classed her knack for negotiation as a weapon. But you could talk to viruses as little as you could see them. Well, you could talk to them, he supposed, but that generally implied that you were nuts. As a matter of fact, if he didn’t get to do anything soon, he might just start talking to that damn virus.
Ronon slid from the dark corner by the door where he’d been doing his hovering and walked over to the isolation unit where Dr. Weir was doing her hovering.
She slanted a glance at him, tried to smile. “Hey, Ronon. How’s the shoulder?”
“Fine.” A shrug would have been more convincing, he guessed, but he wasn’t willing to take the white lie quite that far. Like he said, it hurt. Of course, all of that was minor, compared to the guy in the tent. With a nod at Sheppard, he added, “Seems like he’s still in there. Thinking. Or something. Lots of brain activity, they say.”
“That’s good.” If she was trying to sound hopeful, she needed to try harder. Wasn’t easy, though. Two more people had died.
“Yeah. Good.”
If not that, it sure was weird. A little while ago Sheppard’s brain activity had spiked, sending a gaggle of nurses and Dr. Beckett into the isolation tent to do whatever they did in such situations. The EEG had been going mad for a good three quarters of an hour before it settled down again and—
While Ronon was still staring at that monitor, it lit up like a bunch of fireworks. An alarm went off for good measure, and somebody hollered for Dr. Beckett. Next to him, Dr. Weir shuddered and placed both hands on the plastic sheet that formed the outer shell of the isolation unit, then realized that it wouldn’t support her and clutched her arms around her midriff instead.
STARGATE SG-1: Transitions Page 22
