by Karen Miller
The last time she’d lost a teammate off-world, it had been different. Then it had been Jack — Colonel O’Neill, at the time — and she’d been frantic. She could still remember that banked sense of terror, of guilt, and of overwhelming need to fix the situation. Like a ghost, or an echo, she could feel those emotions still and wasn’t blind to the fact that they were part of what was driving her now. But it was more than that. She’d been in command less than a month and knew her people were still mourning Dr. Weir. This was her chance to prove, not only to them but to herself, that she was ready for this command. So perhaps she was being a little rash, but she —
A sound, close behind her. She turned, weapon raised, and came face to face with Teyla.
“Colonel.” Teyla glanced at the weapon with enviable poise.
“What are you doing?” Sam said, lowering the gun and snapping the safety back on. “I could have shot you.”
“I might ask you the same question,” Teyla said, her gaze dipping to the scanner. “But I believe I already know.”
There was something about this woman’s disapproval that left Sam feeling guiltier than she felt was warranted. “Look,” she said, “if I can figure out what we’re dealing with, I’ll be able to start working on the solution. It could save us hours.”
“We gave them our word.”
“We don’t know Sheppard and McKay’s situation — every minute counts.”
Teyla folded her arms. “You’re reckless, Colonel.”
“That’s been said before. It’s not always a bad thing.” She nodded though the trees. It was still dark, but her scanner showed that they were almost at the shrine. “You coming?”
“Apparently so.”
Sam flashed a smile, relieved to see Teyla’s disapproval soften. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s see what we can find out.”
The first thing Sam confirmed was that the device was definitely Ancient and not Furling. That was good in the sense that she knew a lot more about Ancient technology, but bad in the sense that any parallel with Jack’s experience on PX5-777 was probably meaningless.
However… “If this is a transporter,” she said, squinting up at the archway, “then it must have a way of recognizing receiving and destination terminals, which means it probably keeps a record of —”
“Colonel Carter!”
She turned at Teyla’s call to find three men standing in the entrance to the cave. In the growing pre-dawn light, she recognized Qafsiel and Joqun among them. “Ah,” she said, offering a smile. “We were just getting a quick look —”
“You will come with us,” Reverent Joqun said. “To enter the shrine unaccompanied is to dishonor the will of the Ancestors.”
“Oh no,” Sam said, “I didn’t mean —”
“Silence!” His words echoed around the cave, bouncing back at her from all directions. “You will come with us and face the justice of the Elders.”
Sam closed her eyes, cursed herself thoroughly, and then nodded. “Okay,” she said, and turned a rueful look on Teyla. “More haste, less speed…”
Teyla arched an eyebrow. “Those,” she said as she preceded Sam out the cave, “are wise words.”
“You know, the thing that really bugs me,” McKay said as he sat lining crystals up on the floor, “is that she doesn’t have any experience of the Pegasus galaxy. I mean, sure, she helped defeat the Goa’uld, but what —”
“And the Ori,” John pointed out. He sat opposite McKay watching what he was doing but not interfering.
“Okay, fine, and the Ori.”
“And the Replicators.”
“Look, the point is, what does any of that have to do with this galaxy?” McKay paused. “Apart from the Replicators, I guess. I mean, it just feels like she’s been parachuted in simply because she’s a big shot at Stargate Command.”
“McKay,” John sighed, because frankly he’d reached the end of his patience, “they were never going to give you the job.”
“What? No, I know that.” He frowned, picked up a crystal and held it up to examine in the beam of his flashlight. “But they could have chosen you.”
John stared. “What?”
“Well, come on, if they wanted someone military — which they apparently did — you were the obvious choice. You’ve been second in command here for over three years.” He lowered the crystal and fixed Sheppard with a narrow look. “Don’t tell me you hadn’t thought about it.”
“I thought about it,” he said. “I thought about how much I didn’t want it.”
“Are you kidding?” McKay slotted the crystal back into the panel, and then picked up the next one. “Why wouldn’t you want it? Put another eagle on your shoulder, or whatever.”
“It’s a star, and I don’t want it.” In a way, it was a startling revelation; he didn’t want the next step up because, inevitably, that would pull him back to Earth. He rubbed a hand across his face, the prospect filling him with a kind of numb dread. “I want to stay here,” he said after a while. “I want to stay on Atlantis.”
“Forever?” McKay peered at him through the gloom. “You know you can’t do that. They’d never let you.”
He shrugged. “Maybe not.” Maybe he wouldn’t give them the choice.
“I never thought Sam would leave the SGC, though,” Rodney carried on. “I thought she was there for life, you know? I mean, that should have been her command. Not Atlantis. I bet she doesn’t even want to be here.”
“You don’t want her to be here is more like it,” Sheppard said, fixing McKay with a look long enough to make him squirm. “Come on, spit it out. What’s your problem with Carter?”
“I don’t have a problem with her.”
“Right. What, did you guys have a bust-up back at the SGC? Particle Accelerators at dawn, that kind of thing?”
McKay gave a prim huff and said, “Actually, just the opposite. There’s always been a certain chemistry between us.”
John laughed out loud until he realized McKay wasn’t joking. “Really?” he said, trying to marshal his smile. “Between you and Carter?”
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.” He cleared his throat and made a mental note to ask Teyla — once they’d escaped this little tomb — if she’d heard anything along those lines. “And that’s why you don’t want her here?”
“No, that would be — Look, it’s just that sometimes she can be a little arrogant, a little full of herself.”
John stared; McKay’s lack of self-awareness continued to amaze. “You mean she can be a little too impressed with her own ability? Maybe thinking she’s the smartest person in the room and not making any effort to hide it?”
“Right,” McKay nodded with enthusiasm. “You notice that too, huh?”
“Yeah. Just not about Carter.”
A beat fell, and then McKay scowled. “Ha-ha, very funny.”
“Face it, Rodney, this has nothing to do with some imaginary sexual tension —”
“It’s not imaginary!”
“— and it’s not about my career progression. You have a problem with Carter because you see her as a rival, and you don’t like the competition.”
Rodney waved the crystal he was holding at him. “That is so not —” His expression changed. “Oh, now that’s interesting.”
“What’s interesting?”
“Um, nothing you’d understand. So if you’ve finished your little exercise in psychoanalysis, Dr. Freud, maybe you could shut up and let me work?”
John got to his feet, stretching out the kinks in his muscles, but he couldn’t resist one final dig. “You’d better work hard,” he said. “I’d hate for Colonel Carter to figure it out first.”
It was humiliating. There was no other word for it. Tied to a tree outside the shrine
, Sam felt like a fool. She could almost see Jack shaking his head in disbelief.
“This is all my fault,” she said, knocking her head back against the trunk.
“I am sure Ronon will soon return with backup,” Teyla said.
“Back-up I should be sending.”
Teyla laughed. “You cannot be in two places at once, Colonel. That is impossible, even for you.”
“Which is why I shouldn’t be out here in the first place,” Sam said. “Which is probably what you were thinking but are too polite to say.”
“I believe I already said it,” Teyla pointed out. “Before we left.”
So had Lorne, and like a fool Sam hadn’t listened. “I thought I knew what this was, I thought —” She let the rest of the confession tail off into a sigh. In truth, she didn’t know what she’d been thinking. She felt dislocated in this new city, among strangers in a strange galaxy. She wasn’t herself. “I guess I just wanted to prove myself.”
Teyla tilted her head, watching her with an assessing gaze. “That is understandable,” she said. “I too felt a need to prove myself when I first came to Atlantis — it is a place that seems to require the best of us.”
“Not just the place,” Sam conceded. At Teyla’s inquiring look, she elaborated. “You’re a very close knit team. I mean, so was the SGC, but you guys don’t even get to go home at the weekend. You’re like family, and coming in like this, as an outsider — it’s difficult.”
“As with every family,” Teyla said, “we must all find our places.”
“I guess I don’t always find that very easy. I tend to overcompensate.” She grimaced at a flash of memory. “At least I haven’t offered to arm-wrestle anyone yet.”
Teyla’s eyebrows rose. “That may not be a good strategy.”
“Especially with Ronon, right?”
“Not if you value the use of your arm.” She tipped her head to one side, curious. “Do you often have to prove your worth, Colonel Carter?”
“As a woman scientist in the Air Force?” Sam smiled without much humor. “Only all the time.”
“I also find it necessary to remind people not to judge me by my gender,” Teyla said, her eyes glittering with a humor Sam hadn’t noticed before. “Fortunately, I have developed means to make a lasting impression.”
“I’d like to see that.”
“I would be happy to demonstrate, although Bantos fighting may not be appropriate in your Air Force.” She smiled. “But it would certainly make a stronger impression than arm-wrestling.”
Sam laughed. “I generally try not to challenge my COs to any kind of fight these days.”
“But sometimes it is required?”
“Sometimes,” Sam said, thinking back with an ache of nostalgia. “And I guess that worked out okay in the end.”
Further away, she could see the Reverents lining up outside the shrine. “Do you think there’s any chance of us getting back in there?”
Teyla shook her head. “Not you or I, not without the use of force.”
And that was the last thing she wanted. “Damn it, this is my fault.”
“Perhaps Dr. Zelenka will be able to negotiate access,” Teyla said. “And Dr. McKay, for all his idiosyncrasies, is an exceptional scientist. He may yet find a way to return — I have faith in him.”
Sam felt a pang of sadness. She remembered having that kind of faith in SG-1. She remembered General Hammond having that kind of faith in her. The kind of faith she should have had in Sheppard and his team. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve made things worse by coming here.”
Teyla tipped her head to one side. “We cannot know the path we did not walk,” she said. “And this is not yet over.”
“Okay, that’s the best I can do.” McKay stood up and brushed bone-dust off his knees with obvious distaste. “This really is a gross place…”
“So let’s get outa here,” John said. He’d been stretched out on one of the long benches, trying to ignore how thirsty he was; their rations were sparing, to say the least. Now he swung his legs down and stood up. “Is it going to work?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“I figured,” John said. “So what do we do?”
“You do nothing,” McKay said. “Just come here and stand under the arch. I’m going to activate a pulse that will reverse the polarity of the crystals and, if we’re very lucky, send a signal to the other terminus instigating a transport.”
“And if we’re not very lucky?”
“Either the power discharge destabilizes the rocks and the cave collapses, killing us quickly, or it doesn’t and we die slowly. Probably after drinking our own urine.”
“Rodney…”
“What? You’ve thought about it too.”
“Let’s just stay positive here,” John said, ignoring the question. “I’m sure it’ll work.”
“Well that makes one of you.” Rodney flapped a hand at him. “Stand right there, behind me. Okay…” At the last moment he hesitated. “So this is it, one time only deal.”
John felt a spike of adrenaline, his fingers tightening on his weapon as if he could shoot his way out of this. “Then do it,” he said.
McKay nodded. “Here goes nothing…”
“Did you feel that?”
Teyla nodded — there had been a definite tremor in the ground. She nodded toward the cave mouth. “Look.”
A thin dust drifted out on the morning air, no more than a haze. “That doesn’t look like smoke,” Colonel Carter said.
“No, it is —”
And then the ground convulsed — a long grinding sound that lasted a good ten seconds. From the shrine came cries of terror and then a deep cracking sound. Several of the Reverents spilled out of the cave, one man bleeding from a head wound, scarlet splashed across his white robes.
“It’s them.” Carter scrambled to her feet. “They’re underground!”
Teyla felt a beat of horror. “What?”
“The other transporter must be underground — Sheppard and McKay are trying to get back.” She tugged on the rope that bound her to the tree. “Hey!” she shouted. “Let me in there, I can fix this!”
Another quake rippled through the ground and Carter staggered, struggling to keep her balance with her hands tied. Elder Qafsiel and several Reverents cowered some distance away, crouching on the ground and gazing at the shrine in terrified awe. Teyla swallowed her fear, put thoughts of her friends trapped beneath this unstable ground to one side, and focused on how she could best help them. She got to her feet, hands still bound.
“Hey!” Carter tried again. “You have to untie us!”
Reverent Joqun looked at her, his eyes wide with shock. “We have insulted the Ancestors,” he cried. “You have insulted the Ancestors and this is their punishment!”
“No!” Teyla stepped forward, one hand on Carter’s arm to silence her. Reverence for the Ancestors was one thing, but abdicating responsibility to act was something different. “This is not the way of the Ancestors, Reverent. You know it is not. They would not harm their children because of an accidental slight.”
He hesitated at her words, but she could see more fear than wisdom in his eyes. “Then why do they punish us?”
“It has been many generations since the Ancestors left,” she said, keeping her voice calm despite the fear beating like wings in her chest. “Perhaps this shrine is no longer serving their purpose?”
Beneath her feet the earth continued to shift and grumble, the sound of grinding rock coming from within the cave only heightening her alarm. Two more Reverents stumbled out, shrouded in dust. “It’s collapsing,” one of them gasped, his lips mere gashes of red in his dusty white face. “The floor is splitting, the whole shrine is falling…”
Panic, sharp and bright as l
ightening. “Please,” Teyla said, “our friends are in danger, you must let us help. You must let us save them.”
“And the shrine,” Colonel Carter added. “I can save your shrine too.”
Teyla had to repress a smile; Colonel Carter learned fast.
Qafsiel staggered to his feet, grabbing Joqun’s arm. “We cannot lose the shrine!”
“If it is the Ancestors’ will…”
“Who will buy your berrywine if it is not made with water from the shrine?” Teyla said. “What will Talaverna be without its shrine?”
“She’s right,” Qafsiel said, dropping the Reverent’s arm and making his way through the plumes of dust to Teyla and Colonel Carter.
Reverent Joqun scrambled after him. “But the Ancestors —”
“The Ancestors do not fill the grain house each fall!” Qafsiel snapped. “And neither do you, Reverent. If we cannot trade, we cannot live — unless you wish to take up the plow?”
Joqun blinked, but stopped where he stood. With a nod, Qafsiel drew a short knife from his belt and cut through the ropes binding them to the tree. “Go,” he said. “Save the shrine.”
Colonel Carter wasted no time thanking him, sprinting through the dust and into the cave. Teyla was only a step behind.
In the beam of their flashlights, she saw that the archway had tilted to the side. The Ancient writing along its length glowed with a weak light, and a fissure dissected the cave floor in a diagonal from its mouth to the furthest wall — passing right beneath the arch.
Under her feet, she could feel a constant vibration that was definitely not natural. “What is that?”
Carter scrambled over the loose rock that covered the floor, probably dislodged from the ceiling. Teyla glanced up, but it was too dark to see what might be waiting to fall on her so she fixed her attention on the Ancient archway instead.
