by Jo Graham
“Just the person we need,” he said.
Radek turned and regarded him dubiously over the rim of his glasses. “It is never a good sign when people say that.”
“The team out at the alpha site is having equipment problems. Weird ones. What about the water trailer?” he asked over the radio.
“It’s fine so far.”
There was something about this that was nagging at Lorne. “Stand by, Sergeant,” he said. “You too, doc.” He called up a view of the pier on the security cameras. Several tents were set up there, anchored with some ingenuity to the available supports. All of them looked structurally sound despite the chill wind that was whipping across the pier.
“Lt. Winston?” he said over the radio.
“This is Winston.”
“Have you been having any problems with the tents you set up on the pier?”
“No problems, sir,” Winston said. “All of them check out fine. I really think that the damaged equipment must have been mishandled. You’d be amazed how much damage Marines can do to supplies, sir. They’re beasts.”
“Let’s not start an inter-service war over some tents falling apart,” Lorne said.
“No, sir,” Winston said, sounding at least a little chastened.
Lorne switched the feed over to Anthony at the alpha site. “Sergeant, is any of your personal gear also damaged?”
“Let me take a look at my pack,” Anthony said. “Son of a bitch.”
“I’m assuming that’s a yes.”
“The strap tore when I picked it up.”
“Sir, my watch band broke,” PFC Harper said over the radio.
“Just snapped?”
There was a momentary pause. “Actually, it looks kind of melted,” she said.
“Okay. Sit tight. I’m going to get one of the scientists out there to figure out what’s going on.”
“You think it’s some kind of freaky radiation or something?” Anthony asked. He sounded more than a little nervous. “We ran all the standard scans.”
“Run them again.”
He turned to Radek. “My team out at the alpha site has their gear mysteriously falling apart. Several tents, water cans, a watch band, and the straps on Wilson’s pack. No unusual radiation, weird glowing rocks, people aging a hundred years in a day, or anything else out of the ordinary.”
“The people appear unaffected?”
“They seem fine. The jumper itself seems to be working fine. So does a water trailer we sent out.”
“Let us see what the radiation scan shows. In the meantime
—
“
“Yes, get coffee, go.” He waited while Harper fired up the jumper and used its systems to scan for unusual radiation levels or any other change from the baseline readings. Radek was back, travel mug in hand, by the time Anthony came back on the line.
“Nada,” Anthony said. “Nothing. But something weird’s happening out here. We’re not going to start falling apart, are we?” His voice rose to a perceptibly higher pitch.
“Calm down, Sergeant,” Lorne said. “You’ve already been working out there for hours, and you’re fine, right?”
“So far!”
“Just sit tight, and we’ll figure this out,” he said.
There was the sound of discussion in the background, and then Anthony said, “Harper just took another look at the water trailer.”
“Let me guess,” Lorne said. “It sprung a leak.”
“No, sir. But all its tires are flat.”
Radek leaned in to speak into the microphone. “It sounds from what you are telling us that all the gear that is affected is plastic or synthetic materials.”
There was brief discussion on the other end of the line. “I think you’re right,” Anthony said.
“You want to go out there and take a look?” Lorne said.
Radek hesitated, and then switched off his radio.
After a moment, Lorne did the same. “What?”
“I will send someone. But whoever we send will need to stay on the planet until we find an answer. I would prefer to remain in a position to analyze whatever data they can transmit to us here in Atlantis.”
“If there’s some kind of weird effect, we should get our people out of there.”
“If it were some form of radiation, I would agree with you, but the jumper’s scans say no. I will send someone to confirm that, but we have no reason to believe the jumper itself is malfunctioning.”
“Not at the moment, no.”
“So, either this is some effect we do not understand at all – in which case we should quarantine the affected personnel just as a precaution – or there is the possibility that I like the least. That we are dealing with some kind of microorganism that specifically attacks plastic and other synthetic materials.”
“That would be bad,” Lorne said after a moment.
“Yes. We have hazmat gear, but—”
“But it’s made of plastic,” Lorne finished. He closed his eyes for a moment. “I’ve been out to the alpha site. And in the supply depot with the equipment they brought back.”
“Have you noticed any effect?”
Lorne examined the soles of his shoes, and pulled out a plastic-coated pen from his pocket. He tried bending it experimentally between his hands, but it didn’t give in response to gentle pressure. “Apparently not.”
“Maybe I am wrong, then. Or maybe it requires longer exposure.”
“All right,” he said. “Get somebody out there and let’s figure this out. And get the linguistics people to step up trying to translate the inscriptions they found on those rocks. If whoever was there before left us a message, it’s starting to sound important to figure out what that is.”
Teyla could see the moment John saw Elizabeth, the moment he stopped, swallowing hard, and stood as if frozen in place as Elizabeth began to cross the square toward him. He had lost too many people, Teyla knew, too many friends and teammates dead or gone, never to return except to haunt his dreams. He had the expression of a man unsure whether he was dreaming or waking, and unsure, if it was a dream, whether at any moment it might turn to nightmare.
“Colonel Sheppard,” Elizabeth said.
He nodded wary acknowledgment. “Elizabeth?” he asked cautiously.
“It’s me,” she said, and then embraced him before he could say any more, a long, hard hug. “At least, I think it is,” she said, releasing him.
“That would be the problem,” he said.
She turned up her hands. “I know. You don’t know where I came from or who – or what – I really am. I asked Dekaas – he’s one of the Travelers’ physicians –”
“We met him,” Teyla said, coming up to them with the rest of the team trailing behind her. “He was the one who sent us here.”
“He ran tests to try to find out if I was human, and as far as he could tell, I was. But I know our equipment back in Atlantis is a lot more sophisticated.”
John nodded. “We’ll get Carson to meet us at the alpha site so that he can start checking you out.”
Elizabeth’s whole body went tense at once, all the openness draining from her expression. “Carson Beckett is dead.”
“It is a long story,” Teyla said.
“I’m sure it is,” Elizabeth said, but she took a step back from them. “I’d like to hear it.”
“At the alpha site,” John said.
“Before I go anywhere with you.”
“We need to go ahead and get you to the alpha site so that you’re somewhere we can secure until we’re sure that you’re really Elizabeth Weir.”
“Believe me, I understand that,” Elizabeth said, but she had that stubborn set to her jaw that Teyla remembered well.
John’s headset radio sounded. “Colonel Sheppard?” Lorne said. “We’ve got some delays going on in setting up the alpha site.”
“What kind of delays?”
“Some thing’s breaking down all our plastic gear at the site. Dr. Zelenka
is worried that it might be a microorganism of some kind. We’ve got the site under quarantine while we figure out what’s going on.”
“Keep it that way. Is Carson stuck there?”
“No, thankfully we hadn’t sent him through yet. We’re working on an alternative alpha site, but it’s going to take us a few minutes to get it checked out.”
“Work on it,” John said.
John turned back to face Elizabeth
—
he had to think of her as Elizabeth, and told himself that wasn’t committing to any answers to the question of who or what she really was. “All right. So, we’re having a few technical difficulties.”
“That sounds like the Pegasus Galaxy, all right,” Elizabeth said. “I know that you’re worried about what might happen if I’m really some kind of tool of the Replicators. I’m worried about that myself. But I’ve been here nearly twenty-four hours already. Another hour probably isn’t going to matter.”
“No. Because if you’re a Replicator, you could already have infected hundreds of people and machines here on Sateda.”
“She’s not a Replicator,” Rodney said.
John turned on him. “And exactly how do you know that?”
“If she were in an entirely artificial Replicator body, the most basic medical tests would have shown that,” Rodney said. “You could stick a needle in her and watch her not bleed.”
“There could still be nanites in her bloodstream.”
“Why would there be nanites in her bloodstream? The Ancients wouldn’t construct her a new body and then booby-trap it by filling it with nanites.”
“We are not going to make decisions based on speculation about what the Ancients might or might not do,” John said. “We’re going to take Elizabeth to the alpha site and let Carson decide whether he thinks she’s human.”
“Yes, about that,” Elizabeth said, steel in her tone.
John ran a hand through his hair. “Ronon, go talk to Cai and ask him if he’s got a spare room where we can sit down and talk.”
“There is the jumper,” Teyla said. John shook his head discouragingly. The last thing he wanted was to give Elizabeth access to the jumper and all its systems when he wasn’t sure if she’d been compromised. They could walk through the gate to the alpha site. Once Lorne had finished dealing with their current minor disaster.
“I wouldn’t let me in the jumper either,” Elizabeth said, looking a little amused.
“I’ll talk to Cai,” Ronon said.
“Dr. Lynn, please tell me someone’s translated the writing on those rocks at the alpha site,” Lorne said.
Lynn’s voice over the radio was tart with irritation. “You realize I was on Sateda all afternoon? And that I’m not actually a linguist? Why don’t you call Dr. Jackson?”
“He’s off-world. Tell me somebody down there with a PhD can tell me more than ‘somebody made some marks on the rocks.’”
“Let me see if anyone’s made any notes,” Lynn said, and there was the sound of typing. “All right. You’re in luck, someone’s actually started working on the translations. Letter frequencies suggest that this is a phonetic alphabet for writing Ancient. We don’t have anything with one hundred percent certainty
—”
“At this moment, I will take whatever certainty you’ve got.”
“Two of the groups of letters are very likely the words for ‘warning’ and ‘danger.’ We see those on a lot of equipment in the city.”
“It would have been good to know that several days ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Lynn said, and sounded like it. “We have a backlog of translations waiting to be done. This wasn’t marked as a priority.”
Lorne silently counted to ten before he spoke. “Okay. It should have been, and that’s my mistake. Can you tell me anything else about the message? Does it say anything about plastic?”
“That’s a possible translation of one of the letter groupings,” Lynn said.
“Figure out what the message says. Consider it a priority. I’m guessing something like ‘warning, something on this planet breaks down plastic, and that’s really dangerous.’”
“Ah,” Lynn said. “I see that you might have wanted to know that before now.”
“You can say that again,” Lorne said.
John ended up finding space for the team to get off the street in the lunchroom of an office building that looked out over the gate square. Makeshift shutters had been nailed up over the windows and the floor swept clean, and there were chairs arranged at the long table. The walls were still hung with faded and tattered posters lettered in Satedan, one showing a stylized worker lying crushed under half of an enormous block of stone that had cracked in two.
“I have to ask,” John said with a nod toward the poster.
Ronon glanced at the picture, not even trying to make out the faded lettering. “It’s supposed to remind people not to make mistakes.”
“Maybe we need some motivational posters in Atlantis,” Elizabeth said as she sat down.
John shook his head. “Now you’re really scaring me.” He took his seat at the table along with the rest of his team, and Daniel stopped prowling around the room looking at the posters to come take a seat himself.
It felt like a thousand mornings around the conference table in the early years of the expedition. He reminded himself very firmly that it wasn’t.
“Tell me about Carson Beckett,” Elizabeth prompted.
“It’s not our original Carson Beckett,” Rodney said. “Do you remember Michael?”
“The Wraith we attempted to transform into a human,” Teyla said.
“That sounds familiar,” Elizabeth said, frowning. “An experiment.”
“That is right.”
“Michael used some of Carson’s DNA to create a clone with Carson’s memories,” Rodney went on. “And before you ask, no, we don’t know how he managed that. Our best guess is that he combined some version of the technology that the Wraith use to create drones who already have some degree of imprinted knowledge with his own really disturbing research. He was using that Carson, clone Carson, to help him with his experiments. Eventually we found him locked up in one of Michael’s labs and rescued him.”
“More or less by accident, since we didn’t have any idea he existed,” John added.
Elizabeth regarded him from the other side of the table. “You understand this doesn’t sound particularly likely.”
“You mean unlike the other things that happen to us in the Pegasus galaxy?”
“Even given those.”
“It’s true, though. Carson spent some time back on Earth dealing with some medical problems
—
turns out being a clone isn’t too great for your health
—
and now he’s back filling in for Dr. Keller while she’s on an extended assignment with the Wraith.”
Elizabeth’s eyebrows went up. “Extended assignment with the Wraith?”
John looked at Teyla for rescue from the task of explaining that one.
“In the last year, one of the Wraith queens claimed authority over all Wraith,” Teyla said. “It was not a universally popular claim, and we were able to ally with another faction to defeat her. And there has been another development as well. A retrovirus that makes humans able to survive being fed upon, while still providing nourishment to the Wraith.”
Elizabeth nodded slowly. “That must be complicating things.”
“It is,” Teyla said. “But it offers the possibility of a meaningful peace.”
Elizabeth put her head to one side, regarding Teyla curiously. “And that idea is acceptable to you?”
“Yes,” Teyla said, at the same time Ronon said, “No.” Teyla shot Ronon a sharp look, and went on, “We have discovered that the Wraith are the result of a misguided experiment of the Ancestors. They are descended from our own kin, and they did not ask to be as they are. They have survived as best they can, and created much that is o
f value that we are only just beginning to understand. I would be glad to see them endure as people who no longer have to kill us to survive.”
“Ronon?” Elizabeth asked when it was clear Teyla was finished speaking.
“They’re still Wraith,” he said. “All this means is that they’re going to keep humans as slaves rather than killing them outright. I think we ought to keep fighting them. But it’s not up to me right now.”
“Right now?”
“Right now. If I come back to Sateda at some point… then we’ll see. Cai has this idea that I ought to stand for some kind of election here. I don’t know about that. Yet.”
Elizabeth nodded, and looked up at John. “And your take on all of this?”
“For the moment, the Wraith aren’t attacking Atlantis or killing my people,” John said. “I’ll take it.”
Elizabeth took a slow breath, and then let it out. “All right. I think you’re who you say you are.”
Rodney looked at her quizzically. “I’m glad to hear it, but what did we actually do to convince you?”
“You haven’t tried to persuade me that nothing’s changed,” she said. “That was what I was most worried about when you told me about Carson. If this were an illusion, something drawn from my own mind, then I would be seeing and hearing the people I remembered. And then after I asked about Colonel Sheppard, he appeared a few minutes later.”
“It was not a coincidence,” Teyla said. “He wished to accompany the team that was looking for you, and was only prevented from doing so by the knowledge that his place was in Atlantis.” She gave him a pointed sidelong look at the last words, and he shrugged.
“I expect someone might have reminded him of that,” Elizabeth said. “And I see that. It just made me wonder. But what you’re telling me… you sound like yourselves. I can understand why you might have come to these conclusions. But a lot of what you’re saying is not exactly what I would have expected you to say. You’ve changed. People do. And given that I’ve been gone… ” She frowned. “How long have I been gone?”
“Since you died, or since the last time we saw you when we, umm… had to freeze you in space in a Replicator body?” Rodney asked.
