Stargate Atlantis: Third Path: Book 8 in the Legacy series

by Melissa Scott

  He looked back at his controls, considering his options. He needed to find out what was happening on Atlantis — surely they had the bacteria under control by now — and at his thought, symbols flickered across the communications display. A few moments later, the screen lit, and Lorne looked out at him. He looked like hell, badly shaved and puffy-eyed, and John frowned.

  “Major. What’s your status?”

  “Making progress, sir.” Lorne looked distinctly wary.

  “Have you got the thing knocked down?” John asked.

  Lorne sighed. “Dr. Zelenka has figured out a way to disperse an aerosolized compound throughout the quarantine area, which should take out the alflageolis. Dr. Beckett and the others are still working on the necessary compound.”

  John considered that for a minute. “So you’ve figure out how to kill it, except you don’t have anything to kill it with?”

  “Pretty much, sir.” Lorne paused. “Dr. Beckett is confident they’ll have a compound that’s at least 95 percent effective.”

  “Except somebody doesn’t think that’s going to be enough.”

  “I think everyone would like it to be closer to one hundred percent,” Lorne said carefully.

  John bit his lip. There was no point in blaming Lorne, who was doing everything he could to get the outbreak under control, and who wasn’t a scientist in the first place. “Does anyone have an estimate of how long it’s likely to take?”

  “Hours rather than days,” Lorne said. It sounded as though he was trying hard to be optimistic about that. “And the alflageolis is still a long way from turning into a killer. But no one’s willing to be more precise than that.”

  “Ok.” John tapped his fingers on the console. “What about the teams that were off-world — Parrish’s team? Ronon get through all right?”

  “Ah. Yes, sir, Ronon joined them, and it turns out that what looked like an attack was actually a local plant that apparently fires energy bolts as a defense mechanism.”

  “Par for the course,” John said, after a moment. “Are they going to stay, or evacuate to Sateda?”

  There was another little pause, and then Lorne said, reluctantly, “Actually, sir, they’ve run into a problem. One of the plant’s energy bolts clipped the DHD and now it will only dial Atlantis.”

  “That sounds like kind of a significant problem, Major. Especially if those plants are shooting at them.”

  “Apparently the plants are no longer shooting in their direction,” Lorne said. “But there’s another problem. There’s a line of bad storms moving toward them — something to do with the temperature differential between day and night. I don’t want to bring them through unless their lives are at serious risk.”

  Great, John thought. Just great. And if it was me, I’d rather take my chances with a storm than with some weird disease. “Do they know what’s wrong with the DHD?”

  “Sort of?” Lorne paused, marshaling his thoughts. “It doesn’t seem to be a problem with the device itself — none of the crystals are cracked or anything like that. It’s more as though the bolt scrambled the software. Zelenka tells me that the system will re-set on its own, but nobody knows when.”

  Well, that was better than it could have been, John thought. There were actually some decent options there. “I’ll talk to McKay, see if he’s got any ideas. Don’t bring them back unless there’s no other choice, Major.”

  “Yes sir,” Lorne said. “Colonel, is there anything more on Dr. Weir?”

  “It’s definitely her, and she’s definitely not a Replicator.” John grinned in spite of himself, and saw the same smile spread across Lorne’s tired face. “And I’ve got more good news. We’ve found Lieutenant Ford.”

  “What?” Lorne blinked, and his grin widened. “Ford’s alive?”

  “Yep.” John quickly ran down the events of the last few hours, and saw Lorne shake his head.

  “Wow. Sir, that’s excellent news. Alive and well?”

  “We’ve made a deal with the Wraith to take him back to Earth,” John said. “The only question is how we’re going to do it, and what we’re going to do with Dis while we do it — that’s the Vanir, Major.”

  “Are we going to be able to take him back, sir?” Lorne asked.

  “We’d better be.” John heard the edge in his own voice, and made himself relax. “He was missing in action, and was taken in by local friendlies and got stranded there. That ought to be enough for the SGC.”

  “Yes, sir.” Lorne nodded. “You want me to pass the word to General Landry?”

  “That’d be a help,” John answered. “Tell them — well, I don’t know when we’ll be arriving, but they can be expecting him. And a wife and child.”

  “I’ll tell them that.” Lorne shook his head, the smile breaking out again. “Damn good news.”

  “Yeah.” John matched the smile. “Yeah, it is.”

  Elizabeth made her way back to the Vanir infirmary, Dekaas trailing silently in her wake. Teyla had opened another MRE and was methodically assembling its components into a meal while Daniel sat on one of the infirmary platforms, his pistol ready to hand. Dis seemed not to have moved from when she had left, still sitting almost primly on the edge of its platform, and Dekaas frowned.

  “If you’ll allow me to look you over,” he said, and the Vanir turned the full force of its stare on him.

  “If you wish.”

  “Thank you.” Dekaas moved closer, running his fingers cautiously over Dis’s scalp, and then testing pulse and respiration.

  “No trouble?” Daniel asked, and Elizabeth shook her head.

  “The first two Traveler ships have left. The Wraith cruiser has landed, and they’re swapping crews between it and the scout that landed first.”

  “I expect Guide and Alabaster are arguing about who will stay behind, and who will go,” Teyla said, with a small, rather cat-like smile. Elizabeth glanced at Dekaas, and saw a similar smile flicker across his face: telepathic communication, or did they simply both have the same opinion of the Wraith in question? “Are you hungry? There are more MREs.”

  “Yes, thanks,” Elizabeth said, abruptly aware that she was, in fact, quite hungry. She tore open the bag and began putting together the meal, wolfing down the cheese and crackers while the chili-mac heated.

  “Any idea what Sheppard plans to do about Dis?” Daniel asked.

  Elizabeth shook her head. “The Colonel hasn’t said.”

  “You would be best advised to let me go,” Dis said.

  “Would you agree to stop trying to make Ran unascend?” Elizabeth asked, and the Vanir shook its head.

  “We cannot. We have been through this before. I am prepared to agree not to pursue you further, however.”

  “Sorry,” Eliabeth said. “No deal.”

  “You cannot stop us. Nor, I think, do you wish to see my people driven to extinction.” Dis tipped its head to one side, and Dekaas retreated, seating himself beside Teyla.

  “I’m not entirely sure I’d have a problem with that,” Daniel said. “Your presence in this galaxy has hardly been an unmitigated good.”

  “I also do not see why we should help you,” Teyla said.

  “I am not asking for help,” Dis answered. “I am merely suggesting that you release me.”

  “Well, I for one might consider releasing you,” Daniel said, “or at least encouraging Colonel Sheppard and Dr. Weir to release you, if you turned over the unascension device to us. It wasn’t yours anyway.”

  “I do not think you would be wise to raise the question of original ownership,” Dis pointed out. “You did not build Atlantis, either.”

  “We are the descendants of the Ancestors,” Teyla said heavily, “and that has its burdens as well as its benefits.”

  Elizabeth said, “What would you consider reasonable, Dis?”

  Dis blinked slowly again. “We must have Ran’s genetic material. We must have her eggs, or our species will die. We are not prepared to sacrifice ourselves needlessly. Our lives
and our worth have not ended, though we are damaged. I am prepared to refrain from studying you, as the price of my release, but I cannot offer more.”

  “There are other alternatives,” Daniel said, with a meaningful smile, and Elizabeth sighed.

  “We can’t just kill him.”

  “He’s tried to kill us,” Daniel pointed out.

  “He was trying to examine an unascended person,” Elizabeth said, reluctantly.

  “Which seems to have involved killing you, or at the very least some extremely questionable medical examinations,” Daniel answered. “Not to mention that they invaded Atlantis and nearly got both me and McKay killed. And nearly destroyed all the Stargates in the Pegasus Galaxy, which would have been a disaster of monumental proportions.”

  “That,” Dis said, “was the fault of the Attero Device, not us. We did not build a flawed machine.”

  “Maybe not, but you sure didn’t care what happened.” Daniel glared at the Vanir over the top of his glasses.

  “And again, I must agree with you,” Teyla said, sounding faintly surprised.

  “We cannot simply kill him,” Elizabeth repeated firmly. Though what they should do with him — what they could do with him… She turned her attention to the remains of her meal, hoping that she could come up with something.

  Rodney left Elizabeth and Daniel to argue with the Vanir while Teyla watched it as though debating how much trouble it would be simply to kill it now, and made his way back out through the installation. The landing field was mostly empty now, just the Wraith cruiser with a pair of blades standing guard at the base of its ramp, matched by Durant and its guards waiting just inside the hatchway. The jumper was sitting where they had left it, the rear ramp lowered and the lights on inside the cabin. He could just make out Sheppard in the pilot’s seat, and at that moment Sheppard looked up and waved impatiently for him to hurry. Rodney sighed, and started up the ramp.

  “Elizabeth said you wanted me.”

  “Yeah. Lorne says they’ve got a problem with the DHD on PGX-239.”

  Rodney slouched in the co-pilot’s seat in the jumper’s cockpit, dividing his glare equally between Sheppard and the controls while Sheppard ran down the problem in depth. It was fully in the planet’s day— probably getting close to noon — but the heavy twilight made him feel suddenly vulnerable. The windows opaqued themselves in response, and Sheppard jumped.

  “Hey. You might give me some warning.”

  “I don’t like the idea of someone shooting in at us,”Rodney said.

  “Nobody on this planet has anything that’ll punch through Ancient glass.”

  “Then let’s say I don’t like people watching me.” Rodney turned the full force of his glare on Sheppard, who ignored it. “You realize that this is impossible, don’t you?”

  “Reprogramming the DHD?” Sheppard gave an elaborate shrug. “I assumed that was why Lorne wanted me to ask you.”

  “I admit that I’ve made something of a career of doing the apparently-impossible, and usually stretching the limits of our theoretical knowledge in the process —”

  “You see?”

  “But this — and you don’t know how much it pains me to say it — this really is impossible.”

  “C’mon.”

  “No, listen. Just listen.” Rodney took a deep breath, controlling the irritation that he knew was born of frustration at being unable to help. “What Lorne’s calling ‘software’ — you know it really isn’t any such thing, right? We don’t really know what it is, and we don’t have any real handle on how it works. We’ve been able to make the entire Stargate system do things for us —” Or at least Sam Carter has. “— but we’ve never actually been able to access the ‘program’ that makes it all go. Not ‘we haven’t figured it out,’ but ‘we haven’t ever seen it.’ Haven’t gotten our hands on it. We don’t know anything about it. We’ve never been able to take apart a DHD and read whatever it is that’s inside it. And it’s not anywhere in the Atlantis libraries, either, and believe me, we’ve been looking.”

  “You’d think there’d at least be notes,” Sheppard said.

  “You would. But, no, nothing.” Rodney shook his head. “Sometimes I wonder if the Ancients wiped a few files when they kicked us all off Atlantis that time. But, anyway. No information. So, no, there’s no way I can reprogram the DHD on PGX-239, not even if I was there with them with all the lab equipment I needed and Atlantis’s libraries to back me up. And I most certainly can’t talk Zelenka through a procedure that nobody’s even invented yet.”

  “Ok.” Sheppard nodded thoughtfully. “So what if you —”

  “Sheppard. John. I can’t.” Rodney leaned forward, the anger gone. “If you gave me a spare DHD, one that I could destroy if I had to, and a solid year of doing nothing else — maybe then. Maybe. Now? In time to get them off PGX-239? I can’t do it. No one can. We need to do something else.”

  Sheppard sighed. “Ok. So do you have any idea when the DHD will re-set itself? Will it re-set itself? I’m this close to telling Lorne to bring them through and to hell with the quarantine.”

  “That would be a really bad idea,” Rodney said. “Look, the periodic reboot is one of the few things we do know a little about. It happens fairly often — apparently on some kind of regular schedule, though we’ve never really figured out the actual intervals involved. It might be related to pulsar signals, or maybe the alignment of the entire system with the galactic center, and certainly it takes into account local conditions within the network —”

  “Rodney?”

  Rodney stopped, blinking.

  “What’s the longest the system has gone without resetting itself?”

  Rodney paused. “Thirty hours, give or take an hour. Once in the Milky Way it went seventy-eight hours. We don’t know why. And of course we don’t know when the last reset happened.”

  “We probably ought to keep track of that,” Sheppard said.

  “Yeah. Believe me, I’m putting it on my list.”

  “Damn it.” Sheppard squinted as though he could see the Wraith ships through the opaque windscreen. “If Guide wasn’t waiting for us to get Ford out of his hair, we could take the jumper and go get them.”

  “I could take it,” Rodney said. “You’d still have the Vanir ship, assuming it flies.”

  “Won’t work.” Sheppard gave a little smile. “I already asked. He thought it was an excuse to get out of the deal. Not to mention we don’t know if the Vanir ship actually works or not.”

  “It probably does —” Rodney stopped, seeing Sheppard’s expression. “Ok, no, I haven’t actually tested anything.”

  Sheppard nodded. “Yeah. So we wait it out.”

  “There’s nothing else we can do,” Rodney said, and wished fiercely that there was.

  Ember stared at his screen, his teeth bared as he considered the latest result. So close, so very close, but not good enough, not yet. Each tiny change they made brought them closer to the target, but so far nothing had gained them the necessary level of effectiveness. They needed 100 per cent.

  He switched screens, calling up an unaltered model of the bacterium. Maybe they were going about it wrong. Maybe there was another way to attack, some other weakness he had missed the first time — the first ten times. He shook that thought away, and made himself work his way through the cell’s structure, and then through the genetic material of both bacterium and bacteriophage. Certainly the latter was distinctive, and dangerous, a compact bundle of molecules with no obvious weakness and deadly potential. Or was he looking at the wrong thing? He tipped his head to one side, considering the pattern. They had been targeting the most obvious points, but perhaps a more subtle approach might be equally effective.

  He called up a new protein, adjusting its structure to fit like a key into the alflageolis’s receptors. That was the easy part; the bacteria would take it up without difficulty. The question now was payload. What if he used the protein to insert a more voracious bacteriophage, one that
would destroy host and existing parasite? Could that be done without creating something worse? Yes, if he could adjust the genes that governed its reproduction, create a kill switch that would inactivate the cell when it tried to divide.

  These were all familiar tools in his lab. Here on Atlantis, he had to create each one from the raw materials, a tedious and time-consuming process, but at last he was finished. He spun the model in the screen, but could find no weak spots, and transferred it to the simulation. That would show if he had found something useful, or if he’d wasted his time. But there was nothing else he would do until Beckett’s latest simulation finished, he thought, and straightened from his workbench.

  Zelenka looked up from his own computer at the same moment. “Anything?”

  “Nothing from Beckett. I have set another simulation to run.” Ember came to join him, ignoring the Marines at the door. “And you?”

  Zelenka shrugged, and adjusted his glasses. “I can see how to create vapor cloud that will blanket the contaminated area in less than thirty seconds and cover the entire city in slightly more than three minutes. I am working to reduce that time, though I am somewhat hopeful that even alflageolis won’t be able to respond that quickly to the attack.”

  “It should not,” Ember agreed. “But faster is better, just in case one or two have already achieved a useful mutation.”

  A chime sounded from the main console, and he swung back to check the screens. Beckett’s simulation was finished, and he hissed at the result. Still only 97 per cent success.

  “Aye,” Beckett’s voice said, from the speakers, and in the secondary screen his image nodded. “I don’t think we’re going to get any better.”