by Graham, Jo
THE LOST
Book two of the Legacy series
Jo Graham & Amy Griswold
An original publication of Fandemonium Ltd, produced under license from MGM Consumer Products.
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METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER Presents
STARGATE ATLANTIS™
JOE FLANIGAN RACHEL LUTTRELL JASON MOMOA JEWEL STAITE
ROBERT PICARDO and DAVID HEWLETT as Dr. McKay
Executive Producers BRAD WRIGHT & ROBERT C. COOPER
Created by BRAD WRIGHT & ROBERT C. COOPER
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CONTENTS
The Lost
Acknowledgments
Sneak Preview: Stargate Atlantis: Allegiance
To my parents, Bill and Carolyn Griswold
* * *
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay
Chapter One: Quicksilver
He woke in darkness, in the comforting dark. His throat was raw, and when he tried to speak only a strange croak came out, like some primal bird strangely shaped and grotesque.
“Here,” a voice said, and he felt the metal pipette at his lips, cool and slick. A few droplets of water slid onto his tongue, and he swallowed greedily. “Not too much at first,” the voice said. “Slowly.”
He had dreamed that he opened his eyes to see nothing but blackness behind them, but this time his eyes did open, and for a moment he recoiled. It was just shock — how not? The face that bent over his was concerned, eyes searching his own worriedly. And what a face. Pale gray and seamed with the dark whorls of spiral tattoos, silver hair rising from a widow’s peak above slitted yellow eyes, the other stared down at him, the pipette in his hand.
“There, now,” the other said. “Can you speak?”
He might. He might force something from his raw throat. It came out weak and thready. “Who are you?”
The other’s eyes were compassionate. “I am your brother, Dust. You have been sick these many days, and I have worried about you.”
Dust. His brother. Pictures should come with that, pictures and stories. Words. And yet where they should be was nothing.
“Would you like another sip of water?”
Dust put the pipette to his lips. A few more drops of cold water, soothing his aching mouth.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
Dust shifted, and he saw the lines of arm and sleeve, black cloth embroidered in rich purple, the shades so close that to any eyes other than their own it might have seemed black on black. “Better?”
“Yes,” he said. He. A frisson of terror ran through him for all the things that ran away when he tried to think them, ran like water from a pipette. “Who am I?”
Dust’s voice was patient. “You are my brother, Quicksilver. You have been very sick, and we have all been greatly concerned about you.”
Quicksilver. His own name. And yet it meant nothing. “Quicksilver?”
“Quicksilver,” Dust said with a smile, and he saw the picture in his mind, liquid mercury running in a thousand directions, scattering in a hundred rolling balls on the table, glittering and cool. Quicksilver, like his mind. A thousand projects, a thousand ideas, too many gleaming thoughts to pursue before they escaped.
And now he had no thoughts. He was empty. He could not summon a single idea, a single memory. Fear chorused through him. “I can’t remember,” he said.
“You will,” Dust said soothingly. “You will. You have been very sick. I have tended you twelve days. It is not to be expected that you recover in an hour.”
“Where…” There was something missing, some place. Some other thing. Some other person. Some other hands. “She…”
“She will be very glad to hear that you have awakened,” Dust said quietly. “She has worried too.” Dust lifted a soft cover around him, tucking him in as though he were small. “Rest, my brother. Sleep, and let yourself heal.”
He knew he should protest, but the cushions beneath him were warm and the covers soft. And he was so tired. He meant to speak, but instead he slept.
* * *
The second time Quicksilver awakened he felt stronger. He lay for a long moment, looking up at the curves of the room in the soft shiplight, rose shadows near the ceiling shading soothingly to gray. He lay in an oval nook, soft cushions beneath him to ease every part of his body. Three coverings lay about him, two to warm him against any chill, while a third was folded across his feet where even to an invalid it would be close to hand. A small table beside the bed held a deactivated light pod, and the steel pipette in its stand, the bottom chilled and sweating in the humid air. Water.
Quicksilver turned, trying to reach it. His eyes focused, and he shook.
His hand was grayish green, dark nails lacquered in midnight blue, carefully tended with no chips, as though someone had carefully groomed him while he lay ill. Such tenderness ought to please him, and yet he shook. His feeding hand extended, raw slit gaping. Where it touched the pipette the cold shocked him to the bone, ice on tender tissues biting with cold. The pipette overturned with a crash, falling to the floor.
The door irised open and Dust rushed in.
Quicksilver could do nothing but clutch his hand in horror, rocking, while some sound came out of him that might have been keening.
“It is all right, my brother,” Dust said, kneeling and picking up the pipette. “It is nothing. Just some water spilled. Do not be distressed.” He lifted it up and put it again on the table.
Quicksilver could not speak. He could not speak for the waves of horror flooding through him. And yet…
Dust put his hand in his, back to back, leaning close. “Quicksilver, it is nothing. Just water spilled. Be content, brother.”
“Water,” he whispered.
“I will get you more,” Dust said. “You are clumsy from being ill. Your strength and your coordination will come in time. You will heal.”
“What happened?” he asked. “I remember nothing…”
&nbs
p; “You have been very sick,” Dust said, but he thought his eyes evaded him. “In a few weeks you will be yourself again. Come. Lie down. Let me make you comfortable and bring you more water.”
His legs were better to look at, loose black pants that showed nothing. His limbs were shaking as he let Dust settle him back on the cushions again, Dust’s head bent and his long, fair hair falling forward. He lifted a hand to his own head. No fall of silver, no braids. “My hair…” he whispered. It was shorn close to his head.
Dust did not look up. “It will grow in time,” he said.
“I don’t remember,” Quicksilver whispered. As Dust straightened he caught at him, hand to wrist. “Tell me the truth. What happened?”
Dust let out a long breath, but his eyes did not evade. “You were captured,” he said. “You were captured by the Lanteans. We do not know what they did to you. You were found wandering disoriented on an uninhabited planet, wounded and near starvation. We think…” His voice trailed off, then began again. “We think you somehow managed to escape and dialed a random gate address. We don’t know, and until your memory returns we may never know.”
Quicksilver swallowed. “I don’t remember anything.”
“You have been very sick, but it looks as though you are mending. I am glad that it is so.”
He flexed his hands on the covers, taking warmth from the smooth threads, from the slight spirals of stitching beneath his fingers. “Captured. And I escaped.”
“We do not know how,” Dust said. “But you did.” There was a spark of amusement in his eyes. “But you are the cleverest of clevermen.”
“Who am I?”
Dust plumped one of the cushions behind him for him to lean on. “You are my brother, Quicksilver of the lineage of Cloud, ship’s officer and lord among the Queen’s Clevermen. The Queen herself has been to see you while you slept, and offered her own blood if it might avail you. We have all worried about you and are relieved to see you becoming yourself again.”
“The Queen’s Clevermen…” He ought to know what that was, but didn’t.
“You are a master of sciences physical,” Dust said. “You have your own laboratory, and many men follow you.”
That sounded right. For a moment he could almost see a lab, streaming data on a screen.
“If you would like, I will bring you a data reader,” Dust said. “Though you should rest as well.”
“Thank you,” Quicksilver said. A data reader. Yes. That was more right. That was more as it should be.
“Soon you will be better,” Dust said, “And then perhaps you will remember what happened. Perhaps then you can tell us of Atlantis.”
Chapter Two: The Searchers
“Offworld activation! Colonel Sheppard’s IDC.”
They came through the gate in good order, the ninth passage in three days, Teyla last on six, herding Radek Zelenka ahead of her. Zelenka clutched his laptop case, and Ronon, just ahead of him, looked back over his shoulder.
Above, Richard Woolsey hurried out on the walkway from his office, looking down over the railing with scarcely concealed worry. “Anything, Colonel?”
John shook his head, dropping the muzzle of his P90 down.
Woolsey’s face fell. “Come up and tell me, all of you.”
Wearily, the team climbed the stairs, Teyla reaching up to catch Zelenka’s arm when he stumbled.
“I am fine,” he said quietly.
“Of course,” she said. He did not look fine to her. Unshaven, his hair in need of washing, Radek looked like all of them did at this point, a bunch of scruffy renegades and madmen who had not slept in days. “But I do not think you should go out again right away.”
Radek shrugged, preceding her up the stairs and around toward the conference room. “If we need to go, I will go,” he said.
John had already fallen into one of the chairs, while Ronon poured himself a big glass of water from the pitcher at the back of the room. Woolsey lowered himself into his usual chair at the end of the table. Radek sat down to his left while Teyla went around the table and sat beside John.
He looked at her sideways, dark circles under his eyes like bruises. “You look like hell.”
“Thank you,” Teyla said politely.
“What do you have?” Woolsey asked.
John stirred, his finger tracing patterns on the surface of the table. “M40-P36 was the right planet. Rocky, cold, uninhabited. Some ruins a few miles away, but nothing around the gate worth looking at. No life signs. The gate had only been opened three times in the last six months, and all three times were to dial New Athos.”
“Which means?”
Radek put his laptop on the table in front of him. “The buffer on a Stargate is roughly six months or fifty dialings. The Athosians had dialed thirty seven addresses in the last six months, which I recovered from the gate on New Athos. After talking with the Athosians, Teyla could account for twenty eight of the addresses — allies, trading partners, and us of course. Having checked out the other nine addresses, I am confident this was the gate where the Darts that abducted Rodney originated.”
“Why is that?” Woolsey asked, frowning.
Ronon dropped into the chair beside Radek, his water in his hand. “Dead world. Nobody lives there, but somebody dialed New Athos three times.” He took a gulp of his water. “Where’d they come from? If nobody lives there and they dialed New Athos three times, but nowhere else, those are our guys.”
“I don’t see…” Woolsey began.
“They came from a hive ship,” Teyla put in. “It is the logical conclusion. The ship remained in orbit around an uninhabited world while the Darts attacked New Athos. Once they had what they sought they returned through the gate and rejoined the hive ship. They did not dial anywhere else, and they are not still there.”
“Three times?”
Teyla nodded. “Once to scout, once to send the message that lured us to New Athos, and once to seize… their prize.” She could not quite bring herself to say, ‘to seize Rodney.’ That was too raw.
John sat up straight, his eyes meeting Woolsey’s down the table. “If we get a jumper and go back…”
Woolsey frowned. “What will that give you?”
Radek glanced from one to the other, addressing himself to John rather than Woolsey. “The hive ship has certainly opened a hyperspace window. We did not detect them in orbit and they have had three days to go anywhere they wish. I do not think there is more information we can gain on M40-P36.”
John’s hands opened and closed in frustration. “We have to,” he began tiredly.
“We have to find another means of intelligence,” Woolsey said.
“Rodney…”
“We will find Dr. McKay,” Woolsey said. “But if there’s no more information to be had this way, we need to find another way.”
John’s brows knit, graving deep ridges across his forehead. It was a wonder any of them were making sense, Teyla thought. If they were. “They were after Rodney,” she said. “These were not simply Darts culling. Nor were they merely seeking a prisoner from Atlantis to interrogate. They could have picked up half a dozen Athosians, and at one point they abandoned a run on me that could have been successful.” She looked around the table, as they were all staring at her. “They were after Rodney specifically, and as soon as they had him they disengaged. This is about Rodney. Which means there is a plan, a careful plan that has involved many Wraith. And where there is a plan that involves many, there is talk.”
“Among Wraith,” Ronon said, leaning his elbows on the table and looking at her.
“The one who dialed our gate pretending to be Athosian was not Wraith,” Teyla said. “There is a Wraith Worshipper or an agent among them, someone who might speak with humans.” Her eyes met John’s. “We know Rodney is alive. They would not go to such trouble to capture him only to kill him.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” John said grimly.
Woolsey cleared his throat. “We all know Dr. McKa
y could be a valuable intelligence source for the Wraith. And we all know it’s a priority to find him and recover him. If there’s no further information to be gained from the DHDs of various Stargates, then we need to consider other methods.”
“Such as?” John asked. He looked like he wanted to go out again. John was not usually this dog-headed, but Teyla knew he had not slept in seventy-two hours. Caffeine and adrenaline were no substitute for sleep, and robbed a man of common sense.
“The Genii have the best intelligence in the Pegasus Galaxy,” Woolsey said. “They may have heard something.”
“We’re not exactly on the best terms with the Genii,” John said. “I don’t think…”
“Radim has assured us of his good intentions,” Woolsey interrupted. “Now is a good time for him to show us. And passing on rumors costs him nothing.”
Ronon snorted. “For whatever they’re worth.”
Teyla took a deep breath. “There is Todd,” she said.
To her surprise, John didn’t dismiss it. “There is,” he said.
Ronon put his hand down on the table, fingers clenched. “You’re talking about trusting Todd.”
“Todd’s more likely to know what the Wraith are up to than the Genii are,” John said.
“If he didn’t do it himself,” Ronon said.
“We can only hope we are so fortunate,” Teyla said. “If Todd wanted to kidnap Rodney to help with some plan of his, we know Rodney is unhurt.”
John glanced at her, as though that thought brightened him. “That’s true. And if it’s some other hive, he may be able to get us the lowdown on it.”
She did not mention Queen Death. None of them did, though she was certain that the image from Manaria hung over them all.
Woolsey nodded. “Our next move is to shake the bushes, as it were. And while we do that, I want you and your team to stand down, Colonel Sheppard.” John started to shake his head, but Woolsey did not wait for him to. “Your team is in no condition to go back out again, and yes, that includes you, Dr. Zelenka. If you’re going to be ready when we get word, you need to stand down now.”
