02 - Reliquary (29 page)

John nodded seriously. “So if you ever decide to take over Atlantis, we’ll
have to come up with a new and completely innovative plan to thwart you. I’ll
put McKay right on that.”

Teyla walked in then, saying, “Dr. Weir, they said you wished to—” Flustered,
she halted abruptly, and started to back out of the room. “I’m sorry, I did not
realize—”

By the time John said, “Hey, Teyla,” Elizabeth was already on her feet and at
the door.

She took Teyla’s arm, drawing her back inside, saying, “Teyla, I just have
to—If you could wait for me here—”

Teyla obviously didn’t want to stay but was too polite to just bolt for
freedom. In another moment Elizabeth was out the door and Teyla was left
standing uncomfortably in the office.

Bemused, John watched her, trying to figure out what was wrong. Teyla was
avoiding his eyes, her brow furrowed and her cheeks flushed with embarrassment.
He said, “I thought you were on the mainland, catching up with everybody.” If
Beckett was actually serious about this no active duty for a week thing, John
was half thinking of going out there himself. Watching the kids play, lying on
the beach, getting drunk with Hailing and the others around the campfire let you
remember that there were places somewhere in the universe where people lived
normal lives, without fear, without being hunted. As far as they could tell,
none of those places were in this galaxy, but at least it was nice to think that
they existed somewhere.

Teyla frowned at the floor. “I was, but I was told Dr. Weir wanted to see me
today.”

John was starting to get an inkling of what this might be about. Though one
office wall was transparent, Teyla had come from the direction where the curve
of the gallery blocked a full view of the room until the last instant; she
obviously hadn’t expected to see John here, and Elizabeth had just as obviously
lured her back to the city hoping she would. He pushed to his feet so he could
face her, perching on the edge of the desk and folding his arms. “Okay. Would
you like to tell me what’s wrong?”

Teyla lifted her chin, saying stiffly, “I thought perhaps you would need
time… I did not know how these things were done among your people.”

John sighed. “So you went to the mainland to make it easier for me to be
incredibly unfair and fire you for the exact same thing that happened to half
the Marines and a dozen or so scientists and techs, who are all back on duty now
including Kavanagh, who nearly cracked Ford’s skull?”

Distracted, she asked warily, “Why is it called ‘fire’?”

“It’s a figure of speech.” John shook his head. “Look, that wasn’t you.”

Her voice hardened. “That was me. I could feel myself doing it.” Then she
shook her head, her expression turning rueful. “And I did not think you would
‘fire’ me. But… I cannot ask you to trust me if I do not feel I can trust
myself.” She gestured a little wearily. “I thought I might want to fire me.”

“But Dorane didn’t give you a choice; none of what happened was your idea.”
John noticed Bates again, watching them with a line of suspicion between his
brows, as if hoping to catch them at something, like making out in the
glass-walled office in full view of half the operations staff.
He obviously
thinks being on my ’gate team is a lot more fun than it actually is.
And
Teyla had probably reported in detail what Dorane had made her do, which Bates
would file away as material to use against her eventually. John had never been
able to convince Teyla that selectively leaving items out of your mission
reports in order to make life easier for your team leader was not the same thing
as lying. “You didn’t have any control over what you were doing.”

“To my people, leaving a companion in that kind of danger—” Teyla’s lips
thinned with disgust. “It is as bad as abandoning someone to the Wraith.”

“My people aren’t real thrilled about that either,” John pointed out.

“And it was my hand that gave you the poison that almost killed you. If I
could not prevent myself from doing that—”

“Look, at one point I went nuts and ran off and left McKay alone in the
repository. He was just lucky the Koan weren’t around.” John could tell he
wasn’t going to be able to talk her through this. It was something she was going
to have to get through on her own. “I’m not going to argue with you, because
you’re too stubborn and we’d be here all day. You’re not fired and that’s
final.” He pushed off the desk, straightening up. “Now come here and do the
head-butt thing with me.”

“It is not called the head-butt thing,” she said, but her voice roughened and
she stepped forward. The Athosian embrace had different shades of meaning John hadn’t entirely figured out yet,
though respect was one of them and mutual forgiveness another, as well as
expressing simple relief that you were both still alive. He had also never
gotten the hang of who put whose hands on the other person’s shoulders and in
what order and who bent their head to touch foreheads first. He managed to
fumble the process enough that Teyla actually snorted in amusement.

John led her outside the office after that, so Elizabeth could have it back
and Bates could get on with his life. Teyla asked, “Did Dr. Weir really want to
see me or was this a trick?”

Rodney was standing at the gallery railing, looking over the ’gate room with
the air of a minor tyrant overseeing his domain. John said, loud enough for him
to hear, “Elizabeth probably wants you to guilt McKay into not using this to
drive Kavanagh over the edge.”

Getting the hint, Teyla widened her eyes innocently at Rodney. “Surely Dr.
McKay would not do that.”

“Surely Dr. McKay would.”

Rodney gave them a superior smile. “It’s amusing when you plot against me.
Oh, I want to show you something.” He headed off toward the rear of the gallery.

John hesitated. Teyla had been trying to avoid what had happened to her by
avoiding him, and John had just realized he was avoiding something too. But
realizing it wasn’t enough to make him stop doing it, and he followed Rodney and
Teyla over to a laptop set up on one of the consoles.

Rodney sat down and typed rapidly, bringing up a video program. “Zelenka
managed to pull this off the memory core while he was reconstructing the data.”

Teyla took one of the other seats, scooting over to see the screen, and John
leaned on the back of Rodney’s chair.

A video clip started to play, and Rodney tipped the screen back so John could
see it. “It’s too badly damaged to be significant and we have much better visual
images of actual Ancients. The best ones, aside from the photos of the Ancient woman they found frozen in Antarctica, are probably the holographic
recordings we’ve found here. But this is interesting for one key factor.”

John frowned at the screen, not sure what he was looking for. He recognized
the poorly lit underground corridor leading toward Dorane’s shielded lab area.
Then three people came into view, a woman with two men flanking her. They were
dressed in black and between that, the bad lighting, and the fact that the image
hadn’t been meant to display in this format, it was hard to make out much
detail. The man closest to the camera looked directly at it and Rodney hit a
keystroke, freezing the picture. John started to say, “So what’s the key factor
we’re—What the hell?” The image was grainy but John could see that the man
looked like him. For an instant the resemblance was uncanny, then he realized
part of that was the light and shadow. It was still a little spooky.

Rodney said, “Because of the poor quality of the image, the resemblance seems
closer than it actually is. Fortunately he looks directly at the recording
device so I was able to do a point by point comparison with the photo in your
personnel file—”

“Oh, well, good to know that’s not actually me.” John dropped into the chair
next to Rodney and stared at him, incredulous and indignant. “It’s not like you
could take my word for it that I’m not a ten thousand year old Ancient who
thought it would be fun to hang out here playing tag with the Wraith and
watching you guys scramble for answers. And how many times have I asked you to
stay out of my personnel file?”

“I did not think it was actually you,” McKay said witheringly. Under John’s
suspicious scrutiny, he admitted reluctantly, “Well, not after the first few
minutes or so.”

John put his head down on the console,
Kavanagh and McKay, with Dr.
Heightmeyer and the hand puppets. I am so going to find a way to arrange that.

“Your resemblance to him is obviously a genetic throwback, like the gene itself. But the point is,” Rodney continued blithely,
“that it explains a lot.”

“It does not,” John muttered.

“It does.” Teyla sat up straight, staring at Rodney in startled
comprehension. “When Dorane first woke from the stasis container, he looked at
the Major, and said, ‘you’re human.’”

“Exactly,” Rodney told her. “We thought he was reacting in surprise at seeing
us, but he must have been talking specifically to the Major.” He turned to John.
“Even though he was tracking our movements, that must have been the first time
he got a good look at you. He may have thought, just for an instant, that he was
looking at the man from this recording. Or that you were an Ascendant. According
to Dr. Jackson’s experiences, they can appear in their original corporeal forms.
Then he realized you were human.”

“It must have brought back the memories of his battle with the Ancestors,”
Teyla said thoughtfully.

“It explains why he wanted to kill you at first sight,” McKay added. “As
opposed to the usual reasons why people want to kill you at first sight.”

John sat up, admitting reluctantly, “Okay, it does explain that. Is there
anything else on the recording?”

“No, it fuzzes out right after this.” Rodney frowned at the screen. “I think
he must have blown up the camera with his mind, or something.”

John looked at the screen again, wondering at the motives of those people, so
long dead. Or Ascended, or whatever. Maybe part of Dorane’s desire for revenge
had come from the fact that the Ancients had left him to rot in the repository.
Faced with the Wraith advance, they had just filed him away as not important
enough to bother with. Unless making it clear to Dorane that he was a minor
irritant at best had been some Ancient’s idea of the ultimate punishment.
Considering the effect it had evidently had on him, it just might have been.

John left Rodney and Teyla still searching through the few damaged images
from the core’s display. It was time to stop avoiding this.

He went up to the jumper bay. It was quiet and unoccupied, which was perfect.
He wanted to do this alone, just in case Beckett was wrong. Half the expedition
either didn’t have the Ancient gene or the ATA therapy, and losing it wouldn’t
mean he couldn’t do his job. But it would mean he couldn’t fly the jumpers. If
they weren’t able to contact Earth, it might mean he could never fly again. It
would mean a lot of things he wasn’t willing to give up.

He picked Jumper One for luck; it was the one he had first tried to fly, the
one that had gotten him to the hive ship and back when he had barely known what
he was doing with it.

But when he stepped into the cockpit and sat down, it happily powered up,
adjusted the seat and the lighting for him, popped up several sensor screens
when he thought about them and then tried to hand him a life sign detector. It
was in its way as big a relief as Jumper Five carrying the bioweapon away
through the ’gate; Atlantis still knew him, and everything was all right.

Martha Wells is the author of seven fantasy novels, including
Wheel of the
Infinite, City of Bones, The Element of Fire,
and the Nebula-nominated
The Death of the Necromancer.
Her most recent novels are a fantasy trilogy:
The Wizard Hunters, The Ships of Air,
and
The Gate of Gods,
published in hardcover by HarperCollins Eos in November 2005. She has had short
stories in the magazines
Realms of Fantasy, Black Gate,
and
Stargate
Magazine,
and in the anthology
Elemental
by Steven Savile and Alethea
Kontis. She also has essays in the nonfiction anthologies
Farscape Forever
and
Mapping the World of Harry Potter
from BenBella Books. Her books
have been published in eight languages, including French, Spanish, German,
Russian, Italian, Polish, and Dutch, and her web site is www.marthawells.com.

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