Chapter Text
Prologue
The lights on the gate glow. Tumblers in a lock.
The reason was...
The same reason you lean over the edge of the bed, hang upside down with your hair dragging on the rug, reach slowly for the edge of the blanket, lick dry lips, close your eyes just for a second so that when you do it you can do it fast, surprise yourself with it before you have a chance to change your mind, snatch the blanket up and look under the bed for the monsters. You never knew what you’d do if you saw the monster looking back at you from under there...
The racing lights make the gate appear to spin. Subspace roulette.
Elizabeth closes her eyes the instant before the last chevron starts to glow. She licks dry lips. The wind is blowing hard, whips her pant legs around her ankles, dust up into the air, choking, but she’s not breathing.
“Locked,” Rodney says, and his voice can’t decide between surprise and resignation.
The wormhole billows open and when Elizabeth opens her eyes again it’s there, shimmering like soap before the breath that makes it a bubble. On the plain around the gate there are boxes and two F.R.E.D.s still fully-loaded. One M.A.L.P. faces her, the forest, the personnel gathered behind her. The other faces the gate.
On the other side of the wormhole.... There shouldn’t be a wormhole.
“Send it,” she says, her hand resting for a moment on Rodney’s shoulder.
“We’re gonna lose the M.A.L.P.”
“I know. Send it.”
He nods to Chuck who guides the probe through to... whatever there is on the other side. Leaning her head close to Rodney’s, Elizabeth watches the monitor of his laptop. Static... static...“receiving telemetry.”
The static clears and the probe’s gridlines map out the gate room in neat squares.
Rodney’s shoulders slump. He closes his eyes and grips the edge of the DHD to steady himself. Reaching out quickly, Elizabeth catches the laptop before it can slide off the DHD onto the dusty ground.
“Fuck,” he breathes and rubs his eyes with his fingers and thumb.
From the shadows of the ramp under the control room comes a tall, straight figure. Her hair is blood red against the white of her gown, the blue of her skin. Stopping in the centre of the gate room, she leans her head to the side, thoughtful.
“Greetings,” she says, and even through the tinny speaker she has the voice of a chorus, thousands whispering. “Lanteans.” She shows her teeth in what might be a smile. “But we are the Lanteans, now.”
Elizabeth finds herself smiling too and that’s all wrong but she can’t stop it. She nods, once and says, even though the mic is off and the Wraith can’t hear her, “I think we’ll call you Jane.”
Hush-a Hush-a, We All Fall Down
“This is bad.”
“I think we are all in agreement with this.”
Rodney spun the laptop around and aimed it at Zelenka. “This is bad.”
Tapping a key, Rodney played back the video from the M.A.L.P. The image shuddered for a moment, almost blanked with static and then cleared. Jane was still smiling, but she was pointing behind the probe. Elizabeth rested her elbows on the wobbly table and folded her hands together tightly while the camera swiveled and the gate loomed into view. The wormhole was there, veiled by a shimmer of energy.
“The shield is up,” Zelenka said, his voice dropping to a guttural rumble as he growled out something in Czech and sat back in his chair with his steepled fingers against his lips. “No. It is not possible.”
Rodney’s laugh was too weary to be very bitter. He tapped the screen. “It’s possible.” He turned his watery gaze on Elizabeth. “They obviously circumvented the self-destruct, and it looks like they’ve hacked my lock-down protocols. If they managed to purge Radek’s virus, which is likely if they’ve got primary systems like the gate shield up, we’re screwed.”
“We are not screwed,” Zelenka contradicted, letting his hands fall to the table. “They do not have the control crystal.” Meeting Rodney’s eyes, he blew out a breath. “Yes, they have the intergalactic hyperdrive, but without ZPMs to power it they cannot fly to Earth right away. And without the control crystal they cannot gate to Earth.” After a thoughtful silence, he slid his glasses up his nose and nodded reluctantly, conceding, “We are maybe long-term screwed. As a species.”
Elizabeth squeezed her eyes shut for a second but opened them when the afterimage of Jane’s pointing finger loomed behind her lids. “The lockdown protocol,” she said, frowning, her eyes on the table. “It’s designed to, well, lock out anyone without the gene, right?”
“Yes,” Rodney answered as he turned the laptop back around and, after wincing at the image on the screen, slapped it shut.
Behind him Stackhouse and a couple of the Marines finally got their fire started. The flames were almost colourless against the last flare of sunset and licked at the wood sideways, laid flat by the steady wind. Elizabeth shivered and closed her eyes again, and this time she saw just the clearing and the men in relief, drifting blue and red. It took her a few seconds to get her eyes open again and by then they were all looking at her, Beckett and Heightmeyer with identical, narrow-eyed gazes of concern.
Ignoring them, she went on, “Maybe they didn’t hack your protocol, Rodney. Maybe they have someone with the gene.”
Rodney blinked at her. It was obvious. She watched as he recognized his own obtuseness, and, slumping at the shoulders, folded inward. The circles under his eyes were dark like ripening bruises.
Under her tightly clasped hands, the pages of her notebook curled and rattled. She flattened her palm against them and she could feel the names incised into the paper. The missing. “MIA,” Sergeant Stackhouse said, “MIA,” after each name he dictated to her until it stopped meaning anything at all, became the refrain of a nursery rhyme, extra syllables to fill out the meter. Hush-a, Hush-a, we all fall down. Of the forty Marines who came through the gate with Everett, twenty-eight were unaccounted for. Of the people who were already on Atlantis when the Marines arrived to save them, only eighty-one had made it to the Alpha Site. Eighty-one, plus the Athosians, who were already asleep in their tents, empty places left on sleeping palettes for the souls of their friends and family members who died or were taken defending the city of the Ancestors. There were nine blank leaves left in the book. She’d have to start writing smaller. “Almost half of these people had—” She smoothed the pages gently. “—they have the gene.”
Beckett startled her by smiling briefly. “That’s good news, then.”
“What? ” Incredulous, Rodney turned to look at him. “How is the idea of our people being turned into Wraith meatpuppets good news?”
“Because, Rodney,” Beckett answered with forced patience, “They can’t just use them as meatpuppets. For key systems there has to be intention behind the gene. You know that. It means someone’s alive.”
⸻
Kate Heightmeyer is rolling up her sleeping bag when Elizabeth stoops and crawls into the little tent. Looking over her shoulder at her, Kate smiles—a barely discernible flash of teeth in the gloaming—and says, “I thought I’d bunk with Dr. Kusanagi instead, give you a little privacy.”
Elizabeth’s stomach knots up in panic. “I don’t want privacy,” she answers. “I mean, I want—” She opens her hands, wordless.
Kate sits back on her heels, the sleeping bag on her lap, and considers her for a moment. Elizabeth waits patiently under her assessing gaze. “Okay,” Kate says finally. “Maybe I’ll just go make the rounds instead. See if anybody at all is following my orders.” Leaving the sleeping bag half-rolled on one side of the tent, and crawling around her, she pauses to rest a hand on Elizabeth’s, which lies limply on her lap now. “You too, you know. Follow orders. Sleep.” The gleam of a smile again. “I have drugs. Don’t make me use them.”
When Kate squeezes her hand, Elizabeth doesn’t return the pressure. She’s not sure she’d be able to pry her fingers free again after.
As soon as Kate’s gone the shaking starts. Elizabeth folds her hands together and slides them between her thighs, but the shaking is now shuddering and she can’t remember ever having this kind of feeling, wonders how she can shake this hard without breaking something—she must be breaking—and she thinks seizure, but she should be so lucky, just that lucky to have something break inside, snap audibly and whiplash her into blackness, and she thinks suddenly of the girl in her second year Ethics class who stood up in the middle of the lecture theatre and started to laugh, who laughed and laughed and laughed while they all sat frozen with their pens hovering over half-words and the professor’s chalk made a slow arc across the blackboard as he turned to look, too, and she laughed with tears on her cheeks until she folded, almost like Rodney had folded a few minutes ago, only this folding took her whole body, curled it inward like a leaf ungrowing, and she’d fallen in the aisle, something in her brain broken. Aneurysm, Elizabeth’s mind says, supplying the word because it’s not broken and she doesn’t get to whiplash into blackness. She doesn’t get to, so she curls low over her knees until her forehead is against the crinkling nylon of the tent floor and she shudders tearlessly until there is no more shuddering, no more shaking, only her own breath trapped and sour and slowing.
It means that someone is alive.
⸻
“I could stab you in the ass with a hypodermic. You’d never see it coming.” Kate let the small curl of a smile carry the threat.
Rodney snorted.
“I’m serious. You’d go down like a sack of potatoes.” She raised an eyebrow at him.
“Take your best shot.” He turned his back on her pointedly. “Better bring the big needle, though. You’re going to need something impressive to counteract Beckett’s sunshine cocktail.” He pulled the lid off of his marker and started writing on the white board. “Breakfast of champions and really spectacular losers.”
On top of his sleeping bag in the corner, Dr. Zelenka sat up abruptly. Grumbling to himself, he stumbled to his feet, bundled the bag up untidily in his arms and stomped toward the door wearing only his shirt, boxers and socks. “I would hold him down for this procedure,” he said to her, blinking owlishly behind the askew lenses of his glasses, “but he smells very bad.” The glare he cast in Rodney’s direction softened into a half-smile of sympathy and concern as he turned back to her. “I will sleep in the chemists’ tent. They do not have white board or squeaky marker or strung-out physicist.”
Kate squeezed Zelenka’s arm as he passed, and faced Rodney again. “I’m worried about you, Doctor.”
“I’m worried about you, Doctor.”
“You can’t go on like this.”
"You can’t go on like this.”
“Are you five?”
“Are you five?”
She didn’t grind her teeth. Okay, she did sort of grind her teeth. “I’ll be back in the morning with a child psychologist.”
He waggled fingers over his shoulder. “Beep beep.”
She could practically see him mentally disappearing in a cloud of cartoon dust. “And the Acme Really Big Needle,” she called as she left him in the glow of the lantern, his shadow enormous and waving grotesquely against the canvas wall of the tent.
She didn’t have a big needle.
What she needed was a magic wand. A field of poppies. Doobies for everyone. Lullabies and jacuzzi baths and warm milk and one solid week where nobody died and every single crackpot in the camp could lie down at dusk and sleep until noon.
She was going to have to spike the water.
Pausing in the middle of the restless camp, she pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes and allowed herself a five-second fantasy. In this one, her waiting room was full of people who wanted to quit smoking. They all had fulfilling jobs, happy families and spotless histories. They paid in cash and never stayed longer than fifteen minutes. The office was a perfect, pristine white and there was a pink rose in a vase on the edge of her desk. The nurse’s name was Joan. Joan was so efficient that she had tomorrow’s charts done last week. Everyone left smiling.
The wind blew ashes into her hair. All around her small fires were clinging to deadfall in circles of stones. Half real in the wind-blown light, people huddled in their sleeping bags or sat with their arms around their drawn-up knees, their eyes reflecting hollowly like something she’d dreamed of as a kid. Lost souls at her window. Envious of the light and warmth inside. She used to pull the covers up over her head, but she always left a little opening so she’d see them coming.
Hush, hush, Kate thought as much to herself as to them. With a sigh that tasted of charcoal, she rolled her shoulders, listening to the crackle of taut tendons over her collarbones, and headed back toward the vague shadow of her tent.
Inside, she found her sleeping bag already unrolled, a jacket wrapped in a fleece vest at its head for a pillow. Elizabeth was a blot of darkness against the fire-lit grey of the tent wall. Her eyes gleamed briefly as Kate settled carefully into her bag and started to comb the knots out of her hair with her fingers, getting it ready to be braided. She’d have to cut it off, probably, if they were stuck here. Or let it grow down to her ankles in preparation for the inevitable day when her Expedition-issue uniform finally wore out. She couldn’t contain the quiet huff of a laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Elizabeth asked.
Kate’s hands paused. “The image of McKay and Zelenka as naturists,” she answered and went back to untangling a snarl that seemed to have an actual twig at its centre.
“You have an interesting turn of mind in a crisis.”
“All of us, shaggy-haired and naked, tapping away at our treadmill-powered laptops.”
Elizabeth’s voice was amused but blurred around the edges, fading into the grey around her. “I’m sure the Athosians won’t let us go naked. They’re a well-dressed set. I could get a coat like Halling’s. Long.”
She fell silent while Kate slipped the rubber band off of her wrist and wound it around the end of her braid. “I like that coat,” Kate agreed.
Another long silence. Kate sat inside her sleeping bag and fingered the end of her braid, weaving it between her fingers. She wondered if she’d packed a toothbrush but she couldn’t remember what she’d thrown in her backpack and had no idea where it might be now. Outside, the wind fumbled along the ground, sweeping the sounds of the camp—voices, the crackle of fires—in aimless circles so that the tent seemed adrift, and nothing beyond its walls seemed plausible.
“How are they?” Elizabeth’s question was the swath of a flashlight, made the world real again, found people in the shifting darkness. People. Tap tap at the window. Let us in, Kate. It’s so cold.
Letting her hand fall, Kate patted for a second on the nylon of Elizabeth’s sleeping bag until she found Elizabeth’s fingers, laced them with hers and waited until they finally, reluctantly, closed tightly around her own. “Tomorrow.”
“We need to watch—Stackhouse is only twenty-four. God, at twenty-four I was—well, maybe I’d better not say.” The faint blush of a smile in Elizabeth’s voice was replaced by steel-blue. “I’m not sure he’s ready to be ranking military—”
“Tomorrow, Elizabeth.”
“Tomorrow we—”
Turning on her hip, Kate thumped down on her elbow next to Elizabeth’s head so that their faces were inches apart. She gazed down at her sternly for a long moment, until Elizabeth closed her mouth and nodded a little, barely a waver of shadow in the gloom. With a nod of her own, Kate let her forehead fall against the curve of Elizabeth’s shoulder and sighed into the warm space between them. “Sleep.” Letting go of Elizabeth’s fingers, she raised her own and found Elizabeth’s eyes by touch, brushed her lashes gently and felt them flutter and close. “Good. Lead by example.”
When Kate started to roll away, Elizabeth reached up and closed her hand around her wrist, gently, barely asking. Nodding again, Kate settled down and edged closer with a lot of jerking and rearranging of her now-twisted sleeping bag until she was stretched out on her side, pressed against Elizabeth’s shoulder, the curve of her hip. Shifting a little, Elizabeth made room for her on her makeshift pillow so that Kate’s lips were just against the hollow behind Elizabeth’s ear, her nose tickled by dark curls. Puffing the hair away with a few sharp breaths, Kate closed her eyes and wrapped her arm around Elizabeth. There was a faint shivering there, something delicately raw, bare branches a fine crazing against a pale sky. She held her and was very still.
Hush, hush she thought. Come in from the cold.
⸻
“Stop.”
The grey nylon tent was exactly the same colour as the patch of sky Elizabeth could see through the mesh-covered window above her head and for a moment she blinked up at it and couldn’t get her bearings, felt like she was floating, and that the window had been hastily pinned on clouds. Beside her, Kate was huddled low in her sleeping bag, curled away from the wind that bowed the wall inward a bit at her back and made the carbon fiber struts hum low, hollow notes on the verge of music.
“Just stop it stop it, okay? How ’bout right... now.”
Levering herself up onto her elbows, Elizabeth looked out through the tent door into the camp.
“No, of course not. Why’d I expect anything different?”
Rodney was standing next to Stackhouse’s dead fire. Stackhouse, himself a mirror of Elizabeth, was up on his elbows in his sleeping bag, squinting up at Rodney who faced the wind, leaned into it with his chin out-thrust, arms hanging limply the way they did when he’d been gesturing frustration and had given up. He raised a hand and Elizabeth saw that there was a cup in it, something dark sloshing out of it in a flourishing arc as he used the cup to wave dismissively.
“Whatever.”
Turning away, he hunched his shoulders even more and strode back to his tent, out of Elizabeth’s line of sight. Stackhouse caught her eye and shrugged with his face.
“Trouble?” Kate asked. Only one of her eyes was open, but she was watching Elizabeth keenly.
“Rodney,” Elizabeth answered as she struggled out of her bag and stuffed her feet into her boots. When Kate started to sit up, Elizabeth waved her down again. “I’ll see. Be right back.”
The wind buffeted her as she crawled out into the early light; it blew her hair into her eyes and made her jacket flap and struggle against her when she tried to find the sleeves. Over by the fire pit, the other two Marines were awake now, and all three of the men turned in unison to look at her and then away, back to Rodney’s lab tent, then to her again. When she nodded at them and smiled a little, they laid down and rolled onto their sides, three backs against the wind, heads tucked low under their sleeping bags to shelter them from the drifting grit. They looked like olive drab dunes.
The clearing was dotted with the small domes of tents, some exactly like hers, but most larger, big enough for four or six, all of them straining against the anchors angled into the dry ground as the wind worked persistent fingers under the edges of their floors. Once the bodies—the people—were out of them, the tents would have to be weighted down. To the right of the Stargate, lined in a row with their backs to the open swath of the widening plain, were the lab tents, square with pointed tops, like carnival tents without the stripes and flags. Opposite them, over against the forest, the Athosian camp was awake, the people already stirring, each tent flap pulled open and smoke rising from the holes in the roofs to be snatched away before it could become a plume or warm the air with its scent. She could only see three tents from this angle and craned her neck looking for the rest. Most of them, she decided, were actually in the shelter of the woods, and a few more were down the slope next to the stream. Standing in the doorway of the nearest tent, Halling raised his mug to her. His other arm was wrapped tightly around Jinto, who returned her smile with a little waggle of fingers.
They kept watching her as she strode around the Marines and, protecting her eyes from the dust with a raised hand, made her way to Rodney’s tent. When she undid the ties for the flap, the broad canvas whipped out of her hand and she had to jump up a little to catch it and drag it after her as she went in, stepping on its bottom edge while she got the ties resecured.
Inside the tent, Rodney was standing in front of a white board—someone had thought to bring a white board—writing rapidly. With his other hand, he reached out blindly and put his mug down on the work table, half on the edge of a stack of notebooks. When the mug tipped, he grabbed for it, overcompensated and tipped it the other way, sloshing tea over the table. After watching it for a moment while the tea seeped toward his laptop, he finally moved to block it with the sleeve of his jacket, swiping the spill onto the dirt floor.
“Nice,” he muttered to himself and turned back to the board, his sleeve dripping.
“You’re up early,” Elizabeth observed as she came up behind him and cocked her head to read over his shoulder.
“Busy,” he answered without turning around.
“Did you even go to sleep?”
The marker squeaked against the board as he scribbled something arcane after an equal sign. He leaned back and regarded it for a moment and then drew a line through the equal sign, and, after another few seconds of thought, drew assertive lines through the whole equation before starting again.
“I think I said ‘busy.’ ”
Elizabeth folded her hands behind her back. “Busy with what?”
Pausing, he slumped a little, then tapped the board rapidly with the marker, leaving a smattering of dots in the middle of his equation. “This. And before you say, ‘this what’ I’ll tell you: it’s too complex for you to grasp, but on a simplistic level, this is a map of the potential power draw for the chair on Atlantis and this—” Another tap. “—is the potential power released by gate activation on M5S 224. The planet with the fog.”
“You mean the sentient energy beings.”
He shrugged. “Right. That’s what I said.”
Elizabeth swallowed hard against the tightening in her throat. “Rodney,” she said carefully. “Why are you making this map?”
He didn’t answer. The marker squeaked out another line of numbers and symbols while she waited. Outside, the wind paused like an intake of breath and then gusted again, making the tent’s walls billow against their frame. Elizabeth’s ears popped. The air smelled of dust and sweat.
When she finally spoke again, her voice was harder than she wanted. “We don’t kill other beings to save ourselves.”
Over his shoulder, she could see the curve of his cheek, the dark flutter of his lashes as he closed his eyes. Exasperated. Weary. Resigned. His hand fell and the marker clattered against the board’s ledge. “I know that,” he answered. “I wasn’t thinking of it. That’s the point.”
Elizabeth stepped to the side and leaned her shoulder lightly against the only clear space on the board, folded her arms. “The point?”
When Rodney looked at her, her fingers tightened around her elbows, but she didn’t step back. His eyes were somehow both vacant and bright, as though the light there was only a reflection, and they were shadowed so deeply that he looked like he’d been beaten. His mouth was a thin, bitter twist.
“The point is, I didn’t think of it. I didn’t think of it, or of a thousand other things I could’ve thought of.” His fingers fumbled on the ledge until they found the marker. “That’s the point.”
Taking his wrist firmly, Elizabeth pried the marker out of his hand. “You need to lie down,” she said evenly.
His laugh was a low chuckle, almost a growl, almost something else, sadder, angrier. “Yes, yes, that’s what I’ll do. And maybe I’ll sleep.”
“That would be a good idea.”
Again, he aimed those eyes at her and she worked not to react, not even to suck in a breath. “Works for you, does it?” Stepping close, he looked down his nose at her. “What do you see when you close your eyes?” When she said nothing he nodded and kept nodding as he took the marker back with a jerk and turned to the board. “That’s what I thought.”
It took a few moments before she could trust her voice, find the right tone of commitment and sympathy. “There was nothing you could have done.”
He smiled. “I could’ve sucked the life out of a few thousand fog beings,” he contradicted, waving with the marker at the board. “I could’ve fed them right into the chair, right under Sheppard’s ass and he could’ve remotely piloted the jumper right down the hive ship’s throat and, hey, maybe they would’ve taken Atlantis anyway, and killed Sheppard there, in the chair, instead of letting him kill himself in the goddamn jumper and if you would please go away, Elizabeth, and have your dreams and drink your tea and make your camp and grow some beans or have elections or do whatever it is you plan to do here while we play in our lab tents and write equations and think about who else we could’ve killed for nothing, maybe I could finish my work!”
His hand flew across the board, and the numbers and letters were unreadable and ended finally in a stabbing Q.E.D. that mashed the wedge-point of the marker flat and made the board rock back on its stand.
Reaching out to steady it, Elizabeth drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, counting heartbeats. Beside her, Rodney panted, eyes wide, mouth open, hands hanging again at his sides. The forgotten marker landed on his shoe and bounced point-first into the dirt.
“I just—” he began finally, and stopped to raise a hand to cover one ear with his palm. “I just wish the fucking wind would stop blowing.”
⸻
Elizabeth wasn’t facing the gate when it opened. She was watching Rodney. Rodney glared into middle space, his arms folded, jaw set. He blinked rapidly as the wormhole vortex exploded into the clearing, but his face didn’t change.
“Telemetry coming in,” Chuck said. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground beside the DHD, hunched over the laptop in front of him. It wasn’t time yet to bring a table over. Nobody was going to make that concession. “This is so fucked,” he muttered under his breath and glanced a quick apology up at her.
Elizabeth smiled tightly as she crouched down beside him to watch the screen.
Jane was as she had been yesterday, and the day before and the day before that, standing in the middle of the gate room, her paleness a steady gleam in the near-darkness. Elizabeth felt a pang of sadness when she thought of the golden panes of the windows hidden behind... what? She couldn’t picture the Wraith with paintbrushes and rollers. In her mind, they’d simply filled Atlantis with gloom, like the scent of rot, something oily. But Sheppard had said that they didn’t smell like that at all. The Wraith smelled of desiccation, dry stream beds, something that had leached away and left a fine film of chalk behind. How could something so present smell like absence?
With an effort, she reeled in her thoughts, yard by yard, like they were wide-winged against the wind, resisting. Elizabeth was tired, but Jane looked like she always did, like she’d not moved a muscle since the last time they’d dialed in. Maybe she hadn’t. Steve had stood in the middle of his cell for days without moving. Hibernation? Discipline? No way to know, now.
“Greetings,” Jane said, and waited.
Elizabeth had nothing to say. She never did. It was enough, she thought, just to keep opening the door, to make the point: “We’re still here, by the way.” Or maybe it was worthwhile to see into Atlantis, even just this little bit, for as long as the Wraith would let them.
“It’s not like the butcher cares if the cattle see the abattoir,” Rodney had observed. But he didn’t look anymore, himself, although he was there behind her, where he could see if he chose to. She turned away from the screen to check. Right now he was still staring at some point in space two feet from his eyes. He might be oblivious, but she knew better: his fingers were fluttering against his elbows, typing maybe, or playing scales.
Turning back to the laptop, she thought again, like she did every time the screen cleared and the telemetry started streaming, It’s about the intel, right, Major? Like he always did, Sheppard drawled in her head, You can never have enough intel, with that same sardonic curve of the lips that somehow meant approval and skepticism at the same time. When she’d said it out loud, Rodney had tipped the balance toward skepticism: “Ah, yes, intel. If by intel you mean satisfying your morbid curiosity.”
In short: this was so fucked. She’d crouch beside Chuck for thirty-eight minutes, staring at the diffuse glow of Jane’s skin and wondering what she smelled like. The trees would grope the darkening sky and the camp would prick out its tenuous presence with fires and lanterns, and Rodney’s fingers would play imaginary keys and turn waiting into math. Then the gate would shut down and she would get stiffly to her feet and crawl into her tent where Kate would remind her how to sleep. Rodney would go back to the whiteboard. Tomorrow they’d do it again.
“You know, if you pick it, it will never heal,” Rodney said the third day.
You should talk, Elizabeth thought at him and shifted a little, but it did nothing to ease the cramp in her calf. She wasn’t going to sit down, either, in the dust next to Chuck.
Today, on day five, at thirty-one and a half minutes, Jane tilted her head.
“Lanteans.”
Chuck’s head jerked like he’d been wakened from a doze. “Geez,” he murmured and turned up the volume on the laptop.
A shadow passed over the screen and Zelenka was beside Elizabeth, on his knees, his glasses low on his nose. “It speaks,” he observed. “How to enunciate so well with all those teeth, I wonder.”
Surprising herself with another smile, Elizabeth leaned a little closer to the screen. “Maybe it’s mostly in our heads. Suggestion, right?” She waggled her fingers next to her temple.
“Maybe true.” After a moment he added, “But not so comforting.”
There was movement in the shadows behind Jane and suddenly two figures stumbled into the M.A.L.P.’s light, followed by two more Wraith, one of the thin ones, like Steve, and one of the enforcer drones, who didn’t conjure up a name so much as the sound of bones breaking. The enforcer shoved the two humans down onto their knees. One of them was Mary DaCosta, a biologist. Her dark hair hung over her face and she didn’t lift a hand to move it. She bowed low and started to rock a little, her arms wrapped tightly around her middle. The other was Ford.
“Dr. Weir,” he called.
Elizabeth folded her hands and pressed them to her stomach, hard, squeezing the fingers of one hand with the other until the ache made her face as blank as Jane’s. She knew without looking that Rodney had gone still. Zelenka muttered a curse, gravel against stone.
Leaning forward urgently, Ford looked straight into the camera, speaking rapidly, with exaggerated clearness, reporting at bullet-speed. “I’ve counted at least thirty Wraith, but it’s hard to tell, because of the masks and the darkness. They’ve got main systems up including the shield. They took the Daedalus when she dropped out of hyperspace and that means they have the ZPM. They’re stripping the ship down to components, pulling the hyperdrive, I guess. I’ve seen twenty-eight of us. Some of us are working on the Daedalus. The rest are cocooned in the mess hall. I’m pretty sure a bunch were taken up to the hive during the battle but I can’t say for sure who or how many.” He didn’t even glance up when the Thin Wraith came to stand over him. Jane watched silently, but Elizabeth was sure there was amusement in the tilt of her head. “For the record, this is who I’ve seen.” His eyes went vague as he recited mechanically what he’d memorized: “Andrews, Antonenko, Cameron, Carrelli, DaCosta, Dunning, Colonel Everett—”
Jane stepped between him and the camera. “We have recovered the Ancient power source from your battle ship. Now we require only the control crystal,” she said. “You will bring it. We will move on to a richer feeding ground and have no more use for you, or these.”
“Fournier, Kariz, Kucher—”
Raising her hand, Jane pointed behind her at DaCosta. The enforcer yanked on the small woman’s hair, pulling her up straight so that the Thin one could lean down and tear her jersey open. Ford started to rise, grabbed at the Thin one’s hand as he pulled it back to slam it into DaCosta’s chest. Unresisting, DaCosta stared up at the Wraith, her lips moving in what had to be a prayer, and even over the staticky feed Elizabeth could see white all around the dark brown of her eyes. Ford didn’t have a chance; the enforcer took him easily, twisted his arm behind him, flattened him to the floor with an armored knee hard in the middle of his back.
As the Thin one began to feed on DaCosta—her hands scrambled fruitlessly at the talons hooked into her chest and then fell to her sides, dry twigs—Ford’s voice continued, muffled by the floor, choked by his own rage, “—Laurendeau, the Lingenfelters—”
“There are many of these here today,” Jane said, her voice a cold, bemused caress, the memory of flowing water. “Tomorrow there will be fewer.”
“—Muirhead, Naef, O’Hagan—”
Thirty-eight minutes. The gate closed. Elizabeth eased herself down onto the dust.