Allegiance

Chapter Five Recall

Dick waited until it seemed remotely possible that he might have a few moments of peace and quiet before he retreated to his office to open the email from the head of the IOA that had arrived in the databurst. He certainly felt retreat was the word for it. He tried not to think of himself as defeated before he even opened the email, but there was no way this boded well. He didn’t think they’d dropped him a friendly message to ask how the weather was in Atlantis.

He opened the file and read it quickly, braced for the worst. It wasn’t, in fact, the worst. The IOA requested his attendance at a hearing to review his decisions while in command of Atlantis. He wasn’t fooled for a minute by the requested into believing it was optional, but on the other hand, if they were calling a hearing, it meant they hadn’t already made a decision. Or that whatever decision they’d made was unpopular enough with one or another IOA member that the majority wanted more evidence on their side.

He closed the file and sat for a moment considering the blank screen. The next thing to do was tell Sheppard. Instead, he hesitated, not yet activating his radio. He walked outside, ducking quickly out onto the balcony before anyone could find him and raise whatever their next problem was.

The sun was shining brightly for a change, although the piers still glittered white with accumulated snow. It was warm enough with the sun shining that he wasn’t uncomfortable even without having put on a heavy coat. The water stretched out to the horizon, a deep and unbroken blue.

He walked to the end of the balcony where he could see the city. The towers rose against the sky, blue and silver, catching the afternoon sun. It was truly a magnificent sight. He hadn’t spent much time appreciating it. There had always been something to do that would keep him at his desk. There always was, if you looked hard enough.

When they’d been on Earth, he’d kept busy, too, scheming and playing politics, pulling every string he could find that might get Atlantis back to the Pegasus Galaxy. He’d made impassioned speeches about what it would mean for the residents of Pegasus if they never returned, without ever having time to think about what it would mean for him. Ultimately that wasn’t what was important. Atlantis and the Pegasus Galaxy would both get along without him.

He would get along without Atlantis, if it came to that, but the words rang hollow even as he thought them. He couldn’t think of anything on Earth that had actually made him feel a sense of… It made him feel overdramatic to say it, even in his head, but a sense of wonder. And if it was overdramatic to say that the legendary city of the Ancients inspired wonder, then he wasn’t entirely sure what the word was for.

He’d seen it. That was something. He’d been in some small part responsible for preserving it, and in larger part responsible for returning it to where it belonged. It probably wasn’t very reasonable to ask for a bigger role in history, but he couldn’t help feeling like a chance to do something that mattered was slipping away from him, and might never come again.

He shook his head. He could indulge in maudlin thoughts later, when he was back on Earth, but there were all too many things to be arranged first. Starting with informing Colonel Sheppard.

Sheppard arrived in his office not long after he called, looking like he had a headache. Dick couldn’t say he was surprised. It had been that kind of day all around. “What’s up?”

“Come in and shut the door,” Dick said.

Sheppard did, frowning. “That’s never good.”

“No,” Dick said, trying to smile but not sure how well he succeeded. “The IOA has requested my presence on Earth at my earliest convenience. They would like to discuss my recent decisions.”

“Ouch,” Sheppard said. “That doesn’t sound like fun.” He paused, his eyes searching Dick’s face, probably trying to judge how worried he was. “They made Elizabeth go ‘discuss her decisions’ a couple of times, but she always came out of it all right.”

“I sincerely hope I can manage the same,” Dick said. “But it won’t help to start by making them wait. I’m leaving you in charge of Atlantis while I’m gone. I trust that you’ll make every effort to continue securing the city.”

“Believe me, it’s at the top of my list,” Sheppard said. “We were scheduled to go check out some new planets in the next couple of days, but we can call those missions off.”

“That might not be the best thing to do,” Dick said. “I think it would be better not to suspend all our regular operations while you wait for me to get back.”

“Right,” Sheppard said. “Just how long are you expecting to be gone?”

“In the best-case scenario, General O’Neill will agree to recall Odyssey to Earth as soon as I go through. We’ll have a couple of days of fairly unpleasant hearings, and then when Odyssey arrives with her ZPM, I can come back through the Stargate. If that happened, I would think I’d be back in no more than a week.”

“That sounds a lot like ‘we’ll be home for Christmas’,” Sheppard said.

“Something like that.”

“Realistically speaking.”

“Realistically speaking, it could take significantly longer than that, and if I have to wait to return on Daedalus or Hammond…”

“They’re both here,” Sheppard finished. “Which means it’ll be at least a month before either of them can make the round trip.” He was beginning to look distinctly unhappy. “I’d really rather not be in charge here for a month.”

“I’m sure you’ll do just fine,” Dick said. “Until such time as I get back, or…”

“Let’s pretend there’s not an ‘or’,” Sheppard said.

“Thank you for the vote of confidence,” Dick said after a moment. It was a rather unexpected one, and it made him feel the tiniest bit better.

Sheppard shrugged. “I like dealing with known quantities.”

“And yet you enjoy working in Atlantis.”

“Our people are a known quantity,” Sheppard said. “Everything else, I’m not so sure about.”

Dick nodded agreement. There didn’t seem to be much more to say. “I’ll give the IOA your regards.”

“You know, between that and staying here where we might get invaded by the Wraith…”

“Try to avoid that if you can,” Dick said. “I’d like there to still be a city for me to come back to.”

“We can handle the Wraith,” Sheppard said, with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Trust us. We won’t have wild parties while you’re gone, either.”

“Just as long as they’re not parties that the IOA ever hears about.”

“We won’t tell anyone,” Sheppard said. He hesitated, and then extended his hand. Dick stood to shake it. “Good luck,” Sheppard said.

“Thank you,” Dick said. “Good luck to you, too. If you’d find it convenient to use the office while I’m gone…”

“I don’t know,” Sheppard said. “I’m never very comfortable in the big chair.”

“It’s adjustable.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant,” Dick said. “But you’re going to have to make yourself as comfortable as you can for at least the next few weeks.”

“Right,” Sheppard said. He looked like he thought that would be a tall order.

“You want to take a break?” Jennifer asked. Carson looked up at her, realizing that he’d been staring at his computer screen for the last whoever knew how long rather than reading the words on it. “We’ve got a lot of notes to go through here.”

“No, let’s go on,” Carson said. “I’d rather get it over with.”

“It’s your work, so you may not really need to look over it,” Jennifer said, turning her lab stool so that she was talking to him and not to her own screen. “It’s just been a while since I started back at the beginning and approached this fresh.”

“It’s my work, and then again it isn’t, given that I’m a clone of the man who did it,” Carson said. He hadn’t worried about that as much when he was out in the field, but lately he was beginning to feel like a nice long chat with their new psychiatrist Dr. Robinson might be in order. “I remember doing these experiments. I even remember why it seemed like such a good idea. I don’t expect that the original Carson Beckett ever changed his mind about that before he died.”

“You haven’t changed your mind, have you?” Jennifer said. “I know we’ve had a lot of trouble figuring out how to make your original concept of a retrovirus stable, but it’s been less than four years. It takes longer than that back on Earth to develop a new drug for athlete’s foot.”

“I think that’s my point,” Carson said. “I thought I knew what I was doing when I tested the retrovirus on Michael. It would either work or it wouldn’t, and either way we’d learn something. I never imagined that it would work well enough for everyone to accept the man as a human being, and then…”

“If we can ever get the new version to work permanently, I think it’ll be worth it,” Jennifer said. “Given that the alternative is either going on the way we have been, with whole societies being wiped out, or exterminating the Wraith as a species.”

“I think we may be the only ones in this city who have a problem with that idea,” Carson said.

Jennifer gave him a stubborn look that he rather liked. “That doesn’t make us wrong.”

“It doesn’t,” he said. “That’s why I did it, for whatever that’s worth. We were all a lot more sure of ourselves once, talking about winning the war with the Wraith for good as if we had any idea how to do that. And then there was Ellia, poor soul. You’ve seen the reports?”

“The immature Wraith queen who had been raised as a human,” Jennifer said. “The retrovirus backfired in her, activating more traits that must have come from the Iratus bug.”

“That’s a nice tidy way of summing up a terrible thing,” Carson said. A nice dry scientific explanation that wouldn’t trouble anyone’s sleep. “She was a little girl, a little shy thing who served us tea. Her father had been letting her feed off him so that she could survive, sacrificing years of his life. Because he loved his little girl. And we turned her into a monster, and then we killed her.”

“She was killing people,” Jennifer said.

“I know that,” Carson said. “It was wrong, but she wasn’t some creature we could say we had to put down like an animal. She was a child who had been forced to do terrible things to survive. And after that when we sat around the table and talked about all our newest ideas for how to wipe out the Wraith threat — ” He turned up his hands. “We were talking about genocide. No one wanted to hear it, because it was easier to think of our enemies as things rather than as people. I expect it usually is.”

“That was the whole idea of the retrovirus,” Jennifer said. “To remove their need to feed on us without killing them all.”

“Don’t have too many illusions about our purity of purpose at the time,” Carson said. “Dr. Weir and Colonel Sheppard came around to the idea because by that point, we were starting to get some idea of how hard it would be to defeat the Wraith by shooting at them. If I’d had a way to kill all the Wraith, I expect they’d have preferred that.”

“I don’t know. Dr. Weir never struck me as exactly trigger-happy, and Colonel Sheppard… he doesn’t act like he thinks Todd is an animal.”

“Maybe not. But they’d both lost a lot of people, and seeing what was going on out there — they thought if there was any way to put an end to it, it would be worth it. And you see how that worked out.”

“We just need more time,” Jennifer said. “We’ve gotten so close. If we can get it right, we could save millions of lives, prevent entire civilizations from being wiped out. Human and Wraith.”

“Aye, we could. Hypothetically, if we ever get it right. And in the mean time, we’ve certainly been paying for it. Ask Teyla about that, and she’s one of the ones you can ask, because Michael didn’t actually kill her.”

“Carson — ”

He couldn’t make himself stop. “How many people are dead because Michael decimated whole planets with the Hoffan drug? Or because of his hybrids? Both of which I actually helped him to perfect. And that was me who helped him, not the Carson Beckett who was here in Atlantis writing letters home to his mum. I was spending two years locked in a prison cell at the time, waiting for a rescue attempt that was never going to come and watching a lot of people die. So if you’ll excuse me, I think I get to have a say in whether it was worth it.”

Jennifer looked more than a little surprised, maybe all the way to alarmed. Carson regretted the outburst already, but it was harder than he’d expected to pretend to any kind of objectivity about this research.

“I think maybe you should talk to someone about what happened to you,” she said. “It can’t be easy working on something that’s so much like helping Michael create his hybrids.”

“I have and I will,” Carson said. “But just because I expect I’ll be dealing with this for a long time doesn’t mean I’m not right. I wish I’d never tested the retrovirus without a better idea of what it would do, and frankly I wish I’d never heard of the bloody thing.”

“That’s not going to help Rodney,” Jennifer said.

“If I didn’t care about Rodney, I wouldn’t have agreed to do this. But he’s a good friend, and a good man, and I’m going to do everything I can — ” He broke off, wishing he was sure he could trust his voice.

“We still have your turtles,” Jennifer said, as if that weren’t a total non sequitur. “I mean, now that we have a cat, I don’t know if Rodney’s still quite as attached…”

“Well, don’t give them to me now,” Carson said. “How do you expect him to like it if he comes back and finds out that you’ve given his turtles away? He’ll be impossible to live with.”

“They’re your turtles.”

“I never actually bought the things,” Carson said.

“I suppose that was the other one of you,” Jennifer said. “I always forget.”

“Everyone does.”

“I’m really sorry,” she said, sounding like she really was. “I just want to figure this out, so that we can be sure that if we do get him back, we’re actually going to be able to get him back to… you know, our regular Rodney.”

“Frightening as that is,” Carson said, giving her as much of a smile as he could. “Well, unless they’ve come up with something immensely clever, and there’s no way of anticipating that, the process should start wearing off once they’re no longer administering their retrovirus on a regular basis. What we need is to be able to predict how his body will react to that.”

“It doesn’t seem that Michael ever entirely regained his Wraith form completely,” Jennifer said, as if reluctant to speak the words. “Of course, it’s hard to tell, once he began manipulating his own genetic structure, but…”

“We may be able to help the reversion process along,” Carson said. “You did a fine job of that with the hybrids. I wouldn’t give up hope that we’ll get our Rodney back with his body and his memory intact.” He intended to just leave it there, but Jennifer’s sharp eyes must have caught something in his expression.

“What?”

“Don’t expect this to be easy for him to put behind him. Especially if he’s actually had to feed on a human being.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“We have no reason whatsoever to think that it won’t. Except that we don’t like to think about it, but if we don’t think about it, who will? You heard Colonel Sheppard on the subject. It’s not something he can let himself imagine. But it’s part of being a doctor to face the hard truths.”

“I know that,” Jennifer said. “Believe me, I get to do enough of that in this job.”

“I know you do,” Carson said. “And I shouldn’t take my bad temper out on you. I probably should take myself to Dr. Robinson about some of this, although I’ve been trying to give her time to get settled in before making her deal with a story that begins ‘to start with, I still have some complicated feelings about being a clone’.”

“She used to work for the SGC back on Earth. It’s probably not the weirdest thing she’s ever heard,” Jennifer said.

Carson shook his head. “It won’t be for long if she keeps working here.”

Quicksilver dreamed he was pursued, and then pursuing, changing roles with a fluency that told him he was asleep, even though he could not seem to wake. Sometimes it was the Lanteans who pursued him, the one he had stunned, the big barbarian who had guarded the door, the tiny dangerous one, and then again it was his lab assistants, ringing him in, feeding hands outstretched, while Ember turned his back and Dust laughed. He fled from his brother in a fever of fear, through the corridors of the hive, and metal halls, down stairs that gleamed bronze in the light that fell from tall and narrow windows.

And then quite suddenly he came through metal doors — metal doors familiar in a way that seemed different, as though he had once known them well — ugly heavy things painted with numbers half as tall as he was that lifted away to reveal a room filled with screens and consoles. Beyond a huge window stood a Stargate, quiescent, all its symbols dark. He needed to dial the ship, needed to dial home, and he went unerringly to a keyboard. It was not a proper device, not the Ancients’ work, but he knew it would do the job.

“Rodney.”

He looked over his shoulder, startled, to see the dark-haired queen behind him, her arms folded across her chest.

“You don’t want to do that,” she said.

“I have to,” he answered. “I have to go home.”

“No,” she said.

“But I do.” He looked down at the screen again, frowning, feeling his way into a system that wasn’t the gate after all. “It’s vital.”

“It’s a very bad idea.”

He could hear something like sorrow in her voice, but didn’t turn to see. On the screen, the numbers shifted, changing like a flower unfolding —

“Are you sure this is what you want?” she asked.

“Of course I am,” he answered. “Why wouldn’t I? I need to go home.”

“Then come with me.”

Quicksilver looked up, startled, and they were suddenly in front of the gate, on the metal ramp that led up to its opening. His feet echoed, clumsy, but hers made no sound.

“I believe I should say something cryptic,” she said, “but it seems — pointless. Are you sure you want this?”

“Yes! Of course!” Quicksilver glared at her, looked up at the gate and its darkened symbols. “Of course I do.”

“Very well.”

She gave him a tight, unfriendly smile, and turned away. Abruptly, there were shapes behind the glass, figures moving, a fair-haired woman bent over the control console, and the gate ground into motion, the first symbol lighting. Quicksilver started to take a step back, to get out of the way of the expanding wormhole, but his feet wouldn’t move. He looked down, saw that he was wearing magnetic boots.

“Hey! Hey, I’m down here — ”

He pulled harder, rocked his right foot from side to side the way he’d been taught, but the connection was too strong. A second symbol lit and locked, and a third.

“Hey! Stop!”

The people in the control room ignored him utterly, as though he didn’t exist for them at all. He bent down, fumbling for the catch that closed the boots — the fourth symbol was locked now — and found nothing but smooth plastic. The gate turned, lighting the fifth symbol, moved smoothly toward the sixth. He flung himself forward with all his strength, trying to break the seal, but he remained locked in place. The sixth symbol lit.

“Oh, no,” he said. “No, no, no — ”

The seventh symbol locked. He closed his eyes tightly, but the light engulfed him anyway, scalding cold, consuming him —

He woke, mouth open, suspecting that he had screamed. Sure enough, Ember was bending over him, half dressed, hair in wild disarray. His pupils were huge in the dim light, and he looked almost afraid himself.

*Quicksilver,* he said. *Are you all right?*

*No, I — * Quicksilver stopped, the dream memories slotting into place, driving back the terror. *Yes. Oh, yes! We have to go to the labs.* He swung himself out of the nest, reaching for the tunic he had left on the floor. *I remember — I remember many things, Ember.*

*Do you indeed?* There was an odd note in Ember’s mind, gone before Quicksilver could define it. *It’s the middle-night watch, Quicksilver. Only the most junior clevermen will be there.*

Quicksilver waved his hand in dismissal. *I don’t need them. I just need a computer.* He glared at the other cleverman, for the first time in many days feeling almost himself. *Will you hurry? No one’s going to care about your hair.*

Ember blinked, showed teeth, but then controlled himself. *I will come,* he said.