Blood Ties

Chapter thirty

Through a gray haze of hypoxia, John felt something grab him by the shoulders and haul him up. The change in pressure re-expanded the air in his lungs, and soon he broke the surface of the water, gasping and choking on his first clean breath in what felt like hours.

"That…" He gagged and spat out a mouthful of water, gulping another huge breath. "You're telling me that was only sixty meters?"

Climbing up onto a rock ledge, Anata gave him a smile that blended apology with approval. "Sixty meters just to the bottom," she amended. "You nearly made it all the way here before starting to black out. Without fins or weights, that was rather impressive, for a human."

She reached down to help him, and he dragged himself out of the water on shaky arms. Shivering in the chill of the underground air, he curled up and waited for his breathing to even out. She'd expected him to die, or at least skirt the ragged edge of drowning. It hadn't mattered, of course, because she'd known she could bring him back if necessary. What a radically different mindset, to be able to risk lives without fear of consequences.

He pushed himself up to his knees and looked around. The pool that had been their entrance was really more of a shallow river, winding through a large cavern. He couldn't tell what was providing the light source, but the place was illuminated much better than the average tourist-traveled cave. The ledge they occupied was a massive piece of flowstone that led up to a relatively flat area, where one of the cambion held a hand over Rebecca's chest-and he wasn't performing CPR.

John got to his feet, instinctively moving toward the profiler's unconscious form. She would have gone without oxygen longer than he had during the swim…

"She'll be fine," Anata assured him, pulling off her soaked jacket as she matched his stride.

When John neared the wider part of the cavern, he was startled to see row after row of automatic weapons and minor artillery pieces. These folks were better equipped than the Atlantis armory. He raised his eyebrows. "Expecting a war?"

The cambion who'd gone ahead of them had now congregated near a group of shelves and were stripping off their wet clothes without a trace of embarrassment. One of them, the big guy who'd carried Rebecca, tossed John a towel and a set of dry clothes: nondescript olive-drab fatigues, probably surplus from one military or another.

"As a matter of fact, yes." Anata wriggled out of her clinging shirt. "But not with the Ori."

Because she seemed as comfortable out of her clothes as in them, John didn't bother to avert his eyes as he pulled his own shirt, ripped and bloodied, over his head. Like the others, Anata's skin was pallid almost to the point of albinism, though not tinted with the sickly teal of a Wraith. Her limbs were exceptionally long and thin-gangly, he might have said had she not moved with such grace. While they honestly did need to get into drier clothes, he nevertheless suspected that this display was a demonstration of sorts; evidence that Anata and her children could pass-outwardly, anyway-as human.

His focus shifted to Rebecca again, and he recalled their conversation in Iraq. Being human now seemed to be more of a sliding scale than an absolute.

"What's going to happen to her?" he asked, nodding in Rebecca's direction. Two women, whose arrival he'd somehow missed, began to rid her of her wet clothes as well. He turned back to Anata and finished dressing.

The smile the succubus wore was warm and genuine. "She will sleep a while longer, and when she wakes she will know that she is the one."

Phrases like that tended to make John nervous. "I don't mean to sound ungrateful for the way you saved us, but just what is she supposed to be `the one' of?"

Tugging on a soft-looking sweater and freeing her long hair from its collar, Anata met his gaze squarely. "You already have most of the information you need. I felt it in you when I fed you. Come on. We both could use some energy, and there should be hot chocolate brewing." She shot him a disarming grin that almost made him forget how incredibly old she must be. "There's nothing better than chocolate after a cave dive."

John followed her through a narrow gap between two thick stone columns, quickly ducking to avoid an overhanging formation that resembled a side of bacon. The passage opened out into a tall cavern, prompting him to look up. The light barely reached the ceiling, several stories high and covered with clusters of needlelike stalactites, stained dark with soot. On the ground, a campfire was burning low, and a girl of about fifteen was distributing mugs of steaming chocolate complete with marshmallows. John accepted his with a nod and a quiet "thanks." It was awfully good, he had to admit. Still, he had priorities.

"If that well is your only way in and out of here," he said to Anata, "how-"

With a laugh, the succubus gestured for him to sit on one of the broken chunks of limestone near the campfire. "The well is one of hundreds of entrances to this cave system. It was merely the closest to where Rebecca's vehicle crashed. I apologize for that, by the way. Normally it takes several more hours for the ginkgo solution to trigger the retrovirus. Like I said, Rebecca is unique."

So the ginkgo theory Atlantis's scientists were following was worthwhile. Even so, John wasn't sure whether that comment had answered more questions than it raised or vice versa. A particular question stood out above the rest, however. "How did you slip her this solution of yours in the first place'?"

"Do you remember the water bottle Rebecca had with her in Ramadi?" At John's blank look-Iraq seemed like the distant past by now-Anata elaborated. "The solution is odorless and colorless. Hanan was not far away during your visit. When she realized who Rebecca was, and who you were, she had the water bottle switched. It was a risk, to be sure, especially since our stock of ginkgo on this planet is nearly depleted, but it was necessary. The others, the ones you call the Lilith, were already on her trail because of the investigation. The only way to protect Rebecca was to empower her with her innate abilities."

John decided to skip over the "and who you were" part of what she'd said. He'd long since given up on trying to untangle everyone's various interpretations of his so-called Ancient birthright. "What abilities would those be? The feeding trick?"

"Much more than that. Rebecca is the first among our kind who does not require human life in order to feed."

That explained the cow earlier, which John had been half convinced he'd hallucinated. He took another sip from his mug before responding. "I have a hard time believing you've lived for however many thousands of years and none of you have tried to feed on animals."

"I doubt there's a cambion in existence," replied Anata, unruffled, "except perhaps for those who believe their place is with the Wraith, who hasn't made the attempt. Until now, it's never been successful. It was always Ninlil's intention for animal feeding to be possible, but, as you've learned, her laboratory was destroyed in the great flood five thousand years ago. When the rains ceased and the Tigris and Euphrates finally returned to their riverbanks instead of joining to form a vast inland sea, Ninlil led the survivors north, and we settled in the caves in Germany. They had been used by hunters since Neolithic times and their many passages were well mapped."

Her story made sense, at least in the context of what John already knew. Even so, he had to shake his head. "Hanan could have saved everyone a lot of trouble by telling all this to Daniel Jackson in Iraq, rather than letting us fumble around until we managed to chase you down. If you'd just made yourselves known-"

"Your governments, under the auspices of the International Oversight Authority, would have rounded us up and had us confined to Area 51 for `study'." Anata fixed him with a knowing look. "You'll forgive me, Colonel, if your organization's previous genetic work on Michael doesn't fill me with confidence."

John winced inwardly. That whole mind-sharing thing had some serious drawbacks.

"Don't misunderstand," she told him, stretching her long legs out in front of her. "We're in no position to claim any kind of moral high ground on such activities. In our own way, we've done much the same, attempting to breed one among us whose blood would permanently adjust the retrovirus to allow all succubi, incubi, and cambion to feed from any form of life. This is the only defense we can offer to protect humans from the Ori-or any new legion the Orici might garner."

Finally beginning to warm up, John edged back from the campfire. He wasn't sure he understood that logic just yet, but he was willing to take what he could get. "And the others-the Lilith?"

With a sigh, Anata said, "Those who worship Ninlil as Lilith consider us to be heretics. In fact it is they who are heretical, although I wouldn't use that term, since they are driven by belief whereas we are driven by biological fact. The active Lilith number in the hundreds, possibly thousands, because they have developed themselves into a religion-one that does not actively seek out followers, I grant you, but it muddles their view of those who carry the bloodline with esoteric nonsense about their rightful place in the universe. We, on the other hand, have no doctrine and take no members beyond those whose genetic memories are lucid enough for them to understand the truth. Those who carry the bloodline unknowingly come under the protection of Watchers like Hanan and me. Rebecca wasn't completely honest with you when she described forming her theories of Ninlil. Most of her knowledge actually came from indistinct glimpses into her own memories, which are now Awakening in full. She will understand that she, like all of us, was bred as an instrument, a means to an end. We are nothing more or less than that."

Having been a lifelong fan of self-determination, John was more than a little skeptical of that assessment. "An instrument? Not the most flattering picture, is it?"

Lifting an eyebrow, Anata sipped her chocolate. "Did you think the second evolution of humanity happened by dumb luck? We're all instruments. Annunaki, Ancients, Others, Lanteans — regardless of what you call them, they created all life in this galaxy and several others. And every single thing they did had a purpose, allowing them to further their ambition."

"To Ascend." The Ancients had been amazingly good at looking out for themselves first and foremost.

Anata shrugged. "Having said that, none of us has any reason to complain. We exist because of them, and we aspire to immortality just as they do. Some of us come closer to the goal than others."

John recalled Rebecca's observation that all belief structures shared certain common themes: namely, the desire for immortality. Under the steady gaze of the succubus, he shifted, wondering how much insight their brief mind-link had given her into his time in the Sanctuary. "That's Daniel Jackson's area of expertise, not mine."

"You're a soldier," said Anata simply. "You made a commitment to defend your people and were trained to do it well. We were created, bred, to do the same. That doesn't prevent either of us from exercising free will, and it doesn't exclude us from Ascension. If the Ori ultimately succeed-"

"The Ori are dead."

"You're not entirely certain of that, and in any case the Orici definitely isn't. She has a ready-made army, an entire galaxy's worth of followers and, if the other On are indeed dead, power all to herself."

John didn't want to sound impatient, but so far none of this had gotten him any closer to knowing how to deal with current events. "So what does that mean to us right now?"

Anata finished her chocolate. "We believe that several million, possibly as many as half a billion people carry some trace of the retrovirus. What Rebecca told you is true. The Lilith want to acquire ginkgo from the world you call M1M316 and seed it across Earth. They also want to bring the Wraith here to assist in the battle against the On. Whether or not such a battle will ever actually take place is irrelevant to what will happen should they succeed. The ginkgo will trigger the active retrovirus in human carriers-the Awakening. The Awakened will need the rest of humanity as a source of food." She tossed him a rueful glance. "To quote one of your Talmudic texts, `The children ofLilith will plague all of mankind for eternity' and the Biblical Apocalypse will be here, one way or another."

Cheery thought. "And what's your plan'?"

"Acquire the ginkgo without alerting the disastrous experiment known as the Wraith, create a vaccine using the ginkgo and the mutated virus in Rebecca's blood, and slowly and carefully introduce it into the human population so that the Awakening is eased for all concerned. The Awakened will be given live animals to feed upon as soon as the compulsion takes hold. They'll never need to feed from a human-most people are averse to the idea due to deeply ingrained principles of ethical behavior. That's what saved you when Rebecca Awakened."

"Handing them chickens and goats instead will probably piss off a lot of vegetarians," John commented.

Anata's smile returned. "The feeding will be far more merciful than what currently takes place in a slaughterhouse. More to the point, in the long term you'll have a force capable of going up against the Orici, if necessary, and certainly the Wraith. All the IOA has to do is allow genetic modification on a global scale. Oh, and declassify the Stargate to explain everything while they're at it. Tell me, what do you think the chances are of them going along with that plan?"

Just once, John would really appreciate it if the solution to a problem turned out to be obvious and straightforward.

Before he could answer, the low undercurrent of voices resonating off the cave walls grew louder. He looked up to see people hurrying toward the cavern he thought of as an armory. Abruptly, Anata dropped her mug and ran to join them.

John followed, watching weapons being distributed with alarming speed. "What's going on?" he demanded, afraid he already knew the answer.

"We have guests. The ones you call Lilith know Rebecca is here, and they want her dead. To them she is an abomination. I had hoped we would have more time, but if this is how we are to make our stand, then so be it." Anata snatched up an AK-47. "You can leave through the sinkhole if you choose. This is our fight and-"

From a distance, the first sharp reports of discharging automatic weapons echoed through the caves.

The choices weren't great: take sides in a succubus crusade, or roll the dice and attempt to repeat that marathon swim-this time without help. Of course, if John chose the swim and somehow managed to pull it off, he'd find himself stranded in the middle of an inferno. His teams on the surface must have been either driven back by the fires or overrun by the Lilith. As much as he hoped it was the first option and not the second, the difference didn't change his immediate situation. For now, he was on his own, and he wasn't sure they could afford to let the Lilith win this fight.

"I shoot best with a P-90, if you've got any," he said, reaching for a few spare clips of ammunition. "I think we're all in this together, whether everyone out there knows it or not."