Reliquary

Chapter Twelve

John had a last moment of awareness, enough to realize he was lying on the jumper bay floor. The light was blinding, but he knew it was Rodney and Teyla who were leaning over him, and he thought it was Carson Beckett standing next to his head, yelling orders at someone. He grabbed Rodney’s arm and tried to ask about the jumper, but he couldn’t get the words out.

Rodney must have understood anyway. “It’s gone, it went through the gate,” he said, his voice thick and barely recognizable. Then he looked up at Beckett and shouted, “My God, Carson, will you get off your fat ass and do something!”

John decided that was a good time to let go.

John really expected to be dead, but being dead felt a lot like being in the hospital. Antiseptic odors, tubes and needles in places that tubes and needles should not be, too-bright lights, quiet serious voices with intermittent flurries of frantic activity and arguing. At some point he knew it was McKay standing over him, snapping his fingers at somebody and demanding to see John’s chart, and Beckett telling him, “I would like to remind you, Rodney, that you are not a medical doctor.” Teyla’s anxious face leaning over him, then Ford’s, then a distinct memory of Elizabeth, sitting nearby, her feet propped up on a stool while she read from a laptop.

He remembered all that as he came to gradually in the half-lit gloom of a medical bay. He was lying on his side on one of the narrow beds in the recovery area, a blanket tangled around his waist. He had loose gauzy bandages on his hands, and his left arm was secured to a rail with a light band, but that was probably to keep him from dislodging the several IVs that were stuck in it. Except for that, he felt mostly okay;

the intrusive tubes were thankfully gone, though there was a lingering ache in his throat. He had had a bath at some point and was wearing clean surgical scrubs. He could see into the next bay, where a couple of the medical techs and Dr. Beckett were working at a table spread with open notebooks, data pads, coffee cups, and laptops.

And it was quiet. John went still, listening intently. No whispers, no alien sound that his brain tried to interpret as music, no white noise. Everything he could hear was homey and familiar: the distant crash of waves washing against the city’s platforms, clicking keys as someone typed, hums and beeps from medical equipment both Ancient and Earth-built. The only voices came from further away in the medlab, and were human. He felt his ear cautiously, then ran a hand through his hair. No spines.

John cleared his throat and said, “Beckett?”

Beckett looked up, brows lifted, then said something to one of the techs as he pushed his chair back. He came over to stand beside John’s bed, pulling a portable scanner out of the pocket of his lab coat. “Ah, Major. Are we coherent today?”

“Is that a trick question?” He squinted up at Beckett. “How long have I been out?”

“Six days,” Beckett said, seeming surprised and pleased. Apparently asking if John was coherent hadn’t been a joke. Beckett set the scanner aside and took out a small pocket flashlight. “Hold still a moment and let me check your eyes.”

Expecting to hear that it had been a day or so at most, John was too floored to try to avoid the light. But it was a relief when it just stung a little and didn’t make him want to punch Beckett and throw himself off the bed. Beckett confirmed it, picking up the chart and making a note. “Very good. I think your eyes are quite back to normal.”

“How is everybody?” John didn’t need to ask if he was still dying; he knew what Beckett looked like when people were dying, and this wasn’t it. “Teyla and Ford, everybody who had the mind-control drug—”

“Everyone who was given the drug has completely recovered,” Beckett assured him. “And poor Masterson was the only death from the fighting. There were a number of injuries from the fighting, but everyone’s doing fine now.”

John pushed himself up a little more. “Hey, I can’t hear the ATA anymore. Does that mean…?”

Carson pushed him back down again. “Yes, all physical symptoms are gone. You had us worried for a bit there. We got you on life support just as your body was in the process of shutting down. But that memory core of Zelenka’s had a good deal of information on the various genetic treatments and how to tweak them back to normal for humans and for the Ancients. They did have to pop back to the planet to pick up that download Rodney took from the bastard’s database to figure out exactly what you were given, but once we had that, I was able to start reversing the process.”

John let his head drop back on the pillow. He wasn’t as stiff and sore as he should be, though he could tell he really needed to shave. “I don’t feel like I’ve been unconscious for a week.”

“Oh, you haven’t been unconscious for the past few days,” Beckett said, making some more notes. “We were able to get you up and walking around. But the Ancient genetic treatments had a bit of a side effect in humans that apparently made you extremely, shall we say, loopy, so I doubt you remember any of that.”

“Okay. That’s…weird.” He tentatively flexed his hands, feeling a little residual soreness. “So what happened with the claws? Did they just fall out during all this?”

“Oh, that. No, that took a wee spot of surgery.” John frowned. Beckett tended to pull out the “wee” bit when he was flustered or trying to be reassuring. It was always only a “wee” seizure, a “wee” dose of radiation, a “wee” chunk of shrapnel in your abdomen. Beckett continued briskly, “But don’t worry about it. I did it when I first initiated the other treatments, so your nails would have time to start growing back before you recovered.”

“Oh.” John suspected he was glad he didn’t remember that. And he kept thinking of things he wanted to know more about. “Did Zelenka figure out what was on the memory core that Dorane was so desperate to get?”

“It was his cure, Major.” Beckett’s face turned grim. “Apparently the Ancients needed antidotes for the victims rescued from the repository, and they needed them fast. So they infected the bastard with a few altered strains of his own retrovirus. It was triggered by the altered version of the ATA that he created, or the absence of it. He couldn’t leave the repository for more than a day or so without the full effect setting in, and killing him.” Beckett lifted his brows. “They made a deal with him that if he produced the information they needed, they would give him the specifics of what they had done to him, so he could develop his own cure. He fulfilled his part of the bargain, but they were still trying to decide what to do with him as a permanent solution. There’s no more information on the core. Rodney suspects they were fully occupied by the Wraith at that point and just let nature take its course at the repository. But the recording did have the specifics for the strains of the retrovirus they used.”

He did say it was a punishment, John thought, considering it. “I would have just shot him,” he said finally.

“I’m not a violent man, but it would have saved a lot of trouble,” Beckett admitted.

John had more questions, but Beckett distracted him with an examination that involved multiple scanners, the Ancient MRI machine, and questions about how it felt to be poked in various places. John ended up falling asleep again when they were changing out the IVs.

John felt a lot more awake by the next day, and while taking the bandages off his hands, Dr. Biro filled in some more details for him about the past week.

Sergeant Stackhouse, returned safely from his trading mission, had taken a large and heavily armed team back into the repository three days ago. They had recovered Kolesnikova’s and Boerne’s bodies, and also let McKay do a brief survey of Dorane’s labs. Now that McKay knew what he was looking for, he was able to distinguish between Dorane’s altered gene technology and the real ATA. He had concluded in disgust that most of the equipment that might have been useful in Atlantis was too tainted with the altered gene to risk using. They had taken the drained ZPMs on the chance that some day McKay might figure out how the things were recharged, collected as many spent cartridges as they could so the techs could use them for making new ammo, and managed to salvage Ford’s P-90 and John’s tac vest from the wreckage the Koan had made of their supplies and equipment. Then they had planted C-4 in several strategic locations and blown up the labs.

Biro also told him that Dorane had never had a chance to send jumpers to the mainland for the Athosians, so they had fortunately missed the whole thing. Teyla was out there now, letting them know what had happened, or what had almost happened.

John had also missed the memorial services for Dr. Kolesnikova, Boerne, and Masterson, the Marine who had been killed in the ’gate room.

McKay stopped by later, either out of genuine concern or because he heard John was getting solid food for breakfast, or more probably a combination of both. This actually worked out for the best, since John could handle most of what the medlab considered food, but he didn’t even want to be in the same room with the powdered eggs, and McKay was a convenient means of disposal.

Tucking into the yellow egg mush, McKay told him a lot more about John’s initial treatment and recovery than Beckett or Biro had. The first few days had been much worse than any of the medical staff had implied. The way McKay described it, it had been all out war: Carson Beckett, Earth’s foremost xenobiologist and the man who had invented the ATA gene therapy, against Dorane, the Dr. Mengele of the Pegasus Galaxy. The first day Beckett had just struggled to keep John alive, while Zelenka had hurried to finish reconstructing the damaged portion of the memory core and McKay had set up a copy of Dorane’s database to get Beckett the information he needed. About midway through the third day Beckett had managed to produce the right drugs, and the lab mice he had tested them on had mostly survived, so he had started John on the full treatment. By that night John was breathing on his own again and the antennae spines had started to fall out, and Beckett had collapsed in the next bed over and snored for eight hours.

McKay also filled him in on what the rest of the city had been up to. “Sergeant Bates had your job for a whole day, during which a petition started circulating in the science team demanding that we hold free elections for the position of acting military commander. Apparently Sergeant Stackhouse was a favored candidate. Then Lieutenant Ford was cleared for duty, so things settled down.”

John decided not commenting on that was best, so he just said, “So everybody missed me.”

“Let’s say they prefer your slacker laissez-faire style to Bates’ ‘guilty until proven innocent’ strategy.”

“At least you guys didn’t try to form a separatist commune again. I don’t think that would look good on my record.”

Scraping the bowl for the last of the egg mush, Rodney lifted his brows. “And did they tell you about the operation? Personally, I don’t believe in it for cats, but after you shredded a diagnostic bed, we thought—”

“Sorry to disappoint you but yes, Carson told me how I got declawed, and we’ve already made all the ‘Dr. Beckett, Extragalactic Vet’ and All Creatures Great and Small jokes.” John self-consciously tucked his hands under his armpits.

Dr. Biro picked that moment to swoop in, saying breezily, “It really was fascinating. You can see if you like, we filmed the whole procedure.”.

John stared at her. “You’re kidding.”

“Of course she’s not kidding,” McKay assured him.

“Why?”

“Oh, because Biology thought it would be fun to show at the Christmas party.” McKay rolled his eyes. “If we can ever contact Earth again, Carson wants the first Nobel Prize awarded in xenobiology. Do you really think he’d pass up this opportunity?”

John looked at Dr. Biro for help, which was probably a mistake. She smiled winningly. “Oh, don’t worry, you can’t really see your face. You were intubated.”

“Oh, well, that’s good.”

McKay looked at him pityingly. “Right, no one’s going to figure out who ‘Patient X, Major, Acting Military Commander, Atlantis Expedition’ was.”

“Rodney, shut up and go away.”

Ford came by later to see how John was, and to report that the Koan who had fled the fighting after Dorane’s death were more interested in running away than in attacking anybody, so on Dr. Weir’s advice he had implemented a “catch and release” policy where the security details stunned and collected them to toss back through the Stargate to the repository’s planet. He was pretty sure they had found all of them by now, though you never knew. With a regretful shrug, he added, “Dr. Weir and Dr. Beckett talked about trying to give them some assistance, but we don’t have the resources to do much more than throw a few crates of food through the ’gate after them. And Dr. Beckett thinks trying to mess around any more with their genetics would just make it worse, that now that Dorane’s not there to mess with their minds that they’ve got a good chance of being okay.”

John had to agree. “I think they’ve had about all the ‘help’ they can stand.”

Ford also wanted to apologize for anything he had done while under the influence. He said there was a lot of mutual apologizing going around the city for things people had done to friends and co-workers during the situation. John said in that case he was dropping the charges, so that was okay.

The next day, John got to say goodbye to all the IV stands and escape from the medlab. He was supposed to go to his quarters and rest, but he didn’t think anybody really expected that to happen, so he headed up to the operations tower. John was willing to admit he needed another day or two to recover and he kind of liked padding around in a t-shirt, sweatpants, and old sneakers while everybody else was in uniform and working. But Beckett didn’t want to clear him for duty for another week, which was ridiculous.

Beckett had also told him that he didn’t think anything that had happened would affect the way John’s natural Ancient gene worked, the way the ATA responded to him. John knew he should go up to the jumper bay and make certain, but instead he found himself stopping off in Elizabeth’s office. And once there it seemed like a good time to talk her out of this crazy off-duty for a whole week idea.

Elizabeth, however, refused to budge. John tried everything from rational and pragmatic arguments to wheedling to the cute but wounded puppy expression that had gotten him the go-ahead to do some really crazy things in the past, but nothing worked.

They were in her office, one transparent wall providing a view over the control gallery. Elizabeth was sitting at her desk, her head propped on one hand, and when John realized she was watching his performance as if this was the most entertainment she had had in a month, he decided to give in for now.

“So how’s Dr. Kavanagh? Is McKay riding him into the ground with this?” John noticed Sergeant Bates standing on the gallery outside with a clipboard tucked under one arm, apparently waiting to talk to Elizabeth. John gave him a she likes me best smirk and settled into the chair a little more comfortably, intending to take his time.

“I’m a little concerned about that,” Elizabeth admitted cautiously, from which John inferred that for the past few days that section of the labs had been like a combination snake pit and bear-baiting show. She eyed him a moment. “I’ve recommended that everyone who was affected see Dr. Heightmeyer.”

Kate Heightmeyer was the expedition’s psychologist; John decided not to take the broad hint. He suggested helpfully, “We could all go together, and do that encounter group thing where we talk to each other with hand puppets.”

“That would make a great threat, wouldn’t it?” Elizabeth looked thoughtful. “By the way, I never bought the story that you were cooperating with Dorane. Neither did Peter.” Lifting a brow, she added ruefully, “For one thing, it was exactly the kind of plan you and Rodney would have come up with, like something out of a movie.”

John was actually kind of touched to hear that, but all he said was, “Which movie? One of those old ones with Sydney Poitier and Tony Curtis?”

Her mouth quirked. “I have no idea. But you’re lucky you didn’t have to fool anyone who knew you well and still had possession of their critical faculties.”

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.