Exogenesis

Chapter Twenty-two

"Wait!" Inspiration struck, and Rodney leaped to his feet and snatched up the exogenesis machine. Stumbling as the jumper tilted, he was steadied by Nabu. "We don't need the planet's heat to drive the machine," he asserted. "That was necessary at the beginning, but the spread of the nanites has demonstrated that the reaction is self-sustaining. We just have to get the machine into the gray goo."

"Of course!" Nabu latched onto the idea immediately. "I have set the machine to reprogram the nanites, which have an elastic memory, to return everything to its original state."

"And because the event will occur in a temporal field half a million times faster than the field in here, the effect will be virtually instantaneous. Could take a few hours to spread around the planet, but it'll be much faster than dropping it in a vent"

"I did not consider that." Nabu looked at him with admiration. "Your intellect-"

"No feeding the ego, please" Sheppard quickly worked to expand the shield around the jumper. "Should be able to open the hatch now."

Ronon took that task, and the large plate swung downward to reveal the goo rolling and oozing all around. It would have been mildly nauseating even if the stuff wasn't threatening to wipe out all life in the galaxy. Rodney watched Nabu heave the machine out into the nanites-and felt his stomach sink as the device came to rest inside the jumper's shield.

Well, that was infuriatingly predictable.

"Crap." Sheppard summed it up from the pilot's seat. "Can we close the hatch and try to move away?"

Rodney shook his head. "Won't matter. The machine will still get pulled along within the shield, no matter what we do-and we have about two minutes of power left."

"Change the shield settings to allow the machine to pass through," Teyla suggested, "as we did to keep the goo out in the first place "

"As soon as we do that, the goo will get in here!" Even as he said it, Rodney realized that they were heading inevitably in that direction, no matter what. Their power level was dropping like a stone. The shield was about to fail-and although the machine would then be able to do its work, everyone inside the jumper would be long dead.

Trying desperately to think of something, he almost didn't notice the determination written on Nabu's face. "Weaken the shield in a localized area," the Polrusson said, stepping to the edge of the hatch and indicating a place about the size of his hand. "Here."

Rodney processed the man's intent and stared at him. "Are you-?"

"Yes. Do it quickly." Nabu reached outside, seized the machine and tweaked some settings.

This wasn't going to be pretty, and Rodney badly wanted to devise another solution, but they had run out of options. At the exact moment he adjusted the shield, the Polrusson plunged the machine, and his arm up to his elbow, into the gray goo.

Instantly, the goo vanished, leaving clear ocean all around them. "Oh, hell, yeah!" Sheppard yelled, sounding about twenty years too young for his rank. "It's moving like crazy. The HUD says we've got nothing but water for ten miles already!"

Relief draining his earlier adrenaline, Rodney sank down into his seat, readjusted the shield one final time, and connected the all but depleted power cells in series. That would get them back to Atlantis, at least. Ronon helped Nabu back into the jumper and closed the hatch. The Polrusson's hand showed more wrinkles than it had only moments before, but otherwise appeared unharmed.

Nabu caught Rodney staring at him and smiled. "It is a comfort, in a way," he said, examining the back of his hand. "It has not always been clear to me that my body is aging."

"Atlantis, this is Jumper One," the Colonel said into his radio. "You guys still there?" Silence answered him. "Atlantis, come in, please."

Rodney checked the time, and the sick feeling returned in a jolt of agonized realization. "It's been over three hours." Why couldn't he have come up with that most straightforward of solutions even ten minutes sooner`? It wasn't just Atlantis, but Polrusso. He risked a glance at Nabu and saw that he also had understood.

"We do not know," the Polrusson said. "There is no point wondering until we return and see for ourselves."

Radek would have figured it out. Really, it was simple enough.

Sheppard's expression was guarded as he set a course for the city-or at least where the city had been when they left it-and voiced the inevitable. "I wouldn't blame Elizabeth if she'd set the self-destruct."

"Assuming she got to do it before the nanites " In either scenario, given the little remaining power available to them, they would be permanently marooned on this planet. He'd live out a short and meaningless existence with nothing to contemplate but his own failure and the void that Turpi's absence had created. Death by gray goo might just have been preferable.

"They got your message about the lightning," Sheppard said firmly. "We'll be there in a few minutes, and you'll see how well Radek works under pressure"

"Of course." Rodney was certain the Colonel was right, and, though he would never admit it, he was reasonably confident in Radek's abilities. As long as the message had gotten through, life would go on.

No problem.

Right?

Jumper One skimmed low over the surface of the water, glittering under the golden light of dawn. The sea at last was quiet again, and John could just see Atlantis sitting on the horizon, stable and serene and still in one piece. After the anarchy that had ruled over the past few days, the tranquility of it all was an incredible relief.

Teyla leaned on the back of John's seat and pointed to a school of flying fish skipping across the low waves. Not far away, the tail fins of a few whale-like creatures broke the surface. "How did they survive the nanites?"

"Hey, Rodney, your whale buddy might have made it after all "

"Not if there's any justice," Rodney groused. "One of those damned things led us to the stasis pods that started all this." To Teyla, he replied, "Either they outran the goo long enough to outlast it, or Nabu's accelerated temporal field gave them a shot at being re-created. Either way, it implies that the mainland may still have animal life as well." If the hint of optimism in Rodney's voice was distinctly artificial, John chose to let it slide.

"My people will be gratified."

"There were settlements on land?" Nabu asked.

John glanced over his shoulder at Teyla. The Athosian nodded, her features solemn but her eyes clear. "There will be much rebuilding to be done. But we have overcome far greater obstacles in the past."

Keying his radio, John called again, "Atlantis, Jumper One." Again, no response was heard. "Atlantis, how do you read?"

On approach, Atlantis looked every bit as elegant and powerful as it had before the activation of the exogenesis machine. The city shield and stabilizers had obviously been strong enough to prevent any major structural damage. Now if only someone would answer them.

"Maybe they used up all the power and can't operate the radios," Ronon guessed.

"Not if Radek managed to disable the grounding stations and feed the shield using the charge differential, like I told him. More likely they were able to get away in the Daedalus " Rodney gestured downward as they flew over the empty pier that was the ship's usual parking place. "Everyone's probably at the Alpha site."

Another possibility existed; one that had occurred to John only after the goo had begun to recede. It would have been pointless to mention it at the time, so he'd kept his fingers metaphorically crossed in the hope that someone in the city had thought of it as well.

The jumper bay doors opened for them, ruling out the no-power theory. "Atlantis, anybody home?" John tried one more time, just in case. Nothing. "All right, here comes the part where we check the control room and hope we don't find the self-destruct counting down from ten."

"Then we'd better move fast and have our override codes ready, wouldn't you say?" Rodney had the hatch open in seconds and didn't wait for the rest of the group before heading for the control room.

Everything pointed to a total evacuation. The stillness of the city was bizarre. John had been one of only a handful of people around in the aftermath of the Genii incursion, but then the slowly receding storm and the resulting damage had kept them all on edge. Now, Atlantis was clean, bright, and utterly silent.

First to reach the bottom of the stairs, Rodney visually scanned the control room. "I suppose it would be too much to ask for them to have left a note " When he looked out at the 'gate room, his eyes rounded and his jaw sagged open. "What the hell?"

The empty expanse drew Ronon and Teyla to the railing. John hung back, watching their shock with a grin so wide it hurt.

Vainly attempting to keep his voice in something resembling a masculine range, Rodney demanded, "Was there or was there not a Stargate in here when we left?"

John couldn't help chuckling. "Hot damn, they did it." He shook his head. "That's what I call airlift."

Comprehension, unsurprisingly, hit Rodney before the others, and he swung around to face John. "The Daedalus beamed the 'gate into their cargo hold?"

"They must've gotten the hyperdrive up and running in time to pull it off." At Ronon's expression of complete astonishment, John kept right on smirking. "No 'gate, no way for the nanites to get offworld, no galactic annihilation."

"No reason to set the self-destruct," Rodney finished. "And presumably no reason to take the ZPM from Polrusso. Impressive. I'm sure I would have thought of it had I not had the additional burden of dealing with the exogenesis machine."

Letting the familiar sound of his teammate's vastly relieved rambling fade into the background, John went out onto the nearby balcony and turned his face to the sun. Within moments, he heard only the waves and a few squabbling birds, and he felt as though he were taking his first real breath in over a week.

"My people will be safe now," Nabu said from behind him. "As will yours."

John didn't turn, enjoying the feel of the wind. "Until we find another hornet's nest to stir up."

"That may be," the Polrusson allowed. "But I have come to believe that we are all born for discovery, whatever form it may take. For my people, it may be the development of our abilities. For yours, exploration."

"Yeah, there's a quote like that from my world that I've always liked." John leaned forward on the railing. "`A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for. "'

Nabu moved to stand next to him, gazing out over the calm waters painted by sunlight. "My world will look like this one day, and for the first time in many years, I count myself fortunate that I will live to see it. But for you, in more ways than one, this is also the dawning of a new world."

"We won't waste it," John felt the need to say.

Eyes that had seen ten thousand years sized him up, before returning to the sea. "In that I have great faith."