The Furies

Chapter Eleven Interfaces

They came out of hyperspace in an uninhabited system, just as planned.

John paced around the command podium where Teyla stood, her hands in the grips and her eyes closed. “Are you putting the shields up?”

“Yes, John.” Teyla didn’t bother to open her eyes. “They are already up. And we are here well before Guide.” She heard him cross behind her again.

At least he sounded sheepish as she instructed the cruiser to take up a high parking orbit around a gas giant. “Sorry.”

The cruiser complied smoothly. It was, for want of a better way of putting it, feeling better. The hull breach aft had repaired itself, though the skin of the hull was still thin and cold there, and the internal sensors did not work. They needed to be grafted to the neural net of the cruiser, and it had not been done. Teyla was not certain how to do it. Speaking with the ship did not make her an engineer.

Once their orbit was settled she opened her eyes and stepped back, swaying a little as her vision returned to the physical room around her, soft lit blues and grays allowing the screens to be in high contrast. He was watching her, a strange expression on his face.

“What is it?” Teyla asked.

John shook his head. “You look different when you fly. I don’t know. You look…”

“I look what?” she asked, her brows rising.

“Happy,” he said. “Well, not that exactly. Satisfied. Pleased. I guess I always thought the Wraith tech would be hard.”

“It is not hard for Wraith, John,” she said, lifting her fingers from the podium. “Why would anyone build an interface that was painful or unpleasant to use?”

“I’ve wondered that about the Ancient stuff,” John said, sitting down on the edge of the platform. “Carson’s gotten used to it, but he doesn’t like using the chair because it’s uncomfortable. And Sam said that General O’Neill found using the chair on Earth really painful. That he said using it hurt a lot. Why would you build something that way? They both have the naturally expressed ATA gene too, even out of the same cluster.”

“And you do not find it painful.” She made it a statement as she came and sat beside him on the edge of the platform, her heeled boots stretched out before her. “I have seen you when you use it. You look ecstatic, as though you are enraptured.”

“It feels really good.” John shrugged. “It did the first time in Antarctica. It feels great. I don’t even really have any words to describe what it’s like.” He looked up at the ceiling, as though recalling it minutely. “It’s like being totally safe and totally free at the same time. Like letting go absolutely into this zone where you can feel everything and see everything, and at the same time it all makes sense. Like skiing downhill, when the momentum is carrying you and you can’t hear anything except the wind and you couldn’t stop if you tried and you feel like you can fly. Like you have to let go, and it’s the best thing ever.”

“But you do let go,” Teyla said, ducking her head sideways at him. “Perhaps it is a matter of temperament as well as genetics. I do not think General O’Neill is very good at letting go. He seems to me a man who will not surrender, who cannot in some inner place in his soul.”

“You can’t control the interface,” John said. “You can’t. It’s too strong. It’s not meant to be used like that. You have to slide into it and let it show you. It will do what you want, but you can’t make it. It’s like I was saying about skiing. Gravity is going to pull you down the hill. You can’t make it work some other way. You can just steer how you get there. That’s the skill.” He spread his hands out, flexing them to shake out tension. “You think he doesn’t let go?”

“I do not know him well,” Teyla said, “But he does not strike me as someone who can cease struggling. And if it is as you say, the more he fights the more it hurts. Carson wants to make it do things that are not quite the way it wants to, and so he finds it uncomfortable if not actually painful.”

John grinned sheepishly. “And I totally let the city top.”

She nudged him sideways, laughing. “It seems to work.”

He shoulder bumped her back. “Is that what it’s like to fly a Wraith ship?”

“Ummm,” she said, thinking. “Not exactly. A Wraith ship is designed for a queen. It desires mastery. It expects to serve you. No, not even that. It craves serving you. I do not know how to say it other than that it is designed to feel pleasure when it does what you wish. Otherwise it would not go into battle. It would not do things that will cause it pain, that might even cause it to be destroyed, unless the pleasure it got from serving you were so great that it overrode even self preservation.”

“Otherwise the minute you shot a Wraith ship it would get scared and run away,” John said. “Too bad it doesn’t work that way.”

“It does not,” Teyla said. “The reward of its queen’s or its commander’s approbation is so intense that it desires it even at the cost of great pain.” She flattened her hand against the floor of the platform. “Eternal would go into fire for me because it is well trained and it wishes to please me above all else.”

“Like a cavalry horse,” John said.

“What?”

“On Earth up until about a hundred years ago we used horses in war. They would charge straight into cannon fire sometimes, if they were trained to do it and their riders knew what they were doing. You could charge batteries that way, half a dozen guns firing grapeshot. And the horses would do it, if it was a good unit and they had that kind of rapport.” He looked around. “Is Eternal as bright as a horse?”

“About the same, I would guess?” Teyla replied. “I have never worked with horses. We did not use them on Athos, but I have seen them. Though I thought they were too small to carry a man on their back in a fight as you say.”

John nodded. “All the horses I’ve seen here are little. Thirteen, fourteen hands. I’m guessing here, but I think maybe when the Ancients brought people from Earth back to Pegasus ten thousand years ago and some of them brought their domestic animals, we didn’t have the bigger horses yet. I think they were bred later for height. In 8,000 BC it would have all been little horses. And maybe the Wraith here haven’t ever let a civilization reach the point where they could breed warhorses for size.” He put his head to the side thoughtfully. “That’s not true in the Milky Way. When I was at the SGC for six weeks a couple of years ago we visited this allied world that had been under the protection of the Asgard, and they had regular sized horses. But then presumably they were seeded from Earth in the Middle Ages, not ten thousand years ago.”

“That is truly fascinating,” she said. “There is so much work to be done, so many mysteries to solve. It will take lifetimes to even begin.”

“I hope we have lifetimes,” he said.

“I hope that we do too,” she said. “There is so much we might be, if we ever had the chance. If we could ever grow without knowing that as soon as we have reached a certain height we will be cut off. There is so much we could learn from you, and so much you could learn from us. So many marvels and so many amazing things, if we could but share.”

John looked at her sideways. “You don’t believe that we’ll contaminate you if we have too much contact?”

Teyla snorted. “John, for us that is nothing but a way for your people to feel justified in deserting us. To make it a virtue to leave us to die. How could those of us who have lost kin, who even now worry about their children, wish that you will go away and leave us to the Wraith? Do you think I wish that Torren did not have access to antibiotics or to surgery if he needed it? Since Sateda fell, we have not had anywhere we could trade for many medicines, and Athosians have died for the lack of them. ‘Let us not interfere’ is nothing but an excuse for turning your back on people in need, a way to make your selfishness a virtue.”

“Yeah, but sometimes ham-fisted help is worse than none at all,” he said. “A lot of bad things happen sometimes in the name of being well-meaning.”

“And so the answer is to do nothing at all?” Teyla challenged. “One must use judgment, in this as in all things. But is it rational to say one doctor is bad, let us have no more doctors?” She shook her head. “One must care, John, if one is worthy of being called human. That was a thing I knew of you the first day.”

“Huh?”

Teyla tilted her head back, looking up at the ceiling of the cruiser. “You had come among us for a day only, and then there were the Wraith. They had culled our people, destroyed our camp, and even then a second wave came down upon us to seek retribution for the Dart that was destroyed. And what did you do? You did not speak of contamination, or of the importance of allowing our culture to develop on its own. You took them all to Atlantis, Jinto and Charin, Kanaan and all the rest. You took them through the gate to your camp, and you shared your food with them. You were beleaguered yourselves, in fear of the shield failing, cut off from your home. And yet you shared with us all you had. Your limited supplies, your fading power. And then you came for the captives.”

Teyla leaned back against the step. “I expected to die. How not? We were culled. We were the Lost. A few minutes might pass or a few days until we were fed upon. When the Wraith took Colonel Sumner, I knew I would be next.” She shook her head, half leaned against his shoulder. “The last thing I expected was to see you and Lt. Ford sneaking in. You must understand that no one is rescued. No one returns. I stood with my age-mate Halling and knew we would die together. And then you came. Why should I think it would be better if you had not interfered?”

“We woke the Wraith,” John said. “It might have been a lot better if we hadn’t. A lot of people might be alive today if we hadn’t.”

“John, we have been dying for centuries. For thousands of years. You have seen what the Wraith did on Sateda, six years before you came. Once they did the same to Emege and the cities of Athos. That is not something you began.” She shook her head. “It is a conceit to believe our story begins with you, or that before you came we dwelled in an innocent paradise. The myth of your culpability is just one more way of making the story about you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

“Do not be,” she said, leaning against his shoulder. “We know no more of you than you do of us, and is it not human nature to fit those you meet into your story? To find a frame that allows you to reach for understanding? You tell your stories and I tell mine. And both are true, and both are false.”

“That makes a weird kind of sense,” he said. John looked at her sideways. “I don’t know what to do except follow my gut. You know. Do what I think’s right. I never claimed to understand it.” He squeezed her hand, long green claws between his fingers. “I’m not like Carter or McKay. I wasn’t some kid genius who always figured they’d have the weight of the universe on their shoulders. I’m not like Elizabeth, who knew she had what it took to make decisions that affected millions of people. I don’t know what to do with that kind of power.”

“Follow your gut,” she said.

John let out a long breath. “I’m not sure my gut always makes good decisions.”

“No,” she agreed. “Sometimes it makes bad decisions for the right reasons. You are not wise, and you are a hard man, an expedient man who will do anything for those he loves. But you are not selfish. You do not act out of self interest. You do what you think is best, and perhaps you are wrong. But you do not do it for your own profit.” She nudged him sideways. “And you know when to listen to those wiser than you.”

“And that would be you?” She could not tell if he were joking or not.

“I am conceited,” she said, “and like to think so. It is my great weakness to think I understand all, that I am so very clever and that I understand people so well. And yet what a mess I have made of my own life! I destroyed my marriage to Jorrah long before you came to Athos, and you saw what passed with Kanaan. I no longer speak for my people, no longer fit among those who share my blood. I am Bloodtainted, and I sit here with you as a Wraith Queen.” She stretched her hand against his, claws against his skin. “I am Teyla Who Belongs Nowhere, Teyla of No People. I do not know where I can live.”

“Atlantis,” he said, and she turned her head to look at him. “You belong in Atlantis. It’s your home.”

“A place between?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s your home too.”

She looked down at their joined hands, his big and warm, hers tinted green with veins like twining vines about them. She had said nothing to anyone else. What could she say, lacking proof? “Carson thinks the Wraith began as a failed experiment of the Ancients,” she said. “That like the Replicators it was an experiment that went wrong.”

John was quiet for a long moment, his head bent in thought, and she knew he was adding it up, all the things they had seen, the experiments left by the Ancients who had played games with human beings, who had made war on their creations.

“It could be,” he said. “It makes a hell of a lot of sense, really.” He raised his head. “And then they tried to kill them.”

“Only the Wraith are not easy to kill.”

“The Wraith hunted them down instead.” John nodded. “I’ll buy that. It makes a lot of things make sense.”

“It does,” Teyla said. “They are the avengers, seeing retribution from their creators. But you know this is not something people can accept. It is too much. It is too painful. It cuts to the heart of our stories.”

“You can’t expect people to react well when you challenge them like that,” John said. “That’s not how it works. You can’t destroy what people believe about themselves and expect them to thank you.” He shrugged. “Any kind of social change. You’ve got to do it really carefully, or the backlash kills people. Sometimes literally. And you’re talking about something that would rip apart the foundations of every civilization in this galaxy.”

“That is why I have spoken of it with no one but you,” Teyla said. “And why Carson only spoke to me. We have been too hurt. Our scars go too deep. Your people do not have these scars, and so perhaps they can, some of them, bear to see the Wraith as people. But they have not lost loved ones. They have not lived their lives in terror. They have not seen their children fed upon. They are good men both, but can you see Ronon or Kanaan accepting this?”

John blew out a deep breath. “Ronon,” he said. “No, that’s not going to work.”

Teyla’s head lifted at the same moment that a blue light began to blink, and she hurried to her feet.

“What’s that?” John asked.

“Sensor alert,” she replied. “Todd’s hiveship has arrived.”

The island looked like a big chunk of ice. As Eva Robinson brought the jumper around looking for a place to land, that was her first thought. It glittered in the sun like a bright proof of Atlantis, almost too bright to look at as every surface glared in the morning sun.

Automatically the windscreen of the jumper responded to her thought, darkening with a gray tint to dampen the glare. That was pretty neat. She wasn’t sure she’d ever get used to this many features, but she was certainly willing to try. She’d flown the jumper around the city on practice runs, but this was the first time she’d gone on an actual mission, something she’d never anticipated doing.

Very carefully, Eva set the jumper down on a windswept snowfield on a small plateau overlooking the sea. It wasn’t far from where the sensors detected power sources. Nothing on this island was. Maybe it had once been bigger, but it sure wasn’t very big now.

She shrugged on her heavy parka as Laura Cadman opened the back gate. Laura had been in her office a couple of times to talk about Carson. It was a little strange to work with the clone of the guy she’d been involved with who didn’t remember the last eight months of their relationship before his death. She’d mourned him, finished her rotation and gone back to Earth, thrown herself into her work and gotten promoted, been posted to the Hammond. She was over him. And then suddenly she had to work with him. Or with his clone, who didn’t remember everything she did. It was a damn good reason to come talk to her, in Eva’s opinion. Not at all the kind of adjustment issue you were likely to encounter on Earth!

“It looks like Alcatraz,” Laura said, stepping out onto the ramp.

“Alcatraz?” William Lynn hurried down the ramp after her, putting on his sunglasses against the snowglare. “I don’t see it. This is beautiful.”

“The way it’s situated,” Laura said, gesturing with the muzzle of her gun toward the sea and the shore of a larger island a short distance away, separated by a bay of frigid water. “The rocks. The shape of the island. The sea cliffs. It would be a hell of a place to escape from.”

“Maybe it was a waystation,” Ronon said, clomping off the ramp and into the snow. He sunk to his knees. “If you put the Stargate here, you could control access to it. Nobody else on the planet would be able to use it unless you let them.” He shaded his eyes with his hand, looking out over the sea. “I’d hate to assault this place.”

“It does look quite defensible,” William agreed. “I’ll look for the remains of fortifications.”

“How about we look for the power source?” Ronon said. “That’s what we came to do.”

“Right.” William pulled out his scanner. “I’m reading the energy source in this direction.” He pointed away from the sea, toward a rocky ridge that ran the length of the island, gray stones festooned with snow and sheets of ice.

“In the middle,” Laura said. “That makes sense.”

“This is interesting,” William said. “Very interesting.”

“What is?” Ronon swung around, looking at the archaeologist bent over his instrument.

“I’m picking up a fairly strong trace of naquadah here. Perhaps this was the location of the original Stargate, or where some of the remains of it wound up.”

“Here?” Eva said, looking around. “I don’t see anything.”

“It’s about three meters down beneath the ice,” William said.

“Overrun by glaciers?”

“It makes sense.” William shrugged. “This island could have changed considerably in 10,000 years. As you know, Earth originally had a Stargate in the Antarctic region which was rendered inoperable by glaciation.”

“Do I know that?” Eva said. “How would I know that?”

William looked confused. “I suppose you wouldn’t,” he said. “It came up in the off world trainings I had with Dr. Jackson. A cautionary tale about not getting fixated on a solution.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Colonel Carter — Captain Carter then — found the Antarctic gate by accident when our gate malfunctioned and she and General O’Neill got sent to the wrong one. He was badly injured and nearly died while she tried to figure out how to fix the gate and dial home. Turns out there was nothing wrong with the gate, and if she’d tried dialing any other gate address other than Earth she’d have been home in an hour. But she got stuck on one solution, if you see. She had to make the gate dial Earth. Which it couldn’t, because they were already on Earth.” William shrugged. “As I said, a cautionary tale.”

Laura blew out a breath, steam in the frozen air. “Wow. That sounds like the kind of mistake I would make. I can’t believe Carter did that.”

“Everybody was young once,” Ronon said gruffly, steering William toward the rock formations that towered over the plateau.

“Except you,” Laura said cheerfully. “You’re forty going on seventy five.”

Ronon looked at her sideways, and Eva thought she saw a spark of actual annoyance there. “I’m thirty one.”

“Yeah?” Laura grinned up at him, unabashed.

“Yeah.” He looked at her pointedly. “Now how about you help Dr. Lynn find a way in? Unless you’d just like to blow the cliff up.”

“I would,” Laura said, looking up. “Except I think using explosives would probably start an avalanche. That’s a lot of snow and ice right over us.”

Eva glanced up. It did look a little menacing as well as pretty. “Jinx,” she said under her breath.

Ronon looked over at her as Laura went to join William poking along the cliff base. “Yeah, I don’t like it either,” he said, raising his face to the beetling ridge above. He gestured off toward the cliffs below. “This was not a good scene for somebody.”

“Alcatraz?”

“The Chateau d’If,” Ronon said grimly. “Toss somebody off that cliff and they aren’t coming back.” Eva’s eyebrows rose, and Ronon shrugged. “A book Zelenka loaned me.”

“I’ve read it,” Eva said. “About a man imprisoned wrongly for fourteen years and how he got his revenge, if I remember.”

“Good book,” Ronon said. He gave her a wolfish grin. “True to life.”

“Are you and Dr. Zelenka friends?” Eva asked. That was an odd couple if she’d ever seen one.

“He’s a good man.” Ronon nodded, looking over to where Laura was walking along the cliff knocking on it with her fist like she was planning to find a door. “She’s not going to find anything that way. The Ancients didn’t build like that, like it was some kind of role playing game where you just have to walk up and say the password.”

“Maybe we should try Open Sesame,” Eva said, following him toward the cliff face. She raised her hands up with a smile. “Speak, Friend, and enter!”

Beneath the ice a faint tracery of blue lines appeared, spreading up and down and across, limned not on stone but metal. With a faint grinding sound the ice cracked as the massive doors began to move.

“Oh my God,” Eva said. Chunks of ice the size of her fist fell away as the panels slid back, twice her height and twenty feet wide.

“Good job!” Ronon clapped her on the shoulder.

“Of course it responds to the ATA gene!” William hit himself in the forehead dramatically. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Everyone except Laura refrained from answering. “Because you were fixated on a solution?” she said.

“Very funny.” William turned toward the doors as they ground open. “Now let’s go in and see what we’ve got.”