The Furies

Chapter Nine Sheppard and Guide

“We have much to discuss,” Guide said. “If you do intend to make an alliance in truth.” He looked from Teyla to Sheppard. “There are other things besides the location of Dr. McKay that may prove of interest to you.”

“And I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff you’d like to know,” Sheppard said pleasantly. “We’ll see.”

Guide snorted. “I understand if you must consult with your Colonel Carter first. After all, you are her consort, and doubtless she will want to hear of your safety first and foremost.”

Sheppard frowned. “What?”

“Do you not think she will have a care for your safety?” Guide baited. He had seen such before, a blade trying to play old queen and young queen both, a dangerous game, and one that usually lost a man his life. “Are you not her lover?”

“Carter’s?” Sheppard’s eyebrows rose, and the bewilderment in his voice was genuine. “You think me and Carter? No. Not at all. She’s been with somebody else for a long time. We get along really well, but not that way at all.”

Teyla looked amused. “Though I am sure she will be glad to hear he is safe and well.”

Guide nodded inwardly. Better. That was safer, if Sheppard was not playing some dangerous game of his own. Better if he were Consort to She Who Carries Many Things in name only, a reliable man that a queen might choose to represent her in the absence of her own consort of many years, some older blade who doubtless protected their interests elsewhere. Such a man might be valuable to a queen. “I must have misunderstood,” Guide said smoothly. “Your pardon,” he asked of Teyla.

“Of course,” she said, and Sheppard tipped his head to her, as if wondering what that exchange were about.

“If we have much to discuss,” Guide said. “Will you come aboard my ship?”

They exchanged a look, but this time it was Teyla who spoke. “No. But we will give you coordinates where you may meet us, and there we will talk.”

“And if it is a trap?”

“How should it be?” she asked. “I did not know you would come here, so how could I have arranged with any other to ambush you? And if I did give you the coordinates for a rendezvous with the Hammond, the hive ship and the Hammond would be well matched, and you would come out of hyperspace with your shields raised.”

Which was of course true. Guide sighed. “Very well,” he said tersely. “Give me your coordinates. I will have my shuttle return me to my ship, and we will follow you to this location. I hope you appreciate that doing so is an unprecedented act of trust.”

“Not so much,” Sheppard said. “We’ll be talking under your guns.” He still looked doubtful.

“I will speak with my ship first,” Guide said, and stepped away, lifting his communicator to his mouth. He did not speak into it, only turned his back and listened, wanting to hear whatever passed between them. It would tell him a great deal, what was said and not said. If this were an ambush, there would be no need to say anything.

“We must do this, John,” she said quietly, her tones too low for another human to hear at this distance.

“You really think this is the best shot of getting to Rodney?”

“I do not think we will ever have a better. And what do we lose by talking? Let us take the opportunity we have. It may not come again.”

There was a long pause. “Ok.” Guide did not turn, but he heard Sheppard’s voice change. “I didn’t expect you to come.”

“Did you think that I would ever leave you?”

Guide closed his eyes.

*Did you think that I would ever leave you?* She had said it softly, mind to mind, her fingers where the pulse jumped in his wrist, half turning her head to look at him sideways, red hair rendered dawn colored in the shiplight.

*You should have*, he had said, and the smoke wreathed them, smoke and the scent of burned shipflesh. *It would have been wiser.*

Snow said nothing, but in her eyes he saw her demurral. *Never.*

Guide spun around. “I will meet you,” he said sharply. “But know that if this is a trap I will never treat with you again under any circumstances.”

“It is not a trap,” Teyla Emmagan said.

He turned and strode off to the airlock where his shuttle waited. At the door he turned and glanced back to see them standing apart, silhouetted against the light behind them, her dark skirts and tight laced boots, Sheppard’s tall, lanky shape as he bent his forehead to hers.

Hyperspace cradled the cruiser Eternal, blue streaks shifting in endless patterns past its windowless hull. John finished every last morsel of the cheese and crackers from his MRE and opened the brownie. “You know, I’d forgotten these were good,” he said.

Teyla looked amused. Or at least he thought she did. The curves of her face were different. “You sound like Rodney,” she said.

“I’ve been eating nothing but fruit for days. Cold beef ravioli started looking pretty good.” John looked up at her. “You’re not eating.”

“I cannot,” she said and shrugged. “Just the protein shakes and energy drinks. There is too much plastic surgery in my mouth for me to eat anything solid.” Teyla reached for the thermos beside her. “Jennifer has tried to make it palatable. But it is terrible all the same. I will be fine for a few days,” she assured him. “It is just that I think the beef ravioli has begun to look good too.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” She took a drink and grimaced. “We will hear what Todd has to say. I think it is important, from the shade of his mind.”

“That’s kind of creepy.” John looked down at his brownie. “You reading his mind.”

“John?” Her voice was low, and he glanced up, meeting narrowed yellow reptilian eyes. “You know that I cannot really touch your mind. Not yours, nor any other human’s. It does not work that way.”

“I know,” he said, seeing the way she turned her hand over on her skirts, hiding the feeding slit in the folds of cloth. “Hell of an act.”

“You made it work,” she said. “I could only hope that you would have presence of mind to play along. I did not realize you would do so quite so thoroughly.” There was a mischievous note in her voice.

“Yeah.” John carefully flattened out the brownie wrapper, like it was important. “That was…disturbing.”

“Yes,” she said, and he didn’t think he imagined the tremor in her voice. As disturbed as he was, she must be ten times more so. He didn’t look away from her yellow eyes, from the night dark fall of hair, pale greenish skin against the dark lines of bodice and coat, from the way she twisted her hand in her skirt as though to hide it.

He reached down and took it, turning it very deliberately palm uppermost. It was a good job from Keller, he thought. Her small fingers were elongated, rendered more so in illusion by the long dark green claws shining with emerald lacquer, the lips of the feeding slit open and slightly moist, a little purpled at the edges. Very deliberately he bent over her hand, kissed the base of her palm and watched her shiver.

“John,” she said, and her eyes were shadowed. Strange, yes, but the expression in them wasn’t.

He was no good with words, never had been. “Teyla,” he said. “It’s you.”

“It is all me,” she said sadly. “This is not entirely an act. This is part of me. It is part of who I am.”

“I know.”

She lifted her head to the ceiling, blinking, her hair falling back. “I wish I could say that I am pretending. That I am very clever. But it is not all pretense. I am this person. She is part of me. And I do not know if I can live with that.”

“I can,” he said, closing her hand in his, small and strong in his fingers.

“I am kin to the Wraith. There is nothing that can be said of someone worse than they are like the Wraith. Than that they are Wraith.” She blinked again as though she did not want to cry. “And yet this is me. This will always be part of me. I am not pretending, John. I am being something I have always been.”

“You’re a lot of things,” he said, and shifted closer to get his other arm behind her back. “You’ve always been a lot of things. You’re a good trader and you make impossible deals. Remember when you told me that? You’re a good fighter, a reliable soldier. You’re always good backup. You’re a diplomat, and God help us we need one. You’re a mom. You’re a friend. You’re smart and you’re tough and maybe the bravest person I’ve ever seen.” He shrugged and gathered her in against his shoulder, his face against the top of her head. “This is just one more thing you are. Really scary.”

She gave a strangled little laugh, her hair falling forward so he couldn’t see if she was crying or not.

“Hey, you know. Steelflower is kind of hot. In a wrong kind of way,” he said to the top of her head.

At that she did laugh, though he thought there were tears in it. “John. You are crazy.”

“I know,” he said. “But I’m good with that.” It sounded starker than he’d expected, truer.

Teyla lifted her face, her eyes searching his.

“I told you that a long time ago. Seriously got a screw loose. That’s me. Nancy…” He took a deep breath. “I blew that up pretty badly.”

“I am not afraid of you,” she said. “And I can live with that.” She dropped her head, the side of her face against his shoulder. “I have seen you crazy, when you did not know where you were or who I was. And I did not fear you then.”

“Teyla.” He shut his eyes against the memory of that day on the planet with the Wraith experiment gone awry. “I shot Rodney. It was just luck that I didn’t kill him.”

“You did not shoot me. You thought that I was Holland.”

“And there’s another kettle of fish,” John said, his eyes squeezed tight. “Nancy…”

“I am not Nancy,” she said, and the urgent sound in her voice made him open his eyes. The corners of her mouth twitched over fanged teeth, an ironic and monstrous smile. “Nancy was not Wraith.”

“No,” he said. “She sure wasn’t.” He swallowed. So many words, and so hard to say. His words had died that cold spring in Washington, frozen before summer came into Antarctic ice. “She wasn’t anything like you.” So many words, poured out on a marriage counselor’s silence, words to condemn him, words to cut him to the bone, and no words he could make in return, nothing that would thaw him, frozen in desert night, scoured by raw winds. Antarctica had almost felt good. The icy winds were real.

Golden eyes and a monster’s face, her hand in his and her head against his shoulder, her heart beating against his arm, beautiful and deadly, strange and familiar at once.

“We’ll just watch out for each other and muddle along. Right?” he said, and watched her eyes spill over at last.

“Yes,” she said, and smiled through her tears. “We will just muddle along.”

“Todd better not get any ideas,” he said. “I mean, Steelflower is pretty hot.”

“I can handle Todd,” Teyla said, raising her chin. “I am his queen.”

“No.”

She looked up at him swiftly. “No?”

“You’re my queen,” John said.

Jeannie drummed her fingers on the conference room table, waiting for everyone to arrive. Radek wasn’t actually drumming his fingers, but he looked like he wanted to. Ever since they got the detailed readings from the flyby survey of the island, it had been clear that they couldn’t send a team to investigate fast enough to satisfy him.

Colonel Carter was the next to arrive, a smudge of oil on one cheek as if she’d been interrupted working on the Hammond. She was just pulling back a chair to sit down when Ronon came in looking as if he’d just come from the gym. He’d said something yesterday about training sessions with the new Marines, which apparently meant teaching them how to survive when a big Satedan tried to kill them.

William Lynn, the archaeologist, came in a moment later. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I did want to take a moment to look over these sensor readings, since this is the first anyone’s told me that they found any.”

Radek cleared his throat. “Yes, well. Now that we are all here,” he said, and stood. He tapped at his laptop, and a map of the southern ocean appeared projected on one wall. “While we were working on the Wraith cruiser, we picked up some anomalous energy readings coming from a large island in the southern hemisphere,” he said, pointing. “Dr. Cain and Dr. Ikeda did a flyby of the island this afternoon, and the results of their scans are very promising.” He tapped a few more keys, and an overlay of power readings at different locations appeared on the map.

Colonel Carter leaned over to see better. “Oh, interesting,” she said. Ronon glanced skeptically at William, who shrugged as if to say that he didn’t see what was interesting yet either.

“We believe these power readings suggest that there is Ancient technology present on this planet, and, what’s more, that some of it may still be functioning.” He pushed his glasses up his nose and changed the display on the screen. Now it was showing geological maps, showing their best guess at how the islands and the ice had shifted over time.

“We think this island used to be a lot bigger,” Jeannie said. “Now a lot of it is under water, and the rest of it is under ice. But there’s room for who knows what down there. Okay, probably not a city this size, but something big.”

“Also interesting, Dr. Ikeda took some samples of the ice from the jumper, and we have found trace amounts of naquadah,” Radek said. “That is certainly not naturally occurring on this planet. We are thinking now maybe there actually was once a Stargate here, only now it is buried by the ice.”

“Or by volcanic activity,” Carter said. “If the gate was on a volcanic island, and the volcano entered an active phase, the gate could now be under meters and meters of rock.”

“Right,” Jeannie said. She was getting more confident as she spoke, falling back into the tones she’d used when she had to present in class. “Can you switch back to the other map, Radek? Thanks. So we noticed that these weak energy signatures fall roughly on a grid, as if they’re small devices located in different rooms.”

William looked more closely at the map, as if the pattern was starting to seem meaningful now. “The lights are still on?”

“It could be,” Radek said.

“And the big one, there in the center?” Carter asked. “You’re thinking power source?”

“Maybe even a ZPM,” Radek said. “That would be nice to think. Certainly they would have required a power source of some kind. If it is a ZPM, I doubt it is fully powered. The energy signature is too weak for that, even if it is fainter because it is being transmitted through ice.”

“Or rock,” Carter said. “If the whole thing’s been buried in lava, you’re not going to get to your ZPM. Still, it’s worth checking out.”

“I thought you would think so,” Radek said in satisfaction. “Unfortunately I am needed in the city right now, but if Ronon could take a team to do a preliminary survey, we can at least see what there may be to find. “

“No problem,” Ronon said. “Just don’t expect me to figure out what the Ancient stuff does. I can recognize a ZPM, but beyond that I got nothing.”

“That’s enough for a start,” Carter said. “Please don’t try to turn anything on, but if you find anything interesting, I’m sure Dr. Zelenka would like some video.”

“Definitely,” Radek said. “Dr. Lynn, perhaps you can figure out something about what they were doing down there.”

“I’ll do my best,” William said. “I suppose it’s too much to hope for that they left an explanatory note.”

Radek looked like he was trying not to roll his eyes. “Is that usual to find at archaeological sites that have been abandoned for centuries?”

“You’d be surprised,” William said. “People do document their activities.”

“I’ll take Cadman for backup, but we’ll need someone to fly the jumper,” Ronon said.

“Someone who is not currently engaged in critical repairs,” Radek added quickly,

Carter glanced down at her laptop, probably looking at people’s current assignments. “What about Dr. Robinson? She’s been training with the jumpers in her free time, and she could use the flight hours. This ought to be as routine as it used to be for someone to run over to the mainland.”

“There’s a lot of ice,” Ronon said.

“And there’s going to be, and people are going to have to learn to fly and land in this weather,” Carter said. “It’s a nice day, there aren’t any storms on the radar, and from what the earlier team reported, there’s a wide, flat area where you can land.”

“I see no problem,” Radek said. “This should not be hard.”

“Knock on wood,” Jeannie said under her breath, but she didn’t think anyone heard her.