Unascended

Chapter Five

When John returned with the jumper, he hoped they could make a swift retreat, but Rodney insisted they manhandle part of the climate control device into the jumper. “They” ended up being John and Ronon, wrestling a refrigerator-sized hunk of metal up the stairs while Rodney snapped instructions and Ronon threatened to drop it on Rodney’s foot on purpose. It barely fit up the stairs and then barely fit through the door of the jumper, and the jumper protested its weight when they launched, but at least they were finally on their way.

“And then we’re going to go back for the rest of it, right?” Rodney said, bracing himself in the limited room left in the cargo compartment with a proprietary hand on his piece of Asgard equipment. Taking it apart was probably his idea of fun. Returning to get the rest of the pieces so that Rodney could take it apart did not sound like John’s idea of fun.

“Or something,” John said. Ferrying pieces of machinery back and forth sounded like a prime job for someone else.

He ended off passing the job on to Lorne, who didn’t look thrilled but duly promised to round up a team to go disassemble the thing. “You’re sure this thing is safe?” he asked on his way out.

“McKay says don’t press any buttons.”

“We know not to press buttons,” Lorne said, not sounding comforted.

John shrugged. “As safe as anything else. Watch out for the big ostrich guys with spears and nets. They seemed to think we’d be good with ketchup.”

“Will do,” Lorne said resignedly.

Woolsey regarded the team across the conference table the next morning, cradling the cup of coffee that was all that made dealing with enthusiastic scientists bearable before noon.

“We need to look for another Asgard installation,” Rodney said.

“You have a weather machine to play with,” John said.

“Climate control device. Or… actually, it might be something that could very roughly be described as a ‘weather machine,’ but it’s hard to tell when we’re missing anything like a set of instructions.”

“I thought it said ‘don’t press any buttons.’”

Rodney rolled his eyes at him. “Useful instructions. Or would you prefer that I start experimenting by pressing the buttons that say ‘don’t adjust settings if you don’t know what you’re doing?’”

“Not on the planet where we currently reside, please,” Woolsey said.

“Well, right now it’s a moot point, because when we tried to power it up—”

“I thought you said you weren’t going to experiment.”

“We were going to provide just enough power to get some information about its current settings,” Rodney said. “Believe me, despite the attractions of doing something about this planet’s wretched weather, we aren’t that stupid. My point is, when we powered it up, it burnt out half its systems. Maybe our equipment wasn’t compatible, maybe the thing was just old, I don’t know, but there’s no way to fix it without rebuilding large parts of it. Which is hard to do when we don’t know how it works.”

“You made us haul that thing home,” Ronon said.

“It’s still useful,” Rodney said. “Just not incredibly useful when all we have is one broken device. I think we should try to find another one.”

“I actually agree with Dr. McKay,” Daniel said, with an expression that made it clear he felt that was a possible sign of the apocalypse. “This is the first early Asgard settlement site — or maybe it’s better described as an observation post — that we’ve seen in the Pegasus Galaxy. Even though it’s not nearly as early as the Ancient sites we were originally looking for, I’m tempted to see if we can find out anything else about what the Pegasus Asgard were up to at this point. I realize it may not have immediate practical applications—”

“I agree with you both,” Woolsey said.

Rodney looked up in startlement as if he’d been busy preparing his next argument. “You do?”

He put down his coffee cup reluctantly. “How likely is it that the device you found is capable of having more than an extremely localized effect on climate conditions?”

Daniel and Rodney exchanged glances. “Reasonably likely,” Rodney said after a moment. “We know that after the Wraith pushed the Pegasus Asgard back to a single planet, they dealt with some fairly horrible atmospheric conditions. And, no, they couldn’t fix it, but whatever equipment they came up with while they were trying could have been based on devices like this. We’ve examined its power supply, and if it’s designed to do something on a local level, it’s sure not to heat somebody’s house.”

“We also know that the Asgard have some ability to intervene to prevent natural disasters,” Daniel said. “Mainly from situations where they told us that they wouldn’t help, but they did strongly imply that they could have.”

“Nice guys,” Ronon said.

Daniel shrugged. “They had a treaty with the Goa’uld that allowed them to interfere to help other species in certain situations but not other ones. It was a complicated situation. Maybe a little like the one we’ve ended up in with the Wraith.”

Teyla and Ronon both looked uncomfortable at that. Woolsey was aware that the treaty was still a point of contention between them. Teyla was far more optimistic about its consequences than Ronon was, and while Woolsey agreed with her on the whole, he could also see why Ronon was skeptical. Ronon’s personal experiences with the Wraith aside, their own previous attempts to work with the Wraith had produced decidedly mixed results.

“Moving on,” John said firmly. “Is this really a priority to follow up?”

“Colonel Sheppard, as you may be aware, living in Atlantis can lead to developing a somewhat skewed view of essential priorities,” Woolsey said. “From the point of view of the Atlantis expedition, power sources, weapons, and devices that will improve interstellar travel are fundamental needs. But in terms of solving problems for people back on Earth, a functioning device that would allow us to control weather and climate patterns would be even more important.”

“And dangerous,” Rodney said. “I have to point out that trying anything like that on Earth would also be extremely dangerous.”

John looked at him sideways. “You were the one who wanted to play with it.”

“I want to bring it back here to study, but let’s have realistic expectations.”

“Noted, Dr. McKay,” Woolsey said. “But in the realm of realistic expectations, I am fairly confident that the IOA will consider even a possible solution to Earth’s climate problems to be a significant find. And in my position it pays to produce at least occasional results that they actually like.”

“Understood,” Sheppard said.

“I’m glad to hear it. So, you have my official permission to look for more Asgard technology. Where do you propose to find it?”

Daniel and Rodney exchanged glances again, this time as if each of them were hoping the other had a brilliant solution already prepared. “I want to go through the records of previous offworld exploration by the Atlantis expedition to see if there’s any evidence that might point us in the direction of Asgard sites,” Daniel said.

“I think we would have noticed if there were Asgard bases on the planets we’ve been to,” Rodney said.

“Some have only been briefly explored,” Teyla said.

“Usually for good reason,” John pointed out.

She smiled and nodded a little, granting the point. “Even so, Dr. Jackson might discover something we missed. We have mainly been interested in contacting local inhabitants and looking for working Ancient devices, not in searching for extremely old settlement sites that may be buried beneath the ground.”

“I was also thinking we could ask our allies if they’ve seen any artifacts that might possibly be Asgard,” Daniel said. “Anything with their writing on it, or anything using some of the distinctive features of their architectural style. I can put together a simple briefing on what to look for.”

“Please do, Dr. Jackson,” Woolsey said. “We’re only in irregular contact with the Travelers and the allied Wraith faction, but we can certainly bring the subject up with the Athosians, the Satedans, and the Genii.”

“You might also ask them if they’ve seen Elizabeth,” Rodney said, without looking up from his coffee, as if that were a perfectly reasonable thing to say.

It was very quiet at the conference table for a moment. “We’ll check in with our allies,” Woolsey said finally. “Let’s revisit the Asgard question once we hear what they have to say.”

John fell in next to Teyla leaving the staff meeting and she looked at him sideways. His brow was furrowed, and there was tension to his walk. “Is something bothering you?” she asked.

“No. Yes.” He stopped, waiting for others to pass them in the hall and continue out of earshot. He was looking at the wall somewhere over her head, but at least he answered. “I wish Rodney would get off this thing about finding Elizabeth.”

“You think it is a delusion?”

John nodded. “I think Rodney really wants it to be true. And I get why. He went through some really traumatic stuff. But he’s got to pull it together.”

“I too dreamed of Elizabeth,” Teyla said. “And I believe she meant to help us. That much is real.”

He did look at her then. “You think she’s out there too?”

Teyla shook her head sadly. “No. I do not think the dead return to us that way. A guardian spirit, yes. But a physical person? I do not think so.”

“Maybe I should send Rodney to talk to Dr. Robinson,” John said. “Even if she can’t help, at least that way we’ll have dotted our I’s and crossed our T’s as far as the SGC is concerned. Weird beliefs about the afterlife don’t actually get you canned. But going on and on about it in staff meetings is one of those things.”

“Perhaps Dr. Robinson can help,” Teyla said. “I have great faith in her.”

Dekaas, Elizabeth learned, more or less kept office hours in Durant’s infirmary during the first watch, though apparently people felt no compunction about waking him up any other time that they needed him. He had his own cabin, but he gave Elizabeth use of a curtained alcove off the main infirmary. There was a cot there which looked much more comfortable than the bunk Elizabeth had used before. For one thing, it had a clean, neatly folded comforter and a pillow.

“Maybe you can triage actual emergencies from people with headaches,” he said with a smile, “and keep me from being fetched during the third watch unless I’m really needed.”

“Absolutely,” Elizabeth said. She was fairly certain she could tell the difference between an emergency and a headache. “I’ve done this before, sleeping in the aid center to wake the doctor if there’s trouble.”

“Oh?” Dekaas’ voice was studiously casual. “When?”

Elizabeth started, suddenly aware of what she’d said.

“Don’t force it,” Dekaas said gently, his eyes on hers. “Don’t try to know what it means. Just say whatever comes to mind.”

“When I was much younger. A place, a tent…” She could see it for a moment, the inside of a large white tent, flap rolled up to show a track turned to mud by the spring rains, gray clouds and a cool day, the bright green of new growth on the mountains…. “There was a doctor.” A man who reminded her of Dekaas, though his accent was different. “A white tent, with a red cross on the roof in case of helicopter strikes.”

“Helicopter strikes?” Dekaas prompted quietly.

“They had helicopters. They’d already violated the Gorazde Safe Area, but we thought that they wouldn’t deliberately hit a Red Cross site.”

“Were you a doctor?” he asked in that same, even tone.

“No.” Elizabeth was sure of that. “A logistician. To coordinate the food and the refugees. MSF had a full mission on the ground.” She said the words even as she wondered what they meant. “There were so many refugees. So many.”

She’d never even imagined before what that could mean, children with shrapnel in their bodies, old people walking in the late winter chill with everything they owned on their backs, women clutching their clothes around them and never looking back. Misery upon misery upon misery, until it began to kindle a slow anger in her. She had never understood the desire before, but now she did. Now she understood what she would do with a gun in her hand.

“Rotors,” she said. A fear that dropped in her stomach. “The sound of rotors.” Pausing at her work, eyes on the ceiling of the tent, looking back down only to realize the girl she’d been talking to, the girl who couldn’t have been more than thirteen, had already dived under the metal table. “And then a roar.”

“And then?”

“I ran to the door,” Elizabeth said. A roar of thunder, a pair of F-16s diving in low, the helicopter gunship aborting its run as the jet wash hit it, the fighters passing one to each side rolling up and away, so low and close that every tent, every bit of loose fabric flapped in their wake. The helicopter pulled up as the F-16s came around again, maintaining a firing lock on the helicopter but not firing, just maintaining lock as it ran flat out. “They were enforcing the no-fly zone,” Elizabeth said. “A pair of F-16s from Aviano. I wanted them to fire. I wanted them to fire so badly. Even knowing it was wrong.” They hadn’t. They dogged the copter, dropping on its tail and then away, until all three were out of sight.

“Darts?” Dekaas asked softly.

“Not Darts. These were human. These were my people. And I’d never until that moment known what that meant. I’d never known that kind of pride. That kind of gratitude.” Elizabeth looked for the words. “I wasn’t raised rah-rah the flag. We were suspicious of that. It seemed disturbing, frightening, even Fascist. We didn’t get teary-eyed about ‘our heroes’. That was for people who supported Vietnam. For people who wanted intervention. I’d said we should disband the military. But that moment, that moment in Bosnia, I realized what it was for. Because in a minute, in a few seconds, that helicopter would have opened up just like one had a few days earlier at another site, and I’d have been dead and so would the girl and the doctor and a whole bunch of refugees who had already lost everything they had. And they never fired a single shot. Nobody did.”

Elizabeth looked at Dekaas, who was waiting patiently. “Force should be the last resort. But I realized why it existed. I realized why we need to have it, whether we use it or not. And that restraint is far harder than using it.”

Dekaas nodded. “I do not know your people, and I have traveled a great deal. I do not know a world where this might have happened.”

Elizabeth took a deep breath. The memory was gone, or rather ended. “Neither do I,” she said. “But Sateda is where I should begin my search.”

Elizabeth slept in the second watch so that she could be awake in the third when Dekaas was off duty. At the beginning of the third watch she got a cup of bitter tea from the ship’s galley and settled in to keep office hours. No one came. Apparently the rush of patients had been because of Durant’s docking with other Traveler ships which had no doctors, and everyone who had been nursing an illness or injury had already been seen. The entire watch passed without a single person sticking their head into the infirmary. By the time seven hours had passed Elizabeth was more than a little bored. She wondered if she could leave to go back to the galley and seek out a meal, or at least see other people, but decided that the way things worked the moment she did half a dozen patients would show up and wake Dekaas. Instead, she took inventory of the infirmary. She might as well use her time to understand better.

Many of the things seemed familiar, though she couldn’t remember where she’d seen each thing. A small refrigerated case held a number of glass vials, each labeled in the same language she’d seen before — insulin, morphine. She touched them carefully. She knew what they were for. She knew exactly. For a moment a man’s image floated before her eyes, white coated, dark haired, frowning. But he was dead. She knew that. She’d stood at his memorial service, her hand on the casket that contained his remains…

Elizabeth took a deep breath. There was no more there, just the gaping hole in her memory. She had liked him, called him a friend. She was the one who had recruited him, who had brought him, where? Somewhere dangerous and far from home. And he had been killed. Like so many who had died because of her decisions.

The weight of it bent her head, and Elizabeth closed her eyes over the drawer of tools.

“Wondering what that is?” Dekaas asked. She had not heard him come in.

Elizabeth glanced down at the strange instrument in the drawer. It looked like the handle of something, at first appearing to be made of dark wood, but it hummed faintly with its own power source. The grip had a sliding knob on it, and where a tool or blade might go at the narrow end was a small aperture. “Yes,” Elizabeth said.

“It’s a Wraith screwdriver.” Dekaas smiled as he came over and picked it up. “They use it for mending small tears in the hive’s systems, grafting bioelectrical conducts together. I use it,” he thumbed the knob, and a blue electric glow began at the aperture, “for mending flesh. It can repair small tears in tendons better than sutures, and it can even repair some severed nerves. It’s valuable for those kinds of injuries, ones that aren’t life threatening or involve a lot of blood loss, but that can leave someone without the full use of a limb.” He turned it off again. “A screwdriver.”

Elizabeth nodded approvingly. “That’s very clever.”

“They have some useful things,” Dekaas said.

“I thought humans didn’t use Wraith things.”

“Most don’t.” He put it back in the drawer and closed it. “But the Travelers do. The Wraith are the main spacefarers in this galaxy. The Travelers can’t afford to scorn Wraith technology when it comes their way.”

“The main spacefarers?” Elizabeth asked, a prickle running down her spine.

“There are some others.” Dekaas sat down on one of the metal chairs. “The Travelers. The Lanteans. The Ka-Ni. The Asgard.”

“The Asgard.” Elizabeth frowned. That should be important. It should be. Only no pictures came to accompany the name.

“No one knows where their homeworld is. They show up once in a while on human settled worlds looking for stuff. If you leave them alone, they leave you alone.”

“Stuff?” Elizabeth asked. “What kind of stuff?”

“The same stuff everyone wants. Leftovers from the Ancestors.” Dekaas shrugged. “There isn’t a lot of that, let me tell you. Anything good that isn’t impossible to reach has been plundered a hundred times by humans and Wraith alike. How the Genii got their hands on an Ancient warship I can’t imagine.”

“The Genii have an Ancient warship?” And that seemed critical, tremendously important for reasons she couldn’t name.

“That’s what they say,” Dekaas said easily. “Me, I haven’t seen it myself, so I’m only willing to put so much stock in it. The Genii want to be taken as the leaders of humanity. They’d like everyone to think they have an Ancient warship and defeated Queen Death. Personally, I’m guessing that’s exaggerated. But it’s certainly true that the Lanteans have some Ancient tech. One of our captains has done some trading with them.” He nodded toward the refrigerated case. “That’s where we got some of those drugs.”

“The insulin,” Elizabeth said. “That has to be kept refrigerated. It had to be traded for.”

Dekaas got up and opened the case, pulling out one of the vials and handing it to her. “Read me the label.”

Mystified, Elizabeth did. “Morphine sulfate injection USP. Preservative free. Warning: may be habit forming. This solution contains no antioxidant, bacteriostat or antimicrobial agent and is intended as a single dose injection to provide analgesia via the intravenous, epidural, or intrathecal routes.”

“You read Lantean,” Dekaas said.

“What?”

He took the vial back. “This is labeled in Lantean. I can’t read it. Nobody on this ship can read it.” He paused. “I know what it’s used for because it was explained to me. But these letters — this is Lantean.”

“Why in the world would I read Lantean?”

Dekaas put the vial back in the cold box. “That is a very good question,” he said.