I. (M24-660, known as Torora, Pegasus Galaxy, Present Day)
Rodney was puffing to keep up with his white-bearded guide. Weak light from flickering mirrored lanterns lit the tunnel, but the bearded chief scientist never missed a step. Primitive, really. How did they expect him to work in these conditions? Rodney's breath hung as a mist on the cold air. It was freezing in here! The scientist—what was his name, Dalty or Darbin or something—talked rapidly as he walked. "At first we thought it was just a data storage center. There were many empty data crystals—at least we think they're empty after examining them—"
McKay froze in his tracks. "You moved the crystals? No-no-no-no-no, this is not how this works. You see, you cannot move the crystals and then expect me to figure out exactly what sequence they were supposed to be in."
Blinking behind his round spectacles, Dalty-or-something finally stopped. "We documented the locations, but many of them seemed to have been already out of place. Several were merely fragm—"
Rodney interrupted. "You said the whole place was flooded?"
"Well, yes—and then very quickly and artificially frozen." He hesitated. "As far as we can tell." Was he nervous? That was…reassuring.
Frozen? It was 24° C outside! It was probably 1° in here. Actually, never mind. He saw ice crystals reforming on some puddles. Make that 0. "Why would they do that?" A failsafe of some kind?
"I was about to show you." Darbling or whatever shoved his gloved hands into the pockets of his parka and led Rodney to a railing. Rodney found himself looking down at a forty-foot drop. And a dead female Wraith.
"Beautiful, isn't she?" Dorbin said in a hushed biologist-in-awe voice.
"In a creepy I-would-eat-you-if-I-weren't-dead sort of way, I guess so," McKay said. "Kind of small, isn't she?"
Dorby's bushy white eyebrows drew together as if Rodney has just personally insulted him. "Really?"
"It's hard to tell from up here, but—" Rodney clapped Durby on the back—"it looks like you've got a miniature Wraith."
"Hmm." Dorble rubbed his beard. "We have never had any reports of anyone seeing a female."
"Yeah, well—" Rodney began with a worldly-wise air.
Zelenka skidded around the corner on a thin sheet of ice, cradling his tablet computer. "They opened the last chamber. This wasn't a data storage facility. It was for research on the Wraith. We found some intact data, and we think they were trying to hide their research from the other Ancients."
"Why would they do that?" Dubrin asked.
Probably because the Ancient version of the IOA didn't approve of their methods. "Well, let's go see."
"The bodies or the data crystals?" Zelenka asked, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.
Rodney stopped short. Bodies? Plural? "There are other bodies?"
"There were five human-looking bodies as well. We are assuming that they were Ancients, but we can't be sure. Perhaps you have the means to determine…?"
"Right-right-right." Rodney waved him off and hurried down the tunnel towards the direction Zelenka had come from. "I'll get Keller on it. Hey," he said, stopping. "Are any of them frozen still?"
"No, we had to thaw everything to get to them." Derble said, frowning. "Why?"
(M35-117, New Atlantis, Infirmary, 1 hour later)
Dr. Jennifer Keller watched the screen of the Ancient scanner. "This one was an Ancient, too." she said.
"I thought so," Darbin said, watching breathlessly. He had insisted on accompanying the bodies. Sheppard was off somewhere with Teyla and Ronon when Colonel Carter had gone back to Earth for some reason. That left Dr. McKay behind to make all of the decisions. Jennifer wasn't sure she was comfortable with that. "Was he fed upon like Dr. Zelenka thought?"
Jennifer eyed the mummified-looking tissue and twisted expression of the corpse. "I can't scan the body and tell, but I would guess so." There wasn't much left to autopsy. "Help me put him in the morgue."
After Jennifer shut the drawer, Darbin stepped back. "That just leaves her," he said with satisfaction, nodding towards the draped Wraith body. The water from the melted ice had darkened the sheet covering the body.
Jennifer nodded. She had never had to do an autopsy—no, necropsy—on an alien before. It made her a little nervous to have an audience, even as unimposing as Darbin was. But he was impressed by stitches that eventually disintegrated, so the Ancient scanner and even the EKG might as well have been magic, so that made it a little easier. She flipped the sheet back.
She had expected some tissue damage from the freezing temperatures and the ten thousand years that had passed, but she couldn't see any. "Wow." It sounded stupid when she had said it. "Look at this." She flipped the high-powered surgical light on. Darbin peered down through his spectacles. "Have you ever seen one up close?"
"No," Darbin said. It sounded like a confession. "I'm afraid I'm not the explorer your people are."
"I haven't either. A live one, I mean." She looked down at the Wraith's face. The skin was very pale. An ornate tattoo curled around her left eye down her cheekbone. Her hair was dark brown and still wet. It might have a reddish cast when it was dry. Full, pale lips around small pointed teeth. Those slanting pits on the cheeks that Keller suspected were either sensitive to electrical impulses—like heartbeats, which was a disturbing thought—or some kind of telepathic communication, which was more likely. Keller pulled opened the Wraith's left eye. The iris was still a bright green after all this time. Huh. Usually the proteins degraded very quickly. The freezing must have happened within minutes after the compound was flooded. The vertically slit pupil seemed that reminded Jennifer of a horror novel she read in junior high. She shivered involuntarily.
She moved on. "Well, this doesn't look like the Wraith clothing of choice," she said, looking at the simple, light blue pants and shirt. It looked a little like surgical scrubs.
"Prison clothing, perhaps?" Darbin suggested. "Oh, look here, Doctor." He pointed to a slender five-inch-long sliver of broken data crystal protruding from the Wraith's abdomen. "Cause of death?"
"Maybe," she said, but she doubted it. From everything she had heard, it would take more that to kill a Wraith. "When we get further into the autopsy," –there, she'd said it again— "we'll know more."
Darbin grabbed a pair of forceps from a tray and plucked the crystal out of the wound. "No, wait—" Jennifer said, but it was too late. So much for documentation.
Darbin turned away from the body and held the crystal up to the light to examine it. Jennifer squinted up into the light at it. "We found another piece of this in a second-level chamber. Dr. McKay will be glad to know that we recovered another piece. I wonder if he can put it back together."
At least she could determine whether the injury was postmortem or not now that the crystal was out of the way. She sighed and turned back to the body.
The wound was gone. The hole in the cloth was still there, but the skin underneath was perfectly smooth and white.
Dead Wraith don't heal.
It was like something out of a nightmare. Time stopped. She heard herself stammer something about security, but she wasn't sure it made sense. Darbin was stopping to ask questions. She thought she pushed him out of the room.
She didn't know what to do. Now that she knew it was alive, she couldn't let it die. Now that she knew it was alive, she couldn't stay there with it—her—whatever.
She tried to tell herself that the body on the table was just another patient, but her hands were shaking as she felt for a pulse on the Wraith's neck. What was she doing?? She didn't even know if they had an artery there!
They must, because she felt a weak flutter under her fingertips.
The Wraith wasn't breathing. Jennifer should bag her or start rescue breathing or something—a thought whispered "if you want to save it"—but she felt frozen.
The Wraith's body jerked suddenly. Jennifer snatched her hand back on reflex.
Behind Jennifer, the infirmary door burst open. Sheppard? Was that Sheppard? No, it was Ronon. He raised his enormous gun. She heard it charging.
She batted it down.
Stupid, part of her said. Kill it.
There was an aide standing immobilized with fear over in the corner by a med cart. Had she been there the whole time? "Suction," Jennifer said, not knowing why. The aide blinked and stammered for a second, but she scurried off.
Ronon looked at her like she had gone crazy.
(New Atlantis, Briefing Room, 30 min. later)
"Remind me again why we have a Wraith-cicle in the infirmary?" Sheppard wore his trademark quizzical look. Rodney hated that look. It was annoying to be interrupted in the middle of something important to answer stupid questions. Right now, he was trying to brief Sheppard on what was going on, and Sheppard kept coming back to bothersome details.
"Keller wanted to bring it back. We thought it was dead, okay?"
"You thought it was dead? It's a Wraith! It's like a…like an evil Energizer Bunny."
Rodney threw up his hands. "It was frozen!"
"I leave for a few hours and you have to go find yourself a frozen Wraith and defrost it in the middle of the city…"
Incredible. He was having fun with this. This was…not fair. Rodney rolled his eyes heavenward. "Will you—just—"
The briefing room door whished open. Teyla strode in, wearing one of those leather numbers. Too bad she wasn't blond. And educated beyond ooh-magic-door level. Well, she would look kind of funny blond…but maybe not in a bad way.
"McKay!" Sheppard was giving him that chiding primrose path look. Rodney almost snorted. As if Captain-Kirk-reincarnate could talk.
"Hmm?" Rodney gave him what he hoped was an innocent look. "Oh, right, the Wraith."
Ronon got bigger and meaner looking—if that were possible—when he said that. "I say we kill her." Good thing he was on the right side.
"We may not have to," Teyla said. It sounded like she had told him that at least once. "Dr. Keller says it probably will not survive more than a few hours."
Ronon glared at Teyla. "She's a Wraith. She lived through being frozen and buried for ten thousand years. I think she'll survive the infirmary."
"Apparently being unfrozen is more dangerous than being frozen," Teyla said. "Dr. Keller has told us that it was thought that only a few creatures with simple systems designed for it could survive the process." The sound of the gate being dialed from off-world interrupted Teyla's uninformed regurgitations of information.
"She's early." Sheppard said, glancing at his watch and standing up. "The IOA must've given her an extra-warm welcome." The rest of the team trailed along behind him down to the gate room.
Sam stepped through the shimmering blue pool of the event horizon. Why couldn't she cut her hair? Short hair was sexier. Especially blond short hair…
Teyla was giving him a disapproving look. Was he that obvious?
"Hey!" Sam said. She had her one little bag with her. She stopped and looked first at Sheppard, then at Rodney, then at Teyla, and finally at Ronon. "Why does everybody look so guilty?"
"Rodney brought home a pet," Sheppard said dryly.
"Excuse me? Keller brought it back—"
"—while you were in charge!" Sheppard finished.
"Only because you were gone!"
Sam held up a hand. "What is 'it'?"
Sheppard put on a mock-innocent face and shrugged. "Oh, nothing big. He promised to feed it. Won't be too much trouble. Just a Wraith queen or princess or something like that. "
Sam suddenly looked very tired. "You're joking."
Rodney nodded over to Ronon, whose put-out caveman expression told her everything she needed to know.
She groaned. "And I thought things were going to get back to normal after I got away from the IOA."
"This is normal," Sheppard said very unhelpfully. He took her bag from her.
(New Atlantis, Infirmary)
She woke with a bright, bright light in her eyes. She fought to focus. Everything looked vague, watery. A face. There was a face two hands-breadths above hers. The smell of the skin, the breath. Lantean? Lanteans had her again? No!
No! She had been so close to being free!
She struck out in rage. The face jerked away from her, but not fast enough. She could catch it, she would see the fear in the eyes of this enemy, this Lantean. The glands in her arm and hand ached as they swelled with enzyme.
Restraints snapped her back down against the table and her sight went dark for an instant. The breath rushed out of her. Her lungs hurt. Her eyes hurt. Something small and sharp tore at the skin on the back of her hand. She gasped for air and lay back, still. The sounds around her were muffled in a dull ring.
Her sight cleared and color returned. Her eyes were regenerating. What had happened to her eyes? She remembered nothing that would have damaged her eyes. A bright flicker of panic flared up, along with a memory.
[The water. She held up her hands futilely against the flood wall and turned her head away, screaming in fury. They had trapped her. Ensnared by dead men.
She could see, smell now. These were not Lanteans, or at least not all of them. But the room was. Some of the technology was.
There was one behind her. The face with the bright light. A human, a woman, with a bag of fluid connected to a tube. The human injected something in bag and stepped away quickly. The bag was connected to the spine in her hand, she realized. They were putting something in her body. Sedative. She wasn't thinking clearly. She couldn't think, couldn't remember. Her hands were shaking. Had they done all of this to her? How long had she been here? How much time had she lost to this blank chasm of memory?
It was cold, so cold. Everything was pain. But the sedative mix was reaching her, and it was strong. It had been so long since she had been without pain. She stopped fighting it.