Pathrus was Earthlike in that of its two main continents (plus a couple of archipelagos), the southern one was slightly balmier and more sub-tropic. However, it also possessed an active volcano range, which the cooler Northern one did not. But Kithu was adamant that the southern continent was a lush cornucopia of flora and fauna, a fecund abundance of flowers, fruits, plants and animals.
'In which case, where are they all?' was the unspoken question Rodney and John had exchanged with a glance at each other as John had brought the puddle-jumper warily into a lower altitude and taken another 'pass'. The entire landmass, as far as the puddle-jumper's passengers could see or its sensors detect, was a desert wasteland. No animals, no vegetation…
The entire landmass apparently had some sort of dirty off-white crust that John had flatly refused to land the puddle-jumper upon in view of the sound fact they had no idea whether the 'crust' was one mile or one millimetre deep and the puddle-jumper's sensors weren't calibrated that fine. But Rodney had appeased Kithu by sending out a small drone to get a sample of the stuff. Later analysis by Rodney and Radek back in Atlantis had shown that the white crust were actually skeletons – billions upon billions of them – of spider-bugs and their chitinous shells. Parrish, the botanist, had been hauled in and after much to-and-fro from xeno-biology to botany to geology to climatology and back again, Radek Zelenka had formulated a hypothesis.
The summary of the Czech's theory was that the problem was the spider-bugs. Unaware of the quite literally evolving Wraith threat, the ancient Pathrusim had expanded numerically and technologically across both continents. In the South, they had inadvertently removed the large avian that was the spider-bugs' main prey but also counter-predator. The lack of foliage cover on the 'eucalypt trees' trunks meant the bugs were vulnerable as they scuttled up and span the webs and many were picked off and eaten by the avian species – according to Parrish, anyway. This wasn't a problem, as the humans controlled the bug population, until the initial Wraith attacks decimated the Pathrusim population and sent their development tumbling back a millennium, completing denuding the southern continent of people in the process.
On the southern landmass the bug population had 'gone Australian' according to Rodney…'You know, like the rabbits…in Oz…an idiot named Thomas Austin let 24 out of a sack in the Outback in 1859 and 20 years later there's 300 million of them hopping around a continent where they have no natural predators because 50 million years of isolation from every other landmass means nothing from snakes through dingoes to even Saltwater Crocs recognises Brer Rabbit as a tasty morsel?' He'd rolled his eyes at the blank faces, 'Come on people!'
Zelenka had stepped in at that point and confirmed that Rodney's analogy was correct. The bug population had gone critical then cannibalistic. Without the avian species the bugs had attacked and devoured every other living thing they could find, and then started on each other – since bug bodies rotting didn't do soil quality a lot of good, the more bugs starved or were eaten the more the ground was contaminated, the less plants grew and bingo!, one desert, to go. The only reason the northern continent had been safe was that the bugs drowned in water and there was far too large a gap between the two landmasses for even the most tenacious bug to make it.
Unfortunately another precautionary flyover had showed isolated areas of the northern continent were presently showing similar signs – dying vegetation, and a suspicious absence of all usual bird and animal species in a vicinity. Pathrus didn't have the large global human population it should have, or the technology to spare locating spider-bug nests since scientists had customarily focussed all efforts on anti-Wraith measures.
In order to save their world they needed to exterminate or at least severely eradicate the majority of the spider-bugs back to a remnant population. But they needed a greater level of spider-bugs to obtain the webs that crashed the Darts – a synthetic version of anything close was decades of dedicated research away, and would have to join the colossal list of what Colonel Samantha Carter had wryly described as, "'cool/mega-important stuff the Atlantis expedition just found that we need improving, fixing and/or back-engineering by a week last Tuesday'".
After a lot of hot air, most of which, surprisingly, didn't come from him, Atlantis's latest administrator Dr Richard Woolsey had given the go for this mission (and never mentioned 'cost' once, maybe there's hope for Woolly-Head yet). Specifically, they were to relocate the Pathrusim population en masse to another planet, then send in Marine and Air Force-crewed puddle-jumper units to detect and annihilate all but a remnant of the spider-bug species. Then simmer for twenty years and serve – hopefully the planet's natural ecological checks and balances would swing into operation if given a helping hand and the Pathrusim could move back. By that time the Wraith would have been defeated or at least stopped – John knew that because the alternative was unthinkable…and one he would certainly never live to see.
And it was going so well…A full four-fifths of the Pathrusim had been relocated in an orderly, even jocular 'camping trip vacation' manner. Until the Pathrus early warning system detected one approaching Hive ship, though it was too crude to ascertain the vessel's size - the Pathrusim had never realised that, as with humans, to the Wraith size mattered – bigger ship more prestigious/powerful Wraith in charge. All the Pathrusim scientists and roboticists had been relocated and there was no time to get them back and implement their SOP robot-bomb subterfuge. All the Atlanteans could do was pick up the pace and hold the 'Gate until the last groups of Pathrusim went through.
They were even giving the Wraith pause for thought – until the Hive ship abruptly turned tail and ran…in the face of another Asuran Replicator one which merrily started blasting at everything in sight. Despite the gravity of the situation, a part of John would have much preferred to stick to Bad Guys One instead of the new and improved version.
Up to a point, John had always been able to sympathise with the Asurans. If he had been a replicator, pleading with his creators for help – only to be contemptuously treated like nothing more than a broken toaster and savagely attacked – his anger management problem would have been off the charts too. And ,yes, he got the replicators' sibling-rivalry angle too. Finding out that your creators had 'children' - those silly, squishy 'hyuhmans' who were less intelligent, less robust, less long-lived and less powerful – but which they still favoured over your best efforts, would tend to bring out that whole 'red-headed stepchild' inferiority complex. John could definitely relate – John had been both brainier and more athletic than David (okay, only a bit more) but Dave had always been Dad's favourite, not because of complementary personalities or common interests, but because Dave had always just fallen in line with Dad's attempts to micromanage their lives and live his own through them again, whereas John hadn't permitted the parental bullying.
So, once, John had understood the Asurans' Equal Opps hatred – the Wraith, for being so vicious the Ancients had deliberately created them as a species of homicidal maniacs even worse in the galaxy's most stupid example of one-upmanship; the humans, for being the inferior but always favoured 'children' and the Ancients for not just abandoning their creation but trying to pull off genocide in the bargain.
Meaning that once again humanity was left to clear up the Ancients' mess. A while back John had caught a video-link broadcasting part of a speech Daniel Jackson was giving back on Earth to some Pentagon bigwigs and the IOA Committee chiefs, and the good Doc had excoriated the Ancients with such rhetoric that John had been glad he was stationed this side of the universe. But Jackson had had several good points. As far as John could see, their attitude to any mistake they made or anything that went wrong was to (a) run away (the Ori, the Wraith, fleeing their own galaxy of Celestis for the Milky Way, then Pegasus back to Earth), (b) ignore it and hope it would go away (the Goa'uld, the 'resurrection box' discovered in South America, the Duronda weapon) or (c) try and get rid of it – the Asurans, Atlantis itself, etc.
As Dr Jackson had said, 'what I cannot and will not forgive is not only the arrant cowardice displayed by these creatures, and their steadfast refusal to take responsibility for and corrective action about their mistakes, but above all their repeated, wilful and shameful interference with and persecution – perhaps even murder of, for all I know - those few of their species who had the moral courage and honour to try and atone for the Ancients' intransigent arrogance, repeated abandonment and callous disregard for those they left in the lurch. Oma Desala, Orlin, Chaya Sar, Janus, Merlin, Morgan le Fay…are names that I hope makes every single one of those conceited glowing squid writhe with shame.'
Galaxy away or not, John had been prepared to dive for cover at the first sizzle of a enraged lightening bolt,but it hadn't happened – though maybe that wasn't so surprising as it would have proven Jackson had struck a nerve. As a former Ascended being, though, and a guy who'd been turned into a Prior against his will – what was that scuttlebutt joke, oh yeah…Jackson had been prior-itised. Still, Jackson had the moral high ground; even Vala Mal Doran, a woman whose moral compass, according to Cam Mitchell, wasn't just broken but smashed into a million itty-bitty pieces and scattered to the four winds to boot, had considered the Ancients to be morally reprehensible – apparently her 'I can see why you came back, Daniel' had mortally insulted entire swathes of Ascended-blockheads (who did look like nothing so much as giant glowing squid, come to think of it) who considered themselves vastly above the 'moral mores' of the lower planes.
But! But, if the Ancients had dealt with the Ori instead of running away…if they'd nipped the Goa'uld in the bud and sorted out the Wraith before the initial hybrid creatures evolved into their current state of sentience and technology…there would have been no need for the Asurans - although Rodney had confessed that 'someone of my genius should have seen it coming. The fact that there was a Replicator disintegration weapon the Asgard knew nothing about in the Ancients' arsenal millennia before that robot-kid Whatshername was created and independently invented the Milky Way version, automatically gives rise to the question as to why the Ancients needed one for a threat that wouldn't be created until several thousand years after they'd schlepped to Pegasus.'
But no, the Ancients had done nothing but play the 'higher being' card and leave the universe littered with death-traps like the Dakara super-weapon that half the time they'd just left on standby like a VCR for any twit to trip over and activate and annihilate half the known universe. As General O'Neill – a man who John Sheppard listened to – had put it, the Ancients never seemed to grasp the fact that they had never been as smart as they'd always thought they were.
Colonel Carter had also apparently never agreed with the Asgard's claim that humans were too devolved to be able to cope with the 'place of our legacy' downloads; it was a problem of scale, not substance. If there been some way of General O'Neill accessing only those portions of data he needed to, rather than having to go the all or nothing route, there never would have been a problem – it was the difference between giving a starving man a cup of weak tea for his first sustenance or force-feeding him a banquet.
Likewise, if you ignored Rodney, Zelenka, Beckett and the other IQ-high fliers, the average 'man-in-the-street' plucked at random, dropped in the gate-room and told to go for it, could have made several parts of Atlantis functional enough to support life again given sufficient time, and even without possessing the ATA gene – Radek for instance had little trouble, even though the gene therapy hadn't worked; and if humans were so innately dumb, how come Rodney had had to have the gene therapy whereas John hadn't – meaning the giant glowing squid couldn't claim Rodney's IQ was a throwback to some Ancient progenitor going native with the locals – Rodney's genius was pure homo sapiens. (Although, that could also account for his having the emotional stability of a blancmange in an earthquake).
The operative word here, though, was 'once'. He would never ever forget his last glimpse of Elizabeth's face before they fled the Asurans; he had woken up in cold sweat night after night, hating himself for his failure – "'to do what? Be superman?'" Ronan had asked him once, softly, after a shrewd look at the limp hair and the pasty face. Oh yes, Ronan might be an overachiever in the size department and his tendency to be cheerfully homicidal was always disconcerting, but behind the bloodthirsty grin was a keen brain that observed details others missed – and then was smart enough to keep quiet about it; playing big and stupid had gotten Ronan out of more trouble than all the fancy fighting skills in the galaxy. Ronan's entire world had gone down fighting, but they'd still fallen to the Wraith.
There had been nothing John could have done, except die with Elizabeth and his responsibility at the time was – as she would have furiously insisted upon – to the entire Atlantis expedition.
Except she wasn't dead…
© 2008
C D Stewart
To be continued…