The Astonishing Persistence Of Memory: Present Tense
Part Three
Chapter Eight
Elizabeth listened to John's explanation of what had happened while he was in the chair and tried not to feel as though this was an interrogation.
It didn't help that John looked as though he was a prisoner, the two Marines that Edwards had refused to take off him flanking him where he sat, the various departmental heads sitting around the triangular meeting table. Even the steady clatter of Rodney's keyboard could have been the court stenographer, making notes on the trial.
"I fired the drones and handed control of the city over to the hyperdrive navigation systems and we made hyperspace."
"You're sure the Wraith didn't see where we were going?" She asked the question before Edwards could. John would take the question better from someone he didn't automatically think was out to get him.
"All I know about the planet is the designation." He looked at her rather than Edwards. "The Wraith can't make anything from that – they don't have the knowledge of the Atlantis database. If they even got that much from me, which they didn't."
"And, given that the Wraith managed to freeze you as you've already admitted, what makes you think they didn't get that information from you?"
"They did not." Teyla folded her hands on the table before her with the measured movement of someone who understood the power of distraction in the middle of an argument. "The Wraith would've taken it from John had there been time, but he did not have the time, and John did not give it to him."
"And you, of course, can be sure of that?"
"Yes." The answer was simple, but Teyla had a look of inwards contemplation that suggested it would be folly to challenge her in this. "I can."
John's chair had turned towards Teyla during her statement. He flashed her a brief smile when her gaze turned to him, then turned back to Edwards like a compass needle drawn to its opposite pole. "They didn't get anything from me, other than that we were moving. And that was obvious."
"I don't like the Wraith knowing where we've gone."
Rodney snorted, not looking up from the laptop where he was monitoring the engine status. "It'd be pretty obvious we'd gone somewhere else when they arrived and found the planet deserted. And Sheppard's right. They'd have nothing more useful than a designation. Where's M5T-802?"
"How should I know?"
"So how would the Wraith know if you don't?" Ronon had declined a seat – there weren't enough of them. Instead, like the Marines, he stood and watched the proceedings with a shuttered expression. "Sheppard wouldn't give Atlantis up."
Watching John, Elizabeth saw the softening that the statement of faith produced in John and figured she'd add to it.
"Thank you for piloting the city out of there, John."
He shrugged, nonchalant about it, but she knew him well enough to see the pleasure that the praise gave him. It was important to John that his work was meaningful. In that light, Elizabeth had always tried to ensure he knew he was appreciated.
"In the meantime, we've got other matters to consider. Radek? What's our power status?"
Radek pushed his glasses up his nose and consulted his laptop screen. Unnecessarily, Elizabeth thought. Radek had a perfectly good grasp of what was happening in his section. "The encounter with the Wraith has drained the city's reserves a little more than we expected, but we should have enough power to get us to our destination and to bring the city down at the end of it."
"Good to know," she said without irony. "If things change for any reason, let me know immediately. Dr. Keller?" The young doctor jerked up, looking surprised at being called upon. "Infirmary status report?"
"Uh, well, there were a few injuries. A couple people fainted and hit their heads when they fell – nothing major. We had one broken bone – Dr. Frankwell was going down the stairs when we accelerated and he lost his balance, but it was a clean break. Otherwise...nothing much."
The slim shoulders hunched over a little and Elizabeth smiled kindly at her before turning to Rodney.
"Rodney, the engines?"
"They're fine, although Engine Four collapsed during takeoff. I'm trying to work out what we can sabotage to get it back online. What was with that sudden ascent, anyway?"
"Other than that the Wraith were coming? I wanted to get out of there fast. The longer the flight out took the harder it would be."
Elizabeth watched as John's gaze flickered away for a moment and knew that wasn't the whole of the truth.
"Harder as in...?"
His shoulders twitched. "The usual definition of 'harder.'"
She saw Teyla's gaze drop to the marquetry of the table in what was effectively a ducking of the Athosian woman's head and caught a hint of what the issue was. If not for Edwards, then John might very well have told them; but with a hostile superior at the table, he was guarded and wary.
Faced with a dilemma – between stating her suspicions and remaining silent, Elizabeth chose to speak out. She would rather not have said anything here, but for the sake of the city it was necessary that they all knew. Maybe it could wait while the city moved through space – they had four days of flight from here to the end of their journey – but if this was what she thought, the sooner it was laid out on the table, the better.
"The Iratus virus," she said. "It's affecting your ability to use Ancient technology, isn't it?"
John's head turned, and a trick of the light turned his pupils into Iratus slits before he met her gaze full on and was human again. He didn't deny it.
"What's this?"
She ignored Edwards, feeling a chill steal over her, like a sudden cold breeze in the room. "Will you be able to fly the ship when we reach New Lantea?"
"I don't know. It's a fight now, it'll be more of a fight later, but I should be able to manage it."
Without John, they'd have to rely on one of the other personnel – less experienced, less confident in their flying skills – to bring them down. It was a recipe for disaster. At least, Elizabeth amended, more of a recipe for disaster than their situation already was.
"Should?" Naturally, Edwards leaped on the uncertainty. "You're going to risk the city on a 'should'?"
"Why not?" John's eyes glittered. "We've already risked it on a maybe, a possibly, and a could."
Thinking dryly of all the times they'd held onto the city with a wing, a prayer, and a little bit of luck, Elizabeth couldn't help noting, "It does tend to be a habit."
Still, entrusting this to John without having a Plan B wasn't wise. So far in her time as expedition leader of Atlantis, the universe had thrown enough curve balls at Elizabeth to make planning an alternative a good idea.
"While I agree that John would be more than up to the task of bringing the city down, I think that we should have a contingency pilot at hand in case you're not able to pilot the ship by the time we make landing." In the periphery of her gaze, she saw the nods of agreement, but her gaze was fixed on John, looking for his reaction.
There was none, his expression closed up and shut down as he stared at the table, not even looking up to see who was looking at him. And his thoughts were opaque to her – and apparently to Teyla, who looked away from John to Elizabeth and shrugged a little. It seemed she understood no more of his state of mind than Elizabeth.
She had hoped he would understand why it might be necessary, even if he thought he'd be ready when the time came. But his agreement was not required for her to set policy. "Carson?"
Carson glanced up from his notes. "Oh, no," he said. "I can't fly the city."
Rodney dismissed this with a sniff. "You can fire drones."
"Firing drones is something completely different to– No. There're other people who possess the gene..."
Elizabeth tried again. " The chair responds best to the natural gene, Carson."
Carson blew out a breath and looked down at his hands before he met her gaze again. "I still think we'd be better off with someone who's got real flying experience and an artificial gene."
Maybe they would. But of the personnel they had, only a handful had the gene naturally. Most personnel with the ATA gene were the artificial one, which worked well enough with the 'jumpers. But the city seemed to want a naturally-occurring gene, as though the mocked-up version didn't quite meet the requirements. And not one of the people with the naturally-occurring gene had anything close to John's piloting experience. In that, his skill-set was unique.
"You have flying experience," Rodney said irritably from behind his computer.
"Of 'jumpers! Not cities!"
"Carson." She waited until he swivelled back to her and held his gaze, pleadingly. "We wouldn't ask this if it wasn't necessary."
"And if it's not necessary?"
It took Elizabeth a moment to realise what he was saying. "You've finished work on the retrovirus?"
"I think I've got a solution, yes."
--
"It's much the same as before," Carson said as he prepped John's arm for the injection. "I don't know how much of last time you remember..."
Lying in the bed, his still-human arm stretched out on the covers, Sheppard turned his head to look at his team who were waiting over by the next bed, a mostly-silent support group, although Rodney occasionally made comments. His eyes fixed on them and he gave a faint smile. "Enough."
Curious at the overtones of that smile, Carson half-turned before he reined in his curiosity.
He glanced over at Elizabeth, who was hovering at the foot of the bed and caught the arched brow she transferred from John to him. Colonel Edwards was off managing 'a personnel problem', which might mean that an actual situation had come up, or which might mean he didn't particularly care whether Sheppard made it or not. Either way, Carson didn't mind the Colonel's absence. It meant less questions and demands.
"Well, there might be some burning and feelings of restlessness. You'll want to take regular meals and sleep regularly, too, because your body will be undergoing a lot of changes." Carson pulled the tourniquet tight. Usually, he wouldn't bother looking for a vein, but the sooner they could get this working, the better. The bloodstream would provide both delivery system and energy source for the retroviral changes, and if the changes coming over the Colonel were more or less the same as last time, by the time they reached their new planet, he'd be back to human again.
And Carson wasn't going to think about what would happen if things went wrong.
He took a deep breath. "All right." The needle dipped smoothly into the flesh, injected its payload, and came smoothly out. "I want you to be in here overnight so we can monitor the progress of the retrovirus. If anything starts to hurt, tell me. I'd rather be informed of your troubles than kept in the dark because you don't think I need to know it."
"Yes, Doc." The smile was old-school Sheppard, slightly insouciant, a little wry.
Carson couldn't help returning it. He often despaired of the men and women of this city – so many over-achieving types who didn't know when to stop – but for all that, they were the best, and all of them had a certain charm about them. Even the ones like Rodney.
It was, as the military would say, an honour to serve them – but it was a pleasure, too.
Sheppard's team crowded around the beside, seating themselves with an assumption of right. Rodney produced a laptop from the bed behind him, and a moment later they were arguing over whether or not to watch House or The Office.
Elizabeth gave them a rueful smile and followed Carson out. "How long until it takes effect?"
"If it all goes according to plan...the spread of the Iratus should stop in the next day, with the reversal a day after. He won't be human when we touch down, but he should be on his way. I'm sorry it took so long."
"Moving the city took priority," she reassured him, then craned her neck as a burst of laughter came from the Colonel's group. "Thank you, Carson."
Carson set the syringe aside for sterilisation and went to write up his notes. With any luck, things were looking up – not only for the Colonel, but for everyone in the city.
--
Rodney took one look at John as he put his tray down on the table. "Carson let you out of the infirmary looking like that?"
The dark circles under the other man's eyes suggested a rough night. "It's just tiredness. Curable with sleep."
"Which you don't seem to be getting right now. Actually, no-one's getting much of it – including myself."
"I'll work on it later. Anyway, how's the work on Engine Four going?" John began arranging the tiny dishes of food, picking through each one to determine what was today's meal.
"It's going." Rodney shrugged. "We got them back online, although I'm never going to let Davis do the configuration work for one of these. It was an incredibly sloppy job."
"Heard you ended up having to crawl through several access tunnels to fix it."
"It was horrible. Manual crystal recalibration? Ugh. Do you know what dark, cramped conditions do to my thinking processes? I mean, a city full of people – half of them Marines – and they send a theoretical astrophysicist to do the job!" Rodney was pissed off about that. There were plenty of other personnel available to go worming through the bowels of the city – people who were more expendable than him.
"Is the astrophysics so theoretical anymore?"
"Not the point!"
"Okay, so could the Marines have done the fixes that were needed?"
"No." And everyone said that it was faster for him to go in and do it than for them to do it before messing up and finding he'd have to go in there himself anyway.
There was a certain correctness about that statement, of course.
"So a man's gotta do..."
Rodney rolled his eyes. "Don't. In the end, we had to cannibalise a bunch of parts from the secondary shield to get it working though, so if the primary shield fails, we're in trouble."
"I thought Zelenka said we had more than enough power to get us down to the surface."
"Yes, well, Radek says that sort of thing. "He's an optimist at heart." Rodney flipped a dollop of tuber mash into the sea of gravy. Then, because he was feeling a little guilty about so casually dismissing Radek's research, he added, "He just doesn't take into account all the possible problems we could run into."
"Like?"
"Like the fact that you had a harder time getting the city into space than we thought you would? And you had to fire the drones, which took energy – oh, and the hyperdrive engines aren't working at 100% after sitting dormant for ten thousand years, so our power conversion routines aren't as accurate as we thought they'd be?"
John snorted. "You're so cheerful, Rodney."
"Yeah, but I'm not paid to be cheerful."
"You're paid to crawl through claustrophobic spaces and save the city?" John grinned and dug his spoon into the tub of Jell-O. Rodney noticed blue of the hand holding the cup nearly matched the blue of the jell-o and lifted his gaze to find Sheppard looking at him quizzically.
"How's the retrovirus working?"
"Burning, tingling, itching. I had a headache earlier but it seems to have gone."
"Yes, but is it working?"
"The change seems to have stopped." John glanced down at his arm with a grimace of disgust. "It hasn't moved any further, anyway."
"But you're still sleeping with Teyla." Rodney snorted at the brief flare of colour that washed over John's neck, amused. John Sheppard might be a closed book to most of the city, but he was pretty open if you knew how to read him. "Oh, please. You know what I mean, I know what I mean, everyone else knows what I mean. Get over it. You're not a teenager with a crush, you're a grown man of...what? Forty?"
John glared and took a moment to answer, although the flush didn't fade. "We figured it was a precaution."
"Sleeping with Teyla is taking precautions?" The line was too good not to use and the look he received was a killer. Rodney smirked. "So was it precautious enough?"
The flippancy earned him roll of the eyes. "She said that the Wraith were still waiting for her when she went out so that hasn't changed."
"Yeah, but you've been like that for a few days now, so even if the Iratus change isn't on the march anymore, you're still open channel for the Wraith."
"Do you have to put it like that?"
"No. But I enjoy it." Rodney smirked and went back to eating. The Pegasus stroganoff with mashed tubers was always good, in spite of the meat's gamy taste and the disconcertingly dove-blue mash. If you closed your eyes, you'd hardly realise it wasn't Earth food – venison and potatoes, maybe.
Okay, so weird venison and potatoes, but – most importantly – non-allergenic venison and potatoes.
"Anyway," he said after a few mouthfuls eaten in silence. "I'd written this program to randomly pull planetary designations from a list of empty planets we've seen, and now we're not going to need it, so..."
John's fork fell to the table with a noisy clatter.
Rodney looked up as John made an odd grunting noise, low in his throat. The hand that had been holding the fork was clenched into a fist on the top of the table, and the cords of this throat stood rigidly out beneath the clenched jaw.
"Sheppard?"
His eyes glanced up to meet Rodney's and he gave an unconvincing smile. "It's nothing."
Considering the way John's body was beginning to shake, Rodney disagreed.
"Carson, this is Rodney. I'm with Sheppard in the mess hall." He kept a wary eye on John, while not touching the man. He didn't know what this was and he wasn't about to take chances. No point in risking both of them if it was something contagious – and it might be. "He's not looking to good. In fact, it looks like he's about to go into convulsions."
"I'm fi-i–" The statement turned into a choked noise that screamed pain from every inchoate vowel, and John twitched once and crumpled like a sheet of paper.
"Shit!"
Later, Rodney would hear how he stood up so fast, he kicked his chair into Dr. Byrne's, two metres away. He'd learn that he was around the table faster than it took for most people to turn around to look at what they'd just noticed was happening. He'd be told that the blow from a scaly hand sent him sprawling as Sheppard's Iratus-enhanced instincts made short work of him.
What he remembered was the world spinning and then going black.
- tbc -
