Reminder:
"This is spoken English."
"This is spoken Czech."
This is a thought.

Last time: Our Wraith house guests have been here since Chapter 133. Last chapter we discovered that we perhaps haven't been pursuing the most ethical course of action, and this might have taken a bit of a toll on our psyches.

Chapter 137. But Were Afraid to Ask.

It was too late for the Hippaforalkus; what was going to happen was going to happen. Nothing had happened yet, except that the Daedalus was now headed off into the darkness of space to make sure the Wraith were doing what they'd said they would do.

Anna was kidding herself. The handful of chips she'd replaced in the Hippaforalkus wasn't going to make any difference. She'd done what she could, and all that effort, all that evidence she'd done something kind of significant was probably going to get eaten up in a spectacular explosion in the next few days. She was already surprised no one had pressed her for details on where she found those scrap chips, but, then… everyone was very busy.

Radek looked up when she stepped into the lab, and smiled. He was pale and looked ill—she'd been on the Daedalus for eight days while he'd been down here. Probably sharing the same office space as a Wraith and half a dozen marines.

"It's good to see you back here. How are you?" he asked. He sounded sick, too.

Anna didn't say that she'd slept very well in her eight days on the Daedalus. The soft hum of the engines and the hiss of the air circulating thought the filters was a constant reminder that everything was, for the moment, alright. Of course, that could change at any moment, but one moment at a time was much easier to be happy for on the Daedalus. "Everyone needs a vacation."

He chuckled, and went back to his computer. He paused only briefly to rub a worried crease out of his forehead before going back. "Oh, yes, probably, but there's no time for that, is there?"

"Well, you do know the boss."

He gave a half smile, but didn't otherwise respond.

"Maybe later. You need a few days off, anyway." She leaned on his desk and, instead of looking at his monitor, took a better look at him. His hair was that kind of fluffy that said he'd been tossing and turning all night, and his eyes were that dark hungry they got when faced with a problem he just couldn't solve. Anna couldn't help her frown. "You look awful."

As if surprised, he glanced at her. He opened his mouth as if to reply, but then looked at her more closely. "And you don't." He went back to typing. "Look, I have to dream up a delivery system for a technology paradigm I'm only barely familiar with that—thankfully—never invented beaming technology of the sort we have. And I'm not sure if this stupid field test they're doing bought me more time or lost me the little I did have."

That did sound like a reason to not be sleeping well. If at all. "Rodney thought they weren't going to be gone very long."

"I agree. Then you can go back to the Daedalus. Get more sleep."

"I don't need sleep."

With a heavy sigh, he tapped feverishly at his keyboard. "It would make me feel better."

"What are they doing, anyway?"

Radek didn't answer for so long Anna thought he wouldn't answer at all. Which, she decided, was fair. She shouldn't really be bothering him, but… well, she hadn't seen him in eight days. She talked to him over radio, but when he wasn't working, he was sleeping… which meant, while he usually answered, he never talked much. Sort of like right now.

Finally, though, he said, "They are planning on physically entering their enemy's hive under the pretense of negotiating surrender and, again, physically planting small canisters of gas throughout the hive. Somehow clandestinely."

Anna frowned. "Is that as stupid as it sounds?"

That, he seemed to genuinely find funny. "Probably, yes. Of course, I can't tell you for sure, because I only have a schematic of a Wraith hive that we've compiled from across unfortunate missions that happened to end up in one. I've got a pretty good guess, and they'd do a better job than I would with canister placement, but… there's got to be something better than this."

Anna didn't know if there was, but Radek was most certainly correct that having an accurate and complete schematic of a Wraith hiveship would tell them a lot more than they knew now. But that not only for their own use, of course. Lest they forget, they were helping the Wraith.

"Why can't they come up with something?" It seemed like the most obvious of all questions, since they didn't seem to want to share the knowledge they'd need in order to get the help they wanted in this area.

"Because, apparently, having to think strategically is not in a Wraith's set of skills. They haven't really fought a formidable enemy for ten thousand years, and have never fought each other."

Anna grinned. "At least, that means their enemies might not expect their plan, either?"

Radek was not impressed with that silver lining. He frowned at his monitor and shrugged. "I guess. But they get impatient and decide to throw away all our work so far. Fortunately, they didn't take the entire volume of retrovirus we'd created, so we have something to work with for a real test."

A real test. To be fair, transforming a single Wraith in an isolation room was not the same thing as transforming an entire hive of Wraiths. "What will they do if it doesn't work the way they want…?" Anna voiced her wonderings before really stopping to think about whether she should have.

The answer was probably, nothing good.

"We've been patting the snake with bare feet…" Radek sighed and gave his keyboard a few uncertain taps. Then he looked at her. "Thank you for visiting, darling."

"Have you eaten lunch?"

"Lunch?" He whipped his wristwatch from his sleeve. "You mean breakfast. What kind of crazy time zone are they running up there?"

Alright, so she hadn't slept in as much as she'd thought. "Breakfast, then."

"No."

She tapped his desk and started away. "Alright. Don't faint before I get back."

Atlantis didn't feel much different from when she'd left for the Daedalus… if anything, Anna thought it felt worse. As if the collective breath Atlantis had been holding hadn't been because there were Wraith in the city, after all. It made sense, because there were still Wraith out there who knew their location. And, if they were anything like other Wraith, they would turn on them the moment they had whatever it was they wanted from Atlantis.

She should ask Rodney what he thought.

Anna grabbed two sandwiches from the mess hall, along with a cup of coffee and package of mint tea—just in case Radek really was sick, and ran to the lab in the lower level where she'd heard Rodney was working with Hermiod. Something about reverse-engineering the Wraith hive shield frequencies from the way the access codes bypassed them…

Just as she leaned into the door, Rodney whirled on Hermiod. "My 'assistance'?" He was practically squeaking, like he always did when he felt disrespected. "Excuse me, but whose idea was this test in the first place—hi, Anna, you need something?"

She held out one of the sandwiches for him, which he took almost cautiously. "I was just thinking about the Wraith..."

"Uh-huh." Rodney unwrapped the sandwich, at first with what seemed to be a slow and steady curiosity, and then with more vigor, like a shark swimming toward the scent of blood. "You and everybody else. What about them?"

"I don't think we can trust them."

"We don't?" Rodney took a bite, and then looked up at her, smacking past a mouthful. "Was that it?"

"No… I mean, not really." She shrank back toward the doorway slightly, noticing for the first time Hermiod's enormous black eyes blinking sanguinely at her. "I mean, the Wraith know exactly where we are, and I don't think they're really going to keep that a secret once they have what they want. Do you?"

Rodney pondered that, over two bites of a sandwich, and then shrugged. "No. That's why we're working on figuring out what makes the Wraith shields tick."

"The plan, Miss Zelenková," Hermiod said, "is to be prepared to beam a nuclear warhead onto the hiveship when the betrayal occurs. However, because we do not—"

"She gets it—we don't trust that they gave us anything but dummy codes. What's your point, Anna?" Rodney looked at her, almost a glare, except it wasn't as irritated. He was interested, but he was also annoyed and in a hurry. Her offering of a sandwich probably assuaged some of his wrath, like a peevish god of physics that suffered mood swings from low blood sugar.

"So if they're probably going to betray us as soon as they get what they want… what do they want?"

Rodney and Hermiod exchanged a glance of mild interest. Hermiod was the first to offer his guess: "They do not the retrovirus."

Rodney rolled his eyes and turned on Hermiod. "Oh, really? Well, your assistance has been noted."

#

The past six hours of sleep had been, in a word, wonderful. The Wraith were out of orbit, he'd left Anna in the main room reading, and he ate a sandwich she'd given him. Then, even better, he listened to her suggestion he might work better if he could sleep until they heard from the Daedalus. There wasn't much else he could do in the meantime, anyway.

They hadn't heard from the Daedalus, yet, so he laid in bed and looked at the ceiling. It was pretty high up there—all the ceilings in Atlantis were between ten and fifteen feet above the floor.

He knew he was going to get a call any minute that the Daedalus was on its way back. Or, well, perhaps something else. Something worse. But it was about the Daedalus, and it would be any minute. He'd never had a premonition, and he didn't think he believed in them. Perhaps everyone who had them and everyone who did was sleep-deprived. He wasn't even sure if that made sense.

In any case, it was an explanation he would accept until he fell back asleep because the radio didn't buzz at him… and yet, something in him knew that there was no way he was sleeping anymore. The Daedalus would be back soon. Perhaps any second.

His radio buzzed, and Radek looked at it. He wasn't dreaming.

As soon as the radio was hooked in his ear, he managed, "Hm, yes?"

"Where are you?" Rodney was walking, and quickly. From the tone of voice and the rhythm of his breathing, he might have been running up some stairs. Probably to his lab. Which meant that Radek should probably at least put a shirt on. "Never mind," Rodney interrupted after Radek took too long. "If you're not in my lab, you should be."

"Yes, okay. The Daedalus is back." He did his best to make that not sound like a question, because, of course, it was back. And if Rodney wasn't already aware that Radek had been sleeping, then he certainly wasn't going to tell him.

"Right," Rodney said. "And—I mean, long story short, we have to figure out an effective delivery system."

As if they hadn't figured that out yesterday. "So we have to do everything."

Rodney chuckled, darkly, and out of breath. "You know, that's exactly what I said."

"You don't have to insult me like that."

Rodney paused, and Radek didn't know what to make of that lack of response. Either way, Rodney went on with his explanation while Radek went on with figuring out which of the holes in this shirt was the one intended for his head.

"But there is a silver lining to this—which is that the Wraith have sent us everything," Rodney said.

"Everything, hm?"

"Everything. I'm talking hiveship schematics complete with power distribution, life support configurations. Everything you wanted to know about Wraith technology, but were afraid to ask."

A distant Radek mused that he probably would have been much more excited about this if the message had come about five minutes and exactly one cup of coffee later. "How generous of them." Except, that premonition of sleep-deprivation was knocking again. "Why would they do that?"

"How are we supposed to figure out a good delivery system without it?" Rodney asked.

"Oh, sure."

Radek heard clicking on the other side of the line, like Rodney snapping his fingers. "No, no, no, you're right. Anna had a good point—we don't expect the Wraith to actually keep their end of the deal, right?"

Anna thought that? Well, smart girl. He knew it had to be something like that. "Hm."

Rodney took his mumbling as an affirmative. "Right, so they still don't have what they want from us… and they gave us everything. I mean, Radek, they gave us literally everything. Look at this. We have the locations of the pods where they keep, uh… you know, Humans for later consumption. We know how their hibernation pods work."

"I have a question, Rodney." Radek didn't know why he'd said that, because, in some ways, he was too afraid to ask. He went out into the main room. Anna looked up at him from her place on the couch. He acknowledged her with a small wave before continuing. "Why don't we just beam one of the warheads onto their hiveship? Right now?"

"What?"

"You know, beat them to it?"

"You know Elizabeth would never do that."

You never know, he wanted to say. She might. That would certainly solve a lot of problems, and he could go back to bed. As far as he was concerned, it was a win-win. "Okay, well, I'll be right there."

"Yeah, hurry."

"Is there some deadline I'm unaware of?"

Rodney paused, apparently flabbergasted at just how stupid Radek could be. "I don't know; I would like to get the Wraith out of here as quickly as possible. Wouldn't you?"

"They keep coming back."

Rodney gave an obvious groan, and the line went dead. With a half-smile born more of exhaustion than actual amusement, Radek turned to Anna.

She smiled back. "The Daedalus is back?"

"And we have a whole Wraith encyclopedia, apparently."

She considered that, nodding slowly as she got up from the couch. She tucked her tablet under her arm and came to stand beside him. "You still look awful."

"I will be fine."

"I'll get you coffee."

"Oh." Radek nodded, and opened the door for her to go out first. All things considered, her errand was certainly the more important. "Well, that's very generous of you."

Next time: Where do we start?