Chapter 9 – Surgery
"It's truly interesting," Sheppard murmured as he stopped the records of the security camera at a moment where the picture of a tall, blond man appeared on the screen. The young man had the uniform of a low-ranking soldier on, and he carried no weapon, just a baseball bat, swinging it in his left hand sloppily.
"Look at this guy," John told Rodney, who was about to eat a mango. The scientist got bored with watching the records, so he decided to bring his lunch from the canteen while John was occupied with examining the pictures, and now McKay was eating his dessert.
"Who is this soldier? I've never seen him before," Rodney shrugged, and rammed two slices of mango into his mouth.
"Me neither. The strange thing is that he appears three times in the corridor leading to the place where the Daedalus rests. This is the third occasion he goes through the passage. And all this happened in the morning Teyla disappeared. What was this guy doing there?"
"Maybe, he is the one who kidnapped her," Rodney said not particularly convinced, "But he doesn't look like a kidnapper."
"He doesn't look like one?" John echoed with a surprised smile. "What kind of people are the kidnappers?"
"Well, I mean, you know, someone would not expect a handsome, self-confident, young man to hurt a woman and abduct her from her room," McKay explained.
"What?" Sheppard snapped impatiently, astonishingly troubled. "He is not handsome in the least!"
"I think he looks okay," McKay said timidly, dumbfounded by John's reaction. "What's the matter with that?"
"You have an incredibly peculiar twist in taste, if you think this jerk looks nice," Sheppard kept on fuming.
"Why not?" Rodney became indignant as well. "He is as if he has just been at a model-casting. Okay, normally I don't even notice what a man looks like, but this one is strikingly handsome."
John's face turned pale, and he was obviously trying to form a fretful retort, but at that moment the door of the lab opened with a clack, and Doctor Weir arrived.
"Oh, nice, we need a woman here," McKay snapped his fingers, "to decide which one of us is right."
She raised her eyebrows.
"Look at this nerd," Sheppard pointed at the screen directly. "Do you think he is handsome?"
Weir sighed, "You should check the records about the visitors of the resting Daedalus, not the way the cadets look."
"Okay, okay, we are on the point of doing that, just answer the question," McKay joined John's inquiry.
"You spent the whole morning peering at young soldiers and discussing their looks?" Doctor Weir asked irritated.
"No, no, no, he is the one we were searching for. Incredibly suspicious," Sheppard explained. "He appeared at least three times in the zone of the security camera in the passage leading to the Daedalus in the morning Teyla was kidnapped... Do you find him handsome or not?"
She threw a quick, unemotional glance at the screen.
"He is definitely not my type," she said with a shrug. "So, can you two focus on serious matters now? What did you find about this guy? Who is he?"
"Wait, I'll enlarge the part of the picture where the sign on his uniform can be seen." John typed something at the keyboard, and then he moved the cursor to magnify the point where the name of the soldier was fastened to his jacket. "Corporal A. Ridge," he read the name out. "Who's that?"
"No idea," Elizabeth answered pondering over the question. "I'm sure I've never seen him before. Let's check him in the database."
They searched for the young, blond corporal in the database of the Atlantisian residents and even on the members' list of the crew of the Daedalus, but they found no sign of anyone with the name of A. Ridge.
"Who the hell is this Ridge?" Sheppard wondered.
"Keep on searching for his photo in the database," Weir ordered. "Maybe he used someone else's uniform, but if he has ever been a part of the Atlantisian residents, you'll find him sooner or later."
"That will be a nice job for you, Rodney," John marked mockingly. "I'll let you peacefully seek for Ridge, I'll join Elizabeth in watching the injured Wraith's operation."
McKay wanted to respond something, but John turned away, and he left the room quickly.
"What's up with him?" Rodney asked Elizabeth a bit startled.
"I have no idea. You should know it, you spent the last couple of hours with him," she said, and she followed Sheppard out.
Doctor Beckett took a bigger scalpel from the tray his assistant was holding by his side, and he cut a thoracic muscle through to make the star-shaped heart of the Wraith visible. He started to fix a vein which was torn from a greenish, sack-like organ when the part of the Dart pierced the body through. He had already removed the huge, sharp piece of metal from her chest, and he stabilized her circulation before he could begin examining the injuries on her inwards.
Doctor Weir and John Sheppard were standing in the next room, watching the procedure through a glass wall. They both kept their eyes on the surgical instrument as it was opening the wound of the Wraith even broader. Carson was pulling out an organ with bluish bubbles around its end from the sore to examine, when the door opened behind John and Elizabeth, and Colonel Caldwell stepped in.
Weir suppressed a dejected sigh. Whenever she came across Caldwell during the day, he asked her if she had changed her mind concerning the captured Wraith, if she was ready to order the elimination of the monster. She informed him coldly that she still held on to her former decision. An irritated answer like "Go to hell!" answer began to seem more suitable to her on each occasion he came up with his accusing and aggressive questions, but she managed to swallow it and to give a correct response instead, though it turned out to be more and more difficult for her to hold herself in. She found it awkward that he joined them in the wait for the result of the operation.
Caldwell stopped not far from the doorway, and he kept silent. Every time Elizabeth inquired about the Wraith's condition from Doctor Beckett on her radio head-set, the colonel threw a withering, disdainful glance at her. Doctor Weir started to feel awfully uncomfortable because of his look. The saving of the injured Wraith was a really risky choice, she had innumerable doubts about it, and Caldwell's rigid, insulting behavior confronted her with her own misgivings. She felt like sending him out of the room, and asking him not to come back in the next few days, but she knew that starting an even more serious conflict with him would not ease her bad feelings about the case.
Sheppard did not seem to notice Caldwell's disapproval, he talked about the ambushing Wraiths and their attack, he called up the details of the battle. He needed at least ten minutes to see from the cold, tense expressions on Weir's and Caldwell's faces that something was going on between the two of them. At first he looked at Elizabeth, and then he turned to Caldwell with a questioning glimpse, just to realize that none of them was listening to him in the least. They both seemed to mime two extraordinarily unfriendly statuettes of ice. John decided to go on with the meaningless talking about combats, for an awkward silence would surely not help the situation. Caldwell's expression grew only more somber with every word John said, but Elizabeth seemed to lose some of her tenseness as she started listening to him instead of her dark thoughts.
When Carson Beckett made the sutures and finally closed the greatest wound on the Wraith's chest, Sheppard remarked, "Wraiths restore their health incredibly fast, but this one will need a few days I guess. Those injuries seem to be pretty serious."
"I hope she will be alright," Elizabeth said.
John nodded slowly, "Yes, me too. She might have valuable information for us."
"It won't be easy to persuade her to cooperate with us," Weir answered.
Caldwell did not say a thing, he just stood there in the background and made a wry smile. Doctor Weir tried to pretend that he was not in the room, she walked to the glass-wall dividing the place from the ward of the Wraith. From this position, she could not even see him.
"If she wakes up, I'll tell her that her job here is to collaborate, and that she has no other choice. I hope she'll understand that her future depends on us," John said broodingly.
"I'm not sure," Elizabeth frowned, "that she will understand. I guess, in her place I would not be persuaded that quickly either. She will try to deceive us in any way she just can. We must be really careful. Anyhow, I hope that time will work for us, and we will find a way to convince her."
The door of the room opened, and Doctor Beckett stepped in, throwing his bloody, plastic pair of gloves into the dustbin.
"She'll live," he announced, and he sat down on a chair in front of his computer. He seemed tired and exhausted.
"Nice work, Carson," Weir told him encouragingly. "You did your best."
"Well, it's not my everyday job to operate a Wraith," he answered with a sigh, turning to the screen of his computer to make some notes about the surgery. "She doesn't even have her heart at the normal place where we human have, and she has some organs completely unknown by me, I have no idea what kind of functions they might share." He opened a file and started typing.
"I'm leaving now, if you don't need me here," John announced with a yawn.
"Do that," Weir nodded. "Have a rest. Tomorrow we'll need your help to get along with our guest, if she wakes up."
Sheppard went out of the room, wishing good night to everybody. Elizabeth turned back to the glass to look at the Wraith. Caldwell crossed his arms with a severe expression on his face, and he left as well without a word. Only the quickly typing Carson and Weir remained in the room.
"He hates me," she murmured in front of her. She kept her gaze on the injured Wraith.
"Who?" Doctor Beckett asked surprised. He looked up from his computer-work.
Weir gave no answer; she just stared through the glass at the motionless body of the Wraith.
"He hates me, and he despises me," she whispered.
"You mean Colonel Caldwell?" The doctor inquired, realizing who she meant. "I don't think that he hates or despises you."
"Yes, he does! He thinks I'm incapable of handling serious situations; he even called me naive and a fool. He thinks I'm weak, he reckons me as an inept loser, completely incompetent to manage a community. The only people he respects are the egoistic, conventional, high-ranking commanders from the military like him." Elizabeth bit her lower lip as if she had been in pain instead of the injured Wraith. In the background, Carson Beckett could not help smiling.
Doctor Weir went on, "It simply gets on his nerves that a woman like me can be in charge here. My whole personality annoys him and... and..." She fell silent.
"In my opinion, he respects you for what you do here to organize everything and to make the hardest decisions alone," Doctor Beckett told her reassuringly. "He fully understands your situation."
"No, he doesn't. He just makes things more difficult every time he appears. He mocks at me, he confronts me, he retorts, he fusses..." Weir pressed her forehead against the cold glass. "Oh, God, how can someone be so tiresome?"
Doctor Beckett interjected. "You see? It's not Caldwell who hates you, it's you who hate him."
Elizabeth gave no response for a minute; she just closed her eyes wearily, pressing her palms to the cool, transparent surface. When she answered, her voice was rueful. "I don't hate him. I just can't stand the way he despises me. Well, he is a decent man, I know, and he generally manages to hide his hatred against me, but when it comes to serious matters, he can't cover up his loathing anymore. He shows how much he disrespects my point of view, how much he disdains my decisions, my personality, everything about me."
Doctor Beckett shook his head with a reproving smile. "Ain't it the same thing that he supposes you to feel about him?" he asked.
"What?" Elizabeth turned to him astonished.
"That you hate him and despise him."
"No, he has no reason to think that," she protested. "It's not me who behave like an arrogant jerk every time we have a conflict."
"I don't think that he behaves like that," Carson said. "Don't you see that it's always he who gives in finally? That's because he respects your opinion, and..."
"Oh, that's not because he would respect me or my opinion!" Weir cut off in a bitter tone of voice. "He has simply no other choice. I'm in charge here, not he. The best thing for him would be if I died!" Elizabeth turned away from the doctor, and she rushed out of the room, not waiting for Beckett's reply.
He sighed, shaking his head, and then he turned back to his computer to go on with his notes about the injured Wraith's condition.