Stargate Genesis
Episode 5
"Messes and Messages"
Daniel Jackson walked slowly around the swirling mist that filled the center of the Holo Room. He watched silently as it coalesced into tiny spheres of red and yellow light that danced around one another in long winding tails. He ducked as one swung out over his head and launched a handful of spheres off from the main mass and into the abyss of blackness that hung like a curtain over the walls.
After lazily tracking the trajectory of these lost stars and scribbling something down on a notepad he turned back to behold a new shape emerging from the mist, though not the haloed spiral he had been expecting. This shape was darker, more defined, and dangerous. Its aura bucked even the suggestion of a halo created by the menagerie of twinkling lights, but Daniel's sleep deprived mind had conjured up a pair of stubby pink horns poking up through its midnight-black hair. This shape was the face of Vala Mal Doran.
"Whatchya doing?" it asked.
Daniel rubbed sleep from his eyes and tried to see through the perplexing refractions of starlight that were causing the illusion, but the sharp curves of his companion's horns were far too convincing. In any case he had been standing here in near darkness for hours and it was becoming difficult to make his eyes focus on any one thing.
"I'm plotting the evolution of the Pegasus Galaxy.," He said with a yawn, and pointed to a bright yellow ball hovering just over Vala's disembodied left ear. "I think this cluster of stars is about to become the anchor for a dwarf barred spiral."
"Excellent," said the head with mild interest. "How long do you suppose that'll take?"
"Oh I don't know," said Daniel tiredly. "Eight, maybe nine billion years? The tracking algorithms get a bit iffy after four and a half so I can't really be sure."
"Wonderful," Vala insisted happily. "What do you say we take a Jumper out and see how far along it's gotten?"
"Can't," said Daniel, yawning again. "I promised Dr. Warner a report on my findings."
"Daniel please," said Vala pouting. "I'm dying here. All anyone on this stupid island ever does is make reports on things and I'm sick of it. I want to go exploring. Make contact with strange alien races. Have, you know, adventures, and I certainly don't want to be cooped up in the ruins of a dead civilization any longer."
"Ruins?" asked Daniel, perking up a bit. "There are wonders of science, and art in Atlantis the likes of which most human beings can never hope to see. We owe it to them to document each and every one for the day when we might be so lucky as to leave something as spectacular as all this behind."
Vala had adopted the impassive half-lidded stare she wore when pretending to listen, and Daniel turned from her in frustration. He removed his glasses and blinked furiously to make them stop drooping. When he was satisfied that they would stay up without supervision he turned back, but he didn't put his glasses back on.
"You know if you gave it a chance-" he started, then stopped when he realized he was the only one in the room.
Exasperated and still very tired, he returned his attention to the task at hand. A wandering black hole had made off with several of the stars he had expected to settle near Pegasus' gravitational center and he had to lean in close to see which ones had been lost. For some reason the holographic projections floating around him had all gone slightly out of focus.
~~00~~
Vala stumbled up several steps of the Central Spire relying heavily on the handrails for support. Dr. Jackson's glasses were wreaking havoc on her eyesight. After a few concerned glances from passersby she took them off and stowed them in one of the many pockets lining her flight suit. Now taking the steps two at a time she quickly arrived at the infirmary and slinked quietly inside.
The beds were all empty but Carson Beckett was still there sitting at his desk in his lab coat and muttering what sounded like a patient profile to his laptop.
"Subject has exhibited marked improvement following the injection both in heart rate and blood pressure, however a noticeable increase in fluid intake may be at least partially– Oho! Hey now who is that?"
With his back to her, Vala had easily managed to sneak up on the unsuspecting doctor, and her breath on his ear startled him into.
"Oh, why'd you stop?" she asked disappointedly. "It sounded like you were just getting to the good part."
Carson let out a relieved sigh.
"It's only you then is it? Thank goodness for that. I thought you was Woolsey come to tell me off for wasting supplies."
"Are we wasting supplies?" asked Vala. "Oh I hope we're wasting some of that Athosian wine we got in last week. Take me somewhere romantic and I'd be happy to help. I bet I'd be good at it."
Carson chuckled and smiled genuinely at her.
"I'm afraid I'll have to take a rain check on that love. As you can see I have a patient here in need of my attention."
As he spoke he lifted something from the floor beside his desk, a wire cage covered over by a sheet which he removed. Vala looked down and saw a tiny white rabbit nestled in the folds of a sweater from Carson's alma mater.
"Poor little guy's been so dehydrated I've had to bottle feed him the last few days," said Carson.
Vala raised an eyebrow.
"A rabbit?" she asked.
"Yes," said Carson happily, and he put a finger through the bars of the cage to scratch its nose.
"And will you… eat him once he's gotten better?" she asked.
"Heavens no!" said Carson, pulling his finger back in shock. "This is some poor boy's pet. The Major brought him back from the settlement on the mainland."
Carson turned away from Vala to resume his gentle petting.
"Plus I've gotten rather attached to him me self," he said chuckling.
When he turned back Vala was gone.
"Now where do you suppose she's gotten too?" he asked, turning back to the rabbit, but it was gone as well.
~~00~~
Richard Woolsey sat in a bench on the balcony outside of Stargate Operations. The most recent supply shipment from Stargate Command had included a week old edition of The Morning Herald, a newspaper that primarily covered local stories in and around his hometown. He was reading it, front to back, not because anything in it could possibly be relevant to him or anyone else on Atlantis, but because he was a man who thought newspapers ought to be read front to back and as frequently as possible.
Unfortunately the previous Thursday had been something of a light news day, and the section he was on had been filled out with community profiles and cereal bar recipes. He skimmed the instructions for making "Blasted Bran Bars" then brought the ends of the paper together to turn the page. As he did so he became aware that someone had sat down next to him and was quietly stroking a small white rabbit while staring pensively at the ocean.
"Can I help you?" he asked.
Vala gave him an unhappy look, "You could tell me when the Wraith will be getting here."
Woolsey looked surprised.
"Well we're always looking for them off world, but the hope is that they never show up here," he said. "If you're worried-"
Vala groaned, "You know all I ever heard about Atlantis was what a dangerous and exciting place it was. How you people were living on the frontier of human exploration, facing off against the Wraith in mortal combat, and freeing the galaxy from their oppression, but I've been here almost a month and they've only attacked once, and to make matters worse gate-travel is still off limits while Zalenka tries to figure out which gate in the bridge they managed to compromise. To put it simply Mr. Woolsey, I am achingly soul-crushingly bored."
The rabbit gave out a little squeak as Vala's grip on it grew uncomfortably tight.
"Sorry," she muttered and quickly loosened it again.
The slight furrow that never seemed to leave Woolsey's forehead deepened as he considered Vala's plight.
"Let's take this into my office," he said, and strode back inside.
Vala followed him but was stopped just inside the door by Major Miles Romanoff who had recognized the rabbit she was carrying. She held it out to him and he took it from her happily while smiling and making odd cooing noises. Then he coughed and seemed to remember where he was.
"Ahem… Thank you Miss Mal Doran," he said. "I'll be sure to see it returned to its proper owner."
Vala thanked him and asked that while he was at it he return a pair of glasses she had found to the Holo Room. She had some suspicion that he'd arrive to find Daniel Jackson crawling around on the floor looking for them.
Moments later she walked in on Commander Woolsey wiping the dust off a portable camera and detachable microphone set he had pulled from his office closet. He handed them to her and she took them without comment but was unsure of their meaning.
"It's been suggested…" he said, continuing to rummage through his closet. "That we begin sending periodic video messages through the Stargate to keep the family members of our team apprised of their health and well being," he said. "Apparently it was something Dr. Weir did at one point during her tenure here, and it ended up being quite the morale booster when the city needed it most. Ah there it is."
Woolsey extricated a long black tripod from a bag of golf clubs and turned it over in his hands.
"Unfortunately the videographer who handled the job back then has since been declared Missing in Action," he said. "Aiden Ford, he was a Lieutenant under Sheppard's command." He sighed. "The colonel would have my tongue out for saying so but he's also… well we think he's probably dead."
He handed her the tripod. As was her custom when people weren't talking about her, Vala had stopped listening and was examining the camera with interest. The word videographer had stuck in her mind.
"So you want me to be like, a reporter," she said. "Conducting interviews and uncovering the seedy underbelly of Atlantis."
"Um… No. Wait… What?" Woolsey babbled, but Vala was already out the door and walking too fast for him to catch up without causing a scene. She hadn't even bothered to take the fresh data drive he was still holding out to her.
~~00~~
On the periphery of his vision Rodney McKay was aware of Vala rushing by clutching something excitedly to her chest, but the bulk of his considerable intellect was focused on the simulation program in front of him while his fingers busily punched in parameters for an experiment. Onscreen a stream of text flowed by faster than it could conceivably be read, but for all the data, little of any use was forthcoming.
Rodney put his head in his hands and allowed himself a few moments to feel miserable.
"How's it coming?" asked Woolsey.
Rodney sighed and adjusted the monitor on his laptop.
"Not great," he said. "I can't be sure the cloak the Wraith had was Vanir tech, but it definitely wasn't Lantean."
"Oh?" said Woolsey.
"Yeah, the two systems work on entirely different principles," he said. "Our cloak just prevents the normal signatures we give off from being projected out into space, so light, heat, radio waves, anything that could give us away just gets reflected back down on top of us. The device the Wraith had takes a much more active approach. It fractures and disperses those signals over about 100,000 miles of space so by the time we pick them up they just look like a sort of mild spike in background radiation."
"Enough that we could pick it up?"'
"Sure. In fact we did we just didn't recognize what it was. The computer probably assumed it was a solar flare and next time it could be. I was up all night trying to find a way to spot the difference because if I set the alarms to sound every time a gust of solar wind hits the planet none of us are going to get any sleep for the foreseeable future."
"And what did you come up with?"
"Exactly nothing," said McKay resignedly. "And even if I had found something it's not like it would have done us any good. Knowing that there's a cloaked ship somewhere within 100,000 miles isn't exactly the same as knowing where it is."
With uncharacteristic familiarity Woolsey patted Rodney consolingly on the shoulder.
"One problem at a time Dr. Mckay."
~~00~~
The camera was complicated enough that Vala could not immediately determine what all of its buttons were for. The power button at least, a large red plunger where she felt her thumb should naturally rest, was obvious. She squeezed it down then slid a fingernail into a crease just beside it and swung open a small viewing screen that, for the moment, showed nothing but the inside of the camera's lens cap. Unaware of the need to remove said lens cap, Vala continued pressing buttons until she found a green one that momentarily filled the screen with fuzzy white light.
As she watched it the light faded and a squatting figure in gray fatigues and black armored vest appeared onscreen. A black bandana was pulled down to his eyebrows but it was clear that he had suffered some kind of wound to his left eye which was similarly black and slightly sunken looking. Slung across his back Vala could see the distinctive stubby nose of a P90 sub-machine gun, and holstered to his hip was a Colt M1911A1 pistol. She noted that both weapons were traditionally used by SG teams, marine combat units in particular.
The figure wiped his nose on his sleeve and tried to look stern look then laughed unsettlingly and said, "Surprise! I bet you never expected to see me again huh? Dang… I'll tell ya it wasn't easy getting out of that hive with all my pieces still attached, but uh… Well I made it didn't I?" The figure gave the camera a manic smile before turning serious again. "Listen, I guess I don't actually know who I'm talking to. I hope it's Sheppard, but I guess it's possible he didn't make it… Anyway if that's the case then this message is for whoever's still on Atlantis."
The figure stood up and the angle of the image changed. Behind him Vala could now see miles of waving sand dunes stretching out to the horizon. Sitting atop one of them was a Stargate, and a little further back a Wraith Cruiser lay against another at a steep angle. It didn't look damaged, and Vala guessed that it had simply been inexpertly parked.
"Right now I'm on P3X-3478, but don't get too excited because by the time anyone hears this message I'll be long gone." The figure gestures to the cruiser behind him. "I just need to grab a few things from Atlantis before I go, and I'm dropping something off too…"
~~00~~
Vala sprinted the last few meters of the South-East Corridor without acknowledging the refugees and bleary eyed crew members who had popped their heads out as she rushed passed. Finally she had somewhere to be, something to do, something to find.
As she neared the end of the line the double doors leading to the South-East Pier began to part automatically, but they were too slow for Vala who had to turn sideways to squeeze through. On the other side she stumbled and her pace slowed to a crawl. She eyed the weapons platform ahead of her wearily. In her mind's eye she saw its aperture slamming open and hundreds of angry drones screaming out of it. In battle, the vicious intensity with which they sought out their targets for destruction might lead one to believe they were living things with a mind all their own. Vala wondered if she was supposed to be here. Weapons platforms were strictly off-limits to civilians, but the door had opened for her so she must have clearance. She hoped the drones knew that.
On the short stretch of metal before her the elements had deposited a fine layer of silt and sand. Vala knelt down and gathered up a small handful before throwing it out ahead of her to drift back down in a hazy cloud. Most of it did not reach the ground. Most of it reached a point about two meters above the ground and disappeared. Vala reached out a hand toward the nothingness that had swallowed it.
It was cold, like metal. Several degrees colder than the nothing that surrounded it, Vala shivered. She felt rather than saw the granules of dust shifting and sliding over the solid object beneath them. She ran her hand back along the invisible object following the gentle curves and dips of its veined exterior until she found a shallow crevasse just deep enough to grip with the tips of her fingers. She tugged at it and suddenly a very opaque canopy of an equally opaque Wraith Dart dissolved to reveal a cockpit clearly modified for a human pilot.
~~00~~
In the control room Rodney was becoming increasingly frustrated. He had hoped that tapping into the discriminatory power of the city's long range sensors would be the key to nullifying the Wraith cloaking device, but all it had done was create dozens of 100,000 mile wide ghosts all of which had so far turned out to be in the radiation shadows of nebulas or pulsars. He was starting to wonder if any of them were really cloaked Wraith ships, when an alarm connected to the city's internal sensors began to sound. After a moment of confusion, Rodney pulled up a video feed of the South-East weapons platform and saw the Wraith Dart parked just a few meters in front of it. He felt himself pale slightly as he wondered what kind of nuclear armament a single dart might be capable of carrying.
"Dr. McKay what's happening?" asked Woolsey over the noise of the alarm. "Has your program detected a cloaked ship?"
"No," he replied. "The city sensors must have picked it up right after it de-cloaked. It looks like a dart's managed to find its way onto the South-East Pier."
"Shields up," he said then picked up a headset and spoke hurriedly into it, "Who's in the Chair Room?"
"That would be me," came the voice of Major Romanoff.
"I want drones on standby. Jumper teams two, three, and five prepare to provide aerial support. Teyla, I want nonessential personnel in their rooms and a team to intercept any Wraith that may be trying to access the city via the South-East Pier."
He turned back to Rodney while the gears of war began to turn and Atlantis prepared to defend itself. Over his shoulder he watched as the dart rose up off the ground and prepared to fly.
~~00~~
Vala Mal Doran had once made a living of flying space ships that didn't belong to her and one of the real thrills of life on the run had been outwitting and out maneuvering pursuers. Now that experience was serving her well as she careened around the spires of Atlantis at speed with no less than three drones tailing her at all times.
She could outrun them she knew, but the city's shields were forcing her to double back and gave them all the time they needed to close the distance. Below her the West Pier was coming to an abrupt end and she dipped into a curving dive to bring the dart back around. The drones altered trajectory without slowing and shaved a hundred meters off her lead. Vala resisted the urge to panic. They were at least marginally controlled by whoever was sitting in the Chair Room, so they would be cautious about blasting away at her over the inhabited zones. If she could get back to the South-East Pier she could drop in low and they might back off long enough for her to escape.
Unfortunately marines were already pouring out of the towers and peppering her with small arms fire while machine guns were mounted and loaded. She could feel them trying to route her toward the relatively empty Northern edge of the city and tried to resist, but damage warnings were flying across her screen and she had no choice but to veer off. The Drones drew to within fifty meters.
Vala searched in vain for an escape route. The city's shimmering blue shields may as well have been made of concrete, and unlike the F-302s she had flown on Earth this dart had no ejection system. The pilot, it seemed, was expected to go down with the ship, preferably taking some other ship along for the ride.
The water at the end of the North Pier was coming up fast. She could swing sharply around the last tower and minimize the distance the drones would gain on her, but that would send her careening back into a maelstrom with hostiles surrounding her on all sides. She scanned the command menu for an alternative. There was one thing she hadn't tried yet.
She hit the air brake and spun the dart around a full one hundred and eighty degrees. The drones spiraled around each other and aimed to fly directly up her nose. She jammed the throttle down hard to close the distance at speed. Just before impact she swung the dart into a climb, and when the drones did the same she set the ship's culling beam for as wide a pass as it could manage and swallowed them whole.
On the balcony of the Control Room Ronon Dex took careful aim at the dart's exposed underbelly and let go with a single burst from his particle magnum that burned a baseball sized hole in its skin at 150 meters. The shot sent power surges racing through the ship's wiring. A volley of energy weapons fire racked the sky and the dart plunged back around toward the water as its navigation and weapons systems responded to commands the ship's pilot had not sent. Vala was thrown sideways by the sudden jerking motion and her elbow slammed forward a heretofore unseen lever. The dart vanished.
~~00~~
Reports of clean sweeps were coming in through Woolsey's ear piece, but it wasn't making him feel any less anxious. There was at least one dart now unaccounted for and presumably one Wraith as well.
"I know I hit it," said Ronon. "Maybe it flew off."
"No it's still here," said Rodney. "I seriously doubt it made it passed the shields, and I'm still picking up elevated radiation levels around the city."
"We can't fight them blind," said Woolsey. "There has to be a way for us to know where they are."
Rodney rolled his eyes, "maybe if we asked nicely they'd show us."
As if on cue the elusive dart materialized a few meters above the balcony of the central spire with its nose aimed directly at Rodney's head. The canopy of the cockpit dematerialized and Vala Mal Doran stood up before quickly ducking back down to avoid the stream of red plasma unleashed by Ronon before he saw who it was.
"You know I'm starting to get the feeling that you people enjoy shooting at me," said Vala getting back up.
The others stared at her incredulous. Woolsey spoke first.
"Please tell me, that you captured that dart after it went down somewhere in the city, and that some of the finest minds I've had the privilege of working with haven't spent the last ten minutes firing live rounds at one of their own."
Vala gave an awkward shrug and had to steady herself on the control panel as the dart shifted beneath her. Her fingers graced the screen as she did, and a beam shot out from underneath her depositing three deactivated drones on the balcony.
Woolsey hung his head and walked back inside, trailed by the rest of his solemn team.
"Um," said Vala uncertainly. "Can someone help me down from here?"
Written by Andrew Marron
Story by Andrew Marron and Caleb Palmquist
Also available at stargategenesis/dot/com