Disclaimer: I don't own 'Stargate Atlantis' or any related concepts or characters; you know the drill by now. Also, the basic details of the plot were inspired by 'The Phantom of the Opera', although I have naturally put my own spin on things; hope it meets with your approval
Feedback: Always appreciated, trust me
AN: OK, with us moving into the "Siege" storyline, I would just like to make one detail clear; 'Bob the Wraith' is NOT on Atlantis at this point, thus leaving Teyla completely unaware of her Wraith DNA and therefore ignorant of her ability to tap into the Wraiths' psychic network
The Phantom of Atlantis
Over the course of the next week, as the hive-ships advanced ever closer towards Atlantis, Elizabeth found herself facing all kinds of decisions as her staff made further discoveries about the city's potential defences. Sumner made sure that every available qualified pilot received the necessary practise to effectively pilot the puddle jumpers in the event of a combat situation- in an aerial assault mobile weaponry couldn't fail to be useful, and it had already been determined that it only took one drone to take out the Wraith darts-, Teyla and the Athosians did what they could to prepare for close-quarter combat in the event the Wraith managed to gain access to the city, and McKay and his science team went over everything they could find in the Ancient database seeking further information about possible defences the city had beyond the drones and the shield.
Ironically, it was at moments like this that Elizabeth realised how fundamentally little she had to do on a day without 'gate travel. While she was still in charge of looking over reports from the various staff members regarding what they'd discovered and whether it could be used against the Wraith when they arrived in Atlantis, in the end that was the extent of her involvement in the city's defences at this time. With no way of knowing if the Wraith would send further Darts to try and 'soften them up' like they had sent that first Dart earlier, Sumner had cancelled all offworld travels for the moment- particularly since their efforts to locate a potential Alpha Site were now unnecessary due to the ability to return to Earth having been restored to them-, distributing his men across various areas of the city to better coordinate an effective defensive stance against the Wraith, leaving Elizabeth with no real role other than to approve Sumner's transference of various personnel to certain areas, as well as other such matters as arranging for the city civilians to receive the maximum amount of training in the use of the available weapons in case the Wraith actually managed to get troops inside Atlantis.
All in all, apart from granting approval for various scientific and military matters that she only had a basic understanding of to begin with, the only other activity Elizabeth presently had to occupy her time was something she would never have admitted to anyone else; waiting for John to try and make contact.
She knew that it was essentially pathetic- here she was, a grown woman, and she was waiting for a guy to call her like some schoolgirl who'd just had a date with the star quarterback-, but it wasn't just personal reasons that kept her waiting (Even if a part of her mind kept on taunting her with the knowledge that they did play a big part in what she'd done); if the Wraith did attack, John was far and away the most experienced user of Ancient technology they had available to them. If he could just be persuaded to help them in a more public manner than he'd been helping them up to this point- maybe even helping Sumner coordinate the defences; Elizabeth had little doubt that John wouldn't be that interested in taking orders after so long alone, but he might be willing to consider a partnership of sorts-, his aid could make all the difference…
However, by the sixth day since they'd made contact with the SGC, John still hadn't come to talk to her- whether because he had nothing to say or because he was waiting for the right moment, Elizabeth didn't know-, with the hive-ships now only about two days away from Atlantis, that McKay finally revealed what he and his team had been looking into since she and Sumner had initially given the scientists their various tasks.
"The defence satellite?" Elizabeth repeated, looking sceptically at McKay after the Canadian scientist had explained his latest proposed solution to her. "It took you this long to think of that?"
"Well, it would have been quicker, but Doctor Gaul insisted on checking everything over before we came to you; he wanted to be sure we didn't forget anything we'd picked up in our surveys that might have altered our plans," McKay said, waving a hand dismissively before he continued his speech. "Anyway, the point is, based on what research we've been able to do- what with the obvious distraction of having to investigate that crashed Wraith ship and Sumner preferring to figure out what we've got access to here rather than there-, we're pretty certain that the only thing actually wrong with it is a lack of power; a single naquadah generator should be enough to get everything working in time to start firing at the Wraith when they pass by the satellite."
"And you're sure they'll go along this route?" Elizabeth asked, looking pointedly at McKay. "I admit astrophysics isn't my strong point, but there's a lot of special routes out there for the Wraith to approach Atlantis by; why would they deliberately go past an Ancient weapons platform, even a supposedly obsolete one, when there are so many other ways they could reach us?"
"Well, in a nutshell, the satellite's located at one of many points around this solar system where gravitational forces come together to create relatively stationary points for the Wraith to travel along; I'd go into more detail, but that would require giving you more background information about astrophysics than we can realistically be expected to cover right now," McKay said, waving a hand slightly dismissively before he continued. "The point is, the Wraith will pass by this satellite, and we're confident that we've learned enough about how it works to bring it back."
"And, in your opinion, all that's wrong with it is that it's out of power?" Elizabeth asked.
"Precisely," Doctor Gaul confirmed, nodding at her as he took up the explanation. "While the generators aren't enough to operate Atlantis's weapons systems without what power we have left in our current ZPM, the satellite requires far less power to operate successfully given its relative simplicity; after all, the Ancients' only real disadvantage in the last Wraith war was sheer weight of numbers rather than any kind of technological advantage…"
Elizabeth raised a hand to cut Doctor Gaul off before he started going into any further detail; while she appreciated enthusiasm, right now they really didn't have the time to indulge him.
"All right," she said, looking between the two scientists. "What do you need?"
"The satellite's fifteen hours away by gateship," McKay replied. "I recommend a small crew; the two of us plus a pilot."
"I'm fairly sure I can convince Colonel Sumner to lend you Miller for this; will that do?" Elizabeth asked.
"That should be fine," McKay confirmed. "Just so long as we get going soon; the hive ships will be in range of the satellite in forty-nine hours, and we're gonna need every last second of that time to get it back up and running."
"Understood," Elizabeth said, nodding at the two men before her. "Get to work."
With that, the two scientists stood up and walked out of the room, leaving Elizabeth looking after them with a slight smile.
It wasn't much of a shift in their favour, of course, but right now she'd take any advantage she could get.
And speaking of advantages…
She paused slightly as a thought occurred to her.
She'd spent so much time waiting for John to contact her…
But what if she set up a situation to make it easier for him to do so? After all, she hadn't been out of her office for the last couple of days except to go back to her quarters to sleep… maybe if she headed out to her balcony…
It might appear arrogant to assume that he was watching her at the moment, but Elizabeth simply considered it practical; given John's evident desire to protect Atlantis, it only made sense that he was currently hiding somewhere where he could monitor any plans that the expedition might be coming up with to protect the city, which meant that he was almost certainly currently somewhere where he could keep an eye on her office and the conference room to allow him to listen in on the plans and subsequently contact her in case he had any further information to add to them.
He might not have anything he felt he needed to say to her right now, but that didn't mean she wouldn't appreciate a quick word with him to make sure there wasn't something else they could be doing.
(OK, so she also wanted to see him just for the sake of seeing him; after the effort she'd put into her work so far she felt as though she deserved to have some time off).
Her mind made up, sighing slightly in frustration to add to the impression she now sought to create for anyone else watching her, Elizabeth stood up from her desk and walked out of her office, heading for the balcony after a quick, brief conversation with Chuck to make sure he knew where she'd be in case something urgent came up (As well as giving him instructions to knock if her presence was required, her excuse being that she preferred to be alone right now without any thoughts of potential distractions).
As soon as she'd stepped out onto the balcony that was rapidly becoming her 'private' area in the city, she walked over to the edge, staring silently out at the moonlit ocean before her, before she spoke once again.
"Do you do the sneaking thing because you're used to it, or because you just like to try and surprise me?" she asked, a slight smile on her lips as she heard a low curse being muttered by somebody behind her.
"How did you know?" the now-familiar voice of John Sheppard asked, clearly stunned that she'd detected his presence.
"I didn't," Elizabeth replied, unable to stop herself smiling slightly as she turned around to look at him. "You're just starting to become predictable; if I'm out here and there's some reason you need to talk to me, you'll be here soon enough."
For a moment, John simply stared silently at her, before he chuckled slightly and walked out of the corner to stand alongside her.
"You're good," he said simply.
"I had to know how people would act in my line of work," Elizabeth said simply, before she shook off the smile and looked at John with a more serious expression. "Anyway, I take it you can guess that I want to talk to you?"
"A committed workaholic like yourself coming outside for some fresh air with Wraith hive-ships only around two days away from Atlantis?" John replied, a slight smile on his face under his mask. "The odds weren't exactly in favour of you coming outside for the goodness of your own health; you had to have another objective, really."
"And the reason you never bothered to contact me earlier…?" Elizabeth asked, looking back at him with an expression that combined an inquiry with a slightly teasing smile to reassure him that she didn't mind about the lack of contact.
"Well," John said, looking slightly awkwardly at her, "given that the Wraith are on their way, I've already decided to make contact with Sumner when they get close enough to be an issue; it's just that…"
"At the moment you can't be certain he won't just throw you in the cells the second you're standing in front of him, so you're waiting until he has to accept your help to talk to him?" Elizabeth finished, nodding in understanding at John. His motives might seem selfish- he was trading away potential opportunities to give Colonel Sumner advice about how to secure the city in favour of maintaining his own freedom-, but Elizabeth knew enough about him and Sumner to recognise that he was only doing what he felt he had to do. Given Sumner's repeatedly-stated dislike of John's independence, he'd most likely throw John in a cell as soon as he had the chance, thus restricting the value of the assistance John could provide them with- even the most detailed information wouldn't compare to actually being in the field and thus being able to explain what to do 'on-site', as it were-, but if he waited until the Wraith were nearly on them then Sumner wouldn't have much choice but to let John help them in a more active role.
"Taking part in this fight is really important to you, isn't it?" she said, looking thoughtfully at him.
"There's no question about me taking part in this; recent events just make it more important," John replied, his tone solemn as he looked back at her.
"Recent… you mean the fact that we've been able to dial Earth again?" Elizabeth repeated, looking at him in confusion. "But wouldn't that make it easier-?"
"You think the Wraith won't be interested in the possibilities opened up by regular access to the Milky Way galaxy?" John interjected, looking back at her with a solemn expression on his face.
Elizabeth's blood practically froze at the implications of that last comment.
She couldn't believe it; after all the time they'd spent trying to dial Earth from this end, it had never really occurred to them- beyond the obvious passing thought in the beginning when seeking an explanation for that 'quirk' of the program that controlled the gate shield; after a while they'd just focused on dealing with it rather than worrying about why it was there- that the shield hadn't been set up to keep them out of the Milky Way galaxy, but to keep the Wraith out.
Hell, John had told her that he'd set the shield up to stop the Wraith from getting to Earth, and she'd still not realised what he was saying; she was so focused on them being able to get back to Earth that she'd forgotten that they weren't the only race in the Pegasus Galaxy with an interest in that particular goal!
"But… but how?" she asked, looking in shock and confusion at John, only realising after she'd spoken that the question didn't make immediate sense; how would John know what she was asking him?
"The Wraith captured Captain… Gemmel, wasn't it?… when Sumner's team first went to Athos; from what Sumner said in his report, they were already beginning to torture the poor guy when Sumner arrived there and had to kill him," John explained, his expression grim as he looked at her, clearly having guessed what she meant by her last statement even before she could figure out a more appropriate way to phrase it. "The guy would have fought, I'm not denying that, but no matter how much he'd have guarded specific details about where he came from, the Wraith interrogating him would have picked up the basics at least; we are talking about a race with telepathic abilities, after all…"
He paused for a moment, staring at Elizabeth to make sure she understood what he was saying, before she finally finished what he'd told her.
"They know about Earth…" she said, her voice low as the horrific implications of that statement sunk in.
"Along with the fact that Atlantis is the only way to get there… and from Earth, pretty much every other planet in the Milky Way galaxy," John said grimly. "A whole fresh supply of food for the Wraith, of potentially limitless scale and growth, never having been a victim of a culling before…"
He stared pointedly at Elizabeth as he continued to speak, the grim expression on his face making the severity of what he had to say clear.
If Atlantis fell into the Wraiths' hands, everything was lost.
"I'll… I'll make sure we keep that in mind," Elizabeth said, wishing she could sound as assertive as she felt; the sheer scale of the responsibility she'd just found herself with wasn't exactly what she'd been expecting to deal with when she came here.
She was committed to doing what she could to protect the people of this galaxy from the Wraith, but that was mainly as more of a concept; they'd encountered so few people from this galaxy so far that there hadn't really been the opportunity to… connect with everyone here, really.
The Milky Way galaxy… for all that she'd only read about the civilisations the SGC had encountered in the reports she'd read during her brief period as head of Stargate Command… was more personal- more real to her, almost- than those here; she had her home there, Earth had allies there…
She couldn't allow it to fall to the Wraith.
She wouldn't.
"We'll do everything we can, John," she said once again, nodding briefly at him before her expression changed to a more inquiring, slightly hopeful one. "On the topic of doing what we can, I don't suppose you could provide us with any further information about the satellite…?"
"Nothing beyond what the database can give you or what McKay just told you himself," John replied, shaking his head as he looked apologetically at her (Elizabeth knew that she should be more disturbed at the idea that he'd been watching that particular meeting, but by this point a little thing like that barely mattered to her; it just proved that she was right in thinking that he'd keep an eye on them until they needed him). "Given that I kept Atlantis at the bottom of the ocean ever since I first arrived in this galaxy, the odds of any Wraith weapons being able to affect the city at that depth were sufficiently low for me to feel comfortable relying on the natural defence of the ocean and my apparent absence rather than trying to repair the thing myself."
"Besides," he added, shrugging slightly apologetically, "I couldn't have actually done anything about it even if I'd wanted to."
"Really?" Elizabeth asked, looking at him with only a slight trace of anxiety about her expression at the implications of that last statement; he had said he didn't know anything they didn't know, but maybe they just hadn't reached something that he'd read himself yet. "Why not?"
"Well, given that the thing doesn't have any power- and hence has no life support or any means of activating the docking procedure-, I simply couldn't figure out a way to get into it to actually do anything," John said, shrugging in an almost nonchalant manner. "I could have extended the jumper's forcefield in order to create a basic 'tunnel' between the jumper and the satellite entrance to allow me to access it, but I still wouldn't have been able to do anything once I got there. The jumper's oxygen supply might have provided me with some kind of atmosphere, but it wouldn't be enough for me to actually carry out the kind of examination I'd need to figure out a way to get power on in the satellite itself, and assuming there'd been exterior damage I would have moving back and forth all the time…"
He shook his head dismissively. "It just seemed like too much effort to go into when planning for a situation that wouldn't actually cause me any trouble; the Wraith weren't going to do anything to the satellite so long as they thought it was useless, Atlantis would be safe enough so long as I kept it at the bottom of the ocean, and I knew that people would be here who could-"
He stopped speaking mid-sentence, a look of shock on his face as though he'd only just realised what he was saying, but it was too late.
"You knew that people would be coming here?" Elizabeth said, looking pointedly at him with an expressing that looked like she was trying hard to conceal a (admittedly justified, in John's opinion; he just hadn't felt comfortable bringing it up while he was still being hunted by Sumner's men) sense of betrayal. "How could you have-?"
"Look, that is a really long story, and I can't really tell you everything about it right now without you thinking that I'm insane," John said, his voice lowering slightly as he leaned in closer to look urgently at Elizabeth, placing his hands on his shoulders as he did so. "I'll tell you everything when I can; right now, all I can tell you is that I found something the Ancients left behind in preparation for someone coming to take up residence in the city when I first got here and tried to set up a home here with that in mind. It didn't give me anything beyond basic details about how to run this place- basically all the stuff you would have already learned back on Earth before you even came here in the first place- but I just got a few long-term tips about what to do keep things together until someone more professional came along…"
As his voice trailed off, his eyes fixed almost directly onto Elizabeth's, for a few moments he allowed himself to simply stare back at her, praying that she'd understand what he meant without asking for further details; he just wasn't ready to tell her about… her…
Finally, Elizabeth broke the seemingly tortured silence with a short, small smile.
"All right," she said, nodding briefly at him. "If you say you can't tell me everything now… so long as you've told me everything we need to know right now… I'll accept that."
"Really?" John said, allowing a smile of his own to reach his face.
"You've already saved this city at least three times; I think you've earned that much," Elizabeth said, before her expression became more serious as she looked at him. "Just so long as you are going to help us if those hive-ships get here… I can accept a few little secrets…"
"Just don't make obvious I have them or that you're hiding that I have them, right?" John finished, smiling at her. "Don't worry about it; the second the reinforcements show up from Earth, I'll be dropping in to talk with Colonel Sumner and whoever else the SGC send to coordinate Atlantis's defences."
"Good," Elizabeth said, nodding back at him before she indicated the door behind them. "Well, I'd better get back to work; if nothing else, I need to give myself a little time before I mention my latest 'revelation' to Sumner…"
"Regarding what the Wraith want, huh?" John said, nodding in understanding.
"Of course," Elizabeth said, nodding back at him before she stepped back from the balcony, momentarily uncertain what she should say before she just decided to say it. "Well… see you later?"
"Count on it," John replied.
With that said, he turned around, placed one hand on the balcony, and swung himself over the side before releasing his grip, dropping down and out of sight even as Elizabeth looked at him, his black cloak the last thing she saw of him before he vanished from her vision.
If he had been any other man, Elizabeth would have hurried over to the balcony to see where he was going to hit the ground.
But it was John…
And somehow, for reasons even Elizabeth wasn't sure about, she knew that she could trust him to still be alive even after doing something like that.
Maybe it was a crazy action on her part, but…
She trusted him.
She had no real idea why at times- she knew so little about him when you got down to it, really- but she believed in him.
She just hoped that her faith in him wouldn't prove to be misplaced when the Wraith reached them…
