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Last time: We were keeping some Wraith house guests since Chapter 133, but they left last chapter on a mission of dubious intelligence. Depends on who you ask.

Chapter 138. The Letter S.

Anna could have a small part to play. A very small part. But it was the small things that seemed like big things at times like these. Small things like a silent room on the Daedalus and a good night's sleep. She wished Radek could have gone up there for a few nights just to catch up on a little bit of sleep. He was too stressed for that, though.

Anna wrapped her hands around the warm mug of black coffee and watched Sheppard stand over his tray of coffee with three mugs. He pointed to each one, nodded to himself, and then loaded up on packages of cream and sugar.

Anna approached carefully. "Think you have enough coffee?" she joked.

Sheppard glanced at her, grinning. "Probably not. It's for the team working on the new Wraith info we just got." He shrugged as he counted out a few artificial sweeteners. Kusanagi was a Sweet n' Low adherent—she swore it tasted different from sugar and all the other substitutes. "You know, they're working hard. I figured I can help out a bit."

"That's nice of you." Anna doubted that would ultimately be enough coffee. It was a good start.

"Yep…" Sheppard paused and then pointed at each of the cups again. "Vogel, Hewitt, Heyerdahl, and me. Good." He nodded to himself, picked up the tray, and turned to Anna. He paused when he saw Anna's face.

Anna glanced down at the mug in her hands. "Never mind."

Sheppard rolled his head back momentarily, growling, "Damn—I mean…" He looked at Anna with a small, sheepish grin. "I mean, I knew you would bring him coffee." He studied the mug in her hands for a few seconds. "That is for Radek, right?"

Anna spun toward the door, smirking. "I can't believe you forgot him."

"I did not forget him—okay, I forgot him." He hurried to catch up, though his steps were a little stilted as he tried not to spill. She slowed to let him walk beside him without having to exercise his balance as a server so much. "Don't tell him."

Anna laughed a little. "He'll think it's funny."

"Yeah, I don't think he'd think it was funny if you weren't here." Sheppard looked down at his rattling platter as he stepped into the transporter. Anna pressed the dot for him. "You know what my punishment would be? Cold showers for a week."

Anna giggled.

"You think that's funny? He says he doesn't do it, but I swear every time I tick him off even just a little it's like taking a shower in a waterfall off a glacier." With a shake of his head, he walked over to the stairs.

"He wouldn't." Anna stopped at the bottom of the stairs and watched John take the stairs one at a time. He looked like a large kindergartner. With a sidearm. "Would he?" Anna was suddenly not so sure. She knew that he was normally relegated to sorting out the plumbing issues despite his relative importance. Because Rodney was petty. "Is he that petty?"

"See, that's the first mistake you make." Sheppard paused at the top of the stairs to look down at her. "Thinking coffee is petty."

"Forgetting Rodney sounds much more dangerous." Anna smiled, but Sheppard didn't seem at all concerned.

"Fair point, but…" Sheppard looked like he would have actually waved that away if he'd had a free hand. "You get used to it. Besides, Rodney's on the Wraith ship with Ronon. We're helping them make repairs from the battle."

Anna felt every one of her organs seize up as if they were frozen. Even her heart seemed to stop beating for a moment. "How nice of us." At least it wasn't Radek. But she was comfortable admitting that losing Rodney would be devastating, too.

"Yeah." Sheppard carefully descended the stairs, almost one step at a time like a child. Anna couldn't imagine this was taking any of his concentration, no matter how much coordination and care was required to carry three mugs of coffee. "While your dad and the others check out the Wraith database."

"We're learning a lot about the Wraith these days." Anna fell in step beside him as they walked to the transporter together. Hopefully none of that information would come up too often, but it was good to have it in case it did. "Rodney seemed excited."

"Yeah, I heard that." Sheppard's chuckle was restrained as he navigated the stairs, almost running into Doctor Vogel on his way down.

Anna took a quick step away in case the coffee spill should be catastrophic, but Sheppard was predictably balanced. He took a graceful step back and cursed, watching the coffee in the mugs come precariously close to spilling over.

"Sorry, Colonel!" Doctor Vogel said. "I was just, uh…"

"I don't want to hear it, Doc," Sheppard said through clenched teeth. He took a breath and resumed his climb, this time glancing ahead for any other scientists flying down the halls. "Just bringing coffee to the lab."

"Oh—I was—"

Sheppard continued walking, and Anna wasn't even sure if she heard him saying that he was going to get coffee. It didn't matter. Sheppard arrived, somehow without incident. Heyerdahl grabbed a mug as he walked past. Anna went to Radek's desk and slid the mug to him.

"Thanks, darling," he said absently.

"I know you guys have been burning it at both ends, so…" Sheppard looked around the lab as he stepped up next to Radek's desk. "How's it coming?"

"Ah." Radek took a gulp of coffee and smiled. "To je dobrá. It's phenomenal," he added, glancing up at Sheppard. "It's like being handed a Wraith encyclopedia—hard to know where to start."

"When I was a kid, and I got my first encyclopedia," Sheppard offered, "I started with the letter S."

Since Anna's mind was entirely on things like shield generators and air filtration, she didn't understand what might begin with S that anybody would find interesting in a world where those things weren't of interest.

Radek chuckled. "Yes, well, while I'm sure Wraith sexuality is interesting, we've decided to split into two teams." Anna sighed and rolled her eyes while Radek pointed out who was trying to find the best places to plant the gas canisters, while the others were working on fixing the damage to the hive during their misguided test.

It was a worthy question, though. She had no idea how Wraiths reproduced. Most of her didn't want to know, but the rest of her was sure that might be worth knowing. She wondered if Carson was studying anything like that right now…

"And you?" Sheppard prodded.

"Um." Radek took another gulp of coffee. "I'm mostly just skimming the index."

"Anything exciting?"

"Oh, yes."

"Such as?"

"Well, the ships are massive." He shoved off from his desk, his chair rolling across the floor until he caught himself on a nearby desk and turned to a monitor there. Apparently feeling a bit better as the caffeine started to hit. "But because of their mainly organic design, they have a number of external weaknesses."

Sheppard smiled. "I've got a weakness for external weaknesses. Such as?"

"They are quite resilient, you know, because their ships have the capability of healing themselves?" Radek said. "But it leads to smaller, more complex issues as the ship is damaged and repairs itself and is damaged again."

Anna brought his coffee to the new desk, but Radek was apparently now distracted. "You mean they don't always heal themselves in the exact same way?"

Radek snapped his fingers at her, a smile of pride on his lips. "Exactly." Then he looked at Sheppard. "And the more damage a hiveship has taken, the less likely it is to have healed properly. Especially if it's the same area receiving the damage repeatedly. It's like if you were to try to splint a bone you break every year yourself. If you aren't trained in it, or especially aware what you're doing, you might make mistakes. Even if you don't make it worse, the bone will never return to the same strength it was before."

"The ship hasn't been healing itself properly," Sheppard said.

Radek tilted his head from one side to another as if to say, not quite, and pulled up a schematic on his new screen. "It has been healing itself differently. You see, sometimes it makes connections to new systems such as what it's done here. The life support system has become intertwined with the electrical systems all through this section—connections that don't exist in other parts of the ship. This is a good thing for the ship because it ensures the life support in this area is always working. It can't be disconnected from the power it needs to run."

"But it could be bad because even if that area of the ship is uninhabited, they won't be able to turn life support off in that section." Anna squinted at the schematic, taking note of the different colors that highlighted the different systems. Green for the life support systems, like breathable air and temperature control. Green piped through the whole ship like the nervous system, vital and alive. "It means in this section that has already been damaged, it will be a bigger drain on their power if it's damaged again."

"That sounds great, Doc," Sheppard said, though he didn't sound like he actually thought that was great at all. "But that means that every hiveship's weakness is specific to that one ship. That's not exactly helpful since we don't have the schematics to every hiveship we come across."

"No. Well, yes." Radek hesitated, and looked back at the monitor. "You're right, but we are learning the way that the hiveships heal themselves. You can see the scars all over the ship, like this." He rotated the image and pointed to another bundle of green. "And this." Again, he pointed to where green knots covered the another side of the ship. "If we can visually identify locations where the hiveship has healed itself this way, reopening old wounds is more likely to debilitate the ship. But there is even a worse trade-off for their technology that may prove beneficial to us."

"And that is?"

"Their ships are very, very old. We are fighting the same technology that the Ancients did ten-thousand years ago… and so are they. Their ships cannot be retrofitted—the ships' biology is what it is. It's not technologically malleable."

"Ah. So they can't program their old dogs to do new tricks."

After a brief pause, Radek nodded. "Exactly. This one, they've been bypassing inoperable systems."

"It's been so long since they've fought a real battle that they haven't had a problem…" Sheppard's eyes were on the screen, but Anna wondered if that was what he was looking at.

"Without our help, they might not have been able to repair the damage," Radek added. "We can only assume that the ability to repair the ship—outside what they can heal themselves, of course—was more centralized to specific Wraith who know much more about the ships than everyone else. From what I can tell from the encyclopedia McKay managed to get for us…" He gestured weakly back at the computer he had been working on before. "That seems possible based on their social hierarchy."

"Huh." Sheppard took another gulp of coffee and nodded. "Well, it seems like you're onto something."

Radek chuckled and seemed surprised to find his own coffee at his elbow where Anna had put it. With just a hint of confusion bending his brow, he took another sip. "I hope so," he said, and offered his cup as if in a toast.

"Have you heard anything from Rodney?" Anna asked, leaning on the desk.

Sheppard waved that away and took another gulp of his own coffee. "I'm sure he's fine."

Rodney did have a way of buckling down and getting work done when the need was dire and death was imminent. Nowhere was that more obvious than on a Wraith hive ship. "Yeah. Ronon's with him. And he's probably really motivated," Anna offered.

Sheppard pointed at her with a nod. "Exactly."

#

It was dark, both outside and in the lab. She was surprised everyone, including her, was still awake after the long day and still working into the night. She was getting a headache even from the low light levels in here. Radek leaned on his desk, head in his hands as he watched the translated Wraith text scroll by.

Hard to help when not even he knew what he was looking for. Anything useful could have been, well… literally anything.

Anna was determined to try, anyway. Rodney and Ronon were literally on the Wraith ship right at this moment, helping the Wraith attack another hiveship. John was nearby on the Daedalus in case anything went wrong. Rodney was quick to assure them that something, probably everything, was probably going to go wrong. Everybody else seemed only slightly more optimistic.

So, instead of fretting for hours and waiting for the Daedalus to come back, Anna tried to think of something to read in their new Wraith encyclopedia that would be useful to them, either now or in the future. She couldn't think of anything, so she went with Sheppard's suggestion.

Wraith were capable of sexual reproduction in a manner similar to Humans, thanks to their Human DNA. Female Wraith were produced sexually, between a queen and a male from another hive, but that wasn't the interesting part. Male Wraith were made with genetic material from the queen, no mating necessary, grown in pods on the ship. There was a whole section on the maturation of male Wraiths—she knew there were different "types" of Wraith, but hadn't appreciated how many different kinds there were. But even that was not the interesting part.

The encyclopedia took for granted that male Wraith were cared for and, essentially, produced by the ship. It was so confusing to her at first that she had to trace her way all the way back through an overload of history on Wraith biology to figure it out: the hiveships wasn't just enhanced with biology or designed organically.

"Anything interesting?" Radek asked, as if bored, from his desk behind her.

"Incredibly interesting!" Anna didn't take her eyes off the text as it painstakingly translated slower than she wanted to be reading. "You know the ship is biological, yes? But it's more than that. Hiveships are living creatures. They function according to a telepathic interface with Wraith queens in a symbiotic relationship as old as Wraith themselves."

Radek spun slightly toward her, skepticism obvious even from her periphery. "Where do you get this?"

"I found it here." Anna pointed to her screen, as if that would help him at all. But she was too busy reading, and he was coming toward her anyway. "It's not in the schematics—it's too much like a technical manual. This is a biological history of the hiveship. It's a space-born organism, and most of its biological systems subsist on background radiation."

"No wonder it's so energy efficient." Radek leaned on the desk beside her, his eyes suddenly tracing along the lines with just as much interested urgency. "This obtaining and using energy, it's what all lifeforms we've ever come across are built to do. What made you look in the historical records?"

"The hiveships are responsible for incubating the male Wraith infants." She paused reading long enough to think about it. "Though, I guess, they aren't infants. They are more like insects, with a few evolutions between conception and adulthood. And the way the hive cares for them determines what kind of male the Wraith is."

"Interesting. Have you told Carson this? It might help his research."

"I've only been reading…"

Before Anna could finish, the screen flickered to black a few times. Anna stood back, seeing the other monitors in the room all doing the same thing.

"Eh? What's that?" Radek leaned forward, pulling the keyboard toward himself and tapped a series of keys that Anna recognized as the short cut to a CPU monitor and processes manager. "What's that?" he mumbled. "What's going on?" Before Anna could get too worried, Radek looked to Doctor Picardo. "Is your terminal…?"

The screens all went dark.

"What the hell is that?" Anna whispered, a tremor rippling through her chest.

Doctor Lutrell suddenly turned toward Radek with a working tablet, handing it to him. "You need to see this."

"What is it?" Anna asked, leaning in to see.

Radek scrolled along the lines of text, apparently reading code like it was his first language. Anna stayed quiet all the same. When he took a deep breath, though, his expression became grave. "Oh, no." He glanced up at Doctor Lutrell. "Tell me the Daedalus has not left yet."

Doctor Lutrell frowned. "Yeah, over an hour ago."

There was a short pause. Radek frowned. "Sh—"

Next time: "Best" really is relative.