Part 4
It was evident from the looks on his teammates’ faces that his story didn’t sound as plausible as he’d hoped it would. John finished with a lame, “…and that’s about the size of it.” Let the chips fall where they may—it was out of his hands now.
Cadman’s eyes had gone all squinty, like some crusty old art teacher was forcing her to give an opinion on an abstract painting, and Jackson’s mouth was hinged open as if waiting for some intelligent remark to magically pop out of it. But Carter…oh yeah, John could see the wheels turning, processing what he’d told them, and he could kiss her, because that meant she hadn’t simply concluded that he was off his rocker.
At last she spoke. “Now Major, you did lose consciousness on our last mission. Don’t you think it’s more likely related to that? Maybe this Dr. McKay is simply a complex hallucination.”
“He’s not a hallucination.” John argued, overlapping an identical remark from McKay.
“Jinx. You owe me a beer,” McKay added, his eyebrows lifting in challenge.
“I do not owe you a beer,” John replied, irritably. “Everyone knows it doesn’t count if no one else can hear you.”
“What? You totally made that rule up! It does so count,” Rodney countered.
“Major?” asked Colonel Carter, catching John’s wayward attention.
“He jinxed me,” John explained, thumb pointing in Rodney’s direction, even though he knew they couldn’t see him.
“I’m sorry?” she asked, looking slightly perplexed.
“Look,” said John, “it doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that this is in no way a health-related issue.”
Carter gave him an assessing glare. “Okay,” she said at last, “so, if I were to ask Keller, she’d tell me she’s already ruled out the possibility of brain injury and psychological disorders?” John gave what he hoped was a convincing nod. “And you believe this Dr. McKay’s story?”
“Hey, what do I know? He’s the astrophysicist—to me it’s all just a bunch of long-winded nonsense,” John said.
“Don’t believe a word of it, Sam,” Rodney butted in. “He’s a lot smarter than he looks.”
“Hey!” John replied, feigning injured pride.
“Go on; tell her how you almost made it into Mensa,” Rodney prodded.
“No,” John countered. “And I didn’t ‘almost’ make it into Mensa—I made it in. I just chose not to accept the invitation.” John realised belatedly that he had done exactly as Rodney had asked, and he answered Rodney’s victorious smirk with an evil glare.
“Major?” asked Carter, her lip twitching into an almost-smile.
“It’s not important,” John answered. “What is important is that we find a way to send Rodney back to where he belongs.”
“It would help if the rest of us could at least talk with him directly,” Daniel offered.
“Oh? And how would you suggest we do that?” Rodney berated, his arms crossed, frowning in a way that was likely to have sent children screaming to their mothers. “I’m non-corporeal, you nit-wit. It’s not like you can slap a mic to my lapel and play me over the intercoms.”
“Maybe it’s best that you can’t hear everything he has to say,” John offered, flinching as Rodney’s foot came sharply into contact with his shin. As far as he was concerned, Rodney wasn’t non-corporeal enough. “Okay—ow!”
“You can feel it when he touches you?” asked Carter, to which John nodded. “Then he obviously has a limited physical presence…we need to get to my lab.” And with that, Atlantis’ chief of science jumped off her infirmary bed and had nearly made it out into the hall before Keller banged into her, coming from the opposite direction.
“Colonel?” asked Keller, with her cross kindergarten teacher look. “Were you going somewhere?”
“Busted,” Carter muttered and dutifully returned to her bed.
“Don’t worry, I’ll make this quick,” Keller promised. “Your tests showed low-level radiation sickness, which should respond well to treatment. You’ll need to take these,” she added, handing each of them a small brown pill bottle, “and make sure you follow the instructions carefully. Any sign of nausea, or any symptoms out of the ordinary, and I want you to report back to me immediately. Is that understood?”
They each nodded, grateful to be let off the hook so easy, and Keller left them to see to some new patients. They’d gotten lucky this time—if it hadn’t been for Rodney, things might have been a lot worse. And apparently, John wasn’t the only one to think so.
“Sheppard?” Jackson said, approaching him as they made their way to Carter’s lab. “Can you tell Dr. McKay thanks for the heads up? I’ve done the radiation thing once, and I appreciate not having to go through that again.”
John nodded. “He can hear you.”
“Oh. Well then,” said Jackson, addressing the approximate location of their invisible guest, “thank-you.”
The gratitude seemed to fluster the scientist, who turned slightly pink in the face and muttered something to the effect of ‘all in a day’s work’ before charging ahead of the group to take lead. John shook his head, trying to get a handle on the enigma that was Rodney. Just when he thought he had the guy pegged, he’d go and do something unexpected—he never would have guessed that humbleness was a part of McKay’s makeup.
***
Sheppard and his team hunkered down in the mess hall for the remainder of the afternoon, discussing the results of Carters tests and what should be done about McKay. It was a tiresome conversation for John, who had to edit and relay Rodney’s part of the conversation to the rest of his team. But as frustrating as it was for John, it was clearly driving the scientist round the bend not being able to speak for himself, and by the end, Rodney had resorted to monosyllabic retorts and silent fuming.
Still, it turned out to be a rather productive afternoon. Carter mentioned that Dr. Jackson had undergone a similar experience himself, where a unique form of radiation from a crystal skull had rendered him out of phase. Only his grandfather, who’d also been exposed to the radiation, had been able to see and hear him. Unfortunately, none of her readings were able to confirm Rodney’s existence—no telltale residual lepton radiation to indicate phase-shifting had taken place. The only crumb of hope were some faint quantum fluctuations in a scan Carter took of Sheppard’s brain, although both Rodney and Carter agreed that the fluctuations were too sporadic to draw any meaningful conclusions. Obviously there was a lot more going on here than their technology could uncover, so they were playing this one on faith, and John was grateful that they were all willing to go out on a limb for him.
One thing they did learn from their meeting was the reason behind Rodney’s transformation. Apparently, from what McKay was able to recall from his last mission, it appeared that his current condition was meant to be some kind of punishment for meddling in the affairs of the Pegasus Galaxy. The question in John’s mind (which he unfortunately voiced aloud) was just who was being punished—him or McKay. He was fairly certain there would be a bruise on his arm from the punch Rodney had given him over that one.
It was then put to a vote and the team decided to approach Caldwell in the morning with a proposal to visit the planet where McKay’s team had discovered the old lady. Not surprisingly, Rodney was the only one who thought bringing Caldwell into the picture was a bad idea, but as Carter pointed out, since this was a military expedition and not a civilian one, as was the case where Rodney was from, there was no way they were going to that planet without Caldwell’s permission.
***
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” said Caldwell, leaning back in his seat after having listened to his primary team’s request, “but even if this Dr. McKay is real…”
“Oh, he’s real,” Sheppard assured him. Rodney was once again being his distracting self, pacing and biting at his thumbnail in an attempt to keep quiet.
Caldwell pursed his lips and then continued. “Even if he’s real, we still have no idea where he came from or how he got here. Which means we also have no idea what will happen if you manage to return him to where he came from.”
“Sir,” said Carter, “I think that’s a risk we’ll have to take. Keller has already ruled out physical and mental illness to explain Sheppard’s situation, so if there’s even a remote chance that this old lady can put things right, we have to take it. We’re cut off from Earth—we can’t afford to lose Major Sheppard in the field, and you know he can’t function properly with this Dr. McKay along for the ride.”
Caldwell heaved a seriously put upon sigh and took a moment to study the tips of his fingers. “All right. I’ll allow you to visit this planet and check out McKay’s story, but that’s it. This is a straight forward recon mission—you are not to take any further action until you clear it through me, is that understood?”
Carter smiled at him in triumph. “Yes, Sir.” She spun on her heels and strode out of Caldwell’s office like she was expecting him to change his mind at any moment. The others followed quickly on her heels.
“That went well,” Jackson commented, as surprised as the rest of them with how easy it had been to convince Caldwell.
“You heard the man,” said Carter, “let’s gear up. We leave in fifteen minutes.”
***
The planet Sheppard and his team gated to was a smoking cinder of a world. Blackened trees smouldered where they stood, the muddy cinders underfoot still warm to the touch. The air was thick with the sour stench of fire, the thick, hazy smoke stinging their eyes.
“You sure you remembered that ‘gate address right, Rodney?” asked Sheppard, coughing as the offensive atmosphere clawed at his throat.
“Yes, I’m sure,” Rodney replied snippily. “I’d been pushing to visit the planet for months—ever since I found references to an Ancient outpost in Atlantis’ database. I stared at that address every day for nine weeks until Woolsey finally admitted that the rumours of a Wraith stronghold on the planet were just that—rumours. We figured the Wraith abandoned the place to join the fight against the Replicators, and were either killed off or just never bothered to return.”
Sheppard stopped dead in his tracks and held Rodney back with a palm to his chest. “Hold on a second…did you say Replicators?”
The rest of his team came to a halt when they heard him, and turned as one to face them.
“Yes, Replicators. You know; Asurans—human-form Replicators hell-bent on the destruction of all things Wraith-related. Including their food source,” he added sourly.
Rodney obviously had no idea how huge this news was to them. As far as Sheppard knew, the Replicators’ only interest was destroying Atlantis and anyone unfortunate enough to live there. And they’d done a damn good job of it, too. They’d scarcely escaped Lantea with a tenth of their crew and a quarter of the city intact. That they were able to find a habitable planet to land on at the very last minute was a miracle for which John gave thanks every day.
“Just so we’re clear…you’re saying that, where you’re from, the Replicators are at war with the Wraith?” John ignored the prying stares of his teammates, devoting his full attention to Rodney.
“Not anymore,” McKay replied off-handedly. “Not since I destroyed them.”
“You destroyed them?” Sheppard said sceptically.
“He destroyed the Replicators?” Carter asked, pressing closer. “All of them? How?”
“Is it wrong that I find her ignorance so sexy?” Rodney said with a wistful sigh.
“Yes, it is,” John answered. “So answer the question. How’d you kill them?”
“It’s a long story, but the gist of it is that I created a friendly Replicator to infiltrate their base of operations, then turned her into a kind of gargantuan super-magnet, magnifying the bonds between Replicator nanites until we’d created a nanite blob so massive and dense that it sank into the planet’s core.”
John gawped at him for a moment, and then related what Rodney’d said to the rest of the team. Carter, in particular, looked impressed.
“Amazing,” she said at last, oblivious to the crowing smirk on McKay’s face. “We’ve always fought the Replicators by weakening or destroying the bonds between their nanites, we never thought of strengthening the bonds.”
“Well, whatever happened to the Replicator’s where you came from, here all they want is to take us out and go back to their collective navel-gazing,” replied Cadman.
“Obviously the Wraith never left this planet to go off to war,” Jackson called out from farther down the path where he’d wandered during their discussion. He was kneeling down over the charred remains of a body. As the rest of the team approached, it became clear that the man had been fed on before fire destroyed the forest. A telltale vertical gash and five finger gouges marred the blackened flesh of the bare-chested victim.
“You don’t think the Wraith are still here, do you?” Rodney asked Sheppard with wide, fearful eyes.
“Only one way to find out,” Sheppard answered, and led the way through the smouldering woods.
“Why did I know you were going to say that,” Rodney muttered to himself and reluctantly trudged along behind him towards what little was likely to remain of the Ancient outpost.
Chapter 5