John still looked like he didn’t get it, and Ronon was tired of trying to explain things, but that was the choice; go home, where people understood things without endless explanations, or make the effort to live here.
“So what is this ‘people move on’ crap? Is that how it works for you? Because if so, I’m just saying, you do suck.”
“No, I… “ Ronon thought he was finally getting it that Ronon wasn’t happy. “It’s not like I want that to happen,” John said after a moment.
“Then you think I suck.”
“No,” John said, not quite laughing. “I think stuff happens. People lose touch.”
“People break up, too, but that doesn’t mean you plan on it.”
“I try not to,” John said, but maybe that’s what he was thinking, in the back of his mind, that this thing with Teyla wouldn’t work out any better than being married had. That he wasn’t going to hold onto his friends when he’d gone years without speaking to his own brother.
“You want me to say I’m going to be around when you get old? I’m going to be around when you get old,” Ronon said. “Unless one of us gets killed first. If I end up living on Sateda and you don’t come visit, I’ll get Teyla to make you.”
“She can be pretty scary,” John said with a sideways smile. “So that would probably work.”
It wasn’t either an apology or a promise, not by Satedan standards, but Ronon suspected it might be by John’s standards, and those were the ones he’d made up his mind to live with.
“If you don’t want this job, fine,” Ronon said. “But don’t be stupid.”
“Okay,” John said. Behind the bathroom door, the angry yowling rose in pitch. “You think he wants water or something?”
“I think it wants blood,” Ronon said. “You really let kids on Earth have these things as pets?”
“It can’t really hurt you,” John said. Ronon glanced down pointedly at John’s wrist striped with deep scratches. “Much.”
“We had dogs,” Ronon said. “They were domesticated. They didn’t attack anybody. Or if they did…” His fingers lingered on the stock of his pistol.
“You can’t shoot McKay’s cat,” John said.
“I could stun it,” Ronon offered. “Then you could get some sleep.”
John shrugged. “I was going to just…”
“Go sleep in Teyla’s room?”
“I didn’t say that,” John said, but he was smiling. “I should probably put water in there for the cat first, though.”
“Yeah, have fun with that,” Ronon said, standing up.
“You could help,” John said.
“Or I could not.”
“Some friend you are.”
“Let me know if you want me to come back and stun it,” Ronon said, and left smiling.
Chapter Twenty-three
Divided Loyalties
Quicksilver rolled himself in the quilts that filled his nest, turning his back to the light so that it would seem as though he slept. Soon enough, Ember would be stirring, slipping away either to the lab where his team of clevermen were still working to create a stable interface for the ZPM, or, more likely, to confer with his commander. Quicksilver grudged neither, and only hoped it would be soon. He had managed to ignore Ember’s story, Guide’s hints, but the disastrous attack on Atlantis — and it was a disaster, no matter how good a face Guide tried to put on it — and the queen’s reaction had wakened his fear again. Not that he could be McKay, that was impossible. The transformation had not worked with Lastlight, with Michael, and it was even less likely that the process could be made to work in reverse, from human to Wraith. Suppress Wraith DNA, yes, that made sense. If, as he suspected, there were connections between Wraith and human DNA somewhere in the distant past, then, yes, suppressing the genetic material that differed from the human norm would produce something more or less human — less, if one went by Michael. But to add genes, to change an unwilling human — that should be far too difficult.
Except that biology was not his specialty. Ember had spoken as though it was unthinkable: something immoral, disgusting, not something impossible. And the queen’s reaction, the reaction of the entire zenana, had been profoundly wrong. When he added that to the hostility he still felt throughout the hive, Ardent’s insults and the accusation of taint that dogged him — the possibilities were unsettling, to say the least. It was, surely, impossible. But he needed to be sure.
To distract himself, he began naming prime numbers, had reached 1531 before he heard the gentle stirring in the outer chamber. He kept still, heard the door open and close, and counted two hundred heartbeats before he unwound the quilts form his shoulders.
The lights brightened as he moved into the main room and settled himself at the computer console. Data spilled down the screen, updating the current experiments. He banished that with a gesture, and touched the keys to open Ember’s accounts. If he was lucky, the other cleverman wouldn’t enter the system at all, would be in Guide’s quarters rather than the labs; even if he was going to the lab, it would take him time to get there, and Quicksilver only needed the account for a moment, a springboard to reach the ghost he had planted some time ago
He activated it, closing Ember’s account behind him, and watched the subroutine leverage its privileges until it had wormed its way into the closed database where Dust had kept his data. The layers unfolded before him, data parting like curtains, and he touched keys to enter the search he had so carefully prepared. He would have time to let it run, Ember wouldn’t be back for hours, no matter where he’d gone.
But the screen was already flashing results at him, a torrent of data that he scanned, scowling, and brought back to review more slowly. Yes, this was his own record, the care that Dust had taken of him since his rescue: injuries, surgery, notation spelling out a drug — the drug Ember still made for him — chemical names that meant very little to him. A tailored drug for hyperplasia, Ember had said, and he couldn’t tell otherwise.
That was a dead end, unless he could somehow persuade one of the biologists to explain it to him. He tipped his head to one side — Nighthaze owed him a favor, certainly — but discarded the idea as too dangerous. But here was the record of his progress, from waking amnesiac from surgery, which had disappointed Dust, to the last entry two days before Dust’s death. He winced at that memory, and the brief note of good progress and high expectation, and went back to the beginning. Maybe the reference to surgery would tell him more.
That file was shorter than he had expected, obviously edited down from something larger, perhaps notes dictated during the procedure itself. He frowned again, set a search to locate the original file, and focused his attention on the summary. Most of it had to do with work on his feeding hand, repairs and adjustments to the handmouth, and at the thought his fingers curled protectively. The Lanteans must have tried to change him, despite what Ember said, must have tried to keep him from feeding — no wonder any attempt to feed left him shaking, if the Lanteans had tried to maim him.
Except that wasn’t what the file said. These were repairs to an earlier surgery, the one that wasn’t recorded in this database — his search program flashed at him, confirming the lack of data. Surgery that had not been completely successful, that had required repair, rebuilding…
No. He would not, could not accept that. He had been injured — the Lanteans had tortured him, that was what had to have happened. He turned his feeding hand over slowly, studying the neat mouth that creased the palm. Were those scars, there at the corners? They couldn’t be. Wraith did not bear such marks. He turned his hand palm down, seeing his ordinary, unremarkable claws, in need of tending, but otherwise perfectly normal. The heavy veins that carried the enzyme were taut to the touch, ready to serve. He turned his hand over again, laid his finger gently between the lips, and felt the feeding membrane pulse and swell, tugging at his own life. He was whole. It was just what Ember had said, he had suffered an injury of the mind — and perhaps more, perhaps Dust’s surgery was to mend some further damage, perhaps not even from the Lanteans, but suffered in the escape he could not remember. He was Wraith, Dust’s brother, Quicksilver.