Chapter Seven
The next time John drifted back to half-awareness, there was a ZPM next to the flashlight. Was that there before? he wondered vaguely. Maybe this was some sort of wish-fulfillment hallucination.
Then he was dreaming about being a kid again, about the time he had been attacked by fire ants. The little bastards crawled all over you, waiting to bite until they had swarmed over as much of your skin as they could reach. Then they sent a chemical signal and all bit at once, and the bites hurt like hell, like little pinpoints of acid in your flesh, and then itched and itched—
“Stop it, don’t scratch,” Rodney ordered, leaning over him and slapping at his hands.
“Don’t hit,” John told him, shoving his hands away and glaring. He was lying on the floor, in the little room he remembered, and there was the flashlight and the ZPM, apparently not a hallucination. The itching was real, too. He still felt too hot, but he was sweating now, as if the fever had broken. “What — what are—” He wiggled his fingers, surprised to see them in a pair of slightly oversized lab gloves from the medical kit. “Why am I wearing gloves?”
Rodney looked exhausted. “You were scratching at your skin, leaving marks, I was afraid you were going to hurt yourself,” he explained. He brandished a water bottle. “Here, you need this.”
John realized his throat was painfully dry. “Yeah.” He struggled to sit up, accepted the bottle and took a cautious sip, not letting himself drink as much as he wanted. “This isn’t all we have, is it?”
“We have enough for now.” McKay nodded toward the pitiful little cache of supplies arranged next to the ZPM. There were now two more bottles.
John handed the water back. He eyed the non-hallucinatory ZPM. “That’s a ZPM.”
“Very good, Major.” McKay was obviously too tired to give the sarcasm the usual bite. “When it was time for sunset on the surface, the Koan temporarily cleared out of Dorane’s lab area. I went up there and tried to find any of our supplies. There wasn’t much. I found Kolesnikova’s pack, but her pistol and ammunition were gone. So I took the opportunity to poke around through Dorane’s data storage, and take the ZPM. He had three! Three! But two were at maximum entropy, and that one is almost completely drained.” He gave the ZPM a disgusted look, as if it was at fault for being a disappointment.
John still felt distanced from reality. “You went back there alone?” It seemed like a bad idea, even with the detector.
McKay glared at him. “Hello? You were unconscious.”
“Okay, okay.” John let it drop. He knew McKay had gone for the water because he needed it to keep John’s fever down. “How long was I out?”
“About ten hours. It’s dark up on the surface now, and most of the Koan are up there, so there isn’t much we can do.” McKay hesitated, shifting uncomfortably. “At first light, if you feel up to it, we’ll have to get moving.”
“Ten hours? I feel fine, I just…” John absently ran a hand through his hair and felt something prickle against his palm. Huh? He rubbed his head, baffled, then froze. He stared at McKay. “What do I look like?”
McKay didn’t even blink. “I don’t think we should discuss that right now. I think we need to talk about what we’re going to do at dawn when the Koan come back down here. I’ve had good luck avoiding them using the detector, and—”
“Rodney…” John said slowly, with emphasis. McKay was way too calm, which meant it was really, really bad. He must have gone so far past panic he had come out on the other side. “What do I look like?”
McKay met his gaze, eyes narrowing in determination. “Major, Dorane has been in Atlantis for more than ten hours. Think about that.”
John took a breath and looked away. Everybody in the expedition could be dead. And the Athosians, damn it. Would Dorane find them on the mainland? Oh hell, of course he will. He’ll show up in a jumper, with Teyla or somebody else he’s controlling to smile and say he’s an Ancestor and everything s hunky-dory, and they’ll welcome him with open arms. It made John’s stomach try to turn.
His face must have shown his feelings because McKay abruptly broke down. “All right, fine! You have those little silver spiny things, like the Koan. They’re on the outside of your ears and in your hair and eyebrows. It’s not shocking or awful or even particularly unattractive. It’s just a little odd. That’s the only physical change I’ve noticed.” McKay cocked his head, squinting. “I’m almost certain your ears were always that shape. Of course, if I see you every day and I can’t tell, it’s probably not a big issue.” He added, “I was hoping the spines were sensory organs, and you’d be able to tell how the Koan communicate with Dorane, maybe figure out if they know where we are. Any luck on that?”
“Uh, no, I don’t—” John shook his head helplessly. He touched his ear, felt the spines. They were unexpectedly soft, like thick coarse hair. He suppressed a shudder. His body suddenly felt weird and foreign, like an outsized boot he was knocking around in. “Rodney, I’m not just going to look funny here, there’s mental changes too. They used to be just like us, and the Ancients apparently thought they could make the genetic changes stable, until Dorane messed with them more and drove them all nuts. I could go crazy and try to kill you, and you could be all Atlantis has left.” He took a deep breath. “You’ve got to go.”
McKay rolled his eyes, flung his hands up in irritation. “Will you stop saying that while I’m trying to think?” he snapped.
“I can’t stop saying that, dammit! You’re the only one left who can do something to stop Dorane. I’m a liability. You have to—”
“No, Major.” McKay sounded bitterly angry. “I’m not leaving you to die here. I know what you think of me, but I’m not a coward, and I’m certainly not a quitter.”
“Rodney, I don’t think that!” John sputtered. “And will you stop trying to make this about you? I’m the one with the problem, and I’m being practical here! Before I go nuts, you have to—”
“Shut up or I’ll—”
“Kill me?” John interposed. “Promises, promises.”
“Oh, ha ha,” McKay snarled. “Morbid humor, still not helping!”
John tried, “Hey, if you asked me to kill you I’d do it.”
“No, you would not,” Rodney snapped. “You wouldn’t give up. You’d do something flashy and heroic and crazy, and you wouldn’t give up until you saved my life or got yourself killed too. You don’t think I know that? Now stop confusing the issue so we can decide what to do!”
John sat back, thwarted. He was also oddly touched, but maybe that was the fever talking. And it was probably incredibly stupid to sit here trying to convince McKay to kill him or leave him when they still needed a plan, whether John was sane enough to participate once it was time to implement it or not. “Okay, okay, fine. At dawn we go to the surface.”
“Yes, exactly.” Rodney threw him a suspicious glare. “Now, as I’ve been trying to say for the past five minutes, I’ve had good luck avoiding the Koan with the detector, so at dawn, if you’ve recovered enough to walk, that shouldn’t be a problem. Then we have to get back to Atlantis.”
“Well, yeah, that’s kind of the plan’s problem area.” John rubbed his eyes. “Dorane took the damn jumper, and the Ancients blew up the DHD to keep him from using the ’gate.” He looked up sharply as a solution occurred to him. “You can’t build a new DHD, can you?”
“No, I can’t, but thank you for the thought.” McKay looked mollified by the suggestion. “But we don’t need a DHD, we can dial that ’gate manually.”
“That’s right.” John should have remembered that, but his head was intermittently aching, making it hard to think. There had been a few instances where SG teams had dialed ’gates manually; it was in the mission reports in the expedition’s database. “We can shove the inner ring around like a giant rotary phone. All we need is a power source.” He looked at the ZPM. “Which apparently we have.”