“I agree,” Teyla said. “I too would rather act than stand by helplessly and wait for whatever comes. But it seems that many on your world are not aware of their dangers and would prefer not to be.”
“That’s not… ever really been a possibility for me. I keep asking questions until I find out the answers. Even if they’re unpleasant answers. Especially if they’re unpleasant answers. I’d always rather know the truth.”
“Even if it takes you far from home.”
“I’m not really sure I have a home. I have an apartment in Colorado Springs. I have friends there, and I like my job — all right, most days I like my job, although not the days when we get tortured by unpleasant people or have to deal with the IOA — but I’m not sure it’s really the same as having roots somewhere.”
Abydos had been his home, for a brief precious time. He wasn’t sure what it would take for him to feel the same sense of belonging anywhere, or the same sense of optimism and purpose. It was possible that he’d just gotten old enough to know better. But if he was going to feel it anywhere, Atlantis might be the place.
“I hope you find what you are looking for,” Teyla said.
He nodded. “So do I.”
Lorne stretched out his knee for Carson’s medical scanner to examine its internal workings. “How does it look, doc?”
“Better than it has any right to, given what you did to it,” Carson said.
“Hey, I got hit by a jumper. Being piloted by Dr. McKay, who was out of his mind at the time. I hardly think that counts as my fault.”
“All right, maybe not. But try to dodge next time.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Lorne said. “Maybe we need those warning beepers for the jumpers that they put on garbage trucks so you can hear them when they’re backing up. Except that it wasn’t backing up.”
“A warning beeper might not be a bad idea,” Carson said. “It would also help warn everyone about those of us who aren’t the best drivers.” Carson was a perfectly competent jumper pilot at this point — good, even — but he’d resisted learning with all his might in the early days of the expedition.
“Hey, it’s the hot-shot pilots you have to watch out for. They’re the ones trying to set the speed records.” Lorne sobered, swinging his leg off the table. “Seriously, though… ”
“The fracture healed beautifully. You shouldn’t have any long-term problems, although I want you to keep doing the stretches Dr. Keller prescribed.”
“That’s a relief.” He was acutely aware that getting killed and getting promoted weren’t the only ways to wind up sent back to Earth. For all its frustrations, he enjoyed his current job far too much to want to wind up stuck behind a desk back home.
“For someone who essentially got hit by a truck, you got off very lightly.”
“Don’t I know it,” Lorne said. “Have you heard anything from Dr. Keller?”
“She checked in a few weeks ago and sent me some of the results from her first round of tests of the new retrovirus,” Carson said. “Frankly she didn’t have many results yet to report. I think she just wanted to reassure everyone that she wasn’t dead.”
“Well, when you’re hanging out with the Wraith, people do worry.”
“I worry,” Carson said. “But not as much as Rodney does.”
“Are the two of them… I heard they split up. And also that they were on a break. And also that he asked her to marry him.”
“The Atlantis rumor mill never changes,” Carson said. “It’s like living in a small town full of elderly grannies gossiping over the back fence.”
“It’s probably none of my business.”
Carson shrugged. “It’s not as if either of them told me anything about it as their doctor. I don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t think they know what they’re doing. But she’s going to be gone from Atlantis for some considerable time, and maybe that will give them both time to think about what they want.”
“Absence makes the heart grow fonder?”
“Or presents enough distractions that you stop pining after the one you love. One or the other.”
“Distractions we’ve got.”
“Truer words were never spoken,” Carson said.
John sat in front of his laptop, trying to figure out how to frame the email he was thinking of sending.
Hi Sam, he began mentally. How’s it going? I was just wondering if you think there’s any chance that Elizabeth Weir is an Ascended being, rather than being dead in space because we couldn’t do anything to save her.
That sounded crazy. If he got that kind of email from someone, he’d think there was something wrong with them. Like they were having some kind of guilt complex about not being able to save people they cared about. So, screw that.
Hi Sam, he tried mentally composing again. Hope you’re having a good time on the Hammond. I was just wondering if there’s any chance that McKay is actually onto something rather than just being a little unhinged by having been turned into a Wraith.
He could just imagine Sam’s bemused expression reading that one. “I’m not a psychiatrist, Sheppard,” she would say, with that alarmed look she usually got when she had to deal with problems that involved people’s feelings. It was one of the things they understood really well about each other.
He made himself actually start typing this time. Hi Sam. Hope that you’re having as much fun getting shot at in the Milky Way as you did getting shot at here in Pegasus. A weird thing — McKay has started saying he thinks that Elizabeth Weir may have Ascended and showed up to talk to him in his dreams.
He took a deep breath. Believe me, I know how that sounds. Still, you’ve had some experience with this kind of thing, so I thought I’d ask you if that sounded like something that could possibly actually happen. McKay has this idea that she may have gotten in trouble for helping him and wound up getting kicked out of her higher plane. He keeps saying we ought to look for her, and you can imagine how that goes over with Woolsey. Dr. Jackson probably knows the most about it, but he just says “maybe,” only in a lot more words than that. And I trust your judgment. It’s always been good before. So any advice would be appreciated.
Say hi to the Milky Way galaxy for me,
John
He clicked to send the email before he could think better of it. He regretted it anyway the moment after it was sent, but by then it was too late; he shut his email and resolved not to think about the question any more until he got a reply.
“So what are we supposed to go look for?” Sheppard asked as Daniel came into the conference room, trying to keep his coffee cup from toppling off the top of his stack of books. Sheppard’s team had already staked out one side of the table, with Woolsey at its head. Daniel set down his tablet on the other side of the table, pushing his books to one side, although it made him feel a little like the unpopular new kid in the junior high school classroom.
He cleared his throat. “Well, I’m hoping we can find out more about the early history of Ancient settlement here in the Pegasus galaxy,” he said. “We know they came here after a plague wiped out most of the Ancients in the Milky Way galaxy. At that point, there wasn’t any intelligent life in the Pegasus galaxy. So, the Ancients started seeding planets with humans.”
“And built the Rings,” Ronon said. “We know.”
“Right, because the Ancients left a lot more traces of their presence here than they did on Earth, where we’ve just figured out they existed in the last decade. Okay, decade and a half.” It never ceased to startle him to be reminded that it had been more than ten years since he’d first walked through the Stargate. “Anyway. Various human civilizations developed over time, eventually there was the war with the Wraith, and the Ancients returned to Earth. We know a little bit about that period, but we know almost nothing about what happened when the Ancients first arrived in this galaxy.”