John’s headset radio sounded. “Colonel Sheppard?” Lorne said. “We’ve got some delays going on in setting up the alpha site.”
“What kind of delays?”
“Some thing’s breaking down all our plastic gear at the site. Dr. Zelenka is worried that it might be a microorganism of some kind. We’ve got the site under quarantine while we figure out what’s going on.”
“Keep it that way. Is Carson stuck there?”
“No, thankfully we hadn’t sent him through yet. We’re working on an alternative alpha site, but it’s going to take us a few minutes to get it checked out.”
“Work on it,” John said.
John turned back to face Elizabeth, he had to think of her as Elizabeth, and told himself that wasn’t committing to any answers to the question of who or what she really was. “All right. So, we’re having a few technical difficulties.”
“That sounds like the Pegasus Galaxy, all right,” Elizabeth said. “I know that you’re worried about what might happen if I’m really some kind of tool of the Replicators. I’m worried about that myself. But I’ve been here nearly twenty-four hours already. Another hour probably isn’t going to matter.”
“No. Because if you’re a Replicator, you could already have infected hundreds of people and machines here on Sateda.”
“She’s not a Replicator,” Rodney said.
John turned on him. “And exactly how do you know that?”
“If she were in an entirely artificial Replicator body, the most basic medical tests would have shown that,” Rodney said. “You could stick a needle in her and watch her not bleed.”
“There could still be nanites in her bloodstream.”
“Why would there be nanites in her bloodstream? The Ancients wouldn’t construct her a new body and then booby-trap it by filling it with nanites.”
“We are not going to make decisions based on speculation about what the Ancients might or might not do,” John said. “We’re going to take Elizabeth to the alpha site and let Carson decide whether he thinks she’s human.”
“Yes, about that,” Elizabeth said, steel in her tone.
John ran a hand through his hair. “Ronon, go talk to Cai and ask him if he’s got a spare room where we can sit down and talk.”
“There is the jumper,” Teyla said. John shook his head discouragingly. The last thing he wanted was to give Elizabeth access to the jumper and all its systems when he wasn’t sure if she’d been compromised. They could walk through the gate to the alpha site. Once Lorne had finished dealing with their current minor disaster.
“I wouldn’t let me in the jumper either,” Elizabeth said, looking a little amused.
“I’ll talk to Cai,” Ronon said.
“Dr. Lynn, please tell me someone’s translated the writing on those rocks at the alpha site,” Lorne said.
Lynn’s voice over the radio was tart with irritation. “You realize I was on Sateda all afternoon? And that I’m not actually a linguist? Why don’t you call Dr. Jackson?”
“He’s off-world. Tell me somebody down there with a PhD can tell me more than ‘somebody made some marks on the rocks.’”
“Let me see if anyone’s made any notes,” Lynn said, and there was the sound of typing. “All right. You’re in luck, someone’s actually started working on the translations. Letter frequencies suggest that this is a phonetic alphabet for writing Ancient. We don’t have anything with one hundred percent certainty—”
“At this moment, I will take whatever certainty you’ve got.”
“Two of the groups of letters are very likely the words for ‘warning’ and ‘danger.’ We see those on a lot of equipment in the city.”
“It would have been good to know that several days ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Lynn said, and sounded like it. “We have a backlog of translations waiting to be done. This wasn’t marked as a priority.”
Lorne silently counted to ten before he spoke. “Okay. It should have been, and that’s my mistake. Can you tell me anything else about the message? Does it say anything about plastic?”
“That’s a possible translation of one of the letter groupings,” Lynn said.
“Figure out what the message says. Consider it a priority. I’m guessing something like ‘warning, something on this planet breaks down plastic, and that’s really dangerous.’”
“Ah,” Lynn said. “I see that you might have wanted to know that before now.”
“You can say that again,” Lorne said.
John ended up finding space for the team to get off the street in the lunchroom of an office building that looked out over the gate square. Makeshift shutters had been nailed up over the windows and the floor swept clean, and there were chairs arranged at the long table. The walls were still hung with faded and tattered posters lettered in Satedan, one showing a stylized worker lying crushed under half of an enormous block of stone that had cracked in two.
“I have to ask,” John said with a nod toward the poster.
Ronon glanced at the picture, not even trying to make out the faded lettering. “It’s supposed to remind people not to make mistakes.”
“Maybe we need some motivational posters in Atlantis,” Elizabeth said as she sat down.
John shook his head. “Now you’re really scaring me.” He took his seat at the table along with the rest of his team, and Daniel stopped prowling around the room looking at the posters to come take a seat himself.
It felt like a thousand mornings around the conference table in the early years of the expedition. He reminded himself very firmly that it wasn’t.
“Tell me about Carson Beckett,” Elizabeth prompted.
“It’s not our original Carson Beckett,” Rodney said. “Do you remember Michael?”
“The Wraith we attempted to transform into a human,” Teyla said.
“That sounds familiar,” Elizabeth said, frowning. “An experiment.”
“That is right.”
“Michael used some of Carson’s DNA to create a clone with Carson’s memories,” Rodney went on. “And before you ask, no, we don’t know how he managed that. Our best guess is that he combined some version of the technology that the Wraith use to create drones who already have some degree of imprinted knowledge with his own really disturbing research. He was using that Carson, clone Carson, to help him with his experiments. Eventually we found him locked up in one of Michael’s labs and rescued him.”
“More or less by accident, since we didn’t have any idea he existed,” John added.
Elizabeth regarded him from the other side of the table. “You understand this doesn’t sound particularly likely.”
“You mean unlike the other things that happen to us in the Pegasus galaxy?”
“Even given those.”
“It’s true, though. Carson spent some time back on Earth dealing with some medical problems, turns out being a clone isn’t too great for your health and now he’s back filling in for Dr. Keller while she’s on an extended assignment with the Wraith.”
Elizabeth’s eyebrows went up. “Extended assignment with the Wraith?”
John looked at Teyla for rescue from the task of explaining that one.
“In the last year, one of the Wraith queens claimed authority over all Wraith,” Teyla said. “It was not a universally popular claim, and we were able to ally with another faction to defeat her. And there has been another development as well. A retrovirus that makes humans able to survive being fed upon, while still providing nourishment to the Wraith.”
Elizabeth nodded slowly. “That must be complicating things.”
“It is,” Teyla said. “But it offers the possibility of a meaningful peace.”
Elizabeth put her head to one side, regarding Teyla curiously. “And that idea is acceptable to you?”
“Yes,” Teyla said, at the same time Ronon said, “No.” Teyla shot Ronon a sharp look, and went on, “We have discovered that the Wraith are the result of a misguided experiment of the Ancestors. They are descended from our own kin, and they did not ask to be as they are. They have survived as best they can, and created much that is of value that we are only just beginning to understand. I would be glad to see them endure as people who no longer have to kill us to survive.”