Fellow Traveler by ltlj, Part II; First Contact Challenge

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Fellow Traveler by ltlj, First Contact for the Amnesty Challenge

Part II of II. Story Information is in Part I, here.






They got the first drone in the next corridor. It walked right up to Liam, who was far more convincing standing still than moving or talking. Then it cocked its head as if it had noticed something wrong, and John ducked out from around the corner and shot it. It had been armed with a stunner rifle and a smaller hand model; John took the rifle, gave his hand stunner to Rodney and reluctantly, the other one to Liam.

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Rodney asked, with an eye roll toward Liam.

Liam admitted, "I'm not a very good shot."

"It's a stunner," John explained, mostly patiently. "It doesn't matter what else you hit, as long as you get the Wraith."

Liam brightened. "Oh, that's right!"

Rodney glared at him skeptically. "Are you being sarcastic?"

Liam folded his arms. "Of course I am."

John shook his head, wishing hysteria was a luxury he could afford. "Just come on."

There was another drone guarding the foyer near the hatchway to the bridge. Liam lured it into the corridor by staring intently at it and they took it down, leaving the bridge entrance open and unguarded.

John motioned for Rodney to hang back, to watch the foyer. Rodney nodded rapidly. John looked at Liam, who was scratching his head with the muzzle of his stunner. He had been a Wraith for something under half an hour and the silky gray-white hair was already a tangled mess. There had to be a better way to do this. John just wished he could think of it, whatever it was. "You're going to follow me in there and help, right?" he said quietly.

"Oh yes," Liam nodded earnestly. "In there, right?"

Behind Liam, Rodney knocked his head against the wall in silent despair. "Right," John said, for lack of any better options, "Let's go."

John flung himself through the hatchway and hit the floor, already firing at the two outraged Wraith glaring at him. The room was triangular, as featureless as the rest of the ship's interior except there were two consoles standing on a raised center dais, each supported by weirdly organic-looking stalks. John pumped enough shots into the first Wraith to drop it but the second was three paces away from him when Liam tackled it from behind. It still managed to hook a clawed hand into John's leg before John fired into its head. It went limp.

His heart pounding, John pried the claws out of his pantsleg. "Liam, you were supposed to shoot!"

"It was moving!" Liam struggled to his feet, as graceful as a drunken Wraith with inner ear problems. "You're lucky I was able to throw my body at it."

Rodney ducked into the room, ripping open the rubbery material over the wall. "I shot a drone -- there's more coming!"

John rolled to his feet and went to cover the door. A scatter of shots kept the drones back in the corridor, but it looked like the rest of the crew was on to them now.

Rodney got the wall open and worked hastily at the door controls. Finally a heavy blast door slid down and he stepped back with a gasp of relief. "That should keep them out. For a while, anyway."

"Find the intruder control before they get smart and start using the Enarians as hostages." John put another couple of stunner bolts into the Wraith sprawled on the floor, just to be on the safe side. There were no handy hiding spots in the room for other Wraith, and none lurking on the ceiling. One wall was covered by a flat glassy surface, opaque as obsidian, that might be a viewscreen.

"Yes, fine, but no pressure!" Rodney snapped, heading for the dais.

Liam was already up there, studying the consoles. They were triangular too, with milky glass bubbles instead of crystal touchpads like the Ancient equipment. Liam bent over one, frowning, saying, "The wily creature locked the controls, and I suppose if we were as lacking in initiative as it thought we were, that would be an impediment." It flexed its long fingers, running its hand over the glowing bubbles. "Hmm. My anatomy may not be accurate enough."

"The sensors are looking for the feeding...apparatus," Rodney said, watching him carefully. "It can't read you as Wraith without it."

"Yes." Liam appeared oblivious to the suspicious scrutiny. "Do you both have the Lantian gene?"

Rodney gave John a shove forward. "He does."

Liam absently waggled clawed fingers. "Come here, poppet."

"Don't call me that." John stepped up to the console reluctantly, trying to ignore the fact that Liam's proximity was making his skin creep.

"Then how will you know when I'm talking to you?" Liam said reasonably. "Put your hand on that bubble-thing there."

"Ancients could activate Wraith technology?" Rodney stepped up to the console, looking over John's shoulder.

The Wraith outside were doing something to the hatch, causing a rhythmic pounding.

"Yes. I don't know how it came about, or really much of anything about it." Liam sounded like they had all the time in the world to chat about it. "But the Wraith were never able to lock them out of their systems. Though the Wraith certainly weren't able to use Lantian technology."

"How did you find out about it in the first place?" Rodney asked.

"I had the Lantian gene for a while, a long, long time ago," Liam said absently, manipulating the controls. "I never could do much with it. It wore off over the years. There, I think that's got it."

The rest of the bubbles lit up, and the glossy flat section in the middle of the console lit up with a screen of readouts.

Rodney shouldered John aside, asking Liam, "Can you read Wraith?"

"I'm a little rusty," Liam admitted.

Rodney exchanged a long-suffering look with John. Yeah, John thought, stepping back, That's what he said about the stunners. He waited impatiently as Rodney and Liam studied the console and carefully prodded various controls. Rodney's occasional shouts of "Not that one!" weren't encouraging.

"Here it is," Rodney said finally. "Intruder control. It's a stun, activated by units in the walls, the same variety as their weapons and the culling beam. It'll saturate the entire ship except for the bridge, leaving everyone unconscious but unharmed."

"Do it," John said, relieved. The pounding on the hatch was getting louder. "And can you check the crew complement, so we know how many Wraith are aboard?"

"Oh, you've done this before," Liam said, looking at him admiringly.

Rodney gave Liam a narrow-eyed look as he hit the intruder control, then answered John, "Unfortunately, I can't get into those systems at the moment." Something on the console flashed, and a weird wailing alarm cut in for an instant, before Rodney shut it down. The pounding on the hatch cut off abruptly. "There. They should be out now."

John rubbed his forehead, wincing as he found a developing bruise. It wasn't over yet. "Is there an airlock on this thing?" he asked.

Rodney grimaced and bent over the controls. "Good idea. Let's see."

"Why do we need an airlock when we're in space?" Liam asked, apparently serious.

Rodney sighed and covered his face with his hands, muttering, "I can't take this."

John regarded Liam for a long moment, then said, "The Wraith aren't actually dead, they're just sleeping. So we need to, you know...."

"Oh, I see." Liam nodded.

"Right." John stared at him, trying to figure out if Liam was just messing with them or was actually mentally ill. Or both. But then he was the most alien alien they had ever encountered, and maybe those definitions just didn't fit. He shook it off and said, "You got this, McKay?"

"What? Yes." Rodney waved a hand, absorbed in the console again. "Go take out the garbage."

"Seal the door after us," John told him.

"Oh, I'm going with you?" Liam asked, confused.

"God, don't let it turn into some sort of nightmarish Monty Python routine." Rodney clapped a hand over his eyes. "Yes, go with him!"

Wraith were heavy, and as luck would have it, most of them were on the opposite side of the ship from the airlock. After locating all of them and stunning them again to make sure they stayed unconscious, they quickly got into a routine -- drag, dump, close doors, flush -- and Liam was more help than John had expected. It figured though, that if the guy -- thing -- whatever had been farming with the Enarians, then he had to be used to hard work. The weird part was that every so often Liam lost a Wraith feature and replaced it with something from the blue alien with the external skeleton. It happened really fast, and never when John was looking at him.

When they went after the drones in the hold, the Enarians were starting to stir. "It's all right, it's just me!" Liam announced, and grew a tentacle out of his head to prove it. John nearly knocked himself unconscious slamming into a wall in his instinctive leap away.

Staggering around out in the corridor, John thought he heard Biel say, "Liam, are you all right? I thought--"

"I'm fine, Biel, really, don't mention it," Liam replied, seizing an unconscious drone by the ankle. He looked around for John. "Are you going to help with this? Why are you bleeding again?"

John didn't bother to answer. If the humans were waking from the stun, the Wraith wouldn't be far behind, and they were running out of time.

Finally they dumped and flushed the last drone, and Liam leaned against the wall near the airlock, looking like a very tired Wraith with suckers where its mouth should be and a few stray tentacles. "Are we done?"

"Yeah, we're done." John pushed off from the wall.

Liam did something and the rest of the Wraith form and the other alien parts just sloughed off, leaving a tall gangly human again, dressed in Enarian robes. He shook himself, wispy hair flying. "That's better."

John stared at him for a moment, thought, freak out later and said, "Why don't you go help Rodney figure out how to fly the ship?"

Liam blinked. "Oh, right. We were doing that earlier, weren't we?" he said, wandering off.

John made a last quick sweep to make sure they had found all the Wraith, and opened a closed cubby to find their gear, the vests, weapons, and BDU jackets tossed atop an Auschwitz-like pile of discarded clothing in what was apparently a trash receptacle. He tried his radio first but it picked up nothing but static. Then he spotted more familiar dark gray near the top of the pile, and dug down to find a crumpled bundle of Teyla's jacket, pants, and the non-reg purple tank top thing she had been wearing that day.

In some bizarre way, it hadn't been real until then. John was running off too much adrenaline to feel his own injuries, and Rodney and Liam bitching hysterically at each other through the takeover had somehow made the whole thing more surreal than nightmarish.

This made it real. That they had, by a hair's breadth chance, escaped from the larder of an alien spaceship. And that maybe some of them hadn't escaped.

Breathing hard, he tore the pile apart but he couldn't find Ford's gear or clothes. That didn't necessarily mean anything. The Wraith hadn't had time to strip most of the Enarians and the weapons might be somewhere else.

John made himself take their weapons to the bridge first, where Liam was poking uncertainly at one of the consoles and Rodney was looking over his shoulder with an appalled expression. "I can't get weapons, communications, or sensors online," Rodney informed him, but didn't protest when John pulled him away and made him put his vest on, then clipped Teyla's P-90 to it. "Wait, this is Teyla's gun. She's here too? And Ford?" Rodney asked, his face white and strained in the weird light. "You think--?"

"I have to check the hold," John said, and left again.

In the main hold, the Enarians who had recovered from the stun were already pulling people out of the wall cocoons. John did a quick survey of the unconscious bodies still sprawled on the floor, then started on the wall cubbies. The Enarians stared at him as he moved along the rows, but nobody bothered him, though the P-90 probably had a lot to do with that. After a few minutes frantic search, he found Teyla still webbed up in a cubby in the largest section.

John realized later his brain must have gone offline for a time, because he didn't really remember anything about tearing away the webbing until he could see she was whole and unhurt, her face unaltered, no feeding mark on her chest. Then she was mostly free and he was dragging her out of the cubby, and she gasped and punched him in the chest hard enough to knock him back a step. John caught her wrists before she could hit him again. "Teyla, Teyla, it's me."

She got her eyes open and he saw recognition and awareness and profound relief, before she started to collapse. He lifted her up and she clung to him, wrapping her arms around his neck.

When he carried her into the bridge, Rodney jumped down from the dais, rushing over to them. His face a mix of fear and relief, he asked, "Oh God, is she okay?"

"She's fine," John said, lowering her to the floor. She was dazed, half-conscious, shivering, dressed only in her underwear and still covered with the filthy webbing, but he knew what Rodney was really asking. "Take care of her, I have to look for Ford."

"Yes, yes, of course," Rodney said, and launched into a litany of reassurance and coaxing that got Teyla to let go of John and transfer her determined grip to him.

John went back to the hold first, searching it again, then the rest of the ship. He didn't find any live bodies outside the hold, just old corpses stuck in odd places. By the time he got back, the Enarians had everyone out of the cocoons, including some badly confused and frightened people who had apparently been in the ship since its last stop for supplies. Again, no one tried to stop John, no one said anything to him, and they avoided his eyes, hastily stepping out of his path. John figured his expression was communicating clearly what would happen to anybody who got in his way.

He checked the dead bodies again, the prematurely aged husks still trapped in the webbing. He used the P-90's light to illuminate the faces, making himself look carefully. It was nearly impossible to make out facial features, but he studied the remaining clothing and tried to see past desiccation and rot to guess at size, weight, and skin color. After a while he was certain none of them was Ford. He went back to the other end of the ship and checked the pile of clothes again, just in case he had missed something, but he still didn't find any part of Ford's gear or uniform. Either they killed him on the planet, or he got away, John thought finally, leaning wearily against a rubbery wall. The radio still received nothing but static.

He went back to the bridge, sick of looking at dead people and dead people's belongings. Teyla was curled up on the floor asleep, her head pillowed on her arm, covered by a patchwork collection of BDU jackets, her clothes and an Enarian scarf-like garment. This time Rodney was working determinedly at the console and Liam was watching, scratching his fluffy head and looking as if things weren't going well. Biel was in the room now, sitting over on Liam's side of the room, watching worriedly.

As John came in, Rodney looked up, his preoccupied frown turning anxious. "Ford?"

"He's not on the ship." John sank unsteadily to the floor to sit beside Teyla, facing partly away from the dais so he had a view of Liam, Biel, and the door, cradling the P-90 in his lap.

Rodney was watching him, brow creased with worry. "But that's good. He's still on the planet, or he's back in Atlantis, getting help."

John shook his head, too tired to argue. He had already been over every possible scenario, and the bad ones outweighed the good. "They knew about the jumper, Rodney."

"Atlantis?" Liam looked at them incredulously. "You come from Atlantis? You know, if you people weren't so freakishly secretive--"

"Yes, right, and you've been in hiding for a century while passing for human, so you can shut up about our issues now," Rodney told him, and John thought it was a really good thing that Rodney was here to deal with Liam, because just shooting people that John found irritating was starting to seem like a much better idea than it actually was. Then a power bar bounced off John's chest and Rodney said, "Eat something. I made Teyla have some before she passed out; sugar is supposed to be helpful in cases of shock."

John shook his head, annoyed. "I'm not in shock."

"Please, your eyes are glazing over."

"Shut up and worry about getting us off the Wraith ship, Rodney."

Then Biel said carefully, "What is Atlantis?"

John smiled grimly to himself, gave Rodney the "just wait till I get you home" look, and tore the wrapper on the power bar.

"It's a city of the race commonly known to humans as the Ancestors or the Lantians." Liam leaned against the console, smiling. "I assume they peacefully explored it and decided to live there."

Biel shook her head, confused. "Why didn't you tell us this? It was because Liam saw that the flying ship you had was Lantian that he became suspicious and said we should not trust you."

Rodney signed and explained, "We've had incidents where people tried to steal our technology, or even to invade the city through our stargate. Most of it would be useless to them -- the Ancient technology requires a special gene only present in humans descended from Ancients, like the Major, here. But they refuse to understand that, and frankly, we're tired of being attacked, so we don't advertise the information."

John swallowed a mouthful of power bar. "Kind of like how you introduce Liam as your friend who came to you through the stargate, and not as the alien shapechanger who you provide with human DNA so he can hide from the Wraith."

"They've got us there," Liam contributed cheerfully.

"I see." Biel nodded.

"Frankly," Liam began, and John was pretty certain he wasn't going to want to hear this, "It was you people's behavior that initially made me suspicious. So stiltedly polite, and pretending interest in plows and other ridiculous things, and you," he told Rodney, "so obviously contemptuous of our decision not to pursue advanced technology and live in the mud and filth and like it and you, poppet," he pointed at John, "with the restrained, 'I'm so pretty, don't touch me' flirting. I much prefer your natural behavior, which is apparently to insult and threaten each other continuously. At least it's honest."

Rodney and John stared at each other, while Biel unsuccessfully tried to stifle a laugh. John said finally, "Okay, I should have let you call him an incompetent transvestite."

"What's a transvestite?" Liam asked.

***

Rodney and Liam worked steadily on the controls, and it was eerie to watch Liam's hands shift from large, boney, and very human to blue-gray Wraith skin whenever they needed to activate something. It was especially disturbing to see it happen so close to where Rodney was standing, and John kept instinctively tightening his grip on the P-90, even though he didn't think Liam would screw them over at this point. Or maybe at any point.

Rodney seemed fine, and apparently in his element, at least as long as the power bar supply held out. Liam, on the other hand, looked wilted and ill. Rodney had offered him a power bar, but Liam had waved it off with a, "Oh for the love of the Infinite, no."

"What, don't you eat?" Rodney asked suspiciously.

Liam sighed in exasperation. "Of course I eat; I don't farm for the entertainment of it. But I'd rather not describe what that stuff smells like to me."

Biel went out occasionally to report to the others, and several times a woman or a young man came in, cautiously, to speak to her. It was starting to be a struggle for John to stay awake, and every time he moved, he discovered a new ache or pain. He tried the radio at frequent intervals, but got nothing but static.

Finally, Teyla sat up in the nest of clothes, staring around the room in confusion. She ran a hand through her disordered hair, looking at the webbing on her fingers. "So it was not a nightmare." She looked down. "And I am almost naked." She lifted a brow at John, who smiled and said, "Hi."

"Look at it from my perspective," Rodney said from the console, "Now that I've seen your underwear, my fantasies will be much more accurate."

"There is more lace than I'd always pictured," John admitted.

"I will make you rue that comment later, Dr. McKay. And you, Major," Teyla eyed John critically, "I look forward to our next sparring session. Now help me find my shirt and tell me what has happened."

"Now there," Liam said, waving a hand, "That's what I like -- natural human behavior."

***

Finally, Rodney wiped the sweat off his brow, leaned on the console, and said, "All right, we still can't access most of the main systems, but this is what we can do. We've found a number of automatic subroutines, one of which allows for the entire contents of the hold -- the humans in storage -- to be beamed to another location. The coordinates for the field near the village are still in the system, so we can plug those in with no problem. The other issue we were working on was a way to prevent the Wraith from tying the disappearance of this ship specifically to the Enarians. Fortunately, Liam can clear the last automated log entries so it will look as if the ship never arrived here, and we can activate a subroutine that will initiate a timed jump into hyperspace. When the Wraith track it down, they won't have any idea what happened or where it happened. It'll be the Wraith version of the Marie Celeste."

"That would be ideal," Teyla said, listening intently. "If the Wraith thought the Enarians had anything to do with the death of this crew, they would cull the entire population."

John bit his lip, thinking it over. "We can't keep the ship?"

"Unfortunately not," Rodney admitted. "I can't turn off the transponders. Not without a lot of work and help, and every minute we stay here--"

"Increases the chance of another ship arriving," John finished. "Right, let's do that, then."

Biel pushed to her feet. "Liam? Should I--"

He made an airy gesture. "Yes, better tell the others what we plan to do, and gather everyone in the hold."

She hesitated, looking around at them all as if she wanted to say something, then she turned and hurried out.

Rodney watched her go, adding, "The problem is we'll be using the culling beam to transport ourselves down, so when we arrive, we'll be unconscious. And there's no telling how long we'll be out. The effects of two culling beam trips in less than twenty-four hours aren't going to be a picnic for anybody onboard."

"I won't be unconscious," Liam put in. "I'll be a puddle."

"Shockingly, Liam, not everything is about you." Rodney shook his head tiredly, and added, "If there were any Wraith left on the surface, we'll be helpless."

John scrubbed a hand through his hair. He really didn't like this, but there wasn't exactly a wide range of options. "Or the rest of the village could decide we're responsible for bringing the Wraith and kill us."

"There's always that," Rodney agreed grimly.

Liam stared at them. "You people just lead lives of quiet desperation, don't you? I've been a fugitive for six hundred years and I'm not that cynical."

"Then you're doing it wrong," Rodney told him.

Liam rolled his eyes. "I should only be a puddle for a few minutes. I'll hold off any retaliation by my violent Enarian compatriots. Of course, if there's Wraith, I'll be outnumbered and probably killed."

"Oh, good." John nodded mock-earnestly. "We feel better now."

***

They gathered in the hold, with the large group of Enarians and the few people who had been rescued from older cocoons on the ship.

While the others were milling around, John took the opportunity to pull Rodney aside, saying, "We need to make an alliance with Liam, so we can keep talking to him."

"If we live through this." Rodney rubbed his hands together nervously. "He knows things we've never even had hints of before. And the idea of another sentient alien species, allied with the Ancients, nearly wiped out by the Wraith--"

"And we still need the arum and the toba root," John pointed out.

"That too. Maybe you can talk him into helping us. He likes you." At John's expression, he added, "Oh, come on, he calls you 'poppet.'"

"He's an alien," John protested. "We don't know what that means."

"Please, what do you think it means?" Rodney took out the Wraith wrist control he had keyed to the bridge controls. "Let's get this over with."

They moved to the center of the hold, where Teyla joined them, giving Rodney a confident nod. The Enarians all looked hopeful and frightened and not likely to turn on their rescuers, but then these people would all be unconscious when they arrived on the surface. John didn't like it, but they didn't have any other choice.

"Are we ready?" Rodney looked around, and when no one objected, he took a deep breath and activated the remote. "We have one minute and counting."

"Well, this is going to be unpleasant," Liam said, fussing with his robe. "I hate losing cohesion."

Rodney eyed him, his mouth twisted. "So you're going to be a puddle? Why didn't you get a bucket or something to stand in?"

Liam glared at him. "You could have mentioned that earlier."

Then the hold dissolved in a haze of white light.

***

The shock of cold fresh air startled John into temporary consciousness. He was sprawled on chill wet ground, under a star-filled night sky, and this was the first breath he had taken in hours that wasn't heavy with death.

He tried to sit up but his body might as well have been an inanimate object. He could breathe, but the effort of expanding his lungs was taking everything he had.

Then something filled his vision and he focused on a young Enarian man, staring down at him and holding a club.

Oh, no, John thought. Rodney and Teyla would be lying helpless right next to him and he couldn't protect them, couldn't even twitch his fingers. He managed to choke out, "Wait--" and the effort sent him under again.

***

John flinched awake the next time someone touched him, but this time it was Sergeant Stackhouse leaning over him. "...found them, Lieutenant," he was saying. "All three, warm and breathing. Wait, I think the Major's coming around."

John processed the fact that this was one of the Enarian huts, lit by warm candlelight. That he was lying on a pallet and Rodney was pressed against his side and breathing heavily in his ear, and the warm bundle under his other arm was Teyla. He managed to get a mostly numb arm free and held out a hand. Stackhouse put a headset in it and John got it over his ear and said, "Ford, report."

"Major, it's good to hear your voice!" Ford said enthusiastically.

John got the story from both Ford and Stackhouse as he was trying to climb out of the pallet. Ford had had an exciting day too. He had still been in the jumper when the sensors had picked up the first dart. He had tried to call them but the radio had already been jammed. Ford realized the Wraith must have spotted the jumper, so he cloaked it with his remote and left, heading back to the village to try to warn them. He had nearly run into a small party of drones, obviously searching for the jumper, and ended up having to go to ground in the forest. When the darts had left, he avoided the jumper's position and returned to the gate, killed the drone guarding the DHD, and dialed into Atlantis for backup. Stackhouse and Bates had brought their teams through with two more cloaked jumpers, and they had spent the rest of the afternoon and evening hunting down the Wraith remaining in the area, rescuing the trapped jumper, and looking for their lost personnel. They had wondered why the ship that the jumper's sensors registered as still in orbit failed to send down any darts to help the Wraith on the ground, and had been hoping that was a good sign.

They had been cautiously approaching the ship when it had suddenly broken orbit and jumped away. Ford said they thought that was it, that John and the others were lost, until the ground team reported the appearance of a transport beam near the village right before the ship had vanished.

The villagers had gotten to the transport site first, and there had been a delay while the Atlantis teams tried to figure out exactly what had come down in the beam. When they made contact with the village, the Enarians agreed to let Stackhouse and Yamato come in to look for their lost people.

By the time John made it upright, Rodney was starting to make grumbling noises indicating that he was about to wake up, and Teyla had rolled over and pulled a pillow over her head. Their weapons were piled neatly in a corner. There were several more pallets in the hut, all occupied by unconscious Enarians. "Stay with McKay and Teyla," John told Yamato.

He made it out of the hut with Stackhouse trailing him, saying, "Sir? Do you think you should sit down?"

"Obviously not," John told him. The night air was clear and cold, the village street was torchlit, and there were a lot of people staggering around in about the same shape as John.

Anoch, the village elder, was standing by the fountain, keeping semi-conscious people from falling in.

John reached him and said, "Anoch, where's Liam?"

"Oh, he's in there." Anoch turned John around and pointed him toward a hut across the street. "Biel's with him. He isn't doing well."

"What, is he still a puddle?" John asked, ignoring the worried look Stackhouse was giving him.

"No, he's just not doing well." Anoch winced. "It's nothing we hadn't expected, it's just happening a bit faster."

John made it to the hut and leaned in the doorway.

It was a homely little room, with woven hangings on the walls and grass mats on the dirt floor. And there was something lying on the single bed that looked like a structure made of fireflies and gossamer.

Stepping closer, John could see there were actually things that looked like sinew and blood vessels, but all of it was wispy, impossibly delicate. He had thought Liam's real appearance might be the blue alien with the exterior skeleton, but this made far more sense. Rodney had said Liam was probably rearranging matter around his body, and this looked a lot more like something that could do that. John looked at Biel, who was sitting on a stool near the bed, and asked, "Can he talk?"

She shook her head sadly. "Not in any way we can understand."

"We have a doctor. He knows about aliens-- At least, aliens in general--"

"That is kind, but I don't know if he could do anything to help. It is just that Liam is very old." Biel pointed carefully, and John saw the delicate strands of light had gone dim in places, that some of the traceries of blood vessels or whatever they were had shriveled and dried. John gave Stackhouse a nod, and the sergeant stepped outside to relay the request to Ford.

Biel explained, "He was old when he first came to us, long before I was born. And some years ago he told us that he would not be able to change as he had before. He said he had reached a point where each transformation cost him body mass and energy that there was no way to replace. He said it was simply the way of his species, how they aged and died." Her voice thickened for a moment and she cleared her throat. "He used up almost all he had left helping us."

John sank down on another stool. He thought of how Liam kept dropping pieces of his Wraith disguise, randomly growing tentacles. The moments of weakness and what must have been flashes of senility. "That's why he was so...erratic."

"Sometimes he forgets." She admitted, with a faint smile, "Sometimes he only pretends to forget, so he can say outrageous things."

Rodney stumbled in and sat down heavily on the grass mat. He frowned at Liam's alien form. "He doesn't look healthy. Did we send for Carson?"

John nodded. "He should be here soon."

The creature of light on the bed shifted and suddenly Liam lay there, in his old human form. He sat up suddenly and said, "That's better."

Biel said, startled, "Liam, you said you wouldn't change again."

"Yes, but that's so boring, and there's no point to it." His skin was gray and his eyes were glassy. Instead of a dying alien, he looked like a dying human. It took him a moment to focus on John, and he said, "Poppet, I'd give you the gate address to my planet, but I can't remember it now, and besides, I don't think there's anything useful left there. When you sneak onto hive ships and blow them up, the Wraith get very testy." Liam told Biel, "Give Rodney all my little tools. Some of them stopped working, and they aren't all Lantian. I think it's the batteries. And we're going to trade with them, aren't we?"

"Yes," Biel said hastily, tears in her eyes. "Yes, we are."

Liam said, "That's good," and turned back into the creature of light and gossamer. It faded away slowly, and collapsed into a pile of metallic dust.

***

They headed for the jumpers before morning, with a trading agreement and a promise to return to visit soon.


end

Comments

[norah.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed this a lot, thank you.

[ltlj.livejournal.com]

Thanks, glad you liked it!