![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
linaerys.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
sga_flashficAuthor: ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
linaerys
Title: The Call of the Traveler
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: vaguely Sheppard/McKay established, but basically gen
Word Count: ~5500
Summary: The dark side of the Ancients.
Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me, nor to I derive any profit from them.
Warnings: General creepiness
A/N: thank you tomrshamill for story notes
The marines found the body in one of the abandoned labs.
Little by little, marine teams had been sweeping the city in teams of three or four, mapping, collating, taking pictures with digital cameras whose technology was dwarfed by the technology they recorded. Rodney looked over the pictures and then decided what they should bring back for him examine.
They called Carson and John down to the lab to look at the body. Carson ordered John to put on a protective suit in case it was another plague. Cadman had been among those to find the body, and Carson hugged her awkwardly in his bulky suit, before consigning her to quarantine with the rest of the marines on that detail.
“We didn’t even know he was missing,” she said, as she sat, sliding heavily down the wall.
Carson sealed off a portion of the infirmary so Biro could examine the body without threat of contamination. She spent a few days going over the body, while John sent marines down to the quarantined area with food, water and reading materials no one had any further use for.
The body belonged to Sgt. Ramirez. Elizabeth had John go back through the logs, but no one had seen or heard from him in several weeks. Every marine filed a short report at the end of his or her watch, and none mentioned Ramirez.
“I heard he was helping out the botanists,” said Cadman when John went to visit her in quarantine.
“He wasn’t helping the botanists—he was doing detail on the mainland,” said Lorne. “At least that’s what someone told me.”
Finally Dr. Biro gave Carson a report, which he brought Elizabeth and John while John was in her office.
“I think we can lift the quarantine,” he said. “Atlantis hasn’t imposed quarantine, and no one else has died.”
Elizabeth flipped through the pages and handed the report to John. “All this report says is what didn’t happen to Sgt. Ramirez.”
“That is Dr. Biro’s report,” said Carson. He looked away from John and Elizabeth. John followed his gaze to the wall and Elizabeth’s masks. They looked down like death’s heads.
“But what do you think?” she asked him.
“I don’t know what to think, Elizabeth,” said Carson, his voice rising.
“Time of death—unknown? Why is that?” she asked.
“There were no signs on the body, inside or out, of what could have killed him,” said Carson. “The body was room temperature but had experienced no decomposition. We simply don’t know.”
“And what was the lab for?” she asked.
“Rodney and Zelenka are looking into it now that quarantine has been lifted,” said John.
“With back up?” asked Carson with a hitch of panic in his voice.
“Yes, of course,” said John. “Lorne and a team are with them.”
***
They gave Sgt. Ramirez a memorial service—some of the younger marines knew him and said nice things about him. He had come out with the most recent Daedalus run. He was a Catholic, and some of the other Catholics remembered their prayers. Everyone remembered their prayers these days. Katie Brown knew a Latin hymn and she sang it in her thready voice. Teyla sung an Athosian song for a fallen comrade.
After the service on Atlantis, they bagged the body and put it in the morgue’s freezer. When the Daedalus came back, the body would travel with it back to Earth, so it could rest in consecrated ground. They owed him that much, and more, for never noticing he was gone.
***
The Traveler wakes slowly, sloughing off the cobwebs of millennia. These creatures’ spirits are poor and weak compared to the bounty She remembers. She considers slipping back on the timestreams to try again, yet again, but finds she lacks the energy, or even the maps to do that. They blinded her well, this time. Her favorite children. Now their offspring, weak and diluted, have returned, and they have fed Her.
***
“There’s something wrong with these files, Rodney,” said John. He put his laptop down on Rodney’s lab bench.
“Can’t you see I’m working?” asked Rodney, but with little venom. John knew how he felt. Somehow the death of Ramirez had cast a pall over Atlantis in a way none of the other deaths had. They hadn’t noticed he was gone, and each of the Atlanteans bore that burden. Had they really become so inured to death? Had they really failed to notice?
“This is important. Every one of the reports has been altered. Everyone says that they read reports of Ramirez being somewhere else. The people on his team said he had been reassigned to the biologist team, the biologist team didn’t know anything about it. The logs showed that Ramirez checked his rifle in and out every day, but now they’re showing that he hadn’t done it in two weeks. Something is wrong.”
There was more than that adding to John’s unease, but nothing he could take to Rodney—no rational explanation for feeling, every moment, that something looked over his shoulder. Even the problem with the reports would probably be too vague for him.
Rodney grabbed the computer from him. “I’ll have to run some diagnostics,” he said, without looking up.
“Good, you do that.”
Rodney didn’t find anything, though, and so John tried to get back to normal, to forget about the nagging sense of wrongness about Ramirez’s death. The consensus was that the marines had overlooked him, and there had been a miscommunication. Carson couldn’t say why the marine died, and they put it down as Just One Of Those Things.
It bothered John that the best scientific minds in two galaxies couldn’t come up with anything better, but he had no suggestions to offer, just a growing sense of foreboding that kept him up nights.
***
She finds him, of all the humans, and decides he is the One. He is already a little broken; She will crack him wide and make him serve.
***
It was always two steps forward and one step back with the Genii. Unlike many of the other peoples they encountered, the Genii had some inborn distrust of the Ancients. John never stopped to ask why, just figured it was their longing to be the greatest power in the galaxy.
Elizabeth went off-world with a cadre of marines to negotiate with them for some intelligence about another ZPM, and left John with the promise that he would stay on Atlantis. He sparred with Teyla and Ronon and caught up on paperwork for a while before something bothering him in the back of his mind came to the fore.
“Rodney, where are the star drives?” asked John.
“Look, this city isn’t going to fly,” said Rodney. “I shouldn’t have even told you that. I know you like the idea, but it’s just not going to happen.”
John could cajole Rodney into this, use a flirtatious grin, and Rodney would do what he wanted, but this time the grin wouldn’t come. “I think you might be wrong about that . . .” said John, instead. He could feel the city’s engines, banked and silent, but longing for flight.
“Me? Wrong?” said Rodney.
John wanted to smile or roll his eyes at Rodney’s posturing, but all he could do was grimace. “But that’s not why I want to see them. I think . . . it’s about Ramirez.”
“That again? I think it’s probably some kind of disease that Carson missed, or a what’s-it, a mini-aneurism, aren’t those supposed to be undetectable?”
“Just show me.”
Rodney rolled his chair over to one of the massive screens that covered one wall and typed in a few commands on his computer. “See, I think it’s here,” he said, pointing to a blank space on the schematic. “I’ve never been able to get any more detail, and it’s never been a very pressing concern, even though I know how much you’d like it to be . . .”
John nodded. “Let’s go there, then.”
“There isn’t any there there per se. That part has never been accessible.”
“I think it might be now,” said John. He didn’t know where the certainty had come from.
Elizabeth had asked him, when the first came to Atlantis, if he could sense things about the city, if it had any closer linkage to him than to other members of the team. He said no, then, and then he had meant it. But every so often, he was gripped with an odd conviction that his mind held thoughts not his own, when Atlantis was under attack, or when the nanovirus had been set loose, a feeling that Atlantis was aware.
“See, they’re just bulkheads,” said Rodney after they took the transporters down to that section. They didn’t look any different than any others—huge gray walls, and behind them, the ocean. The sensors showed nothing but marine life. “This is where the hyperdrives should be, but there’s nothing.”
“Not nothing.” John put his hand to the bulkhead and felt the weird, thrumming energy behind it. Not ocean, something else. Atlantis, itself. He asked it to open. “Stand close, Rodney,” he ordered.
One moment the bulkhead was there, and the next it dissolved into mist. John felt the buzzing in the back of his mind growing, crowding out conscious thought. The only thing anchoring him was Rodney’s warm, solid presence by his side.
Behind the bulkhead lay pieces of equipment John had never seen before, never even imagined. Huge crystals, like Ancient control crystals but immensely bigger, hung from the ceiling like stalactites, matched by metal spires poking up from the floor.
They walked among the silent towers, lit only by Rodney’s flashlight and the dim glow issuing from the floor lighting. John didn’t feel self-conscious reaching out to clutch Rodney’s hand. The place felt more haunted than any place in Atlantis, even than the city had felt when they woke her from her sleep. Ancient ghosts, he thought.
In the center of the room was a shaft going down into the floor, ten feet in diameter, the bottom lost in shadows. There were holes at even intervals around the perimeter, perhaps where a guard rail had been anchored. If so, someone had removed it long ago; dust collected in the holes. Rodney shone his flashlight into the depths of the shaft, only to see the light disappear, eaten by the dark.
“Maybe this was for heat exhaust,” he said, voice subdued by the vastness of this place.
“Light,” said John, in the same command voice he used when Ronon needed controlling. As if Atlantis would obey him that easily. But she did, and light started to glow from the bases of the spires, penetrating everywhere but the pit in the center of the room.
“You know, this is probably draining power . . . ,” said Rodney, trailing off. He tightened his grip on John’s hand and John squeezed back.
Lights continued to come on, nearly blinding in their intensity, so that John almost didn’t notice when the shaft in the middle of the room became illuminated. The light reached further down into the pit, as if fighting some primordial monster of dark. John walked over to the edge, pulling Rodney behind him and looked in.
He couldn’t make sense of the sight at first, it was just a tangle of shapes, but then he saw outlines, the fine bones of a hand silhouetted against the wall of the shaft, the curve of a skull, the butterfly shape of a pelvis, and then finally he saw the entirety: a pile of bodies, mostly skeletal, but some with faint shrouds of flesh still clinging to them. Some bodies were whole, but many were just pieces and, mostly horribly of all, many had their arms stretched up the sides of the shaft, as if they had been put down there alive, and had been trying to climb out until their death came.
Rodney pulled him away from the edge. John couldn’t feel himself teetering there, but Rodney told him later he that was, and John had to believe him. He didn’t even remember the transporter ride back, or when he punched the wall of Atlantis so hard he fractured two knuckles. It didn’t even dent the wall.
John showed Elizabeth a few days later when she returned. He had an idea that he shouldn’t bring any more than one person down at a time, that something dangerous still waited down with the star drive. He told himself it was nerves—that many dead bodies would frighten anyone.
He prepared Elizabeth, but she was still shocked when she saw them.
“We have to find out how these people died,” she whispered, unwilling to disturb the mausoleum-like atmosphere. “So much for me sleeping tonight. Or ever again,” she added almost inaudibly.
***
She is still waking up, and learning Her new children. Her food needs are still simple. Raw power in whatever form they can pour into Her.
***
“Well, we’ve always suspected this,” said Carson. He put a bulleted list of his findings up on the screen in the conference room. This senior staff meeting was smaller than most, just John, Elizabeth, Rodney, Radek and Carson. Teyla was visiting the mainland, and John had ordered Ronon to stay away. Carson had asked him to, and given the subject matter of this meeting, John didn’t want to vouch for any of their lives if Ronon found out.
“You’re sure Carson?” asked Elizabeth. “This is quite unsettling.”
“It’s clear as day. The Ancients created the Wraith. As you know, we’ve been going through the stores of data from the various labs, when we had a chance—there’s still so much we haven’t yet covered. I found descriptions of their experiments on a storage crystal from one of the genetics labs.”
“Why?” asked Rodney. “Why would they do that?” He sounded petulant and frightened. For once he wasn’t looking for scientific reasoning, but simple reassurance.
“It must have been a mistake,” said Carson. He rubbed his forehead.
“Yes,” said Elizabeth with a false smile. “I can’t imagine that they would have done it on purpose. Perhaps it was part of their research into Ascension.”
“Are we going to excuse everything with that?” asked John.
“What?” Elizabeth’s voice was sharp.
“When do we start to ask if maybe the Ancients weren’t so good after all?”
“That’s not the point, John.” Elizabeth didn’t think in terms of good and evil, and when you get down to it, neither did John, but while he thought in terms of “my people” and “people trying to kill my people” and maybe “neutrals” or “people who haven’t tried to kill my people yet,” Elizabeth thought in terms of power and more power.
“Can we use this, Carson?” Elizabeth asked.
“Maybe—knowing they were created artificially might make turning them human easier.” The worried expression never left Carson’s face these days. John wondered when he would give up on that dream.
“Or killing them,” said John, because Ronon wasn’t there to say it for him. “Did you have a chance to look at those bodies we brought you?”
The temperature in the room seemed to drop, and no one would meet John’s eyes across the table. They didn’t want to think about it.
John had asked for volunteers to go into the pit and retrieve the bodies, and finally drew names from a hat, exempting those who had found Sgt. Ramirez’s body. He and Ronon had gone along as well. Of the marines who had been chosen, two were being treated for panic attacks now, and John was glad Dr. Heightmeyer had her supplies of Valium replenished by the latest Daedalus run. They all needed it.
The lines on Carson’s forehead deepened even further. “Well, they started to fall apart as soon as I got them in the lab. There’s no way of knowing how they died, and they were immensely old. We were able to get DNA from some of the scraps of remaining skin.”
John had been lowered down into the pit to retrieve some skin and seal it in a jar. Carson had sent him back. He had nightmares now of standing on that pile of bones, feeling it shift and give under his feet.
“How old?” asked Elizabeth.
“Ten thousand years, plus or minus a century—carbon dating gets less accurate at those time frames.”
“And they were all human?” asked John.
“Yes. Some had the Ancient gene, some did not, but they were all human.”
***
It has been too long since She fed. She sends her consciousness (such as it is, in these lean times) across the wastes that separate Her from the rest of Her kind. She receives no answer, but gives it little thought. The Travelers are solitary creatures, for the most part; Her brethren will be millions of years away from Her, and She will need more power to contact Them.
***
“Something’s changed since Ramirez,” said John. He and Rodney stood looking over the Atlantean Ocean from one of the balconies. The silhouette of Atlantis rose behind them, most of the spires dark. Rodney had lowered the power consumption as much as was possible, at John’s request.
“I have a feeling,” John had said.
“Oh, a feeling—that’s what I like to base power projection levels on.” But he had done it. John could feel Atlantis, begging for more power, but he had started to doubt whether the interests of this city were the same as the interests of the people who inhabited her.
“Did you ever find out more about the nanovirus?” asked John.
“That isn’t what killed Ramirez,” said Rodney brusquely. “The nanovirus. Elegant engineering that, but the entry in the database was encrypted to a level we haven’t been able to break.”
“Well, have you been trying?”
“Yes, I’ve been trying, I’ve just also been trying to keep the Wraith off our backs, and keep the city powered and . . .”
“Yeah, I know, save everyone’s lives.” That shut down Rodney’s diatribe. “Try again, Rodney.”
“My computer’s in my lab.” Rodney looked at John, worried. “You want me to look at it now?”
“Please,” said John. He walked with Rodney back to his lab; the feeling that no one should be left alone had been growing lately and was worse at night.
“I have it right here,” said Rodney when he opened up his computer. As John suspected, he had been working on it whenever nothing more pressing came up—Rodney wasn’t the type who could let an unsolved problem lie.
“You hovering over my shoulder is not going to get it done any faster,” he said to John after a few minutes.
“Wake me if you figure anything out.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“No, really. Wake me.”
“I will, Colonel. Don’t worry.”
John went back to his bunk and tried to sleep, but the waking nightmares that had been hovering at the edge of his mind for weeks descended in force. Sensations impossible to comprehend filled his mind: the fathoms-deep scream of a silent void, the searing light of a black hole, the explosion of every cell in a vacuum.
He didn’t know whether he was asleep or awake when Rodney’s voice came over the radio. “You should come here right away,” he said.
***
They know, She realizes. Or they will soon. Her sense of time runs ahead of their fourth dimension limitations. Soon She will get her due, and the great war, the great dance, will begin again. She hopes that these ones will truly understand what She can give them, that they won’t fear Her gifts.
***
“They made the nanovirus, we were right about that, but it wasn’t intended to kill non-Ancient humans, at least not at first. That was an unfortunate side effect.” Rodney's voice quavered a little, even as he tried to maintain his usual sarcastic tone. “It was intended to produce those visions. Those terrifying visions.”
“Why?”
“To feed The Traveler, is all it said.” John could hear the capital letters when Rodney spoke. He had a feeling the report had said much more.
“What’s The--?”
“We thought it was an Ancient god of some sort, or maybe some kind of messiah, the first ascended being—that’s never really been my field.”
“Gods are trouble,” said John.
“You said it—but this wasn’t a Go’a’uld.”
“What was it?” John asked. The name seemed familiar, beyond the memory of reading it in old SG-1 mission reports. It sat on the edge of his consciousness, tantalizing, like a word on the tip of his tongue.
Rodney didn’t answer. “The decryption program also worked on all the notes about the Energy Beast, remember? That thing that tried to eat me?”
“I remember, Rodney. What did it say, what is The Traveler?”
“We should have looked into this earlier. It just didn’t seem pressing, with the Wraith threat . . .” Rodney sounded like he was talking to himself, and John wanted to shake him out of it.
“Rodney,” said John sternly. “What is it? What is The Traveler?”
“You should read for yourself.” He handed John the laptop.
***
She exults. She can feel his understanding, and it trickles like the finest nectar through Her. He was the right choice, She is sure now. He will be her finest partner. He will decide who else is worthy to know Her.
But then She senses another, much more faint. One whose goals align more closely to hers. The other is so hidden she cannot even tell if it is male or female or some third possibility. This other may be even better. She waits for time to decide.
***
It took John several hours to read everything. At first he sat on one of Rodney’s high lab stools, and swung his legs like a child in kindergarten, but as he read more, he stopped fidgeting, slowed his breathing. His body wanted to go into stealth mode, to hide from something that couldn’t be hidden from.
While John was reading, Rodney called up other documents, feverishly scanning the database. John could feel the distress coming off of Rodney in waves, and when he was done reading, he understood. The lab was dark except the glow from Rodney’s computer screens, and a few goose-neck lamps. Atlantis could have been deserted except for them. John felt a slow movement below him, one he used to think was the motion of the Atlantean Ocean rocking them, but now he knew better.
“Does anyone else know about this?” John asked. He knew what need to be done. This knowledge had to be destroyed. No one else would understand it the way he did, and Rodney? John looked at his face. Rodney had to understand, or he had to be destroyed. John reached for his sidearm, and felt the metal under his fingers.
“We have to tell Elizabeth,” said Rodney. So no, he wouldn’t understand. It was John’s job to end this, to make sure the Traveler got her due. He took the gun out of its holster.
But there was too much between them, too many lives saved, too many horrors faced together for John to face this one alone.
Slowly and carefully, he turned the gun around and handed it barrel-first to Rodney. Rodney took it gingerly. “I don’t think I should have this right now,” said John.
Rodney backed into the far corner of the room, holding the gun in his hand like some loathsome thing he wanted to fling away from him. “What? Why? Who are you?”
“I’m still John,” he said, and that was true, to a point. “Put the gun away, Rodney. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just taking precautions.”
“You’re not making me feel a ton better right now,” said Rodney, but he opened his desk drawer, put the safety on the gun, and locked it in there.
Some part of John’s mind screamed for him to end Rodney, but he quelled it by telling that part that Rodney would be of great use, might even come around.
“You’re it, aren’t you?” whispered Rodney. “There were hints in some of the other things I read, but . . .” Rodney gestured for John to leave the room first—he’d learned something from all those years spent with the military. “Let’s find Elizabeth.”
“We should do this on the mainland,” said John. He thought that if he got away from Atlantis he might be freed from this weight in his mind, this certainty that now he served something greater than himself, and its interests were his own.
Rodney didn’t argue. He strapped his laptop to his back and John called Elizabeth.
She didn’t want all three of them to leave Atlantis at the same time, but Rodney talked her into it. The streaks of dawn were fading into the blue sky when the jumper made landfall on the mainland. They went to a clearing far from the Athosian camp, and sat down on a flat stone there. John tried not to notice how much the stone looked like an altar. He did not want any more images of sacrifice in his head right now.
“What do you know about The Traveler, Elizabeth?” asked John. He resolved to stop saying the name—every time he did he felt like a gong resounded in his head.
“Some kind of Ancient god, perhaps dating from before the Ancients mastered stargate technology?” She raised an eyebrow. “Dr. Jackson has some theories on the subject.”
“The Colonel asked me to decrypt some Ancient files—I would have thought the Ancients would have better encryption, but I guess their large number research wasn’t targeted in that direction—.”
“Rodney!” John interrupted.
“Atlantis is The Traveler,” said Rodney.
“Um . . .” said Elizabeth.
“It’s a parasite—a symbiote—no, a parasite. The Ancients created the nanovirus to feed her—it. The micro-machines somehow fed on the brain waves, and transmitted the energy back to Atlantis. Of course, once they found that using the virus to kill humans also fed Atlantis, as long as the humans were on the same planet, they no longer needed to suffer the visions. That’s why there was no human population on the mainland.” Rodney couldn’t stay seated; he paced back and forth in front of John and Elizabeth as he spoke.
“I don’t understand,” said Elizabeth.
“And the Energy-sucking beast that we woke up, when we got here? The Ancients captured that to try to kill Atlantis,” said John. “It wasn’t about Ascension. Well, it was, but not really.”
“John, this makes no sense. Start from the beginning.”
“Let me,” said Rodney. John nodded. “Several thousand years ago, a Traveler, Atlantis came to this galaxy. I don’t know from where, but I think it must be capable of traveling through all eleven dimensions of space-time—but that’s not important.
“It came to the people we call The Ancients. They were a society no more advanced than Earth is now, but they recognized Atlantis as having vastly greater technology, and started to learn from it.”
“Wait,” said Elizabeth. “What do you mean Atlantis came here?”
“It’s sentient,” said John. “In fact, she’s trying to talk to me right now.” The influence had faded somewhat, but he wasn’t far enough away.
“Really?” Elizabeth looked excited. “What is she trying to say?”
John grimaced and flexed his hands, glad he had given his gun to Rodney. “You don’t want to know.”
“They discovered, though, that it demanded sacrifices. Human lives. Ancient lives,” said Rodney. “That’s why those people were in the star drive.” Elizabeth shuddered visibly, and Rodney continued. “When Atlantis came to this galaxy and chose the Ancients, she also chose her food. She chose to respond to Ancient genes more than others, although she can still feed off regular humans.”
John nodded as Rodney spoke. He hadn’t read what Rodney was saying, but knew it was true nonetheless. She told him it was true.
“Human sacrifice? Rodney, that is awfully far-fetched.” Elizabeth crossed her arms over her chest, but John could see gooseflesh standing up the hairs on her forearms.
“No,” said John. “It explains everything. The Ancients created the Wraith to try to kill Atlantis, at least the sentient portion of her. She feeds on life force, just like they do. They thought that if they got Atlantis to feed on the Wraith, or a large number of Wraith, they would just kill each other. And then they could harvest the technology without having to deal with her appetite.”
“But Atlantis runs on ZPMs,” Elizabeth protested.
“The power grid does, even the gates do, but Atlantis’s mind, her sentience, needs lives to feed it,” said Rodney. “The star drive needs even more. Atlantis can travel not just through space, but time, and dimensions we haven’t even named yet. She needs her mind to do that, and the more she needs to think . . . . I think there were some groups of Ancients who were willing to pay the price, to keep her technology working for them, while others worked to defeat her.”
Yes, there were enemies. John felt a growing anger at them, an implacable anger, banked for millennia.
“Ascension was also a way to feed Atlantis,” Rodney continued. “That’s why they punished Chaya so much. Without giving up her humanity, she cheated Atlantis of her food. At first, Atlantis forced the Ancients to ascend so it could feed on the energy they gave up, but then Ascension became incorporated into their religion. Now they think it’s a good thing.”
John could feel dim memories of the first time the Ancients Ascended. Atlantis enjoyed that, a new source of energy for her.
Rodney let out a mirthless bark of a laugh. “It only feeds her when it happens on Atlantis, though. Or another Traveler. The Energy Beast was another attempt to destroy her, to suck out her life-force, but as you remember, all it does is drain the batteries—it doesn’t care about life force. Project Arcturus—it was shut down because it would have defeated her—it was built to take out a whole solar system and the Traveler with it.”
John turned toward Rodney. “You didn’t tell me that,” he said. Atlantis hadn’t known about it either.
“I just figured it out this morning,” said Rodney. “The Wraith weren’t even why the Ancients left Atlantis. They left it booby trapped to flood and fail when the next group of explorers discovered it. They knew she would never allow herself to be destroyed. See—she chooses someone, an avatar to make sure that her interests are served. Ten thousand years ago, one of them rebelled and tried to abandon Atlantis to the Wraith and the ocean. Janus’s intervention saved it—he thought they really were running from the Wraith.”
“Wait, they weren’t running from the Wraith?” said John. “You didn’t tell me that, either.”
“The Wraith were a nuisance, that’s it. When Atlantis is full-fed, she can easily take out as many hive ships as they could throw at us.”
Elizabeth raised her eyebrow at that. “So, we don’t have to worry about the Wraith then?”
“If you have a thousand people you’re willing to kill for it,” said Rodney, horrified.
“Are you sure this wasn’t just the ranting of some paranoid fringe group?” asked Elizabeth. “You know, like people on earth who believe in aliens.” John gave her a look and Elizabeth looked down for a moment before meeting his eyes again. “Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best analogy, but you know what I mean. Ancient conspiracy theorists?”
“Can’t you see, Elizabeth?” said John. “It all fits. Even the stargates—they are Atlantis’s way of keeping track of all her feeding grounds.”
“You’re saying the Ancients didn’t build the stargates?”
“You know it’s funny—when you’re a three dimensional animal, trying to understand the higher dimensions,” said Rodney. “Some think it will never really be possible to understand, let alone build ways of manipulating higher dimensions without actually being able to see them with our own two eyes. I always thought that was crap.”
“Rodney . . .,” said John.
“But maybe they’re right,” Rodney continued. “Maybe in order to build a wormhole, you have to be able to stand outside space and time, like the Travelers.”
“So why didn’t the Ancients defeat the Wraith?” asked Elizabeth. “A thousand lives, for a galaxy? They let loose the threat. Why didn’t they choose a thousand people to be casualties of war and save the galaxy?”
“Because the Wraith forced refugees into Atlantis. More food for Atlantis without sacrificing Ancient lives,” said John. This he knew without even reading any of Rodney’s documents. “By the time of the Wraith war, only a few Ancients even knew Atlantis’s true nature.”
“We think she’s been waking up since we got here, and Ramirez was her first, uh, victim,” said Rodney.
Elizabeth stood up and paced around in tight little circles, looking at the ground.
“So what do we do now, Elizabeth?” asked Rodney.
“A thousand people,” she said. “To free the galaxy of Wraith.”
Rodney recoiled in horror. “You can’t actually be considering this,” he said.
“A thousand people, or the whole galaxy?” said Elizabeth again. “What would Ronon say?”
And John felt the presence in his mind shift again. Yes, her, it said, she is the other. The pressure in his skull eased off a little.
“We can’t do this, Elizabeth,” said Rodney. “Even if we knew how.”
“Find out how.” Her voice was grim.
“Why don’t we just go back to Earth?” said Rodney. “Leave life-sucking aliens and life-sucking cities, and get out of here.”
“Should we abandon the people of Pegasus to the Wraith again?” Elizabeth smiled thinly. “We can’t just leave the power of Atlantis to the Wraith, the Ori, anyone else who comes along.” John found himself nodding along with her. “And we can still learn from the technology. Better she should be in our hands than in theirs.”
***
She hears them in her own mind, and Her agitation settles. They cannot resist Her technology, and like their ancestors, they will feed Her for it. For every life given Her, She gives her keepers more weapons, more knowledge, more influence. Their kind has never been able to resist that. She cycles a whisper of power through Her star drive to indicate Her pleasure, and anticipates the bounty ahead.
linaerysTitle: The Call of the Traveler
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: vaguely Sheppard/McKay established, but basically gen
Word Count: ~5500
Summary: The dark side of the Ancients.
Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me, nor to I derive any profit from them.
Warnings: General creepiness
A/N: thank you to
mrshamill for story notesThe marines found the body in one of the abandoned labs.
Little by little, marine teams had been sweeping the city in teams of three or four, mapping, collating, taking pictures with digital cameras whose technology was dwarfed by the technology they recorded. Rodney looked over the pictures and then decided what they should bring back for him examine.
They called Carson and John down to the lab to look at the body. Carson ordered John to put on a protective suit in case it was another plague. Cadman had been among those to find the body, and Carson hugged her awkwardly in his bulky suit, before consigning her to quarantine with the rest of the marines on that detail.
“We didn’t even know he was missing,” she said, as she sat, sliding heavily down the wall.
Carson sealed off a portion of the infirmary so Biro could examine the body without threat of contamination. She spent a few days going over the body, while John sent marines down to the quarantined area with food, water and reading materials no one had any further use for.
The body belonged to Sgt. Ramirez. Elizabeth had John go back through the logs, but no one had seen or heard from him in several weeks. Every marine filed a short report at the end of his or her watch, and none mentioned Ramirez.
“I heard he was helping out the botanists,” said Cadman when John went to visit her in quarantine.
“He wasn’t helping the botanists—he was doing detail on the mainland,” said Lorne. “At least that’s what someone told me.”
Finally Dr. Biro gave Carson a report, which he brought Elizabeth and John while John was in her office.
“I think we can lift the quarantine,” he said. “Atlantis hasn’t imposed quarantine, and no one else has died.”
Elizabeth flipped through the pages and handed the report to John. “All this report says is what didn’t happen to Sgt. Ramirez.”
“That is Dr. Biro’s report,” said Carson. He looked away from John and Elizabeth. John followed his gaze to the wall and Elizabeth’s masks. They looked down like death’s heads.
“But what do you think?” she asked him.
“I don’t know what to think, Elizabeth,” said Carson, his voice rising.
“Time of death—unknown? Why is that?” she asked.
“There were no signs on the body, inside or out, of what could have killed him,” said Carson. “The body was room temperature but had experienced no decomposition. We simply don’t know.”
“And what was the lab for?” she asked.
“Rodney and Zelenka are looking into it now that quarantine has been lifted,” said John.
“With back up?” asked Carson with a hitch of panic in his voice.
“Yes, of course,” said John. “Lorne and a team are with them.”
***
They gave Sgt. Ramirez a memorial service—some of the younger marines knew him and said nice things about him. He had come out with the most recent Daedalus run. He was a Catholic, and some of the other Catholics remembered their prayers. Everyone remembered their prayers these days. Katie Brown knew a Latin hymn and she sang it in her thready voice. Teyla sung an Athosian song for a fallen comrade.
After the service on Atlantis, they bagged the body and put it in the morgue’s freezer. When the Daedalus came back, the body would travel with it back to Earth, so it could rest in consecrated ground. They owed him that much, and more, for never noticing he was gone.
***
The Traveler wakes slowly, sloughing off the cobwebs of millennia. These creatures’ spirits are poor and weak compared to the bounty She remembers. She considers slipping back on the timestreams to try again, yet again, but finds she lacks the energy, or even the maps to do that. They blinded her well, this time. Her favorite children. Now their offspring, weak and diluted, have returned, and they have fed Her.
***
“There’s something wrong with these files, Rodney,” said John. He put his laptop down on Rodney’s lab bench.
“Can’t you see I’m working?” asked Rodney, but with little venom. John knew how he felt. Somehow the death of Ramirez had cast a pall over Atlantis in a way none of the other deaths had. They hadn’t noticed he was gone, and each of the Atlanteans bore that burden. Had they really become so inured to death? Had they really failed to notice?
“This is important. Every one of the reports has been altered. Everyone says that they read reports of Ramirez being somewhere else. The people on his team said he had been reassigned to the biologist team, the biologist team didn’t know anything about it. The logs showed that Ramirez checked his rifle in and out every day, but now they’re showing that he hadn’t done it in two weeks. Something is wrong.”
There was more than that adding to John’s unease, but nothing he could take to Rodney—no rational explanation for feeling, every moment, that something looked over his shoulder. Even the problem with the reports would probably be too vague for him.
Rodney grabbed the computer from him. “I’ll have to run some diagnostics,” he said, without looking up.
“Good, you do that.”
Rodney didn’t find anything, though, and so John tried to get back to normal, to forget about the nagging sense of wrongness about Ramirez’s death. The consensus was that the marines had overlooked him, and there had been a miscommunication. Carson couldn’t say why the marine died, and they put it down as Just One Of Those Things.
It bothered John that the best scientific minds in two galaxies couldn’t come up with anything better, but he had no suggestions to offer, just a growing sense of foreboding that kept him up nights.
***
She finds him, of all the humans, and decides he is the One. He is already a little broken; She will crack him wide and make him serve.
***
It was always two steps forward and one step back with the Genii. Unlike many of the other peoples they encountered, the Genii had some inborn distrust of the Ancients. John never stopped to ask why, just figured it was their longing to be the greatest power in the galaxy.
Elizabeth went off-world with a cadre of marines to negotiate with them for some intelligence about another ZPM, and left John with the promise that he would stay on Atlantis. He sparred with Teyla and Ronon and caught up on paperwork for a while before something bothering him in the back of his mind came to the fore.
“Rodney, where are the star drives?” asked John.
“Look, this city isn’t going to fly,” said Rodney. “I shouldn’t have even told you that. I know you like the idea, but it’s just not going to happen.”
John could cajole Rodney into this, use a flirtatious grin, and Rodney would do what he wanted, but this time the grin wouldn’t come. “I think you might be wrong about that . . .” said John, instead. He could feel the city’s engines, banked and silent, but longing for flight.
“Me? Wrong?” said Rodney.
John wanted to smile or roll his eyes at Rodney’s posturing, but all he could do was grimace. “But that’s not why I want to see them. I think . . . it’s about Ramirez.”
“That again? I think it’s probably some kind of disease that Carson missed, or a what’s-it, a mini-aneurism, aren’t those supposed to be undetectable?”
“Just show me.”
Rodney rolled his chair over to one of the massive screens that covered one wall and typed in a few commands on his computer. “See, I think it’s here,” he said, pointing to a blank space on the schematic. “I’ve never been able to get any more detail, and it’s never been a very pressing concern, even though I know how much you’d like it to be . . .”
John nodded. “Let’s go there, then.”
“There isn’t any there there per se. That part has never been accessible.”
“I think it might be now,” said John. He didn’t know where the certainty had come from.
Elizabeth had asked him, when the first came to Atlantis, if he could sense things about the city, if it had any closer linkage to him than to other members of the team. He said no, then, and then he had meant it. But every so often, he was gripped with an odd conviction that his mind held thoughts not his own, when Atlantis was under attack, or when the nanovirus had been set loose, a feeling that Atlantis was aware.
“See, they’re just bulkheads,” said Rodney after they took the transporters down to that section. They didn’t look any different than any others—huge gray walls, and behind them, the ocean. The sensors showed nothing but marine life. “This is where the hyperdrives should be, but there’s nothing.”
“Not nothing.” John put his hand to the bulkhead and felt the weird, thrumming energy behind it. Not ocean, something else. Atlantis, itself. He asked it to open. “Stand close, Rodney,” he ordered.
One moment the bulkhead was there, and the next it dissolved into mist. John felt the buzzing in the back of his mind growing, crowding out conscious thought. The only thing anchoring him was Rodney’s warm, solid presence by his side.
Behind the bulkhead lay pieces of equipment John had never seen before, never even imagined. Huge crystals, like Ancient control crystals but immensely bigger, hung from the ceiling like stalactites, matched by metal spires poking up from the floor.
They walked among the silent towers, lit only by Rodney’s flashlight and the dim glow issuing from the floor lighting. John didn’t feel self-conscious reaching out to clutch Rodney’s hand. The place felt more haunted than any place in Atlantis, even than the city had felt when they woke her from her sleep. Ancient ghosts, he thought.
In the center of the room was a shaft going down into the floor, ten feet in diameter, the bottom lost in shadows. There were holes at even intervals around the perimeter, perhaps where a guard rail had been anchored. If so, someone had removed it long ago; dust collected in the holes. Rodney shone his flashlight into the depths of the shaft, only to see the light disappear, eaten by the dark.
“Maybe this was for heat exhaust,” he said, voice subdued by the vastness of this place.
“Light,” said John, in the same command voice he used when Ronon needed controlling. As if Atlantis would obey him that easily. But she did, and light started to glow from the bases of the spires, penetrating everywhere but the pit in the center of the room.
“You know, this is probably draining power . . . ,” said Rodney, trailing off. He tightened his grip on John’s hand and John squeezed back.
Lights continued to come on, nearly blinding in their intensity, so that John almost didn’t notice when the shaft in the middle of the room became illuminated. The light reached further down into the pit, as if fighting some primordial monster of dark. John walked over to the edge, pulling Rodney behind him and looked in.
He couldn’t make sense of the sight at first, it was just a tangle of shapes, but then he saw outlines, the fine bones of a hand silhouetted against the wall of the shaft, the curve of a skull, the butterfly shape of a pelvis, and then finally he saw the entirety: a pile of bodies, mostly skeletal, but some with faint shrouds of flesh still clinging to them. Some bodies were whole, but many were just pieces and, mostly horribly of all, many had their arms stretched up the sides of the shaft, as if they had been put down there alive, and had been trying to climb out until their death came.
Rodney pulled him away from the edge. John couldn’t feel himself teetering there, but Rodney told him later he that was, and John had to believe him. He didn’t even remember the transporter ride back, or when he punched the wall of Atlantis so hard he fractured two knuckles. It didn’t even dent the wall.
John showed Elizabeth a few days later when she returned. He had an idea that he shouldn’t bring any more than one person down at a time, that something dangerous still waited down with the star drive. He told himself it was nerves—that many dead bodies would frighten anyone.
He prepared Elizabeth, but she was still shocked when she saw them.
“We have to find out how these people died,” she whispered, unwilling to disturb the mausoleum-like atmosphere. “So much for me sleeping tonight. Or ever again,” she added almost inaudibly.
***
She is still waking up, and learning Her new children. Her food needs are still simple. Raw power in whatever form they can pour into Her.
***
“Well, we’ve always suspected this,” said Carson. He put a bulleted list of his findings up on the screen in the conference room. This senior staff meeting was smaller than most, just John, Elizabeth, Rodney, Radek and Carson. Teyla was visiting the mainland, and John had ordered Ronon to stay away. Carson had asked him to, and given the subject matter of this meeting, John didn’t want to vouch for any of their lives if Ronon found out.
“You’re sure Carson?” asked Elizabeth. “This is quite unsettling.”
“It’s clear as day. The Ancients created the Wraith. As you know, we’ve been going through the stores of data from the various labs, when we had a chance—there’s still so much we haven’t yet covered. I found descriptions of their experiments on a storage crystal from one of the genetics labs.”
“Why?” asked Rodney. “Why would they do that?” He sounded petulant and frightened. For once he wasn’t looking for scientific reasoning, but simple reassurance.
“It must have been a mistake,” said Carson. He rubbed his forehead.
“Yes,” said Elizabeth with a false smile. “I can’t imagine that they would have done it on purpose. Perhaps it was part of their research into Ascension.”
“Are we going to excuse everything with that?” asked John.
“What?” Elizabeth’s voice was sharp.
“When do we start to ask if maybe the Ancients weren’t so good after all?”
“That’s not the point, John.” Elizabeth didn’t think in terms of good and evil, and when you get down to it, neither did John, but while he thought in terms of “my people” and “people trying to kill my people” and maybe “neutrals” or “people who haven’t tried to kill my people yet,” Elizabeth thought in terms of power and more power.
“Can we use this, Carson?” Elizabeth asked.
“Maybe—knowing they were created artificially might make turning them human easier.” The worried expression never left Carson’s face these days. John wondered when he would give up on that dream.
“Or killing them,” said John, because Ronon wasn’t there to say it for him. “Did you have a chance to look at those bodies we brought you?”
The temperature in the room seemed to drop, and no one would meet John’s eyes across the table. They didn’t want to think about it.
John had asked for volunteers to go into the pit and retrieve the bodies, and finally drew names from a hat, exempting those who had found Sgt. Ramirez’s body. He and Ronon had gone along as well. Of the marines who had been chosen, two were being treated for panic attacks now, and John was glad Dr. Heightmeyer had her supplies of Valium replenished by the latest Daedalus run. They all needed it.
The lines on Carson’s forehead deepened even further. “Well, they started to fall apart as soon as I got them in the lab. There’s no way of knowing how they died, and they were immensely old. We were able to get DNA from some of the scraps of remaining skin.”
John had been lowered down into the pit to retrieve some skin and seal it in a jar. Carson had sent him back. He had nightmares now of standing on that pile of bones, feeling it shift and give under his feet.
“How old?” asked Elizabeth.
“Ten thousand years, plus or minus a century—carbon dating gets less accurate at those time frames.”
“And they were all human?” asked John.
“Yes. Some had the Ancient gene, some did not, but they were all human.”
***
It has been too long since She fed. She sends her consciousness (such as it is, in these lean times) across the wastes that separate Her from the rest of Her kind. She receives no answer, but gives it little thought. The Travelers are solitary creatures, for the most part; Her brethren will be millions of years away from Her, and She will need more power to contact Them.
***
“Something’s changed since Ramirez,” said John. He and Rodney stood looking over the Atlantean Ocean from one of the balconies. The silhouette of Atlantis rose behind them, most of the spires dark. Rodney had lowered the power consumption as much as was possible, at John’s request.
“I have a feeling,” John had said.
“Oh, a feeling—that’s what I like to base power projection levels on.” But he had done it. John could feel Atlantis, begging for more power, but he had started to doubt whether the interests of this city were the same as the interests of the people who inhabited her.
“Did you ever find out more about the nanovirus?” asked John.
“That isn’t what killed Ramirez,” said Rodney brusquely. “The nanovirus. Elegant engineering that, but the entry in the database was encrypted to a level we haven’t been able to break.”
“Well, have you been trying?”
“Yes, I’ve been trying, I’ve just also been trying to keep the Wraith off our backs, and keep the city powered and . . .”
“Yeah, I know, save everyone’s lives.” That shut down Rodney’s diatribe. “Try again, Rodney.”
“My computer’s in my lab.” Rodney looked at John, worried. “You want me to look at it now?”
“Please,” said John. He walked with Rodney back to his lab; the feeling that no one should be left alone had been growing lately and was worse at night.
“I have it right here,” said Rodney when he opened up his computer. As John suspected, he had been working on it whenever nothing more pressing came up—Rodney wasn’t the type who could let an unsolved problem lie.
“You hovering over my shoulder is not going to get it done any faster,” he said to John after a few minutes.
“Wake me if you figure anything out.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“No, really. Wake me.”
“I will, Colonel. Don’t worry.”
John went back to his bunk and tried to sleep, but the waking nightmares that had been hovering at the edge of his mind for weeks descended in force. Sensations impossible to comprehend filled his mind: the fathoms-deep scream of a silent void, the searing light of a black hole, the explosion of every cell in a vacuum.
He didn’t know whether he was asleep or awake when Rodney’s voice came over the radio. “You should come here right away,” he said.
***
They know, She realizes. Or they will soon. Her sense of time runs ahead of their fourth dimension limitations. Soon She will get her due, and the great war, the great dance, will begin again. She hopes that these ones will truly understand what She can give them, that they won’t fear Her gifts.
***
“They made the nanovirus, we were right about that, but it wasn’t intended to kill non-Ancient humans, at least not at first. That was an unfortunate side effect.” Rodney's voice quavered a little, even as he tried to maintain his usual sarcastic tone. “It was intended to produce those visions. Those terrifying visions.”
“Why?”
“To feed The Traveler, is all it said.” John could hear the capital letters when Rodney spoke. He had a feeling the report had said much more.
“What’s The--?”
“We thought it was an Ancient god of some sort, or maybe some kind of messiah, the first ascended being—that’s never really been my field.”
“Gods are trouble,” said John.
“You said it—but this wasn’t a Go’a’uld.”
“What was it?” John asked. The name seemed familiar, beyond the memory of reading it in old SG-1 mission reports. It sat on the edge of his consciousness, tantalizing, like a word on the tip of his tongue.
Rodney didn’t answer. “The decryption program also worked on all the notes about the Energy Beast, remember? That thing that tried to eat me?”
“I remember, Rodney. What did it say, what is The Traveler?”
“We should have looked into this earlier. It just didn’t seem pressing, with the Wraith threat . . .” Rodney sounded like he was talking to himself, and John wanted to shake him out of it.
“Rodney,” said John sternly. “What is it? What is The Traveler?”
“You should read for yourself.” He handed John the laptop.
***
She exults. She can feel his understanding, and it trickles like the finest nectar through Her. He was the right choice, She is sure now. He will be her finest partner. He will decide who else is worthy to know Her.
But then She senses another, much more faint. One whose goals align more closely to hers. The other is so hidden she cannot even tell if it is male or female or some third possibility. This other may be even better. She waits for time to decide.
***
It took John several hours to read everything. At first he sat on one of Rodney’s high lab stools, and swung his legs like a child in kindergarten, but as he read more, he stopped fidgeting, slowed his breathing. His body wanted to go into stealth mode, to hide from something that couldn’t be hidden from.
While John was reading, Rodney called up other documents, feverishly scanning the database. John could feel the distress coming off of Rodney in waves, and when he was done reading, he understood. The lab was dark except the glow from Rodney’s computer screens, and a few goose-neck lamps. Atlantis could have been deserted except for them. John felt a slow movement below him, one he used to think was the motion of the Atlantean Ocean rocking them, but now he knew better.
“Does anyone else know about this?” John asked. He knew what need to be done. This knowledge had to be destroyed. No one else would understand it the way he did, and Rodney? John looked at his face. Rodney had to understand, or he had to be destroyed. John reached for his sidearm, and felt the metal under his fingers.
“We have to tell Elizabeth,” said Rodney. So no, he wouldn’t understand. It was John’s job to end this, to make sure the Traveler got her due. He took the gun out of its holster.
But there was too much between them, too many lives saved, too many horrors faced together for John to face this one alone.
Slowly and carefully, he turned the gun around and handed it barrel-first to Rodney. Rodney took it gingerly. “I don’t think I should have this right now,” said John.
Rodney backed into the far corner of the room, holding the gun in his hand like some loathsome thing he wanted to fling away from him. “What? Why? Who are you?”
“I’m still John,” he said, and that was true, to a point. “Put the gun away, Rodney. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just taking precautions.”
“You’re not making me feel a ton better right now,” said Rodney, but he opened his desk drawer, put the safety on the gun, and locked it in there.
Some part of John’s mind screamed for him to end Rodney, but he quelled it by telling that part that Rodney would be of great use, might even come around.
“You’re it, aren’t you?” whispered Rodney. “There were hints in some of the other things I read, but . . .” Rodney gestured for John to leave the room first—he’d learned something from all those years spent with the military. “Let’s find Elizabeth.”
“We should do this on the mainland,” said John. He thought that if he got away from Atlantis he might be freed from this weight in his mind, this certainty that now he served something greater than himself, and its interests were his own.
Rodney didn’t argue. He strapped his laptop to his back and John called Elizabeth.
She didn’t want all three of them to leave Atlantis at the same time, but Rodney talked her into it. The streaks of dawn were fading into the blue sky when the jumper made landfall on the mainland. They went to a clearing far from the Athosian camp, and sat down on a flat stone there. John tried not to notice how much the stone looked like an altar. He did not want any more images of sacrifice in his head right now.
“What do you know about The Traveler, Elizabeth?” asked John. He resolved to stop saying the name—every time he did he felt like a gong resounded in his head.
“Some kind of Ancient god, perhaps dating from before the Ancients mastered stargate technology?” She raised an eyebrow. “Dr. Jackson has some theories on the subject.”
“The Colonel asked me to decrypt some Ancient files—I would have thought the Ancients would have better encryption, but I guess their large number research wasn’t targeted in that direction—.”
“Rodney!” John interrupted.
“Atlantis is The Traveler,” said Rodney.
“Um . . .” said Elizabeth.
“It’s a parasite—a symbiote—no, a parasite. The Ancients created the nanovirus to feed her—it. The micro-machines somehow fed on the brain waves, and transmitted the energy back to Atlantis. Of course, once they found that using the virus to kill humans also fed Atlantis, as long as the humans were on the same planet, they no longer needed to suffer the visions. That’s why there was no human population on the mainland.” Rodney couldn’t stay seated; he paced back and forth in front of John and Elizabeth as he spoke.
“I don’t understand,” said Elizabeth.
“And the Energy-sucking beast that we woke up, when we got here? The Ancients captured that to try to kill Atlantis,” said John. “It wasn’t about Ascension. Well, it was, but not really.”
“John, this makes no sense. Start from the beginning.”
“Let me,” said Rodney. John nodded. “Several thousand years ago, a Traveler, Atlantis came to this galaxy. I don’t know from where, but I think it must be capable of traveling through all eleven dimensions of space-time—but that’s not important.
“It came to the people we call The Ancients. They were a society no more advanced than Earth is now, but they recognized Atlantis as having vastly greater technology, and started to learn from it.”
“Wait,” said Elizabeth. “What do you mean Atlantis came here?”
“It’s sentient,” said John. “In fact, she’s trying to talk to me right now.” The influence had faded somewhat, but he wasn’t far enough away.
“Really?” Elizabeth looked excited. “What is she trying to say?”
John grimaced and flexed his hands, glad he had given his gun to Rodney. “You don’t want to know.”
“They discovered, though, that it demanded sacrifices. Human lives. Ancient lives,” said Rodney. “That’s why those people were in the star drive.” Elizabeth shuddered visibly, and Rodney continued. “When Atlantis came to this galaxy and chose the Ancients, she also chose her food. She chose to respond to Ancient genes more than others, although she can still feed off regular humans.”
John nodded as Rodney spoke. He hadn’t read what Rodney was saying, but knew it was true nonetheless. She told him it was true.
“Human sacrifice? Rodney, that is awfully far-fetched.” Elizabeth crossed her arms over her chest, but John could see gooseflesh standing up the hairs on her forearms.
“No,” said John. “It explains everything. The Ancients created the Wraith to try to kill Atlantis, at least the sentient portion of her. She feeds on life force, just like they do. They thought that if they got Atlantis to feed on the Wraith, or a large number of Wraith, they would just kill each other. And then they could harvest the technology without having to deal with her appetite.”
“But Atlantis runs on ZPMs,” Elizabeth protested.
“The power grid does, even the gates do, but Atlantis’s mind, her sentience, needs lives to feed it,” said Rodney. “The star drive needs even more. Atlantis can travel not just through space, but time, and dimensions we haven’t even named yet. She needs her mind to do that, and the more she needs to think . . . . I think there were some groups of Ancients who were willing to pay the price, to keep her technology working for them, while others worked to defeat her.”
Yes, there were enemies. John felt a growing anger at them, an implacable anger, banked for millennia.
“Ascension was also a way to feed Atlantis,” Rodney continued. “That’s why they punished Chaya so much. Without giving up her humanity, she cheated Atlantis of her food. At first, Atlantis forced the Ancients to ascend so it could feed on the energy they gave up, but then Ascension became incorporated into their religion. Now they think it’s a good thing.”
John could feel dim memories of the first time the Ancients Ascended. Atlantis enjoyed that, a new source of energy for her.
Rodney let out a mirthless bark of a laugh. “It only feeds her when it happens on Atlantis, though. Or another Traveler. The Energy Beast was another attempt to destroy her, to suck out her life-force, but as you remember, all it does is drain the batteries—it doesn’t care about life force. Project Arcturus—it was shut down because it would have defeated her—it was built to take out a whole solar system and the Traveler with it.”
John turned toward Rodney. “You didn’t tell me that,” he said. Atlantis hadn’t known about it either.
“I just figured it out this morning,” said Rodney. “The Wraith weren’t even why the Ancients left Atlantis. They left it booby trapped to flood and fail when the next group of explorers discovered it. They knew she would never allow herself to be destroyed. See—she chooses someone, an avatar to make sure that her interests are served. Ten thousand years ago, one of them rebelled and tried to abandon Atlantis to the Wraith and the ocean. Janus’s intervention saved it—he thought they really were running from the Wraith.”
“Wait, they weren’t running from the Wraith?” said John. “You didn’t tell me that, either.”
“The Wraith were a nuisance, that’s it. When Atlantis is full-fed, she can easily take out as many hive ships as they could throw at us.”
Elizabeth raised her eyebrow at that. “So, we don’t have to worry about the Wraith then?”
“If you have a thousand people you’re willing to kill for it,” said Rodney, horrified.
“Are you sure this wasn’t just the ranting of some paranoid fringe group?” asked Elizabeth. “You know, like people on earth who believe in aliens.” John gave her a look and Elizabeth looked down for a moment before meeting his eyes again. “Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best analogy, but you know what I mean. Ancient conspiracy theorists?”
“Can’t you see, Elizabeth?” said John. “It all fits. Even the stargates—they are Atlantis’s way of keeping track of all her feeding grounds.”
“You’re saying the Ancients didn’t build the stargates?”
“You know it’s funny—when you’re a three dimensional animal, trying to understand the higher dimensions,” said Rodney. “Some think it will never really be possible to understand, let alone build ways of manipulating higher dimensions without actually being able to see them with our own two eyes. I always thought that was crap.”
“Rodney . . .,” said John.
“But maybe they’re right,” Rodney continued. “Maybe in order to build a wormhole, you have to be able to stand outside space and time, like the Travelers.”
“So why didn’t the Ancients defeat the Wraith?” asked Elizabeth. “A thousand lives, for a galaxy? They let loose the threat. Why didn’t they choose a thousand people to be casualties of war and save the galaxy?”
“Because the Wraith forced refugees into Atlantis. More food for Atlantis without sacrificing Ancient lives,” said John. This he knew without even reading any of Rodney’s documents. “By the time of the Wraith war, only a few Ancients even knew Atlantis’s true nature.”
“We think she’s been waking up since we got here, and Ramirez was her first, uh, victim,” said Rodney.
Elizabeth stood up and paced around in tight little circles, looking at the ground.
“So what do we do now, Elizabeth?” asked Rodney.
“A thousand people,” she said. “To free the galaxy of Wraith.”
Rodney recoiled in horror. “You can’t actually be considering this,” he said.
“A thousand people, or the whole galaxy?” said Elizabeth again. “What would Ronon say?”
And John felt the presence in his mind shift again. Yes, her, it said, she is the other. The pressure in his skull eased off a little.
“We can’t do this, Elizabeth,” said Rodney. “Even if we knew how.”
“Find out how.” Her voice was grim.
“Why don’t we just go back to Earth?” said Rodney. “Leave life-sucking aliens and life-sucking cities, and get out of here.”
“Should we abandon the people of Pegasus to the Wraith again?” Elizabeth smiled thinly. “We can’t just leave the power of Atlantis to the Wraith, the Ori, anyone else who comes along.” John found himself nodding along with her. “And we can still learn from the technology. Better she should be in our hands than in theirs.”
***
She hears them in her own mind, and Her agitation settles. They cannot resist Her technology, and like their ancestors, they will feed Her for it. For every life given Her, She gives her keepers more weapons, more knowledge, more influence. Their kind has never been able to resist that. She cycles a whisper of power through Her star drive to indicate Her pleasure, and anticipates the bounty ahead.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-27 11:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-27 11:44 am (UTC)Thank you for reading! I'm glad it worked for you.