“I’m sure you’ll do just fine,” Dick said. “Until such time as I get back, or…”
“Let’s pretend there’s not an ‘or’,” Sheppard said.
“Thank you for the vote of confidence,” Dick said after a moment. It was a rather unexpected one, and it made him feel the tiniest bit better.
Sheppard shrugged. “I like dealing with known quantities.”
“And yet you enjoy working in Atlantis.”
“Our people are a known quantity,” Sheppard said. “Everything else, I’m not so sure about.”
Dick nodded agreement. There didn’t seem to be much more to say. “I’ll give the IOA your regards.”
“You know, between that and staying here where we might get invaded by the Wraith…”
“Try to avoid that if you can,” Dick said. “I’d like there to still be a city for me to come back to.”
“We can handle the Wraith,” Sheppard said, with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Trust us. We won’t have wild parties while you’re gone, either.”
“Just as long as they’re not parties that the IOA ever hears about.”
“We won’t tell anyone,” Sheppard said. He hesitated, and then extended his hand. Dick stood to shake it. “Good luck,” Sheppard said.
“Thank you,” Dick said. “Good luck to you, too. If you’d find it convenient to use the office while I’m gone…”
“I don’t know,” Sheppard said. “I’m never very comfortable in the big chair.”
“It’s adjustable.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant,” Dick said. “But you’re going to have to make yourself as comfortable as you can for at least the next few weeks.”
“Right,” Sheppard said. He looked like he thought that would be a tall order.
“You want to take a break?” Jennifer asked. Carson looked up at her, realizing that he’d been staring at his computer screen for the last whoever knew how long rather than reading the words on it. “We’ve got a lot of notes to go through here.”
“No, let’s go on,” Carson said. “I’d rather get it over with.”
“It’s your work, so you may not really need to look over it,” Jennifer said, turning her lab stool so that she was talking to him and not to her own screen. “It’s just been a while since I started back at the beginning and approached this fresh.”
“It’s my work, and then again it isn’t, given that I’m a clone of the man who did it,” Carson said. He hadn’t worried about that as much when he was out in the field, but lately he was beginning to feel like a nice long chat with their new psychiatrist Dr. Robinson might be in order. “I remember doing these experiments. I even remember why it seemed like such a good idea. I don’t expect that the original Carson Beckett ever changed his mind about that before he died.”
“You haven’t changed your mind, have you?” Jennifer said. “I know we’ve had a lot of trouble figuring out how to make your original concept of a retrovirus stable, but it’s been less than four years. It takes longer than that back on Earth to develop a new drug for athlete’s foot.”
“I think that’s my point,” Carson said. “I thought I knew what I was doing when I tested the retrovirus on Michael. It would either work or it wouldn’t, and either way we’d learn something. I never imagined that it would work well enough for everyone to accept the man as a human being, and then…”
“If we can ever get the new version to work permanently, I think it’ll be worth it,” Jennifer said. “Given that the alternative is either going on the way we have been, with whole societies being wiped out, or exterminating the Wraith as a species.”
“I think we may be the only ones in this city who have a problem with that idea,” Carson said.
Jennifer gave him a stubborn look that he rather liked. “That doesn’t make us wrong.”
“It doesn’t,” he said. “That’s why I did it, for whatever that’s worth. We were all a lot more sure of ourselves once, talking about winning the war with the Wraith for good as if we had any idea how to do that. And then there was Ellia, poor soul. You’ve seen the reports?”
“The immature Wraith queen who had been raised as a human,” Jennifer said. “The retrovirus backfired in her, activating more traits that must have come from the Iratus bug.”
“That’s a nice tidy way of summing up a terrible thing,” Carson said. A nice dry scientific explanation that wouldn’t trouble anyone’s sleep. “She was a little girl, a little shy thing who served us tea. Her father had been letting her feed off him so that she could survive, sacrificing years of his life. Because he loved his little girl. And we turned her into a monster, and then we killed her.”
“She was killing people,” Jennifer said.
“I know that,” Carson said. “It was wrong, but she wasn’t some creature we could say we had to put down like an animal. She was a child who had been forced to do terrible things to survive. And after that when we sat around the table and talked about all our newest ideas for how to wipe out the Wraith threat — ” He turned up his hands. “We were talking about genocide. No one wanted to hear it, because it was easier to think of our enemies as things rather than as people. I expect it usually is.”
“That was the whole idea of the retrovirus,” Jennifer said. “To remove their need to feed on us without killing them all.”
“Don’t have too many illusions about our purity of purpose at the time,” Carson said. “Dr. Weir and Colonel Sheppard came around to the idea because by that point, we were starting to get some idea of how hard it would be to defeat the Wraith by shooting at them. If I’d had a way to kill all the Wraith, I expect they’d have preferred that.”
“I don’t know. Dr. Weir never struck me as exactly trigger-happy, and Colonel Sheppard… he doesn’t act like he thinks Todd is an animal.”
“Maybe not. But they’d both lost a lot of people, and seeing what was going on out there — they thought if there was any way to put an end to it, it would be worth it. And you see how that worked out.”
“We just need more time,” Jennifer said. “We’ve gotten so close. If we can get it right, we could save millions of lives, prevent entire civilizations from being wiped out. Human and Wraith.”
“Aye, we could. Hypothetically, if we ever get it right. And in the mean time, we’ve certainly been paying for it. Ask Teyla about that, and she’s one of the ones you can ask, because Michael didn’t actually kill her.”
“Carson — ”
He couldn’t make himself stop. “How many people are dead because Michael decimated whole planets with the Hoffan drug? Or because of his hybrids? Both of which I actually helped him to perfect. And that was me who helped him, not the Carson Beckett who was here in Atlantis writing letters home to his mum. I was spending two years locked in a prison cell at the time, waiting for a rescue attempt that was never going to come and watching a lot of people die. So if you’ll excuse me, I think I get to have a say in whether it was worth it.”
Jennifer looked more than a little surprised, maybe all the way to alarmed. Carson regretted the outburst already, but it was harder than he’d expected to pretend to any kind of objectivity about this research.
“I think maybe you should talk to someone about what happened to you,” she said. “It can’t be easy working on something that’s so much like helping Michael create his hybrids.”
“I have and I will,” Carson said. “But just because I expect I’ll be dealing with this for a long time doesn’t mean I’m not right. I wish I’d never tested the retrovirus without a better idea of what it would do, and frankly I wish I’d never heard of the bloody thing.”