“Then…?”
Jennifer began peeling off her exam gloves to give her something to do with her hands. “The big problem is that the worst-case scenario shows him not regaining the ability to survive on human food. That’s… obviously, we’ll figure out how to avoid that, but it’s not a possibility we wanted to see coming up at all.”
“I am sure you and Carson will do everything you can,” Teyla said.
“We all want to fix this,” Jennifer said. “I’ll keep working with Carson and see if we can get a better model. We may be able to use some version of our own retrovirus to complete the transformation from Wraith back to human.”
She was kind of hoping Teyla wouldn’t see the catch there, but she frowned and said, “And when you stopped administering your drug?”
“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, too,” Jennifer said. “Even if he ended up having to take doses of our retrovirus on a regular basis, that’s a result we could live with.”
“Mr. Woolsey would not want Rodney to be sent back to Earth, even if he were dependent on the retrovirus,” Teyla said, as if it were a comforting thought. It probably was, to her and Sheppard.
“No, I imagine he wouldn’t,” Jennifer said. “What would we do without Rodney in Atlantis performing technological miracles?”
“We will have him back to perform miracles again soon,” Teyla said firmly, her eyes on something behind Jennifer. Jennifer wasn’t surprised to see that Sheppard had returned, carrying Torren against his shoulder.
“I think he’s going to sleep,” Sheppard said. “Either you wore him out, or I’m just really boring today.”
“He had an exciting night,” Teyla said. Jennifer wondered what Torren had made of the alarm in the middle of the night. He seemed fine now, content to take a nap on Sheppard’s chest. “I must take him, John. The wormhole to the alpha site will disengage soon, and they will be dialing New Athos for me.”
“I’ve got some medical supplies that it would be great if you could take with you,” Jennifer said. “I was going to go over there myself once we got settled, but since it might be a little while, I’d at least like to send a couple of boxes of antibiotics.”
“I can carry Torren on the way upstairs if you want to get the boxes,” Sheppard said. “I’m headed that way anyway, since I get to sit in the big office now. But if you’d rather take him — ” He sounded like he was trying very hard to sound casual. It hadn’t occurred to Jennifer before that he’d probably miss Torren too, as much time as he’d been spending with him.
Teyla met Sheppard’s eyes for a moment, a wordless exchange that Jennifer couldn’t read and wasn’t sure she was meant to. “It would be a help for you to carry him,” Teyla said gently. “As far as the gateroom. I will take the boxes.”
“It won’t be for long,” Sheppard said. Jennifer hoped he was right.
Dick tried to look like repacking his briefcase was a complicated task, giving the assembled IOA members time to leave the room. He didn’t want to look like he was running away from them, as tempting as that thought was at the moment. Finally he straightened up in the empty room.
“I think that went well,” he said. It didn’t sound convincing even to him.
He stepped outside to the unwelcome sight of General O’Neill waiting in the hallway. It had been an entire day of explaining himself, at great length and repeatedly, and he had hoped that the next few hours would involve nothing but his hotel room and the chance to take his shoes off.
“General O’Neill,” he said, trying to sound more pleased than he felt.
“Woolsey,” O’Neill said. “Having fun?”
“The committee is going to recommend a more thorough review by the full IOA,” Dick said. “In the mean time, they’d like to go over our full inventory list.”
“Exciting.”
Dick wasn’t sure what O’Neill’s agenda here was, and the fact that he was making smart remarks told him nothing except that this was O’Neill. He squared his shoulders. “What can I do for you, General?”
“I think the question is what I can do for you,” O’Neill said. “Or, more to the point, what I’m prepared to do.”
Dick looked back at the conference room wearily. “I suppose we should…”
“After you,” O’Neill said. He pulled the door shut after him. “All right. What the hell’s going on in Pegasus?”
“I’m sure you’ve read my latest report,” Woolsey said.
“I have. I’m just hoping I haven’t read it right. You seriously gave the Genii an Ancient battlecruiser? Why would you do that?”
It was tempting to say, ‘No, Colonel Sheppard gave the Genii an Ancient battlecruiser, and it seemed like a bad idea to take it back.’ That wouldn’t win him any points with O’Neill, though, and it wasn’t fair, either. He’d known Sheppard wasn’t exactly a diplomat, and he’d sent him anyway, because the Genii were reluctant to negotiate with civilians.
“If you’ve read my report, you know that we were hoping to obtain intelligence about the location of Dr. McKay. Although we didn’t get that information from the Genii, we did preserve our tentative alliance with them.”
“Preserving alliances means sending a fruit basket, not a warship.”
“I don’t think Ladon Radim is very interested in fruit baskets.”
“Ladon Radim is a tinpot dictator with ambitions to take over the Pegasus Galaxy,” O’Neill said. “Are we going to help?”
“He probably can’t even get the thing to work,” Dick said. The moment the words were out of his mouth, he suspected that had been a mistake.
“And according to your reports, we could have!” O’Neill said. “With our engineers and a pilot with the ATA gene, we’d have a functional Ancient battle cruiser. Our only one, since you people got the Orion blown up.”
“That was a year and a half before I took command of the expedition,” Dick said, but it didn’t seem to slow O’Neill down.
“Now, the best case scenario is that it’s a great big paperweight. If we’re not so lucky, Radim will paste the thing together, find a pilot with the gene, and start knocking over the neighbors. What the hell were you thinking, writing Sheppard a blank check like that? I don’t expect him to be sensible when it’s a member of his team who’s missing, but I expect you to be.”
“As long as he’s in the hands of the enemy, Dr. McKay poses a threat to the security of Atlantis — and Earth — that is difficult to overestimate,” Dick said. “More than that, he’s a valued member of the expedition, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to make every effort to find him.” After the silence dragged out for a moment, Dick couldn’t help asking, “What?”
“I’m just wondering,” O’Neill said. “Because I remember sitting — well, not right here, but at a table a lot like this one only not as nice — while you explained that it hadn’t been cost-effective for us to rescue one of our teams. And so now I’m wondering, just because I’m curious, how much do you think an Ancient battlecruiser is worth? More, or less, than the one person you’re looking for?”
“Are you suggesting that if it were a trade, it would be reasonable to sacrifice McKay for the ship?”
“I’m just asking for a simple opinion. A cost-benefit analysis. That’s what all these decisions boil down to, right?”
He wanted to defend himself against the anger in O’Neill’s voice, but he didn’t think there was an answer O’Neill wanted to hear, other than the value of a human life is priceless. And there was a sense in which that was true, and a sense in which it wasn’t, and neither one was the most important point at the moment.
“The real benefit of letting them have the ship is something more important than whether we find Dr. McKay or not,” Dick said. “It’s perfectly clear to me that Homeworld Security has no intention of sending us the kind of firepower we would need to conduct a successful war against the Wraith on our own.”