Not that second thoughts were all that unreasonable; he’d had second thoughts himself. Any sane person would, confronted with a posting not to a well-defended Ancient city, nestled pleasantly into tropical seas, but a city newly vulnerable, and a climate that resembled a North Sea oil rig. Though at least on a rig, you were likely to be spared attacks by life-sucking aliens… He smiled to himself then. He’d thought he was pretty tough, able to cope with just about anything — after all, he’d grown up on dig sites all across the Middle East, and spent most of his working life either in the field or playing with the artifacts brought back by the SG teams, both of which had a rather high risk of unpleasant if unintended consequences. But being eaten by aliens was definitely in a different class from the risks he was used to. It had taken him a full twenty-four hours to decide that, when you came down to it, dead was dead.
And the crisis meant that his project was that much more valuable. His original proposal had been a survey of contemporary Pegasus-galaxy technologies with an eye to helping their allies take the next steps in their development. With the Wraith on the offensive, it was already clear that he’d be expected to dive straight into what had been Phase 2. Which was all right, it was a manageable task, but, as usual, scholarship would go by the board…
“Mind if I join you?”
He looked up at the voice, an automatic smile on his face. The speaker was one of the Daedalus’s officers, a good-looking, red-haired lieutenant colonel, and he shook his head. “Not at all, colonel. Please, make free.”
“Thanks.” She returned the smile. “Mel Hocken. I have the Daedalus’s 302 wing.”
“William Lynn.” There was no room to shake hands without risking everything on the little table, and her hands were busy with her tray in any case. William compromised with a wider smile and a nod, and shifted his laptop to make more room.
“Thanks, Dr. Lynn,” she said again, and settled herself in the opposite chair. “Physicist?”
“Archeologist, actually,” he answered, and her smile widened.
“Ah. Atlantis’s version of Dr. Jackson.”
“God, I hope not,” William said, and she laughed aloud.
“I mean, I’d rather not end up dead quite so many times,” William said. “Or Ascended. Or many of the things that have happened to him.”
“I can understand that,” Hocken said, and turned her attention to constructing a sandwich from the contents of her tray. She’d selected quite a lot of the pale orange ‘cheese’ that seemed to be a favorite of the Daedalus’s crew, and Lynn looked hastily back at his screen, touching the pad to call up the reports he’d uploaded in the last hours before he left Earth.
The trouble was, Jackson had been right the first time they’d discussed this mission. No one had ever done anything approaching a systematic survey of the cultures the Atlantis expedition had encountered. There were some solid facts — for example, it was a good bet that the Wraith were preferentially feeding on the more technologically advanced cultures — and some plausible theories, like the correlation between proximity to the Stargate and strategies for dealing with the Wraith, but there was so much more he would like to have known before he started making suggestions. And a part of him still felt guilty about that, too; he was supposed to study the dead past, not meddle with the living.
“Excuse me.”
William looked up again to see a tired-looking blonde in civilian clothes standing beside the remaining chair. He recognized her at once — Daedalus was too small for a story like hers not to have spread — and saw the same flash of sympathy on Hocken’s face.
“Is this seat taken?” Jeannie Miller asked.
“No,” William began, and in the same instant, Hocken said, “Help yourself.”
“Thanks.” Jeannie seated herself, set her mug carefully on the table in front of her. A tag dangled over the lip, yellow and green letters proclaiming it to be chamomile and caffeine free. Jeannie frowned at it, and began to dunk the bag up and down as though that would hasten the steeping process.
William looked at Hocken, saw the same embarrassed uncertainty in her face. You couldn’t pretend everything was normal, that Jeannie Miller was just another civilian contractor heading to Atlantis, not when everyone knew that her brother was Rodney McKay, and everyone also knew that McKay had been captured by the Wraith and was probably dead, and she was going to Atlantis to try to help protect the city from anything her brother might have betrayed. But at the same time, it was obvious from her stare, from the tilt of her head and the way she avoided their eyes, that she did not want a conversation. He cleared his throat nervously, and Jeannie looked up, her lips curving in something that wasn’t a smile.
“Please don’t,” she said. “I know — I appreciate it, but…”
Her voice trailed off, and William felt himself blush. “No, no, of course not.” He sounded more English than ever, the Hooray-Henry voice of his childhood coming back at the worst possible time. But at least it was something to hide behind, along with the laptop screen. Across the table, Hocken was staring intently at her sandwich, a touch of color on her cheeks as well. William cleared his throat again, and tugged the laptop toward him, pretending to study the report. The last thing he wanted to do was add to her troubles.
“Sorry,” Jeannie said, to no one in particular, and pushed herself away from the table. For a second, William thought she was going to leave the tea, but she turned back to snag it, before working her way to the door.
“Well,” Hocken said, after a moment. “That was awkward.”
“Very,” William agreed, and looked back at the laptop.
Quicksilver did not know how long he had lain in his nest, wrapped in sorrow and the aching loss, the absence that left his mind empty. Long enough for the hive to be underway again, long enough for strangers to come, and go again when he would not respond, long enough that he felt empty, as dry as the touch of his brother’s mind. He should move, he knew, rise and be about his work, but that was lost to him, too, and so he waited, too drained to do more than wait for what would come next.
*Quicksilver?*
The voice in his mind was banked fire, a coal still warm at the core; not a man he knew, and Quicksilver rolled over, untangling himself from the quilts that filled his nest. It should have been Dust, standing there, and the sorrow broke over him like a wave, so that he ducked his head, covering his face with his off hand until he had mastered himself.
*I honor your grief,* Ember said, and there was compassion in his mind.
Quicksilver peered from between his fingers, seeing a blade standing there — no, a cleverman, but a cleverman in blade’s clothes, his long leather coat dulled and dark. He was fair, and passably handsome, his hair pulled up and back in a style Quicksilver hadn’t seen before. A stranger, then, not of the hive, and he lowered his hand, lips parting in a reflexive snarl.