Of course, if his claims were true, she could add ten thousand years onto any age she came up with.
“How long has he been like this?” she asked.
Jennifer Keller was on the other side of the bed, looking at Angelus with the same kind of slightly perplexed expression that Carter guessed she’d probably been wearing. “Hmm?”
Carter gestured to the sleeping man. “Has he woken up at all? Said anything?”
“Ah, yeah. He woke up just after he was brought in, asked who I was.”
“Anything else?”
Keller put her head to one side. “Yeah, now that you mention it. He asked if he was home.”
“Home…” Carter barely whispered the word. Of course, to a Lantean, Atlantis would be home. The human expedition occupying it now were only interlopers. Before today, it had seemed completely natural for Carter and her team to be here in this alien city; necessary, even. Now, with the possibility that one of the original owners was here, her whole perspective was threatening to come unglued. Suddenly, she was no longer sure of how she saw herself.
Charitably, maybe she could call herself a guest. From another point of view, though, little more than a trespasser.
If Angelus was truly an Ancient, she wondered, which view would he hold?
She shook herself. “All right, what else can you tell me?”
“Okay, I’ve run a full series of MRI scans, done blood tests, taken tissue samples… EEG and ECG too.” Keller was nodding to herself slightly as she spoke, as if running through a list of her own actions in her mind. “Pretty much everything I can do with what I have here.”
Carter hadn’t known the woman for long, but could already see that while Keller was a competent doctor, she could be uncertain of herself. “I’m sure you’ve been thorough,” she told her.
Keller half-shrugged. “I’ve probably forgotten something… Anyway, I’ve run the results against everything we know about the Lanteans. As far as I can tell without a complete genome-sequence, I don’t see anything that disproves his story.”
“You’re sure?”
“Look, I’ll show you.” Keller pointed to a nearby table, outside the screens, and when Carter moved over to it she followed her there. “X-Rays here, brainwaves here… I’m still waiting on final analysis of the blood samples, but the gross chemical makeup is a match. See?”
Carter rubbed the back of her own neck, trying to loosen up a niggling stiffness there. “I was right, you’ve been thorough.”
“Thank you.”
“So what do you think?”
“Me?” Keller gave that little half-shrug again. “Honest opinion? I think- Oh!”
The woman’s hand had flown to her mouth, and she was staring at Angelus.
The man was sitting up.
Carter walked quickly over to him. “How are you feeling?” she said quietly.
Angelus was blinking repeatedly, a slightly puzzled expression on his face. His eyes, now that Carter could see them, were very dark, with almost no difference in color between iris and pupil. “Luxis est valda perspicuous… Excuse me, I mean that it’s very bright here. The light.”
“We can turn them down…” Carter nodded to Keller, who went over to a panel and dimmed the lights. “That better?”
“Yes, thank you.” He looked up at Carter. “In answer to your question, I feel quite well. Where is this place?”
“You’re in Atlantis. We call this section the infirmary, it’s where we heal our sick.”
“And injured…” A frown darkened his features for a moment, then he seemed to gather his thoughts. “Please, forgive my rudeness. My name is Angelus.”
“I’m Colonel Samantha Carter. Do you remember meeting Doctor Keller?”
“Of course.” He bowed slightly to Keller, then fixed Carter with a strange, intense look. “Colonel? Is that a signifier of authority?”
“It’s a military rank.”
“I see. And is there anyone of higher rank here in Atlantis?”
“No, I’m in charge of this expedition.”
Angelus nodded slowly, as if taking the information in. “Very well. In that case, Colonel Samantha Carter, I have a request to make of you.”
“Me, personally?”
“As leader, it should be no other.”
Carter took a deep breath. “What do you need me to do?”
“I need you, “ said Angelus, “to hear my confession.”
A second passed, while what Carter had been expecting to hear and what she had actually heard collided in her mind and then dodged around each other for a while. Finally she mastered her surprise enough to say: “Excuse me?”
Angelus got to his feet, and as he did Carter saw that he was very tall. When he reached out and took her hands in his, his skin was cool, and oddly smooth. “You, Colonel,” he said quietly, “shall be my confessor. I have done things, things you need to hear about. I must confess to you.”
“What?” Carter whispered, in spite of herself. “What did you do?”
The Ancient gave her a sad smile. “I killed my children,” he said.
Chapter Three
Suffer the Children
It was dark, and someone was crying for help. He could hear her screams even through the weight of sleep, scratching at him, over and over. But his arms were like lead, too heavy to move, and no matter how he tried he couldn’t reach her. He couldn’t even shout back, to let her know help was coming.
If he had, it would have been a lie.
Sheppard blinked awake, staring up into the dark. His alarm clock was chirping at him, an insistent two-tone whine, and the display was flashing plaintive green digits into the gloom. Sheppard turned his head, squinted at the numbers, then reached out and hit the alarm button hard.
Harder than he should have done. There was a dull cracking sound from the clock’s innards and the numbers went out.
“Snooze,” he muttered.
Silence was preferable to the sound of the alarm, but Sheppard was already regretting the destruction. He’d have to requisition a new clock, now, and lie about what had happened to the old one. Still, a story about how the thing had mysteriously fallen off the table and broken sounded better than the truth. He couldn’t have told anyone that.
He sat up, shaking his head to clear the last vestiges of dream from his mind. Maybe the next clock he was given wouldn’t have an alarm that sounded so much like distant cries.
Or at least not ones in a voice he remembered so well.
Carter was waiting for him outside the conference room. She was looking at her watch as he walked towards her, and for a moment he wondered if he was late. His sleep had certainly been disturbed — he had lost count of the number of times he had woken during the night — but he couldn’t remember lapsing back into slumber after he had murdered the alarm. Perhaps, he thought, the clock had exacted a final revenge on him, stealing a few minutes to make him look bad at the briefing.
Then again, he wouldn’t have been the only one not at his best. Sam Carter looked as if she hadn’t slept at all during the night, or at least had gotten up in even more of a hurry than he had.
“Morning,” he said as he drew close.
“Colonel.” She smiled, but he could see that her hair was just a little unkempt, odd strands of it sticking out at random angles. The folder under her arm was in a similar state, with printouts and scraps of paper jutting from it.
Sheppard jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “Look, I’m sorry, but my alarm got busted… I must have —”
“What?” She gave him a blank look, then glanced down at her watch again. “Oh, I see! No, it’s not you, it’s Rodney.”
“Rodney’s late?”
“No, he’s early. Dragged us all in there twenty minutes ago. I’m surprised he wasn’t knocking on your door too.”
“He knows what I’d do to him if he did.” He frowned at her. “Sam, are you all right?”
“Hm? Yeah, I’m fine. Just a lot to take in, that’s all.” She gestured towards the doors. “Come on.”