Tuning out Geisler's steady chatter about the animals he'd seen, all of which seemed to be called saurs of some kind, Ronon focused on the landscape that was coming into view as the jumper descended. The fog in the valley where the Stargate was located had burned off as the sun had risen. The animal paths that wound through the jungle-Geisler could call it rainforest if he wanted, but as far as Ronon was concerned, it was dense jungle-were only occasionally visible through the crowns of tall trees.
Major Lorne punched in Atlantis's address on the dialing console. The shape of the Ancient lab that had once housed the gate had been blurred by millennia of floods and overgrowth, and even the gate itself was difficult to make out until the familiar vortex erupted.
Teyla transmitted their IDC while Lome brought the jumper in low. What happened next occurred so fast that Ronon barely had time to process what he saw. Something-a whole pack of somethings by the look of them-burst out of the jungle and skittered through the gate, just an instant ahead of a wall of speckled skin that belted the jumper aside with its shoulder and plowed in after them.
Barely keeping his seat, Lorne was the first to react. "Atlantis-raise the shield! I repeat, raise the-"
Something else slammed into the jumper, and shoved them into the wormhole.
Chapter six
When the hotel's automated wakeup call had drawn her out of bed at six that morning, Elizabeth had anticipated a contentious day in front of the International Oversight Advisory. She hadn't prepared at all for holding a negotiation in a morgue, with one side represented by SGC personnel and the other by a forensic psychologist who gave all indications of being at the end of her rope.
In one aspect, at least, the detour wasn't totally unwelcome. Elizabeth hadn't had the chance to explain to John or Rodney the main reason she'd been called to Washington in the first place, and she had no plans to bring it up now. They didn't need the distraction of worrying about Atlantis's future on top of everything else.
Although she knew better than to take lightly any threat to the expedition, she'd been down this road with the IOA before. Whenever one of the Advisory's member governments changed or reshuffled its bureaucracy, a new representative joined the committee and was promptly horrified to learn of secret intergalactic wars being fought on multiple fronts. Elizabeth couldn't blame any of them; she remembered her initial reaction to being told about the Goa'uld, who now seemed like trivial pests compared to the other dangers they'd discovered.
Not for the first time, the IOA's incoming members had examined the high cost, in both dollars and lives, of maintaining the Atlantis expedition. On this occasion, they'd actually voted to shut the expedition down. The Ori — or more accurately, their followers-were the immediate problem and focusing on them was a better use of resources. After all, the Wraith couldn't reach Earth.
Primed to defend Atlantis yet again, Elizabeth had found an unlikely ally in Woolsey. The Payton video had, at first, added fuel to the committee's fire; a Wraith presence on Earth seemingly had to be a result of some action the expedition had taken. If nothing else, it demonstrated the risks of sustaining a link to the Pegasus Galaxy.
Then Elizabeth had played her ace, reminding the members of Carson Beckett's report on the retrovirus a full year earlier. She knew the field of international affairs, had learned her craft in many of the same places as these people, and she could see in their expressions that they knew they'd backed themselves into a comer. Some of them hadn't even read Carson's report the first time around. They read it this time, and they were forced to concede the truth, sealed by Lam's autopsy findings. The Wraith, such as they were, had been on Earth for a very, very long time. Like Jekyll's Hyde, the monster hid within. In this case, while the Atlantis expedition's exploration of Pegasus wasn't the cause of the problem, it might yet provide the solution.
If one existed.
Elizabeth refocused on the situation at hand. The county coroner, a soft-spoken man of about fifty, seemed accustomed to dealing with personnel from the handful of military bases within his jurisdiction. When a CDC `containment team' had shown up on his doorstep, he probably had recognized the subterfuge for what it was, but he'd gone along without comment. The FBI profiler, on the other hand, was proving more difficult.
"This can't possibly be a public health risk," Dr. Rebecca Larance insisted, one hand resting in a fist on her hip. "The etiology
"The rate and method of transmission are still largely unknown," countered Daniel without missing a beat.
Across the room, Rodney hovered behind Lam and Radek, making no effort to conceal his discomfort. Three corpses lay side by side on tables: two sheltered inside body bags, the third exposed and charred almost to the point of losing any definition as a body, let alone a human one. While Radek handed Lam some type of magnifying lens, Rodney caught Elizabeth's eye and wordlessly urged her over to an alcove, away from both groups.
Joining him there, she asked, "Has Dr. Lam found something?"
"Nothing she hasn't found already on Payton and Cabal." Even as he spoke, Rodney's gaze inched over to where Larance stood. Elizabeth resisted the temptation to regain his attention with a sharp elbow. True, the FBI agent was rather striking, but it wouldn't help their cause if Rodney were to make some socially dubious remark to her. "Listen, who decided on this division of labor'? Colonel Sheppard gets to play Fox Mulder with the profiler? Because it seems to me that I'd be more qualified, given that he has no investigative experience."
"And your own experience in that arena is so vast?" Elizabeth asked dryly.
"Research is investigation by another name." Rodney scanned the room with an incipient frown. "Where is he, anyway? Not only does he get the best role in this pointless farce, but he manages to avoid this dungeon."
The morgue was as open and modem as the rest of the sheriff's headquarters, but Elizabeth let the comment pass. "John's upstairs, taking care of the paperwork for the custody transfer so we can bring the bodies back to the Mountain."
"Which somehow requires the assistance of CDC 'specialists' who all appear to have the same stylish haircut and an impressive fitness regime. Elizabeth, what precisely is our plan here'?"
She kept a firm hold on her patience. "How much of the cover story we discussed in the car did you miss during your panic attack?"
Rodney started to object to her appraisal and then apparently thought better of it. "Assume a substantial amount," he answered tightly.
Might as well start at the beginning. "If the victims' families, or especially the media, saw a team of soldiers barge in here and lock down everything associated with these cases, we'd attract far more attention than we're prepared to handle. Our explanation is that a joint military/civilian expedition to Antarctica discovered a 30,000-year-old virus in an ice core sample, and containment was breached upon their return. This virus appears to cause a form of rapid, acute progeria, hence the accelerated aging found in the victims."
Eyebrows climbing, Rodney admitted, "That's a remarkably good cover story."
Elizabeth smiled. "Thank Radek. The majority of it was his idea."
"And here's why it's transparently flawed." Rodney changed tack without so much as a blink. Amazing, she thought, the way he was able to do that. "The first thing the FBI will do to check our facts will be to consult the histories they've assembled for each of these people-victimologies, I believe they're called-and discover that none of the victims have any connection whatsoever to Antarctica. Also, a point that I'm confident this Dr. Larance won't miss: how are we going to explain the symbol of the gate and Dart found at all the scenes?"