In confusion, the man glanced over at the television and furrowed his brow. "What?"
Teyla stared at the image, which now showed many of the crew of the Greenpeace vessel on deck, looking out across the unsettled waters. Behind her, John finished his phone conversation with a "Yes, sir" that suggested the caller had been General Landry. He came up to stand at her shoulder, seemingly at a loss for words.
Dressed in the bright orange survival suit worn by all the ship's crewmen, Rebecca Larance had turned her head to stare directly into the camera. Standing with her were two other people, one a woman with distinctively elongated features. All three wore expressions as grim as that of the ship's captain.
"I'll be damned," John said under his breath. "Hanan and Baqir."
Chapter thirty-five
"This decision came from the highest levels, Dr. Weir." Woolsey folded his arms. "MIM-316 is the sole source of the plant life that can be used to trigger the Wraith genes in humans on Earth. Eliminating the risk requires that 316's biosphere be neutralized."
Elizabeth sat back in her chair, looking at him with appalled disbelief. John wished he could be as surprised. The cynical part of his brain had suspected something like this was coming. "Wipe out everything on that planet," she said bluntly. "Just like that?"
"As you're aware," Woolsey replied, standing stiffly near the head of the SGC briefing room table, "DNA analysis has confirmed that several IOA representatives, and of course members of their families, are also burdened with fragments of the genes."
Analysis, my ass. John knew damn well the bottom-feeding bureaucrat had gone into panic mode as soon as he'd realized that his late cousin's connection to Hanan implicated his gene pool.
Woolsey continued, "Since the SGC failed to end the threat on Earth-"
"That's going too far, Woolsey." Landry's tone was icy.
"Is it?" Woolsey was undeterred by the General's ire. "Your people were unable-"
"Our people?" Jackson raised his eyebrows. "Wasn't it your idea for us to work with the FBI profiler?"
"Be that as it may. Your top Wraith hunters were unable to prevent Hanan and a group of her cambion followers from escaping."
"Escaping to what? Death by hypothermia or drowning? You know the timeline of events. Less than an hour after the Greenpeace ship reported one of their Zodiac boats missing, along with a group of eight crewmembers that included Agent Larance, Hanan, and Baqir, a massive storm blew through the area. An inflatable wouldn't have stood a chance in those seas, and there's no way they could have escaped on foot through the ice pack."
With a gesture in John's direction, Jackson stood and activated the viewscreen, which displayed a grid map of Antarctica. "Over the last week, we've performed a comprehensive aerial survey of the entire continent. The deep-look scans indicated nothing beneath the polar ice cap except a surprising quantity of fresh water-enough to fill the Great Lakes a few times over, I'm told. The IOA might be better served to worry about the risk of mass drowning from an abrupt rise in sea levels if the ice shelves damming the water give way. It's far higher than the risk of a mass gene activation."
Woolsey shook his head, not reacting to the implied challenge in Jackson's tone. "You can't be absolutely certain on either aspect of that. For one thing, I've read the reports on global warming, and the conclusions are ambiguous to say the least."
Why the man had chosen to nitpick that particular issue, John had no idea, but he had to acknowledge Woolsey's first point-in spite of that `Wraith hunter' comment earlier, which might have been aimed at any or all of them and had sounded an awful lot like a pejorative.
John had led the flight of jumpers that had crisscrossed the frozen continent with sensors tuned to maximum settings. As powerful as the scans were, they'd barely managed to get a ping even from the already known Ancient base-and to achieve even that much he'd had to make use of a direct sightline through the tunnel dug by the Goa'uld Al'kesh during the Battle ofAntarctica. All things considered, he wouldn't be surprised if Jimmy Hoffa were under that ice cap. More to the point, since a cloaking system wasn't out of the question, it was still wholly possible that another Stargate or even a cityship like Atlantis waited below the surface.
Then there was the matter of Rebecca's new talent for sucking life from animals. He didn't want to hazard a guess as to how the remaining Lilith contingent from the Verreisen Sie Heim had fared in that monster storm, but if Rebecca's group had somehow managed to make landfall, the penguins and seals down that way would allow her to keep her Ninlil cohorts alive. A little cold probably wouldn't bother them too much.
Of course, John had no plans to voice those opinions in this forum. He wasn't about to give the IOA any further ammunition. The rest of his team had spent a fair bit of time on M1M316 and was adamant that the planet should be left in peace. Jackson had taken up the cause without being asked, pointing out that his standing with the IOA was more secure than that of anyone else involved. John, and to a lesser extent Elizabeth and Rodney, still had to make up lost ground after their unauthorized defense of their city, while Teyla and Ronon, being `alien,' hardly counted to the unashamedly xenophobic committee.
Although John didn't like having to hide behind a member of SG-1 to get things done, he'd seen the logic. Rodney, however, had never learned about the better part of valor. "Does it strike you as ironic at all that these cambion of which you're so terrified have the same genetic makeup you do?" He snapped his fingers. "Wait, I misspoke. I confused irony with hypocrisy. Subtle difference in this case."
John could practically hear Woolsey's teeth grinding. "If the creatures that escaped find a way to reach 316-"
"They're human beings," Jackson countered. "Not 'creatures'."
"If they've got Wraith genes, they're not human," stated Ronon.
So much for presenting a united front behind Jackson. John would have reined Ronon in, but Teyla beat him to it, spinning her chair sharply toward him. "Go ahead and kill me now, then. If that is the definition by which you view humanity, you must kill all of us." Her cool gaze swept from Ronon to John and then Woolsey. "Every one of us who harbors genes other than those you consider to be purely human."
"That's not what I said," Ronon backpedaled. "Just that they aren't the same as…" Failing to find an appropriate description, he trailed off, looking troubled.
"It might be time for you to rethink that perspective, Ronon." Elizabeth spoke up, her voice resolute but not without compassion. "I would never ask you, of all people, to stop hating the Wraith. The fact is, though, you're immune to their feeding because of a gene that originated from the iratus bug. Does that make you less than human? Or more?" She leaned forward, placing her forearms on the table. "The point of all this, and what many of us seem to be missing, is that not one person in this room, or anywhere else for that matter, has a `perfect' set of genes that's completely free of any trace of other life forms. We evolved from life that came before us. Because of that, we're all linked, not just between our two galaxies but across all others as well, because ultimately we're all made from the same building blocks of life."
For a moment, no one spoke, acknowledging her statement. His gaze downcast, Rodney said quietly, "That sounds like Carson talking."
Elizabeth gave him a wistful half-smile and a nod. "I remember him quoting Sagan once or twice. `For we are all star stuff."'
"Exactly," said Jackson. "If the IOA is willing to sanction genocide-"
.,It is not genocide," Woolsey argued. "MIM-316 has no human inhabitants."
Well, that brief truce hadn't lasted very long.
"Are we really going to have a semantic debate about what to call this particular form of mass murder?" Apparently it was Rodney's turn to be impassioned. "It's utterly insane, the idea of wiping out all life on an entire planet based on nothing more than the off chance that one of its plants might trigger an unwanted gene if it ever reached Earth. And it won't reach Earth, because its Stargate is sealed off to incoming travelers.