“Follow your gut,” she said.
John let out a long breath. “I’m not sure my gut always makes good decisions.”
“No,” she agreed. “Sometimes it makes bad decisions for the right reasons. You are not wise, and you are a hard man, an expedient man who will do anything for those he loves. But you are not selfish. You do not act out of self interest. You do what you think is best, and perhaps you are wrong. But you do not do it for your own profit.” She nudged him sideways. “And you know when to listen to those wiser than you.”
“And that would be you?” She could not tell if he were joking or not.
“I am conceited,” she said, “and like to think so. It is my great weakness to think I understand all, that I am so very clever and that I understand people so well. And yet what a mess I have made of my own life! I destroyed my marriage to Jorrah long before you came to Athos, and you saw what passed with Kanaan. I no longer speak for my people, no longer fit among those who share my blood. I am Bloodtainted, and I sit here with you as a Wraith Queen.” She stretched her hand against his, claws against his skin. “I am Teyla Who Belongs Nowhere, Teyla of No People. I do not know where I can live.”
“Atlantis,” he said, and she turned her head to look at him. “You belong in Atlantis. It’s your home.”
“A place between?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s your home too.”
She looked down at their joined hands, his big and warm, hers tinted green with veins like twining vines about them. She had said nothing to anyone else. What could she say, lacking proof? “Carson thinks the Wraith began as a failed experiment of the Ancients,” she said. “That like the Replicators it was an experiment that went wrong.”
John was quiet for a long moment, his head bent in thought, and she knew he was adding it up, all the things they had seen, the experiments left by the Ancients who had played games with human beings, who had made war on their creations.
“It could be,” he said. “It makes a hell of a lot of sense, really.” He raised his head. “And then they tried to kill them.”
“Only the Wraith are not easy to kill.”
“The Wraith hunted them down instead.” John nodded. “I’ll buy that. It makes a lot of things make sense.”
“It does,” Teyla said. “They are the avengers, seeing retribution from their creators. But you know this is not something people can accept. It is too much. It is too painful. It cuts to the heart of our stories.”
“You can’t expect people to react well when you challenge them like that,” John said. “That’s not how it works. You can’t destroy what people believe about themselves and expect them to thank you.” He shrugged. “Any kind of social change. You’ve got to do it really carefully, or the backlash kills people. Sometimes literally. And you’re talking about something that would rip apart the foundations of every civilization in this galaxy.”
“That is why I have spoken of it with no one but you,” Teyla said. “And why Carson only spoke to me. We have been too hurt. Our scars go too deep. Your people do not have these scars, and so perhaps they can, some of them, bear to see the Wraith as people. But they have not lost loved ones. They have not lived their lives in terror. They have not seen their children fed upon. They are good men both, but can you see Ronon or Kanaan accepting this?”
John blew out a deep breath. “Ronon,” he said. “No, that’s not going to work.”
Teyla’s head lifted at the same moment that a blue light began to blink, and she hurried to her feet.
“What’s that?” John asked.
“Sensor alert,” she replied. “Todd’s hiveship has arrived.”
The island looked like a big chunk of ice. As Eva Robinson brought the jumper around looking for a place to land, that was her first thought. It glittered in the sun like a bright proof of Atlantis, almost too bright to look at as every surface glared in the morning sun.
Automatically the windscreen of the jumper responded to her thought, darkening with a gray tint to dampen the glare. That was pretty neat. She wasn’t sure she’d ever get used to this many features, but she was certainly willing to try. She’d flown the jumper around the city on practice runs, but this was the first time she’d gone on an actual mission, something she’d never anticipated doing.
Very carefully, Eva set the jumper down on a windswept snowfield on a small plateau overlooking the sea. It wasn’t far from where the sensors detected power sources. Nothing on this island was. Maybe it had once been bigger, but it sure wasn’t very big now.
She shrugged on her heavy parka as Laura Cadman opened the back gate. Laura had been in her office a couple of times to talk about Carson. It was a little strange to work with the clone of the guy she’d been involved with who didn’t remember the last eight months of their relationship before his death. She’d mourned him, finished her rotation and gone back to Earth, thrown herself into her work and gotten promoted, been posted to the Hammond. She was over him. And then suddenly she had to work with him. Or with his clone, who didn’t remember everything she did. It was a damn good reason to come talk to her, in Eva’s opinion. Not at all the kind of adjustment issue you were likely to encounter on Earth!
“It looks like Alcatraz,” Laura said, stepping out onto the ramp.
“Alcatraz?” William Lynn hurried down the ramp after her, putting on his sunglasses against the snowglare. “I don’t see it. This is beautiful.”
“The way it’s situated,” Laura said, gesturing with the muzzle of her gun toward the sea and the shore of a larger island a short distance away, separated by a bay of frigid water. “The rocks. The shape of the island. The sea cliffs. It would be a hell of a place to escape from.”
“Maybe it was a waystation,” Ronon said, clomping off the ramp and into the snow. He sunk to his knees. “If you put the Stargate here, you could control access to it. Nobody else on the planet would be able to use it unless you let them.” He shaded his eyes with his hand, looking out over the sea. “I’d hate to assault this place.”
“It does look quite defensible,” William agreed. “I’ll look for the remains of fortifications.”
“How about we look for the power source?” Ronon said. “That’s what we came to do.”
“Right.” William pulled out his scanner. “I’m reading the energy source in this direction.” He pointed away from the sea, toward a rocky ridge that ran the length of the island, gray stones festooned with snow and sheets of ice.
“In the middle,” Laura said. “That makes sense.”
“This is interesting,” William said. “Very interesting.”
“What is?” Ronon swung around, looking at the archaeologist bent over his instrument.
“I’m picking up a fairly strong trace of naquadah here. Perhaps this was the location of the original Stargate, or where some of the remains of it wound up.”
“Here?” Eva said, looking around. “I don’t see anything.”
“It’s about three meters down beneath the ice,” William said.
“Overrun by glaciers?”
“It makes sense.” William shrugged. “This island could have changed considerably in 10,000 years. As you know, Earth originally had a Stargate in the Antarctic region which was rendered inoperable by glaciation.”
“Do I know that?” Eva said. “How would I know that?”
William looked confused. “I suppose you wouldn’t,” he said. “It came up in the off world trainings I had with Dr. Jackson. A cautionary tale about not getting fixated on a solution.”