“Beg pardon?”
“Colonel Carter — Captain Carter then — found the Antarctic gate by accident when our gate malfunctioned and she and General O’Neill got sent to the wrong one. He was badly injured and nearly died while she tried to figure out how to fix the gate and dial home. Turns out there was nothing wrong with the gate, and if she’d tried dialing any other gate address other than Earth she’d have been home in an hour. But she got stuck on one solution, if you see. She had to make the gate dial Earth. Which it couldn’t, because they were already on Earth.” William shrugged. “As I said, a cautionary tale.”
Laura blew out a breath, steam in the frozen air. “Wow. That sounds like the kind of mistake I would make. I can’t believe Carter did that.”
“Everybody was young once,” Ronon said gruffly, steering William toward the rock formations that towered over the plateau.
“Except you,” Laura said cheerfully. “You’re forty going on seventy five.”
Ronon looked at her sideways, and Eva thought she saw a spark of actual annoyance there. “I’m thirty one.”
“Yeah?” Laura grinned up at him, unabashed.
“Yeah.” He looked at her pointedly. “Now how about you help Dr. Lynn find a way in? Unless you’d just like to blow the cliff up.”
“I would,” Laura said, looking up. “Except I think using explosives would probably start an avalanche. That’s a lot of snow and ice right over us.”
Eva glanced up. It did look a little menacing as well as pretty. “Jinx,” she said under her breath.
Ronon looked over at her as Laura went to join William poking along the cliff base. “Yeah, I don’t like it either,” he said, raising his face to the beetling ridge above. He gestured off toward the cliffs below. “This was not a good scene for somebody.”
“Alcatraz?”
“The Chateau d’If,” Ronon said grimly. “Toss somebody off that cliff and they aren’t coming back.” Eva’s eyebrows rose, and Ronon shrugged. “A book Zelenka loaned me.”
“I’ve read it,” Eva said. “About a man imprisoned wrongly for fourteen years and how he got his revenge, if I remember.”
“Good book,” Ronon said. He gave her a wolfish grin. “True to life.”
“Are you and Dr. Zelenka friends?” Eva asked. That was an odd couple if she’d ever seen one.
“He’s a good man.” Ronon nodded, looking over to where Laura was walking along the cliff knocking on it with her fist like she was planning to find a door. “She’s not going to find anything that way. The Ancients didn’t build like that, like it was some kind of role playing game where you just have to walk up and say the password.”
“Maybe we should try Open Sesame,” Eva said, following him toward the cliff face. She raised her hands up with a smile. “Speak, Friend, and enter!”
Beneath the ice a faint tracery of blue lines appeared, spreading up and down and across, limned not on stone but metal. With a faint grinding sound the ice cracked as the massive doors began to move.
“Oh my God,” Eva said. Chunks of ice the size of her fist fell away as the panels slid back, twice her height and twenty feet wide.
“Good job!” Ronon clapped her on the shoulder.
“Of course it responds to the ATA gene!” William hit himself in the forehead dramatically. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Everyone except Laura refrained from answering. “Because you were fixated on a solution?” she said.
“Very funny.” William turned toward the doors as they ground open. “Now let’s go in and see what we’ve got.”
Chapter Twelve
Son of the Ancients
“You came to me before when you wished to test your retrovirus,” Todd said. He was pacing, and each time he came to the end of the room he swung around, exactly the same number of steps across the control room of the cruiser each time. “Because you needed Wraith subjects, and you needed my help.”
“Yeah,” John said. “But it didn’t work.”
“It did not,” Todd said, “And if it had I frankly doubt that most of us would have been willing to take it, given the diminishment in capabilities it inflicted.” He gave John a look that might have been intended as a mirthless smile, or as something entirely different. “Would you accept a retrovirus that would leave you blind? Or that would make it impossible for you to engage in intimacy?”
“Um,” John said, not entirely sure that was translating right.
“The telepathy,” Teyla said. She was sitting in the only chair in the control room, her ankles crossed, seeming utterly self possessed. “Without it a Wraith cannot emotionally connect normally.”
“Just so,” Todd said.
“It didn’t work,” John said. “We know that. So? Nobody is suggesting we use it again.”
“We have been working on our own retrovirus,” Todd said.
“We?” Teyla’s brow rose. “Queen Death?”
“My own clevermen,” he said, swinging around again.
“The retrovirus that has turned Rodney into a Wraith,” John said flatly.
“And what good would it do us, Sheppard, to have more Wraith? Why should we want to make more humans like us, to compete for already scarce resources?” Todd glowered at him. “Queen Death may find it amusing or even useful to turn one of her enemies into her pet, but it is of no long term strategic value.”
“And yours is,” Teyla said, making it a statement, not a question.
“We hope that ours will solve our problems in the long term, yes.” His eyes met Teyla’s, and John wondered if some other conversation were passing between them, one he couldn’t hear. “But we have reached the point where your cooperation would be helpful.”
“And why’s that?” John asked.
“Ours is intended for humans,” he replied.
“Why would we do that?” John began.
Teyla frowned, shaking her head slightly. “Let us hear,” she said.
“It is not to our advantage to kill our food source,” Todd said. “The process of feeding is almost inevitably fatal for the human, and so therefore it takes an exceedingly large human population to support a hive. It is possible to feed without killing, yes, but only by feeding very shallowly, not enough to sustain one for long, and even so the process is so debilitating for the human that most die anyway, or at least appear greatly aged and are no longer capable of functioning normally.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” John said. He didn’t see how this was going anywhere good, but Teyla was still listening, a little frown on her face.
“Our retrovirus is designed to provide humans with an enzyme that reacts with our enzyme during the feeding process,” Todd said.
“Like the Hoffan drug,” Teyla said.
“Indeed, in conception. But most unlike in practice. What ours does is to provide a strengthening agent for the human, so that the effects of feeding are not traumatic to the human physiology. Being fed upon would leave a human debilitated and weak, but it would not appreciably age them as it does now, and would not, were they healthy to begin with, prove fatal.”
Teyla nodded slowly. “And so, in practice, the same humans could be fed upon many times, rather than requiring fresh prey on each occasion.”
“Provided there were sufficient time left between. We do not know how long that might be. Months, certainly. Possibly years. But even if it were years, if the humans in question could continue to live and reproduce, we would not find that our herds were depleted so dangerously and quickly.” He paced away, turning again at the far end of the room. “A much smaller population of humans could sustain us. We should not have to slay within the populations of our worshippers.”