“Why don’t you tell me what you really think, Daniel? An unbiased opinion,” Jack said, his lips twisting in a half smile.
Daniel gave him a dirty look. “I’m not saying I’m unbiased. I’m saying that it was a tragedy for the entire world that the Roanoke colony was not the one that took root. I’m saying that if we drew our heritage from Roanoke instead of Plymouth that we would be a better country and a better people. If our guiding principles were based on the naturalists of the age of Shakespeare, rather than the manifest destiny of a bunch of Calvinists, the entire history of the world from that point on would be much improved.”
“You can’t know that,” Jack said. “Daniel, if there’s one thing we’ve learned seeing all these quantum realities and alternate timelines, it’s that we have no idea how our actions will affect the future. We can’t play that game. We can’t hedge our bets based on some kind of mega end on down the road. We have to play the cards we have, right here and right now. We can’t get into the whole ‘ends justify the means’ based on social theories of what will be better in three or four hundred years.”
“All right, how’s this for the short term?” Daniel glanced at him sideways again, apparently oblivious to the dump truck riding up on his back bumper. “The Austerlitz will launch in eighteen months. You know India’s research ship is right behind them. The Russians want more Stargate access, and they’re going to get it because they’re chipping in money we can’t afford. Meanwhile, our budget is flat for the next fiscal year and the Pentagon is planning a surge in Afghanistan. Your point about Atlantis?”
“My point is that we can’t determine whether or not humans from the Milky Way have contact with the Pegasus Galaxy. That’s out of our hands. What we can determine is what the guiding principles of these first contacts are. Who goes and what do they do? How do we respond to the peoples already there? How do we deal with the Wraith? What do we do about the rogue Asgard already in Pegasus? How do we safeguard the legacy of the Ancients so that it is available to all their heirs?” He shook his head. “We can’t abrogate that responsibility, Jack.”
“I never said we should.”
“You said…”
“I said I don’t make the budget. That’s the President and Congress. And I don’t determine the military priorities of the country. That’s way above my pay grade.”
Daniel snorted. “I thought that third star was good for something.”
“It occasionally gets me drinks with pretty girls.” Jack glanced out the window at the exit coming up. “Look, I can’t control the IOA. I can’t make them invest in Atlantis in the middle of an international economic crisis. All I can do is deal with our starships. Such as we have. As few as we have. Right now, 25 % of our force is sitting in Atlantis. Daedalus will be on her way back as soon as she’s repaired. That’s what I’ve got, Daniel.” His voice was harder than he wanted it to be.
“I know,” Daniel said more gently. “Believe me, I know you’re doing everything you can.”
Chapter Twenty-one
The Gift of Life
“Well?” Guide asked, looming over her.
“Just a second,” Jennifer murmured as she scanned the results, her lips forming the numbers soundlessly. “Almost done…” She ignored his quiet hiss of impatience, unwilling to rush. At last, she waved the datapad away and swiveled on the weirdly organic stool in order to look up at him. She could feel her heart pounding. “I think we’ve got it.”
He bared his teeth slightly, either amusement or derision or both. “You think.”
“Well, we won’t know until we really test it. But at this point…” She nodded. “Everything adds up. The simulations and lab tests have gone perfectly. So… I can safely say I think it will work.”
Guide snorted. “Such confidence.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re not the one who’s going to die if it doesn’t,” she said. It had been easy to throw herself into this project. Easier than usual, actually, to lose herself in numbers and results, because the implications of success were so much harder to think about. But now it had to be faced.
To her surprise, he barked a laugh. “Your jest is not in the best of taste.”
“It’s not a joke,” she said, shaking her head. “The next step has to be a trial on a human subject. We can’t just assume it works from the simulations.”
“Of course it must be tested,” he snapped. “But it would be wasteful to test it on yourself. There are humans in the feeding cells. Use one of them.”
She stood, wishing he weren’t quite so tall. But then, Teyla somehow managed to project utter bad-ass from all of five foot three, so maybe it wasn’t height that she needed. “You want me to give someone who’s waiting to be eaten a drug that, in itself, could kill him. And then you want me to watch while you feed on him and take notes,” she said, putting as much anger as she dared into her voice. “And then, if it doesn’t work, are you really going to tell me that you would do what you did for Colonel Sheppard and give this random human his life back? He’s only food to begin with, right?”
“You were only food to begin with,” he snarled, stalking closer. He held up his feeding hand, close enough for her to see the slitted mouth pulsating. She shivered but didn’t step back. “Feeding is excruciatingly painful for the human, Fair One,” he said, and his name for her sounded almost like a curse. “It burns, and you will feel it as your body shrivels, as the life drains from you and I consume you. It is not some gentle sleep.”
Jennifer drew in a shaky breath. “Which is exactly why I’m not going to let you do that to anybody else as an experiment,” she said. “Experimenting on an unwilling subject, on a prisoner…that’s wrong. Beyond wrong. Which would narrow the choices to me or Teyla, and she wouldn’t be as reliable a test subject with her Wraith DNA. Which… which leaves me.”
“Leaves you for what?” Teyla asked, her boots clacking softly on the floor as she entered the lab. Guide bowed his head to her as if she really were his queen, before replying.
“This one wishes me to feed upon her,” he said, still sounding angry. “I have expressed my reservations about this plan.”
Teyla smiled thinly, after a moment, as if he’d added something else with telepathy, and for the hundredth time, Jennifer kind of wished she could hear what they were saying. She turned to Jennifer, her hairless brows furrowed with concern. “To test your retrovirus?”
“We have to know if this works. You know as well as I do that we don’t have a lot of time here. It’s like every time Rodney has tried something that would either do what it was supposed to or blow up.” Her voice shook on his name, but she pushed on, thinking of all the times he’d given her that triumphant, I’m the smartest man in the universe grin. “Sooner or later you’ve just go to flip the switch.”
Teyla shook her head. “But to risk your life for a test…”
“You’re risking your life,” Jennifer said. “Both of you. Teyla, I have to do this. We need to know. It’s a risk someone has to take, and I can’t ask anyone else to do it in my place.”
Teyla nodded, making the ebony curtain of her hair sway. “Guide?”
“We require a trial,” he admitted.
“Then let’s do it,” Jennifer said, heading for the workbench where their various prototypes were arranged, neat glass vials in an intricate bone holder. “There’s no point in putting it off. Teyla, I don’t know if you want to watch…”
Teyla gave Guide a warning look. “I insist on it,” she said.
Jennifer unzipped her jacket and peeled it off. Even in the warm air of the hive, once she was standing there in her tank top she could feel herself start to shiver. She’d never actually watched a Wraith feeding, only seen video, and heard people talk about it, about seeing it again and again in their dreams.