“I have seen my share of snow,” Radek said. “I am from the mountains, you know.”
She nodded absently. “I’m from Wisconsin. Where it snows. But I think everybody got used to living on a nice warm island.”
“And we are all simply going to have to learn to cope with living on a colder one. The energy consumption that would be required to keep the shield up every time it is snowing…” He was getting a little tired of this explanation. Perhaps it would help if he sent a memo. “It is prohibitive.”
Jennifer shook her head. “I’m not asking you to put up the shield so that it won’t snow.”
There was a momentary pause. “Then…”
“Why are you in here? That was actually my question.”
It took a moment. There had not been much sleep for anyone in the last few days, which might have something to do with a tendency to fall down icy stairs. “I came to see if you were all right,” he said simply.
There was still hope, of course. They had lost people to the Wraith before and recovered them again after it had seemed that all hope was lost. But it did not look good, and he thought it might be the first time that it was personal for her. She and Rodney had been seeing each other for months, had been sharing living quarters since they returned to Atlantis, and now he was gone, and it might end just like that, quick and sudden like a candle being blown out.
Jennifer’s expression was more awkward than anything else, as if trying to remember how one responded to such remarks. For a moment she reminded him oddly of Colonel Sheppard. “I’m good,” she said. “I mean, as much as possible, considering that we’re kind of in a holding pattern right now.”
“We must be patient,” Radek said. “But it is frustrating.”
“It’s probably best to just get on with everything else,” Jennifer said, looking up as one of the Marines entered the infirmary with a sheepish expression and a pronounced limp. “It’s not going to do any good to fall apart until, you know, we’re there.”
“I hope we will not be there,” Radek said, but he could recognize a request to be left alone when he heard one. They were hardly close, and he was sure he was not her first choice for a sympathetic ear. It was only that he suspected she might not have one, and at a time like this, sometimes anyone would do to tell about one’s troubles.
No, not only that. What he wanted to say was: The first year, when Peter Grodin was killed, it was hard for me to take, and I said nothing about it because everyone was unhappy, what else was new? And Rodney, who had been his friend, tried awkwardly to say something comforting, although it came out more ‘when you think about it, we’re probably all going to die,’ and I told him to please be quiet so we could get on with work. And now I am sorry I did, because Rodney is terrible at such things, but he tried instead of saying nothing, and to say nothing would have been so easy.
Jennifer was already crossing the infirmary to greet her new patient, though, and maybe there really was nothing more to say. Radek left her to her examination and ducked out of the infirmary. He nearly ran into Major Lorne, who looked distinctly troubled. That in itself was probably not a surprise.
“Hey, doc, have you got a minute?”
“Not really, but tell me your problems,” Radek said. “I will add them to the list.”
“The short-range scanners keep cutting in and out,” Lorne said. “And when they’re in, we’re getting some weird readings off them. I don’t think it’s really likely that we’ve got company here, but back on Lantea there was that business with the whales — ”
“There could be whales here,” Radek said. “Dangerous space whales intent on battering themselves against the city suicidally, or possibly on eating military personnel. I would not at all be surprised.”
“I’m just saying it would be nice to check it out,” Lorne said. “I don’t really want to be on a new planet with scanners that don’t work.”
“I see that,” Radek said. “It is possible that the weather is causing some problems. The city was surely once equipped to handle cold and snow in Antarctica, but that was literally thousands of years ago, and it may be that given Lantea’s milder climate, keeping those systems working was not a priority.”
“But now maybe we might want to rethink that. I’ve also been noticing that it’s a little cold in here.”
“People keep opening and closing the exterior doors,” Radek said. “You see, without the shield, we have no control over exterior temperatures, and while the city’s heating system is very good, we cannot heat the entire outdoors.”
“My mom used to say that,” Lorne said. “Maybe you could send a memo.”
“Yes, that will be sure to help.” Radek spread his hands in surrender to the uselessness of attempting to teach all Atlantis personnel to keep doors closed. “I will add it to the list, but at the moment we have worse problems to deal with.”
“I know,” Lorne said, all humor gone. “Believe me.”
Teyla came into the gateroom twelve hours later, cradling a cup of coffee in her hands. Sleep and food had made her feel human again, capable of taking up the search for Rodney with competence.
Radek was there ahead of her, frowning into one of the monitors, his glasses askew. His hair was still wet, so he had not been there long. His usual travel mug of coffee was beside him.
Teyla came and stood beside him, looking over his shoulder at the screen filled with incomprehensible code. “What are you doing?”
“Locking Rodney out,” he said. “Which is pretty much an impossible task.”
“I don’t understand.”
Radek spread his hands, flexing fingers above the keyboard and reached for his coffee. “Rodney is in the hands of the Wraith. Rodney has access codes to every one of Atlantis’ systems, from power to the shield to the gate codes to the requisition order forms for Earth! He has the codes for the auto-destruct system. He has the codes to drop the shield on the gate. So I am changing everything.”
“Rodney would not tell…” Teyla began, and stopped. Of course he would tell. He would have to. She had touched the mind of the Wraith far too often not to understand what it was like, what a Queen’s telepathy was capable of. The first time, she had folded like bent paper. When faced with a great queen, the one they had discovered aboard the lost power station beneath the sea, John had crumpled in seconds. Taken by surprise, she had crumpled as well.
But later, knowing and expecting the strength of the mind that wrestled with her own, she had won.
Coldamber, Todd had named her, the queen Teyla defeated. Coldamber, he had said, with a kind of wonder in his voice, and through the corners of his mind she had seen what he remembered, Coldamber in her beauty and pride, while Todd fell to his knees before her in homage, as helpless as John. She had seen his wonder that she, Teyla Emmagan, had defeated Coldamber.
This was the Gift, the remnant of a long-ago medical experiment when a renegade Wraith scientist had combined his own DNA with that of captive humans. Some few of them had survived. Some few of them were her ancestors. Among her foremothers stood a Wraith Queen, the mother of the scientist who had done this, and from that tainted blood sprung her Gift. She was strong enough now, strong enough with Todd’s tutelage, that she thought she could face a Wraith Queen and give away nothing.
But Rodney had none of her defenses. He had none of the protection offered by her tainted blood, by the strand of Wraith DNA among her own. His mind would be open to a queen, as surely as the mind of a captive Wraith could be opened to her. She had not tried that. She hoped she would not need to, and yet she held it in reserve, a hidden dagger that no one had as yet realized she carried.