The Saints of Atlantis 26
Richard Woolsey had been born a bureaucrat. Few things made him happier than an office full of orderly paperwork filled out with the minutia of daily life. Once it had seemed likely that he would spend the rest of his life in a cubical in Washington D.C. tracking down the misuse of military funds. He could have been very happy doing so, but certain men in what they thought were powerful positions had tried to use him to bring the leaders of the Stargate program to heel. It had backfired spectacularly, because above all else, even his love of rules and regulations, Richard Woolsey was an honest and honorable man.
This was the reason he had become the American President’s representative to the IOA and the one bureaucrat that was actually more welcomed than tolerated by the SGC. Now he was being sent to Atlantis along with two other IOA representatives to inspect the base and to find out just why Doctor Weir had insisted on hiring people with families. She had blackmailed the IOA into allowing those families to be brought along by threatening to throw two of the scientists out of Atlantis, sending them back to Earth. It was not a move that he would have ever predicted that she would make.
While Woolsey did not like the thought of blackmail at these levels of government, he was also very aware that sometimes it was needed, as long as there was a good reason for it and there was no other recourse. He simply could not imagine a situation where that was the case here. He stepped out of the food line into the mess hall and looked around for a place to sit. Normally he would have chosen a seat with the other two representatives, but here was an opportunity that he hadn’t yet had.
Two women and three children were on board the Daedalus traveling to join the other families in Atlantis. They were the only complete civilians traveling on this particular voyage of the Daedalus, and it was his understanding that the reason for the delay of their travel had been due to the younger woman’s pregnancy. As she had two newborns with her, he could understand her being under travel restrictions before their birth. Right now the older woman was nowhere to be seen and she was attempting to deal with all three children by herself.
Woolsey sat his tray across from hers and gently took one of the babies from the travel seat on the table. Before the woman could come across the table and strangle him, he said, “It looks like you could use some help. May I?” He reached into the diaper bag and removed a bottle, expertly snapping off the top and offering the nipple the fussy baby. This changed the woman’s expression from murder to thankfulness.
“Danke schon!” the woman said with a smile. “Gretchen McManus,” she added, pointing to herself.
‘Well, that was certainly unexpected,’ Woolsey thought. He’d understood that the civilians that Doctor Weir had hired were Irish, not German; although her last name probably meant that she’d married into the same family as the ones he’d been told about. “You’re welcome,” he replied in German. He was thankful that he’d studied the language and spoke it fairly well. “I’m Richard Woolsey. Boy or girl?” he asked, nodding to the child in his arms.
“All three of my little devils are boys,” Gretchen replied with a smile as she wrestled a piece of jam covered toast away from her eldest and continued to feed her other baby. She grabbed a wet napkin and washed her son’s face. He scrunched up his face and crossed his arms, but sat still for the procedure. As Woolsey had seen her tap her son smartly on the head when he’d disobeyed two days earlier, he thought it spoke well of the child’s intelligence. Most children didn’t learn that sort of acceptance of the inevitable until much later. “We are going to Atlantis to live with my husbands there.”
Woolsey ignored his translation mistake and asked, “Are you sure that this is the right thing to do? Atlantis is in the middle of a war zone and has been attacked before.”
His concern showed through his awkward manner, so Gretchen wasn’t offended. “It is just as dangerous at home if we travel more than fifty miles Mr. Woolsey, perhaps even more so. In Atlantis I will not have to be worried about car bombs, or drive by shootings, or my family being caught between two groups who have not been able to come to a full peace in centuries,” she said, referring to the violence that was never truly resolved in Ireland. It was still possible to start a brawl just by talking about something that had happened two centuries before. “Besides, from what I understand living in Atlantis will be helpful for my children to learn their heritage.”
“Simply because your children are likely to be ATA positive hardly strikes me as a good reason to move them out to Atlantis,” Richard said in disbelief.
Gretchen smirked. “Their heritage has nothing to do with Atlantis or being ATA positive, Mr. Woolsey. It has everything to do with being a son of clan McManus. Either Jacob or the twins will be called, as their fathers, grandfather and great-grandfather were. In Atlantis they will not have to hide their lessons.” Richard looked at her in confusion, but she merely smiled and went back to feeding her children.
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Michael stayed for two weeks. During that time he was very open about his people, which allowed the Lantians to gather some much needed information. There were 834 hive groups in Pegasus, most of which were older and more established than his own. A new hive was created when a Wraith Queen reached puberty, her mother sending her off with a single cruiser and enough drones and males to operate the ship.
This ship would become the starting point of a new hive. Each new queen was capable laying up to 50 eggs a day. Most of these eggs would produce drones, but a good percentage would be males. Females were the rarest eggs laid, usually only one in every 100,000. Drones reached maturity in two years, males in four and queens in six. Their rapid growth and reproductive rates were greatly reduced in comparison to their Iratus cousins, who matured in weeks and laid thousands of eggs at a time, which meant that the Lantians would not be facing the entomologists’ worst case guesses. Unfortunately it was still a greater rate of production than their most optimistic guess.
Michael also exchanged cultural information with the anthropologists, telling them the story of the Ancient/Wraith war from the Wraith point of view. There was a great deal of bitterness there, and while that bitterness was not totally unexpected, Michael was now questioning just how much of the story was accurate. In an attempt to soften the blows Michael was now experiencing, Kate Heightmeyer tried to explain to him that most likely the Wraith who were still around from that time had told themselves the story for so long that they actually believed it. The lies that a person told themselves were often the hardest to see through.
Doctor Beckett ran extensive tests on Michael, with his permission and participation, before and after he had fed on various animals of different sizes and species. The Athosians participated in the experiments by bringing in live caught animals, mainly because they did not wish for those living in the city to be threatened by having a hungry Wraith nearby. Those who observed the daily experiments were often shocked and beyond furious when the experiments were explained to them. They made the connection that their people had been living with the threat of culling for ten thousand years, simply because Wraith preferred to eat humans.
That Michael was choosing to turn his back on this practice was something that both Halling and Teyla formally thanked him for. They would never be friends, but even if no other Wraith took up his choice knowing that one Wraith was honorable enough to stop when he learned that he didn’t have to eat humans was something that they could appreciate. They understood far more than the Earth born who had only recently been exposed to the deprivations of the Wraith as a whole just how difficult a choice it was for him.
Michael in turn apologized for the humans he had killed once he had learned just what it was that he had been destroying. He had been raised with the notion that humans were not only inferior simply because they were food, but also that somehow they were not intelligent enough to be ‘real people’. It was an all too common attitude towards ordinary people by conquerors of all sorts.
Doctor Beckett’s examinations and feeding experiments produced rather unique results. Michael was actually much stronger and had an increased ability to focus the greater the variety of animals he fed on. He was restricted to animals over a certain size, as creatures smaller than a mid-sized dog wasted more energy than they produced, but that was the only restriction.
“Basically what I’m getting from these readings is that eating humans for a Wraith is rather like living off of sugar or alcohol would be for a human,” Carson explained, showing Michael the results of his latest scan. “Tastes or feels good, but ultimately is very bad for your health. From a medical stand point I’d recommend that you eat at least one large animal and several different smaller ones a week, say three or four depending upon their size. They should all be different species, and try to rotate so that you’re not eating the same species more than twice a month if you can. Also while it would be very easy for you to survive being separated from your hive now that you know what’s best to eat, it isn’t good for you mentally.”
Carson sighed, and patted Michael on the shoulder, finding the gesture far easier after two weeks of working with the Wraith. “Your people are far more social than even the most social teenaged butterfly of a human. You need the mental contact that is normal among your own people. If there was a way to duplicate that here, I’d tell Rodney and Radek and I’m sure they’d whip up some way to make sure that you had it, but there isn’t. My recommendation is that you go home, find out what is happening with your hive, and if you can convert as many of your people as you need to make a healthy mental web. It would be best if you could convert the whole hive, but I’m not counting on it and you shouldn’t either.”
“You don’t think that they’d prefer to find a way to not starve to death?” Michael asked, genuinely curious.
“Lad, it’s not that I don’t wish that all of your people would suddenly stop eating us, pull their heads out of their collective superiority complex and learn some decent livestock management and population control, but let’s be realistic. Not one single one of the older ones want to change and most of the younger ones like yourself aren’t going to be listening simply because eating humans feels too good to stop. It’s probably very addicting, otherwise why would the old ones have kept doing it in the first place?” Carson asked.
Michael understood what Carson was saying far more than any human ever could, but he still had a question for the doctor. “What is population control?”
Carson drew his hand down his face. Of course Michael didn’t know what he was talking about. The Wraith were great examples of a species eating themselves out of house and home. “Population control means deliberately not having more people than your resources can support. In the case of your people, that means your prey’s numbers must always equal at a minimum 120 times your people’s numbers. You need sixty animals per Wraith per year plus a breeding population based on the diet I just gave you. If you keep those numbers current none of you will have to go into hibernation if you don’t want to.”