Slide Into the Night: Chapter Nine
Title: Slide Into the Night
Rating:T
Warning(s): Language; Implied Violence
Disclaimer: Other than being a fan, I have nothing to do with Stargate:Atlantis
Prompt: This was written for the Season 4/5 Fix-It ficathon at john_elizabeth with the prompt: BASMR alternate ending: The away team on Asura finds and rescues Elizabeth. How does she deal/recover from her imprisonment?
Spoilers: Everything up to “Be All My Sins Remembered"
Summary: Janos Arany once wrote, "In love and dreams, there are no impossibilities." It's a faith that Atlantis is clinging to when the Pegasus Galaxy throws another curveball at them.
Beta: The amazing bluewillowtree who was invaluable with her input and generous with her time.
~*~*~*~*~
Leadership is a two-way street: loyalty up and loyalty down. Respect for one’s superiors; care for one’s crew. ~ Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper
Sam sat back in her chair, her lower back muscles protesting the strain from being hunched over her desk for the better part of the day. She sighed, closing her eyes and wondering futilely if her headache would fade. It wouldn’t, but she could hope.
There had never been a time that she didn’t have the Air Force in her life. She knew what it meant to be an officer, to command and to follow, to serve and to protect. Loyalty meant being dedicated to the people around you, the team that supported you, the family who protected you. A decade on SG-1 had taught her that: family were the ones for whom you chose to sacrifice everything, defended at all costs, and trusted without question. It was how she survived; it was how she lived.
When Elizabeth Weir had come into the SGC all those years ago and told her to sacrifice Jack…Sam had rebelled; a civilian puppet who knew nothing about the chaos that existed beyond Earth’s atmosphere had the gall to waltz into the SGC and tell them, the experts, how to do things? Fury and duty had driven her to take the risk of blackmailing a politician with powerful connections, and in the end, the other woman had understood. Loyalty was a powerful motivator, one that could only be forged by time and experience, never brought or sold.
What were the loyalties at play now?
She knew what Daniel would say, having been counted for dead so many times and having Ascended twice. He would argue that regardless of the risks and consequences, the moral and right thing to do was to defend a helpless woman. He would talk about a higher duty to help others, but in his eyes, she would see that he was talking about being someone’s protector, about doing what he hadn’t been able to do for Sha’re. His eyes would plead, and she would cave.
Teal’c would be practical and wise, pointing out that Weir was no different than a liberated Jaffa, newly freed from enslavement and finding the path to a life of choices, rather than of lesser sacrifices. He would refer to the tenets of honor and responsibility, of protecting those who could not protect themselves. Weir had sacrificed much to save her own people, and there was no honorable reason to fail to honor her now for that choice. He would reason with Sam, and she would agree.
Jack. Jack would give her a look and she wouldn’t be able to say no. He was fond of SGC personnel, both past and present, and she knew that he did everything in his power to protect not only Earth, but everyone at Cheyenne and on Atlantis, from the backstabbing officials in D.C. and the sleazy politicians on the IOA. It was a role he played with the same finesse that he had employed throughout his military career-a cunning mind and strong negotiation skills hidden behind the façade of a dumb grunt with a dismissive attitude toward everything intellectual. He protected his people, and because of that, sympathized with people who protected their own against selfish, money-counting idiots. She knew that he felt that Weir belonged in Atlantis, had given her heart and soul to the city and its people. He would give Sam a look-the one that reminded her of everything they’d been through together, the times they’d almost died, the times they’d thought the other dead-and then tell her that the city’s people had that kind of relationship with the person who had led them through it all.
Sam sighed again and saved her half-finished report on her laptop before closing the document. The weekly databurst to Earth was within a day. The after-action reports had to go out and there would be no concealing information because Ellis couldn’t be trusted to keep quiet. She smiled bitterly to herself, betting that it wouldn’t be even an afternoon before there was hell to pay from the SGC and the IOA. She could imagine the IOA screaming about security risks. The SGC’s reaction might be milder, but Landry wasn’t Hammond, and there would probably be a stern lecture about randomly rescuing people who were compromised, if not delivered via video feed, then on her laptop. She wasn’t looking forward to either of those reactions.
She was a scientist. She was an officer. She wasn’t cut out to be a politician or a bureaucrat. She wasn’t a backstabber who played with words and twisted meanings. Jack had faith that she could handle it; she could make the tough calls about right and wrong, black and white in a galaxy where survival twisted everything into complicated shades of gray. She had a made a split-second choice, one that she couldn’t regret. It was the decision that had been made for her before, a mercy given that had saved her future, and Sam couldn’t not grant that same chance to another person in the same position.
She knew he would back her up on her decision, taking it all the way up to the Commander-in-Chief if he had to, but she didn’t know if he would succeed. She knew that D.C. played by different rules and that the IOA had a say in how things were run in Pegasus, even though they knew nothing about the way things were. She had to stand steady at all costs and pray that it would be enough. This choice could cost her career, but… she didn’t want to retire from the Air Force with more regrets than she already had on her plate. She wasn’t going to let this situation become one of those regrets.
Sam stood up and went to the glass windows of her office, staring at the inactive Stargate wreathed in the moonlight before her. It had a majesty that never failed to take her breath away-when there wasn’t an emergency or imminent danger of all of them dying in one horrible fashion or another. She wondered if her predecessor had spent the midnight hours standing in this very spot, pondering the consequences of the choices she had made. Now, more than ever, with a chill running down her spine, she felt that this was Weir’s office, where the other woman had sat for three long years and commanded people to live or die for the sake of the expedition. The lesson she had first learned on Earth had been applied to the fullest in another galaxy. The woman sleeping in the infirmary had earned the undying loyalty and devotion of an entire city of people, of a unit, of a family of hardass Marines and caffeinated scientists.
Their history didn’t matter now. Elizabeth Weir was still an expedition member, and as the leader of Atlantis, Sam had a responsibility to protect her, no matter what.
~
3655
It was nearing the end of his shift, yet Chuck wasn’t sure if he really wanted to leave his station in the Control Room. For one thing, it would put him out of the loop until he was hopelessly behind on the news. There was too much uncertainty, too many people who were unsettled and too many issues floating through the city right now for him to sleep comfortably tonight. That was, of course, supposing that anyone had gotten any sound sleep in the past week or so, and that was a hypothesis just as viable as the Wraith suddenly all dropping dead tomorrow.
When the news first broke in a hushed whisper from Lindsey, he’d nearly choked on his afternoon coffee. He had to ask her to repeat herself twice before her words really sank in.
Dr. Weir was alive. She was alive! His face must have given away the shocked joy that was ringing through him because Madeline had given him a questioning look, and from there the news had spread like a wildfire throughout the city. He could feel the wave of gratitude that swept through Atlantis, thankful that one of their own was found, on her way home, and alive.
Dr. Weir was alive.
The quiet celebrations lasted until the Daedalus came into radio contact with the city and Dr. Keller had requested a secure channel to the infirmary. Eager for more information, he had perhaps inadvertently eavesdropped on part of the conversation, but what little he had heard was enough to know something was horribly wrong. As the hours passed after their little armada returned to the city, and there was still no word about Dr. Weir’s condition, the expedition fell into a grim sort of silence, buckling themselves down for disappointment and fear. Unfortunately, they weren’t wrong.
There was dead silence from the infirmary staff-no one who knew anything of importance was talking about what they knew. Still, this was an entire city full of people who knew how to add two and two together to get four. There were the ludicrous rumors and speculations floating around, but no one took them seriously. What was being spread around the city and could be relied upon as mostly fact was that the prognosis wasn’t good. Dr. Weir’s injuries were too severe, too extensive to hope that she would survive. Yes, Dr. Keller was a good doctor, but she wasn’t Dr. Beckett, not close enough.
There weren’t many people Chuck had met who could command the kind of loyalty Dr. Weir inspired in the expedition’s members. He didn’t know how she had managed to placate the scientists (especially Dr. McKay) while holding onto the respect of the Marines. He had seen her play so many roles, each as the situation demanded it-leader, commander, diplomat, friend, counselor, advocate, and the list went on. She was Atlantis’ rallying point. For the ‘gate teams, she was the last person they saw before they left and the first person they greeted when they returned. To the Marines, it was a secret comfort to know that someone, with a face and a name, was waiting for them back on Atlantis when they left the city. For the scientists, it was nice to finally have a non-military superior who could fully appreciate higher intellectual pursuits, even if she was from the soft sciences. In times of crisis, there was no question of her leadership, no hesitation in obeying her command because every person knew she cared and that her decisions were never made lightly, never made without thought to consequences and the human costs.
The majority of the city’s personnel were fiercely protective of her-she was their leader, the person who had to be kept safe. The scientists promised to keep the city from blowing up or being blown up; the soldiers promised to keep the city from being invaded or taken by hostile forces. When she had been declared killed as a prisoner of war less than a month ago, the entire expedition had plunged into a state of shocked numbness. After all, she was one of the untouchables, the one of the few people in the city who wasn’t supposed to make a life-taking sacrifice.
Now here they all were, living the aftermath of her decision to save the city at the cost of her own freedom. It was a roller coaster ride of emotions and events, and they were all too smart to think that it would end anytime soon. The people around him were grim, too wise to the machinations of the IOA and SGC to even hope that there wouldn’t be attempts to take her away from them again. Chuck knew if any brass or politician tried to have Dr. Weir sent back to Earth, there would be open revolt from the civilian population that might, just possibly, be wholeheartedly supported by the military contingent.
No one on Atlantis wanted to take any chance that the IOA would ship Dr. Weir to an asylum, or worse, Area 51, and throw away the key. If an expedition member had been in the same situation that she was now, she would have never stood for them being taken away and forgotten. Atlantis’ people knew that, and with that knowledge, they were standing firm against the howling winds of official disapproval that would soon come. He knew they weren’t the only ones who would fight to keep Dr. Weir safe. He glanced at the glass-walled office just a few yards away, staring briefly at the blond-haired woman who kept watch in the night like her predecessor, ceaselessly working to protect the people underneath her from the manipulations of narrow-minded fools on Earth.
There would be a long, drawn-out battle with the higher-ups over what was going to happen next, and he knew that the city had to be prepared for anything. In order to do that, though, he needed a decent night’s sleep. If he didn’t get one…he could still hear Dr. Weir’s fond admonition for him to go off shift, even as she worked through the night. Even though she was nowhere near him now, he left the Control Room quietly, heading off to bed.
Tomorrow, Chuck knew, the fight would go on.
3659
~
Steven found himself standing in the deserted mess hall of his ship, staring out at the vivid streaks of color that flowed past the window-like structure. It was nearing 0300 hours on the Daedalus’ time cycle and he couldn’t sleep. There were too many thoughts chasing each other in angry circles in his mind.
For all the moral challenges that the Pegasus galaxy could pose to a person, it was the political complications on Earth that gave rise to his insomnia. The IOA would be furious with him; he had very little doubt that the committee would challenge his decision not to kill Elizabeth on sight or treat her as a prisoner of war. He didn’t think they would be sympathetic to the fact that the woman in question had been bleeding to death in front of him. All they would see was that he let a security risk compromise the safety and integrity of his ship, and they’d come after him for that.
Of course, he was painting the IOA as a bunch of heartless, bean-counting whiners, but they hadn’t exactly endeared themselves to him in the past. The fact that he had been taken hostage by a fucking Goa’uld symbiote for the better part of a year and it was the symbiote, not him, that tried to destroy Atlantis, hadn’t stopped the IOA committee from hauling him in for a hostile interrogation and then afterwards, recommending him for court-martial for treason and espionage. Yes, he was still a little resentful about that particular memo. He knew that Generals Landry and O’Neill had told the IOA where they could shove that suggestion.
He knew that the SGC wouldn’t be completely happy either. There were strict procedures that he should have followed, and unspoken guidelines about what he should and shouldn’t have done. It was one thing to see to it that rescued personnel received prompt and proper medical treatment, even if they had been compromised. It was another to purposefully keep a fellow Air Force officer in the dark about a possible security risk until the man himself noticed that something was up. Steven had pushed the line between acceptable and unacceptable, challenging of the way things were done, and he should have felt guilty about his deception of not only Ellis, but also his own crew.
“Should” being the operative word, but he didn’t. Not if he was honest with himself.
The primary unspoken rule in the Stargate program was that you protected your own. When something went wrong off-world, your teammates hauled you home. When something went wrong Earthside, your superiors protected you until they couldn’t, and then they turned a blind eye to let your team step in to save you. That was the code all of the program’s veterans lived by; it was what they trusted without question.
He had seen his share of Trojan horse tricks and heard the stories about duplicitous “damsels in distress.” But seeing Weir, bleeding to death on the floor of his bridge, knowing that she had survived a fatal accident only because she had active nanites in her and probably still did…Steven couldn’t have given the order to kill her. Because that was what discharging an EMP would have done: killed Weir. He couldn’t have done it. At that moment, on his ship, staring at her still body, he didn’t even have to look at his crew to know that if he had given that order, asked Carter or McKay to build a EMP and use it, he would have lost his crew’s respect and trust in his leadership. He knew that if he had made the other choice, Weir’s blood would have been on his hands, and he didn’t want that haunting him for the rest of his life.
So he had essentially abused his power and station over a subordinate officer to fabricate and perpetrate a lie. Carter and McKay were geniuses beyond scale, and he had very little doubt that even on his battle-damaged ship that there weren’t any lack of the proper materials needed to build a portable EMP device. There were going to be questions about that-why hadn’t they built one? Why wasn’t one brought along as a contingency? He almost wished that he could drag McKay with him in front of the committee. Steven smiled a little to himself at the idea of the acerbic scientist verbally dicing the IOA bean-counters into tiny little pieces; McKay had an ego the size of a small nation-state and had no qualms about reducing everyone else’s to the size of quantum quarks.
Peering into the depths of his mug of chamomile tea, he sighed to himself. If the Air Force ever found out that he had essentially fabricated a lie in front of his entire crew and gotten a lower-ranking officer to go along with him… All it would take would be one engineer or technician to speak up, not to buy into the massive silent conspiracy that he had set into motion and they’d all be hanged-hopefully not literally, but most certainly figuratively.
Still, what choice did he have? He could either have treated Weir as an enemy and/or a person of dubious alliance, or as he had done, as a human being, a respected equal to his station. He hadn’t always agreed with her, but he knew how important she was to her people, how Atlantis unquestioningly looked to her as their leader. Weir had inspired the sort of rare loyalty that could only be earned through tears, sweat and blood. She was important to all them, in some way or another; the least he could do for her was to give her a chance, and he had. He’d given Keller a chance to step in and save Weir’s life. Again. He sent up a silent prayer of gratitude that he had insisted his ship be the one to transport the away team to and from Asura; who knew what Ellis would have done if Weir had been beamed onto the Apollo instead?
The more important question, though, was what was he going to do now? There was no way around reporting Elizabeth’s rescue to his superiors, not with Ellis-
Steven froze, half-surprised by his traitorous line of thought. Almost automatically, he took a sip of his tea, feeling the lukewarm liquid slide down his throat as he turned the thought over in his head. Ellis was the unknown factor, ironically the one player in this conspiracy who could be trusted not to keep silent, to be untrustworthy of vital secrets. It was odd, thinking of a fellow officer as an adversary, but it was true. Steven had heard the rumors and mutterings in the months following Weir’s capture about the confrontational showdown she had had with Ellis over a preemptive strike on Asura. The other man had not endeared himself at all to Atlantis’ residents by disrespecting Weir’s position as their leader and disregarding her opinions about the plan itself.
Ellis had failed to recognize that while Atlantis was officially an outpost of the Stargate program, it was not merely a military base, and Weir was not a figurehead leader to placate the civilians. The scenario of being so isolated from Earth and surviving in a hostile galaxy for an entire year without any sort of outside support had solidified the bonds of trust and cooperation between the city’s military and civilian populations, and both sides unquestionably looked to Weir as their commander. That sort of loyalty was the kind that had to be respectfully acknowledged and handled, not trampled all over with arrogant mistrust and sharp accusations of incompetence.
So what now? Steven had taken the first step in protecting Weir from IOA backlash, but what was the next step? He could stop, let Atlantis’ people take care of themselves, as they always had and would. He didn’t have to take on the entire responsibility of deflecting trouble from the bureaucrats. The problem with that option was that he had to stay firm with his story, and in order to do that, he would have to get more involved in this web of partial-truths until it would stand up under harsh scrutiny. There was the option of walking away, dumping the blame entirely on Carter who, after all, was the one had who responded in the negative to his deceptively innocuous question. He knew that it had been done before by far less scrupulous superior officers, laying disastrous decisions entirely on the shoulders of those they were supposed to protect, but he wasn’t that kind of a soldier or person. He had started the story and now he had to figure out how to finish it. Was he going to drop the matter entirely, or was he going to stay on Atlantis’ side until the end?
He inwardly scoffed at himself. Who was he kidding? He had already made his choice. Now, he had to live with it.
Standing alone in the mess hall of his ship, Steven wondered if he could do it.
~
Evan was a highly competent United States Air Force officer who skillfully carried out his duties without unnecessary fuss. He was known to be calm and logical in a crisis, a quick thinker in rapidly escalating situations, and a decent strategist when it came to executing missions. He was an indispensible part of the senior command staff and frequently conspired with Zelenka, Ryan and Jameson to make the bureaucracy on Atlantis flow slightly more smoothly. He was a patient man, well-liked and respected by the scientists he supervised and the Marines he commanded. He didn’t lose his temper easily and rarely expressed frustration out loud.
At the current moment, alone in his quarters in the wee hours of the morning, Evan wanted to bang his head against the wall.
The reason for this urge primarily stemmed from the extremely agitated databurst that had arrived three days ago from Earth, following Atlantis’ weekly databurst the previous day. To say that the IOA was upset would be to say that the Wraith were merely misunderstood in their feeding habits. The committee had Colonel Carter at attention for the better part of twenty minutes, thoroughly dressing her down for gross incompetence in letting a security risk into Atlantis, as if Dr. Weir was freely and randomly wandering around the city. Despite the fact that the conversation was supposed to be confidential, the precise details of the IOA’s temper tantrum had managed to find their way onto Atlantis’ grapevine before lunchtime, and by nightfall, the majority (if not the entirety) of the city was on one side of the argument. It didn’t take a genius to figure out which one.
Still, even with the backing of several hundred people, Colonel Carter looked exhausted these days as she fended off the political bloodsuckers. Evan knew from the daily morning briefings and from gossip that Sheppard wasn’t doing much better. Ronon was beating up Marines like crazy, Keller was still sleeping off four days of back-to-back shifts, Jameson was beginning to look frazzled by her responsibilities, and McKay was biting heads off left, right and center. The only person on the senior staff who appeared to be handling this situation with any degree of equanimity was Teyla, and he knew that she was the one who had decapitated the training mannequin with her bantos rods. The Marines needed some outlet for their frustrations, and they weren’t getting it. The civilians were feeling particularly helpless and that never led to anything good…
Hell, the entire city was pissed off at Earth, and for good reason. Atlantis was very used to handling situations like this by themselves, and outside interference was not looked upon kindly. Evan had heard of a dozen plots of revenge floating through the science department alone, and he had seen enough “creative retribution” in the past from the ‘geeks’ and ‘nerds’ of the city to be seriously worried. After catching the end of a highly unsettling plan involving paperclips, the ferret-like creatures found on P5X-449 that were being studied in the Zoology department, and two canisters of baking soda, he had sent up a half-hearted prayer that no IOA committee members decided to come to Atlantis in the near future. He wasn’t sure he could entirely guarantee their safety; some of the mutterings had been that vindictive.
Still, he couldn’t say that he didn’t share in some of the fury himself. The IOA was being completely unreasonable, demanding information that no one-except a highly traumatized, voiceless woman who was under heavy sedation-could give. So far, the committee hadn’t made any noises about having Dr. Weir sent back to Earth, but everyone knew it was only a matter of time. When-not if-that demand came, Evan knew that the tension in the city could explode into outright rebellion if Earth pressed too hard. There were already rumblings about possible “situations” that could happen to shut down ‘gate operations, including a massive computer failure, Atlantis’ OS mainframe crashing, the main dialing crystal being swapped with a broken one, or simply “vanishing.” It was something that he would have to bring up with Sheppard, and soon. The time to defuse the situation was running out. There were only thirteen days left before both the Daedalus and the Apollo reached Earth and both Air Force Colonels would go before the IOA committee to present their reports.
Evan had a feeling Atlantis had made a semi-willing ally of Caldwell through long-standing familiarity alone, but Ellis… he was the wild card. It wasn’t exactly like the man had made the best of impressions on anyone in the city, especially going after Dr. Weir as he had during their very first meeting. Ellis also hadn’t helped matters by cutting McKay down to size-though Carter’s firm reprimand of the man had been a quiet affair, the news had spread like water running downhill all over the city by the end of the day. It was one thing for one of McKay’s minions (and everyone who lived on Atlantis was a minion) to talk about deflating their CSO’s massive ego, but it was another for an outsider to actually do it. To say that Ellis was not well-liked by most Atlantis personnel wouldn’t be too far from the truth. On the other hand, he wasn’t familiar with how things worked around the city, the unspoken rules that governed interactions between civilian and military. Evan could only hope that with time, Ellis would learn how to deal with the crazy orderliness in which Atlantis and its people functioned. It would certainly help ease his headache.
He sighed. It was late, and he needed to get some sleep before another, more urgent crisis arose. With the Colonel distracted by, yet also oddly detached from, the entire situation with Dr. Weir, the primary responsibility of keeping Atlantis running smoothly had fallen onto Evan’s shoulders. Nearly everyone knew that Sheppard spent the majority of his off-duty hours in the observation room in the infirmary, doing more paperwork than he had probably ever done in his entire tour as the city’s CO, while he kept watch over the city’s first leader. As a result, Evan dealt mostly with the practical, daily issues of morale and troop discipline-two areas that Sheppard usually handled on his own. It was a bizarre role-reversal of sorts, but since it was Pegasus, Evan knew it could be so much worse. For one thing, it could have been literal role-reversal, as in body-swapping…
Evan shook his head, sternly reminding himself not to tempt Fate as he thought the lights of his room off. Pegasus stopped for no one, not even a city full of angry and worried people. Damage control would have to wait for the morning.
~
Abraham stared into his steaming mug of coffee as he sat at his desk and wondered what he was missing from the big picture. There had to be some clue or piece of information he didn’t have that would explain the odd roadblocks he had stumbled into during his last two days on Atlantis. The people in the city hadn’t been openly hostile to him, but he could tell from their behavior that he was given deference only because of his rank, not because he had earned their loyalty or respect…not like Dr. Weir apparently had.
He shook his head, contemplating the entire fucked-up situation. On one hand, there was Dr. Weir-first leader of Atlantis, not at all meek when it came to her beliefs, declared KIA roughly a month ago-who had been, through sheer chance, rescued from the hands of her tormentors and was now recuperating at a safe, top-rate medical facility. It was a miracle that her subordinates were celebrating, because there weren’t many happy endings in Pegasus. He had to confess that a part of him was rejoicing with them; he always did when a soldier came home.
On the other hand, there was Dr. Weir-imprisoned and tortured for over seven months, having survived God knew what-who was possibly compromised and had to be treated as a security risk until further information was available… and no one seemed to give a damn about the issue. When he had brought up precautionary security measures during the first debriefing, Keller had looked about ready to bite his head off, and no one seemed to disagree with her. Neither Carter nor Caldwell backed his suggestion that maybe an EMP generator should be placed in the infirmary wing, just in case there was a nanite outbreak in the isolation unit. Sheppard had just given him a bland “screw you” look before rattling off an entire set of decent (but still inadequate) containment protocols. Abraham didn’t understand how a city full of genius, part-time hypochondriac scientists were not panicking about possibly being infected with thousands of tiny robots, and he really didn’t comprehend why his fellow military officers seemed so damned unconcerned about it too. Carter, Caldwell, Sheppard and Lorne were all veterans of the Stargate Program and had to know full well the kind of nasty surprises that could come from seemingly innocent people. The SGC’s mission reports were full of stories like that, yet when he brought those examples up, he was always politely ignored by his peers.
If he didn’t know any better, he’d say that the entire city, senior staff included, was drawing battle lines of Us versus Them, and that was unsettling-especially since he had the distinct impression that he’d been firmly shoved into the “Them” camp. It wasn’t like he wanted to harm Weir in any way, but everyone seemed to think that he would kill her himself if they let him near her.
If he even tried to venture near the infirmary, a technician on the Apollo would radio in a possible problem in the ship’s diagnostics that he had to take care of immediately (and nearly all of those calls were false alarms), or Atlantis’ transporters would mysteriously lockdown or redirect themselves to destinations on the other side of the city (and Dr. McKay had fobbed off the issue on one of his subordinates until he himself had been locked inside one of those transporters, so maybe there hadn’t been deliberate tampering on anyone’s part). When he had managed to make into the infirmary to see his men, Abraham could almost swear that the entire nursing staff was keeping tabs on him. He knew it sounded paranoid, but he had noticed that his crewmembers were placed close to the front of the infirmary, the furthest location from the entrance to the isolation rooms, and that there were always at least two nurses doing rounds when he was visiting. It seemed as though he was never left alone when he was in the city. The surveillance made him jittery.
Then there was the silence. On any military base, the only thing that traveled faster than the speed of light was gossip. In a city of only a few hundred people, the rumors about Dr. Weir’s condition should have been flying all over the place, but they weren’t. As far as he could tell, and his own officers could hear, there was nearly next to nothing on the grapevine about her recovery. There was satisfied talk about extracting fair revenge on the Replicators, and some mumbling about the IOA committee being assholes, but either there was no information being leaked out of the infirmary (which was impossible, in Abraham’s opinion) or his entire crew was being shut out of Atlantis’ grapevine, marked as outsiders to the situation. The latter was probably the more viable explanation for why he knew next to nothing about Weir’s health, besides the daily radio briefings that Keller had given. People were gossiping, but just not to the Apollo’s crew.
He knew that they were talking to the Daedalus’ people, though, and that Caldwell was… Abraham didn’t want to accuse his senior officer of any wrongdoing since, technically, Caldwell hadn’t broken any laws of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but there was just this impression that the older man knew more than he was letting on. Maybe. He wasn’t sure, and he wasn’t the kind of officer or person who would make that sort of accusation without any kind of proof. Until he had solid, irrefutable testimony to back up his claims (and he knew Caldwell wouldn’t be so stupid as to leave a trail of evidence behind), all Abraham had were his suspicions and his opinions on how things should have been handled.
The honest truth, though, was that he didn’t know how he would have reacted if Dr. Weir had ended up on the Apollo’s bridge instead of the Daedalus’, if her life had first landed in his hands rather than Caldwell’s. Would he have made the same decisions as the other man had? Or would he have acted differently? It was rather disturbing to realize that he didn’t know the answer to those questions.
His doorbell chimed and he straightened in his chair before calling out, “Come in.”
One of his lieutenants walked into the room and saluted crisply before he stood at attention and said, “Colonel Ellis, we’ve crossed into the Milky Way. The SGC requests you contact them immediately.”
The news wasn’t a surprise, though the timing was a bit fast. He had been expecting this summons since the day he had left the Pegasus galaxy. Abraham stood up from his desk, his cold coffee still untouched. “Thank you, Lieutenant Caple. Dismissed.”
The young man nodded crisply and left the room. Abraham sighed heavily to himself, gathering the papers on his desk into their manila folder. He knew what he would tell the SGC when they asked about Atlantis.
He had to do his duty. He didn’t have a choice.
~
Someone was singing softly to her, a gentle lullaby that brushed the edge of her consciousness. It was a song that was faintly familiar, strains of an idyllic childhood lifted in the sweet caress of a smooth voice. There was a promise of soaring, breathtaking heights, dancing among the stars of the universe-untouchable and safe from harm. She was there, laughing with companions she couldn’t see, swirling through time and space, when life was both simpler and just as complicated as it was now. Music cradled her, lulling her into security.
The smooth slide of bow against string reminded her of the deep, serene ocean of Lantea, with the gentle wash of the waves against Atlantis’ piers, the incessant soft roar of the sea filling her mind. The airy dance of a flute spoke of windswept balconies at the dawn of the day, midnight conversations under a full moon, and moments full of tantalizing potential, just out of her reach. The steady beat of light drums echoed a heartbeat, the soul of a city drifting on the water, the pulse of a people wondrous and gifted, the fluttering rhythm of a person’s life, counting out the minutes and days of a lifetime.
She didn’t fear its seductive call. The music was simply there-its presence steady and comforting. The tune neither smothered nor pressured her to yield; it existed for her to take as she chose, a gift laid at her feet, a warm blanket covering her cold soul, a safe haven from the storm.
For the first time in months, Elizabeth’s mind let its guard down, and she slept.
Rating:T
Warning(s): Language; Implied Violence
Disclaimer: Other than being a fan, I have nothing to do with Stargate:Atlantis
Prompt: This was written for the Season 4/5 Fix-It ficathon at john_elizabeth with the prompt: BASMR alternate ending: The away team on Asura finds and rescues Elizabeth. How does she deal/recover from her imprisonment?
Spoilers: Everything up to “Be All My Sins Remembered"
Summary: Janos Arany once wrote, "In love and dreams, there are no impossibilities." It's a faith that Atlantis is clinging to when the Pegasus Galaxy throws another curveball at them.
Beta: The amazing bluewillowtree who was invaluable with her input and generous with her time.
~*~*~*~*~
Leadership is a two-way street: loyalty up and loyalty down. Respect for one’s superiors; care for one’s crew. ~ Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper
Sam sat back in her chair, her lower back muscles protesting the strain from being hunched over her desk for the better part of the day. She sighed, closing her eyes and wondering futilely if her headache would fade. It wouldn’t, but she could hope.
There had never been a time that she didn’t have the Air Force in her life. She knew what it meant to be an officer, to command and to follow, to serve and to protect. Loyalty meant being dedicated to the people around you, the team that supported you, the family who protected you. A decade on SG-1 had taught her that: family were the ones for whom you chose to sacrifice everything, defended at all costs, and trusted without question. It was how she survived; it was how she lived.
When Elizabeth Weir had come into the SGC all those years ago and told her to sacrifice Jack…Sam had rebelled; a civilian puppet who knew nothing about the chaos that existed beyond Earth’s atmosphere had the gall to waltz into the SGC and tell them, the experts, how to do things? Fury and duty had driven her to take the risk of blackmailing a politician with powerful connections, and in the end, the other woman had understood. Loyalty was a powerful motivator, one that could only be forged by time and experience, never brought or sold.
What were the loyalties at play now?
She knew what Daniel would say, having been counted for dead so many times and having Ascended twice. He would argue that regardless of the risks and consequences, the moral and right thing to do was to defend a helpless woman. He would talk about a higher duty to help others, but in his eyes, she would see that he was talking about being someone’s protector, about doing what he hadn’t been able to do for Sha’re. His eyes would plead, and she would cave.
Teal’c would be practical and wise, pointing out that Weir was no different than a liberated Jaffa, newly freed from enslavement and finding the path to a life of choices, rather than of lesser sacrifices. He would refer to the tenets of honor and responsibility, of protecting those who could not protect themselves. Weir had sacrificed much to save her own people, and there was no honorable reason to fail to honor her now for that choice. He would reason with Sam, and she would agree.
Jack. Jack would give her a look and she wouldn’t be able to say no. He was fond of SGC personnel, both past and present, and she knew that he did everything in his power to protect not only Earth, but everyone at Cheyenne and on Atlantis, from the backstabbing officials in D.C. and the sleazy politicians on the IOA. It was a role he played with the same finesse that he had employed throughout his military career-a cunning mind and strong negotiation skills hidden behind the façade of a dumb grunt with a dismissive attitude toward everything intellectual. He protected his people, and because of that, sympathized with people who protected their own against selfish, money-counting idiots. She knew that he felt that Weir belonged in Atlantis, had given her heart and soul to the city and its people. He would give Sam a look-the one that reminded her of everything they’d been through together, the times they’d almost died, the times they’d thought the other dead-and then tell her that the city’s people had that kind of relationship with the person who had led them through it all.
Sam sighed again and saved her half-finished report on her laptop before closing the document. The weekly databurst to Earth was within a day. The after-action reports had to go out and there would be no concealing information because Ellis couldn’t be trusted to keep quiet. She smiled bitterly to herself, betting that it wouldn’t be even an afternoon before there was hell to pay from the SGC and the IOA. She could imagine the IOA screaming about security risks. The SGC’s reaction might be milder, but Landry wasn’t Hammond, and there would probably be a stern lecture about randomly rescuing people who were compromised, if not delivered via video feed, then on her laptop. She wasn’t looking forward to either of those reactions.
She was a scientist. She was an officer. She wasn’t cut out to be a politician or a bureaucrat. She wasn’t a backstabber who played with words and twisted meanings. Jack had faith that she could handle it; she could make the tough calls about right and wrong, black and white in a galaxy where survival twisted everything into complicated shades of gray. She had a made a split-second choice, one that she couldn’t regret. It was the decision that had been made for her before, a mercy given that had saved her future, and Sam couldn’t not grant that same chance to another person in the same position.
She knew he would back her up on her decision, taking it all the way up to the Commander-in-Chief if he had to, but she didn’t know if he would succeed. She knew that D.C. played by different rules and that the IOA had a say in how things were run in Pegasus, even though they knew nothing about the way things were. She had to stand steady at all costs and pray that it would be enough. This choice could cost her career, but… she didn’t want to retire from the Air Force with more regrets than she already had on her plate. She wasn’t going to let this situation become one of those regrets.
Sam stood up and went to the glass windows of her office, staring at the inactive Stargate wreathed in the moonlight before her. It had a majesty that never failed to take her breath away-when there wasn’t an emergency or imminent danger of all of them dying in one horrible fashion or another. She wondered if her predecessor had spent the midnight hours standing in this very spot, pondering the consequences of the choices she had made. Now, more than ever, with a chill running down her spine, she felt that this was Weir’s office, where the other woman had sat for three long years and commanded people to live or die for the sake of the expedition. The lesson she had first learned on Earth had been applied to the fullest in another galaxy. The woman sleeping in the infirmary had earned the undying loyalty and devotion of an entire city of people, of a unit, of a family of hardass Marines and caffeinated scientists.
Their history didn’t matter now. Elizabeth Weir was still an expedition member, and as the leader of Atlantis, Sam had a responsibility to protect her, no matter what.
~
3655
It was nearing the end of his shift, yet Chuck wasn’t sure if he really wanted to leave his station in the Control Room. For one thing, it would put him out of the loop until he was hopelessly behind on the news. There was too much uncertainty, too many people who were unsettled and too many issues floating through the city right now for him to sleep comfortably tonight. That was, of course, supposing that anyone had gotten any sound sleep in the past week or so, and that was a hypothesis just as viable as the Wraith suddenly all dropping dead tomorrow.
When the news first broke in a hushed whisper from Lindsey, he’d nearly choked on his afternoon coffee. He had to ask her to repeat herself twice before her words really sank in.
Dr. Weir was alive. She was alive! His face must have given away the shocked joy that was ringing through him because Madeline had given him a questioning look, and from there the news had spread like a wildfire throughout the city. He could feel the wave of gratitude that swept through Atlantis, thankful that one of their own was found, on her way home, and alive.
Dr. Weir was alive.
The quiet celebrations lasted until the Daedalus came into radio contact with the city and Dr. Keller had requested a secure channel to the infirmary. Eager for more information, he had perhaps inadvertently eavesdropped on part of the conversation, but what little he had heard was enough to know something was horribly wrong. As the hours passed after their little armada returned to the city, and there was still no word about Dr. Weir’s condition, the expedition fell into a grim sort of silence, buckling themselves down for disappointment and fear. Unfortunately, they weren’t wrong.
There was dead silence from the infirmary staff-no one who knew anything of importance was talking about what they knew. Still, this was an entire city full of people who knew how to add two and two together to get four. There were the ludicrous rumors and speculations floating around, but no one took them seriously. What was being spread around the city and could be relied upon as mostly fact was that the prognosis wasn’t good. Dr. Weir’s injuries were too severe, too extensive to hope that she would survive. Yes, Dr. Keller was a good doctor, but she wasn’t Dr. Beckett, not close enough.
There weren’t many people Chuck had met who could command the kind of loyalty Dr. Weir inspired in the expedition’s members. He didn’t know how she had managed to placate the scientists (especially Dr. McKay) while holding onto the respect of the Marines. He had seen her play so many roles, each as the situation demanded it-leader, commander, diplomat, friend, counselor, advocate, and the list went on. She was Atlantis’ rallying point. For the ‘gate teams, she was the last person they saw before they left and the first person they greeted when they returned. To the Marines, it was a secret comfort to know that someone, with a face and a name, was waiting for them back on Atlantis when they left the city. For the scientists, it was nice to finally have a non-military superior who could fully appreciate higher intellectual pursuits, even if she was from the soft sciences. In times of crisis, there was no question of her leadership, no hesitation in obeying her command because every person knew she cared and that her decisions were never made lightly, never made without thought to consequences and the human costs.
The majority of the city’s personnel were fiercely protective of her-she was their leader, the person who had to be kept safe. The scientists promised to keep the city from blowing up or being blown up; the soldiers promised to keep the city from being invaded or taken by hostile forces. When she had been declared killed as a prisoner of war less than a month ago, the entire expedition had plunged into a state of shocked numbness. After all, she was one of the untouchables, the one of the few people in the city who wasn’t supposed to make a life-taking sacrifice.
Now here they all were, living the aftermath of her decision to save the city at the cost of her own freedom. It was a roller coaster ride of emotions and events, and they were all too smart to think that it would end anytime soon. The people around him were grim, too wise to the machinations of the IOA and SGC to even hope that there wouldn’t be attempts to take her away from them again. Chuck knew if any brass or politician tried to have Dr. Weir sent back to Earth, there would be open revolt from the civilian population that might, just possibly, be wholeheartedly supported by the military contingent.
No one on Atlantis wanted to take any chance that the IOA would ship Dr. Weir to an asylum, or worse, Area 51, and throw away the key. If an expedition member had been in the same situation that she was now, she would have never stood for them being taken away and forgotten. Atlantis’ people knew that, and with that knowledge, they were standing firm against the howling winds of official disapproval that would soon come. He knew they weren’t the only ones who would fight to keep Dr. Weir safe. He glanced at the glass-walled office just a few yards away, staring briefly at the blond-haired woman who kept watch in the night like her predecessor, ceaselessly working to protect the people underneath her from the manipulations of narrow-minded fools on Earth.
There would be a long, drawn-out battle with the higher-ups over what was going to happen next, and he knew that the city had to be prepared for anything. In order to do that, though, he needed a decent night’s sleep. If he didn’t get one…he could still hear Dr. Weir’s fond admonition for him to go off shift, even as she worked through the night. Even though she was nowhere near him now, he left the Control Room quietly, heading off to bed.
Tomorrow, Chuck knew, the fight would go on.
3659
~
Steven found himself standing in the deserted mess hall of his ship, staring out at the vivid streaks of color that flowed past the window-like structure. It was nearing 0300 hours on the Daedalus’ time cycle and he couldn’t sleep. There were too many thoughts chasing each other in angry circles in his mind.
For all the moral challenges that the Pegasus galaxy could pose to a person, it was the political complications on Earth that gave rise to his insomnia. The IOA would be furious with him; he had very little doubt that the committee would challenge his decision not to kill Elizabeth on sight or treat her as a prisoner of war. He didn’t think they would be sympathetic to the fact that the woman in question had been bleeding to death in front of him. All they would see was that he let a security risk compromise the safety and integrity of his ship, and they’d come after him for that.
Of course, he was painting the IOA as a bunch of heartless, bean-counting whiners, but they hadn’t exactly endeared themselves to him in the past. The fact that he had been taken hostage by a fucking Goa’uld symbiote for the better part of a year and it was the symbiote, not him, that tried to destroy Atlantis, hadn’t stopped the IOA committee from hauling him in for a hostile interrogation and then afterwards, recommending him for court-martial for treason and espionage. Yes, he was still a little resentful about that particular memo. He knew that Generals Landry and O’Neill had told the IOA where they could shove that suggestion.
He knew that the SGC wouldn’t be completely happy either. There were strict procedures that he should have followed, and unspoken guidelines about what he should and shouldn’t have done. It was one thing to see to it that rescued personnel received prompt and proper medical treatment, even if they had been compromised. It was another to purposefully keep a fellow Air Force officer in the dark about a possible security risk until the man himself noticed that something was up. Steven had pushed the line between acceptable and unacceptable, challenging of the way things were done, and he should have felt guilty about his deception of not only Ellis, but also his own crew.
“Should” being the operative word, but he didn’t. Not if he was honest with himself.
The primary unspoken rule in the Stargate program was that you protected your own. When something went wrong off-world, your teammates hauled you home. When something went wrong Earthside, your superiors protected you until they couldn’t, and then they turned a blind eye to let your team step in to save you. That was the code all of the program’s veterans lived by; it was what they trusted without question.
He had seen his share of Trojan horse tricks and heard the stories about duplicitous “damsels in distress.” But seeing Weir, bleeding to death on the floor of his bridge, knowing that she had survived a fatal accident only because she had active nanites in her and probably still did…Steven couldn’t have given the order to kill her. Because that was what discharging an EMP would have done: killed Weir. He couldn’t have done it. At that moment, on his ship, staring at her still body, he didn’t even have to look at his crew to know that if he had given that order, asked Carter or McKay to build a EMP and use it, he would have lost his crew’s respect and trust in his leadership. He knew that if he had made the other choice, Weir’s blood would have been on his hands, and he didn’t want that haunting him for the rest of his life.
So he had essentially abused his power and station over a subordinate officer to fabricate and perpetrate a lie. Carter and McKay were geniuses beyond scale, and he had very little doubt that even on his battle-damaged ship that there weren’t any lack of the proper materials needed to build a portable EMP device. There were going to be questions about that-why hadn’t they built one? Why wasn’t one brought along as a contingency? He almost wished that he could drag McKay with him in front of the committee. Steven smiled a little to himself at the idea of the acerbic scientist verbally dicing the IOA bean-counters into tiny little pieces; McKay had an ego the size of a small nation-state and had no qualms about reducing everyone else’s to the size of quantum quarks.
Peering into the depths of his mug of chamomile tea, he sighed to himself. If the Air Force ever found out that he had essentially fabricated a lie in front of his entire crew and gotten a lower-ranking officer to go along with him… All it would take would be one engineer or technician to speak up, not to buy into the massive silent conspiracy that he had set into motion and they’d all be hanged-hopefully not literally, but most certainly figuratively.
Still, what choice did he have? He could either have treated Weir as an enemy and/or a person of dubious alliance, or as he had done, as a human being, a respected equal to his station. He hadn’t always agreed with her, but he knew how important she was to her people, how Atlantis unquestioningly looked to her as their leader. Weir had inspired the sort of rare loyalty that could only be earned through tears, sweat and blood. She was important to all them, in some way or another; the least he could do for her was to give her a chance, and he had. He’d given Keller a chance to step in and save Weir’s life. Again. He sent up a silent prayer of gratitude that he had insisted his ship be the one to transport the away team to and from Asura; who knew what Ellis would have done if Weir had been beamed onto the Apollo instead?
The more important question, though, was what was he going to do now? There was no way around reporting Elizabeth’s rescue to his superiors, not with Ellis-
Steven froze, half-surprised by his traitorous line of thought. Almost automatically, he took a sip of his tea, feeling the lukewarm liquid slide down his throat as he turned the thought over in his head. Ellis was the unknown factor, ironically the one player in this conspiracy who could be trusted not to keep silent, to be untrustworthy of vital secrets. It was odd, thinking of a fellow officer as an adversary, but it was true. Steven had heard the rumors and mutterings in the months following Weir’s capture about the confrontational showdown she had had with Ellis over a preemptive strike on Asura. The other man had not endeared himself at all to Atlantis’ residents by disrespecting Weir’s position as their leader and disregarding her opinions about the plan itself.
Ellis had failed to recognize that while Atlantis was officially an outpost of the Stargate program, it was not merely a military base, and Weir was not a figurehead leader to placate the civilians. The scenario of being so isolated from Earth and surviving in a hostile galaxy for an entire year without any sort of outside support had solidified the bonds of trust and cooperation between the city’s military and civilian populations, and both sides unquestionably looked to Weir as their commander. That sort of loyalty was the kind that had to be respectfully acknowledged and handled, not trampled all over with arrogant mistrust and sharp accusations of incompetence.
So what now? Steven had taken the first step in protecting Weir from IOA backlash, but what was the next step? He could stop, let Atlantis’ people take care of themselves, as they always had and would. He didn’t have to take on the entire responsibility of deflecting trouble from the bureaucrats. The problem with that option was that he had to stay firm with his story, and in order to do that, he would have to get more involved in this web of partial-truths until it would stand up under harsh scrutiny. There was the option of walking away, dumping the blame entirely on Carter who, after all, was the one had who responded in the negative to his deceptively innocuous question. He knew that it had been done before by far less scrupulous superior officers, laying disastrous decisions entirely on the shoulders of those they were supposed to protect, but he wasn’t that kind of a soldier or person. He had started the story and now he had to figure out how to finish it. Was he going to drop the matter entirely, or was he going to stay on Atlantis’ side until the end?
He inwardly scoffed at himself. Who was he kidding? He had already made his choice. Now, he had to live with it.
Standing alone in the mess hall of his ship, Steven wondered if he could do it.
~
Evan was a highly competent United States Air Force officer who skillfully carried out his duties without unnecessary fuss. He was known to be calm and logical in a crisis, a quick thinker in rapidly escalating situations, and a decent strategist when it came to executing missions. He was an indispensible part of the senior command staff and frequently conspired with Zelenka, Ryan and Jameson to make the bureaucracy on Atlantis flow slightly more smoothly. He was a patient man, well-liked and respected by the scientists he supervised and the Marines he commanded. He didn’t lose his temper easily and rarely expressed frustration out loud.
At the current moment, alone in his quarters in the wee hours of the morning, Evan wanted to bang his head against the wall.
The reason for this urge primarily stemmed from the extremely agitated databurst that had arrived three days ago from Earth, following Atlantis’ weekly databurst the previous day. To say that the IOA was upset would be to say that the Wraith were merely misunderstood in their feeding habits. The committee had Colonel Carter at attention for the better part of twenty minutes, thoroughly dressing her down for gross incompetence in letting a security risk into Atlantis, as if Dr. Weir was freely and randomly wandering around the city. Despite the fact that the conversation was supposed to be confidential, the precise details of the IOA’s temper tantrum had managed to find their way onto Atlantis’ grapevine before lunchtime, and by nightfall, the majority (if not the entirety) of the city was on one side of the argument. It didn’t take a genius to figure out which one.
Still, even with the backing of several hundred people, Colonel Carter looked exhausted these days as she fended off the political bloodsuckers. Evan knew from the daily morning briefings and from gossip that Sheppard wasn’t doing much better. Ronon was beating up Marines like crazy, Keller was still sleeping off four days of back-to-back shifts, Jameson was beginning to look frazzled by her responsibilities, and McKay was biting heads off left, right and center. The only person on the senior staff who appeared to be handling this situation with any degree of equanimity was Teyla, and he knew that she was the one who had decapitated the training mannequin with her bantos rods. The Marines needed some outlet for their frustrations, and they weren’t getting it. The civilians were feeling particularly helpless and that never led to anything good…
Hell, the entire city was pissed off at Earth, and for good reason. Atlantis was very used to handling situations like this by themselves, and outside interference was not looked upon kindly. Evan had heard of a dozen plots of revenge floating through the science department alone, and he had seen enough “creative retribution” in the past from the ‘geeks’ and ‘nerds’ of the city to be seriously worried. After catching the end of a highly unsettling plan involving paperclips, the ferret-like creatures found on P5X-449 that were being studied in the Zoology department, and two canisters of baking soda, he had sent up a half-hearted prayer that no IOA committee members decided to come to Atlantis in the near future. He wasn’t sure he could entirely guarantee their safety; some of the mutterings had been that vindictive.
Still, he couldn’t say that he didn’t share in some of the fury himself. The IOA was being completely unreasonable, demanding information that no one-except a highly traumatized, voiceless woman who was under heavy sedation-could give. So far, the committee hadn’t made any noises about having Dr. Weir sent back to Earth, but everyone knew it was only a matter of time. When-not if-that demand came, Evan knew that the tension in the city could explode into outright rebellion if Earth pressed too hard. There were already rumblings about possible “situations” that could happen to shut down ‘gate operations, including a massive computer failure, Atlantis’ OS mainframe crashing, the main dialing crystal being swapped with a broken one, or simply “vanishing.” It was something that he would have to bring up with Sheppard, and soon. The time to defuse the situation was running out. There were only thirteen days left before both the Daedalus and the Apollo reached Earth and both Air Force Colonels would go before the IOA committee to present their reports.
Evan had a feeling Atlantis had made a semi-willing ally of Caldwell through long-standing familiarity alone, but Ellis… he was the wild card. It wasn’t exactly like the man had made the best of impressions on anyone in the city, especially going after Dr. Weir as he had during their very first meeting. Ellis also hadn’t helped matters by cutting McKay down to size-though Carter’s firm reprimand of the man had been a quiet affair, the news had spread like water running downhill all over the city by the end of the day. It was one thing for one of McKay’s minions (and everyone who lived on Atlantis was a minion) to talk about deflating their CSO’s massive ego, but it was another for an outsider to actually do it. To say that Ellis was not well-liked by most Atlantis personnel wouldn’t be too far from the truth. On the other hand, he wasn’t familiar with how things worked around the city, the unspoken rules that governed interactions between civilian and military. Evan could only hope that with time, Ellis would learn how to deal with the crazy orderliness in which Atlantis and its people functioned. It would certainly help ease his headache.
He sighed. It was late, and he needed to get some sleep before another, more urgent crisis arose. With the Colonel distracted by, yet also oddly detached from, the entire situation with Dr. Weir, the primary responsibility of keeping Atlantis running smoothly had fallen onto Evan’s shoulders. Nearly everyone knew that Sheppard spent the majority of his off-duty hours in the observation room in the infirmary, doing more paperwork than he had probably ever done in his entire tour as the city’s CO, while he kept watch over the city’s first leader. As a result, Evan dealt mostly with the practical, daily issues of morale and troop discipline-two areas that Sheppard usually handled on his own. It was a bizarre role-reversal of sorts, but since it was Pegasus, Evan knew it could be so much worse. For one thing, it could have been literal role-reversal, as in body-swapping…
Evan shook his head, sternly reminding himself not to tempt Fate as he thought the lights of his room off. Pegasus stopped for no one, not even a city full of angry and worried people. Damage control would have to wait for the morning.
~
Abraham stared into his steaming mug of coffee as he sat at his desk and wondered what he was missing from the big picture. There had to be some clue or piece of information he didn’t have that would explain the odd roadblocks he had stumbled into during his last two days on Atlantis. The people in the city hadn’t been openly hostile to him, but he could tell from their behavior that he was given deference only because of his rank, not because he had earned their loyalty or respect…not like Dr. Weir apparently had.
He shook his head, contemplating the entire fucked-up situation. On one hand, there was Dr. Weir-first leader of Atlantis, not at all meek when it came to her beliefs, declared KIA roughly a month ago-who had been, through sheer chance, rescued from the hands of her tormentors and was now recuperating at a safe, top-rate medical facility. It was a miracle that her subordinates were celebrating, because there weren’t many happy endings in Pegasus. He had to confess that a part of him was rejoicing with them; he always did when a soldier came home.
On the other hand, there was Dr. Weir-imprisoned and tortured for over seven months, having survived God knew what-who was possibly compromised and had to be treated as a security risk until further information was available… and no one seemed to give a damn about the issue. When he had brought up precautionary security measures during the first debriefing, Keller had looked about ready to bite his head off, and no one seemed to disagree with her. Neither Carter nor Caldwell backed his suggestion that maybe an EMP generator should be placed in the infirmary wing, just in case there was a nanite outbreak in the isolation unit. Sheppard had just given him a bland “screw you” look before rattling off an entire set of decent (but still inadequate) containment protocols. Abraham didn’t understand how a city full of genius, part-time hypochondriac scientists were not panicking about possibly being infected with thousands of tiny robots, and he really didn’t comprehend why his fellow military officers seemed so damned unconcerned about it too. Carter, Caldwell, Sheppard and Lorne were all veterans of the Stargate Program and had to know full well the kind of nasty surprises that could come from seemingly innocent people. The SGC’s mission reports were full of stories like that, yet when he brought those examples up, he was always politely ignored by his peers.
If he didn’t know any better, he’d say that the entire city, senior staff included, was drawing battle lines of Us versus Them, and that was unsettling-especially since he had the distinct impression that he’d been firmly shoved into the “Them” camp. It wasn’t like he wanted to harm Weir in any way, but everyone seemed to think that he would kill her himself if they let him near her.
If he even tried to venture near the infirmary, a technician on the Apollo would radio in a possible problem in the ship’s diagnostics that he had to take care of immediately (and nearly all of those calls were false alarms), or Atlantis’ transporters would mysteriously lockdown or redirect themselves to destinations on the other side of the city (and Dr. McKay had fobbed off the issue on one of his subordinates until he himself had been locked inside one of those transporters, so maybe there hadn’t been deliberate tampering on anyone’s part). When he had managed to make into the infirmary to see his men, Abraham could almost swear that the entire nursing staff was keeping tabs on him. He knew it sounded paranoid, but he had noticed that his crewmembers were placed close to the front of the infirmary, the furthest location from the entrance to the isolation rooms, and that there were always at least two nurses doing rounds when he was visiting. It seemed as though he was never left alone when he was in the city. The surveillance made him jittery.
Then there was the silence. On any military base, the only thing that traveled faster than the speed of light was gossip. In a city of only a few hundred people, the rumors about Dr. Weir’s condition should have been flying all over the place, but they weren’t. As far as he could tell, and his own officers could hear, there was nearly next to nothing on the grapevine about her recovery. There was satisfied talk about extracting fair revenge on the Replicators, and some mumbling about the IOA committee being assholes, but either there was no information being leaked out of the infirmary (which was impossible, in Abraham’s opinion) or his entire crew was being shut out of Atlantis’ grapevine, marked as outsiders to the situation. The latter was probably the more viable explanation for why he knew next to nothing about Weir’s health, besides the daily radio briefings that Keller had given. People were gossiping, but just not to the Apollo’s crew.
He knew that they were talking to the Daedalus’ people, though, and that Caldwell was… Abraham didn’t want to accuse his senior officer of any wrongdoing since, technically, Caldwell hadn’t broken any laws of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but there was just this impression that the older man knew more than he was letting on. Maybe. He wasn’t sure, and he wasn’t the kind of officer or person who would make that sort of accusation without any kind of proof. Until he had solid, irrefutable testimony to back up his claims (and he knew Caldwell wouldn’t be so stupid as to leave a trail of evidence behind), all Abraham had were his suspicions and his opinions on how things should have been handled.
The honest truth, though, was that he didn’t know how he would have reacted if Dr. Weir had ended up on the Apollo’s bridge instead of the Daedalus’, if her life had first landed in his hands rather than Caldwell’s. Would he have made the same decisions as the other man had? Or would he have acted differently? It was rather disturbing to realize that he didn’t know the answer to those questions.
His doorbell chimed and he straightened in his chair before calling out, “Come in.”
One of his lieutenants walked into the room and saluted crisply before he stood at attention and said, “Colonel Ellis, we’ve crossed into the Milky Way. The SGC requests you contact them immediately.”
The news wasn’t a surprise, though the timing was a bit fast. He had been expecting this summons since the day he had left the Pegasus galaxy. Abraham stood up from his desk, his cold coffee still untouched. “Thank you, Lieutenant Caple. Dismissed.”
The young man nodded crisply and left the room. Abraham sighed heavily to himself, gathering the papers on his desk into their manila folder. He knew what he would tell the SGC when they asked about Atlantis.
He had to do his duty. He didn’t have a choice.
~
Someone was singing softly to her, a gentle lullaby that brushed the edge of her consciousness. It was a song that was faintly familiar, strains of an idyllic childhood lifted in the sweet caress of a smooth voice. There was a promise of soaring, breathtaking heights, dancing among the stars of the universe-untouchable and safe from harm. She was there, laughing with companions she couldn’t see, swirling through time and space, when life was both simpler and just as complicated as it was now. Music cradled her, lulling her into security.
The smooth slide of bow against string reminded her of the deep, serene ocean of Lantea, with the gentle wash of the waves against Atlantis’ piers, the incessant soft roar of the sea filling her mind. The airy dance of a flute spoke of windswept balconies at the dawn of the day, midnight conversations under a full moon, and moments full of tantalizing potential, just out of her reach. The steady beat of light drums echoed a heartbeat, the soul of a city drifting on the water, the pulse of a people wondrous and gifted, the fluttering rhythm of a person’s life, counting out the minutes and days of a lifetime.
She didn’t fear its seductive call. The music was simply there-its presence steady and comforting. The tune neither smothered nor pressured her to yield; it existed for her to take as she chose, a gift laid at her feet, a warm blanket covering her cold soul, a safe haven from the storm.
For the first time in months, Elizabeth’s mind let its guard down, and she slept.