Fic: Diploma 22/25
Dr. Elizabeth Weir had once prevented the outbreak of a minor nuclear war by making a joke about the coffee.
It wasn't something she had ever considered putting on her resume, but those who had a reason to know knew all about it. Twice she'd been at a cocktail party where someone made a joke in reference.
When Elizabeth was nine years old, she learned about Prince Albert, the Consort of Queen Victoria.
Of course, at the time she'd been primarily interested in Victoria, not her nothing-consort-husband. Rising to the throne at eighteen in 1832 and ruling over a fourth of the world's population by the time she died in 1901, Queen Victoria was a figure of both admiration and disdain for Elizabeth. She was simultaneously the beloved figure of English monarchy as "the sun never set on the British Empire" and the woman who had made a high crime out of being a gay man (but not a gay woman, since she refused to acknowledge such a thing).
She had told women to live like servants who were perpetually two seconds from fainting, and to increase the population she urged women to lie back and "think of England" after they finally shed over 200 pounds of clothing, including their whalebone corsets.
She had championed civil rights, including the global abolition of slavery. She was a figurehead extraordinaire, and she had wielded power unlike any monarch before her.
Elizabeth had many heroes when she was nine years old, but Queen Victoria hadn't been among them. As for Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, she knew he had married his first cousin, Victoria, produced nine children with her who pretty much went on to rule Europe. He died of typhoid at forty-two, like a drone bee that had done its duty.
What she had not known was that he had also served as an extraordinary ambassador.
Albert campaigned for many public reforms and for modernizing the British army. He was a trench fighter for advances in public health and education. He counseled a diplomatic solution between the Russian and Ottoman empires when he, not his wife, saw to the marriage of his daughter Victoria to Prince Frederick William of Prussia, a union that helped promote additional social reform while averting conflict.
He was a great advocate of science, and even proposed a -- rejected -- knighthood for Charles Darwin after the publication of On the Origin of Species.
And, in his final year, though already suffering from the typhoid that would soon take his life, Prince Albert averted a possible war between the US (currently fighting its Civil War) and Britain simply by changing the wording of a single letter that allowed the northern US to save face.
That was enough to make him a lifelong hero for anyone, Elizabeth reasoned. And later, in college, she had read the original letter and Albert's revised version over and over, memorizing every slight turn of phrase, every euphemism, every gentle suggestion that no escalation was needed to resolve the situation.
Elizabeth thought now of what it must have been like for Albert, German, twenty years old, and a man of great education and influence, as he stood in front of Queen Victoria and waited to see if she would ask him to marry her. As Dr. Blair Fucking Sandburg and Jim Holy Shit Ellison walked out through the gate and asked to speak with her in her office, she thought of that scenario as strongly as she could.
"Would you like some tea?" she asked as she took her place behind her desk, absently hooking a foot around a chair leg.
"We need to see Sheppard and McKay," Ellison said.
"Jim, give the woman a minute to breathe," Sandburg said, rolling his eyes. "They've bonded now. We can take a moment."
"You know that Colonel Sheppard and Dr. McKay have bonded?" she asked.
Sandburg smiled, and his whole face got in on the act. He was an attractive man, well-defined cheekbones, lips that could only be described as "pouty," and thick, dark, curly hair that fell to his shoulders. He was shorter than she had thought he would be, but compact and fit. He had the most understanding, gentle, and resolute eyes she had ever seen.
"Of course we know, Dr. Weir," he said as though they were sharing a gentle joke. "If I'd known an armadillo and beaver could rock the spirit world that hard, I'd have sent out a warning."
Ellison snorted, and it took her a conscious effort not to flinch. As much as Sandburg emanated peace and reassurance, the Sentinel managed to give off the impression he could crack golf balls with his eyelashes. Under his severely cut dark hair and strong brow, blue eyes coolly assessed her, running through a silent patrol of the door, Sandburg, through her office glass wall, and then back to her.
"An armadillo and a beaver?" she asked, then realized two seconds later what he must have meant.
Sandburg laughed. "Now you're wondering which is which," he said.
What the hell. She had a fifty-fifty shot. "The beaver must belong to Dr. McKay."
"Or McKay to the beaver," Ellison muttered, his eyes going suddenly to a corner of the room. Sandburg smiled, his own eyes going to the floor at his feet. "They're on their way."
"I'm sorry. I don't..."
"Sheppard and McKay," Ellison said. "They're on their way."
"You know," Sandburg said, leaning forward with a smile. "I would love a cup of tea. How about you, Jim?"
"Whatever, Chief."
She turned quickly to the tea set behind her, filling three cups and asking questions about lemon and sugar until the ritual had done all the calming the Guide had intended.
"It was my understanding that communication between spirit guides was extremely rare," Elizabeth explained as they settled back with their cups.
"It is," Sandburg said, smiling again.
She set her cup down. "Are you here to request that my military commander and chief science officer return to Earth?"
Ellison raised his brows. "Don't you mean your pet Sentinel and Guide?"
"Would you like me to call for Ambassador Xiaoyi?" she asked, curling a fist tightly under the cover of her desk.
"If it would make you more comfortable," Sandburg said carefully.
"I'm not prepared to lose key personnel to a matter I don't understand, and I have been...warned against asking questions when things have progressed so far."
"Things?" Ellison rumbled.
"I assure you that nothing has progressed anywhere at present, Dr. Weir," Sandburg said, and for the first time there was a hint of frost in his voice.
"I don't want to lose them," she blurted, then felt rather horrified at herself.
"Because?" the Guide prompted.
"We'd be dead seven times over without Colonel Sheppard, and McKay's work since he got to the city has been invaluable to the most important reasons we came out here in the first place."
"Oh?" Ellison asked.
She set her hands in place on her desk. "If the SCG objects to my handling of the...situation with Colonel Sheppard, I would like to make it clear at this juncture that I would be willing to step down."
"Now that the Sentinel has claimed his Guide, he will claim his pride," Sandburg said.
"What does that mean?"
"Dr. Weir?" The call from Lorne came over the PA.
She slapped a hand to her ear piece. "Yes, Major?"
"Colonel Sheppard just called from the mainland. He and McKay have a fifteen-minute ETA."
"Understood. Thank you." She killed the connection, looking at her empty cup.
"Elizabeth." The name came, surprisingly enough, from Ellison. "We're not here to ask you to step down or to ask Sentinel Sheppard to leave his posting of choice. This is a diplomatic visit, one pride to another."
She instantly swallowed the objection that Sheppard didn't have a pride.
"In what way may I accommodate you?" she asked instead.
"Look, we just want to talk to the Alpha Prime Sentinel and Guide of the Pegasus Galaxy," Sandburg said, smiling again.
"The armadillo insisted," Ellison grumbled.
Elizabeth she wouldn't be alone for two minutes before she was Googling the spirit guide qualities of armadillos and beavers.
Wait. Sandburg had said Alpha Prime.
"Dr. Weir."
"Yes, Chuck?
"Ma'am, we're picking up an unusual energy signature from Pier 3. It seems to be coming from Dr. Hewston's lab."
"Excuse me, gentlemen," she murmured, rising quickly to walk out of her office and over to Chuck's console.
"The signal's gone, ma'am," he said quietly.
"Dr. Hewston," Elizabeth called over the radio. "Status report."
"Is Dr. McKay available?" the scientist radioed back.
"McKay here. What the hell was that?"
"I've tripped some sort of alarm, sir. I've shut down the simulation. We're reading zero across the board."
The radio silence lasted several ominous seconds.
"Lock it down. I'll be there to look at it later. Take your team to lunch or dinner or whatever meal it is."
"Yes, sir."
"Dr. Grodin."
"Yes, Dr. McKay?"
"I want a sensor sweep for radiation in the Delta grid pattern."
Grodin got clarification for duration and half-lives, and Elisabeth tuned them out while Chuck ran through the basic post-what-the-heck-was-that protocols. Sooner than she expected, the jumper hangar opened, and the puddlejumper holding Sheppard and his team was coming through.
God, she didn't want to lose Atlantis. All she'd have at home was her dog and fading memories of the man she'd loved more than life.
Fifteen minutes after the puddlejumper had safely docked, she was escorting Sandburg and Ellison to a small conference room. Inside, she found McKay stabbing furiously at a tablet while Sheppard slouched in a chair with his arms crossed. Ronon and Teyla were absent, unfortunately. She really could have used a little Athosian/Setedan calm right now.
"Elizabeth," Sheppard said, rising slowly, and there was something in the movement she'd never seen before, something in his green-hazel eyes as well. She thought maybe she was looking at the John Sheppard who could have been hunting in the jungle or following the flight of birds a mile into the sky.
McKay turned his tablet over and stood in a sort of dance of unity, his shoulders back ever-so-slightly, and she flashed to that moment of their first meeting in the Gate room, when Sheppard had crouched and McKay had expanded.
If it hadn't been for the chip in McKay's brain, would they have bonded right then and there? Just how much had she failed everyone in this room, including herself.
And Dillon. Had she failed him worst of all? She could have kept her husband on base and ordered Sheppard to lead the team.
She felt her shoulders curl in. "I'll leave you all to -"
"No, please," Dr. Sandburg said. "We'd like you to be here, Dr. Weir."
"Please, call me Elizabeth," she told the room, sinking into a chair as far into the corner as she could manage and telling herself it was so she could get the best view of the room.
Indeed, having the two Guide/Sentinel pairs stare at each other was the oddest confrontation she had ever seen, beating even a deposed head jailer and medical liaison of an Uzbekistan concentration camp.
Ellison and Sandburg had walked into the room as though they were about to host a tea party, while Sheppard and McKay might as well have been standing in tribal council on Survivor.
"I hope you will forgive our coming in like this," Sandburg said as he and Ellison easily took their seats, "but they kinda wouldn't leave us alone."
"I'm not ready for you," Sheppard said, still standing, blank and impassive with his Guide at his side.
"This is an informal visit," Ellison said, looking pointedly at those empty seats.
"So is a head cold," McKay grumbled, taking a seat with his arms already crossed.
"Look, this is a pretty fucked-up problem," Ellison said, watching Sheppard ooze into a chair. "But for a few hundred years this was pretty simple. Sandburg and I would recognize you as our successors, and that would be that."
Okay, so he did say Alpha Prime. The two most powerful Guide/Sentinel pairs known to humanity are sitting in this room with me. Elizabeth kept her breathing steady as clockwork.
"Rodney and I will never return to Earth," Sheppard said, startling her.
Sandburg chuckled. "Yeah, we kinda noticed."
"As Alpha Primes of the Earth, and, as far as we know, the Milky Way Galaxy, I'm here to establish diplomatic relations with the Alpha Primes of the Pegasus Galaxy," Ellison said, teeth grinding. "If you can spare the time from your busy day."
As Elizabeth tried not to have a heart attack, the colonel narrowly eyed Ellison and the Sandburg for a full minute, then just seemed to flow into...something less ready to kill everyone in the room. McKay actually smiled, though faintly, and stayed seated.
"In that case, Alpha Prime," Colonel Sheppard said while extending a hand. "I welcome you and Alpha Prime Guide Sandburg to our neck of the woods."
"Alpha Prime," Ellison said, taking his hand in a strong shake.
"Alpha Prime," Sandburg said, standing now with his Sentinel and extending a hand toward McKay.
"What? Seriously?" McKay said, standing.
"Rodney," Sheppard rumbled.
"Okay, okay. Alpha Prime," the scientist said, and shook Sandburg's hand to the Guide's evident amusement.
"Permission?" Ellison asked Sheppard next.
The colonel nodded, then asked, "Permission?"
While Ellison nodded, Sandburg and McKay's eyes met, one set amused, the other just a little indignant.
The Sentinels walked around the table, effectively replacing each other, and then squared off in front of the other's Guide.
Sandburg nodded graciously, his eyes just a little mischievous, before Sheppard leaned in and lightly - there was no other word for it - sniffed at him.
McKay did a little side-step jerk at the sight, then visibly calmed himself and looked at Ellison. The muscle mountain with blue eyes smiled gently, then leaned in and sniffed for a moment. McKay held himself with the ease of a hummingbird confronting a jet engine, or maybe a jet engine confronting a hummingbird, but he submitted to the ceremony without further complaint.
After a moment everyone returned to their original positions and sat. Elizabeth realized she wasn't breathing and forced her ribcage to relax.
"So," McKay - of course it was McKay - said. "What's the next step? I mean, seeing as we're making ground-breaking history and all that."
"According to Incacha -"
"No!" McKay said, breaking off Sandburg's tentative answer. "I refuse to do anything dictated to us by a dead witchdoctor."
"Rodney," Sheppard said, though he was partially drowned out by Sandburg's "Hey!" and Ellison's quiet growl.
"What?" McKay demanded. "The guy was some Peruvian voodoo bead-shaker, right? I don't care if he's speaking from the grave, we're dealing with 21st century problems here, and nothing's going to get better from an application of acai berries and Amazon water."
"McKay!" Sheppard snapped. "If someone's taking the trouble to speak from the dead, he probably has something to say."
"What? 'Get that trash off my grave'?" McKay rolled his eyes. "Does Mr. Dead have a clue what we're dealing with here?"
"Actually, he said we are dealing with the 'sickness walking.' Which I take to mean he meant the Wraith."
"Because that's so exact."
"Which, I believe, Dr. McKay, means he was trying to say there is medicine for a cure."
"If we're talking about the Wraith," Sheppard said, "I want Ronon and Teyla here."
"Later," Ellison said. "I want to know what the Guide/Sentinel breakdown is here in Pegasus."
"A few, scattered here and there." Sheppard shrugged a little further into his chair, and for the first time the power of his body struck her. She was kind of put off, though she knew as a woman it should be a sexual - sensual, a subliminal kind of awareness.
Instead, she simply thought, Beware, power here. It was kind of unsettling.
"So you think the Wraith understood the significance of Sentinels and Guides?" Ellison asked.
"No," McKay said, obviously focusing on something not in the room. "The Wraith only care about flavor. They love the taste of defiance, and they love the taste of the ATA gene. But they don't distinguish Sentinels and Guides from regular humans. They love to devour strength, power, ambition, deep love, the desire to live. It's like steak sauce on crack to them."
Everyone in the room stared at him.
"It's clear from the reports in the database," McKay muttered.
"So is that something we can use against them?" Ellison asked.
"Definitely," Sheppard said, "but we have to figure out how."
"It will be easier once you get your pride together," Sandburg said.
There was a sort of dark pause.
"Yes," Sheppard said, looking at the table. Elizabeth kept still.
"If the Wraith learn about the location of Earth, then our world is done," Ellison said.
"I know that," Sheppard growled.
"It won't be great for the Pegasus citizens either," Sandburg said. "They'll probably drain everyone here dry for the journey over."
"I said, If we're going to talk about the Wraith, I want Ronon and Teyla to be here."
"Look, it's not like I know what we're doing here either," Ellison growled. "All I know for sure is that your mission has created a new threat to Earth, and I need to assess it."
"We've read through your mission reports, seen the videos, got the T-shirt," Sandburg said.
"You want to meet a Wraith," Sheppard said.
"You've captured one before," Ellison said.
"No," McKay snapped. "I won't allow a live Wraith here on the city. And outside the city there's no place to keep one contained safely."
Everyone in the room was quiet for just a moment, and Elizabeth felt the oddest sense crawl up her spine, like she could almost hear the wind howl through the eaves of an old house.
"Yeah, that's the thing, man," Sandburg said, nodding. "We have a Wraith in mind already."
"Your roster says you're taking two scientists to survey a Lagrangian Point satellite in a few days," Ellison said.
"Gall and Abrams," McKay said.
"Yeah," Sandburg said. "There's a Wraith there."
tbc
/25
It wasn't something she had ever considered putting on her resume, but those who had a reason to know knew all about it. Twice she'd been at a cocktail party where someone made a joke in reference.
When Elizabeth was nine years old, she learned about Prince Albert, the Consort of Queen Victoria.
Of course, at the time she'd been primarily interested in Victoria, not her nothing-consort-husband. Rising to the throne at eighteen in 1832 and ruling over a fourth of the world's population by the time she died in 1901, Queen Victoria was a figure of both admiration and disdain for Elizabeth. She was simultaneously the beloved figure of English monarchy as "the sun never set on the British Empire" and the woman who had made a high crime out of being a gay man (but not a gay woman, since she refused to acknowledge such a thing).
She had told women to live like servants who were perpetually two seconds from fainting, and to increase the population she urged women to lie back and "think of England" after they finally shed over 200 pounds of clothing, including their whalebone corsets.
She had championed civil rights, including the global abolition of slavery. She was a figurehead extraordinaire, and she had wielded power unlike any monarch before her.
Elizabeth had many heroes when she was nine years old, but Queen Victoria hadn't been among them. As for Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, she knew he had married his first cousin, Victoria, produced nine children with her who pretty much went on to rule Europe. He died of typhoid at forty-two, like a drone bee that had done its duty.
What she had not known was that he had also served as an extraordinary ambassador.
Albert campaigned for many public reforms and for modernizing the British army. He was a trench fighter for advances in public health and education. He counseled a diplomatic solution between the Russian and Ottoman empires when he, not his wife, saw to the marriage of his daughter Victoria to Prince Frederick William of Prussia, a union that helped promote additional social reform while averting conflict.
He was a great advocate of science, and even proposed a -- rejected -- knighthood for Charles Darwin after the publication of On the Origin of Species.
And, in his final year, though already suffering from the typhoid that would soon take his life, Prince Albert averted a possible war between the US (currently fighting its Civil War) and Britain simply by changing the wording of a single letter that allowed the northern US to save face.
That was enough to make him a lifelong hero for anyone, Elizabeth reasoned. And later, in college, she had read the original letter and Albert's revised version over and over, memorizing every slight turn of phrase, every euphemism, every gentle suggestion that no escalation was needed to resolve the situation.
Elizabeth thought now of what it must have been like for Albert, German, twenty years old, and a man of great education and influence, as he stood in front of Queen Victoria and waited to see if she would ask him to marry her. As Dr. Blair Fucking Sandburg and Jim Holy Shit Ellison walked out through the gate and asked to speak with her in her office, she thought of that scenario as strongly as she could.
"Would you like some tea?" she asked as she took her place behind her desk, absently hooking a foot around a chair leg.
"We need to see Sheppard and McKay," Ellison said.
"Jim, give the woman a minute to breathe," Sandburg said, rolling his eyes. "They've bonded now. We can take a moment."
"You know that Colonel Sheppard and Dr. McKay have bonded?" she asked.
Sandburg smiled, and his whole face got in on the act. He was an attractive man, well-defined cheekbones, lips that could only be described as "pouty," and thick, dark, curly hair that fell to his shoulders. He was shorter than she had thought he would be, but compact and fit. He had the most understanding, gentle, and resolute eyes she had ever seen.
"Of course we know, Dr. Weir," he said as though they were sharing a gentle joke. "If I'd known an armadillo and beaver could rock the spirit world that hard, I'd have sent out a warning."
Ellison snorted, and it took her a conscious effort not to flinch. As much as Sandburg emanated peace and reassurance, the Sentinel managed to give off the impression he could crack golf balls with his eyelashes. Under his severely cut dark hair and strong brow, blue eyes coolly assessed her, running through a silent patrol of the door, Sandburg, through her office glass wall, and then back to her.
"An armadillo and a beaver?" she asked, then realized two seconds later what he must have meant.
Sandburg laughed. "Now you're wondering which is which," he said.
What the hell. She had a fifty-fifty shot. "The beaver must belong to Dr. McKay."
"Or McKay to the beaver," Ellison muttered, his eyes going suddenly to a corner of the room. Sandburg smiled, his own eyes going to the floor at his feet. "They're on their way."
"I'm sorry. I don't..."
"Sheppard and McKay," Ellison said. "They're on their way."
"You know," Sandburg said, leaning forward with a smile. "I would love a cup of tea. How about you, Jim?"
"Whatever, Chief."
She turned quickly to the tea set behind her, filling three cups and asking questions about lemon and sugar until the ritual had done all the calming the Guide had intended.
"It was my understanding that communication between spirit guides was extremely rare," Elizabeth explained as they settled back with their cups.
"It is," Sandburg said, smiling again.
She set her cup down. "Are you here to request that my military commander and chief science officer return to Earth?"
Ellison raised his brows. "Don't you mean your pet Sentinel and Guide?"
"Would you like me to call for Ambassador Xiaoyi?" she asked, curling a fist tightly under the cover of her desk.
"If it would make you more comfortable," Sandburg said carefully.
"I'm not prepared to lose key personnel to a matter I don't understand, and I have been...warned against asking questions when things have progressed so far."
"Things?" Ellison rumbled.
"I assure you that nothing has progressed anywhere at present, Dr. Weir," Sandburg said, and for the first time there was a hint of frost in his voice.
"I don't want to lose them," she blurted, then felt rather horrified at herself.
"Because?" the Guide prompted.
"We'd be dead seven times over without Colonel Sheppard, and McKay's work since he got to the city has been invaluable to the most important reasons we came out here in the first place."
"Oh?" Ellison asked.
She set her hands in place on her desk. "If the SCG objects to my handling of the...situation with Colonel Sheppard, I would like to make it clear at this juncture that I would be willing to step down."
"Now that the Sentinel has claimed his Guide, he will claim his pride," Sandburg said.
"What does that mean?"
"Dr. Weir?" The call from Lorne came over the PA.
She slapped a hand to her ear piece. "Yes, Major?"
"Colonel Sheppard just called from the mainland. He and McKay have a fifteen-minute ETA."
"Understood. Thank you." She killed the connection, looking at her empty cup.
"Elizabeth." The name came, surprisingly enough, from Ellison. "We're not here to ask you to step down or to ask Sentinel Sheppard to leave his posting of choice. This is a diplomatic visit, one pride to another."
She instantly swallowed the objection that Sheppard didn't have a pride.
"In what way may I accommodate you?" she asked instead.
"Look, we just want to talk to the Alpha Prime Sentinel and Guide of the Pegasus Galaxy," Sandburg said, smiling again.
"The armadillo insisted," Ellison grumbled.
Elizabeth she wouldn't be alone for two minutes before she was Googling the spirit guide qualities of armadillos and beavers.
Wait. Sandburg had said Alpha Prime.
"Dr. Weir."
"Yes, Chuck?
"Ma'am, we're picking up an unusual energy signature from Pier 3. It seems to be coming from Dr. Hewston's lab."
"Excuse me, gentlemen," she murmured, rising quickly to walk out of her office and over to Chuck's console.
"The signal's gone, ma'am," he said quietly.
"Dr. Hewston," Elizabeth called over the radio. "Status report."
"Is Dr. McKay available?" the scientist radioed back.
"McKay here. What the hell was that?"
"I've tripped some sort of alarm, sir. I've shut down the simulation. We're reading zero across the board."
The radio silence lasted several ominous seconds.
"Lock it down. I'll be there to look at it later. Take your team to lunch or dinner or whatever meal it is."
"Yes, sir."
"Dr. Grodin."
"Yes, Dr. McKay?"
"I want a sensor sweep for radiation in the Delta grid pattern."
Grodin got clarification for duration and half-lives, and Elisabeth tuned them out while Chuck ran through the basic post-what-the-heck-was-that protocols. Sooner than she expected, the jumper hangar opened, and the puddlejumper holding Sheppard and his team was coming through.
God, she didn't want to lose Atlantis. All she'd have at home was her dog and fading memories of the man she'd loved more than life.
Fifteen minutes after the puddlejumper had safely docked, she was escorting Sandburg and Ellison to a small conference room. Inside, she found McKay stabbing furiously at a tablet while Sheppard slouched in a chair with his arms crossed. Ronon and Teyla were absent, unfortunately. She really could have used a little Athosian/Setedan calm right now.
"Elizabeth," Sheppard said, rising slowly, and there was something in the movement she'd never seen before, something in his green-hazel eyes as well. She thought maybe she was looking at the John Sheppard who could have been hunting in the jungle or following the flight of birds a mile into the sky.
McKay turned his tablet over and stood in a sort of dance of unity, his shoulders back ever-so-slightly, and she flashed to that moment of their first meeting in the Gate room, when Sheppard had crouched and McKay had expanded.
If it hadn't been for the chip in McKay's brain, would they have bonded right then and there? Just how much had she failed everyone in this room, including herself.
And Dillon. Had she failed him worst of all? She could have kept her husband on base and ordered Sheppard to lead the team.
She felt her shoulders curl in. "I'll leave you all to -"
"No, please," Dr. Sandburg said. "We'd like you to be here, Dr. Weir."
"Please, call me Elizabeth," she told the room, sinking into a chair as far into the corner as she could manage and telling herself it was so she could get the best view of the room.
Indeed, having the two Guide/Sentinel pairs stare at each other was the oddest confrontation she had ever seen, beating even a deposed head jailer and medical liaison of an Uzbekistan concentration camp.
Ellison and Sandburg had walked into the room as though they were about to host a tea party, while Sheppard and McKay might as well have been standing in tribal council on Survivor.
"I hope you will forgive our coming in like this," Sandburg said as he and Ellison easily took their seats, "but they kinda wouldn't leave us alone."
"I'm not ready for you," Sheppard said, still standing, blank and impassive with his Guide at his side.
"This is an informal visit," Ellison said, looking pointedly at those empty seats.
"So is a head cold," McKay grumbled, taking a seat with his arms already crossed.
"Look, this is a pretty fucked-up problem," Ellison said, watching Sheppard ooze into a chair. "But for a few hundred years this was pretty simple. Sandburg and I would recognize you as our successors, and that would be that."
Okay, so he did say Alpha Prime. The two most powerful Guide/Sentinel pairs known to humanity are sitting in this room with me. Elizabeth kept her breathing steady as clockwork.
"Rodney and I will never return to Earth," Sheppard said, startling her.
Sandburg chuckled. "Yeah, we kinda noticed."
"As Alpha Primes of the Earth, and, as far as we know, the Milky Way Galaxy, I'm here to establish diplomatic relations with the Alpha Primes of the Pegasus Galaxy," Ellison said, teeth grinding. "If you can spare the time from your busy day."
As Elizabeth tried not to have a heart attack, the colonel narrowly eyed Ellison and the Sandburg for a full minute, then just seemed to flow into...something less ready to kill everyone in the room. McKay actually smiled, though faintly, and stayed seated.
"In that case, Alpha Prime," Colonel Sheppard said while extending a hand. "I welcome you and Alpha Prime Guide Sandburg to our neck of the woods."
"Alpha Prime," Ellison said, taking his hand in a strong shake.
"Alpha Prime," Sandburg said, standing now with his Sentinel and extending a hand toward McKay.
"What? Seriously?" McKay said, standing.
"Rodney," Sheppard rumbled.
"Okay, okay. Alpha Prime," the scientist said, and shook Sandburg's hand to the Guide's evident amusement.
"Permission?" Ellison asked Sheppard next.
The colonel nodded, then asked, "Permission?"
While Ellison nodded, Sandburg and McKay's eyes met, one set amused, the other just a little indignant.
The Sentinels walked around the table, effectively replacing each other, and then squared off in front of the other's Guide.
Sandburg nodded graciously, his eyes just a little mischievous, before Sheppard leaned in and lightly - there was no other word for it - sniffed at him.
McKay did a little side-step jerk at the sight, then visibly calmed himself and looked at Ellison. The muscle mountain with blue eyes smiled gently, then leaned in and sniffed for a moment. McKay held himself with the ease of a hummingbird confronting a jet engine, or maybe a jet engine confronting a hummingbird, but he submitted to the ceremony without further complaint.
After a moment everyone returned to their original positions and sat. Elizabeth realized she wasn't breathing and forced her ribcage to relax.
"So," McKay - of course it was McKay - said. "What's the next step? I mean, seeing as we're making ground-breaking history and all that."
"According to Incacha -"
"No!" McKay said, breaking off Sandburg's tentative answer. "I refuse to do anything dictated to us by a dead witchdoctor."
"Rodney," Sheppard said, though he was partially drowned out by Sandburg's "Hey!" and Ellison's quiet growl.
"What?" McKay demanded. "The guy was some Peruvian voodoo bead-shaker, right? I don't care if he's speaking from the grave, we're dealing with 21st century problems here, and nothing's going to get better from an application of acai berries and Amazon water."
"McKay!" Sheppard snapped. "If someone's taking the trouble to speak from the dead, he probably has something to say."
"What? 'Get that trash off my grave'?" McKay rolled his eyes. "Does Mr. Dead have a clue what we're dealing with here?"
"Actually, he said we are dealing with the 'sickness walking.' Which I take to mean he meant the Wraith."
"Because that's so exact."
"Which, I believe, Dr. McKay, means he was trying to say there is medicine for a cure."
"If we're talking about the Wraith," Sheppard said, "I want Ronon and Teyla here."
"Later," Ellison said. "I want to know what the Guide/Sentinel breakdown is here in Pegasus."
"A few, scattered here and there." Sheppard shrugged a little further into his chair, and for the first time the power of his body struck her. She was kind of put off, though she knew as a woman it should be a sexual - sensual, a subliminal kind of awareness.
Instead, she simply thought, Beware, power here. It was kind of unsettling.
"So you think the Wraith understood the significance of Sentinels and Guides?" Ellison asked.
"No," McKay said, obviously focusing on something not in the room. "The Wraith only care about flavor. They love the taste of defiance, and they love the taste of the ATA gene. But they don't distinguish Sentinels and Guides from regular humans. They love to devour strength, power, ambition, deep love, the desire to live. It's like steak sauce on crack to them."
Everyone in the room stared at him.
"It's clear from the reports in the database," McKay muttered.
"So is that something we can use against them?" Ellison asked.
"Definitely," Sheppard said, "but we have to figure out how."
"It will be easier once you get your pride together," Sandburg said.
There was a sort of dark pause.
"Yes," Sheppard said, looking at the table. Elizabeth kept still.
"If the Wraith learn about the location of Earth, then our world is done," Ellison said.
"I know that," Sheppard growled.
"It won't be great for the Pegasus citizens either," Sandburg said. "They'll probably drain everyone here dry for the journey over."
"I said, If we're going to talk about the Wraith, I want Ronon and Teyla to be here."
"Look, it's not like I know what we're doing here either," Ellison growled. "All I know for sure is that your mission has created a new threat to Earth, and I need to assess it."
"We've read through your mission reports, seen the videos, got the T-shirt," Sandburg said.
"You want to meet a Wraith," Sheppard said.
"You've captured one before," Ellison said.
"No," McKay snapped. "I won't allow a live Wraith here on the city. And outside the city there's no place to keep one contained safely."
Everyone in the room was quiet for just a moment, and Elizabeth felt the oddest sense crawl up her spine, like she could almost hear the wind howl through the eaves of an old house.
"Yeah, that's the thing, man," Sandburg said, nodding. "We have a Wraith in mind already."
"Your roster says you're taking two scientists to survey a Lagrangian Point satellite in a few days," Ellison said.
"Gall and Abrams," McKay said.
"Yeah," Sandburg said. "There's a Wraith there."
tbc
/25