Back from the dead! Rejoice, rejoice I tell you!
“Cadman?”
He’s smiling at me. What do I do? Smile back? He’s holding a goddamn heart in his left hand. “Er, Kenmore, what are you doing?”
“Saving your life,” he says, almost prissily.
“You just stuck your fist in that guy’s chest,” I feel compelled to point out. His face twitches, as though he’s confused. As though he sees no reason that he shouldn’t have torn the Evil Villager’s heart from his chest cavity. As though Lorne isn’t already calling back to Atlantis and suggesting back-up, and the villagers aren’t putting down their guns and backing away. As though Harriet isn’t gagging a little (er, more than a little, by now).
“He was going to kill you,” he says.
“Yeah, I know, bummer,” I reply. “But you could’ve shot him.”
“Close range, I might’ve hit someone,” Kenmore clarifies. “There was only about a twenty percent chance a knife wound would have been lethal.”
As I eye his bloody hand and stifle my gag reflex-holy fuck, he makes Freddy Kreuger look like a kindergartener with pig-tails-I have to admit that he certainly made sure that the Evil Villager is one hundred percent dead.
I’ve also come to the conclusion that Michael Kenmore is one hundred percent certifiable. And I really wish that he wasn’t walking about in Atlantis-issue specs. Lorne and I make eye contact as he whispers harshly into his headset and Michael just sort of stands there, and I can tell we’re thinking the same thing. We were willing to be open-minded about Kenmore replacing Mads Jacobsen, true, but there’s open-minded and then there’s stupidity on par with the short-lived female leads in slasher flicks.
One more mission out with Kenmore and a semi and Lorne and I could be labeled as the latter.
~
Back on Atlantis, everyone’s pretty damn frazzled. The reason why becomes glaringly obvious when Sheppard catches us outside of Weir’s office, ready to debrief, and in classic Sheppard fashion briskly advises us to come back later.
“We’ve got a problem, sir,” says Lorne under his breath, and as we’ve already sent Michael to the infirmary (to check for possible blood poisoning, which I think I can confidently say was pretty quick thinking on my part), he feels free to add, “with Kenmore.”
Sheppard isn’t really the blanching type, but he looks horrified. “Oh, crap,” he says. “Not now.”
As he says that, there’s a heavy thud from inside Weir’s office, like a foot meeting a filing cabinet. She appears a couple seconds later, and there’s an expression on her face that’s part heartless, part terrified, part lost, and she says in this tiny little voice, “The IOC wants us back,” and I know that telling them about Michael going caveman on the residents of M14-389 is just icing on the cake.
“What?” I sort of breathe, and although it’s a breach in protocol no one spares me a glance.
“They finally decided to care about Michael and the procedure,” Weir is explaining, raking a hand through her hair. “They honestly have no idea what it’s like out here.”
Sheppard’s face becomes furious, the likes of which I haven’t seen since-well, ever, really. “The political fuckwits,” he swears, and although Weir gives him a Look, she doesn’t pause to correct him. Lorne and I, for the second time that day, make eye contact and simultaneously acknowledge that some seriously deep shit is going down on Atlantis. “How far are they taking it?”
“They want to court marshal you,” she replies, sarcastically bright, “and no doubt revoke as many medical licenses as they can get their grubby little hands on. They’re calling it cruel and unusual experimentation.”
“There’s a problem,” interrupts Lorne as the silence following Weir’s little announcement takes a fast turn towards awkward. “Kenmore ripped the heart out of an attacking villager during our mission, ma’am. And didn’t see anything much wrong with it, either.”
Weir sighs and buries her head in her hands. Sheppard takes a few steps forward and lightly grasps her shoulder in a comfortable grip. “Did you tell Dr. Beckett?” she asks the hallway at large. Lorne doesn’t look at me, which I appreciate, because I know what’s going through his brain right now. He can’t exactly say, No ma’am, because Lt. Cadman can’t do her job due to that nasty break-up she and the good doctor had a few weeks ago.
He may not blame me for my lack of a spine, true. He doesn’t really need to. I blame myself just fine.
“Someone get down there and pull Dr. Beckett aside. I want Kenmore kept for medical observation in the infirmary. Tell Beckett to feel free to make up any excuse he wants, as long as it gets done. Oh, and Lorne, we’ll need to arrange a military guard for the IOC commander.” Her mouth twists, as though the words are souring on her tongue.
“Will do, ma’am,” says Lorne, and he and I turn on our heels like good little soldiers and make our way down the hall. There’s a corner at the end, left to the military offices, right to the infirmary, and he takes the right without even asking about it. “Make sure not to put Jacobsen and Young on the same detail,” is all that he says on the matter, and then his back has disappeared, and I’m left with the omnipresent reminder that my commander is a far better man than I’ll ever be.
~
As we stand in the gate room and listen to Weir talk, it’s like a world gone mad, like bits and pieces of me have tumbled all over the floor. You know that we would’ve been heroes otherwise; it’s just one of those things you can feel in your bones, like a side-effect of the human condition. We really would’ve been heroes in the star-bright eyes of the IOC if they weren’t such blind idiots.
I guess, though, you spend time on Atlantis and you start to forget that there’s a whole other galaxy out there that doesn’t have the same set of priorities. You forget about social mores and cultural cues and that American and Russian and Canadian come before Atlantean.
So when some tight-mouthed little IOC politician comes and insists that you’re all immoral scumbags, basically insinuates that you’re no better than a modern-day colony of Mengeles and Himmlers, it’s like being shot with a syringe full of liquid nitrogen.
As Weir, tight-lipped, introduces Reiter, the temperature in the gate room plummets. The universal opinion is one of you have no fucking idea, but Reiter just continues blithely on as though he hasn’t made an enemy of everyone in Pegasus from the moment he and his prejudices stepped onto Atlantis. “Hello,” he begins, and his high-pitched voice echoes in an almost painfully embarrassing fashion in the peaked architecture of the gate room.
I wonder if Weir engineered this on purpose, to make him sound like even more of an imbecile than he actually is. I wouldn’t be surprised; she has a vindictive streak, she just doesn’t use it that often.
“I understand all of you have put in years of faithful service to the IOC, and I wanted to thank you for it.” His tone is breathily sarcastic, almost oppressively condemning, and surely he’s realized by now that he isn’t winning any friends? But no, he just continues, “However, the Atlantis expedition has recently taken a turn that we at the IOC neither expected nor condoned, and as such I feel that we must take a step back and reevaluate our concerns.”
I feel almost insulted that he’s precluded his witch hunt with false gratitude. We weren’t serving the man behind the desk (when did I become anti-establishment? Funny, I should ask Lorne. He probably noticed at some point). We were serving humanity. And I doubt this guy qualifies as human.
He blinks. He looks like a lizard, with a snaking tongue and transparent eyelids.
“For the moment, we simply want to observe.”
Shakespeare said that all the world’s a stage, all the men and women merely players. Well, guess what, Will? I’m a player, and my strings are so tangled I can’t tell who’s jerking my limbs and who’s just watching with laughter in their eyes. I never thought being on Atlantis would make me hate Earth (I kind of thought it’d help with my global patriotism, actually), but at this moment it has. Mr. IOC Real Politicks has no idea what we do here, that we are protecting people and saving their lives, and he has no possible way of comprehending what we go through. I’m a grunt, yeah, I blow things up. Whoop de fucking doo. That gives me about forty-hundred more hours of field experience than any IOC high-level political tinker toy.
He’s expecting applause, the poor bastard. All he’s going to get is stony silence.
How did we get to this point, I wonder? I remember coming here and thinking I would never fit in, never understand this dynamic. With the Secret Service and the Gulf, I knew where I was. I didn’t have to worry about relationships with psychologists and botanists and anthropologists; I didn’t have to concern myself with whether an astrophysicist or a lieutenant is higher in the chain of command out in the field. A lot of things made sense back on Earth. Things stop making sense in Pegasus. I mean, how did I turn around one day and the man guarding my back is someone who tried to kill me a handful of months ago? Because that is seriously fucked up, especially when that man is a class-A whack job like Michael Kenmore.
But I got to tell you. If the choice for that position is between Michael and the IOC bag of air, I’ll pick Kenmore every time. Hell, I’d probably pick Kenmore if he was still a Wraith.
Lorne shows up at my side at the end of the “speech”-or the pathetic lack thereof, really-and his face is hard like marble and brittle like slate. “You know what this means,” he says, and I crack my neck, wincing.
“Yeah,” I say. “Are you going to talk to Sheppard about it, or just wait and see what he and Weir are going to do?”
His shoulder twitches in a half-shrug. “Ten to one I don’t really want to know what they’ve got up their sleeves about this.”
“It’s going to become a witch hunt,” I point out. “This has the potential to go bad very, very quickly.”
“Yeah,” he agrees. “I know.”
~
Surprisingly, it doesn’t take that long for the IOC to find their niche and start digging. They predictably set in on Teyla and Ronon, and although they get stonewalled on Teyla so quickly it probably makes their heads spin (that woman has saved the life of every Marine on this base at least once, yours truly included), they find a bit of leeway with Ronon, enough to keep them distracted for a while.
I make myself an almost permanent home in Rodney’s lab, and as he’s used to it by now, he ineffectually protests for only an hour or so before settling into a sullen silence. I’ve brought a circuit board with me-nothing major, just something to fiddle with as I wait for news from Kate or Amelia, or possibly even Lorne-and we work in silence for a while before Rodney’s head appears over his computer screen and he demands, “What are you still doing here?”
“I’m working,” I say, not looking up.
“Yes, but why here?” he asks. “You have quarters. I’ve seen them. A little too Rambo-like for my tastes, but I don’t have to sleep there.”
“I thank God every day,” I say absently, shaking away a few sparks and prodding a mass of wires.
“This is my lab,” he says petulantly.
“You have plenty of space,” I reply. “And besides, I’m still concerned that you aren’t getting enough normal human interaction.” He huffs at this, but returns to clacking away at his bevy of screens for a while, at least until Zelenka skids in with hair that’s atomized almost obscenely (even for him) and a mouthful of Czech curses.
They leave, snarking at each other and arguing about complex mathematics that I only half-understand (in my defense, I’m only paying half-attention), and so the lab is empty when Sheppard comes wandering in. “Sorry, sir,” I tell him, looking up. My hair’s in my face, so I have to pause to scoop it away, and once I’m done he’s molded himself into his usual casual pose in the door, arms folded across his chest. “Rodney just left with Zelenka.”
“That’s all right,” Sheppard replies, even though he’s far too tense to pull off his usual nonchalance. “Rodney’s never where you need him.”
“Can I help you, sir?” I ask, just in case.
“No, Cadman,” he says. “Although-did you organize Reiter’s security detail?”
“Yeah,” I say, hooking hair behind my ear. “Is there a problem, sir?”
“While I would find it incredibly amusing if Jacobsen knocked Reiter’s head against a couple railings, I doubt the IOC would agree with me.” I frown, trying to remember if I managed to put Mads with Frank Young even though Lorne reminded me not to. But no, Frank is off-world for the next week or so.
Sheppard raises an eyebrow in expectation. “Jacobsen’s usually very even-tempered, sir,” I hedge. “I didn’t think there would be a problem.”
“Reiter’s being a bastard,” says Sheppard rather bluntly. “I would replace Jacobsen with Young, if you can.”
“Young’s out on a mission, sir,” I reply. “At any rate, how long is Reiter planning on staying?”
“Far too long,” says Sheppard darkly. He glowers at Rodney’s host of computer screens and then sighs. “If you can’t get another Marine, I’d say just leave the spot open and put Young in when he gets back.” He makes to leave, and although I’m probably being way out of line for a lieutenant-even an Atlantis lieutenant-I can’t help myself from calling out.
“Sir?”
“Yeah, Cadman?”
“How bad is it going to be?”
He doesn’t turn around, which gives me my answer even before he speaks. “I’d walk carefully. This isn’t going to just go away.”
“How bad, colonel?” I press.
He sighs. “Oh, most, if not all of us, are going home as soon as possible. They might shut down Atlantis, although it’s more likely they’ll bring in a few IOC flunkies to keep it running. They’ll do their best to kill Beckett, Weir, and my careers, and they’ll either insist on telling Kenmore about his past or sticking him in a government facility to wait for bureaucracy to sort itself out.”
“Oh,” I say. “Really bad, then, in other words.”
~
I go to see Michael a few days into Reiter’s visit, when Carson isn’t on shift and Jennifer Keller is running the infirmary. She’s nice, if a little nervous, and she’s friends with Katie Brown so we talk for a little bit about her and Rodney’s tumultuous relationship and compare notes before she clears me and lets me in to see him. They have him tucked into one of their precious few private rooms. “Hey, what’s up?” I ask as I walk in, and his left eye peels open.
“Laura, hey,” he croaks, then coughs and clears his throat.
“How you feeling?” I ask, perching on the edge of his bed. He struggles to sit up, and settles for just adjusting his head to a higher angle. Keller told me beforehand that they’ve got him on blood thinners and a host of other things to preserve the illusion, and he looks damn awful. I’ll be honest here-when Michael looks like he just got the shit beat out of him, he’s a lot easier to be around.
“Fine, I guess,” he says. “My diabetes is being a bitch.”
For one thing, he doesn’t talk like there’s a stick up his ass, which is nice.
“Sorry to hear that,” I sympathize. “Has Lorne been by to see you yet?”
“Yeah,” he says. “He says that there’s someone from the IOC wandering around?”
I mentally strangle Lorne, even though in the long run having Michael know about the IOC beforehand might manage to preserve some vestige of sanity. Then again, with Michael, who knows? “Yeah,” I say, smoothing the blanket on his bed. I don’t actually touch him, because he’s weird about physical contact, but my mom used to do it to me when I was sick, and whatever, it helps. “He’s making waves about all those little breaks in protocol that the IOC’s usually willing to overlook. Dr. Weir wants to smother him in his sleep, naturally, and Col. Sheppard keeps on offering to do the deed.” Michael chuckles a little darkly at this.
“And me, unable to help,” he says sarcastically, and then coughs. I laugh at this, and remember two seconds too late the image of his arm, bloody to the elbow, the villager’s heart clenched in his fist. The chuckles get caught in my throat and I make my excuses and leave so quickly that our time together doesn’t really count as a visit at all.
But it matters to Michael that I took the time to see him, I know, and that he’s become my teammate sometime between when we captured his dart and he took down an enemy villager because the guy wanted to make me into a shish kabob is half terrifying and half gratifying. Terrifying because, you know, psychopathic alien who wants to suck my life force, and gratifying because we’ve managed to make someone human out of the aforementioned life-force-sucker.
I’ve got an added skip to my step and I’m walking to the tune of fuck you, IOC, when Lorne catches me by the elbow, hauls me pretty damn close to his side, and hisses in my ear, “Reiter’s arrested Dr. Beckett.”
And just like that, my day gets ten times worse.
I immediately turn and try to barrel my way to Carson’s rooms, but Lorne has me latched to him securely, and even as I raised my arm to twist free he puts his other hand on my shoulder and steadies me. “No,” he says firmly.
“They arrested Carson!” I shriek. Lorne shakes me a little, and glowers.
“Lt. Cadman,” he says. “I just gave you classified information, all right? The Orion is taking Reiter and Beckett back to Earth tonight, and he had no intention of telling anyone about his plans before they were already half a galaxy away. This goes nowhere.”
I’m so angry I think I am actually vibrating, but I give Lorne a stiff nod and he cautiously releases me. “Good,” he says. “Because I think Sheppard is planning something stupid, and knowing him he’ll need some back-up. Are you in?”
I give him a Look. “Yes,” I say through clenched teeth. “Isn’t it kind of obvious?”
“You and Beckett didn’t break up on the best of terms,” Lorne says seriously, his eyes holding mine so firmly I don’t think I could look away even if I wanted to. I appreciate how much space Lorne gave me after the blow-up, and I knew the day would come when we would need to hash out the specifics, but really, now?
“Look, just because I’m not in love with the guy anymore doesn’t mean I want him to go on trial because some IOC scumbag doesn’t know shit about the Wraith,” I hiss. “What kind of person do you think I am, Lorne?”
“A good one,” he says, and releases me. “Get geared up, meet me at my quarters in ten minutes.”
“Yes sir,” I say without an ounce of sarcasm.
~
The reason why we’re meeting in his quarters becomes readily obvious when he opens the doors and reveals for my inspection a personal artillery that would make Ronon Dex green with envy. I can’t help petting a few of his very pretty guns, but soon enough I’m straight business, checking rounds and surreptitiously sliding an extra knife into my boot that I can’t quite resist.
He takes a few minutes longer (and I’m supposed to be the girl), so I wander around awkwardly as he adjusts buckles and other things, and stumble upon his painting stash. I’ve seen his pieces before, and joined him while he’s working out on the various decks, but there are a whole host of canvases that are obviously unfinished buried underneath a paint-splattered tarp, most of which are unfamiliar to me.
He’s a landscape man, I notice, like my mom, and he favors purple in just about everything. I stumble across a handful of portraits in the back of the pile, Teyla sparring with Ronon, Kate Heightmeyer at her desk, Rafaela’s face lit blue by her hand console. The last one is of us-our team-and although he, Harriet, and Michael are vague outlines, I’m finished.
Kind of literally too, actually, because holy shit, I look really good. So good, in fact, that there’s no way he actually drew that realistically. I don’t glow, for one thing, except in fuzzy photographs, but I’m definitely glowing in that painting. I look like I kick ass.
By the time he’s done putting away his things, I’m tapping my foot in front of the door. The paintings are back in place, the folds of the tarp settled, and I make sure to rib him about taking as much time as my mother to get ready as we make our way to Weir’s office. Who said I’m not a good actress?
The look of surprise on Weir’s face is kind of gratifying, as is Rodney’s pathetic squawk.
“Oh good, back-up,” is all Sheppard will say, and then it’s been accepted that Lorne and I aren’t going anywhere and the plans are changed to suit our presence. The plan is nice, actually, clever in a Rodney sort of way and reeking of Ha Ha Fuck You, and none of us expect it to work that cleanly.
~
It does.
~
Three hours later, Carson is in his quarters, purportedly resting even though we all know he’s just going to go back to the infirmary, and Reiter is on his way back to Earth with an empty cargo hold full of nothing but a holographic image of a walking, talking, complaining Carson Beckett. Rodney’s maths predict that it will take Reiter three days at warp to realize that they don’t have a human Carson on board, and twenty minutes after that to attempt to turn around and realize that Rodney has sabotaged their warp system. They’ll be dead in the water for another week until the Daedalus can reach them.
Which gives us a week and a half to make the hard choice.
Weir is very up front about the entire thing, admitting that over the course of time Earth and Atlantis have come to hold very different understandings of the Pegasus galaxy and that the choice to stay is only for certain people. We lose about three-quarters of the crew-mostly those who have families on Earth-but manage to retain someone in almost every major field.
At the end of the week, those who want to go back are put on the mainland to wait out the return of the Daedalus, and the rest of us say our good-byes. I wouldn’t consider myself a master at them, but watching Rodney attempt to bid farewell to Katie Brown is so painful an experience I immediately feel ten times better about crying at bit as I hug Kate and Amelia.
It’s kind of sad (in a pathetic way), actually, that the hardest bit is saying good-bye to everyone. I don’t think twice about leaving, not after everything crazy and fucked-up that I’ve gone through over the course of my time at Atlantis, and I’ve become sort of addicted to saving people. It’s not like the Gulf, where the war’s around you twenty-four seven and you constantly need a mental health day (or hour or minute). Atlantis isn’t just a state of mind, it’s a state of existence, and I’m not even sure I could operate under normal military conditions anymore.
At lot of people, Lorne and Sheppard included, feel the same way.
Rodney doesn’t, I know that, because I know how he feels about his sister and his niece, but he claims that we’d all end up dying without him to around and stays anyway. He busies himself with finding a likely-looking planet, and we all let him mourn the end of his relationship with Katie in peace. It takes him a few days of no sleep and most of our remaining stash of Oreos to find the best contestant, which is uninhabited and over seventy percent water with some fields that seem friendly towards possible vegetation, and with little pomp or circumstance (thank god), Sheppard flies us out.
Lorne and I spend the duration of the journey in the rec room, steadily working our way through a deck of cards and playing seven-card stud with some semi-stale crackers as chips. I don’t mention the painting (even though I want to), and he doesn’t mention that I’m still kind of crying as I solidly beat his ass into the ground.
“I’ve always wanted to be an outlaw,” he says as he reveals two nines. I show him my three aces and scrape in the small pile of crackers.
“Really?” I ask, raising an eyebrow.
“Yeah,” he says, trying for a half-grin and mostly succeeding. “Life of mystery and romance, open range and no one on your tail. You telling me you didn’t want that, Cadman?”
I shrug and deal quickly, my fingers greasy from the crackers. “I guess. Although I think I prefer the term ‘space pirate.’ I wasn’t a cowboys-and-Indians kind of girl.”
“Space pirate,” muses Lorne, glancing at his cards and then adding two crackers to the ante. “You read a lot of Heinlein?”
“Not really,” I say. “Not since I was a kid. But I’m guessing that space pirates have more fun than armed forces personnel. Less rules. More sex.” Lorne raises his eyebrow, but refuses to take the bait.
We bet. We reveal. He loses.
He’s sighing tragically and reaching to deal when Michael joins us. He looks like he was recently beat over the head with a dead horse, which puts him at his most human. As he throws himself into the chair next to Lorne, his face is expressionless. “Deal me in,” he says.
Lorne and I look at each other. Weir and Michael must have had their Discussion. That he’s sitting here with us and not ripping the heads off of Marines in the sparring room says a lot. It also makes me feel a whole lot better about maybe kind-of sort-of running away just for the sake of protecting our decision to save his soul-sucking ass. The two of us agree silently not to mention Weir or Sheppard for a while.
“You know how to play seven-card stud, tiger?” I ask.
“I learn fast,” he says. He glowers at the table. Men.
“Okay, then,” I say, waggling my eyebrows at the pair of them, and gesture for Lorne to start passing around the cards. “So everybody starts with three cards, two down and one up . . .”
We begin.
~
So . . . thoughts?
He’s smiling at me. What do I do? Smile back? He’s holding a goddamn heart in his left hand. “Er, Kenmore, what are you doing?”
“Saving your life,” he says, almost prissily.
“You just stuck your fist in that guy’s chest,” I feel compelled to point out. His face twitches, as though he’s confused. As though he sees no reason that he shouldn’t have torn the Evil Villager’s heart from his chest cavity. As though Lorne isn’t already calling back to Atlantis and suggesting back-up, and the villagers aren’t putting down their guns and backing away. As though Harriet isn’t gagging a little (er, more than a little, by now).
“He was going to kill you,” he says.
“Yeah, I know, bummer,” I reply. “But you could’ve shot him.”
“Close range, I might’ve hit someone,” Kenmore clarifies. “There was only about a twenty percent chance a knife wound would have been lethal.”
As I eye his bloody hand and stifle my gag reflex-holy fuck, he makes Freddy Kreuger look like a kindergartener with pig-tails-I have to admit that he certainly made sure that the Evil Villager is one hundred percent dead.
I’ve also come to the conclusion that Michael Kenmore is one hundred percent certifiable. And I really wish that he wasn’t walking about in Atlantis-issue specs. Lorne and I make eye contact as he whispers harshly into his headset and Michael just sort of stands there, and I can tell we’re thinking the same thing. We were willing to be open-minded about Kenmore replacing Mads Jacobsen, true, but there’s open-minded and then there’s stupidity on par with the short-lived female leads in slasher flicks.
One more mission out with Kenmore and a semi and Lorne and I could be labeled as the latter.
~
Back on Atlantis, everyone’s pretty damn frazzled. The reason why becomes glaringly obvious when Sheppard catches us outside of Weir’s office, ready to debrief, and in classic Sheppard fashion briskly advises us to come back later.
“We’ve got a problem, sir,” says Lorne under his breath, and as we’ve already sent Michael to the infirmary (to check for possible blood poisoning, which I think I can confidently say was pretty quick thinking on my part), he feels free to add, “with Kenmore.”
Sheppard isn’t really the blanching type, but he looks horrified. “Oh, crap,” he says. “Not now.”
As he says that, there’s a heavy thud from inside Weir’s office, like a foot meeting a filing cabinet. She appears a couple seconds later, and there’s an expression on her face that’s part heartless, part terrified, part lost, and she says in this tiny little voice, “The IOC wants us back,” and I know that telling them about Michael going caveman on the residents of M14-389 is just icing on the cake.
“What?” I sort of breathe, and although it’s a breach in protocol no one spares me a glance.
“They finally decided to care about Michael and the procedure,” Weir is explaining, raking a hand through her hair. “They honestly have no idea what it’s like out here.”
Sheppard’s face becomes furious, the likes of which I haven’t seen since-well, ever, really. “The political fuckwits,” he swears, and although Weir gives him a Look, she doesn’t pause to correct him. Lorne and I, for the second time that day, make eye contact and simultaneously acknowledge that some seriously deep shit is going down on Atlantis. “How far are they taking it?”
“They want to court marshal you,” she replies, sarcastically bright, “and no doubt revoke as many medical licenses as they can get their grubby little hands on. They’re calling it cruel and unusual experimentation.”
“There’s a problem,” interrupts Lorne as the silence following Weir’s little announcement takes a fast turn towards awkward. “Kenmore ripped the heart out of an attacking villager during our mission, ma’am. And didn’t see anything much wrong with it, either.”
Weir sighs and buries her head in her hands. Sheppard takes a few steps forward and lightly grasps her shoulder in a comfortable grip. “Did you tell Dr. Beckett?” she asks the hallway at large. Lorne doesn’t look at me, which I appreciate, because I know what’s going through his brain right now. He can’t exactly say, No ma’am, because Lt. Cadman can’t do her job due to that nasty break-up she and the good doctor had a few weeks ago.
He may not blame me for my lack of a spine, true. He doesn’t really need to. I blame myself just fine.
“Someone get down there and pull Dr. Beckett aside. I want Kenmore kept for medical observation in the infirmary. Tell Beckett to feel free to make up any excuse he wants, as long as it gets done. Oh, and Lorne, we’ll need to arrange a military guard for the IOC commander.” Her mouth twists, as though the words are souring on her tongue.
“Will do, ma’am,” says Lorne, and he and I turn on our heels like good little soldiers and make our way down the hall. There’s a corner at the end, left to the military offices, right to the infirmary, and he takes the right without even asking about it. “Make sure not to put Jacobsen and Young on the same detail,” is all that he says on the matter, and then his back has disappeared, and I’m left with the omnipresent reminder that my commander is a far better man than I’ll ever be.
~
As we stand in the gate room and listen to Weir talk, it’s like a world gone mad, like bits and pieces of me have tumbled all over the floor. You know that we would’ve been heroes otherwise; it’s just one of those things you can feel in your bones, like a side-effect of the human condition. We really would’ve been heroes in the star-bright eyes of the IOC if they weren’t such blind idiots.
I guess, though, you spend time on Atlantis and you start to forget that there’s a whole other galaxy out there that doesn’t have the same set of priorities. You forget about social mores and cultural cues and that American and Russian and Canadian come before Atlantean.
So when some tight-mouthed little IOC politician comes and insists that you’re all immoral scumbags, basically insinuates that you’re no better than a modern-day colony of Mengeles and Himmlers, it’s like being shot with a syringe full of liquid nitrogen.
As Weir, tight-lipped, introduces Reiter, the temperature in the gate room plummets. The universal opinion is one of you have no fucking idea, but Reiter just continues blithely on as though he hasn’t made an enemy of everyone in Pegasus from the moment he and his prejudices stepped onto Atlantis. “Hello,” he begins, and his high-pitched voice echoes in an almost painfully embarrassing fashion in the peaked architecture of the gate room.
I wonder if Weir engineered this on purpose, to make him sound like even more of an imbecile than he actually is. I wouldn’t be surprised; she has a vindictive streak, she just doesn’t use it that often.
“I understand all of you have put in years of faithful service to the IOC, and I wanted to thank you for it.” His tone is breathily sarcastic, almost oppressively condemning, and surely he’s realized by now that he isn’t winning any friends? But no, he just continues, “However, the Atlantis expedition has recently taken a turn that we at the IOC neither expected nor condoned, and as such I feel that we must take a step back and reevaluate our concerns.”
I feel almost insulted that he’s precluded his witch hunt with false gratitude. We weren’t serving the man behind the desk (when did I become anti-establishment? Funny, I should ask Lorne. He probably noticed at some point). We were serving humanity. And I doubt this guy qualifies as human.
He blinks. He looks like a lizard, with a snaking tongue and transparent eyelids.
“For the moment, we simply want to observe.”
Shakespeare said that all the world’s a stage, all the men and women merely players. Well, guess what, Will? I’m a player, and my strings are so tangled I can’t tell who’s jerking my limbs and who’s just watching with laughter in their eyes. I never thought being on Atlantis would make me hate Earth (I kind of thought it’d help with my global patriotism, actually), but at this moment it has. Mr. IOC Real Politicks has no idea what we do here, that we are protecting people and saving their lives, and he has no possible way of comprehending what we go through. I’m a grunt, yeah, I blow things up. Whoop de fucking doo. That gives me about forty-hundred more hours of field experience than any IOC high-level political tinker toy.
He’s expecting applause, the poor bastard. All he’s going to get is stony silence.
How did we get to this point, I wonder? I remember coming here and thinking I would never fit in, never understand this dynamic. With the Secret Service and the Gulf, I knew where I was. I didn’t have to worry about relationships with psychologists and botanists and anthropologists; I didn’t have to concern myself with whether an astrophysicist or a lieutenant is higher in the chain of command out in the field. A lot of things made sense back on Earth. Things stop making sense in Pegasus. I mean, how did I turn around one day and the man guarding my back is someone who tried to kill me a handful of months ago? Because that is seriously fucked up, especially when that man is a class-A whack job like Michael Kenmore.
But I got to tell you. If the choice for that position is between Michael and the IOC bag of air, I’ll pick Kenmore every time. Hell, I’d probably pick Kenmore if he was still a Wraith.
Lorne shows up at my side at the end of the “speech”-or the pathetic lack thereof, really-and his face is hard like marble and brittle like slate. “You know what this means,” he says, and I crack my neck, wincing.
“Yeah,” I say. “Are you going to talk to Sheppard about it, or just wait and see what he and Weir are going to do?”
His shoulder twitches in a half-shrug. “Ten to one I don’t really want to know what they’ve got up their sleeves about this.”
“It’s going to become a witch hunt,” I point out. “This has the potential to go bad very, very quickly.”
“Yeah,” he agrees. “I know.”
~
Surprisingly, it doesn’t take that long for the IOC to find their niche and start digging. They predictably set in on Teyla and Ronon, and although they get stonewalled on Teyla so quickly it probably makes their heads spin (that woman has saved the life of every Marine on this base at least once, yours truly included), they find a bit of leeway with Ronon, enough to keep them distracted for a while.
I make myself an almost permanent home in Rodney’s lab, and as he’s used to it by now, he ineffectually protests for only an hour or so before settling into a sullen silence. I’ve brought a circuit board with me-nothing major, just something to fiddle with as I wait for news from Kate or Amelia, or possibly even Lorne-and we work in silence for a while before Rodney’s head appears over his computer screen and he demands, “What are you still doing here?”
“I’m working,” I say, not looking up.
“Yes, but why here?” he asks. “You have quarters. I’ve seen them. A little too Rambo-like for my tastes, but I don’t have to sleep there.”
“I thank God every day,” I say absently, shaking away a few sparks and prodding a mass of wires.
“This is my lab,” he says petulantly.
“You have plenty of space,” I reply. “And besides, I’m still concerned that you aren’t getting enough normal human interaction.” He huffs at this, but returns to clacking away at his bevy of screens for a while, at least until Zelenka skids in with hair that’s atomized almost obscenely (even for him) and a mouthful of Czech curses.
They leave, snarking at each other and arguing about complex mathematics that I only half-understand (in my defense, I’m only paying half-attention), and so the lab is empty when Sheppard comes wandering in. “Sorry, sir,” I tell him, looking up. My hair’s in my face, so I have to pause to scoop it away, and once I’m done he’s molded himself into his usual casual pose in the door, arms folded across his chest. “Rodney just left with Zelenka.”
“That’s all right,” Sheppard replies, even though he’s far too tense to pull off his usual nonchalance. “Rodney’s never where you need him.”
“Can I help you, sir?” I ask, just in case.
“No, Cadman,” he says. “Although-did you organize Reiter’s security detail?”
“Yeah,” I say, hooking hair behind my ear. “Is there a problem, sir?”
“While I would find it incredibly amusing if Jacobsen knocked Reiter’s head against a couple railings, I doubt the IOC would agree with me.” I frown, trying to remember if I managed to put Mads with Frank Young even though Lorne reminded me not to. But no, Frank is off-world for the next week or so.
Sheppard raises an eyebrow in expectation. “Jacobsen’s usually very even-tempered, sir,” I hedge. “I didn’t think there would be a problem.”
“Reiter’s being a bastard,” says Sheppard rather bluntly. “I would replace Jacobsen with Young, if you can.”
“Young’s out on a mission, sir,” I reply. “At any rate, how long is Reiter planning on staying?”
“Far too long,” says Sheppard darkly. He glowers at Rodney’s host of computer screens and then sighs. “If you can’t get another Marine, I’d say just leave the spot open and put Young in when he gets back.” He makes to leave, and although I’m probably being way out of line for a lieutenant-even an Atlantis lieutenant-I can’t help myself from calling out.
“Sir?”
“Yeah, Cadman?”
“How bad is it going to be?”
He doesn’t turn around, which gives me my answer even before he speaks. “I’d walk carefully. This isn’t going to just go away.”
“How bad, colonel?” I press.
He sighs. “Oh, most, if not all of us, are going home as soon as possible. They might shut down Atlantis, although it’s more likely they’ll bring in a few IOC flunkies to keep it running. They’ll do their best to kill Beckett, Weir, and my careers, and they’ll either insist on telling Kenmore about his past or sticking him in a government facility to wait for bureaucracy to sort itself out.”
“Oh,” I say. “Really bad, then, in other words.”
~
I go to see Michael a few days into Reiter’s visit, when Carson isn’t on shift and Jennifer Keller is running the infirmary. She’s nice, if a little nervous, and she’s friends with Katie Brown so we talk for a little bit about her and Rodney’s tumultuous relationship and compare notes before she clears me and lets me in to see him. They have him tucked into one of their precious few private rooms. “Hey, what’s up?” I ask as I walk in, and his left eye peels open.
“Laura, hey,” he croaks, then coughs and clears his throat.
“How you feeling?” I ask, perching on the edge of his bed. He struggles to sit up, and settles for just adjusting his head to a higher angle. Keller told me beforehand that they’ve got him on blood thinners and a host of other things to preserve the illusion, and he looks damn awful. I’ll be honest here-when Michael looks like he just got the shit beat out of him, he’s a lot easier to be around.
“Fine, I guess,” he says. “My diabetes is being a bitch.”
For one thing, he doesn’t talk like there’s a stick up his ass, which is nice.
“Sorry to hear that,” I sympathize. “Has Lorne been by to see you yet?”
“Yeah,” he says. “He says that there’s someone from the IOC wandering around?”
I mentally strangle Lorne, even though in the long run having Michael know about the IOC beforehand might manage to preserve some vestige of sanity. Then again, with Michael, who knows? “Yeah,” I say, smoothing the blanket on his bed. I don’t actually touch him, because he’s weird about physical contact, but my mom used to do it to me when I was sick, and whatever, it helps. “He’s making waves about all those little breaks in protocol that the IOC’s usually willing to overlook. Dr. Weir wants to smother him in his sleep, naturally, and Col. Sheppard keeps on offering to do the deed.” Michael chuckles a little darkly at this.
“And me, unable to help,” he says sarcastically, and then coughs. I laugh at this, and remember two seconds too late the image of his arm, bloody to the elbow, the villager’s heart clenched in his fist. The chuckles get caught in my throat and I make my excuses and leave so quickly that our time together doesn’t really count as a visit at all.
But it matters to Michael that I took the time to see him, I know, and that he’s become my teammate sometime between when we captured his dart and he took down an enemy villager because the guy wanted to make me into a shish kabob is half terrifying and half gratifying. Terrifying because, you know, psychopathic alien who wants to suck my life force, and gratifying because we’ve managed to make someone human out of the aforementioned life-force-sucker.
I’ve got an added skip to my step and I’m walking to the tune of fuck you, IOC, when Lorne catches me by the elbow, hauls me pretty damn close to his side, and hisses in my ear, “Reiter’s arrested Dr. Beckett.”
And just like that, my day gets ten times worse.
I immediately turn and try to barrel my way to Carson’s rooms, but Lorne has me latched to him securely, and even as I raised my arm to twist free he puts his other hand on my shoulder and steadies me. “No,” he says firmly.
“They arrested Carson!” I shriek. Lorne shakes me a little, and glowers.
“Lt. Cadman,” he says. “I just gave you classified information, all right? The Orion is taking Reiter and Beckett back to Earth tonight, and he had no intention of telling anyone about his plans before they were already half a galaxy away. This goes nowhere.”
I’m so angry I think I am actually vibrating, but I give Lorne a stiff nod and he cautiously releases me. “Good,” he says. “Because I think Sheppard is planning something stupid, and knowing him he’ll need some back-up. Are you in?”
I give him a Look. “Yes,” I say through clenched teeth. “Isn’t it kind of obvious?”
“You and Beckett didn’t break up on the best of terms,” Lorne says seriously, his eyes holding mine so firmly I don’t think I could look away even if I wanted to. I appreciate how much space Lorne gave me after the blow-up, and I knew the day would come when we would need to hash out the specifics, but really, now?
“Look, just because I’m not in love with the guy anymore doesn’t mean I want him to go on trial because some IOC scumbag doesn’t know shit about the Wraith,” I hiss. “What kind of person do you think I am, Lorne?”
“A good one,” he says, and releases me. “Get geared up, meet me at my quarters in ten minutes.”
“Yes sir,” I say without an ounce of sarcasm.
~
The reason why we’re meeting in his quarters becomes readily obvious when he opens the doors and reveals for my inspection a personal artillery that would make Ronon Dex green with envy. I can’t help petting a few of his very pretty guns, but soon enough I’m straight business, checking rounds and surreptitiously sliding an extra knife into my boot that I can’t quite resist.
He takes a few minutes longer (and I’m supposed to be the girl), so I wander around awkwardly as he adjusts buckles and other things, and stumble upon his painting stash. I’ve seen his pieces before, and joined him while he’s working out on the various decks, but there are a whole host of canvases that are obviously unfinished buried underneath a paint-splattered tarp, most of which are unfamiliar to me.
He’s a landscape man, I notice, like my mom, and he favors purple in just about everything. I stumble across a handful of portraits in the back of the pile, Teyla sparring with Ronon, Kate Heightmeyer at her desk, Rafaela’s face lit blue by her hand console. The last one is of us-our team-and although he, Harriet, and Michael are vague outlines, I’m finished.
Kind of literally too, actually, because holy shit, I look really good. So good, in fact, that there’s no way he actually drew that realistically. I don’t glow, for one thing, except in fuzzy photographs, but I’m definitely glowing in that painting. I look like I kick ass.
By the time he’s done putting away his things, I’m tapping my foot in front of the door. The paintings are back in place, the folds of the tarp settled, and I make sure to rib him about taking as much time as my mother to get ready as we make our way to Weir’s office. Who said I’m not a good actress?
The look of surprise on Weir’s face is kind of gratifying, as is Rodney’s pathetic squawk.
“Oh good, back-up,” is all Sheppard will say, and then it’s been accepted that Lorne and I aren’t going anywhere and the plans are changed to suit our presence. The plan is nice, actually, clever in a Rodney sort of way and reeking of Ha Ha Fuck You, and none of us expect it to work that cleanly.
~
It does.
~
Three hours later, Carson is in his quarters, purportedly resting even though we all know he’s just going to go back to the infirmary, and Reiter is on his way back to Earth with an empty cargo hold full of nothing but a holographic image of a walking, talking, complaining Carson Beckett. Rodney’s maths predict that it will take Reiter three days at warp to realize that they don’t have a human Carson on board, and twenty minutes after that to attempt to turn around and realize that Rodney has sabotaged their warp system. They’ll be dead in the water for another week until the Daedalus can reach them.
Which gives us a week and a half to make the hard choice.
Weir is very up front about the entire thing, admitting that over the course of time Earth and Atlantis have come to hold very different understandings of the Pegasus galaxy and that the choice to stay is only for certain people. We lose about three-quarters of the crew-mostly those who have families on Earth-but manage to retain someone in almost every major field.
At the end of the week, those who want to go back are put on the mainland to wait out the return of the Daedalus, and the rest of us say our good-byes. I wouldn’t consider myself a master at them, but watching Rodney attempt to bid farewell to Katie Brown is so painful an experience I immediately feel ten times better about crying at bit as I hug Kate and Amelia.
It’s kind of sad (in a pathetic way), actually, that the hardest bit is saying good-bye to everyone. I don’t think twice about leaving, not after everything crazy and fucked-up that I’ve gone through over the course of my time at Atlantis, and I’ve become sort of addicted to saving people. It’s not like the Gulf, where the war’s around you twenty-four seven and you constantly need a mental health day (or hour or minute). Atlantis isn’t just a state of mind, it’s a state of existence, and I’m not even sure I could operate under normal military conditions anymore.
At lot of people, Lorne and Sheppard included, feel the same way.
Rodney doesn’t, I know that, because I know how he feels about his sister and his niece, but he claims that we’d all end up dying without him to around and stays anyway. He busies himself with finding a likely-looking planet, and we all let him mourn the end of his relationship with Katie in peace. It takes him a few days of no sleep and most of our remaining stash of Oreos to find the best contestant, which is uninhabited and over seventy percent water with some fields that seem friendly towards possible vegetation, and with little pomp or circumstance (thank god), Sheppard flies us out.
Lorne and I spend the duration of the journey in the rec room, steadily working our way through a deck of cards and playing seven-card stud with some semi-stale crackers as chips. I don’t mention the painting (even though I want to), and he doesn’t mention that I’m still kind of crying as I solidly beat his ass into the ground.
“I’ve always wanted to be an outlaw,” he says as he reveals two nines. I show him my three aces and scrape in the small pile of crackers.
“Really?” I ask, raising an eyebrow.
“Yeah,” he says, trying for a half-grin and mostly succeeding. “Life of mystery and romance, open range and no one on your tail. You telling me you didn’t want that, Cadman?”
I shrug and deal quickly, my fingers greasy from the crackers. “I guess. Although I think I prefer the term ‘space pirate.’ I wasn’t a cowboys-and-Indians kind of girl.”
“Space pirate,” muses Lorne, glancing at his cards and then adding two crackers to the ante. “You read a lot of Heinlein?”
“Not really,” I say. “Not since I was a kid. But I’m guessing that space pirates have more fun than armed forces personnel. Less rules. More sex.” Lorne raises his eyebrow, but refuses to take the bait.
We bet. We reveal. He loses.
He’s sighing tragically and reaching to deal when Michael joins us. He looks like he was recently beat over the head with a dead horse, which puts him at his most human. As he throws himself into the chair next to Lorne, his face is expressionless. “Deal me in,” he says.
Lorne and I look at each other. Weir and Michael must have had their Discussion. That he’s sitting here with us and not ripping the heads off of Marines in the sparring room says a lot. It also makes me feel a whole lot better about maybe kind-of sort-of running away just for the sake of protecting our decision to save his soul-sucking ass. The two of us agree silently not to mention Weir or Sheppard for a while.
“You know how to play seven-card stud, tiger?” I ask.
“I learn fast,” he says. He glowers at the table. Men.
“Okay, then,” I say, waggling my eyebrows at the pair of them, and gesture for Lorne to start passing around the cards. “So everybody starts with three cards, two down and one up . . .”
We begin.
~
So . . . thoughts?