STARGATE ATLANTIS: The Furies (Book 4 in the Legacy series) (25 page)

When Jack didn’t reply, Daniel went on, the sound of his window going down as he leaned out to swipe his card to get out of the parking lot. “Croatoan.”

There was a long pause, and it got the response he wanted. Jack opened his eyes and looked over. “What’s a Croatoan?”

“A Native American tribe related to the Pasquotank,” Daniel said. “But it’s also a mystery.”

Jack straightened up in his seat, fishing in his pocket for his sunglasses. The late afternoon sun was coming straight in through the windshield and his eyes were starting to water. They’d been photosensitive for a long time now. “Ok, I’ll bite. What about it, Daniel?”

“Let me tell you a story,” Daniel said, turning onto the expressway. “In 1587 a group of British settlers led by a man named John White, and financed by Sir Walter Raleigh, landed on the island of Roanoke just off the North Carolina coast. They were following up on a previous expedition, also led by White, which had established a temporary camp and begun friendships with the Native Americans who used the island as a summer hunting place. There were no permanent native settlements on the island, for good reasons, as the colonists would learn. These were not the kind of settlers who came later, not the adventurers of Jamestown or the fanatical religious separatists of Massachusetts Bay, looking for a place to practice their strict religion without the fetters of secular law. They were natural scientists, skilled craftsmen, skilled farmers, soldiers. Men and women too who were driven more by the relentless curiosity of the Elizabethan age. Some of White’s papers and drawings survive — beautiful sketches of plants and animals, carefully measured and catalogued according to the best data collection of the day. Translations from the Algonquin language, accurate and sympathetic portrayals of the people they met there, beautifully rendered pictures and stories.”

“You have a point?” Jack asked, more for form’s sake than anything else. Of course Daniel did, and he’d get to it in his own time.

“A few weeks later, White returned to England with the ship to get more provisions, but it was late in the year and they could not sail again until spring. And you know what happened then.”

“I do?”

“1588. The Spanish Armada. When spring came every ship was needed to defend England. The hundred and some members of the Roanoke expedition were not a priority, not when faced with invasion. White hounded the Queen and so did Raleigh, but to no avail. No ships could be spared. By the time the Spanish Armada was finished, the last ships wrecked in the gales of autumn off Scotland, it was too late to sail again. The next year it was the same story. The threat of war kept ships close in, fearing a repeat of the previous year’s battles. It was 1590 when John White and the resupply ship landed at Roanoke. To find the expedition gone.”

“Gone?”

“Gone. The settlement had been abandoned. The absence of most of the goods the expedition had brought, as well as the dismantling of some of the buildings, suggested that the expedition had not been attacked, but had moved on for some unknown reason. No bodies, no spent musket balls, no signs of burning or violence. All the clue there was left was the word ‘Croatoan’ carved into a tree.”

Jack looked over at him sharply from behind his sunglasses. “Which means?”

“It was the name of a Native American tribe that lived about fifty miles away on the mainland. They’d had good relations with them in the past.” Daniel shrugged. “We don’t know why they left. We do know that the hurricane season of 1588 was exceptionally active, and that the entire island is very low lying. In recent decades it’s been ravaged by hurricanes several times, and structures near where the settlement was were badly damaged. We also know that the Spanish raided along the coast in 1589, searching for a British colony, and that they had already destroyed a French colony in South Carolina. In any event, the island was a very unsafe place to stay. It seems likely that it became untenable, and that they picked up and moved in with their allies.”

“So you’re saying that when we get
Daedalus
back to Atlantis, we’re going to find the whole place deserted with no clue except New Athos written on a pillar in lipstick?” Jack winced. “That’s comforting, Daniel.”

“I’m not saying that,” he replied tranquilly. “I’m saying that things well begun have been abandoned before because the nation that sponsored them lacked the national will to follow through. Because other things happened at home that made the well being of the expedition a minor priority. Because it simply wasn’t important enough.”

Jack twitched. “Some people would say it’s better that way,” he said. “That it would have been better if there had never been colonies in the New World.”

Daniel glanced at him sideways, a giant truck roaring past him in the outside lane. “Contact between the New World and the Old was going to happen. It was already happening. It had been nearly a century since Columbus, sixty years since the Aztecs fell. There’s no putting the cat back in the bag once it’s out, Jack. You can’t just sail away and forget about it. Do you think for a minute that if we turned off the Stargate and recalled our ships that we would be left alone? That we can ever go back to the way things were? We have to be realistic. We’re part of a wider universe, and you and I have been places that makes those old sea dogs’ adventures pale in comparison.” He looked back at the road. “And you know as well as I do that we’re not the biggest dogs out there. We’re technologically inferior, and our population is a tiny percentage of all sentient species we’ve encountered. We’d like to think we’re the conquistadors, but we’re not. Compared to the Wraith, or to the Jaffa or the Tok’ra here in the Milky Way, we’re some second rate power trying to act real big with a bunch of technology we kind of half understand that we got from the Asgard or dug up from the Ancients. We’re not the Spanish Empire. We’re more like…”

Daniel seemed to run down for a moment, out of an appropriate comparison. “Lichtenstein?” Jack supplied.

“I was going to say the Venetian Republic, or maybe Norway in this period, but that will do.”

“So your point is that we can’t give up.” Jack thought this was a pretty long winded way of getting there.

“My point is that contact is going to happen. The question is what the nature of that contact will be.”

Jack didn’t say anything, which Daniel seemed to take as encouragement.

“Do you think it makes a difference that the predominant strain in the founding of our country was Puritan separatism rather than the broadminded and curious attitudes of the Elizabethan age? Do you think that it’s irrelevant to our national pathologies that we were founded to be a haven for a bunch of nuts who wanted to opt out of secular law and society and create a theocratic state?”

“Why don’t you tell me what you really think, Daniel? An unbiased opinion,” Jack said, his lips twisting in a half smile.

Daniel gave him a dirty look. “I’m not saying I’m unbiased. I’m saying that it was a tragedy for the entire world that the Roanoke colony was not the one that took root. I’m saying that if we drew our heritage from Roanoke instead of Plymouth that we would be a better country and a better people. If our guiding principles were based on the naturalists of the age of Shakespeare, rather than the manifest destiny of a bunch of Calvinists, the entire history of the world from that point on would be much improved.”

“You can’t know that,” Jack said. “Daniel, if there’s one thing we’ve learned seeing all these quantum realities and alternate timelines, it’s that we have no idea how our actions will affect the future. We can’t play that game. We can’t hedge our bets based on some kind of mega end on down the road. We have to play the cards we have, right here and right now. We can’t get into the whole ‘ends justify the means’ based on social theories of what will be better in three or four hundred years.”

“All right, how’s this for the short term?” Daniel glanced at him sideways again, apparently oblivious to the dump truck riding up on his back bumper. “The
Austerlitz
will launch in eighteen months. You know India’s research ship is right behind them. The Russians want more Stargate access, and they’re going to get it because they’re chipping in money we can’t afford. Meanwhile, our budget is flat for the next fiscal year and the Pentagon is planning a surge in Afghanistan. Your point about Atlantis?”

“My point is that we can’t determine whether or not humans from the Milky Way have contact with the Pegasus Galaxy. That’s out of our hands. What we can determine is what the guiding principles of these first contacts are. Who goes and what do they do? How do we respond to the peoples already there? How do we deal with the Wraith? What do we do about the rogue Asgard already in Pegasus? How do we safeguard the legacy of the Ancients so that it is available to all their heirs?” He shook his head. “We can’t abrogate that responsibility, Jack.”

“I never said we should.”

“You said…”

“I said I don’t make the budget. That’s the President and Congress. And I don’t determine the military priorities of the country. That’s way above my pay grade.”

Daniel snorted. “I thought that third star was good for something.”

“It occasionally gets me drinks with pretty girls.” Jack glanced out the window at the exit coming up. “Look, I can’t control the IOA. I can’t make them invest in Atlantis in the middle of an international economic crisis. All I can do is deal with our starships. Such as we have. As few as we have. Right now, 25% of our force is sitting in Atlantis.
Daedalus
will be on her way back as soon as she’s repaired. That’s what I’ve got, Daniel.” His voice was harder than he wanted it to be.

“I know,” Daniel said more gently. “Believe me, I know you’re doing everything you can.”

“Well?”
Guide asked, looming over her.

“Just a second,” Jennifer murmured as she scanned the results, her lips forming the numbers soundlessly. “Almost done...” She ignored his quiet hiss of impatience, unwilling to rush. At last, she waved the datapad away and swiveled on the weirdly organic stool in order to look up at him. She could feel her heart pounding. “I think we’ve got it.”

He bared his teeth slightly, either amusement or derision or both. “You
think
.”

“Well, we won’t know until we really test it. But at this point...” She nodded. “Everything adds up. The simulations and lab tests have gone perfectly. So ... I can safely say I
think
it will work.”

Guide snorted. “Such confidence.”

“Easy for you to say. You’re not the one who’s going to die if it doesn’t,” she said. It had been easy to throw herself into this project. Easier than usual, actually, to lose herself in numbers and results, because the implications of success were so much harder to think about. But now it had to be faced.

To her surprise, he barked a laugh. “Your jest is not in the best of taste.”

“It’s not a joke,” she said, shaking her head. “The next step has to be a trial on a human subject. We can’t just assume it works from the simulations.”

“Of course it must be tested,” he snapped. “But it would be wasteful to test it on yourself. There are humans in the feeding cells. Use one of them.”

She stood, wishing he weren’t quite so tall. But then, Teyla somehow managed to project utter bad-ass from all of five foot three, so maybe it wasn’t height that she needed. “You want me to give someone who’s waiting to be eaten a drug that, in itself, could kill him. And then you want me to watch while you feed on him and take notes,” she said, putting as much anger as she dared into her voice. “And
then
, if it doesn’t work, are you really going to tell me that you would do what you did for Colonel Sheppard and give this random human his life back? He’s only food to begin with, right?”

“
You
were only food to begin with,” he snarled, stalking closer. He held up his feeding hand, close enough for her to see the slitted mouth pulsating. She shivered but didn’t step back. “Feeding is excruciatingly painful for the human, Fair One,” he said, and his name for her sounded almost like a curse. “It burns, and you will feel it as your body shrivels, as the life drains from you and I consume you. It is not some gentle sleep.”

Jennifer drew in a shaky breath. “Which is exactly why I’m not going to let you do that to anybody else as an experiment,” she said. “Experimenting on an unwilling subject, on a prisoner...that’s wrong. Beyond wrong. Which would narrow the choices to me or Teyla, and she wouldn’t be as reliable a test subject with her Wraith DNA. Which… which leaves me.”

“Leaves you for what?” Teyla asked, her boots clacking softly on the floor as she entered the lab. Guide bowed his head to her as if she really were his queen, before replying.

“This one wishes me to feed upon her,” he said, still sounding angry. “I have expressed my reservations about this plan.”

Teyla smiled thinly, after a moment, as if he’d added something else with telepathy, and for the hundredth time, Jennifer kind of wished she could hear what they were saying. She turned to Jennifer, her hairless brows furrowed with concern. “To test your retrovirus?”

“We have to know if this works. You know as well as I do that we don’t have a lot of time here. It’s like every time Rodney has tried something that would either do what it was supposed to or blow up.” Her voice shook on his name, but she pushed on, thinking of all the times he’d given her that triumphant,
I’m the sm
artest man in the universe
grin. “Sooner or later you’ve just go to flip the switch.”

Teyla shook her head. “But to risk your life for a test...”