STARGATE ATLANTIS: The Furies (Book 4 in the Legacy series) (6 page)

He changed clothes and put some random dinner something in the microwave, then opened the fridge again. Why not? He pulled out a beer and popped it open just as there was a huge crash of thunder and the lights went out.

“Aw, crap.”

He went over to the floor to ceiling windows in the alcove with the dinette table and looked out just as the first spray of rain dashed against them, the fall thunderstorm he’d seen coming breaking over the city. Horns honked eight stories below, the swirling raindrops illuminated by the bright headlights of a big red Circulator bus, opening doors between stops to let two dashing women with their purses over their heads onboard. The traffic lights were out, and the lights across the street, but up toward the Hill the lights were on, streetlights two blocks away. Just the local transformer then. Well, he could wait for dinner.

Jack sat down at the dinette table with his laptop and opened it, behind glass as microdrafts threw rain horizontally against the window.

September 22, 2009

Hey, Carter…

…you’ve been missing for twenty six days now. Well, not missing missing. Not MIA. Just disappeared. You’re probably perfectly fine. You, and your ship and Atlantis. Everybody’s perfectly fine. It’s probably just something wrong with the Atlantis gate or something, so that you can’t dial in and send a databurst.

It’s probably not that it’s been destroyed. That the
Hammond’s
been destroyed. I’m sure everybody’s ok.

We had Woolsey’s second hearing today.

And there wasn’t much to say about that. There wasn’t much he could tell her that wouldn’t look like stuff above her grade level when it went through Landry and Caldwell and everybody else, wasn’t stuff Walter needed to know for water cooler gossip at the SGC. And if she never read it…

He wasn’t going there.

It was pretty interesting. Don’t know how it will all come out.

Translation: it sucked, and they’re probably going to sack him. Jack took a long drink of his beer. Probably he should have gone to dinner with Woolsey. He’d get some dinner that way.

But he might also kill him, which would be bad. He wasn’t sure who he could really stand to see right now.

It’s raining here, a hell of a thunderstorm. The power’s out, but I’m on the laptop. Dick says to give you his best.

Well, he would say it. Although he’d probably say something like “Do you think they’re all right?” and Jack would have to say, “Sure, of course they are. Just because they disappear for a month or so doesn’t mean a thing. This is Carter and Sheppard. They’re fine.”

We’ve recalled
Odyssey
and Mitchell is champing at the bit to dial in when they get back to Earth with their ZPM.

As soon as they could dial Atlantis, they would. And Mitchell would be the first one through the gate, Mitchell and Teal’c and Daniel and Vala…

There was a loud pounding on the apartment door, and Jack reached for the sidearm that of course he wasn’t wearing. This was Earth. Not that it was always safe. And usually people rang the bell. Of course the power was out, so they probably couldn’t.

He was nearly at the door when a familiar voice called through it. “Jack? You there?”

“Oh for crying out loud.” He opened the door on the tall, hooded and dripping wet specter outside.

“Hi, Jack,” Daniel said.

“Hi, Daniel.”

Daniel pushed back the hood of his rain jacket and shook his wet hair like a dog. “The power’s out,” he said.

“I know.”

“I walked up eight flights.”

“Good for you,” Jack said.

“I was in the neighborhood,” Daniel said. Fifteen hundred miles from Colorado Springs. “What are you up to?”

Jack glanced back at the glowing laptop, the only light in the apartment. “Oh. I was just emailing Carter.”

“That’s what I figured,” Daniel said, his head to the side. “But it’s dark in here. Come get some dinner with me. There’s an Irish pub up by Columbus Circle that’s really good, and we won’t have to catch a cab in this haywire traffic.”

“We’ll get soaked,” Jack said.

“I’m already soaked.” Daniel said. “Hot boxties. Guinness.”

“Ok.” Jack went back in to look for a jacket that wasn’t his uniform overcoat while Daniel prowled over to the window, looking out at the traffic while carefully not glancing at the laptop screen.

“They probably blew their gate up again,” Daniel said. “That happens.”

“Yeah.”

Daniel looked at him squarely. “We’d know. This isn’t it.”

“It never feels like it,” Jack said. “It likes to catch you like a gut punch. It never plays fair.”

There wasn’t anything to say to that, so Daniel just shrugged. “I thought I’d stay until
Odyssey
gets in.”

Jack let out a long breath. “I’ve got a flight to Peterson the day before.”

“I’ll come back with you then. Mitchell will kill me if I’m not there the second
Odyssey
arrives.”

“Right.” For a second he thought Daniel was going to say something. He’d probably rather not hear it. So he put on his jacket instead. “Pub by Columbus Circle, huh?”

“Yeah.” Daniel smiled. “It’s good.”

Jack made sure his keys were in his pocket, came out and pulled the door shut. “Woolsey got massacred today.”

“Tell me about it,” Daniel said, and he did, for eight flights down.

Jennifer
shook her head. “Teyla, I don’t know. Are you sure about this?” The cup of coffee she’d brought back to her desk was going cold, and the file she’d just opened on her computer was sitting untouched. When Teyla had come in, she’d expected — well, she didn’t quite know what she’d expected. A request for aspirin, maybe. God knew the last few weeks had been one big headache. But not this.

“It is the only way,” Teyla said seriously. “I cannot attack a hive ship with a cruiser. I must persuade Waterlight that Colonel Sheppard is not worth winning the anger of Steelflower, and sway her with the Gift if she will not see reason. For that, I must be able to speak with her as an equal. As a Wraith.”

Jennifer nodded. “I can’t say I love it, but it makes sense,” she said. “I just wish I knew the long-term effects of doing this to you again. If there are any. When we first came up with this procedure — ”

“You assured me before then the procedure is completely safe, and completely reversible,” Teyla said, sounding a little frustrated. “Is that not still true?”

“Yeah, but at the time I thought it was a one-time thing. I didn’t think I’d be turning you into the Michael Jackson of the Pegasus galaxy.” At Teyla’s puzzled look, she winced. “Really famous singer with a
lot
of plastic surgery. Who died recently, so that was a pretty terrible thing of me to say, actually — ”

“Will you not help me?” Teyla asked. “I do not wish you to do things that you believe to be wrong, but time is limited, and Colonel Sheppard’s life is at stake.”

Jennifer raised her coffee cup to hide her frown. She knew Colonel Sheppard would say he wasn’t worth what she was about to do, but she also knew that it was Teyla’s job to put herself in harm’s way. She was getting used to patching up soldiers so that they could go out and get hurt again the next day, treating their wounds and their symptoms until they’d used their bodies so hard that she had to send them home.

And if she was starting to have doubts about whether that was what she’d taken the Hippocratic Oath in order to do, this wasn’t the moment for them. “All right, then,” she said. “Let’s get busy turning you into a Wraith.”

The anesthetic looked like water as it dripped down the tube, colorless and harmless. But then, vodka looked like water, too, and Jennifer had had enough bad hangovers in college to know that appearances were deceptive. Too many drinks at too many frat parties she’d been way too young for, all in the name of trying to fit in when she was a junior in college at sixteen. If she’d known she’d end up standing here in an alien city in another galaxy about to turn one of her friends green, maybe she wouldn’t have bothered trying so hard to be normal. Maybe she would’ve been friends with guys like Rodney, like Dr. Zelenka, the ones in the anime club, who’d hung around the science hall wearing superhero t-shirts.

It was all too easy to imagine Rodney as he must have been at eighteen, pudgy and unshowered in a faded Batman shirt, and she closed her eyes as pain pricked, sharp as the hypodermic in her hand. She couldn’t afford thoughts like that now, not in surgical scrubs and mask with Teyla unconscious on the operating table. Not with so much at stake.

Jennifer took a deep breath and counted slowly as she exhaled, grounding herself firmly in the present, feeling the weight and pull of her hair fastened into a bun at the base of her skull, the slight pressure of the elastic holding her cap and mask in place. This wasn’t the time for anything else. Not her life outside. Not her feelings. Not even her patient, because you can’t operate on your friend or a five-year-old or a man who looks like your father or a young mother of two. There was only the procedure. Only each precise action in the silence.

It was harder working without Todd’s input, but she had extensive notes and photos from last time. The facial surgery was first, and, like last time, it made Jennifer wish she’d paid more attention during her plastic surgery rotation. She’d done well, but at the time, she’d hated the idea of spending her life doing nose jobs and facelifts instead of actually saving lives. She hadn’t imagined she’d wind up needing the same skills to turn beauty into a beast.

Even without much experience, though, it was simple to find the hairline scars left from last time and re-open the incisions in order to insert the silicone implants that gave Teyla’s brows the bony contours of a Wraith’s. The sensor pits on either side of her nose were trickier, requiring dyed silicone and skin adhesive and some swearing beneath her breath, but by the time Jennifer was finished, they looked the same as last time.

The hand surgeries were more difficult, requiring an hour each to put implants in each finger to lengthen them and more silicone to give her knuckles the bony ridges of a Wraith. The fake feeding slit was a challenge as well, constructed similarly to the nasal pits but ringed by temporary tattoos to simulate lips. But the moments blurred, faded, and while she was dimly conscious of the beeping monitors showing Teyla’s vitals regular and steady, of her own knees and feet that wanted a rest, those things seemed insignificant. Like only her eyes and hands were alive.

While the adhesive on Teyla’s hand set, Jennifer turned her attention to her teeth, using strong dental adhesive to attach the fanged caps. She’d never wanted to be a dentist, either. Too messy, and nobody liked you, a lifetime of bad breath and crying kids. She’d thought about oncology because of her mom, but she hadn’t wanted a lifetime of that many dying patients, either. But surgery — surgery wasn’t about the patient, not while she was in the operating room. It was about fixing a problem, and it was only afterwards that the person became real again.

After the teeth, the rest was easy. She’d worked out the right drugs with Todd’s help last time. The first was designed to engorge and darken her veins, making them stand out black against her skin. The second spread throughout her body quickly, bonding to the melanin in her skin and giving it a greenish cast. Jennifer wasn’t sure how she’d have done the same to someone paler, and was glad she didn’t have to figure that out. The last IV push was the drug to send Teyla’s oil glands into overdrive, making her skin look slick instead of soft.

A glance at the monitor told her the drugs had made Teyla’s blood pressure spike, a known risk. Teyla usually ran somewhere around 110/70, ridiculously healthy, and she wasn’t in an immediately dangerous range now. Even so, Jennifer made a mental note to keep an eye on that.

She stepped back and pulled her mask down, breathing the cooler, drier air with relief. The band of her cap was itching, too; fully back to herself now, back in her own skin, she noticed that as well as her aching back and thirst. Teyla was stable and not likely to wake for at least an hour yet, so Jennifer took a moment to snag a bottle of water and sat down by Teyla’s bedside, her eyes on the monitors.

All that was left was cosmetic, putting in hair extensions and dying Teyla’s hair black, and applying and polishing long, clawed fake fingernails. Not exactly doctor’s work, but Jennifer had done her own experimentation with hair dye and fake French tips in college, and you could find instructions for just about anything on the Internet. You could buy just about anything online, too, like the cat’s eye contact lenses they’d had sent over from Earth last time.

The hair would have to wait until Teyla could sit up, but the fingernails would be easier while she was unconscious. She applied the acrylic nails she’d carefully filed to sharp points and waited for them to set, shaking the bottle of green nail polish. Green-wich Village, the label said. There was probably a college student wearing the same nail polish sitting in a New York coffee shop right now, some girl with Teyla’s eyes who had never heard of the Wraith.

Teyla’s skin was already beginning to change color as Jennifer took her hand and gently stroked color on her thumbnail. Her skin felt smoother, too, and a little cooler, its normal brown changing quickly now to a black-marbled green. The nail polish really was her color, Jennifer had to admit. For a moment she imagined a Wraith queen frowning at bottles of nail polish, trying to choose a shade of green to match her skin. Maybe they did.