STARGATE ATLANTIS: The Furies (Book 4 in the Legacy series) (9 page)

Steelflower did not blink. “My dear Guide,” she said evenly. “You are as always the model consort.”

“Four hundred men,” Thorn said tightly. “We are reading four hundred men aboard your hive, and shields are raised. Is this how you bring alliance?”

“Guide is tender of my safety,” Steelflower said. “And sometimes overzealous. Guide, drop your shields immediately so that Queen Waterlight may see that I intend no betrayal.” So intent was she upon her consort that perhaps she did not even notice that the human’s hand had tightened on her ankle.

For a moment Guide hesitated as though he would not obey, but then he bent his head in deep respect again. “As Queen Steelflower requires,” he said.

“Shields are dropping,” Bronze said at the sensors.

Steelflower looked at Waterlight. “I thought it best if I came to talk to you alone, rather than with Guide and a full hive. I thought that would seem as though I wished to intimidate you, rather than speak as queen to queen. And so I asked my consort to follow after. But I fear he values me rather too much, and did not wait as long as I said.”

Waterlight’s eyes were shining. “What other would do as you do?” she asked, “To come alone and speak with me as kin, when you might have had me beneath your guns and simply demanded my compliance?”

“That would be the act of an enemy, not a sister,” Steelflower said.

“Then gladly I name you sister and ally,” Waterlight said.

“As I name you,” Steelflower replied.

“My Queen?” Guide said. “Will you not come aboard your ship?”

“I would prefer to travel aboard the Eternal,” Steelflower said coolly. “Come to me there and make your report.”

“As my queen wishes,” he said, and the transmission ended.

“I must return to my ship,” Steelflower said to Waterlight. “I would hope that we may yet speak further, but it seems my consort is eager to speak with me. No doubt some matter has arisen he feels needs my attention.”

“Of course,” Waterlight said.

Guide met them in the corridor outside the docking port, and there were many expressions of respect all around, Thorn to Guide, Waterlight to Steelflower, before the portal closed and they stood within the skin of the cruiser Eternal, Steelflower, Guide, and the human John Sheppard.

Guide watched as the portal iris closed, and the cruiser disconnected from the Promised Return, floating free between the two hive ships.

“What in the hell is going on here?” Sheppard demanded.

“I was about to say the same thing,” Guide echoed.

“I am surprised you ask,” Teyla said, turning to Guide, her long coat like a blade’s swirling around her. “Since you are the one who told me where Colonel Sheppard was.”

“This was not what I had thought Carter would do,” Guide began. “It is…”

“Wait.” Sheppard held a hand up. “Todd, you told Teyla where I was?”

“I told Colonel Carter where you were,” he corrected. “Though I had no doubt that she would share that information with the Young Queen. And that she would take steps to insure your release.” He swung back to Teyla. “What are you playing at with Waterlight and Thorn? Do you have any idea the stinger’s nest you are getting into?”

“Wait,” Sheppard said again.

Guide stopped, his eyes on his face. “Yes?”

“Thanks.” Sheppard was disheveled and dirty, but his back was straight and his eyes level. “I appreciate it.”

Guide huffed, almost a laugh. “It was nothing, I believe the expression is.” He shook his head, turning back toward Teyla, looming a foot over her, and yet she looked as though it didn’t even occur to her to step back, unarmed and inches from his feeding hand. “But this masquerade is unexpected, and throws all into disarray.” He shook his head again. She was Steelflower to the core, and though he knew it was false he could not fail to respond to her as though she were the Queen she pretended. She might wear a human body, but there was no mistaking the strength of mind that dwelled within. Were she Wraith indeed, she might have been a great queen. “I do not know what you hope to gain.”

“Besides Colonel Sheppard’s release?” She lifted her head, her beautiful hair rippling at the movement in the soft shiplight. “We have tried and failed to gain access to Dr. McKay. Perhaps Steelflower can prevail where Teyla Emmagan failed.”

“Not now that you have now branded yourself enemy to Queen Death!” Guide snapped, not disguising the fear in his mind, not from her. “And myself as well! Do you not see that this is the cruiser Eternal, and now Thorn knows so as well, he and all his crew? This is one of Death’s ships.”

“Not any longer,” Teyla said, her chin rising proudly. “It met with an accident.”

“And I shall have to explain to Queen Death why my queen is raiding her scoutships!” Guide exploded. “She will hear of it, and then she will want your head!”

“She can come and get it,” Teyla said.

“And she will not have to look far for mine, or that of my men!” Guide snapped. “But that is nothing to you. We are Wraith. If you were Steelflower, you would have a care for the men of your own that you thus condemn to death.” He stalked away, finding some respite in motion that took him away from her. “You will disappear again, and I shall dwell with your folly. I gave you all you needed to do this cleanly, as I did with McKay!”

“You didn’t tell us McKay was Wraith,” Sheppard said.

“I did not know that,” Guide snapped. “Do you think that I am Death’s Consort, to be privy to all her secrets? I have gone too far as it is.”

“And not far enough,” Teyla said, taking a step after him, her hand rising as though she meant to take his wrist. She glanced back at Sheppard, her golden eyes inscrutable. “We cannot be half allies, Guide, as we have tried to be.”

He swung around wondering what madness she and Sheppard had concocted between them, but Sheppard looked as baffled as he.

Her hand closed on his wrist, her mind touch firm and strong as a queen’s, intimate as a lover’s, not compelling but simply persuading him of her honesty. “We must be allies or enemies, Guide.” Her eyes held his. “Queen Death will destroy us all if we do not stand together against her.”

“Allies?”

“All of our counters unmasked on the board,” she said.

He looked at Sheppard behind her. “And you think I will believe that you will put all your counters on the board?”

“As much as you will,” Sheppard said.

“John,” she snapped, though she did not look around. “Can you not see that we cannot do this without him?”

“Get McKay back or defeat Queen Death?” he said.

“Both.” Teyla spared him a glance over her shoulder, her hand still on Guide’s wrist. “She will crush us both if we do not act together, and then she will destroy all civilizations in this galaxy that have any technology.”

“She would take us back to the days after the First Armada,” Guide said, and the taste of the words was bitter in his mouth. “What lovely promises we had in those days! Once the Ancients were defeated, we should have plenty. Once cities lay in rubble, we should feast. But you know what came, John Sheppard. When the predators outnumber the prey, they turn upon one another. When the prey are hunted to extinction, what then shall we feed upon? You did not believe me before when I spoke of husbandry, but this one did. Teyla Emmagan has lived as a predator in the woods and fields, and she knows.”

She nodded. “We do not overhunt, because if we do in time to come we will starve.”

“Queen Death overhunts, and in destroying she will render us starving in no short time unless we find your Earth. But it will not be easy pickings if we find it, and if we do not, then we will starve.” He gave Sheppard a mirthless smile. “I believe it is intended to be motivational.”

“Burning your ships on the beach so you can’t retreat,” Sheppard said. “Nice.”

“In the years after the war your numbers dropped until you were almost extinct,” he said. “Groups of wanderers making brief shelters in broken buildings, in caves, flirting with genetic viability. And we starved too, knowing that if we took too many we might eat today, but there would be none tomorrow. And how should there be? Your kind take many years to reproduce and to grow to adulthood. If we cull more often than once a generation, soon the numbers will begin to drop and then there will be none.” Guide paced away from her, from her hand on him. “And so the long hibernations were born, to sleep through the years between one culling and the next, waking for a year or three in twenty, and then sleeping again. In each interval our prey might reproduce, and in time replenish the ecosystems.”

“And that is the core of it,” Teyla said quietly. “You need us. And we need you. The peoples of the Milky Way will keep you from Earth. That is assured. But I am not of Earth, and there is a limit to what they will do here, a limit we have very nearly reached. The people of Earth will not send enough ships to defeat Queen Death, and we will die.”

“Teyla,” Sheppard began.

“Truth for truth, John,” she said, her eyes on Guide’s. “They have neither the power nor the will to conquer this galaxy. They will leave us to you, and you have already seen where that will end.”

Guide took a long breath, perhaps the longest of his life, very long and very strange indeed, his eyes upon this one with the seeming of a young queen but who was not. She was kine. Or half kine, the product of a twisted experiment which had given an animal the semblance of a person, the mental voice of a woman. His answers should be clear, and yet they were not.

His true queen would speak thus, once and away.

His eyes slipped past her to Sheppard. “And when we are done, Sheppard? When we have defeated Queen Death together?”

Sheppard put his head to the side as he had done once, escaping Kolya’s prison together. “All bets are off.”

“All bets are off,” Guide said gravely.

Sam slept
aboard the
Hammond
, no matter what was going on in the city. To do anything else would give the wrong impression to her crew. It was one thing to use the office above the gateroom in Sheppard’s absence. That was a matter of convenience. But she slept shipboard. She might be the senior officer on station in Atlantis, but she was the commander of the
Ham
mond
.

Besides, that office was borrowed. This was home.

Her cabin was the largest on the
Hammond
, nice enough if you didn’t mind having your feet in the shower to brush your teeth. There was a small single bed built into the wall, storage space beneath it, the other wall occupied by a metal desk similarly bolted down. The chair wasn’t, as that would be really annoying. The wall between the door and the desk held a closet ten inches wide and a bolted on mirror. Above the bed a framed picture of the
Hammond
was likewise screwed in with four big screws.

Her laptop was on the desk, sharing the cramped space with her mp3 player and its mini speakers, currently blasting ABBA at the top of their tiny voices,
When All Is Said and Done
from one of the late albums, her email open on the desktop. There was nothing new from outside Atlantis, of course. It had been nearly a month since the last databurst. There was nothing she hadn’t read twenty times, nothing she hadn’t replied to.

But still.

September 24, 2009

Dear Ca
ssie,

Sam looked up at the pictures held to the wall above her desk with magnets. There was Cassie smiling back at her, her mortarboard on her head, Jack with his arm around her grinning like a loon. Cassie had a bottle of champagne in her hand, and was holding on to her mortarboard with the other hand, a smile that ought to light the world on her face. Yellow letters printed across the bottom of the picture proclaimed ‘Congratulations Class of 2009!’

It was hard to believe that the young woman in the picture was the mute child they’d rescued so long ago, the one who had clung to her in the darkness waiting to die. Now she was the assistant’s assistant for an organization that helped refugee children around the world, the kind of starting position that a liberal arts degree got you these days. Mostly, she answered the phone.

I hope you’re doing ok, and that work isn’t too boring. It probably is, but it’s a start. There aren’t many jobs where you get to save the world at twenty two.

Sam hoped that didn’t sound too sanctimonious, or like the kind of letter Jacob had sent her when she was twenty two.

When she was twenty two she’d been in Saudi Arabia, part of the build up called Desert Shield. Her top ten class rank at the Air Force Academy had at least won her that. Not a top posting to a top squadron, not F-15s or F-16s, the best of the best, even though she had more than earned it, but at least she could shuttle a Warthog around behind the lines. Congress forbade women to fly in combat positions. It didn’t matter how much she deserved it or how well she had done, or even how much her superiors wanted to give her the chance. Congress said that her uterus disqualified her. The American public would not stand for women being killed.

She’d been bitter. Of course she had been. Bitter, and certain that it would not be long before that asinine rule was overturned.

Nineteen years later it was still here, ignored more than obeyed, gotten around by a generation of Air Force commanders her age who came up with baroque excuses to avoid saying they were actually sending women into combat, actually letting them compete on a level field with men. Congress hadn’t budged. But more and more positions were open to women, at least in her service.

Technically, captaincy of the
Hammond
wasn’t a combat position. Technically, the
Hammond
was a research vessel. Of course officially the
Hammond
didn’t exist, which made it much easier to ignore that its captain was a woman.