Chapter Text
It was unlike anything he’d ever seen before, was John’s first thought after he rematerialised in another galaxy, in a city that existed thousands of years before humans had mud huts. But then his attention was drawn away from that by Sumner’s orders for an ATA-negative recon team to scout the immediate area; they’d decided against allowing ATA-positives to switch anything on accidentally.
And then Weir was talking, giving the speech she’d no doubt practised over and over again.
“This is it. We’re here. Welcome, everyone,” she said, standing in front of the gathered crowd of people and materials. “Thanks to all your hard work we made it through with everything we’d planned, as far as we can tell. So congratulations. But the hard work isn’t over: already we have teams out, scouting the area to see just where it is we are. We’ve got a lot to do, and we don’t know how long we’ve got to do it.”
John tuned out again as Sumner’s voice buzzed in his ear. There was something all the command staff had to see, apparently. Weir wound up and then joined him for the walk to Sumner’s location.
“What do you think it is?” she asked, her voice a mixture of curious and worried; really, Sumner could have found pretty much anything. He’d read some SGC reports that put the Twilight Zone to shame.
“I’m scared to say,” he replied easily. He liked Weir. She was strong and confident, and stood her ground with Sumner. Soon enough they knew anyway.
Sumner stood at what was best described as a window, looking out into vast blue nothingness. Not sky; the entire city was underwater.
“Ah, yes, exactly what I wanted you to see, Elizabeth!” said McKay. “We’re under water.”
“I can see that, Rodney.” Her expression was serene. Still, John assumed she was just holding in the panic, because it looked pretty fucking bad from his angle. “What do we do about it?”
“How the hell am I supposed to know?” croaked McKay. “The Ancients must have submerged the city for some reason, maybe to keep it safe? It’s got a shield, look, so we’re okay for now.”
“For now?” questioned Weir.
“Yeah, for now?” echoed John.
“Power levels spiked when we arrived. It’s likely the city’s been in sleep mode since the Ancients left. Us coming here, with, what, 68% ATA-positives? We woke it up.” He grimaced. “We’re looking for the ZPM chamber now.”
“What-PM?” John found himself saying. It wasn’t the time to quip, but it never was, was it? He grinned despite himself.
“ZedPM. I’m Canadian,” replied McKay, not missing a beat. “Once we’ve found it we can try to hook up the generators.”
“So what do you recommend, McKay?” said Sumner, speaking for the first time. “Reel the scouts back in, restrict ATA-positive movements, what?”
“What? Yes, yes, yes,” he said. “I’ll go with one of your teams to see—”
He got cut off by the radio.
“Rodney, Dr Weir—you have got to see this now.”
It was Beckett. He caught Rodney’s look of horror and nodded grimly; another thing they had to see? Hopefully he’d just noticed they were under water.
*
When Rodney saw what Beckett was doing, he nearly screamed. He didn’t, and instead shut off the chattering Ancient woman hologram before it did any more significant power damage.
“I said not to touch anything! No ATA-positives in the initial recon teams! Damn it, Carson,” he said.
“Well I really think she has something you want to hear, Rodney,” he replied. “I think I can do it without the pretty lights if you’d like.”
Rodney huffed but nodded anyway. It had sounded like a message—probably to whoever came back for the city. To them, he supposed, although they weren’t the intended recipients.
That voice echoed through the room again, and everyone gathered listened to it intently. It described how the Ancients, outnumbered by a foe of comparable strength, were pushed further and further out of the Pegasus Galaxy. How soon, the human life they had seeded through the galaxy was lost to them. How Atlantis alone stood as the last bastion of defence and then—they’d submerged the city the depths of the ocean and run back to Earth, where untold years ago they’d run away from something else.
It had echoes of Earth’s own situation, of the chaos and uncertainty the Expedition had left behind. Only to stumble into a galaxy the Ancients themselves had fled from—fled back to the place that had nearly killed them so many years before.
“Well, shit,” drawled Sheppard. “What’s the phrase? Out of the pan, into the fire?”
“There’s still a lot we don’t know about the situation. We need to take stock of what we know and come up with a plan of action. Rodney – I need Dr Zelenka to supervise Machine analysis of the situation. Then you need to see if there’s anywhere we can dial out to. Colonel, I think you and your people should take the opportunity to move equipment from the gate room.”
“Before or after I work something out for the power?” He sighed. “No, no, I’ll get Chuck or Chad or whatever it is to do it, and Zelenka can help me with the power; Kavanaugh can cover the analysis, it’ll be Machines doing it anyway.”
“Whatever it takes, Rodney,” she said, which signalled the discussion was over. He didn’t bother waiting around for them to decide what else to do. He grabbed Sheppard on the way out and headed to where they thought the ZPMs were housed.
*
They’d solved the power crisis temporarily; hooking up four of their naquadah generators fixed the immediate problems but didn’t appear to help the long-term situation much. Still, Elizabeth counted it as a win. They were here, they were—safe. That was enough for now. They’d sent out two off-world teams to scout some planets Chuck had found stored in the Ancient database.
Rodney was still off somewhere, no doubt trying to get something online, and Carson was gushing over the infirmary they’d found. That meant Elizabeth was alone in a room she’d decided to claim as her office, assuming they didn’t have to evacuate the city. Rodney had assured her there’d be some way of raising the city; all it would take is a database search.
There was always a catch. They had trouble interfacing their devices with the Ancient tech, and it was unlikely the database would be easy to search. The sea could come crashing down on top of them before they’d even decoded the welcome message. The system had become even more difficult to navigate after they tried to run Machine analysis, so they’d had to stop almost as soon as they’d started.
Automated defence turrets had been installed in several key areas, and from Elizabeth’s own location she could hear the inane, disturbing chatter from one of them.
‘Please don’t kill me. I don’t want to hurt you.’ The Machine voice was chilling, and eerie, and it sounded far too sincere for comfort. That was of course the point: it was meant to warn, to serve as an unnerving warning that one more step would cause—probably death, if they hadn’t used a modified ‘zat gun as a base for the tech. It was programmed to know friend from foe, and to have a strict set of circumstances in which it could fire—but it still bothered Elizabeth they had them at all, even if they were a hard-won concession.
She stood in her office and looked down at the gate room. Already they had started off-world operations; Elizabeth thought it was too soon to go crashing about and alerting the native Pegasus cultures to their presence, but the current situation left them few alternatives.
Machine analysis in this situation was a Godsend. The technology had been developed in the late 90s and before the advance was leaked to the public the SGC purchased it and its scientists and ringfenced the whole affair. By the end of the decade the SGC used so-called Machine analysis to help in decision making and planning, and specialised programs were even set to optimising BC-303 design to produce the BC-304s. Now, Elizabeth had set it to thinking about which of the options they’d thought up would be best.
What was worrying was that so far it had recommended relocation to a defensible, not-underwater, site—which was so almost not an option that Elizabeth wondered why they included it. In the event of FUBAR Protocol, as General O’Neill had called it, Earth fleet would relocate to Pegasus Galaxy. If the city went dark they would have nowhere to go.
Then a message from Sumner’s off-world team made her swear, and she promptly left all thoughts of the future behind.
“Dr Weir? We’re going to need some marines and a nuke. We have a situation.”
*
Teyla Emmagan was strong. Strength was abundant in the Pegasus Galaxy. The strong survived, and the weak were stamped out, destroyed after every Cull. The Athosians were strong. They would endure, as they always had. But the Earthers, the strange people who had come through the portal—she did not know if they were strong, if they could be strong, in the face of the Wraith.
They had told her their world did not know of the Wraith, had never suffered a Cull. She had suggested that they return, then, and never set foot off-world again—and from the reaction she had had, that was not an option.
And yet the Earthers had a look about them that reminded her of those she had seen in Pegasus: a coldness born of fear, of running, the strength of a cornered animal. So she had asked leading questions, traded titbit for titbit, and the one named Major Sheppard, John, told her some of what they were fleeing from.
She did not want to tell them to what exactly they had come to, but she found the strength to do so anyway. She took John to the caves, their place of refuge and to the old city itself. She told him of the Wraith and of the horrors they brought, the devastation that came to every generation.
And then once more the Wraith came to Athos, came to cull their herd. The Earthers were not spared, and nor was Teyla. She prepared for the end, and turned to offer words of—of not comfort, as the Wraith Hive was not a place for that—but she was rebuffed.
The one called Colonel Sumner assured her that his people would come. They would not sit in the dirt and mourn their losses. They would fight and win, and bring their people home. She had asked what if they could not bring them home, what if they too were crushed under the power of the Wraith?
He had told her that if his men were lost, his people would make the Wraith burn, and destroy the Hive.
Teyla Emmagan was no fool. She did not believe Sumner understood the truth of the situation, the harsh reality that came with the Wraith—but his words gave her much to think on. What sort of people were these Earthers, to believe so strongly in their own might that even foes such as the Wraith did not scare them?
*
John had killed people before. It came with being a soldier—it was what he did, what he was trained to do. But this was something different. Sumner had been dead the moment that thing, the Wraith, had touched him. The native woman, Teyla, the Athosian, had said so herself.
He’d still killed his superior officer in the field. Someone would probably run Machine analysis on the situation later before they wrote a report—John had learnt about that from Jackson—and that would likely decide his fate.
Then he got the hell out of the ship and nuked it to shit. He didn’t even feel guilty: these aliens treated humans like cows, and sucked out their youth. He didn’t feel like any nuke ever used in history (and apparently, the SGC had used them a few more times than people knew about) was more justified than this one. If they were lucky, Teyla said the other Wraith, untold thousands, would still slumber and remain unaware of their presence.
What Teyla didn’t know was that Earth was unlucky as shit when it came to aliens. He’d read the files – a promising alliance with the Asgard, the Roswell greys, floundered because humans were still ‘too young’. Other advanced aliens, the Nox, thought they were too violent, too aggressive. Fuck that shit – they were already involved, and without advanced weaponry the Goa’uld would just steamroll them.
Probably were steamrolling them. Bound up in in the anxiety and fear about the now was a queer kind of survivor’s guilt—which was totally misplaced given the current situation.
He laughed, and probably worried the other people in the Puddlejumper – not Gateship, never Gateship. He didn’t care. They were probably going through the same shit. His earlier quip about pans and fires was fitting in so many ways, so he laughed again.
McKay would probably find it funny, anyway.
*
Sumner is dead, ma’am. The words stuck in Elizabeth’s head like nothing before. On their first off-world mission they had suffered casualties, not just to themselves but to the indigenous population, and on top of it all they’d nuked an entire ship full of sentient, thinking aliens.
It did not leave a good feeling in her mouth. Or anywhere. This was supposed to have been doing it right, avoiding all of the mistakes they had already made in getting here. And the first thing they did was interfere in native conflicts and detonate nuclear devices for a quick, decisive victory.
And then to learn that these aliens, the Wraith, had a way of sending messages that might not have been prevented before their destruction—Elizabeth did not feel at all positive.
She had been debriefed by Major Sheppard, had spoken with Teyla of Athos, with Halling and a dozen others. Sumner’s death was a mercy, both to him and to the Expedition. If it prevented the Wraith from finding a way to Earth, to the Milky Way, then it was a necessity.
They had to open the city to the Athosians, of course. Their home had been destroyed, and it was still unclear whether the Expedition had simply been unlucky or if it was their own presence that had caused the problem in the first place.
And that of course had only worsened their immediate problems, boosting the power consumption and reducing the time left for shield coverage. She had already begun moving essential equipment off-world to an uninhabited planet the Athosians had provided them with. It was disheartening to sa goodbye to the city after so little time, but as the Ancients before them had known it was necessary to preserve the city for those who could come back to it, and raise it safely.
“Elizabeth? Power levels are critical. I suggest we are leaving now.”
It was Zelenka. If the order came from him and not Rodney, that meant it was serious. Rodney had a flair for the dramatic, but it was likely he was trying to do what he could to keep the shield up for as long as possible.
“Atlantis, this is Dr Weir. Prepare for evacuation immediately, Evac Protocol D.”
She exited her office quickly, but was knocked back as the city itself started to shake. All around her she could hear people shouting, could hear to pitiful wails of the turret gun—please don’t hurt me—and she knew they’d waited too long.
The shield was failing, and the city was going to flood—except it wasn’t, and Elizabeth staggered away to get a better look.
The city was rising. It had left the ocean floor and was climbing, climbing towards the surface.
“Elizabeth? Are you seeing this? The city had a fail-safe. We’re not dying. We’re not dying!” crooned Rodney over the radio.
She was seeing it. She had never seen something so beautiful. It was like—it was like tangible hope. As the tall spires of Atlantis poked above the surface the shield failed in strategic points until the whole city rested calmly atop the waves.
“Atlantis? This is Dr Weir. Forget my last message. We’re home.”