Prologue

 

There were no letters to write.

 

Elizabeth Weir had sat down at her desk, turned on her computer, and opened a new document before she’d realized that the entire sequence was unnecessary. The bleak custom had become so familiar that it now felt wrong to skip it. For an odd moment, she considered writing the letters anyway, as if committing the words to paper might ease her burden in some way.

 

It was my great privilege to work with your son for the past ten months…

Your daughter’s strength of spirit shone through in everything she did…

This may be of little comfort, but his sacrifice saved more lives than you can imagine…

 

She’d composed far too many such letters over the course of nearly three years. Each was unique and sincere, but at the core they all said the same things, and none of them fit this situation. Giving up, she closed the document and leaned her elbows on the desk, letting her head sink into her hands.

 

A soft knock on the doorframe forced her to pull herself upright. John Sheppard stood there, looking about as tired and beaten as she felt. She wondered briefly if maybe she should write the letters and address them to him.

 

“Got a minute?” he asked simply.

 

“Of course.” Elizabeth gestured toward the chair in front of her desk. Her military commander stepped into the office but didn’t take the chair, instead standing with his hands clasped behind his back in a kind of parade-rest position. The stilted decorum of it looked strange on him, and it unnerved her.

 

“How are you holding up?” she asked, because it was the only thing that came to mind.

 

John offered a small shrug, barely detectable. “I don’t know how to answer that question.”

 

She knew the feeling. “You went to the mainland before I got back.”

 

“I had to tell the Athosians what happened. It was…tough. They took it about like you’d expect—they’re survivors. But it was tough.”

 

His features were controlled, as always, but it was clear that he was weighing a decision. At last he exhaled sharply. “Look, there’s no easy way of doing this, so I’m just going to get it over with.”

 

Bringing his hands out from behind him, he took a step forward and laid a plain white envelope down in the center of her desk.

 

Elizabeth realized what it contained almost before he pulled back his hand. That recognition only amplified the ache that had long since settled into her chest. She looked at the envelope for a long moment, then glanced up at him. “You can’t really believe I’ll accept this.”

 

“Half my team is dead.” John’s voice was toneless. “Two good people, people who followed me because they chose to, not because of a rank. They deserved better.”

 

She couldn’t dispute his statement. “Yes, they did. But that doesn’t mean that you failed them. You’re blaming yourself for events that were beyond your control.”

 

For the first time since he’d entered the room, some of the tension in his frame seemed to abate, and his shoulders slumped. “Yeah, well, it’s starting to look like I’ve let far too many things get ‘beyond my control’ lately.”

 

“John, you’re doing a very difficult job with a constantly changing rulebook,” she said, doing her damnedest to sound unimpeachably reasonable. Though she knew—better than most—how difficult it could be to change this man’s mind, she had to try. “All of us have made mistakes. Yes, these last few days have been an absolute nightmare, but do you honestly think that this expedition would be better off without you?”

 

He didn’t respond directly, his gaze straying to the window, where the control room personnel were maintaining some semblance of business as usual. “I’ve never doubted my instincts like this before,” he said quietly. The admission surprised her into silence. “When I’ve improvised or gone against recommendations in the past, it’s always been because I had a clear picture of how to resolve the situation, and the benefits were worth the risks. This time…I got target-fixated. I lost sight of the big picture, and the expedition can’t afford that.”

 

“So you’re just going to give up?” Elizabeth demanded, startling herself with her vehemence. “Leave us to fend for ourselves? That hardly sounds like the John Sheppard I thought I knew.”

 

His eyes flared at her challenge, but too quickly he recognized the tactic. “There are a lot of officers better qualified for this position than I am, Elizabeth. Don’t think I don’t know how many times the SGC has told you that. Maybe it’s time you listened to them.”

 

“Your instincts and your experiences are exactly why we need you here,” she argued. “Do I have to remind you that, without your intervention a few weeks ago, a Wraith hive ship would have reached Earth?”

 

“Of course not.”

 

“And more than that—” Rising, Elizabeth leaned forward on the desk. “We balance each other out, you and I. We approach problems differently, and that’s what allows us to arrive at the best course of action for Atlantis. Everything we’ve been through out here has been faced together. Don’t ask me to bring in some new officer with no conception of that.”

 

They studied each other for an interminable time as she fervently hoped that she’d gotten through to him. More than anyone else, he’d been her anchor during her recent battle with the nanite infection, and she couldn’t imagine taking on the unending challenges of life in the Pegasus Galaxy without his support.

 

Finally, John dropped his gaze. “My decision’s been made. I’ll continue my responsibilities here until the SGC sends a replacement. I’m sorry.”

 

Elizabeth wasn’t about to let him go quietly. Drawing in a breath, she played her ace. “There’s just one thing, Colonel. As long as you wear the uniform of the U.S. Air Force, your duty station is their choice, not yours. And your commander-in-chief has been known to take my calls. This has always been a voluntary assignment, but I can make your transfer options very limited.”

 

His eyebrow lifted. “More limited than Antarctica?”

 

“Much more. Remember, there are Air Force bases without aircraft.”

 

There was no surprise in his expression; only resignation. “I had a feeling you’d say something like that.”

 

Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew a small object and placed it on her desk beside the envelope.

 

Elizabeth stared at it, her resolve wilting. “John, please.”

 

Defeat resonated through his voice. “I really am sorry, Elizabeth.”

 

He didn’t have any more words, and neither did she. Helplessly, she watched him leave her office, then reached down and traced a finger across the gleaming silver wings.

 

After allowing herself a few moments to mourn the end of something she couldn’t quite define, Elizabeth sank back into her chair and opened a new document on the computer. Given this development, Stargate Command would need a full report on the disastrous events of the past few days as soon as possible. She might as well get started.

 

 

Chapter One

 

Six days earlier

 

No matter how far from home a person drifted—and this was a fair bit farther than John Sheppard reasonably could have expected to drift—some things remained constant.

 

While the Ancient version of a washing machine bore little resemblance to anything Maytag had ever dreamed up, everyone agreed that it was awfully efficient. Still, there was only one room of the machines in the occupied section of Atlantis, and so laundry days often turned into a communal experience, much like in a college dorm or basic training.

 

In one corner, Teyla primly folded clothes and stacked them in a woven basket. Radek Zelenka had his head partially inside a dryer, muttering something that had to be a series of Czech expletives.

 

“Hate to break it to you, Radek,” John remarked as he entered, “but there’s nowhere in there for clothes to get stuck. If you’re missing another sock, you’d be better off checking your quarters.”

 

From the scientist’s glower, John inferred that any further cursing would probably be directed toward him.

 

“Your input is most helpful, Colonel, thank you.”

 

Teyla watched her team leader dump the contents of a large, nearly overflowing gear bag into one washer. “Do you change clothing more often than I realized?”

 

Her curious expression didn’t fool John for a second. “Very funny. No, I stick to one uniform per day, except when something in Rodney’s lab goes boom, or I have to crawl through ten thousand years of dust in the outer areas of the city, or—and I’m just picking an example at random—a recon mission turns into finger painting with six-year-olds.”

 

“The Rianns demonstrated deep trust by allowing you to interact with their young.”

 

“And I’m all warm and fuzzy about that, but even these spiffy Ancient washers took three cycles to get that green gunk out of my jacket.” As he spoke, a pair of brightly-patterned boxers slipped out of his laundry pile and glided to the floor, proving once again that this galaxy really was out to get him.

 

Eyes glittering behind his glasses, Radek peered down at the fabric. “Are those airplanes?”

 

With reflexes that surprised all three of them, John snatched up the shorts and shoved them into the washer. “Some people have differential equations. I have airplanes. You want to put money on which one girls go for?”

 

Radek was still searching for a response when Teyla offered, “I am not convinced that either design would have a noticeable effect on any interpersonal situations…at least, not a positive effect.”

 

Her sense of humor was becoming more Earth-like all the time. John flashed an approving grin at her.

 

Swiftly changing the subject, Radek asked, “Daedalus has finished off-loading supplies, has she not?”

 

Despite the innocence of the scientist’s tone, John knew damn well what the real question was. The ship’s arrival hadn’t become a highly anticipated event because Hermiod’s company was so enjoyable. “This morning,” he confirmed. “Mail call will probably be tomorrow after dinner.”

 

Radek broke into a wide smile, but an announcement over the citywide communication system cut off any reply he might have made.

 

“Unscheduled offworld activation.”

 

Not a big shock. These days they had more unscheduled activations than scheduled ones. The emergence of the Asurans had thrown a serious wrench into Atlantis’s standard operating procedure, assuming such a thing had ever existed. Having demonstrated in short order that they were not to be taken lightly, the replicator bastards had been testing the waters on a number of planets. They didn’t seem interested in conquest, just information—and the occasional opportunity to put some of their revitalized, hard-wired aggression to use. And if they ran into a team from the city they were so obsessed with commandeering, well, that was just convenient, wasn’t it?

 

John’s team alone had run into them on three separate worlds and observed that their tactics had changed each time. He had a different word for the situation, and it wasn’t family-friendly. On each mission, the team had hustled back home earlier than planned, often with weapons-fire singing past them all the way to the gate. He was willing to bet that Major Lorne’s team had just found themselves the lucky recipients of the Asurans’ attention this week. What fun.

 

A low rumble sounded, reverberating through the floor strongly enough for John to feel a faint tremor through his boots.

 

That, on the other hand, was not typical.

 

Apprehensive, he cast a glance across the room at Radek, finding him equally startled and equally concerned.

 

“That could not have been the jumper—could it?”

 

“No,” John replied, his resolve drawn less from what he knew to be true than from what he needed to be true. Granted, they were fairly close in the relative sense to the bay that housed Atlantis’s “puddle jumper” spacecraft, but for anything happening in there to be felt this far out…

 

The trio waited, all clearly hoping to hear a radio call that would reassure them. After a few seconds, the call came, but Lorne’s ever-present calm had obviously been shaken.

 

“Medical team to the jumper bay!”

 

Everyone reacted in the same instant. Teyla was the first one through the door, but John’s longer strides overtook hers halfway down the corridor. Adrenaline keeping his pace at something just below an all-out sprint, he barreled into the transporter at the end of the hall and reached for the control panel just as Teyla flung herself inside.

 

Instantly they found themselves outside the jumper bay. With his teammate on his heels, John burst through the hangar’s double doors and immediately was sucker-punched by a rush of smoke.

 

Almost before he could grasp the implications of that, the haze began to clear, whisked out of the cavernous room by some kind of Ancient fire-suppression system. When he could see, he reflexively wished for the blindness back.

 

Jumper Five, having returned from its first mission after a long grounding for maintenance, was now grounded in the ugliest sense of the word. John was surprised that the craft had made it back at all. One of its engine pods was now a blackened gash in the jumper’s side.

 

“Pro boha,” murmured Radek from behind them, breathing heavily from the run.

The jumper’s hatch opened with a weary shudder. “Some help here!” yelled Major Lorne from the rear compartment, seemingly trying to perform triage on three of his men at once.

 

Beckett would be here in seconds, no doubt, but seconds looked to be a precious commodity. John dashed up the ramp to one wounded Marine, Teyla to another. The Athosian smoothly took the field dressing out of Lorne’s hand and knelt down to stanch the blood flowing from the sergeant’s upper leg wound.

 

“They reacted so freaking fast, sir.” Shaking his head, Lorne addressed his CO while turning his attention toward a corporal with a messy laceration above his right eye. “It was almost like they were anticipating us. And that hit on the engine pod—Colonel, I swear to God that we did everything we could think of.”

 

“I don’t doubt it, Major.” Dropping to his knees with an inelegant thud against the unforgiving deck, John glanced at the remains of the jumper’s first-aid kit and then at the face of the lieutenant lying beside it. Harper, he recalled. Matt Harper. Less than two years out of ROTC at Oklahoma—or was it Oklahoma State? Another mom-and-apple-pie kid, another officer who’d done everything ever asked of him and now had a hole in his chest to show for it.

 

John swallowed a curse and leaned in to apply pressure to the wound. Time to be The Colonel. “No lying down on duty, Harper. That’s strictly a commander’s privilege.”

 

Harper blinked at him with unfocused eyes. “Sir,” he managed. “Don’t know…what happened.”

 

“Doesn’t matter right now,” he said, forcing himself to ignore the blood welling in the young man’s mouth. “Just hang in there, all right? You’re gonna be fine.”

 

Harper’s response was a weak cough and an expression of growing fear. As he feebly reached out, John seized his wrist with one hand, maintaining pressure with the other. “Hey,” he offered, aware that he sounded just a little desperate. “Remind me again where you went to school. Was it OU or OSU? It’s almost football season back home, and I can’t be mixing up my guys’ loyalties when the game tapes start coming in.” Even as he finished the sentence, the Marine’s eyes were sliding shut. “Lieutenant! Stay with me here, damn it—”

 

He felt Harper’s breath stutter just as Carson Beckett and his team moved in to take over. As John got to his feet and climbed down from the hatch, Teyla came to stand beside him, her features deeply saddened. They watched the medics, hearing the even-toned instructions passed back and forth as if working on nothing more than a broken finger. John suspected Teyla wasn’t convinced by the calm. Having flown his share of med-evac missions half a lifetime ago, he sure as hell wasn’t.

 

When Beckett finally sat back on his heels, exhausted and defeated, John felt a familiar numbness creep into his bones. Turning away, he stripped off his sweatshirt and let it fall from his hand, the garment stained beyond repair with Harper’s blood.

 

**************

 

Although Rodney McKay’s presence wasn’t strictly required at the M1X-030 debriefing, he thought it prudent to show up anyway. For one thing, he wanted to know what had so thoroughly destroyed the jumper’s engine pod. For another…well, it was an unwritten rule that no one skipped out on a debriefing after an expedition member had been killed. It would have been disrespectful, somehow, not to hear the report, even if Rodney had no desire to know the details of the lieutenant’s demise.

 

In the briefing room, Major Lorne sat ramrod-straight in his chair with a hardened stare. Rodney took a seat next to Colonel Sheppard, who was hunched over his coffee mug, giving off don’t-mess-with-me-today vibes. It was a warning the scientist rarely heeded, but this morning he decided to be magnanimous and resist pointing out that the Colonel’s hair was sticking up in back in ways that couldn’t possibly be intentional, even for him.

 

And people thought Rodney was incapable of tact.

 

“I’ve scheduled the memorial service,” Elizabeth began, sliding into her own chair. “Tomorrow, shortly before our scheduled check-in with the SGC, so we can send Lieutenant Harper’s body back then. We’ll also need to pack up his personal effects to send back for his family.”

 

“I’ll take care of it,” Sheppard said before she could turn to him, not looking up from the table. Of course he’d take care of it. He always did when they lost a Marine.

 

“Thank you.” Elizabeth leaned her forearms on the table. “Why don’t you start at the beginning, Major?”

 

“By now you probably know the basic story as well as I do, ma’am.” Lorne delivered his after-action report dispassionately. “The Asurans apparently have assembled a network of human intel. We’d barely been in the village half a day when one of our guides started getting twitchy around us. He tried more than once to get us to split up. When we finally called him on it, he took off. We tracked him into the ruins, and that’s where the Asurans got the drop on us.”

 

“How many?” Elizabeth asked.

 

“Three—two with weapons and one who looked like a scientist or a doctor. That one came at Sergeant Dunleavy. I’m pretty sure he was planning to do that hand-through-the-forehead thing and drag Dunleavy’s IDC out of him right then and there.”

 

Whatever else might be said about those sons-of-robots, they were persistent. Unconsciously, Rodney slid his hand across his right forearm, where the scar from a similar interrogation had faded from everyone’s sight but his. A Genii with a knife or an Asuran with a mind-probe—either way, it added up to bad guys who wanted their city, and he’d never been big on sharing.

 

“They pursued us.” Lorne seemed aware that he wasn’t being blamed for the results of the mission. Still, his voice was taut, frustration barely held in check. “Lieutenant Harper was hit about a hundred yards out from the jumper, but he made it inside. I cloaked us as soon as the jumper powered up. I guess it wasn’t fast enough, because they shot something big at us and clipped the engine pod. It lost power immediately. We’re lucky the pod retracted for gate transit. As soon as we got back into the jumper bay, the engine blew.”

 

“Did you get a look at what they fired at you?” Rodney wanted to know.

 

Lorne shook his head. “Felt like a rocket-propelled grenade. It came from about the eight-o’clock position, so nobody saw it coming.”

 

Irritation prickled Rodney’s skin. At least with the Wraith they’d been able to procure some of the enemy’s technology for study. How was he supposed to counteract whatever the replicators were throwing at them if all he had was a charred husk of an engine pod?

 

“You did well to get your team out of there, Major,” said Elizabeth. “We’ll have to reexamine our security posture before we undertake any more off-world missions. If the Asurans want Atlantis badly enough to canvass this many planets looking for our teams, we may need to find methods of being more covert.”

 

“Perhaps my people can assist,” Teyla suggested. “There are still many trade worlds that may not know the Athosians have relocated to Lantea.”

 

“Thing is, these guys probably aren’t going to quit.” Sheppard pushed his mug forward and leaned on the table. “We need a better long-term strategy than ninja-Marines and Athosian stand-ins. What we need is a way to even the odds.”

 

“A weapon,” Ronon said, making Rodney jump a little in his seat. The Satedan spoke so infrequently in these meetings that Rodney tended to forget he was even in attendance.

 

Sheppard swung his chair around and pointed at his teammate. “Bingo.”

 

“The scientists have spoken of such a weapon in your people’s possession,” said Teyla. “Can the Daedalus not bring one here from Earth?”

 

Rodney was already shaking his head before she’d finished the sentence. He’d considered that option on half a dozen occasions and rejected it as futile each time. “Based on the paltry effect our projectile weapons have had so far, it’s a safe bet that the Asurans have strengthened the cohesive factors the disrupter would target. It was developed by the Asgard specifically to combat the replicators as encountered in the Milky Way Galaxy. While the Asurans may have started out their lamentable existence in that form, we have to face the fact that they have evolved significantly since the time of the Ancients—even more so than their Milky Way counterparts, which were infuriatingly adaptable in their own right. Should we be so fortunate as to surprise the Asurans with the disrupter once, their learning curve would render it obsolete immediately.”

 

“Which is why we need to come up with something better,” Sheppard countered.

 

“Oh, well, since you asked nicely,” Rodney snapped back. “Look, we have a lot of very bright people in this city, many of them with a disturbing talent for spectacular destruction. The same goes for the researchers at Stargate Command and at Area 51, not the least of which is Colonel Carter. She’s got a prototype of a new anti-replicator weapon in development. Unfortunately, these projects don’t provide instant results and, for better or worse, she has next to nothing to test it on. It’s not like this problem slipped anyone’s mind. We’ve been working on it, but occasionally even I have trouble saving the day on a deadline.”

 

“You could use a leg up?”

 

“A leg, a big toe—I’ll take what I can get.”

 

The Colonel swiveled back toward the head of the table. “Then I think it’s time to reprioritize P7L-418.”

 

Elizabeth’s somewhat shuttered expression now closed down completely. Rodney grimaced. This was bound to be interesting, and not in a pleasant way.

 

A few weeks ago, the linguistics division had briefed the senior staff on a recently-translated historical record from the city database. The battle for P7L-418 had been, up until the siege of Atlantis, the largest conflict of the Ancients’ war with the Wraith. The planet had housed a facility that the Ancients had seen fit to defend with the full might of their fleet. Rodney had started to doze off when the head linguist had begun listing all the assets involved, but he understood that over the course of eight days a large number of ships, on both sides, had been destroyed or damaged beyond recovery.

 

He’d snapped awake when the timid man had explained just what the Ancients had been protecting so fiercely.

 

“We’ve been over this,” Elizabeth said, her fingers tightening around a pen. “The records implied that the facility on 418 was used primarily for weapons development. It also implied that high-risk testing was conducted there. That could mean any number of things, many of which may involve extreme hazards to our personnel or others.”

 

“There’s no way to know unless we take a look,” Rodney pointed out. “If I can get my hands on a prototype weapon or even some of their notes, it might be enough to provide a jump-start on something we can use the next time any replicators come out to hassle us.”

 

“And if the research was flawed?” Elizabeth asked quietly.

 

She didn’t elaborate, but Rodney got the inference; it was the reason he’d agreed, however reluctantly, to steer clear of P7L-418 during the first round of this debate. A year ago they’d thought the abandoned Ancient project on Doranda would solve all their problems, and that hadn’t gone too swimmingly for them. Or for the better part of a star system.

 

“We’ve learned that lesson,” Sheppard replied, making an obvious effort not to glance over at Rodney as he spoke. “We’ll approach anything and everything with all due caution. If it’s a dead end, it’s a dead end. But how could we be better off just sitting back and hoping an easier solution presents itself?”

 

Atlantis’s leader had faced off against heads of state in two galaxies. She wasn’t likely to simply cave in now. “The database is extremely vague about the aftermath of the battle. We know the Ancients drove the Wraith away from the planet, but a later record makes reference to the facility eventually being abandoned.”

 

“Because they were losing the war and the fleet had to be recalled to defend Atlantis.”

 

“We can’t be sure that was the reason, John,” Elizabeth maintained. “If the work being done there was so critical that the Ancients spent eight days and half a dozen ships protecting it, why would they then give it up?”

 

Rodney fielded the question. “The obvious possibilities are that they either lost interest in the research or took everything useful with them.”

 

“Or something catastrophic happened.” Elizabeth looked at him. “Did you get any details out of the database that even hinted at what they were working on?”

 

“Only in the most general terms. As best I can tell, the facility was a directed energy lab, which means there’s a chance it met some kind of nasty radioactive end.”

 

“Which is why the SGC keeps sending us shiny new MALPs,” Sheppard insisted. “If the scan is clear, I don’t see any reason why this mission should be more dangerous than any other, and there’s an opportunity for a major gain. What am I missing here?”

 

As much as it pained him to admit it, Rodney was in complete agreement with the Colonel. “This might give us the edge we need.” When Elizabeth’s eyebrows climbed in surprise at their tag-team approach, he explained, “I recognize and accept your points. I accepted them the last time we discussed this, but that was before we started running into firefights on every other planet. Circumstances have made it no longer advisable to ignore the potential of this facility. If directed energy research was conducted there, it’s possible I’d be able to find something that would exploit the Asurans’ molecular cohesion with more success than a standard disrupter.”

 

Sitting back in her chair, Elizabeth pinched the bridge of her nose. “I understand. I just hate the idea that this expedition seems to be turning into an arms race.”

 

“I’m not wild about it either.” Sheppard held firm, as resolute as Rodney had ever seen him in a briefing. “But I’m really tired of giving eulogies.”

 

It all came down to that, didn’t it? Rodney had a healthy sense of self-preservation, but even he could rationalize facing a potential hazard if it offered some hope of mitigating known hazards in the future. And the Asurans were a guaranteed hazard.

 

“I believe the journey to be worthwhile,” Teyla said. Ronon gave a curt nod of assent.

 

“All right. P7L-418 goes to the top of the list.” Elizabeth checked the calendar on her datapad. “Let’s aim for the day after tomorrow. But if anything doesn’t add up on that MALP scan, I’m scrubbing the mission.”

 

The Colonel nodded, already rising from his chair. “Pre-brief and MALP deployment at 0800,” he instructed his team.

 

Rodney followed him out when the meeting disbanded, the room’s tinted wall panels rotating with graceful precision to offer them exit. “I assume you realize that we really don’t have any idea what we’ll find out there,” he felt compelled to point out. “I mean, irrespective of the facility, we’ve got almost no data on the planet that houses it.”

 

Sheppard tossed him a smirk, though the humor looked a bit artificial. “In what way would that be different from usual?”

 

He headed off down the corridor. Rodney sighed. “Depressing but true.”