Twilight of the Fifth Sun: Lantern 1/4
Title: Twilight of the Fifth Sun: Lantern
Author: Tzzzz
Category: McKay/Sheppard (eventually), AU, crossover SGA/SG1
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~37,000
Spoilers: Hide and Seek
Betas: Thank you inkscribe , dossier , gaffsie , and corposant for betaing, reading, and prodding.
Summary: The Earth has been destroyed and John and Rodney have been evacuated to Atlantis. In this chapter, the search for John's father leads the kids to interesting new people and more adventure than they bargained for.
Chapter 1: Lifeboat
Twilight of the Fifth Sun: Lantern
So, let's recap. December 21st 2012, the world ended. People in America were asleep, or in the middle of a particularly amusing late night skit in which Conan O'Brien had his eyebrows waxed. The Hong Kong stock exchange was up. A skinny blond girl was just about to be crowned Australia's Next Top Model. A flock of birds was lost somewhere above the pacific ocean and the last living member of the order plesiosauria was watching the sunrise over a Scottish lake. There was a coup in progress in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in the forests of Colombia, John Sheppard Senior continued to wage a war whose outcome would be forever undecided.
If you're looking for reassurances, there's only one: it was painless.
***
Meanwhile, in a galaxy far, far away, John Sheppard Junior was letting Rodney McKay pull him to his feet. He didn't want to do the whole fainting damsel thing (especially not when Rodney was the one who had screeched like a girl), but his knees were rubber-weak from treading water against the current and he felt the adrenaline flow out of him like the water dripping down his neck.
"Easy. Take deep breaths," Rodney ordered. "I said deep, you idiot!" John might have been amused if he didn't feel like he might cough up a lung any second now.
A few feet away, three Marines were giving CPR to the woman he'd pulled out of the ocean. Her skin was pale in the light of two moons, her lips a hollow crystalline blue and her hair a dark mass gripping her face like claws. He stumbled backwards, suddenly afraid. He'd never been this close to death before. He'd never held it in his hands.
He shuddered, transfixed by the swift efficient motions of the Marines. They'd clearly done this before.
Then there was a hand on his arm, stronger than the small, willowy body it was attached to might suggest. Rodney was thin, almost boney; John could tell from the way his ribs pressed up against John's back, holding him up. He had a strong jaw and blue eyes that shone with panic and concern. He was the first person who looked, really looked at John since he'd gotten here, something that allowed him to lean back into the meager warmth the other boy provided. "Jesus, it's not that cold out here. How can you be like an ice cube? C'mon, we need to find you some dry clothes before you die of hypothermia."
"I'm not going to die," John snapped, still watching the medical scene unfolding before them.
"You could if you go into shock. Come on." Rodney gave a put-upon sigh, reaching for John's shirt. "What in the hell do you think you were doing back there?" he whispered. "You could have drowned!"
"So could that girl," John coughed, pointing to where the medics were hastily yanking a mask over the girl's face.
"She wanted to die!" Rodney whispered back. "Who knows who she could have lost back on Earth?!"
"She didn't really want to die." Suicide was for cowards, or at least John's father had always said it was.
"Yes, and you know this because?"
"I just do," John replied, looking away from Rodney to where the gurney and the medics were disappearing into a nearby building. He didn't feel like accepting the jacket Rodney was wrapping around him, but he could feel shock settling in, like the time he'd fallen off the roof of Mr. Henderson's old barn and broken his leg.
"Hey! Watch it!" John batted his hands away. "What do you think you're doing?"
"Take off your shirt and you can put on your hoodie."
Right, he'd forgotten that he took it off before jumping in the ocean. Even though the night was warm, John felt numb, grateful to Rodney for maneuvering his limp arms into the sweatshirt and zipping it up.
It wasn't until he saw several people in grey uniforms running towards them with a gurney that John remembered that he wasn't supposed to be here at all. He didn't know who these people were or what kind of military base this was and he had no idea what they'd do if they caught him wandering around on the other side of the city from where he was supposed to be. As far as he knew, he was one of the few people who hadn't known about this whole thing from the beginning. He didn't want to think it, but this could have been part of the plan. "Come on," he turned to the other boy, "we have to get out of here."
"No," Rodney ordered, even as John struggled weakly in his arms. "We're staying right here until we get a medic to look at you. There is absolutely no way you're dying on my watch, even if it is due to your own monumental stupidity. That was an alien ocean you took a dive into. Who knows what kinds of toxins you might have swallowed?"
John shrugged. "It tasted fine to me."
That comment apparently warranted an eye roll. "Yes, because sea water is such a delicacy. You're lucky you didn't get eaten by a two headed alien whale. Now, I think we came in over here," Rodney pointed to a panel in the metal wall of the building. "Though it's hard to tell. I got lost in the MoMa once, took my parents hours to find me. But then again, all modern paintings look pretty much the same so it's a wonder anybody has ever found their way out of there at all. Hey, do you think--"
Did this kid ever shut up? "Look, Rodney," John growled. "My body, my risk to take, and honestly, I'd rather risk a cold, even an alien one, over whatever punishment a group of soldiers who pulled me off of a planet without any cause or warning might have for me."
"Hey, they saved you from the apocalypse. I'd call that a good cause."
John shrugged. "You don't know that. Now, seriously, let's get out of here before they notice anything." The gurney with the rescued woman was already departing and once the immediate crises was over the soldiers were bound to notice that there'd been some people around to do the rescuing.
He had to admit that the two of them weren't particularly stealthy, with John coughing and barely on his feet and Rodney complaining in the worst whisper John had ever heard. "Are you sure about this? Because nothing screams guilt like running from the scene of the crime."
"Saving a drowning girl isn't a crime, Rodney."
"Then explain to me again why we're running away?" And also John really hoped Rodney knew where he was going, because so far as he could tell they were headed for a wall.
"Now the door was around here somewhere. It just appeared when she walked up to it. Motion sensor maybe. I think we came in over here," Rodney pointed to a panel in the metal wall of the building.
John pushed away from Rodney, shivering as he propped himself up against the wall and wondering where the hell the door could be. Was it possible that Rodney had the wrong building, despite the fact that John didn't see another one within 100 yards?
"Open sesame," John sighed wearily.
They were both surprised when the wall slid open. "There is no way that worked," Rodney grumbled.
"I think this city might be telepathic." John shrugged, trying to play it off as not a big deal, though in reality it was seriously cool. He just didn't want to freak Rodney out more than he already seemed inclined to be.
"And I think you might be crazy, not to mention masochistic and utterly deluded. And how is your hair still sticking up?"
John shrugged again. "You wouldn't happen to have a spare pair of pants, would you?"
"You mean you didn't bring any?" Rodney looked incredulous, if not downright horrified.
"They pulled me out of school. I just have these wet clothes and my backpack, though I don't know what good Basic Calculus, Topics in US History and Macbeth are going to do me out here."
"Calculus, huh? I'm auditing a class on topology over at the university, or I was before the whole--" Rodney waved his hand as though that explained it. Jesus, as though the destruction of a whole fucking planet could be encompassed in the wave of a hand. "Then again, maybe you're here for your lemming-like instincts and not your brains."
John shook his head. "I wouldn't be here for being smart." Though the occasional teacher would try to convince him otherwise. "I," he looked down at the dry sneakers he clutched in his hand. "I'm not sure I'm supposed to be here at all."
"Yes, well, now you are. I doubt they're going to open up another Lorentzian wormhole and boot your scrawny ass back to a non-existent planet, so there's no use dwelling. Head over to the bathroom and I'll bring you something to wear."
John nodded, making his way slowly through the sleeping crowd to the bathrooms. Ironically, he really should have remembered his towel. But the moment the thought crossed his mind, he felt a warm jet of air, like a blow dryer, skirt against his chilled skin. John sighed, slowly extracting himself from his wet pants and leaning against the wall with his forehead pressed into its cool metal panelling.
So this was it: an alien city in the middle of an ocean, with body dryers and telepathic doors. The ocean had seemed endless and the moonlight too bright and he wondered if this strange metal island floated as alone as he felt on this planet. Were there continents? If there were forests on this world, were they teaming with life, strange and wonderful? Maybe they'd sent a refrigerator through along with all the people - a frozen Noah's Ark like the shaving cream bottle in Jurassic Park. Perhaps they'd populate the desolate forests with jaguars and grizzly bears and they'd flourish here like they hadn't in the presence of so many people. Or maybe John would never see another animal again in his lifetime, not even a dog or a cat.
He'd stopped even the pretense of drying himself when the door slid open and Rodney stepped inside, before immediately turning around, covering his eyes and holding out a pair of sweatpants, fluffy looking (but mismatched) socks and Superman briefs. "I wasn't looking," he announced. "Though, speedo-tan? Seriously?"
John felt himself blush. "Thanks." He grabbed the clothes and started pulling them on.
"I'm sorry if you prefer boxers, or if they don't fit or anything, it's just that I don't find the idea of a perfect stranger's junk rubbing up against the inside of the last pair of sweatpants I might ever own to be particularly appealing. And who knows when we'll be able to do laundry? It might even be some kind of sonic cleaning method, which while seriously cool and theoretically even more effective against pathogens than soap and water, still strikes me as kind of gross."
By the time Rodney was done with his rant, John had pulled on the underwear and the pants (which only covered to about mid-calf and looked decidedly dorky). He grabbed a hold of Rodney's shoulder to pull on the socks before yawning and leaning a little against the other boy. "So, where are we sleeping?"
"We? No, no, there is no we. I'm going back to where I left my sister and you're finding your own martyr-shaped bedroll and hunkering down there. And you're returning my clothes in the morning."
"Yeah, about that," John ducked his head in what he hoped was a bashful and appealing way (he didn't want to have to beg). "I don't actually have a bedroll. I, um, came from the group over by the East Pier. That's why we're in here and not out there with the soldiers, remember?"
"Of course you did. Why would anybody listen to the guys with guns when they ask you politely not to go exploring and to stay in your designated areas for your own safety and protection in a city filled with telepathic doors and God knows what?!"
"I thought you said my 'telepathic doors' were a delusion."
"Yes, well, you obviously believed it and thought it was a good idea to go traipsing around anyway, not really helping your case for sanity."
"So you'll let the crazy person stay with you then?" John tried for charming, but he could never tell if that worked.
Rodney gave probably the most put-upon sigh John had ever heard before nodding. "Fine, but you get the military-issue blanket. My sister and I have very sensitive skin. Eczema runs in the family, though through careful use of moisturizing products, I've managed to protect myself."
That statement was just begging for some kind of playful barb, but John ended up yawning instead. It had been a long day and he'd just taken a swim in an alien ocean, not to mention the disastrous event he wasn't even acknowledging at this point.
"C'mon," Rodney ordered (not that John had a choice, considering that he was being pulled by the sleeve). "You look exhausted."
John had been hoping that Rodney's sister would be seventeen and gorgeous, with Rodney's same blue eyes and obvious (though also obviously annoying) intelligence. Instead he got a girl not more than six years old with blond Shirley-Temple-esque ringlets, snuggled beneath a pink comforter. Rodney slid in beside his sister, who turned instinctively into his warmth, before handing John an Army-green blanket.
"Thanks," John yawned, spreading it out (though he had to curl his legs in to keep his feet from sticking out the end). Rodney was right - it was a little scratchy, but better that than pink and totally gay. He looked over at Rodney, who was tucking his strangely endearing ski-jump nose into the face of what appeared to be a pink unicorn. "Goodnight."
"'Night," Rodney replied.
This was how they began their life on a new world.
***
Rodney awoke to a harsh hacking sound and an over-warm shivering body pressed up against his side. He was used to waking with a head resting on his stomach or an elbow in the chest (the price of a little sister) but he'd never be accustomed to the harsh cough coming out of John as he struggled in his sleep. How could Jeannie sleep through that death rattle? Rodney moved quickly to try to wake the other boy and get him propped up. Hopefully he wouldn't hack up any mucus onto Rodney and Jeannie's only blanket (even if the thing was covered in pink unicorns, it was an important possession).
John did nothing more than groan, a dead weight against Rodney's chest as he maneuvered his fevered body up. Alien pneumonia. Rodney hated always being right. Well, not the being right part, because he definitely enjoyed that, but the being right about bad things bit. But it looked like John had been a little bit right as well, because one of the Marines from earlier, Soldier Barbie, was striding over to them through the crowd, a kind of sidearm straight out of Star Trek held carefully at her side.
John didn't even stir as she approached, just turning his head into Rodney's chest and coughing some more.
"I knew you'd show yourselves eventually," Soldier Barbie smirked. "Now, how about you tell me why you two went running off while clearly in need of medical care?"
"We saved a woman's life!" Rodney exclaimed. Trigger-happy Barbie should be congratulating them, not standing there with her hand on a weapon and motioning to the two other Marines in the building to back her up.
"And we're all very happy about that, but nothing says guilty like running from the scene of the crime."
"That's what I said!"
Her glare managed to be both challenging and chilling at the same time. "And yet you still made a run for it."
"He made me," Rodney gestured to a still-sleeping John, glancing around him nervously at the half-awake refugees around them who were starting to gawp and stare. "He thought we'd get in trouble for leaving the compound. I told him he needed to see a doctor and, speaking of which, he's currently dying of alien pneumonia, so would you mind moving it along please?"
"Bates?" she spoke into her radio. "We've found them. Everything is under control. We need to take the swimmer to the infirmary. The other one's all yours."
Rodney was too preoccupied with John coughing himself into wakefulness to pay much attention to Soldier Barbie, or her name when she tried to introduce herself: Lauren Cartman or something.
"That was very brave what you did back there," she said, reaching out to pat John's shoulder. Rodney was gratified to see him flinch away. Who was she to make pronouncements like that anyhow? As though they even cared what she thought.
"If by brave, you mean suicidal and moronic."
"It was brave," Barbie retorted.
"He wouldn't have even had to, if you'd been doing your job and keeping watch. I mean, how lax does security have to get in order for you to let depressed people just wander about with a great big suicide pit of an ocean a stone's throw away? She just walked right up to a wall and it opened for her! Is that really all it takes? And furthermore, if it's up to two kids like us to do the rescuing, then your little military contingent here is woefully--"
"That's enough," Cartman snapped, not seeming intimidated in the least. "What's your name anyway?"
"McKay. Rodney McKay."
"Well, McKay, you are going to talk to our lead security officer," she nodded to one of the other soldiers who had materialized behind her, "while I take your little friend to the infirmary."
She grabbed John roughly by the arm, dragging another hacking cough out of him. He tried to pull away, but either he was too weak or she was tougher than she looked.
"Sorry, sweetheart, but we need to get you some oxygen and warm bed, ASAP. Hey, Stackhouse, why don't you get over here and help carry the kid?"
John finally succeeded in yanking himself away from the soldier's grasp, but it cost him, making him double over in another coughing fit. "No, I can walk," he protested hoarsely. "Please."
She looked skeptical, but reached out a hand to pull him to his feet.
"Just give me a minute." John waited for her to nod and turn away before he gestured Rodney closer and whispered. "Listen, I know you don't owe me anything, but could you do me a big favor?"
"How big?"
John looked like he wanted to make some sarcastic comeback, but with an ever increasing number of Marines and bystanders hovering nearby, he didn't have much time. "Just-- find my father, John Sheppard Senior. He'll know what to do."
"Okay, kid, time's up," one of the Marines said, grabbing Rodney by the shoulder. "Time for a quick chat with Sergeant Bates."
"Promise me," John whispered, as Soldier Barbie put a guiding hand on John's arm and started leading him through the crowd and out the door.
"Promise," Rodney was forced to shout after him, before another Marine was shoving him forward and away from where Jeannie was currently curled up, small and alone beneath her pink comforter. She looked almost doll-like in the moonlight, too angelic to be real. These guys had to be real heartless bastards to leave her alone and vulnerable like that.
"Wait, you big oaf! What about my sister? I just can't leave her here!"
"Just a quick word with Bates and I'm sure you'll be free to go. With all the security threats of the evacuation, the man doesn't have time to waste on kids. We'll have someone look after your sister. Don't worry."
Somehow Rodney was less than reassured by that, but what else could he do? Struggle and make Jeannie watch him get dragged off by a group of fascists? He looked over at where she was still slumbering soundly. Rodney crossed his fingers, hoping that she wouldn't wake up alone.
***
"For the last time, what were you doing outside of your designated area at three in the morning?" Sergeant Bates, as it turned out, was a short, anxious man with caramel colored skin and dark, darting eyes. He was also criminally stupid and possibly trigger-happy. Rodney glared.
"I already told you: I followed the woman."
"And what were you doing up at that time?" Bates leaned forward, fixing Rodney with an intense stare. Unfortunately for Bates, staring contests were the one form of intimidation that didn't work on Rodney. He'd met enough chess and math competitors with more fierce stares than Bates. Bates' glare might had promised violence, if Rodney weren't a kid and Bates a member of an institution that generally did not favor beating children. But at a science fair, some of the kids were easily capable of building weapons of mass destruction, and smart enough to get away with it, so all in all, Rodney was only mostly terrified.
"Well, supposedly, we've just been evacuated from our planet because the whole thing's about to explode in a flood of zero point particulate matter, so excuse me if I was a little on edge. But since you're obviously a government-trained robosoldier I wouldn't expect you to understand."
Bates slammed his hands down hard on the table. "I understand plenty, McKay. My family, my little brother, they were all back on Earth. What I don't understand is how you know anything about zero point modules." Zero point modules! God, it was Chernobyl all over again, only on a mass extinction scale. The awesome power of science. It almost made Rodney not want the genius to wield that kind of power. Almost.
Rodney crossed his hands over his chest. "I'm not an idiot. In fact, I'm a genius. That's why you brought me here, isn't it?"
Bates stood, walking behind Rodney like every cliché interrogation scene in every thriller Rodney had ever seen. If he thought it might have done any good, Rodney would had wet his pants. "You might be a genius, but not even a genius can come up with ZPMs from just the news that we're evacuating, at least not without seeing something he shouldn't have."
"Maybe your monkey-brain can't understand it, but I'm just that smart." Rodney tried for confident, but wasn't convinced that he succeeded.
"When you tell me everything you know, we'll see who's a monkey brain."
"Oh, that's mature." Not that lack of maturity promised lack of bruising in the end. Maybe John was right about what these people would do if they caught someone outside of their section. Project Lifeboat had certainly been a legitimate product of the shadow organizations of many governments. Rodney's interaction with the CIA and CSIS proved this, and yet that didn't guarantee that these organizations followed the standards set by the laws of the countries that created them. Their very nature demanded they operate outside the established rules.
"It doesn't need to be mature. What I need from you is the truth. Why were you outside your assigned living area? What information did you access? Who is this other boy and how did he contact you? When you've told me these things, then I will maturely consider your release."
"I told you. I followed the woman because I was curious. I know curiosity killed the cat and though I really am a cat person, and I should obviously know better than to poke around secret alien bases when I have fascist American goons to threaten me, but I didn't, okay? I saw her walk out. I followed her. She jumped in the water, I called for help. The other kid appeared out of nowhere and saved her, end of story."
"And the ZPM?"
"Back on Earth, I heard a woman. The blond - you know the one: short hair, beautiful blue eyes. She said something and I put two and two together. If you had more than two brain cells to rub together and even a rudimentary knowledge of high energy physics, you would have drawn the same conclusion." Rodney finally sucked in a breath of air, summoning all the courage and confidence he had to fix Bates with a determined stare. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a six-year-old sister who's just lost her parents and her planet, no thanks to you morons, so if you'd show me back to the barracks--"
"What do you mean, 'no thanks to us?' We saved you. Seven billion dead and we saved you." Maybe Bates had been reasonable once, but Rodney could see the despair in his dark eyes. Seven billion dead. Rodney wasn't even sure the human mind was able of comprehending such a tragedy. He knew that his mind, as brilliant as it was, couldn't even come close. Seven billion atoms, sure. Seven billion stars. The finite infinity of the universe, but death on that scale and the death of potential, the infinite number of possible generations snuffed out in an instant. It wasn't necessarily impossible to comprehend, just too horrible a thought to undertake with your sanity intact. So he did the smart thing and forced himself to ignore it.
"And I'm grateful. Trust me, I'm grateful. But you people are the reason for those deaths. If nobody's stopped and explained it to you in language you can understand, it's not my fault."
"I don't know who you think you are but--"
Luckily for Rodney, Bates was interrupted by the door swinging open and the woman who had introduced herself as Dr. Elizabeth Weir earlier that day stepped through, flanked by two more soldiers. "What is going on here? Sergeant, have I ever given you the impression that it's okay to interrogate children?"
"Hey! I'm not a--" Rodney protested, before he realized that qualifying as a child meant he was disqualified from the interrogation.
"With all due respect, Ma'am, this 'child' has somehow gained knowledge of ZPM research. He's claiming that the SGC is responsible for the loss of Earth."
Dr. Weir ignored the question, preferring to fix Bates with a stern glare. "That does not make this acceptable. I understand you are facing a great loss. We all are, this boy included. And the only way we're going to get through this is by using thread of our common humanity to pull together, and that includes treating each other with compassion and respect. Until I have determined that the refugees from Earth have been settled, all security personnel will check in with a superior officer before disciplinary actions are taken, no exceptions. You will be reporting to Lieutenant Ford." She nodded to one of the men on either side of her. "Lean on each other; don't take your frustrations out on the people you are charged with protecting."
"Come with me, Rodney," she ordered, reminding Rodney of his English teacher, with her precise, distinguished speech and her tired, serious eyes. "I'll take you back to your sister."
"Thank you," he replied warily. She had long legs and walked at a pace that forced him to struggle a little to keep up. Her cheeks were flushed with exhaustion, but her uniform was pristine and she carried herself with a dignity that Rodney could appreciate. She was kind of hot for an old lady.
"I'm sorry about that. He's under a lot of stress, as you can imagine."
"It's no excuse," Rodney added crossly. He might have been just one child out of thousands of refugees, but he helped keep a woman from drowning today (even if John did most of the work). He had the right to protest a system that repaid his heroic nobility with interrogation and psychological warfare.
"No, it's not. And it won't happen again."
"How do I know that?"
"Lieutenant Ford will keep him in check. We're not monsters, Rodney. We're just a small group of people trying to accomplish an enormous task. Have patience with us." She lead him down a different corridor, leaving the other soldier in her detail behind with a nod.
Once they were alone, Dr. Weir stopped, grabbing Rodney's arm a little too tight for comfort. Even as she turned to him, Rodney could sense a little of her polished, diplomatic mask slipping. He wasn't usually this perceptive, but he supposed that maybe even this show of heartfelt emotion was strategic for her. "You really think that we did this?"
"Didn't you?" From the blond's comments, Rodney was almost positive, but he could have been mistaken. He wanted to be, because he couldn't imagine living controlled by the people who had destroyed his planet, his home, as dysfunctional as it might have been.
Dr. Weir half chuckled morosely, running a hand through her tangled hair. "You know, I haven't even had the time to discuss it? The evacuation is taking all of my attention and will be for at least another month." Rodney debated not answering, but she'd just rescued him from Practical Advanced Information Retrieval 101, so maybe he should get on her good side.
"Well, then I can give you a likely scenario. Your goon back there mentioned zero point modules, which I assume means that you've found a way to utilize zero point energy and I couldn't help but overhear that one of your scientists was talking about the modules charging themselves. Of course, the natural entropy of energy dissipation is such that the only reason they would do this on their own is from an overabundance of high energy particles in our own space-time. I can think of a few things that might do this. One is experimentation with zero point energy from our own universe, which people like yourselves, using zero point modules for power, might be interested in."
"Those experiments were being conducted here, not on Earth." If he'd heard that a day ago, Rodney would have been impressed. But now, how could he be, after those experiments had destroyed a planet?
"Well, then another explanation is some rift, possibly in subspace. Most likely at the core of the planet, where the available energy is the highest. But the effect of a wormhole shouldn't cause that." He snapped his fingers, thinking. "I know! It could be a phasing problem. An experiment to cross between dimensions, maybe."
"Merlin's cloaking device."
"Excuse me?"
"The Ori fleet was coming. We had no choice. We had to pull the whole planet out of phase."
"The whole planet?" Rodney gasped. All of this time when he'd been reading about it - he might have been out of phase even then.
Elizabeth nodded.
"Well, that is explains it then. The core of a planet is dense, very dense, and whatever device was used probably only had a limited capacity. You were dragging the dense core of the planet through subspace like an anchor. Who knows what kind of instability that produced? Enough to create a cascade of exotic particles, clearly."
"You mean--"
"You destroyed the world in order to save it," Rodney replied. He'd imagined this, or something like it. It was one of those scenarios that he dreamt up late at night, staring at the ceiling of his bedroom in the dark, unable to shut off his mind. After that whole fiasco with the CIA and the nuclear bomb, the principal had sat him down with a pile of history books as part of his punishment. So he'd grudgingly learned about Oppenheimer, and Fermi, and Szilard. The science traced back to Einstein and Rutherford, back to Newton and the Galileo and the quest for truth itself. It had been a quaint attempt on behalf of his small minded teacher to educate him about the dangers of the science he saw as only a game, but what he really learned from everything wasn't the lesson of Harry K. Daghlian, who'd died to the pursuit of knowledge, but the lesson of James Chadwick, and perhaps the greatest lesson of human history: that the creation of a destructive truth from science was as inevitable as war itself.
Dr. Weir gulped, stopping just outside the door of the hangar where he and Jeannie were housed (oh, god, Jeannie. He'd left her alone with these people!).
"I have to go. My sister--" he started.
She nodded, turning to him, her eyes shining with grief, maybe guilt. "You're a very smart boy, Rodney."
"Well, your government brought me here for a reason," he grumbled. Not that he wasn't grateful to still be alive, but he couldn't even begin to comprehend the magnitude of it. Maybe this woman could. She looked it, from the way she'd seemed to age years in the space of a few minutes. "I'm a genius."
"Yes, you are. And maybe, we'll be enlisting your help in the future." She smiled. It was hollow and condescending and indulgent in a way that made him positive that Dr. Elizabeth Weir had never had any children. She certainly didn't seem to have met any teenagers. He was brilliant, but she was also lying.
"Just do me a favor," he added at the last minute, already scanning the bustling room before him for Jeannie. "Let me visit John when he's recovered." Rodney didn't know why he said that. He didn't owe the other boy anything. He certainly didn't need another hanger-on to his brilliance when he already had Jeannie to deal with, but he'd made a promise. And Rodney McKay hadn't made very many promises in his life. Promises were a thing between friends, after all.
"John?" she asked.
"The other boy. The one who pulled the woman out of the ocean."
"Right. I'll arrange it." She squeezed his shoulder. He could feel how cold her fingers were even through the material of his shirt. "You did good, Rodney."
He should've protested that he didn't do anything, but then he spotted Jeannie, just by her purple corduroy jumper and her out-of-control blond curls. That botanist held her in her lap, rocking her back and forth and hugging her. Dawn had broken, the light shining down through the open panels of the hangar's ceiling and sparkling off the sea of groggily stirring refugees below, but in this sea of suffering, Rodney only had eyes for Jeannie.
They'd been on their own less than 24 hours and he'd already abandoned her, a six-year-old who'd just lost her parents. Thank god hell was a bunch of mumbo jumbo made up by moronic fanatics, because after this, Rodney would definitely be going there.
"I'll be in touch," Dr. Weir called as Rodney ran through the crowd, launching himself at the unsuspecting red-headed botanist and yanking his sister from her arms.
"Mer?" Jeannie sniffled, practically toppling him over when she wrapped her arms around his neck to be carried like a toddler. "Where'd you go?"
Rodney sighed. "I'm sorry, Jeannie. I didn't mean to go." He did his best to rock her, like the botanist had, but she weighed a lot more than she looked, so he ended up slumping back onto a nearby cot and rubbing her back in what he hoped would be a soothing gesture.
"Mer. I thought," she hiccuped, sucking in a sob. "Don't go. You won't go again?"
"Not if you don't want, Captain," he whispered, hoping she'd remember their game, when she was Captain Janeway and Rodney was Mr. Spock.
"No?"
"No." He tried petting her hair, but ended up getting his fingers tangled. "Don't you ever brush this monster? My god, and I get in trouble for bad hygiene habits!"
"But where did you go, Mer?"
"I stupidly tried to be a good citizen and there was this crazy boy and a fascist security officer and an strangely attractive diplomat and I got here as soon as I could."
"Kay," Jeannie murmured, burying her face in Rodney's shoulder with a yawn.
"She's been crying nonstop for the past hour," the botanist put in, staring at Rodney accusingly.
"Hey, it's not my fault! If you have a problem talk to that psycho, Sergeant Bates. And if you want to tell me what to do with my sister, well, get your own kid. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a little girl to put back to bed."
The building was beginning to buzz around them, with people already lining up for tea and water and restrooms, or quietly muttering among themselves, but Rodney laid his sister down on their cot, checking to make sure no one had stolen his laptops during the night, and settled at her side, pulling the pink pony blanket over them both and drifting off to sleep.
***
John woke up with a start. He'd dreamed of floating, all alone in an endless sea with nothing but a pod of whales circling him, singing a strange story of cities, sinking and rising, worlds ending, people dying. Their voices sounded melancholy but pure, like the even, echoing tone of the singing bowl used for meditation.
Something covered his mouth and his chest felt tight and bruised. He struggled into a sitting position, swatting at the thing covering his mouth.
"Easy, lad," a voice came from his left side, accompanying warm hands that felt his forehead and tilted him up into a sitting position. "Deep breaths. Don't fight the mask." The man had a thick brogue, like Scotty.
"What?" John blinked up at the unfamiliar bronze colored ceiling wonderingly. "Where am I?"
"The City of Atlantis, son. Remember your orientation?"
So it hadn't been a nightmare then. The whales were made up, but not the destruction. "Earth?"
John turned to his side to meet his Doctor's gaze. Like everyone here, the man looked tired and scruffy, but unlike some, he didn't bother to hide the red bloodshot look of his eyes, or the sticky tear tracks running down into a few days worth of stubble. "We lost contact, but we won't know until the Daedalus gets here to confirm it."
"Daedalus."
"Spaceship. They're a mite slower than the Stargate, but we'll know soon enough."
John wasn't sure he wanted to know. He looked away. If he watched the pain in the doctor's eyes much longer, he might be tempted to cry himself. And if he did that, who knows when he'd stop?
"I'm Dr. Carson Beckett, if I didn't mention it. And you are?"
"John Sheppard."
"Good, just let me enter that in and we can start the exam."
John nodded, moving away from Beckett's hollow smile to fix his gaze on the intricate patterns of the stained glass windows along the wall.
"Beautiful, isn't she?" Beckett asked, running his fingers along John's chest and then pulling out his stethoscope. "I mean, if we can't be on Earth," he paused for a moment to gather himself, "then I can't think of anywhere else I'd rather be."
The exam passed quickly, with much fewer tests than John had come to expect at the doctor's office. "Any pain?" Beckett asked.
"No, just aches all over. It was a hard swim."
"I'm sure it was. I can't imagine doing such a thing. But you're alive and not much worse for the wear. Let me just get you under the scanner and then we'll likely be able to pull you off the pressurized oxygen. Think you can stand?"
With Beckett's help, John managed to lie flat on a table that looked more like a computer console with a strange contraption, too small to be an x-ray, passing over him.
At John's questioning look, Beckett grinned a little. "Ancient scanning device: sees in marvelous detail."
"Ancient?" John asked. The thing couldn't be that old, if it was so high tech.
"Oh, that's just our name for the people who built this city and the Stargates. They were largely human, a race that lived ten thousand years ago. They abandoned this city and let it sink into the sea, only for us to revive it eight years ago."
"What do you mean by 'largely human'?" On Star Trek didn't they call it 'humanoid'?
"Well, we're actually somewhat of an offshoot of their physiology. They basically seeded humans throughout the galaxy for some reason still unknown to us."
"And they don't mind us using their city?"
"No, not that we can tell. They're long gone. They were so physically advanced that they were eventually able to abandon their physical bodies entirely. They live as pure energy now." He nodded in the general direction of the windows. "Rat bastards, if you ask me, but they're out there." He punched a few buttons on a strange-looking palm pilot before looking up and smiling at John. "In fact, they're in here as well. He pointed to John's chest. "You have the gene."
"What gene?"
"ATA."
"What do you mean?"
"Stands for Ancient Technology Activation. It means that sometime long in the past one of these Ancients was your ancestor, giving you the gene that allows you to operate their technology. Less than a percent of a percent have it, and only half of those strong enough to really use it. I'm more of the latter. You, on the other hand--" He offered John the palm pilot. "Take that and think about some part of the human body."
The second the thing touched John's hand, the screen flickered, displaying a diagram of someone's right shin.
"You have a good faculty with that, lad. Though why you'd think about a shin remains a mystery. When I was your age, I would have gone for something a little more female." He winked, leaving John to tinker more with the scanner.
John shrugged. "Seemed as good a part as any."
"Aye, I suppose so. Now what's that you've got there?" He gently removed the scanner from John's hands, examining the strange letters scrolling across the screen with fascination. "You've pulled up the Ancient database entry on shin splints, which you don't seem to have at the moment."
"I'm on the cross country and track teams, but it's off season. Shin splints suck."
Beckett nodded, still staring at the device. "Unfortunately, according to this the Ancients have little help to offer in that department, unless we can find the muscle regeneration machine they keep referencing. You know, I've never been able to use the scanner interface to access the database. And you took to it bloody quickly. I've never seen anyone express the gene this strongly."
"Is that a good thing?"
"Very. Dr. Gaul will worship the ground you walk on. Now, if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to run a few blood tests."
John wanted to protest, but no matter how friendly Dr. Beckett appeared, it was clear John didn't really have a choice. He looked away from where the doctor tied on a pressure cuff and focused instead on the curtained-off area to his right. "How is she?"
"Hm?" The doctor preoccupied himself with entering John's data into a tablet computer.
"The woman who came in with me: is she okay?"
Beckett sighed. "Physically, same as you. She inhaled a wee bit too much sea water, and we were forced to perform CPR, but she'll recover in time."
John knew adults well enough to know what Beckett wasn't saying, however. "But you don't think she'll survive?"
"I don't know, lad. She tried to kill herself, and I can hardly blame her. Seven billion people. We don't even know what she's lost." The doctor looked as though he'd lost things too.
"But she's not the only one who lost their planet. We're not all jumping off piers in the middle of the night."
Beckett shook his head. John cringed in horror. He hoped to God he wouldn't have to see this grown man cry. "No, lad. I've too much to do to be killing myself now."
"I just don't see the point." He'd give his life for something important, he supposed. But it'd have to be really, really important. And after all the people left behind, it seemed even more of a waste to give in now.
The doctor sighed. "Who are we to judge that poor girl's pain? All I can tell you is that we don't have the resources to keep her on suicide watch at the moment. We have 25,000 people to examine, vaccinate, and establish medical records for, not to mention the public health concerns involved in housing so many in close quarters."
John nodded. Like Mr. Spock always said: the good of the many outweighs the good of the few. What he never mentioned was how much it hurt. "Let me talk to her."
"She's not awake yet, but I don't see why you couldn't sit with her." He flipped off the oxygen and removed the mask, but simply pushed the IV pole to where John could use it as a crutch.
John moved slowly to the drawn curtain and the silhouetted figure behind it. His mother died behind an identical curtain, in a galaxy far, far away. He half expected to find her there, the same way a part of him still expected to find her waiting for him at the front door. "No chance of that now," he murmured to himself.
The woman looked pale and drawn, her features washed out and plain. Long strands of dirty blond hair fell like limp straw over her face and shoulders. She could be thirty, or a difficult seventeen. On her thin face, wrinkles and worry lines were indistinguishable.
John eased himself down into the seat beside her, ignoring the rattle of the IV pole as he drew it in. He still felt strung out and shaky, sore from last night's exertion. Maybe he should hold her hand. But, then again, they were essentially strangers. She might not appreciate it.
Luckily, John was saved the decision by the slight show of blue peaking out from behind tired eyelids. The second she caught sight of him, however, she bolted upright, several monitors screaming in the background.
"Hey, hey. It's all right. I'm not going to hurt you." John backed off, the way his father had taught him to when confronting an armed aggressor. The girl didn't have a knife or anything, but the desperate, panicked look in her eyes made her dangerous enough.
"Who are you? What are you doing here? Where am I?"
"I'm John. I," it sounded stupid now, "I'm the one who rescued you."
"Rescued me? I don't remember," she slurred, staring at him intently. "I'm sorry, but you look a little young for a rescue team."
"I'm fifteen."
"Oh. What did I need rescuing from, again?" She pulled her legs up to her chest, hooking her arms around them and resting her head on her knees. She looked like a circus performer in heroine chic.
"Swam after you and pulled you back onto the pier." She didn't looked confused, but almost accusing. "Maybe I shouldn't have bothered."
"What makes you say that?" She was only half listening to him, going through the medical chart on the computer tablet John hadn't even noticed was clipped to the foot of her bed.
"You were trying to kill yourself, weren't you?" John still couldn't imagine why. Well, he understood that if you were the kind of person who contemplated suicide, the destruction of your planet and probably most of your loved ones would be a good reason if there ever was one. He just couldn't imagine a situation desperate enough that he wouldn't want to live. Not when he had no idea what hope the future might hold.
"I don't think I was. Why would I do that?" She picked at her IV absently, working the tape off without a mark on her pale, almost translucent skin.
John gulped. Maybe he should lie. He didn't want to break the news badly and make her try it again. "Um, I don't know how to tell you this, but the Earth--"
"Was destroyed." She looked about as destroyed by it as John felt. He wanted to sit next to her and comfort her maybe, but she looked almost too fragile, like anything might cause her to break. "I remember that part. I wasn't trying to kill myself." Having successfully pulled out her IV, she grabbed a cottonball from the tray by her bed to staunch the slow trickle of blood down the back of her hand, reaching over with the other hand to flip off the heart rate monitor.
"Then why did you jump into an alien ocean in the middle of the night?"
She yanked off the leads attached to her chest and pushed herself to standing. She looked as though a strong wind might knock her over. "Are you sure you want to be doing that? You almost drowned."
"Pulse-ox is fine. I've had a full course of IV antibiotics and plenty of fluids. Not much lingering effects from the CPR either. I'll be fine. Just, have you seen my clothes?"
John hadn't even found his own clothes yet. He shook his head.
"Thanks for rescuing me." She smiled shyly, sweeping in before John could defend himself to place a quick kiss on his cheek. "I'm sorry I don't remember."
"But you do remember why you walked off a pier?"
"Swimming for land, I imagine," she shrugged. "I'm Jennifer, by the way."
"I'm John." He stuck out his hand, not sure of what else to do. Her palm was small, her slender fingers clammy, but her smile showed real gratitude. John supposed she was cute in an awkward, dimpled sort of way.
Jennifer quickly procured a pair of white hospital scrubs out of a drawer and turned, flushing, to pull them on.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm checking out of here. You want to help?"
"You're not going to try it again are you?"
"Try to escape? Maybe. Maybe not."
"Wait, escape? We're in the middle of an ocean!" Not to mention the fact that their planet had just been evacuated. Now wasn't a time to dick around, divided they fall and all that.
"Look, John. I just have to get out of here. I promise I'm not going to try to kill myself. These people are bad news. They just showed up in a black van and forced me to come with them. I'm not part of this Project Lifeboat thing. I told them I didn't want anything to do with them after I saw the kind of work they're doing, but they came for me anyway. I tried to hide, but the NID," she gulped. "We have to get out of here."
"They're not--" John yanked harder. "Just let me call Dr. Beckett and he'll tell you."
"Don't trust them, John. Before you know it they'll have you locked up. If you're of any use to them at all, they'll use you. They don't care that you're just a kid and they'll stop at nothing to make you do what they want." She shuddered. "I have to go." She gripped his shoulders, staring into his eyes with all the seriousness in the world. "You don't have to help me. You don't even have to believe me. Just let me go."
John wanted to protest, because she was paranoid, not to mention delusional. But she was also right. It wasn't his right to stop her, just like it wasn't anybody's right to stop him finding his dad. He let go. "Okay."
She smiled then, looking suddenly less terrified and less pale and less worried. "Good luck."
"Good luck yourself."
She disappeared before John even had a chance to object.
***
It had taken nearly an hour for Jeannie to fall asleep (and with her, both Rodney's legs and his left arm). He certainly had never been this clingy as a child. But then again, he couldn't blame her. Twenty-four hours as her permanent guardian and he'd already ruined her for life. Rodney sighed, pushing her hair back from a face sticky with tears and delivering a soft kiss to her temple before laying her down on top of the pink pony blanket and pulling a laptop to him. He'd made a promise to John that he'd at least look, and he didn't want to break it.
Sure, Rodney knew that he didn't owe the other boy anything. John was just another kid borrowing Rodney's sweats. If they'd met back on Earth, John would probably have called Rodney a scrawny pussy-faced little geekboy and asked about his pocket protector. But Earth was gone and John was the only person, besides Jeannie, he had in this place. Everyone else he'd ever known was dead. In fact, John didn't even have to know that Rodney was a geek who he might've beaten up in another life. Rodney could just pretend like he'd been cool back on Earth. Which is what he resolved to do.
The code was like nothing Rodney had ever seen, scrolling by in flash of color and alien characters. It looked like the kind of thing that could destroy the world: complex and elegant and too knowing. But there was an entry point somehow, a translation program that he dove into like a shark darting down into the depths of a prehistoric sea. This trail of code was serpentine and as jumbled and patchworked as the other was elegant, and it was breathtakingly easy. This wasn't a traditional wireless network. There were no base stations or IP addresses, so far as he could tell. Whatever system it was seemed to ooze out of the floor and the walls. It even powered up his laptop without the need for a plug. Similar technology was in development on Earth, but it wasn't anywhere close to this point.
"Well, good," he sighed, exhaling the breath he hadn't even known he'd been holding. "Piece of cake." It wasn't as though he hadn't hacked government files before. Those governments just hadn't been so close. And possibly not so well armed. He risked a glance over his shoulder to find the majority of the hangar queued at the lunch line. No Sergeant Bates, just Lieutenant Barbie, letting the annoying botanist cry on her shoulder.
John Sheppard's name came up right away, but when Rodney looked through the rudimentary file they had on him, there was only a military ID photo of a dazed and confused looking kid, age 15, on a list called ATA. Rodney had no idea what that stood for. It could mean that John was a threat, for all he knew. The first thing that came up in his search of the server was a recent message entered via the base's internal messaging system, from Colonel Marshall Sumner to all@lantis:
Re: ATA carriers:
Recent incidents with ATA users reported outside their authorized area have made it imperative that they be quarantined in a locked-down holding area. This is for their own safety as well as improved management of the evacuation. Attached is a list of known ATA carriers. Please cross reference this with the basic group census for your area. As soon as we have established a suitable area and cleared known gene carriers, we will do a sensor sweep for unregistered ATA genes. I will be in contact with security teams as needed.
They were going to quarantine them? That seemed unnecessary to Rodney, especially considering how Sergeant Bates had treated Rodney himself. If Bates perceived these people as a security threat, then who knew what he'd do to them? Then again, how did anybody know that they weren't a security threat? John had been wandering around on the pier by himself when Rodney called for his help. If he hadn't been around, the woman might be dead right now, but if this city was half as dangerous as it appeared, he could have easily gotten into a lot of trouble too.
Rodney was just about to start in on a search for exactly what they meant by a "locked down holding area" when a shadow fell across his screen. He'd gotten too engrossed in his work. Not an unusual occurrence, but this time it mattered. He gulped, slamming the screen shut and standing. "It's not what you think it is, I swear! I was just-- playing video games. You know, this new Star Trek game is really very realistic. Simulates an alien language and everything. A little too iTunes visual synthesizer for my taste, but what can you do? People love Apple. iPods. I have an iPhone. Expensive and over-hyped but a stunningly efficient piece of hardware." He gulped again.
The shadow turned out not to be a shadow, but a man. He was short, slightly balding with otherwise nondescript features other than biceps a little larger than Rodney was used to and an accusing stare that Rodney hadn't seen since his mother. "What? Do I have something stuck in my teeth?"
The man shook his head. "No, but you look guilty enough. Do you need any help?"
Rodney shook his head. "No, that's all right. I'm good. I'll just sit here with my sister."
"Everyone else is getting their lunch. What's so special about you? You don't need to eat?"
Rodney's stomach chose that moment to grumble.
"I see. So, what are you doing over here when the food is over there?"
Rodney puffed himself up, mentally cautioning himself not to piss his pants. If he got caught hacking the system, Dr. Weir might be too busy to reign in Bates. She might not even want to. "I have a sister, you know. I promised her I wouldn't leave her, and she's already lost her parents. I don't want to traumatize her even more by not being here when she wakes up."
He didn't know why, but suddenly it hit him. His parents were dead. He and Jeannie were all alone and at the mercy of adults like this guy, who'd as soon turn him in for his hacking, when even his father would have reluctantly gone to court to protect him. He was the adult here and if it were his word against Rodney's, then it was obvious who they'd believe. And what would they do? What if they "quarantined" Rodney the way they were planning to do to John? He had no idea what'd happen to Jeannie. And how would Rodney live with himself then? He wasn't sure which was worse: the sudden crushing sense of grief (so many people) or the weight of responsibility for just one.
And before he knew it, his fists were balled up and tears of frustration were streaming down his face and he shouted, "Fuck off," at this stranger who had the nerve to bug him when they'd just lost their god damned planet and nearly everyone on it. The thing was: all Rodney's life he'd known that things would get better. His parents would finally let him go to college. He'd blow through his Masters and a few PhDs. He'd conquer the world of physics and engineering and government contracts, get enough money for a big house and all the coffee and doughnuts he could eat, meet a beautiful woman with blond hair and big breasts, maybe more than one, like Hugh Hefner. But this, this was unknown territory, the vastness of which even subsumed his big fight with his father about his intellectual independence. It made the increasing price of oil and wars in the Middle East and gang violence and climate change all look wonderfully safe and secure. At least those things had a direction.
But what did he know about this world? Were there aliens? Was this about to turn into every bad sci-fi movie ever? And the government? Dr. Weir seemed well-intentioned enough, but this had originally been an expedition staffed largely by researchers. Who knew what kind of crazy Utopian procedures she might implement? And the military presence. Without the backing of Earth governments, how could she control it? They could be days away from the plot of Moonraker for all he knew.
He thought about his mother, her soft voice (when she wasn't screaming at him to clean his room), the way she tucked him into bed every night, even at age fourteen. He always pretended he hated it, but now -- he'd just have to make sure to do the same for Jeannie. And then there was his father. They'd fought and as cliché as it now sounded, he never really knew his dad. But they were family and now they were gone. And there was only so much he could rationalize himself out of.
Rodney blinked and there were tears streaming down his face. The man had somehow lowered himself to Rodney's side, pulling him into an almost uncomfortably tight hug and rubbing circles on Rodney's back. "Shh. It's okay. It's okay."
"It's not okay!" Rodney shouted. "Look around you! It's not okay."
"No. I guess it's not," the man replied. "But we're here and we have to make the best of it, eh?"
"We may not have Earth, but at least the spirit of Hallmark cards has survived." He rolled his eyes.
"I'm not being sentimental. That's the way things are. Earth's gone and we're here now. We'll either create a better world or a worse one."
"Oddly, I can live with that," Rodney replied. He didn't much care for the other option.
"Good," the man plastered on a plastic grin. "I'm Steve. Now, how about I get you and your sister some lunch before they run out?"
Rodney nodded, almost shocked by the kindness this man was showing some strange kid (no matter how brilliant this particular kid might be). But Steve had said it himself: they'd either create a better world or a worse one and they had to try for the former.
Lantern 2/4
Author: Tzzzz
Category: McKay/Sheppard (eventually), AU, crossover SGA/SG1
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~37,000
Spoilers: Hide and Seek
Betas: Thank you inkscribe , dossier , gaffsie , and corposant for betaing, reading, and prodding.
Summary: The Earth has been destroyed and John and Rodney have been evacuated to Atlantis. In this chapter, the search for John's father leads the kids to interesting new people and more adventure than they bargained for.
Chapter 1: Lifeboat
Twilight of the Fifth Sun: Lantern
So, let's recap. December 21st 2012, the world ended. People in America were asleep, or in the middle of a particularly amusing late night skit in which Conan O'Brien had his eyebrows waxed. The Hong Kong stock exchange was up. A skinny blond girl was just about to be crowned Australia's Next Top Model. A flock of birds was lost somewhere above the pacific ocean and the last living member of the order plesiosauria was watching the sunrise over a Scottish lake. There was a coup in progress in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in the forests of Colombia, John Sheppard Senior continued to wage a war whose outcome would be forever undecided.
If you're looking for reassurances, there's only one: it was painless.
***
Meanwhile, in a galaxy far, far away, John Sheppard Junior was letting Rodney McKay pull him to his feet. He didn't want to do the whole fainting damsel thing (especially not when Rodney was the one who had screeched like a girl), but his knees were rubber-weak from treading water against the current and he felt the adrenaline flow out of him like the water dripping down his neck.
"Easy. Take deep breaths," Rodney ordered. "I said deep, you idiot!" John might have been amused if he didn't feel like he might cough up a lung any second now.
A few feet away, three Marines were giving CPR to the woman he'd pulled out of the ocean. Her skin was pale in the light of two moons, her lips a hollow crystalline blue and her hair a dark mass gripping her face like claws. He stumbled backwards, suddenly afraid. He'd never been this close to death before. He'd never held it in his hands.
He shuddered, transfixed by the swift efficient motions of the Marines. They'd clearly done this before.
Then there was a hand on his arm, stronger than the small, willowy body it was attached to might suggest. Rodney was thin, almost boney; John could tell from the way his ribs pressed up against John's back, holding him up. He had a strong jaw and blue eyes that shone with panic and concern. He was the first person who looked, really looked at John since he'd gotten here, something that allowed him to lean back into the meager warmth the other boy provided. "Jesus, it's not that cold out here. How can you be like an ice cube? C'mon, we need to find you some dry clothes before you die of hypothermia."
"I'm not going to die," John snapped, still watching the medical scene unfolding before them.
"You could if you go into shock. Come on." Rodney gave a put-upon sigh, reaching for John's shirt. "What in the hell do you think you were doing back there?" he whispered. "You could have drowned!"
"So could that girl," John coughed, pointing to where the medics were hastily yanking a mask over the girl's face.
"She wanted to die!" Rodney whispered back. "Who knows who she could have lost back on Earth?!"
"She didn't really want to die." Suicide was for cowards, or at least John's father had always said it was.
"Yes, and you know this because?"
"I just do," John replied, looking away from Rodney to where the gurney and the medics were disappearing into a nearby building. He didn't feel like accepting the jacket Rodney was wrapping around him, but he could feel shock settling in, like the time he'd fallen off the roof of Mr. Henderson's old barn and broken his leg.
"Hey! Watch it!" John batted his hands away. "What do you think you're doing?"
"Take off your shirt and you can put on your hoodie."
Right, he'd forgotten that he took it off before jumping in the ocean. Even though the night was warm, John felt numb, grateful to Rodney for maneuvering his limp arms into the sweatshirt and zipping it up.
It wasn't until he saw several people in grey uniforms running towards them with a gurney that John remembered that he wasn't supposed to be here at all. He didn't know who these people were or what kind of military base this was and he had no idea what they'd do if they caught him wandering around on the other side of the city from where he was supposed to be. As far as he knew, he was one of the few people who hadn't known about this whole thing from the beginning. He didn't want to think it, but this could have been part of the plan. "Come on," he turned to the other boy, "we have to get out of here."
"No," Rodney ordered, even as John struggled weakly in his arms. "We're staying right here until we get a medic to look at you. There is absolutely no way you're dying on my watch, even if it is due to your own monumental stupidity. That was an alien ocean you took a dive into. Who knows what kinds of toxins you might have swallowed?"
John shrugged. "It tasted fine to me."
That comment apparently warranted an eye roll. "Yes, because sea water is such a delicacy. You're lucky you didn't get eaten by a two headed alien whale. Now, I think we came in over here," Rodney pointed to a panel in the metal wall of the building. "Though it's hard to tell. I got lost in the MoMa once, took my parents hours to find me. But then again, all modern paintings look pretty much the same so it's a wonder anybody has ever found their way out of there at all. Hey, do you think--"
Did this kid ever shut up? "Look, Rodney," John growled. "My body, my risk to take, and honestly, I'd rather risk a cold, even an alien one, over whatever punishment a group of soldiers who pulled me off of a planet without any cause or warning might have for me."
"Hey, they saved you from the apocalypse. I'd call that a good cause."
John shrugged. "You don't know that. Now, seriously, let's get out of here before they notice anything." The gurney with the rescued woman was already departing and once the immediate crises was over the soldiers were bound to notice that there'd been some people around to do the rescuing.
He had to admit that the two of them weren't particularly stealthy, with John coughing and barely on his feet and Rodney complaining in the worst whisper John had ever heard. "Are you sure about this? Because nothing screams guilt like running from the scene of the crime."
"Saving a drowning girl isn't a crime, Rodney."
"Then explain to me again why we're running away?" And also John really hoped Rodney knew where he was going, because so far as he could tell they were headed for a wall.
"Now the door was around here somewhere. It just appeared when she walked up to it. Motion sensor maybe. I think we came in over here," Rodney pointed to a panel in the metal wall of the building.
John pushed away from Rodney, shivering as he propped himself up against the wall and wondering where the hell the door could be. Was it possible that Rodney had the wrong building, despite the fact that John didn't see another one within 100 yards?
"Open sesame," John sighed wearily.
They were both surprised when the wall slid open. "There is no way that worked," Rodney grumbled.
"I think this city might be telepathic." John shrugged, trying to play it off as not a big deal, though in reality it was seriously cool. He just didn't want to freak Rodney out more than he already seemed inclined to be.
"And I think you might be crazy, not to mention masochistic and utterly deluded. And how is your hair still sticking up?"
John shrugged again. "You wouldn't happen to have a spare pair of pants, would you?"
"You mean you didn't bring any?" Rodney looked incredulous, if not downright horrified.
"They pulled me out of school. I just have these wet clothes and my backpack, though I don't know what good Basic Calculus, Topics in US History and Macbeth are going to do me out here."
"Calculus, huh? I'm auditing a class on topology over at the university, or I was before the whole--" Rodney waved his hand as though that explained it. Jesus, as though the destruction of a whole fucking planet could be encompassed in the wave of a hand. "Then again, maybe you're here for your lemming-like instincts and not your brains."
John shook his head. "I wouldn't be here for being smart." Though the occasional teacher would try to convince him otherwise. "I," he looked down at the dry sneakers he clutched in his hand. "I'm not sure I'm supposed to be here at all."
"Yes, well, now you are. I doubt they're going to open up another Lorentzian wormhole and boot your scrawny ass back to a non-existent planet, so there's no use dwelling. Head over to the bathroom and I'll bring you something to wear."
John nodded, making his way slowly through the sleeping crowd to the bathrooms. Ironically, he really should have remembered his towel. But the moment the thought crossed his mind, he felt a warm jet of air, like a blow dryer, skirt against his chilled skin. John sighed, slowly extracting himself from his wet pants and leaning against the wall with his forehead pressed into its cool metal panelling.
So this was it: an alien city in the middle of an ocean, with body dryers and telepathic doors. The ocean had seemed endless and the moonlight too bright and he wondered if this strange metal island floated as alone as he felt on this planet. Were there continents? If there were forests on this world, were they teaming with life, strange and wonderful? Maybe they'd sent a refrigerator through along with all the people - a frozen Noah's Ark like the shaving cream bottle in Jurassic Park. Perhaps they'd populate the desolate forests with jaguars and grizzly bears and they'd flourish here like they hadn't in the presence of so many people. Or maybe John would never see another animal again in his lifetime, not even a dog or a cat.
He'd stopped even the pretense of drying himself when the door slid open and Rodney stepped inside, before immediately turning around, covering his eyes and holding out a pair of sweatpants, fluffy looking (but mismatched) socks and Superman briefs. "I wasn't looking," he announced. "Though, speedo-tan? Seriously?"
John felt himself blush. "Thanks." He grabbed the clothes and started pulling them on.
"I'm sorry if you prefer boxers, or if they don't fit or anything, it's just that I don't find the idea of a perfect stranger's junk rubbing up against the inside of the last pair of sweatpants I might ever own to be particularly appealing. And who knows when we'll be able to do laundry? It might even be some kind of sonic cleaning method, which while seriously cool and theoretically even more effective against pathogens than soap and water, still strikes me as kind of gross."
By the time Rodney was done with his rant, John had pulled on the underwear and the pants (which only covered to about mid-calf and looked decidedly dorky). He grabbed a hold of Rodney's shoulder to pull on the socks before yawning and leaning a little against the other boy. "So, where are we sleeping?"
"We? No, no, there is no we. I'm going back to where I left my sister and you're finding your own martyr-shaped bedroll and hunkering down there. And you're returning my clothes in the morning."
"Yeah, about that," John ducked his head in what he hoped was a bashful and appealing way (he didn't want to have to beg). "I don't actually have a bedroll. I, um, came from the group over by the East Pier. That's why we're in here and not out there with the soldiers, remember?"
"Of course you did. Why would anybody listen to the guys with guns when they ask you politely not to go exploring and to stay in your designated areas for your own safety and protection in a city filled with telepathic doors and God knows what?!"
"I thought you said my 'telepathic doors' were a delusion."
"Yes, well, you obviously believed it and thought it was a good idea to go traipsing around anyway, not really helping your case for sanity."
"So you'll let the crazy person stay with you then?" John tried for charming, but he could never tell if that worked.
Rodney gave probably the most put-upon sigh John had ever heard before nodding. "Fine, but you get the military-issue blanket. My sister and I have very sensitive skin. Eczema runs in the family, though through careful use of moisturizing products, I've managed to protect myself."
That statement was just begging for some kind of playful barb, but John ended up yawning instead. It had been a long day and he'd just taken a swim in an alien ocean, not to mention the disastrous event he wasn't even acknowledging at this point.
"C'mon," Rodney ordered (not that John had a choice, considering that he was being pulled by the sleeve). "You look exhausted."
John had been hoping that Rodney's sister would be seventeen and gorgeous, with Rodney's same blue eyes and obvious (though also obviously annoying) intelligence. Instead he got a girl not more than six years old with blond Shirley-Temple-esque ringlets, snuggled beneath a pink comforter. Rodney slid in beside his sister, who turned instinctively into his warmth, before handing John an Army-green blanket.
"Thanks," John yawned, spreading it out (though he had to curl his legs in to keep his feet from sticking out the end). Rodney was right - it was a little scratchy, but better that than pink and totally gay. He looked over at Rodney, who was tucking his strangely endearing ski-jump nose into the face of what appeared to be a pink unicorn. "Goodnight."
"'Night," Rodney replied.
This was how they began their life on a new world.
***
Rodney awoke to a harsh hacking sound and an over-warm shivering body pressed up against his side. He was used to waking with a head resting on his stomach or an elbow in the chest (the price of a little sister) but he'd never be accustomed to the harsh cough coming out of John as he struggled in his sleep. How could Jeannie sleep through that death rattle? Rodney moved quickly to try to wake the other boy and get him propped up. Hopefully he wouldn't hack up any mucus onto Rodney and Jeannie's only blanket (even if the thing was covered in pink unicorns, it was an important possession).
John did nothing more than groan, a dead weight against Rodney's chest as he maneuvered his fevered body up. Alien pneumonia. Rodney hated always being right. Well, not the being right part, because he definitely enjoyed that, but the being right about bad things bit. But it looked like John had been a little bit right as well, because one of the Marines from earlier, Soldier Barbie, was striding over to them through the crowd, a kind of sidearm straight out of Star Trek held carefully at her side.
John didn't even stir as she approached, just turning his head into Rodney's chest and coughing some more.
"I knew you'd show yourselves eventually," Soldier Barbie smirked. "Now, how about you tell me why you two went running off while clearly in need of medical care?"
"We saved a woman's life!" Rodney exclaimed. Trigger-happy Barbie should be congratulating them, not standing there with her hand on a weapon and motioning to the two other Marines in the building to back her up.
"And we're all very happy about that, but nothing says guilty like running from the scene of the crime."
"That's what I said!"
Her glare managed to be both challenging and chilling at the same time. "And yet you still made a run for it."
"He made me," Rodney gestured to a still-sleeping John, glancing around him nervously at the half-awake refugees around them who were starting to gawp and stare. "He thought we'd get in trouble for leaving the compound. I told him he needed to see a doctor and, speaking of which, he's currently dying of alien pneumonia, so would you mind moving it along please?"
"Bates?" she spoke into her radio. "We've found them. Everything is under control. We need to take the swimmer to the infirmary. The other one's all yours."
Rodney was too preoccupied with John coughing himself into wakefulness to pay much attention to Soldier Barbie, or her name when she tried to introduce herself: Lauren Cartman or something.
"That was very brave what you did back there," she said, reaching out to pat John's shoulder. Rodney was gratified to see him flinch away. Who was she to make pronouncements like that anyhow? As though they even cared what she thought.
"If by brave, you mean suicidal and moronic."
"It was brave," Barbie retorted.
"He wouldn't have even had to, if you'd been doing your job and keeping watch. I mean, how lax does security have to get in order for you to let depressed people just wander about with a great big suicide pit of an ocean a stone's throw away? She just walked right up to a wall and it opened for her! Is that really all it takes? And furthermore, if it's up to two kids like us to do the rescuing, then your little military contingent here is woefully--"
"That's enough," Cartman snapped, not seeming intimidated in the least. "What's your name anyway?"
"McKay. Rodney McKay."
"Well, McKay, you are going to talk to our lead security officer," she nodded to one of the other soldiers who had materialized behind her, "while I take your little friend to the infirmary."
She grabbed John roughly by the arm, dragging another hacking cough out of him. He tried to pull away, but either he was too weak or she was tougher than she looked.
"Sorry, sweetheart, but we need to get you some oxygen and warm bed, ASAP. Hey, Stackhouse, why don't you get over here and help carry the kid?"
John finally succeeded in yanking himself away from the soldier's grasp, but it cost him, making him double over in another coughing fit. "No, I can walk," he protested hoarsely. "Please."
She looked skeptical, but reached out a hand to pull him to his feet.
"Just give me a minute." John waited for her to nod and turn away before he gestured Rodney closer and whispered. "Listen, I know you don't owe me anything, but could you do me a big favor?"
"How big?"
John looked like he wanted to make some sarcastic comeback, but with an ever increasing number of Marines and bystanders hovering nearby, he didn't have much time. "Just-- find my father, John Sheppard Senior. He'll know what to do."
"Okay, kid, time's up," one of the Marines said, grabbing Rodney by the shoulder. "Time for a quick chat with Sergeant Bates."
"Promise me," John whispered, as Soldier Barbie put a guiding hand on John's arm and started leading him through the crowd and out the door.
"Promise," Rodney was forced to shout after him, before another Marine was shoving him forward and away from where Jeannie was currently curled up, small and alone beneath her pink comforter. She looked almost doll-like in the moonlight, too angelic to be real. These guys had to be real heartless bastards to leave her alone and vulnerable like that.
"Wait, you big oaf! What about my sister? I just can't leave her here!"
"Just a quick word with Bates and I'm sure you'll be free to go. With all the security threats of the evacuation, the man doesn't have time to waste on kids. We'll have someone look after your sister. Don't worry."
Somehow Rodney was less than reassured by that, but what else could he do? Struggle and make Jeannie watch him get dragged off by a group of fascists? He looked over at where she was still slumbering soundly. Rodney crossed his fingers, hoping that she wouldn't wake up alone.
***
"For the last time, what were you doing outside of your designated area at three in the morning?" Sergeant Bates, as it turned out, was a short, anxious man with caramel colored skin and dark, darting eyes. He was also criminally stupid and possibly trigger-happy. Rodney glared.
"I already told you: I followed the woman."
"And what were you doing up at that time?" Bates leaned forward, fixing Rodney with an intense stare. Unfortunately for Bates, staring contests were the one form of intimidation that didn't work on Rodney. He'd met enough chess and math competitors with more fierce stares than Bates. Bates' glare might had promised violence, if Rodney weren't a kid and Bates a member of an institution that generally did not favor beating children. But at a science fair, some of the kids were easily capable of building weapons of mass destruction, and smart enough to get away with it, so all in all, Rodney was only mostly terrified.
"Well, supposedly, we've just been evacuated from our planet because the whole thing's about to explode in a flood of zero point particulate matter, so excuse me if I was a little on edge. But since you're obviously a government-trained robosoldier I wouldn't expect you to understand."
Bates slammed his hands down hard on the table. "I understand plenty, McKay. My family, my little brother, they were all back on Earth. What I don't understand is how you know anything about zero point modules." Zero point modules! God, it was Chernobyl all over again, only on a mass extinction scale. The awesome power of science. It almost made Rodney not want the genius to wield that kind of power. Almost.
Rodney crossed his hands over his chest. "I'm not an idiot. In fact, I'm a genius. That's why you brought me here, isn't it?"
Bates stood, walking behind Rodney like every cliché interrogation scene in every thriller Rodney had ever seen. If he thought it might have done any good, Rodney would had wet his pants. "You might be a genius, but not even a genius can come up with ZPMs from just the news that we're evacuating, at least not without seeing something he shouldn't have."
"Maybe your monkey-brain can't understand it, but I'm just that smart." Rodney tried for confident, but wasn't convinced that he succeeded.
"When you tell me everything you know, we'll see who's a monkey brain."
"Oh, that's mature." Not that lack of maturity promised lack of bruising in the end. Maybe John was right about what these people would do if they caught someone outside of their section. Project Lifeboat had certainly been a legitimate product of the shadow organizations of many governments. Rodney's interaction with the CIA and CSIS proved this, and yet that didn't guarantee that these organizations followed the standards set by the laws of the countries that created them. Their very nature demanded they operate outside the established rules.
"It doesn't need to be mature. What I need from you is the truth. Why were you outside your assigned living area? What information did you access? Who is this other boy and how did he contact you? When you've told me these things, then I will maturely consider your release."
"I told you. I followed the woman because I was curious. I know curiosity killed the cat and though I really am a cat person, and I should obviously know better than to poke around secret alien bases when I have fascist American goons to threaten me, but I didn't, okay? I saw her walk out. I followed her. She jumped in the water, I called for help. The other kid appeared out of nowhere and saved her, end of story."
"And the ZPM?"
"Back on Earth, I heard a woman. The blond - you know the one: short hair, beautiful blue eyes. She said something and I put two and two together. If you had more than two brain cells to rub together and even a rudimentary knowledge of high energy physics, you would have drawn the same conclusion." Rodney finally sucked in a breath of air, summoning all the courage and confidence he had to fix Bates with a determined stare. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a six-year-old sister who's just lost her parents and her planet, no thanks to you morons, so if you'd show me back to the barracks--"
"What do you mean, 'no thanks to us?' We saved you. Seven billion dead and we saved you." Maybe Bates had been reasonable once, but Rodney could see the despair in his dark eyes. Seven billion dead. Rodney wasn't even sure the human mind was able of comprehending such a tragedy. He knew that his mind, as brilliant as it was, couldn't even come close. Seven billion atoms, sure. Seven billion stars. The finite infinity of the universe, but death on that scale and the death of potential, the infinite number of possible generations snuffed out in an instant. It wasn't necessarily impossible to comprehend, just too horrible a thought to undertake with your sanity intact. So he did the smart thing and forced himself to ignore it.
"And I'm grateful. Trust me, I'm grateful. But you people are the reason for those deaths. If nobody's stopped and explained it to you in language you can understand, it's not my fault."
"I don't know who you think you are but--"
Luckily for Rodney, Bates was interrupted by the door swinging open and the woman who had introduced herself as Dr. Elizabeth Weir earlier that day stepped through, flanked by two more soldiers. "What is going on here? Sergeant, have I ever given you the impression that it's okay to interrogate children?"
"Hey! I'm not a--" Rodney protested, before he realized that qualifying as a child meant he was disqualified from the interrogation.
"With all due respect, Ma'am, this 'child' has somehow gained knowledge of ZPM research. He's claiming that the SGC is responsible for the loss of Earth."
Dr. Weir ignored the question, preferring to fix Bates with a stern glare. "That does not make this acceptable. I understand you are facing a great loss. We all are, this boy included. And the only way we're going to get through this is by using thread of our common humanity to pull together, and that includes treating each other with compassion and respect. Until I have determined that the refugees from Earth have been settled, all security personnel will check in with a superior officer before disciplinary actions are taken, no exceptions. You will be reporting to Lieutenant Ford." She nodded to one of the men on either side of her. "Lean on each other; don't take your frustrations out on the people you are charged with protecting."
"Come with me, Rodney," she ordered, reminding Rodney of his English teacher, with her precise, distinguished speech and her tired, serious eyes. "I'll take you back to your sister."
"Thank you," he replied warily. She had long legs and walked at a pace that forced him to struggle a little to keep up. Her cheeks were flushed with exhaustion, but her uniform was pristine and she carried herself with a dignity that Rodney could appreciate. She was kind of hot for an old lady.
"I'm sorry about that. He's under a lot of stress, as you can imagine."
"It's no excuse," Rodney added crossly. He might have been just one child out of thousands of refugees, but he helped keep a woman from drowning today (even if John did most of the work). He had the right to protest a system that repaid his heroic nobility with interrogation and psychological warfare.
"No, it's not. And it won't happen again."
"How do I know that?"
"Lieutenant Ford will keep him in check. We're not monsters, Rodney. We're just a small group of people trying to accomplish an enormous task. Have patience with us." She lead him down a different corridor, leaving the other soldier in her detail behind with a nod.
Once they were alone, Dr. Weir stopped, grabbing Rodney's arm a little too tight for comfort. Even as she turned to him, Rodney could sense a little of her polished, diplomatic mask slipping. He wasn't usually this perceptive, but he supposed that maybe even this show of heartfelt emotion was strategic for her. "You really think that we did this?"
"Didn't you?" From the blond's comments, Rodney was almost positive, but he could have been mistaken. He wanted to be, because he couldn't imagine living controlled by the people who had destroyed his planet, his home, as dysfunctional as it might have been.
Dr. Weir half chuckled morosely, running a hand through her tangled hair. "You know, I haven't even had the time to discuss it? The evacuation is taking all of my attention and will be for at least another month." Rodney debated not answering, but she'd just rescued him from Practical Advanced Information Retrieval 101, so maybe he should get on her good side.
"Well, then I can give you a likely scenario. Your goon back there mentioned zero point modules, which I assume means that you've found a way to utilize zero point energy and I couldn't help but overhear that one of your scientists was talking about the modules charging themselves. Of course, the natural entropy of energy dissipation is such that the only reason they would do this on their own is from an overabundance of high energy particles in our own space-time. I can think of a few things that might do this. One is experimentation with zero point energy from our own universe, which people like yourselves, using zero point modules for power, might be interested in."
"Those experiments were being conducted here, not on Earth." If he'd heard that a day ago, Rodney would have been impressed. But now, how could he be, after those experiments had destroyed a planet?
"Well, then another explanation is some rift, possibly in subspace. Most likely at the core of the planet, where the available energy is the highest. But the effect of a wormhole shouldn't cause that." He snapped his fingers, thinking. "I know! It could be a phasing problem. An experiment to cross between dimensions, maybe."
"Merlin's cloaking device."
"Excuse me?"
"The Ori fleet was coming. We had no choice. We had to pull the whole planet out of phase."
"The whole planet?" Rodney gasped. All of this time when he'd been reading about it - he might have been out of phase even then.
Elizabeth nodded.
"Well, that is explains it then. The core of a planet is dense, very dense, and whatever device was used probably only had a limited capacity. You were dragging the dense core of the planet through subspace like an anchor. Who knows what kind of instability that produced? Enough to create a cascade of exotic particles, clearly."
"You mean--"
"You destroyed the world in order to save it," Rodney replied. He'd imagined this, or something like it. It was one of those scenarios that he dreamt up late at night, staring at the ceiling of his bedroom in the dark, unable to shut off his mind. After that whole fiasco with the CIA and the nuclear bomb, the principal had sat him down with a pile of history books as part of his punishment. So he'd grudgingly learned about Oppenheimer, and Fermi, and Szilard. The science traced back to Einstein and Rutherford, back to Newton and the Galileo and the quest for truth itself. It had been a quaint attempt on behalf of his small minded teacher to educate him about the dangers of the science he saw as only a game, but what he really learned from everything wasn't the lesson of Harry K. Daghlian, who'd died to the pursuit of knowledge, but the lesson of James Chadwick, and perhaps the greatest lesson of human history: that the creation of a destructive truth from science was as inevitable as war itself.
Dr. Weir gulped, stopping just outside the door of the hangar where he and Jeannie were housed (oh, god, Jeannie. He'd left her alone with these people!).
"I have to go. My sister--" he started.
She nodded, turning to him, her eyes shining with grief, maybe guilt. "You're a very smart boy, Rodney."
"Well, your government brought me here for a reason," he grumbled. Not that he wasn't grateful to still be alive, but he couldn't even begin to comprehend the magnitude of it. Maybe this woman could. She looked it, from the way she'd seemed to age years in the space of a few minutes. "I'm a genius."
"Yes, you are. And maybe, we'll be enlisting your help in the future." She smiled. It was hollow and condescending and indulgent in a way that made him positive that Dr. Elizabeth Weir had never had any children. She certainly didn't seem to have met any teenagers. He was brilliant, but she was also lying.
"Just do me a favor," he added at the last minute, already scanning the bustling room before him for Jeannie. "Let me visit John when he's recovered." Rodney didn't know why he said that. He didn't owe the other boy anything. He certainly didn't need another hanger-on to his brilliance when he already had Jeannie to deal with, but he'd made a promise. And Rodney McKay hadn't made very many promises in his life. Promises were a thing between friends, after all.
"John?" she asked.
"The other boy. The one who pulled the woman out of the ocean."
"Right. I'll arrange it." She squeezed his shoulder. He could feel how cold her fingers were even through the material of his shirt. "You did good, Rodney."
He should've protested that he didn't do anything, but then he spotted Jeannie, just by her purple corduroy jumper and her out-of-control blond curls. That botanist held her in her lap, rocking her back and forth and hugging her. Dawn had broken, the light shining down through the open panels of the hangar's ceiling and sparkling off the sea of groggily stirring refugees below, but in this sea of suffering, Rodney only had eyes for Jeannie.
They'd been on their own less than 24 hours and he'd already abandoned her, a six-year-old who'd just lost her parents. Thank god hell was a bunch of mumbo jumbo made up by moronic fanatics, because after this, Rodney would definitely be going there.
"I'll be in touch," Dr. Weir called as Rodney ran through the crowd, launching himself at the unsuspecting red-headed botanist and yanking his sister from her arms.
"Mer?" Jeannie sniffled, practically toppling him over when she wrapped her arms around his neck to be carried like a toddler. "Where'd you go?"
Rodney sighed. "I'm sorry, Jeannie. I didn't mean to go." He did his best to rock her, like the botanist had, but she weighed a lot more than she looked, so he ended up slumping back onto a nearby cot and rubbing her back in what he hoped would be a soothing gesture.
"Mer. I thought," she hiccuped, sucking in a sob. "Don't go. You won't go again?"
"Not if you don't want, Captain," he whispered, hoping she'd remember their game, when she was Captain Janeway and Rodney was Mr. Spock.
"No?"
"No." He tried petting her hair, but ended up getting his fingers tangled. "Don't you ever brush this monster? My god, and I get in trouble for bad hygiene habits!"
"But where did you go, Mer?"
"I stupidly tried to be a good citizen and there was this crazy boy and a fascist security officer and an strangely attractive diplomat and I got here as soon as I could."
"Kay," Jeannie murmured, burying her face in Rodney's shoulder with a yawn.
"She's been crying nonstop for the past hour," the botanist put in, staring at Rodney accusingly.
"Hey, it's not my fault! If you have a problem talk to that psycho, Sergeant Bates. And if you want to tell me what to do with my sister, well, get your own kid. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a little girl to put back to bed."
The building was beginning to buzz around them, with people already lining up for tea and water and restrooms, or quietly muttering among themselves, but Rodney laid his sister down on their cot, checking to make sure no one had stolen his laptops during the night, and settled at her side, pulling the pink pony blanket over them both and drifting off to sleep.
***
John woke up with a start. He'd dreamed of floating, all alone in an endless sea with nothing but a pod of whales circling him, singing a strange story of cities, sinking and rising, worlds ending, people dying. Their voices sounded melancholy but pure, like the even, echoing tone of the singing bowl used for meditation.
Something covered his mouth and his chest felt tight and bruised. He struggled into a sitting position, swatting at the thing covering his mouth.
"Easy, lad," a voice came from his left side, accompanying warm hands that felt his forehead and tilted him up into a sitting position. "Deep breaths. Don't fight the mask." The man had a thick brogue, like Scotty.
"What?" John blinked up at the unfamiliar bronze colored ceiling wonderingly. "Where am I?"
"The City of Atlantis, son. Remember your orientation?"
So it hadn't been a nightmare then. The whales were made up, but not the destruction. "Earth?"
John turned to his side to meet his Doctor's gaze. Like everyone here, the man looked tired and scruffy, but unlike some, he didn't bother to hide the red bloodshot look of his eyes, or the sticky tear tracks running down into a few days worth of stubble. "We lost contact, but we won't know until the Daedalus gets here to confirm it."
"Daedalus."
"Spaceship. They're a mite slower than the Stargate, but we'll know soon enough."
John wasn't sure he wanted to know. He looked away. If he watched the pain in the doctor's eyes much longer, he might be tempted to cry himself. And if he did that, who knows when he'd stop?
"I'm Dr. Carson Beckett, if I didn't mention it. And you are?"
"John Sheppard."
"Good, just let me enter that in and we can start the exam."
John nodded, moving away from Beckett's hollow smile to fix his gaze on the intricate patterns of the stained glass windows along the wall.
"Beautiful, isn't she?" Beckett asked, running his fingers along John's chest and then pulling out his stethoscope. "I mean, if we can't be on Earth," he paused for a moment to gather himself, "then I can't think of anywhere else I'd rather be."
The exam passed quickly, with much fewer tests than John had come to expect at the doctor's office. "Any pain?" Beckett asked.
"No, just aches all over. It was a hard swim."
"I'm sure it was. I can't imagine doing such a thing. But you're alive and not much worse for the wear. Let me just get you under the scanner and then we'll likely be able to pull you off the pressurized oxygen. Think you can stand?"
With Beckett's help, John managed to lie flat on a table that looked more like a computer console with a strange contraption, too small to be an x-ray, passing over him.
At John's questioning look, Beckett grinned a little. "Ancient scanning device: sees in marvelous detail."
"Ancient?" John asked. The thing couldn't be that old, if it was so high tech.
"Oh, that's just our name for the people who built this city and the Stargates. They were largely human, a race that lived ten thousand years ago. They abandoned this city and let it sink into the sea, only for us to revive it eight years ago."
"What do you mean by 'largely human'?" On Star Trek didn't they call it 'humanoid'?
"Well, we're actually somewhat of an offshoot of their physiology. They basically seeded humans throughout the galaxy for some reason still unknown to us."
"And they don't mind us using their city?"
"No, not that we can tell. They're long gone. They were so physically advanced that they were eventually able to abandon their physical bodies entirely. They live as pure energy now." He nodded in the general direction of the windows. "Rat bastards, if you ask me, but they're out there." He punched a few buttons on a strange-looking palm pilot before looking up and smiling at John. "In fact, they're in here as well. He pointed to John's chest. "You have the gene."
"What gene?"
"ATA."
"What do you mean?"
"Stands for Ancient Technology Activation. It means that sometime long in the past one of these Ancients was your ancestor, giving you the gene that allows you to operate their technology. Less than a percent of a percent have it, and only half of those strong enough to really use it. I'm more of the latter. You, on the other hand--" He offered John the palm pilot. "Take that and think about some part of the human body."
The second the thing touched John's hand, the screen flickered, displaying a diagram of someone's right shin.
"You have a good faculty with that, lad. Though why you'd think about a shin remains a mystery. When I was your age, I would have gone for something a little more female." He winked, leaving John to tinker more with the scanner.
John shrugged. "Seemed as good a part as any."
"Aye, I suppose so. Now what's that you've got there?" He gently removed the scanner from John's hands, examining the strange letters scrolling across the screen with fascination. "You've pulled up the Ancient database entry on shin splints, which you don't seem to have at the moment."
"I'm on the cross country and track teams, but it's off season. Shin splints suck."
Beckett nodded, still staring at the device. "Unfortunately, according to this the Ancients have little help to offer in that department, unless we can find the muscle regeneration machine they keep referencing. You know, I've never been able to use the scanner interface to access the database. And you took to it bloody quickly. I've never seen anyone express the gene this strongly."
"Is that a good thing?"
"Very. Dr. Gaul will worship the ground you walk on. Now, if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to run a few blood tests."
John wanted to protest, but no matter how friendly Dr. Beckett appeared, it was clear John didn't really have a choice. He looked away from where the doctor tied on a pressure cuff and focused instead on the curtained-off area to his right. "How is she?"
"Hm?" The doctor preoccupied himself with entering John's data into a tablet computer.
"The woman who came in with me: is she okay?"
Beckett sighed. "Physically, same as you. She inhaled a wee bit too much sea water, and we were forced to perform CPR, but she'll recover in time."
John knew adults well enough to know what Beckett wasn't saying, however. "But you don't think she'll survive?"
"I don't know, lad. She tried to kill herself, and I can hardly blame her. Seven billion people. We don't even know what she's lost." The doctor looked as though he'd lost things too.
"But she's not the only one who lost their planet. We're not all jumping off piers in the middle of the night."
Beckett shook his head. John cringed in horror. He hoped to God he wouldn't have to see this grown man cry. "No, lad. I've too much to do to be killing myself now."
"I just don't see the point." He'd give his life for something important, he supposed. But it'd have to be really, really important. And after all the people left behind, it seemed even more of a waste to give in now.
The doctor sighed. "Who are we to judge that poor girl's pain? All I can tell you is that we don't have the resources to keep her on suicide watch at the moment. We have 25,000 people to examine, vaccinate, and establish medical records for, not to mention the public health concerns involved in housing so many in close quarters."
John nodded. Like Mr. Spock always said: the good of the many outweighs the good of the few. What he never mentioned was how much it hurt. "Let me talk to her."
"She's not awake yet, but I don't see why you couldn't sit with her." He flipped off the oxygen and removed the mask, but simply pushed the IV pole to where John could use it as a crutch.
John moved slowly to the drawn curtain and the silhouetted figure behind it. His mother died behind an identical curtain, in a galaxy far, far away. He half expected to find her there, the same way a part of him still expected to find her waiting for him at the front door. "No chance of that now," he murmured to himself.
The woman looked pale and drawn, her features washed out and plain. Long strands of dirty blond hair fell like limp straw over her face and shoulders. She could be thirty, or a difficult seventeen. On her thin face, wrinkles and worry lines were indistinguishable.
John eased himself down into the seat beside her, ignoring the rattle of the IV pole as he drew it in. He still felt strung out and shaky, sore from last night's exertion. Maybe he should hold her hand. But, then again, they were essentially strangers. She might not appreciate it.
Luckily, John was saved the decision by the slight show of blue peaking out from behind tired eyelids. The second she caught sight of him, however, she bolted upright, several monitors screaming in the background.
"Hey, hey. It's all right. I'm not going to hurt you." John backed off, the way his father had taught him to when confronting an armed aggressor. The girl didn't have a knife or anything, but the desperate, panicked look in her eyes made her dangerous enough.
"Who are you? What are you doing here? Where am I?"
"I'm John. I," it sounded stupid now, "I'm the one who rescued you."
"Rescued me? I don't remember," she slurred, staring at him intently. "I'm sorry, but you look a little young for a rescue team."
"I'm fifteen."
"Oh. What did I need rescuing from, again?" She pulled her legs up to her chest, hooking her arms around them and resting her head on her knees. She looked like a circus performer in heroine chic.
"Swam after you and pulled you back onto the pier." She didn't looked confused, but almost accusing. "Maybe I shouldn't have bothered."
"What makes you say that?" She was only half listening to him, going through the medical chart on the computer tablet John hadn't even noticed was clipped to the foot of her bed.
"You were trying to kill yourself, weren't you?" John still couldn't imagine why. Well, he understood that if you were the kind of person who contemplated suicide, the destruction of your planet and probably most of your loved ones would be a good reason if there ever was one. He just couldn't imagine a situation desperate enough that he wouldn't want to live. Not when he had no idea what hope the future might hold.
"I don't think I was. Why would I do that?" She picked at her IV absently, working the tape off without a mark on her pale, almost translucent skin.
John gulped. Maybe he should lie. He didn't want to break the news badly and make her try it again. "Um, I don't know how to tell you this, but the Earth--"
"Was destroyed." She looked about as destroyed by it as John felt. He wanted to sit next to her and comfort her maybe, but she looked almost too fragile, like anything might cause her to break. "I remember that part. I wasn't trying to kill myself." Having successfully pulled out her IV, she grabbed a cottonball from the tray by her bed to staunch the slow trickle of blood down the back of her hand, reaching over with the other hand to flip off the heart rate monitor.
"Then why did you jump into an alien ocean in the middle of the night?"
She yanked off the leads attached to her chest and pushed herself to standing. She looked as though a strong wind might knock her over. "Are you sure you want to be doing that? You almost drowned."
"Pulse-ox is fine. I've had a full course of IV antibiotics and plenty of fluids. Not much lingering effects from the CPR either. I'll be fine. Just, have you seen my clothes?"
John hadn't even found his own clothes yet. He shook his head.
"Thanks for rescuing me." She smiled shyly, sweeping in before John could defend himself to place a quick kiss on his cheek. "I'm sorry I don't remember."
"But you do remember why you walked off a pier?"
"Swimming for land, I imagine," she shrugged. "I'm Jennifer, by the way."
"I'm John." He stuck out his hand, not sure of what else to do. Her palm was small, her slender fingers clammy, but her smile showed real gratitude. John supposed she was cute in an awkward, dimpled sort of way.
Jennifer quickly procured a pair of white hospital scrubs out of a drawer and turned, flushing, to pull them on.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm checking out of here. You want to help?"
"You're not going to try it again are you?"
"Try to escape? Maybe. Maybe not."
"Wait, escape? We're in the middle of an ocean!" Not to mention the fact that their planet had just been evacuated. Now wasn't a time to dick around, divided they fall and all that.
"Look, John. I just have to get out of here. I promise I'm not going to try to kill myself. These people are bad news. They just showed up in a black van and forced me to come with them. I'm not part of this Project Lifeboat thing. I told them I didn't want anything to do with them after I saw the kind of work they're doing, but they came for me anyway. I tried to hide, but the NID," she gulped. "We have to get out of here."
"They're not--" John yanked harder. "Just let me call Dr. Beckett and he'll tell you."
"Don't trust them, John. Before you know it they'll have you locked up. If you're of any use to them at all, they'll use you. They don't care that you're just a kid and they'll stop at nothing to make you do what they want." She shuddered. "I have to go." She gripped his shoulders, staring into his eyes with all the seriousness in the world. "You don't have to help me. You don't even have to believe me. Just let me go."
John wanted to protest, because she was paranoid, not to mention delusional. But she was also right. It wasn't his right to stop her, just like it wasn't anybody's right to stop him finding his dad. He let go. "Okay."
She smiled then, looking suddenly less terrified and less pale and less worried. "Good luck."
"Good luck yourself."
She disappeared before John even had a chance to object.
***
It had taken nearly an hour for Jeannie to fall asleep (and with her, both Rodney's legs and his left arm). He certainly had never been this clingy as a child. But then again, he couldn't blame her. Twenty-four hours as her permanent guardian and he'd already ruined her for life. Rodney sighed, pushing her hair back from a face sticky with tears and delivering a soft kiss to her temple before laying her down on top of the pink pony blanket and pulling a laptop to him. He'd made a promise to John that he'd at least look, and he didn't want to break it.
Sure, Rodney knew that he didn't owe the other boy anything. John was just another kid borrowing Rodney's sweats. If they'd met back on Earth, John would probably have called Rodney a scrawny pussy-faced little geekboy and asked about his pocket protector. But Earth was gone and John was the only person, besides Jeannie, he had in this place. Everyone else he'd ever known was dead. In fact, John didn't even have to know that Rodney was a geek who he might've beaten up in another life. Rodney could just pretend like he'd been cool back on Earth. Which is what he resolved to do.
The code was like nothing Rodney had ever seen, scrolling by in flash of color and alien characters. It looked like the kind of thing that could destroy the world: complex and elegant and too knowing. But there was an entry point somehow, a translation program that he dove into like a shark darting down into the depths of a prehistoric sea. This trail of code was serpentine and as jumbled and patchworked as the other was elegant, and it was breathtakingly easy. This wasn't a traditional wireless network. There were no base stations or IP addresses, so far as he could tell. Whatever system it was seemed to ooze out of the floor and the walls. It even powered up his laptop without the need for a plug. Similar technology was in development on Earth, but it wasn't anywhere close to this point.
"Well, good," he sighed, exhaling the breath he hadn't even known he'd been holding. "Piece of cake." It wasn't as though he hadn't hacked government files before. Those governments just hadn't been so close. And possibly not so well armed. He risked a glance over his shoulder to find the majority of the hangar queued at the lunch line. No Sergeant Bates, just Lieutenant Barbie, letting the annoying botanist cry on her shoulder.
John Sheppard's name came up right away, but when Rodney looked through the rudimentary file they had on him, there was only a military ID photo of a dazed and confused looking kid, age 15, on a list called ATA. Rodney had no idea what that stood for. It could mean that John was a threat, for all he knew. The first thing that came up in his search of the server was a recent message entered via the base's internal messaging system, from Colonel Marshall Sumner to all@lantis:
Re: ATA carriers:
Recent incidents with ATA users reported outside their authorized area have made it imperative that they be quarantined in a locked-down holding area. This is for their own safety as well as improved management of the evacuation. Attached is a list of known ATA carriers. Please cross reference this with the basic group census for your area. As soon as we have established a suitable area and cleared known gene carriers, we will do a sensor sweep for unregistered ATA genes. I will be in contact with security teams as needed.
They were going to quarantine them? That seemed unnecessary to Rodney, especially considering how Sergeant Bates had treated Rodney himself. If Bates perceived these people as a security threat, then who knew what he'd do to them? Then again, how did anybody know that they weren't a security threat? John had been wandering around on the pier by himself when Rodney called for his help. If he hadn't been around, the woman might be dead right now, but if this city was half as dangerous as it appeared, he could have easily gotten into a lot of trouble too.
Rodney was just about to start in on a search for exactly what they meant by a "locked down holding area" when a shadow fell across his screen. He'd gotten too engrossed in his work. Not an unusual occurrence, but this time it mattered. He gulped, slamming the screen shut and standing. "It's not what you think it is, I swear! I was just-- playing video games. You know, this new Star Trek game is really very realistic. Simulates an alien language and everything. A little too iTunes visual synthesizer for my taste, but what can you do? People love Apple. iPods. I have an iPhone. Expensive and over-hyped but a stunningly efficient piece of hardware." He gulped again.
The shadow turned out not to be a shadow, but a man. He was short, slightly balding with otherwise nondescript features other than biceps a little larger than Rodney was used to and an accusing stare that Rodney hadn't seen since his mother. "What? Do I have something stuck in my teeth?"
The man shook his head. "No, but you look guilty enough. Do you need any help?"
Rodney shook his head. "No, that's all right. I'm good. I'll just sit here with my sister."
"Everyone else is getting their lunch. What's so special about you? You don't need to eat?"
Rodney's stomach chose that moment to grumble.
"I see. So, what are you doing over here when the food is over there?"
Rodney puffed himself up, mentally cautioning himself not to piss his pants. If he got caught hacking the system, Dr. Weir might be too busy to reign in Bates. She might not even want to. "I have a sister, you know. I promised her I wouldn't leave her, and she's already lost her parents. I don't want to traumatize her even more by not being here when she wakes up."
He didn't know why, but suddenly it hit him. His parents were dead. He and Jeannie were all alone and at the mercy of adults like this guy, who'd as soon turn him in for his hacking, when even his father would have reluctantly gone to court to protect him. He was the adult here and if it were his word against Rodney's, then it was obvious who they'd believe. And what would they do? What if they "quarantined" Rodney the way they were planning to do to John? He had no idea what'd happen to Jeannie. And how would Rodney live with himself then? He wasn't sure which was worse: the sudden crushing sense of grief (so many people) or the weight of responsibility for just one.
And before he knew it, his fists were balled up and tears of frustration were streaming down his face and he shouted, "Fuck off," at this stranger who had the nerve to bug him when they'd just lost their god damned planet and nearly everyone on it. The thing was: all Rodney's life he'd known that things would get better. His parents would finally let him go to college. He'd blow through his Masters and a few PhDs. He'd conquer the world of physics and engineering and government contracts, get enough money for a big house and all the coffee and doughnuts he could eat, meet a beautiful woman with blond hair and big breasts, maybe more than one, like Hugh Hefner. But this, this was unknown territory, the vastness of which even subsumed his big fight with his father about his intellectual independence. It made the increasing price of oil and wars in the Middle East and gang violence and climate change all look wonderfully safe and secure. At least those things had a direction.
But what did he know about this world? Were there aliens? Was this about to turn into every bad sci-fi movie ever? And the government? Dr. Weir seemed well-intentioned enough, but this had originally been an expedition staffed largely by researchers. Who knew what kind of crazy Utopian procedures she might implement? And the military presence. Without the backing of Earth governments, how could she control it? They could be days away from the plot of Moonraker for all he knew.
He thought about his mother, her soft voice (when she wasn't screaming at him to clean his room), the way she tucked him into bed every night, even at age fourteen. He always pretended he hated it, but now -- he'd just have to make sure to do the same for Jeannie. And then there was his father. They'd fought and as cliché as it now sounded, he never really knew his dad. But they were family and now they were gone. And there was only so much he could rationalize himself out of.
Rodney blinked and there were tears streaming down his face. The man had somehow lowered himself to Rodney's side, pulling him into an almost uncomfortably tight hug and rubbing circles on Rodney's back. "Shh. It's okay. It's okay."
"It's not okay!" Rodney shouted. "Look around you! It's not okay."
"No. I guess it's not," the man replied. "But we're here and we have to make the best of it, eh?"
"We may not have Earth, but at least the spirit of Hallmark cards has survived." He rolled his eyes.
"I'm not being sentimental. That's the way things are. Earth's gone and we're here now. We'll either create a better world or a worse one."
"Oddly, I can live with that," Rodney replied. He didn't much care for the other option.
"Good," the man plastered on a plastic grin. "I'm Steve. Now, how about I get you and your sister some lunch before they run out?"
Rodney nodded, almost shocked by the kindness this man was showing some strange kid (no matter how brilliant this particular kid might be). But Steve had said it himself: they'd either create a better world or a worse one and they had to try for the former.
Lantern 2/4