Episode One- The Fifth- Chapter Twelve

Posted on November 30, 2012 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Twelve

The vast room Wraith-hybrid Michael is running through is empty.  No stacks, no gangways, just aging scaffolding covering the wall he just came from indicating that the warehouse had at one point in time been worked by humans.  Humans he already knew what had happened to.  However…

He had no idea the Wraith were going to be here.  Has his equipment been so relegated to such inadequacy that it couldn’t detect a Wraith ship nearby?  He thought the news of his ‘death’ would be enough to quell their hunts for him, it had for the residents of Atlantis, but this proved him wrong.  The Wraith were hungrier than ever for anything relating to him.  He didn’t necessarily mind being wrong, it helped modify and correct experiments, but he hated being wrong in this instance.  It proved more than dangerous to himself.  They had even had time to set up traps for him, series of traps, in almost every room of the warehouse.  He’d open doors and explosions or drones or other males would come out at him, or try to.  So much effort for him.  He wanted to allow himself a smile.  The Wraith were trying to find a way to cure themselves of the Hoffan drug he had let loose in the Pegasus galaxy, thanks to the help of his clone of Doctor Beckett who had originally helped the Hoffans themselves create the disease, the first bio-weapon of the Pegasus Galaxy, before they were rendered extinct by both the Wraith cullings and vengeance and the side-effects of the virus they believed would be their salvation.  There again Michael wanted to laugh, only humans would come up with a virus that automatically killed one out of every two of their own population.  It was no small concession that his former species were here searching a long forgotten warehouse that even Michael had long since abandoned trying to find anything that helped them.  They were desperate.  He wanted to be able to stay and watch them search this entire warehouse and the one next to it for one room, one room, containing all that they thought they needed.   But the computer’s database was empty and he could see it up ahead, the light of the open air and the free and clear way he had left for himself.  The floor is quickly passing away underneath him.  He reaches a certain point and suddenly Kenmore comes out of nowhere behind him with the barrel of her P-90 aimed at his back.

“Freeze,” she orders.

Michael stops.  It was amazing how Wraith agility, diluted as it is in him, could make such a thing so abrupt.  The dust that had previously crackled underneath his boots was barely disturbed.

“By the authority of the SGC, I’m placing you under arrest…Not really I just always wanted to say that,” she laughs, lowering her gun a little.

That laughter, that so very human laughter, Michael slowly turns around to face her and Lieutenant Ursula Kenmore gets her first look at Atlantis’ Lieutenant Michael Kenmore. He’s wearing a rust-colored tunic with a dark red, scaly, animal hide yoke and dark red, scaly, animal hide, perhaps the more aggressive part of whatever reptile the hide had come from, gauntlets topping the tunic with a rust-colored, leather belt closed with a gold buckle that had a carving of an ornately designed ‘G’ wrapped around his waist—what did that stand for, ‘Dear God, look what my tailor did to me?’  The pants are the same leather as the belt but the same color as the animal hide of the tunic and leather boots.  Although it’s more than a bit overdramatic for her taste let alone way too matchy-matchy, she had to admit the Wraith-like outfit is a pretty nice fit on him.  She couldn’t complain about the physique any.  He had a man’s answer to the hour-glass figure:  an upside-down triangle.  And her eyes were having a tendency to stray to his biceps too, which was distracting but nothing more.  His whole body looked comfortable, looked right, in the outfit.

As for his face, she could see where the disruption there was.  He didn’t look like any of the photos of Wraith males she had been supplied with, although she still didn’t know what was under that skull mask but she doubted it was anything like this.  No long hair the color of the heart of an ice cube.  His is short and is more or less frosted with white, although on him, in the dismal light that managed to pour down on them from the windows set so close to the ceiling, it looked gray.  Not exactly unattractive.  She had had a thing for rock stars when she was younger, long-hair metal bands, that had since aged into more of a liking towards the mad professor or mad scientist side of the spectrum.  His face is still more or less Wraith, but his skin wasn’t as deep a green as she had seen in the photos of the other Wraith males either.  It looked like it was…diluted somehow and his eyes weren’t as catlike as she had expected.  Oh, they were still yellow, but they seemed more…human in design…look…yes, he was definitely not like any of the other Wraith she had been given photos of.  Her mind didn’t stay too long on the question of why she hadn’t been given photos of this clearly other type of Wraith, she didn’t have that sort of time right now.

“So you’re the Wraith they’re after,” Kenmore nods as she considers him, “You don’t look anything like the photos of the Wraith I’ve seen.”

“I’m not a Wraith,” Michael growls, staring at her intently the way a lion crouched in tall grass eyes an antelope in the open field.

“Then what are you?”

“I am none of your concern,” his words echo bizarrely in the room…or was that just in her head?

Kenmore’s eyes dart around the room, waiting for something to happen.  Nothing does.

“I don’t know what you’re doing but it’s not working.”

Michael looks at her, curious, and whatever tactically intimidating stance he had initially taken with her, he now relinquishes.

“It has no effect on you?”

“Nope.  See I can do that too.  Echo!”

Her words do not echo.  Kenmore looks around her.  Well isn’t this awkward.  She fills in for it.

“Echo, echo, echo, echo, echo,” she decrescendos.

Yeah, that wasn’t awkward.  No, not at all.  She smiles tryingly.  Michael stares at her then takes a step towards her.  Immediately Ursula reassures him of her aim by bringing the barrel of her P-90 up again.

“I don’t think so,” Kenmore’s smile becomes derisive, “Yeah, this ain’t my first rodeo.”

Michael stares at her.  She may be a curious specimen of the human race, especially for the Lantean variety, but that smile, that human smile that reminded him of every fake smile every shown to his face or he sensed behind his back from those that had used, abused, and betrayed him, brought back all the hatred he had ever had for the city of Atlantis and her denizens.  His eyes don’t have to narrow, the chill that he had gazed down at a pregnant Teyla with as he experimented on the fetus inside of her fills them.  Atlantis had brought him to this point.  Humans had brought him to this point.  That smile had brought him to this point.  And he was going to repay the visitation in kind.  Michael feels all the muscles he needs to take another step tense beneath his skin.

Suddenly they hear roars coming from the sole entry into this room behind her.  The three drones that Kenmore had not known had pursued her have finally caught up with her.  Not good.  They’re close, too close.  Kenmore, despite the imminent threat in front of her, instinctively turns, kneels, and opens fire into the entryway, mowing down two drones trying to charge while they were still deep in the hallway.  They hadn’t fired any weapons at her.  Why?  They must have found the bodies she scavenged from.  And now they were angry…but they were still armed.  Why not use their weapons?

Michael takes the opportunity to turn and run; he may have wanted to annihilate the woman, but he was not stupid enough to stick around when Wraith were descending upon the place in numbers he had no accurate count on but, once being a Wraith himself, he had a fairly good guess at how many numbers were going to be used and they were not in his favor.  Kenmore looks back at him.

Suddenly she hears rustling from the scaffolding and looks back up at it only to see the third drone in mid-leap from the scaffolding covering what appears to be another entry into the room two levels up.  Yeah, really angry.  So angry weapons were no object anymore.  And something else…He’s coming down way too fast.  She doesn’t have time to shoot.  Kenmore has no choice left but to take the card she’s been dealt.  She turns her head down and away.  She doesn’t want to see the end coming like this.  She didn’t even have time to try and pull her own trigger.

Without warning a massive burst of bright, white light explodes from her towards the drone like a massive web of searing white electricity with just as dangerous sounding a crackle as the web is beautiful.  Michael stops and tries to look back, but all he can do is block the blinding light with his hands from his squinting eyes.  The drone screams as the web of light engulfs him and incinerates him in mid-air a few feet above Kenmore’s head.

The brightness dims and Kenmore, slack-jawed, scared, and confused, opens her eyes wide and sees Michael, shocked and staring right back at her.  As the web of energy dies away around her, some of that strange, powerful light absorbs back down into Kenmore’s pupils…and Michael’s as they stare at each other.  Then it fades from there as well like dying liquid gold.

They hold each other’s stare for a long moment.  Kenmore’s trembling, she knows she’s trembling.  She can’t stop herself from trembling.  She can feel her teeth rattling inside her skull and her breathing shake.  What the hell was that? What the hell was that?

Then she hears it:  a few small things fall behind her.  How many more of these guys are there?  Kenmore looks back as Michael starts to run away again and sees the whole wall of scaffolding start to tilt forward.  It’s not more Wraith.  Oh God.  What was that blast?  What did it do?  The left behind things on the scaffolding start slipping off.  Heavy paint cans whose contents have long since dried into bricks pound into the concrete near her.  Breaking concrete floor in circles of impact craters.  A tool, perhaps an awl she couldn’t really tell, but it was still pretty damn sharp looking, stabbed into the floor next to her.  Splinters of broken concrete flare up at her face.  Hammers break up even more chunks of flooring.  A screwdriver-type tool stabs down into the floor and stays there like a sword in stone.  Kenmore looks from side to side, trying to shield her eyes and face from all the sharp fragments flying up at her, but she can’t keep up and she sure as hell isn’t going to let go of her gun, she knows better than that with an enemy still somewhere in the room.  Some of the scaffolding’s more aged parts start to rain down on her.  She feels rusty bolts and flakes of old wall start to pelt the top of her head.  And creaking.  She can hear the creaking now.  Kenmore rolls to her side, lands on her back, and looks up and again has no hope and no time but to start to cover her face as the whole thing finally crashes down on her.  She tries to throw up an arm over her face.  The other clinging tightly to her gun.  Through the roar of crumbling scaffolding and debris there comes a single yell…

“Michael!”

The “–eal” of Kenmore’s scream echoes quickly and bizarrely.  Unlike anything he’s every heard before, Michael stops at his name and looks back.  He was already breathing hard from the shock of what he’d just seen.  What was that light?  Dust and debris cover everything.  What new weapon had Atlantis managed to create while he was forced to go underground?  What experiments had they done to their own?  He takes one last look at the scene, the soldier is gone, then he continues to run out of the building to the still clear light of a pristine day through the open door he had left for himself and the modified Wraith scoutship he knew he had left landed on the concrete loading dock just twenty yards beyond.

 *                      *                      *

Doctor Jennifer Keller gets a good grip under his armpits and lifts, helping the little boy up onto the examination table.  He was heavy, much heavier than she had been expecting.  Of course there was quite an age gap between Torren, Teyla’s son, who was barely two years old, and Michael Kenmore here, who was five, and, of course, that meant that there was quite a weight difference.  Keller supposed she would have to get used to having an older child around to take care of on a regular basis even if it is only temporary, or at least the boy’s mother hoped it was going to be temporary.  Well—after all Torren was going to get older, might as well use the practice while Michael was still here.

She smiles at the little boy then turns around to get his file from her desk.  Michael Kenmore…junior.  Keller opens the file.  How could she have missed that?  The boy was barely, and she meant that, barely mentioned in his mother’s file as well as the child’s father.  Even here, the father was only mentioned in required areas like on the boy’s birth certificate:

Father’s Name                       Michael Kenmore

or on his transfer papers:

Father’s Current Status                   Deceased

Keller couldn’t imagine that.  The only things you were allowed to officially know about your father was you inherited his name and he was dead.

Jennifer turns back around to face the little boy and fixes him with another smile although he’s not looking at her.  He’s too busy being a child in a new place.  He’s looking everywhere, the ceiling, the walls, the rest of the room behind him.  He is completely fascinated by everything here.  Jennifer’s grin deepens enough that she can feel her dimples set firmly in her cheeks.  It was nice to see someone else just as in love with this place on first sight as she had been and still was… a nervous first day on the job, soul-sucking aliens, catastrophic explosions, and world-destroying plagues aside of course.  The little boy looks like, yes, he’s staying where he is.  He’s just vibrating with the urge to run around and touch everything or point at it and ask a million questions a million miles a second.

Keller’s eyes duck back down to the paper’s of his file for cover.  Rodney gets the same look when he sees some new Ancient technology or item they hadn’t dealt with before.  A boy and his candy shop.  Scientists.  Little boys.

Jennifer looks back up at Michael.  She wondered if he had inherited his father’s looks let alone his scientific curiosity.  He didn’t look tremendously alot like his mother.  She had dark hair and dark skin.  Michael had blonde hair that wasn’t his mother’s color or texture and fair skin, but he did have his mother’s rich, lustrous mahogany brown eyes.  Jennifer clears her throat.  Michael looks back at her.

“Well, according to your file, you did very well back at the SGC, but I’m sorry I have to tell you that I will have to take some more of your blood for our blood and DNA database here.  Now that might sting a little.”

“That’s okay,” he answers nicely, “I’m a fast healer.”

Just like his mother.

“That’s good.”

Jennifer turns around and goes back to her desk to put his file back and fetch her supplies.  Michael goes back to looking around.  He was finding the massively high ceilings just fascinating.  How did they make them so high?

Michael!

His head immediately snaps back to the rest of the room.

His sudden intake of breath sounds like a death rattle to Jennifer and she’s heard plenty of those before.  She immediately looks back at him.  He isn’t a happy child anymore.  He’s a scared child.  Keller looks at the rest of the room.  There’s nothing unusual there.  Nothing she can see anyway.  She’s rushes over to him.

“Michael,” she grabs his upper arms, “Michael, what is it?”

“Mommy.  She screamed my name.”  His voice sounds so…

He’s shaking.

“She isn’t here Michael.”

And that sets him off…

“Mommy,” he screams and tries to make a run for it.  Keller grabs him, he fights her, “Mommy!  She’s calling for me.  She’s hurt.  Mommy!  Mommy!”

Quickly three other nurses run over to help Jennifer restrain the deranged child and they’re all barely enough to do the job as he keeps screaming for his mother.  Now this, this was what Jennifer expected of her days in Atlantis especially in her ward.  This, she dodged a tiny reaching, clawing hand that managed to squirm free, a nurse wrangled it back under control as they continued to hold in its owner, was normal.

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Episode One- The Fifth- Chapter Eleven

Posted on November 24, 2012 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Eleven

The blasts of weapons fire that is definitely not SGC-grade munitions are coming from ahead of her.  It had been awhile since she had heard anybody else and the hallways had long since started to look exactly the same as the ones they entered the warehouse in except for the lighting.  These hallways still had bright white lights strapped to the ceiling, although this particular section had none at all, rather than red lighting the color of freshly spilt blood.  Kenmore stops then silently and slowly steps into the glow of natural light that is cast across the walls and spreading floor at the end of this hallway.  Just like the one upstairs, the hallway opens up onto yet another series of metal gangways floating above the perimeter of another vast room holding yet more stacks of crates and containers just like Kenmore had suspected it would.  It’s almost exactly like the room she ditched Colonel Sheppard and his team in.  You’d think you were going in circles in a place as reflective as this, Kenmore peers down at the scene below, well, perhaps not entirely reflective.

There are five of what she understands to be Wraith drones—was it the drones that had the craggy skull things over their faces or was that the Queens; no, the Queens were the most individual looking, right; with red hair or human looking skin or anything else that could possibly set them apart as female—that have taken up scattered positions behind stacks of wooden crates in the middle of the room near the right wall and they’re firing on a single cloaked and hooded figure hiding behind a single low stack of two metal containers again in the middle of the room just near the middle of the left wall.  The figure is a good aim.  He dodges and fires and each fire is methodically blowing tiny bits out of the Wraith’s stacks.  Frankly, it’d be exactly what Kenmore would do if she didn’t have the advantage of being the taller opponent or the one with the most back up but had been granted the mercifully leveling advantage of being the one behind the metal.  The figure blows a hole in one stack then moves on to fire on the next.  Kenmore nods.  That’s exactly right, be a systematic pain in their backsides.  The process is slow and time consuming but effective.  Make them think that you think they’re too much for you.  Make them think they’ve got the upper hand.  Make them think your firing is frantic.  Uncoordinated.  Overwhelmed.

Finally when the hooded figure fires on the first stack, his shot blows right through the container and takes out the Wraith hiding behind it.  He moves his aim to the next stack and takes out that Wraith.  Perfect.  Simply perfect.  The figure couldn’t have gotten much more textbook strategic firepower than if he’d wrote the textbook himself.  Kenmore nods her head approvingly again.  Impressive.  Most impressive.  But are you a Jedi…yet?  In a few seconds, there’s only one Wraith drone—Kenmore finally felt comfortable calling him that—left and he’s caught on to the hooded figure’s game and has lowered himself deeper behind his stack.

Oooh, this could be a tricky one.  The figure hadn’t blown any holes in the lower part of the stacks.  Kenmore watches carefully.  The figure checks the entryway just mere yards away from him, then looks back at the final Wraith’s stack, then back at the entryway, and judges it to be a worthy chance.  Kenmore’s not so sure she would have made that exact same decision.  The drone was far taller and longer legs could close mere yards in equally mere seconds.  She would have let the drone come after her.  From the sounds of his hissing, he was foaming at the mouth to do it.  Desire was an advantage.  Bloodlust was an advantage.  Survival was an advantage.  After all, which usually won out, gut instinct or the calculating mind?

The figure runs for the entryway firing at the stack the entire way.  Apparently the battlefield was truly level, survival was just as big a desire as bloodlust.  Well at least he?—Kenmore shrugged—wasn’t just going to make a plain, old fashioned run for it.  The drone comes out from behind his stack and starts to pursue the figure, dodging the figure’s stray shots.  Just like Kenmore thought, the drone had been itching to physically get his hands on the figure rather than just be content enough to blow a hole through the fleeing form.  But not all of the shots are stray, several hit the drone as he quickly closes on the figure.  Dear God, the caped crusader might actually make it.  Kenmore grabs on to the gangway railing in front of her and leans over it to see the rest of the scene play out.

The drone is feet away from the figure when the figure’s last few shots finish him off and the drone stumbles to his knees…Oh God…and reaches out towards the figure…Oh God…The drone manages to catch the bottom of the figure’s robe…Oh crap…and pulls it to the ground with him.  Kenmore suddenly yanks herself back and dips down to the floor to try to get a better look beneath the railings’ bars at whoever the figure is, but the figure is too far into the entryway for her to get a proper look at him.  She can see the back of him from the shoulder blades down though.  Just clothes, no skin, no defining markers.  Not exactly eye-opening.  In a fraction of a second, he’s completely out of sight.  Kenmore jumps at the chance before her and runs across the gangway lining above the left wall and disappears into the entryway’s upper-deck twin.

 

 

Sheppard and his team stalk slowly down a whole new design of hallway.  This one is still solid, windowless concrete, but it’s lined on either side with doors every few feet.  But the doors still aren’t necessarily spectacular or interesting, they look like some precinct door out of an old police television show.  John wasn’t particularly inspired.  So far he was doubting Michael had ever set up any sort of shop here.  They would keep looking, but more and more John was taking into consideration a personal decision: what were they going to do when they discovered that there was no lab?  Woolsey hadn’t said anything about that.  Woolsey’s stipulation was clear and precise:  these warehouses were one of Michael’s labs; his distinctions were simple:  either they’re in use or they aren’t, and either way, blow them up.  But…Were they just supposed to leave the warehouses here and let the Wraith have them?  John wasn’t sure he liked that idea but he liked the idea of wasting ammunition even less.  They move down the hallway checking every open doorway they came upon.  It was best to skip the closed ones for now, seeing as how nothing was currently jumping out at them from behind one or just blasting through the door at them either.  In a sick way, John was hoping they would find something, anything, soon.  He could see how Woolsey thought that there had to be a lab here.  Everything pointed to it.  And the Wraith are here.  They had to be protecting something, but the longer he and his team poked around, the more it was looking like the Wraith weren’t doing anything here except scavenging what the planet’s own inhabitants had left behind.  They hadn’t seen them do that before, but…a duck’s a duck.

After the second cleared room and just when Sheppard was starting to loosen up, they heard the sounds of the three drones they were after up ahead of them.  The bored grunting and irritated hissing was unmistakable.  Sheppard signals for them to stop and form up into a diamond again, this time Teyla and McKay calling sides and Ronon taking the back point, then they move forward again.  Suddenly they hear scuffling sounds echoing up from behind them.  They stop and look behind.  Somebody was coming up on them fast and whatever it was didn’t care who heard it coming.  Why didn’t he think of that?  How long has he been doing this and John hadn’t thought of that?  His team takes one glance at each other then breaks apart, taking up parallel positions against the walls.  Sheppard slams his himself against the wall with well more than enough force just to punish himself for the lapse in judgment.  He chokes down his grunt and keeps silent just like the rest of his team, like they always did when the crap hit the fan and there was no way to avoid the wind coming from both sides.  Just like they expected, the sounds of the drones suddenly stop as the new scuffling sounds finally reach their ears and the drones, wasting no time whatsoever, of course, come around the corner and open fire on the team and the hallway.

Teyla and Ronon, in the front positions, return fire as Sheppard and McKay, in the rear positions, stare behind and wait.  Sheppard wiggles the butt of his P-90 into his shoulder a bit more, getting it comfortably set in for the long haul as Rodney’s outstretched pistol wiggles in mid-air for an entirely different reason.  It had been a long time since they’d had to do anything like this.  But in their own ways, they were, as usual, ready.

The scuffling was getting louder to the point that Sheppard could comfortably call it thunderous bounding, considering it was starting to drown out the sound of gunfire directly behind him.  This was going to be bad, this was going to be really bad…Suddenly Lorne and his team break into Sheppard and McKay’s view running towards them.  John and Rodney shoot each other looks.  Thank God, that was the break they needed, the one John had been looking for.  Sheppard and McKay turn on their heels, Lorne’s team catches up, and everyone’s aim turns towards the drones.

“‘Bout time you guys showed up,” Sheppard yells over the weapons fire.

Lorne, out of breath, answers, “Sorry, Sir, there was nothing in the other warehouse.  When we tried to radio you, we discovered the jam and when we got into that other room…this way had the most footprints in the dust.  We figured we better come help you.  Where’s Ursula?”

“She went the other way.”

And John regrets answering him honestly, the worry in Lorne’s voice is apparent, “Alone?”

Damn.  Well, if you’re going to be honest, might as well go all the way.

“Yeah, she had a problem with my orders.”

“What problem?”

“Following them.  You ready for this,” Sheppard needed the subject change and thankfully Lorne goes along with him.

Lorne nods and both teams suddenly unload mass simultaneous fire at strategic areas in the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and into the open air the drones would have to be forced out of cover into.  It only takes a few seconds and the drones are easily mowed down.  The teams let the dust and smoke from the cooling gun barrels and blasted out chunks of wall fade away just to give the drones time to either regenerate and come back up swinging or stay dead.  They stay dead and the two teams come out of their positions and walk forward to survey the damage they’ve done.  Despite the not exactly easy way they had to take care of the Wraith, Ronon doesn’t buy how easy he believes it was.

“They were ahead.  Why’d they stop,” he asks.

McKay points at the muddle of footprints in the disturbed dust in front of a regular plain, old door with a regular plain, old round doorknob, “They were guarding that room.”

Sheppard nods at Rodney.  Rodney puts his back to the safety of the solid concrete wall beside the door and puts his hand on the knob.  Lorne’s team ducks down and slips past the wooden part of the door and form up on the other side as Sheppard, Ronon, and Teyla form up just in front of their fellow teammate.  As soon as both teams are set, Rodney turns the knob and tosses the door back open.  The teams burst into the room.  It’s empty except for what Sheppard’s and Lorne’s teams were there for in the first place:  a lab room with a computer that looks like it was grown rather than built.

“Well, there’s your computer McKay,” Sheppard gives the scientist the go ahead.

Rodney runs forward, pulls his computer tablet out from the pack behind his back, plugs it in, and starts turning the lab computer on.  The others spread out in the room.  Teyla looks around her with particular horror.  It is familiar to her and yet not entirely.  She can’t put her finger on why.  It’s more than familiar to Sheppard and Ronon though.  It looks almost identical to the birthing room Michael had set up for Teyla in that booby-trapped building they had found themselves buried underneath almost a year ago now.  An incubator sitting against the wall by the door.  It looked like it had been metal and glass once, standard-issue human stuff, but there’s an organic web stretched over it now like the cobwebs stretched over the crates in the previous room.  An operating slab residing nicely in the middle of the cramped room, again it looked like it had been beautiful once.  Delicate metal wrapped around and embroidering thick frosted glass.  Beautiful…but now it too was covered in organic web material with chunks of what would look like organs if they didn’t have small diodes, computer panels, and screens embedded in them.  And everything had inch-thick, ribbed cords coming out of them and running along the floor and up into the computer Rodney was currently plugged into.  Beyond his control, John actually shudders.  Bad memories.

“Well, this is one of Michael’s labs,” McKay announces from his spot.

A ghostly specter of Teyla strapped down at the ankles and wrists to the top of the slab seems to coalesce right before John’s eyes and he can hear the ethereal wailing of a crying baby coming from next to him.  He fought hard to not look at the incubator.  He didn’t want to see what horrors his mind was going to trick him into seeing over there.  It was bad enough he was seeing what might have happened to Teyla had they not rescued her in time…barely…by sheer dumb luck.  Sheppard closes his eyes, shakes his head slightly, and blinks the image and the crying away back into reality.  Really bad memories.

“Well we figured that,” Sheppard snaps, “The room looks like a backup birthing room for Teyla when she was pregnant,” he catches Teyla’s eye as she suddenly turns to look at him, “Tell us something we don’t know.  Can you download anything from that thing?”  Their eyes just lock and nothing is said, but they’re sharing the same thought.  They saved her from this.  Enough said.  And frankly Sheppard doesn’t know what more he could say on the matter and Teyla doesn’t know how to express her gratitude any further, she gave her son Torren the middle name of John in Sheppard’s honor.

Rodney nods as he continues to work, “Of course I can.  I’m just bringing up—“

At McKay’s sudden stop, Sheppard’s look shoots to him, and at McKay’s look of shock and horror at the computer display in his hands, Sheppard starts at him.

“What?  What is it?”

McKay looks back at him, his shock and horror not leaving him for a second.

“It’s Michael,” they all stare at him, “He’s alive and he’s here.”

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Episode One- The Fifth- Chapter Ten

Posted on November 16, 2012 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Ten

The hallway was plain as hallways go.  It wasn’t exactly as plain Jane as the ones from upstairs though.  No doors, no windows, concrete materials, yes, but there are also blocks of bright white lights on the ceiling, looked to be fluorescent or the Pegasus Galaxy alien equivalent thereof.  The same lineup of pipes run down the walls by the ceiling like crown molding, just like upstairs.  But this time there are two colors of paint cutting the walls in half at an odd ascending angle until part of the hallway was all one color and then the odd angle would come back into view, only this time it would be descending, and the original color would return.  Bright, God-awful red-orange then putrid, mustard yellow.  Yeah, the sixties had been the interior decorator.

Kenmore nonchalantly walks down the hallway singing to herself.  No one was here, she hadn’t seen anyone yet.  What else was there to do?  Except sing and admire the architecture, half-assed acid trip as it was.

“Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay…”

She carefully approaches each junction of two intersecting hallways which seems to be all red-orange ceiling and mustard yellow floor, checks either way, and then chooses the one she wants.  In a new hallway that looks exactly like the one she’d just left, she suddenly stops as she hears sounds funneled down to her from the other end of the hallway:  grunts, shuffling, and all the other familiar sounds of a guard party waiting in a hallway to pick off whoever manages to come their way.  Kenmore smiles and starts walking again, singing the same song more quietly…

“Plenty of sunshine headin’ my way.”

As she draws near, she brings up the barrel of her P-90.

“Zip-a-dee-doo-dah…”

In mid-verse, she jumps out from around the corner into the next hallway and mows down the three drone Wraith standing there not expecting her.

“…Zip-a-dee-ay,” she finishes after the bodies hit the ground.

She takes a moment to see if anybody is going to pop up.  She didn’t know necessarily about the Wraith, but the Goa’uld had a nasty habit of crawling out of their dead hosts seeking a new one.  No one pops up and nothing crawls out.  Kenmore takes that as the all clear and walks forward, whistling the same song in the new silence, Mister Bluebird’s on my shoulder…, and begins to scavenge extra resources from the crumpled bodies on the floor.  Kenmore looks at the massive Wraith stunner lying beside the body she was currently examining.  It’s long, pointy at one end and fat and cylindrical at the other with glowing yellow lights along the cylindrical shaft.  It looks like a giant alien syringe.  Yep, no way she was going to be able to carry one of those things around with her easily.  She returns her attention to the body.

The body armor was a nice touch but it wasn’t going to help her either and she fought the urge to see what was under the crusty skull mask, but the belt with all its sections of—pod’s?—might help.

Keeping one hand on her P-90 at all times, she fingers around the perimeter of one of the pods and, just like she figured, it pops open.  Three metal cylinders, perhaps an inch, inch and a half, in diameter and three squat inches in length that reminded her of Doctor Keller’s little glass vials.  Rather zaftig versions but still…they were strapped to the flat part of the belt by little shiny metal hooks that looked like they were designed to spread open as the vials were pressed against them then clamp shut around the little things to secure them.  Kenmore pops one out of its hook, held it up to her ear, and shook it.  There was liquid inside.  Kenmore looked at the little vial in her hand.  She couldn’t see what color the stuff inside was.  Probably something to aid, what did the files refer to it as, their regeneration process.  Kenmore looked down at the body, still unmoving, still dead.  What good was injectable medicine when you snuffed it before you could get to it?  Of course, Kenmore had to admit it was SGC requirements to carry aspirin and all sorts of medicinal aids in the pockets of their tacvests as well as spare cartridges of ammo.  And how many times did her fallen comrades get a chance to get any of those before they snuffed it in the field?

Kenmore looks at the vial in her hand again.  Perhaps they were spare power cells for those big ass weapons. She glances again at the big round weapons with what looked like harpoons sticking out of one end.  Nope.  She doubted anything so small no matter how many of them you had was going to be able to generate enough power to keep that thing going for any useful period of time.  Kenmore shakes her head at it.  She simply had no idea what these things were.  She puts the vial back with its friends and pops open another belt pod.  Three more vials.  She pops open the next pod.  Three more.  And the next one.  Still three.  Kenmore opened as many pods as she could without having to flip the body over and take the belt off.

And speaking of belts, on his left there was a holster strapped to the belt and his leg with some sort of pistol in it.  Carefully Kenmore eases the weapon out of the holster.  She weighs it in the palm of her hand.  It’s light.  The barrel measures eight inches and from what would be the hammer on a revolver at home to the end of the angled handle would be about…seven inches, seven and a quarter maybe.  It looks like it’s grown more than built too.  Like the barrel’s more or less bloomed to form the rest of the hand weapon and the handle of it continued to grow into a twist of gnarled old tree branches that fused neatly and comfortably together at the end, but the more Kenmore looks at it the more it looks less like tree branches and more and more like twisted—bone?  And where there’s a gap in the leaves of the ‘bloom’—although ‘plates’ was more like it now, come to think of it—the insides of the weapon shows.  It’s faintly glowing yellow.  Her eyes slid from the weapon’s interior to the Wraith’s belt of opened pods.  Little metal vials.  Her eyes slide back to the weapon’s energy core.  What would you want to bet those little metal vials contained the juice to power the energy cells of this little weapon?

Kenmore hefts the pistol in her hand a couple of times then slips it back into its holster.  Silently and one-handedly, she keeps watch around herself and on the other bodies as she unties and pulls the holster off the Wraith’s corpse.  She flings the holster, pistol and all, over her shoulder.  She pockets all over her tacvest as many of the little vials as she can get from each of the three bodies, again without having to turn them over, then stands up.

She looks herself over.  Well the P-90 is hooked to the front of her vest and its strap is flung around her so that’s not going anywhere.  And her zat gun is strapped to her right thigh and there’s sure as hell no way she’s moving that around, she was too comfortable with where it was.  Her Berretta she kept snuggled quite safely and soundly against the small of her back and hidden underneath her vest.  Again, she sure as hell wasn’t going to move that from its spot.  Again she was too comfortable with where it was.  Well that left only one place.  Kenmore looks back behind her.  Her eyes dart from left to right.  No one was coming.  She looks back down at the bodies.  No one was moving, not even a residual nervous system twitch.  Finally, Kenmore looks up ahead of her.  Well no one else was coming…yet.  She picks her way over to the wall and braces her back against it, never letting her eyes stray from watching up ahead of her.  For the first time since she’s entered the warehouse, she lets go of her P-90 but maintains vigilance as she removes the holster draped over her shoulder, hooks it to the left side of her belt and leans over a little bit further and straps it to her thigh.  When she’s sure everything is settled nicely, hooked on correctly, nothing bugging the crap out of her, she takes her P-90 back in her hands and takes one last survey of the bodies then continues to the end of the hallway.

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah…she peers into the next hallway junction, she looks it over up and down, both ways are clear, she chooses which way she wants to go, and continues walking on whistling to herself…zip-a-dee-ay.

Pinned down and frustrated by not being able to call for any backup whatsoever, all Sheppard’s team can do is watch and return fire.  Ronon pops up from behind his stack of containers and lets off a couple of shots.  They’re close but they just shred the parts of wooden crate surrounding where the Wraith fire is coming from.  As he’s up, he sees another group of drones break away from the main group barricaded on the other side of the vast room and run down the other entryway.  Ronon bends back down as the barricade returns fire.

“Three more just went down the other entrance.”

“So how many does that leave,” Sheppard asks.

Teyla pops off a few shots from her position and stays up for the return fire.  She counts how many flashes from weapons she sees from the barricade of crates and containers then ducks back down to safety again.

“There are four left,” she reports.

Okay, Sheppard fought the urge to nod, I like those odds.

“Good.  That leaves one for each of us,” Sheppard says.

McKay suddenly screams as he simply puts his hand up without looking and fires a few wild shots from his pistol in the general direction of the Wraith.  The others stare at him.

And I was thinking?

“Okay.  That leaves four for the three of us,” Sheppard corrects.

Teyla nods at him.

“Okay, here’s the plan.  Ronon, you pop up and draw their fire.  Teyla and I will come out and pick off the rest.”

“And if we do not ‘pick off the rest’,” Teyla asks.

“Then I’ll pop up and you and Ronon will pick off what’s left.”

“Will the Wraith fall for the same thing twice?”

“We don’t have much choice,” Sheppard tells her.

Her brows furrow.  She doesn’t look happy with that and he couldn’t blame her, but it really is like it wasn’t like they had much of a choice.

McKay lets off another screaming volley.  Sheppard frowns at him then takes a deep inhale as he braces himself to pull this off.  Ronon and Teyla watch him.  He begins…

“One, two, three.”

Ronon pops up and fires the most shots anyone has this entire firefight and it obviously draws the Wraiths’ attention.  He manages to pick off one and to make sure to keep their attention, he stays up.  The Wraith fire starts going off at him like highly accurately aimed fireworks.  Shattering pieces of wooden crate near his face.  Sheppard and Teyla peer around from their stacks and open fire at the barrel flashes.  Sheppard takes out one, Teyla takes out another, and McKay lets off another volley, that wasn’t part of the plan, but it draws the last Wraith’s fire and Ronon picks that one off easily.  They all freeze, waiting and watching for the dust and shrapnel and smoke to clear.  They don’t hear any movement, which wasn’t saying anything special.  Slowly, they give up their covered positions and approach the barricade in a coupled formation.  Ronon with Rodney, Sheppard with Teyla.  Still nothing, which again wasn’t saying anything special.  How many times had they approached anything even remotely Wraith and seemingly down for the count only for it to pop back up and come at them again…and again…and again?  The defiant ones usually took a drone directly to the chest to finally go down and stay down, in pieces.  And John still couldn’t quite forget the first time they came under attack by the Wraith on Athos and Sergeant Bates managed to down one of their culling darts and half of the pilot’s arm dragged itself out of the wreckage and started towards John.  He Swiss-cheesed it on the ground but still…it had been like Thing’s green psychotic cousin.

They move up right beside the barricade.  Still nothing.  Ronon looks over at Sheppard from the other side of the barricade.  John nods at him.  They go around the barricade.  And see the Wraith bodies.  Nobody pops up; yep, they were dead.

“Did any of them manage to get off a distress call,” Sheppard asks.

He can’t see all of the bodies, but from where McKay and Ronon stand, they could.  McKay steps forward and checks the gauntleted wrist of the nearest body just to make sure, but it was nothing more than light catching off of the blue gem embedded in the gauntlet, then he looks up at Sheppard and shakes his head.

“No,” Rodney stands up.

“The others might have,” Ronon adds.

“So which ones do we go after?  The ones after our new dear Lieutenant Kenmore or the ones that went that way,” Rodney asks.

Sheppard tries his shoulder radio again.

“Kenmore come in.”

Static.

“Damn it, they’re still jamming us.”

Teyla looks around, “Should we split up?”

Sheppard considers it for a moment.  Taking into account the fact that four bodies were here after six had run off, that meant that there had been ten Wraith lying in wait for them.  If they ran into another batch like that, with no cover around…he shakes his head.  Four would barely survive and two would be fodder.

“No.  We’ll go after the three that went the other way.”

Teyla stares at him.  He knows what she’s thinking.

“And what about Lieutenant Kenmore,” she asks.

“If she’s smart, she’ll find cover.”

Teyla glares at Ronon for his comment.

“And if there is no cover,” she presses.

Sheppard sees the showdown brewing between his teammates and makes his final pronouncement.

“Look, it’s three drones against the four of us.  We’ll make short work of them and then go help her out.”

Teyla doesn’t look exactly enthusiastic about the plan.  He knew that look, remembered its quietness.  It was the same way she had not looked particularly enthusiastic but kept silent on board the jumper when they had been trapped on her father’s friend’s Orin’s planet during a massive Wraith culling the likes of which neither of them had seen before and that was saying a lot for Teyla considering she was born and grew up in the Pegasus Galaxy.

John sat in the jumper’s pilot seat staring at the ensuing carnage occurring just yards in front of him with a pair of binoculars to his eyes, because of course seeing the destruction of a village just wasn’t horrific enough from a distant front row seat, John had to see it as though he were on the one yard line, which was so much better.

“Come on, Orin.  Show up.”  It wasn’t like his words were going to do the trick but it made John feel better just to say them out loud.

John never did well under anxious situations like this.  Sit back and do nothing because you couldn’t…but you wanted to, you really, really wanted to.  And sometimes you really relied on hoping to replace action.  John settled for irate pissiness and a sigh and put—slammed—the binoculars back down on the DHD console in front of and a little off to his right. It was enough off to the right that he had no problem catching Teyla staring at him from the corner of his eye and the Athosian woman did not look happy.  In fact, she looked absolutely disgusted by him.  He met her look, and her expression, head on and she looked away from him, back to the horrors outside the jumper’s window.

“What?”

Although she was clearly refusing to look him in the eye, she had no hesitation in answering him.

“Not long ago, you would have blithely left him behind.”

“Well, the situation has changed,” John told her and went back to his observations.

He noticed her look at him from the corner of his eye again.  Her expression was different, the sentiment behind it was different.  He had only known her for about a year now, but was that disappointment…and perhaps confusion?  Her brows were furrowed but John got the feeling it was more from distress than misunderstanding.  She looks away from him again and back to the village.  She takes a breath and continues…

“Earlier today, Lieutenant Ford suggested we steal from a community of children.”

“It’s because they have a ZPM, and we can bring them back,” John pleads his case, he looks at her, and before he can even finish his words, she finally meets his eyes…

“Only to face death in Atlantis.”

Well that was quick.  John lets a heartbeat fall to cool his anger slightly but his first word to her still had a sharp edge to it…

“Look.  Ford and I are military.  We’ve spent a lot of our lives learning how to survive.”

And once again, before the words can even leave his lips, she came back at him…

“I have spent my life surviving the Wraith.”

“Part,” John went on, “of that training is knowing who you can save and who you can’t.”

She tilted her head sweetly and for a moment John thought they were okay, but her words had bite with a squint of her eyes…

“And that decision is yours alone?”

John may not have known her long, but he knew sarcasm when he heard it coming from anyone and, frankly, he had had enough of it.

“I said that I’d wait for your friend if there was time.  Now there’s time,” John felt his boiling point; he thought Teyla was the last person he’d have to have this conversation with, perhaps Elizabeth, but not Teyla.  “What else do you want from me?”

Again there was another moment of silence, Teyla took a breath like she was bracing herself for something she never wanted to admit ever and more than likely never wanted to admit again:  disappointment.  She looked away from John again…

“Too much I fear,” she finally said in that quiet Athosian Mother-Earth voice of hers as she continued to watch the carnage outside.

Well that stung like hell.  John kept staring at her.  The last person in the world he wanted against him was Teyla.  She was the first woman he had trusted, gotten used to being close to in a long time.  Not since his now ex-wife, Nancy.  And in his typical fashion when he and Nancy had a fight, John let his own disgusted retort slip with a shake of his head…

“It’s gonna be a long night.”

John picked the binoculars back up again as Wraith darts screeched overhead, put them back to his eyes as a means of telling Teyla he was done with this conversation, and began to watch the carnage from a front row seat again because what he was seeing outside, he could handle a lot better than the carnage that was going on in here.

In the end, they did save Orin’s family plus about twenty others and John had been glad of it because the culling had truly been massive and disastrous.  Orin, his family, and those twenty others had been the only ones to survive; the entire village had been wiped out.  Teyla had told him then that it would mean something, be something, if he could save them and she was right.  Later that day she had nodded at him, trusting him once more.

And she trusts him now and nods her agreement.  The group goes down the other entryway.  Forming up in their regular formation, Ronon and Sheppard leading the way followed by Rodney then Teyla bringing up the rear.  Finally, it felt like old hat again.  John wasn’t entirely sure that was a good thing or a bad thing but he was definitely sure it was a comfortable thing.

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Episode One- The Fifth- Chapter Nine

Posted on November 9, 2012 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Nine

Jumper One glides slowly towards the entrance of the largest of a set of two windowed, white stone warehouses, but stops a few feet away from the gapping, dark, empty maw that was their opened front doors and settles silently and smoothly down onto the concrete.  It doesn’t look out of the ordinary, like any other warehouse any Earth-born—well, human—person could find on a pier somewhere, but like McKay had said earlier in the mess hall looks can be deceiving.  Keeping the cloak activated, Sheppard shuts the jumper down while Lorne lands his jumper a few feet beside theirs, also maintaining his cloak.  Although no one can see it, their jumpers’ ramps lower, but what anybody can see is Sheppard, Ronon, and McKay disembarking at the same time Lorne and his team did.  Just a bunch of armed guys literally appearing out of nowhere.

Teyla does one last double check on her tacvest as she walks through the rear cabin, past Kenmore, and slowly descends the ramp.  She stops to stand at the bottom making extra sure that everything was secure.  It would not be wise in a place like this to bear loose armaments.  Kenmore checks her own vest as she quietly walks back into the front compartment.  Done, Teyla looks back into the jumper for the Lieutenant and sees the woman do something at the jumper’s DHD.  Then the Lieutenant turns around and, without looking up, walks back through the rear compartment towards Teyla as Kenmore finishes adjusting one of the pockets on her tacvest.  As soon as the bottom of one of her boots sounds a metal clank on the jumper’s ramp, the Lieutenant finally looks up at the Athosian leader.

“Ready,” the Lieutenant asks.

Teyla nods silently.  Kenmore continues down the ramp and moves on past Teyla to join the others as they group between the two cloaked jumpers.  Teyla lingers behind for a moment.  She takes a step on the ramp and the jumper’s interior suddenly comes back into view.  She looks the interior over, eyeing the DHD, and trying to think of what it was Kenmore could have been interfering with.  Ronon’s accusations of the possibility that Mister Woolsey and the Lieutenant could be working together to spy on the team suddenly pops into her mind and she side-glances at Kenmore’s back moving away from her for a moment then looks back at the DHD.  There didn’t seem to be anything added like a listening device or a tracking device and Teyla had spent years in this vessel in particular its front and she could not find anything different from her memory of the tiny ship’s front interior.  It did not make Teyla comfortable but, at a loss for anything out of the ordinary, she follows Kenmore.  Teyla’s brows furrow at the unruffled Lieutenant.  Then Teyla looks back again at where the jumper was even though she couldn’t see it then back at the Lieutenant again, now standing with the rest of the assembled troops.  The Athosian leader is confused, she did not know why but there is a knot forming in her stomach.  As she gets closer to the group, she hears the start of a plan…

“Okay, Lorne, you and your team’ll take the second warehouse next door.  We’ll cover this one.  Everyone proceed quietly.  I don’t want to hear any radio chatter unless you’re pinned down and need, need the backup.  And I especially don’t want to set off any alarms or alert any Wraith probes that could be in the area to our presence here.  Everyone got that?”

They all nod at Sheppard.

“Okay move out.”

Lorne’s team splits off, single-file, as Sheppard’s team and Kenmore start to head deeper into the warehouse’s maw.  Kenmore, bringing up the rear, watches Lorne’s team as they near the edge of the warehouse door.  They slow down and nestle the butts of their guns into the joint of their shoulders before they cautiously peer around the corner into the alley between the two warehouses then, one by one, the men disappear around the corner.  Kenmore returns her attention to her own group’s task at hand.  She cocks her P-90 as they pass into the shadows that the light from the windows above don’t even pinprick anymore.  In the darkness, the others can be heard either charging their weapons or cocking them as well.  Then, in that same darkness, Sheppard opens a door upon a red-lit corridor leading off to the left.  He checks their immediate way, nods to the rest, and then heads in.  The others follow.

 *                      *                      *

John had never been a big fan of narrow, solid concrete corridors with no windows and which were so flooded with bright, blood red light he felt like he was walking through one hell of a photographer’s dark room…or a horror flick.  Bad, John, bad.  Don’t go there.  Every time you go there, you end up walking right into the movie.  They come to the junction at the end of the hallway, Sheppard halts them with a raise of his hand then he takes out his lifesigns detector and checks it.  It shows him a map of the warehouse but no lifesigns, which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing except that it wasn’t even showing Sheppard himself or his team.  Sheppard shakes it and Rodney catches the motion.

“What?  What is it,” he whispers from behind.

“It’s not showing any lifesigns.  Not even us,” Sheppard whispers back.  It’s shielded.  Great, just what they needed when entering a warehouse that might be crawling with Wraith or experimental equipment or…things.

“It must be shielded.  Great, just what we needed when entering a warehouse that might be crawling with Wraith or experimental equipment or…things,” McKay whispers in exasperation, throwing his hands up.

Sheppard looks back at him.  Sometimes it’s scary how much he and McKay think alike.  Then Sheppard returns to the predicament ahead of him.  He checks the detector again.  Well even if it can’t tell him where any body is exactly at least it still has a map of the structure which is still helpful. He decides to take the way going off to the right.  The others follow with Kenmore providing the sole rear view.  Although Ronon had it more than covered even if he didn’t look like it and that was just the way Sheppard liked it.  He didn’t entirely trust Kenmore and he trusted her even less if the look he thought he had seen in her eyes proved to be true and the whole fortune-telling thing with the cards was a trick.

This hallway is dark.  No longer saturated in bloody light, but dark…just dark.  No lights at all.  And as they slowly stalk forward, the hallway is beginning to open up.  Sheppard slows down, usually a widening path ahead of them turned out to be a bad thing, but he wasn’t planning on stopping any time soon just because.   As they keep going forward the hallway continues to spread until it finally opens onto a system of metal gangways suspended overhead of a huge, open room.  The group spreads out along the basically designed railing in front of them.  They pause and look down into the cavernous room below.  There’s…nothing.

Well, there’s nothing terrifying here.  Just stacks of crates and containers.  No plastic sheet-covered rows upon rows of deceased science experiments stacked up to the ceiling or Wraith computer banks still up and monitoring stasis pods or stasis chambers full of half-experimented on people that were now more like blind things that crawled along the ground and hissed at you than people.  Just plain, old boxes.  And old was an accurate description.  Everything looked like it hadn’t been touched in years, not too many years, but still years.  On the other side of the warehouse, Kenmore can see an entrance in each corner of the room, each one probably belonging to its own hallway that leads into the rest of the warehouse.

“Looks simple enough,” Sheppard says.

“It doesn’t look like anybody’s been here in a long time.  Are we sure the scout team was right?  I mean a probe would have showed the Wraith this.  There’s nothing here for them.  There’s nothing here for us,” McKay complains.

Ronon nods.

“Looks can be deceiving,” Kenmore pipes up from beside Ronon.

Sheppard looks down the line at her.  Gees, was everyone on the same wavelength today?

“We still check out everything,” Sheppard tells them, “I don’t want to leave here without something useful.”  And if that wasn’t possible, then he’d follow Woolsey’s orders and blow both buildings sky-high.  Both ways still meant they had to go down there.

With that, Sheppard leads them slowly towards the metal staircase to his immediate left.  Nothing seems to be noticing them.  No ticking, no hissing.  He puts a tentative boot on the first step and cringes at the echoing sound of just how loud a clang that was in the silence, but still nothing happens.  He continues down the staircase.  John tries very carefully to make sure no more sound comes from him and thankfully so do the others as they each in turn step lightly onto the staircase and follow him down.  Sheppard gingerly steps onto the concrete floor, still nothing happens, and he stalks forward a few steps as the others join him one by one on the main floor.  Sheppard stops so the rest of them can reform up on him then he leads their diamond formation forward again.

In a way, he felt kind of stupid acting this way.  It wasn’t like there was anything here.  But still, they had to come down here and plant explosives if need be.

“There are two entryways on either side of the far wall.  We should split up between the two,” Kenmore tells Sheppard.

“No, we stick together here.”

“We’ll cover more ground if we split up.”

The whole group pauses.  The others look at her.  Sheppard slowly turns his head around to look back at Kenmore.  No one but the other members of Sheppard’s team had ever questioned his tactics in the field before, and even then that was rare, and, in their mutual opinions, they were the only ones allowed to do so.

“No, we stay together,” he tells her firmly.

John returns his attention back to peering down the barrel of his gun.

“No, we should split up.”

His focus breaks and he glances back at her again.  They weren’t going to be going very fast if he had to keep arguing everything with her every five seconds, granted this was the first argument, but he knew where this was heading.  He’d done it to his own superiors hundreds of times.  He did it to Colonel Sumner in the middle of the gateroom back at the SGC when they were getting ready to dial Atlantis.

A spinning Stargate.  Sirens.  Chevrons clunking into place.  Sumner standing just behind John, speaking in that gravelly voice of his that sounded like two bricks being gently ground together, low, sharp enough to cut steel, and entirely meant for Major John Sheppard and anybody next to them.

“Let me make myself clear Major,” a breath’s pause, the standard military commanding hard-ass’s measure to which John could only smirk, then, “You are not here by my choice.”

Then John’s half of the witty exchange, which John of course had to make as witty as possible, and add some smart-ass to the hard-ass.

He turned his head a little, seemed to speak into his shoulder, and told the Colonel, “I’m sure you’ll warm up to me once you get to know me, Sir.”

To which the gravelly reply came almost instantly…

“As long as you remember who’s giving the orders.”

Then the Colonel passed in front of John, heading towards tending other duties and certain he was the one who had gotten the last word in their banter.  John smiled to himself, watching the man go.  Men like Sumner never failed to unimpress John.  And he wasn’t about to let the Colonel get the last word…

John could still remember what he had retorted to the Colonel’s back.

“That would be Doctor Weir, right?”  With another helping of smart-ass if you please.

And it was rewarded with the Colonel turning around to face the Major with a glare as lackeys made sure the Colonel’s gear was on right that John only replied to with a lopsided grin and an eyebrow shrug of self-satisfaction.  He was going to be damned if Sumner got the last word…and he didn’t.

“Look, I don’t know how they do things exactly back at the SGC but here we do things differently, and that means you do what I tell you and what I’m telling you is that we stick together.”

Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard returns his focus to his aim, as does the rest of his team except for Lieutenant Ursula Kenmore.  They prepare to move forward, again except for Lieutenant Ursula Kenmore.  The new Lieutenant stares at the back of her new Commanding Officer’s head.  Her eyes narrow for a moment then, with a sigh, she suddenly bolts across the floor behind him.  She runs in front of McKay, stuck in the middle, then Ronon.

“Get back in line Lieutenant Kenmore,” Sheppard orders.

And he wasn’t about to let the Colonel get the last word…

She isn’t stopping.  And she wasn’t about to.  Everyone loosens their stances to watch her.  And whatever skill and training in keeping it together they had walked in here with flew out the damn windows.  Oh yeah, even though nothing was here, this is exactly what they needed.  Sure, great.

“I said get back in line Lieutenant.”

Kenmore slows down to a trot, that’s better, then bolts to her immediate right, that wasn’t.

Sheppard steps forward.

“Lieutenant!”

He was going to be damned if Sumner got the last word…

Kenmore heads, at full tilt, up the clear path towards the entryway.

“Kenmore!”

…and he didn’t.

She disappears down the entryway.  Sheppard sighs then looks back at his team.  Teyla looked the same way Sheppard felt, they didn’t need to be chasing after some upstart newcomer who thought she knew best.  McKay looked so exasperated he could scream but wasn’t even complaining for once, perhaps Kenmore irritated him so much it overrode his ability to articulate being ticked off.  Well at least that was sort of a bonus.  And Ronon just looked at him like ‘What could you expect’ and Sheppard shrugged at him.  He had to admit his friend was right.  What had he expected?

“C’mon, let’s go get her,” Sheppard broods.

He starts forward again and passes in between two stacks of metal shipping crates.  He doesn’t notice that when his boot lands on the floor, two pinpricks of blue-green laser light suddenly appear on either side of it.  Alarms start to go off and Sheppard looks down and sees the pinpoints of light against the black leather on either side of his combat boot.  He’s just landed right in the middle of a blue-green laser line invisible in this light to his naked eye and held between the two stacks, “Aw crap.”

Suddenly a Wraith blast erupts from the part of the warehouse right in front of him and sails right over Sheppard’s bowed head.  Sheppard dives for cover and returns fire as well as dodging it as do the others.

“I thought Woolsey said the Wraith were near the planet,” Rodney shouts over the fireworks.

“Well this is near,” Sheppard shouts back and returns fire.

“Clearly we should redefine that.”

Teyla delivers a volley from her position and sees three drones leave their posts behind a barricade of wooden crates and run down the same entryway Kenmore had disappeared down.  She pulls back to the cover of her stack of metal containers as Wraith blasts streak past and shouts to Sheppard, “Some have gone after Lieutenant Kenmore.  We should radio her.”

Sheppard glances around his own stack to see then he pulls back and nods at her.  He touches his shoulder radio.

“Lieutenant Kenmore come in.”

He gets static and tries again.

“Lieutenant Kenmore.”

Still static.

“Damn it.  They’re jamming us,” he yells.

McKay stares at him, panic stricken, from the corner he’s stuck in.

“So, what, we’re on our own here?  We have backup next door and we’re still on our own?”

Sheppard nods grimly, Yeah this is what he had been expecting.  ‘Looks simple enough,’ ‘Looks can be deceiving.’  You know some days he hated this job, and returns more fire.

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Episode One- The Fifth- Chapter Eight

Posted on November 2, 2012 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Eight

The jumper comes out of the activate Stargate sitting in the middle of an open field lined by forest, familiarly, and that’s what makes it always so disturbing, pine trees, lots and lots of pine trees, and immediately goes to cloak as it takes to climbing just a little bit higher in the sky.  After a moment, although no one can see it, the little craft levels off.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, you are now free to move about the cabin,” Sheppard announces.

He always liked doing that.  He often imagined a specific scenario where some farmer had the misfortune to be nearby when the MALP came through to his side of the gate and he comes to investigate but doesn’t get to the MALP yet when the jumper breaks through the rippling surface of the wormhole and scares the crap out of the poor guy.  Sheppard allows himself a smile.  It wasn’t funny, in fact it was kinda mean, but still…it was kinda funny.  If you pictured it right.  Maybe add a smathering of scared sheep scrambling away.  Or goats.  Goats would be cool.  Especially if they were the ones that faint when they get spooked…okay, maybe that one was mean.

McKay and Teyla immediately get up.  McKay plugs his tablet back into the jumper’s system and goes back to bouncing back and forth between his computer and the jumper’s systems.  John was absolutely convinced that McKay did that as a means of pretending that he was the one flying the ship rather than John.  Sheppard didn’t mind.  He kept his fingers moving over the controls intentionally double-checking McKay’s systems checks.  Teyla walks back into the rear cabin.  Kenmore looks up at her, Teyla smiles at the other woman, Kenmore offers a polite smile back, and Teyla goes on to check the overhead compartments of the bench opposite Kenmore.  Well at least Lieutenant Kenmore could be polite, that was something Teyla had not yet seen from her.  When Teyla is done, she turns and offers the Lieutenant another smile.  This time it is not returned, perhaps Teyla had been a little too quick bestowing her good opinion of the Lieutenant.  Teyla goes back to the front compartment, leaving Kenmore alone in the rear.

Kenmore watches the woman go then starts to look around again.  She was right in her first impression.  This—what did they call it, puddlejumper—wasn’t much to look at.  It was no tel’tak, that was for sure.  When you looked at a tel’tak, it looked a little bit bigger than this thing, but when you got inside it, that little ship was massive, sort of like a Tardis.  This wasn’t a Tardis.  This wasn’t massive.  That little woman Teyla had maybe a foot and a half clearance over her head just now when Kenmore was watching her.  Which would be comfortable for her, but Kenmore could tell the woman was definitely not average female height.  Hell, Kenmore doubted whether or not that Ronon guy could stand up straight in here.  She glanced at what little of him she could see from her seat…Yes, very much doubted.  She goes back to her immediate surroundings…And everything was so plain.  A Tok’ra scout ship, they may not have been the Goa’uld, but they still had an exuberant habit of richly ornate interiors.  Gold plated walls with hieroglyphics scrawled all over the place.  There weren’t any storage compartments in them so if there were crates, they were usually stacked everywhere in the main hold, which only served to enhance how massive the interior really was.  You never felt cramped in one those vessels.  Kenmore stares across from her at the bags stacked into the netted hammocks dangling over the bench and felt its twin’s shadow over her head.  Yep, you never felt cramped in a Tok’ra scout ship.  You never felt bored either.  And even though this was supposed to be a short trip, boredom was starting to creep in on the outskirts of Kenmore’s mind.  Something else was creeping into her consciousness too.

The newcomer grabs her canteen from her vest, opens it, and starts to take a sip.  In mid-tilt, she stops and pulls the canteen away from her lips then tips it completely over.  Nothing comes out.  Kenmore shakes it.  Empty.  Disgusted, she tosses the canteen next to her onto the bench.  This ship was definitely not like a Tok’ra tel’tak scout ship.  And this place was most certainly not like the SGC.  It was completely unprepared.  Who in the SGC would ever think of going someplace, including a short trip, which in the SGC was usually spoken with bunny-ear gestures, with even a single canteen empty?  No one.  It was becoming clearer and clearer to her that Atlantis’ mode of operation was ‘shoddy work’ at best.  Clearly, the IOA’s list Nazis being in charge did not necessarily mean an orderly house, even though they kept shoving down your throat that they could do a better job at managing things than you could every chance they got.  The whole thing was frustrating as hell.

“God, I’m just thirsty,” Kenmore complains breathlessly and lets the back of her head hit the jumper’s wall.

Suddenly a tray shoots out beside her from the wall holding a white cup of some dark, brown liquid.  Kenmore looks down at it.  Was it supposed to do that?  A ‘You Are Here’ map popping up in the middle of a hallway was one thing, but did drinks really pop out of the walls here too?  Her eyes dart around, not knowing what to do necessarily.  Nothing else seems to be happening.  No one else seemed to be alarmed, although no one looked like they had noticed what had happened yet either.  You would think that if something unusual happened inside this thing, it would have alerted everybody up front.  Even with the map, the lights changed colors and started flashing at her to show her the way.  Wouldn’t the ship have the same feature up in the front, some handy little light on a console flashing with a label saying ‘Hello, I gave someone in the back a drink.  Have a nice day.’  Kenmore sortof doubted it would be that simple given the Ancients’ infamy of overcomplicating things beyond comprehension let alone belief, but it would have been a nice gesture.  And despite what Kenmore may think of Team Atlantis’ preparation practices, she would hope that they wouldn’t take something like indications of weird trays of liquids popping out of the walls lightly.  Still no one seems worried or if they had a flashing light telling them anything, it wasn’t telling them anything they apparently weren’t already familiar with.  She takes the cup.  She can hear that Doctor guy in the front muttering something about how he always had to do everything.  McKay takes a step into the rear compartment, looks at Kenmore, and stops to watch her.  Kenmore toasts the empty tray.

“Thanks.”

She looks at the liquid.  She sniffs at it then starts to take a sip.  McKay charges forward and snatches the drink away from her before the liquid can get anywhere near her lips.  Kenmore stares at him.

“Hey.  Get your own,” she complains.

“Where did you get this,” McKay snaps.

“From the wall,” she looks over at the tray.

The now empty tray zips back into the wall, seamlessly as though nothing had been there in the first place.  McKay gapes with widened eyes.

“How,” he exclaims breathlessly.

Kenmore shrugs, not knowing what the big deal was.  Was it puddlekicker—jumper—fuel or something else she wasn’t supposed to drink?  Or was it a ‘No Drinks Allowed’ voyage?  Or just a she wasn’t allowed any drinks voyage?  That would be just like Woolsey to add that little rule behind her back just like he’d added everything else pertaining to her or her son behind her back today.

“I just said I was thirsty.”

The tray shoots out of the wall again with another white cup of dark, brown liquid.  Rodney is even more dumbstruck.  Kenmore reaches over, grabs the cup again, and again the tray shoots back into the wall seamlessly.  Kenmore sniffs the liquid again, doesn’t smell like fuel, and without any further hesitation, she takes a sip.  McKay freaks out.

“Oh my God, what are you thinking?  That could be poison.”

Kenmore looks at him like he’s crazy.

“Relax, it’s not poison.  It’s hot cocoa.”

Rodney can’t believe this.

“You know what, okay.”

McKay takes the cup out of Kenmore’s hand again, to which she gapes again, sets it down beside her as she starts to sputter her objections, then yanks her up by her upper arm, and drags the Lieutenant to the front of the jumper.  He shoves her past Teyla, to which the Athosian woman recovers quickly from and turns around with a roll of her eyes, and practically tosses Kenmore into the co-pilot’s chair.  Kenmore, as well as everyone else, stares at him.  It’s a brave act for him and, frankly, a strong and aggressive one too.  Apparently no one’s allowed to show up Rodney McKay about mysterious Ancient technology popping up out of nowhere.

“Show them,” McKay orders her.  It’s even rarer still that Rodney would order any military personnel, even though he treated the other scientists of the expedition like his own personal herd of whipping boys and girls.

Kenmore looks at the others, clueless.

“Show them what,” she asks.  Something they should already know about?

“What do you think,” Rodney snaps.

Ronon sits up, wondering if McKay had indeed stumbled upon Kenmore reporting on them to Woolsey in the back.  The others may have discredited that assumption but Ronon hadn’t.  He angles his head to try and examine her hands just slightly out of his view and the rest of her person for any even slightly noticeable communication devices whether they look SGC issue, Ancient, or not.  Kenmore is still clueless however.  And, begrudgingly, Ronon can’t see any signs of behind-their-backs communication.

“That you’re more than just a little bit demented and sad,” she tries the answer, an eyebrow cocked.

McKay frowns.

“Show them this.”

McKay holds up the cup he had held on to.  The others stare at it then look up at him like he’s crazy.  Ronon had always thought McKay was a little off his rocker but liquid as a form of illegal communication?  Then it hit Ronon.  Maybe it’s the cup.  He tries to angle his head to look underneath it.  Teyla’s mouth hangs slightly open.  Perhaps Rodney had discovered something she had not suspected before, maybe Lieutenant Kenmore had snuck poison on board the jumper.  Perhaps if Teyla was pushed far enough, she would do the same.  Maybe the Lieutenant had some sort of contingency plan that would allow her son to be free of Woolsey’s threat should the Lieutenant die on a mission here.  Teyla eyes Lieutenant Kenmore.  Perhaps.  Sheppard looks at Kenmore then at the cup then he takes the cup out of Rodney’s hand and, just like Kenmore, without hesitation takes a sip from it.  Teyla gapes at him, McKay freaks out again, and Ronon’s wary and highly protective gaze zeroes in on Sheppard.  Ronon knew it was a stupid thing of Sheppard to do, but if he came to any harm because Kenmore managed to cook up a cup of poison when they weren’t looking…

“What is wrong with you people?  That could’ve killed you,” Rodney exclaims.  Was he surrounded by people with suicidal tendencies?  What was Rodney thinking about?  He’s known these people for years now.  Of course, he knew they operated on suicidal tendencies.  It would be weird if they didn’t.

Sheppard nonchalantly hands the cup back to him and returns to the jumper’s controls.

“Relax Rodney, it’s hot chocolate.  Pretty good stuff too.  You should try it.”

“Really,” and Rodney’s ire shifts instantly to ‘Food!’.  He sniffs at the brown liquid.

“Kinda thick and rich with a little bit of cinnamon in it, very Mayan,” Kenmore pipes up.

Sheppard looks over at her.  If she were anyone else, he’d say she had his sense of humor, instead he just nods.  Kenmore nods back.  McKay looks at her with an ‘Oh really’ look.  He isn’t about to be shown up just yet.

“Now tell them how you got it.”

“It came out of the wall.”

Suddenly the others stare at her.  Kenmore looks back at them; her eyes going from each set of shocked eyes to the other, not understanding the problem.

“Show them,” McKay keeps going, “Do it again.  Say that you’re thirsty.”

“I’m thirsty.”

They all wait, looking at the walls, looking everywhere else.  Nothing happens.  Ronon allows himself a cocky smile.  Yeah right, she got it out of the wall.

“You see, you see, I knew there was more to it than that,” if Rodney had the room to jump up and down in triumph, he would.

The others roll their eyes.

“But I’m not thirsty anymore…I’m hungry.”

Suddenly a tray shoots out of the wall behind her right beside her shoulder.  Kenmore looks over at it.  Sheppard double takes and stares at the tray, in his shock he almost loses control of the jumper.  It takes him a moment to recover it.  Ronon and Teyla gape at it as well.  On the tray is a sandwich.  Kenmore takes the sandwich and toasts it at the tray again with a nod.

“Thank you.”

The tray shoots back into the wall, blending seamlessly once again.  Sheppard’s team watch as Kenmore sniffs the sandwich then takes a bite out of it.  McKay’s almost catatonic, almost.  Oh for the love of God people.

“What are you doing?  You didn’t know what that was.  Did you not just learn something?”

Kenmore takes a moment to chew her mouthful down a bit then says around it, “Relax…it’s turkey.”

McKay straightens up, “Really?”

Kenmore swallows and answers him, “It’s turkey or at least an attempt at turkey.  I don’t think you people have turkeys around here, do you?”

Kenmore looks to Teyla and Teyla shakes her head.

“No, I didn’t think so.  And I think it’s someone’s try at sourdough even though I was thinking about plain, old-fashioned white.”

McKay catches on to that.

“Wait, wait, you were just thinking about it?”

“Yeah,” Kenmore nods, “Isn’t that how you guys do it?”

They do do it that way; it’s just like with everything else in the jumper, in Atlantis, and they have to mean it when they do it too.  Rodney could have admitted that the Lieutenant was right in those exact words but instead he opts for…

“Well yeah, but it’s never done that before.”

Sheppard’s more than a little offended, for memories sake…

“On my first mission, I asked one of these things for a turkey sandwich.  It didn’t give me one.”

Kenmore looks at him, “Did you ask it nicely?”

She smiles sweetly at him.

And Sheppard can readily think of an answer but he knows it isn’t appropriate to say in mixed company even if the one it’s aimed at is part of that mixed company.  Then Sheppard doesn’t know what to say when suddenly another panel slides open on the wall above where the tray had come from.  That panel normally coughed up a lifesigns detector, but this time it wasn’t a detector.  It was roughly the same shape and size though.  Kenmore is suddenly giddy at the sight…

“Cool.  A deck of playing cards.  Thank God, I was getting bored.”

The Lieutenant grabs the deck of cards from the panel and toasts the hole again.

“Cheers.”

The panel slides shut as Kenmore gets out of the co-pilot’s chair.  Sheppard’s team watches her walk back into the rear of the jumper, put the sandwich beside the cup on the bench, then sit herself down on the floor in front of the bench and begin to remove the cards from their copper and highly ornately, and Sheppard might add very in keeping with the Lantean design aesthetic, carved case.  She turns the cards over and begins to sort through them.  She takes a small amount of the top cards and sets them down on the floor beside her, face up.  Where McKay had expected suits and numbers or even the smiling face of the Ancient answer to a joker wearing a jester’s hat are pictures with labels that force him to comment.

“Those aren’t playing cards, their tarot cards.”

Kenmore pauses to look up at him, “Where do you think playing cards came from?”

“What?”

“Look,” Kenmore shuffles and deals out a game of plain, old, standard computer-issue solitaire in front of her.  McKay, never one to pass up a science lesson even if it comes from a snotty underling, starts forward, Teyla’s own curiosity draws her in as well, and she and McKay crouch down beside Kenmore, “there are four suits:  pentacles, cups, swords, and wands.  Each one has changed over time.  In some decks, pentacles are also known as coins.  Money, wealth, treasure.  What else is considered treasure besides coins?  Jewels maybe,” she holds up the first face-up card of the game:  a pentacle, the image of a raven-haired, old Hollywood glamour woman dripping with jewelry and wearing a belt made of solid gold pentacle coins over her pink dress, “Diamonds.”

She puts the card back and picks up the next different suit she sees:  a cup, a gold chalice overflowing with blue-white waters beneath a blue horizon dotted with golden stars and an evening landscape behind it, “Chalices.  Back in the day, they represented an abundance of food like a cornucopia.  Only the wealthy had an abundance of food and the wealthiest of the wealthy was royalty.  Have you ever noticed that the top of a scepter bears a striking resemblance to a club?”

She puts that card back and picks up another suit:  a sword, the image of a defenseless man ducking and running away from a hail of swords raining down on him with a single sword impaling from his back through his chest, “Not only were swords the weapon of choice back then but so were spears.  Likewise, the tip of a spear resembles a spade.”

Kenmore puts the card back and picks up the final suit:  a wand, a depiction of a woman in sort of gypsy looking clothes sitting cross-legged in the desert with lotus blossoms in front of her praying with arms stretched out to the sun above her, “And what act of faith isn’t an act of heart?”

She puts the card back down and looks at the whole setup in front of her, “Wealth, food, protection, and love.  All that a human needs to survive.  Only the twelve extra cards were meant to tell you your future.  The rest are just cards to play with really.”

McKay looks at her skeptically.

“Okay then, tell me my future,” he challenges.

“Okay.”

Well crap, he hadn’t actually expected her to accept his challenge.  No one usually did.

“Uh,” Rodney tries to stammer his way out of it but he couldn’t really think of a way of doing it exactly that would allow him to exit with both his dignity and a respite from Sheppard’s ridicule.

Kenmore puts down the rest of the deck and picks up the twelve top cards.  She shuffles them, face down, then fans them out in her hands, still face down, and holds the fan out to McKay.

“The card you pick is supposedly picked by fate.  Your gut instinct.  Pick a card, any card.”

Rodney eyes Kenmore for a moment then he draws a card, looks at it, and scoffs.

“Death.  Of course, I get death.  Can I get a happy card?  No, I get told I’m going to die.  My instinct is to die.”

“No,” Kenmore says calmly.

Rodney shows her the image of the torn hooded-robe and the skeleton wearing it carrying a scythe with a long gleaming white blade standing amidst broken things like swords and tombstones, skulls, clocks, with the horizon gleaming gold behind it, “Oh no?”

Kenmore nods, “No.  Death doesn’t mean death in Tarot.”

McKay looks at her with the same bemused condescension that he shows everybody when he knows his right and they’re dumber than dirt.

“Then what does it mean,” he challenges again.

“Death means rebirth,” she tells him.

“Oh really,” McKay begins but the fact that the Lieutenant remains so calm dissuades him and he asks far more interestedly, “really?”

Kenmore nods and Rodney looks his card’s image over again.

“It says that you’re going to encounter an obstacle that you’ll have to overcome—“

“When does it not,” McKay interjects, not looking up from the card.

“And that you’ll overcome it for the better,” Kenmore finishes.

“Well that’s always good, I suppose.”

Kenmore nods emphatically.

“Might I try,” Teyla shifts her feet underneath her, just as curious in the Ancestor’s future-telling cards and Lieutenant Kenmore’s knowledge of them and what they mean as Rodney is of any new and alien technology he has never encountered before but has always hoped existed even if humanity had yet to figure it out.

Kenmore nods at her, takes back Rodney’s Death card, reshuffles, and fans out the deck in front of Teyla.  Teyla has always trusted her own instincts and the guidance of the Ancestors.  Without hesitation, she picks a card and shows it to Kenmore.

“The Heirophant,” Kenmore recites, “It’s the card of the Wiseman.  Sort of like Merlin to Arthur, Gandalf to Frodo,” Teyla’s brows draw together, she does not know what those references mean; Kenmore catches on, “It means you’re very wise and that you’ll guide someone much younger than you to be just as wise, to be a great leader.  It’s a very good card.”

Teyla beams at Kenmore as she hands the card back to the Lieutenant, thinking of Teyla’s own position as leader of her people and her son Torren.  Indeed, much younger than she is.  And if what the Ancients’ cards told the Lieutenant was true, then she will continue to lead her people well and so would her son after her.  Indeed, it is a very good card.

Not liking being left out the conversation even though it’s more of a show-and-tell, John never liked being left out of those either, he calls back to them…

“Well since we’re all playing…”

He trails off, letting the hint hang there for the rest of them to pick up.

The trio looks towards the front compartment then they stand up and make their ways to join the other two in the front cabin.  Taking up positions standing in the doorway to the front cabin, Kenmore, in the middle, reshuffles the cards again and fans them out for Sheppard.  Teyla, Rodney, and even Ronon all watch diligently to see what card fate would deal their fearless leader.

“Pick a card, any card,” the Lieutenant happily tells him with a funny little gangster accent as if she were dealing Blackjack in Atlantic City during the 1920s.  If it had come from anybody else, John would have smiled and probably played along just as playfully; there again, if it were anybody else…

John takes a moment to look at the cards then look at Kenmore and Rodney and Teyla beside her.  Their faces don’t seem to be on their guard by any of this.  John would expect near blind trust bordering on childlike naivety with something, anything Ancient even if it’s just a deck of playing cards from Rodney, but Teyla’s instincts were more well-honed and just as tried and true as either John’s own gut feelings or Ronon’s.  She knew what danger was, she’d be on her guard if anything needed her to be.  John puts the jumper on auto and turns to Kenmore.  He looks the fan over then picks a card out of the fan and shows it to her.  She gives the card a weird, calm sort of look.  Sheppard isn’t sure he likes that.

“Justice,” she reads.

McKay automatically scoffs.

“Of course Captain Kirk gets sit around comfortably ruling the world as judge and jury and I get to jump hurdles.”

Kenmore shakes her head, “No.”  She meets Sheppard’s eyes, “It means that you’ve met your match.”

“What,” McKay asks.

And John wonders if she means he’s looking at his match…

Kenmore goes on, her eyes never breaking away from his just as steady gaze, “There’s a man you’ve come up against—“

“How do you know it’s a man,” McKay stops her.

“Because he’s a man.  If it were a woman, he’d be a woman.  And he would have drawn a different card,” McKay takes the information with a scientist’s accepting and processing nod of his head then Kenmore continues translating for John, “No matter how hard you try you’ve never been able to defeat him and you never will but you’ll never lose to him either because…he’s your match.  It’ll always end in a tie.  It’s all about balance.  You’ll never win but you’ll never lose either.  It’s a relatively good card.”

Kenmore nods at Sheppard just as emphatically as she had nodded at a beaming Teyla, but Sheppard doesn’t look at all comfortable.  Normally he would have said that that could only be one of two people in this galaxy:  Todd or Michael.  Since Michael was dead, that would leave Todd, and that would be his preference, but Kenmore’s previous observations that Michael could have faked them out unsettled him then and now were setting up permanent residence in the shadows nearest the front of his mind.  Ronon notices the thoughts passing over and fogging his best friend’s face.  He didn’t like that.  His eyes slide to Kenmore.

“And what’s my future,” he asks in that gravelly baritone voice of his; it wasn’t hostile, it was more of a nonchalantly, direct challenge to her.

Kenmore looks at him.  He had been so silent she had forgotten he was there.  Probably an old and well-trained habit of his; bonus for him, Kenmore thought.  She takes back the card from Sheppard, reshuffles the deck once again, turns to Ronon, and fans it out for him.  Ronon observes her every step of the way.  She didn’t look like she’d tried to do anything to them, but you never know.  Never taking his stern gaze off of her face, he draws a card and flips it over for her without looking at it himself.  She looks shocked at it and not shocked in a good way or at least not in the way Sheppard’s card had surprised her.  Despite not wanting to miss a moment of being able to gage her reaction, Ronon looks down at the card too.

“The Lightning Struck Tower,” she says; her voice sounds…well he didn’t know what it sounded like but it didn’t sound like what she knew about the card was good, “It means that there’s something or someone precious to you…and you’re going to lose them…and it’s going to destroy you.”

Kenmore’s discomfort spreads to Teyla, Rodney, and John but for entirely different reasons and to an entirely different extent.  They know about their friend’s recent heartache at his girlfriend’s transfer back to Earth, his loss of her, and it was something Kenmore definitely could not have known about regardless of Atlantis’ gossip grapevine.  But Ronon isn’t buying Kenmore’s translation.

“I don’t have anything or anyone like that,” he tells her smoothly enough but there’s a crispness to his tone of voice that makes it all too clear how much he was lying to her.

Behind Lieutenant Kenmore’s back, the other three members of Ronon’s team share the same look between each other.  They know about Amelia.  They knew how hard it was to open himself up to anyone just for friendship let alone a relationship, and they knew how long he had held on to the memory of the ‘as good as his wife’ woman that died on Sateda all those years ago as more than just memory.  Melena had been her name.  When they had recovered him from Sateda and he was recovering in the Daedalus’s infirmary during the ride back to Atlantis, he kept muttering her name over and over while he was unconscious and in-between his bouts of consciousness where he would tell them little utterances about some other Runner he had encountered long ago.  Even losing Doctor Jennifer Keller, fleeting as the idea of that romance had been, was still a raw nerve to him and that was from a year ago; he still gives Rodney an evil-eye glare over it sometimes.

Kenmore looks Ronon in the eye, “It’s happened to you before.”

The others suddenly look at her.  How could she possibly have known how hard Ronon took the loss of his Satedan love?  That wasn’t in his personnel file, Doctor Elizabeth Weir had made sure of that out of consideration for him.  The SGC hadn’t needed to know about it, no one but his closest teammates did, and even then it took him a year to get comfortable enough to mention her once to Sheppard.

“You see the tower’s foundation is cracked and crumbled,” Kenmore gestures with the tip of the remaining fan to the bottom of the tower’s image, “It means it’s been destroyed before but you’ve rebuilt since then.  The tower is strong but the lightning goes all the way down to the foundation.  That means…this loss…will take you back to that previous time of loss.  It will destroy you all over again and break your foundation further.  See the lightning bolt is piercing the ground, shattering it a little bit too.”

Ronon holds her gaze.  At least she was acting like the information was difficult for her to tell him even though she didn’t know him at all except for what some report Woolsey had ordered be given to her told her about him.  And she was conveying the information with unbiased confidence as though what she’s explaining to him is in no way a lie.  But he still isn’t believing her.  He knew he cared about Amelia and that she had been there for him as he recovered from his near death experience—well, it wasn’t a ‘near death’ experience since he was technically really dead there for a bit before a Wraith brought him back but to him that still only counted as ‘near’—last year.  But he also knew what his friends didn’t, that the love he had for Amelia didn’t run as deep as his love for Melena had been.  It had kept him alive and thriving against every Wraith that dared to hunt him for his seven years as a Runner then and for his years as part of Atlantis now.  As much as he loves Amelia, she was not the love that keeps him fighting, just grumpy.

But his teammates knew about that relationship from Sateda even though he never really talked about it, Kenmore didn’t.  Not unless that big stack of files Woolsey had a staffer bring her in the mess hall had included not only his personnel file, but a personal file on him that Woolsey had made special without their knowledge telling Kenmore far more personal information that had no right being in any sort of a file anywhere but which now he wouldn’t necessarily put out of Woolsey’s depth.  No, Ronon Dex didn’t like this woman at all.  Maybe her and Woolsey planted the cards in here and just put on a show for them earlier in the conference room.  It wouldn’t be the first time Atlantis had encountered people who were deceivingly good at deception.

During the tense moment of silence, Sheppard’s eyes dart back and forth between the new Lieutenant and his old friend.  He knows that look, if not in Kenmore’s eyes, then definitely in Ronon’s.  Sheppard breaks the silence…

“And what about you,” he asks the Lieutenant.

She turns slightly to look back at him.

“Me?”

He nods.

“Sure,” she shrugs.

She hands him the deck, which John thought was a nice and surprisingly confident gesture.  He holds the deck out to Ronon, who puts his card back in it, then Sheppard reshuffles the deck a couple of times to make sure it’s good and mixed and fans out the cards for Kenmore just as she had done for all the rest of them.  Unlike most of the others, Kenmore holds her hand out over the fan and lets a finger dangle a little bit further down than her other fingers.  She passes the hovering finger left to right over the whole fan slowly and surely until she finally picks a card and looks at it.  She gives it a dry smile like the whole exercise had been a shell game to her and it had been her job to find out which one had the walnut shell hidden underneath it.  As John eyes her, waiting to see what card fate had supposedly dealt out to her, the thought, motivated by the look of her reaction in her eyes, crosses his mind that perhaps she had set all of this up.  Perhaps it really was a game and she was just leading them all on.  And even though they didn’t at all like her, they all had fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker.  John wasn’t necessarily sure he liked that either.  Why hadn’t he seen that coming?  Why hadn’t he spotted that?

“Here you go Doctor McKay,” she leans the card, face up, against the top panel of the onboard DHD.

It’s a picture of a contented man wearing a green tank top, a pair of black shorts, and a pair of beige hiking boots with white socks dangling upside down by his foot from a what looks like a part of a piece of wood stretched between two branches of a grapevine growing two substantial bunches of bright green grapes on either side.  One of the man’s feet is strapped with white bonds, barely distinguishable from his socks, to the central spike between the two vines with his hands neatly hidden behind the small of his back.  He looks bizarrely contented with his fate.  Happy about it, really.

“The Hanged Man,” she says, “Now that card means death.  Looks like I’ve come here to die.”

They stare at her and the card.  She’s so complacent.  Suddenly a proximity alarm goes off on the console in front of Sheppard and a map appears on the Heads Up Display on the jumper’s windscreen.  Thank God.  Sheppard starts pushing buttons and takes the jumper off autopilot.

“We’re coming up on the warehouses,” he announces, “I’m taking her in.”

As John takes back control of the jumper’s flight path, Kenmore goes back to her spot on the bench and Rodney and Teyla take up their seats again.  Their eyes never really leave the card still sitting above the bottom panel of their DHD like some eerie mascot.  No one in the front cabin looks comfortable anymore, not that they actually had been before.

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Episode One- The Fifth- Chapter Seven

Posted on October 26, 2012 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Seven

The jumper bay as usual before a mission requiring its use is busy.  Lorne and his team have their jumper open and are running back and forth double and triple checking everything just the way Lorne does.  Sheppard’s own jumper is a lot less active.

Teyla walks into the bay adjusting her gear and making sure she has everything she has come to rely upon on missions with her teammates.  She continues walking up the ramp into the open waiting Jumper One and joins Sheppard, Ronon, and McKay inside.  They were running through their usual preflight, pre-mission checks and warm-ups of their usual jumper.  Sheppard had explained to her once why they always used Jumper One.  Apparently each puddle jumper aligns itself to its activators way of thinking.  Therefore, as much as every pilot picks a jumper, the jumper picks its pilot.  And apparently that meant that Jumper One had bonded with Colonel Sheppard and Colonel Sheppard, she knew, had bonded with it.  She had noticed over her years with Atlantis that John consistently felt the most comfortable with this jumper.  Silently, she starts going through her share of their usual pre-flight checks.  She also seems to have walked into the middle of a conversation that had been brewing in the minds of everyone long before any of them had made it to the jumper bay.

“I still can’t believe she rattled Woolsey.  I’ve never seen him get angry before.  It was, it was kind of scary,” McKay was saying.

Teyla nods…

“Indeed and I for one did not like how he used her son in order to force her to join this team.”

She yanks on a strap anchoring a bag into its place on one of the upper racks floating above one of the rear cabin’s benches.  As a devoted and loving mother herself, she knew she would kill anyone who dared to use her son against her as a bargaining chip to force her to do anything.  After all, she already had;  Michael.  And after all, she just came from leaving said child in the loving arms of his father.

Stationed in the pilot’s seat, Sheppard nods as he works at the controls, but Ronon, doing a final check of his own weaponry from his usual seat behind the co-pilot’s seat, seems to muse almost with disdain…

“Michael Kenmore.”

Sheppard nods again as his fingers continue to dance over the controls though he’d probably never say the name that way himself…then again, perhaps he would.  That nasty little thought came back and this time John wasn’t going to pass on it, “Yeah, do you think that was meant for us?”

Me?

Rodney doesn’t have to look away from his computer and the jumper’s systems he’s running his checks on from behind the second seat behind Sheppard’s to respond.

“What?”

Sheppard turns his seat to face his team.

“We all know what Woolsey thinks of the whole Wraith-turned-human-turned-Wraith-again-turned-human-again-turned-hybrid thingy with Michael.  Do you think he found Kenmore and just brought her here with her son to press the point?”

Question my ability to command?

Teyla looks at him, “I do not think so.  It was Mister Woolsey who did not want to seek Michael when he first took command of Atlantis.”

“That’s what I mean, do you think he’s covering his own ass?”

Questioning my ability to command?

It had been a long time since any of them had thought anything negative about Mister Richard Woolsey.  But much more recent events had brought out a darker side of him than anyone of them had ever seen or even heard of before.  And they had definitely given some cause to pause at least for now.

“Well as nice it is to hear how paranoid you can be, no,” McKay says again without looking up from his computer tablet, “I checked her service file myself before I came here.  There really was a Doctor Michael Kenmore who served as a scientist at the SGC, oh and you’re going to love this, he served directly under our very own Lieutenant Colonel Samantha Carter.  He died five years ago in an experiment gone horribly wrong leaving behind a widow, one Lieutenant Ursula Kenmore, and a son, one Michael Kenmore Junior.  She’s the real thing, so is her kid, and so was her husband.”

Teyla pauses a moment in the securing of the rear cabin materials and Sheppard swallows hard.

“So we were just stupid to name him that,” Sheppard says.

“Well actually, since you’re the one who names everything, you were stupid but,” McKay nods, still not looking away from his own work, “Pretty much.”

“Well that’s comforting,” Sheppard says.

He didn’t like that.  If he had known he’d be stepping on a widow’s toes, he’d never have come up with the name Michael in the first place.  Why did he do that?  Why did he name everything?  Couldn’t he just leave it alone for once?  Let someone else name the Wraith bad guy they had in their control.  Let someone else name anything.  John turned his seat back around and returned to running the jumper through its pre-flight systems check, but with a little less enthusiasm and speed.  Why did he always have to do it?  Why couldn’t McKay pipe up with something before Sheppard could open his mouth?  Oh wait, he had…when Sheppard had named Todd’s second in command Kenny without telling anyone.  Oh and there was that time they fought over what to rename the Ancient warship they saved from that volcano planet.  And come to think of it for that matter too, it had been Lieutenant Ford’s idea to name the jumpers gateships and Rodney had gone along with it too.

Aiden Ford.  Sheppard’s fingers paused in midair above the controls for a split second.  It hadn’t been awhile since Sheppard had thought of him.  Every time they came back from a mission or someone else came back from a mission and reported the loss of another member of the expedition, Sheppard thought of Ford.  It didn’t help Ursula Kenmore’s case much that she too was a Lieutenant.  The Expedition seemed to have real crappy luck with lieutenants, they might as well issue them the red version of the Atlantis uniform with the words “Epic Fail” stamped in big bold black letters on the back as soon as they step out of the gate.  John had never told this to anyone not even the new base shrink but when Teyla was missing and John found himself trapped underneath a blown-up building, he had a dream…or a hallucination he couldn’t tell which anymore and he wasn’t really sure he could then either…but he had dreamed he was eating dinner with Teyla, a romantic one at that which was disturbing to him on its own, when she suddenly changed into Aiden and began condemning him for not saving him and not being able to save Teyla either.  But Sheppard did save Teyla.  But Sheppard didn’t save Aiden.  John shook his head and went back to his preflight.

He had to stop thinking like that.  They didn’t know whether or not Ford had died in that Wraith hive ship’s explosion.  Granted, it had been years and there still has been no sign or rumor of Ford being around anywhere.  And John still checked although he didn’t know whether or not the rest of his team knew that.  But he kept reminding himself, reassuring himself, that just because they haven’t heard anything didn’t mean a damn thing.  They all had thought Aiden had died when he jumped into the sweep of a Wraith dart’s culling beam but he showed up later with the start of his own personal army of fellow Wraith juice junkies.  So there was always hope.

Behind them, the sound of boots could be heard walking across the floor of the bay then stepping onto the ramp at the back of the jumper.  Here they go, their own personal Round Two with the new Lieutenant.  They all turned and looked back at Kenmore.  She wasn’t dressed in Team Atlantis gear like John suspected she wouldn’t be, but rather she was wearing the full set of green BDUs of the SGC and she was eyeing everything ahead of her as she caught more and more of the ship’s interior as she slowly walked up the jumper’s ramp.  Once finally in, she stares around her at the interior of the jumper’s rear cabin.  As she does so, she turns slightly and John sees her designation shoulder patch isn’t like theirs, a chevron with a winged horse flying through it with the name ATLANTIS capping the image.  Instead it’s the image of a large circle closely surrounding half of a sketchily detailed Stargate crowned with a small hollow space marking where a gate chevron would be bearing the large initials SG and underneath the bottom of the half a Stargate, and taking up the entire bottom half of the patch, is one massive exactly detailed chevron bearing a single giant number at its heart:  25.  Sheppard could only guess that on the other shoulder, where they all had the flags of their individual nations or in Teyla’s case, a bare patch, the Lieutenant would have a round patch the same size as her designation one bearing a thick black outer circle pinpricked with white dots marking constellations around it’s perimeter and an inner circle containing the beautiful, round space-seen image of Earth with a giant Point of Origin symbol embroidered over it, filling up the entire patch with its neatly ratioed size.  And where his team had their pistols normally holstered to the sides of their thighs, Kenmore has what Sheppard could only recognize from SGC photos and weapons reports as a “zat” gun neatly nestled there.  Yep, SGC, tried and true.  An Earthgater…and she wasn’t looking particularly impressed by what she was seeing.

Sheppard wasn’t particularly impressed with her expression either.  John never had liked anyone that couldn’t play by his team’s rules, which was ironic coming from him but anyway, and he especially didn’t like anyone knocking his jumper before they’d seen what the little ship could do period.  This baby had gotten them out of more scrapes than John cared to remember, but he could recall every single one of them and Kenmore had absolutely no right to knock one millimeter of this puddlejumper.

“Well it’s not as big as a Tok’Ra ship,” Kenmore finally remarks, giving voice to her unimpression.

Sheppard rolls his eyes and returns to his piloting control panel.

“It’s a puddlejumper,” McKay rises to the little ship’s defense which Sheppard smiles to himself at.

Kenmore looks at Rodney.

“A what-le what-er?”

“A puddlejumper.  We call it that because…”

He trails off seeing that Kenmore doesn’t look the least bit interested in the explanation.  She walks up to the forward compartment, leans her head in and looks around to see what the front compartment looks like.  She still doesn’t look impressed.  Sheppard glances at Ronon.  The glance was mutual.  If she wasn’t going to give the jumper the time of day, then why should they give her—suddenly Woolsey’s voice comes over the jumper’s radio…

“Colonel Sheppard, we’ve established a wormhole.  We’re sending a MALP through now, awaiting telemetry,” there was a few moments of silence then, “the telemetry is good.  Colonel Sheppard, you have a go.”

Sheppard nods and starts pressing buttons.  The jumper’s ramp rises and closes as McKay unplugs his computer tablet from one of the jumper’s systems and takes up his seat in the co-pilot’s chair.  Teyla gives another bag’s strap one final yank then comes up to the front compartment and takes up her seat behind Sheppard.  They all watch Kenmore as she turns to leave the forward compartment.  Kenmore walks back to the rear cabin and flops down on the middle of a bench.  The team exchange looks between each other then return their attention to their departure.  Well at least she had the courtesy to stay in back.

Sheppard radios the control center, “Here we go.”

 

*                      *                      *

 

The two jumpers gently lift off of their individual spots of the jumper bay as the center of the bay’s floor begins to spiral open.  One of the jumper’s starts to easily ferry towards the growing opening.

Down in the gateroom, a hole in the ceiling spirals open and a jumper gracefully turns as it delicately descends into the gateroom.  As soon as it reaches the perfect position, it slips through the waiting wormhole with barely a ripple.

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Episode One- The Fifth- Chapter Six

Posted on October 19, 2012 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Six

Even in Atlantis’ darkest hour that first year and all her darkest hours every year since, through the tense discussions of an unthinkable alliance with Michael’s Hive Queen to the loss of Elizabeth Weir, the Expedition’s first Commander, to the abduction of Teyla and her then unborn son to Woolsey’s first meeting as Atlantis’ newest Commander in this very room, the conference room had never ever been this uncomfortable, quiet, or stressed.  The members of Sheppard’s team as well as Doctor Jennifer Keller sit in their usual spots around the rectangular conference table Woolsey had brought with him to the Pegasus Galaxy when he assumed command of Atlantis.  Waiting.  Sheppard raps his fingertips against the top of the solid mahogany table.

“So the lights were flashing yellow,” he asks Rodney.

“Yeah, it was probably just some weird little power surge,” Rodney blows it off.

“Hey, weird little power surges don’t usually go well for us.”

Rodney gives him a dry look, “Well nothing’s exploded.”

John returns the look, “Yet.”

Then suddenly the fan of doors marking the entrance to the room start to turn open.  They all look up prepared to greet in their usual manner their boss but instead Lieutenant Kenmore is literally shoved through.  A staffer armed with a handful of files follows her through.  Kenmore has barely enough time to recover from her stagger and realize she’s in a room full of probably the last people she wanted to see before the staffer grips her upper arm and marches her over to the empty seat next to Ronon.

“You are supposed to sit here,” he tells her.

Kenmore looks around at all of their faces.  It’s clear she’s flustered.  She starts moving her mouth, “But, but, but I was supposed to meet Woolsey privately.”

The staffer looks like he’s had about all of her he can take, which was saying a lot.  Those guys take a lot of crap all day and John hadn’t seen one of them crack even once in over five years.  The guy shoves her down into the chair and slaps the files down on the table in front of her.  Sheppard sees her purse her lips so tight they almost disappear, she tightly rolls her head slightly on her shoulder a little, and her fingers strain in their resistance to ball into a pair of tight, white knuckled fists.  She’s fighting the urge to deck the guy.  Sheppard felt himself nod a little, that’s a good thing.  Restraint, at least she’s finally proved she has some of it.

“You are supposed to sit here,” the staffer repeats.

As Kenmore starts to protest, the staffer turns on his heels and heads for the doors.  Kenmore takes one glance at Sheppard’s watching eyes and bolts after the staffer, repeating her complaints about meeting Woolsey privately.  The doors turn and shut in her face.  They all watch her.  Again…waiting.  She stands there face-to-face with the door panels for a moment then lets her forehead slowly lean forward and hit the panels.  Sheppard can’t help but get the feeling he’s staring at the back of a caged animal.  Then silently Kenmore lifts her head back up, turns on her heels, and walks back to what the staffer had implied was ‘her chair.’

Kenmore sits down next to Ronon, who’s just as displeased to be sitting next to her, and Sheppard can’t blame him, knowing how she was even here in the first place.

The silence takes over again.  Sheppard resumes rapping his fingertips on the piece of tabletop in front of him again except he took care to do it as gingerly and therefore as silently as possible so as not to disturb the whole new uncomfortable silence…and, frankly, he was quietly wondering how long this silence was going to last—well, and, of course, all of them are still waiting for Woolsey to come.  Rodney, not surprisingly, was finally the one to break the silence.

“Why did you bring your kid?”

John rolls his eyes, Oh my God Rodney.  And, not surprisingly, John could have broken the silence without using that particular question first.  Ronon roll his eyes too, Jennifer closes hers and mouths Rodney’s name, and Teyla can’t help but turn her head away in exasperation.  But the desire to know if there was going to be an answer is too much a temptation for them to deny themselves.  After a moment, all of their eyes come out of hiding and look towards Kenmore.

Kenmore is stiff, but answers, “Like I said, I thought there was a school here for him.”

Well, since she’s willing to answer questions—well, not willing, but she is answering them…

“And where was ‘here’ supposed to be exactly,” John asks her.

Her eyes address him.

“A former Goa’uld outpost.”

Sheppard isn’t just speaking for himself when he sits up at this.  Everyone sits up at this.  They’ve all read the reports from the SGC.  They all knew the battles, the years, the SGC fought against the Goa’uld.  Hell, one, using the thoroughly corrupt misguidance of the Trust, managed to get into Atlantis and had a pretty close run at sabotaging the Stargate let alone the city itself.  McKay leaps first.

“You were taking your kid to a Goa’uld outpost?”

Kenmore behaves like a good little soldier being questioned.

“Former,” Kenmore states firmly, “It was taken by the Tok’ra and is heavily guarded by the Jaffa.  I had no fear for him there.”

A smirk from McKay is a tell-tale sign, he can’t pass this up.

“And why is that?”

“It was the closest Goa’uld outpost to Earth, practically on our doorstep.  It was the farthest away from what remains of the Priors still unaffected by the Ark short of leaving him on Earth.”

“And why aren’t you still on Earth,” Ronon asks.

Kenmore doesn’t look at him but remains facing the bulk of the assembled as Sheppard knew she was trained to do in an interrogation situation.  Interrogated, she feels like she’s being interrogated.  It told him a lot about her and how she viewed being in this room let alone this city.  And it told him a lot about how she got here.  Perhaps Teyla and Rodney were right, perhaps she really had been tricked into coming here.  But why?  And why with a kid in toe?

“There’s nothing there for us anymore,” she answers.

Keller makes a funny face.  That didn’t fit with her report.  There was a record of the Lieutenant giving birth in the medical ward of the SGC and of a Doctor Kenmore being present for the birth of a baby boy.  Jennifer had naturally assumed that he was Lieutenant Kenmore’s husband, the baby’s father, seeing as how Kenmore’s personnel file didn’t list her as having a doctorate of any sort; there was no record of the loss of him anywhere in Kenmore’s file.  Surely, if she had lost her husband, divorce or something, there should be something listed about it in the section of her medical file labeled Psychological Counseling.

“Isn’t there a Mister Kenmore,” Jennifer asks.

Kenmore finally breaks poise and shifts uncomfortably in her chair but she doesn’t say anything.  Its whole meaning doesn’t escape Sheppard’s notice, knowing a soldier’s training, knowing the training Kenmore had been exhibiting up until this point.  No one breaks poise, it’s against the rules.  No one else shifts uncomfortably but he knows just by catching the look of each and every one of his team out of the corner of his eye it’s in their guts to want to shift too, well except Ronon.  Even John feels it in his gut that this is wrong but he does it anyway.  He decides to press the issue…

“Well?”

Kenmore takes a moment to collect herself, return to her soldiers’ stoicism.  Sheppard felt in the light of her current situation, he may not have wanted her here but that was no reason to send her away with any hard feelings, that he should give her credit for gathering herself back up.  In her silence, the team seems eager to hang on her every word.  Finally Kenmore speaks but clearly under duress…

“My husband was a Doctor at the SGC, a scientist.  He was working on an experiment.  A weapon to use against the Ori.  There was an explosion.  He didn’t make it.”

At the very end, it’s clearly detectable.  A small crack in her voice, a slight warble that shouldn’t have been there but was absolutely beyond her control to restrain.  Sheppard lowers his eyes for a moment.  Why the hell did he have to do that?  Why did he have to push?  The shift in his gut tells him that that was definitely the wrong thing to do.  Sure, leave her with no hard feelings just bring back up the memories of the death of her husband which she clearly still hasn’t gotten over.  Yeah, sure, no hard feelings.  If he and Nancy hadn’t divorced, if she had died like that, and anyone brought that up again, he would have decked them, all of them, no matter how long it had been since.  As luck would have it, he and Nancy’s divorce had been bitter and nasty and that had finally aged into a barely tolerated hostility and general distrust of the other; although she had attended John’s father’s funeral and come to the wake at home thereafter a couple of years ago and had helped him when a Replicator had gotten loose on Earth during that same time.  That had been nice, but there was still a lot of baggage there neither one particularly cared to go through or climb over at any future point in their lives.  Nope, not gonna go back there, but if things had been different…they would have been a lot different.  Yeah, he’d pretty much have decked everyone in this room and would have been trying to work his way through the city before anyone would have even had the chance of stopping him.  He glanced at Kenmore and fought the urge to nod approvingly, sympathetically, at her.  Yeah, that sort of restraint he could admire…were it anybody else and not a representation of the question of his authority.

“I’m sorry for the loss of your husband,” Keller said quietly, humbly.  After all it was her boyfriend who had started the questioning in the first place.  She should have known it was coming.  They knew Rodney, Kenmore didn’t.

Kenmore’s head shoots straight to Keller with a look of clear and present hostility.  Sheppard’s head shoots up at Kenmore.  She had been quick, but if she was going to make a move, he was going to be there before she could do it.  After all, she had a table to climb over, he didn’t.

“He is still my husband.”

Well there was definitely a bite of venom in that.  Sheppard lets it go, but Ronon glares at Kenmore as Keller sheepishly backs down and looks away like the rest of the team.  And Sheppard didn’t think the ill, tense feeling in the room could get any worse.

The doors open again.  Woolsey walks in and takes up his usual spot at the head of the table amidst another ensuing uncomfortable silence.  His disposition isn’t unusual for him, perhaps a glint of sun shining just beneath the surface at Kenmore’s presence at the table.  He immediately lays out two stacks of files, neatly arranges them, and gets his notepad ready.

“Well, we have quite the mission to get underway,” he chirps.

“I really don’t see why I’m here considering I’m not a part of this team,” Kenmore wastes no time and no kindness in getting straight to her point. And Sheppard, due to his close proximity to Woolsey, clearly sees the sunshine obliterated from the sky.  Woolsey firmly addresses Kenmore with a cold face and a cold voice, neither of which any of this team had ever seen or heard from him before not even when he was bluffing one of repli-Weir’s cronies into destroying the city and thus destroying the Replicator’s hopes of returning to a body again.

“I think you’ll come to find out you are.”

It was frostier than Sheppard had been expecting and without missing a beat, Woolsey takes up the first stack of files he laid out, divides it, and passes one stack down one side of the table and the other stack down the other side.  Each team member takes one of the files and continues passing the stack on.  It’s business as usual but they’re waiting intently for the next shoe to drop between Woolsey and the new Lieutenant.  Ronon tosses the final file in his stack in front of Kenmore.  Sheppard glares at him.  It was already quite clear that she didn’t want to be there anymore than either one of them wanted her there and right now she was working overtime to get Woolsey to see the same light and that was perfectly fine with John.  No need to rock the boat she was already swaying.  It might tip the damn thing over.  And they all might end up really screwed.  John looks over at her.  She doesn’t come across as offended by the blatantly hostile gesture, in fact Sheppard isn’t even sure that she’d noticed it.  She was too busy glaring at Woolsey.

“I didn’t sign up for this,” Kenmore states firmly, bordering on growling.

Drop.  The team freezes and only their eyes look up and move from Kenmore to Woolsey.  For the first time, Sheppard senses and recognizes the sidelines as the need for survival.  And apparently so does the rest of his team.  Woolsey meets her gaze and Sheppard realizes for the first time since he met the man that Woolsey was genuinely scaring him, and he meant it, really scaring him.  The expression on the man’s face looks so…

“I have paperwork that speaks to the contrary.”

Was that actually a chill going up Sheppard’s spine…or was it down?  Holy Crap, it really is a chill.

“And what if I go home,” Kenmore asks, no less deadly sounding.

“Impossible.  There are no further gates back to Earth.  I’ve restricted all gate activity back to normal mission status.”

“And what if I go home,” Kenmore says slower, and Sheppard didn’t think it was possible, but even more lethal sounding.

Woolsey offers the usual wry smile he gives when he’s in a situation he knows he’s going to win, it usually irked the hell out of John but now it just seemed spooky, then he returns to sorting through his notes as he goes on to respond, returning once more to his usual tone of voice which John found even scarier now than the absolutely lethal sounding Woolsey.

“Then you’ll be in breach of your contract.  I’d have to list you as AWOL and be forced to arrest you for desertion,” he shifts the papers in his hands into a neat and orderly stack with a sharp clack on the tabletop, “I wonder what would happen to your son if you were in prison?”

Whoa…Sheppard sits up and he isn’t the only one to suddenly stiffen up.  Everyone stares at Woolsey in shock, even Ronon was and that was a significant stretch, nothing ever shocked Ronon.  Richard continues to stare at Kenmore with a dark but thoroughly at ease countenance as if he had just sat down in a big fat comfy leather chair to a nice concerto, a good book, and a glass of truly expertly poured wine.  They look at Kenmore.  Her resolve seems no less firm.  In fact, it doesn’t look like her own countenance has shifted at all but her eyes give away that she’s heard Woolsey’s threats before and knows how good he makes them.  And judging by what he sees in her eyes, John figures they weren’t threats, so much as guarantees.  Quietly, without looking away from Woolsey, Kenmore reaches over and flips open the file that had been handed out to all of them.

“Oh look, it’s a mission.  Whoopee,” she says flatly.

The others look back at Woolsey.  John can actually feel himself start to shrink back into his chair.  That shiver was threatening his spine again.  As if the room hadn’t been outrageously tense before.  Richard smiles, looks down at his notes, then starts the mission briefing.  John’s, and he was pretty sure everyone else’s even though their heads are down and opening their own mission file’s in front of them, eyes travel to watch Kenmore.  She too has her head down, seemingly pouring over the first page of the mission file, but it’s clear to see that she isn’t reading any of it.  The look in her eyes, no matter where anyone is in the room, is that of someone who knows they’re trapped and frustrated at the fact that they know they can’t do anything about it.  Stuck is never a very calm emotion on anyone’s face.

“We’ve received reports of an abandoned city,” Woolsey returned to his regular happy briefing self, “I’ve sent one of the other teams to scout it out but they couldn’t get close to it, the Stargate on this planet is quite far from the city, but from what they could get, it is still abandoned.”

Sheppard didn’t like the sound of what got so nonchalantly passed over, but before he could mention it.  Ronon grumpily speaks out.

“Then what are we needed for?”

“We’ve also received word that there has been an increase in Wraith activity near the planet.”

Ah-hah, there it is.  Why the scout team couldn’t get any closer to an abandoned warehouse far from a Stargate, jumper or not.

“And you need us to go in and check the place out before the Wraith get to it,” Sheppard asks.

Woolsey nods.  Well that seems pretty easy.

“The reports tell us that there’s a series of warehouses abandoned a few years ago near the city.  The report says the city started going quiet around the same time the warehouse did.  It’s a familiar scenario I’m afraid.”

Kenmore perks up.  At least she’s trying to join the briefing.  Good soldier, Sheppard thought but that didn’t change his opinion about her being here in this room right now.

“How so,” she asks.

The team and Keller exchange looks between themselves.  Sheppard shares their knowledge too, but doesn’t allow himself to show it.

“We’ve had dealings with a Wraith that had been experimenting on people.  He had a tendency to create laboratories in places near cities and use the people of the cities as guinea pigs,” Woolsey carefully answers her.

Good job, Sheppard was wondering how Woolsey was going to deliver the news about that.  Sheppard had pictured it sort of along the lines of sitting her down in Woolsey’s office and telling her ‘Oh gee, we had a psycho Wraith-hybrid-thingy guy running around here doing a mad scientist impression that gave the city a run for its money and, oh yeah, he had the same name as your son.’  And then Kenmore promptly freaking out and having to be tossed back through the gate, sedated.  That would have been just lovely.  Actually now that John really thought about it, yeah it really would have been just lovely.  He’d already hurt her feelings, why not hurt her ass?

Kenmore doesn’t look particularly fazed.

“Sounds like Nirrti.  She had a mad scientist knack.”

Woolsey, although sour at Kenmore’s nonchalance, nods.  Sheppard shifts in his seat.  Okay, so maybe Kenmore wouldn’t have freaked out and need to be sedated.  But she still needed to be tossed back through the gate.  She could at least give him that, couldn’t she?

“Yes, quite…we dealt with him a long time ago but…”

The team and Keller exchange looks with each other as Woolsey trails off knowing full well they didn’t particularly agree with that statement.  They all felt that that particular Wraith should have been Woolsey’s top priority when he first took command of Atlantis, especially Teyla seeing as how her new family had just been saved from him, but Woolsey had thought better of that and overridden the entire team and, whether or not he knew it, the whole of the Atlantis Expedition.  It was only when Wraith Michael—whaddya know, Sheppard was already starting to think in terms of separating the newly arrived Michael Kenmore from the Michael Kenmore they had created their second year here—had launched a damn good precision strike at the heart of Atlantis itself that Woolsey had agreed his previous judgment call had been an error.  But Michael had ended up dead at the end of it so there was really no harm, but there were still some pretty hard feelings.  Then Kenmore said something that jolted Sheppard out of his private thinking.

“Ba’al.”

The name was still a mind-jerker for any member of the Stargate Program, be they in the Milky Way Galaxy or the Pegasus.  McKay was the first one to crack, not with any note of fear, but with absolutely every note of his own personal symphony of derision.

“What?”

“This Wraith dude, oh and by the way I love him being described only as,” she reads off one of the files she had brought with her from the mess hall, “’Wraith Male’,” John thought it was a nice touch Woolsey referred to him as that rather than the typical ‘Patient One of the retrovirus experiment’, “I think dude has such a funkier sound to it, don’t you?  Anyway,” she tosses the file back down in front of her, “he’s like Ba’al.”

No one catches on and McKay can’t help but continue the conversation with his usual rancor.

“And how did you get that?”

“From a one,” Kenmore picks up one of the other files she had brought with her and reads its tab, “Doctor Carson James Beckett.  By the way, love the red-tape special on this one.”

She tosses the file in Woolsey’s general direction but it skids to a stop on the table more towards Sheppard than it does Woolsey.  Sheppard reaches out, picks up the file, and opens it.  He looks over at Kenmore.  She nods.

“Yeah, literally,” she tells him.

She wasn’t lying.  Sheppard holds open the personnel file exposing its papers to be practically covered in lines of red tape blocking out obviously the material Kenmore was not allowed to see.  If you added a square of white star-marked blue in the corner, the file would look like the star spangled banner, each and every page of it.  Kenmore goes on.

“The real Carson Beckett died at the end of your third year here and you lot discovered him alive at the end of the next year.  He now currently works here with plague survivors and on the odd occasion at Area Fifty-One, right?”

McKay begrudgingly nods.  Kenmore continues.

“His clone currently works here.”

Sheppard finds it hard not to glare at her.  It had been a long time since anyone made the distinction, since anyone cared to.  Fact, their Carson as they originally knew him was dead; new fact, now they knew their Carson in a different way.  But both facts rang with one truth, he was still their Carson either way.  McKay begrudgingly acknowledges her again.

“And apparently, according to Sam’s report—“

“Colonel Carter,” Teyla cuts Kenmore off.

Kenmore stares blankly at her for a moment then returns to addressing McKay again, “Sam’s report, the ‘Wraith Male’ created a perfect clone of Doctor Beckett, not just body but brain patterns, personality, and memories as well.  Ba’al cloned himself just as perfectly, body, Goa’uld symbiot and all, as well as brain patterns for both, personalities for both, and memories for both.  Every time we thought we’d killed Ba’al for good he’d pop up somewhere all over again.  It was a bit before we’d discovered what he’d done to himself.  In fact, at one time at the SGC, we had twenty perfect clones of Ba’al in prison.  We had to keep them apart, they kept trying to kill each other.  But—“

“And how does this help us,” Ronon cuts in, clearly offended more than Teyla was at Kenmore’s blowing her off.

“The problem with such perfection is that we couldn’t tell whether or not we had the real Ba’al, the original, or just another clone.  Maybe what you dealt with before was a clone of this Wraith and not the real one.  Maybe your Carson Beckett was a test run at perfection.  He passed and so this Wraith guy went on to clone himself.”

“Wait, wait, wait. He didn’t pass,” Rodney objects, “We ran him through every test we could throw at him.  We absolutely distrusted him.”

“He’s still here, isn’t he?  He’s still your friend, isn’t he?  He was still accepted, wasn’t he?”

Rodney’s silent.  They know she’s right.  She knows she’s right.  It had been a long time since they had made the distinction that their new Carson was exactly what he was, a clone made by the enemy.  Rodney was right too though.  They had ran Carson through every test in the book and he had been viewed with every sense that the word ‘distrust’ entails here, but in the end their compassion prevailed and they accepted Carson because he was after all, clone or not, their Carson, family.

“So he passed,” Kenmore didn’t have to say it, but she did.

The others stare anywhere they can except at her in discomfort at Kenmore’s point.  If they accepted that point, then they might have to accept the other.  It was terrifying to think that Michael could do something like this because he could and probably would have.  But they had had the body recovered from one of the lower piers of the city it had landed on, and it was a disgusting recovery.  No one should fall from almost the very top of the city like that.  Keller and Carson, clonehood regardless, both had done the autopsy on the remains and then the body was unceremoniously burned.  Sheppard’s whole team and Teyla’s partner, Kanaan, had taken a flaming torch to the guy’s body.  And they had all stayed, with baby Torren in Teyla and Kanaan’s arms, to watch the body burn to ashes.  Afterwards, Keller and Carson gathered up the ashes, put them in a canister, then the three of them were beamed aboard the Daedalus, flown to the system’s sun, and the canister was jettisoned into the burning mass.  Nothing was too good or too much to make sure Wraith hybrid Michael was truly dead and gone.  It had given them all, Teyla especially, so much peace of mind.  But here came Kenmore, with that rank and that last name of all last names, and blew a hole straight through the heart of their comfort and reasoning.

“I think that that is highly unlikely.  Ba’al was using Goa’uld technology—“

“The Goa’uld are scavengers,” Kenmore cuts Woolsey off abruptly, “Sam also said that this Wraith was also using scavenged technology.  She also said that the technology was science that’s been around for ages and has long since become easy and simple if you have even the slightest hint of knowing what you’re doing.  I think it’s safe to say it’s highly likely.”

“It is,” McKay adds soberly and sadly.

No one had really wanted him to do it, but Rodney had that uncanny knack of telling the truth regardless.  And who wanted to admit this?

Woolsey looked like he definitely didn’t like the turn this mission briefing had taken in Kenmore scoring an undeniable point.

“And I say that I don’t believe it,” he says defiantly and Sheppard knows that tone of voice.  It’s the ‘my opinion is the only opinion that matters and I said no’ voice.  She was going to be fighting an uphill battle and perhaps, John thought, she already knew that.

“You don’t have to believe it for it to be true,” she bit back.

John sits up.  Here we go, Round 2.  Ding ding ding ding ding.  Front seats.

“Well until I have proof in front of me,” Kenmore gestures at Beckett’s file still in Sheppard’s hands, Woolsey is still unmoved, “In front of me,” he continues.

“Oh throw the stupid file at him,” Kenmore snaps.

John side-glances at Woolsey, Can I do that?

Woolsey continues once again, ignoring both John’s look and Kenmore’s snap, “I refuse to deal with this any further.”

Kenmore sits up.

“Ba’al enslaved dozens of worlds, used hundreds of thousands of people both when he was a System Lord and when he picked up the scraps left over from the others when they fell,” she addresses them all, “How many planets had this guy gone after?”

Who was going to answer this one?  McKay speaks up rather quietly.

“We’ve lost count.”

Kenmore stares at Woolsey, “And you’re ready to ignore that?”

“And what would you have me do?”

“Make sure there aren’t anymore.”

“We took care of the matter Lieutenant Kenmore.  Those people are already gone.”

“Just because a corpse isn’t on paper doesn’t mean you can pretend like it’s not there.”

“The matter is done with.”

Kenmore stands up, slamming her fists on the table, “You can’t ignore a body count!”

Woolsey shoots up out of his seat as well, “Enough!”

The others jump back.  Sheppard had to admit he liked her passion for something that truly didn’t even slightly involve her but no one’s ever lashed out at each other like this in this room before.  No matter how dark the hour had been.  John hadn’t even gone after Caldwell that way when the guy had insinuated that it might not be in their best interests to go rescue Ronon from Sateda and the Wraith.

After a long tense moment, Woolsey sits back down, gathers himself again, and calmly states, “The matter is done.”

There’s that lethal tone to his voice again.  It takes a few more moments and she hesitates at every step of the way down, but Kenmore sits back down too.  Woolsey straightens a stack of files in front of him although it didn’t need it as his way of continuing with the briefing on his terms.

“I don’t think I have to tell you that it is of the utmost importance that the Wraith do not get their hands on that laboratory or any of its contents.”

Kenmore scoffs.  Woolsey tries to ignore her, but glances at her before continuing nonetheless.  But Kenmore isn’t going to let him get away with this.

“Is this what it’s like when the IOA is in charge of an SGC operation?  Your heads are shoved so far up your butts you can’t see daylight?”

Sheppard wanted to laugh and had the remark come from anyone else he probably would have but the speaker and the situation in general wasn’t very funny.  No one answers her.

Kenmore can’t take it anymore.  She gets up and heads for the doors, they open at her presence, and she walks out, leaving her files behind.  They all watch her go.  When the doors turn closed again, all eyes turn to Woolsey.  He keeps watching the doors.  Without removing his eyes from them, he addresses Sheppard…

“I don’t think I have to stress the importance of this mission to any of you.  Michael was a threat, yes, but so are the Wraith in general.  As far as they know, we still have their only means of surviving the Hoffan drug anywhere near safely.  If they get their hands on Michael’s research of the drug, they might be able to find their own method of survival and…”

As he trails off, Woolsey finally looks over at Sheppard.  Sheppard nods his head.

“There goes any leverage we ever had,” he says.

Woolsey nods.

“The alliances between the various Wraith factions have always been tenuous at best.  Right now, we have an alliance with one of them only because we can provide him with a means of not falling victim like everyone else,” it was nice how Richard managed to glean over the facts that Todd thought they were trying to kill him when they came up with the first cure and in turn tried to kill them all and then there was that time Todd had tried to cure himself and everyone on his hive ship ended up either dead or psychotically de-evolved and came to Atlantis seeking help; it had taken a lot to build that alliance back up, “Todd will stay on our side only as long as we prove useful to him.  If other Wraith or if even Todd himself gets access to Michael’s research on the drug…”

Sheppard picks up his slack again, “We’re back where we started from.”

“But didn’t we give them our research, which included Michael’s research, on the drug last year?  The Wraith’ll discover their own way to survive the drug anyway.  Todd managed it, even if the curative process is dangerous and it was a last ditch attempt at survival.  He still found it,” Keller interjects.

Woolsey, Sheppard, and McKay exchange looks.  Keller stares at them, especially McKay.

“That’s not entirely true.  We didn’t give them all of the research,” Woolsey informs her.

Keller starts at him.

“But I told them—“

Woolsey cuts her off, “It was for the best Doctor Keller.”

“What best,” she objects but her eyes stray towards Sheppard, he gently shakes his head at her, and she backs down.

Suddenly Woolsey looks like he wants to say something but doesn’t know exactly how to put it, but after a few seconds he does, “The reports also state that there are signs that the warehouses do contain the remnants of a laboratory.”  He lets silence take hold for a moment.  With the whole Kenmore debacle only cooled by seconds ago, it’s hard news for everyone to take, “Colonel Sheppard, you and your team are supposed to go there with Major Lorne’s team and find out if it is one of Michael’s labs.  And if it is, if it’s truly been abandoned…”

“We’ll download as much of its database as we can,” McKay adds.

“Then we’ll destroy it,” Sheppard finishes.

Woolsey adds, “And if it hasn’t…”

“We’ll download as much of its database as we can,” McKay repeats.

“And we’ll blow it up,” Ronon finishes.

Woolsey nods his head.

“Then Colonel Sheppard, your team has a go.”

Richard Woolsey collects his files again into the neat stacks he had carried them in as as the team gets up from the table and start to leave.  Sheppard had only ever heard an exit from this room be this quiet when a very pregnant Teyla had been taken from their ranks and they all felt they had only one job to do, one mission:  get Teyla and her baby back, safe and sound.  John glances over at her.  She seems to be her usual steadfast self but John senses the same undercurrent passing through all of them.  She’s unhappy with the whole damn situation.  And John knows there’s nothing any of them can do about it.

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Episode One- The Fifth- Chapter Five

Posted on October 12, 2012 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Five

Okay so that crazy doctor was right.  Atlantis was…pretty.  God it was begrudging to admit that.  Atlantis was not her home, was not the new home she had been expecting for her and her son.  Lieutenant Kenmore walks through the halls.  They were busier than back at the SGC, but it was not exactly hectic.  Finally she rounded a corner just like any other corner in Atlantis, they all looked the same to her, except this one was empty.  Hey, first time for everything, she must have strayed off the beaten path.  She stopped in the middle of the empty hallway and looked up and down it and all around her.  There was nothing truly descript here.  Nothing to tell her ‘Hey your grumpy butt went the wrong way.’  She turned, Ooh, a wall sconce, she turned again, ooh, another one, she turned again, and another.  Wow this place was a barrel of laughs.  At least it was empty, otherwise she would have termed it as monkeys.  With a frustrated sigh and an irritated flail of her arms, Kenmore continues to head down the corridor, looking around.  Where am I?

Suddenly a panel came out of the floor as her attention was averted to what she thought might have been a hidden door but was just another panel of wall, she had never heard of doors having sconces before and hadn’t seen it yet in Atlantis though she wasn’t putting it past the city highly ornate as it is, and her hip slams right into the obstruction.  Kenmore froze at the pain and temporarily doubled-over and clinging to the object.  It was waist-high.  Perfect height to hurt like hell and make her mouth form an O.  Jesus Christ, what the—Kenmore took a moment to catch her breath.  Did everything always pop out of the floor like that?  Maybe she hadn’t strayed off the beaten path so much as a construction zone that had been hitherto unmarked off.  Maybe workers were in a different hallway taping off an end leading this way.  Kenmore gets her elbow underneath her and lifts herself off of the panel.

She stares down at the object.  It was…white…or grey…or was grey Atlantis’ answer to white?  Kenmore backed up a little so her shadow wasn’t cast over it and nodded at the sight.  No, no, it was cream.  Still unusual for Atlantis.  The Ancients wore cream, they didn’t use the color for their decorating.  Or at least she hadn’t seen that yet.  But the blue lights coming from the art deco, angular cut-outs trying so desperately to evoke stained glass, was an oceanic shade of blue that degraded, with varying tones of blue, to the almost icy shade of light blue that a curling ocean breaker’s foam was.  Now that was definitely Lantean motif.  And the blue was showing through, again excessively decorative but not in the least practical, in a series of slats cut into the podium—Yeah I guess it’s safe to call it that, podium—just underneath the lit paneling.  Kenmore looks at the top of it and sees a few buttons.  It all looks pretty much, you know, press and ye shall receive.  Except that in the middle of the top panel there’s a large round circle, taking up the whole center of the panel.  Perhaps it’s a spot for your hand?  It’s just glowing blue, did these old dead people—sorry ascended people—not like any other color for their lighting or something?  What was so friggin’ hideous about all the other colors of the rainbow?  Kenmore looks up ahead of her.

“Hello?  Uh, something came out of the floor.  Can, can somebody help me?”

No one comes.  What the hell?  She just left a hallway half-full of people.  She looks behind her and calls out…

“Hello,” still no one comes, Kenmore’s exasperated, “Where is everybody?”

Suddenly a beam shoots up a few feet out of the panel—podium, well, maybe panel—then expands into a rectangular holoprojection of a map?  Kenmore stares at it.  There are hundreds of flashing, little pink dots milling about the pale blue-outlined map of the city.  Each dot has a line of script next it.  She couldn’t read the foreign language.  She never learned to read Ancient, never cared to, never had to.  Maybe they were little nametags?  Kenmore looks back down the hallway again.  Where am I?

It gets dimmer behind her.  Her head snaps back to the map.  It’s changed.  All the little dots have disappeared except for one.  Kenmore bends down and peers at it.  It seems to be standing in the middle of a hallway.  Oh God, Kenmore realizes…

“This is a ‘You Are Here’ map,” the realization is dumb-founding and frankly stupid bordering on the irritating-as-hell side, “So, this place is the Ancient version of the mall?  Oh yeah, science guys, big discovery.  Gee which way should I go? The shoe store or the gateroom?”

The map changes.  The dot disappears and leaves only the empty outline of the city except for a bright shine of light.  It’s not a dot necessarily but it’s a shining fuzzy oval set off to one side of a room.  The Stargate.  Kenmore gapes.  Okay, so it wasn’t the shoe store but…

“You’re not just a…you’re a directory.  Oh this is so much more handy,” Kenmore looks up at the nearest sconce and says to it, as though it’s the representative of the whole city, “Oh I like you,” she returns her attention to the map.  She wasn’t sure how to say this, “May, may I see where my son is?”

A single dot glows into life in a room on the perimeter of the city’s central spire.  Kenmore smiles.  She didn’t know what the inscription next to the dot said exactly but she knew it was Michael, her little boy.

“And me,” she asked.

Another dot appears glowing in a spot she remembered from before, the middle of a hallway closer to the gateroom than her son.  Okay, so how to get from here to there?

“Can you show me how to get to him?”

Suddenly the map shows a flashing, yellow path of rectangular dots—no, no, more like dashes—leading from just ahead of her dot all the way to the door of the room her son’s dot was in.  Kenmore couldn’t help but feel a little crestfallen at it.  How was that going to help her?  It wasn’t like she could take this map with her.  Wait…Can I?  She looks over the podium again, nope no niche or anything where some paper or a little palm-sized map device could come out.  And considering she just asked it and all her other questions had been answered by some sort of action, nothing had come out at her as another answer.  There was only going to be one way to do this.  Kenmore stares at the map intently, trying to memorize every turn she would have to take.  She straightened back up, well, it was worth a try, and that’s when she noticed it.  The sconce that she had talked to was flashing yellow.  Kenmore looks back at the map.  That explains why the path seemed to so closely follow the walls.  The sconces, now strobing yellow rather than holding their solid emmitance of bright, oceanic teal, would show her the way.  Kenmore smiles again and nods back at the podium and its map.

“Thank you,” she said and the map folded back up into a beam of light, receded back into the podium’s panel, and the whole thing slid back down into the floor and the floor tile slid over it seamlessly.  Kenmore couldn’t even tell it was there but she knew it.

 

Doctor Radek Zelenka looked up and paused in the hallway he was in and he wasn’t the only one.  It wasn’t like this hallway was one of Atlantis’ more deserted corridors and it wasn’t exactly like this was an odd hour of the day.  It was shift-change, rush hour, and this hallway was practically packed with people and many of them were stopped at staggered inconvenient places and staring at the same thing he was.  A section of the wall sconces were flashing with yellow light.  They never did that.  He had never seen them do that through the course of five, almost six years now.  Not in any case of any emergency Atlantis had ever had and he had been through a lot of them.  He put his hand up to his earpiece and activated it.

“Rodney?”

After a moment, the voice came through with its usual irritated snap.

“Yes, what is it?”

“Is there something wrong going on that I should know about?”

Zelenka can hear Rodney’s anxiety through the sound of his voice, “No, why?”

“Because there is something going on.  The lights in the hallway I am in, the sconces, they are flashing…yellow.”

“What?”

“I thought you knew.”

“No I didn’t know,” Zelenka could here Rodney’s frightened exasperation and he felt it too.  He wanted to know what was going on before the next, usually near fatal, shoe dropped…like the sound of Atlantis’ self-destruct counting down.  He felt like some unknown danger had been triggered without his or Rodney’s notice.  He also didn’t notice the young, newly arrived, Hispanic woman wearing a black t-shirt and green BDU pants coming around the corner and walking alongside the wall with the trail of flashing sconces.  She continues steadily on down the hallway and disappears around another corner, Zelenka is too mesmerized by the lights to notice, and suddenly the lights stop.  No more flashing, no more yellow.  They are back to the solid teal they normally were.  Silently, the scientist waits for any further lights, any alarms to suddenly start sounding.  Nothing.  Radek puckers his lips in his astoundment.

“They’ve stopped,” he remarks loud enough for his earpiece to relay then continues walking when Rodney’s disturbing response comes through…

“I didn’t do anything.”

Radek freezes in mid-step.

 

The flashing lights lead Kenmore up to a closed door.  Kenmore stops and turns to the flashing sconce right next to the door and notices that all the other lights that she passed to get here have gone back to normal.  She looks at the one still flashing and nods at it.

“Thank you.”

It returns to normal.

Wow, this is a helpful place.  Okay maybe the doctor isn’t as whacked out as I thought, of course the whacked out doctor had been talking about the beauty of the scenery.

Okay, now she was stuck standing in front of a door and had no idea how to open it.  Kenmore felt that familiar creep of tension start to tingle in her shoulders again.  She bowed her head and rubbed the bridge of her nose.  Why hadn’t she asked the panel how to get into the room when she got here?  Kenmore flails her arm out and it swings in front of the narrow, outcropped panel holding beneath its cover a trio of blue-glowing, vertical slated crystals.  And the door opens.  Kenmore stared at the panel—door opener—okay, that works.

She walks in to find her son sitting on the larger of two beds.  It is residing comfortably in front of a window with a breath-taking view of a small stretch of the inner ring of the city and the extension of one of its arms—piers, one of those damn files called them piers, oh and the doctor too—and that beautiful ocean the crazy doctor had been talking about as well.  Okay so the city was beautiful.  Michael’s little feet were bouncing against the side of the bed.

“This is your bed Mom,” he announced spreading his arms wide to mimic the width of the bed.  “Uncle Lorne got called away.  He thought I’d be safe here alone.”

Kenmore frowned at him and looked off to her left at the rest of the room, Clearly Uncle Lorne didn’t fully understand how you managed to wander away from the gateroom to the command center.  The second bed, much smaller, was snuck off into a set-out part of the room.  There was a night stand next to it with a lamp.  A nice, little comfy cozy personal area.  What she would have given him if they had had to share a room together back on Earth.  That didn’t exactly make her feel better.  Right next to her son’s ‘bedroom’ nook and positioned at an angle facing into the room is another door.  Though it doesn’t have a door opener unit set into the wall next to it.  She walks over to it and it opened at her presence like she was used to in Atlantis.  She peers in.  It was the bathroom.  It was nice.  The same coloring as all the other décor in Atlantis but it had a nice shower/bath combo, which she hadn’t expected, a toilet, which was just as ornate as everything else here was and that was going a little overboard to her way of thinking, and a sink, which she had expected to be likewise as ornately decorated as everything else.  She looked up at the mirror hanging on the wall just above the sink.  It was rectangular, non-descript, and totally brought and placed here by a human.  There were lights, bright, white, and definitely of human design and construction, right above it.  Apparently the Ancients didn’t think primping before someone heads out or overhead lighting was in keeping with their décor, although Kenmore did note that there was a mechanism on the wall next to her that she figured might actually be for the sconces decorating the corners of the room and the pillars on either side of the sink.  Maybe it was more like the humans here didn’t think the Ancients’ lighting skills were enough.  She ducks back into the main room and the bathroom door closed behind her.

Next to the big bed was another nightstand, larger, in keeping with the size of the bed, and on the far wall was what she could only describe as the Ancients’ interpretation of a built-in closet with a few crates of their personal items from their home on Earth and their suitcases stacked in front of it and on the wall next to her was a desk with rows and rows of shelves above it stacked up a few feet shy of the ceiling.  A labtop was already sitting there, silver, folded up, off, and it had a big, fat Atlantis winged-horse-flying-through-a-chevron emblem decal on it.  There was also a picture frame laying flat on the desk top.  She looked over at her son and finally saw what his whole body had been hiding from her.  He had been unpacking one of their suitcases.  In fact, one of her suitcases.  She fixes him with a very unhappy Mommy Look.

“Michael.”

“But Mom—“

“Don’t ‘But Mom’ me.  You had no right to do this,” Kenmore rushes over to the desk and snatches the picture frame off of it.  She doesn’t flip it over, she knows exactly who’s picture it is:  her dead husband’s, “We aren’t staying here,” Kenmore marches the frame back to her opened suitcase and tosses it on top of her clothes then slams the suitcase’s lid shut, “You don’t unpack.  Do you hear me?  You don’t!”

Michael nods, for all his playfulness at trying to get his mom to stay with Uncle Lorne’s help, sitting at a tray a food was one thing and setting up shop in the room assigned to them was entirely another.  He had crossed a huge line with her.  Now was the time to be humble, to be quiet, and do as you’re told.  He nodded at her and his legs stopped bouncing.  He knew what had really set her off was him setting up his father’s image.  That one had really stung.  He knew his mother still felt lonely in her bed and she got out of bed alot when she couldn’t take it anymore and walked around in the dark.  It usually made her feel better, or at least it got her to stop moving, staring out the window in her bedroom…his parent’s bedroom.  He looked at her.  Now she had a much bigger window to comfort her with a much different view than their backyard and the always dark woods behind their house.

“I’m sorry Mommy.”

Kenmore sighed, bowed her head, and rubbed the bridge of her nose again.  She had lost count of how many times she’d done that today and it had only been a few hours.  Michael could see the tension in his mother’s shoulders, knew she wanted to cry.  Yeah, he really went way too far.  But he couldn’t help but feel that this was good for her.  If anything, Atlantis wasn’t home.  Home hurt her…really bad.

“I thought Mister Woolsey told you we were staying,” that was a good way to approach it, blame it on Mister Woolsey.

“I haven’t talked to Mister Woolsey yet,” she sounded tired.

Michael nods.  Stress.

“When are you suppose to?”

Kenmore checks her watch.  Ten minutes.  She had just enough time to get to his office if she left now and asked for help getting there again.  Great, Kenmore slapped her hand against her thigh, just great.  There isn’t any time to solve this problem.  She looks around, this is not where she wanted to be, not where she wanted her son to be.

“I’m going to go talk to him now.”

Michael nods again.

“Do you have those files I gave you before the doctor called me to the infirmary?”

He nods again and points at the desk, “I put them in one of the drawers.”

Kenmore walks back over to it, opens up the first drawer on the left side, and finds the files.  She picks them up.  Might as well return them to Woolsey, thank him for the reading material but they’re no longer required, never were…she looks back at her son, much calmer now.

“Just don’t unpack anymore things, okay?”

Michael nods at his mother.

“Now, are you sure you’re okay here?”

He nods.

“Are you sure you’re sure?”

He nods again.

She gives him a look that asks ‘Are you sure you’re sure you’re sure?’ without her having to utter another word.

Michael nods at his mother again and she reluctantly leaves.  As soon as the door closes behind her, Michael’s feet start bouncing again.  He looks around.  He didn’t see what was so bad about this place anyway.  He thought it was pretty.

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Episode One- The Fifth- Chapter Four

Posted on October 5, 2012 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Four

The medical wing of Atlantis is unusually calm.  It would have been buzzing compared to a regular hospital, maybe hyperactive for a military one, but for Atlantis it was calm.  Nurses were going this way and that, either fetching medical supplies like thermometers or syringes or running files.  Other doctors were tending to other patients or doing final checks on some equipment necessary for the furtherance of whatever medical studies they were working on.  The usual fervor that accompanied an urgent medical unit to the gateroom had died down now becoming as it always was with an SGC installation, second-nature.  There hadn’t been any serious injuries with Sergeant Stackhouse’s team.  There was a medical bed required, but that was temporary until the swelling in one of Stackhouse’s marine’s ankles went down.  Two hours tops.  As for the others, one did get clipped by a Wraith stun blast but only in the pinky.  The man’s hand twitched at odd times, but it was nothing more than the nerve-endings trying to fight off the stun effects.  When he had first gotten to the medical wing, his arm up to his elbow had been numb and barely usable, limp as a rag doll’s, but now it was just his pinky that was suffering.  He had been excused ten minutes ago.

Doctor Jennifer Keller sat on the stool at her desk with the computer on it running it’s screensaver of a shiny silver rotating, moving Atlantis Expedition emblem.  She checks her watch then scribbled some more on her medical report on Stackhouse’s team as the Sergeant himself stood behind her waiting for it.  From the corner of her eye she could see Stackhouse bend over and examine a large beaker full of pink, clear liquid capped with a piece of thin, red rubber stretched over it and sealed with a yellow rubber band.  Jennifer smiled to herself.  It wasn’t exactly a high-tech way of keeping sterilization liquids where they were supposed to be and free of debris that might fall into it from some attack on the city or other disturbance causing the usual ensuing mayhem and destruction and ruining the solution.  Finally Jennifer reached the bottom of her report and signed.  She put down her pen, straightened the papers then put them in their folder, and closed the file.  She spun the stool around, Stackhouse came to attention, and she extended the file to him.

“Here you go.  That Lieutenant should have feeling and control back in his pinky by now and I’ll release Sergeant Mathur to light duty in a couple of hours when his swelling goes down.”

“Perfect,” Stackhouse nods as he steps forward and takes the file from her, “I’ll stick him with report duties.  That should keep him off his feet for a while.”

Jennifer smiles.  It was notorious how much every soldier, whether high-ranking or not, tried desperately to shove the report writing and reading off on anyone they could and an injured teammate was as good a victim as anybody, but the tactic very rarely worked.  Richard Woolsey was a stickler for reports coming from who he ordered them from.  Everyone thought it was bad enough they actually had to write them on the computers and input them into Atlantis’ SGC database before but when Woolsey came, he insisted on everyone filing the originals as honest-to-God pen and paper reports and the copies as computer files.  It made Woolsey feel better and Jennifer could tell anyone about how the military personnel felt about making Richard Woolsey feel better.  She simply nods at him.

He shook the file at her with a grateful smile, “Thank you Doc,” then turned on his heels, the military members always turned on their heels, it was the training, and left.

Jennifer sat up.  As Stackhouse left, the new arrival, Lieutenant Ursula Kenmore, passes by him and walks in.

Jennifer had been both looking forward to this and fearing it all at the same time.  When she read the list she got of the new arrivals due to her for their physicals, both her mind and her heart skipped at the sight of the infamous rank and name:  Lieutenant Kenmore.  She immediately scrambled to the page listed that gave a quick rundown of that crewman’s medical file.  And she read the name “Kenmore, Lieutenant Ursula” with a huge sigh of relief.  Ever since then, she’d been waiting to meet the woman and now here she was wearing a black t-shirt and a pair of green, SGC BDU pants.  Whatever Jennifer had been expecting by means of physicality, what was heading towards her was not it.  The Lieutenant was a plus-sized, full figure, not what she’s use to seeing from the military.  She had tan skin, in keeping with her ethnicity.  Her hair was long and a rich espresso brown that Jennifer envied because when the natural light hit it, highlights of bright coppery auburn, brilliant gold, shining silver, and deep bronze suddenly showed up and it had a natural curl that given enough length turned into waves that reminded her of an ocean’s rolling waves.  How fitting she should be assigned to Atlantis then.  Her eyes were a richer, more fascinatingly golden mahogany brown than anything Jennifer had ever seen before.  And the woman had a kind of swagger that, if she hadn’t noticed the slightly stiffer subtleties of it, Jennifer would have mistaken for Colonel Sheppard’s regular, on-duty/off-duty saunter.  No this woman was not at all what Keller had been expecting.  Lieutenant Kenmore stopped in front of her.

“I was told you needed to see me.”

It was hard for Jennifer to keep her smile up.  She could feel it straining.  She hadn’t expected the Lieutenant to sound so…mean.

“Yes, it’s required that all SGC personnel get a physical before they go on a mission.”

“I’m not going on one.”

Wait, what?  Jennifer’s brows drew together in confusion.  She turned and searched all the other files and papers on her desk until she found the one she had been looking for, read it, and then spun back around to face Kenmore with it still open and a page lifted up in her hands.

“I have an order here from Mister Woolsey that says you do.”

“I don’t take orders from Richard Woolsey.”

Jennifer’s head shot up.  Well that was new.  She never heard anyone in uniform shoot down Richard Woolsey like that before even if he wasn’t around.  Usually the soldiers obeyed the orders of the base commander whoever that was, civilian or military.  They took orders from Doctor Weir.  They took orders from Lieutenant Colonel Samantha Carter.  They take them from Richard Woolsey, perhaps a little irritated, but they still took them.  And why not Woolsey—other than the obvious reasons?

“But he’s the Base Commander.”

“He’s not my Commander.”

Keller paused.  Okay, so that was that.  Keller sucked in her lips a little and looked away.  New tactic.

“Well, whether or not you’re going on a mission here.  I still have to examine you for any infections you might have brought through the gate with you.”

The Lieutenant considers it for a moment then walks over to the nearest examination table and hops up on it.  She gets comfortable then looks at Keller.  Jennifer’s strained smile returns.  This was going to be a tough one.  Jennifer had become used to patients, military or scientific, fighting her on the physical with excuses ranging from absolute confidence in their country’s military’s standard training regiments to fear of needles to, and this one was her personal favorite, fear of exercise equipment.  Rodney had tried that one on her the first time they ever met.  Before Jennifer could call him on it, warning sirens went off, alerts went out, she freaked out because it was her first day on the job in Atlantis and already bad things were coming to get them, Rodney raced off, and Jennifer didn’t get him to take his physical until six weeks later.  And even then she had had to rely on the then Base Commander, Doctor Elizabeth Weir, to personally bully Rodney into letting Jennifer take it:  Elizabeth had sent Ronon with Rodney.  She had even given the great big, intimidating Satedan orders to either physically hold Rodney down while Jennifer took his blood or stun Rodney into unconsciousness in order for Jennifer to take his blood.  Either way, Atlantis’ new Chief of Medicine was getting some of his blood.  Weir had even gone so far as to say that if Rodney was going easy on the treadmill that Ronon could take potshots at the scientist’s feet to force him to run at his best.  The memory touched Jennifer’s heart.  It was both the first time she had ever meet Ronon Dex and it was also the first time she learned that to work in Atlantis meant that who had to be a strong person and not the mouse she frankly had been at the beginning of her tenure here…But she had never before gotten the excuse of denying even being a part of Atlantis for refusing the standard pre-mission physical.

Jennifer picks up her clipboard, clips a brand new standard-issue physical form to it, and scoots a tray of equipment over to Kenmore.  Jennifer slips on a pair of latex gloves.

“Okay, let’s get started here.”

Kenmore looks down at the contents of the tray, “I will not require any blood tests.  I won’t be here long enough for the effects of any blood intoxicant to be carried on to anyone else.”

Jennifer stares at her.  Well at least she knew something about medicine more than the standard-issue military triage procedures.  But still…

“It’s standard procedure.”

“If you require my blood tests, I took my physical back at the SGC before I came here.  You can coordinate your efforts with them.”

“With all due respect, two week old blood tests—“

“It was two hours ago.”

Jennifer started.  Kenmore had a growl on her that almost reminded the physician of Ronon.  Okay, so…Jennifer decided that she would switch her tactics yet again and act as if she were trying to get Ronon to take his physical.

“That may be but we don’t exactly have those records here,” Kenmore opens her mouth but Keller doesn’t give her the chance to interrupt, “I know I could have a message sent back to Earth for your records but the energy drain on the ZPM would be too much just dialing back to Earth willy-nilly,” Kenmore opens her mouth again but Keller stops her again, “I know that your blood work is not willy-nilly but here in Atlantis, dialing back to Earth just for some test results is not considered worth the energy expenditure.  That is why we have our own blood and DNA database.  In case something goes wrong, we need that information here with us not in another galaxy.”

Keller finishes and Kenmore allows her to catch her breath for a moment then, “Do you anticipate something going wrong in the course of the next few hours I will be here?”

“You’re the soldier in the SGC, you tell me.”  One thousand one.

Kenmore extends her arm, palm up.  Keller nods.

“Thank you.”

Jennifer reaches over to the tray, takes up a strip of thin, bright neon pink rubber, and ties the band around Kenmore’s bicep then she grabs a little square package from the tray, tears it open, and starts rubbing the antiseptic pad over the inside of Kenmore’s elbow.  Then Jennifer picks up a needle with a yellow cap at one end, “This will sting,” Kenmore nods, Jennifer nods back then pushes the sharp end of the needle into the little bump of vein that has popped up in the middle of the wiped area.  Keeping one hand holding the needle in place, Jennifer removes the band from Kenmore’s upper arm, releasing her nice blood flow again, then reaches over to the tray and picks up a clear vial with a pale blue stopper at the top of it and pops the stopper into the needle’s yellow cap.  Almost instantly dark red blood spurts out of the blue stopper and into the bottom of the vial.  For a moment it looks to Keller like poured wine hitting the bottom of a glass.  The blood follows the curl of the bottom of the vial and splashes over onto itself like the curl of an ocean breaker just waiting for a surfer to ride inside its crest.  But it only lasts for maybe a second at most before the blood, continuing to spurt from the penetrated cap, begins to fill the vial and overtakes the breaker movement.  Three seconds later the vial is filled, Keller pops it out, lays it on the tray, picks up a duplicate vial, and pops the new vial into the yellow cap.  Again, the deep red blood just flash floods into the little glass vial.  It was an ironic thing to think, but at least she was a good and fast bleeder.

“So…how do you like Atlantis so far?”

“I’m not staying here.”

Well that was flat.  Keller wants to roll her eyes at the quickly filling, little glass vial.  This woman was perhaps a bit more rude than Ronon.  Well that wasn’t entirely true.  Ronon wasn’t rude so much as tactless, occasionally flirtatious when he liked someone, but blunt, always blunt.  He says what he thinks when he feels he has to and says it with brutal honesty.  There’s no mean intention behind it.  This Lieutenant Kenmore though…Keller didn’t get the feeling of mean intent like “I’m trying to hurt your feelings,” she got more of the mean intent as in “Stay away from me.”  Ronon had that sort of a feel to his whole manner and way of talking but it wasn’t the dominant feel.  And the same thing could be said of Rodney, he said things without thinking how they came across because they needed to be said.  Jennifer felt a smile tug at her lips, but fought it off.  It was one of the things she loved about him, had fallen in love with him for:  telling her what she needed to know despite how it came across.  Although they had been working on putting those things not necessarily sugary but more gently than he had been.  Humility, or at least that’s how she had put it to him.

“You don’t have to stay here to have an opinion on it,” Keller said.

“I don’t see why you would care.”

Ouch.  There was something more to that line.  Was it…suspicion?  Why would anyone be suspicious of Jennifer?  When the second vial is filled, Jennifer pops in a third one and watches it begin to fill.

“I don’t.  It’s just small talk,” Keller tries to smooth over, she glances up at Kenmore’s face, and sees the Lieutenant glaring at her.  Her eyes go back to the vial.

Jennifer decides not to push the matter.  After all, if you pushed anything with Ronon about his feelings or the ones he was letting leak through and didn’t know it, he had a great tendency to become even more hostile and irate and besides, Kenmore is right, why should Keller care what somebody else thought of Atlantis…but it was just nice to hear someone who didn’t live in the place, who hadn’t lived in the place, to say that they could at least see why it was worth fighting for.  Perhaps something about the beautiful architecture, the Ancients sure liked angles.  It wasn’t to Jennifer’s preference, but it was pretty.  Someone could at least admit that.  Keller pops out the third and final vial and lays it on the tray beside the other two, then picks up a cotton ball.

“I don’t need that,” Kenmore speaks up.

Jennifer stops and looks at her, “Yes you do.”

“No I don’t.  I’m a fast healer.”

No, you’re a fast bleeder.  Now this was what Keller was used to encountering, childish bickering back and forth of ‘Yes you do, No I don’t.’  ‘Fast healer’ or not, the Lieutenant was getting the cotton ball and everything else that went with it.  It’s called a bandage.

“It’s protocol,” Jennifer says.

“I don’t care about your protocols.  I don’t need it.”

“You can take it off as soon as you leave here.  I just can’t let you leave here without it on.  It’s protocol.”  And according to any and every military installation’s protocols, the Doctor’s word is law.

Before Kenmore can object any further, Keller puts the cotton over the needle’s tip still underneath the Lieutenant’s skin and slides the needle out.  Jennifer puts the needle back on the tray and, for putting up the fuss, picks up a strap of bright, neon pink woven rubber and uses it to strap down the cotton ball to the inside of Kenmore’s arm.  Then checks through the Lieutenant’s file again.

“Well, you were right about one thing.  I was forwarded the tests results of your physical back at the SGC.  I must admit the running results were pretty impressive.  You can keep up a good pace, almost as good as Colonel Sheppard.”

“I know,” Kenmore’s expression didn’t change.

Keller shoots her a quick look again, the doctor highly doubts that Kenmore knew the Colonel’s physical capabilities, but she continues on, “I need to take your temperature.”

Kenmore doesn’t move.  Keller just goes with the flow, again the same way she would if this was Ronon.  She picks up the needle and walks it over to the hazardous material disposal, drops it in, takes off her gloves, drops them in, and puts on a new pair of gloves before returning to Kenmore.  Well at least she had the courtesy to not run for it when Keller’s back was turned, unlike some people…Rodney…and frankly Carson.  Jennifer picks the thermometer up off the tray, Kenmore dutifully opens her mouth revealing her already lifted tongue, well that’s good, and Keller puts the thermometer in.  Kenmore closes her mouth and Keller watches the hands tick away on her watch.  It’s silent.  Jennifer never really liked silence in a medical ward.  It made her anxious like everyone’s just watching and waiting for her to screw up and not live up to the job or worse, that everyone’s just watching and waiting for the next round of casualties to come through the gate.  It also spooked the hell out of her.  It got to her more than the sound of a heart monitor flat-lining.  The silence usually meant that the heart monitor had finally been turned off.  Jennifer fought the urge to shudder.

Forty-five seconds.  Jennifer thought about just running her mouth.  Start babbling like there’s no tomorrow because she rarely had time like this in the medical ward.  Thirty-five seconds.  Would that really be so bad if she just started yabbering?  Thirty seconds.  No.  And it isn’t like there’s anything Lieutenant Kenmore can do about it either.

“The mess hall is pretty good.  The food not so much, but the hall itself is pretty nice.  It has a waterfall,” Kenmore’s eyes narrow but Keller just keeps on truckin’, “You should really try taking a nice walk of the perimeter of the city.  The piers get the most wonderful breezes and it’s really nice to just stand there and listen to the ocean splash up against the city.  It’s like being on the ocean,” she had of course been thinking of the ocean back on Earth but, “Of course, we’re on an ocean,” Jennifer chuckles to herself.

If Kenmore’s eyes narrowed any further, she wouldn’t be able to see.  Jennifer quickly checks her watch again.  Time.  With a smile worthy of any recovery, Jennifer reaches up for the thermometer and Kenmore let’s her have the instrument.  Keller checks it.

“Well your temperature is normal.”

Kenmore doesn’t respond.

Why should Jennifer keep this going, “All I needed was your blood to check for toxins and the database.  You’re free to go.”

Kenmore nods, “I’ll send my son to you later then.”

Keller starts, “Your son?”

There was nothing in her files about a son.  Who would bring their child here?  Without a second word, Kenmore hops off the examination table and walks off.  She passes by Rodney just coming in on her way out.  He turns and starts to walk backwards as he watches Kenmore.  As she nears the door to the medical wing, she reaches up and yanks the pink rubber fabric off, cotton ball and all, and throws it in the garbage just before she walks out the door and out of sight.  Rodney turns back around and walks up to Jennifer putting labels on the filled vials.

“Hey,” Rodney greeted, “what’s that?”

“Lieutenant Ursula Kenmore’s blood.”

Rodney stares down at the vials.

“You needed that much.”

Jennifer’s shoots him a wry smile, “It’s the same amount I take from all of you when you get your physicals.”

“I know.  You really need that much?”

“I run your blood through every possible test I can imagine to ensure that none of you are who you say you aren’t.  I was here for a whole four days when I figured out that’s why the SGC’s policy was that way,” Jennifer flags over a passing nurse and hands her three of the vials, “Standard physical,” the nurse nods then Jennifer holds the fourth vial up, “This is for the blood and DNA database,” the nurse nods again, takes the fourth vial, and walks away.

Jennifer turns and sits back against the edge of her desk and sighs.  Rodney leans over and kisses her shoulder, trying to perk her up.  She smiles.

“I don’t have much time.  I’ve got fifteen more of those to do.  Wait, sixteen, Lieutenant Kenmore’s son,” Jennifer looks up at him, “Who would bring their son here?”

“Yeah, we’re still trying to figure that one out.  Say if you need some help, when you get the findings back on the blood, I can help you input them into the system.”

Keller smiles at him.  Impressed.  Rodney didn’t usually volunteer for paperwork-like things.  No one did.

“Don’t you have others that do that for you?”

“Yeah, well…,” Rodney played coy.

“You would do that for me,” she asks already knowing the answer.

“Sure.  Why not,” McKay turns on the charm for his girlfriend, “Like you said you don’t have a lot of free time today.  So it’d give us a chance to spend at least some of that time together.”

Keller’s grin broadens, “You know I could time it so that I’m doing some extra file work at that time too…Just to make the time last a little longer.”

McKay grins, “I was hoping you’d say that.”

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Episode One- The Fifth- Chapter Three

Posted on September 28, 2012 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Three

Their surroundings are just as dismal as they feel.  The mess hall is about half full.  Smatherings of people are all over.  Some can be seen through the windows sitting at the outdoor tables enjoying the oceanic breezes and others are spread all around the room sharing jovial conversations or engaged in deep psychological warfare via a chessboard.  But there are a handful who are neither jovial nor playing a game, in fact they aren’t currently finding anything good about the day so far, not even the food.  They aren’t eating at what had become their usual outdoor table.  They really don’t feel like happy sunshine today.  Sheppard, twiddling his thumbs, and McKay, eating, sit on one side of a long table while Ronon, remaining still, and Teyla, staring down at the stretch of empty table in front of her, sit on the other side.  Everyone is silent.  No one looks happy.

“We don’t need a fifth,” Ronon finally says after half an hour of silence.

“Perhaps it is for the best,” Teyla tries, “If it was a great help to the other teams on Earth—”

McKay cuts her off, still chewing around his bite of food…

“Vala was only allowed on SG-1 because she was an information broker.  That was it.  Plain and simple,” McKay swallows and continues, “She had a lot, and I mean a lot, of contacts and whatever information she couldn’t get from them, she stole.”

He goes back to eating.  After so many years working and socializing with Rodney, they knew that he honestly believed he had just helped the situation and after so many years working and socializing with Rodney, they knew he had done the exact opposite of his intentions.  John was only half-listening anyways.  There was a nasty thought that kept strolling past his mind.  Was Kenmore’s arrival here a reflection of Woolsey’s opinion of Sheppard’s ability to command?  John knew his style wasn’t exactly in line with what Woolsey had both wanted in an officer and expected of one but John thought that they had gotten past all that.  Richard was throwing the rulebook out Atlantis’ windows more and more often and John was beginning more and more to understand where Woolsey was coming from.  We saved Earth together, didn’t we?  He thought that there was a meeting of the minds going on here, but now there was a fifth.  Richard had put a fifth on his team.  My team.  They didn’t need a fifth…Or at least John thought they didn’t need a fifth.

John looks over at Ronon.  The big guy is sitting stiller than Sheppard has ever seen him sit.  This was underneath the Satedan’s skin bad.  Really bad.  He could see it in Ronon’s eyes.  There was a lot he wasn’t saying but wanted to, a lot he wasn’t doing but wanted to.  Sheppard returns his eyes back to the floor and the nasty thought strolled past the front of his mind again.  Both Sheppard and Ronon are too dismayed by the situation to try and be a part of the conversation, but Teyla is not about to let this go without trying to understand it first.

“I got the distinct impression that Lieutenant Kenmore was not an information broker nor did I get the feeling that she is a thief.”

“Yeah, well, looks can be deceiving,” McKay pointed out through another mouthful of food.

That doesn’t help Rodney, and he can’t stand that damn thought making another pass at him.  Okay, so he was going to join the conversation.  Maybe if he did that the damn thought would shut the hell up and leave him alone.  Sheppard finally snaps.

“Well if she isn’t an information broker and she doesn’t have any Ancient artifact for us to examine, then why is she here?”

After a moment of silence, Ronon pipes in with the only answer he can think of.

“Maybe she was sent here to report back on us to the IOA?”

That was one Sheppard hadn’t thought of.  Okay, okay that one actually helped.  The thought hadn’t made a pass yet.  So it was slowing down.  Joining the conversation was actually helping.  Even though the IOA’s report of Ronon a couple of years ago had been glowing after the incident involving the destruction of the Midway Station and Teyla had passed their inspection with flying colors despite the IOA’s misgivings about her pregnancy, the IOA still didn’t exactly trust either of them.  They really barely even trusted their own members.  So if Kenmore was here, that had to mean that they approved of her, didn’t it?  Teyla shakes her head.

“I do not believe so.  If she were merely reporting on us back to Mister Woolsey’s former organization, then why would she be so angry to be here?”

The thought made a pass again.  God dammit.

“Maybe she’s acting,” Ronon’s look at Teyla tells her all she needs to know about his belief in what he’s saying.

McKay shakes his head.

“I don’t think so.  It isn’t exactly a secret that the SGC and IOA don’t get along.  And that last IOA report nearly cost Woolsey his job here.  I don’t see him playing nicely with the IOA anymore.  No, I agree with Teyla, she’s not reporting on us.”

Ronon looks at him incredulously, “Is that all you’ve got?  She doesn’t like the IOA and neither does Woolsey?”

The big guy had a point.

“She brought her son,” Teyla adds.

Sheppard sits up at this.

“See, that’s what gets me,” he says, “That’s what doesn’t add up.”

Teyla nods.

“I agree.  I believe she was tricked.  If I knew that I was coming to a place which had such a threat as the Wraith, I would not bring my son.  I do not believe that she would do so either.”

Ronon’s expression changes.  He looks away.  Okay, so they did have more.  He wasn’t buying any of it though, he liked his own explanation better.  But they did have more.  McKay shrugs as he continues eating, the visual representation of his team’s acknowledgement that Teyla did have a point that no one could really get around or talk around.  And the scene returns to what it had been before their little outbreak of conversation:  silent, glum, and absolutely tense.  John’s about to explode in anger and scream out loud at the thought in his head already on its third pass since the end of the conversation when Teyla suddenly straightens up.  Sheppard and Ronon stare at her.  She nods in the direction back behind McKay and Sheppard.  Sheppard and Ronon look in the direction indicated to see what had so caught her attention.  Walking up the stairs into the mess hall is the new arrival Lieutenant Ursula Kenmore.  She’s wearing a black t-shirt now and from the waist down it’s still all the green BDUs of the SGC and black combat boots.  Sheppard couldn’t tell from here if everything was spit and polish, but the closer she got to them the more he noticed her slight swagger and doubted her shoes were so militaristic.  John rolled his eyes.  He hated cocky people which was odd considering the general opinion of him was that he was one of them.  But this woman took it to a whole new level he didn’t particularly like.

Her path was taking her in between their table and the empty one next to it.  Sheppard looks over at Teyla and she gives him a barely perceptible nod of agreement.  He looks back at Kenmore approaching.  He didn’t like having to do this, but okay, here goes nothing.  John stands up and prepares to talk to her as she passes by, but before he can manage a word, she slips past him without removing her focus from a table beyond them.  Well thank God that bombed before he had the chance to set the charge on it.  It saved him from lying to her face and John wasn’t sure he could do a good impression of sincerity right now.  He looks down at Ronon and Teyla, the mutual expression is one of shock.  It wasn’t normal for someone in or out of uniform to slight Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard, especially someone new to Atlantis, his command.  John turns and they watch Kenmore continue on to a table at the far end of the room her son and Lorne are sitting at.  Well that explains that.  As she stops and starts to talk to the Major and her son, Sheppard sits back down.  McKay can’t help himself, even around yet another mouthful of food.

“See what I mean, looks can be deceiving.”

Kenmore takes up the empty seat right next to Lorne and facing across the expanse of practically empty mess to their table.  Sheppard nods.  Rodney, you have no idea, John goes back to twiddling his thumbs, but instead of staring at the floor he watches Kenmore’s table intently, no idea at all.

 

 

Kenmore stops at the table her son and Lorne are sitting at.  Lorne, facing her, looks up at her with a smile.

“See I told you your Mom would be here soon.”

Michael looks up at his mother, chomping happily with a big grin on his face; he tells her, “I got blue gelatin with whip cream.”

She smiles down at him and his blue-tinted lips and teeth and lovingly brushes the top of his head.

“Speaking of which, I got you a tray too,” Lorne gestures at the tray of food sitting on the table in front of the empty seat next to him.  Kenmore looks uncomfortably at it.  It isn’t hard for them to catch on to it.

“Come on Mom,” Michael pleads.

Kenmore looks at her son, still unsure…

Lorne takes that as his tag in.

“You gotta eat.”

…Then she looks at Lorne.  Their faces look so inviting and Kenmore knew Lorne from his days back at the SGC.  He was more geologist than marine then but the SGC had a funny knack of turning every field scientist into soldiers.  She trusted him, she trusted her son.  After a moment, Kenmore relinquishes, walks around the table, and takes up the seat next to Lorne.  She picks up a fork and looks down at her plate.  Okay maybe she didn’t trust them this much.

“Salisbury steak.  The last time I had this in the SGC mess hall was a few months ago.”  Were they kidding?

She takes a bite and the instant flood of just bad is almost more than she can bear.  She starts to chew the bite loosely in her mouth.  She isn’t sure if she even wants her teeth touching this stuff.  Her face isn’t even bothering to contort, it’s beyond that now.  It’s just wanting the piece of food out of her mouth.  She has to fight to keep it in, although for the life of her she can’t understand why she’s doing that.  Surely it would be saner just to spit it out on her tray and get it over with.

“And it tastes like it’s that old too,” Kenmore says around the bite.

Lorne and Michael shoot each other smiles.  They go back to eating too.  She watches them.  Ah, resilience, it was amazing how young stomachs and well-trained ones were so alike.

“I’ve been showing Michael around the city,” Lorne pipes up.

And with that Michael can’t stay in his skin, he starts bouncing in his seat, his eyes look like if they could bulge out of their sockets by their stems, they would, and he’s forgotten all about food.  He’d be the perfect physical incarnation of a cartoon character.  She smiles, ah yes, how resilient.

“He has Mom.  He really has.  This place is so huge.  There are towers all over the city.  And they have spaceships.  Did you know they have spaceships?  And it’s so cool.”

Kenmore’s smile disappears.  She hates to have to do this, she knows what it’ll do to her son.

“Yeah well don’t get too attached to it.  We’re going home,” she forks her mashed potatoes.  Those might be safe enough.  Flavorless starch ought to be safe.

Her son’s enthusiasm slightly dims but it doesn’t diminish, oh but it will, and his whine returns complete with swinging, kicking legs underneath the table.

“But Mom…”

Kenmore cuts him off, she has to.

“Don’t ‘But Mom’ me.  We don’t belong here Michael.  We weren’t meant to come here.  We’re supposed to be at an outpost.”

“This is an outpost,” Michael tries.

Damn, she shouldn’t have given him that opening.  Better make this as quick and painless as possible.

“Nice try.  A Jaffa outpost in the Milky Way.”

That really does seem to put out Michael’s fire.  Glumly, he pokes at his own mashed potatoes.

“Are we really going home,” he asks after a moment of silence.

God he had that puppy dog thing down.  What the hell was she going to do when he got older and the whimpers became cries of teen angst and he bellowed Mom was oppressing his creativity by telling him to pick up his dirty underwear out of the middle of his bedroom floor?

“Yes,” she puts more kindly but she can’t help but be more tight and terse in her next breath and that wasn’t Michael’s fault, “Mommy’s going to have a little chat with Mister Woolsey later.  He agreed to meet with me in a few hours.  With any luck, we’ll be having Salisbury steak for dinner back at the SGC.”

Michael keeps poking at his potatoes, he doesn’t look as happy as Kenmore feels at the prospect.  As Kenmore prepares to finally take a bite of her own potatoes, a staff member walks behind Lorne and up to Kenmore’s free side and sets down a stack of files beside her on the table.  Kenmore freezes with the fork stopped just in front of her open mouth and looks down at the stack.

“Lieutenant Kenmore, Mister Woolsey wanted me to deliver these to you.  He wants you to read through them before your mission briefing in a few hours,” he tells her, sounding exactly like how she expected a Woolsey lackey to sound, stiff and unyielding to anything but the orders Woolsey has given him.

They all three look up at him then Kenmore looks back at the stack of papers, too stunned to really function.  She thought that it was a private meeting between her and Woolsey in his office in a few hours not a mission briefing.  How could she be going to a mission briefing, she didn’t belong to any teams here?  Maybe he was planning to squeeze her in just before that mission briefing.  That has to be it.

“But,” she finally manages; but before she can even fathom any more words, the staff member walks away.

Kenmore and Michael stare down at the stack as Lorne watches the staff member leave.

“But Mommy, I thought you said you hated paperwork.”

Lorne looks over at the stack.  It’s thick.  Perhaps five, six inches; six inches sounded right to his judgment.  Let alone are there lots of file folders, he can’t see a single one that doesn’t look at least a quarter of an inch thick.  That is paperwork he wanted no part of, either reading it or creating it.  Lorne wasn’t even sure he wanted to be sitting at the same table as it.  Funny thing, he took a bite of steak and began to chew it with absolutely no hesitation or revulsion, his taste buds we’re so used to it by now, Lorne had a sinking suspicion that he was a part of at least a few pages worth of report in there.  But one thing was for sure, he swallowed, he didn’t envy his old friend one little bit.  He takes another bite of steak.

Kenmore puts down her fork and stares at the stack with a false smile, “Well now apparently Mommy does,” she sounded like she could strangle the files with her kindness.  Although Lorne had a strong feeling that it wasn’t the files’ neck she was imagining there when she looked down at them.

“I don’t think you’re going to be able to convince him you’re not staying here,” Lorne says, eyeing the stack again.

Lorne and Michael go back to their meals as Kenmore continues to stare at the files.

“Wanna bet,” she mutters under her breath.

Lorne glances at her out of the corner of his eye.

 

 

From across the room Sheppard and his teammates watch the staffer come, deliver, and go.  They know that stack.  Both Sheppard and McKay had handed them to staffers themselves when new arrivals came and were put directly under their individual commands.  Today, John had managed fifteen of those, and his gut was giving him a nauseating feeling that he had probably had a little bit of a hand in that one too, and Rodney had managed twenty, and probably had no hand in this one whatsoever.  It was the Welcome-to-Atlantis stack of immediately relevant mission reports and team personnel files.  Sheppard doesn’t even know where the umph came from to power his voice, let alone make it sound strong, clear, and, despite the slightly downcast edge to it, normal…

“Well, I guess that answers that.”

Normally the others would nod.  No one nods.

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