Jo Graham - Unascended

John fell in next to Teyla leaving the staff meeting and she looked at him sideways. His brow was furrowed, and there was tension to his walk. “Is something bothering you?” she asked.

“No. Yes.” He stopped, waiting for others to pass them in the hall and continue out of earshot. He was looking at the wall somewhere over her head, but at least he answered. “I wish Rodney would get off this thing about finding Elizabeth.”

“You think it is a delusion?”

John nodded. “I think Rodney really wants it to be true. And I get why. He went through some really traumatic stuff. But he’s got to pull it together.”

“I too dreamed of Elizabeth,” Teyla said. “And I believe she meant to help us. That much is real.”

He did look at her then. “You think she’s out there too?”

Teyla shook her head sadly. “No. I do not think the dead return to us that way. A guardian spirit, yes. But a physical person? I do not think so.”

“Maybe I should send Rodney to talk to Dr. Robinson,” John said. “Even if she can’t help, at least that way we’ll have dotted our I’s and crossed our T’s as far as the SGC is concerned. Weird beliefs about the afterlife don’t actually get you canned. But going on and on about it in staff meetings is one of those things.”

“Perhaps Dr. Robinson can help,” Teyla said. “I have great faith in her.”

Dekaas, Elizabeth learned, more or less kept office hours in Durant’s infirmary during the first watch, though apparently people felt no compunction about waking him up any other time that they needed him. He had his own cabin, but he gave Elizabeth use of a curtained alcove off the main infirmary. There was a cot there which looked much more comfortable than the bunk Elizabeth had used before. For one thing, it had a clean, neatly folded comforter and a pillow.

“Maybe you can triage actual emergencies from people with headaches,” he said with a smile, “and keep me from being fetched during the third watch unless I’m really needed.”

“Absolutely,” Elizabeth said. She was fairly certain she could tell the difference between an emergency and a headache. “I’ve done this before, sleeping in the aid center to wake the doctor if there’s trouble.”

“Oh?” Dekaas’ voice was studiously casual. “When?”

Elizabeth started, suddenly aware of what she’d said.

“Don’t force it,” Dekaas said gently, his eyes on hers. “Don’t try to know what it means. Just say whatever comes to mind.”

“When I was much younger. A place, a tent…” She could see it for a moment, the inside of a large white tent, flap rolled up to show a track turned to mud by the spring rains, gray clouds and a cool day, the bright green of new growth on the mountains…. “There was a doctor.” A man who reminded her of Dekaas, though his accent was different. “A white tent, with a red cross on the roof in case of helicopter strikes.”

“Helicopter strikes?” Dekaas prompted quietly.

“They had helicopters. They’d already violated the Gorazde Safe Area, but we thought that they wouldn’t deliberately hit a Red Cross site.”

“Were you a doctor?” he asked in that same, even tone.

“No.” Elizabeth was sure of that. “A logistician. To coordinate the food and the refugees. MSF had a full mission on the ground.” She said the words even as she wondered what they meant. “There were so many refugees. So many.”

She’d never even imagined before what that could mean, children with shrapnel in their bodies, old people walking in the late winter chill with everything they owned on their backs, women clutching their clothes around them and never looking back. Misery upon misery upon misery, until it began to kindle a slow anger in her. She had never understood the desire before, but now she did. Now she understood what she would do with a gun in her hand.

“Rotors,” she said. A fear that dropped in her stomach. “The sound of rotors.” Pausing at her work, eyes on the ceiling of the tent, looking back down only to realize the girl she’d been talking to, the girl who couldn’t have been more than thirteen, had already dived under the metal table. “And then a roar.”

“And then?”

“I ran to the door,” Elizabeth said. A roar of thunder, a pair of F-16s diving in low, the helicopter gunship aborting its run as the jet wash hit it, the fighters passing one to each side rolling up and away, so low and close that every tent, every bit of loose fabric flapped in their wake. The helicopter pulled up as the F-16s came around again, maintaining a firing lock on the helicopter but not firing, just maintaining lock as it ran flat out. “They were enforcing the no-fly zone,” Elizabeth said. “A pair of F-16s from Aviano. I wanted them to fire. I wanted them to fire so badly. Even knowing it was wrong.” They hadn’t. They dogged the copter, dropping on its tail and then away, until all three were out of sight.

“Darts?” Dekaas asked softly.

“Not Darts. These were human. These were my people. And I’d never until that moment known what that meant. I’d never known that kind of pride. That kind of gratitude.” Elizabeth looked for the words. “I wasn’t raised rah-rah the flag. We were suspicious of that. It seemed disturbing, frightening, even Fascist. We didn’t get teary-eyed about ‘our heroes’. That was for people who supported Vietnam. For people who wanted intervention. I’d said we should disband the military. But that moment, that moment in Bosnia, I realized what it was for. Because in a minute, in a few seconds, that helicopter would have opened up just like one had a few days earlier at another site, and I’d have been dead and so would the girl and the doctor and a whole bunch of refugees who had already lost everything they had. And they never fired a single shot. Nobody did.”

Elizabeth looked at Dekaas, who was waiting patiently. “Force should be the last resort. But I realized why it existed. I realized why we need to have it, whether we use it or not. And that restraint is far harder than using it.”

Dekaas nodded. “I do not know your people, and I have traveled a great deal. I do not know a world where this might have happened.”

Elizabeth took a deep breath. The memory was gone, or rather ended. “Neither do I,” she said. “But Sateda is where I should begin my search.”

Elizabeth slept in the second watch so that she could be awake in the third when Dekaas was off duty. At the beginning of the third watch she got a cup of bitter tea from the ship’s galley and settled in to keep office hours. No one came. Apparently the rush of patients had been because of Durant’s docking with other Traveler ships which had no doctors, and everyone who had been nursing an illness or injury had already been seen. The entire watch passed without a single person sticking their head into the infirmary. By the time seven hours had passed Elizabeth was more than a little bored. She wondered if she could leave to go back to the galley and seek out a meal, or at least see other people, but decided that the way things worked the moment she did half a dozen patients would show up and wake Dekaas. Instead, she took inventory of the infirmary. She might as well use her time to understand better.

Many of the things seemed familiar, though she couldn’t remember where she’d seen each thing. A small refrigerated case held a number of glass vials, each labeled in the same language she’d seen before — insulin, morphine. She touched them carefully. She knew what they were for. She knew exactly. For a moment a man’s image floated before her eyes, white coated, dark haired, frowning. But he was dead. She knew that. She’d stood at his memorial service, her hand on the casket that contained his remains…