Jo Graham - Unascended

Elizabeth took a deep breath. There was no more there, just the gaping hole in her memory. She had liked him, called him a friend. She was the one who had recruited him, who had brought him, where? Somewhere dangerous and far from home. And he had been killed. Like so many who had died because of her decisions.

The weight of it bent her head, and Elizabeth closed her eyes over the drawer of tools.

“Wondering what that is?” Dekaas asked. She had not heard him come in.

Elizabeth glanced down at the strange instrument in the drawer. It looked like the handle of something, at first appearing to be made of dark wood, but it hummed faintly with its own power source. The grip had a sliding knob on it, and where a tool or blade might go at the narrow end was a small aperture. “Yes,” Elizabeth said.

“It’s a Wraith screwdriver.” Dekaas smiled as he came over and picked it up. “They use it for mending small tears in the hive’s systems, grafting bioelectrical conducts together. I use it,” he thumbed the knob, and a blue electric glow began at the aperture, “for mending flesh. It can repair small tears in tendons better than sutures, and it can even repair some severed nerves. It’s valuable for those kinds of injuries, ones that aren’t life threatening or involve a lot of blood loss, but that can leave someone without the full use of a limb.” He turned it off again. “A screwdriver.”

Elizabeth nodded approvingly. “That’s very clever.”

“They have some useful things,” Dekaas said.

“I thought humans didn’t use Wraith things.”

“Most don’t.” He put it back in the drawer and closed it. “But the Travelers do. The Wraith are the main spacefarers in this galaxy. The Travelers can’t afford to scorn Wraith technology when it comes their way.”

“The main spacefarers?” Elizabeth asked, a prickle running down her spine.

“There are some others.” Dekaas sat down on one of the metal chairs. “The Travelers. The Lanteans. The Ka-Ni. The Asgard.”

“The Asgard.” Elizabeth frowned. That should be important. It should be. Only no pictures came to accompany the name.

“No one knows where their homeworld is. They show up once in a while on human settled worlds looking for stuff. If you leave them alone, they leave you alone.”

“Stuff?” Elizabeth asked. “What kind of stuff?”

“The same stuff everyone wants. Leftovers from the Ancestors.” Dekaas shrugged. “There isn’t a lot of that, let me tell you. Anything good that isn’t impossible to reach has been plundered a hundred times by humans and Wraith alike. How the Genii got their hands on an Ancient warship I can’t imagine.”

“The Genii have an Ancient warship?” And that seemed critical, tremendously important for reasons she couldn’t name.

“That’s what they say,” Dekaas said easily. “Me, I haven’t seen it myself, so I’m only willing to put so much stock in it. The Genii want to be taken as the leaders of humanity. They’d like everyone to think they have an Ancient warship and defeated Queen Death. Personally, I’m guessing that’s exaggerated. But it’s certainly true that the Lanteans have some Ancient tech. One of our captains has done some trading with them.” He nodded toward the refrigerated case. “That’s where we got some of those drugs.”

“The insulin,” Elizabeth said. “That has to be kept refrigerated. It had to be traded for.”

Dekaas got up and opened the case, pulling out one of the vials and handing it to her. “Read me the label.”

Mystified, Elizabeth did. “Morphine sulfate injection USP. Preservative free. Warning: may be habit forming. This solution contains no antioxidant, bacteriostat or antimicrobial agent and is intended as a single dose injection to provide analgesia via the intravenous, epidural, or intrathecal routes.”

“You read Lantean,” Dekaas said.

“What?”

He took the vial back. “This is labeled in Lantean. I can’t read it. Nobody on this ship can read it.” He paused. “I know what it’s used for because it was explained to me. But these letters — this is Lantean.”

“Why in the world would I read Lantean?”

Dekaas put the vial back in the cold box. “That is a very good question,” he said.

Teyla came to see Daniel that afternoon in his makeshift office, where he had installed his books and computer. There was no shortage of space in Atlantis, which was such a change from Cheyenne Mountain that he had installed himself in a spacious corner room with two glass walls that let the sun stream in. He caught himself actually feeling guilty about the profligate use of space, and deliberately spread his books out a bit more.

Teyla had brought him coffee, which was nice of her even if Atlantis coffee managed to be even worse than Cheyenne Mountain coffee, which he wouldn’t have thought possible. He took a sip and tried to avoid grimacing. “I suppose a Starbucks franchise is out of the question,” he said.

Teyla looked amused. “It is a frequently made request,” she said. “Mr. Woolsey says he has suggested it would improve morale, but he doubts the IOA will see it that way.”

“I doubt they will, too,” Daniel said. “I don’t think the IOA believes in morale. I’m surprised that Woolsey does.”

“He has been a good leader for Atlantis,” Teyla said.

“I know, I know. People change. Maybe here especially. It’s just a little hard for me to remember that.”

“Was he so unpleasant when you knew him?”

“He was… determined to do things by the book. Let’s put it that way. Maybe that’s why Atlantis has been good for him. There’s not really a book that covers a lot of the things you see here.”

“Mr. Woolsey and I have contacted a number of our allies,” Teyla said. From her tone he could tell she wasn’t here with wonderful news.

“No luck, I take it.”

“We have not heard back from the Travelers yet. Of the rest of our allies, most have heard nothing of the Asgard. It is true that on a few worlds, there were very old legends of mysterious beings that appeared and led humans away, only to return them much later or not at all.”

“We have those, too,” Daniel said. “Probably because aliens kept showing up and messing around with various human cultures. Between the Asgard, the Ancients, and the Goa’uld, it’s a wonder anybody has any remaining doubt about whether people really get kidnapped by aliens, or faeries, or the gods, or whatever they were pretending to be at any given time.”

“Most people believe those legends speak of the Ancestors, or that they are merely better ways of explaining what had happened to people who were taken by the Wraith. We have nothing as specific as your people’s stories of gray aliens.”

“I think our Asgard got careless after a while,” Daniel said. “Or figured that gray aliens in spaceships was more believable than gods riding in chariots, or more culturally appropriate, or something. It’s hard to be sure why they did what they did, now that Thor isn’t around to ask. Not that he was the world’s best cultural informant anyway. Heimdall was actually better about answering questions without making cryptic pronouncements.”

“They were your friends?”

“Our allies. And friends in a weird kind of way. Thor always got along best with Jack, for whatever reason.”

“Is that surprising?”

“Well, Jack always says that he’s completely average and uninteresting, but since that’s almost entirely untrue, no, it isn’t. And apparently his genes are an excellent example of human potential to evolve into a higher form, if you look for that kind of thing. Really I think they just liked each other. I know Jack misses having the Asgard around, although he’d never admit it.” He shook his head. “Sometimes I miss them too.”