Melissa Scott: The Inheritors

The sun rose over the icy sea, pale and watery, but at least today wasn't overcast. John Sheppard and Sam Carter stood on the balcony off the gateroom, both of them nursing steaming cups of coffee as they watched the light touch the tips of the towers of Atlantis, gilding them with light that slid down them like liquid as the sun lifted clear of the horizon.

"So do we have a plan for destroying this thing yet?" John asked.

"I'm still going with 'let's drop it into a sun,'" Sam said. "It may not be elegant, but it'll get the job done."

"Maybe a little overkill."

"Or maybe not," Sam said. "If Hyperion's weapon has a naquadah casing, it's going to be very hard to destroy by any other means. A large enough nuclear explosion would do it, but it would have to be a really big nuclear explosion. Not very practical."

"Let's not nuke our own planet." It didn't sound to John like much of an option.

"I'm with you there. If we drop the thing into the sun in front of a Wraith observer, that should take care of the problem. It would be nice to have a chance to study it first, but I'm not sure we have that luxury right now."

"I'm pretty sure we don't," John said. "Todd and his people are understandably unhappy about our having a weapon that could destroy all the Wraith. If we want their help against Queen Death — and whether we want it or not, we need it — we can't play around."

"I'm with you there, too."

John looked at her sideways. "Is General O'Neill?" He figured she'd talked to O'Neill after the official briefing. O'Neill had been wearing his best poker face, but if anyone knew what his true feelings were, it was Sam.

"You mean does he agree that we have to act on this quickly?"

"I mean does he agree that destroying the weapon is the right thing to do?"

"Do you?"

"Yes," John said after only a momentary pause. "I do."

"Because it might kill humans with Wraith DNA as well as the Wraith themselves?"

"That's what Alabaster says it'll do," John said. "I'm not sure I trust Alabaster any farther than I can throw her. But, okay, say you looked at it and said you thought it would just kill Wraith, and we said we were all willing to take that chance. Press a button, and, bang, no more Wraith. We win, right?"

"By committing genocide," Sam said. She looked grim, and John wondered if she was thinking about the Asuran Replicators. They'd had no other choice, and Sam had clearly taken a fierce satisfaction at the time in wiping out the Replicator threat once and for all, but that probably didn't make it easier to live with late at night.

"Yeah, let's not go there today. But is O'Neill in our corner?"

"Always," Sam said seriously. "But if you mean does he agree with you, yes, he thinks that destroying the device is the right thing to do."

"You talked him around?"

"I didn't have to. Apparently Woolsey was pretty persuasive." She didn't quite say go figure , but she didn't have to.

"You know, he's not so bad," John said.

"He used to be. I'm glad he's changed."

"Atlantis does that to people." John started to say Look at McKay , and then remembered with a twinge just how much Rodney had changed in the hands of the Wraith. He seemed more or less his old self, despite being left with shockingly white hair and the telepathic abilities of a Wraith, but having lived as one of the Wraith, actually led a deadly attack on Atlantis… it couldn't be easy to come back from that.

"I've noticed," Sam said, a little teasingly. He smiled crookedly in response. He'd be the first one to say that Atlantis had changed him for the better. The people he'd met there, and the city itself.

"As long as O'Neill's on board."

"He's on board," Sam said. "And he's in the best position to see the other reason we have to destroy this thing fast. The IOA," she added when he raised his eyebrows. "If they find out we had a weapon that could have destroyed the Wraith and didn't use it, Woolsey will probably lose his job, and Jack might not be far behind. Of course, he's been saying for years that it would be a relief if they finally kicked him out of the Air Force, so that he could dump it all on someone else and go fishing." Sam smiled a little ruefully. "But he doesn't mean it."

"So let's get this done," John said.

"Well, I'll need the device before I can destroy it," Sam said. "If you'll go get it from wherever you hid it…"

"You may as well come with me," John said, after a moment's hesitation that he decided wasn't entirely rational. "I'd rather not handle the weird Ancient device we don't understand any more than I have to. You don't have the ATA gene, so you're less likely to destroy all the Wraith in the galaxy by accident."

"Assuming that the user has to have the gene," Sam said. "We have found some Ancient devices that will work for anyone as long as someone with the gene turns them on."

"I didn't turn it on," John said, but he knew that sometimes touching Ancient machinery was all it took to make it respond to him, waking up eagerly in his hands. "I hope I didn't turn it on."

"We'll see, right?"

Sam followed him up a transport chamber and several sets of stairs to the catwalks where he usually went running with Ronon. Above them, a tangled grid of struts and roof supports extended up into the shadows.

"I keep some stuff up here," John said. "Just in case." He wondered if she'd call him paranoid, but she only nodded.

"You should see all the stuff we had stashed around Cheyenne Mountain," Sam said. "In case of a foothold situation, or the government being taken over by aliens, or something. We had a list of worst-case scenarios. A lot of them happened, eventually."

"And the important thing is that you were prepared."

"That's right," Sam said. He wasn't sure if she was joking or not. For that matter, he wasn't sure if he was or not.

"It's up there," John said. He scrambled up onto the rail of the catwalk, and then hauled himself up the jungle gym of struts and poles until he could reach the ledge where he'd stashed the weapon in between a spare Wraith stunner and a box of C4.

The stunner and the C4 were both still there, still securely duct taped to the ledge. In between them, the web of duct tape had been slit neatly with a knife.

"Damn it!"

"What?" Sam called from the catwalk below.

"The weapon's gone," John said. "Somebody got here first."

Ember had buried himself deep in the clevermen's section of the hive Just Fortune , in a laboratory sufficiently inconvenient of access as to remain largely private. Guide had ordered him to continue work on the human's retrovirus, and he was starting to make new progress. It would have been easier had he been able to recover more of the twinned humans that were so common on Lymours; among the Tenassan refugees had been a single pair, twin males, and they had agreed to serve the experiment, but with mixed results. He had fed on both, the treated and the untreated, and given the Gift to the latter when it was clear he would die, but the one who had been infected with the retrovirus now lay unconscious, his brother at his side, bathing his forehead in a pointless attempt to comfort. Ember believed he would wake, in time — his life signs were good — but he had hoped to create more resilience in the human subject.