Elizabeth Christensen: Casualties of war

When Beckett finally sat back on his heels, exhausted and defeated, John felt a familiar numbness creep into his bones. Turning away, he stripped off his sweatshirt and let it fall from his hand, the garment stained beyond repair with Harper's blood.

Although Rodney McKay's presence wasn't strictly required at the MIX-030 debriefing, he thought it prudent to show up anyway. For one thing, he wanted to know what had so thoroughly destroyed the jumper's engine pod. For another. .well, it was an unwritten rule that no one skipped out on a debriefing after an expedition member had been killed. It would have been disrespectful, somehow, not to hear the report, even if Rodney had no desire to know the details of the lieutenant's demise.

In the briefing room, Major Lorne sat ramrod-straight in his chair with a hardened stare. Rodney took a seat next to Colonel Sheppard, who was hunched over his coffee mug, giving off don't-mess-with-me-today vibes. It was a warning the scientist rarely heeded, but this morning he decided to be magnanimous and resist pointing out that the Colonel's hair was sticking up in back in ways that couldn't possibly be intentional, even for him.

And people thought Rodney was incapable of tact.

"I've scheduled the memorial service," Elizabeth began, sliding into her own chair. "Tomorrow, shortly before our scheduled check-in with the SGC, so we can send Lieutenant Harper's body back then. We'll also need to pack up his personal effects to send back for his family."

"I'll take care of it," Sheppard said before she could turn to him, not looking up from the table. Of course he'd take care of it. He always did when they lost a Marine.

"Thank you." Elizabeth leaned her forearms on the table. "Why don't you start at the beginning, Major?"

"By now you probably know the basic story as well as I do, ma'am." Lome delivered his after-action report dispassionately. "The Asurans apparently have assembled a network of human intel. We'd barely been in the village half a day when one of our guides started getting twitchy around us. He tried more than once to get us to split up. When we finally called him on it, he took off. We tracked him into the ruins, and that's where the Asurans got the drop onus."

"How many?" Elizabeth asked.

"Three-two with weapons and one who looked like a scientist or a doctor. That one came at Sergeant Dunleavy. I'm pretty sure he was planning to do that hand-throughthe-forehead thing and drag Dunleavy's IDC out of him right then and there."

Whatever else might be said about those sons-ofrobots, they were persistent. Unconsciously, Rodney slid his hand across his right forearm, where the scar from a similar interrogation had faded from everyone's sight but his. A Genii with a knife or an Asuran with a mindprobe-either way, it added up to bad guys who wanted their city, and he'd never been big on sharing.

"They pursued us." Lorne seemed aware that he wasn't being blamed for the results of the mission. Still, his voice was taut, frustration barely held in check. "Lieutenant Harper was hit about a hundred yards out from the jumper, but he made it inside. I cloaked us as soon as the jumper powered up. I guess it wasn't fast enough, because they shot something big at us and clipped the engine pod. It lost power immediately. We're lucky the pod retracted for gate transit. As soon as we got back into the jumper bay, the engine blew."

"Did you get a look at what they fired at you?" Rodney wanted to know.

Lome shook his head. "Felt like a rocket-propelled grenade. It came from about the eight-o'clock position, so nobody saw it coming."

Irritation prickled Rodney's skin. At least with the Wraith they'd been able to procure some of the enemy's technology for study. How was he supposed to counteract whatever the replicators were throwing at them if all he had was a charred husk of an engine pod?

"You did well to get your team out of there, Major," said Elizabeth. "We'll have to reexamine our security posture before we undertake any more off-world missions. If the Asurans want Atlantis badly enough to canvass this many planets looking for our teams, we may need to find methods of being more covert."

"Perhaps my people can assist," Teyla suggested. "There are still many trade worlds that may not know the Athosians have relocated to Lantea."

"Thing is, these guys probably aren't going to quit." Sheppard pushed his mug forward and leaned on the table. "We need a better long-term strategy than ninjaMarines and Athosian stand-ins. What we need is a way to even the odds."

"A weapon," Ronon said, making Rodney jump a little in his seat. The Satedan spoke so infrequently in these meetings that Rodney tended to forget he was even in attendance.

Sheppard swung his chair around and pointed at his teammate. "Bingo."

"The scientists have spoken of such a weapon in your people's possession," said Teyla. "Can the Daedalus not bring one here from Earth?"

Rodney was already shaking his head before she'd finished the sentence. He'd considered that option on half a dozen occasions and rejected it as futile each time. "Based on the paltry effect our projectile weapons have had so far, it's a safe bet that the Asurans have strengthened the cohesive factors the disrupter would target. It was developed by the Asgard specifically to combat the replicators as encountered in the Milky Way Galaxy. While the Asurans may have started out their lamentable existence in that form, we have to face the fact that they have evolved significantly since the time of the Ancients-even more so than their Milky Way counterparts, which were infuriatingly adaptable in their own right. Should we be so fortunate as to surprise the Asurans with the disrupter once, their learning curve would render it obsolete immediately."

"Which is why we need to come up with something better," Sheppard countered.

"Oh, well, since you asked nicely," Rodney snapped back. "Look, we have a lot of very bright people in this city, many of them with a disturbing talent for spectacular destruction. The same goes for the researchers at Stargate Command and at Area 51, not the least of which is Colonel Carter. She's got a prototype of a new antireplicator weapon in development. Unfortunately, these projects don't provide instant results and, for better or worse, she has next to nothing to test it on. It's not like this problem slipped anyone's mind. We've been working on it, but occasionally even I have trouble saving the day on a deadline."

"You could use a leg up?"

"A leg, a big toe-I'll take what I can get."

The Colonel swiveled back toward the head of the table. "Then I think it's time to reprioritize P7L-418."

Elizabeth's somewhat shuttered expression now closed down completely. Rodney grimaced. This was bound to be interesting, and not in a pleasant way.

A few weeks ago, the linguistics division had briefed the senior staff on a recently-translated historical record from the city database. The battle for PM-418 had been, up until the siege of Atlantis, the largest conflict of the Ancients' war with the Wraith. The planet had housed a facility that the Ancients had seen fit to defend with the full might of their fleet. Rodney had started to doze off when the head linguist had begun listing all the assets involved, but he understood that over the course of eight days a large number of ships, on both sides, had been destroyed or damaged beyond recovery.

He'd snapped awake when the timid man had explained just what the Ancients had been protecting so fiercely.

"We've been over this," Elizabeth said, her fingers tightening around a pen. "The records implied that the facility on 418 was used primarily for weapons development. It also implied that high-risk testing was conducted there. That could mean any number of things, many of which may involve extreme hazards to our personnel or others."