Martha Wells: Reliquary

John Sheppard pivoted, eyes narrowed critically as he examined the large round chamber. “I don’t know, Ford. I don’t think we could mount a backboard on these walls.”

They were a pearly white ceramic, ornamented with three wide silver bands that had a faint hint of sea greens and blues woven into their metal. The sunlight that fell through the cathedral-like stained glass panels high in the peaked roof made the whole room opalescent. The floor also had translucent white-on-white patterns, long lines that were abstract and floral, sort of Art Nouveau. It was a subtle and beautiful space, but for Atlantis, that was hardly unusual.

“Major,” Lieutenant Ford said regretfully, shaking his head. “You are obsessing on the basketball. I’m thinking this would be a great place to play handball. Or racquetball. We’re in another galaxy here. You have to think outside the hoop.”

John lifted his brows, considering it. “Racquetball, huh? You may be on to something.” He doubted anybody had brought a set of rackets along as a personal item, but they could probably make them. He might even be able to talk one of the Athosians on the mainland into carving a set out of wood, which would bypass the whole “using limited materials for recreation” issue. “McKay, what do you think?”

Rodney McKay and Radek Zelenka were both deep in the innards of the pillar device at the center of the room, occasionally muttering inaudible comments to each other. John thought of it as a pillar device because at the moment they didn’t have a clue what it did except look like a pillar. It was silver and waist-high with the typical crystalline touch-pad controls on the flat top. So far, poking at it and pressing the touchpads had done nothing, but that wasn’t atypical for Atlantis, either.

McKay’s voice answered from inside the device’s guts. “I think you should stop exchanging facetious random babble with Ford and try to use your obviously overrated gene to make this damn thing work.”

John obligingly leaned an elbow on the unresponsive pillar. Most of the Ancients’ technology had to be either operated or initialized by someone who had the Ancient gene, which was rare even on Earth, where the Ancients had spent a lot of their time when they weren’t traveling between galaxies. There was a mental component to it too, which was sort of cool when you could turn lights on with your mind, and lifesaving when the puddlejumpers responded to your urgent need to make a course change or fire a drone before you could physically reach the controls. “I don’t think that’s the problem. If it won’t work for me or your half-assed gene, then it’s probably a lost cause.”

McKay had the gene artificially through the gene therapy retrovirus Carson Beckett had developed. It worked for much of the Ancient tech, but some things just needed the natural gene to initialize. “Oh please, nothing is a lost cause. It’s just a matter of — Are you thinking at it?”

“I’m thinking it’s broken,” John admitted. It was kind of hard to turn something on with your mind when you had no idea what it was supposed to do.

“That’s not helping!”

“So if it is broken, can we use this room for recreation?” Ford put in hopefully.

McKay extracted himself from the pillar’s guts, twisting sideways to avoid elbowing Zelenka in the head. Annoyed and sweating from working in the close confines of the device, he said, “So not listening to you, Lieutenant.” He picked up a tool, nudged the grumbling Zelenka over, and plunged back into the pillar again.

“Hey, recreation is important,” John said, just to keep the argument going. Standing around cradling a P-90 while watching other people work on something he couldn’t help with bored the crap out of him, but moving on to another room while the others were occupied was out of the question. This wing wasn’t part of the secure area patrolled by the Marine detail and hadn’t even been thoroughly explored yet. It was distant enough from the center section that the only sound was the constant wash of the sea against the floating city’s substructure far below their feet. Nobody was supposed to be here without a military escort, and two scientists, deeply distracted by recalcitrant Ancient machinery and oblivious to the world, definitely needed somebody to watch their backs. Or their butts, which was about the only part of them visible most of the time.

But John really didn’t mind. It wasn’t that it beat being up in the operations tower, debating the different ways to replenish their dwindling stores of ammo and toilet paper; exploring Atlantis was one of the coolest things he had ever done in his life, and he didn’t expect that to change anytime soon, no matter what wonders they found traveling through the ’gate.

“Yeah, recreation is important. For team-building, and exercise. And for morale,” Ford agreed earnestly. Or at least he was doing a good imitation of earnest.

“Morale, that’s a good one.” John gave Ford an approving nod. “We’ll use that when we talk to Elizabeth.” John and Ford had both been hoping to find an area that could convert to outdoor space closer to the center section of the city. They had found several big rooms that could have been meant for theaters, lecture halls, or even ballrooms, and the others had searched for controls while John had stared hopefully up at the ceilings, thinking retract, please. But nothing had happened.

Since Atlantis had been built for underwater use, space travel, and harsh land conditions like the Antarctic, John could see why the inhabitants hadn’t gone for an open football field. But there were balconies, so it seemed like they might have wanted a larger outdoor area occasionally.

And, with the city’s shields inoperable, any large space able to open to the air could function as a landing field for an intruder. John wanted to know about that, too. At low power, with so many of its Ancient defenses useless, Atlantis was nearly helpless against Wraith attack.

McKay grunted and emerged from the pillar again, wiping sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. “Nevertheless, you’re out of luck. This is some kind of projector, and it must use the walls to display images. Throwing a ball around in here could damage the surface. And, to be absolutely clear, it’s a stupid idea.”

“You’re a spoilsport. Literally,” John told him.

Rodney McKay did not work and play well with others. Even the science and technical teams of the expedition, the people who had spent their whole professional lives dealing with brilliant and creative personalities, had trouble with him. Some of that probably stemmed from the fact that Rodney was right so much of the damn time, and that just had to chafe.

But the fact remained that a tense situation just made McKay think faster. You could probably phrase it as an equation, where the increasing awfulness of whatever tight spot they were in was directly proportional to the speed of McKay’s ability to think a way out of it. He was so reliable on this point that John had stopped counting the number of times McKay’s brain had saved their asses.

Some people were intimidated by that, and it made for a lot of yelling on occasion. John wasn’t intimidated, and neither was their other teammate, Teyla. Ford, twenty-five years old and barely out of kidhood, was learning not to be. And John had realized early on that he and Rodney had eerily compatible senses of humor. That probably wasn’t a good thing, but it made for interesting conversations.

McKay was steadily getting better on the fieldwork aspect as well. It helped that nobody ever had to tell him to be careful; he knew better than anyone just how dangerous any kind of alien technology could be and just how many things there were out there besides Wraith that wanted to kill you.