Lions and Tigers and Conspiracies, Chapters 14 &15 (Patreon)

Chapter Fourteen

Rodney hated that John had to go back into the VIP confinement room with those other assholes. A fucking Ark of Truth. What kind of assholes risked exposing everyone to untested ancient technology that rewrote a person's brain?

Oh yeah, that would be people from Earth. Maybe he shouldn't condemn all people from Earth because the people he had just help escort back were not the sort to pull that sort of shit. But it seemed like the wrong people constantly managed to grab power on Earth. Maybe it was because the average Joe Schmoe hated politicians so much that only people who didn't mind being hated went into politics. That explained the US and France and even Canada. As much as Rodney loved his home country, there had been a couple of things he had seen during their latest visit that didn't exactly make him happy.

But this level of betrayal was unthinkable.

“Rodney, are you okay?” Teyla asked.

Rodney gave her a narrow-eyed look. “John is locked in that room with those assholes. Do you really think I'm okay?”

Teyla rested her hand on Rodney's arm. “John is best positioned to get any information we need. After all, he has publicly defended Earth policies in the market more often than anyone else.”

That's because he's an idiot, Rodney said. He was Rodney's idiot and Rodney loved him, but John did suffer from a lack of common sense sometimes. Rodney had kept his mouth shut in his head down when it came to Earth politics because he didn't want to get removed as chief science officer, but there were days that he just wanted to slap John upside the back of the head for the way he defended some of the decisions idiots on Earth had made.

The only reason why Atlantis hadn't been in full rebellion five years ago was because people in the Pegasus galaxy tended to follow John's lead, especially after Daniel and O'Neill, the other two who had links to the Alterans had ascended to explore the universe. And now, Tony and Gibbs were missing.

Someone on Earth was responsible for that. Either they had kidnapped Tony and Gibbs or they had done something so stupid that those two were in hiding to try to stop them. The government seemed to specialize in idiocy, at least when it came to the rest of the universe. They protected themselves well enough.

They hadn’t activated the Ark on Earth, after all. They wanted to know Turi secrets, but they had sent the Ark off-world and used the Atlantis population as guinea pigs. Rodney wondered if it had occurred to Helms and Knight and all the Earth-loyal morons defending them that Earth’s government had Turi secret shoved into the brains of everyone on Atlantis without their permission. Some of the soldiers did.

After Aleighta had put everyone to sleep, she’d had the Turi and Setedans move those from Earth to secured quarters, depending on how loyal they were to Earth. And even the barracks with the most nationalistic soldiers resented that they hadn’t been warned. And unlike the officers locked in the VIP containment, those soldiers didn’t care about Pegasus natives having another city. They did care about what they felt was a personal invasion.

Oddy, Rodney agreed. No one had a right to shove things in his mind.

Of course, that was a secondary reason for his current hatred for all things Earth.  They were most likely holding Gibbs and Tony hostage. They may have killed Jo after they got the information they needed to program the Ark. They did hate symbiotes. And Rodney was not good at letting go of his friends. His relationship with Tony was too special to allow xenophobic asses to take it away.

Before Antarctica, Rodney had never made a friend. He had colleagues who used him, colleagues who admired him, colleagues to hated him but still respected his work, but he never had friends. Now he did. Zelenka was his closest friend, but he didn’t know if he would have recognized Radek’s offer of friendship if Tony hadn’t been in his life. Maybe his previous experience with being used would have prevented him from seeing it. Rodney didn't know.

But there was a chance that if he took Tony out of the equation, he would've remained as friendless on Atlantis and in the Antarctica as he had on every other base. Tony with his stupid cheerfulness and inane sense of humor had bullied his way past all of Rodney's defenses, and when he did that, somehow it made everyone else realize that Rodney was more than just his work. That was a gift that Rodney could never repay.

Would he be godfather to Radek and Selana’s children if not for Tony? Hell, he didn't know if Atlantis would have survived without them. That stupid quantum mirror project that the IOC came up with had revealed two things.

Without John, there was no Atlantis. And without Tony, Gibbs and Samus, Atlantis was not a safe or pleasant place to be. And now the same people who owed those three for helping make their world possible, for making Atlantis into the city that it was, were missing. That was not going to happen on Rodney's watch. He headed for the transporter.

“Rodney?” Rodney ignored her. He got in the transporter but before he could signal for a destination, Teyla got in with him. “Where are we going?” She asked. That was a stupid question because she had eyes as well as he did. He just touched the screen to take them to the Turi bonding waters.

The light flashed and Teyla gave him a very odd look. “Rodney?”

“I'm going to Earth after them.”

“Rodney, you can't. You're the head of the science department. They need you here.”

“Technically, there isn't a science department right now. After all the drama is over, will need to reform a science department using those people who have chosen to stay, or those I allow to stay. I fully intend on getting rid of a lot of deadweight.” Rodney crossed his arms expecting a fight over that, but Teyla just nodded.

“You are responsible for the scientists so only you can determine who is an asset to your department. However, you cannot run off on some mission.”

“No, you can't run off on some mission because you failed in your quest to get Elizabeth to retake her role as head of the council. Me? I'm not head of the council so I can do whatever I want,” Rodney said without any sympathy.

“You are part of the council,” Teyla said firmly. “This is a time when we must stand together.”

“Yes, and Tony is part of this council, and he is standing on his own somewhere else. So I am going to go to the somewhere else until I find him and can stand with him.” Rodney pressed his lips into an angry line. He respected Teyla, but he wasn’t giving up on Tony. If John could be a stupid martyr and volunteer to get locked in a room with idiots with almost no likelihood of success, then Rodney could damn well do whatever he needed to do to make sure that Tony came home safe. And Gibbs and Jo, of course.

“Rodney, Earth would not be safe for you.”

“Correction. Earth wouldn't be safe from me.” Rodney indulged in a fantasy of burning the capitals of all the IOC members, or the ones involved in the Antartica treaty, anyway. Places like Mexico, Portugal, Sweden, and South Africa were safe from him, but he was having some dark fantasies about DC, Moscow, Paris, and a half dozen other cities.

“You must remain calm,” Teyla said.

Rodney pushed past her. “I'm pissed right now, and I'm not the nicest person. Usually, John is here to stop me from dropping any nuclear bombs or destroying any credit scores, but he seems to be busy elsewhere, twiddling his thumbs with people who are likely to stupid to know what's actually going on. They didn't activate the Ark on earth, which means they don't trust the technology. If they did, they would've wanted to keep all that truth to themselves. Instead, they sent it here to be activated in front of people that they don't care that much about. If the Ark melted all our brains, people back home wouldn’t care. I don’t think they’re going to share any operational details with Helms or Knight.” Rodney raised his eyebrows and dared Taylor to disagree with that. She just looked at him sadly. “Exactly,” Rodney said.

“But surely you do not mean to get a symbiote. All these years, you've said that you would never take a one. Tony, Gibbs, Samas and Jo would all be very displeased if you did something you found distasteful for the sake of rescuing them when they are just as capable of rescuing themselves. And failing that, I would put my faith in Ronon over all the militaries of your planet.”

“If he took them on individually, I would agree with you. Ronon versus any one member of the military or even any ten members of the military, and Ronan is going to come out on top. However, that's not how this fight is going to go. If it comes down to brawn, even Ronon is going to have a difficult time against the combined force of Earth’s military. So, I am going to provide the brains to his brawn.”

“I doubt Ronan will appreciate your suggestion that he needs backup.”

“I don't care,” Rodney said. Ronon was a team member and a friend, but he wasn't a friend on the same level that Tony was. And he definitely wasn't on the same level as John. So Rodney just needed to focus on the family members who needed him most.

Rodney reached the entrance to the warrior's path, and ignoring all of the signs the Turi had put up about death and mayhem and potential bodily maiming, he stepped through the arch. There were no trials scheduled for today, so only a couple of Turi sat on the benches gossiping like old women.  Hew was there, so old that he couldn’t walk without a staff. He was the favorite storyteller and one of the few who could still tell the children about Seteda as it had existed before the Wraith. He stood as Rodney walked in. “What are you doing here,” he asked. “This place is not for you.”

“No shit. This places for idiots who think beating each other is a suitable past time,” Rodney said.

Hew’s eyebrows went up and the other three Satedans stood. One put a hand on her sword, but Rodney didn't care if he offended someone. He strode past them, past the half pillars that littered the floor of the challenge ring and into the next room.

Hew followed. “You cannot have a little brother unless you challenge properly. No doubt the scholar's path would prove easiest for you, but to barge into the waters is dishonorable. And you are not a dishonorable man.” No doubt Hew intended that tone to be calming, but Rodney was having fantasies of kicking the walking stick out from under him. Honor was a pointless platitude and counted for nothing when people's lives were in danger.

“Aleigheta, translate for Samas,” Rodney said. Overhead, banners glowed with florescent threads traded from one of those little moon worlds. Pale yellows and blues and beiges marked the successes of those Turi who walked the warrior path. There were fewer than the warrior ribbons, but they were larger to show the long periods of time the Turi had to sacrifice to those goals. Most of the ceiling was covered in the jewel tones of warrior banners. Someone like Hew could probably list each battle and tell the story of that adventure. He could probably list the names of all the lives lost on those banners with red stained ends.

That was fair. Rodney knew the story behind each pale banner that was stained the same. Dr. Harriet Hewston had been too aggressive in her explorations. She had not waited for someone to check her reassembly of a transporter system off world and her internal organs had rematerialized in the wrong order. Dr. Graydon had died in a jumper accident while mapping the sea floor, and Dr. Dumais had been killed by a breakaway Genii group who wanted to kidnap someone to teach them technology. Each of them had carried a symbiote that had been taken from the dead bodies and carried back in jugs of water. They had died, but the expedition members had made sure their stories were still told.

But there were other ribbons too. Pure white ones. They floated on the edge of the display, the threads dim so that someone could miss them if they didn’t know what to look for. But for all his desire to avoid symbiotes, Rodney paid attention to the world around him. He knew what those white ribbons were, and Samas was going to listen to him. If not, Rodney was going to dump rotting fish carcasses in his waters. Rodney’s threat to nuke Earth cities might be hyperbole, but he would never joke about rotting fish.

Chapter Fifteen

“Rodney, what are you doing?” Teyla asked. One of the Turi brought a stool from the outer room, and Hew settled on it, leaning against his stick.

“What I have to,” Rodney said. “Aleigheta, is Samas close enough to hear me?” The Samas who swam in the waters with not the same as the one Rodney had worked beside for so many years. He wasn't as mathematical or precise. Apparently, he had gained those parts of his personality from Gibbs, which meant that Gibbs’s career as a Marine and NCIS agent had been a waste to science. The precision he showed in coding would have been an asset in most fields. But freed of a host, Samas was different. Something Rodney had mourned until he had gotten to know the new Samas. And now he counted this version as a friend just as much as the one who had been some amalgam of Samas and Gibbs.

“He is here,” Aleigheta. She then provided a translator voice that sounded a lot like Gibbs.

“How goes the insurrection?” Of course, those words were an interpretation of the images and chemicals Samas put out. Aleigheta had to put words to those inputs, but the Daniel Jackson had trusted her words, and Rodney had no reason to do otherwise. Maybe linguistics was too informal to even count as a science, but Daniel almost wasn’t stupid.

“You already know. You and Aleigheta are closer than anyone else,” Rodney said, and given that John was in the middle of the insurrection, both would have kept a close eye on the events.

“I do. I am concerned about Tony and Gibbs there was a pause. And Jo.”

Rodney knew that must be hard for Samas to admit. Queens were not likely to socialize with each other, but Rodney knew they cared about each other in their own way. “I want to go to earth with a symbiote.”

“The scholar's path is open to you,” Samas said.

“I don't want a shadow,” Rodney said. It was as if time froze. He was fairly sure Teyla and Hew had stopped breathing and the Satedan standing at Hew’s side had a hand half-raised. Rodney remembered that day all those years ago when John had lay in a bed in the infirmary slowly turning into a blue bug. Samas had called his children shades and shadows. He'd suggested their lives didn't have meaning until they had adventures. Rodney had been horrified, and part of him still was. After all, the Onac ability to see life as disposable had contributed to the horror that became the Goa’uld.

“What do you mean?” Samas asked.

“This is Tony were talking about, Tony and Gibbs. They would've had plans inside plans inside plans. The whole reason why the Genii and the Travelers like those two is because they are all equally fond of scheming.”

There was a long pause before Samas answered. “Explain what you want.”

Rodney mourned the friend he’d known, the one he’d counted on to help with endless hours of coding when the Atlantis computers were a tangled mess. The Samas he remembered from years ago would've already understood his implication. “I want a symbiote that has been in Gibbs since they started traveling to Earth.”

Hew jerked back as though Rodney had slapped him, and Teyla’s eyes grew large.

“What?” Rodney demanded, even though he knew what he was asking for. It went against their culture, but he couldn’t let their reactions put him off the best solution. “It's perfectly logical. I need the symbiote that is been in Gibbs most recently or maybe the one before that. They’re most likely to know what contingency plans those two idiots had that didn't work and from there we can start tracking where they might've gone.”

Samas finally spoke. “What you are asking for is an abomination.”

“What I'm asking for is the Queen's path,” Rodney retorted as he gestured toward the white ribbons that drifted on a breeze created by the ventilation system. Hopefully Aleigheta was translating his gestures. “Isn't that a legitimate path for the Turi? Sacrificing a person's own desires for the good of the queen?”

Samas spoke. “All Turi are born knowing that hosting twice is an abomination. It is not just sacrificing oneself, it is sacrificing one's stories and one's honor.”

Rodney assumed that the Turi obsession with honor had come from how many Setadan hosts they had. The two Satedan Turi certainly had twin looks of horror on their faces. Someone really should've limited the number of limited-intelligence warriors they’d allowed close to the waters. Having such a logical species infected with honor over logic was a tragedy.

“If you want them to become a queen’s guard or prevent them from passing on their stories, that's your choice,” Rodney said, “but I'm asking you to put the request out and see if they will make the sacrifice.”

“No Turi would sacrifice their right to have a queen bite their tail—the ability to have children. No Turi would sacrifice the ability to be remembered, to have their stories told. That is a death that we fear as much as your kind fears the death of a body,” Samas explained, and maybe it was Rodney’s imagination or Aleigheta’s creative interpretation, but the voice almost sounded apologetic.

“Their stories from their first joining with Gibbs will continue even if their stories from this adventure don't. So just ask them,” Rodney said.

“I will not put my children in a position to say no to their queen. I understand them in a way you do not, and what you ask can only cause harm and it will not bring you the advantage you think you can gain here.”

Rodney sighed.

“Come. We can find another way to help,” Teyla said gently.

Rodney ignored her. “Do you know why I specialized in Ancient technology instead of Goa’uld?” He asked. There was a long silence, and Rodney assumed he had confused Samas. He continued without waiting for an answer. “Carter had already spent years studying the Goa’uld technology before I joined the Stargate program. I knew she had a head start, and I could never equal her skills in that area. And I am not good at being second best.” Rodney understood his own flaws, and that was the most significant of them.

“However, I knew that her knowledge of the Goa’uld technology would hinder her ability to learn Ancient versions of the tech. Once she had wrapped her mind around the logic of the Goa’uld, she would always look for that sneaky twist in the circuits. She would always expect to see something that wasn't there. And so, I studied Ancient. I walked in with a fresh slate, so I knew I could surpass her in Ancient technology and that the longer she worked with the Goa’uld versions, the more I would get ahead of her.” That didn’t put Rodney in the best light, but the people who knew and loved him were already aware that he was a petty and jealous man.

“Why do you share this?” Samas asked.

“Because the same is true here. You speak for the Turi. But the fact is you are Igigi. That's the culture you learned first, and that's the culture that you will always default to when making a decision. Jo is the first Turi Queen and she will always understand the Turi better than you do.” Rodney feared that he was being horrifically offensive, but he couldn't think of another way to make his point. “If Tony and Jo asked to sacrifice themselves to save someone they loved, would they?” Rodney knew Tony would, and he suspected Jo might if it was someone special, like Gibbs or Tony. Or Samas. Jo talked about Samas like he was the most wonderful creature in the universe.

Samas was still silent.

“They would, and you know it,” Rodney said. “The Turi keep sharing stories about love, about the mathematics that Miko loves but also about how she loves Abby and Lorne. Abby's symbiotes probably sing about her vicious way of punishing people who can't do paperwork, but I bet they also sing about giving up the city she loves to be with the people she loves. People are the most important things. Well not people as in humanoids with two arms and two legs. Symbionts can be people too. And now that I know about Spidersilk and her city, she is definitely part of the reason Abby gave up Atlantis….” Rodney stopped, having lost his point.

Teyla put a hand on his arm. “Samas, tell the symbiotes that you do not approve of this and that will be enough for them to refuse the suggestion if they have any qualms. But ask those who have been in Gibbs most recently. Ask them and see what they will say,” she urged. The request sounded so much more elegant coming from her.

As the silence drew out, Rodney thought he had failed. Without a symbiote, there was no point in him going to Earth. He could hack Earth’s computers from here and his own skills in investigation were minimal at best. When John had gone missing on Earth more than a decade ago, Abby, who at the time hadn't even known about the Stargate, had had more insight in how to find him then Rodney had. His only hope was to have more information than anyone else. With that, he would be able to track Gibbs and Tony through their various bolt holes.

Hew stepped to Rodney side and put an arm on his shoulder. “It was well spoken and your heart is that of a warrior.”

Rodney swallowed as the bitterness of failure crawled up the base of his throat. He didn't want to be stuck on Atlantis waiting for some answer that might never calm. That was why John was stupid enough to volunteer to sit in on the prisoners’ conversations when they likely didn't know anything more than John himself. When your family was in danger, stupid sacrifices seem better than doing nothing.

After probably five minutes, during which Rodney feared he may have ruined his friendship with Samas in addition to making a fool of himself, Samas finally spoke. “The two most recent symbiotes Gibbs carried are both exploring the Wraith ship below. I will have to swim down in search of them. Return tomorrow and I will tell you their answer, but do not blame them when the answer is no.”

“Deal. Absolutely. No blaming,” Rodney promised, although he knew the symbionts wouldn't turn this down. This was a chance to rescue their family, if that wasn't worth dying for, nothing was.