Archive of Our Own

“General, they’re nearly ready for you.”

The voice in his ear was crisply professional and, like always, sounded like it was coming from over his left shoulder. Which, in turn, made Major General Cameron Mitchell, USAF (Ret.), itch to pull the communicator out of his ear. He’d liked it better when the things had sounded like transistor radios. At least then he’d known no one was sneaking up on him. “Thank you, Maxwell, I’ll be right there.”

Pushing his chair back and easing himself to his feet, he reached for the cane he’d started using a few years back and leaned on it, testing his left leg. That hip, always more finicky than the other one after the Antarctica crash, had been particularly cranky since the flight up to the space station the day before. At least, Cam thought, he didn't have terrestrial humidity to contend with, or he’d be meeting with the head of Space-X and her chief exploration officer from the comfort of his La-Z-Boy.

Not, of course, that his office on Earth was equipped with anything as plebian as a recliner. Not officially, anyways.

“Can I help with anything?” Maxwell again, and Cam shook his head irritably.

“Sir?”

“No, thank you, son. Will you tell Dr. Blaine I’ll be right there?”

“Of course, General.”

Wondering, somewhat idly, what the young person attached to the voice he only knew as “Maxwell” actually looked like, Cam got his recalcitrant leg firmly under him and headed for the door. At his approach, it slid open soundlessly, and he stepped out into a narrow hallway.

Like his quarters the hallway was deeply, preternaturally silent, the only sound the muted hiss of the HVAC. Cam still found it unnerving: too many years spent in machines whose noises, carefully parsed, could tell you if you were going home that night or if you needed to start planning for the possibility of a very sudden deceleration. The time he’d gone into the ice, he’d spent the moments after the crash cataloging the plane’s systems as they shut down one by one. By the time the noises stopped, leaving him listening to nothing but the rush of blood in his own ears, he’d been pretty sure he wasn’t going home.

“You’re morbid today.”

This time, the voice appeared in his right ear, and Cam smiled ruefully.

“They found her,” he said simply.

There was a long pause, and if Cam had been on the phone – or talking to Maxwell through the communicator– there would have been breaths to count in the space between his words and John’s reaction. But John Sheppard hadn’t taken a breath since shortly after herding his few remaining team members, Cam included, into a jumper and forcing them back through the gate bridge to Earth.

And then, flying the damaged and dying city itself, John Sheppard had disappeared.

Mostly.

“John?” He kept his voice low, figuring that, retired general or not, he didn’t need to start developing a reputation for eccentricity.

“Developing?” There was strain underneath the humor, but at least John was back.

Cam still remembered the bone-deep shock of hearing the familiar voice again, six weeks after they’d left the city. He’d been sitting in the jumper, trying - and mostly failing – to talk the little craft’s operating system into coming alive under his hands the way it did under John’s. At first, he’d thought it was a hallucination.

Later, he tried to persuade himself it was a postcard of sorts, like a post-it note left in his go-bag, although neither he nor McKay could figure out how that might have worked. It took McKay another week to find the source of the signal, and a week after that before Cam would agree to let him implant the tiny crystal beneath the skin of his temple.

“Eight days, actually. I felt like your Chanukah present.”

“I’m not Jewish, “ Cam responded automatically, then, noticing the broad expanse of smoked glass that led into the space station’s conference room, he tapped his left ear. “Maxwell, tell Dr. Blaine I’m here, please, and then get yourself some lunch.”

“Right away, sir.” He heard the click that signified Maxwell was offline, probably headed out into whatever passed for a nice day in his Nevada cubicle farm; Cameron wasn't entirely comfortable with the whole set-up, but he could make his own coffee and nothing had needed typing in the dozen years e’d been consulting for Space-X.

“You send Junior away?”

Cam put his hand up to his left ear before answering, in case the kids in surveillance had been building any new toys. “He’s a growing boy, I think. Meanwhile, you got anything I need to know?” He could hear his voice sharpening, and did nothing to soften it; they’d been having this argument ever since the Atlantis probe went out, and while John’s consciousness had long since untethered itself from the city’s physical plant, he knew John was still… reaching out and touching her, somehow.

Cam didn’t pretend to understand the somehow part.

There was a pause, hollow and dark. Finally John, his voice harsh, said, “No. She’s safe. Cam – there’s nothing left of her, just broken glass.”

“Damn.”

“Yep.”

Ahead of him, the smoked glass doors turned clear and slid open. A tall, bony woman in a vibrant red coat rose to her feet and smiled broadly. “Cameron. Have you heard the good news?”

He smiled in return. “It’s good news then? How does she look?”

“We don’t know yet.” She inclined her head in the direction of the room’s other inhabitant, a slender young man whose eyes, in glittering spectacles, were fixed on the surface of the meterorite-inlaid conference table. “Carey here says it’ll be another day or so before they’ve got enough data to predict whether we can –“

The young man shook his head. “More than that, Emerson,” he said, “I told you –“

Cam glanced from one to the other. Interesting. He wondered what Explorations wanted that Blaine didn’t. Cam held up his hands and put a little extra drawl into his voice - the doc knew his record; the explorations guy, not so much. His mother’d called it gravying up the plate, for reasons he’d suspected were less than complimentary all the way around. “Well, I know she’s not just down the block. Are we planning on sending a tow truck or just emptying out the glove compartment?”

A dismissive shrug in his direction told him the tactic had mostly worked. “Again, General, we’re not quite ready to make that –“

“—Carey’s right, we’re not, but that’s a good thing,” Blaine interrupted smoothly. The shut the fuck up directed toward the young man at her side was all the louder for being unspoken, and once he’d subsided, she turned back to Cam with a tight smile. “And that’s where you come in,” she added, and dropped back into her chair.

“It is?” Moving carefully, he pulled out the closest seat and maneuvered himself into it. “What did you have in mind?”

“As you say, we’re going to need a … tow truck, of sorts. And as Atlantis has been - well, resting, I guess you’d say, on a planet that until recently we’d never even seen. Watch.”

Glancing down, she moved her hand across the screen embedded in the table in front of her. The room’s lights dimmed and its wide curved windows filled with a moving image of a huge gas nebula. Blaine tapped the screen, and next to a smudge of light the size of an eraser, way up in the far right corner, a blinking cursor appeared.

“That’s where she is?” In spite of himself, Cam was impressed. McKay would have loved the science that got them that far, he thought, making a mental note to say something to John later.

A muffled cough sounded in one ear, John’s sarcastic, if unspoken, response, and Cam cleared his throat discreetly. There was another cough, and then silence, and Cam tore his eyes away from the screen.

“You want me to lead the salvage mission?” he asked, trying to sound dubious.

There was a distinct snort from across the table. Dr. Blaine shot her chief explorations officer a pissy look and turned back to Cam with a bright smile. “Oh no, General, we’ve got a bigger task for you.”

Conscious of a wave of disappointment he shouldn’t logically have been feeling, Cam stared back at the nebula. That would have been cool, he thought, and felt, like a low-frequency hum, John’s wistful agreement.

The shot of the nebula disappeared, replaced by the gold-tinted windows that looked out perpetually on Earth. Cam blinked and dragged his attention back to the conference room. “What’s the job, Doc?”

She tapped her screen and a section of the table shifted to black and pulsed to life. “We need you to get the funding for this. You’ve got an appointment with the Joint Chiefs in two days. In Washington,” she added. “I’ve booked you into the Hay-Adams.”

The screen showed him a photograph of an old-fashioned row house, followed by shots of people moving through an elegant lobby and a wood-paneled bar. The beds, he noticed, looked far more comfortable than his own.

Cameron. John’s voice was low and carried a note of anguish unlike anything Cam had heard since they’d said farewell at the door of the jumper all those years back.

I know, he answered, letting everything they’d shared in the intervening years flow into the words. I know.

The nebula caught his eye again but this time he pushed his chair back firmly. As he stood up, the overlapping triangles of the table’s meteorite veneer reappeared. Cam remembered that mission; remembered, too, the salvage operation they’d had to mount when mining space rocks turned out to be more complicated than the previous explorations guy thought.

And now they wanted to go get Atlantis, drag her broken corpse back from wherever John had hidden her and – do what, precisely?

He shook his head, pulling his cane closer to his hip and moving toward the door. This time, Blaine didn’t get to her feet. He turned back to watch her for a moment, trying to calculate his chances of talking her out of this mission. He was pretty sure it was the chance to get her hands on whatever remained of the Ancient tech than any interest in the soaring glass city itself that was behind this project, and he wondered, briefly, who she’d been talking to. She shook her head, an almost-imperceptible movement, and he smiled ruefully.

One thing Cam had enjoyed about working with Emerson Blaine was that they’d always known what the other was going to say, at least when it came to space. But his momma had raised him well, so he said it anyways. “It’s been a good run, Doc. But you’ve got what you need, and I can’t help you with the Atlantis mission.”

Carey looked up from his calculations, glancing between them. Cam thought about warning him, warning them, that no one ever truly came back from Atlantis. He opened his mouth to say the words, but Carey’s eyes, flat and gray behind delicate wire-framed glasses, slid back to the data streaming across his screen. Cam watched the numbers flicker across the lenses for a moment, and promised himself he’d get a new phone number.

“I’ll leave you my keys.” He reached for the door. It slid open soundlessly and he turned back toward Blaine, pleased to see a flash of what looked like real regret cross her face.

“Time for that rocking chair?” Her voice was pitched for his ears, and under its corporate-tightass consonants he heard the echo of his own Carolina drawl. Her mother, she’d explained, and a childhood like some of his cousins had known, summers in Myrtle Beach across the state line.

“Maybe so,” he replied. “Maybe so.”

*

“At least you don’t need to pack.”

“Nope.” He didn’t keep much in the way of personal effects on the space station. Too long in the military, maybe, or just paranoia. Or maybe those amounted to the same thing. Regardless, everything that meant anything was Stateside, in the snug Raleigh condo he’d bought for a song in the last terrestrial property crash.

Cam glanced around the three rooms that made up his quarters, threw his dop kit and sweats into the leather carryall he’d brought up, and that was pretty much it.

Tapping his left ear to switch on his communicator, he said, experimentally – after all, he’d just quit his job - “Maxwell?”

“Sir?” Maxwell was gone, apparently, replaced by an equally pleasant-sounding young woman.

“Did Maxwell --? Never mind, what time is my flight back to Cape Canaveral?”

There was a brief ticking silence and then the voice was back. “You’ll need to be at the ship’s bay doors in one hour, sir.”

“Very good,” he said, and pulled the communicator out of his ear. “Thank you,” he added, holding it up in front of his lips before tossing it onto the coffee table. It stopped right before the table’s edge and he stared at it for a moment before reaching down and, grunting, hoisted the carryall over his shoulder. “Come on, Sheppard, I want to get a last look at the view.”

The space station’s Ob Deck was two flights down, past the galleys and crew quarters, and circled the airlock that led to the docking stations. He dropped his bag off with the Ship’s Bay gate staff and walked to the far side of the deck. There, in the nearly-360° windows, Earth spun below them on her blanket of stars.

“Myrtle Beach, hmm?” John’s voice had lost its strained note, dropping back into its normal, slightly nasal register. “I thought you promised me Mavericks.”

Cam turned his face to the galaxy below them. “Yeah, the last time we were there that water was cold and the sand is full of dead seaweed. And I couldn’t even see past the breakers to find your ass, never mind appreciate it.” It had been a sore point for years: nobody, Cam still maintained, should have to wear a flight suit to stay warm at the beach. Especially not in California, of all places.

No, they weren’t moving to Santa Cruz, especially since one of them was no longer corporeal.

“Hey.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He continued, mildly, “I was thinking of Kitty Hawk, actually. There’s a little town there, and we can buy a place on the beach.”

White sand, long rolling dunes to look out on, and best guess, they’d get a good ten years, maybe more, before rising sea levels swamped the place. He hadn’t really been kidding about the rocking chair; he had a sneaking suspicion that he had another ten years on the bad hip before it put him back into a place where he’d need more help than he really wanted.

“Or that you can get from the voice in your head.”

True.

Far below them, clouds swirled across the surface of the planet, parting and closing across wide stretches of sea. From this far up, the continents were harder to spot, their familiar outlines uncertain. “That reminds me,” he said to John. “Where’d you leave Atlantis?”

For a long moment, John didn’t speak, and then Cam caught a glimpse, as if in a dream, of a rocky shoreline lapped by waves. Overhead, immense, stretched the long lens of a galaxy whose outlines Cam had never seen.

“I thought she’d be safe there,” John whispered, and Cam sighed.

“We’ll figure something out,” he promised, and checked his watch. It was nearly time to catch the shuttle back to earth. He turned away from the window, bidding a silent farewell to the thermosphere and, while he was at it, that pretty beach at Kitty Hawk. “We will, John, we will.”