GTFO

 

Title: GTFO
Author: Ladyholder
Fandom: Stargate & Stargate: Atlantis
Relationship(s): None
Content Rating: M
Wordcount: 5,753
Warnings: Levels of violence will be typical of the show & discussions of suicide

 

 

Jack sat back and watched as Sheppard was raked over the coals for his debrief. Every single person in the room had an ax to grind, including him. Rocking back and forth in his chair, he saw Sheppard’s eyes flick to him and then return to stare at the man asking him the latest question.

“Major, you stated that Lt. Ford was recovered from the waters around Atlantis with a dead wraith attached to his chest, is that correct?”

“Yes, sir,” Sheppard confirmed.

When Sheppard didn’t say anything else, Jack suppressed a grin. The kid was being smart and making the assholes work for the information they were getting from him. And minimizing the chances of being tripped up.

“What happened to the corpse?” the Marine pressed.

“After our wounded were treated, the corpse was inspected by Gunny Bates and Dr. Lindsey Biro, the pathologist for the expedition. They found that it was a standard warrior wraith with nothing on it other than its weapon. Dr. Biro removed the enzyme sack and we disposed of the body by sending it through a space gate,” Sheppard reported without looking at the tablet computer before him.

“You got rid of it?” asked a man in the uniform of a Navy Captain. Jack glanced at the cheat sheet that Walter had made for him and nodded. Walter had the guy listed as Johnson. “Why didn’t you bring it with you?” Jack suppressed a grimace and made a note beside the man’s name. Like hell he wanted him in his mountain.

“Sir, we recovered Lt. Ford seven days ago and we weren’t going to keep wraith corpses on ice for study when we’ve already got that information,” Sheppard explained. “We’ve brought all the information gathered for the SGC and a number of samples. Keeping wraith corpses in the same storage as our dead wasn’t going to happen.”

“That’s unfortunate, Major,” Johnson sniped. He looked put out to Jack’s eye and he made another note to have Carter look into who the man was and who his backers were. “We could have learned a great deal from the corpses.”

Sheppard’s expression didn’t change, but Jack could tell the man wasn’t thrilled at the thought. He wasn’t either. “We have very detailed research notes, sir, as I said. And samples for study. I couldn’t authorize holding enemy corpses while my men were waiting to come home.”

“As you say, Major,” Johnson said. “What happened to Lt. Ford? How did he react to his exposure to the wraith enzyme?”

“Badly, sir,” Sheppard admitted.

Johnson looked interested at hearing that. “How badly? What did the enzyme do to him?”

The expression on Sheppard’s face could only be described as blank. Jack couldn’t quite see the Major’s eyes, but he was sure they were guarded. “His strength was increased by a factor of at least three, his pain tolerance was also increased and so was his aggression. However, his ability to reason and follow orders was decreased by the same proportions.”

“So potentially a useful drug,” Johnson mused. “Did you bring samples of this ‘enzyme’ back with you?”

“I believe Dr. Beckett has a sample with the specimens he brought back,” Sheppard confirmed. “He’d be able to give you a better description of how the enzyme affects humans.”

“Major,” Jack cut across Johnson’s next question. “What typically happens when a wraith feeds on a human?”

Sheppard turned to look at him and nodded once. “I have video, sir, of a wraith feeding on a human.” At Jack’s nod, Walter took the memory stick Sheppard handed him and queued up the avi files on the little memory device. “It will be the file titled ‘Sumner’, Sergeant.”

One of the marines at the table leaned forward to stare at Sheppard. “You recorded Colonel Sumner being fed on?”

“I made sure to wear a camera and mic whenever I left Atlantis. I started with the first away mission I went on with Colonel Sumner and I didn’t need to switch out the memory on my camera before I left on the rescue mission. I didn’t stop recording during the whole time,” Sheppard confirmed.

“How were you able to do that?” the marine asked. “Cameras don’t have that much memory storage!”

“Well, they don’t here on Earth apparently. However, I wasn’t using standard Earth-born equipment,” Sheppard said calmly. “Dr. Kusanagi supplied all of us with our A/V equipment before we left on the mission to Athos. She informed us that the run time was eight hours. At the end of the away mission, the return to Atlantis and the rescue, we were at a run time of six hours. The file Master Sergeant Harriman is accessing has been copied out of the main file, which is also available.”

“Convenient,” the marine allowed.

“Our scientists were planning for this type of thing, Colonel Richards,” Sheppard corrected. “Exploration is part of our mandate and the plan for that has always included a visual record of what we see when we go through the gate.”

“Right,” Richards leaned back at glanced at Harriman. “Let’s see this file.”

“Master Sergeant? Could you please start the file?” Sheppard requested. The file came up on the large screen facing the conference room table and Harriman handed over a remote to Sheppard after starting it. “Thank you.”

Jack suppressed the urge to flinch at the face that filled the screen. Whatever she was, she had red hair that could never be found on a human. And her teeth were the stuff of nightmares. “Do the wraith eat?”

Sheppard paused the file on the image. “Every single one we’ve autopsied has shown that they had no food in their digestive systems. They have the same digestive organs we do, they’re just empty. We don’t know if they need water, either.”

“What do they eat?” Johnson asked as he leaned forward to get a closer look at the wraith.

“People,” Sheppard informed him bluntly. “Watch.” He hit play on the remote and the record from Sumner’s camera started back up. The room was silent as they watched Sumner be questioned. As the female wraith asked about Earth, the screen split to show two views, one obviously still Sumner and a second from above. “The second view is from my camera. I arrived to see her questioning him.”

“It looks like he’s trying not to answer,” Richards observed. He sounded vaguely disturbed. “What is she doing to him?”

“All Wraith are telepathic, but the queens are stronger by an order of magnitude. They can project illusions to anyone in their area and can use this ability to pluck information out of your head. That’s what she’s doing now. Trying to get the Colonel to think about where he’s from,” Sheppard explained. “And then she’s going to graze on him.”

“Graze?” Johnson asked.

“Wait for it,” Sheppard said softly. Jack winced as the wraith slammed her hand into Sumner’s chest above his camera and the man screamed as she dug her fingers in. From Sheppard’s angle, they could see Sumner age as the wraith drained him.

“Jesus,” Richards cursed. “What the hell?”

Sheppard paused the video and used the built-in laser pointer to point at the hand the wraith had on Sumner’s chest. “She’s using her feeding hand on him. It holds an organ that enters their victim’s chest and allows them to feed. But before they start to draw from their victim, they inject the enzyme so their victim can live long enough to get a full meal out of them. If they didn’t inject this enzyme, a human would die too quickly.”

“And then?” Richards asked. To Jack’s ear, he sounded appalled.

“And then the wraith normally sucks their victim dry until they die of extreme old age,” Sheppard reported evenly before he pressed the play button on the remote. On the screen, he lined up a shot and put a bullet into the wraith attacking Sumner.

Jack watched as Sumner was drained into extreme old age before their eyes as the female Wraith held him down. The shot from Sheppard was almost a relief when it came. “She used whatever she took from him to heal, didn’t she?”

“Yes, sir, she did,” Sheppard agreed.

The conference room was quiet for several minutes before Jack took a deep breath. “Everyone dismissed for the next thirty minutes.”

“But, sir,” Johnson protested.

Jack glared at him without bothering to try to shield his ire. “Everyone but Sheppard get the fuck out.” The room got quiet as they took in his mood before everyone stood up and left quietly. “Thank you for what you did for him,” Jack told the other man softly.

Sheppard shrugged. “I couldn’t do anything else.”

 

 

John leaned back in his chair and watched as the men and women who had been interrogating him all left. It took effort, but he kept his face neutral as he waited on General O’Neill to enlighten him on why he wanted privacy.

“Walter?” O’Neill called softly.

The man John had seen operating the dialing computer poked his head up from the stairs in the corner and waved at the general. “We’re clear down here, sir. I’ll slide the cover over the entry here and put on a set of headphones.”

O’Neill nodded once. “Thank you.”

John could hear the sounds of something being put into place and he kept his eyes on O’Neill. This wasn’t his show. There were two distinct metallic clanks that echoed through the room and then it was silent.

“Finally,” O’Neill muttered. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small device and flicked a switch on it with his thumb and nodded once as the light lit green. “Okay, we’re free to talk now.”

“Sir?” John asked, curious. He’d spent the whole morning talking to various people. How was this going to be different?

“You’ve been very circumspect through the whole debrief period, Major, and I commend you for it. But I need more than that,” O’Neill said. He moved down the table until he was across from him. “I need to know what actually happened out there in the bluntest, most honest way you can.”

“It’s not going to look good on anyone, sir,” John warned. There had been so much that had been fucked up that the expeditions survival had been a total surprise.

“If I was interested in people looking good, I’d go look at a magazine full of models,” O’Neill snapped. He tapped a finger against the conference room table and then clenched his fist. “You lost 20% of the troops that were sent out with you, one of them, your commanding officer. Questions will be asked, should be asked. So. This is me asking before you are put up against Rampart and his people.”

John swallowed heavily at that reminder. The loss of his men weighed heavily on him. “Right.”

“Shall we get started?” O’Neill asked.

“Yes, sir,” John agreed. He opened the file he’d put together and pulled out the timeline he’d made of events. It had worked to let him organize everything in his own head and it would keep him on track now. “Starting when?”

“You reported to the Mountain the day before we shipped the expedition out. Why?” O’Neill asked. He had a legal pad of his own out and was jotting down something as he read from a file in front of him. John didn’t try to read whatever he was writing.

“After I informed you that I was okay with going on the mission, I was issued orders from Colonel Sumner. The orders were accompanied by a letter informing me that while I had been assigned to the expedition, he had no use for me in his chain of command. Thus, I wasn’t needed at any point in the process until it was time to leave,” John breathed out as the memory of that gut punch echoed through him again. He hadn’t expected his new CO to be thrilled to get him, but to know the man had despised him that much had hurt. Moving his paperwork around, he found the letter and shoved it over to the general.

“For fucks sake,” O’Neill muttered as he pulled the letter closer and read it over. Sumner hadn’t pulled any punches in his missive and John had read it too many times for his mental health, but nothing on the page had changed.

“So, when I showed up, I had just enough time to get my physical, get issued my gear and that was about it. I had no idea what I was getting into because I hadn’t been informed of anything,” John admitted. He’d had no one to approach to get the information he’d needed and he and his men had paid for that with their lives.

“I was informed that you were being briefed regarding the whole program and Sumner was making sure that you were aware of what you were getting into,” O’Neill muttered. His jaw was clenching and releasing as if he was trying not to grind his teeth. “Do you have anything to support this?”

“Yes, sir,” John confirmed. He pulled out his laptop and opened it up. It took him only moments to pull up the electronic paper trail that Kusanagi had taught him to find. It hadn’t been difficult and it had helped that the laptop he was using had belonged to Sumner. “Here. When Sumner was killed, I took over his computer since it had all the information I needed to do my job.”

“I’m going to call Colonel Carter up here to look this over,” O’Neill warned. When John shrugged, O’Neill got up and walked to the door leading to a corridor and stuck his head out it. John didn’t bother to listen in. The laptop was passed over and the general sat back down at the conference room table without a word. Several seconds passed before he pulled in a deep breath. “Okay, what else happened?”

“So, we got to Atlantis and found out we were deeply fucked,” John said. There was no other way to describe it. A city without power and underwater? Bad, bad news. And Sumner had been less than thrilled to be informed that there wasn’t any way to fix the issue. “Lack of power, and being underwater were just two of the issues. Then to find out we had no gate addresses? The Colonel was frustrated and angry. When we came up with the address for Athos, we went through on a hope and a prayer.”

“Because any place was better than being in a city that was about to be flooded due to losing its shields,” O’Neill finished.

“Yes, sir,” John agreed. He took a deep breath and confessed his first failure. “And in the course of going there and meeting the Athosians, I managed to trigger a culling.”

“How did you do that?” O’Neill asked. He looked up at John and held his gaze.

“I’m ATA positive,” John started.

“I remember,” O’Neill cut in. “Vividly.”

“Yes, sir. Well, being ATA positive in Pegasus can be both good and bad, often both,” John said before he took a deep breath. “The Wraith use a device designed to be activated by Ancient genetics as a hunting tool. The Athosians had acquired one of these devices and made it into jewelry. Since none of them were ATA active, it was never triggered despite being worn for generations. I picked it up and it turned on. Less than 30 minutes later, the Wraith showed up and culled everyone they could. And that included the Colonel and several other members of the military.”

“And then you returned to the city, and reported to Dr. Weir?” O’Neill asked.

“Yes.” John confirmed. “And I brought all the surviving Athosians with me.”

O’Neill wrote down several points before he pointed his pen at him. “Because they might have the information you needed to be able to figure out what you were facing?”

“That was one reason. I wasn’t going to leave them on a planet where they could be scooped up from the sky by a being that eats them.”

“Okay, what happened after you got back to the city?” O’Neill asked.

“I set the scientists on figuring out the possible gate address where the wraith had gone with our people based on what Ford saw. Meanwhile, I worked to get a rescue mission together,” John answered. He took a deep breath through his nose and tried to hold onto his temper. “Every step of the way, Dr. Weir tried to interfere. I spent more time going around her than I did working with the men I took with me and that bit us at the end.”

“How so?”

“We were very lightly armed, sir. Only one of the men brought a heavier weapon and even then, it wasn’t quite heavy enough to fully knock a wraith dart out of the sky. Our shots wounded it, but we got lucky. We also didn’t bring any C4 to blow up the facility on our way out. I thought about it, but was distracted by Dr. Weir as she suggested that we negotiate with the wraith for the return of our people.”

O’Neill looked interested at that point. “Would that have worked?”

“No, sir, it wouldn’t have,” John said, definitively. “The Wraith consider us dinner. I don’t negotiate with my dinner. Neither do they.”

“I take it Dr. Weir was informed of this?” O’Neill pressed.

“Yes,” John said before he ran a hand over his face. “Admittedly by one of the Athosians, but at the time, they were the only ones with actual experience with the Wraith. She ignored them and tried to order me to negotiate anyway. I ignored her and took stock of where the men were in organizing the rescue. We had almost everything we needed but transport. I wanted something that would allow us to be on a more even level with the darts. Dr. McKay came through for us on that and showed me the puddle jumpers.”

O’Neill hummed softly as he made notes. “How long did this all take?”

“About 30 minutes. I was able to figure out how to fly the puddle jumper fairly quickly, so we were about 45 minutes from the time of culling until we were ready to go.” John reported.

“And how much of that time was eaten by Dr. Weir getting in your way?” O’Neill asked.

“About half of that,” John admitted after he thought things over. “When we left through the gate, I was glad we had a spaceship to go in since the gate attached to the planet were heading towards was a space gate. If we’d run through without checking, we would have died. We made sure to check every single gate after that. Lesson truly learned.”

O’Neill grimaced. “Yeah, that sounds wretched. So, what happened next?”

“We found our people being held in a Wraith hive,” John said. He could feel his expression getting pinched as he remembered the place. “The ships the Wraith use are huge. I don’t have a good comparison, except to say that every single one I’ve seen is huge.”

“I’ll get you some size comparisons,” O’Neill promised. “And?”

“And we went in to get them out,” John continued. “We found most of our people easily enough, but Colonel Sumner had been taken along with one of the Athosians. We were able to get a bearing on where the colonel was and I went off to get him back while Ford was supposed to be taking everyone back to the puddle jumper.”

“And it didn’t work out like you wanted it to?” O’Neill confirmed.

“No, sir, it really didn’t. I had the presence of mind to tuck an audio/visual unit in my ALICE vest before we left for Athos, and I made sure that it was running as I went after the colonel. That’s the video I showed,” John said before he took a moment and got himself a drink of water. “As you saw on the video, the colonel was being interrogated by a female wraith. She had fed on the Athosian boy that had been taken before him and he was… Sir, he looked like a freeze-dried human. Skin stretched over bones and that was it.

“The Colonel did his best to not answer his questions, but we found out later that female Wraith are all telepathic and they can reach into your head to pluck information out of it. She was apparently diving into the colonel’s head to find out where he was from because he wasn’t afraid of her like every other human she’d ever come across,” John explained again. He took a deep drink from his water and wished it was some of Zelenka’s rotgut. “From the location I was in, I was out of her line of sight, but the colonel could see me. He kept quiet and the female wraith placed her hand on his chest and pressed.

“He screamed and I could see him start to age. In less than a minute, he looked ten years older. She stopped feeding off of him and asked him where Earth was. He didn’t say anything, but she apparently got a basic idea of Earth and how big our population is. I guess he figured he wouldn’t be able to hold out against her because he ordered me to shoot, so I did. I shot her,” John admitted. He deeply regretted not going for the headshot when he’d had the chance. “I took a center-of-mass shot and she didn’t die. She instead drained the colonel until he looked like he was about ninety, and she was completely healed. She started to push the colonel again and I shot him to keep him from saying anything more.”

“I’m sorry you had to do that,” O’Neill said after several seconds of silence. “But I’m equally certain that Sumner was grateful that you did it.”

“Yeah,” John said with a sigh. “Well, I had no idea what she was, but I knew she couldn’t be anything good. When Sumner died, she sent her guards up to fetch me. I thought I was going to be fed on, and I almost shot myself in self-defense. The only thing stopping me was that I was the only person who could fly the puddle jumper and that meant that I needed out of there.”

“What did you do?”

“I looked for an alternate weapon since my gun barely made a dent. I took what looked like this pregnant super-soaker gun thing and shoved it in her gut. And then I avoided her hands while she flopped around like a speared fish,” John admitted bluntly. “I also managed to kill some of the warrior-level Wraith along with an enforcer or two. While I was doing that, Ford was making it back to me and he helped me kill the female Wraith who I had stabbed. She mentioned something about ‘all of them waking up’ and I looked up to see what seemed like thousands of cells with figures moving in them. Never, ever, have I regretted not having C4 more.”

“Did you even have C4 in your TOE?” O’Neill asked as he reached out to pull a sheaf of paper towards him.

“Not enough,” John said with a wince. “It got to the point where the chemists were churning out a homemade C4 derivative on a weekly basis. As much as possible with the supplies we had. It worked, but we can’t let it get to that level again.”

O’Neill’s jaw dropped slightly as he looked up from the original expeditions supply list. “Jesus, really?”

“Yes, sir. We got lucky that Atlantis, as crippled as she was, tried to help. The desalination tanks give us salt, metals and after some tinkering, the chemicals that we used to mix up what we needed,” John closed his eyes as he remembered their desperate attempts at DIY IED making. “It was not a good time while we figured out the recipe.”

“Did anyone get hurt doing that?” O’Neill asked, interested.

“No, thank goodness. Some of our scientists brought some interesting files with them with helpful recipes,” John said with a smile. “But Ford saved my ass and we ran for the jumper. Thankfully everyone we’d rescued had made it to the ship and we took off. The jumpers record our flights, so my report has the space battle we fought. Atlantis has a function that allows her to catch any craft that come in at full speed before they crash through the wall across from the gate. It means that we’re able to come in at full speed and not have to worry about slowing down right before we enter the gate. We found that out with this mission.”

“That’s interesting and convenient,” O’Neill agreed, writing down notes on his pad. “When you got back to Atlantis, what did Weir do?”

“Roasted me over a small fire,” John remembered. “She was not happy that we had actually interacted with the wraith. And when I showed her the footage of my encounter with the Wraith and their ship, she was even less happy.”

“And when you took command of the troops?” the general asked as he finished his note and looked up. “What did she do then?”

John flushed in remembered anger. “She wanted Ford to take over the military and for me to stay outside of the chain of command as the sciences light switch.”

“What changed her mind?” O’Neill asked, curious. John appreciated that the general wasn’t demanding answers in a way that implied that it was all his fault for the issue. “All the reports since that first encounter show that you’ve been in charge of the military arm of the Atlantis expedition.”

“McKay is what happened. Him, his people, and Ford backing them to the hilt,” John explained. “McKay apparently took the time to read my full file and realized that I was a fully experienced officer and giving command to a kid that was less than six months out of the Academy was stupid. He made sure that Weir was aware that if she did try to give Ford the command, he’d ruin her. She believed him.”

O’Neill looked interested at that. “Was that recorded as well?” At John’s nod, he grinned. “Excellent. And now?”

John shrugged. “Now she wants me because she knows me, but she also wants to make sure I’m controlled.”

“And what do you want?” the general asked. He leaned back in his chair and stared at John.

Staring back and meeting that gaze took more effort than John was happy with but less than he would have had to use before he spent the year in Pegasus. He wasn’t the same officer who had been so smart-mouthed at the thought of leaving the planet. “What I want, sir, is to be able to go back to my city with enough men, armaments, supplies, and backup to allow me to protect Atlantis, Earth, and the Pegasus galaxy,” John said finally.

“And if I tell you that we’re willing to do all of that?” O’Neill pressed.

“I’d ask what the catch was, sir,” John admitted. Getting what he wanted as easily as the general was suggesting, was suspicious. “Because I can feel it’s there somewhere.”

“And you would be right,” the general confirmed with a nod. “The IOA is officially in charge of the Atlantis mission. But the president isn’t willing to allow the IOA to call the shots on a mission that might become Earth’s Hail Mary.”

“What happened in the last twelve months that means that a galaxy filled with people eaters is the better option to Earth?” John demanded. He blinked and then belatedly remembered who he was talking to. “Sir.”

“Ha. Please don’t even try to pretend that didn’t shock you,” O’Neill sniped. “Look, Sheppard, the SGC has a bad habit of making enemies. And we’ve got several on the horizon who have the potential of fucking the planet over in a permanent fashion. You and your remote location may be the saving grace of the human race if we need you. And if we need you, you’re going to need to be ready right then, not six months later.”

“Then sir, if that’s what you want to do, we’re going to need to start treating Atlantis like more than an afterthought,” John snapped. He waved a hand at the empty seats that had been filled with the men and women debriefing him. “The people you kicked out of here earlier are likely to give me the bare minimum of what I need to do my job if that. And they will do their best to hamstring me and my scientists as we try to make the city work. Atlantis will need to be fully supplied in every single way we can manage.”

O’Neill nodded once. “I know.”

 

 

“Thank you for the information on what happens when a wraith feeds on a human,” Johnson started as everyone sat back down at the table. “But you still didn’t answer what happened to Lt. Ford after his exposure to the wraith enzyme.”

“Lt. Ford was extremely hyped up on the enzyme,” Sheppard reported. “As best we were able to determine, he was immediately addicted to the high that the wraith enzyme engendered in him since he wasn’t actually fed on. He was stronger, faster, and felt less pain than was standard. But while those are the advantages, the downside of the enzyme was that Lt. Ford was also impulsive, homicidal, and out of control. He also had several obvious physical changes. He threatened members of medical to get another dose of the enzyme that we had for research purposes. When he didn’t get it, he attacked them.”

“Did they give him the drug?” Jack asked. He didn’t remember hearing anything on Lt. Ford but the report on the Atlantis expedition was over a thousand pages long and he’d only gotten through the highlights.

“No,” Sheppard said bluntly. “The nurse who he was threatening had the presence of mind to grab a vial of morphine instead of the enzyme sample that was next to it. She gave him enough to drop an elephant. He was knocked out, but only for about ten minutes. But that ten minutes was enough for us to get him into a locked iso room that he couldn’t get out of.”

“Good on her,” Jack offered. “What happened after that?”

“It took most of three days for Ford to come down off the effects of the enzyme and be rational enough that we could talk to him. The physical changes seem to be permeant,” Sheppard continued. “He’s got an eye that’s been damaged to the point of blindness. He’s still not able to process physical pain on any type of consistent basis. He apparently broke his collarbone during his initial battle with the Wraith and never noticed. However, while he was in the isolation room coming down from his high, he scrapped one arm up badly in an escape attempt and screamed like we were ripping his skin off.”

“Do we know if this is standard for anyone who survives a feeding from a Wraith?” Johnson asked.

Jack could see Sheppard’s jaw clench from his angle and suppressed a frown at the captain’s pushiness. “Most of the time, sir, there are no survivors to be had when the Wraith feed someone. If they stick a feeding hand in your chest, they’re going to take everything they can from you and leave you a husk. I know of two other people who were fed on. One died and the other later ate his gun.”

“What?” Johnson looked flummoxed and Jack was right there with him.

“Dr. Brendan Gaul was fed on during an away mission. The wraith left him alive,” Sheppard reported. He quickly used the remote still in his possession and queued up a file. “Dr. Gaul was on an away mission with myself, Dr. McKay, and Dr. Abrams. We had gone to one of the planets on the edge of the life zone for Lantea’s solar system. The planet had attracted our attention due to the Ancient defensive satellite in orbit around it. We went down to the surface due to finding a crashed wraith ship. Scans showed that there were no life signs, and we thought to check it out. All the data we could get on the Wraith suggested that it would be needed if they came in ships.

“In the course of checking what we thought was a derelict ship, I left Dr. Gaul and Abrams on the ship while Dr. McKay and I investigated another area,” Sheppard grimaced once and then hit play. “Turns out, the ship wasn’t as uninhabited as our sensors were reporting.”

The room was quiet as the screen showed Abrams being drained to the point of death and Gaul was drained until he looked like a very old man. “Come to find out that the enzyme, when injected by a Wraith, also immobilizes their prey for at least an hour. After that, movement comes back, but it’s basically from the top of the spine down,” Sheppard explained. He kept quiet as the recording sped up before returning to a normal pace when he and another man appeared in the frame. “That would be Dr. McKay.”

The rest of the scene played out and everyone winced as Gaul grabbed his gun after McKay stepped away. Thankfully, the recording cut away before they saw anything. “He had enough muscle control to put the gun in his mouth and pull the trigger,” Sheppard reported grimly. “We managed to kill the Wraith that killed him, but it wasn’t going to bring back Abrams or Gaul.”

“Jesus,” Johnson breathed before he cleared his throat. “So, what you are saying is that while the enzyme does a lot for the victim to keep them alive, it’s not something that we can use to augment our troops?”

“We, who, Captain?” Jack cut in. This was the first he’d heard of anyone wanting to augment troops using a drug from Pegasus. Sadly, it wasn’t the only time he’d heard mention of augmenting using something from off-world.

“The Pentagon is interested in what can be used to make our troops more effective, sir,” Johnson