STARGATE ATLANTIS: The Furies (Book 4 in the Legacy series) by Jo Graham

kind take many years to reproduce and to grow to adulthood. If we cull more often than once a generation, soon the numbers will begin to drop and then there will be none.” Guide paced away from her, from her hand on him. “And so the long hibernations were born, to sleep through the years between one culling and the next, waking for a year or three in twenty, and then sleeping again. In each interval our prey might reproduce, and in time replenish the ecosystems.”
    “And that is the core of it,” Teyla said quietly. “You need us. And we need you. The peoples of the Milky Way will keep you from Earth. That is assured. But I am not of Earth, and there is a limit to what they will do here, a limit we have very nearly reached. The people of Earth will not send enough ships to defeat Queen Death, and we will die.”
    “Teyla,” Sheppard began.
    “Truth for truth, John,” she said, her eyes on Guide’s. “They have neither the power nor the will to conquer this galaxy. They will leave us to you, and you have already seen where that will end.”
    Guide took a long breath, perhaps the longest of his life, very long and very strange indeed, his eyes upon this one with the seeming of a young queen but who was not. She was kine. Or half kine, the product of a twisted experiment which had given an animal the semblance of a person, the mental voice of a woman. His answers should be clear, and yet they were not.
    His true queen would speak thus, once and away.
    His eyes slipped past her to Sheppard. “And when we are done, Sheppard? When we have defeated Queen Death together?”
    Sheppard put his head to the side as he had done once, escaping Kolya’s prison together. “All bets are off.”
    “All bets are off,” Guide said gravely.

Chapter Eight
     

The Last War
     
     
    Sam slept aboard the
Hammond
, no matter what was going on in the city. To do anything else would give the wrong impression to her crew. It was one thing to use the office above the gateroom in Sheppard’s absence. That was a matter of convenience. But she slept shipboard. She might be the senior officer on station in Atlantis, but she was the commander of the
Ham mond
.
    Besides, that office was borrowed. This was home.
    Her cabin was the largest on the
Hammond
, nice enough if you didn’t mind having your feet in the shower to brush your teeth. There was a small single bed built into the wall, storage space beneath it, the other wall occupied by a metal desk similarly bolted down. The chair wasn’t, as that would be really annoying. The wall between the door and the desk held a closet ten inches wide and a bolted on mirror. Above the bed a framed picture of the
Hammond
was likewise screwed in with four big screws.
    Her laptop was on the desk, sharing the cramped space with her mp3 player and its mini speakers, currently blasting ABBA at the top of their tiny voices,
When All Is Said and Done
from one of the late albums, her email open on the desktop. There was nothing new from outside Atlantis, of course. It had been nearly a month since the last databurst. There was nothing she hadn’t read twenty times, nothing she hadn’t replied to.
    But still.
     
    September 24, 2009
    Dear Ca ssie,
    Sam looked up at the pictures held to the wall above her desk with magnets. There was Cassie smiling back at her, her mortarboard on her head, Jack with his arm around her grinning like a loon. Cassie had a bottle of champagne in her hand, and was holding on to her mortarboard with the other hand, a smile that ought to light the world on her face. Yellow letters printed across the bottom of the picture proclaimed ‘Congratulations Class of 2009!’
    It was hard to believe that the young woman in the picture was the mute child they’d rescued so long ago, the one who had clung to her in the darkness waiting to die. Now she was the assistant’s assistant for an organization that helped refugee children around the world, the kind of starting position that a