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Chapter Three: Designation
Characters: John Sheppard, Rodney McKay, Aiden Ford, Teyla Emmagan, Female OC
Summary: Sheppard, McKay, and Zelenka explore the derelict ship in orbit above Lantea. In its stasis bay they uncover records of a human weapon project, collect data spines and a local cache, and return to Atlantis with more questions than answers.
Discussion of Human Experimentation and Dehumanization
Chapter Three (You're on this one)
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The ship hung in a lazy slice of orbit over Lantea, black against the thin halo of blue. Inside, the corridors drank their flashlights whole. Every sound seemed to belong to the ship first and to them second- the rasp of fabric, the clack of boots, the hiss of rebreathers. The air was thin and cold enough to sting the soft tissue in the nose, dry enough to make each swallow feel like dragging a tongue over old copper. Somewhere deep in the hull, something old flexed and settled with the aching complaint of metal that remembered pressure.
“Remind me,” Rodney muttered, tablet clutched like a talisman, “why we are inside the haunted murder-canoe instead of literally anywhere else.”
“Because Beckett still can’t tell us what she is.” John said, sweeping his P-90 and flashlight across ribbed walls. Frost glittered in the beam like ground glass trapped in seams, then slid away. “If this place has anything on her, we need to know.”
Their lights sheeted over bulkheads the color of gunmetal ice. The plating was slightly pebbled under their gloves, a texture made to shrug off blood or grease or both. It held the cold. Every step sent a soft tremor through John’s ankles, a vibration that said the ship had mass, age, and habits. He marked three doorways, two dead consoles, one camera eye sandblasted to opacity. Nothing moved but their breath.
Radek Zelenka crouched at a junction panel, coaxing faint light from the interface. His glasses caught the glow, blue ghosting over the smudged lenses; his breath fogged the lip of the open housing. Atlantis’s chief systems engineer, he had the steady hands of a watchmaker and the patience of a man used to keeping miracles from grinding themselves to dust. Where Rodney’s brilliance burned hot, Radek’s ran quiet—meticulous, relentless, and no less essential. “Architecture is familiar, yes,” he murmured. “Less elegance. Built for war.”
“Oh good. All my favorite words,” Rodney sighed, already fishing a cable from his kit. The cable’s sheath squeaked against his glove. His movements had that particular clipped precision he saved for when he was afraid and pretending not to be.
Then Radek’s tablet beeped, smug as a sparrow. “Found something. Ship’s designation: Daevos.”
Rodney’s head snapped up so fast his light juddered across the wall. “Wait what? I was already ninety percent of the way there!”
“Ah,” Radek said, deadpan, trying not to smile. “But I was one hundred percent. Which is bigger.”
John tilted his head, enjoying the way the air shifted around tension when humor cut it. “Think that means he wins the bet.”
“There was no official bet,” Rodney snapped.
“There was,” John said. “Pretty sure we called it thirty bucks.”
Rodney folded his arms. The vinyl creaked. “Retroactively non-binding.”
“Inflation,” John said. “Call it fifty.”
Radek brushed dust off the panel with the back of his sleeve; the dust came away in gray curls that stuck to the fabric from static. “We can call it whatever you like; the ship calls itself Daevos. And look, secondary index: stasis bays. Cross-referenced to asset designations.”
John’s stomach tightened in a way the cold couldn’t explain. “Then let’s see for ourselves. Pod bay.”
The ship seemed to agree. Corridors bent inward in an almost organic curve, the floor subtly bowing, the ceiling dropping just enough to make a taller man feel watched. Their footsteps changed timbre as the metal beneath them thickened; the air grew a degree colder and picked up a faint, sweet-sour tang that reminded John of antiseptic left open too long. Bulkhead doors parted with a stick and sigh, like seals breaking in a freezer, and they stepped into a chamber that felt colder than the rest as if it kept a private winter.
The cradle sat at the center, glossy gunmetal, its lid reared back like a hood. The bay lights were dead, so their flashlights threw narrow cones that left the corners in pooled shadow. Condensation rings stained the deck where thaw had bled away and then evaporated, leaving mineral outlines like tide marks in a dry harbor. Across the glass lay the faint, greasy cloud of a forehead and nose pressed there for years, the human oil baked into a film by time. John’s shoulders prickled under his tac vest. He knew that kind of mark. Every barracks had a bunk rail polished the same way by hands and heads and waiting.
Rodney leaned in uneasily. His breath ghosted the pod lid in quick bursts. “Her designation point. Asset-Zero-Two.” His gaze flicked to the empty clamps circling the deck. The clamps were bite-marked and scabbed with old grime, the kind of residue that only built around something that had once lived there a very long time. “But the logs… show more.”
John swept his light across the mounts. Empty. The beam caught the faint outline of where shapes had been- dust shadows, deep and undisturbed. “So where the hell are the rest?”
Radek was already at the console, fingers deft, the pads of his gloves whispering on the touchplate. The screen woke reluctantly, a thin shimmer under a film of frost, then sputtered as the translator tried to pin sense to written bones. Characters shuffled and rearranged as if embarrassed to be caught in the wrong clothes; then the header resolved in stark text that looked as new as a fresh bruise.
────────────────────────────
CODENAME : Crimson Soldier
STATUS : INACTIVE — STASIS [BIO-SYNCHRONIZED]
PURPOSE : Adaptive Combat / Neutralization / Lethal Enforcement
NOTES : Efficiency Prioritized Over Autonomy
─────────────────────────────
The glow from the console felt colder than the room. Rodney blew out a breath that managed to fog both the screen and his own courage. “Fantastic. Prototype, enforcement, and asset in the same file. Comforting.”
“Not an object,” John said, voice flat before he knew what it would be. The words misted and hung. “A person used as one.”
Something in the bay clicked. Just a thermal tick, a metal contraction, but they all stilled as if the ship had cleared its throat. Before Rodney could argue, Radek tapped a seam beneath the cradle. The panel resisted in a way that said it had slept for years and did not appreciate alarms; then it slid open on caked runners, revealing racks of slim, black spines. Some dull with age, some blinking faint green like sullen eyes.
“Data spines,” he murmured, equal parts awe and dread. He brushed the top row with the back of his glove and came away with a smear of fine gray dust that glittered under John’s light like graphite.
Rodney was already pulling one into his reader. The spine had a surprising weight for its size, a solid little density that implied an old-fashioned respect for permanence. His tablet accepted the connection with a buzz he felt through his wrist. The first rush of characters spilled out in a clean block, translated so quickly it might have always been English.
─────────────────────────────
Containment Layers Verified
Handler Clearance: Scarlet
─────────────────────────────
Rodney swore under his breath, nothing dramatic, just his own name, the one he used when he was irritated at himself for wanting to look away. “Layers on layers. And someone made sure she didn’t get much of a say.”
He didn’t say free will. He didn’t have to. The words hung anyway.
Radek’s voice was quiet. “If she is Asset-Two, then there was an Asset-One.”
“Or is,” John said, eyes lingering on the empty clamps, on the dented circle where a pod had once worn the deck smooth. He followed the scuffed track of something heavy dragged away and deliberately stopped looking when the track vanished under newer grime. His hands rebalanced the P-90 without thinking, a muscle memory tic that had nothing to do with firefights and everything to do with not liking the shape of a thought.
They worked in silence, the kind that wasn’t empty. Rodney called out numbers, Radek labeled; foam swallowed each spine with a soft hush like pillows taking a head. The case buckles clacked when they closed, too loud in the stillness. On the console, the file header pulsed with the stubborn rhythm of a heartbeat that refused to be read.
“Local cache.” Rodney said, almost to himself, feeling under the console lip. His fingertips found a recess and a braided lead. A thumbnail module slid free, warm—the only warm thing in the room—for a second in his palm before he laid it in its cradle and snapped retainers around it like seatbelts. “Hello, darling.”
“Don’t flirt with the black box,” John said out of habit.
“I flirt with success,” Rodney said. “It flirts back.”
John tapped the radio at his earpiece. His breath felt close, warm, suddenly too present now that he noticed it. “Atlantis, this is Sheppard. We’ve got a ship designation—Daevos. Pulled a local cache and several spines tied to ‘Asset-Two,’ codename Crimson Soldier. All air-gapped. Bringing them straight to isolation.”
“Copy,” Weir’s voice came back, calm and steady, the Control Tower’s acoustics ghosting her words with a faint room echo that sounded suddenly, achingly civilized. “We’re ready.”
Rodney exhaled hard, fogging his visor, and wiped it with the back of his glove, leaving a greasy crescent. “Great. Because what my life was missing was an evil filing system.” He tried to make it a joke and almost got there.
John gave the pod one last look. For a heartbeat, the fogged glass seemed to align with memory—steady eyes, unblinking, watching him from behind the isolation room’s clean light. The words on the screen stamped themselves in his head like a label cut too deep to sand down.
He turned away before the thought could stick to anything else.
They retraced their path. The Daevos groaned softly as if turning in its sleep, as if heat from their bodies had woken a nerve. The corridor air felt even drier now that they were leaving, their tongues going wooden at the edges. Frost had begun to creep back into the seams they had warmed with their hands; breath plumes thinned. John kept them to the center line of the deck where the grit was least, where boots sounded true. Above, a cable sang a single, thin note when the hull shrank. He measured each turn and the time between them and told himself that the way the ship’s silence thickened near the doors was architecture, not attention.
At the jumper collar, the metal changed underfoot. The Daevos’ skin gave way to the cleaner, lighter alloy of Lantean fabrication; the temperature lifted, barely, but enough that the hairs on John’s forearms woke under the sleeves. The city gleamed beyond the viewport, spires catching sun, shield down because it trusted the day. The light off the water threw slow ripples into the jumper bay, and the faint tang of salt rode the recycled air—Atlantis’s scent, impossible to fake.
Rodney cleared his throat. The sound stuck for a second on the edge of relief. “You think there are more like her?”
Radek’s reply was careful, as if language were another device to be handled with gloves. “I think we will learn more than we want, and less than we need.”
“That’s optimistic,” Rodney muttered, but he didn’t push. His hand rested on the spine case like a parishioner’s on a pew.
“It is realistic,” Radek said simply.
John didn’t weigh in. He brought the jumper alive; lights rose in a cooperative glow that felt indecent after the ship’s meanness. Systems purred. The stick was warm from internal heat. He kept his hands steady and eased them away from the black hulk that had finally given them a name. The Daevos stayed in the viewport a long second, not diminishing so much as surrendering its claim, and then space opened like a held breath let go.
He threaded them toward home. Behind the glass, the city’s geometry sharpened, sun finding facets. The contrast made the cold in his chest more noticeable, not less. He thought of the clamps, the dust shadows, the field where a name should have been, filled instead with designations.
Crimson Soldier. Asset-02.
