by Graham, Jo
I looked at O’Neill, and I saw a shiver pass over his face. He was the only one who knew. He was the only one who felt it. He was the only one who knew what it could do, and what it felt like to do it, like sitting on top of turbos open all the way, an elevator ride straight to the top, charging for the ceiling like a bat out of hell. He knew. He knew how it could eat you, seduce you, pull you in and fill you up. I can’t explain what it feels like, Teyla. I don’t have the right words. An interface like that—you own it and it owns you, like being one thing, one consciousness.
And so Dr. Weir decided she wanted me on the Atlantis Expedition, kind of a human lightswitch to deal with Ancient technology. She asked O’Neill for me, and I guess he figured it was her party. He must have had a look at my record, but maybe that didn’t carry any weight with her. I don’t know.
I almost didn’t go. He tried to talk me into it. “I think anybody who doesn’t want to walk through a Stargate is crazy.” Sounded a lot like you, actually.
I flipped a coin.
It’s how you decide when you don’t care what the outcome is, when you figure why the hell not. Leave it to chance or fate or whatever. I flipped the coin and I waited a second, looking at my hand clasped against my wrist, wondering which one I wanted it to be. Stay, go back to Antarctica and fly in that quiet dream, go back to sleep and let the snow roll over me. Kind of a quiet life, actually. Stay stuck in grade until I’ve got my twenty years and then get out and do…something. Some kind of security work, maybe. Or be a private pilot for a corporation, flying guys like my dad from a meeting in Austin to a meeting in Tampa on their Lear Jet. That’s not so bad, really.
Or walk through a Stargate. Take a one way trip to a place you know nothing about, a place that could be anything.
Most of these guys did it out of curiosity. They wanted to know something so much—these scientists and engineers and Dr. Weir most of all—that nothing else mattered. Rodney and Zelenka and the rest—they’ve got some balls. They signed up for this knowing they were probably going to get killed and they wouldn’t even get a shot off at what took them down. Disease. Hostiles. Drowning in the gate room when the shield failed and the city died.
I did it on a coin toss. I watched it spin, and I knew which way I wanted it to fall.
Why the hell not?
***
He looked away, across the broad canal to the desert, shrugged.
“Do you miss it?” she asked quietly.
“Antarctica?” John stood against the side of the barge. “I don’t know. Atlantis isn’t exactly quiet.” He looked at her sideways, the corner of his mouth twitching as though he would smile. “I guess I miss that a little bit.”
“I meant your homeworld,” Teyla said. “Earth. Your family, your friends.”
His face stilled, but it didn’t harden as it often did when someone talked about home. “I don’t really have anybody to miss,” he said, and his eyebrows drew together.
“You have no children, no sons and daughters?” It was strange to think not. A man of his age ought to be the father of children well grown, daughters learning to hunt and sons to till the soil. Unless some tragedy had intervened. She hoped she had not touched on that.
“It was never the right time,” he said, his eyes eliding from hers.
“Surely your mother…” Teyla began delicately. Every man has a mother who will miss him, who he will mumble for with his dying breath.
“My mom died a long time ago,” he said. “Thirteen years. She died of breast cancer six years after the divorce, when I was stationed at Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey.” John looked out across the canal again, toward the fruit trees leaning toward the water on the other side, their branches almost touching their reflections in the stream. “That wasn’t long after Desert Storm, and I was still overseas enforcing the no-fly zone. I was there a couple of years, actually, all through Desert Shield and Instant Thunder. I was gone the whole time she was sick.”
“I am very sorry,” Teyla said quietly. “I did not realize.” She had thought they were different, these men from Earth with their medicines and their world of safety. She had thought they did not also stand in the shadows.
He shrugged but didn’t take his eyes from the line of distant trees. “I was twenty five. It’s not like I was a little kid.”
“My father was taken by the Wraith when I was thirteen,” she said. “But I think it is difficult to lose a parent at any age.”
John shrugged again, putting the sunglasses back on. End of the conversation, Teyla thought. Though she had known John Sheppard more than a year she sometimes felt she knew him no better than she had the first day he came to Athos, the day he followed a coin toss through the blue fire of a gate.
Some kind of bird gyred in the distant sky, and she lifted her hand to watch it circle, hunting where the edge of green fields met desert. The wind blew across the canal freshened by the water, but still hot and dry. Hopefully along the coast there would be a sea breeze which would be somewhat more comfortable. I am getting spoiled by the Ancients’ climate control, Teyla thought. Once I would not have missed air conditioning.
“I’m not much like her,” he said out of the blue, expression unreadable in the sunglasses. “She was in way over her head about everything. My dad made a lot more money than she grew up with and she was always terrified she was going to make a mistake and embarrass everyone. She took tennis lessons and needlepoint lessons and did Jane Fonda and pretty much everything, but she always had this awkwardness, you know? Like she was some weird outsider in her own life. Like it was all an act and she was scared people would see through it. She loved us kids, though. She always wanted to protect us from everything. I think she’d have run through fire or lifted a car off us or one of those kinds of stories you hear on the news about regular suburban moms who beat off carjackers with their purse.”
Teyla looked at him sideways, not chancing saying anything, as one does with a skittish animal who has finally trusted a little, waiting for him to go on.
“She kept her thoughts to herself, whatever she was thinking. She had this smile that wasn’t right but you could never see behind it.” John shifted from one foot to another with the slight motion of the barge as it began a gentle curve, the trees that came almost down to the water blocking the view ahead. “I don’t think I ever really knew her.” He glanced toward Teyla and shrugged.
Above on the upper deck of the barge there was a shout. As the canal straightened out of the curve again a body of water glistened ahead, a lake or a harbor, and beyond it was a city. White walls and white towers were stark in stone against an azure sky, massive square buildings and fortifications overlapping one behind the other, stretching as far left and right as one could see, the entirety studded with green trees. Beyond it, faint on the horizon, was the glittering line of the ocean.
“Pelagia?” Teyla asked, coming to stand at his side.
“Must be,” John said. He shook his head. “It’s enormous.”
“Half a million people,” Jitrine said with satisfaction, approaching across the deck. “There are half a million people in Pelagia under the rule of our King.”
Teyla looked at John and she did not need him to speak to hear his thought. Why does the Wraith allow so many to live when they did not on Sateda, or anywhere else we have seen? What is wrong on this world? The forboding sank like ice in her heart.
“We will be there soon,” Jitrine said. “And then we will see what can be done.”
“Yeah,” John said, but he sounded no happier than Teyla felt.
***
“There!” Rodney almost shouted in triumph as the gate whooshed open. “Got it!”
Major Lorne grinned, shading his eyes against the desert sun. “Great job, doc.” The gate was operational again, and it had only taken Rodney the better part of a day to do it. After a nap in the shade repatterning the third crystal had been much easier. “I knew you’d get it done.”
“Atlantis, this is
McKay,” Rodney said into his headset. “The gate is repaired. We’re coming through.”
Chuck’s familiar voice sounded over the radio static. “We hear you,” he said. “Dr. Weir’s eager to talk to you.”
“Let’s go then,” Lorne said, and a moment later they stepped through the event horizon into the Atlantis gateroom.
Elizabeth Weir hurried down the stairs to meet them, her brows knit together across her forehead. “Rodney! I was starting to worry.”
Rodney spread his hands. “I can fix anything with time and the right equipment.”
“Have you heard anything from Colonel Sheppard or the others?” she asked, looking from Rodney to Lorne and back again.
“Negative,” Lorne said. “And that concerns me, ma’am. No hostiles, as far as we can tell, other than maybe some wildlife. But they’ve been gone twenty four hours. It’s possible they’ve had an accident. They were going quite a ways north of our position, and they would have been out of radio range of the handsets.”
“Or there could be interference at the Ancient ruins they were investigating,” Rodney put in. “We’ve had that happen before. Messing up the radios.”
“Still.” Elizabeth frowned. “That might account for not reporting in for a few hours, but not a full day. If Colonel Sheppard couldn’t get through with the radio he would have come back to report, even if they’d found something interesting enough to warrant staying to check it out. I think we have to conclude something’s wrong.” She looked at Lorne. “Major, get your backup team together. You’re going back with Dr. Beckett and a jumper.”
“And me,” Rodney said. His forehead stung with sunburn. But Carson would have something for that.
Elizabeth’s eyebrows rose in unison. “Rodney, you’ve just come in. You’re probably dehydrated and…”
“Yes, I probably am,” Rodney said flatly. “And I also know where I’m going, which Major Lorne does not. So once again I need to rise to the occasion and rescue Sheppard from whatever he’s gotten himself into this time.”
Major Lorne made a strangled sound, but when Rodney looked at him his face was composed.
“Give me half an hour,” Rodney said. “I need to get some equipment together.”
“Take your time,” Lorne replied.
Rodney strode off toward his lab. Just like Sheppard and Zelenka to be in trouble investigating what had to be some very dull and ordinary ruins! Couldn’t anyone manage without him for more than a few minutes? Really, how hard could that be?
Chapter Nine
“I am not sure it is supposed to be doing that,” Radek shouted, holding on to a piece of rope as the sail stretched full and straining. The rope sung taut in his hands. It took leaning back on it with all his weight to hold on to it.
The fishing boat leaped over the waters, the rising wind of the approaching thunderstorm urging it on.
On the opposite side of the little boat, Ronon held onto the other rope apparently effortlessly, his head thrown back. “Probably not!” Ronon shouted back, a wide grin on his face. The speed and the movement sent his hair flying behind him, and he whooped like a boy.
Dark clouds piled up behind them, purple in the light of afternoon, the sun shining beneath them slantwise. Lightning crackled from point to point, illuminating the depths of the clouds. Thunder rolled across the water, loud and menacing.
“This does not look good!” Radek shouted over the rising wind. “I think the storm is getting closer!”
“What are we going to do? Stop?” Ronon yelled back. He grinned as the freshening wind tugged at him, like he thought this was nothing but a wild ride for fun.
“We do not know what we are doing!” Radek yelled. The rope bit into his hands, threatening to pull free. Or perhaps to just jerk him off his feet and deposit him in the ocean. Which did not seem like Radek’s idea of a good time. He could swim, yes. But that did not mean he wanted to be lost in the middle of an ocean.
“Why do I go offworld?” he said to himself. “Why?” This was only his third trip, and it was beginning to look like it might be his last. Thunder rolled to punctuate the thought, even closer than before. The storm looked very big, and they very much did not know what they were doing with a sailboat.
Now would be a good time for Colonel Sheppard to show up with the jumper. Just about now. Surely any moment he would appear.
***
Afternoon had come and the buildings cast long shadows when the barge tied up at the dock in Pelagia. Up close, the city was even more impressive than it had been at a distance. Surrounded by sturdy walls close to fifty feet high, it boasted many buildings of four or five stories, broad streets paved with white stones, and a good many ships clustered around the docks. It looked very prosperous indeed, and more heavily populated than anything John had seen in the Pegasus Galaxy.
John was starting to get used to villages, to the kind of subsistence agriculture practiced only in the poorest countries of Earth. The Genii had a greater level of technology, as had the Hoffans, but he had not seen this level of population on either world.
As Tolas came down the steps from the upper deck, John moved to put himself in front of him. “We want to see the king,” he said. “Teyla told you what we’ve got to offer. So let’s talk.”
Tolas didn’t look disturbed. “You will see the king, of course,” he said. “But one does not simply walk in and talk to the king. I will send word immediately that we are here, and then he will reply with an appointment that is convenient. In the meantime, we will be his guests.”
John suppressed the desire to shake him. Did everything on this planet have to take forever? Strangers from an alien world ought to be an emergency! ‘Get an appointment’ sounded like the way the IOA would handle things. Gosh, it’s nice you’re here from another planet. Make an appointment.
Teyla glanced at him sideways, and he knew what she was thinking. She thought he popped off at the mouth, damaging diplomatic relationships before they even started. For that matter, that’s what Elizabeth thought. She’d had a lot to say about it.
John made himself smile at Tolas. “We’re happy to talk to the king whenever it’s convenient for him,” he said.
“Good,” Tolas said, but he didn’t smile. Instead he led the way off the barge and into the city.
It was further than it looked, maybe fifteen blocks in a regular city at home, but by the end of it John felt a little lightheaded. He was getting pretty sick of this concussion. Back in Atlantis, Carson probably wouldn’t have let him out of the infirmary yet. He’d be stuck watching the same shows twenty times on his laptop and complaining. That actually didn’t sound so bad.
Teyla looked serene, if sweaty and tired. If her arm was bothering her it didn’t show. He probably should be more concerned about it, even though she didn’t say anything.
The palace was big. Really big. The columns in the first hall were three stories tall, and the walls and columns alike were painted with murals of flowers and trees, as though one had stepped into a painted forest. It was a pretty amazing effect, like walking through a series of pictures, animals and plants appearing at different distances as you moved. They turned left, into what might be guest quarters, another courtyard and stairs going up, four flights spiraling around the courtyard. He guessed important guests got the lower rooms, while random people who happened in got upstairs. Four flights was enough to make the vertigo come back. John concentrated on just putting one foot in front of the other. Not good. This concussion thing was starting to suck.
They stopped outside a door that opened on the landing over the courtyard, and one of Tolas’ men pushed past them to open it. At least that’s what John expected. Instead the guy grabbed for the 9mm in its holster.
He got John’s elbow in his ribs, then a swift kick in the knees that knocked him down, the other guards crowding in with their spears. Teyla was taken by surprise, but it only took her a second to shake off the guard who’d tried to grab her and to be beside him in a fighti
ng stance, their backs to the door.
“Hold, there,” Tolas said mildly to his guards.
“What the hell is this about?” John demanded. “You said we were guests.”
“I should have made it more clear that weapons were not allowed in the House of the King,” Tolas said. “You will have your weapons back when you depart, but I cannot permit you to have them in this house.”
“I’m not giving these to you,” John said. “No way.”
Tolas looked vaguely amused. “What are you planning to do? Fight your way out of the palace and city? I thought you wished to speak with the king. Surely most leaders do not allow strangers to come armed into their presence.”
John could take them easily enough, even with nothing but the pistol. But then what? Tolas had a point. Even if these guys had never seen firearms before, which he was beginning to doubt, he couldn’t stretch the shock and awe factor to getting out of the palace. Not with three clips and Teyla unarmed except for a hunting knife. They could probably call a couple of hundred men out if they needed to, in a place this size.
“They do not,” Teyla said. “But you should ask for our weapons, not grab them. It is the kind of thing that breeds…misunderstandings.”
“Your pardon,” Tolas said. He held out his hand. “Your weapons?”
Teyla looked at John sideways, waiting for his cue. Was this going to be a fight or not?
Not. This wasn’t the time for it, and starting something would sour any chance they had at a deal. Besides, Lorne and the rescue jumper would be showing up any second now. Rodney must have dialed out hours and hours ago. Better to make that kind of stand with some firepower behind it if they needed to make it.
