by Jo Graham
There was a crash and a sickening series of thuds, the jumper skipping like a stone across the ground. The impact sent them both tumbling toward the back of the compartment, and Sora’s grip on the pistol loosened. Daniel kicked it away and drew his own pistol from her belt, jamming the muzzle against the small of her back as the jumper tore its way through the landscape and shuddered to a halt.
“Don’t move,” he said. “Taka! Throw me the radio!” There was a moment when he wasn’t sure if the man was still conscious, and then he turned slowly in his seat, wincing as he stretched his limbs. None of them seemed to be broken from his expression.
“Do what he says,” Sora said.
Taka put his head to one side. “I’m beginning to wonder what the point is of doing what you say.”
“Because he’ll shoot me.”
“And then I’ll be a lot worse off, right?”
Daniel stretched his left arm and managed to snag one of the pairs of handcuffs. The effort was painful, but while his muscles protested, he didn’t feel the unique grinding pain of broken bones. He snapped the handcuffs around Sora’s wrists and held onto her by them, although she strained against the cuffs and tried to twist away.
“Toss me the radio,” he said again.
Taka picked up the radio and held onto it. “I’m not sure why I should.”
“Let me talk to my team, and you can walk away from this.”
“I still have work for you,” Sora said. “All right, this isn’t going the way it was supposed to, but when we get out of this—”
Daniel jerked her hands back harder behind her back. “You’re just a bomb-proof optimist, aren’t you?”
“If I gave up every time things didn’t seem to be going my way, I’d be dead by now,” Sora said. It was the first thing she’d said that he felt he could sympathize with.
“Right, fine, you’re going to escape any minute now,” Daniel said. “But you might not want to bother trying to talk Taka into coming with you if you’re relying on him to activate Ancient technology for you. It looks to me like your Asgard genetic manipulation wasn’t as permanent as you wanted it to be.”
“This doesn’t prove that,” Sora said. “There’s probably something wrong with your ship. I still think your people sabotaged it.”
“Try for yourself,” Daniel said. He stood with caution, stepping well back from Sora so as not to give her the opportunity to kick his feet out from under him, and pulled down a life signs detector from where it was stowed. He tossed it to Taka. “Turn this on.”
“Don’t do that, you idiot, it’s a trap,” Sora said, but Taka was already frowning at the device in his hand.
“Nothing’s happening.”
“I’m guessing that whatever the Asgard device did to you, it’s wearing off.”
Sora frowned at him. “What do you know about it?”
“I know that every time we’ve tried using alien technology that we only sort of understood, it’s only sort of worked.”
“It doesn’t matter. We can do the same procedure again.”
“Maybe. If it works more than once on the same person. And if the time that it lasts isn’t variable – you really don’t want a pilot who’s going to suddenly stop being able to fly the ship at some random moment. And if Taka’s still interested in working for you, which isn’t seeming like such a great gig right now, whatever you promised him.”
Taka put down the life signs detector and picked up the radio.
“You give me the radio,” Daniel said. “I call my team. We talk this out.”
Taka hesitated, and then threw Daniel the radio. He turned it on to hear Teyla’s voice on the radio, the words sharp and tight.
“—hear me? We have restored power to the gate. Please respond.”
“We’re here,” Daniel said. “We had some problems with the jumper.”
“Dr. Jackson,” Teyla said, and he could hear the relief in her voice. “Are you hurt?”
“Only the usual bumps and bruises. Sora’s out of commission for the moment—”
“I’m warning you, let me go!” Sora demanded.
“—as you can hear, and I’m having a little talk with her pilot about where we go from here. Actually, he’s Satedan, as it turns out, so maybe he’d like to talk to Ronon. Ronon, why don’t you tell Taka why getting mixed up in this woman’s apparent personal vendetta against Ladon Radim is a fairly lousy idea?”
“Is that Ronon Dex?” Taka asked, his eyebrows going up in startlement. He actually sat up straighter, like someone who’d just been told they were being put on the phone with a celebrity. “The Ronon Dex?”
“Who’s this?” Ronon asked over the radio.
“Taka. Taka Hendrik.”
“This is Ronon Dex. What are you doing with Sora Tyrus? She’s bad news.”
“She said the Genii would have work for me as a pilot if I could fly the Ancestors’ ships,” Taka said. “I was a train engineer on Sateda. I make a piss-poor farmer.”
“I tried farming once,” Ronon said. “On New Athos. They were all pretty grateful when I left.”
“That is not true,” Teyla protested in the background, but she sounded amused.
“I’m not cut out to be a farmer,” Taka said. “Sora said the Genii homeworld has cities. Electric light. Hot baths that don’t involve carrying buckets of water after you fight the sheep for it.”
“So don’t sit on Manaria. Go back to Sateda. They could use people who are good with machinery.”
“You stole their ship and kidnapped one of their people,” Sora said. “Do you really think they’re going to just let you go?”
“We’re not the police,” Daniel said. “Give us the jumper back, walk away, and we’ll chalk this whole thing up to a misunderstanding.”
Sora gave him a black look. “Who’s supposed to have misunderstood what?”
“To start with, you misunderstood how easy it would be to steal our jumper.”
“You’re taking this whole thing really calmly,” Taka said.
“You don’t understand,” Daniel said. “This kind of thing happens to me all the time.”
Taka nodded in slow appreciation. “Army?”
“I’m a civilian contractor.”
“You ought to be in the army.”
“I’m a scientist,” Daniel said. “It’s just that people keep shooting at me.”
He pointed the gun at Sora and motioned her to her feet. “I imagine my team is on their way here right now,” he said. “Are you going to get out of here, or do you want us to drag you back to Atlantis and hand you over to the Genii?” The radio channel was still open, and he waited to see if Teyla would object, but apparently a side trip to drag a reluctant Sora Tyrus back to Atlantis didn’t sound any more attractive to her at this point than it did to him.
“I’m going,” Sora said.
“We are on our way,” Teyla said.
Sora turned, and then stumbled, apparently still unsteady on her feet. He was reaching out to steady her when she kicked his feet out from under him. She hit the ground herself and rolled with an ease that made it clear she’d shed her handcuffs.
She came up with her pistol in her hand, and Daniel cursed himself for not making sure it was out of her reach. She leveled it at Taka, who spread his hands slowly.
“Some ally you are,” he said.
“He won’t try to jump me while I have a hostage,” she said. “The Lanteans are softhearted that way. I’m not sure I can say the same thing about you.”
Daniel kept his own pistol leveled at Sora. “What, you want to find out who can shoot first?”
“I want some leverage when your team gets here.”
“I was going to let you go.”
“You would have shot me in the back.”
“I wouldn’t have,” Daniel said. “Besides, I thought you said we were softhearted.”
“When it comes to your allies you are.”
“There’s no reason you can’t be one
of our allies.” No reason except the fact that she’d kidnapped him and nearly wrecked the jumper. But compared to some of the people they’d allied themselves with over the years, those were small considerations.
“I don’t want to be your ally. I just want to get out of here in one piece.”
“I would let you go.”
“Let Taka handcuff you to the chair again and I’ll go.”
“Leave me out of this,” Taka said. “And stop pointing that gun at me.”
“Sorry,” Sora said, although she didn’t sound it. “Well?”
“Given what you just said about shooting people in the back, I’m not inclined to do that. I’ll wait for the rest of my team to show up, thank you very much.”
“Fine,” Sora said, and leaned back against the side of the jumper. Daniel shook his head. It was going to be a long wait.
The jumper had dug a deep gouge through a pasture, and several sheep were investigating curiously as the team approached.
“Dr. Jackson, is the jumper secure?” Teyla asked over the radio.
“No, I’m afraid we still have company,” Daniel said. “We’re at a little bit of an impasse here.”
“Let me talk to Sora.”
“I don’t want to talk to you,” Sora said over the radio. “I just want to walk away from this without any tricks.”
“Then let Dr. Jackson go.”
The rear door of the jumper opened, and Teyla could see that Sora was holding her pistol not on Daniel but on a man she had never seen before, a man who sat in the pilot’s seat with an expression of resentment on his face.
“She’s holding her own confederate hostage,” Daniel said. “She and Taka here have had a little bit of a falling out.”
“I told you that you shouldn’t have gotten mixed up with the Genii,” Ronon said.
The man spread his hands. “You were right.”
“I’m going to walk out of here with Taka,” Sora said. “And you’re not going to stop me.”
“So that you can shoot him in the back once you’re out of the jumper?” Daniel shook his head. “Not acceptable.”
“You see, you are soft-hearted.”
“If by that you mean that I don’t want perfect strangers to get killed for no good reason, then, yes.”
“Put the weapon down and we will let you go,” Teyla said.
Sora lifted her chin. “Why should I believe that?”
“Because we do not have the time to return you to Ladon Radim for the punishment you probably deserve. And if I had wanted you dead, I would have let Radim kill you already.”
Sora looked at Teyla, her expression wavering, as if she wanted to believe her but wasn’t sure that she could. “I’m coming out of the jumper with Taka.”
“If you say so,” Taka said, and stood. He walked in front of her out of the jumper’s hatch.
“Now lower your weapon,” Teyla said.
“Ronon has a stun weapon,” Sora said. “Tell him to put it down.”
“Ronon?”
Ronon slowly set his pistol down on the ground in front of him, although Teyla knew just how fast he could have it back in his hand if necessary.
After a moment Sora lowered her own pistol, although she kept it in her hand. “You’d better not come after me.”
“We have better things to do,” Ronon said.
“Come show us what you found, and we might be able to help you get the Asgard device working better,” Daniel offered as Sora began backing away. “I expect we know a little bit more about the Asgard and their technology than you do.”
“I don’t need your help,” she said.
“Okay. Have fun.”
Sora turned on her heels and ran, sprinting for the nearest cover in zig-zag darts that let her look back over her shoulder at them until she was out of what she seemed to consider pistol range. Ronon had his pistol in his hand again, and didn’t appear to believe that she was out of range for him.
“Want me to stun her?”
“No,” Teyla said. “It is true that we do not have time to deliver her to Radim at the moment.” She shook her head regretfully as Sora reached the cover of a line of trees. “Nor to spend more time trying to persuade her that she is making unfortunate decisions.” Teyla turned back to Daniel, who was stretching, apparently painfully, as if testing each limb to see if it worked properly.
“Are you injured?”
“Probably nothing broken,” he said. “Definitely some interesting bruises.”
“Then you got off lightly.”
“Good to hear it,” Daniel said. He contemplated the damage that the jumper had done to the field. “Think we ought to offer to pay for this?”
“When we return,” Teyla said. “I think now it is time for us to go.”
SGA-22 Unascended
INTERLUDE
The way back to the city from the suburbs wasn’t quiet. Everyone talked, the salvage team and the Eze family comparing notes on the last ten years. What had happened out in the hinterlands, in the mining valleys a hundred miles from the city? What had happened recently with the returning Satedans? There was so much to catch up on. Elizabeth dropped back, walking last, oddly apart with nothing to contribute to the conversation.
One of the men was talking to Jana. “…so the Genii said the Satedan Band were little flowers, and Caldwell said he’d referee a fight…”
Caldwell. That name meant something. She knew him. That came to her in a breath. She knew Caldwell. He knew her. Was he in the city? Where was Caldwell?
Elizabeth looked up just as Margin Bri dropped back beside her. “That was well done,” Margin said.
“What?”
“You’ve negotiated before.”
“Yes.”
“Weren’t you frightened? You didn’t know how many of them there were or if they’d shoot.”
“Not really,” Elizabeth said. It truly hadn’t occurred to her to be frightened. She’d never thought it was a hardened enemy, just a tense misunderstanding that could get out of hand. Those kinds of things needed to be stopped before they started. But no, she’d never been frightened. No one meant to hurt her. She’d done this so many times before that she knew to a fine point where danger was. Why would she be frightened when there wasn’t any?
“Who are you?” Margin asked, an incredulous expression on her face.
“I have no idea,” Elizabeth said.
They reached the city center just after nightfall. Elizabeth was tired and sore, but their sense of triumph kept her going. Not only had they found some medical supplies, but a tie to survivors of Sateda outside the city. They came down the street leading to the back of the hotel, Beron, Jana and Vetra marveling at the electric lights behind windows, the voices of many people gathering over the end of the day meals.
“Let’s go straight to Ushan Cai,” Margin said. She held open the back door of the hotel and they went in.
Cai was in his office off the kitchen talking to a man Elizabeth hadn’t met before, tall and rangy with dark hair and blue eyes. He was wearing an unfamiliar pants and jacket combination that looked almost like a uniform.
“You’re welcome to have a look of course,” Cai was saying, “But anything you find is subject to the same terms as before. I won’t beggar our people’s cultural legacy for boxes of energy bars. Anything Ancient comes straight to me. Then we’ll talk about it. Bear in mind our agreement about the light airplane.”
“Agreed,” the man said. “I’m not from the school of archaeology that’s little short of looting.”
“I’ll take your word on that, Dr. Lynn,” Cai said. He looked up as they paused in the door. “Yes, Margin?”
“I’ve got some amazing news,” she said, and ushered in Beron and his daughters, who stood blinking in the electrical light, a wide smile on Jana’s face. “We met some survivors from outside the city. There’s a settlement of a couple of dozen people up in the old mines near Escavera.”
Ushan Cai got to his feet quick
ly. “Escavra? You’ve walked all this way? I’m Ushan Cai.”
“Jana Eze,” the young woman said, putting out her hand. Her father looked a little bewildered, as though he’d thought he’d never see so many strangers in one place again. “It’s good to meet you. We didn’t know there were people in the city.”
“We thought there must be survivors in rural areas,” Cai said, clasping her arm wrist to wrist. “We just couldn’t get there. That’s why we’ve been making a deal to buy a light plane from the Lanteans. So we can get out there and see.”
“You’re Lantean?” Elizabeth asked, looking at the man Cai had called Dr. Lynn. Nothing about his face or voice was familiar.
“Er, yes,” he said. “I suppose I am. I mean, I’m British. But we’re all Lanteans to you.”
“How many people? How did you get by?” Cai asked Jana.
Elizabeth drew Dr. Lynn aside. “I have many questions about the Lanteans,” she said.
“I’m happy to answer your questions if I can,” he said.
“How did you come here?”
“Through the Stargate,” Dr. Lynn replied, an answer so obvious as to be useless.
“I assumed that,” Elizabeth replied.
Cai was promising Beron and his daughters supplies. “And we’ve got an electrical generator we can bring out and install. That will give you folks some power to run a radio. We can keep in touch that way.”
“That’s heavy equipment,” Beron said. “And I don’t like to say so, but there’s rough country between home and here. I don’t see how to get something like that back without the trains running.”
Dr. Lynn looked over Elizabeth’s head. “I can answer that,” he said. “We can run the generator over in the puddle-jumper. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. We can take you home as well, along with whatever you’re taking back with you.”
Jana blinked. “In an aircraft? A Lantean aircraft?”
“I assure you it’s perfectly safe,” Dr. Lynn said. “And the puddle-jumper is large enough to carry you and your equipment. It’s just outside. That’s what we brought the trade goods in. It’s much easier to bring the jumper when there are heavy goods.”
