by Graham, Jo
He put his forehead to hers. “One of those screwed up vets who drifts from job to job, never quite getting it together, the kind of guy who dies alone in a cheap motel somewhere…”
“We are your family, and we will never let that happen.” Her voice was flat. “Perhaps you will die in space, or in the cocoon of a hive ship, but you will not die on Earth, John Sheppard. That is fact.”
“Ok.” He took a deep breath. “I can live with that.”
“Good,” she said, her hand still tight on his wrist. “Now you should sleep. I will watch.”
“You’re tired too and you’re hurt…” he began.
“I have slept for several hours.” Teyla checked her watch, the luminous dial shining faintly in the dark. “Nearly six hours, actually. It is midnight here, with ten hours to run until dawn.”
“And getting colder all the time.” In the cave it must be in the sixties from their body heat, but outside the temperature must be in the fifties and dropping.
“Sleep a while,” she said. “I can watch, and you can sleep here beside me where you will hear if I make any sound.” She let go of him, lifting her head. “You must be able to fly the Ancient warship, and right now you cannot.”
He nodded. Right now he wasn’t sure he’d trust himself to find his way from the jumper bay to his own quarters. “Ok.”
“Lie down and rest as you can,” she said, pulling the third mylar blanket from around her and passing it to him. “I will call you if I see anything.”
“Maybe just for a minute.” He stretched out as much as he could, his knees still bent because of the narrowness of the entrance. Nice, soft rocks. Cold. He pulled the blanket up to his chin. He’d never sleep like this, not keyed up and frozen.
The last thing he saw before he drifted off was Teyla silhouetted against the stars, her chin lifted, the barrel of the P90 beside her.
* * *
John woke to darkness and soft voices.
“There. Is that better?”
“Much better, thanks.”
It took a moment to place the voices. Dahlia Radim and Carson.
“I think there is another MRE in my pack,” Teyla said. “Carson, perhaps you should try to eat.”
John rolled over, sitting up. It was still dark. In the back of the little cave Dahlia was helping Carson to sit up. He looked drawn and pale, but far more alert than he had before. Dahlia was looking in the pack, and drew out a foil packet as he watched.
“That’s the one,” Teyla said from the other side of John. She was still sitting in the entrance, the gun across her lap, barrel pointing out into the night. Her breath made a cloud of steam in the cold air.
John scrubbed his hand across his unshaven face. “How long did I sleep? And how much has the temperature dropped?”
“Five hours,” Teyla said. “And I think it is around freezing.”
“You’ve been sitting there like that for five hours? You should have woken me.”
“I have been warm enough.” Teyla dropped her voice. “Also I am not sure I can move. My hip has stiffened up.”
John swallowed, his voice low enough for Carson not to hear. “You may have a hairline fracture.”
“It does not matter if I do or not,” she said. “There is nothing that can be done about it, and I cannot stay off it. We are twelve miles from the Ancient warship. We must get there. When we do I will rest it.”
John nodded slowly. “Ok. Carson looks better. Let’s get a meal into everybody and then we’ll go on. It’s cold enough that those reptile things should be out of the picture. I can carry you if I have to.”
“Let us hope you do not have to,” she said.
Which was quite a concession, coming from Teyla. He knew better than to ask if it hurt. Obviously it hurt like hell.
“There are two more MREs in my pack,” he said. “Let’s split one of them. Some energy.”
“Some caffeine,” she said with a smile. “Even if the water is cold the granulated coffee will dissolve. And cold coffee is better than none.”
“Yeah, let’s not get between you and your coffee,” he said.
“It is a tempting vice from Earth,” she said, and her eyes danced with mischief. “Perhaps a vice we could share.”
“I’m good with that.” He dug out the MRE and handed it to her. “I’ll get the water. Carson, how are you holding up?”
* * *
They walked on under the bright stars, through the cold night. Carson could walk, though Dahlia stuck close beside him. The bleeding had stopped, and some rest and food seemed to have stabilized his blood pressure some. It probably wasn’t good for him to walk twelve miles, but he could do it.
Teyla could hobble, John’s left arm around her waist to help, but it was slow going on the broken terrain. A walk that might normally take them three or four hours was likely to take twice that. And when the sun rose and the temperatures began to climb again, those lizard things would awaken.
The cold air cleared his head. Or maybe it was a few hours sleep and some coffee. But he felt more like himself.
They halted every hour for ten minutes. By the third halt John thought his left shoulder was going to freeze that way, hunched over so that he could get it under Teyla’s. One disadvantage of her being so much shorter than him.
“We’ll be there soon,” he said.
Dahlia Radim nodded. “This is where the canyon comes out onto the plateau, just there. After that it is not far to the ship, maybe five of your miles.”
“And not too long to dawn.” John looked up at the sky where the stars were already paling.
“I have never seen the lizards on the plateau,” Dahlia said. “Perhaps they only hunt in the canyons.”
“I hope so,” Carson said fervently. He was sweating in the cold air, and he looked clammy.
“Once we get to the ship you can just get comfortable,” John said. “Dahlia and I will take it from there.”
“If the ship will fly,” Teyla said. She refrained from saying anything pointed about Radek Zelenka. Which didn’t mean she wasn’t thinking it. He was.
“I think it will fly,” Dahlia said somewhat indignantly. “If I did not think it would, we would not have made this bargain in the first place.”
“We’ll see when we get there,” John said.
* * *
It was a scoutship, smaller than the Orion had been but larger than a puddle jumper. Perhaps it had once carried a crew of fifty to a hundred, but now it lay half covered in sand. The slanting morning sunlight limned its battered hull, streaked and pitted to the color of old sand. No markings remained, blasted away by the sandstorms of thousands of years.
Carson looked gray with exertion. “That’s peachy,” he said, giving voice to the thought John would not. “That thing’s supposed to fly?”
“We have been doing repairs for nearly a year,” Dahlia said. “I have gone as far as I can without someone powering it up.”
“Ok.” John took a deep breath. “Let’s get on with it.”
Teyla set her teeth for the last little distance.
“The hatch we have been using is over here,” Dahlia said.
It opened smoothly, a good sign. Or at least a sign that the Genii engineering teams knew how to lubricate a door.
Dahlia went in first, turning on a battery powered lamp that was sitting in the hall. It cast a yellow glow ahead of them. “We’ve been using these lamps,” she said. “It doesn’t appear that there’s anything wrong with main power, but we can’t initialize it.”
“This is a job for Rodney,” Carson said, leaning on the doorframe.
“Yeah,” John said shortly.
Dahlia turned around. “Where do you want to go first? The bridge or main engineering?”
“Let’s get our people settled first,” John said with a wary look at Carson.
“We’ve been using the crew lounge behind the bridge when we were here,” Dahlia said. “It’s this way.”
Two more of the bat
tery powered lamps illuminated what had once been a fairly small curved room with wide viewscreens along one wall and recessed lighting in the ceiling. Several metal tables and chairs had been pulled together, and some stained white cushions were piled in one corner with a bunch of grey Genii military blankets. The air was stale, but not cold.
Dahlia switched on the lamps. “We have a heater too,” she said, “But it’s down in engineering now since that’s where we were working last. This is where we’ve been staying.”
“It’s perfect,” Carson said, looking longingly toward the pile of cushions. “Just pull one of those down for me, pass me a blanket, and I’ll be a happy man.”
John wrestled one down, spread it with a blanket, and added a second for good measure. He patted Carson on his good shoulder. “Why don’t you have a nap while I see if this baby will fly?”
Carson nodded. “Call me if you need anything.”
“I will stay here with Carson,” Teyla said, sinking onto a second cushion, her left leg stiffly out before her. Which said a great deal about how much this walk had taken out of her.
“Ok.” John looked at Dahlia. “The bridge then.”
* * *
The layout was similar to the Orion and the Aurora, but smaller as fitted a smaller ship. The panels had been carefully cleaned, but stood dark. One of them was broken, the viewscreen cracked wildly.
“We couldn’t fix that,” Dahlia said, her voice oddly hushed.
There were no remains. Would there not be after so long, or had the Genii done something with them? Running his hand over the silent consoles, he had to ask.
“We didn’t find any,” Dahlia said. She sounded surprised. “Maybe the survivors of the crash evacuated to the Stargate and took their casualties with them.”
“Maybe,” John said. There was always such a sense of people in the spaces they’d inhabited, even military spaces. When he was a kid they’d gone on a World War II battleship when they were on vacation. It was restored as a museum, tied up at a busy pier next to seafood restaurants selling Calabash clams and t shirts, but below decks in the long, silent corridors he’d still had that feeling, as though all the men who had served there were waiting, and at the claxon would come running out, pulling on shirts and sidearms. They might have been pleased to know their ship was a museum. Hell, maybe they were. Maybe those old guys with beer guts and baseball caps embroidered “Navy” were the same guys. Maybe they were the survivors.
But the Ancients wouldn’t be coming to reclaim this ship. He was the closest thing it was going to get.
John laid his hand on the communications panel. Ok, baby, he thought. Let’s see what you’ve got. Come on. Wake up for me.
With a shudder the panel purred to life, screens and buttons lighting, monitors flickering as power ran down damaged conduits.
He walked left. Weapons control. Tactical. Come on, honey. Wake up.
Lights flickered, the panel humming, something sparking underneath.
Propulsion.
It shivered under his hand, stabilized.
Shields.
Screens lighting, buttons flashing red and yellow alarms ten thousand years old.
Hyperdrive.
Internal systems.
The overhead lights came on, the floor lights around the bridge flared to life blue and white. Somewhere there was the soft sound of air circulation systems starting, blowing cool in his face.
Wake up, baby.
Around him the Avenger came to life.
Chapter Thirteen: Rendezvous
Jennifer was glad when Lorne and his team came back through the Stargate, and not only because they didn’t look like they were in panicked retreat from the Wraith. They’d been waiting while Lorne sent a MALP through, checking out its transmission carefully and then taking his team through after it to make sure they weren’t walking into an ambush. She wasn’t going to complain about being cautious, but standing next to Ronon with her pack leaning against her feet had involved a lot of awkward silence. There wasn’t much small talk that seemed appropriate to the situation.
She was finding it hard to know what to say to anyone. Half of the people who knew her were acting like Rodney was dead, which she thought was jumping the gun just a little bit. The other half kept saying things that were probably intended to be reassuring, like ‘we’ll find him,’ without seeming to have much idea of how they intended to do that.
“So what did we find out?” Woolsey asked, coming down the stairs behind her. He looked a bit relieved, too. They were all pretty twitchy at the moment.
“Basically the Stargate is sitting in the middle of a big open field,” Lorne said. “Just a big, flat grass plain, with what looks like a river and some trees way off to the north. No sign of a road. The good news is, you could see anybody coming for miles.”
Ronon nodded shortly. “What’s the bad news?”
“Anybody could see you coming for miles. If we were thinking about setting up an ambush, we’re going to need to take a cloaked jumper through.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Woolsey said. “Major Lorne, I’d like you to take a jumper and provide some backup, just as a precaution.”
Jennifer glanced at Ronon, suspecting he’d argue it wasn’t necessary, but he didn’t. He did hesitate for a moment, as if not sure whether Lorne expected to take charge of the mission. Jennifer wasn’t sure exactly how chain of command applied to the current situation; Ronon was a civilian acting on Woolsey’s orders, but Sheppard and by extension Lorne were supposed to be in charge in military situations, and if this wasn’t a military situation, she wasn’t sure what was.
“Let’s do this,” Ronon said when Lorne didn’t make any move to step in.
“I’m on my way,” Lorne said promptly, and headed for the jumper bay.
Jennifer shouldered her pack. “Let’s do this.”
“I’ll contact Todd once you’ve gone through,” Woolsey said. “Don’t hesitate to dial the gate if you have problems.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Ronon said. Jennifer wasn’t sure exactly which way Ronon meant that, but the gate was already boiling blue, and Lorne’s jumper was descending in front of them. The event horizon rippled as it passed through ahead of them.
She and Ronon followed cautiously. She was very aware of the unfamiliar weight of the pistol in her thigh holster. She’d hesitated before putting it on, but there had seemed like too many ways this could go wrong. Just wearing the pistol didn’t mean she was going to have to use it.
She still wasn’t used to the tug of the wormhole, even after who knew how many trips through the Stargate in the last two years. It felt like being tumbled through cold air, like being on the carnival rides at the state fair when she was a kid with the world whipping by in streaks of color. She’d usually been too breathless to scream.
They stepped out into a warm afternoon. The grassy field stretched out in all directions, although in the distance she could see a smudge of trees on the horizon and what might be the distant gleam of water. Lorne must have already cloaked the jumper; she wished she knew where the jumper was, but it was probably better if she didn’t. It meant she couldn’t give its position away with an unguarded glance upwards.
Ronon turned a circle, his pistol drawn, before seeming to decide that they weren’t yet surrounded by Wraith.
“What now?” she asked.
“Now we wait,” he said. He backed up from the gate and lowered his pistol at it. Jennifer thought about drawing her own and decided that the situation wasn’t that dire yet. She tried to look like she was totally confident about dealing with the Wraith.
They didn’t have to wait long. Almost at once, the gate’s chevrons lit as it activated. Jennifer braced herself, ready to move fast if she had to.
Instead of Wraith, what emerged through the gate was a small floating device of some kind, roughly spherical and gleaming metallic in the sunlight. It hung in the air, rotating all the way around its axis, and then darted towar
d them.
Ronon aimed his pistol in one easy motion, looking like he was about to shoot the thing out of the air. Jennifer caught his arm. “I think it’s a probe,” she said. “We did send a MALP.”
“I know what it is,” Ronon said. He didn’t lower his pistol, but he didn’t shoot, either. He glanced down at her hand on his arm. “Don’t do that.”
Jennifer let go. “I just think that if we shoot the probe, it’s going to make them think twice about going through with this meeting.”
She half-expected Ronon to say that would be fine with him, but he let out a frustrated breath instead. “They’d better know something about where McKay is.”
“Well, I hope so, too,” Jennifer said. “Obviously. But we’re probably not going to find out if you shoot that thing.”
Ronon lowered his pistol to the side and spread his free hand with a little smile that didn’t actually make him look less threatening. “I know you can hear us,” he said to the probe. “We haven’t got all day.”
The event horizon rippled, and two Wraith walked through into the grass between them and the gate. One of them was all too familiar. She’d gotten used to looking at Todd through the blur of the stasis field. At close range without the field between them, she had to fight not to twitch as he strode toward them.
He and his companion stopped with a good ten feet still between them, well out of arm’s reach if not out of reach of a flying tackle. She hoped no one was about to tackle anyone else. “Ronon Dex,” he said, his rusty voice rising over the rustle of the tall grass. “Dr. Keller.”
“That’s us,” Ronon said. He didn’t like to use the names Sheppard had given the Wraith, Jennifer had already noticed. Then again, they weren’t their real names, if they had real names, so she wasn’t sure using them won them any points for being polite.
“Thank you for meeting with us,” Jennifer said.
Todd inclined his head slightly to her. She wished she knew exactly what that meant. “As you see, I am practically defenseless. This is neutral ground, by long tradition. You may put your weapon away.” His eyes flickered to Ronon as he said it, but returned to Jennifer.
