Death Game

Chapter Eight

Afternoon came. The barge glided onward, drawn by plodding oxen.

John had been trying to chat up one of the guardsmen, but he came back at last and sat down with Teyla beneath the awning, on the right side of the barge now, out of the sun. “Three more hours or so,” he said, rubbing his stubbled chin. “If I got that right. So not too much farther to Pelagia.”

Teyla stretched out her legs flexing her bare toes, her boots and socks piled neatly beside the bench. “Not much longer then.”

John looked like he’d like to take his shoes off, but didn’t. “Not too much.” He had another drink of the lukewarm water they’d been provided and took his sunglasses off to wipe them on his shirt.

“It is your turn,” Teyla said.

“My turn for what?”

“To tell me a story,” she said, and gave him an offhanded smile. “I told you one last night. We have three hours with nothing to do except sit here. It is your turn to tell a story.”

“I don’t know any stories,” he said.

It was on the tip of her tongue to ask when he had journeyed in the desert before and what had befallen him there, but Teyla thought that it was probably not a happy story, not a story for a time like this, and so she asked instead for something she thought he might actually answer. “It is your turn,” she said tranquilly. “You must tell one. I would like the story of how you came to Atlantis.”

Antarctica is really quiet. It’s just miles and miles of snow, miles and miles of nothing. No towns, no cities, no highways. No people. Nothing. It’s quiet. Even in good weather you have to rely on instruments. The ground pretty much looks the same, just mountains and glaciers, and the outposts are so small that you could miss them and just keep on flying until you ran out of gas in an endless sea of clouds and snow that all blend together.

I liked it. Like I say, it was quiet.

My duties were pretty minimal, just flying some brass and some scientists around, a fifty mile hop out to an advance research post on the ice. Fly ‘em out, sit around while they did whatever they did, fly ‘em back. It’s the kind of job you give a guy who’s too flaky to handle anything else. I didn’t mind that. It was probably true.

One time it was this guy, General O’Neill. We were just cruising along, everything pretty normal, and suddenly the radio was reporting incoming, some kind of rogue missile that could acquire a target on its own. I had a hell of a time dodging the thing, and it would have gotten us if it hadn’t shut down by itself suddenly. I’d never seen anything like it.

Didn’t know then that I had Carson to blame. He was messing around with the command chair and accidentally fired an Ancient drone. But at least he turned it off before he blew me and O’Neill to kingdom come.

So I was screwing around while O’Neill met with a bunch of people, got to talking to Carson, and there was this thing. You’ve seen our chair. You know how it looks. This one was just like it, cold and strange and eerily beautiful, like it was carved out of a snowflake.

And I wanted it. I don’t quite know how else to put it. It’s like it needed to be touched. It needed me to touch it. I couldn’t stop looking at it. It looked like something out of a fairy tale, or like something I’d dreamed a long time ago but forgotten. And so I sat down.

You know what happened then, right? It turned on. It turned on because of the ATA gene, because I have this gene, because I’m descended from some Ancient who went native on Earth thousands of years ago. And then everybody rushed in, and Rodney said, “Imagine where we are in the solar system,” like that was some big thing. Anybody can do that, right? It’s like knowing your own address.

But it didn’t look like just anything, lines of force and gravity drawn in blue fire like the best heads-up display ever invented, planets and asteroids and comets tracing perfect ellipses, streaming datapoints by the thousands eager and ready and waiting. I’d never seen anything like it. Never felt anything like it, an interface that moved like my thoughts, faster than any game, faster than anything I ever flew.

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?