Unascended

Chapter Seventeen

Daniel tried not to pace around the interior of the jumper. There wasn’t really room to take more than a few steps, anyway. Teyla’s words still rankled. All right, he’d gone off on a tangent, and one that might not have been tactful, but he’d spent years having to fight to pursue the answers to any questions other than “who’s trying to shoot us today and what are we going to do about it?”

He certainly didn’t believe he had all the answers. Some days he didn’t feel like he had any of the answers. But there had to be some way to fight back against that sense of frustration, to find out enough to be able to piece together the complete story of something. It was all intertwined, the Ancients and the Wraith and the Asgard, and he wasn’t sure how to begin understanding the story of Atlantis without knowing more.

It had to fit together, all the pieces that he’d been uncovering over the years. Somehow there had to be a way to assemble them into an actual story, one more satisfying than “a lot of strange and fascinating and tragic things have happened to humanity, but at least we’re still here.” He just needed more information. Or the right piece of information. Or—

The back hatch of the jumper opened, and he looked up, an apology and justification for his actions forming on his lips. Instead he stared at the two figures standing in the doorway and said, “Who the hell are you, and how did you get in here?”

One of them, a young woman with red-blond hair and a grim expression, pointed a gun at him. “Move away from the controls,” she said. Her companion, a tall man with golden skin and close-cropped hair, moved toward the pilot’s seat.

“I can’t fly this thing anyway,” Daniel said. He reached for his sidearm, and she moved fast, jamming the gun against his chest.

“Move and you’re dead,” she said.

“I thought you wanted me to move away from the controls.”

“Don’t get smart.” She reached for his radio earpiece and divested him of it neatly. She was wearing what looked like a military uniform, dark green and severely cut.

“I don’t think you’re going to be able to fly the jumper either,” he said. “Whatever it is you want, we can talk about it. But how about you put the gun down.”

“That’s what you think,” the woman said. She glanced at the man, who gave her a nervous look from where he sat at the controls.

“I’ve never seen a control panel like this.”

“Figure it out,” she said.

“You see, you’re not actually going to be able to activate any of the Ancient technology… ” Daniel trailed off as the rear door of the jumper closed. “Except apparently you can.”

“Thanks to the medical information your people traded to ours,” the woman said. “You didn’t think that we’d be able to activate the ATA gene successfully. You thought you were cheating us, didn’t you?” She smiled, not pleasantly. “Think again.”

“I actually have no idea who you are.”

“Sora Tyrus,” the woman said. “I take it you’re new.”

“Actually, yes. So whoever it is that you have a problem with in this picture, it isn’t me.”

“I don’t have a problem,” Sora said. “I have a new spaceship. My only question is, should I take you with it, or leave you here?”

“I think you should leave me here.”

“Take you with us it is,” Sora said. “Taka! Come over here and tie him up.”

She held her pistol jammed against his chest while the man snapped handcuffs around his wrists and relieved him of his pistol. Sora handed the man a second pair of handcuffs, which he used to cuff Daniel’s ankle to his chair.

“These controls aren’t much like the pictures you showed me,” Taka said, sliding back into the pilot’s seat. “It’s responding to my commands, but… ”

“This ship is a lot simpler than the Pride of the Genii,” Sora said. “Figure it out!”

“It’s a lot more complicated than a train, too!”

“You’re Genii,” Daniel said. “You’re supposed to be our allies.”

“She’s Genii, I’m not,” Taka said.

“Fly the ship,” Sora snapped. She turned back to Daniel with a scowl. “Ladon Radim is your ally. I’m not his favorite person anymore, or he wouldn’t have sent me out here to watch a bunch of farmers dig in the dirt. He’s not my favorite person, either. But now I’ve got something better than his creaky hulk of a warship that we haven’t figured out how to fly yet.”

“Our jumper,” Daniel prompted. He was getting the impression she was the kind of enemy who craved attention or validation and could therefore be relied upon to brag about her plans to a captive audience. That was always an advantage. The most dangerous enemies just kept their mouths shut and shot you.

“Your jumper is the proof that my friends’ method for activating the ATA gene works,” Sora said. “I was a little worried when it looked like none of the Manarians had even the recessive gene, but checking the Satedans who’ve settled here paid off. And now I’ve got a pilot.”

“More or less,” Taka said.

“Can you fly this thing or not?”

With a shudder, the jumper lifted off the ground.

“Flying a spaceship by trial and error sounds like a really bad idea,” Daniel said. “Anyway, your people have the Pride of the Genii, right? So you can test your ATA gene activation program with its equipment. You don’t need this ship.”

“I don’t have Pride of the Genii,” Sora said. “And Radim doesn’t know that I’ve been conducting my own private tests of our gene therapy ahead of his own glacial schedule. He wasn’t moving fast enough to suit a lot of people. Some friends of mine were willing to step in and move faster.”

“You said this stuff had been tested,” Taka said.

“You’re fine,” Sora said. “Fly the ship.” She slid into the seat next to Taka, leaving Daniel trying to work his hands free of the handcuffs. He found himself actually wishing Vala were there. She would be out of the cuffs in thirty seconds flat with a shrug of her shoulders and an unrepentant smile. Of course, whether she would let him out equally promptly was always a good question.

The jumper lifted the rest of the way off the ground, and began making its way unsteadily toward the gate.

“Dial the gate,” Sora said.

“How?”

“The ship has a DHD,” Sora snapped. As Taka brought the jumper around, Daniel could see running figures making for the gate.

His radio crackled tinnily in Sora’s pocket, and Sora pulled it out and set it on the control panel.

“What is happening?” Teyla demanded over the radio.

“I’m taking your ship,” Sora said. “Get out of my way.”

“Sora. You do not want to do this.”

“I’m tired of being told what I want to do,” Sora said. Taka was still struggling to get the ship lined up level with the gate, and Sora reached over to stab at the buttons of the jumper’s DHD herself.

“Is Dr. Jackson unharmed?” They had reached the gate, and Rodney had thrown himself full length to the ground in front of the planet’s DHD, pulling its maintenance panel open.

“She’s dialing the gate,” Daniel called, which he felt answered the question as well as providing more important information.

“Shut up!” Sora slapped her hand down on the last of the symbols, and the gate began to hum. It lit, the chevrons brightening, and then immediately dimmed again, its rising hum dropping to an anticlimactic thud. She turned on Taka. “What did you do?”

“We’ve disabled the gate,” Rodney said through the radio. “The jumper’s DHD won’t do you any good if the gate doesn’t have any power.”

“Ready weapons!”

“Oh, yes, brilliant idea, fire a drone at the DHD! Only if you’d like to be a permanent resident of Manaria.”

“What weapons?” Taka asked.

“Never mind,” Sora said. “They’re right, we can’t fire on them until they move.”

“If they move out of the way and then you shoot them, how are you intending to fix the DHD?” Daniel asked conversationally.

“It can’t be that hard,” Sora said, but she didn’t sound entirely convinced.

“Land the jumper now,” Teyla said over the radio.

“I don’t think so.”

Ronon was standing directly between the jumper and the rest of the team. He drew his pistol and fired at the jumper, several bolts of energy that rocked the ship when they hit.

“Shields!” Sora demanded.

Taka looked at her sideways. “We have shields?”

“Get us out of here,” she said. “Just get us out of range.”

“I can do that,” Taka said, and the jumper swerved away from the gate, picking up height and speed as it went. “And I think I’ve found the shields.”

“You think?”

“Trains don’t have shields,” Taka said. “And they don’t talk in your head. You’re expecting me to be an expert here?”

“I am warning you, Sora—” Teyla began over the radio. Sora switched it off.

“You’re going to have to negotiate if you want to get off this planet,” Daniel said into the silence that followed. “Unless you’d like to try to fly the jumper to the nearest solar system at sub-light speeds. That should take, what, a couple of years?”

“I’ll negotiate,” Sora said. She switched the radio back on. “You have five minutes to repair the damage you’ve done to the gate. If it’s not fixed by then, I’m going to shoot Dr. Jackson in the head.”

“This is a very bad idea,” Daniel said evenly as Sora snapped the radio off again.

“It’s a fair exchange,” Sora said. “I don’t really want to be saddled with you, and I do want this ship. I’ll be happy to throw you out unharmed as soon as your people fix the gate.”

“They can’t just give you the jumper,” Daniel said.

“That’s unfortunate for you.”

“Even if they did, what are you planning to do with it? If you take it back to the Genii homeworld, we’ll know where to find it.”

“And Radim will deny having it.”

“And we’ll tell him that we know you stole it.”

“If I leave any of you alive.”

Daniel winced inwardly. There was nothing to stop her from making a deal for his return and then firing on the rest of the team as soon as they repaired the gate. Although they were experienced enough to demand his return first. Only Sora seemed experienced enough to insist that they fix the gate first. And he’d rather not be the one sitting there with a gun to his head while they tried to figure out that little tactical problem.

“Do you just want me to circle around?” Taka said.

“No,” Sora said. “I don’t want to give them the chance to do anything to sabotage this ship. Put some distance between us and the gate.”

The jumper turned and began flying over rolling farmland, the bright squares and ribbons of cultivated fields set in between rougher patches of pasture land and copses of trees.

“What do you actually want out of this?” Daniel asked. “Are you trying to get back into Radim’s good graces, or trying to show him up, or do you just want the jumper for reasons that have nothing to do with Ladon Radim?”

Sora turned, pressing her lips together tightly. “Why should I tell you?”

“I’m listening. You might say I’m a captive audience.”

“Radim wants me dead,” Sora said. “And right now he has a parade of successes to keep him in power. Things will look a little different if I have an Ancient ship and the only successful program to activate the ATA gene in our people.”

“I thought you said it was Radim’s program.”

“I’ve improved on it.”

“I thought you weren’t a scientist.”

“How would you know?”

“You’re not interested in how the jumper works. And you didn’t try to persuade me that it was your research all along.” Daniel tried to spread his hands, only to have them jerked back by the handcuffs. “It was an educated guess.”

“I have friends who are scientists,” Sora said. Daniel repressed the urge to express surprise that she had friends at all. It really wasn’t the time for that. “And we had help.”

“Help?”

Sora wanted to talk, he could tell, and keeping her busy was probably the best way to give the team back at the gate time to do something. What they were going to do, he wasn’t sure, but at least they had a reputation for being good at improvising.

“What do we do now?” Rodney asked.

Teyla let out a frustrated breath. The jumper was disappearing quickly over the horizon. As impatient as she had been with Daniel, he did not actually deserve to be killed by Sora as part of her continuing grudge against Teyla. “What can you do?”

“I might be able to reprogram the DHD to send her to a different address than the one she dials. It would have to be one that’s recently been dialed.”

“You mean back to Atlantis.”

“And we radio them and tell them to raise the iris,” Ronon said.

“No,” Teyla said. “I do not want Sora dead. Do what you must to get the gate working again.”

Ronon put his head to one side. “She’s going to kill Jackson.”

“He will be equally dead if he is aboard a jumper that is disintegrated when it hits the iris.”

“I’m just saying she’s not a great person.”

“Even so. I would rather not kill her if there is any other choice.”

Rodney turned up his hands. “So, what, we trade her the jumper? We have four minutes to make up our minds.”

“We will trade her the jumper,” Teyla said. “When the DHD is working again, dial an unpopulated planet. Then call Atlantis and tell them to send two more jumpers to intercept Sora when she arrives there.”

“And then reprogram the DHD to send her to that address?” Rodney said. His hands were moving rapidly, his whole body tense with concentration. “We maybe have time to do two of those three things.”

“Then we will not call Atlantis. When Sora goes through the gate, we will follow her ourselves.”

“We’ll be in the same stand-off we’re in now,” Ronon said.

“Except that she will no longer have a hostage, and therefore we will not have a time limit,” Teyla said. “Rodney?”

“I’m working on it,” Rodney said. “Why is it never ‘take all the time you need, nothing bad will happen if you don’t work faster than humanly possible?’”

If he was complaining rather than flatly refusing, it meant that he could accomplish the tasks she had set him in the time they had left. “I have every faith in your abilities,” Teyla said.

“I still think we’d be better off smearing her across the iris,” Ronon said.

“I went to some considerable trouble to save her life when last we met,” Teyla said.

“Funny way of repaying you.”

“That is not why I did it,” Teyla said, and hoped she wasn’t about to regret it.

“I made friends with one of Radim’s researchers,” Sora said. “He was highly motivated to make friends with me after I showed him what I’d found. A device capable of making certain genetic changes in one person’s DNA given a genetic sample from someone else.”

“Interesting. I should tell you that we’ve had some very bad results from using Ancient devices to alter people’s DNA,” Daniel said. “There was the Ascension device that made people keel over dead if they didn’t reach enlightenment fast enough, for one thing. The exploding tumor incident also comes to mind.”

“Exploding what?” Taka demanded. The jumper wobbled perceptibly in the air, banking back and forth hard enough to make Sora grab at her chair to stay in it. It would have been the perfect moment to jump her if he hadn’t been handcuffed to a chair.

“I’m sure nothing like that will happen,” Daniel said.

“How sure?”

“You worry too much,” Sora said. “Besides, I’m not even sure it was an Ancient device. It had a setting that made it provide instructions in the language of the Ancestors, but also in some kind of writing nobody could figure out. And it didn’t look anything like the devices in Pride of the Genii.”

“And it wasn’t Wraith.”

“We’ve all seen Wraith technology before. Give me some credit. I may not be a scientist, but I’m not an idiot.”

“Was the writing — did it look something like this?” He sketched Asgard characters in the air with his fingers, and then shook his head in frustration. “Give me something to write with.” Sora shook her head, and he traced the shapes of the same characters more slowly. “Vertical and diagonal strokes, all the same weight.” He sketched the letters of the first phrase he thought of, “Thor’s hammer,” and then after a moment’s thought, “genetic pattern,” which seemed more relevant.

“That looks like it,” Sora said.

“That’s Asgard. That’s Asgard! And you found a piece of their genetic manipulation equipment? Where did you find it?”

“On Sateda,” Sora said. “It was in the city museum. Gathering dust, because no one who knew anything about science had ever taken a good look at it and figured out what they had.”

“The city museum that your people agreed not to loot as part of your trade agreement with the new Satedan leaders.”

“You looted this from our museum?” Taka said, swiveling around in his chair to face Sora. Daniel wished he wouldn’t, as it only made the jumper’s course more erratic, but he felt any tensions between the two of them were worth encouraging.

“We made a deal for the artifacts we took off Sateda.”

“At gunpoint, the way I heard it,” Daniel put in.

“That’s not true,” Sora said, but Taka was frowning. The jumper’s flight became even less stable.

“Maybe you should concentrate on flying the ship,” Daniel prompted.

“You said you found the device.”

“We did find it,” Sora said. “We had a deal with Cai and his people on Sateda to salvage machinery that they were in no position to use. Then the Lanteans got in the middle of it and persuaded them to go back on their bargain.” Taka looked like he was at least listening, and Daniel felt it was unfortunate for Sora that she went on, “Besides, what do you care? You’re Manarian now.”

“You don’t understand much.” The jumper pitched hard enough that Daniel would have fallen out of the chair if he weren’t cuffed to it.

“Watch what you’re doing!” Sora snapped.

Taka’s eyes were back on the console, but the jumper’s nose was down, and they were losing altitude fast. “I am,” he said. “But something’s wrong! The controls aren’t responding.”

Sora turned on Daniel, brandishing her pistol. “What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything. I’ve been sitting here handcuffed, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“McKay,” Sora said. “He must have sabotaged the ship somehow.”

“It’s not responding to my commands,” Taka said. “I can’t bring up the displays anymore.”

“Fix it!”

“How?”

“I might be able to fix it if you let me get to the controls,” Daniel said.

“Not a chance.”

“Then we’re going to crash,” he pointed out. The ground was coming up fast.

“Damn it!” Sora scrambled out of her chair and unfastened the cuff on his leg.

“Handcuffs too.”

She bent to unlock them left-handed, holding her pistol on him while she did.

“We’re going down!” Taka yelled.

“All right!” Sora said as she freed his hands. “Get this thing working again!”

“I’ll do my best,” Daniel said, and grabbed for her gun hand.

She brought her knee up hard, and he just barely managed to twist enough for it not to connect in a delicate location. He kicked off from the chair, knocking her down under his weight and rolling as she scrambled to get on top, fighting him for the pistol.

The jumper pitched wildly, and Taka was cursing at the controls. They were going down, and Daniel hoped fervently that Taka could bring the jumper in for a landing that wouldn’t kill them all. If he could, he had at least one advantage — he’d probably been in a lot more crashing ships than Sora had.

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.”

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 quickly. “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.”

“A puddle-jumper. Outside.” A chill ran down Elizabeth’s back. “You have a puddle-jumper outside.”

“Yes,” Dr. Lynn said, looking mystified.

Elizabeth turned and ran out the door of the office, ran down the hall past what had been the welcome desk, past people coming in with boxes, through the front doors. There, in the middle of the square beside the customs shed, was a stubby metal form. She felt her heart leap. She stopped. It sat not far from the Stargate, the tailgate down. Various Satedans were unloading boxes and crates from the back, no doubt the trade goods Ushan Cai had talked about.

Elizabeth took a step forward, then another.

Two men came around the corner of the shed, a small man with glasses and improbably blue eyes, and a taller one with square shoulders and a weapon slung casually across his chest. They stopped as if they’d hit a glass wall, the small man’s mouth open as he muttered something incomprehensible, and pieces suddenly slid into place, final and inexorable as though they had been there all along.

The man with the weapon blinked incredulously. “Dr. Weir?”

She felt herself smile. “Major Lorne, Dr. Zelenka, it’s good to see you.”