Shep H/C Pic-Fic Challenge: The Specimen Strikes Back (Chapter 10)
Title: The Specimen Strikes Back
Author: nacinom
Rating: PG13
Characters: John Sheppard, Teyla Emmagan, Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, drama
Spoilers: Set during Season 3, soon after "Sunday"
Chapter word count: 4133 (Chapter 10 of 13-ish)
Disclaimer: The SGA world is not mine. I wrote this story for fun not profit.
Summary: The team is split up by difficult circumstances. Her Wraith detector tingling, Teyla wakes up alone in a very strange place. The last thing she remembers was that Sheppard had been with her. Will anything stop her from finding out what the heck is going on?
Acknowledgements: Thanks to coolbreeze1 for the very cool pic prompt and to my super beta editors:
amycat8733and firedew1.
Written for: The sheppard_hc 2013 Summer Pic-Fic Challenge
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Chapter 10
Teyla’s question was perfectly fair. The three Darts parked nose first against the wall to the right of the bay doors appeared indistinguishable. They bore no obvious insignia or other identifiable markings like the ones painted on military air and spacecraft from Earth. But John had a pilot’s trained eye and appreciation for all flying machines. During their pursuit on the planet’s surface, he’d memorized every angle, curve, and spike on the rear of the Dart that had culled Rodney and Ronon. Because the Wraith vessels were grown organically and not made in a factory from an exact blueprint, there were subtle yet discernable differences between them.
He was one hundred percent positive that this one was it. But it was nice to get confirmation when he noticed the grooves on the Dart’s tail left by the rounds from his P90. Despite the fever chills and the unpredictable shooting pains in his back, he had a sudden burst of energy. He would fly this puppy out of here to bring his team home. All they had to do was figure out a way to get out of the ship. Piece of cake.
“John, they are coming.” Teyla nudged him to take cover between the two closest Darts. “I will circle around them to create a distraction and give you time to take the Dart and pick me up.”
Four armed ralbraks were approaching with what apparently passed for stealth in their neck of the woods. Two wore purple uniforms and two wore longer, bright pink tunics. Camouflage was obviously not a top priority for them, unless their plan was to traipse through a little girl’s dream bedroom. If he were inclined to give them some credit for knowing their own business (xenophobic and tainted by a superiority complex as it was), he might acknowledge that with their high tech MO, they probably didn’t have much need to dress for boots on the ground combat situations. But it was better for his own morale to mock them.
The Darts blocked the blasts from the ralbraks’ mega-sized banana guns without suffering any apparent damage. It would be a travesty if their only means of escape were destroyed right in front of their eyes.
John took in the dimensions of the flight deck. As he’d suspected, there was a slight hiccup in their escape plan. “There isn’t enough clearance to fly the Dart through a sweep and scoop maneuver.”
Teyla didn’t seem upset at the news. “What is the alternative?”
He liked the way she trusted him to have a plan B in hand. He postponed his answer because the ralbraks had fanned out in an attempt to outflank them. He and Teyla fired their P90s in low sweeps. The continuous rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire echoed ominously in the large chamber.
Hit at the knee, one pink ralbrak went down. Its closest companion dragged it behind a large pyramidal shaped object, which was uncomfortably reminiscent of a scaled-up version of the robotic tentacled machine that Worf had used to vivisect John. The other ralbraks stopped shooting. One of them yelled something as it waved its weapon in John and Teyla’s direction.
A second later the familiar, impersonal translator voice reverberated through the bay. “You cannot escape this ship. Surrender your weapons now and you will be allowed to live. You have our assurance that you will be set free after you provide the requested information.”
“Assurances my ass,” John said under his breath.
Teyla glanced at him. Her eyebrows were always so expressive. “What information does it want?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
“It is lying,” she said. “They will kill us.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We’ll have to squeeze ourselves into the cockpit.”
“Is that even possible?”
John figured that together he and Teyla barely equaled the mass of an average Wraith pilot. “I think so, but it won’t be comfortable.”
“It certainly shall be more comfortable than remaining here,” Teyla said.
“Good point.” He dug into his tac vest and confirmed that he was out of flash bangs. For once, it would’ve been nice to have miscalculated his inventory. A smoke screen would’ve made things easier. Time for plan C. “We’ve got to….”
“The ralbraks are moving back,” Teyla said.
He looked to where she was pointing. “Crap. We’re running out of time. Cover me.”
He stepped out from behind the Dart and took careful aim at the closest retreating figure. One shot and it dropped to the ground. Another ralbrak with a blown knee cap might buy them enough time to scramble into the Dart before the ship’s captain decided to vent the bay into space. A clean way for them to get rid of the human pests their former specimens had become.
The ralbraks’ comrades stopped their retreat and returned fire. Hopefully, whoever was in charge of the ship valued its crew’s lives despite the alleged abundance of replacements in cryogenic storage.
John ducked back next to Teyla. “Shoot around them to pin them down. Try not to hit them. We don’t want them desperate, yet.”
While she was busy shooting at the ralbraks, he dug out the last block of C-4 and slipped it into one of the propulsion tubes from the middle Dart.
“I am almost out of bullets. I have to replace the magazine,” she said.
“Okay, I’ll take over.” John stepped into her post as she crouched down. He was running a little low on rounds too, but he had enough left for their immediate needs. Later they would either be free with plenty of time to replace magazines or dead.
Within a few seconds, Teyla was back in business. Unlike McKay, she had a natural facility with all the weapons they had brought over from Earth.
“Time to go,” he said. “I’ll go first. You get in right behind me.”
Without turning her attention away from the ralbraks, Teyla nodded.
John trusted her to protect his six as he stepped on the stubby Dart wing and swung his leg over to climb into the cockpit. He could ignore the stabs of pain from most of the abused parts of his body, but the spikes of fire piercing his spine made him gasp. It was as if the machine was drilling into him again. Luckily, Teyla couldn’t hear him over the racket she was making with the P90. He shoved his weaknesses aside and sat forward in the seat to leave room for her. A cursory glance reassured him that the ralbraks hadn’t messed with the Dart’s instrumentation. If they had, he and Teyla would’ve been screwed.
To cover her six, he scanned around for a target for his P90. He found nothing worth shooting at. The transport shuttles and other junk scattered around bay blocked the ralbraks’ retreating figures.
A rainbow of colored lights suddenly flashed to life on a large oblong panel to the right of the bay doors. The colors pulsed with the same cadence as the horn that had just begun to screech like a banshee. Any second now, they would start feeling the effects of decompression as the bay doors began to open into space.
“Teyla, get in here now!”
As she climbed over the side of the Dart, John remembered her leg wound. No wonder she wasn’t moving with her usual agility. He dropped the P90 in his lap and clasped her upper arm to help control her flop into the cockpit. All the twisting and jostling didn’t feel good at all. One particular bump hit him in such a bad spot that he let out a pathetic whimper.
“I am so sorry,” she said. But she didn’t stop. There was no time to be gentle.
“It’s okay,” John said.
Quickly and with only a more few hisses of pain (from both of them), she untangled her limbs and slipped into the tight space behind him. Her legs pressed against his hips and upper thighs, as if they were going for a sled ride. It was an intimate position that in a calmer situation would’ve been either very enjoyable or quite embarrassing. Teyla was his teammate, but she was also a beautiful woman, and no matter how hard John always tried to keep his thoughts about her strictly professional, he was a warm-blooded, hetero male. And she was definitely and delightfully not male. Thalen hadn’t lied when he’d told Teyla that John cared for her more than she knew.
He blinked repeatedly to clear up the many tiny points of light that flickered in his vision as he scrambled to find the internal canopy control. He pressed what was hopefully the right one. The opaque canopy materialized in an instant. For the moment, they were safe from the venting atmosphere.
He activated the Dart’s HUD. One second there was nothing there, the next a confusing mess of readouts burst into life, mysteriously projected onto the dashboard and interior curve of the canopy. All the information pilots would need, except for a direct visual of what the heck went on right outside the ship.
Behind him, Teyla gasped.
“Is it your leg? You should bandage it,” he said.
“I will, but it is not that. I have never sat in a Dart before. It feels … strange,” she said. Of course she hadn’t; all her previous experiences with Darts had involved being culled and transported as disassembled molecules in the materializer buffer.
“Can you sense it like you did when you flew the Hive ship?” John didn’t want to mention Michael and the whole Carson iratus retrovirus disaster. So many mistakes. So many regrets.
“No, I cannot,” she said. “It is a diluted version of the discomfort I feel in the presence of a single Wraith. Perhaps, I would be able to sense more if there were a tactile interface.”
“The Darts aren’t equipped with those.” So much for the wishful thinking that with her Wraith-sense she might be able to help him decipher the HUD readings.
“Sorry that I cannot be of any assistance,” she said as if she’d read his mind.
“It’s okay. I know how to fly it.”
“I am well aware that you do. I am not at all worried,” she said. He could practically hear the smile in her voice.
Last year, Lieutenant Ford and his merry band of Wraith enzyme addicts with hero complexes had forced John through a self-taught, fly-or you and your friends-die crash course on piloting a Dart. This time he didn’t have the benefit of McKay’s handy computer tablet dashboard interface to translate the readouts from the HUD. He would have to rely on his good memory and pilot instincts.
John found the section on the HUD that showed the activity in their surroundings. Apparently not much was going on. Then he noticed the energy spike readings in the center of the bay. They matched up with the life signs on his LSD.
“Two of the shuttles are being powered on. There’s a ralbrak in each.” He puzzled over the data scrolling down the right side of the Dart’s HUD. The pounding in his head and his rather primitive grasp of written Wraith weren’t helping speed things up. “The bay is almost completely vented to space.”
“Their plan is to let us go. Pursue us with their shuttles and destroy us in space.”
“Yup. They want to avoid more damage to their ship. We’d rather do the opposite.” John searched his pockets for the last detonator. He reached over his shoulder to hand it to Teyla. “I’ll need both hands to handle the controls. Would you mind being in charge of this?”
“It would be my pleasure.” She took the little gizmo from his hand. “I had not noticed you planting another charge.”
“You were busy. I hid it in the middle Dart.” He almost made a joke about the C-4 being a tip for maid service, but that would have required an explanation that he didn’t have the breath to give. “So that the debris doesn’t block our escape path, I won’t fire the Dart’s weapons until we’re out of the bay. Trigger the detonator when I tell you we’re clear of the bulkhead.” It would take him a few, precious seconds to maneuver the Dart into position to fire at any of the departing shuttles. The fewer shuttles chasing them, the better. He wasn’t sure if blowing up the Dart would do enough damage to the nearby ralbrak shuttles, but it was worth a try.
“I like your plan,” she said.
“Okay, here we go.”
And then there was no time to chit chat.
He flicked a switch and pulled up gently on the main throttle. The Dart’s engines responded immediately with a smooth vertical lift. With a touch more power, they easily broke the makeshift docking clamps that the ralbraks had used to anchor the ship onto the deck. Despite the typical moldy Wraith smell, mighty uncomfortable seats, ghoulish-looking skeletal interior, and complete reliance on instrument flying, the Darts were pretty sweet fighters.
There wasn’t much ceiling clearance in the bay, so John picked a low path that barely skimmed over the other Darts and ralbrak shuttles.
When they zoomed out of the bay into space a few seconds later, he said, “Hit it."
The C-4 must have made a bit of a mess because there was no one immediately on their tail.
To quickly reverse direction, he pulled the Dart straight up into a vertical lift. Then he swiveled into a one-eighty which positioned him for a quick descent-a textbook hammerhead turn-an acrobatic maneuver his flight instructor never imagined John would be doing in space in an alien spaceship. Good thing the Dart’s inertial dampers worked just as well as the ones in the puddle jumpers, otherwise he would have ended up squishing Teyla against the back of their cramped seat. It wouldn’t have been pleasant for either of them.
If he’d correctly interpreted the HUD, high impact destruction was ongoing in the bay compartment of the ralbrak vessel. Maybe, as he had secretly hoped, the C-4 blast had triggered the self-destruct on one or both the Darts, wreaking even more havoc.
He felt Teyla peering over his shoulder.
“Things are blowing up in there,” he said pointing to the spot on the HUD.
“Oh, I see.”
He repeatedly fired the Dart’s energy weapon at the bay entrance just as one of the shuttles was exiting. By the looks of its skittering flight pattern away from the scene, he must have hit it badly enough to partially disable it. Maybe its retrieval would keep the mother ship from chasing after them, at least for a little while. That was one piece of good news. And the other good news was that the HUD showed additional damage to the bay compartment.
He plunged the Dart along the underbelly of the larger ship and indiscriminately fired away at the structure, hoping to hit something vital. Too bad they couldn’t get a visual on what was going on. Not that it would be as impressive as the space battle scenes from Star Wars and Star Trek, with impossible colorful bursts of flames and rancorous blasts in airless space. The kind of stuff that inevitably drove McKay into a rant (especially when John egged him on) against the preposterous physics and other egregious scientific errors made by movie directors and, verging on criminal according to McKay, by the morons they hired as scientific advisors. The rants usually ended when John pointed out that if they hired McKay as a consultant, the movies would be scientifically accurate, special effects snoozers.
A blinking point on the HUD showed the bad news. A second shuttle had made it out of the bay unharmed. If he didn’t destroy it quickly, it might snag them with the tech they’d used to capture the three Darts in the first place. Or had the mother ship done that?
“It would’ve been helpful to know how the ralbraks managed to grab the Darts,” he said. He was flying in an erratic pattern to lure the shuttle away from the mother ship, which (if he was reading the HUD correctly) had suffered some damage beyond the bay area, but not enough to stop it from activating its own weapons system. More bad news.
“Can the Daedalus’ transport beam capture an object as large as a Dart?” Teyla said.
“No.” Some time ago, he’d read a report about the Asgard beam capabilities. The math had been very cool, the physics a little less so. Bottom line: small nukes, yes; larger more complex machines, especially while in flight, no. This didn’t mean that the ralbrak’s transporter had the same limitations. If so, why hadn’t they have used it already? “Maybe they have a tractor beam.”
“What is that?”
“Something I’ve only seen in mov…” He stopped in midstream to avoid the burst of fire from his pursuer, who had caught up with him faster than expected.
The little stinker had become a true pain in the ass. John sent the Dart downward into a spin, then rolled into an accelerated split S maneuver to reverse course and sneak up behind the too cocky ralbrak pilot. The Dart’s systems locked onto their target. It took only one pulse to tear the disc apart.
“Well done,” Teyla said. “I don’t see any other shuttles near us. Or am I misreading the display?”
“You got it right. Only those two made it out.” John manipulated the HUD to retrace their path to the point of origin. He pointed to a larger, moving blob. “Crap, the mother ship is chasing us.”
He pushed the engine to put some more distance between them and impending doom.
“Are the Dart’s weapons powerful enough to disable it?” Teyla asked.
“It’d be hard. Mama ship is a big sucker, the size of a BC-304 Daedalus-class warship. And I’ve got no intel on its shield configuration and potential weaknesses.” He checked and rechecked all the information he could glean from the HUD. Nothing useful. He supposed that in a similar situation a Wraith pilot would turn kamikaze. Contrary to popular belief, John didn’t have a death wish. Far from it. However, if alone, he might have risked another run at the ralbraks, but he refused to gamble with his teammates’ lives. “I hate to leave without finishing the job, but I think we’d best skedaddle.”
“It is for the best,” Teyla said. “I just hope that we have inflicted enough damage to prevent them from continuing on their abhorrent mission.”
“Me too,” he said. The ralbrak ship wasn’t gaining much ground. Maybe they’d damaged its engines. If that were true, they would soon lose interest in pursuing them.
“Have you located the nearest planet with a stargate?”
“Yes, we’re heading towards it. It’s a spacegate.” The HUD was set to automatically search for stargates and show a continuously updated star map of their locations. John had previous experience with this feature. It was a useful thing, because with the adrenaline rush from the dog fight simmering down, his battered body had begun to lag. He wiped at his sweaty forehead.
“Argh.” He’d forgotten about the wound in his arm. It pulsed with fire.
“Take this.” Teyla offered him a handful of pills and her canteen.
“Yes ma’am.” He took the meds and chased them down with sips of water.
“John?” Teyla sounded uncharacteristically hesitant.
“Yes?”
“Can you verify that Ronon and Rodney are indeed in this Dart?”
Excellent question. He studied the materializer readings, a handy skill that Zelenka had taught him during the McKay-Cadman simultaneously scary and weirdly entertaining, two people in one body incident. “There are two life signs. It has to be them. It has to be.”
“You are right. The life signs must be Ronon and Rodney’s,” she said. “Thanks to the diversion they provided, we managed to help the villagers hide from the culling. No one else was taken.”
They dropped the subject without either of them mentioning that they didn’t know what happened after they were taken by the ralbraks. They had to go with the optimistic assumption that the Dart that captured their friends got caught by the ralbraks before it went back to its Hive ship to dump its latest batch of fresh meat. He squashed aside the annoying voice in his head that wanted to point out that the two life signs might be Wraith drones being transported or other poor bastards snagged during a subsequent culling. Either way, they’d get confirmation soon enough.
The ralbraks had brought them to the outer reaches of Pegasus where the Ancients had more sparsely dispersed their stargates. According to his initial estimate, at the current safely sustainable maximum speed, it should take them nearly two hours to reach the stargate. Normally, he would consider this to be a pretty short flight, but today it seemed to go on forever. He felt so drained.
“Do you want a power bar?” he said, remembering the stash he kept in his tac vest for McKay and other emergency situations.
“Yes, thank you,” she said. “You should try to eat something too.”
He took one bite of his and slowly chewed it. When he swallowed, his stomach protested. He managed to keep it down. He set the rest of the bar aside. The Dart smelled bad enough with its natural eau de Wraith mixed in with their own (probably mostly his) rather potent BO-an unrefined blend of sweat, blood, dirt, and ralbrak spittle.
To keep him and herself awake, Teyla engaged him in a conversation. First, she asked about the HUD and other Dart controls. He showed her pretty much everything he knew. With some practice she could fly this thing. Then she talked about other things. All probably interesting, but he only remembered little snippets.
At one point, the warmth of her breath against his neck made him shiver. Or maybe it was a fever chill.
“Teyla, I’m sorry about the grenade,” John said. The guilty thought had nagged him since he’d seen her sickened expression when they were traipsing through the gore.
“What do you mean?”
“I shouldn’t have made you throw it. That bloody kill shouldn’t be on your conscience.”
Not usually the touchy-feely type, Teyla gently rubbed his good shoulder. “You did not make me do anything. I did what I had to do for us to get out of that place alive. You did the same. It is the ralbraks who forced us to fight for our survival. I am glad we won.”
“Me too,” he said.
She had to nudge him a few times when he started drifting off course.
When they finally reached the spacegate, he pressed the symbols on the Dart’s DHD. “I’m dialing the spacegate in the Jalaranion solar system.” The system’s one habitable planet, M8R-174, had its own stargate. They considered M8R-174 to be currently safe from the Wraith for the tragic reason that it had been culled three months before. The surviving Jalaranions had relocated their settlements farther away from their gate, but they kept sentries posted by it.
“It would not be safe to fly the Dart through their planet’s ring,” Teyla said. Thanks to the weapons and training provided by the Atlantis expedition, the Jalaranions were quite capable of shooting down an incoming Dart.
“That would be one stupid way to die,” he said. Even though it wasn’t funny, the irony made him chuckle (was this an early stage of delirium?). The ensuing coughing fit hurt his rib cage and brought on a dizzy spell.
Teyla made him drink more water. Maybe the discomfort from one of Worf’s intrusive devices had been worth the price of a roomy bladder.
Once they popped out of the wormhole, it took another endless hour to reach the planet. He entered the atmosphere over an uninhabited part of the single continent. He didn’t want to scare the bejesus out of its traumatized and trigger-happy population.
His headache and the shivering had gotten worse.
“John, you are quite ill. You should set down as soon as you find a suitable area,” Teyla said.
“We’re still far from the stargate,” he said, even though she was right.
“No matter, we will make Ronon and, if need be, Rodney walk to get help.”
He liked that idea. It was about time those two pitched in with this whole escape thing. So he did as he was told. The first part of the task went well. He rematerialized the two life signs in a nice grassy field near a grove of trees. No way yet to confirm that they were their two friends.
The second part was tougher. Admittedly, it was not his best landing.
Go back to C hapter 1.
Author: nacinom
Rating: PG13
Characters: John Sheppard, Teyla Emmagan, Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, drama
Spoilers: Set during Season 3, soon after "Sunday"
Chapter word count: 4133 (Chapter 10 of 13-ish)
Disclaimer: The SGA world is not mine. I wrote this story for fun not profit.
Summary: The team is split up by difficult circumstances. Her Wraith detector tingling, Teyla wakes up alone in a very strange place. The last thing she remembers was that Sheppard had been with her. Will anything stop her from finding out what the heck is going on?
Acknowledgements: Thanks to coolbreeze1 for the very cool pic prompt and to my super beta editors:
amycat8733and firedew1.
Written for: The sheppard_hc 2013 Summer Pic-Fic Challenge
----------------------------------------------
Chapter 10
Teyla’s question was perfectly fair. The three Darts parked nose first against the wall to the right of the bay doors appeared indistinguishable. They bore no obvious insignia or other identifiable markings like the ones painted on military air and spacecraft from Earth. But John had a pilot’s trained eye and appreciation for all flying machines. During their pursuit on the planet’s surface, he’d memorized every angle, curve, and spike on the rear of the Dart that had culled Rodney and Ronon. Because the Wraith vessels were grown organically and not made in a factory from an exact blueprint, there were subtle yet discernable differences between them.
He was one hundred percent positive that this one was it. But it was nice to get confirmation when he noticed the grooves on the Dart’s tail left by the rounds from his P90. Despite the fever chills and the unpredictable shooting pains in his back, he had a sudden burst of energy. He would fly this puppy out of here to bring his team home. All they had to do was figure out a way to get out of the ship. Piece of cake.
“John, they are coming.” Teyla nudged him to take cover between the two closest Darts. “I will circle around them to create a distraction and give you time to take the Dart and pick me up.”
Four armed ralbraks were approaching with what apparently passed for stealth in their neck of the woods. Two wore purple uniforms and two wore longer, bright pink tunics. Camouflage was obviously not a top priority for them, unless their plan was to traipse through a little girl’s dream bedroom. If he were inclined to give them some credit for knowing their own business (xenophobic and tainted by a superiority complex as it was), he might acknowledge that with their high tech MO, they probably didn’t have much need to dress for boots on the ground combat situations. But it was better for his own morale to mock them.
The Darts blocked the blasts from the ralbraks’ mega-sized banana guns without suffering any apparent damage. It would be a travesty if their only means of escape were destroyed right in front of their eyes.
John took in the dimensions of the flight deck. As he’d suspected, there was a slight hiccup in their escape plan. “There isn’t enough clearance to fly the Dart through a sweep and scoop maneuver.”
Teyla didn’t seem upset at the news. “What is the alternative?”
He liked the way she trusted him to have a plan B in hand. He postponed his answer because the ralbraks had fanned out in an attempt to outflank them. He and Teyla fired their P90s in low sweeps. The continuous rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire echoed ominously in the large chamber.
Hit at the knee, one pink ralbrak went down. Its closest companion dragged it behind a large pyramidal shaped object, which was uncomfortably reminiscent of a scaled-up version of the robotic tentacled machine that Worf had used to vivisect John. The other ralbraks stopped shooting. One of them yelled something as it waved its weapon in John and Teyla’s direction.
A second later the familiar, impersonal translator voice reverberated through the bay. “You cannot escape this ship. Surrender your weapons now and you will be allowed to live. You have our assurance that you will be set free after you provide the requested information.”
“Assurances my ass,” John said under his breath.
Teyla glanced at him. Her eyebrows were always so expressive. “What information does it want?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
“It is lying,” she said. “They will kill us.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We’ll have to squeeze ourselves into the cockpit.”
“Is that even possible?”
John figured that together he and Teyla barely equaled the mass of an average Wraith pilot. “I think so, but it won’t be comfortable.”
“It certainly shall be more comfortable than remaining here,” Teyla said.
“Good point.” He dug into his tac vest and confirmed that he was out of flash bangs. For once, it would’ve been nice to have miscalculated his inventory. A smoke screen would’ve made things easier. Time for plan C. “We’ve got to….”
“The ralbraks are moving back,” Teyla said.
He looked to where she was pointing. “Crap. We’re running out of time. Cover me.”
He stepped out from behind the Dart and took careful aim at the closest retreating figure. One shot and it dropped to the ground. Another ralbrak with a blown knee cap might buy them enough time to scramble into the Dart before the ship’s captain decided to vent the bay into space. A clean way for them to get rid of the human pests their former specimens had become.
The ralbraks’ comrades stopped their retreat and returned fire. Hopefully, whoever was in charge of the ship valued its crew’s lives despite the alleged abundance of replacements in cryogenic storage.
John ducked back next to Teyla. “Shoot around them to pin them down. Try not to hit them. We don’t want them desperate, yet.”
While she was busy shooting at the ralbraks, he dug out the last block of C-4 and slipped it into one of the propulsion tubes from the middle Dart.
“I am almost out of bullets. I have to replace the magazine,” she said.
“Okay, I’ll take over.” John stepped into her post as she crouched down. He was running a little low on rounds too, but he had enough left for their immediate needs. Later they would either be free with plenty of time to replace magazines or dead.
Within a few seconds, Teyla was back in business. Unlike McKay, she had a natural facility with all the weapons they had brought over from Earth.
“Time to go,” he said. “I’ll go first. You get in right behind me.”
Without turning her attention away from the ralbraks, Teyla nodded.
John trusted her to protect his six as he stepped on the stubby Dart wing and swung his leg over to climb into the cockpit. He could ignore the stabs of pain from most of the abused parts of his body, but the spikes of fire piercing his spine made him gasp. It was as if the machine was drilling into him again. Luckily, Teyla couldn’t hear him over the racket she was making with the P90. He shoved his weaknesses aside and sat forward in the seat to leave room for her. A cursory glance reassured him that the ralbraks hadn’t messed with the Dart’s instrumentation. If they had, he and Teyla would’ve been screwed.
To cover her six, he scanned around for a target for his P90. He found nothing worth shooting at. The transport shuttles and other junk scattered around bay blocked the ralbraks’ retreating figures.
A rainbow of colored lights suddenly flashed to life on a large oblong panel to the right of the bay doors. The colors pulsed with the same cadence as the horn that had just begun to screech like a banshee. Any second now, they would start feeling the effects of decompression as the bay doors began to open into space.
“Teyla, get in here now!”
As she climbed over the side of the Dart, John remembered her leg wound. No wonder she wasn’t moving with her usual agility. He dropped the P90 in his lap and clasped her upper arm to help control her flop into the cockpit. All the twisting and jostling didn’t feel good at all. One particular bump hit him in such a bad spot that he let out a pathetic whimper.
“I am so sorry,” she said. But she didn’t stop. There was no time to be gentle.
“It’s okay,” John said.
Quickly and with only a more few hisses of pain (from both of them), she untangled her limbs and slipped into the tight space behind him. Her legs pressed against his hips and upper thighs, as if they were going for a sled ride. It was an intimate position that in a calmer situation would’ve been either very enjoyable or quite embarrassing. Teyla was his teammate, but she was also a beautiful woman, and no matter how hard John always tried to keep his thoughts about her strictly professional, he was a warm-blooded, hetero male. And she was definitely and delightfully not male. Thalen hadn’t lied when he’d told Teyla that John cared for her more than she knew.
He blinked repeatedly to clear up the many tiny points of light that flickered in his vision as he scrambled to find the internal canopy control. He pressed what was hopefully the right one. The opaque canopy materialized in an instant. For the moment, they were safe from the venting atmosphere.
He activated the Dart’s HUD. One second there was nothing there, the next a confusing mess of readouts burst into life, mysteriously projected onto the dashboard and interior curve of the canopy. All the information pilots would need, except for a direct visual of what the heck went on right outside the ship.
Behind him, Teyla gasped.
“Is it your leg? You should bandage it,” he said.
“I will, but it is not that. I have never sat in a Dart before. It feels … strange,” she said. Of course she hadn’t; all her previous experiences with Darts had involved being culled and transported as disassembled molecules in the materializer buffer.
“Can you sense it like you did when you flew the Hive ship?” John didn’t want to mention Michael and the whole Carson iratus retrovirus disaster. So many mistakes. So many regrets.
“No, I cannot,” she said. “It is a diluted version of the discomfort I feel in the presence of a single Wraith. Perhaps, I would be able to sense more if there were a tactile interface.”
“The Darts aren’t equipped with those.” So much for the wishful thinking that with her Wraith-sense she might be able to help him decipher the HUD readings.
“Sorry that I cannot be of any assistance,” she said as if she’d read his mind.
“It’s okay. I know how to fly it.”
“I am well aware that you do. I am not at all worried,” she said. He could practically hear the smile in her voice.
Last year, Lieutenant Ford and his merry band of Wraith enzyme addicts with hero complexes had forced John through a self-taught, fly-or you and your friends-die crash course on piloting a Dart. This time he didn’t have the benefit of McKay’s handy computer tablet dashboard interface to translate the readouts from the HUD. He would have to rely on his good memory and pilot instincts.
John found the section on the HUD that showed the activity in their surroundings. Apparently not much was going on. Then he noticed the energy spike readings in the center of the bay. They matched up with the life signs on his LSD.
“Two of the shuttles are being powered on. There’s a ralbrak in each.” He puzzled over the data scrolling down the right side of the Dart’s HUD. The pounding in his head and his rather primitive grasp of written Wraith weren’t helping speed things up. “The bay is almost completely vented to space.”
“Their plan is to let us go. Pursue us with their shuttles and destroy us in space.”
“Yup. They want to avoid more damage to their ship. We’d rather do the opposite.” John searched his pockets for the last detonator. He reached over his shoulder to hand it to Teyla. “I’ll need both hands to handle the controls. Would you mind being in charge of this?”
“It would be my pleasure.” She took the little gizmo from his hand. “I had not noticed you planting another charge.”
“You were busy. I hid it in the middle Dart.” He almost made a joke about the C-4 being a tip for maid service, but that would have required an explanation that he didn’t have the breath to give. “So that the debris doesn’t block our escape path, I won’t fire the Dart’s weapons until we’re out of the bay. Trigger the detonator when I tell you we’re clear of the bulkhead.” It would take him a few, precious seconds to maneuver the Dart into position to fire at any of the departing shuttles. The fewer shuttles chasing them, the better. He wasn’t sure if blowing up the Dart would do enough damage to the nearby ralbrak shuttles, but it was worth a try.
“I like your plan,” she said.
“Okay, here we go.”
And then there was no time to chit chat.
He flicked a switch and pulled up gently on the main throttle. The Dart’s engines responded immediately with a smooth vertical lift. With a touch more power, they easily broke the makeshift docking clamps that the ralbraks had used to anchor the ship onto the deck. Despite the typical moldy Wraith smell, mighty uncomfortable seats, ghoulish-looking skeletal interior, and complete reliance on instrument flying, the Darts were pretty sweet fighters.
There wasn’t much ceiling clearance in the bay, so John picked a low path that barely skimmed over the other Darts and ralbrak shuttles.
When they zoomed out of the bay into space a few seconds later, he said, “Hit it."
The C-4 must have made a bit of a mess because there was no one immediately on their tail.
To quickly reverse direction, he pulled the Dart straight up into a vertical lift. Then he swiveled into a one-eighty which positioned him for a quick descent-a textbook hammerhead turn-an acrobatic maneuver his flight instructor never imagined John would be doing in space in an alien spaceship. Good thing the Dart’s inertial dampers worked just as well as the ones in the puddle jumpers, otherwise he would have ended up squishing Teyla against the back of their cramped seat. It wouldn’t have been pleasant for either of them.
If he’d correctly interpreted the HUD, high impact destruction was ongoing in the bay compartment of the ralbrak vessel. Maybe, as he had secretly hoped, the C-4 blast had triggered the self-destruct on one or both the Darts, wreaking even more havoc.
He felt Teyla peering over his shoulder.
“Things are blowing up in there,” he said pointing to the spot on the HUD.
“Oh, I see.”
He repeatedly fired the Dart’s energy weapon at the bay entrance just as one of the shuttles was exiting. By the looks of its skittering flight pattern away from the scene, he must have hit it badly enough to partially disable it. Maybe its retrieval would keep the mother ship from chasing after them, at least for a little while. That was one piece of good news. And the other good news was that the HUD showed additional damage to the bay compartment.
He plunged the Dart along the underbelly of the larger ship and indiscriminately fired away at the structure, hoping to hit something vital. Too bad they couldn’t get a visual on what was going on. Not that it would be as impressive as the space battle scenes from Star Wars and Star Trek, with impossible colorful bursts of flames and rancorous blasts in airless space. The kind of stuff that inevitably drove McKay into a rant (especially when John egged him on) against the preposterous physics and other egregious scientific errors made by movie directors and, verging on criminal according to McKay, by the morons they hired as scientific advisors. The rants usually ended when John pointed out that if they hired McKay as a consultant, the movies would be scientifically accurate, special effects snoozers.
A blinking point on the HUD showed the bad news. A second shuttle had made it out of the bay unharmed. If he didn’t destroy it quickly, it might snag them with the tech they’d used to capture the three Darts in the first place. Or had the mother ship done that?
“It would’ve been helpful to know how the ralbraks managed to grab the Darts,” he said. He was flying in an erratic pattern to lure the shuttle away from the mother ship, which (if he was reading the HUD correctly) had suffered some damage beyond the bay area, but not enough to stop it from activating its own weapons system. More bad news.
“Can the Daedalus’ transport beam capture an object as large as a Dart?” Teyla said.
“No.” Some time ago, he’d read a report about the Asgard beam capabilities. The math had been very cool, the physics a little less so. Bottom line: small nukes, yes; larger more complex machines, especially while in flight, no. This didn’t mean that the ralbrak’s transporter had the same limitations. If so, why hadn’t they have used it already? “Maybe they have a tractor beam.”
“What is that?”
“Something I’ve only seen in mov…” He stopped in midstream to avoid the burst of fire from his pursuer, who had caught up with him faster than expected.
The little stinker had become a true pain in the ass. John sent the Dart downward into a spin, then rolled into an accelerated split S maneuver to reverse course and sneak up behind the too cocky ralbrak pilot. The Dart’s systems locked onto their target. It took only one pulse to tear the disc apart.
“Well done,” Teyla said. “I don’t see any other shuttles near us. Or am I misreading the display?”
“You got it right. Only those two made it out.” John manipulated the HUD to retrace their path to the point of origin. He pointed to a larger, moving blob. “Crap, the mother ship is chasing us.”
He pushed the engine to put some more distance between them and impending doom.
“Are the Dart’s weapons powerful enough to disable it?” Teyla asked.
“It’d be hard. Mama ship is a big sucker, the size of a BC-304 Daedalus-class warship. And I’ve got no intel on its shield configuration and potential weaknesses.” He checked and rechecked all the information he could glean from the HUD. Nothing useful. He supposed that in a similar situation a Wraith pilot would turn kamikaze. Contrary to popular belief, John didn’t have a death wish. Far from it. However, if alone, he might have risked another run at the ralbraks, but he refused to gamble with his teammates’ lives. “I hate to leave without finishing the job, but I think we’d best skedaddle.”
“It is for the best,” Teyla said. “I just hope that we have inflicted enough damage to prevent them from continuing on their abhorrent mission.”
“Me too,” he said. The ralbrak ship wasn’t gaining much ground. Maybe they’d damaged its engines. If that were true, they would soon lose interest in pursuing them.
“Have you located the nearest planet with a stargate?”
“Yes, we’re heading towards it. It’s a spacegate.” The HUD was set to automatically search for stargates and show a continuously updated star map of their locations. John had previous experience with this feature. It was a useful thing, because with the adrenaline rush from the dog fight simmering down, his battered body had begun to lag. He wiped at his sweaty forehead.
“Argh.” He’d forgotten about the wound in his arm. It pulsed with fire.
“Take this.” Teyla offered him a handful of pills and her canteen.
“Yes ma’am.” He took the meds and chased them down with sips of water.
“John?” Teyla sounded uncharacteristically hesitant.
“Yes?”
“Can you verify that Ronon and Rodney are indeed in this Dart?”
Excellent question. He studied the materializer readings, a handy skill that Zelenka had taught him during the McKay-Cadman simultaneously scary and weirdly entertaining, two people in one body incident. “There are two life signs. It has to be them. It has to be.”
“You are right. The life signs must be Ronon and Rodney’s,” she said. “Thanks to the diversion they provided, we managed to help the villagers hide from the culling. No one else was taken.”
They dropped the subject without either of them mentioning that they didn’t know what happened after they were taken by the ralbraks. They had to go with the optimistic assumption that the Dart that captured their friends got caught by the ralbraks before it went back to its Hive ship to dump its latest batch of fresh meat. He squashed aside the annoying voice in his head that wanted to point out that the two life signs might be Wraith drones being transported or other poor bastards snagged during a subsequent culling. Either way, they’d get confirmation soon enough.
The ralbraks had brought them to the outer reaches of Pegasus where the Ancients had more sparsely dispersed their stargates. According to his initial estimate, at the current safely sustainable maximum speed, it should take them nearly two hours to reach the stargate. Normally, he would consider this to be a pretty short flight, but today it seemed to go on forever. He felt so drained.
“Do you want a power bar?” he said, remembering the stash he kept in his tac vest for McKay and other emergency situations.
“Yes, thank you,” she said. “You should try to eat something too.”
He took one bite of his and slowly chewed it. When he swallowed, his stomach protested. He managed to keep it down. He set the rest of the bar aside. The Dart smelled bad enough with its natural eau de Wraith mixed in with their own (probably mostly his) rather potent BO-an unrefined blend of sweat, blood, dirt, and ralbrak spittle.
To keep him and herself awake, Teyla engaged him in a conversation. First, she asked about the HUD and other Dart controls. He showed her pretty much everything he knew. With some practice she could fly this thing. Then she talked about other things. All probably interesting, but he only remembered little snippets.
At one point, the warmth of her breath against his neck made him shiver. Or maybe it was a fever chill.
“Teyla, I’m sorry about the grenade,” John said. The guilty thought had nagged him since he’d seen her sickened expression when they were traipsing through the gore.
“What do you mean?”
“I shouldn’t have made you throw it. That bloody kill shouldn’t be on your conscience.”
Not usually the touchy-feely type, Teyla gently rubbed his good shoulder. “You did not make me do anything. I did what I had to do for us to get out of that place alive. You did the same. It is the ralbraks who forced us to fight for our survival. I am glad we won.”
“Me too,” he said.
She had to nudge him a few times when he started drifting off course.
When they finally reached the spacegate, he pressed the symbols on the Dart’s DHD. “I’m dialing the spacegate in the Jalaranion solar system.” The system’s one habitable planet, M8R-174, had its own stargate. They considered M8R-174 to be currently safe from the Wraith for the tragic reason that it had been culled three months before. The surviving Jalaranions had relocated their settlements farther away from their gate, but they kept sentries posted by it.
“It would not be safe to fly the Dart through their planet’s ring,” Teyla said. Thanks to the weapons and training provided by the Atlantis expedition, the Jalaranions were quite capable of shooting down an incoming Dart.
“That would be one stupid way to die,” he said. Even though it wasn’t funny, the irony made him chuckle (was this an early stage of delirium?). The ensuing coughing fit hurt his rib cage and brought on a dizzy spell.
Teyla made him drink more water. Maybe the discomfort from one of Worf’s intrusive devices had been worth the price of a roomy bladder.
Once they popped out of the wormhole, it took another endless hour to reach the planet. He entered the atmosphere over an uninhabited part of the single continent. He didn’t want to scare the bejesus out of its traumatized and trigger-happy population.
His headache and the shivering had gotten worse.
“John, you are quite ill. You should set down as soon as you find a suitable area,” Teyla said.
“We’re still far from the stargate,” he said, even though she was right.
“No matter, we will make Ronon and, if need be, Rodney walk to get help.”
He liked that idea. It was about time those two pitched in with this whole escape thing. So he did as he was told. The first part of the task went well. He rematerialized the two life signs in a nice grassy field near a grove of trees. No way yet to confirm that they were their two friends.
The second part was tougher. Admittedly, it was not his best landing.
Go back to C hapter 1.