SGA fic: Planet Megalodon Wraith Defense Force, 1/4
Title: Planet Megalodon Wraith Defense Force
Author: Pentapus
Disclaimer: Stargate Atlantis is not mine.
Notes: Set in early season 2. Intended for sga_flashfic’s “Shark!!!1” challenge, but I fail at deadlines. Thanks to ltlj for the beta and for helping me keep up my determination to finish this thing. And to thetruebard who wouldn't let me get away with a less than perfect ending.
“How many times do I have to say: DO NOT THROW AWAY THE POTENTIALLY INVALUABLE ANCIENT ARTIFACTS,” Rodney seethed.
It had given him a sort of brain itch as he walked by, a square foot of matte black psuedo-plastic, folded neatly in the bottom of a plastic storage bin--one of the new people had mistaken it for Ancient packing material--before he came to his senses and snatched it to safety.
“That’s the unidentified material box, actually,” Simpson said icily from behind a laptop and a cowering chemist. “The trash is over by the door.”
Rodney harrumphed expertly. “As if I have time to spend on the flawed organizational systems of morons,” he said but fondly because his attention was on the Ancient diagrams blossoming across the touch-sensitive screen. “Oh, oh.”
The gold gleam of the Ancient characters was so delightful that even Simpson unfroze enough to admit, “But we didn’t think it could do that,” before Rodney was shouting over the radio for Zelenka. Initial tests showed that the screen responded only to gene carriers (Rodney didn’t even have to call dibs) and seemed unable to display whole sections of the Ancient database to which the diagrams seemed to correspond. About an hour in, Rodney unlocked the schematics of the control room consoles and everybody got real excited.
Realistically, Rodney had to admit that the square seemed to have poorer access to the database than the expedition laptops and lacked the--admittedly imperfect--translating programs that helped the non-linguists interpret the complicated Ancient grammar, but it was still neat.
The other plus--besides having an Ancient palm pilot to play with--came when he took the database square to the briefing room and it proved to be one piece of Ancient technology that John Sheppard couldn’t operate. Though it would be inaccurate to suggest that nothing happened when the Colonel tried to navigate the displayed directories.
“It’s a portable database terminal!” Rodney announced proudly. In the next chair, Zelenka did his usual hmming and hawing and was otherwise unsatisfactorily supportive.
“Default screen does appear to display table of contents very similar to database, though is in different form than we have seen previous--”
“Yes, yes, fine, the handheld version is designed to be more easily navigable than the stationary versions,” Rodney said and poked helpfully at one bubble in the web diagram labeled “Cool! Puddlejumper controls!” in Ancient which was when Sheppard suddenly got interested and tried to poke a bubble of his own. He got an immediate response. Sort of.
“John?” Elizabeth sounded worried, leaping out of her seat to peer across the table. Rodney might admit, later, to an instant of coldness in the chest region, but he'd probably caught a cold bug somewhere.
“Oh my,” said Zelenka.
“Huh,” Rodney said, taking back the square. “That’s funny.”
Sheppard was blinking slowly up at him from the floor, his chair rolling sedately away from where he had fallen out of it. “The hell?” Sheppard said, grabbing the edge of the table. The effects, it seemed, were extremely fleeting.
“You fainted,” Rodney said and, as an afterthought, beamed. “Try again.” He shoved the square back at him. Sheppard started. When his fingers brushed one black corner, he let out a shuddering breath and folded to the floor. Rodney stared, impressed.
“If you do that again,” Sheppard said mildly when he woke up the second time, only a moment later.
“Rodney!” Elizabeth again.
“You are astonishing,” Zelenka said with feeling.
“Okay, okay--where are you going, Colonel? Beckett.” He jerked a thumb towards the infirmary. Because there was no reason to be completely stupid about it.
“I have no idea,” Carson said, resigned, when he had Sheppard perched on the edge of a cot, submitting to medically minded prodding with Rodney bouncing at his shoulder. Elizabeth was on radio and Zelenka had vanished back to the lab.
“Not surprised,” Rodney said, cradling the square happily, folded up and conveniently palm sized. He tapped it against the back of Carson’s hand. Carson gave a tiny shriek, leaping away from the bed. “See? You’re fine. It shouldn’t do that.” Sheppard looked amused for all of two seconds before Rodney said, “Maybe--” and frowned at him.
Sheppard saw this one coming, finally, and jumped up in time to crumple onto the floor instead of the bed.
“God damnit, McKay!” he snapped, perfectly healthy as soon as Rodney took the square away from his skin.
“Rodney!” Carson said, which was getting repetitive, really.
“Fine. If you want to impede important scientific research--” Rodney lifted his chin and stomped out of the infirmary.
**
“You’ve been cleared for off world travel?” Elizabeth inquired politely, standing at bottom of the steps, hands clasped in front of her.
“Sure. As long as Rodney keeps that damn thing away from me.” John smiled tightly at the scientist fiddling with his tac vest a few feet away in front of the gate.
“Oh, sure, blame me--" Rodney started.
“Thanks,” John said, “I will.”
Rodney glared, struggling with a retort. John could hear Zelenka trying to argue with him over the radio: “Is portable database terminal--does not contain the information within itself. Once stargate is closed, connection is severed.”
Rodney gave John once last glare before he turned away, waving his hands in emphatic gestures completely invisible to his audience. John wondered if he should be narrating for Zelenka’s benefit. “Yes, yes, useless off world. Brilliant theorizing. However, some scientists believe in the power of experimentation.”
“Rodney, is too valuable. Play with it later. Perhaps on safe world that has been cleared by Marines?”
Rodney sniffed, crossing his arms over his chest. “You have no sense of adventure.”
“Neither do you! Now go away. You distract entire lab when you annoy me.”
John choked down a laugh. Beside him, Teyla smiled more sincerely. “We are prepared?”
“As we’ll ever be.” He gave Rodney a painful slap on the back under the cover of manly bonding.
“Ow ow ow!” Rodney said, and John gave the guy up at the DHD a cheerful thumbs up.
**
They stepped through the gate into warm, humid air and a light drizzle. John shivered once when the wet hit the back of his neck. The gate stood on a rise around wooded hills. He could see ocean in the distance over the rise and fall of the trees.
“It is an island,” Teyla said, turning a slow circle, hand on her gun. John turned with her and sure enough, could see glimpses of that same distant water in all directions.
“Islands,” Rodney corrected, pointing absently at the smudges of rocky shore rising from the water, already whipping out the life signs detector.
“Been here before?” John looked at Teyla.
“I have never visited this place.” She frowned. John waited, expecting elaboration after a face like that.
“Nothing else?”
“What? No, Colonel.” She added vaguely, “I am fine,” which since John hadn’t been asking about at all, he filed away for later.
“Hmm? Yes, of course you are. This way,” Rodney said, taking two steps toward a faint path and blinking expectantly at John.
So John said, “Righty-o,” and they headed off, following the path along the ridgeline, sloping gently into a forest of thin trees and brush.
“Life signs,” Rodney was muttering, “some anomalous energy readings. Not the signs of an advanced culture. Remnants?” He started poking at the screen, each poke accompanied by a musical, “Not a ZPM, not a ZPM, not a ZPM...”
“Hey, what’s this?” John asked, taking two quick running steps up a jutting rock to peer through the trees.
“What’s what?” McKay asked absently.
“It looks like a hole. Like somebody’s filling in a big hole.” John pointed at a flat expanse in the vallley between the hills. It looked a little like a plowed field sunk half a dozen feet into the ground, a torn up rectangle of bare earth. “Down that ridge, by the shoreline.”
“Huh,” Mckay said, joining him. He eyed the scanner. “Life signs. I don’t see anything that looks particularly human.”
“I see a path,” Teyla said, looking through the field glasses. “If this one joins it, we should be at the shore before too long.”
“Hey, good idea,” John said generously, meaning the field glasses. Rodney gave him one of those looks that meant he was wondering how John ever got promoted.
Farther down the path along the ridge, there was another gap in the trees. “Hole,” John called and then, consulting the field glasses, “People working on the hole!”
“We’re actually on the other side of a ridge from the last one. The ‘holes’,” McKay wiggled two fingers in skeptical air quotes, “are clustered at the shore there. There may be a river or a bay that we can’t see. Energy readings still nil. If they’re--” he squinted down at the spread of fresh dirt, “planting crops? Over the hole? They’re doing it manually.”
“Well, what do you think? Should we wave?” John hooked a thumb into the edge of his vest.
“Let’s not,” Mckay suggested. He’d pulled out his own field glasses.
“I doubt that they could see us,” Teyla said. John glanced at her; she was wincing.
“What?” he protested. “It wasn’t that bad an idea!”
“Oh my god,” Rodney said suddenly, looking through the glasses. “We’re in Riven.”
John said, “Wait what?” just as Teyla said, “You have heard of this place before, Dr. McKay?”
**
After Rodney discovered the flimsy bridges connecting the islands and John made his usual ineffective attempt to explain the genre of computer puzzle games, they headed back down the path, perhaps stepping a little faster because they knew there were people at the end of it or just because John had started to think, hey, maybe this was sort of interesting.
A few minutes later, the path jagged unexpectedly to the right, a brush of wind bringing with it the smell of salt and cooler air. They began to hear the thump of waves against rock, as though the ocean were closer than it had seemed from the stargate. Turning, they found that the forest had been hiding a coastline of meandering, rocky cliffs, like the map had been drawn by a child with a bottle of easy cheese. Straight ahead, the path took them off the edge of a narrow channel arrowing deeper into the island. The gap was bridged by a rope and wood slat bridge.
“Well,” Rodney said, peering over John’s shoulder, “I can feel the acrophobia coming on. Which, actually, isn’t a regular for me.”
“You learn new things every day,” John said, feeling a little leery of it himself.
“Perhaps if you closed your eyes as you walked across,” Teyla suggested mildly. Rodney stared at her. John laughed out loud. “I believe it has been used recently,” she added, bending to study the damp earth. John stepped forward, testing the first slat carefully with one foot.
“That’s... odd,” he said.
“What?” Rodney snapped. “It will give out and plunge us to our deaths? That’s not odd; that’s entirely expected.”
“It looks pretty brand new. There are some chips off the wood and it’s stained, but not so much with the weathering.”
“Of course, it’s new. At the height of Ancient Rome, the coloseum had new paint. Also,” he said, recanting, “I will admit that it looks structurally sound. If these bridges are the primary route between islands, they’re probably kept in good repair.”
“Good. Guess we cross it then.”
He waited. McKay stared at him.
“What? I said it looked sound, that doesn’t mean I’m going first. Do you know how valuable I am to--”
John just pressed his lips together into one of those things people called a smile and was surprised to find he meant it. Even the overcast sky couldn’t dim John’s immediate response to smelling the sea. Even after a year on Atlantis--or because of it--it made him feel like there was something good around the corner.
Teyla nodded at him wearily, not anywhere near as tolerant of Rodney as she usually was, and started the uneventful, though noticeably swaying, trek across the bridge. The water beneath them was a dark, rich blue, apparently quite deep.
Soon, they passed another gap in the trees where John could see the--fields? excavations?--before the path met up with a much wider, wetter roadway, and Rodney tripped over a paving stone submerged in the mud. The single stone was flat and smooth and neatly cut, obviously worked by human tools, though the rest of the road was unpaved.
“What,” Rodney said, standing ankle deep in churned mud with the rest of them and hating it, “they unpaved their road?”
“Or maybe they didn’t keep up with road maintenance so much after the last big culling. What do you think, Teyla?”
“Yes,” Teyla said tiredly. “Of course, Colonel,” and looked pretty blatantly under the weather. But when John managed to draw her aside further down the road, she just looked blank and said firmly, “I am fine.”
“You sure?”
He saw her give in, ducking her head and admitting reluctantly, “I do not sense the Wraith,” which sent alarm bells off all over the place, “but since we stepped through the stargate, I feel as if... I feel some of the same cold in my mind.” She fixed him with a cool glare, clearer than any expression he’d seen on her since stepping through the gate. “I would not hide something that would endanger my team.”
John skipped over that part. “Not Wraith?” he repeated stubbornly. Up ahead, he could hear Rodney’s monologue falter. When he looked up, Rodney was glancing back at them curiously with a hint of panic.
“No,” Teyla said. “Of that I am sure. I think perhaps it is... a headache, nothing more. I will not stay quiet if that changes.”
“Okay,” John said.
**
At the village, things got a little weirder.
“Oh my god,” Rodney said, shrinking back into John’s shadow and eyeing the forest around them. “You don’t think there are any of them around?”
“Naw,” John said, gazing admiringly at the the colossal jaw bones gaping open in a predatory yawn. The path to the village led right through them. “The village wouldn’t be out in the open like this if giant space monsters were an everyday hazard. It looks pretty fossilized. And sort of,” he gestured vaguely, “water-dwelling. Carcarodon megalodon,” he added with a certain nostalgia.
“What?” Rodney asked skeptically. Teyla was giving him one of her looks again.
“You know,” John said, “sharks. Shark. The really big one.” When Rodney’s expression didn’t turn any less horrified, John added, “I was a dinosaur kid. Weren’t you a dinosaur kid? Stegosaurus, Tricerotops, Ichthyosaurus.”
“Okay, one, memorization should not be mistaken for intelligence. I had better things to do than learn taxonomy, and two, megalodon was not a dinosaur. Neither was any ichthyosaur or plesiosaur or archaeopteryx.”
“Come on, Rodney, you know the kid definition of dinosaur is just ‘cool monster bones!’ so...”
“Ah, ah! Sharks have cartilege!” Rodney stabbed a finger in the air triumphantly.
Teyla snorted and did a weird wise alien thing where she pretended she hadn’t. John shrugged amiably and stepped through the jaws of the village gate.
**
The villagers had a real amish vibe going, which these days made John edgier than automatic rifles. Like the plots they’d seen through the trees, the ground around the village had been ripped up recently, though a heroic effort had been made to conceal it.
Two teenagers, lithe and lean, met them at the gate, dressed in sturdy pants and simple sleeveless tunics that made John shiver in sympathy. Down at sea level there was less of a bite in the air, but the misty rain was still rolling in over the houses. John’s hair was damp and there was dew on his P90.
Painted indigo waves and jaws and tails moved up the kids’ bare arms from the wrist. The girl’s cheeks were marked at the edge of her jaw with dark slashes. John thought, Gills, and didn’t point it out to Rodney because, ok, if sharks were that big a deal, they wouldn’t go swimming, and he didn’t need Rodney to spend twenty minutes persuading him at progressively greater volume.
The guides led them down towards the waterside into the downtown and a mess of activity and traffic. There were about a hundred villagers gathered in the main square, packing what looked like paving stones and other unidentifiable items into large crates and carting them off to the shore.
John started getting a little confused when it became clear that boxes full of construction material were being transported from somewhere downhill, unloaded, then loaded again, this time with paving stones and other junk, and finally sent back. Wood, wood, more wood, furniture, thick pillars already carved with horned sharks’ heads. These were apparently being used to construct the simple houses that made up the village. Their guides weren’t much help, being flighty and mostly uncommunicative, the boy finally darting into the crowd while the girl twisted her hair between fingers and stared intently at their weaponry.
“Well, this is reassuring,” Rodney muttered.
“McKay,” John said.
Eventually the boy reappeared with a noble looking woman in a billowing robe and a thick-waisted man in work clothes, both dressed in pale sea green, and the teenagers drifted off to rejoin the work.
“Welcome to our village,” said the woman with graying hair and shoulders broader than John’s. John figured her for the obligatory elder type. “We do not know you,” she added, which, John admitted, didn’t seem so encouraging.
“Pleased to meet you,” John said. “I’m Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard and this is my team, Teyla Emmagan and Dr. Rodney Mckay.” There was an empty space at the end of his speech for a third name, and John tripped into a bullshit smile, hands clasped over his gun.
“We are the Latere people,” said the old woman, crossing her arms. “I am Senator Panlow and this is Senator Barr.”
“Senator?” Rodney repeated incredulously. “This is a republic?”
“McKay--”
The elder blinked. “You came through the worlds’ gate?”
“If the worlds’ gate is a big round shiny thing that takes you strange places, then yeah. Sure.”
The elder squinted at them. “How did you come? By the cliffs or the valley?”
The team shared a quick discussion by way of looks and eyebrows. “Which one has the bridge?” John asked.
The elder’s eyes widened a tiny fraction, hidden quickly behind a mask of calm. “Ah," she said, "Well. It’s good that you got here then.”
Teyla said carefully, “Should we have taken a different route?”
“On days like today, the water is not so warm. It is good to stay inland,” was all the elder would say. John saw a fishlike body made of blue and green glass dangling from a roof edge, twisting and chiming in the wind. Definitely no swimming.
“You’ve come at a bad time, forgetting the weather,” added the man helpfully. He didn’t sound threatening, and in fact, appeared to bat his eyelashes in Teyla’s direction, who thankfully was a little off her game and didn’t notice. Rodney choked. “We’re leaving soon. As we speak, really.” He bobbed his head at the traffic.
“You are... leaving?” Teyla asked frowning at the newly built houses.
“Well, the Wraith--” said the elder.
“--are culling.” The man nodded, satisfied. “We absolutely can’t leave ourselves so open to attack.”
“Steps must be taken,” the woman agreed quickly. John got the feeling she thought her pal was being a little too talkative.
John shared a glance and a raised eyebrow with Teyla. “We know about the Wraith,” he said finally. “Actually, we come from a city that requires a... certain power source to run it, and without it we’re kind of stuck for defending outselves. So we were wondering if you’d mind us looking around a bit? We got a tip from a nice old woman that this would be a good place to look.” He smiled his best harmless smile.
Behind him, Rodney waved the scanner in a nervous ‘yes, yes, moving on,’ gesture.
The old woman looked unexpectedly interested. “Oh! You don’t say!”
“Don’t get too excited,” Rodney said shortly. “I don’t see anything powerful enough on the scanner--”
“If you’re scavenging,” the elder said, sounding really animated for the first time, making John’s hackles rise, “you must be looking for an artifact of the ancestors.”
“Well--” John said.
“You know where it is?” Rodney asked incredulously. His scanner beeped faintly.
“We wish,” said the man, sighing expansively. He opened his mouth to continue, expression a picture of tragedy--
“Wait!” Rodney said and leaped at a bush.
The elder stiffened, sliding her hands into the sleeves of her robes. The other guy was in limbo, mouth open on a speech. John looked at McKay, Teyla kept an eye on the natives, and they both pretty much waited for the angry spears to come out. Rodney surfaced with a small, not-amish object in his hand. He flipped something, and one end of it started to vibrate.
“McKay?”
“I--” Rodney looked flummoxed. “I think it’s an electric sander.”
The thick guy said with some annoyance, “Who left that there?” He looked over John’s shoulder and said something colloquial that John thought sounded a lot like cursing a bluestreak.
Which was about the time a young man with a gleaming rifle lined with blinky laser lights stalked up in combat boots, a kevlar-like vest, alien BDUs, a radio, and said, with an eye for the Atlantean’s guns, “Hey, none of that high-tech near the gate!”
“Like you’re one to talk!” said the thick man. “Aren’t you supposed to cover that up with something?” He eyed the elder’s robe significantly.
Rodney goggled at them, Teyla and John swung their guns up to point at the new guy’s chest, and John yelled, “What the Genii is going on here?”
**
“What is this--a movie set?’
John made cutting motions at Rodney but since when had that worked.
They were sitting under the overhang of one of the shiny new huts--though it had been rubbed down with dirt to appear older--set apart from the others on a slight rise. Perhaps it would become a meeting hall when the village was complete. John looked to his right across still water to the blue silhouettes of forested islands.
“The Wraith awakened earlier than expected,” Panlow explained. “Luckily, we are the only inhabitated planet in this region of space so the Wraith are slow to appear. It may yet be years before the culling reaches us.”
Senator Barr cut in, worriedly, “Surely you noticed that some of the forests are too slender? Too sparse?”
John glanced at Teyla, who was giving him sort of an expectant look like she wondered why he was having trouble with the easy questions. John said cautiously, “No, the landscape seemed pretty healthy.” Teyla gave him a small, approving smile, and John wondered if he was the only one who’d noticed she was looking a little green.
The Latere smiled instead, obviously pleased. “The ports near the Stargate were built to be integrated with nature,” Panlow admitted, “anticipating their eventual deconstruction.”
“And, of course, they were beautiful!” Barr boomed, throwing up his hands and otherwise beaming like an uncovered light bulb. John figured, ok, he kind of liked this guy.
“Right,” he said. Rodney was--unexpectedly--looking pretty bored. John leaned over. “McKay?” he said quietly. “What? Mystery solved?”
“Oh please, Major,” Rodney said, “They’re hiding from the Wraith. Obviously.”
John felt his shoulders go tense, because, really, not a revelation, but people could be touchy when the secret to their survival was being bandied about with that level of sarcasm.
Senator Panlow only gazed at them serenely, hands hidden in opposing, voluminous sleeves. “Hide what is valued at the end of impossible roads,” she intoned, “and may monsters lurk between what you protect and those that threaten it.”
“Yes, fine,” Rodney said, “but what on earth for? You’ve dismantled your previous settlement, ok. From what you’ve said, you aren’t the low population agrarian society you’re setting up out there, so how are you going to support all the extra people if you punt yourself back to the stone age? Not to mention that you can’t leave people out here after you’ve stripped all their defenses against the Wraith--”
Panlow raised a hand. Her expression had gone a little hard around the eyes.
The young man in the high tech military gear had been hanging around at her back looking somewhat chargrined. The rifle hung from a strap over his shoulder. When Panlow gestured, his back stiffened and his chin lifted in an eerie alien parallel of military attention.
"Yes, Dr. McKay,” said the soldier, who John had started thinking of as ‘Gun’, “that’s exactly what we’re going to do. Most of us will retreat, taking what we’ve learned with us. The bridges are the only way to cross the water, and the Wraith don’t know them. When the bridges are rolled back and our people are in hiding, they won’t look past the farmers on the plain.”
“You really think that will work?” Rodney scoffed. “The Wraith aren’t doing this for fun or because they’re mean. You people are food. We’re food. Wherever you go, the Wraith will find you, they have darts that can fly. Trust me--when you’re starving to death, you don’t stop looking just because-- ”
“But it does work,” interrupted Gun, and Panlow was looking smug as all get out. “This will be the third culling we have survived in this manner. How did you think our culture got so advanced?”
**
John called a team huddle on one side of the hut with the Latere at the other, though not far enough away to afford real privacy. He kept his voice low.
“This is insane,” Rodney hissed, trying to shift away from the edge of the overhang and the wet air.
“McKay, we’re low on allies in this galaxy. What allies we have are low on effective weapons to combat the Wraith--”
“Is that polite for ‘are low on anything resembling science’?”
“The Latere,” John went on, “have not only not been culled for centuries longer than anyone else, they’re also technologically advanced. We don’t know how much. And if we can convince them to stop hiding and start fighting--”
“So, what? Maybe they have an A-bomb we could borow? Colonel, we are on a world where the entire existence of the military is highly-trained undercover suicide farmers.”
“Dr. McKay,” Teyla said patiently, “the men and women in this village did not volunteer solely to die. By fighting for their own lives apart from the advancements their civilization has earned, they insure that the rest of their people will remain hidden.”
“Like I said,” Rodney snapped. “Suicide.”
Teyla’s jaw tightened. “These people survived the culling that destroyed the great cities of my people!” she shot back. John had only been in this galaxy a year, but already the idea of anyone finding a way to escape the effects of the Wraith struck a powerful chord. Even if some of the ways the people here came up with were really creepy.
“Teyla,” John said. She backed off, though her expression stayed steely. On a bad day, Teyla could match Rodney for exasperation with the morons around her. The difference was, it never occurred to Rodney to bother keeping it to himself.
“Not to be too obvious about this,” Rodney said lightly, sounding not at all casual and a whole lot on the edge of panic, “but we’re supposed to be looking for a ZPM, not discovering underground space bunkers--which is what, a fad in this galaxy? And, oh look, we already have a ZPM. More would be nice, la la, let’s go back to Atlantis before they decide to shoot us and-or expose us to lethal amounts of neutron radiation.”
“I don’t think these people are like the Genii,” John said. “For one, they obviously aren’t trying to keep the secret from other humans. I’ll take that as a good sign.”
“Or maybe they have a really good place to hide the bodies. You did see the excavations on the way in?”
“Teyla,” John said, ignoring him, “I want you to head back to Atlantis. Give Elizabeth a head’s up,” about the negotiations, but also about the possibility of failed negotiations, leading to decisions to shoot them and/or expose them to lethal amounts of neutron radiation. He could count on Teyla pick up on that sort of thing. “Also check up with Beckett for a painkiller before you head back here.”
He got a cool look for that last part, but Teyla wasn’t the type to insist on ignoring a health concern at the expense of the mission. Actually, scratch that, John corrected himself, she was completely the type. She was stronger than anyone he’d ever met. She’d keep going through almost any adversity, missing limbs included. Luckily, she also listened to him. Sort of.
So Teyla stepped out from the shelter and John started explaining things like opening negotiations and checking back with his boss and they started to walk Teyla back to the Stargate, which was when the Latere went a little batshit.
“No, no, no,” protested Senator Barr, taking enthusiastic hopping steps towards Teyla that had John putting his hands on his gun and Teyla moving back behind her serene mask and a languid posture that meant she was ready to hug the man or deck him as circumstances required. “You absolutely cannot take the cliff road!”
“Um,” John said, not relaxing his grip. “Why?”
“Usually they prefer to feed in deeper waters, but on cool days, the pistricii swim closer to the surface,” Barr said. “The bridges are high, but not always high enough.”
There was a brief pause.
“Oh,” Rodney said weakly. “Sea monsters. Sea monsters that eat people off of bridges like that one we walked across.”
“So you’re saying we can’t go back...?” John asked carefully, stepping between Barr and his team. That put Rodney on the middle, Teyla at the front of any retreat, and John watching their six.
The Senator blinked. “What? Oh no, just take the right fork instead. It will stay in the forest the entire way.”
**
“Of course it appeals to you,” Rodney muttered behind him, when Teyla was walking through the giant jaws--and hey, guess there were some of those still around!--that marked the village entrance. “An army of people specially trained to to be human shields--”
John didn’t say: you mean a group of people who fight and die knowing that what they’re doing is protecting their people. Because yeah, ok, it did appeal to him. It struck him as an existence a whole lot more satisfying than fucking up on Atlantis and letting Ford go through that wormhole to who knows where.
Senator Panlow had waited calmly through their little batch of excitement, and a glance from her had kept Gun at his post, causing John to second his earlier suspicion that Panlow was military. When the Latere finished evacuating, he wouldn’t expect to see Senator Barr still here, but he could picture Senator Panlow at the head of a legion of farmers, churning butter with murderous determination.
She appeared now at John’s shoulder and said, “Let me walk with you.”
“Of course, Senator.” John gestured warmly at the path ahead as though he were the host here. Barr had disappeared with a host of fellow--architects? engineers? stage crew?--into the midst of the construction, waving plans and mumbling about weathered thatch.
When they reached the DHD, Rodney stepped up in a uncoordinated rush, dialing the delta site without even having to be told, or, rather, without John having to make any faces at him. “Right, okay, home sweet home,” Rodney said, and favored their Latere escorts with a ghastly smile of supposed sincerity.
Teyla disappeared into the wormhole with a nod, and the gate shut down.
“Now,” said Panlow calmly, “would you like a tour of our illusion?”
Rodney sidled up to John’s side, shifting nervously, rubbing a hand on the pants of his BDUs.
“Well,” John drawled, “we were thinking about looking around for that energy source we mentioned, but, hey, a tour--it’ll be like Disney World.”
“Colonel, you remember you’re on an alien planet, don’t you? Fine, fine. As long as we’re moving in--” Rodney pointed slowly, with a cocky jerk at the end. “--that direction.” He had the scanner out. “Something’s showing up that way. From the irregular nature of the data, it’s possible that there's some short of shielding concealing larger readings.”
“Ah,” said the Senator. “You want to see the beach. And the bridges.”
“The beach?” Rodney demanded, “Wait, what about the sea monsters? You said there were sea monsters--”
Then they were part of a caravan towards the shore.
Rodney fell in beside John, fiddling with the scanner and casting nervous glances at the Senator’s back. “Teyla was,” he started awkwardly, “um, quiet?”
John blinked. “She usually is, McKay,” he said automatically.
“No, I know. But I mean, she really--”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” He cocked an eyebrow at Rodney. “And if you’re noticing--”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Rodney demanded.
“That I... trust your powers of observation." John smiled.
“Oh, ha ha. You think your powers of sarcasm are beyond me.”
“McKay, believe me," John said generously. "I never underestimate you in matters of sarcasm.”
Rodney sniffed. “If you need me, I’ll be over here, doing something useful with my intelligence.”
He stalked off toward their guides. John followed him, eyes sweeping the villagers passing by with crates and tools. The electric sander had been taken and packed away with the rest of the high-tech tools used to put up the low tech village and were now being whisked away so as not to disrupt the illusion. Senator Panlow, who wasn’t a village elder type after all, it seemed she'd been elected with ballots and everything, had been watching the scanner thoughtfully ever since.
Rodney wandered back almost immediately. “But--about Teyla.”
“I dunno, Rodney,” John said, and then just for kicks, "Do you want to be the one to ask her if she took her midol this morning?”
“What?” Rodney stared at him. “Oh. Ohhh.”
John figured he might feel bad about that later, but only if Teyla found out.
Senator Panlow drifted back to talk to them. “Other worlds are stunted by the deaths caused by the Wraith,” she said, right out of a tourist pamplet, “or are driven to desperation, but we can build on the intact timeline of our past.” She smiled, a little stilted--her pamphlets must not come with cues for facial expression--and gestured to McKay’s clothing. “We rarely see people so advanced as you. The Wraith prevent it, but we learn better ways to hide with each culling.”
Rodney snorted. “What, with technology? It’s easier to detect technological advancement--you could be giving off EM signals, electricity, radio, light, heat--”
“Yeah,” John agreed casually, an idea coming to him, “wouldn’t cloaking technology be great?”
Senator Panlow jerked around the stare at him.
Rodney laughed shortly in the special way that meant he thought John was flattering him. “Even I don’t know how Atlantean cloaks work, Major, I don’t care what Radek says, he’s obviously lying to get back at--”
“I never said you did,” John told him. “But look, Rodney, we’ve got stuff we don’t understand, and they’ve probably got stuff they don’t understand, and wouldn’t a meeting of the minds be cool?”
Rodney looked at John like chocolate, and John forgot to be irritated about the rank mix-up.
“Actually--yes.” Rodney turned to Panlow in his 'here, let me explain to you in small words why I'm right and it's great and hurry up I have a deadline' mode, “Look, Senator, whatever your name is-- ”
**
“I’m sorry,” said Senator Barr, shaking his head regretfully. One of the escort had been sent to fetch him almost as soon as Sheppard said the word “cloak”. “You can join us in hiding, but once we roll back the bridges there won’t be any contact through the stargate until the Wraith return to sleep.”
Sheppard’s smile turned brittle. “The Wraith kill us too,” he said with an odd flatness to his voice, which--what? Was supposed to change their minds somehow? With two notable exceptions, the entire structure of the government, as well as any valuable members of the scientific community, had already been evacuated. Any exchange of information would mean bringing non-expendable personnel back to the danger zone--which they weren’t willing to risk--or revealing the location of their secret hidey hole. Friendly though they might seem, the Senators weren’t that stupid.
Admirable, Rodney thought, and yet less than helpful in this instance.
“Our survival depends on an illusion of simplicity,” said Senator Panlow. “Advanced technology cannot be seen traveling through our gate.”
“We have cloaked jumpers!”
Rodney’s focus, which had been re-evaluating probable locations of the cloak function in puddlejumper circuit design, flipped back over to the conversation at hand as his pulse kicked up a notch. Rodney thought: maybe Teyla should be here to handle this. Teyla makes the natives like us. Usually. Actually, why keep that to himself.
“Colonel, maybe Teyla--”
“And if you are ever taken by the Wraith,” Senator Panlow continued icily, “you will know exactly where we are.”
“If you’re worried about us giving you away to the Wraith,” Sheppard drawled, wearing a smile that might have looked lazy on a cougar, “then listen buddy, it’s already enough that we know you’re hiding at all.”
Dead silence on the path. People were putting down their burdens, turning to watch them with the beginnings of fear on their faces. Senator Barr paled.
“Oh my god,” Rodney said, “you just convinced the only people in this galaxy possibly more advanced than us to kill us. You moron!”
**
The path narrowed as it descended between dark rock ridges on its way to sea level. Rodney had to press against the rocks so two villagers toting a full crate could get by, casting wary looks at the earthlings as they went.
The small party had acquired an escort of villagers, carrying tools or construction scraps, all of which were coincidentally hefty and clublike. The senators were striding ahead, Senator Panlow stiff-backed and formal, Senator Barr smiling awkwardly and possibly apologetically. If Senator Panlow weren’t so obvioulsy capable of breaking him in half with her pinky, Rodney might have felt a little more positive about that.
He’d also feel a lot more positive if Sheppard hadn’t accidentally threatened their entire people with annihilation by Wraith, but there was no use crying over spilt milk.
Sheppard dropped casually back and whispered out of the side of his mouth, “If we need one, escape plan is me shooting, you running back up the--”
They turned the corner and the whole ocean was spread out before them on the other side of a gray, rocky beach.
Later, Rodney’s mission report would note the lack of a harbor or any ocean-going vessel, but right now all he could see were the bridges. Sheppard stumbled to a halt.
“Holy shit,” Rodney said, fumbling for his scanner. “I thought they meant more of the--”
“--rope bridges,” Sheppard agreed faintly. “Yeah, me too.” Beside them, the Latere stood, beaming proudly, plans for Sheppard’s swift execution apparently forgotten for the moment.
The bridges--three of them, huge, flat constructions of metal and polymer, the widest big enough for two tanks to pass each other with room to spare--were obviously Ancient in manufacture. They stretched out into the ocean for a hundred yards and then, from what Rodney could see, vanished.
The bridges themselves were built of detacheable segments about four feet long, marked in the warm red-orange-grey color scheme of parts of Atlantis. The villagers not busy loading or unloading crates onto motorized carts--low tech was apparently restricted to the faux village--were engaged in manually rolling back all but the narrowest bridge. They did so by means of lifting the last slat and twisting it to the side and back, fitting it into a groove that ran along the whole edge of the bridge. The last slat could then be attached to a truck of sorts. When the truck drove back the way it had come, it would pull the entire bridge back in on itself while allowing a small team to supervise the twisting of the slats, to make sure the procedure was running smoothly. On the whole it looked to be a slow and laborious process.
“Whoops, energy spike,” Rodney said, to the sound of snapping cables.
Lights danced along the edges of the slats as the bridges rolled themselves across the water and up the beach with a deafening WHUMP THUMP THUMP, fetching up at Sheppard’s feet like a cat offering its belly to be scratched. Two of their escort threw themselves frantically out of the way. All along the beach people stopped to stare.
“Hey there,” Sheppard said, inordinately pleased, blinking at the huge mechanical creations arrayed across the beach in front of him. Also: "Sorry about that."
Rodney sniffed. “Stop flirting with the planet's Ancient technology. You’re already married.”
“Aw,” Sheppard said, “Atlantis knows she’ll always be my favorite.”
**
After that, Rodney got to shout at the Latere a lot about ATA and working power sources and the need to examine the Ancient technology. He paused to reflect that he may have unnecessarily confirmed Sheppard’s role in the bridges’ response, then dismissed it. Panlow’s lackey, the kid with the blinky gun, wanted to know why Sheppard had been “chosen by the Ancestors.” Barr had more brain that he’d been showing because he just wanted to know how. The whole time, Rodney was more than half-certain that somebody was going to decide enough was enough and just shoot them already.
Rodney had to bite his tongue on all sorts of useful information like “random genetic characteristic” and “I have the gene too, you know. It could have been responding to either one of us.” Better they were a little in awe of Sheppard. A lot better they didn’t know that there were dozens of people on Atlantis equally able to command control of one of the keys to their continued survivial.
(Imagine if they’d been that lucky with the Genii.)
The strategic advantage of the ATA gene in this instance was undeniable. He just wished the Latere hadn’t noticed. Or that Sheppard hadn’t been around to draw their attention to it. He probably thought he was helping.
Then Panlow gave them the obvious out, with a question, “Can you roll them back?” that didn’t sound much like a question at all.
Armed with farming equipment, the Latere huddled around Rodney while he kneeled on the rocky beach, prodding at the end of the smallest bridge in hopes of finding a control panel. He thought about panic and also about wet while mist fell against his eyelashes and onto the back of his neck.
Sheppard crouched next to him, keeping a watchful eye on the Latere. “We need to get back to Atlantis, bring back a jumper.”
Rodney stared at him. “Oh, yes, that will be handy when Atlantis comes to retrieve our corpses.”
“Puddlejumpers have cloaks, and they’re a lot more portable than the control room. Just--maybe if they see it, they’ll realize what we’ve got to offer.”
“And what do they have to offer us? They’re hermits!”
“McKay, there are thousands, maybe millions of people here, safe from the Wraith. If we can help with that... that’s worth a lot.”
“Until they decide to shoot us and steal the puddlejumper because you can’t reverse engineer the secrets of the Ancients from a quick peek.”
“They’d need the gene to fly it,” Sheppard pointed out.
“Fine,” Rodney snapped. “Until they decide to shoot you and Teyla, kidnap me, and steal the puddlejumper because you can’t reverse engineer the secrets of the Ancients from a quick peek.”
“How come you get to be the kidnapped one?” Sheppard’s lips were twitching. Rodney thought he’d be happier about his singular ability to cheer up the Colonel if the Colonel’s sense of humor were less annoying and, oh yes, if they weren’t about to die. Sheppard ran a hand across his forehead, pushing back the hair sticking to his damp skin.
“Please," Rodney huffed. "You can fly it; I can fly it and explain how it works.”
Sheppard arched an eyebrow at him, and could the man at least pretend to know he’d given the natives reason to murder them? Twice? “I dunno if I’d call what you do flying...”
“Colonel Sheppard? Dr. McKay?” asked Senator Barr, standing anxiously behind them, wringing his hands. Because, of course, he was probably here to announce the death sentence.
Sheppard straightened.
“Do you know yet if you can roll the bridges back?”
Sheppard shrugged. “I could give it a shot.”
Rodney groaned. “No, no, you can’t. As much as I dislike dying on an alien world beaten to death by primitve farming equipment because of your trademark tourettes negotiating style, you have no idea what else these are designed to do. Tossing off poorly-planned mental commands at this point would be bad.”
For the first time, Sheppard’s forehead showed a wrinkle of worry. Rodney hmphed at him in satisfaction before turning back to the bridge. Then he heard Senator Panlow say flatly, “Watch the gate,” and suddenly Rambo was tapping a radio on his outfit and telling teams 1 and 2 to intercept Teyla Emmagen. He only half heard the instructions to do so “nonlethally” because the world had whited out a little.
He came back to himself with his hands braced on the gray, beaded tread of the the bridge, staring up at Panlow and Sheppard. Sheppard, who was speaking softly and reasonably, who only remembered how to sound like a professional when he was furious. Sheppard, who thought negotiations shouldn’t be more complicated than a group of friendly people being neighbourly, who thought everybody knew that “I can tell the Wraith where you are” meant “We’re all in this together.”
The villagers closed in a ring around them. The guy in the high tech gear pulled his rifle and the rest lifted their scythes and pitchforks competently, reminding Rodney that these people were the planet’s special ops. Rodney’s radio crackled. Sheppard didn’t bat an eye to betray that he'd heard anything.
Teyla said, “I have spoken with Doctor Weir. She is excited about the prospects of the Latere as allies.” A pause. “Colonel--there are some Latere in the woods. I believe they are looking for me. Are things well with you? The Latere seem... tense.”
Rodney scratched his ear, stealthily tapping the radio. “You won’t catch her,” he said lifting his chin. “She’ll go through the gate, report, and come back with reinforcements.”
“McKay,” Sheppard said patiently, also scratching his ear because he wasn’t stupid, “No need to worry just because I activated some Ancient tech. You’re working on a fix, we’re uninjured--“
“SO FAR,” Rodney squeaked while an alien method actor threatened him with a rake.
“--and Senator Panlow is a very reasonable military leader.”
Apparently the Latere weren’t stupid either because after that they took the radios.
“ANCIENT SUBMERSIBLE BRIDGES BEACH DEATH FARMERS,” Rodney finished in a rush.
“Well,” Sheppard said, “at least they know we wouldn’t give up their secret.”
**
“No,” Rodney said, “I refuse to be calm in the event of my death.”
“No! If Pistricii fall from the sky, no!” Senator Barr’s exclamations had grown progressively more colloquial in time with his agitation. “We wouldn’t kill you, but--” Rodney almost called ‘Foul!’ because pauses like that were completely unfair, “you’ll have to come back to the city--”
“Okay,” Sheppard said reasonably, nodding. He looked oddly light without his tac vest and P90. His hands were perched awkwardly on his hips like he didn’t quite know where to put them. Panlow had stalked up the gray beach with two Latere soldiers, leaving Barr with three as backup while he tried to explain the new situation to their guests.
“What? So we can be tried by a jury of our peers? Because you have to admit, ninjas with hoes don’t really qualify. Although, honestly--”
“Honestly, Rodney is without peer,” Sheppard said, grinning.
Rodney sniffed. “I wasn’t going to say that.”
“Of course you weren’t,” Sheppard agreed warmly. Dampness from the ocean and the mist had colored all the rock of the narrow beach dark like wet shale.
Panlow finished discussing with her lieutenants below the tall evergreens jutting up from the sides of the path, jerking a hand up in a clear signal. Rodney glared at Barr again, who looked miserable but also determined. Panlow turned and started walking towards the biggest bridge and the truck/cart thing parked on it with its motor running. The Latere around Rodney and Sheppard, which included the one with the rifle, moved forward as one, clearly intent on herding the Atlanteans with them.
Sheppard said, “Once we speak to your council, we’ll be able to leave?”
Barr didn’t answer immediately, rubbing his hands together anxiously. “I’m not--I’m not a regular member of the council. I’m an architect. Working here requires a certain status and so I was--”
“I’m sorry, did we care?” Rodney snapped, stumbling over a wobbling rock, glaring the tiny oysters peeking out from the underside of the stone.
“You’re welcome to join us in hiding,” Barr said finally, helplessly, sounding a little like one of Panlow’s tourist pamphlets.
“Okay,” Sheppard said sweetly. Rodney glanced up, knowing he was making a horrible face, but what was with the smiles? He opened his mouth to ask because, really, was he missing something here? He was about to be locked up in a hidden city forever and deprive the world of his--
Sheppard stumbled to the side. The Latere with the gun reached for Sheppard’s elbow, letting go of the gun--the Latere had begun favoring Sheppard’s grins almost as soon as Rodney opened his mouth because playing favorites was apparently universal--and Sheppard’s arm connected with the Latere’s windpipe just as his other hand found the rifle barrel.
“Duck,” Sheppard said, so Rodney hit the ground throwing his hands over his head. He heard two shots and, “Okay, time to run,” so he came up, throwing a fist sized rock at the Latere who wasn’t on the ground. The Latere in kevlar was lying in a crumpled heap behind him, and Sheppard had the rifle off the strap, backing as quickly as possible towards the tree line.
The scrambled up the slope, incline and mud making progress slow and desperate. Rodney grabbed at tree trunks, hauling himself up by the strength of his arms and reached the top, gasping, cradling scraped palms and panic when he realized Sheppard wasn’t there with him.
“It’s okay, coming,” Sheppard said, sounding distracted. Rodney heard two more rifle shots and then scrambling behind him. “Ok,” Sheppard said, eyeing the sky through the tree branches. “Gate’s...this way,” and took off before Rodney could protest resting their survival on Sheppard’s directional sense. At least it was drier under the trees.
**
They hit the roadblock about a mile from the shore. Turned out, yes, of course, Sheppard knew which direction the Stargate was in because he’d been relying on following the road. Peering over the ridge, Rodney stared at the scattered Latere huddled behind trees and brush, ambushing anyone moronic enough to come strolling down the path. Three scouts faced outward, scanning the forest. Rodney ducked back down next to Sheppard against the wet mix of leaves and dirt.
“They have scythes,” Rodney insisted, gesturing at the rifle, “couldn’t you--?”
Sheppard looked up his inspection of the Latere weapon, staring at Rodney for a long second. “Yes,” he said evenly, “I could take them out.”
Rodney swallowed coldly, because the Colonel was looking at him like Rodney had just asked him to kill twelve people because it would be easy. “No, no, of course not,” Rodney said quickly. He wanted his life signs detector.
"Okay,” Sheppard was saying, pointing somewhere off to the left and away from the Latere, “you make for the gate, follow that ridge over there. I'll circle round and meet you. Hopefully, you’ll meet up with Teyla. She’ll be heading for the beach--towards us." And nodded at him like that settled that.
Except Rodney heard, So long, Rodney, and--there was just no fucking way. Shivering, he reached under his expedition jacket, pulling out a square of matte black plastic. When Sheppard turned away in a crouch, Rodney placed the folded database square lightly on the back of Sheppard’s neck. It worked like a charm, Sheppard sighing softly and collapsing forward into the loam, the rifle pinned beneath him.
Rodney stared at him, cupping the square against Sheppard’s skin, and thought, Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap, and also, I can’t kill twelve people either.
**
John heard roaring silence where he expected voices and a slow wind through the trees. Where he expected to feel the uneven relief of a forest floor against his knees, only a bright circle of heat at the back of his neck let him know he had a body at all. Without arms, he couldn’t reach up to push it off.
**
“He’s sick!” Rodney barked. “It’s congenital! Don’t move him, you horrible--okay, yes, fine, you can have the gun--Hey, hey!”
Barr stood on the small rise, shadowed by the forest and the mist, staring at the two Atlanteans sitting on the forest floor. In Rodney’s defense, there really wasn’t any other way to hold the square against Sheppard’s skin without being really obvious about it. For their part, the Latere soldiers seemed to have lost any inclination to be gentle with Sheppard. Rodney wondered how many Latere Sheppard had killed during the escape.
He heard the rumble of an engine from the road, and soon two Latere appeared over the ridge, passing out handguns and rifles to the farmer-soldiers, who were quickly slinging their pitchforks and shovels back over their shoulders, and seriously, who had shoulder straps for shovels?
Barr said, sounding as naseous as Rodney felt, “We’ll return to the city, where you can seek medical treatment for Colonel Sheppard.” He said the name stiffly, like he was forcing himself to remember that Sheppard was an individual and not a random, extremely skilled perpetrator of lethal violence. “Please do not resist, there is no need to cause more loss of life, you have not been sentenced to anything--”
Rodney remembered not to shout, “Yet!” indignantly, but only because Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard was passed out in his lap and his hair was tickling Rodney’s palm.
Then the Latere were lifting Sheppard (“Gently, you miserable, slimy oafs!”) while Rodney rushed to keep a hand against the square he’d tucked into the back of Sheppard’s t-shirt while a pitchfork ninja pressed the alien equivalent of a 9mm against his back. They ended up in the back of the truck he’d seen on the beach, Latere perched on the back of the open cab and more Latere walking round the truck in guard. Rodney saw their tac vests piled in the opposite corner of the truck, but there was also a Latere sitting on top of that, and she noticed Rodney looking, narrowing her eyes and tightening her grip on her handgun.
Rodney tried to look harmless while also looking like he wasn’t weird about keeping a hand underneath Sheppard’s neck--
Oh god, he’d made Sheppard pass out, he was keeping Sheppard out, definitely against his will and against his orders, he’d accidentally on purpose gotten them captured, what if there were health risks involved: brain damage, cardiac arrest, low blood sugar--
This was so stupid, he should have ideas better than this, ideas that deserved to have their own bestelling memoirs written about them. It was such a phenomenally bad idea--but no matter how bad it had been, letting John go off by himself had been fucking impossible.
So Rodney sat on an alien truck, surrounded by alien guards and his unconscious team leader, and thought about PTSD as they drove out onto the bridges that became complicated, multichambered tunnels a hundred yards from shore, descending into blue-tinged darkness beneath the surface of the ocean.
They drove by tall, arching windows that cast blue shadows across the floor. All around plastic gleamed like steel, marked with proturbances and angles; machinery essential to the maintenance of the tunnels become something like public art in the hands of Ancient architects.
The passage was lit dimly by a trail of electric lights along the high ceiling, obviously installed by the Latere. Occasionally, dark recesses hinted at hidden doorways. Geometric patterns of orange and red lit up bright within the wall panels as they passed, tumbling after them in a flickering dance. Some of the Latere seemed unnerved, some of them admiring, but there was no other response to the ATA. Trapped under many feet of ocean water in an enclosed space, Rodney wasn’t about to start experimenting.
His panic wasn’t exactly receding with time, but sooner or later he’d have to try something, or resign himself to being tried for some mysterious crime by whatever dubious judicial system Barr kept hinting at.
After about ten minutes of slow travel, they hit a fork in the tunnel system where two tunnels from the mainland joined into one. A group of Latere waited there with another truck, Panlow as their vanguard. Rodney didn’t recognize her at first because she’d stripped off her voluminous robe, revealing a high-tech military outfit to match the Latere whose gun Sheppard had stolen on the beach.
Her face was murderous, and it wasn’t until they got closer and Rodney saw the three body shapes and the red on white sheets that he guessed why.
When she spoke it was an emotionless, “He’s shot?” meaning Sheppard.
One of the Latere stepped forward to report. Rodney tried to communicate through a series of tragic expressions that he was worried about Sheppard’s serious chronic condition. Barr hopped out of the cab, but Panlow had already heard all she needed to hear because she pointed at Sheppard draped across Rodney’s lap and said, “Bring him.”
“Excuse me,” Rodney snapped, pulling the square away from Sheppard’s skin. “Did you miss that he is seriously ill? I don’t know what kind of abyss of human rights protection you people are suffering from, but you can yell at him after he gets medical attention! Look, he can’t even walk.” This last was hissed for the express benefit of Sheppard’s fluttering eyelids and sleepy glare.
“Rodney?” Sheppard rasped, frowning with sleepy perplexity. His recovery obviously wasn’t as immediate as it had been on Atlantis, but there didn’t seem to be any lingering brain damage--
“Hypoglycaemia is a very serious condition!” Rodney finished. He felt Sheppard’s back tense against legs, and halfway through freaking out all over again, thought, is he laughing?
But Sheppard must have caught some of what Rodney was saying because when the Latere pulled him away, he sagged in their hands and forced them to all but drag him to the second truck. Rodney would have worried that maybe there were side effects after all, except he was pretty sure he knew the meaning of Sheppard’s clear-eyed stare as they pulled him off the truck. Then the wounded soldiers--thank god, only one of them was legitimately a corpse--were being transferred from Panlow’s truck to Barr’s and Panlow’s truck was executing a stupid looking three point turn inside the tunnel, which was just absurdly mundane, and heading back the way it’d come--
“Wait, wait,” Rodney protested, “where are they going? Aren’t we going to the city? We have an appointment with your incompetent judicial system--”
Barr’s eyes as he got back into the cab were huge in his pale face, and Rodney felt his voice desert him, replaced by something icy and suffocating.
**
PART TWO
Author: Pentapus
Disclaimer: Stargate Atlantis is not mine.
Notes: Set in early season 2. Intended for sga_flashfic’s “Shark!!!1” challenge, but I fail at deadlines. Thanks to ltlj for the beta and for helping me keep up my determination to finish this thing. And to thetruebard who wouldn't let me get away with a less than perfect ending.
“How many times do I have to say: DO NOT THROW AWAY THE POTENTIALLY INVALUABLE ANCIENT ARTIFACTS,” Rodney seethed.
It had given him a sort of brain itch as he walked by, a square foot of matte black psuedo-plastic, folded neatly in the bottom of a plastic storage bin--one of the new people had mistaken it for Ancient packing material--before he came to his senses and snatched it to safety.
“That’s the unidentified material box, actually,” Simpson said icily from behind a laptop and a cowering chemist. “The trash is over by the door.”
Rodney harrumphed expertly. “As if I have time to spend on the flawed organizational systems of morons,” he said but fondly because his attention was on the Ancient diagrams blossoming across the touch-sensitive screen. “Oh, oh.”
The gold gleam of the Ancient characters was so delightful that even Simpson unfroze enough to admit, “But we didn’t think it could do that,” before Rodney was shouting over the radio for Zelenka. Initial tests showed that the screen responded only to gene carriers (Rodney didn’t even have to call dibs) and seemed unable to display whole sections of the Ancient database to which the diagrams seemed to correspond. About an hour in, Rodney unlocked the schematics of the control room consoles and everybody got real excited.
Realistically, Rodney had to admit that the square seemed to have poorer access to the database than the expedition laptops and lacked the--admittedly imperfect--translating programs that helped the non-linguists interpret the complicated Ancient grammar, but it was still neat.
The other plus--besides having an Ancient palm pilot to play with--came when he took the database square to the briefing room and it proved to be one piece of Ancient technology that John Sheppard couldn’t operate. Though it would be inaccurate to suggest that nothing happened when the Colonel tried to navigate the displayed directories.
“It’s a portable database terminal!” Rodney announced proudly. In the next chair, Zelenka did his usual hmming and hawing and was otherwise unsatisfactorily supportive.
“Default screen does appear to display table of contents very similar to database, though is in different form than we have seen previous--”
“Yes, yes, fine, the handheld version is designed to be more easily navigable than the stationary versions,” Rodney said and poked helpfully at one bubble in the web diagram labeled “Cool! Puddlejumper controls!” in Ancient which was when Sheppard suddenly got interested and tried to poke a bubble of his own. He got an immediate response. Sort of.
“John?” Elizabeth sounded worried, leaping out of her seat to peer across the table. Rodney might admit, later, to an instant of coldness in the chest region, but he'd probably caught a cold bug somewhere.
“Oh my,” said Zelenka.
“Huh,” Rodney said, taking back the square. “That’s funny.”
Sheppard was blinking slowly up at him from the floor, his chair rolling sedately away from where he had fallen out of it. “The hell?” Sheppard said, grabbing the edge of the table. The effects, it seemed, were extremely fleeting.
“You fainted,” Rodney said and, as an afterthought, beamed. “Try again.” He shoved the square back at him. Sheppard started. When his fingers brushed one black corner, he let out a shuddering breath and folded to the floor. Rodney stared, impressed.
“If you do that again,” Sheppard said mildly when he woke up the second time, only a moment later.
“Rodney!” Elizabeth again.
“You are astonishing,” Zelenka said with feeling.
“Okay, okay--where are you going, Colonel? Beckett.” He jerked a thumb towards the infirmary. Because there was no reason to be completely stupid about it.
“I have no idea,” Carson said, resigned, when he had Sheppard perched on the edge of a cot, submitting to medically minded prodding with Rodney bouncing at his shoulder. Elizabeth was on radio and Zelenka had vanished back to the lab.
“Not surprised,” Rodney said, cradling the square happily, folded up and conveniently palm sized. He tapped it against the back of Carson’s hand. Carson gave a tiny shriek, leaping away from the bed. “See? You’re fine. It shouldn’t do that.” Sheppard looked amused for all of two seconds before Rodney said, “Maybe--” and frowned at him.
Sheppard saw this one coming, finally, and jumped up in time to crumple onto the floor instead of the bed.
“God damnit, McKay!” he snapped, perfectly healthy as soon as Rodney took the square away from his skin.
“Rodney!” Carson said, which was getting repetitive, really.
“Fine. If you want to impede important scientific research--” Rodney lifted his chin and stomped out of the infirmary.
**
“You’ve been cleared for off world travel?” Elizabeth inquired politely, standing at bottom of the steps, hands clasped in front of her.
“Sure. As long as Rodney keeps that damn thing away from me.” John smiled tightly at the scientist fiddling with his tac vest a few feet away in front of the gate.
“Oh, sure, blame me--" Rodney started.
“Thanks,” John said, “I will.”
Rodney glared, struggling with a retort. John could hear Zelenka trying to argue with him over the radio: “Is portable database terminal--does not contain the information within itself. Once stargate is closed, connection is severed.”
Rodney gave John once last glare before he turned away, waving his hands in emphatic gestures completely invisible to his audience. John wondered if he should be narrating for Zelenka’s benefit. “Yes, yes, useless off world. Brilliant theorizing. However, some scientists believe in the power of experimentation.”
“Rodney, is too valuable. Play with it later. Perhaps on safe world that has been cleared by Marines?”
Rodney sniffed, crossing his arms over his chest. “You have no sense of adventure.”
“Neither do you! Now go away. You distract entire lab when you annoy me.”
John choked down a laugh. Beside him, Teyla smiled more sincerely. “We are prepared?”
“As we’ll ever be.” He gave Rodney a painful slap on the back under the cover of manly bonding.
“Ow ow ow!” Rodney said, and John gave the guy up at the DHD a cheerful thumbs up.
**
They stepped through the gate into warm, humid air and a light drizzle. John shivered once when the wet hit the back of his neck. The gate stood on a rise around wooded hills. He could see ocean in the distance over the rise and fall of the trees.
“It is an island,” Teyla said, turning a slow circle, hand on her gun. John turned with her and sure enough, could see glimpses of that same distant water in all directions.
“Islands,” Rodney corrected, pointing absently at the smudges of rocky shore rising from the water, already whipping out the life signs detector.
“Been here before?” John looked at Teyla.
“I have never visited this place.” She frowned. John waited, expecting elaboration after a face like that.
“Nothing else?”
“What? No, Colonel.” She added vaguely, “I am fine,” which since John hadn’t been asking about at all, he filed away for later.
“Hmm? Yes, of course you are. This way,” Rodney said, taking two steps toward a faint path and blinking expectantly at John.
So John said, “Righty-o,” and they headed off, following the path along the ridgeline, sloping gently into a forest of thin trees and brush.
“Life signs,” Rodney was muttering, “some anomalous energy readings. Not the signs of an advanced culture. Remnants?” He started poking at the screen, each poke accompanied by a musical, “Not a ZPM, not a ZPM, not a ZPM...”
“Hey, what’s this?” John asked, taking two quick running steps up a jutting rock to peer through the trees.
“What’s what?” McKay asked absently.
“It looks like a hole. Like somebody’s filling in a big hole.” John pointed at a flat expanse in the vallley between the hills. It looked a little like a plowed field sunk half a dozen feet into the ground, a torn up rectangle of bare earth. “Down that ridge, by the shoreline.”
“Huh,” Mckay said, joining him. He eyed the scanner. “Life signs. I don’t see anything that looks particularly human.”
“I see a path,” Teyla said, looking through the field glasses. “If this one joins it, we should be at the shore before too long.”
“Hey, good idea,” John said generously, meaning the field glasses. Rodney gave him one of those looks that meant he was wondering how John ever got promoted.
Farther down the path along the ridge, there was another gap in the trees. “Hole,” John called and then, consulting the field glasses, “People working on the hole!”
“We’re actually on the other side of a ridge from the last one. The ‘holes’,” McKay wiggled two fingers in skeptical air quotes, “are clustered at the shore there. There may be a river or a bay that we can’t see. Energy readings still nil. If they’re--” he squinted down at the spread of fresh dirt, “planting crops? Over the hole? They’re doing it manually.”
“Well, what do you think? Should we wave?” John hooked a thumb into the edge of his vest.
“Let’s not,” Mckay suggested. He’d pulled out his own field glasses.
“I doubt that they could see us,” Teyla said. John glanced at her; she was wincing.
“What?” he protested. “It wasn’t that bad an idea!”
“Oh my god,” Rodney said suddenly, looking through the glasses. “We’re in Riven.”
John said, “Wait what?” just as Teyla said, “You have heard of this place before, Dr. McKay?”
**
After Rodney discovered the flimsy bridges connecting the islands and John made his usual ineffective attempt to explain the genre of computer puzzle games, they headed back down the path, perhaps stepping a little faster because they knew there were people at the end of it or just because John had started to think, hey, maybe this was sort of interesting.
A few minutes later, the path jagged unexpectedly to the right, a brush of wind bringing with it the smell of salt and cooler air. They began to hear the thump of waves against rock, as though the ocean were closer than it had seemed from the stargate. Turning, they found that the forest had been hiding a coastline of meandering, rocky cliffs, like the map had been drawn by a child with a bottle of easy cheese. Straight ahead, the path took them off the edge of a narrow channel arrowing deeper into the island. The gap was bridged by a rope and wood slat bridge.
“Well,” Rodney said, peering over John’s shoulder, “I can feel the acrophobia coming on. Which, actually, isn’t a regular for me.”
“You learn new things every day,” John said, feeling a little leery of it himself.
“Perhaps if you closed your eyes as you walked across,” Teyla suggested mildly. Rodney stared at her. John laughed out loud. “I believe it has been used recently,” she added, bending to study the damp earth. John stepped forward, testing the first slat carefully with one foot.
“That’s... odd,” he said.
“What?” Rodney snapped. “It will give out and plunge us to our deaths? That’s not odd; that’s entirely expected.”
“It looks pretty brand new. There are some chips off the wood and it’s stained, but not so much with the weathering.”
“Of course, it’s new. At the height of Ancient Rome, the coloseum had new paint. Also,” he said, recanting, “I will admit that it looks structurally sound. If these bridges are the primary route between islands, they’re probably kept in good repair.”
“Good. Guess we cross it then.”
He waited. McKay stared at him.
“What? I said it looked sound, that doesn’t mean I’m going first. Do you know how valuable I am to--”
John just pressed his lips together into one of those things people called a smile and was surprised to find he meant it. Even the overcast sky couldn’t dim John’s immediate response to smelling the sea. Even after a year on Atlantis--or because of it--it made him feel like there was something good around the corner.
Teyla nodded at him wearily, not anywhere near as tolerant of Rodney as she usually was, and started the uneventful, though noticeably swaying, trek across the bridge. The water beneath them was a dark, rich blue, apparently quite deep.
Soon, they passed another gap in the trees where John could see the--fields? excavations?--before the path met up with a much wider, wetter roadway, and Rodney tripped over a paving stone submerged in the mud. The single stone was flat and smooth and neatly cut, obviously worked by human tools, though the rest of the road was unpaved.
“What,” Rodney said, standing ankle deep in churned mud with the rest of them and hating it, “they unpaved their road?”
“Or maybe they didn’t keep up with road maintenance so much after the last big culling. What do you think, Teyla?”
“Yes,” Teyla said tiredly. “Of course, Colonel,” and looked pretty blatantly under the weather. But when John managed to draw her aside further down the road, she just looked blank and said firmly, “I am fine.”
“You sure?”
He saw her give in, ducking her head and admitting reluctantly, “I do not sense the Wraith,” which sent alarm bells off all over the place, “but since we stepped through the stargate, I feel as if... I feel some of the same cold in my mind.” She fixed him with a cool glare, clearer than any expression he’d seen on her since stepping through the gate. “I would not hide something that would endanger my team.”
John skipped over that part. “Not Wraith?” he repeated stubbornly. Up ahead, he could hear Rodney’s monologue falter. When he looked up, Rodney was glancing back at them curiously with a hint of panic.
“No,” Teyla said. “Of that I am sure. I think perhaps it is... a headache, nothing more. I will not stay quiet if that changes.”
“Okay,” John said.
**
At the village, things got a little weirder.
“Oh my god,” Rodney said, shrinking back into John’s shadow and eyeing the forest around them. “You don’t think there are any of them around?”
“Naw,” John said, gazing admiringly at the the colossal jaw bones gaping open in a predatory yawn. The path to the village led right through them. “The village wouldn’t be out in the open like this if giant space monsters were an everyday hazard. It looks pretty fossilized. And sort of,” he gestured vaguely, “water-dwelling. Carcarodon megalodon,” he added with a certain nostalgia.
“What?” Rodney asked skeptically. Teyla was giving him one of her looks again.
“You know,” John said, “sharks. Shark. The really big one.” When Rodney’s expression didn’t turn any less horrified, John added, “I was a dinosaur kid. Weren’t you a dinosaur kid? Stegosaurus, Tricerotops, Ichthyosaurus.”
“Okay, one, memorization should not be mistaken for intelligence. I had better things to do than learn taxonomy, and two, megalodon was not a dinosaur. Neither was any ichthyosaur or plesiosaur or archaeopteryx.”
“Come on, Rodney, you know the kid definition of dinosaur is just ‘cool monster bones!’ so...”
“Ah, ah! Sharks have cartilege!” Rodney stabbed a finger in the air triumphantly.
Teyla snorted and did a weird wise alien thing where she pretended she hadn’t. John shrugged amiably and stepped through the jaws of the village gate.
**
The villagers had a real amish vibe going, which these days made John edgier than automatic rifles. Like the plots they’d seen through the trees, the ground around the village had been ripped up recently, though a heroic effort had been made to conceal it.
Two teenagers, lithe and lean, met them at the gate, dressed in sturdy pants and simple sleeveless tunics that made John shiver in sympathy. Down at sea level there was less of a bite in the air, but the misty rain was still rolling in over the houses. John’s hair was damp and there was dew on his P90.
Painted indigo waves and jaws and tails moved up the kids’ bare arms from the wrist. The girl’s cheeks were marked at the edge of her jaw with dark slashes. John thought, Gills, and didn’t point it out to Rodney because, ok, if sharks were that big a deal, they wouldn’t go swimming, and he didn’t need Rodney to spend twenty minutes persuading him at progressively greater volume.
The guides led them down towards the waterside into the downtown and a mess of activity and traffic. There were about a hundred villagers gathered in the main square, packing what looked like paving stones and other unidentifiable items into large crates and carting them off to the shore.
John started getting a little confused when it became clear that boxes full of construction material were being transported from somewhere downhill, unloaded, then loaded again, this time with paving stones and other junk, and finally sent back. Wood, wood, more wood, furniture, thick pillars already carved with horned sharks’ heads. These were apparently being used to construct the simple houses that made up the village. Their guides weren’t much help, being flighty and mostly uncommunicative, the boy finally darting into the crowd while the girl twisted her hair between fingers and stared intently at their weaponry.
“Well, this is reassuring,” Rodney muttered.
“McKay,” John said.
Eventually the boy reappeared with a noble looking woman in a billowing robe and a thick-waisted man in work clothes, both dressed in pale sea green, and the teenagers drifted off to rejoin the work.
“Welcome to our village,” said the woman with graying hair and shoulders broader than John’s. John figured her for the obligatory elder type. “We do not know you,” she added, which, John admitted, didn’t seem so encouraging.
“Pleased to meet you,” John said. “I’m Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard and this is my team, Teyla Emmagan and Dr. Rodney Mckay.” There was an empty space at the end of his speech for a third name, and John tripped into a bullshit smile, hands clasped over his gun.
“We are the Latere people,” said the old woman, crossing her arms. “I am Senator Panlow and this is Senator Barr.”
“Senator?” Rodney repeated incredulously. “This is a republic?”
“McKay--”
The elder blinked. “You came through the worlds’ gate?”
“If the worlds’ gate is a big round shiny thing that takes you strange places, then yeah. Sure.”
The elder squinted at them. “How did you come? By the cliffs or the valley?”
The team shared a quick discussion by way of looks and eyebrows. “Which one has the bridge?” John asked.
The elder’s eyes widened a tiny fraction, hidden quickly behind a mask of calm. “Ah," she said, "Well. It’s good that you got here then.”
Teyla said carefully, “Should we have taken a different route?”
“On days like today, the water is not so warm. It is good to stay inland,” was all the elder would say. John saw a fishlike body made of blue and green glass dangling from a roof edge, twisting and chiming in the wind. Definitely no swimming.
“You’ve come at a bad time, forgetting the weather,” added the man helpfully. He didn’t sound threatening, and in fact, appeared to bat his eyelashes in Teyla’s direction, who thankfully was a little off her game and didn’t notice. Rodney choked. “We’re leaving soon. As we speak, really.” He bobbed his head at the traffic.
“You are... leaving?” Teyla asked frowning at the newly built houses.
“Well, the Wraith--” said the elder.
“--are culling.” The man nodded, satisfied. “We absolutely can’t leave ourselves so open to attack.”
“Steps must be taken,” the woman agreed quickly. John got the feeling she thought her pal was being a little too talkative.
John shared a glance and a raised eyebrow with Teyla. “We know about the Wraith,” he said finally. “Actually, we come from a city that requires a... certain power source to run it, and without it we’re kind of stuck for defending outselves. So we were wondering if you’d mind us looking around a bit? We got a tip from a nice old woman that this would be a good place to look.” He smiled his best harmless smile.
Behind him, Rodney waved the scanner in a nervous ‘yes, yes, moving on,’ gesture.
The old woman looked unexpectedly interested. “Oh! You don’t say!”
“Don’t get too excited,” Rodney said shortly. “I don’t see anything powerful enough on the scanner--”
“If you’re scavenging,” the elder said, sounding really animated for the first time, making John’s hackles rise, “you must be looking for an artifact of the ancestors.”
“Well--” John said.
“You know where it is?” Rodney asked incredulously. His scanner beeped faintly.
“We wish,” said the man, sighing expansively. He opened his mouth to continue, expression a picture of tragedy--
“Wait!” Rodney said and leaped at a bush.
The elder stiffened, sliding her hands into the sleeves of her robes. The other guy was in limbo, mouth open on a speech. John looked at McKay, Teyla kept an eye on the natives, and they both pretty much waited for the angry spears to come out. Rodney surfaced with a small, not-amish object in his hand. He flipped something, and one end of it started to vibrate.
“McKay?”
“I--” Rodney looked flummoxed. “I think it’s an electric sander.”
The thick guy said with some annoyance, “Who left that there?” He looked over John’s shoulder and said something colloquial that John thought sounded a lot like cursing a bluestreak.
Which was about the time a young man with a gleaming rifle lined with blinky laser lights stalked up in combat boots, a kevlar-like vest, alien BDUs, a radio, and said, with an eye for the Atlantean’s guns, “Hey, none of that high-tech near the gate!”
“Like you’re one to talk!” said the thick man. “Aren’t you supposed to cover that up with something?” He eyed the elder’s robe significantly.
Rodney goggled at them, Teyla and John swung their guns up to point at the new guy’s chest, and John yelled, “What the Genii is going on here?”
**
“What is this--a movie set?’
John made cutting motions at Rodney but since when had that worked.
They were sitting under the overhang of one of the shiny new huts--though it had been rubbed down with dirt to appear older--set apart from the others on a slight rise. Perhaps it would become a meeting hall when the village was complete. John looked to his right across still water to the blue silhouettes of forested islands.
“The Wraith awakened earlier than expected,” Panlow explained. “Luckily, we are the only inhabitated planet in this region of space so the Wraith are slow to appear. It may yet be years before the culling reaches us.”
Senator Barr cut in, worriedly, “Surely you noticed that some of the forests are too slender? Too sparse?”
John glanced at Teyla, who was giving him sort of an expectant look like she wondered why he was having trouble with the easy questions. John said cautiously, “No, the landscape seemed pretty healthy.” Teyla gave him a small, approving smile, and John wondered if he was the only one who’d noticed she was looking a little green.
The Latere smiled instead, obviously pleased. “The ports near the Stargate were built to be integrated with nature,” Panlow admitted, “anticipating their eventual deconstruction.”
“And, of course, they were beautiful!” Barr boomed, throwing up his hands and otherwise beaming like an uncovered light bulb. John figured, ok, he kind of liked this guy.
“Right,” he said. Rodney was--unexpectedly--looking pretty bored. John leaned over. “McKay?” he said quietly. “What? Mystery solved?”
“Oh please, Major,” Rodney said, “They’re hiding from the Wraith. Obviously.”
John felt his shoulders go tense, because, really, not a revelation, but people could be touchy when the secret to their survival was being bandied about with that level of sarcasm.
Senator Panlow only gazed at them serenely, hands hidden in opposing, voluminous sleeves. “Hide what is valued at the end of impossible roads,” she intoned, “and may monsters lurk between what you protect and those that threaten it.”
“Yes, fine,” Rodney said, “but what on earth for? You’ve dismantled your previous settlement, ok. From what you’ve said, you aren’t the low population agrarian society you’re setting up out there, so how are you going to support all the extra people if you punt yourself back to the stone age? Not to mention that you can’t leave people out here after you’ve stripped all their defenses against the Wraith--”
Panlow raised a hand. Her expression had gone a little hard around the eyes.
The young man in the high tech military gear had been hanging around at her back looking somewhat chargrined. The rifle hung from a strap over his shoulder. When Panlow gestured, his back stiffened and his chin lifted in an eerie alien parallel of military attention.
"Yes, Dr. McKay,” said the soldier, who John had started thinking of as ‘Gun’, “that’s exactly what we’re going to do. Most of us will retreat, taking what we’ve learned with us. The bridges are the only way to cross the water, and the Wraith don’t know them. When the bridges are rolled back and our people are in hiding, they won’t look past the farmers on the plain.”
“You really think that will work?” Rodney scoffed. “The Wraith aren’t doing this for fun or because they’re mean. You people are food. We’re food. Wherever you go, the Wraith will find you, they have darts that can fly. Trust me--when you’re starving to death, you don’t stop looking just because-- ”
“But it does work,” interrupted Gun, and Panlow was looking smug as all get out. “This will be the third culling we have survived in this manner. How did you think our culture got so advanced?”
**
John called a team huddle on one side of the hut with the Latere at the other, though not far enough away to afford real privacy. He kept his voice low.
“This is insane,” Rodney hissed, trying to shift away from the edge of the overhang and the wet air.
“McKay, we’re low on allies in this galaxy. What allies we have are low on effective weapons to combat the Wraith--”
“Is that polite for ‘are low on anything resembling science’?”
“The Latere,” John went on, “have not only not been culled for centuries longer than anyone else, they’re also technologically advanced. We don’t know how much. And if we can convince them to stop hiding and start fighting--”
“So, what? Maybe they have an A-bomb we could borow? Colonel, we are on a world where the entire existence of the military is highly-trained undercover suicide farmers.”
“Dr. McKay,” Teyla said patiently, “the men and women in this village did not volunteer solely to die. By fighting for their own lives apart from the advancements their civilization has earned, they insure that the rest of their people will remain hidden.”
“Like I said,” Rodney snapped. “Suicide.”
Teyla’s jaw tightened. “These people survived the culling that destroyed the great cities of my people!” she shot back. John had only been in this galaxy a year, but already the idea of anyone finding a way to escape the effects of the Wraith struck a powerful chord. Even if some of the ways the people here came up with were really creepy.
“Teyla,” John said. She backed off, though her expression stayed steely. On a bad day, Teyla could match Rodney for exasperation with the morons around her. The difference was, it never occurred to Rodney to bother keeping it to himself.
“Not to be too obvious about this,” Rodney said lightly, sounding not at all casual and a whole lot on the edge of panic, “but we’re supposed to be looking for a ZPM, not discovering underground space bunkers--which is what, a fad in this galaxy? And, oh look, we already have a ZPM. More would be nice, la la, let’s go back to Atlantis before they decide to shoot us and-or expose us to lethal amounts of neutron radiation.”
“I don’t think these people are like the Genii,” John said. “For one, they obviously aren’t trying to keep the secret from other humans. I’ll take that as a good sign.”
“Or maybe they have a really good place to hide the bodies. You did see the excavations on the way in?”
“Teyla,” John said, ignoring him, “I want you to head back to Atlantis. Give Elizabeth a head’s up,” about the negotiations, but also about the possibility of failed negotiations, leading to decisions to shoot them and/or expose them to lethal amounts of neutron radiation. He could count on Teyla pick up on that sort of thing. “Also check up with Beckett for a painkiller before you head back here.”
He got a cool look for that last part, but Teyla wasn’t the type to insist on ignoring a health concern at the expense of the mission. Actually, scratch that, John corrected himself, she was completely the type. She was stronger than anyone he’d ever met. She’d keep going through almost any adversity, missing limbs included. Luckily, she also listened to him. Sort of.
So Teyla stepped out from the shelter and John started explaining things like opening negotiations and checking back with his boss and they started to walk Teyla back to the Stargate, which was when the Latere went a little batshit.
“No, no, no,” protested Senator Barr, taking enthusiastic hopping steps towards Teyla that had John putting his hands on his gun and Teyla moving back behind her serene mask and a languid posture that meant she was ready to hug the man or deck him as circumstances required. “You absolutely cannot take the cliff road!”
“Um,” John said, not relaxing his grip. “Why?”
“Usually they prefer to feed in deeper waters, but on cool days, the pistricii swim closer to the surface,” Barr said. “The bridges are high, but not always high enough.”
There was a brief pause.
“Oh,” Rodney said weakly. “Sea monsters. Sea monsters that eat people off of bridges like that one we walked across.”
“So you’re saying we can’t go back...?” John asked carefully, stepping between Barr and his team. That put Rodney on the middle, Teyla at the front of any retreat, and John watching their six.
The Senator blinked. “What? Oh no, just take the right fork instead. It will stay in the forest the entire way.”
**
“Of course it appeals to you,” Rodney muttered behind him, when Teyla was walking through the giant jaws--and hey, guess there were some of those still around!--that marked the village entrance. “An army of people specially trained to to be human shields--”
John didn’t say: you mean a group of people who fight and die knowing that what they’re doing is protecting their people. Because yeah, ok, it did appeal to him. It struck him as an existence a whole lot more satisfying than fucking up on Atlantis and letting Ford go through that wormhole to who knows where.
Senator Panlow had waited calmly through their little batch of excitement, and a glance from her had kept Gun at his post, causing John to second his earlier suspicion that Panlow was military. When the Latere finished evacuating, he wouldn’t expect to see Senator Barr still here, but he could picture Senator Panlow at the head of a legion of farmers, churning butter with murderous determination.
She appeared now at John’s shoulder and said, “Let me walk with you.”
“Of course, Senator.” John gestured warmly at the path ahead as though he were the host here. Barr had disappeared with a host of fellow--architects? engineers? stage crew?--into the midst of the construction, waving plans and mumbling about weathered thatch.
When they reached the DHD, Rodney stepped up in a uncoordinated rush, dialing the delta site without even having to be told, or, rather, without John having to make any faces at him. “Right, okay, home sweet home,” Rodney said, and favored their Latere escorts with a ghastly smile of supposed sincerity.
Teyla disappeared into the wormhole with a nod, and the gate shut down.
“Now,” said Panlow calmly, “would you like a tour of our illusion?”
Rodney sidled up to John’s side, shifting nervously, rubbing a hand on the pants of his BDUs.
“Well,” John drawled, “we were thinking about looking around for that energy source we mentioned, but, hey, a tour--it’ll be like Disney World.”
“Colonel, you remember you’re on an alien planet, don’t you? Fine, fine. As long as we’re moving in--” Rodney pointed slowly, with a cocky jerk at the end. “--that direction.” He had the scanner out. “Something’s showing up that way. From the irregular nature of the data, it’s possible that there's some short of shielding concealing larger readings.”
“Ah,” said the Senator. “You want to see the beach. And the bridges.”
“The beach?” Rodney demanded, “Wait, what about the sea monsters? You said there were sea monsters--”
Then they were part of a caravan towards the shore.
Rodney fell in beside John, fiddling with the scanner and casting nervous glances at the Senator’s back. “Teyla was,” he started awkwardly, “um, quiet?”
John blinked. “She usually is, McKay,” he said automatically.
“No, I know. But I mean, she really--”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” He cocked an eyebrow at Rodney. “And if you’re noticing--”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Rodney demanded.
“That I... trust your powers of observation." John smiled.
“Oh, ha ha. You think your powers of sarcasm are beyond me.”
“McKay, believe me," John said generously. "I never underestimate you in matters of sarcasm.”
Rodney sniffed. “If you need me, I’ll be over here, doing something useful with my intelligence.”
He stalked off toward their guides. John followed him, eyes sweeping the villagers passing by with crates and tools. The electric sander had been taken and packed away with the rest of the high-tech tools used to put up the low tech village and were now being whisked away so as not to disrupt the illusion. Senator Panlow, who wasn’t a village elder type after all, it seemed she'd been elected with ballots and everything, had been watching the scanner thoughtfully ever since.
Rodney wandered back almost immediately. “But--about Teyla.”
“I dunno, Rodney,” John said, and then just for kicks, "Do you want to be the one to ask her if she took her midol this morning?”
“What?” Rodney stared at him. “Oh. Ohhh.”
John figured he might feel bad about that later, but only if Teyla found out.
Senator Panlow drifted back to talk to them. “Other worlds are stunted by the deaths caused by the Wraith,” she said, right out of a tourist pamplet, “or are driven to desperation, but we can build on the intact timeline of our past.” She smiled, a little stilted--her pamphlets must not come with cues for facial expression--and gestured to McKay’s clothing. “We rarely see people so advanced as you. The Wraith prevent it, but we learn better ways to hide with each culling.”
Rodney snorted. “What, with technology? It’s easier to detect technological advancement--you could be giving off EM signals, electricity, radio, light, heat--”
“Yeah,” John agreed casually, an idea coming to him, “wouldn’t cloaking technology be great?”
Senator Panlow jerked around the stare at him.
Rodney laughed shortly in the special way that meant he thought John was flattering him. “Even I don’t know how Atlantean cloaks work, Major, I don’t care what Radek says, he’s obviously lying to get back at--”
“I never said you did,” John told him. “But look, Rodney, we’ve got stuff we don’t understand, and they’ve probably got stuff they don’t understand, and wouldn’t a meeting of the minds be cool?”
Rodney looked at John like chocolate, and John forgot to be irritated about the rank mix-up.
“Actually--yes.” Rodney turned to Panlow in his 'here, let me explain to you in small words why I'm right and it's great and hurry up I have a deadline' mode, “Look, Senator, whatever your name is-- ”
**
“I’m sorry,” said Senator Barr, shaking his head regretfully. One of the escort had been sent to fetch him almost as soon as Sheppard said the word “cloak”. “You can join us in hiding, but once we roll back the bridges there won’t be any contact through the stargate until the Wraith return to sleep.”
Sheppard’s smile turned brittle. “The Wraith kill us too,” he said with an odd flatness to his voice, which--what? Was supposed to change their minds somehow? With two notable exceptions, the entire structure of the government, as well as any valuable members of the scientific community, had already been evacuated. Any exchange of information would mean bringing non-expendable personnel back to the danger zone--which they weren’t willing to risk--or revealing the location of their secret hidey hole. Friendly though they might seem, the Senators weren’t that stupid.
Admirable, Rodney thought, and yet less than helpful in this instance.
“Our survival depends on an illusion of simplicity,” said Senator Panlow. “Advanced technology cannot be seen traveling through our gate.”
“We have cloaked jumpers!”
Rodney’s focus, which had been re-evaluating probable locations of the cloak function in puddlejumper circuit design, flipped back over to the conversation at hand as his pulse kicked up a notch. Rodney thought: maybe Teyla should be here to handle this. Teyla makes the natives like us. Usually. Actually, why keep that to himself.
“Colonel, maybe Teyla--”
“And if you are ever taken by the Wraith,” Senator Panlow continued icily, “you will know exactly where we are.”
“If you’re worried about us giving you away to the Wraith,” Sheppard drawled, wearing a smile that might have looked lazy on a cougar, “then listen buddy, it’s already enough that we know you’re hiding at all.”
Dead silence on the path. People were putting down their burdens, turning to watch them with the beginnings of fear on their faces. Senator Barr paled.
“Oh my god,” Rodney said, “you just convinced the only people in this galaxy possibly more advanced than us to kill us. You moron!”
**
The path narrowed as it descended between dark rock ridges on its way to sea level. Rodney had to press against the rocks so two villagers toting a full crate could get by, casting wary looks at the earthlings as they went.
The small party had acquired an escort of villagers, carrying tools or construction scraps, all of which were coincidentally hefty and clublike. The senators were striding ahead, Senator Panlow stiff-backed and formal, Senator Barr smiling awkwardly and possibly apologetically. If Senator Panlow weren’t so obvioulsy capable of breaking him in half with her pinky, Rodney might have felt a little more positive about that.
He’d also feel a lot more positive if Sheppard hadn’t accidentally threatened their entire people with annihilation by Wraith, but there was no use crying over spilt milk.
Sheppard dropped casually back and whispered out of the side of his mouth, “If we need one, escape plan is me shooting, you running back up the--”
They turned the corner and the whole ocean was spread out before them on the other side of a gray, rocky beach.
Later, Rodney’s mission report would note the lack of a harbor or any ocean-going vessel, but right now all he could see were the bridges. Sheppard stumbled to a halt.
“Holy shit,” Rodney said, fumbling for his scanner. “I thought they meant more of the--”
“--rope bridges,” Sheppard agreed faintly. “Yeah, me too.” Beside them, the Latere stood, beaming proudly, plans for Sheppard’s swift execution apparently forgotten for the moment.
The bridges--three of them, huge, flat constructions of metal and polymer, the widest big enough for two tanks to pass each other with room to spare--were obviously Ancient in manufacture. They stretched out into the ocean for a hundred yards and then, from what Rodney could see, vanished.
The bridges themselves were built of detacheable segments about four feet long, marked in the warm red-orange-grey color scheme of parts of Atlantis. The villagers not busy loading or unloading crates onto motorized carts--low tech was apparently restricted to the faux village--were engaged in manually rolling back all but the narrowest bridge. They did so by means of lifting the last slat and twisting it to the side and back, fitting it into a groove that ran along the whole edge of the bridge. The last slat could then be attached to a truck of sorts. When the truck drove back the way it had come, it would pull the entire bridge back in on itself while allowing a small team to supervise the twisting of the slats, to make sure the procedure was running smoothly. On the whole it looked to be a slow and laborious process.
“Whoops, energy spike,” Rodney said, to the sound of snapping cables.
Lights danced along the edges of the slats as the bridges rolled themselves across the water and up the beach with a deafening WHUMP THUMP THUMP, fetching up at Sheppard’s feet like a cat offering its belly to be scratched. Two of their escort threw themselves frantically out of the way. All along the beach people stopped to stare.
“Hey there,” Sheppard said, inordinately pleased, blinking at the huge mechanical creations arrayed across the beach in front of him. Also: "Sorry about that."
Rodney sniffed. “Stop flirting with the planet's Ancient technology. You’re already married.”
“Aw,” Sheppard said, “Atlantis knows she’ll always be my favorite.”
**
After that, Rodney got to shout at the Latere a lot about ATA and working power sources and the need to examine the Ancient technology. He paused to reflect that he may have unnecessarily confirmed Sheppard’s role in the bridges’ response, then dismissed it. Panlow’s lackey, the kid with the blinky gun, wanted to know why Sheppard had been “chosen by the Ancestors.” Barr had more brain that he’d been showing because he just wanted to know how. The whole time, Rodney was more than half-certain that somebody was going to decide enough was enough and just shoot them already.
Rodney had to bite his tongue on all sorts of useful information like “random genetic characteristic” and “I have the gene too, you know. It could have been responding to either one of us.” Better they were a little in awe of Sheppard. A lot better they didn’t know that there were dozens of people on Atlantis equally able to command control of one of the keys to their continued survivial.
(Imagine if they’d been that lucky with the Genii.)
The strategic advantage of the ATA gene in this instance was undeniable. He just wished the Latere hadn’t noticed. Or that Sheppard hadn’t been around to draw their attention to it. He probably thought he was helping.
Then Panlow gave them the obvious out, with a question, “Can you roll them back?” that didn’t sound much like a question at all.
Armed with farming equipment, the Latere huddled around Rodney while he kneeled on the rocky beach, prodding at the end of the smallest bridge in hopes of finding a control panel. He thought about panic and also about wet while mist fell against his eyelashes and onto the back of his neck.
Sheppard crouched next to him, keeping a watchful eye on the Latere. “We need to get back to Atlantis, bring back a jumper.”
Rodney stared at him. “Oh, yes, that will be handy when Atlantis comes to retrieve our corpses.”
“Puddlejumpers have cloaks, and they’re a lot more portable than the control room. Just--maybe if they see it, they’ll realize what we’ve got to offer.”
“And what do they have to offer us? They’re hermits!”
“McKay, there are thousands, maybe millions of people here, safe from the Wraith. If we can help with that... that’s worth a lot.”
“Until they decide to shoot us and steal the puddlejumper because you can’t reverse engineer the secrets of the Ancients from a quick peek.”
“They’d need the gene to fly it,” Sheppard pointed out.
“Fine,” Rodney snapped. “Until they decide to shoot you and Teyla, kidnap me, and steal the puddlejumper because you can’t reverse engineer the secrets of the Ancients from a quick peek.”
“How come you get to be the kidnapped one?” Sheppard’s lips were twitching. Rodney thought he’d be happier about his singular ability to cheer up the Colonel if the Colonel’s sense of humor were less annoying and, oh yes, if they weren’t about to die. Sheppard ran a hand across his forehead, pushing back the hair sticking to his damp skin.
“Please," Rodney huffed. "You can fly it; I can fly it and explain how it works.”
Sheppard arched an eyebrow at him, and could the man at least pretend to know he’d given the natives reason to murder them? Twice? “I dunno if I’d call what you do flying...”
“Colonel Sheppard? Dr. McKay?” asked Senator Barr, standing anxiously behind them, wringing his hands. Because, of course, he was probably here to announce the death sentence.
Sheppard straightened.
“Do you know yet if you can roll the bridges back?”
Sheppard shrugged. “I could give it a shot.”
Rodney groaned. “No, no, you can’t. As much as I dislike dying on an alien world beaten to death by primitve farming equipment because of your trademark tourettes negotiating style, you have no idea what else these are designed to do. Tossing off poorly-planned mental commands at this point would be bad.”
For the first time, Sheppard’s forehead showed a wrinkle of worry. Rodney hmphed at him in satisfaction before turning back to the bridge. Then he heard Senator Panlow say flatly, “Watch the gate,” and suddenly Rambo was tapping a radio on his outfit and telling teams 1 and 2 to intercept Teyla Emmagen. He only half heard the instructions to do so “nonlethally” because the world had whited out a little.
He came back to himself with his hands braced on the gray, beaded tread of the the bridge, staring up at Panlow and Sheppard. Sheppard, who was speaking softly and reasonably, who only remembered how to sound like a professional when he was furious. Sheppard, who thought negotiations shouldn’t be more complicated than a group of friendly people being neighbourly, who thought everybody knew that “I can tell the Wraith where you are” meant “We’re all in this together.”
The villagers closed in a ring around them. The guy in the high tech gear pulled his rifle and the rest lifted their scythes and pitchforks competently, reminding Rodney that these people were the planet’s special ops. Rodney’s radio crackled. Sheppard didn’t bat an eye to betray that he'd heard anything.
Teyla said, “I have spoken with Doctor Weir. She is excited about the prospects of the Latere as allies.” A pause. “Colonel--there are some Latere in the woods. I believe they are looking for me. Are things well with you? The Latere seem... tense.”
Rodney scratched his ear, stealthily tapping the radio. “You won’t catch her,” he said lifting his chin. “She’ll go through the gate, report, and come back with reinforcements.”
“McKay,” Sheppard said patiently, also scratching his ear because he wasn’t stupid, “No need to worry just because I activated some Ancient tech. You’re working on a fix, we’re uninjured--“
“SO FAR,” Rodney squeaked while an alien method actor threatened him with a rake.
“--and Senator Panlow is a very reasonable military leader.”
Apparently the Latere weren’t stupid either because after that they took the radios.
“ANCIENT SUBMERSIBLE BRIDGES BEACH DEATH FARMERS,” Rodney finished in a rush.
“Well,” Sheppard said, “at least they know we wouldn’t give up their secret.”
**
“No,” Rodney said, “I refuse to be calm in the event of my death.”
“No! If Pistricii fall from the sky, no!” Senator Barr’s exclamations had grown progressively more colloquial in time with his agitation. “We wouldn’t kill you, but--” Rodney almost called ‘Foul!’ because pauses like that were completely unfair, “you’ll have to come back to the city--”
“Okay,” Sheppard said reasonably, nodding. He looked oddly light without his tac vest and P90. His hands were perched awkwardly on his hips like he didn’t quite know where to put them. Panlow had stalked up the gray beach with two Latere soldiers, leaving Barr with three as backup while he tried to explain the new situation to their guests.
“What? So we can be tried by a jury of our peers? Because you have to admit, ninjas with hoes don’t really qualify. Although, honestly--”
“Honestly, Rodney is without peer,” Sheppard said, grinning.
Rodney sniffed. “I wasn’t going to say that.”
“Of course you weren’t,” Sheppard agreed warmly. Dampness from the ocean and the mist had colored all the rock of the narrow beach dark like wet shale.
Panlow finished discussing with her lieutenants below the tall evergreens jutting up from the sides of the path, jerking a hand up in a clear signal. Rodney glared at Barr again, who looked miserable but also determined. Panlow turned and started walking towards the biggest bridge and the truck/cart thing parked on it with its motor running. The Latere around Rodney and Sheppard, which included the one with the rifle, moved forward as one, clearly intent on herding the Atlanteans with them.
Sheppard said, “Once we speak to your council, we’ll be able to leave?”
Barr didn’t answer immediately, rubbing his hands together anxiously. “I’m not--I’m not a regular member of the council. I’m an architect. Working here requires a certain status and so I was--”
“I’m sorry, did we care?” Rodney snapped, stumbling over a wobbling rock, glaring the tiny oysters peeking out from the underside of the stone.
“You’re welcome to join us in hiding,” Barr said finally, helplessly, sounding a little like one of Panlow’s tourist pamphlets.
“Okay,” Sheppard said sweetly. Rodney glanced up, knowing he was making a horrible face, but what was with the smiles? He opened his mouth to ask because, really, was he missing something here? He was about to be locked up in a hidden city forever and deprive the world of his--
Sheppard stumbled to the side. The Latere with the gun reached for Sheppard’s elbow, letting go of the gun--the Latere had begun favoring Sheppard’s grins almost as soon as Rodney opened his mouth because playing favorites was apparently universal--and Sheppard’s arm connected with the Latere’s windpipe just as his other hand found the rifle barrel.
“Duck,” Sheppard said, so Rodney hit the ground throwing his hands over his head. He heard two shots and, “Okay, time to run,” so he came up, throwing a fist sized rock at the Latere who wasn’t on the ground. The Latere in kevlar was lying in a crumpled heap behind him, and Sheppard had the rifle off the strap, backing as quickly as possible towards the tree line.
The scrambled up the slope, incline and mud making progress slow and desperate. Rodney grabbed at tree trunks, hauling himself up by the strength of his arms and reached the top, gasping, cradling scraped palms and panic when he realized Sheppard wasn’t there with him.
“It’s okay, coming,” Sheppard said, sounding distracted. Rodney heard two more rifle shots and then scrambling behind him. “Ok,” Sheppard said, eyeing the sky through the tree branches. “Gate’s...this way,” and took off before Rodney could protest resting their survival on Sheppard’s directional sense. At least it was drier under the trees.
**
They hit the roadblock about a mile from the shore. Turned out, yes, of course, Sheppard knew which direction the Stargate was in because he’d been relying on following the road. Peering over the ridge, Rodney stared at the scattered Latere huddled behind trees and brush, ambushing anyone moronic enough to come strolling down the path. Three scouts faced outward, scanning the forest. Rodney ducked back down next to Sheppard against the wet mix of leaves and dirt.
“They have scythes,” Rodney insisted, gesturing at the rifle, “couldn’t you--?”
Sheppard looked up his inspection of the Latere weapon, staring at Rodney for a long second. “Yes,” he said evenly, “I could take them out.”
Rodney swallowed coldly, because the Colonel was looking at him like Rodney had just asked him to kill twelve people because it would be easy. “No, no, of course not,” Rodney said quickly. He wanted his life signs detector.
"Okay,” Sheppard was saying, pointing somewhere off to the left and away from the Latere, “you make for the gate, follow that ridge over there. I'll circle round and meet you. Hopefully, you’ll meet up with Teyla. She’ll be heading for the beach--towards us." And nodded at him like that settled that.
Except Rodney heard, So long, Rodney, and--there was just no fucking way. Shivering, he reached under his expedition jacket, pulling out a square of matte black plastic. When Sheppard turned away in a crouch, Rodney placed the folded database square lightly on the back of Sheppard’s neck. It worked like a charm, Sheppard sighing softly and collapsing forward into the loam, the rifle pinned beneath him.
Rodney stared at him, cupping the square against Sheppard’s skin, and thought, Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap, and also, I can’t kill twelve people either.
**
John heard roaring silence where he expected voices and a slow wind through the trees. Where he expected to feel the uneven relief of a forest floor against his knees, only a bright circle of heat at the back of his neck let him know he had a body at all. Without arms, he couldn’t reach up to push it off.
**
“He’s sick!” Rodney barked. “It’s congenital! Don’t move him, you horrible--okay, yes, fine, you can have the gun--Hey, hey!”
Barr stood on the small rise, shadowed by the forest and the mist, staring at the two Atlanteans sitting on the forest floor. In Rodney’s defense, there really wasn’t any other way to hold the square against Sheppard’s skin without being really obvious about it. For their part, the Latere soldiers seemed to have lost any inclination to be gentle with Sheppard. Rodney wondered how many Latere Sheppard had killed during the escape.
He heard the rumble of an engine from the road, and soon two Latere appeared over the ridge, passing out handguns and rifles to the farmer-soldiers, who were quickly slinging their pitchforks and shovels back over their shoulders, and seriously, who had shoulder straps for shovels?
Barr said, sounding as naseous as Rodney felt, “We’ll return to the city, where you can seek medical treatment for Colonel Sheppard.” He said the name stiffly, like he was forcing himself to remember that Sheppard was an individual and not a random, extremely skilled perpetrator of lethal violence. “Please do not resist, there is no need to cause more loss of life, you have not been sentenced to anything--”
Rodney remembered not to shout, “Yet!” indignantly, but only because Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard was passed out in his lap and his hair was tickling Rodney’s palm.
Then the Latere were lifting Sheppard (“Gently, you miserable, slimy oafs!”) while Rodney rushed to keep a hand against the square he’d tucked into the back of Sheppard’s t-shirt while a pitchfork ninja pressed the alien equivalent of a 9mm against his back. They ended up in the back of the truck he’d seen on the beach, Latere perched on the back of the open cab and more Latere walking round the truck in guard. Rodney saw their tac vests piled in the opposite corner of the truck, but there was also a Latere sitting on top of that, and she noticed Rodney looking, narrowing her eyes and tightening her grip on her handgun.
Rodney tried to look harmless while also looking like he wasn’t weird about keeping a hand underneath Sheppard’s neck--
Oh god, he’d made Sheppard pass out, he was keeping Sheppard out, definitely against his will and against his orders, he’d accidentally on purpose gotten them captured, what if there were health risks involved: brain damage, cardiac arrest, low blood sugar--
This was so stupid, he should have ideas better than this, ideas that deserved to have their own bestelling memoirs written about them. It was such a phenomenally bad idea--but no matter how bad it had been, letting John go off by himself had been fucking impossible.
So Rodney sat on an alien truck, surrounded by alien guards and his unconscious team leader, and thought about PTSD as they drove out onto the bridges that became complicated, multichambered tunnels a hundred yards from shore, descending into blue-tinged darkness beneath the surface of the ocean.
They drove by tall, arching windows that cast blue shadows across the floor. All around plastic gleamed like steel, marked with proturbances and angles; machinery essential to the maintenance of the tunnels become something like public art in the hands of Ancient architects.
The passage was lit dimly by a trail of electric lights along the high ceiling, obviously installed by the Latere. Occasionally, dark recesses hinted at hidden doorways. Geometric patterns of orange and red lit up bright within the wall panels as they passed, tumbling after them in a flickering dance. Some of the Latere seemed unnerved, some of them admiring, but there was no other response to the ATA. Trapped under many feet of ocean water in an enclosed space, Rodney wasn’t about to start experimenting.
His panic wasn’t exactly receding with time, but sooner or later he’d have to try something, or resign himself to being tried for some mysterious crime by whatever dubious judicial system Barr kept hinting at.
After about ten minutes of slow travel, they hit a fork in the tunnel system where two tunnels from the mainland joined into one. A group of Latere waited there with another truck, Panlow as their vanguard. Rodney didn’t recognize her at first because she’d stripped off her voluminous robe, revealing a high-tech military outfit to match the Latere whose gun Sheppard had stolen on the beach.
Her face was murderous, and it wasn’t until they got closer and Rodney saw the three body shapes and the red on white sheets that he guessed why.
When she spoke it was an emotionless, “He’s shot?” meaning Sheppard.
One of the Latere stepped forward to report. Rodney tried to communicate through a series of tragic expressions that he was worried about Sheppard’s serious chronic condition. Barr hopped out of the cab, but Panlow had already heard all she needed to hear because she pointed at Sheppard draped across Rodney’s lap and said, “Bring him.”
“Excuse me,” Rodney snapped, pulling the square away from Sheppard’s skin. “Did you miss that he is seriously ill? I don’t know what kind of abyss of human rights protection you people are suffering from, but you can yell at him after he gets medical attention! Look, he can’t even walk.” This last was hissed for the express benefit of Sheppard’s fluttering eyelids and sleepy glare.
“Rodney?” Sheppard rasped, frowning with sleepy perplexity. His recovery obviously wasn’t as immediate as it had been on Atlantis, but there didn’t seem to be any lingering brain damage--
“Hypoglycaemia is a very serious condition!” Rodney finished. He felt Sheppard’s back tense against legs, and halfway through freaking out all over again, thought, is he laughing?
But Sheppard must have caught some of what Rodney was saying because when the Latere pulled him away, he sagged in their hands and forced them to all but drag him to the second truck. Rodney would have worried that maybe there were side effects after all, except he was pretty sure he knew the meaning of Sheppard’s clear-eyed stare as they pulled him off the truck. Then the wounded soldiers--thank god, only one of them was legitimately a corpse--were being transferred from Panlow’s truck to Barr’s and Panlow’s truck was executing a stupid looking three point turn inside the tunnel, which was just absurdly mundane, and heading back the way it’d come--
“Wait, wait,” Rodney protested, “where are they going? Aren’t we going to the city? We have an appointment with your incompetent judicial system--”
Barr’s eyes as he got back into the cab were huge in his pale face, and Rodney felt his voice desert him, replaced by something icy and suffocating.
**
PART TWO