(no subject)
Title: Eurydice Turns Left
Author: Vehemently vee_fic
Fandom: SGA
Spoilers: vague early-mid season 2
What is it: An adventure story. An extremely deep drama. A deathmarch.
Rating: PG-13, for language, violence, and scariness
Tagline: "Aha!" crowed Rodney. "Better a wuss than the biggest klutz in two galaxies."
***
TWO -- And The Rock Cried Out
***
John couldn't remember which direction they'd originally gone, two weeks ago, so he was pretty sure they wouldn't find the rock he'd gone tumbling off, unless he was really unlucky. He was too busy to look anyway, corralling Melo forward when all the Sergeant wanted to do was stare. Van Arden was more orderly, stiffening her spine any time he looked at her, and John was pretty sure she had something to prove.
That was all right with him; he'd have to think of some way she could do that and get over it, something heroic and nonfatal.
They turned left, then right -- there was no way to walk in a straight line, much less get good sightlines. It kind of creeped him out. Ronon was idle, playing with his knife and bringing up the rear. "Hey," John muttered to him. "You're making sure we don't get lost, right?"
The look he got back needed to be bottled and sold to teens and punk musicians everywhere. "Climb up on rock. Look for huge Stargate. Go in that direction."
"Oh. Right. Go back to your goofing off, then." Rodney gave that a glance over his shoulder, and it was much more of a problem if he was getting bored. The last time, he'd made his own fireworks in the field from scratch, which, John had been really sure you couldn't do that outside of a Star Trek episode. Pretty, though. Except for the interplanetary incident they'd caused.
"The hand-held isn't working," said Rodney, and smacked it twice.
"All right," Sheppard announced. "Two more hours of Cretaceous rapture, and then we take a break, and then we try to find the edge of this puzzle and see what there is to see."
"And then we can go traipsing home with gravel in our boots," said McKay, "And sunburn. Whatever this thing is, I can't get at it a broken hand-held, without a control panel, and with no aerial map, which we can't get if the jumper won't fit. Which means this part of the adventure is a gigantic waste of time."
"You know it won't fit," said John, picking up his pace till he was downright ambling. "Whoever put the rocks there didn't want anybody flying in, not even us. And if you'd ever been in the service, you would have learned about how to hurry up and wait."
Melo chuckled at this.
"See, the Sergeant knows," added John. Melo gave him a look that said, I am humoring you, because you are my insane boss. There might have been a little bit of I'm a Marine and you're not, but that kind of thing got to be transparent after a while.
"You're not worried about natives, sir?" Van Arden interjected.
"Uninhabited." John paused, looked up into the sun. It was making him sweat a little too much. "MALP showed nothing but rocks and dust. If there are people here, they're pretty damned agile."
"Could be ninjas," said Melo. "Sir."
"Oh sure," said John. "The SGC didn't tell you about the advance team of extras from Jackie Chan movies, that they sent through a decade ago? I'm sure they've all settled down and had babies and established a whole ninja civilization by now."
Ronon eyed him, unsure. "What are ninjas?"
Teyla listened with interest as Melo explained a concept that was half Hollywood and half gory comic books. It would have been a fine joke, except Rodney kept butting in to point out the ludicrousness of warriors who could go invisible (with Earth technology, anyway) and cloud the minds of their enemies. Melo could clearly hold his own, and John was just as happy to sit out the war of zingers. The sun beating down, or possibly just his chatterbox team, was making his head hurt.
Van Arden kept her eyes on the wandering geologist in-between barks of embarrassed laughter. Ronon clearly thought they had all lost their minds.
"Okay, fine," said Rodney at last. "You're the expert on assassination techniques." (Me? thought John.) Rodney was looking at him funny. "Can you really kick a guy in the nose and send pieces of bone into his brain and kill him, or is that just a myth?"
"Um, I've never tried," John rejoined. "I heard Bruce Lee did that once, but people make up a lot of stuff about him."
"Dude, Jackie Chan versus Bruce Lee." Melo's face shone. "Awesomest fight ever! Sir."
Sheppard adjusted his sunglasses and dropped back to fill in Ronon's blanks. "You saw that one Jackie Chan movie. Bruce Lee was this guy -- little guy, small as Van Arden, there -- fast, good on his feet. He was a dance champion and a movie star too."
"He was a what?" Rodney asked. Teyla was laughing, just at the incredulous tone.
The answer came before John could supply it. The geologist, Yu, poked her head out from between two stones: "Dance champion. Cha-cha, right?" John gawked at her. "My mom was a huge fan. She grew up in Hong Kong. Went to his funeral, too. Before I was born." Yu shrugged, and disappeared again back into the rocks.
"So," Ronon asked, deadpan, "Who would win, Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee?"
Melo and Rodney prepared themselves for verbal battle while Teyla smirked.
John wanted to roll his eyes, but he was afraid they might fall out of his head.
***
The time allotted for a break came and they squatted companionably in a space among the rocks -- too small to be called a proper clearing. Teyla admired how John had brought together his team, joking strange Earth jokes, and now Melo and Rodney would sit side by side without glancing at each other awkwardly. Ronon ate a snack, and scaled a stone to watch over them from on high.
"Be careful up there," said John, bland. Teyla looked at him but he had his dark glasses on and she could not read him. Probably he was ashamed at falling, and made it into another joke. She watched him rummage in Melo's rucksack until he pulled out the medical kit.
Rodney saw him at it and asked, "Are there painkillers in there?" He was chewing with gusto on that foodbar he liked so much.
"Just the serious stuff," John grumbled, rattling a very small number of pills in a plastic bottle. "Painkillers are still rationed. You hurt?"
"My brain is leaking out my ears. Possibly heatstroke. Whatever it is, it hurts, and I don't see the point in suffering."
"Me neither." John grimaced, and put the bottle away.
Rodney did a strange thing then. He stood up and stepped up close to John, squared shoulders in front of him, serious and silent. Teyla had never seen him like this, using actions instead of his usual excess of words. The whole group paused to watch this weird calm confrontation.
All he did was reach out with both hands and remove the glasses from John's face, folding them absently. Without those masking lenses, John was sallow, dull-eyed as he watched Rodney warily. Teyla noticed for the first time that he was sweating, beads rolling down from his hairline, far more than the pleasant weather warranted.
Rodney asked, "What is the matter with you?"
"Nothing," said John, and snatched back his glasses.
Rodney did not push him further, and nobody said anything for a while. John packed up the medical kit back into the rucksack. He was ready again, and expected them to be ready as well. Ronon, who had watched the whole exchange from above their heads, stood and jumped to another stone.
Teyla sidled past John. He had the glasses back in place. "Rodney worries about you as he does everyone."
"I know." John waved one hand irritably.
She continued, "He said you were dying, before when you had stitches. I assume that means you were hurt more than you let on."
"Not really," he replied. "He just wants to rescue me."
She grinned at him, then, hoping for and expecting a return in kind. But John just turned away, blank. She was reaching out to touch his arm when Ronon hissed from above.
"Movement," he growled, low and carrying. He was squatting again, still, all grays and browns and those unlikely pale eyes. "My five o'clock, two or more, in among the rocks."
A high noise, far away behind them, behind Ronon. Long and gentle, twittering, like birdsong.
"You see any birds?" whispered Melo. John gestured him to silence, pointed him to guard Judy. He beckoned Van Arden and she melted to his side like a feather on wind, weapon ready.
The birdsong came back again, lower and shorter, from their twelve. It wasn't far off at all. They all had weapons out, now. Rodney screwed his eyes shut and then opened them. Sheppard and Van Arden argued in one-handed gestures, till suddenly they broke off. The small blonde woman spun and gathered up Melo, and without a backward glance she struck out laterally into the stone maze. Judy followed, eyes glassy, hands helpless at her sides. They left their rucksacks behind.
John made his gathering gesture, and pointed their direction, weapon low in one tense hand. Teyla felt his expertise and control, and followed him as he led them away from the way the others had taken. Ronon slipped down to the ground like a viscous liquid pouring.
John paused ten or fifteen strides out, spun one finger and they huddled up automatically. "When I say," he whispered, jostling his shoulder with Rodney's. "When I say, I want you all to break in opposite directions. Find your way through this damned maze, lead them on a chase. Meet up in the crags facing the gate, and keep in radio contact."
"East southeast," added Rodney, breathless. "Sight off the peak if you have to."
"Okay, go," John said, and they were all upright then, hustling away from each other. Her mouth tight, Teyla ran, birdsong coming at her from all directions.
***
They took Rodney quickly, with a scuffle. He got off one wild shot with his sidearm and then it was quick underhanded movement from three dark bodies, and him bashing desperately around him, long-armed. When two of them were sitting on his back and he was wheezing yellow dust (maximum 20 seconds), he saw that the third at least had taken a blow and was lying addled in a heap beside him.
That close, McKay saw that the bodies weren't dark, but dark-clad, head to foot in some black-brown homespun. The one in the dirt was female, long-limbed and with long, pale fingers. That was the only visible skin -- she'd just engaged in physical combat with the equivalent of a bushel bag over her head.
There was no appropriate quip to the situation. The two sitting on his back barked and muttered at each other, a language totally indecipherable and unlike any other language he'd heard in Pegasus. They weren't talking to him.
"This is McKay, I've been captured," he said, and repeated it, before realizing his radio headset had been knocked off. He turned his head, felt around in the dust with his hands, but couldn't find it.
Soon the hooded people were muscling him up, crossing his arms behind him tightly and grinding together his wrist bones harder than could really be considered humane for a prisoner. They bound him that way, tightly, palm to palm behind his back, and instantly (instantly!) the thongs cut his wrists and numbed his fingertips.
"Ow, ow, hello!" he called, in case anyone was listening to be sure he was alive. "Okay, I can walk. You got me."
He knew they really did have him when the shorter one gestured with something heavily metallic in his hand -- not a gun, not a zat, but something else that looked kind of like what would happen if you built a crowbar that could change channels on a TV. The taller one grabbed up his rucksack in one hand and jostled the one who'd fallen with the other. The hoodie-people crouched and scoured the dirt, picking up objects off the ground: broken plastic (his headset, in two pieces) and his sidearm, held upside-down and uncarefully.
"That thing's not a toy," he said, but they weren't listening to him. They knocked him in the ankles to get him moving. Together they trooped back the way Rodney had come when he had blundered away from Sheppard's hissing order.
He kicked up all the dust he could, being pushed between the boulders, and listened with all his might. There wasn't a lot to hear: four people breathing, clothes and feet and his own annoyed complaints. There had been gunfire, far away, single shots like someone with a plan, but Rodney couldn't tell whether it had ended in capture from just the noise. At least some of them had to escape, of course. Teyla had a gift for silence, and Ronon was some kind of Terminator freak, and Sheppard -- maybe Sheppard had been that gunfire.
"Look, we might as well start negotiating now," he told the hoodie people. "What exactly is it you want? Because I really --"
More gunfire, from another direction. A P-90 this time, the massive crackle of it ugly and solitary. Controlled firing, short bursts, but it went and went and went. The hoodie with the zapper-crowbar gestured sharply, spun and ran off, making low throaty barking noises as he went. Rodney's one shot had missed. They'd been too fast for him. Rodney had no idea who was who out there, and who to shout for when the rescue party came.
The bullets kept flying, and now Rodney heard screaming and the high ping of ricochets. With rock on all sides, whoever it was was probably in grave danger of shooting himself accidentally, while he mowed down these defenseless secretive freaks. Their bodies would pile up between the stones, bloody and heaving, until he -- surely not Van Arden? -- cut off his own retreat. Unless he could climb through the gore, God, a foot on someone's hooded head and a hand grabbing a cracked ribcage --
"They want us alive!" He bellowed out, thoughtless.
The firing paused. The cries went lower, raging: attack noises. Oh, I've doomed him, thought Rodney to himself, even as his captors kicked him forward. Without his arms to steady him, he stumbled hard and had to stagger.
All he could do was walk and listen to the sputtering gunfire, and if he was really stupid shout more useless advice. Really, it was only a question of the number of bullets, and the number of the cowled enemy, and which number was larger.
The screaming voices turned again, throaty and full, echoing in the labyrinth and redoubling like the breaths of some horrifying animal. The firing stopped entirely, and didn't start again. Out of bullets. Rodney imagined himself trying to reload, hands shaking on the clip and botching it while crazed faceless monsters came leaping at him from every direction, and closed his eyes. The roaring hoodies were triumphant now, high descants over the thrum of male basses: they had him.
McKay had to walk, thumbs tapping his own lumbar spine, lost among the stupid stones that all looked alike. The two hoodies left with him mumbled to each other, unreadable noises. Even if he did shout now, he wouldn't hear a reply over the din, and not hearing a reply would make it impossible to tell whether that was because a reply wasn't coming. He put one foot in front of the other, shaky.
They came upon the clearing where the team had rested, a million years and forty minutes ago, and McKay realized that was where they had been heading all along. Van Arden and Judy Yu were there, trussed and sitting back to back, bruised. Teyla was unconscious by their side.
"Doctor!" breathed Van Arden, and Judy whipped her head around to see. "Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," he grumped. He opened his mouth to ask about Melo, and shut it. "Looks like we're all here," he said. Van Arden gave him a grateful look.
The hoodie he'd knocked around took special care to kick him squarely in the backs of his knees, so that he flopped in a heap in front of Teyla.
"They just brought her in," Judy supplied. "Tied her anyway, even out cold. Motherfuckers."
Rodney boggled at that carefully enunciated expletive. She had a split lip, and spat blood with every syllable. "Yeah," he muttered. "Have they let on whether they can understand us?"
"No," Van Arden whispered back. "But who knows."
Teyla groaned on the ground. Hands tied, they crouched over her and wished her awake.
She was still lying on her side, groggy but answering to her name when Sheppard tumbled into the camp, bound like all the rest of them and staggering. His sunglasses were missing. A short, round hoodie kicked him over and he crashed shoulder-first into the dirt while they stared. He didn't say anything, and lay on his face for a long moment.
"Sheppard?" asked Rodney, just as Van Arden was blurting,
"Are you all right, sir?"
"I've had better days," said Sheppard, rolling over and sitting up. The light was failing, but the finger-bruises on his neck were pretty obvious. His forehead, all sweat some hour ago, was caked with yellow dirt.
"Was that you with the single shots?" asked Rodney, as carefully as he knew how.
"Yeah," Sheppard grunted. "They've got their own weapon, funnylooking. Like a taser." He didn't mention Melo either, or Ronon. They sat like that, all together in a circle, for a long while. The shadows grew tall and the light lower in the sky, and Rodney wondered to himself about meals, and shelter, and where their two missing people were.
In the end, they heard him before they saw him. The hoodie people had lasped from full aria to a dull hum, and his cry of agony pealed above the stones so clear he seemed to be closer than he turned out to be. Sheppard was on his feet instantly, breathing hard, and the rest rolled over and stood, waiting, helpless.
Sheppard darted forward, tried to muscle aside a hoodie standing in his way. The creature whipped around and bashed him with a zapper-crowbar, and then zapped him with it for good measure. Close up, Rodney could hear the hum of it, see the writhing of Sheppard's shoulder muscles under the current. Sheppard took a while to shake it off and get to his feet again, Van Arden by his side with gritted teeth.
Nobody could see far in the maze of stones. The two of them had already guessed what was going on, but didn't say.
That horrible cry rose and then fell, and rose again lower. Now it came in half-articulated swear words, moans, pleas. They listened all of them, speechless, as this awful noise moved closer and closer. His progress was tortoise-slow, and his voice was growing hoarse. He was sobbing bitterly when he hobbled into view, surrounded by humming hoodies: Sergeant Melo.
"Son of a bitch," breathed Van Arden at Rodney's elbow, and then raced Sheppard to their fellow soldier's side. Rodney saw it clearly now, how the man's left leg turned in the wrong direction halfway down the calf. His boot glistened with blood. He'd been walking on it that way, who knew how far. His face was a mass of new bruises, bloody nose, tears and snot and that stupid dust turning his hair yellow. He opened his mouth as if to cry again --
"I'm sorry sir," gasped Melo. Van Arden gave him a terrible look. Sheppard didn't answer at all, just shouldered Van Arden out of the way and knelt in the dirt in front of his Sergeant.
"Get on," he said.
"Sir?" Melo stared down at him, clueless.
Judy Yu, beside Rodney, said, "Oh," to herself, a terrified noise.
Sheppard raised his head and his tone was savage: "Shut up and get on, you dumb grunt." He lowered his head again, flexed his shoulders.
Comprehension dawned on Melo's face. Rodney was watching Van Arden, her blonde hair plastered to her forehead. Rodney realized that if Sheppard hadn't volunteered, she would have been the one in the dirt, trying to lift a man bigger than her. Melo was short, but he wasn't small. She brushed against Melo's bad side, steadying him while he drew up his weight.
At the moment he committed to throwing himself over Sheppard's shoulders, one of the hoodies behind him kicked him in his good ankle. It was more of an uncontrolled flop, and both of them gasped out hard. Van Arden used her shoulders to help push Melo into a balanced position.
Sheppard lurched from two knees to one, and then lurched again and was standing. With 180 pounds of Marine on his back, he duck-walked, bent and slow. Van Arden danced behind, trying to help steady the load. Rodney looked into Sheppard's face, and he wasn't sallow any longer. His face and neck were flushed, tendons corded. A vein pounded visibly in his forehead as he lugged his man back to the group.
***
They stood in the darkening twilight in their sunny-day clothing, and Teyla shivered. As if they understood his grim anger, the No-faces allowed John to carry the Sergeant, and allowed his forward momentum to continue as the whole column of creatures turned and directed them through the maze of boulders. Teyla could not decide if it was mercy -- surely not, not these monsters that would force the injured to walk -- or urgency, or distaste for their captives. The No-faces were as inscrutable as their absent features.
Her head pounded, and she was thirsty and sore. John would pause and hitch his whole body, hard, to keep Melo from falling off. Melo would mutter "fucking ninjas" like an imprecation to a god, while John grimaced. They were all very clumsy, but bunched together with No-faces on all sides, their shock-weapons poking, there was no room to fall.
She said, quietly, "Ronon, can you hear me? Please come in." Rodney looked at her funny, but he had lost his earpiece. She could not reach hers, to activate it. She stopped and pressed her ear to Rodney's shoulder, trying to trigger the device. "Ronon, can you hear me?"
Ronon did not speak his life or cry his death-cry, and he did not come to them alone and armed or captive and tied. It was possible he was dead, or that he had escaped through the gate. Teyla could not know, and as the No-face people stomped forward and sang their low chant, she realized she could not do anything about the lack of knowledge. He would have to come to good or ill without her input, for now.
This was no consolation, when the No-faces behind her kicked her heels, propelling her forward faster. Night was growing cold, that stiffness working into her bones. But John could not keep to a straight line with a man's weight on him, and drifted always to the left as if on an incline. Rodney walked ahead of him, turning often to see his progress, muttering advice and encouragement and the occasional cheerful death-threat.
John responded with many curse words Teyla knew, and several she did not. Sweat rolled down his temples, clearing runnels through the dust on his face. It was a very long walk, or seemed so.
But the dark was still not complete when their strange quiet column began to disappear into the mountain. Teyla watched the No-faces ahead of them, there and then suddenly not, their deep unintelligible voices humming as in ritual.
Judy was first in the line, and balked at what she saw. "No way," she said, slow and firm, but the No-faces were on every side, their black shapes looming. One of them kicked her hard and she tumbled past a turn and away into darkness. Rodney gasped and stumbled forward, and as they all moved Teyla could see it was stairs, down and to one side, next to a tall stone like a camouflage screen. Each step was rounded, worn down with a thousand years of feet, and the rock above sanded by passing hands. An enormous door into the dark, with Judy Yu already inside and the No-faces everywhere, voices insistent. Teyla took the first step.
"You will want to take the steps sideways, Colonel," she said, "I will guide your feet downward."
"We won't let you fall," added Rodney, and in tandem they all struggled into the black maw.
It would have felt so much more like an accomplishment that they reached the bottom without falling if Teyla had not seen Judy sitting, with her head covered in a black hood. She had only time to gasp before the rough fabric was slipped over her own face.
***
Evasion was a comfortable discipline. He knew the ways of it, silence and trickery and murder as a last resort. Ronon had seen that the others did not know and it pleased him a little to confirm his exceptionalism. He had listened to the weaponsfire and to the shouts that accompanied it and later to the cries of the tortured prisoner. He heard Teyla's voice in his ear, and might have responded, but evasion was a discipline. She might have been coerced to speak to him.
There was no way he could have rescued all of them, and to choose among them was untenable. He waited, and listened, and planned. He observed the enemy, their ragged lines of soldiers slipping among the stones as if born to it, pivoting gracefully. They did not look up at him. He crouched atop a boulder unnoticed, close enough to reach out and snatch a dark mask from one of those enemy heads. It would be easy.
The enemy had no notion of the intelligence it was giving away.
He leapt from stone to stone, carefully arrhythmic in pattern and speed, following the column. He glimpsed the prisoners, Sheppard's black-clad back bent with the weight of the tortured one. They did not look up either. Just as well; they would have tried to signal him, and gotten him caught.
Here was the dangerous part, the gap where the stones ended and the mountainside began. Anyone could turn and see him, crouching there in the open -- but they did not think to turn. The enemy column found the narrowest point and hurried across, jogging, the low thrum of their ritual speech everywhere. They did not slow as they approached the cliff. The first of them disappeared into rock from one instant to the next.
Ronon watched carefully, disbelieving, and soon he saw the trick of it: they were agile and sinuous all of them, and turned a corner into an entrance hidden in the cliff face. He leapt to another stone, and then another, watching as the enemy slipped one by one around the natural-looking baffle and into their stronghold.
The prisoners plodded forward, prodded and kicked into line, and began to disappear into that dark entrance. As soon as they were gone from view, the advantage would be lost and rescue would become difficult. It was an easy decision to make, and even easier to take action: Ronon waited for a straggler to slide past his stone, someone the right size, and he reached down and snapped that dark-covered neck.
It was a human, because it expired its last breath into Ronon's palm. He lifted the body high, and stripped it of its clothes. It was a man, skin no particular color and hair like dust, yellow-gray. He thumbed the prominent eyes open to check: more gray, almost pink. Albino. Quickly Ronon donned the roughspun sweater and hood, the faint smell of animal in the fabric. The dead white creature he folded carefully and balanced on top the stone. Down in the dirt, his vision narrowed to the rocks on all sides, Ronon tucked his hair into the back of the sweater and rejoined the troop. They did not say anything to him, rapt in their ritual, and he did nothing to invite notice. At the heels of his enemy, he turned a corner and tracked his way into the bowels of their prison.
***
Well, this was sucking very much. It wasn't the dark so much, and it wasn't the itchy hood that caused it. He had carried people around on his shoulders before (usually, with free hands to steady, and mostly in swimming pools), and had the flu on duty before, and he'd even spent his fair share of time tied up among unpleasant people. But having Melo disappear suddenly, that weight off his back making him pop up like a folding lawn chair -- and then the screaming. No fun at all.
On the up side, Melo's hysteria gave a pretty good sound-picture of what had happened, so John wasn't terribly surprised when grabby hands shoved him forward, stumbling, until one boot stumbled over a big pile of nothing and down he went. "Incoming!" he called, and felt the rough stone on one shoulder as he slid down into an extremely deep hole. By the time he landed, Melo had heeded his warning and managed to roll out of the way. John wasn't quite smart enough to do his own rolling, and he got a nice Teyla-sized boot print on his chest.
At this point, he began thinking that possibly there was a dental surgeon down here, and a swarm of biting black flies, and his seventh grade French teacher. It's better to know you're in hell for sure than always to be wondering.
The bizarro Indiana Jones villains echoed and faded, scraped away with an echoing thunder of stone on the move. John listened to the tick of falling pebbles, and realized that the hole was being closed, with them inside. Outside? Wherever, someplace probably bad.
"Uh," he said, and listened to the echo. Under that was Melo, hyperventilating, his shocky breaths just this side of crying. John rolled over to to his knees and nudged around till they were touching.
"Sounds big," said McKay, somewhere nearby. "Tall cavern, some kind of -- baffles or chambers. Do you smell that?"
"Groundwater," said Yu, the geologist. "Limestone, I think -- calcium carbonate in solution. There'll be drips and pools all over."
Sheppard caught that hard, metallic whiff, something dank and inorganic. "At least we've got a water supply," he muttered.
They began to shift, shuffling with their feet and knees, searching. Someone was exploring the space, stumbling around. Pebbles skittered everywhere. "Oh! Oh!" said a high voice. Judy Yu again. "Sharp edges here. I think I can cut --"
"Do that." He listened to the woman huffing and shifting, and to the blessed blessed noise of friction. None of the cowled bizarro guys stepped in to stop her, which meant they really were alone.
"So hey," said Sheppard, low. "Can I convene a little council-of-war here for a second?"
Scuffling noises around him. He was tickled to realize, suddenly, that Van Arden on his right, and Teyla and McKay on his left, had all had the same idea: they backed towards him, crouching. They convened by reaching out backwards with their bound fingers, little fluttering touches and quick thumb-grabs. It was impossible to tell whose hands were whose, in the disorienting absence of light and weird position -- just hands, anybody's. They were all freaking out in the dark a little; he really hoped he still had glow-sticks stowed in his vest, or things might get ugly.
"So here's the deal," said Sheppard, to get them all focussed. "We'll be missed in how many hours?"
"We're due back midmorning tomorrow," supplied Van Arden. "Probably twelve hours, fourteen maybe, sir. I can't read my watch."
"Okay. Well, we're in jail at least till then, or till Elizabeth negotiates some kind of peace treaty or something. Maybe Ronon made it back, and we can start the clock early." He stopped and thought. "Even in jail, we have to stick together, take care of business."
McKay rustled next to him, impatient.
"McKay, as usual, you're on escape plan. You find us a way out of here, and work with the geologist. If they don't turn the lights on, we're gonna need a sense of night and day - Van Arden, that'll be you handling a schedule, working out shifts, and please tell me you've got a flashlight up your sleeve. Teyla, you're quartermaster and inventory, since we don't know if we'll be fed." That was her hand, squeezing his thumb. "Melo, you've got some medic training?"
"Yes sir," said Melo. He inched a little, his arm against Sheppard's knee.
"Good," Sheppard told him. "As soon as Yu gets us all untied, you and I are gonna set your leg."
Melo breathed long, like somebody who's just been told about a guy who didn't make it back. "Yes, sir," he mumbled.
Yu was quick, and Yu was tough, cutting herself free and her wrist to ribbons in only a few minutes. She was a lot slower locating Sheppard's knife (her hands shy, tracing down his body) and practically glacial putting the blade to the thongs that bound him. "I'll try not to cut you," she blurted, and the ties parted instantly under the sharp edge. "Oh!"
"Good job, Yu," he said, (Call me Judy, she grumbled) and set her to cutting loose all the rest. He ripped the hood off his face, and there was still no light at all. Sheppard patted himself down for glowsticks, cracked one and saw faces emerge one by one. They all looked a little haggard, blinking and shuddering in the dim green light, so he blended in just fine, but intelligence was way too important --
It was awfully nice to find a heap of military-issue stuff, rucksacks in a pile, just left there where they'd all fallen. John didn't bother searching the dark ceiling for the hole; he wasn't sure he wanted to know how far up it was. And anyway, he had a heap of stuff to play with, that probably still had a medical kit and a huge beacon flashlight. "You're in luck," he told Melo.
Luck turned out not to be the right word, not for Melo's tibia. Sheppard got to know it real well over the next while, and he couldn't give the poor guy a dose of morphine till he'd found out all the Sergeant knew about compound fractures.
"Fucking ninjas," came the whimper, for the millionth time. Sheppard hadn't decided whether that was an active delusion or just some really terrified irony. Van Arden came, and sat with Melo, talking him through it. Sheppard watched them, how she held his hands so he wouldn't reach and interfere, how she would breathe deeply and coax him to breathe. She threw Sheppard foul looks, until at last the break was stabilized with a pair of collapsible spades from Judy's pack, and the bleeding stanched.
"Just say yes to drugs," he muttered, jabbing Melo in the hip with an ampule. "Half-dose, and save the rest for the morning." John repacked the medical kit and thoughtlessly stood up. Immediately he sat back down again, brains whirling.
Van Arden didn't say a word, but the line between her brows sent out some kind of distress signal, because Rodney dropped his stack of rucksack inventory and scuttled up close.
"What just happened? Are you hurt? Oh my god did they beat you up and you're such a goddamned stoic you wouldn't admit it and now you're bleeding internally? You know I'm not qualified for thoracic surgery, right?"
"I got banged around," John contradicted. "No worse than you. But --" Rodney's hands were on him, searching down ribs and tickling fiercely. He batted them away. "Stop that, McKay. I just have a bug."
This went over considerably less casually than he'd said it. The cavern echoed with dismayed silence.
"Not a bug bug. The flu, or something. Came on a couple hours ago, while we were in the rock maze." He shifted, awkward. "Headache, chills, and the vertigo is a really nice touch. I have a policy about not throwing up in front of friends, by the way. The dark was kind of a nice rest from all that spinning."
"I knew you were acting like a freak," hissed Rodney. Everyone else sat quietly, even Melo, his eyes shiny and far away. They were waiting for him.
"Nothing serious," he said, and Rodney replied instantly,
"Take the painkillers in the kit. There were at least a few, right? And then we can start you in on morphine."
Judy Yu was sitting on her haunches, rock in hand. She needed that wrist bandaged -- he should have remembered that before packing up the kit. She told Rodney, "You're the kind of guy who traded his Prozac for Ritalin in college, aren't you?"
Come to think, she was probably right. Rodney would have traded his left nut for Ritalin, and would today if anybody had some.
"The kit is packed for trauma, not viruses," answered John at last. "Anyway. We stick with the plan, and the plan is to sit tight until diplomacy or crooked thinking gets us out of here."
"You weren't going to tell us," said Teyla, from across the space of the cave. She was with the rucksacks, counting MREs. How did she always know?
He decided on rearguard action. "Hey, in case it's catching, don't let me lick any spoons."
Sheppard turned off the flashlight, to conserve the battery for emergencies.
***
He followed the humming band, silent, hanging back but not too far. Sometimes Ronon wondered whether it was a brain-skill, convincing the enemy he was not there simply by thinking it; but McKay's trashing of ninja powers this afternoon suggested not. He was there, and the enemy did not distinguish him from their own. The whole group moved as one, taking right turns and traveling down, deeper, into the mountain.
Their voices rumbled lower and softer as the passages they crossed grew larger: caves, natural caves with hanging columns. These had not been dug but found. The enemy as one crossed some invisible boundary, and yellow fingernails pulled at masks till all faces were clear. Ronon hung back farther. He saw those pop-eyes gaping wide, some albino some not, as they sang reverence and fear and tramped onward. They pushed their prisoners more gently now, hands-on, guiding. The prisoners said nothing to each other.
Down deep, the daylight gone, they struck sparks near one wall and created light, a bright arc of electricity, blinding at first. Ronon hung back to regain his vision and assess, but the enemy surged forward. It was a signal, an arrival. Enemy men and women leapt foward into an alcove, a hole man-high and wide enough for ten abreast. Mechanical sounds like chain, echoing. He could not see inside.
Ronon watched the prisoners stumble in, prodded from behind. The enemy sorted themselves, still humming low, ranging outside the alcove in a half-moon -- like the stones before the gate.
A scream, terror, that went thin and far even as it emerged. Someone echoing away, like the pitch-change of a bullet after it goes past. Another shout, low and warning: that was Sheppard. The rest made no call. A strange noise followed, like grain among millstones, and that was all.
After a few moments, the enemies who had gone in came out again. There were no prisoners. The assembly roared, arms high, masks falling off their shoulders. It was a triumph, the last note to their ritual. They stopped humming after that, and turned to one another to slap shoulders and catch each other up in embrace. They laughed, and their gray teeth reflected the sparklight along with their unnerving eyes.
The enemy struck smaller arcs, little personal lights here and there, and let the bright white light lapse. They looked to each other then, exclaiming, and grouped off in threes and fours. They disappeared down corridors, satisfied, their jobs done. Ronon faded backwards into the dark. They did not see him.
When they were all gone, no guard at all, he came forward again, into the alcove, if only to carry home mementoes of the honored dead. His night vision was powerful, but even he saw nothing, his head brushing the ceiling and the walls blowing back his breath. The prisoners made no sound and their blood did not taint the air. In the middle of the space was an obstacle, and he clicked his tongue to find the echoing shape. Large, all the way to the ceiling and just as wide. He touched it: a perfect round stone, like the soccer ball the Marines played with. A made thing.
Ronon traced his way all about the space, felt the small, regular holes in the walls, and came back to the rock sphere. He examined the ceiling, how the low roof sloped upward just so, space for the stone to move within that alcove but no further. And then, on his knees, he touched the ground it sat on: a hewn floor, a dip just so, space for the stone to sit still without rolling. He guessed it held a secret, a passageway or a transporter or the mechanism for opening another chamber, and knew with shuddering relief that the prisoners were alive.
But the stone would not move under his effort. He heaved at it, quietly at first and then groaning, with everything he had: immense, implacable stillness. He leaned against it, panting, and felt it leach away the warmth from his body. It would not move.
***
Part 1 | (2/5) | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
Author: Vehemently vee_fic
Fandom: SGA
Spoilers: vague early-mid season 2
What is it: An adventure story. An extremely deep drama. A deathmarch.
Rating: PG-13, for language, violence, and scariness
Tagline: "Aha!" crowed Rodney. "Better a wuss than the biggest klutz in two galaxies."
***
TWO -- And The Rock Cried Out
***
John couldn't remember which direction they'd originally gone, two weeks ago, so he was pretty sure they wouldn't find the rock he'd gone tumbling off, unless he was really unlucky. He was too busy to look anyway, corralling Melo forward when all the Sergeant wanted to do was stare. Van Arden was more orderly, stiffening her spine any time he looked at her, and John was pretty sure she had something to prove.
That was all right with him; he'd have to think of some way she could do that and get over it, something heroic and nonfatal.
They turned left, then right -- there was no way to walk in a straight line, much less get good sightlines. It kind of creeped him out. Ronon was idle, playing with his knife and bringing up the rear. "Hey," John muttered to him. "You're making sure we don't get lost, right?"
The look he got back needed to be bottled and sold to teens and punk musicians everywhere. "Climb up on rock. Look for huge Stargate. Go in that direction."
"Oh. Right. Go back to your goofing off, then." Rodney gave that a glance over his shoulder, and it was much more of a problem if he was getting bored. The last time, he'd made his own fireworks in the field from scratch, which, John had been really sure you couldn't do that outside of a Star Trek episode. Pretty, though. Except for the interplanetary incident they'd caused.
"The hand-held isn't working," said Rodney, and smacked it twice.
"All right," Sheppard announced. "Two more hours of Cretaceous rapture, and then we take a break, and then we try to find the edge of this puzzle and see what there is to see."
"And then we can go traipsing home with gravel in our boots," said McKay, "And sunburn. Whatever this thing is, I can't get at it a broken hand-held, without a control panel, and with no aerial map, which we can't get if the jumper won't fit. Which means this part of the adventure is a gigantic waste of time."
"You know it won't fit," said John, picking up his pace till he was downright ambling. "Whoever put the rocks there didn't want anybody flying in, not even us. And if you'd ever been in the service, you would have learned about how to hurry up and wait."
Melo chuckled at this.
"See, the Sergeant knows," added John. Melo gave him a look that said, I am humoring you, because you are my insane boss. There might have been a little bit of I'm a Marine and you're not, but that kind of thing got to be transparent after a while.
"You're not worried about natives, sir?" Van Arden interjected.
"Uninhabited." John paused, looked up into the sun. It was making him sweat a little too much. "MALP showed nothing but rocks and dust. If there are people here, they're pretty damned agile."
"Could be ninjas," said Melo. "Sir."
"Oh sure," said John. "The SGC didn't tell you about the advance team of extras from Jackie Chan movies, that they sent through a decade ago? I'm sure they've all settled down and had babies and established a whole ninja civilization by now."
Ronon eyed him, unsure. "What are ninjas?"
Teyla listened with interest as Melo explained a concept that was half Hollywood and half gory comic books. It would have been a fine joke, except Rodney kept butting in to point out the ludicrousness of warriors who could go invisible (with Earth technology, anyway) and cloud the minds of their enemies. Melo could clearly hold his own, and John was just as happy to sit out the war of zingers. The sun beating down, or possibly just his chatterbox team, was making his head hurt.
Van Arden kept her eyes on the wandering geologist in-between barks of embarrassed laughter. Ronon clearly thought they had all lost their minds.
"Okay, fine," said Rodney at last. "You're the expert on assassination techniques." (Me? thought John.) Rodney was looking at him funny. "Can you really kick a guy in the nose and send pieces of bone into his brain and kill him, or is that just a myth?"
"Um, I've never tried," John rejoined. "I heard Bruce Lee did that once, but people make up a lot of stuff about him."
"Dude, Jackie Chan versus Bruce Lee." Melo's face shone. "Awesomest fight ever! Sir."
Sheppard adjusted his sunglasses and dropped back to fill in Ronon's blanks. "You saw that one Jackie Chan movie. Bruce Lee was this guy -- little guy, small as Van Arden, there -- fast, good on his feet. He was a dance champion and a movie star too."
"He was a what?" Rodney asked. Teyla was laughing, just at the incredulous tone.
The answer came before John could supply it. The geologist, Yu, poked her head out from between two stones: "Dance champion. Cha-cha, right?" John gawked at her. "My mom was a huge fan. She grew up in Hong Kong. Went to his funeral, too. Before I was born." Yu shrugged, and disappeared again back into the rocks.
"So," Ronon asked, deadpan, "Who would win, Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee?"
Melo and Rodney prepared themselves for verbal battle while Teyla smirked.
John wanted to roll his eyes, but he was afraid they might fall out of his head.
***
The time allotted for a break came and they squatted companionably in a space among the rocks -- too small to be called a proper clearing. Teyla admired how John had brought together his team, joking strange Earth jokes, and now Melo and Rodney would sit side by side without glancing at each other awkwardly. Ronon ate a snack, and scaled a stone to watch over them from on high.
"Be careful up there," said John, bland. Teyla looked at him but he had his dark glasses on and she could not read him. Probably he was ashamed at falling, and made it into another joke. She watched him rummage in Melo's rucksack until he pulled out the medical kit.
Rodney saw him at it and asked, "Are there painkillers in there?" He was chewing with gusto on that foodbar he liked so much.
"Just the serious stuff," John grumbled, rattling a very small number of pills in a plastic bottle. "Painkillers are still rationed. You hurt?"
"My brain is leaking out my ears. Possibly heatstroke. Whatever it is, it hurts, and I don't see the point in suffering."
"Me neither." John grimaced, and put the bottle away.
Rodney did a strange thing then. He stood up and stepped up close to John, squared shoulders in front of him, serious and silent. Teyla had never seen him like this, using actions instead of his usual excess of words. The whole group paused to watch this weird calm confrontation.
All he did was reach out with both hands and remove the glasses from John's face, folding them absently. Without those masking lenses, John was sallow, dull-eyed as he watched Rodney warily. Teyla noticed for the first time that he was sweating, beads rolling down from his hairline, far more than the pleasant weather warranted.
Rodney asked, "What is the matter with you?"
"Nothing," said John, and snatched back his glasses.
Rodney did not push him further, and nobody said anything for a while. John packed up the medical kit back into the rucksack. He was ready again, and expected them to be ready as well. Ronon, who had watched the whole exchange from above their heads, stood and jumped to another stone.
Teyla sidled past John. He had the glasses back in place. "Rodney worries about you as he does everyone."
"I know." John waved one hand irritably.
She continued, "He said you were dying, before when you had stitches. I assume that means you were hurt more than you let on."
"Not really," he replied. "He just wants to rescue me."
She grinned at him, then, hoping for and expecting a return in kind. But John just turned away, blank. She was reaching out to touch his arm when Ronon hissed from above.
"Movement," he growled, low and carrying. He was squatting again, still, all grays and browns and those unlikely pale eyes. "My five o'clock, two or more, in among the rocks."
A high noise, far away behind them, behind Ronon. Long and gentle, twittering, like birdsong.
"You see any birds?" whispered Melo. John gestured him to silence, pointed him to guard Judy. He beckoned Van Arden and she melted to his side like a feather on wind, weapon ready.
The birdsong came back again, lower and shorter, from their twelve. It wasn't far off at all. They all had weapons out, now. Rodney screwed his eyes shut and then opened them. Sheppard and Van Arden argued in one-handed gestures, till suddenly they broke off. The small blonde woman spun and gathered up Melo, and without a backward glance she struck out laterally into the stone maze. Judy followed, eyes glassy, hands helpless at her sides. They left their rucksacks behind.
John made his gathering gesture, and pointed their direction, weapon low in one tense hand. Teyla felt his expertise and control, and followed him as he led them away from the way the others had taken. Ronon slipped down to the ground like a viscous liquid pouring.
John paused ten or fifteen strides out, spun one finger and they huddled up automatically. "When I say," he whispered, jostling his shoulder with Rodney's. "When I say, I want you all to break in opposite directions. Find your way through this damned maze, lead them on a chase. Meet up in the crags facing the gate, and keep in radio contact."
"East southeast," added Rodney, breathless. "Sight off the peak if you have to."
"Okay, go," John said, and they were all upright then, hustling away from each other. Her mouth tight, Teyla ran, birdsong coming at her from all directions.
***
They took Rodney quickly, with a scuffle. He got off one wild shot with his sidearm and then it was quick underhanded movement from three dark bodies, and him bashing desperately around him, long-armed. When two of them were sitting on his back and he was wheezing yellow dust (maximum 20 seconds), he saw that the third at least had taken a blow and was lying addled in a heap beside him.
That close, McKay saw that the bodies weren't dark, but dark-clad, head to foot in some black-brown homespun. The one in the dirt was female, long-limbed and with long, pale fingers. That was the only visible skin -- she'd just engaged in physical combat with the equivalent of a bushel bag over her head.
There was no appropriate quip to the situation. The two sitting on his back barked and muttered at each other, a language totally indecipherable and unlike any other language he'd heard in Pegasus. They weren't talking to him.
"This is McKay, I've been captured," he said, and repeated it, before realizing his radio headset had been knocked off. He turned his head, felt around in the dust with his hands, but couldn't find it.
Soon the hooded people were muscling him up, crossing his arms behind him tightly and grinding together his wrist bones harder than could really be considered humane for a prisoner. They bound him that way, tightly, palm to palm behind his back, and instantly (instantly!) the thongs cut his wrists and numbed his fingertips.
"Ow, ow, hello!" he called, in case anyone was listening to be sure he was alive. "Okay, I can walk. You got me."
He knew they really did have him when the shorter one gestured with something heavily metallic in his hand -- not a gun, not a zat, but something else that looked kind of like what would happen if you built a crowbar that could change channels on a TV. The taller one grabbed up his rucksack in one hand and jostled the one who'd fallen with the other. The hoodie-people crouched and scoured the dirt, picking up objects off the ground: broken plastic (his headset, in two pieces) and his sidearm, held upside-down and uncarefully.
"That thing's not a toy," he said, but they weren't listening to him. They knocked him in the ankles to get him moving. Together they trooped back the way Rodney had come when he had blundered away from Sheppard's hissing order.
He kicked up all the dust he could, being pushed between the boulders, and listened with all his might. There wasn't a lot to hear: four people breathing, clothes and feet and his own annoyed complaints. There had been gunfire, far away, single shots like someone with a plan, but Rodney couldn't tell whether it had ended in capture from just the noise. At least some of them had to escape, of course. Teyla had a gift for silence, and Ronon was some kind of Terminator freak, and Sheppard -- maybe Sheppard had been that gunfire.
"Look, we might as well start negotiating now," he told the hoodie people. "What exactly is it you want? Because I really --"
More gunfire, from another direction. A P-90 this time, the massive crackle of it ugly and solitary. Controlled firing, short bursts, but it went and went and went. The hoodie with the zapper-crowbar gestured sharply, spun and ran off, making low throaty barking noises as he went. Rodney's one shot had missed. They'd been too fast for him. Rodney had no idea who was who out there, and who to shout for when the rescue party came.
The bullets kept flying, and now Rodney heard screaming and the high ping of ricochets. With rock on all sides, whoever it was was probably in grave danger of shooting himself accidentally, while he mowed down these defenseless secretive freaks. Their bodies would pile up between the stones, bloody and heaving, until he -- surely not Van Arden? -- cut off his own retreat. Unless he could climb through the gore, God, a foot on someone's hooded head and a hand grabbing a cracked ribcage --
"They want us alive!" He bellowed out, thoughtless.
The firing paused. The cries went lower, raging: attack noises. Oh, I've doomed him, thought Rodney to himself, even as his captors kicked him forward. Without his arms to steady him, he stumbled hard and had to stagger.
All he could do was walk and listen to the sputtering gunfire, and if he was really stupid shout more useless advice. Really, it was only a question of the number of bullets, and the number of the cowled enemy, and which number was larger.
The screaming voices turned again, throaty and full, echoing in the labyrinth and redoubling like the breaths of some horrifying animal. The firing stopped entirely, and didn't start again. Out of bullets. Rodney imagined himself trying to reload, hands shaking on the clip and botching it while crazed faceless monsters came leaping at him from every direction, and closed his eyes. The roaring hoodies were triumphant now, high descants over the thrum of male basses: they had him.
McKay had to walk, thumbs tapping his own lumbar spine, lost among the stupid stones that all looked alike. The two hoodies left with him mumbled to each other, unreadable noises. Even if he did shout now, he wouldn't hear a reply over the din, and not hearing a reply would make it impossible to tell whether that was because a reply wasn't coming. He put one foot in front of the other, shaky.
They came upon the clearing where the team had rested, a million years and forty minutes ago, and McKay realized that was where they had been heading all along. Van Arden and Judy Yu were there, trussed and sitting back to back, bruised. Teyla was unconscious by their side.
"Doctor!" breathed Van Arden, and Judy whipped her head around to see. "Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," he grumped. He opened his mouth to ask about Melo, and shut it. "Looks like we're all here," he said. Van Arden gave him a grateful look.
The hoodie he'd knocked around took special care to kick him squarely in the backs of his knees, so that he flopped in a heap in front of Teyla.
"They just brought her in," Judy supplied. "Tied her anyway, even out cold. Motherfuckers."
Rodney boggled at that carefully enunciated expletive. She had a split lip, and spat blood with every syllable. "Yeah," he muttered. "Have they let on whether they can understand us?"
"No," Van Arden whispered back. "But who knows."
Teyla groaned on the ground. Hands tied, they crouched over her and wished her awake.
She was still lying on her side, groggy but answering to her name when Sheppard tumbled into the camp, bound like all the rest of them and staggering. His sunglasses were missing. A short, round hoodie kicked him over and he crashed shoulder-first into the dirt while they stared. He didn't say anything, and lay on his face for a long moment.
"Sheppard?" asked Rodney, just as Van Arden was blurting,
"Are you all right, sir?"
"I've had better days," said Sheppard, rolling over and sitting up. The light was failing, but the finger-bruises on his neck were pretty obvious. His forehead, all sweat some hour ago, was caked with yellow dirt.
"Was that you with the single shots?" asked Rodney, as carefully as he knew how.
"Yeah," Sheppard grunted. "They've got their own weapon, funnylooking. Like a taser." He didn't mention Melo either, or Ronon. They sat like that, all together in a circle, for a long while. The shadows grew tall and the light lower in the sky, and Rodney wondered to himself about meals, and shelter, and where their two missing people were.
In the end, they heard him before they saw him. The hoodie people had lasped from full aria to a dull hum, and his cry of agony pealed above the stones so clear he seemed to be closer than he turned out to be. Sheppard was on his feet instantly, breathing hard, and the rest rolled over and stood, waiting, helpless.
Sheppard darted forward, tried to muscle aside a hoodie standing in his way. The creature whipped around and bashed him with a zapper-crowbar, and then zapped him with it for good measure. Close up, Rodney could hear the hum of it, see the writhing of Sheppard's shoulder muscles under the current. Sheppard took a while to shake it off and get to his feet again, Van Arden by his side with gritted teeth.
Nobody could see far in the maze of stones. The two of them had already guessed what was going on, but didn't say.
That horrible cry rose and then fell, and rose again lower. Now it came in half-articulated swear words, moans, pleas. They listened all of them, speechless, as this awful noise moved closer and closer. His progress was tortoise-slow, and his voice was growing hoarse. He was sobbing bitterly when he hobbled into view, surrounded by humming hoodies: Sergeant Melo.
"Son of a bitch," breathed Van Arden at Rodney's elbow, and then raced Sheppard to their fellow soldier's side. Rodney saw it clearly now, how the man's left leg turned in the wrong direction halfway down the calf. His boot glistened with blood. He'd been walking on it that way, who knew how far. His face was a mass of new bruises, bloody nose, tears and snot and that stupid dust turning his hair yellow. He opened his mouth as if to cry again --
"I'm sorry sir," gasped Melo. Van Arden gave him a terrible look. Sheppard didn't answer at all, just shouldered Van Arden out of the way and knelt in the dirt in front of his Sergeant.
"Get on," he said.
"Sir?" Melo stared down at him, clueless.
Judy Yu, beside Rodney, said, "Oh," to herself, a terrified noise.
Sheppard raised his head and his tone was savage: "Shut up and get on, you dumb grunt." He lowered his head again, flexed his shoulders.
Comprehension dawned on Melo's face. Rodney was watching Van Arden, her blonde hair plastered to her forehead. Rodney realized that if Sheppard hadn't volunteered, she would have been the one in the dirt, trying to lift a man bigger than her. Melo was short, but he wasn't small. She brushed against Melo's bad side, steadying him while he drew up his weight.
At the moment he committed to throwing himself over Sheppard's shoulders, one of the hoodies behind him kicked him in his good ankle. It was more of an uncontrolled flop, and both of them gasped out hard. Van Arden used her shoulders to help push Melo into a balanced position.
Sheppard lurched from two knees to one, and then lurched again and was standing. With 180 pounds of Marine on his back, he duck-walked, bent and slow. Van Arden danced behind, trying to help steady the load. Rodney looked into Sheppard's face, and he wasn't sallow any longer. His face and neck were flushed, tendons corded. A vein pounded visibly in his forehead as he lugged his man back to the group.
***
They stood in the darkening twilight in their sunny-day clothing, and Teyla shivered. As if they understood his grim anger, the No-faces allowed John to carry the Sergeant, and allowed his forward momentum to continue as the whole column of creatures turned and directed them through the maze of boulders. Teyla could not decide if it was mercy -- surely not, not these monsters that would force the injured to walk -- or urgency, or distaste for their captives. The No-faces were as inscrutable as their absent features.
Her head pounded, and she was thirsty and sore. John would pause and hitch his whole body, hard, to keep Melo from falling off. Melo would mutter "fucking ninjas" like an imprecation to a god, while John grimaced. They were all very clumsy, but bunched together with No-faces on all sides, their shock-weapons poking, there was no room to fall.
She said, quietly, "Ronon, can you hear me? Please come in." Rodney looked at her funny, but he had lost his earpiece. She could not reach hers, to activate it. She stopped and pressed her ear to Rodney's shoulder, trying to trigger the device. "Ronon, can you hear me?"
Ronon did not speak his life or cry his death-cry, and he did not come to them alone and armed or captive and tied. It was possible he was dead, or that he had escaped through the gate. Teyla could not know, and as the No-face people stomped forward and sang their low chant, she realized she could not do anything about the lack of knowledge. He would have to come to good or ill without her input, for now.
This was no consolation, when the No-faces behind her kicked her heels, propelling her forward faster. Night was growing cold, that stiffness working into her bones. But John could not keep to a straight line with a man's weight on him, and drifted always to the left as if on an incline. Rodney walked ahead of him, turning often to see his progress, muttering advice and encouragement and the occasional cheerful death-threat.
John responded with many curse words Teyla knew, and several she did not. Sweat rolled down his temples, clearing runnels through the dust on his face. It was a very long walk, or seemed so.
But the dark was still not complete when their strange quiet column began to disappear into the mountain. Teyla watched the No-faces ahead of them, there and then suddenly not, their deep unintelligible voices humming as in ritual.
Judy was first in the line, and balked at what she saw. "No way," she said, slow and firm, but the No-faces were on every side, their black shapes looming. One of them kicked her hard and she tumbled past a turn and away into darkness. Rodney gasped and stumbled forward, and as they all moved Teyla could see it was stairs, down and to one side, next to a tall stone like a camouflage screen. Each step was rounded, worn down with a thousand years of feet, and the rock above sanded by passing hands. An enormous door into the dark, with Judy Yu already inside and the No-faces everywhere, voices insistent. Teyla took the first step.
"You will want to take the steps sideways, Colonel," she said, "I will guide your feet downward."
"We won't let you fall," added Rodney, and in tandem they all struggled into the black maw.
It would have felt so much more like an accomplishment that they reached the bottom without falling if Teyla had not seen Judy sitting, with her head covered in a black hood. She had only time to gasp before the rough fabric was slipped over her own face.
***
Evasion was a comfortable discipline. He knew the ways of it, silence and trickery and murder as a last resort. Ronon had seen that the others did not know and it pleased him a little to confirm his exceptionalism. He had listened to the weaponsfire and to the shouts that accompanied it and later to the cries of the tortured prisoner. He heard Teyla's voice in his ear, and might have responded, but evasion was a discipline. She might have been coerced to speak to him.
There was no way he could have rescued all of them, and to choose among them was untenable. He waited, and listened, and planned. He observed the enemy, their ragged lines of soldiers slipping among the stones as if born to it, pivoting gracefully. They did not look up at him. He crouched atop a boulder unnoticed, close enough to reach out and snatch a dark mask from one of those enemy heads. It would be easy.
The enemy had no notion of the intelligence it was giving away.
He leapt from stone to stone, carefully arrhythmic in pattern and speed, following the column. He glimpsed the prisoners, Sheppard's black-clad back bent with the weight of the tortured one. They did not look up either. Just as well; they would have tried to signal him, and gotten him caught.
Here was the dangerous part, the gap where the stones ended and the mountainside began. Anyone could turn and see him, crouching there in the open -- but they did not think to turn. The enemy column found the narrowest point and hurried across, jogging, the low thrum of their ritual speech everywhere. They did not slow as they approached the cliff. The first of them disappeared into rock from one instant to the next.
Ronon watched carefully, disbelieving, and soon he saw the trick of it: they were agile and sinuous all of them, and turned a corner into an entrance hidden in the cliff face. He leapt to another stone, and then another, watching as the enemy slipped one by one around the natural-looking baffle and into their stronghold.
The prisoners plodded forward, prodded and kicked into line, and began to disappear into that dark entrance. As soon as they were gone from view, the advantage would be lost and rescue would become difficult. It was an easy decision to make, and even easier to take action: Ronon waited for a straggler to slide past his stone, someone the right size, and he reached down and snapped that dark-covered neck.
It was a human, because it expired its last breath into Ronon's palm. He lifted the body high, and stripped it of its clothes. It was a man, skin no particular color and hair like dust, yellow-gray. He thumbed the prominent eyes open to check: more gray, almost pink. Albino. Quickly Ronon donned the roughspun sweater and hood, the faint smell of animal in the fabric. The dead white creature he folded carefully and balanced on top the stone. Down in the dirt, his vision narrowed to the rocks on all sides, Ronon tucked his hair into the back of the sweater and rejoined the troop. They did not say anything to him, rapt in their ritual, and he did nothing to invite notice. At the heels of his enemy, he turned a corner and tracked his way into the bowels of their prison.
***
Well, this was sucking very much. It wasn't the dark so much, and it wasn't the itchy hood that caused it. He had carried people around on his shoulders before (usually, with free hands to steady, and mostly in swimming pools), and had the flu on duty before, and he'd even spent his fair share of time tied up among unpleasant people. But having Melo disappear suddenly, that weight off his back making him pop up like a folding lawn chair -- and then the screaming. No fun at all.
On the up side, Melo's hysteria gave a pretty good sound-picture of what had happened, so John wasn't terribly surprised when grabby hands shoved him forward, stumbling, until one boot stumbled over a big pile of nothing and down he went. "Incoming!" he called, and felt the rough stone on one shoulder as he slid down into an extremely deep hole. By the time he landed, Melo had heeded his warning and managed to roll out of the way. John wasn't quite smart enough to do his own rolling, and he got a nice Teyla-sized boot print on his chest.
At this point, he began thinking that possibly there was a dental surgeon down here, and a swarm of biting black flies, and his seventh grade French teacher. It's better to know you're in hell for sure than always to be wondering.
The bizarro Indiana Jones villains echoed and faded, scraped away with an echoing thunder of stone on the move. John listened to the tick of falling pebbles, and realized that the hole was being closed, with them inside. Outside? Wherever, someplace probably bad.
"Uh," he said, and listened to the echo. Under that was Melo, hyperventilating, his shocky breaths just this side of crying. John rolled over to to his knees and nudged around till they were touching.
"Sounds big," said McKay, somewhere nearby. "Tall cavern, some kind of -- baffles or chambers. Do you smell that?"
"Groundwater," said Yu, the geologist. "Limestone, I think -- calcium carbonate in solution. There'll be drips and pools all over."
Sheppard caught that hard, metallic whiff, something dank and inorganic. "At least we've got a water supply," he muttered.
They began to shift, shuffling with their feet and knees, searching. Someone was exploring the space, stumbling around. Pebbles skittered everywhere. "Oh! Oh!" said a high voice. Judy Yu again. "Sharp edges here. I think I can cut --"
"Do that." He listened to the woman huffing and shifting, and to the blessed blessed noise of friction. None of the cowled bizarro guys stepped in to stop her, which meant they really were alone.
"So hey," said Sheppard, low. "Can I convene a little council-of-war here for a second?"
Scuffling noises around him. He was tickled to realize, suddenly, that Van Arden on his right, and Teyla and McKay on his left, had all had the same idea: they backed towards him, crouching. They convened by reaching out backwards with their bound fingers, little fluttering touches and quick thumb-grabs. It was impossible to tell whose hands were whose, in the disorienting absence of light and weird position -- just hands, anybody's. They were all freaking out in the dark a little; he really hoped he still had glow-sticks stowed in his vest, or things might get ugly.
"So here's the deal," said Sheppard, to get them all focussed. "We'll be missed in how many hours?"
"We're due back midmorning tomorrow," supplied Van Arden. "Probably twelve hours, fourteen maybe, sir. I can't read my watch."
"Okay. Well, we're in jail at least till then, or till Elizabeth negotiates some kind of peace treaty or something. Maybe Ronon made it back, and we can start the clock early." He stopped and thought. "Even in jail, we have to stick together, take care of business."
McKay rustled next to him, impatient.
"McKay, as usual, you're on escape plan. You find us a way out of here, and work with the geologist. If they don't turn the lights on, we're gonna need a sense of night and day - Van Arden, that'll be you handling a schedule, working out shifts, and please tell me you've got a flashlight up your sleeve. Teyla, you're quartermaster and inventory, since we don't know if we'll be fed." That was her hand, squeezing his thumb. "Melo, you've got some medic training?"
"Yes sir," said Melo. He inched a little, his arm against Sheppard's knee.
"Good," Sheppard told him. "As soon as Yu gets us all untied, you and I are gonna set your leg."
Melo breathed long, like somebody who's just been told about a guy who didn't make it back. "Yes, sir," he mumbled.
Yu was quick, and Yu was tough, cutting herself free and her wrist to ribbons in only a few minutes. She was a lot slower locating Sheppard's knife (her hands shy, tracing down his body) and practically glacial putting the blade to the thongs that bound him. "I'll try not to cut you," she blurted, and the ties parted instantly under the sharp edge. "Oh!"
"Good job, Yu," he said, (Call me Judy, she grumbled) and set her to cutting loose all the rest. He ripped the hood off his face, and there was still no light at all. Sheppard patted himself down for glowsticks, cracked one and saw faces emerge one by one. They all looked a little haggard, blinking and shuddering in the dim green light, so he blended in just fine, but intelligence was way too important --
It was awfully nice to find a heap of military-issue stuff, rucksacks in a pile, just left there where they'd all fallen. John didn't bother searching the dark ceiling for the hole; he wasn't sure he wanted to know how far up it was. And anyway, he had a heap of stuff to play with, that probably still had a medical kit and a huge beacon flashlight. "You're in luck," he told Melo.
Luck turned out not to be the right word, not for Melo's tibia. Sheppard got to know it real well over the next while, and he couldn't give the poor guy a dose of morphine till he'd found out all the Sergeant knew about compound fractures.
"Fucking ninjas," came the whimper, for the millionth time. Sheppard hadn't decided whether that was an active delusion or just some really terrified irony. Van Arden came, and sat with Melo, talking him through it. Sheppard watched them, how she held his hands so he wouldn't reach and interfere, how she would breathe deeply and coax him to breathe. She threw Sheppard foul looks, until at last the break was stabilized with a pair of collapsible spades from Judy's pack, and the bleeding stanched.
"Just say yes to drugs," he muttered, jabbing Melo in the hip with an ampule. "Half-dose, and save the rest for the morning." John repacked the medical kit and thoughtlessly stood up. Immediately he sat back down again, brains whirling.
Van Arden didn't say a word, but the line between her brows sent out some kind of distress signal, because Rodney dropped his stack of rucksack inventory and scuttled up close.
"What just happened? Are you hurt? Oh my god did they beat you up and you're such a goddamned stoic you wouldn't admit it and now you're bleeding internally? You know I'm not qualified for thoracic surgery, right?"
"I got banged around," John contradicted. "No worse than you. But --" Rodney's hands were on him, searching down ribs and tickling fiercely. He batted them away. "Stop that, McKay. I just have a bug."
This went over considerably less casually than he'd said it. The cavern echoed with dismayed silence.
"Not a bug bug. The flu, or something. Came on a couple hours ago, while we were in the rock maze." He shifted, awkward. "Headache, chills, and the vertigo is a really nice touch. I have a policy about not throwing up in front of friends, by the way. The dark was kind of a nice rest from all that spinning."
"I knew you were acting like a freak," hissed Rodney. Everyone else sat quietly, even Melo, his eyes shiny and far away. They were waiting for him.
"Nothing serious," he said, and Rodney replied instantly,
"Take the painkillers in the kit. There were at least a few, right? And then we can start you in on morphine."
Judy Yu was sitting on her haunches, rock in hand. She needed that wrist bandaged -- he should have remembered that before packing up the kit. She told Rodney, "You're the kind of guy who traded his Prozac for Ritalin in college, aren't you?"
Come to think, she was probably right. Rodney would have traded his left nut for Ritalin, and would today if anybody had some.
"The kit is packed for trauma, not viruses," answered John at last. "Anyway. We stick with the plan, and the plan is to sit tight until diplomacy or crooked thinking gets us out of here."
"You weren't going to tell us," said Teyla, from across the space of the cave. She was with the rucksacks, counting MREs. How did she always know?
He decided on rearguard action. "Hey, in case it's catching, don't let me lick any spoons."
Sheppard turned off the flashlight, to conserve the battery for emergencies.
***
He followed the humming band, silent, hanging back but not too far. Sometimes Ronon wondered whether it was a brain-skill, convincing the enemy he was not there simply by thinking it; but McKay's trashing of ninja powers this afternoon suggested not. He was there, and the enemy did not distinguish him from their own. The whole group moved as one, taking right turns and traveling down, deeper, into the mountain.
Their voices rumbled lower and softer as the passages they crossed grew larger: caves, natural caves with hanging columns. These had not been dug but found. The enemy as one crossed some invisible boundary, and yellow fingernails pulled at masks till all faces were clear. Ronon hung back farther. He saw those pop-eyes gaping wide, some albino some not, as they sang reverence and fear and tramped onward. They pushed their prisoners more gently now, hands-on, guiding. The prisoners said nothing to each other.
Down deep, the daylight gone, they struck sparks near one wall and created light, a bright arc of electricity, blinding at first. Ronon hung back to regain his vision and assess, but the enemy surged forward. It was a signal, an arrival. Enemy men and women leapt foward into an alcove, a hole man-high and wide enough for ten abreast. Mechanical sounds like chain, echoing. He could not see inside.
Ronon watched the prisoners stumble in, prodded from behind. The enemy sorted themselves, still humming low, ranging outside the alcove in a half-moon -- like the stones before the gate.
A scream, terror, that went thin and far even as it emerged. Someone echoing away, like the pitch-change of a bullet after it goes past. Another shout, low and warning: that was Sheppard. The rest made no call. A strange noise followed, like grain among millstones, and that was all.
After a few moments, the enemies who had gone in came out again. There were no prisoners. The assembly roared, arms high, masks falling off their shoulders. It was a triumph, the last note to their ritual. They stopped humming after that, and turned to one another to slap shoulders and catch each other up in embrace. They laughed, and their gray teeth reflected the sparklight along with their unnerving eyes.
The enemy struck smaller arcs, little personal lights here and there, and let the bright white light lapse. They looked to each other then, exclaiming, and grouped off in threes and fours. They disappeared down corridors, satisfied, their jobs done. Ronon faded backwards into the dark. They did not see him.
When they were all gone, no guard at all, he came forward again, into the alcove, if only to carry home mementoes of the honored dead. His night vision was powerful, but even he saw nothing, his head brushing the ceiling and the walls blowing back his breath. The prisoners made no sound and their blood did not taint the air. In the middle of the space was an obstacle, and he clicked his tongue to find the echoing shape. Large, all the way to the ceiling and just as wide. He touched it: a perfect round stone, like the soccer ball the Marines played with. A made thing.
Ronon traced his way all about the space, felt the small, regular holes in the walls, and came back to the rock sphere. He examined the ceiling, how the low roof sloped upward just so, space for the stone to move within that alcove but no further. And then, on his knees, he touched the ground it sat on: a hewn floor, a dip just so, space for the stone to sit still without rolling. He guessed it held a secret, a passageway or a transporter or the mechanism for opening another chamber, and knew with shuddering relief that the prisoners were alive.
But the stone would not move under his effort. He heaved at it, quietly at first and then groaning, with everything he had: immense, implacable stillness. He leaned against it, panting, and felt it leach away the warmth from his body. It would not move.
***
Part 1 | (2/5) | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5