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Chapter 2 – The Hope of Distraction
Alliance Planet - Sula
Sula's Portal City was hardly the prettiest of settlements in the daytime, but in the thick of night, rain and wind in the air, it was ugly as sin.
Which was appropriate, as it was sin that had brought Oneakka here.
Sula was set deep in Alliance territory, close to the Central Planets that had first formed the Alliance. As the Central Planet had first struck, battling back the Wraith from their local area of space, Sula had quickly found itself in safe territory from the Wraith. Quick to jump in with the Alliance and benefit from its protection, Sula had lived in safety for a very long time now.
As a result, it had built up quick and fast. The Portal City had grown up in tall, thick-walled towering buildings of concrete and steel, with hundreds of thousands of civilians all living tightly together. The close living had only sprawled outward in the decades since, with Portal City now one of the largest populated settlements in the Alliance.
From those first days of protection here, people had flocked in to live in the city, and had been welcomed. But, as expected, the less savoury types had moved in too and had set up camp in the tightly pressed concrete buildings of Portal City. City battles had been common in the first years, different groups vying for power, but once the Alliance had been properly established and Enforcement had been formed, the crackdown on crime on Sula had been intense.
It had supposedly worked too, but the new intell said different.
According to Seeal's Dreamstation database, Sula was still a hotbed of crime and sleaze, so it was hardly surprising to Oneakka that Division had tracked down one of the most wanted from Toshka's database to Portal City.
But Robiah and his Division lackeys hadn't had enough evidence or guts to actually come and collect the wanted man – Zau.
Zau appeared to have been working with Toshka, though the details of his exact role weren't all that clear from the database Oneakka had helped extract from Toshka's office.
Yet, Division weren't prepared to head into Portal City and pull Zau out and into custody. Apparently there wasn't enough evidence and intell suggested he had powerful friends in the High Council and in the ruling body of Sula.
Well, Esna Toshka had High Council 'friends' too and he was now in custody and soon to undergo trial.
Unlike Toshka, Zau was lying low, hiding away in the depths of the most criminally associated hotels in Portal City, hoping his faint unspecified associations with Toshka weren't going to be enough to lead to his arrest.
And he was right if Division got their way.
Zau probably felt safe and protected here.
He was wrong.
Division might not think they could arrest Zau, or even be able to grab him in this jungle of concrete and hundreds of watching eyes, but the Elite had enough evidence to speak to him.
Zau had met with The Traitor on at least two occasions.
It was all Oneakka needed, and he had no problem going in where Division were too afraid to tread.
Weaklings.
He was faintly aware that his mood hadn't been great in the last week since the Sythus had slid into space dock undergoing significant repairs. People had been keeping their distance from him more than usual, not that he cared. Unfortunately there were no missions for him to join as yet whilst the Sythus was beached, so Oneakka had set his sights on making sure Division were accurately and thoroughly following up on the Toshka database.
And it kept him away from the Training Facility.
He would normally be using his small quarters in the Facility while based off the Sythus, but he hadn't been back to the Facility yet.
And he wasn't planning to go back any time soon.
There wasn't any need.
Though he could visit Massa and Aki, and normally he would entertain himself with training the Recruits for awhile too, but that wasn't worth the risk either.
It would be too tempting.
If he went to the Facility, he would see her.
Even if he didn't go anywhere near the areas of the Facility where she was working – which was in the Research Sector, Base Level in Project room Alpha six – he might walk into her in the hallways near the habitation areas of the Facility – because she was assigned room 1168 in the Visitor Sector and he might use that corridor himself.
He'd promised himself that he'd keep his distance from her. He had asked Massa to keep an eye on Seeal at least, and though he had subtly tried to gain some insight from Massa as to how she was coping in the Facility, Massa had stubbornly refused to tell him anything.
He had only been checking she was alright and that she wasn't going to do anything 'stupid'.
She'd gotten the best deal she could – a clean slate and a worthy job, at least for a year or so. She'd been grateful, and had promised she would behave herself.
He'd believed her, but still...he thought about her far too much.
With a loud growl at himself, he pushed himself out of the small sheltered spot he had been using to wait for his moment. Sixteen floors up from the concrete street below, the rain pattered against his head, the waterproof black headgear protecting him from the water, but making him slightly itchy inside its warmth.
A glance down at the street far below confirmed no one was walking around down there. The wind was picking up, pushing the falling rain across the narrow space between one building and the next.
Oneakka pulled out his pad that had a link up to the watching satellite above and checked the scan of the building across the space before him. The room in which Zau was currently thinking was his safe haven was set deep in the middle of the building. The satellite's soft scan and Oneakka's patch into the hotel's internal cameras confirmed that nothing had changed inside.
Everyone was asleep, apart from two sentries, one of which was in the corridor and the other in the lounge of the large hotel suite Zau was enjoying.
Oneakka shoved the satellite linked pad back into a sealable waterproof pocket of his black jacket over his armour beneath. A glance through the rain across the narrow alley confirmed no change to the long guttering pipeline that ran down the side of the building in front of him.
The leap was easy for him from one building to the next, his grip slipping only briefly as he got a good purchase on the gutter pipe and the edge of a concrete balcony.
The climb up three more floors wasn't difficult, though it was slippery and the guttering groaned slightly with his weight, but it held until he reached the right floor and slipped onto an empty balcony. He then made his way along the balconies of the same floor level until he reached the one he had selected, knowing it would be empty.
He easily bypassed the security lock on the balcony door and moved silently through the dark empty hotel room inside to the room's entrance. At the closed door, he pulled out the scan link again and checked the sentry's position in the hallway outside; Three doorways down on the other side of the corridor.
He watched the building's internal camera feed, watching the sentry looking back and forth. He was good and alert, not some cheap overly relaxed guard.
Oneakka released the lock on the door carefully. Fortunately the doors were the old fashioned types that actually physically opened towards you, not siding into the wall space which would limit his ambush out of the doorway.
He eased the door open a fraction as the sentry looked the other way down the corridor.
The sentry looked back this way and sighed. He looked at his timepiece attached to the cuff of his jacket.
He looked away.
He registered Oneakka's approach just in time to look round, but it was too late by then.
Oneakka lowered the man's unconscious body to the thin hallway carpet as he checked both ways down the corridor. He had looped the hotel's camera feeds a second before he had stepped into the hallway, so he had no eyes on the other hallways, but all seemed quiet.
He pulled the slim door key from the unconscious sentry's pocket and set it in the door's electronic lock. He heard the lock disarm inside, so he stepped back, pulled his headgear off to show his Elite face, pulled out two guns and applied his boot to the door.
Zau hadn't expected the Elite to come for him, and stories of his capture in the middle of that night by one silent unseen Elite warrior nineteen floors up fast became legendary in Portal City.
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Atlantis
It had been ten days now since John had returned to Atlantis from the mission to Giant with the Elite, but it felt like twice that. It had been a long ten days, through which he hadn't been getting all that much sleep.
The first couple of nights back had been uncomfortable thanks to the bruises and one sprained ankle he had brought back with him from the mission on Giant. But, as more nights had passed with barely any sleep, John had started to admit to himself that he was wired and worried.
His days had been far from dangerous since his return, not having been off world since, but they had been stressful in entirely new ways.
The largest stress being the IOA's official response to the Political Marriage – or rather their lack of one so far. Instead they had been just sending lists of questions through from Earth. Each day the Gate activated from home, albeit via the new Midway Station, and each day a new list of questions would arrive for him and Colonels Carter and Sumner to answer. They would then pour over the questions together. Well, he and Carter did, as Sumner couldn't seem to take more than half an hour a day at it before he declared he had more important things to do.
So despite his previously thorough reports, John was spending his days answering seemingly unending questions about the Alliance, about Athos, about the Elite, the missions he had shared with them, about the fire power he had seen, and even on political bits and pieces he had overheard. Woolsey would normally have helped with that, but he had been recalled to Earth for the IOA to talk to directly.
Which left John and the Colonels still waiting for an official response ten days and counting since Giant, which had already been days after the Wedding.
John didn't know if he could stand the waiting anymore.
Were the IOA going to honour the contract with the Elite and Athos?
Was John going to keep his job?
Was Colonel Carter going to keep her job?
Or were the IOA going to ruin everything by deciding to pull him out of the Political Marriage contract?
Or were they going to try to renegotiate things and risk the contract that way?
Hell, even if the IOA agreed to keep the contract, what was Stargate Command going to say about John having made this contract without permission?
Too many damn questions going round his head and no answers. Just the damn lists of IOA questions, day after day, going round and round. The answers sent back home each day only brought more questions, some of them even clearly repeating earlier answered questions, or posing questions he had no idea how to answer accurately.
How many ships did he estimate there were in the Alliance Military Fleet? How much firepower? How many worlds in the Alliance were pro-Atlantis?
How the hell was he supposed to know those answers?
He didn't even know where his wife was.
He didn't know what the hell he was supposed to do about having an alien wife he was secretly in love with.
Was he going to have to tell The Powers That Be that he had been in a relationship with Teyla? Had Woolsey worked it out? Had he told the IOA? Stargate Command?
Was she thinking about him?
Had she decided how she was going to approach their marriage? Because he sure didn't know what the hell to do. He'd told her that they could start fresh, let the bad things they had said to each other go.
They loved each other, but it was hardly the best relationship in the best circumstances. She had said she was confused about things between them, which had at least made him feel less alone in his confusion, but it had hardly helped sort anything out. She hadn't seemed thrilled with the prospect of them being together again – how was he supposed to take that?
He wasn't even sure how he felt about it all. She'd walked away from their relationship once already – if he risked his job and perhaps his future in Pegasus in being with her again, what if she threw it all away again?
What if she had been killed and he would never get to answer these questions?
What if she was out there somewhere hurt and dying and he didn't know about it?
Too many questions and no damn answers.
His dark ceiling was completely unhelpful as he silently worked through his questions towards it, which only made him feel more restless.
Huffing out a loud sigh, John rolled onto his side and contemplated his alarm clock. 04:33. Great.
He contemplated getting up, maybe going for a run. He could even go into the Infirmary, see if Carson was awake.
Carson was another reason to worry.
The Doc was out of the woods as far as surviving, but his burns...
They weren't good, the swelling and who knew what kind of pain the guy was in, was covered with bandages most of the time, but twice a day they came off and the Elite's ointment was smeared over the guy.
But, it wasn't the treatments that worried John. It was what he saw in Carson's eyes.
The guy answered questions, showed some interest in what was going on in the city, but there was a distance in his eyes that John wasn't so sure was due to the pain killers. Carson's right arm had been pinned and plated back into shape, he'd taken a knock to the head, and half of him had been burned to the point of them almost losing him, but physical recovery was only one part. John had seen people come back from horrendous injuries in war, but the emotional, psychological side of things was harder to call.
The Doc had made a decision that had resulted in people around him, including his patient and his best Nurse, Marie, being killed. That Carson had himself survived wasn't going to make him feel better.
John knew a little about Survivor's Guilt, but any attempt he'd made to broach the subject with Carson had been carefully ignored by the Doc, but then the guy was uncomfortable and in pain. He had a right to be withdrawn.
Besides, if you had Rodney sat by your elbow all day every day, it would drive anyone mad.
Which was yet another source of concern; Rodney appeared to be taking what had happened to Carson as somehow his fault. Everyone had argued otherwise, Carson included, but it hadn't helped. Rodney spent every minute of every day at Carson's side, constantly talking and trying to be upbeat.
Maybe Rodney could see what John could see in Carson's eyes, or at least sense that Carson wasn't doing so well on the inside.
There was something uniquely painful about seeing a kind hearted and courageous non-military man like Carson be broken inside and try not to show it.
There was no ointment for that, Elite given or otherwise.
And nothing more that John could do for Carson, to help Rodney, or know where Teyla was and what she was thinking. Or to get the IOA to make a decision!
There were just questions, worries, and stress.
If something didn't change soon, John swore he was going to lose it.
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TBC