CHAPTER SIX
SYMPHONY NO. 1, THE TRANSCENDENTAL
The puddle jumper zipped through the cloudy upper atmosphere of Earth with the HUD tracking a Wraith transponder beacon moving sluggishly down the African continent. McKay's best guess was that a lone Wraith had left its crashed dart and now walked toward the nearest village across the Serengeti.
"What about golf?" Sheppard asked, bringing up a subject that had died ten minutes ago.
"I told you," Ronon repeated, glancing over his shoulder. "I have plans."
"Yeah, but you didn't say what plans."
Rodney sighed melodramatically and scowled at Sheppard like he was a misbehaving three-year-old. Teyla fixed her sight on the HUD and tried to block out the repetitive back-and-forth that consumed their entire flight from Atlantis to the western coast of Africa.
"He's teaching Cassie to beat people's brains in, Satedan style," Rodney said, exasperation in every syllable. "So can we please stop this childish conversation and focus on more important things like finding and killing this Wraith?"
"Cassie, huh?" Sheppard asked, grinning.
"Like you, I do not believe Ronon's interest is purely martial," Teyla teased. The Satedan looked away from his team, but smiled good-naturedly.
Within the half hour, the puddle jumper approached the Wraith's coordinates and Sheppard landed the spaceship half a click to the west. They gained the rest of the distance on foot, sweating under the blistering African sun.
"This is terrible," Rodney whined. "Five minutes, and I can already feel my skin burning."
"You know what this reminds me of?" Ronon asked, ignoring his team mate's complaints entirely.
"I am thinking of the first time we all met," Teyla said. Up ahead, Sheppard nodded his agreement.
Four years ago, Ronon had taken Sheppard and Teyla hostage on a planet with intense ultraviolet sunlight as a bargaining chip to get past the Atlantis marines guarding the gate. That same day, Carson had removed the transmitter from Ronon's back and ended his life as a Runner. Harsh sunlight always put him in a good mood now.
As they closed in on the Wraith's position, the team fanned out over the flat terrain. The calf-high brown grass and sparse, flat-topped trees gave them little cover. Woolsey had told them a little about the types of animals in this part of Earth, but Ronon saw no sign of them now. Whatever kind of predators they were, they had clearly sensed something much higher on the food chain around.
Rodney had the life signs detector and hand signaled the Wraith's location. Peering ahead, Ronon saw a blotch of black moving through the stunted vegetation.
"Oh no." Rodney stared at the white rectangle in hand and paled under the bright red flush on his cheeks. "No, no, no."
"What?" Ronon demanded.
"I'm picking up more life signs – twenty at least, moving fast in this direction. From their speed and trajectory, I'm guessing we have a safari tour wondering where all the lions and giraffes are and about to encounter a famished Wraith."
Ronon needed no direction from Sheppard. He sprang forward and sprinted across the plain toward the blurry black spot on the horizon. Angry memories propelled him forward. The adrenaline of hunting a Wraith kicked into overdrive, and he picked up his pace to outdistance even Sheppard and Teyla running at full tilt behind him.
He gained steadily on the Wraith, and while normally it might have turned back to fight and try to feed, the alien creature sensed an even greater opportunity ahead. With a cry of rage, Ronon pushed his legs to pump faster than since he had quit being a Runner. Particle magnum out, set to kill, he fired steadily at the Wraith's retreating back.
A blast hit the Wraith, it stopped moving in mid-step, and then toppled to the sun-baked earth. Ronon ran straight past the dead creature, his adrenaline still up, and walked off the heady surge of rage while Sheppard and Teyla inspected the fallen Wraith.
"We have to find the dart so we can take care of the wreckage before some tourists or locals stumble across it and dematerialize themselves," Sheppard announced. "We'll do that from the air. Let's head back to the puddle jumper."
They couldn't leave the Wraith to rot in the sun, although it deserved nothing better, or someone would notice the decaying alien corpse. Nor could they set fire to it in this dry country. Ronon seized it by one arm and dragged it back to the puddle jumper leaving a wide swath of crushed grass and clumps of white hair in his wake.
"Lovely, a Wraith corpse," Rodney said. Apparently, Sheppard had ordered him back to the puddle jumper when they chased down the Wraith. He unhooked his tablet from the control crystals in the jumper ceiling, took a seat in the co-pilot's chair, and plugged the computer back in. "I've reconfigured the sensors to pick up the energy signature of the dart and contacted the Daedalus in orbit. Caldwell said to paint the target, and they'll beam it to Area 51."
Sheppard took the jumper into the sky and engaged the cloak. Flying invisibly through the clear cerulean sky, the sensors searched for the Wraith ship. It was a matter of minutes before the wreckage had been found and Colonel Caldwell's voice over the radio confirmed transport to Area 51.
"Thanks, Daedalus. We're headed back to Atlantis."
o o o
For once, the post-mission debriefing hadn't taken long. Night had fallen by the time the team had returned to Atlantis in the puddle jumper, and everyone including Woolsey was eager to call it a night and get some sleep. Everyone, it seemed, except Cassandra who returned to her desk in the control room immediately after the debriefing adjourned.
"Hey."
Cassandra looked up from the computer and offered Ronon a tight-lipped smile. She had been quiet in the conference room too. She stood up from her desk again with an armload of file folders stamped with the SGC logo.
"Hi, Ronon. I'm headed to the infirmary to turn these over to Carson."
"Want some company?"
"Sure."
They walked in silence out of the control room and to the transporter. It took Cassandra two steps to match one of his own, and he noticed for the first time how small she really was: about Teyla's height, but with none of the muscle. There was still a quality about her that convinced Ronon she was a fighter. He saw it in the set of her mouth and her firm gaze.
"It's almost one in the morning. Why are you working so late?" he asked.
"These are copies of Dr. Lam's medical notes and research on a Goa'uld called Khalek. Carson requested the files. I also have to put together a briefing on P3C-39C for Mr. Woolsey and AR-5, somehow convince Dr. Hirsch to stop connecting the spare naquadah generators to all of his experiments, make sure all the mission reports for the week are ready for IOA review, and it all has to be done by seven am tomorrow."
"Sounds boring."
"Yeah, well, we're not all cut out to kill Wraith for a living."
"You are."
She looked up at him sharply, frown lines wrinkling her brow. "So you keep saying, but you're wrong about that, Ronon. I've never killed anything except bugs."
"Perfect. Wraith evolved from bugs."
They had reached the infirmary. Cassandra paused, cast him a sardonic smile, and said, "Good night, Ronon."
o o o
Ronon looked for Cassandra the following day to see if he could convince her to start Satedan knife fighting, but she wasn't at her desk or in Woolsey's office. Her quarters were empty, and no one had seen her in the gym. When he checked the infirmary, Jennifer suggested the east pier.
As she had predicted, Cassandra lay on the wet metal pier with a sketch pad propped up and covered in plastic before her. She held a green-wrapped pencil loosely in her left hand and glanced up frequently at the spires of Atlantis stretching into the overcast afternoon. Her lunch tray, completely untouched, lay forgotten off to the side. Ronon joined her on ground, ignoring the wet pier and the sea spray carried over the breaker by the strong wind.
"How long have you been an artist?"
Cassandra started so badly the pencil jerked in her hand and poked a hole through the sketch paper. She pushed herself up from the pier to sit on her knees with one hand clutching at her chest. With her free hand, she hit his upper arm in a gesture so casual it must have been a habit for her.
"Gods, Ronon! You can't sneak up on people like that."
He glanced from his arm to the woman who had so casually struck him. "There's not a lot of people in this city who would have hit me."
"What? Oh, sorry." She tossed the pencil down on the sketch pad and folded her legs under. She didn't look the slightest bit worried he would want revenge for the light punch on his arm. "I've been an artist my whole life. I even went to art school in Chicago, which is when I found out I'm not a particularly fantastic artist. So I went to law school. How long have you been a … soldier?"
"I stopped being a soldier a long time ago, but I've been fighting since I was a kid. Can I see?"
He held out his hand for the now ruined sketch of Atlantis. Reluctantly, Cassandra handed it over. He studied it for a moment, brow furrowing the longer he did. She had drawn the lines sharp and angular, although the city was full of rounded corners, so that the windows and balconies looked more like prison cells than graceful architecture. Deep shadows filled the painting from a dim light source in the lower left corner that did not match the afternoon sun's position.
"Is this how you see Atlantis?"
"It's just an artistic style, Ronon. There's no message in it." She took back the drawing and tucked it away inside the cover of the sketchbook.
"On Sateda, we called that austerism and only used it to paint Wraith ships. And there's always a message in art."
Cassandra's eyebrows arched dramatically. "Oh? So you were some kind of artist on Sateda? I find that hard to believe."
"Then reassess what you think about me because it's true." He leaned in close to say this, to emphasize the seriousness of it. "I was younger, and I didn't have time after we started resisting the Wraith. I probably wasn't very good."
"Ronon, I'm sorry. I didn't think about how everything must have changed." He started to say something, to explain, but stopped. "It's okay. You don't have to. I read everyone's personnel file before I came here."
The unspoken conversation hung in the air for a minute like the droplets of water swept up from the bay, and then Ronon changed the subject entirely.
"So where are you from?"
She showed the same reluctance she had when he asked to see her sketch of the city before answering. "I grew up in Colorado Springs. My mom was a doctor at the SGC. Then I moved to Chicago for art school and stayed there for law school. It's a fantastic city." She added as an afterthought, "I wish I could be there right now."
"So you do think Atlantis is a prison."
Her mouth worked silently, and she finally gave up trying to find the words to deny it. "I'm not sure I'm staying is all. I came here because Mr. Woolsey persuaded me. I don't know if it was kindness or manipulation, but either way, I think I might have made the wrong choice taking this job."
"Because it's boring?" She laughed shortly, as he had intended. "How'd he convince you?"
"Like I said, my mom worked at the SGC, so there are all kinds of documents from her: mission reports, e-mails. In one of her e-mails to Sam, she wrote something about me, just the kind of thing you write to your best friend and daughter's godmother. She said that she thought I would join the Stargate program as a physicist because I'm so good at math. It was so casual, like she never considered I would do anything else. She obviously wanted this for me."
"What do you want?" She only grinned ruefully. "That's what I thought."
"Ronon, this is Sheppard. Come in," called the team leader over the radio. Ronon touched his radio. "This is Ronon."
Cassandra gathered up her art supplies, making sure to carefully dry each pencil before sliding it back into the case, while Sheppard instructed Ronon to report to the gym to break in some new marines. They parted ways back inside the city, she to get dry clothes from her quarters and he to go to the gym.
"Good talk, Ronon," she said. "And if you have any examples, I'd love to see some Satedan art, austerism or not."
o o o
Cassandra took the transporter back to her room and changed into a fresh uniform before heading back to her desk. She needed to pay more attention to her clothes now she had a professional job, but her art school ways of wearing paint-splattered jeans and ratty t-shirts hadn't quite left her yet. It would only get worse when she progressed to oil paint on canvas.
On the way back to her desk, she stopped by the infirmary to make sure Carson had the files she had left on his desk. She had to wonder if the doctor had waited to request the files until someone other than Mr. Woolsey arranged to receive them. It might not be such a bad thing to remind their leader about Khalek, however, when another potential disaster was locked in the brig.
"Yes, I got them. Thank you very much, Cassie."
"You're welcome. Carson …" She wanted to say that Khalek had been a clone of Anubis and that was a far cry from being a clone of a kind-hearted man. She couldn't bring herself to say it. It would only open the door for questions about her own genetic history. "Never mind."
"See you at movie night," the doctor said. "It's my turn to pick, and I've got a good one in mind."
Cassandra smiled, but thought these people were just a little too social for her tastes. She'd hardly had a night to herself since arriving in the city. As the day wore on, however, she started to warm to the idea of movie night and being surrounded by people watching a film they had all seen multiple times before.
At every tiny lull in the day – waiting for an e-mail sent confirmation, listening for a response on the radio – her thoughts drifted to her conversation with Ronon. What she had thought was a good talk she now realized contained some glaring omissions. That is, she had not mentioned Hanka. Just thinking the name of her home world cause a dull ache to develop in her chest; what must have talking about Sateda done to him? She alone in the city could empathize, but she had said nothing at all.
Distracted and upset with herself, Cassandra quit working much earlier than normal. She paced around her quarters for an hour and tried to distract herself with sketching or Sudoku, but nothing helped take her mind off Ronon's question: what do you want?
She wanted to forget all the bad stuff forever, but remember the people who had helped her survive those tough times. She wanted to be like every other Earth-born 24-year-old without betraying the memories of the Hankan deceased. She wanted to be a good friend and show sympathy to Ronon, Carson, and Teyla, but not have to talk about her past. She wanted to be the daughter Janet Fraiser had wanted so badly, but have nothing to do with the Stargate program.
"Impossible," she told her reflection. "All of it. Impossible."