Mining
"We all sing," said the gigantic miner, his bass rumble slow, deliberate and heavy with menace, "about mining." He glared down at them, his eyes two laser-sharp points of white in his grit-darkened, hard-featured face.
"And we'll be sure to listen to that!" drawled John, the pleasant smile on his face belied by his twitching trigger finger.
The hulking form gradually bent over from the waist, hands like shovels coming to rest on the sticky surface of the table, which creaked under the strain. Rodney swallowed painfully and his questionable stew shifted uneasily in his stomach.
"We. All. Sing." The fleshy face loomed close, its bulbous thread-veined nose almost touching John's. "About. Mining."
Great, just great, thought Rodney. Our first chance in ages of trading for something really useful and we run into a cult of karaoke-worshipping Neanderthals.
"Oh, you mean we as in... we." John waved a pointing finger around his team. "See, I'm not sure if I know any mining songs. Johnny Cash? Elvis? C'mon, everyone loves the King!"
Oh, nice one, Sheppard, wind up the silverback, why not? Rodney glanced round the room. There was no way they could shoot their way out of this; the place was packed. The table began to tremble under the man's vibrating tension, and Rodney turned his face further away to avoid the puffing snorts of sour miner-breath.
"Perhaps a hunting song would be acceptable?" Teyla spoke, ever the diplomat, followed, surprisingly, by a helpful contribution from Ronon.
"I know a couple 'bout fighting."
The miner drew back and hauled his massive body up to its full height, fervour for his artistic cause replaced by frowning thought.
"Hunting. Fighting." He considered the worthiness of these lesser pastimes, his lips pressed together and the heavy granite jaw clamping tight on his aggression. Wide nostrils flared as the man huffed out an acknowledging grunt. "Have to do," he said and thumped away toward the bar.
"What the hell is it with these people?" Rodney's voice was high and tense as he leant over the table, drawing closer to his teammates. "And look at the size of them all!" He glanced furtively over one shoulder, then the other, and lowered his voice further. "Do you think they breed selectively for gigantism?"
"Rodney!" Teyla said, disapprovingly. "They are people, not animals!"
"Only the strong survive in a place like this," said John. "And if we want to survive, and stop this whole deal going south, we're gonna have to do as Goliath says."
A gentle rumble started up, growing to an earth shaking tremor, and Rodney was about to thank the dangerous seismic activity for averting his humiliation, when he realised that the surrounding tables were all receiving a vigorous thumping from meaty fists. A spotlight sprang to life, illuminating a small stage in the corner of the room, as well as the fair performer, a lady of immense height and girth. She gave a nod toward one side and a deep, booming, pounding beat began, which Rodney could feel vibrating in his chest.
The mineress sang into a microphone, and it crossed Rodney's mind that this cavernously deep, yet still feminine tone, could be the voice of Mother Earth (or Mother whatever they called this place), if Mother Whatever were an immense figure of knee-weakening authority, that made you want to apologise for everything you'd ever done and a fair few things you would never have dreamt of doing. The music was shockingly loud, so that Rodney thought it almost qualified as a weapon.
He leant over, put his head close to Teyla's, and shouted, "What are you going to sing?"
"An Athosian hunting song," she yelled back, managing to sound calmly confident.
"Do you need a backing track?"
She shook her head.
He leant further over the table to ask Ronon, but his question was anticipated and Ronon half stood up to shout, right in his ear.
"Satedan army chant!"
Rodney sat down. He looked at John with a questioning face. John shrugged. Rodney bent down to retrieve his laptop from his pack. It wasn't his laptop, though, which he'd been annoyed about all day, from when he'd turned it on to find a pigeon flying across the screen, to when he'd had to mess about with it for ten minutes before it would mesh with the Jumper's sensors, and especially when he'd had to write a whole new section of code before it would display the energy readings from the local naquadah, mine to his exacting specifications. He hoped his laptop was giving Zelenka hell; although it was unlikely it was giving him anything, except a blank screen and some rude words designed to spring up in glorious technicolour if the likes of Zelenka tried to break through his firewall.
The earth-shattering song finished, to similarly earth-shattering applause. Rodney felt the attention of the entire room of rock-shifting mammoths land on himself and his team like a couple of tons of hardcore. Teyla rose gracefully to her feet, made her serene way through the tables, mounted the stage and waved away the microphone. There were murmurings and rumblings from the tables. A few fists thumped. Teyla waited, smiling gently, for the noise to abate, and then she began.
"Grey mist floats over the morning earth,
Tracks linger in the dew,
I take my bow and my sharpest blade,
And follow, follow, follow..."
Teyla sang beautifully, as Rodney knew she would, and the loose phrase structure and meandering melody suited her voice particularly well. It also sounded like she was embellishing and elongating, playing for time, in fact; time that he'd better use.
He opened the laptop, sneered at the pigeon and began digging through Zelenka's files. John scooted his chair closer.
"Radek got any music on there?"
"Oh, good idea, and here was me searching for cupcake recipes!"
A bearded hulk of a man glared at them from a nearby table.
"Looks like Teyla's scored a hit," whispered John.
"Lucky her; she gets to take our bodies back to the Gate when they've lynched the rest of us! Right, here we are: audio files." Rodney scrolled down the list. He clicked on one, and the coo of a pigeon burbled out of the speakers. Rodney hastily muted it, hearing a crunch of gritted teeth from Teyla's number one fan. "Jeez, Radek, get a grip!" He scrolled further down.
"What's that?" John pointed. "No! Go back up! Look!"
"Sonny and Cher? You have got to be kidding me!" Rodney began to scroll down again.
"Wait, McKay. Can you bring up the lyrics to that?"
Rodney regarded John steadily. "I am not singing, 'I got you, babe,' with you, Sheppard! And definitely not in a room full of giant cavemen!"
"They won't kill us, Rodney!"
"No. They wouldn't," he replied, flatly.
John looked confused, then understanding dawned. "Oh, you mean a fate worse than death? Huh, yeah!" He rubbed the back of his neck, nervously. "I think you might be right, there! But just bring up the lyrics; I've got an idea!" he grinned.
"I am so going to regret this," said Rodney.
Teyla's song came to an end and the room erupted with deep-chested roars and table-thumping. She resumed her seat, completely unruffled. Ronon strode boldly up to the stage in the wake of her applause, and stood, arms crossed, his face challenging under lowering brows, until there was silence. Then he jumped straight up in the air, landed on the planking with a crashing thud, and launched into an aggressive chant which reminded Rodney strongly of a Maori haka, fascinating in its throbbing rhythm.
"Rodney!" John pulled his attention back to the screen and he brought up the lyrics.
"Oh, God, no, we can't!" Rodney said, scanning through them.
"Watch!" John deleted the first two lines and replaced them. "Yeah?"
"Oh. Yes. I suppose."
"And then..." He altered the next two lines and made a small change to the chorus. Rodney's lips twitched.
"Sappy, but not bad. Let me do the next verse!" He altered three of the lines and left the last.
"Cool!" assessed John.
"Now for the 'B' section!" said Rodney.
"Here, let me!" John pushed in and changed the first line.
"Oh, I know!" Rodney elbowed him aside to alter the second.
John snorted. "Not here we haven't! What about the next two?"
"Leave them!"
"Yeah, they pretty much fit, don't they?"
"Last verse!" Rodney looked up at the stage as John typed. Ronon's stampings and percussive syllables were losing momentum; he was nearly finished.
"Last two lines!" said John.
Rodney took them in at a glance and altered just one word.
"Oh thanks, McKay!" said John, sarcastically.
"The last line's true!" Applause and foot stamping rang out. "Well, that obviously appealed to their inner warrior!"
Ronon fell heavily into his seat and lounged back, watching them smugly.
Rodney's eyes met John's. They exchanged sickly smiles, pushed back their chairs and made for the stage, John leading, his arms cradling a phantom P90, his eyes flicking here and there in futile threat assessment.
Rodney put the laptop down on the edge of the stage and climbed up to stand next to John. The crowd did not look impressed. First Teyla and then Ronon had managed to win them over, but they had reset, back to their default glowering menace, and Rodney was pretty sure that some of the waste rock from the day's mining would be sent forcibly toward the stage if they decided they didn't like the act. John shifted uneasily and Rodney nudged him with an elbow.
"Quit it, McKay!" he mumbled. Then, raising his voice, John announced, "This is a song about fighting the Wraith!"
The faces remained stony, although one or two sat up a little straighter, in what Rodney hoped was interest rather than readiness to aim their missiles. He bent down and tapped a key on the laptop. Small, reedy and somewhat discouraging, a gently swinging rhythm and the repetitive 'toot-toot' of an oboe floated up from the laptop. Rodney froze, feeling like he'd been stuffed, his throat closing up and his eyes bulging wide. A sharp elbow in his ribs shocked him into a deep breath, so that, miraculously, he was ready with the first two lines.
"They say we're food and suck our lives,
Beam us up and take us to their hives!"
John continued.
"It's hard to fight the Wraith, that's true,
But you got me and Rodney, I got you..."
Here came the dangerous bit. Did the miners do the whole team camaraderie, brothers-in-arms thing, or would rocks start to fly?
"...friend."
He joined John in singing:
"I got you, friend,
I got you, friend."
No rocks. Yet. On to the second verse.
"They say they're gonna cull us all,
We'll keep on fighting till they fall!"
Some rumbles of approval, possibly?
"And sometimes we get hurt a lot,
But at least I'm sure of all the things we got... friend."
Chorus again, and still no rocks. Rodney began to feel more confident as they moved into the 'B' section
"We got Jumpers in the sky!" sang John.
"We got coffee and plenty of pie!" responded Rodney.
The next two lines were the originals.
"And when I'm sad, you're a clown!"
"And if I get scared, you're always around!"
The final verse; they were nearly there!
John began:
"Don't let them say our fight's in vain,
We'll win with courage and your genius brain!"
And Rodney responded, grinning:
"Then put your sweaty hand in mine,
There ain't no hill or mountain we can't climb... friend!"
And he felt triumphant, until, singing the final chorus, he realised there were four sets of tacked-on rhyming couplets that they'd forgotten about. He looked at John whose mouth was singing but whose eyes were panicking.
The moment arrived and John pounced on the first line:
"I got you to save my life."
"I got you and your combat knife!" Rodney improvised, his brain scrambling for the next line so that John would have to follow his rhyme. Too late!
"I got you to fix the Gate!"
"I got you to aviate!" Rodney shot back desperately, then followed immediately with:
"I got you to watch my six!"
John, eyes narrowed, responded.
"I got you to hike ten clicks!"
Rodney, enjoying himself finally, jumped in with:
"I got you to fire your gun!"
And John, grinning at his own ingenuity, sang, "We can blow shit up and run!"
"I got you, friend!" they sang, together, and as they repeated the line, Rodney realised that their accompaniment was being drowned out by a curious groaning; the miners were actually singing along.
"I got you, friend!" They finished, arms around each other's shoulders. There was a storm of applause. John nodded his head awkwardly in acknowledgement. Rodney indulged in a flourishing bow. And then they were back at the relatively safe haven of their table, bruised by several buffeting back-slaps from calloused hands.
"That was very nice John, Rodney," said Teyla.
"Yeah, 'blow shit up and run,'" quoted Ronon. "Cool."
There was a break in the entertainment as the bar was mobbed, and quantities of ale were downe- in-one from massive tankards. Rodney took a gulp of his, gratefully moistening his dry mouth. He realised that a huge shape was blocking out what little light there was. A shovel-like hand once more descended, but this time it was held out. John shook it, winced, and then Rodney did the same, and rubbed his crushed hand surreptitiously under the table.
"Tunruck," said the man, which sounded to Rodney like a suitable name for one so hugely solid. "Your songs," he said, with his trademark zealous glare and no hint of a smile. "They weren't about mining."
Rodney stifled a sarcastic quip.
John said, "No, they sure weren't," meeting Tunruck's gaze levelly.
"I liked them," rumbled the giant man, and hairline cracks appeared at the dirt-ingrained corners of his mouth. "'Specially yours." The penetrating eyes moved between John and Rodney. "You together?"
"To...? What? No!"
"Oh. That there..." He jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward Teyla's bearded devotee. "That's Denrik. My husband."
Denrik waved. They waved back.
"Um... Me 'n' Denrik? Trade council get us to check people out, so... you're in." He held out a fist, gifted them each with bruised knuckles from a vigorous bump, and shambled away.
Rodney flexed his fingers.
"Ouch," he said succinctly. "Was that the local equivalent of signing on the dotted line?"
Teyla nodded. "A successful agreement!"
"Sonny and Cher," said John, thoughtfully. "Intergalactic trade negotiators."
"Who knew?" said Rodney.
A.N: I hope you enjoyed this installment of 'Gatebnb'. The next will be written when inspiration strikes! Hope you're all okay and thank you so much for your reviews! Remember to log in to write a review if you want a reply! For guest reviews, I have to click the moderate button before they appear and sometimes I forget!
Sally x