A/N: Yeah! Chapter two! Sorry about the delay, I'm usually better than this but school's been crazy lately and I only post on odd days… Don't ask, there is no explanation.
It takes Major Sheppard six hours to manage to get into trouble again, but when he does, he gets into serious trouble.
John Sheppard never does anything halfway.
He and Corporal O'Grady are checking out an area about a mile and a half out from the Atlantis team temporary base. It's slow going walking through the brush and thin trees up the slight incline, and when Sheppard stops to look around O'Grady gets ahead of him, cresting the slight rise. You aren't supposed to get ahead of your CO.
It's the last mistake O'Grady ever makes.
Sheppard isn't sure why, but something makes him turn suddenly so he's looking right at O'Grady when the shot takes the corporal in the chest and he collapses.
Sheppard makes it to the crest of the hill in record time and ducks, just missing getting stunned for the second time in as many months.
There's a Wraith ship in the valley below him.
He's lying on the ground, waiting. He can't get to O'Grady, but he knows he's still alive so he isn't particularly worried.
High time somebody else joined the I-got-shot-with-a-Wraith-stun-gun club.
Without looking up he points his P-90 in the Wraith's general direction, pulls the trigger, and adjusts until he hears the thing, (he tries to always think of the Wraith as "things") make Goddamit-he-shot-me! sounds. At about that moment, as he raises his head and sees the Wraith go down, he notices movement in the corner of his eye. It can't be O'Grady yet; the man should still be paralyzed.
Unless he's immune. That would be interesting.
It's not O'Grady; it's another Wraith.
Even as he swivels to fire he can see the thing bringing its weapon to bear, and even as he pulls the trigger and sees the bullets hit the thing he feels the shiver in the air that always precedes being stunned and he very clearly thinks, 'Not again.'
And then he falls down the hill.
Six hours go by in relative peace and quiet.
The scientists find some interesting (to them) form of mold, Sergeant Toombs apologizes stiffly for his actions, and Desperaux comes back from "keeping an eye" on the Atlantians with a smirk and a report that they're doing pretty much the same thing the Alketch are: wandering after the scientists.
Six hours of peace and quiet.
And then gunshots.
Conditioned from childhood to be able to tell the difference between Alketch Ground Corps troops strafing from helicopters and raiders strafing from trucks, Ezrikos has only a momentary thought that the shots might be her men. They aren't.
Which makes it the Atlantians. And not her problem.
More shots.
It is not her problem.
But she's the farthest out of all her people, the closest to the vague Atlantian zone, and she can still hear gunfire. Faint but sure.
Ezrikos has very, very good hearing.
And a sense of…responsibility?
Damn her and her instincts.
She tilts her head sharply, listening. Was that…?
And then she takes off running, another thing she's particularly good at, toward the suddenly silent area where a moment ago there was gunfire.
Ezrikos is no stranger to the Wraith. Or to war.
She is thirty-two years old, and for the first eighteen years of her life she lived with her father's people in the middle of the Greater Desert laying traps for the Alketch Ground Corps, who were continually trying to kill the Bahzir.
As an officer of the Alketch Space Corps, she doesn't talk about that anymore.
But it did help prepare her for the Wraith.
Even the Space Force is trained in ground warfare, mostly guerrilla warfare, because brass assumes that any pilot having to fight on the ground was probably shot down alone.
They had to train with the Ground Corps, who Ezrikos grew up calling "the dust-eaters." She had bitten her tongue and worked hard at not attacking anyone in a homicidal rage. She qualified out of the program in three weeks; she was a trained guerrilla warrior at five years old.
So: instead of rushing out into the middle of the clearing like an idiot, she stops at the edge where the trees start to fade into the dry grass, and looks around.
The first thing she sees is the two-man Wraith ship.
The second thing she sees is Major Sheppard lying very still in the middle of the clearing (probably having fallen down the hill while stunned) between her and…the Wraith.
One Wraith, who appears to be finishing off a half-hidden Atlantian soldier. Nothing she can do about that.
Where's the other Wraith?
At this point, the Wraith finishes with the unfortunate Atlantian, straightens, and starts toward Major Sheppard in that menacing, stalking way they have.
Still no sign of the other Wraith. It could be behind her for all she knows.
The Wraith she can see is getting steadily closer to the paralyzed Major.
Dammit, dammit, dammit.
She hits the panic button on her radio, which, actually, she should have done several minutes ago.
And then she draws her sidearm, and steps into the clearing, the little voices in her head all screaming, "Stupid, stupid, stupid!"
The Wraith looks very surprised when she puts two bullets in its chest. It stops suddenly.
They're maybe 20 yards apart, staring at each other over the Major's body. There's a long moment of stunned silence and stillness. And then the Wraith growls at her.
And Ezrikos shoots him again.
Later she will remember walking slowly towards the Wraith, and the Major, while firing steadily and reloading automatically.
All she knows at the moment is that there's a Wraith in front of her.
Because she's moving faster than the Wraith, probably because no one is shooting her, she gets to the Major first.
She bends down next to him, and while reloading one-handed, she presses two fingers against his throat, hoping that they're biologically similar enough for this to work.
The man's pulse is strong, if not exactly steady, so she gets back up, spares a thought for the other Wraith, and then steps over the major, and advances, still firing, on the one Wraith she can see.
He snarls at her, and drops to his knees when she is six feet away. He makes as if to reach out to her, and she puts two bullets between his eyes.
He drops like a stone, and does not move. Ezrikos takes a long look at him, then looks around, and doesn't see another Wraith.
She walks back to the Major and picks up his weapon, some kind of machine gun, she thinks.
Ezrikos goes back to the downed Wraith, points the machine gun at him, and fires until she can see the ground through the space where the thing's head used to be.
When she stops there's a ringing silence. She looks around and, past the forms of approaching Atlantian soldiers, she spots the body of the other Wraith.
It was there before, she realizes. Major Sheppard must have killed it.
One of the Atlantian soldiers comes up to her, and she hands him the machine gun.
"I borrowed this," she says.
He nods. Something in his eyes clues her in.
"You found more Wraith?"
This time a verbal reply. "Yes, Captain."
She nods to herself, watching her own people come out of the woods at a run, looking around for her. They appear to have had a few run-ins themselves.
"Maybe we should stick together."
The relief that spreads over the young lieutenant's face is answer enough.
A/N: Coming up…eventually. Smug scientists, more Wraith, and …could that possibly be coffee? Notice how the Wraith went from being an "it" to being a "him"? Neither did I. Could there possibly be veiled significance? Amaruk will like that.
