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Chapter Four: Afghanistan

"Afghanistan in the winter."

Teyla raised her head from a marker post that she was studying. The post, made of stone, was as high as her waist and covered in the Ancestors' writing. "I'm sorry?"

"Afghanistan." Sheppard stalked around her, studying the life signs detector in his hand. "This place. Reminds me of it."

"This ... Afgastan is on Earth?" Teyla guessed.

"Served a tour of duty there." John leaned against a boulder and stared out at the windswept wasteland beneath them. Behind him, he heard her start to say something, and then go back to her inspection of the marker.

God, but it did look like Afghanistan in January. When he'd first gone over there, it was a hundred and ten in the shade and he used to make bets with Mitch and Dex about whether the platoon commander was just pulling their leg about the winters -- it couldn't really get that cold in a place so goddawful hot, could it? Six months later, he wondered if he'd ever get warm again. That screaming wind, coming down out of the mountains, it just never stopped. He used to wonder whatever possessed people to live in such a hell-hole in the first place -- hot enough to melt lead half the year, cold enough to freeze your eyeballs the other half.

This place could have been Afghanistan's sister country ... only without the helicopters in the sky and the insurgents on the ground, of course. That, or a big, frozen gravel pit. Below him, the gray and tan rockscape fell away into a valley criss-crossed with jagged ravines, dipping to a great river at its central point and then, on the other side, rising into a series of high, pitiless mountains clawing at the oddly colorful sky. The Stargate had been located on the west side of the river valley, and a cold morning sun slanted over the mountains and into his eyes, offering little warmth. Beneath him, the ever-present wind stirred up small whorls of dust and dry, sandy snow.

He hadn't seen a place so utterly devoid of life since the world where he and Rodney had investigated the crashed Wraith ship. Where Rodney had saved his life ... he pushed that thought away, didn't want to think about it right now. The point was, the place was barren and desolate and didn't even have those little glowy bugs to add some interest to the nearly colorless landscape. The life signs detector confirmed it ... the place was empty.

The only odd thing about it was that crazy shifting sky. He'd seen auroras in Antarctica, but this was more than just those curtains of green and white light. And auroras were never bright enough to see in the daytime. The whole sky was alive with what resembled faintly multi-colored static. It wreaked havoc with their communications equipment, and they'd been unable to bring the jumper because of it -- hence the reason why they were currently on foot. As soon as they came through the gate, McKay had immediately started muttering about sunspots and the hazards of solar radiation. He'd hypothesized that the planet might have been abandoned due to increasing levels of radiation. At least, Sheppard thought that's what McKay had said; personally, he was too busy trying to tune out the whining about radiation and sunscreen. As if most people would be worried about sunburn and skin cancer on a winter day with the temperature in the thirties at best. McKay never shut up, and he never quit worrying about his own skin ... literally, in this case.

Some deep part of John informed him in no uncertain terms that he wasn't being fair to McKay. He told it to shut up and went back to surveying the valley.

"You said the abandoned village is on top of the hill?" Ronon asked Teyla.

She nodded. "But there are several different roads; this marker will show us the quickest one."

"Thought you'd been here before."

"I have, but I am used to having a guide. I came here many times as a small child, before this world was abandoned and the inhabitants went elsewhere."

"I wonder why they might have done that," McKay grumbled, swatting at his arms to keep himself warm as they started climbing again.

What Teyla had called a "road" was, in Sheppard's eyes, more of a goat path: narrow, uneven and strewn with rocks. The hill was not exactly a cliff face, but steep enough to make climbing difficult, and the road or path or whatever you wanted to call it followed the natural twists and turns of the land. After fifteen minutes or so of ligament-straining hiking (punctuated by McKay's complaints), the "road" turned sharply and entered a crevice in the rocks. Looking up, Sheppard could see the flat, crackling sky high above them, framed by gray rock faces. The wind still whistled high overhead, but down here in the crevice it was almost comfortable.

Teyla reached up a hand to touch the rock face at her side, and Sheppard noticed that the rocks were carved with swirling pictographs. He was still looking at them when he heard Teyla say, from somewhere up ahead, "Here it is."

Hurrying to catch up with his team, Sheppard emerged into a flat, clear amphitheater in the rough gray stone. He couldn't tell if the wide opening was natural or man-made -- it was hard to imagine what natural force could have taken such a great bite out of the rock, but he remembered the eerie rock spires and arches of the American Southwest, and supposed that it was possible.

The amphitheater was perhaps a quarter mile across. They stood at one end of a huge courtyard paved with flagstones and drifted with shallow patches of sandy snow, and ringed all about with squat stone buildings whose empty windows gaping darkly like the eyes of the dead. The buildings even climbed partway up the walls of the amphitheater, built against the cliff face like mushrooms, with steep, narrow streets winding between them. Sheppard thought it looked as if the place had had quite a sizeable population at some point in the past; hard to believe, considering how much of a wasteland it was, but then, there were a lot of people in Afghanistan too.

Now that they were out of the wind, Sheppard found himself becoming more comfortable -- actually, with a sweater under his uniform jacket and a hat and gloves covering the rest of his exposed skin, he was starting to sweat a little bit. He peeled off his gloves and took a look at the life signs detector.

"Hey, looks like it's working a little better in here," he said, starting to glance at McKay out of habit, and shifting to look at Teyla at the last minute. "I can see all of you guys on here. Before, I was only picking you up occasionally."

To his surprise, he caught a glimmer of unexpected emotion from Teyla at his announcement -- surprise and what appeared to be disappointment or nervousness.

"The rocks must be helping cut out the interference," McKay said. Sheppard, distracted from wondering about Teyla, glanced over to see the scientist waving his hand at the rocks. The familiar wrist-snapping gesture set off an unexpected twinge of pain in Sheppard's midsection -- like stepping down too suddenly on an injured ankle and feeling it twist under you.

"Maybe that's why they built here," McKay was saying, moving towards one of the abandoned buildings with scanner in hand. "Everything works better in here. No way you could have any kind of technological society if you can't use tech. Hey!" He spun around, his face animated and smiling; his eyes slid to Sheppard's face and slid immediately away again, the smile becoming fixed. Again, Sheppard felt that twinge deep down. He busied himself keeping an eye on the buildings, just in case something decided to come out of them.

"What did you find?" Teyla was peering over his shoulder at his detector, not that she could read it.

"There's some kind of energy source here. Very faint. Teyla, the people who lived here, were they advanced or not?"

"Advanced?" Teyla repeated.

"Yeah, advanced, you know, herding pigs and eating with their fingers, or watching TV and building ZPMs? More like your people or more like mine?"

Teyla's eyebrows shot up and Sheppard, suddenly intrigued, watched the barely-masked irritation uncoil on her face at McKay's casual dismissal of her people. The more surprising reaction, though, was McKay's. He looked up from his scanner, saw her face, and immediately his whole face, his whole body radiated shock and regret.

"Oh. Teyla, jeez, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to -- I -- you know I don't think you're -- I have a big fat mouth, Teyla."

Teyla relaxed and reached out to touch his arm briefly. "I know that you do," she said with a hint of a smile. "I am not offended. The people here, they were more like mine than yours, as far as their technology was concerned. But they did have a few Ancient devices in the village. Most were treated reverentially, as sacred artifacts rather than items of everyday use."

"Really? Where did they keep them?"

They turned away as she started pointing out landmarks to McKay, and Sheppard glanced over at Ronon to see if the runner had noticed that little byplay, but Ronon wasn't looking in their direction.

He couldn't ever remember seeing Rodney just ... back down like that. And picking up on Teyla's rather subtle body language, too. The thought occurred to him that since Arcturus, Rodney had been ... well, subdued wasn't really the right word, but -- cautious, maybe. Afraid of treading on his teammates' toes.

Afraid of being rejected?

Sheppard almost snorted aloud. Rodney McKay, the original sarcastic asshole, wilting like a flower at the idea of emotional rejection. That'd be the day.

But as he followed his team deeper into the village, rather than seeing the buildings around him, he found himself seeing a pair of wounded blue eyes -- Rodney's eyes, fixed on him in the hallway after Duranda ... Rodney, as John had turned away into the transporter, calling him back with a most un-McKaylike desperation in his voice. Rodney, trying in his clumsy way to patch over the growing chasm between them.

Rodney, thinking that a simple apology could heal everything ... thinking that he could use their friendship to serve his own ego trip and then expecting to patch it all up with a few words.

No, he wasn't anywhere near ready to forgive Rodney McKay yet.

Still, those eyes haunted him.

Sheppard caught up to the others in a small courtyard off the main one. "There are several temples in the town," Teyla was saying. "I do not know which one would be most likely to have what you are looking for."

McKay whacked the side of the scanner in frustration. "It's so hard to pinpoint anything with all this damned interference. I can't get a direction on the signal. Maybe if I walk around the place, triangulate it ..."

"We can split up, perhaps?" Teyla asked, looking to Sheppard for confirmation.

"We can cover more ground that way," Sheppard conceded. "But we go in pairs. Nobody goes anywhere alone. That means you, McKay."

Rodney shot him a quick, hard look and didn't say anything.

Teyla moved smoothly between them. "I will go with you, perhaps?" she offered to Sheppard. "Of us all, Rodney is the most likely to notice the sort of technology that is valuable to your people, but I know the village best. So I can be your eyes as we search, and Ronon can be Rodney's guard in case anything should attack us."

"I thought you said the planet was deserted," McKay said hastily. "Not even animals, you said."

"As far as I know," Teyla said. "But it is best to be prepared."

Sheppard thought about Teyla's partnering suggestions and found that it did make sense, at the very least, not to put their two strongest fighters together while leaving the other two less defended. Not that Teyla was a bad fighter by any means, but she still wasn't as good with guns as either Sheppard or Ronon, and she'd also be distracted by her role as guide. "All right, let's do it," he said. "We may have trouble staying in touch if the radios keep cutting out, so let's arrange to meet back here in an hour, whether or not we've found anything. At that point we can compare notes and follow up on anything that looks promising, or head back to the Stargate, whichever. And we'll have regular check-ins ... every fifteen minutes, assuming the radios keep working."

McKay rolled his eyes. "Yes, mother."

It had been just one sniping comment after another since they'd come through the gate, and for Sheppard, that one was the final insult. He lost his temper. "Excuse me, but it's your ass that I'm trying to keep in one piece, Doctor McKay. If you'd act like a goddamn adult instead of a kid in pursuit of the ice cream truck every time you see a shiny new piece of alien technology, then maybe I wouldn't have to keep a leash on you, but I'll just be damned if I'll go back and tell Elizabeth that her head scientist walked into a hole in the ground and broke his neck while staring at the pretty lights."

McKay had gone pale under the slight flush of windburn on his cheeks -- pale with anger. His blue eyes burned. "So you don't trust me. Nice of you to finally say it out loud."

"I've already said it! Of course I don't trust you! Why should I?" The two men circled each other like stray dogs preparing to leap, their bodies tense and bristling. "The last time I made that mistake, you almost got us both killed and cost us an extremely valuable weapon that could have ended the Wraith threat! Elizabeth is still giving me the third degree every time I go on an offworld mission. I wish I hadn't trusted you then!"

"I wish I'd never asked you to," McKay hissed. "Rest assured I won't make that mistake again!"

Teyla looked at Ronon, seeing her helplessness reflected in his eyes. The runner's shoulders lifted in a slight shrug. If it actually came to blows, he'd help her separate the two of them, but this was far outside his expertise.

"You'd better just remember who's in charge here," Sheppard snarled. "I'm your team leader and you --"

"Are what? I'm civilian, Colonel! You have no authority over me and you never have!"

"No authority, is that right? You sure as hell could have fooled me over the last year, taking orders right and left, McKay! Guess you're a better liar than you are a scientist, huh?"

McKay punctuated his words with a stabbing finger, so furious he nearly lost his grip on the scanner balled in his fist. "I followed you because I wanted to, Colonel, sir! And that's another mistake I won't make again! When we get back to Atlantis, the first thing I'm going to do is get a change of assignment from Elizabeth! This is the last time you'll ever have me in your damned team, so enjoy the hell out of it!"

Sheppard threw up his hands. "Thank God, it's about damn time! Maybe I'll get a scientist who actually follows orders this time! Maybe one who's got a little bit of common sense too!"

McKay's face had gone red and his eyes blazed so brightly that Sheppard half-expected to see blue sparks fly from them. "I should have left you on Duranda," he snapped, and spun on his heel, stalking away with great strides into the abandoned city.

Sheppard wasn't about to let him have the last word. "You should have left me? What the hell, McKay! Who dragged your suicidal ass off that planet? Who flew the jumper through an asteroid belt with a planet-sized gun shooting at us? You'd be dead a dozen times over if I hadn't been there!"

McKay swiveled back, half-swallowed by shadows in an alley between two buildings. "Oh, well, that changes everything, then! Excuse me for not worshipping the water you walk on, Colonel! Too bad that giant swollen head makes it so hard to get it out of your ass, hm?"

"--But you know what?" Sheppard charged on, relentless. "If I'd known you were going to react this way, I'd have left you there with no hesitation, Dr. McKay!"

"Whatever happened to 'the military doesn't leave a man behind', Colonel, sir?"

"You're the one who keeps telling me you're not military!" Sheppard crowed, triumphant. Score!

McKay appeared to have become, for perhaps the first time in his life, speechless with anger. He just stood there for a moment, opening and closing his mouth. If looks could kill, Sheppard would have been a small scorched spot on the snow-dusted flagstones. Then McKay whirled around and vanished into the alley.

Teyla jerked her head sharply at Ronon, but the runner was already halfway across the courtyard and vanished after McKay.

"And you'd better be back here at the rendezvous or I'm dragging your sorry ass back to the Stargate at gunpoint!" Sheppard hollered after him.

The echoes of his words rolled back to him from the walls of the amphitheater as he stood in the middle of the courtyard, his heart pounding in his ears, his breathing slowly returning to normal. At gunpoint ... at gunpoint ... at gunpoint ...

Was this how bad it had gotten -- that he had to threaten his head scientist with violence to get him to follow a simple order? There had been a time, not too long ago, when Rodney would have --

No, not Rodney, not any longer. Doctor McKay. He pronounced the words inside his head, four syllables that echoed hollowly into the emptiness inside his chest. Dr. McKay, and he'd better not forget it again. After this mission, of course, it really wouldn't matter.

Christ, he'd messed this one up, hadn't he?

"John?"

Teyla spoke his given name softly, almost shyly, and he looked down to see her hand hovering near his arm. Soft brown eyes looked up at him with compassion. John shut down quickly, hastily, throwing up barricades between his eyes and the world. At this moment, he didn't dare let anyone else inside him.

"I'm fine," he said, too abruptly. Teyla's hand hesitated with her fingertips almost touching his sleeve, then withdrew.

"So I can see," she said quietly, and gestured across the courtyard, opposite the direction that McKay and Ronon had gone. "Shall we go look in one of the temples?"

The absolute last thing Sheppard wanted to do right now was the extraterrestrial equivalent of a museum tour. He wanted to scream, punch things, empty a lot of ammo into something, scream some more and then get drunk. Instead, he started walking, with Teyla by his side. His boots rang on the flagstones.

They left the courtyard and climbed a narrow flight of stairs that opened into a crooked alley, barely wide enough for one person, let alone two. After a glance at John, Teyla took point, leading him through a virtual maze of tiny streets. The walls of the amphitheater kept him oriented; it was impossible to get lost with giant direction indicators towering above them on three sides. Still, Sheppard suspected that without Teyla, it might take him nearly the full hour just to find his way back to the rendezvous point.

This, normally, would have led into his usual wondering and worry about the state of the rest of his team. But not this time. He didn't think about them, couldn't think about them.

"So, you said you've been here before, with your people?" he asked, wanting to talk about something, anything to occupy his mind.

Teyla looked over her shoulder and nodded. "Yes, we used to come here to trade when I was a small girl. There were not very many people here, even then, but the city was not quite so empty as you see it now."

John waved a hand at the barren hills around them. "What in the world did they eat?"

"There are actually some good grazing lands down by the river." Teyla pointed into the valley. John followed her finger. They were very high up, and it still looked like a gravel pit to him. Looking back at her face, he saw that her lips were tilted in a small smile. "You must remember that it is this world's winter, John. The land is not quite this cold and barren in the summer."

"I'll take your word for it." He shivered, rubbed his hands together. "Ain't my idea of a vacation spot, that's all I'm gonna say." He looked around, and asked, "So if there were people living here that recently, what happened to them?"

Teyla shrugged. "The climate changed, grew drier. Their harvests were poor. Eventually they sought a better world through the gate. We have not traded with them in many years."

"Ah." After a moment he asked, searching for more conversation topics, "What was the name of this world? I mean, what did the locals call it?"

"It was called Cleta."

"Ah." Again, silence.

They entered another tiny courtyard overlooking the valley. They appeared to be nearly halfway up the side of the amphitheater by now, and the landscape spread before them, a vista of startling beauty for all its harshness.

"The temple," Teyla said, pointing, and Sheppard realized that the building on the far side of the courtyard was larger than the rest, with slender columns and statues around the front door. If she hadn't pointed it out, he'd probably have walked right by. John didn't notice buildings; he assessed them for danger, for possible cover and exits, but that was about it.

Out of habit, he glanced automatically at the life signs detector in his hand, but it wasn't reading anything but the two of them. They crossed the courtyard and paused for a moment by the small fountain at its center. The fountain was bone-dry and half full of snow. John snapped a dry stick from what might once have been ornamental topiary and poked half-heartedly at the snowdrifts around the fountain's base. This place was so dry that the texture of the snow was like sand, and there wasn't much of it; as elsewhere in the town, the wind had swept most parts of the courtyard clean. Thank goodness for small favors, he thought -- with worse luck, they could have been wading through knee-deep snow right now.

"Teyla," he said, and when she looked at him, he looked away, continuing to poke with the stick. "Sorry I've been such a dick lately," he said.

He paused automatically for the usual question about an unfamiliar figure of speech, but she must have understood that one, either by context or because of hanging around soldiers all day. "I do not feel that you have been a 'dick'," she said seriously. "I am not angry at you, John."

"I know I haven't been easy to be around lately, but I haven't meant to take it out on you."

"I know."

Poke, poke, at the snowdrifts. "I suck at this heart-to-heart stuff," John said. "Let's just assume that we're solid and go from there, okay?"

"John," Teyla said in a half-affectionate, half-exasperated tone, causing him to look over at her. The expression on her face matched the voice. "What on Athos would make you think I'm angry at you?"

"I don't know," he said shortly. Damn it, this was why he hated this sort of conversation. It always went off in strange, unexpected directions.

"Perhaps it is not me that you truly want to apologize to," Teyla said gently.

John had his mouth open to tell her that he had no idea what she was talking about, then shut it, and looked down into the valley. He wished to God this place didn't remind him so much of Afghanistan. It was hard not to think about what had happened in Afghanistan.

His two best friends had died in front of him.

------

tbc...

Next chapter: the nature of Teyla's plan -- REVEALED:)

By the way, I'm estimating at this point that there will be about 12 chapters ... but it'll depend on whether the plot gets out of control or not.