Once again, deep thanks to Tazmy for beta-ing, and thank you to everyone who left your wonderful, thoughtful reviews! Chapter has been revised to reflect some of the comments that pointed out errors or inconsistencies. (See, I do listen!)
Chapter Ten: Brother's Keeper
The Stargate field collapsed; the blue and silver light shattered like ice and flowed away into nothingness, leaving only a view of desolate brown hills drifted with patchy snow. Major Lorne couldn't help staring up at it for a moment. Man, no matter how many times he saw that, he never got tired of it.
But right now he had a potentially hostile zone to secure. He dispatched his men off to the sides of the Stargate, keeping an eye on the two noncombatants whose safety was his job today.
"I can see Sheppard or Rodney doing something this half-arsed, but you and Teyla?" Beckett's tetchy voice carried loudly across the clear air. Lugging a pack full of medical equipment, he appeared to be giving Zelenka a good chewing-out. "You disappoint me, lad! Of all the people on this station that I have to worry about, you two are supposed to be the voices of reason. What in the world happened to that?"
Zelenka heaved a sigh, glancing nervously up at the hills around them. "Rodney happened," he said.
"Ah, now that I can believe. Want to tell me the full story?"
"Major Lorne, sir!" Lorne's attention was drawn away from the two of them. One of his men gestured to the hills at the eleven-o'clock position from the Stargate. Lorne saw immediately what had drawn the corporal's attention. On an ordinary world, he would hardly have noticed it, but this place was so barren and desolate that the wisps of dust or smoke drifting over the hills might as well have been a giant neon sign saying SHEPPARD AND MCKAY WERE HERE. Sure, it could be some sort of atmospheric phenomenon (speaking of which, damn, that sky was weird) but, even no longer than he'd dealt with Sheppard's team, he'd lay money that one of them had pushed some funky button up there.
"Get ready to move out on my order," Lorne called, and to the two civilians he said, "Doctors? Looks like we've got a lead. You two, behind me, and if I say duck, you duck."
Neither one of them looked like they were going to put up much of a fight to that. In fact, if he'd said "duck" at that moment, they would probably have both fled for the Stargate. "Wraith?" Zelenka squeaked.
Lorne heaved a sigh. It was better than babysitting McKay, but just how much better remained to be seen. "Just follow my lead. Let's move out!"
------
Rodney's most pressing problem -- how to get back to the Cletan city and his teammates -- turned out to be the easiest to solve. It only took him a few moments of studying the teleporter's controls to be confident that it was a two-way device. At least in the short term, getting out of here would be as simple as he could have hoped -- all he had to do was set the controls and step into the chamber. Unfortunately, that would bring him out in the middle of a bunch of well-armed Cletans, and he'd be right back where he started. Well ... right back where he started only carrying their leader's dying child, which struck him as a very bad bargaining position.
Before he went anywhere, he needed a plan. He tried not to think about what might be happening to the others right now. Hopefully, Karmath had followed through on his promise and was even now providing them with food and better living quarters. Hopefully they had not yet tried to escape. He figured that his current deadline amounted to: How long would Sheppard put up with being a prisoner before he tried to escape and possibly got them all killed? Not long, Rodney guessed. He had that much time to figure out how things worked around here and to come up with a good rescue strategy.
He went and checked on the kid -- unconscious, still breathing, but clearly on her way out. It was just too little, too late at this point. She needed an I.V. and electrolytes and other stuff Beckett always natterred on about. A few sips of water by mouth were just not going to cut it. So his second deadline was: How long could the kid survive before he had to get her through the Stargate to Atlantis's medical facilities? Once again, he didn't think he'd like the answer.
He felt deeply guilty about not just walking through the transporter with her right now. But at this point, he suspected it was probably too late already. The Cletans would never let him just walk back to the Stargate with her, and he couldn't see how they could help someone who was so sick, considering their low state of technological development. He told himself that he was not being cowardly, just pragmatic. It wouldn't help the kid if he went off half-cocked, took her through the transporter and then got shot while she died under whatever passed for medical care with the Cletans.
He would try to get them both out alive. He really would. But he wasn't about to throw his life away in an attempt to save the kid when it probably wouldn't help her anyway.
He got his computer hooked up to the local system and started downloading data. Like all the Ancients' computers, their filing system was ass-backwards and crammed with useless information that he had to decode to get to the good stuff. It was like trying to figure out the nature and function of an IBM 386 by downloading and deciphering the source code for Pong. Still, he caught on quickly that this was an old facility even by Ancient standards. While Doranda had had all their newest and best equipment, this place was filled with stuff that was outdated by Atlantean standards -- like that transporter, which was really just a prototype for the much better ones used on Atlantis.
As far as he could tell, this planet, and more specifically this facility, had been a test lab for sensor-blocking technology. Hence that weird staticky field in the sky. It wasn't harmful; it just didn't quite do what they wanted it to do. It interfered with all signals rather than just blocking transmissions from outside. Skimming record logs and what appeared to be personnel files, he got the impression that the facility had been occupied off and on for a few decades and then abandoned. The area under the present-day Cletan town had been their main living and working area, while this small lab up here was the control center for the facility, separated from the main living space both to prevent problems -- here he thought again of Doranda -- and to allow them to test various sensor arrays over distance, to gauge the shield's effects.
Apparently the shield used to be much stronger than it was now. It didn't draw a whole lot of power, but over ten thousand years, it had managed to almost completely run down their ZPM -- and, yes, they did have a ZPM here, but like most of the other ones in this galaxy, it would be utterly useless to Atlantis even if he could manage to find it. If these readings were accurate, it'd barely run the Atlantis shield for a few seconds.
He also learned that Ancients had tested more than just the sensor-blockers here. This place had been a general tech laboratory where they worked on prototype versions of a lot of the technology that was now being used in Atlantis -- those hanging displays in the gate room, personal shields (ooh, bad memories there), some systems he recognized as puddlejumper technology.
Rodney left the data downloading to his laptop -- connections weren't as fast here as in Atlantis, either -- and wandered through the rooms, poking at stuff, well aware that both of his deadlines were still ticking away. Something here had to be useful to help him get the others out of the Cletans' hands. This planet was an archaeologist's treasure trove. In much the same way as the operation of a Model T Ford engine could be fathomed more easily than that of a 2005 Ford Mustang, they could probably understand a lot of the technology in Atlantis much better by getting a look at the early development stages. He found a couple of the prototype personal shields, and (a bit reluctantly) tried to turn them on, but either they wouldn't respond to his artificial gene, or the Ancients hadn't gotten them working yet. If he could only find a weapon or --
Hold the phone! What was this? On a shelf of unfamiliar objects, he picked up one that looked very familiar indeed. He'd read most of the SGC mission reports in detail, and he remembered seeing pictures of something very much like this. What had it been?
Oh yes. A Tok'ra healing device.
McKay fitted it over his hand, grinning, and laughed aloud when it lit up and he felt it respond to his ATA gene, attuning itself to his body as the personal shield had done. Where the modern version could only be used by Goa'uld hosts, this one, naturally, responded to Ancient genes instead. Despite slight differences of design, he was pretty sure it must be the prototype for the eventual Ancient technology that the Goa'uld had appropriated in creating their own.
He could heal the kid!
Suddenly a plan began to come together. Coming back with Karmath's dead or dying daughter was a sure-fire recipe for getting a hole blown in his own head. On the other hand, coming back with Karmath's alive-and-well daughter ... that was a different story altogether. They just might get out of this.
More excited than he'd been since first stepping through the transporter, he ran into the other room. The child was still huddled under his jacket, very still, and for a heart-stopping moment he thought he was too late, but as he pulled away the jacket he saw her thin chest shudder as she drew a shaky breath.
"You are one lucky little girl," he told her, scooping up the tiny body, not even noticing that he didn't have the slightest hint of revulsion as his hands contacted the small, shivering form. Gently he laid her out on his lap and placed his hand over her chest. How did these things work? The SGC reports had been sketchy ... but he reminded himself to stop thinking of it as a Goa'uld device. It wasn't the same -- it was Ancient technology, and he was the resident expert on all forms of Ancient technology. They always had a mental component.
Heal, he thought, concentrating. For a moment he felt as if a giant hand had reached down into his chest and squeezed; he leaned forward, gasping for air. The sensation wasn't necessarily bad, but it was very startling and like nothing he'd ever experienced.
And heal she did.
Her dry, flaky skin softened and smoothed as he watched. The shadows under her eyes vanished. Her limp, tangled hair became glossy and rich; her cracked lips plumped out; the painful thinness began to recede from her sticklike limbs and they more resembled the thin arms and legs of a normal, twiggy child.
"Hey ... kid?" He started to poke at her, but then her eyes snapped open -- huge, brilliant blue eyes. She gave a small cry and sprang for him, seizing upon him as her rescuer or maybe just the only halfway familiar thing in that empty place of death, wrapping her arms and legs around him like a jumping spider going after its prey. Rodney recoiled, and found that his arms had gone shaky and wouldn't catch him. He fell flat on his back, the child pressed against him.
What was wrong with him? His head buzzed and the world swam around him. He swallowed, swallowed again, trying to work up some saliva in a mouth gone dust-dry.
Maybe she did have the plague -- and now he had it!
No ... he didn't really feel sick, just very weak and dizzy. Rodney sat up, impatiently pushing the child off him; he didn't want to be clung to at the best of times, let alone when he wasn't feeling well. He reached for his canteen -- paused when he remembered that he'd been letting a potentially plague-ridden ch ild drink from it, but thirst was strong enough to overcome revulsion, and he drank half the remaining water in one gulp. Then he dug in his vest for a power bar, ate a few bites, began to feel a little better.
He just felt ... drained. As if something had sucked all the energy out of his body.
His eyes went down to the device on his hand.
Hello! He could have smacked himself in the head for being such a dunce. That was where the power to run the thing came from -- the operator!
He stared at the device, his mind spinning as he worked out its function. Nothing about this side effect had been mentioned in the records on the Goa'uld and Tok'ra devices, so presumably this, like everything else in the lab, was an early version that would later be improved upon. If it truly did draw power from its operator -- and from the way he was feeling now, he assumed that it did -- then it stood to reason that the power consumption must be proportional to the severity of the injuries being healed; most Ancient devices worked in a similar fashion, such as the shields that drew variable levels of power depending on need. He was just lucky that all that had been wrong with the kid was a few days of neglect; if she'd been badly hurt, he could easily have killed himself before he even figured out what was happening.
What an incredibly stupid thing to do ... stupid of the Ancients to build such a thing, and doubly stupid of him to use it without fully understanding how it worked. Shuddering, he stripped it off and stuffed it into a pocket of his vest. No way he was putting that on again! The lab monkeys back on Atlantis could mess with it, figure out if they could reverse-engineer anything useful out of it.
He looked around for the kid, intended to yell at her for luring him into risking his own life to heal her. The words died when he saw her sitting on her knees a few feet away, staring at the half-eaten power bar as if she hadn't seen food in months. Which was quite possibly how she felt at the moment.
"Here." He tossed it to her, got himself out another one. She ate it so quickly she nearly choked and then looked back at him with wide, beseeching eyes. He gave her half of the other one, too, and then he sat against the wall and ate the remainder more slowly, feeling a little less woozy.
"What's your name, kid?"
She stared back at him with those enormous eyes, and just when he'd finally decided that she was an idiot or brain-damaged or too young to talk, she said, "Amma."
"Amma. Nice name. Er, I have a sister named Jeannie." He hated making conversation with kids, mostly because he was terrible at it. They never had the slightest interest in quantum physics or differential calculus, and beyond that, his conversation skills were limited -- with children or adults.
Heaving a sigh, he got to his feet and went back to his cursory inventory of the lab contents. What he really needed was some kind of weapon, but he couldn't find anything that he recognized as one, at least not anything that worked.
The child padded around after him, watching him with wide eyes. At least she had the sense not to try to talk to him while he was working. Actually, as kids went, she wasn't really that annoying. He wouldn't mind kids so much if they'd shut up and leave him alone most of the time.
"What's your name?"
Drat, spoke too soon.
Rodney turned to give her an exasperated look. "I'm Rodney. Now be quiet please, so I can find a way to rescue my teammates, hmm?"
"Where's my daddy and mommy?"
"Not here, obviously." Rodney waved his hand at the room around them, and went back to the shelf he was checking. Damn it, there could be a million useful things here, but if he couldn't recognize their functions, he couldn't use them! Overcome with a fit of frustration, he swept his hand across the shelf, knocking priceless artifacts onto the floor. Some of them shattered. He put his hand over his eyes. Wasting time, wasting time safe in an Ancient lab when his teammates were ... where?
A small hand tugged at his leg. Rodney fought back a very tempting urge to smack her off him. Instead, he removed his hand from his face and looked down at the wide blue eyes staring up at him.
"I want to go home, please," the child said in a very tiny voice.
"Hell," said Rodney, "me too. ... Oh, goddammit, I just said hell to a four-year-old. Also goddammit, damn it. Crap!"
He sighed.
"You want to go home, kid?" he asked.
The child stuck her thumb in her mouth. "Yes," she said around it.
"Me too. Let's go home."
He gave her another half a powerbar and finished his lab sweep, with the child clinging by one sticky fist to his leg, to his annoyance. At least she stayed quiet while hanging onto him. He'd put up with the weight on his leg in return for the silence.
Nothing else in the lab promised to be immediately useful to him. He wished he had about six months to study the place in peace; alas, duty called, and it looked as if he would be going up against a city full of angry Cletans armed with nothing more than his brains. Luckily, they were his most effective weapon.
While the kid sat nearby and watched with a finger in her mouth, Rodney dropped under one of the control consoles and pulled one of its micro power supplies -- they were used for maintaining local settings in the event of a power failure, like the batteries on a laptop, only stronger. He also pulled two control crystals and in about thirty seconds had himself a --
"--Taser," he said to the kid, waving it proudly in front of her. "Clever, huh?"
"Tather," the child repeated dutifully, and tried to grab it.
Cripes, he was showing off to a four-year-old. Maybe he did need to work on that ego problem a tad.
All right. Got weapon, sort of. Got kid. Got element of surprise. Not got a whole lot else. He went back to the console and whistled when he got a look at the power levels. They were dropping fast. This world's ZPM must be on its proverbial last leg. His trip through the teleporter, combined with his ATA gene turning on everything in the facility that could be powered up, had come pretty close to kicking that last leg right out from under it. He tried to shut down the prototype sensor shield, only to find that he couldn't. The facility was programmed to consider the shield a primary system, right up there with life support. Sure, he could have rewritten the program if he'd had time, but he was starting to feel a lot of urgency about getting back through the teleporter -- not just because of what might be happening to the rest of the team, but because if he waited too long, there might not be enough power to teleport back.
"Hey. Kid. Er, Amma. C'mere."
The child hesitated, but when he held out his hand, she trotted over to him, trusting as a puppy, and clamped onto his leg. Rodney shut down all the systems that he could, and set the controls on a time delay. Casting a last regretful glance around the room, he stepped into the teleporter.
"Shut your eyes." He put a hand on her head in what he hoped was a comforting manner. The last thing he needed was the rugrat panicking and getting herself cut in half trying to escape the teleportation field.
Light flashed. Rodney blinked, wiped his eyes, and went into a defensive crouch, as best he could with the child still attached to him. Glancing quickly around the room, he found that it was empty.
First piece of good luck he'd had all day.
"Mommy?" the child piped hopefully.
"Do you see Mommy anywhere? Hanging from the ceiling maybe?"
Rodney tried to pry her off his leg. He managed to detach her from that appendage, only to have her clamp onto his hand instead. Good grief, it was like having a little blue-eyed squid wrap its tentacles around him.
Taser in one hand, child clinging to the other, he made his way to the door and peered out into the hallway. Deserted. He quickly went to this room's control consoles, and was pleased to find that most of the dark crystals came alight when he ran his hand over them. The lights flickered as he did so, and he reminded himself that his power supplies were extremely limited. Well, all he really needed to do was find some sort of map. That shouldn't be too difficult.
It wasn't. The wall in front of him lit up with a three-dimensional display of the whole complex. Damn, the place was huge! He noticed in passing that the amphitheater on the surface, which contained the town, had not been there when the map was made 10,000 years ago. There had been a hill where now there was a gigantic hole, and the facility had had external towers. He didn't need a history book to tell him where that big hole had come from -- he sensed the greedy blue fingers of the Wraith. Or, possibly, the Ancients had actually destroyed the part of the facility on the surface to keep it from falling into Wraith hands.
... none of which mattered right now; the important thing was to find everybody else. He soon got a life-signs display and found that most of the life signs in the place were a few tunnels over from his current position, grouped in a corridor. Odd. But convenient.
The lights flickered again, ominously. Rodney quickly powered down the console and darted out into the hall, towing the kid with him and hoping against hope that the lights stayed on long enough for them all to get out. He didn't relish finding his way through the dark, especially when the place would be crawling with well-armed and possibly very angry Cletans.
Gunfire. He jumped. It was impossible to tell which way it was coming from, with the way the tunnels twisted around, but he put that together with the cluster of life signs and his heart sank. Apparently he hadn't been quick enough to thwart an attempted Sheppard jailbreak. Now if he could only be in time to keep somebody from getting hurt.
He came around the end of a long corridor and found himself in a war zone.
The air smelled like gunpowder and blood; the hallway swarmed with people, screaming and milling around, some waving guns around and some unarmed. He saw a man lying on the ground with hands clutched to his bloody abdomen -- wearing Cletan clothing, he registered with a detached sense of relief -- while a dark-haired woman crouched over him. Down at the far end of the hall, he could see a knot of people in frantic motion, but he couldn't tell what was going on.
Damn it. Damn it.
At least all he saw were wounded Cletans, not wounded Atlanteans. And actually, there only seemed to be a few wounded people -- along with a lot of panic. Down at the end of the hall, he heard the distinctive rattatat of a P-90, followed by a single blast from one of the Cletans' weapons. The noise nearly blew his eardrums out, reverberating off the walls. No wonder everyone was panicking. If you wanted a lousy place for a firefight, you couldn't really pick anything worse than a tunnel underground. The richochets alone could be deadly, let alone the possibility of cave-ins.
Just as he was wondering how in the world he was going to find the kid's parents in this mess, let alone get to his team without being shot, the child suddenly yanked on his hand with a loud cry of, "Mommy!"
The dark-haired woman jerked as if she herself had been shot, and slowly she straightened up, turned around. McKay tried to remember if she'd been one of the ones holding a gun on him. He didn't think so. At the moment, she was unarmed and up to her elbows in blood, with a roll of bandages in one hand. His brain put two and two together and came up with doctor.
His original plan had been to use the child as a hostage of sorts, insisting on seeing his team before he let her go. But when Amma yanked her hand free of his, he simply let her go, watched her make a beeline for the dark-haired woman's arms. The woman swept her up into a crushing embrace. Surrounded by panic, madness and blood, the two of them made up their own little world, entirely lost, for the moment, in each other.
Rodney approached slowly, amazed and happy and, strangely, stinging from a very deep, very old wound. He could not ever remember either of his parents hugging him like that.
Seeing him over the child's head, the woman seemed to come back from someplace deep inside herself. She swung around to him, with her daughter hanging from her neck. "I don't know who you are, and I don't know how you have accomplished this miracle, but --" She broke off, looked him up and down. "You are dressed like the other strangers. Are you one of them?"
"Yeah," Rodney said.
"I am Sasha."
"Rodney," he said, and then, stupidly, "We'd all like to go now, if you don't mind."
She looked him up and down, seeming to measure him to a standard he could not quite meet. If this was how she looked at a person who brought her child back from the dead, he hated to think how she would have reacted if he'd just showed up without the kid.
"Your people have hurt and killed some of my friends today, Rodney."
"Your people tried to kill my friends," he retorted. "Look, at this point I just want to get out of here. That's all any of us want, all we ever wanted. You think you can stop them from shooting my teammates up there?"
Sasha looked around, then she freed one arm from the child and reached out to grab a rifle from a man running past her. Controlling it with one arm, she fired it into the ceiling. Rodney jumped. Dust and rock chips showered down all around them. There was a sudden silence.
"Karmath!" Sasha bellowed into the stillness. "I'm coming up there. The first person who fires a gun is going to explain it to me!"
And with that, she began walking towards the front lines of this impromptu war. All around her, everyone had gone still and silent. Rodney followed, feeling as if he was trailing in the wake of a battleship. He also felt very exposed and out of control.
Karmath came charging through the cluster of people at the front of the hall, pushing them aside. He looked exhausted and furious. Blood dripped from one of his arms. "Damn it, Sasha, they're holed up and they just took out another of my men and what the hell do you -- oh."
He had seen the kid.
Slowly he looked from the child in Sasha's arms, past her shoulder to Rodney. The look on his face was terrifying -- shock and joy mingled with a fury, fear and hatred so deep that Rodney actually flinched backwards from it.
"Karmath," Sasha said, "this man brought Amma back to us."
Karmath took a slow step backwards. "This man is dead, Sasha. Amma is dead. That's not --"
"You're an idiot," Rodney said.
The Cletan leader raised his eyes to Rodney's face. The whites showed all around them. He raised his rifle. "What did you call me?"
"You heard me. Idiot." For an instant, Rodney remembered standing at the business end of Kolya's gun with Elizabeth at his back, desperately trying to bullshit the Genii commander before they both died. He felt a little bit the same way now -- high on adrenaline, his faster-than-usual brain so highly charged with terror that he felt as if he could think circles around a goddamn supercomputer. And he was mad, too. "That thing you call an incinerator? It took me to another place on this world, that's all. The place where you guys send people to die. Only it isn't the so-called incinerator that kills them. They die of starvation because they can't get back."
"You got back," Karmath snarled, the muzzle of the rifle trembling. All around them, men and women with guns, some of them wounded, were watching the showdown in silence. Rodney had never been less thrilled to be the center of attention.
"Yeah -- because I know how the equipment works!" No time to try to explain about the ATA gene to someone who probably didn't even know about chromosomes. "Lucky for you it'd only been a few days since you sent the kid through, otherwise she'd be like all those other poor saps up there. Do you know what death from exposure looks like, Karmath? It's ugly." Rodney noticed his voice was shaking, not just with fear but with anger, and he realized that a lot of that anger was on behalf of all those people who'd been sent to their deaths because the superstitious idiots down here hadn't understood enough to know how the technology worked.
"You lie!" Karmath held the rifle square on Rodney's chest. "If not the people, then where does the power --"
"--to run this place come from? It's a generator, um, a battery --" He could see that none of them understood what he was talking about. "It's like the sun, all right? Do you get that? Only man-made and much smaller -- uh, and not as bright, or as hot, and -- damn it! Look at the technology around you!" He waved his hands at the lights -- currently flickering -- and the walls. "Do you really think that someone who could build all this couldn't come up with a better way to power it than by feeding people into a freaking garbage burner? Are you honest-to-God so far gone that you believe the Ancients -- er, the Ancestors you worship would build a promised land that runs on human suffering? Are you people really that stupid?"
He dared to take his eyes off Karmath and look around, at the hollow desperation in the eyes of the people looking back at him. They wanted to believe, he thought, because it gave them the illusion that they were doing something to help themselves, rather than waiting in the dark for their world to die around them.
"Look," Rodney said. "All we want to do is leave. We don't want anything from you. All we want is just to ... go. We won't take anything from you and, frankly, I don't give a damn if you go on stuffing people into that machine from now until the sun goes nova. Just let us walk out of here."
"He is right," came a clear voice from behind the assembled Cletans. Rodney raised his head, eyes wide, to see Teyla standing in the hallway. She was unarmed and covered from head to foot with half-dried blood, but as far as he could tell from her stance, she wasn't actually hurt herself, so it must be Cletan blood. What had she done, torn them apart with her bare hands? He wished he'd gotten here earlier, been able to spare her whatever she'd had to go through to get free.
"We mean you no harm," Teyla said, looking from one to another of the Cletans while holding her hands in the air, palms out. "If you let us leave, we'll go and we won't come back to bother you."
"Outside," one of the Cletans spoke up suddenly. "On the hill. You people fired first. We weren't shooting at you."
"That would be me." Ronon's low rumble carried to Rodney, although he couldn't see the man from here. "I'd do it again."
"What he means," Teyla interjected smoothly, "is that he found himself surrounded by strangers with guns and, understandably, felt himself under attack. We have been fighting the Wraith for many years, and we have been to many worlds where enemies tried to kill us. We have become, sadly, very suspicious of those whose intentions we do not know. I can assure you that we have no desire to be enemies with your people, and I can also assure you that if you allow us to leave, we will make sure you are not bothered, and even offer trading and assistance if you wish. If we continue to be held here, however, our people will send others to find us, and we have many more weapons like the ones you took from us. Many will die."
When she stopped talking, a waiting silence filled the corridor. Rodney leaned over to Sasha, who as far as he could tell was the closest thing they had to a sympathetic ear in the whole sorry group. "Just let us walk out of here," he said quietly. "It doesn't have to be hard."
Sasha looked at Karmath. And Karmath moved the rifle in a sharp, imperative gesture. The people along the corridor withdrew, opening a clear path from Rodney to Teyla.
Rodney McKay, hostage negotiator. Elizabeth would be so proud, he thought.
He began walking, feeling his heart starting to approach a normal rhythm. As he walked by Sasha, she reached out and gave his arm a quick squeeze. That was all. He kept walking, and when he reached Teyla, turned around and looked back at the group of Cletans. The weapons were mostly lowered, but he had the sense that at one wrong move, all those rifles, shotguns and decrepit energy weapons could be bristling in their direction once again.
"Get out," Karmath said. "Yes, you are free to go back to the surface. We will not bother or hinder you. Get out, and don't come back."
"Ronon!" Teyla called into the open doorway beside her. The runner ducked under the doorframe and Rodney saw that he was carrying one of the P-90s and had been covering her. No doubt anyone who moved to hurt her would have been mowed down in a hail of bullets. He must be getting used to Ronon, because the fact that the man had been firing an assault rifle with a broken arm hardly even startled him.
Rodney's eyes went past Ronon, into the darkness of the room, and then turned to Teyla questioningly. "Where's Shep--"
"We will talk of this in a moment," she said firmly. He looked at her; she would not meet his eyes. "First let us get away from them."
"I want my gun back," Ronon growled, turning to glower at the crowd.
After a brief hesitation, Karmath nodded and the gun was produced from the depths of the crowd and kicked down the hallway. The runner scooped it up with a look of evident relief and relinquished the P-90 to Teyla.
"We're keeping the other ones," Karmath said in a challenging tone.
"Go for it," Rodney said. Fat lot of good the P-90 and the handguns would do them once they ran out of ammo.
As he turned away, Rodney saw Karmath lower his gun and raise one hand to softly and carefully touch the child's hair.
Turning his back on all those armed people and walking away was one of the hardest things Rodney could ever remember doing in his life. He kept expecting to feel the impact of a bullet between his shoulder blades. But no one shot at them, and they turned a corner and the Cletans were gone. Rodney drew a long, deep, shaky breath, and turned to grin at Teyla.
"Rodney," she said, her tone filled with a warmth that truly surprised him -- almost as much as it surprised him when she gripped his shoulders and touched her forehead to his. "We did not think we would see you again."
Rodney laughed in spite of himself. "You people need to have a little faith in me. You really think Rodney McKay would let himself get crispified by a cult on another world? Have some respect for the man with the brain!"
He couldn't help it; he was goofy with relief. Her next words sucked all the joy out of his world, though, along with most of the air.
"The Colonel did not believe that you were dead," Teyla said. "He believed in you all along."
It was the little things -- the past tense, along with the fact that Sheppard wasn't with them, and that blood, all that damn blood...
"Where is he?" Rodney demanded.
"We are going the way that ..." Teyla trailed off, and started over. "He is here. The way we are walking. We will see him before we ... leave. I do not know if he will see us."
"He's not dead," Rodney said. Flat denial. Sheppard, he of the infinite optimism, would have approved. "Not dead, right?"
Teyla seemed to choose her words one by one. "He was ... still breathing, when we left, but --"
"You left him?"
"No choice," Ronon spoke up, cutting across McKay as he started to launch into a tirade -- because talking was better than thinking right now. "He was dying," the runner went on, flatly, without mercy. Someone who didn't know him would have thought he didn't care. They might not have noticed the way his knuckles had gone white on the handle of his gun, the shutters that had slammed down behind his eyes. "See her?" He gestured, with the gun, at Teyla's blood-drenched uniform. "He saved her life. Pretty nearly cut in half. Dying. No way to take him with us, not having to fight our way out. We'd all have gone down, and he wouldn't have wanted that."
It was a long speech for the runner. Rodney didn't care. He backed away from them, shocked and disbelieving and horrified. "You left him. I don't believe it. You don't get it. I can --"
He trailed off. And then he said in a voice not quite his own, "Where is he?"
Teyla pointed, ahead of them. A half-open door in the corridor. "There."
Rodney turned and ran. Ran like a thousand Wraith were at his heels. He skidded to a stop at the entrance to the room, half-expecting it to be dark inside like all the others, but this one was brightly lit.
It would have been easier, had it been dark.
He remembered learning in biology class that the human body contains about five liters of blood -- slightly over a gallon by the American system. He recalled thinking that it didn't sound like a whole lot. And if five liters was the total, then the amount on, under and around Sheppard couldn't possibly be nearly that much.
It looked like a hell of a lot more.
He didn't remember crossing the room, didn't remember getting out the healing device either, but it was cold against his palm and he was kneeling in a pool of Sheppard's blood, blood on his feet and knees and on his hands as he pulled away Teyla's sodden jacket to see the damage. He thought he'd have to open Sheppard's shirt but he didn't need to -- it had been shredded by the bullets, and what was underneath ... Rodney wasn't a soldier, wasn't combat trained, and in spite of all the things he'd seen since coming to the Pegasus Galaxy, he felt a yawning gulf of blackness open up under him at the sight of his friend's chest looking like hamburger. He swallowed, tried desperately to distance himself. It's not Sheppard. It's just ... some guy ... yeah, you can handle this. You can do it.
Sheppard couldn't possibly be alive, not looking like that. It wasn't possible. But ... this was Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard, too damn stupid to know when to quit. Had his chest moved a little? Rodney left bloody fingerprints on the white skin of Sheppard's neck, feeling for a pulse. Nothing. His brain rattled off statistics from the various first aid courses he'd been forced to take since coming to Atlantis, on blood loss and shock and blood volume -- if he'd lost so much blood, then his pulse could be faint, too weak to detect. He dug his fingers in harder. Yeah, there was something, a light fluttering against his fingertips.
Sheppard's lips moved; he made a slight choking sound, deep in his throat -- trying to draw air into lungs filling up with blood. How could someone still breathe, when their chest looked like that?
If Sheppard was the one with the massive chest injury, why was he the one who couldn't breathe?
"Too dumb to quit." He didn't realize he'd said it aloud until Sheppard's eyelids fluttered, opened a little. "And too dumb to know when to pass out, either," Rodney added, wondering whether Sheppard could hear him.
He could. The glazed, hazel eyes widened a little, and one side of his mouth lifted in a weak, lopsided, bloody grin. "You are one sneaky S.O.B., Rodney," he whispered. "Either that or I'm dead, but I was hoping for a prettier angel."
"You're not dead, now shut up."
"Not dead yet, huh?"
The effort of speaking caused more blood to trickle from his mouth, his nose. It was all Rodney could do not to turn away, but not because of revulsion, not this time.
"I said shut up," Rodney snapped, more harshly than he'd meant it. "You're not dead and you're not dying, Sheppard."
One of the Colonel's eyebrows twitched; it was all the movement he could manage. "I've seen fatal wounds before, Rodney," he whispered, "and you've always been a lousy liar."
"You're not going to die because I can fix this." Rodney held up his hand, trying to still its shaking. The healing device nestled in his palm. "I found this in one of the labs here. It's for healing, obviously," he added impatiently, seeing Sheppard's confusion. "I can heal you."
Sheppard stared at it, his glassy eyes slowly focusing. His gaze went from the device, to Rodney's face, and a slight frown furrowed his brows. He did not seem to like what he saw there. His mouth opened, closed, as if he wanted to say something and couldn't find the words, or perhaps he had just lost the strength to speak.
"Hang on," Rodney said. "Wait for me. Something I gotta do first."
Rodney uncoiled from his crouch, shot to his feet. Teyla had come up behind him and was standing in the middle of the room with a helplessness entirely unlike her. Rodney grabbed her arm, drew her aside. "Do you and Sheppard still have your GDOs?" he asked her in a tense whisper, fumbling in his vest pockets.
Teyla shook her head. "We were searched when we were captured. What are you--"
He shook his head, silencing her, and pressed a handful of objects into her hands, leaving streaks of blood on her skin. He had to be quick; there was so little time; but he had to be sure that he remembered everything, didn't leave the rest of them twisting in some trap that he hadn't anticipated. It was hard to anticipate all possible contingencies after your own death. On the other hand, what was the point of being a genius if you couldn't do that? And it kept him from dwelling too much on what he was about to do, on the consequences of using the device to heal a wound that severe.
Teyla looked down in surprise. She saw various tools, some of which she did not know how to use, and Rodney's gate GDO. While she stared at the handful of technology with a rising sense of foreboding, Rodney was digging through his pockets and cursing softly. He came up with a pad of paper and a pen, and began hastily writing. "You know the Atlantis and alpha site gate addresses, right?" he whispered.
"Yes, of course, but--"
"If you lose the GDO, don't forget you can't go back to Atlantis because of the shield. You'll have to go to the alpha site or one of the other safe addresses." As he spoke, he tore off the sheet of paper, folded it, scribbled a single word on the back and started writing on the next one.
"I know that; it's basic gate protocol. Rodney, what are--" Teyla broke off and searched his face with worried eyes. "Aren't you coming back with us, Rodney?" she asked quietly.
McKay's lips pressed together. "I doubt it," was all he said, and he pressed two folded sheets of paper into her hand. One said ELIZABETH. The other said JEANNIE.
Teyla saw, in those little notes and in his fear-filled blue eyes, all that he would not tell her. She glanced at the device curled in his hand. "Then I will use that instead of you," she said immediately. "We need you too much, Doctor. What if something goes wrong with the DHD? I cannot fix it."
Rodney shook his head with a stab of regret. So easy, to hand the burden to someone else. Alas, not to be. "It needs the ATA gene, and even if it didn't, it's attuned to me. I'm the only one who can do this. Any of the rest of you can dial the DHD. Besides, if you don't come home Atlantis will send a team through. They may already be looking for us."
Teyla stared into his face. She saw resolve, determination ... and fear. She had seen that look on his face before -- just before he saved their lives by walking into the energy creature's black field back on Atlantis, many months ago. "How likely do you think it is that this will kill you?" she asked, her voice barely audible.
He cast a sideward glance at Sheppard, at the bloody mess where the Colonel's chest used to be, and lowered his voice until it was as soft as hers. "Pretty damn likely."
"One life for another is not a fair trade." But that was the trade Sheppard had already made, in front of a P-90: his life for hers. She did not want to think about that.
"It's my decision. I've got a lot to make up for," he told her, knowing even as he said it that it was only an excuse, that guilt had nothing to do with it, but maybe it was a reason she could accept. From the moment he got a look at Sheppard, there was never any doubt about what his decision had to be. The fact that he couldn't stand by and watch a friend die, especially not this friend, even if it meant his own life ... it wasn't something that he could even really understand about himself, let alone explain to someone else.
"Teyla, please, let me do this before I lose my nerve. Promise me you won't try to stop me, and you won't let Ronon, either. Promise me, Teyla."
His eyes nearly broke her heart -- so frightened, yet so determined. He truly did not expect to survive. "I promise," she whispered, her heart in her throat, nearly choking her.
He smiled at her ... a small, vulnerable smile. "Thanks," he said softly, and turned away from her.
Teyla felt Ronon's presence behind her. "What is he planning?" the runner demanded in a low rumble.
"He is planning to save the Colonel's life, of course," Teyla said. She wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. In a terrible way, her plan seemed to have worked ... but, oh, such a terrible way.
Rodney knelt down beside Sheppard and laid his hand, with the device curled in it, lightly on his chest. "I don't know if this'll hurt you," he said, his voice cracking slightly with nervousness. "I've used it once before and I don't think it causes any pain, but--"
"Rodney." The voice was only a faint thread of sound.
He looked down at Sheppard, reluctant to meet his eyes.
"You sure you know what you're doing?" Sheppard whispered, with a faint, bloody shadow of his usual crooked grin. "This thing ... not gonna fry me, is it?"
Rodney's first reaction was a quick flush of anger. Here he was prepared to throw his life away for the man, and Sheppard had to go and make a point that he still didn't trust him? But ... it was a joke, he realized. A bad joke, a typical John Sheppard "laugh in the face of danger" kind of joke. The sort of joke that Sheppard would have made before Doranda. In the face of that small crack in the wall that had grown up between them, he could think of only one thing to say. Maybe it was entirely the wrong thing, and he didn't know how Sheppard might react -- but there were so many things to be said, and no time to say them, and in the end it came down to two simple words.
"Trust me," he said, his whole heart in those two syllables.
And Sheppard's bloody lips curved, the grin growing wider, stronger. "I do," he said quietly, the last word turning into a rattling cough. His eyes closed.
Rodney just stared at him, until the realization that it had been a very long time since the Colonel's last breath shocked him into moving. Just as he started to lean down to check for a pulse, Sheppard's body jerked slightly and he drew another shaky, uncertain gasp of air.
"Stubborn jerk, it'd be just like you to drop dead now," Rodney murmured, focusing all his attention on the device. "Hogging all the glory for yourself, as usual. Lieutenant Colonel John Q. Whatever-the-fuck-your-middle-name-is Sheppard, kamikaze pilot. Well, it's my turn now, asshole."
His fingers curled around the device as he felt it begin to warm in his hand.
"So long, Sheppard."
Heal.
------
tbc
McKay's last words are a Seige reference, of course. Snarky to the last, isn't he?