Okay, I know I set a new world record for "slow" on this chapter, but there's been a lot going on. Only one more chapter to go, and then we're done!

I also wanted to thank everyone for the absolutely fantastic response to my one-shot "Old Soldiers". I'm blown away, humbled and grateful for all the feedback.

"Got any ... threes?"

"Go fish." After a moment, Rodney said, "You know, I seem to recall that one of the conditions of giving these cards to you was that you would never try to make me play card games. Got any sixes?"

"Go fish. Yeah, I vaguely remember that. Sevens?"

"Damn." Rodney handed over two cards, then folded down his cards in his lap so that he could pick up the half-eaten cup of oatmeal by his thigh. Through a mouthful, he demanded, "How is it possible that you always win this game?"

"Yeah right, as if I'm giving away all my secrets." If Rodney didn't already know that he unconsciously mouthed the numbers on the cards in his hand, Sheppard wasn't about to tell him. A normal person would simply have a lousy poker face; Rodney, of course, had to do them one better, even if he didn't mean to. "And I don't always win. You've won, um ... one game, so far, I think."

"Yeah, and you've won what, twelve? I want to play something else. By the way..." Rodney's sharp eyes fixed on Sheppard. "... what's the matter with you? Bugs in your pants? If you've acquired fleas on one of the hell-hole planets we've been to, Colonel ..."

Sheppard froze in mid-twist. He'd been shifting about, trying to find a comfortable position, but hadn't realized it had been so obvious. "Huh?" he said intelligently.

"Mensa material, indeed," Rodney scoffed, setting down the empty cup and sorting his cards, studiously not looking at Sheppard. "It's your leg, isn't it? Where that wolf thing got you? Good God, what if you have space rabies?"

"There's no such thing as space rabies, McKay. My leg is only scratched, and I've been taking antibiotics. It's fine." Aside from feeling as if it was on fire every time he moved. When he didn't move, it felt more like -- as Rodney had said -- bugs were crawling under the skin. Through the hand resting lightly atop his thigh, he could feel the heat radiating from the blood-stiff bandages under the coveralls. The antibiotics didn't seem to be doing a whole hell of a lot. Or maybe it'd be worse without them; no way to know for sure.

Rodney's mouth opened and it was obvious that he didn't intend to let this go, but just then Caldwell woke up with a snort, started to roll over, and recovered himself with a sharp gasp on the verge of falling off the puddlejumper's bench seat. He sat up, looking bleary and oddly vulnerable. Glad for the interruption, Sheppard said without thinking, "Good morning, sleeping beauty." Then he winced, reminding himself that he was, after all, talking to a superior officer and not a member of his team.

Caldwell didn't answer; he looked at his watch, took another look, and then squinted up at the daylight filtering wanly through the snow on the jumper's windshield. "Why didn't you wake me?"

"Why should I?" Sheppard countered. "It was dark until a couple hours ago, and we could all use some rest. We've got one hell of a walk ahead of us unless Rodney can fix the jumper." He playfully snapped a card in Rodney's direction; the scientist ducked and glowered. "Speaking of which ..."

"Hmph. 'Oh dear, I crashed the jumper, now the scientists will fix it.' It never fails." Rodney straightened a little bit to see into the cockpit. "From here, Colonel -- Colonels," he amended with a quick glance at Caldwell, "it looks like the in-depth diagnostic is still running. I'll take a look, though; I'm as eager to get off this snowball as you are."

He started to get to his feet, the sleeping bag still wrapped around his shoulders, then froze, hunching forward. He was now wearing coveralls that obscured his bruises, but the body language spoke volumes. "Oh God. I don't think I've been this sore since the first time you and Ronon took me jogging. Do we still have morphine, or did you two use it all?"

Sheppard looked up at him from the floor. "You don't need morphine for bruises, McKay."

"Yes I do," Rodney whined piteously. "Where's the first-aid kit?"

The really sad thing was that the pitiful expression on his face was actually working, on Sheppard at least; it was just too easy to remember the Rodney of a few hours ago, pale and cold and limp, mere inches from death. It made it unusually difficult to refuse him anything -- which was a fairly big problem, considering that Rodney was not a model of self-restraint and giving in to him just once, on anything, could be dangerous. Luckily Caldwell had no such weakness.

"Touch the morphine and I'll shoot you, McKay," Caldwell said, swinging his legs down over the edge of the jumper's seat. "Do you happen to have anything vaguely resembling breakfast food in that box of yours, Sheppard?"

"Oatmeal," Sheppard said, holding up his own cup. He'd only downed a few bites, and knew that his lack of appetite was probably another warning sign.

Caldwell eyed the gluey mass in the bottom of the cup. "Huh. Think I'll stick with MREs."

Rodney, meanwhile, limped into the cockpit, grumbling all the while about jocks and people with overdeveloped pain thresholds. "Suck it up, McKay. Don't worry about it, McKay. It's only a gaping flesh wound and twelve broken ribs, McKay. Carson would have given me morphine."

Sheppard turned his attention away from Caldwell and twisted around to follow Rodney's progress, trying not to jar his leg. "I heard that the last time he did that, you hallucinated a troupe of Russian clog dancers in the infirmary and kept insisting that the nurses look up the exchange rate for rubles. And you insulted my hair behind my back and called Ronon a caveman."

"Carson told you that? What in the world happened to doctor-patient confidentiality? He won't have hot water in his quarters for a week when I get back to Atlantis, I'm telling you right now ... Oh, look, the diagnostic is done, and oh, look, we're totally screwed. What a shock."

"Can you fix it?" Caldwell wanted to know.

"'We're totally screwed' would tend to imply otherwise, wouldn't you say?" Rodney poked at the controls with sharp, angry jabs. "One drive pod's completely gone, the other one might be fixable if I had a week and a full mechanic's bay, which obviously I don't..."

Sheppard folded together his cards and laid them down. "It doesn't even have to be spaceworthy, Rodney; it just has to limp its way back to the Daedalus."

"Oh yes, I'll just wave my magic wand and ask the puddlejumper fairy for a new drive pod! How does that sound? Colonel, I may be a genius but even a genius can't fix what's simply not there to fix. Oh, I know! Let's all get out and push. Maybe we can make it back by the time we retire."

"In other words, we're walking." Sheppard gripped the bench seat and hoisted himself painfully upright.

The look of exasperation on Rodney's face changed to annoyed concern as he watched Sheppard's slow progress. "You know, call it a hunch here, but I'm guessing that your 'little scratch' is more of a gaping hole, and if we end up having to drag you back to the Daedalus, then you're going to end up owing me ... something ... valuable ... until the end of time."

"Such as my life, say?"

"I said valuable, Colonel," Rodney retorted, a little too quickly.

"First pick of pudding in the cafeteria?"

"I already have that, because I'm faster than you are."

Caldwell was wearing the slightly befuddled look that people often had when spending a lot of time in close proximity to Sheppard and McKay. Shaking his head, he reached for his parka. "Think I'll take a look around, see what the weather's doing. If the storm's cleared up, we might be able to reach the Daedalus with the radios."

Sheppard perked up a bit. "Hey, that's a --"

He broke off at a sudden thud on the side of the jumper, obviously the impact of a fist on the metal hull. At the same time, his radio crackled from his pile of discarded clothing. He reached for it, but McKay was faster, sliding to grab it before Sheppard could get himself moving. "Yeah?" he said into it, and then his jaw dropped and his eyes went round. "What the hell are you doing here?" He turned his befuddled look on Sheppard. "It's Ronon."

"What? Give me that." He took the radio away from Rodney, ignoring the startled bark of "Hey!", and raised it to his ear. "Ronon? Didn't I tell you to stay with the Daedalus?"

"Yeah, you did," the deep voice agreed matter-of-factly, but didn't volunteer anything else.

"Rodney, open the hatch." Sinking back down onto the bench seat, Sheppard said, "Is everything okay back at the ship? Are you out here alone?"

"Yes, and no." The hatch disengaged with a loud ka-thunk and quite a lot of snow spilled through it onto the floor; the storm appeared to have nearly succeeded in burying them. Over the snow, sharp sunlight shafted into the jumper's cabin along with a swirl of biting cold air. A moment later, an unmistakable, dreadlocked shadow appeared across the snow. Ronon jumped lightly to the jumper's floor, his lean figure followed by two other people in parkas.

"It's good to see you, sir," Ling told Caldwell, pushing back her hood, and added to Sheppard and Rodney, her eyes warm, "All of you."

Rodney was staring at Ronon in complete disbelief. "How in the world did you find us?"

"Tracked you," Ronon said, shaking snow out of his dreads. Ling had moved quickly to her captain and was examining his arm.

"Close the door, Rodney, you're letting all the heat out," Sheppard said impatiently, shifting his weight on the bench seat in an effort to look more natural. Damned if he was getting up.

Rodney reached absently for the button to close the hatch, while waving his other arm at the side of the jumper, and, by implication, the snow beyond. "Through that?"

"Yeah." Ronon seemed unimpressed, either by his own feat or by Rodney's agitation. "You all right?" He included Sheppard in this, with a sweep of his eyes.

"No," Rodney said promptly. "My head hurts, my chest hurts, my nose hurts, even my toenails hurt. I think I may have internal injuries and no one cares. And Lieutenant Colonel 'It's Only Pain, It Doesn't Hurt' over here keeps insisting he's fine despite barely being able to walk due to the giant, germ-ridden tooth holes in his leg that are probably killing him with alien microbes even as we speak."

At this, Ling looked up sharply from Caldwell's arm. "Tooth holes?"

"Rodney," Sheppard said, "shut up." As Ling bore down on him, he tried to fend her off. "Look, it didn't bite me, it clawed me, and it's not as bad as Rodney thinks."

"Based upon your extensive medical experience, I'm sure? Where's the first-aid kit?"

Rodney looked around for it and slapped it into her hand with a triumphant grin. Sheppard glowered at him. "Traitor."

"You were attacked by one of the wolves, I'm guessing?" Ling frowned into the first-aid kit and picked up a package of strip-style skin thermometers. "This is --? Oh, Colonel, I definitely need to have a talk with whoever stocks your first-aid supplies." She slapped a strip on his forehead, and when he opened his mouth, spoke right over him. "Where did it get you?"

"It's his leg," Rodney said. Tilted back on his heels, arms folded, he was watching with a combination of smugness and glee. Ronon cast an amused look at him. Seavey just looked baffled.

"Rodney, will you put a sock in it?" Sheppard snapped. As Ling pulled on rubber gloves and attacked the leg of his coveralls with a pair of scissors from the med kit, he protested, "I've been taking antibiotics from the med kit, Doc."

"It should be evident" -- to anyone who isn't a moron, that is, her tone seemed to imply -- "that antibiotics don't affect all organisms equally. We've had an ongoing problem with finding Earth antibiotics that work on Pegasus Galaxy microbes."

"Oh, well, that's comforting," Rodney snapped. "Why do you quacks bother putting antibiotics in the medkits at all if they don't work?"

Ling shot him a quick look. "While I take a look at the Colonel, why don't you give me a quick rundown of your own injuries, Dr. McKay?"

Rodney hesitated for an instant, looking suspicious as if expecting a trick, then launched into his litany, illustrated with hand gestures. "I've been shot in the head, and I have a gigantic bruise on my chest, bruises all over my body in fact, not to mention almost dying from hypothermia ..."

Some ten minutes later, the group in the jumper had been triaged -- Ling declared Sheppard the biggest health risk, with a mild infection that appeared to be resistant to Milky Way antibiotics, "which could turn real bad, real fast," she said, looking up from rebandaging Rodney's head with fresh gloves on. "There are more jumpers inbound from Atlantis, and I'd definitely like to see you on one of them, Colonel. And I want to keep you away from Rodney."

"Why?" both of them wanted to know immediately, Sheppard looking nervous and guilty.

"Why?" she repeated, raising her eyebrows at them. "Because you have an antibiotic-resistent infection in your leg and he has an open wound on his head, as well as elsewhere on his body; do I have to draw you a picture?"

Rodney opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, and directed a death-glare at Sheppard, who now looked even more guilty. "Colonel --" he began threateningly.

Caldwell cleared his throat from the back of the jumper. "If we're ready, Doctor, I'd really like to get moving before another of those storms rolls in."

"Could turn bad again, quick," Ronon put in. "Mountain weather. Chancy."

"Oh shit -- Armstrong," Sheppard said suddenly, as Ling helped him wrap a thermal blanket around his leg to help protect it now that the coveralls had been rendered useless. "He's still out there."

"Dead," Ronon said.

Ling and Seavey's reaction to that was odd -- Seavey looked away, and Ling pressed her lips together in a grim white line. Sheppard filed that away for future reference. Still, considering the circumstances, he wasn't inclined to be choosy. "You sure?" he asked, studying Ronon.

The former Runner met Sheppard's eyes levelly. "Yeah."

"Good enough for me," Sheppard said. There was a little nod from Ronon, and something passed between them, something he couldn't define, couldn't explain. Like so many other things about his team, it just was.

The hatch lowered into the snow with a whine of servos and a muted flumph. Ling slid an arm under Sheppard's shoulders and helped him to his feet. Caldwell and Seavey went out first, the Colonel asking questions that the young Airman answered in a quick, shy voice. Rodney hung back, looking over his shoulder as Sheppard took a few awkward, hopping steps, clinging to Ling's shoulder. "Will you at least --" he began, but Ronon's hand settled on his shoulder.

"It's under control," Ronon said. McKay gave a startled squawk as Ronon boosted him out the opening; he immediately turned around and crouched down to see what was going on inside.

"Wait, wait," Sheppard said suddenly, twisting free of Ling's hand. He bent over, sliding his leg stiffly out in front of him, so that he could scoop up the scattered cards and deposit them in a pocket of his coat. Giving Ling an apologetic shrug, he explained, "Sentimental value."

"What are you people doing down there, having afternoon tea?" Rodney demanded in a petulant whine from the jumper's hatch.

"We're coming, McKay; don't have a fit." Sheppard allowed Ling to take some of his weight, the difficult position made even more awkward by their height difference. Caught up in the pain in his leg and the effort of not falling over, he didn't notice Ronon cross the floor until the Runner loomed above him. Then he had only a split second's warning before powerful arms scooped him up, one under his shoulders and the other beneath his knees. He gaped in pain and then in embarrassment.

"Ronon, put me down," he said with all the dignity he could muster under the circumstances, as Ronon hauled him over to the jumper's hatch. That had better not be snickering coming from Rodney's direction, but he was pretty sure that it was. McKay was going to have a few new bruises as soon as he got within smacking range.

"If I do, can you walk?" Ronon asked.

Sheppard hesitated, but only for a moment. "Yes."

"No you can't. Ronon, don't listen to him."

"Rodney, shut up."

Ronon, saying nothing, ducked through the opening and clambered up to the top of the wind-driven snow. For a minute Sheppard forgot his pain and humiliation as the glittering expanse of pure-white wilderness took his breath away. The air was so incredibly clear that distances were difficult to judge, especially with most of the recognizable landmarks covered with snow; the mountains looked close enough to reach out and touch. The sky was a pale, fresh blue.

"Snow goggles," Caldwell said suddenly, snapping his fingers. "The parkas should have a pair each. Check your pockets."

Rodney had plunged his hands into his pockets, out of instinct, no doubt -- when the local military ordered you to do something in that tone of voice, even he did it -- but with a token hint of exasperation. "And those would be ...?"

"Snow blindness. You're right." Sheppard found his own pair of goggles, smoked plastic to protect the eyes from the cumulative, temporarily blinding effects of sun on snow. "Didn't they teach you anything in Antarctica, Rodney?"

"I spent most of my time trying to stay out of the snow, unlike some people."

Sheppard tilted his head backwards to get a look at Ronon. "You need a pair of these things, big guy?"

Ronon lifted a shoulder in a slight shrug. "I squint my eyes. No big deal."

"Of course you do," Sheppard muttered, pulling the goggles over his own eyes. He felt the hitch in Ronon's breathing only because he was presently held next to the big man's chest -- a laugh, suppressed; he would have missed it if they hadn't been in physical contact. Briefly, he wondered how often Ronon bit back on amusement that way ... and how difficult must have been the events that had taught him to.

"Sometime today, people?" Caldwell inquired.

Sheppard got another unpleasant surprise when Ronon, again without warning, slung him over his shoulder like a sack of grain. "Oomph," he grunted as Ronon's hard shoulder dug into his stomach, and when he'd managed to get enough breath back to speak: "All right, the other way was bad enough, but this is not even close to comfortable. And I am not staring at your ass all the way back to the Daedalus, damn it."

"Can't see you have much choice," Ronon's voice came from somewhere above the current, regrettable position of his head, adding after a moment, "Too far to carry you the other way."

"Besides, it serves you right for infecting me with flesh-eating bacteria," Rodney griped from somewhere off to his right.

Sheppard sighed and closed his eyes. The sight of the snow and the tails of Ronon's coat jouncing beneath his head was making him slightly ill. With his eyes shut, he could relax into the rolling motion of the ride. Since he didn't appear to have much of a choice in the matter, he may as well sleep through it. His team was safe ... Elizabeth was on her way back to Atlantis, as safe as she could possibly be ... and, yeah, he was safe too. Back at the Daedalus, and then on Atlantis, they'd have to confront the whole issue of Wraith worshippers, of determining who could and could not be trusted. But not yet.

Eyes closed, he listened as Rodney's current complaint-fest was cut off by Ling, who started bitching him out for not making sure that his hands were well covered -- something about hypothermia and frostbite and not getting cold again. Caldwell added something to the debate that he couldn't quite hear, but Rodney's outraged squeak made Ronon's broad back do that little laughter-hitch thing again.

We're in good hands, all of us, Sheppard thought, a bit inanely, and drowsed.

------

To be concluded