To linda: Indeed! I add a new chapter every Friday. Thank you ever so much for continuing to read! I'm very glad that you're still enjoying it. Literally made my day to see you think it's wonderful. Thanks for the review, and I hope you like this chapter as well. ;)

Last time: The Daedalus is pretty sweet, right? So, next stop, Atlantis!

Chapter 14. Prime.

"Hm. 113." Radek looked up with a smile from his breakfast.

It was a week into the Daedalus trip and Anna was losing her mind with boredom. It was like boredom and homework were having a competition to see which could kill her faster. Either that or Radek's haphazard comments and embarrassing attempts at small-talk.

The random-number thing, though. That was new.

"Prime or not prime?"

Anna thought for a long, long moment. "What?"

"Oh, please." Anna glanced to see Doctor McKay two tables down, alone with his breakfast. "Why didn't you just start with seven if you were gonna insult the girl's intelligence?" Radek shot him a look that clearly said to keep out of it, but Doctor McKay was having none of that. "Prime. 3531."

Radek sighed and looked at Anna. "It's a game that we play to pass time." He glanced at Doctor McKay. "Not prime. One of us says a number, like 1779, and the other says whether it's a prime number or not."

"Not prime," Doctor McKay said. "5399."

"Prime." Radek looked right at Anna. "491?"

"Prime," Anna answered. She tried to remember why she thought it was a good idea to memorize all the prime numbers up to five-hundred. It seemed like a fun thing to do at the time, waiting for the conductor to finish lecturing the cello section. "315." She should have thought that one through. That one was so easy her cousin could figure it out.

Still, Radek smiled obligingly. Maybe he was glad she was playing along. "Not prime. 3313."

"Prime," Doctor McKay spoke up. "6013."

"Not prime," Radek said. "3207."

Everyone in the mess hall seemed to fall deathly silent. Even Doctor McKay was quiet, waiting for her to answer. Would he be disappointed if she just guessed? "Not prime?" she said. She hadn't meant to make it sound so much like a question.

"Congratulations, you're better than most of the military personnel already," Doctor McKay said.

"But it's not a guessing game to you," Anna said quietly. She spent the next few rounds of numbers trying to figure patterns in the numbers they chose. She knew well enough there was no apparent pattern to actual prime numbers. But they were choosing numbers themselves. Numbers they knew were prime or not prime. There was a pattern to their knowledge and choosing, wasn't there?

"You know, one time Ford guessed 4692 wrong?" Doctor McKay asked wistfully a second later.

Radek smiled, but didn't get a chance to answer.

"Ford?" Anna asked.

"Ah, Aiden Ford," Doctor McKay said. "A member of one of the offworld teams on Atlantis. My team, actually." He grimaced, like he was remembering something unpleasant. Something sad.

"He was probably just trying to get you to be quiet," Radek offered.

From the sudden tone of the conversation, Anna could only imagine this Ford was dead or otherwise gone now. "What happened to him?" Anna asked.

Radek sighed, shook his head like he knew questions like this would be coming and the last thing he wanted to do was answer them. "I told you about the siege of Atlantis," he said. "The Wraith made it onto the city. Ford was one of the military personnel defending the city, and a Wraith got to him."

"He's not dead." Doctor McKay looked between Radek and Anna. Anna didn't know what she looked like, but Radek looked apologetic. "He's not," Doctor McKay insisted. "When the Wraith feed on, well, um, humans, they release an enzyme into the human body that makes it—"

"Rodney," Radek interrupted. "2423."

"Anyway, it kept him alive," Doctor McKay skipped ahead, looking at Anna to tell his story since Radek didn't seem to be interested. "But he became addicted to the stuff."

"Addicted?" Anna asked, glancing at Radek.

Radek sighed. "Závislý," * he translated, still glaring at Doctor McKay.

Doctor McKay didn't seem to take notice. "The Wraith enzyme makes the human body stronger, to-to facilitate the, um, feeding process. But it apparently does something to the mind, makes them unable to see reason."

Anna nodded slowly. Like amped-up steroids, maybe? Not that she had any experience. She had only heard stories… read teenage crime novels.

"I guess the moral of the story is, don't do drugs, kids."

Anna smirked. She guessed there was even littler chance of that happening on Atlantis than there was at home. "Don't worry," she said to Radek. "No Wraith enzyme."

"I feel better already," Radek said sarcastically.

As much as Anna was interested in continuing the talk about the Wraith enzyme, it didn't seem to be among the subjects Radek was comfortable talking about. So she looked at Radek. "Prime." At Radek's confused look, she reminded him, "2423. It's prime?"

"Ah." Radek nodded. "Yes."

Her turn to come up with a number. She had already decided she could try any old number. She could probably trust Doctor McKay and Radek's answers. "1571."

Doctor McKay arched an eyebrow. "Prime."

Anna shrugged. "I just picked a number." A number that wasn't even, didn't end in a five, and wasn't divisible by three or nine. She decided not to say that part. She figured she had the easy stuff covered if it wasn't divisible by those things.

She didn't know how low the odds were of her picking a prime number at random.

"Fair enough." With that, Doctor McKay stood up and looked at Radek. "I need you to come to Engineering as soon as you get a minute."

"It's my day off, Rodney." Radek looked up slowly at Doctor McKay, casting a glance at Anna for just a moment.

"It will just be a few minutes," Doctor McKay said.

Radek looked conflicted.

He was probably feeling guilty. He had barely seen her on Earth, but she shrugged that off. After all, getting ready to go to another galaxy seemed like a lot of work. She could shrug this off, too. There was a lot of work to be done on a space ship. It was for the best, anyway. What were they going to do? Play Prime/Not-Prime all day?

No. Anna knew the ranking of importance in Radek's mind, even if Radek didn't know. Even if Radek was lying to himself, trying to be something he wasn't. Work came first. Work always came first. There were times when he tried to convince himself that it didn't, when he tried to convince himself something else was more important. Anna knew the truth.

"I can do some homework with Doctor Beckett," Anna offered.

A huge sigh. "It's your day off, too," Radek said.

"The Daedalus doesn't get a day off," Anna said.

"There, listen to the girl," Doctor McKay said. "It's important. It will only be a few minutes."

Radek seemed to consider that. Anna watched him. It's important. It would always be important, wouldn't it? Whether a spaceship or an alien city. Minutes would always stretch into hours.

"You have five minutes, Rodney," Radek scolded, and rose from his chair to go with him. He glanced at Anna. "I will be right back."

Anna nodded, but she knew what would actually happen. "Don't worry. If it's important…"

"This is important." Radek followed Doctor McKay through the mess hall and disappeared through the door.

Anna looked toward the window into hyperspace. Radek didn't know what he thought was important. Anna was sure everyone else did. Prime numbers and spaceship engines.

#

"Do prdele!" **

Anna blushed and looked up. Then she remembered she was the only one in the room who spoke Czech. She'd been whispering. Still, even if they did, it wasn't as if this was the worst thing she'd ever said. Radek wouldn't appreciate her… advanced vocabulary. He seemed intent on treating her about seven years old. Anna didn't remember when she'd discovered vulgarity, but it was certainly sometime after he was gone.

She wondered how many of his colleagues would be surprised to learn that.

Elizabeth seemed to guess what she meant, looking up from her book. She didn't seem upset. She seemed amused. "I've been, honestly, a little nervous to ask what that means. Radek isn't beyond cursing in Czech. Although, for all I know, he could be talking about oxen and ostriches."

Anna pursed her lips. "I don't know the words for English." With reason, her vocabulary for swearing-English wasn't great. She knew how to say conduit, coupling, and power transfer station, though. Maybe that counted? "It's not friendly."

Elizabeth chuckled. "I assumed that. What's wrong?"

Anna sighed and tried to arrange her English. She was getting really tired of it. English was a necessity more than ninety percent of the time. She didn't have words for ninety percent of what she wanted to say. A simple conversation about the food available in the Daedalus mess hall made her feel like a stupid child. But she couldn't articulate that, because the majority of her vocabulary involved a myriad of useless scientific and musical terms, as well as a handful of general conversation items.

No one talked about the weather in space.

"Nothing."

"As in it's too hard to explain?" Elizabeth guessed. She set her book aside and turned her full attention on Anna. "Give it a try. I'm not fluent in Czech, but I do know quite a bit."

Anna looked at the paper and her broken pencil tip. She didn't need English for that. She rolled the pencil toward Elizabeth, looking sheepish.

Elizabeth smiled, but obviously didn't buy it. "It's something a little more than that, isn't it?"

"I don't know," Anna said. She hoped that Elizabeth understood her to mean she didn't know how to say what she wanted to. Not that she was unsure what was wrong. She knew exactly what was wrong.

She wasn't smart enough for this. Her homework assignments had barely started, and she hadn't felt this incompetent since preschool. Even if she was getting one-quarter of this science right, her English was horrific. On the off chance that she was understanding an even more unimpressive fraction of what Doctor McKay was saying, there was no way she was even applying it correctly.

The Pegasus galaxy only had room for Earth's most brilliant and brave.

"Everyone…" Anna sighed and thought through her words. "Everyone is so smart."

"Here?" Elizabeth nodded her agreement. "Yes, that's true. Is that a bad thing?"

"Jak jsem tady…?" *** Anna looked around hopelessly. "I'm sorry. English, English. All the English. Do you speak any other languages?"

"French. German. Spanish." Elizabeth, for some reason, looked like she might know French. Radek told her that Elizabeth used to be a diplomat. Anna figured that was where she learned her handful of Czech words and phrases. Some of the weirdest words, too, like accord and ceasefire. "I know a smattering of Russian," Elizabeth went on, "but nothing to boast about."

"I can understand most of what I hear, and I know many, many words," Anna said. "But I am so tired. It's very hard to have to always think about what I want to say. It was easier, but it's suddenly so hard again."

That made absolutely no sense to her, either. It was like all the progress she'd made in Colorado Springs had been deleted from her brain. It might have had something to do with her first English paper Elizabeth requested she write.

It wasn't even about anything important. Elizabeth wanted to keep it familiar. She wanted Anna to write about her home, a vacation she took. She decided to write about Prague. Old buildings. The city always looked brown to her.

Writing about colors and other simple nouns was about as elementary as it got. "I'm not like… not smart enough for this."

"Smart enough?" Elizabeth frowned, her disagreement as plain as if she'd spelled it out. "I think you aren't giving yourself enough credit. You are a very intelligent young lady, Anna."

Anna picked up her sheet of paper. At least her handwriting looked like she'd been practicing for over ten years now. "All I can write about is blue sky and sidewalks." She flicked the page back onto the table.

"Writing in a foreign language is hard." Elizabeth paused. "Besides, isn't English your third?"

Anna nodded a little. She didn't know if she'd call herself fluent in German, but she was certainly more comfortable with it. Americans had enough trouble with their own language, much less a second or third. It wasn't that, though. "I don't understand anything Doctor McKay is trying to teach me…"

She didn't mean to speak so quietly. Still, Elizabeth dragged her chair closer to Anna's and put her hand on the table next to Anna's page. "You don't understand right now," she said.

Anna shook her head. Elizabeth couldn't possibly understand what it meant, to know that she would never know something. Anna was in a spaceship, surrounded by things so wonderful and strange, and the handful of people who understood how it worked. Anna never thought the world was within her reach. It wasn't practical.

So why should she think any differently of a spaceship?

"Listen to me, Anna. No one is born knowing these things." Elizabeth picked up the pencil and the bit of broken lead. "And you're fifteen years old. I think it's a little early to be comparing yourself to someone like Doctor McKay."

"He's so…" Anna paused, smiling a little at Elizabeth. "Condescending?"

Elizabeth laughed. "He's that way with everyone." She smiled softly. "You the daughter of one of the smartest physicists Earth had to offer. You may not be there now, but you will grow into that."

"Radek is smart, isn't he?" Anna was glad, not for the first time, that she was his daughter. However incompetent he was at starting a conversation, or even keeping one going, he did have almost anything analytical on his side.

Unfortunately, relationships were rarely analytical.

"Yes," Elizabeth answered. "And I think you'll be surprised how very much you're like him."

Anna didn't know what to think of that. On Earth, Radek didn't fit in. Was that what Anna wanted? On the other hand, in the Pegasus galaxy—or, rather, partway between two galaxies—he fit in perfectly fine.

Anna wasn't sure which world she wanted more, not sure which one was more important.

"These things take time," Elizabeth finished. "Now, in the meantime…" She pulled a pen from a little slot on her tablet's case. "I've heard this works in zero-gravity."

"Mine, too," Anna joked, taking the pen. It was blue, with the letters NASA on it. "Until it broke."

Czech Things

* Courtesy of Google, of course. Dependent.

** Do prdele = according to the Stargate Wiki: a vulgar (yet common) expression of anger and frustration. It literally means, "into the ass," and is used in situations where an English speaker would use either the 'S-word' or the 'F-word.'

*** Jak jsem tady? = How am I here?

Next time: Why would I be scared of the dark? There are only a thousand-and-one reasons to be.