Jo Graham - Unascended

“I can do that,” Taka said, and the jumper swerved away from the gate, picking up height and speed as it went. “And I think I’ve found the shields.”

“You think?”

“Trains don’t have shields,” Taka said. “And they don’t talk in your head. You’re expecting me to be an expert here?”

“I am warning you, Sora—” Teyla began over the radio. Sora switched it off.

“You’re going to have to negotiate if you want to get off this planet,” Daniel said into the silence that followed. “Unless you’d like to try to fly the jumper to the nearest solar system at sub-light speeds. That should take, what, a couple of years?”

“I’ll negotiate,” Sora said. She switched the radio back on. “You have five minutes to repair the damage you’ve done to the gate. If it’s not fixed by then, I’m going to shoot Dr. Jackson in the head.”

“This is a very bad idea,” Daniel said evenly as Sora snapped the radio off again.

“It’s a fair exchange,” Sora said. “I don’t really want to be saddled with you, and I do want this ship. I’ll be happy to throw you out unharmed as soon as your people fix the gate.”

“They can’t just give you the jumper,” Daniel said.

“That’s unfortunate for you.”

“Even if they did, what are you planning to do with it? If you take it back to the Genii homeworld, we’ll know where to find it.”

“And Radim will deny having it.”

“And we’ll tell him that we know you stole it.”

“If I leave any of you alive.”

Daniel winced inwardly. There was nothing to stop her from making a deal for his return and then firing on the rest of the team as soon as they repaired the gate. Although they were experienced enough to demand his return first. Only Sora seemed experienced enough to insist that they fix the gate first. And he’d rather not be the one sitting there with a gun to his head while they tried to figure out that little tactical problem.

“Do you just want me to circle around?” Taka said.

“No,” Sora said. “I don’t want to give them the chance to do anything to sabotage this ship. Put some distance between us and the gate.”

The jumper turned and began flying over rolling farmland, the bright squares and ribbons of cultivated fields set in between rougher patches of pasture land and copses of trees.

“What do you actually want out of this?” Daniel asked. “Are you trying to get back into Radim’s good graces, or trying to show him up, or do you just want the jumper for reasons that have nothing to do with Ladon Radim?”

Sora turned, pressing her lips together tightly. “Why should I tell you?”

“I’m listening. You might say I’m a captive audience.”

“Radim wants me dead,” Sora said. “And right now he has a parade of successes to keep him in power. Things will look a little different if I have an Ancient ship and the only successful program to activate the ATA gene in our people.”

“I thought you said it was Radim’s program.”

“I’ve improved on it.”

“I thought you weren’t a scientist.”

“How would you know?”

“You’re not interested in how the jumper works. And you didn’t try to persuade me that it was your research all along.” Daniel tried to spread his hands, only to have them jerked back by the handcuffs. “It was an educated guess.”

“I have friends who are scientists,” Sora said. Daniel repressed the urge to express surprise that she had friends at all. It really wasn’t the time for that. “And we had help.”

“Help?”

Sora wanted to talk, he could tell, and keeping her busy was probably the best way to give the team back at the gate time to do something. What they were going to do, he wasn’t sure, but at least they had a reputation for being good at improvising.

“What do we do now?” Rodney asked.

Teyla let out a frustrated breath. The jumper was disappearing quickly over the horizon. As impatient as she had been with Daniel, he did not actually deserve to be killed by Sora as part of her continuing grudge against Teyla. “What can you do?”

“I might be able to reprogram the DHD to send her to a different address than the one she dials. It would have to be one that’s recently been dialed.”

“You mean back to Atlantis.”

“And we radio them and tell them to raise the iris,” Ronon said.

“No,” Teyla said. “I do not want Sora dead. Do what you must to get the gate working again.”

Ronon put his head to one side. “She’s going to kill Jackson.”

“He will be equally dead if he is aboard a jumper that is disintegrated when it hits the iris.”

“I’m just saying she’s not a great person.”

“Even so. I would rather not kill her if there is any other choice.”

Rodney turned up his hands. “So, what, we trade her the jumper? We have four minutes to make up our minds.”

“We will trade her the jumper,” Teyla said. “When the DHD is working again, dial an unpopulated planet. Then call Atlantis and tell them to send two more jumpers to intercept Sora when she arrives there.”

“And then reprogram the DHD to send her to that address?” Rodney said. His hands were moving rapidly, his whole body tense with concentration. “We maybe have time to do two of those three things.”

“Then we will not call Atlantis. When Sora goes through the gate, we will follow her ourselves.”

“We’ll be in the same stand-off we’re in now,” Ronon said.

“Except that she will no longer have a hostage, and therefore we will not have a time limit,” Teyla said. “Rodney?”

“I’m working on it,” Rodney said. “Why is it never ‘take all the time you need, nothing bad will happen if you don’t work faster than humanly possible?’”

If he was complaining rather than flatly refusing, it meant that he could accomplish the tasks she had set him in the time they had left. “I have every faith in your abilities,” Teyla said.

“I still think we’d be better off smearing her across the iris,” Ronon said.

“I went to some considerable trouble to save her life when last we met,” Teyla said.

“Funny way of repaying you.”

“That is not why I did it,” Teyla said, and hoped she wasn’t about to regret it.

“I made friends with one of Radim’s researchers,” Sora said. “He was highly motivated to make friends with me after I showed him what I’d found. A device capable of making certain genetic changes in one person’s DNA given a genetic sample from someone else.”

“Interesting. I should tell you that we’ve had some very bad results from using Ancient devices to alter people’s DNA,” Daniel said. “There was the Ascension device that made people keel over dead if they didn’t reach enlightenment fast enough, for one thing. The exploding tumor incident also comes to mind.”

“Exploding what?” Taka demanded. The jumper wobbled perceptibly in the air, banking back and forth hard enough to make Sora grab at her chair to stay in it. It would have been the perfect moment to jump her if he hadn’t been handcuffed to a chair.

“I’m sure nothing like that will happen,” Daniel said.

“How sure?”

“You worry too much,” Sora said. “Besides, I’m not even sure it was an Ancient device. It had a setting that made it provide instructions in the language of the Ancestors, but also in some kind of writing nobody could figure out. And it didn’t look anything like the devices in Pride of the Genii.”

“And it wasn’t Wraith.”

“We’ve all seen Wraith technology before. Give me some credit. I may not be a scientist, but I’m not an idiot.”

“Was the writing — did it look something like this?” He sketched Asgard characters in the air with his fingers, and then shook his head in frustration. “Give me something to write with.” Sora shook her head, and he traced the shapes of the same characters more slowly. “Vertical and diagonal strokes, all the same weight.” He sketched the letters of the first phrase he thought of, “Thor’s hammer,” and then after a moment’s thought, “genetic pattern,” which seemed more relevant.