Amy Griswold - The Lost

Yes. I hope this is the only time you will have to go diving.

Knock on wood, Lorne said. Just out of curiosity, how big do very large pieces of ice get?

A couple of hundred meters in length we would say was very large, Radek said. Hopefully we will not run into anything bigger than that.

Great, Lorne said. How big are the ones we're hoping we won't run into?

Closer to the size of a city, Radek said reluctantly. But that is very rare, so I would not worry about it too much yet.

I try not to, Lorne said. There were usually plenty of current problems to worry about instead.

They didn't actually race to the Genii homeworld. That would be irresponsible, and John and Sam were both very responsible people. Maybe they were a little competitive, but not quite that competitive, at least John wasn't when he was flying a ship that might fall apart any minute, and that anyhow Sam could dust with one hand tied behind her back.

For once, nothing terrible happened. Despite being on tenterhooks for the whole thirteen hours in hyperspace, there was nothing more dire to report than a few power fluctuations that had Dr. Kusanagi crooning and muttering over the crystals as if she could talk them into behaving. Maybe she did, because everything held together, and they came out of hyperspace exactly where they were supposed to, twenty two minutes after the Hammond . It was a good thing it wasn't a race, because that would have been pretty embarrassing.

Carter had spent a good twenty minutes trying to explain to Ladon Radim that she was there full of good will and happy thoughts, and that the Ancient warship and Dahlia were just behind. He is pretty much stopped believing her and the rhetoric was escalating when John dropped out of hyperspace and Dahlia called down to report that both she and the Avenger were in great shape.

After that things warmed up a bit, and there were a few hours of changeover as they landed on a camouflaged field and the Genii crew came aboard. Then there was a hastily prepared meal with Ladon Radim in a farmhouse that looked like it was straight out of Amish country, built over an underground bunker that generated nuclear power. John really didn't have enough words to express how glad he was that he wasn't the ranking officer in the party, so all the making nice and polite conversation that would be scrutinized for secret clues to Earth intentions was on Sam.

The Genii clearly had a problem with that. The way that some of the senior officers looked straight through her or posed their questions to John instead was pretty obvious. If he's been feeling a little more charitable, maybe he would have done something different, instead of giving everyone what Teyla called The Smile of Wrongness and deferring to Sam on every answer, like he couldn't tie his shoes without her permission. He wasn't sure what the Genii made of that little performance, but it seemed to amuse Sam to no end.

Dahlia Radim made polite conversation for a few minutes, clearly more at ease now that Teyla wasn't around. She kept giving him pitying looks, like a guy you expect to get killed in some awful way any day now, but that you can't say you didn't warn. Or maybe like the looks you give a guy who is blowing up his career by getting serious about the wrong person, but hasn't realized it yet. He's seen that kind of thing back on Earth, and he didn't like it any better here.

It was hours before Sam managed to shut the festivities down on the grounds that they had to get back to Atlantis. There was nice flat bunk waiting in the Hammond's guest quarters, and he sacked out and took a long nap while they left the Genii behind, homeward bound. It was the best sleep he's had in quite a while.

Radek looked at Ronon over the rim of his glasses as they entered the armory. “You know I think this entire thing is a bad idea.”

“I know that,” Ronon said. He refrained from pointing out that Radek had said so more than once in the last fifteen minutes. “But we need a scientist. If we get the jumper shot up, or we wind up on a planet where there’s something wrong with the DHD, or there’s some weird radiation that’s going to make us all mutate if we stay too long — ”

“It would more likely just kill you,” Radek said. “I understand that you must have someone on the team with an understanding of Ancient and Wraith technology. I just wish Sheppard would choose someone else.”

“But given that he hasn’t…”

Radek sighed and squared his shoulders. “Given that he hasn’t, I sense that my future will involve much more shooting at things than I would prefer. So here we are.”

Ronon smiled a little. “Lorne said you did a pretty good job beating up his Marines that time everybody had amnesia.”

“I had the element of surprise,” Radek said. “And my goal was not to overpower an entire Marine team, but to buy time in which to run away.”

“A lot of the time that’s us, too,” Ronon said. “If we get into it with the Wraith, the main thing is for you to be able to defend yourself as we retreat. Teyla will be covering you while me and Sheppard hold them off. You and Teyla are supposed to get back to the gate and dial out for us.”

“Believe me, I will not hesitate in that,” Radek said. Ronon handed him the pistol and watched while he loaded it. He did at least know how to do that competently, which put him ahead of where some of the scientists had started.

It had taken a while for Ronon to make it clear to Sheppard when he first came to the city that he knew how to train people with no combat experience at all, and that he wasn’t going to break them by accident. He always felt wrong teaching people to shoot before how to fight with their hands — you were supposed to teach the foundation skills before you worked with any weapons — but he could see that sometimes it was a necessary evil.

“Okay,” he said. He demonstrated the beginner’s firing stance Sheppard’s people taught, shoulders square and feet apart. He’d learned a sideways stance, body angled away from enemy fire, but this way was better for bracing against the pistol’s recoil. “Keep a firm grip onto the pistol. Don’t jerk the trigger. It’s going to be loud.”

“I am not afraid of the gun,” Radek said. “I am just a bad shot.” He sighted along it and fired. It was a hit on the target, but just barely. Not close enough to the center.

“You want to at least hit within the rings,” Ronon said. “Hit between here and here,” he said, sweeping his hand down his own body from the hollow of his throat to his groin. “It can take two or three chest shots with one of these pistols to drop a human attacker. More than that for a Wraith.”

“Wonderful,” Radek said. He shot twice more, sighting carefully each time. The first shot went way too low, and though Ronon could see him trying to correct with the second one, he over-corrected, missing the target entirely. “I told you I was a terrible shot.”

“You need practice,” Ronon said.

Radek made a noncommittal noise and emptied the rest of the clip, without much improvement.

“Did you teach Rodney to shoot?” Radek said as he was reloading.

“Sheppard did,” Ronon said. “Sheppard’s pretty patient as a teacher.”

“Rodney is not,” Radek said wryly. “If he were, perhaps the rest of you would have learned something of jumper repair these last few years.”

“None of us are scientists,” Ronon said. “And Sheppard’s the only one who knows anything about your technology.”

“It is not our technology. The Ancients built many things we are lucky if we can even use. And, yes, we have needed our own scientific knowledge to determine how things work and how they can be repaired. But it should not require an education in nuclear physics to make repairs we have made a hundred times already. Not everything is a fascinating new unique problem.”