Jo Graham - Death Game

I did it on a coin toss. I watched it spin, and I knew which way I wanted it to fall.

Why the hell not?

He looked away, across the broad canal to the desert, shrugged.

“Do you miss it?” she asked quietly.

“Antarctica?” John stood against the side of the barge. “I don’t know. Atlantis isn’t exactly quiet.” He looked at her sideways, the corner of his mouth twitching as though he would smile. “I guess I miss that a little bit.”

“I meant your homeworld,” Teyla said. “Earth. Your family, your friends.”

His face stilled, but it didn’t harden as it often did when someone talked about home. “I don’t really have anybody to miss,” he said, and his eyebrows drew together.

“You have no children, no sons and daughters?” It was strange to think not. A man of his age ought to be the father of children well grown, daughters learning to hunt and sons to till the soil. Unless some tragedy had intervened. She hoped she had not touched on that.

“It was never the right time,” he said, his eyes eliding from hers.

“Surely your mother…” Teyla began delicately. Every man has a mother who will miss him, who he will mumble for with his dying breath.

“My mom died a long time ago,” he said. “Thirteen years. She died of breast cancer six years after the divorce, when I was stationed at Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey.” John looked out across the canal again, toward the fruit trees leaning toward the water on the other side, their branches almost touching their reflections in the stream. “That wasn’t long after Desert Storm, and I was still overseas enforcing the no-fly zone. I was there a couple of years, actually, all through Desert Shield and Instant Thunder. I was gone the whole time she was sick.”

“I am very sorry,” Teyla said quietly. “I did not realize.” She had thought they were different, these men from Earth with their medicines and their world of safety. She had thought they did not also stand in the shadows.

He shrugged but didn’t take his eyes from the line of distant trees. “I was twenty five. It’s not like I was a little kid.”

“My father was taken by the Wraith when I was thirteen,” she said. “But I think it is difficult to lose a parent at any age.”

John shrugged again, putting the sunglasses back on. End of the conversation, Teyla thought. Though she had known John Sheppard more than a year she sometimes felt she knew him no better than she had the first day he came to Athos, the day he followed a coin toss through the blue fire of a gate.

Some kind of bird gyred in the distant sky, and she lifted her hand to watch it circle, hunting where the edge of green fields met desert. The wind blew across the canal freshened by the water, but still hot and dry. Hopefully along the coast there would be a sea breeze which would be somewhat more comfortable. I am getting spoiled by the Ancients’ climate control, Teyla thought. Once I would not have missed air conditioning.

“I’m not much like her,” he said out of the blue, expression unreadable in the sunglasses. “She was in way over her head about everything. My dad made a lot more money than she grew up with and she was always terrified she was going to make a mistake and embarrass everyone. She took tennis lessons and needlepoint lessons and did Jane Fonda and pretty much everything, but she always had this awkwardness, you know? Like she was some weird outsider in her own life. Like it was all an act and she was scared people would see through it. She loved us kids, though. She always wanted to protect us from everything. I think she’d have run through fire or lifted a car off us or one of those kinds of stories you hear on the news about regular suburban moms who beat off carjackers with their purse.”

Teyla looked at him sideways, not chancing saying anything, as one does with a skittish animal who has finally trusted a little, waiting for him to go on.

“She kept her thoughts to herself, whatever she was thinking. She had this smile that wasn’t right but you could never see behind it.” John shifted from one foot to another with the slight motion of the barge as it began a gentle curve, the trees that came almost down to the water blocking the view ahead. “I don’t think I ever really knew her.” He glanced toward Teyla and shrugged.

Above on the upper deck of the barge there was a shout. As the canal straightened out of the curve again a body of water glistened ahead, a lake or a harbor, and beyond it was a city. White walls and white towers were stark in stone against an azure sky, massive square buildings and fortifications overlapping one behind the other, stretching as far left and right as one could see, the entirety studded with green trees. Beyond it, faint on the horizon, was the glittering line of the ocean.

“Pelagia?” Teyla asked, coming to stand at his side.

“Must be,” John said. He shook his head. “It’s enormous.”

“Half a million people,” Jitrine said with satisfaction, approaching across the deck. “There are half a million people in Pelagia under the rule of our King.”

Teyla looked at John and she did not need him to speak to hear his thought. Why does the Wraith allow so many to live when they did not on Sateda, or anywhere else we have seen? What is wrong on this world? The forboding sank like ice in her heart.

“We will be there soon,” Jitrine said. “And then we will see what can be done.”

“Yeah,” John said, but he sounded no happier than Teyla felt.

“There!” Rodney almost shouted in triumph as the gate whooshed open. “Got it!”

Major Lorne grinned, shading his eyes against the desert sun. “Great job, doc.” The gate was operational again, and it had only taken Rodney the better part of a day to do it. After a nap in the shade repatterning the third crystal had been much easier. “I knew you’d get it done.”

“Atlantis, this is McKay,” Rodney said into his headset. “The gate is repaired. We’re coming through.”

Chuck’s familiar voice sounded over the radio static. “We hear you,” he said. “Dr. Weir’s eager to talk to you.”

“Let’s go then,” Lorne said, and a moment later they stepped through the event horizon into the Atlantis gateroom.

Elizabeth Weir hurried down the stairs to meet them, her brows knit together across her forehead. “Rodney! I was starting to worry.”

Rodney spread his hands. “I can fix anything with time and the right equipment.”

“Have you heard anything from Colonel Sheppard or the others?” she asked, looking from Rodney to Lorne and back again.

“Negative,” Lorne said. “And that concerns me, ma’am. No hostiles, as far as we can tell, other than maybe some wildlife. But they’ve been gone twenty four hours. It’s possible they’ve had an accident. They were going quite a ways north of our position, and they would have been out of radio range of the handsets.”

“Or there could be interference at the Ancient ruins they were investigating,” Rodney put in. “We’ve had that happen before. Messing up the radios.”

“Still.” Elizabeth frowned. “That might account for not reporting in for a few hours, but not a full day. If Colonel Sheppard couldn’t get through with the radio he would have come back to report, even if they’d found something interesting enough to warrant staying to check it out. I think we have to conclude something’s wrong.” She looked at Lorne. “Major, get your backup team together. You’re going back with Dr. Beckett and a jumper.”

“And me,” Rodney said. His forehead stung with sunburn. But Carson would have something for that.