Jo Graham - Death Game

That was my first gate, and I have never looked back. Since then I have never ceased from travel, from wanting to dare one more gate, to see one more sunrise. It makes me a bad Athosian. We are stolid people in many ways, fatalistic and accepting of the world as it is. We have consigned our romantic past to stories, to tales of daring deeds that once were, but life is too hard for such things now. We are children of war, of a war that never ends. Most of us do not grow old, and while we tell stories of the great cities we once lived in, of heroes who once lived and dared all, we know those days are past. Such things do not happen in the real world.

When you came to Athos, we thought you were marauders who would try our strength. What else is there to think of a group of wary armed men whose eyes are not hard but frightened, as though they did not know what waited around each corner? Your Colonel Sumner looked through me as though I were nothing, as though he had assessed the value of all he saw and found it wanting.

We are a careful people. We try not to make enemies, especially enemies with weapons that could level our village in minutes.

We did not know we were being pulled into a Story.

Once there was an Ancient city, sleeping beneath the moon, abandoned by her children, sheltered by the sounding seas. Once there was a city that came to life at her son’s touch, woke from her long dream and thought of her other children, those scattered like seed before the wind.

And so the story began. It began as stories always begin, in the blue flare of a gate.

“They’re in trouble,” Ronon said.

Radek looked up from his laptop, its light reflecting off his glasses in the darkness. “You conclude this now?”

“Yeah.” Ronon said. “Sixteen hours. There’s no way they wouldn’t be back by now unless something was wrong. We have to go help.”

Radek closed his laptop to save the battery. He was getting tired of batting away flying insects attracted to it anyhow. “And how do you suggest we do that?”

“There are Wraith out there.” Ronon got to his feet, pacing back and forth for all the world like a nervous panther he’d seen in the Prague zoo. “The cruiser probably picked up the jumper.”

“And where would we look for them?” Radek asked reasonably. “Ronon, it’s a very big planet. In the jumper they could be thousands of kilometers away in any direction. We are two men on foot. How do you propose we find them?”

“We can’t just sit here,” Ronon said in a tone that seemed to disdain Radek’s cowardice.

“I did not say we should sit here. But let us not go off half cocked, as they say. We do not know where Colonel Sheppard and Teyla have gone. He said they were going to ‘fly around and have a look.’ We do not know where they went, or even which direction. They could be on the other side of the planet, and we will not find them this way.”

“What’s your suggestion?” Ronon crossed his arms on his chest, glaring down at Radek.

“We should return to the gate, get Rodney, and get another jumper through. We can search for them much more effectively from the air, and then we will have the jumper’s weapons if we run into the cruiser or Wraith Darts.” Radek stood up to his not very impressive height. “Otherwise we are just wasting time wandering around that might be spent getting back to the gate.”

“You know where the gate is?” Ronon asked skeptically.

Radek opened the laptop. “I have the telemetry from our survey as we flew over. I was patched into the jumper’s navigational computer. Yes, I know exactly where the gate is. Unfortunately, it’s quite a distance, about 900 km. We are approximately 350 km from the mainland, on one of an archipelago of islands in a sub tropical sea. The coastal regions appeared inhabited, though there is an interior desert which contains the actual location of the gate. Still, it’s doable.”

Ronon looked at the map, his eyes darting keenly from one thing to another, fingers nimble on the keys as he focused in on first one place, then another. One always forgets, Radek thought, that he came from an industrial world. Much of Ronon’s idea of technology was the same pre-war stuff he’d grown up with. Antiquated, to be sure, from the perspective of forty years later in the West, but hardly primitive. The idea of a keyboard, for example, was not new to Ronon. Did they have manual typewriters on Sateda? Presumably, if they had printing. Radek had learned to type his first year in polytechnique on a manual typewriter. Electric typewriters were for the offices of important men. He had found this manual one junked and had made it work, though there were some keys that stuck. To this day he always banged the C on his keyboards out of force of habit.

“What we need, yes? A map of where we are going.” Radek said.

Ronon grinned. “Exactly what we need.” He handed the laptop back. “But first we need a way off this island. There’s a fishing village down at the end not too far away. We steal a boat, head for the mainland. Sound good?”

“Sounds excellent,” Radek said, and grinned back. Ronon was, on the whole, less trouble to work with than Rodney. “But I believe overpowering the fishermen is your part.”

In the end it was more a matter of stealing than overpowering. The fishing boats were pulled up on the beach, single masted, sails furled, and there was no guard. Who would steal them, if there was no one on the island except the fishermen and their families? About the half circle of white beach, a few houses stood above the high tide line, while more clustered back in the shade of the trees. There were no lights and no one stirred.

“Good. There are no dogs,” Radek whispered, then wondered if there were dogs in the Pegasus Galaxy at all. No one had mentioned them, but it seemed that wherever people went their dogs went too, and the domestication of the dog far predated the Ancients’ last contacts between Earth and the Pegasus Galaxy.

Ronon glanced at him sideways. “No guards either. Follow me.”

They slipped across the sand, feeling extremely vulnerable silhouetted against the white sand. Ronon put his shoulder to the prow of one of the smallest boats, shoving. It slid backwards, splashing as the surf came up around it.

“Get in!” Ronon hissed.

Radek didn’t have to be told twice. Knee deep in water, he scrambled aboard, managing to fall on his nose in the bottom in the process. Several inches of water slimy with old bits of fish sloshed around, distinctly unappetizing. A pair of oars lay in the bottom, and he managed to hoist one of them up — surprisingly heavy, he thought — nearly hitting Ronon in the head as he stuck his head over the side.

“Sorry,” Radek whispered.

Ronon said nothing, only shoved. The fishing boat moved backwards into the water, scraping against the sandy bottom with a sound that seemed awfully loud to Radek. Of course it probably wasn’t, with both wind and waves for company, but to him it was as loud as an alarm.

On the beach nothing stirred.

Ronon shoved again, and the boat rocked as it came free, Ronon chest deep in the swelling rollers. One broke over him, and he threw his head back, shaking water from his long hair with an expression that spoke more of exhilaration than fear.

It must be nice, Radek thought. He, on the other hand, was once again reminded why he hated to go offworld. Something always went wrong. Sometimes it was a big thing, sometimes it was a small thing. Sometimes one was bitten by ants. Other times one was lost on a strange planet with only Ronon Dex for company. But something always went wrong.