Jo Graham: Death Game

Lt. Colonel John Sheppard was sure he’d had better days. That he couldn’t remember any of them right now was just one disturbing thing. Another one was the great big crack in the puddle jumper’s front window. He was pretty sure that shouldn’t be there. He was almost sure that the view out the window shouldn’t be mostly dirt, with what looked like the trunks of several big trees in it. Also, the board of instruments under his chest shouldn’t be sputtering and smoking.

The latter seemed like a really bad thing, so he cautiously pulled himself off the panel and sat back in his seat. Moving hurt, but not as much as it would have if he’d broken ribs, which was something, but there was a long wet smear of blood across the docking indicators and the tactical controls, which couldn’t be good. Several droplets splashed against the board as he watched, and he put his hand to his head. It came away drenched in blood. Great. Holding his left hand to the general vicinity as tightly as possible, John looked around the jumper. What was he doing? Who was with him? He remembered the jumper descending into the gate room, the bright blue fire of the gate kindling. And after that… Nothing.

He took a deep breath and made himself let it out slowly. Some short term memory loss was normal with a head wound. He knew who he was and what he was doing, Lt. Colonel John Sheppard, with a gate team mission to M32-3R1 to check out an anomalous energy reading. He had punched the gate and…

John heard a moan behind him and scrambled backward out of the pilot’s seat as quickly as possible. “Teyla?”

She seemed to have been thrown clear of the copilot’s seat, lying crumpled between the pair of rear seats, her left arm twisted at an odd angle that couldn’t possibly be right. He heard the swift hiss of her breath as she moved, her fingers opening and closing against the floor.

“Hang on,” John said, kneeling beside her. “Careful.” When he bent over, blood ran down into his eyes and he dashed it away.

Teyla pushed herself up with her right arm, half rolling into a sitting position, her left arm clutched tight against her side. When she saw him her eyes widened. “John? You are bleeding badly.”

“I know,” he said. “I think I hit my head on the board.” He took his hand away. Yeah, it was bleeding hard.

Teyla reached up to get a look at it, wincing as she moved. Not good.

“Can you move your fingers?” he asked, reaching across to her left arm. She was wearing a jacket, and he couldn’t tell if the shape of her arm looked right or not.

“Yes,” she said, wiggling them. “But I cannot move my arm as it should or put any weight on it.” She leaned back against one of the rear seats, fumbling in her pants pockets with her right hand and producing a dressing. “But you are bleeding. Here, now.”

“Got it,” John said, unrolling it and putting it to his head, holding it in place as tightly as he could stand. Not good. There was a world of not good here. Teyla’s shoulder was probably broken or at least dislocated, and his head was bleeding hard — in addition to not being able to remember anything since he’d dialed the gate… A thought struck him and he glanced wildly around the jumper. “Where are Rodney and Ronon and Zelenka?”

“What do you mean, where are they?” Teyla looked at him with concern. “We dropped them off. Do you not remember?”

“No, actually.” He’d dialed the gate and watched it open, said something to Rodney, and then… Nothing. Everything after that was a blank until he’d picked himself up from the board in the crashed jumper.

“We left Rodney at the gate to try to figure out what had been done to the DHD because it was tampered with in a way he had never seen before,” Teyla said. “And we dropped off Radek and Ronon on the island with the Ancient ruins to investigate the energy readings because Rodney said it was a waste of time. You do not remember?” Her voice was concerned, and the two small lines between her brows deepened.

John shook his head slowly. Good to know no one else from his team was lying bleeding around here, but… “What happened?”

“We had just lifted off from the island when we spotted a Wraith cruiser. It was at low altitude and we did not see it at first, not before it got off a number of shots that disabled the cloaking mechanism. You ran hard at extremely low altitude, trying to put some distance between us, but without the cloak there wasn’t any way to hide, especially over open sea. We took fire and crossed the coast, and you said we were going down.” Teyla’s eyes were apprehensive. “Do you truly not remember any of this?”

“No.” A cruiser. That was very, very bad, much worse than a few Wraith Darts.

Teyla pushed herself up, using the seat to get to her feet. “John, we have to get out of here. The cruiser is still out there, undamaged, and it will be able to find our wreckage. We have to get as far away from it as we can before the Wraith arrive. We are in no shape to face them.”

“I have to agree with that,” John said, dragging himself upright. There were backpacks in the rear compartment with survival gear, and they needed ammunition and preferably the P90s, not just the sidearms they carried in the field. He tied the dressing on and grabbed for supplies, aware that Teyla was doing the same beside him, stuffing her pockets with various things as she usually did. He felt like he was missing something, but annoyingly couldn’t remember what. Something he’d lost along with what sounded like the better part of a couple of hours.

Dressings. The first aid kit. They were going to need that. Flares? Not so much so. A drill? He hoped not.

“We need to go,” he said, reaching for the emergency release for the back hatch. Even if he’d eluded the cruiser in the last moments of their flight, the wreckage of the jumper would be obvious from the air.

“Understood,” Teyla said, making a last awkward lunge for something.

The air that poured in the back was hot and dry, bright sunlight dazzling him. John blinked, his eyes watering as he refocused on blindingly blue sky and the tall palm trees that surrounded the jumper. It had come down in a grove of trees, the right drive pod sheared off entirely by the cruiser’s fire. Ok. That was pretty impressive looking if he did say so himself. The crippled jumper should have dropped like a rock instead of landing upright and more or less level, a long scar through the trees marking their passage. He must have used the trees to bleed off airspeed and soften the crash. Nice, but even more easily spotted from above. He might as well have drawn a big arrow across the landscape pointing to them.

Teyla dragged at his arm with her good hand. “Come on, John. We must go.”

The trees seemed thicker in one direction, and so they set off toward the heavier cover, though there was very little undergrowth. Taller palm trees shaded shorter, but the sky was always visible, lambent and bright through the trees above. It was also hot. That was going to get old fast. But it wasn’t humid. Not a jungle. An oasis. Beyond the edges of the trees were the stark lines of desert, sand and ridges of stone showing gold and white under the glaring sun.

John stopped and swore. That limited their options a lot. He knew all too well that two people trekking across the desert were very, very vulnerable, not to mention that it would be incredibly stupid to set off across it without any idea where they were going. He must have seen from the air. They’d flown this way, dodging the cruiser. He must have seen how the course lay, how far they were from the sea and the island where they’d left Zelenka and Ronon, from more hospitable areas. But he couldn’t remember.