"The old friend who fell down the stairs?"
"Yeah. Except, he didn't call it debriefing. And he didn't tell me he was working for their intelligence office. That might have made even me think twice," Ronon said bitterly. "Marcon pretended to be my friend. I wanted to belong somewhere, he offered the solution. I was a warrior after all. Why not join their army? Why not join the Behemoth?"
Sipping some more wine, Teyla tried to find a reason why this revelation should have been so difficult to make and failed. "So the Behemoth is their army?"
"That's what I thought too, until I joined." Ronon snorted, somewhere between derision and disgust. "The Ancestors control it and it's designed to stop the soldiers from rising against them, but ultimately the Behemoth is… an entity that's fueled by the basest instincts of every man in that army. It's hedonistic and violent, it's cruel, it's insatiable, and it feeds on pain and fear. It's everything that's worst in a mercenary, magnified a thousand times and given sentience. And it makes you do exactly what it wants you to do. It made me do stuff that-"
"How?" Teyla cut in because she couldn't bear what she was hearing in his voice.
He blew out a breath, and when he continued he sounded vaguely relieved at having been interrupted. "They tell you that you need to be inoculated against a bunch of diseases, but what those shots actually contain is a few zillion nano-robots that will float into your brain and start rewiring it. The process is… unpleasant.
"It gets better," he said when she let slip a small gasp of dismay. "Don't ask me how it works-maybe Beckett could explain it, I can't-but the nano-robots hook you into this entity, the Behemoth. That's what joining means; your mind becomes part of this group consciousness. And from that moment on the Behemoth will determine what you do and how you do it and it'll monitor every thought and emotion, and if you step or think or feel out of line you get zapped, `cos obviously the nano-robots have access to the pain center in your brain. It's perfect."
Abright crash somewhere at the back at of the cockpit made Teyla jump, then she realized that he must have hurled his glass against the wall. "Apparently not so perfect," she observed quietly. "You managed to break away. That's what happened back at the laboratory, wasn't it?"
The movement was barely audible, and its very quietness painted the picture for her. Fast and smooth as a predator he crossed the cockpit, and then she sensed him right in front of her, trapping her. His hands clamped on the armrests of her seat, and she felt the warmth from his body, smelled the wine on his breath.
"Who says I broke away?" he hissed. "Maybe I've been doing what the Behemoth wanted me to do all along. Marcon ordered me to be your Marcon. To squeeze every last bit of information out of you, especially all the details on how you got the Stargate to work. I've done that, haven't I? Now that I've got the information, I'm to `dispose' of you. I might do that any moment, whether I like it or not. You can't possibly know what I'll do. Nobody can. Even I can't."
"What if you're wrong? What if I can?" Teyla threw it at him like a challenge. "What if I told you that there's nothing I can see that is not completely and exclusively Ronon Dex?"
"How would you-" He cut himself off, drew back, some of the tension sloughing off him. "That gene of yours? Telepathy? I thought that only worked with Wraith."
"As I pointed out to Major Sheppard, I've had plenty of time to practice." She wished she could see his eyes. It'd be easier to tell whether or not he believed her. "There is nothing there, Ronon, I swear. Nothing but you."
That presence hovering above her lifted, and a second later she heard Ronon fling himself heavily into the pilot's seat. "When Marcon gave me that order, I knew I couldn't do it," he whispered. "I told myself that, this once, I'd win, even if it killed me. Only, I told myself the same thing more times than I can count. And I let myself fail every time. A few days ago, I beheaded a boy whose only crime was to defend his home… What does that make me, Teyla?"
"It makes you a man who keeps trying against all odds until he succeeds," she replied just as softly. "I don't see anything wrong with that. On the contrary."
"I could have saved that kid if I'd tried harder!"
"No, you couldn't. Some other soldier would have killed him, and you know it." For a moment she struggled with the impulse to touch him, then curbed it-he wouldn't let her. Not now. "There's another consideration," she added, "even if it is a little selfish; if you had succeeded in breaking away sooner, we'd be dead. If what you're telling me about the Ancestors here is true, there is no way you would have been allowed to live. Somebody else would have been ordered to deal with me, and I very much doubt he would have resisted the Behemoth.
.,you saved both our lives, Ronon. Personally, I prefer being alive. Besides, on the more altruistic side, the death of either one of us likely would have made Charybdis irreversible."
"You're saying this was fate?" Ronon sounded huffy with disbelief-which was a vast improvement on despondency.
"I am not saying anything." She shrugged. "Except perhaps that lately I've come up against a great many unlikely coincidences."
"No such thing as co-"
A warning klaxon went off, sawing the air until Ronon found the control that switched it off. She heard soft tapping as his fingers danced over touch pads, and then the static buzz of data scrolling across a holographic screen. No point in even guessing at what he was doing. He'd tell her soon enough; she'd just have to be patient. Always patience. Teyla barely suppressed a snarl. Patience wasn't in her genes.
Her answer came when the whine of the engines dropped in pitch and a barely perceptible shudder traveled through the vessel-they had dropped out of hyperspace.
"This thing is faster than I expected it to be." Ronon was using that absurdly proud tone all men seemed compelled to adopt when speaking of ships. "That was a proximity warning. We're here."
"And where is here?"
"Abandoned mining planet. I used to push guard duty here, until the naquada ran out. About as exciting as watching grass grow. But it's deserted, and it's got a gate."
Reentry fell somewhat short of routine, and Teyla nursed a sneaking suspicion that Ronon was making up flight path and procedure as he went along. On several occasions the anti-gray boosters broke into protesting howls while vicious bumps and jolts taxed the inertial dampeners to their limits and beyond. At last, and with a final insane lurch, the transporter bounced to a halt and its engines shut down one by one, until only the steady hum of the anti-gray drive remained audible.
"Smooth," she remarked a little weakly, not sure if all relevant pieces were still attached to her body. "Who taught you to fly? Rodney McKay?"
"Hey, I got us down!"
"Yes."
"And we're practically on top of the gate."
"Good." She took practically to mean that the gate was still standing.
Twenty minutes later they stepped off the ramp and into a patch of warm evening sunshine that eased the goose bumps off Teyla's skin. In the shadows beneath the transporter's belly the air had been chilly. A steady swish of tree tops in the breeze told her that they had to be in or near a forest. Pine needles rustled under her soles, sent up a cloud of scent at every step, and somewhere above chirped a bird. After the mayhem of the Ancestors' home planet, this struck her as incongruously serene.
"It's beautiful."
Ronon barked a laugh, caught himself and squeezed her hand. "Be glad you can't see it. They strip-mined. Smells a lot better than it looks, I suppose… DHD's right over there. Wait here while I dial. You said it doesn't matter which planet?"
"It doesn't," she replied, wondering which address he'd dial. Sateda? More than likely. She'd dialed Athos.