The guards galloped past him, Teyla, and McKay as though they'd never heard the prune's order. And maybe they hadn't. As they passed, Ronon could all but smell their fear. Something had happened, and he had a pretty good idea of-
"Sirs!" the leader of the detachment yelled. "They've broken down the gate. The city gate has fallen!"
Yep.
The timing couldn't have been better. A furtive glance over his shoulder told Ronon that even the prune had forgotten they so much as existed. He bustled his charges into the shadows beneath the archway and through to the portcullis. The sole guard, Teyla's friend, was still on duty, but Ronon was in no mood to enter into negotiations over why he was bringing his `captive' back out again, together with an escaped prisoner. Without so much as waiting for the surprised man to open his mouth, he landed a solid right hook on the tip of the guard's chin, knocking him out cold.
"That felt good!" Grunting happily, Ronon watched as the guard crumpled into an ungainly heap at his feet. "Been meaning to do that since I first met the guy."
"Glad to see those charm school classes are finally paying off," muttered McKay.
"If you can talk, you can run. Let's go!" Ronon grabbed Teyla's arm again and began guiding her down the lane at a brisk jog.
Here and there the rain-laden darkness above the rooftops had turned an ugly, pumping red; burning houses where he and Teyla had left their fire-starters. The noise was obvious now, or maybe he just hadn't been paying attention while they were still inside the fortress-screams of panic as people tried to get away from or extinguish the fires in the heart of the city and, from the direction of the gate, shouts and the metal-clad sounds of fighting.
Ronon winced at the thought of them having to push their way toward the gate against the onrush of an angry mob, but you didn't look a gift horse in the mouth. Besides-
"What in God's name have you started here?" McKay panted from behind, more than a little apprehension in his voice. "A palace revolution?"
"We didn't start it. Much."
The shouts were getting louder and below, where the lane joined the city's main thoroughfare, the speckled glitter of torches swung around the comer and surged up the road like a swarm of pissed-off fireflies. And the torches kept coming, a rising tide of lights and noise, sweeping their way. Ronon tried to weigh the risk of being spotted and potentially killed against his increasing sense of urgency when it came to stopping Charybdis. It was no contest, really. Death would delay them indefinitely.
A little further down the road gaped a dark alleyway, once closed off from the lane by a wooden gate that had half torn from its hinges and now creaked and clattered in the storm. He ducked in, pulling the others after him, and wedged the gate shut behind them.
The alley was cramped with items discarded from the houses on either side, heaps of trash harboring things that squealed and swished and scurried through the darkness. They stank, too. Or maybe that was the garbage. Ronon found he no longer cared. Somehow this unplanned stop and the semblance of safety provided by the rickety gate had shaken loose a mountain of fatigue, piled up since he forgot when-when, if ever, had he last slept? — and now hurtling down on him in an avalanche of exhaustion. All he wanted to do was obey that overwhelming urge to sit and rest, slide down the gate and slump into a puddle, heedless of the wet and cold. A pair of shivering shadows, McKay and Teyla had already done just that, finding a wall and an old crate respectively to lean against.
Out in the street the clanging of weapons and the shouts from throats roared hoarse closed in and wrapped him in a blanket of threat.
"Kill them!"
"Drive out the Ancients!"
"Torch the city!"
"Kill them all!"
Torchlight leaped through between the rickety planks of the gate, streaked unsteadily over his companions' faces-McKay's lips were moving; he seemed to be caught up in a spirited discussion with himself-and chased rodents back to their burrows amid squeaks of outrage. The throng outside, filling the street to bursting point, pushed and bumped against the gate again and again. Sooner or later the tired wood and metal would give. So much for safety.
We can't stay here," Ronon whispered. Ignoring their mutters of protest, he pulled Teyla and McKay to their feet again, flinched when one of them, in rising, knocked over a stack of garbage that came clattering around their feet. "Quiet!"
For a couple of seconds they all froze, but the stampede outside the gate continued unchanged. If anyone had heard the noise, they probably were too busy to investigate. More likely, though, the mob was deafened by its own racket. For now.
He guided Teyla's hand to grab an end of Rodney's shirt and pulled a reluctant McKay in behind himself. "Make sure he keeps moving!" he snapped at Teyla.
Then he set off at a staggering run, dodging trash and rodents tumbling in his path, barely daring to hope that this wouldn't be a dead end.
It wasn't.
Closed off by a similarly wonky affair as the gate they'd encountered first, the far end was a mere two hundred yards or so down the alley, and it led out onto an apparently deserted side street, so quiet you'd think this was a night like any other. Ronon held back on a sigh of relief until he'd checked and double-checked and found this first impression confirmed.
"Have you given any thought to where we go from here?" Teyla demanded.
He swallowed a sharp reply. She was right. She was right… He'd been thinking like a runner, as always, tackling each problem as it came along because all that mattered was surviving this second right now; only when you'd managed that you could start worrying about the next and the one after that and so on. Teyla was thinking like a leader of people, as always, wanting the larger picture to determine means of long-term survival.
We get out of the city, try to cross the river, and head for the Stargate," he said at last.
"And what then, Ronon?" she asked. "What then?"
"We-" He cut himself off, suddenly seeing what she was driving at. They had no DNA sample to guide them to another original, and unless McKay could figure out a way of making the Stargate work regardless… "We're stuck," he croaked.
"In other words, we're stuck." John Sheppard short-circuited the debate among the scientists by jumping to the inevitable conclusion. "We're stuck," he repeated with a finality that made Elizabeth shiver.
The faces around her settled into varying permutations of glum, and she very much doubted that hers looked any more cheerful. The woman who'd been with Radek and flown the glider sagged a little further into herself and absently stroked a bandage that covered a deep cut on her forehead. Two younger men who at some point had materialized from the crowd-apparently they'd been trying to get a colleague to the hospital earlier in the day-glanced at each other and, by mutual consent, seemed to suppress a shrug or sigh.
Once all the injured had been seen to and the physicians relinquished their claim, Radek and his friend, Selena, had requisitioned one of the triage tents. Together they'd moved it a good ways up the slope and improvised a field lab from six folding chairs, several laptops donated by concerned citizens, and a bagful of data crystals, which the two latecomers had volunteered to retrieve from the wrecked glider. It wasn't much to look at, but, as Radek had pointed out repeatedly, the processing power, while not exactly up to the standards they were used to from Atlantis, beat anything Earth could have rustled up at short notice. Elizabeth figured he was trying to reassure himself with the assertion.
Because, so far, the superior processing power had failed to get him or anybody else anywhere.