“Oh, right.” John sprawled on one of the benches while McKay bent over the largest station and tapped the touch-pads. John closed his eyes, forced the dizziness down. “Can you find Dorane?”
“Yes, yes, yes, hold on. Let me check the Stargate… Oh.”
“What?” John opened his eyes, saw McKay staring grimly at the flickering screen. He shoved himself upright, nearly lurching to the floor as he leaned forward to see.
It was a long-distance view of the Stargate, in color though fuzzy and pixilated as the system tried to enlarge the distant image. The ’gate held an active wormhole, and a puddlejumper hovered in front of it. Their puddlejumper. John swore.
McKay spread his hands helplessly, his face bleak. “There’s nothing I can do. These are just sensors, cameras, there’s no communications equipment. No weapons. Though if we had weapons what would we do? He’s got our people in there.”
John shook his head, sick. It wasn’t McKay’s fault. “He’ll come back for the Koan, the ones that still follow his orders. After he gets control of our ’gate.”
The tiny jumper on the screen vanished into the worm-hole’s event horizon.
Confusion reigned in the jumper bay for some time before Elizabeth Weir found herself facing their new guest. Lieutenant Ford and Private Kinjo had both been injured and taken off on gurneys, and Dr. Corrigan had seemed confused and probably needed to go to the medlab as well. She had gotten the most information out of Dr. Kavanagh, upset and barely coherent himself. He had told her that they had encountered a group of about fifty refugees from another world hiding in the ruins, that there had been a Wraith attack, and that Dr. Kolesnikova and Corporal Boerne had been killed. The Wraith had withdrawn temporarily but the Stargate was such a distance from the repository that the refugees were afraid to approach it in daylight. They had agreed to come out once night fell.
Boerne and Kolesnikova. Elizabeth felt it like a little stab in the heart. Two more dead. She had taken a sharp breath and asked, “Where are Major Sheppard and Rodney?” The medical team had cleared out of the back of the puddlejumper, and she could see now that no one else was aboard. “Who flew the jumper back?”
“It was Dorane,” Kavanagh had said, already backing away from her, avoiding her eyes and her first question. “His people have the Ancient gene as well.”
Now, facing Dorane and Teyla in the relative quiet of the jumper bay, with Zelenka, Sergeant Bates, and the Marine security detail gathered around her, she could finally ask the question again.
Dorane was saying, “I would ask you to send a gateship back for the rest of my people, but they feel they must wait until nightfall, when they can go to the Stargate under the cover of darkness.”
“Yes, of course. Are Major Sheppard and Dr. McKay waiting with them?” Ignoring the tightness in her chest, Elizabeth tried to keep her eyes on their visitor, not Teyla. The other woman looked awful, her face drawn and ill, and the look in her eyes told Elizabeth she had seen something terrible. She knew Sheppard would have stayed behind to make sure the stranded refugees reached the Stargate safely, but would he have kept Rodney with him rather than Teyla?
Dorane looked startled and uncertain. “Did no one tell you?” He shook his head, spreading his hands regretfully. “I am sorry, but there was nothing we could do. In the Wraith attack — They are gone.”
John was in that drifting state of consciousness again. He couldn’t remember how long he had been here, or why it was happening. The heat came and went in cycles, as if he was staked out on a beach under the hottest sun imaginable, with only an occasional wave washing up high enough to give him some relief.
There were long periods where he was convinced that he had been taken by the Wraith.
Sometimes it was the Wraith from the downed supply ship, and it had him pinned to the floor of the jumper, sucking his life out slowly, trying to make him unlock the controls so it could go to Atlantis. Sometimes he was webbed up in one of those little cubbies, sick with fear and writhing uselessly against the sticky bonds, hearing familiar voices — Rodney, Teyla, Ford, Elizabeth, Kolesnikova, Zelenka, Stackhouse, Beckett, Hailing, Jinto — calling frantically to each other somewhere in the darkness of the hive ship.
Fortunately for John’s sanity, there were times he knew clearly that he was badly ill and that Rodney was trying to take care of him, making him sit up to drink water or just pouring it down his throat when he was so out of it he refused to drink. He remembered having several conversations where he kept asking questions and fading out when Rodney tried to answer him.
When John finally woke up, everything was still weirdly vague and dreamlike. He was lying on an uncomfortably hard floor in a small rock-walled room, and he couldn’t remember much of the immediate past. He could see, because there was a small pocket flashlight balanced on its base, pointing upward so it mostly lit the little space. His head was propped on a pack which felt like it was stuffed with hammers. Large awkwardly-shaped hammers.
The fever was burning through him, making his own body feel distant and strange; his skin felt too tight, as if it had shrunk a little in the heat. He remembered that they had been moving around a lot, finding different places to hide. McKay had seen the Koan coming toward the security area on the detector, and they had had to run for it or, in John’s case, hobble for it. They couldn’t afford to be boxed in, for the Koan to trap them in a room and starve them out.
He shifted a little and winced. His leg was throbbing where the Koan had clawed him, and his wrist still hurt; McKay had had a small medical kit in his pack and had wanted to use most of the contents on him. John had argued him down to pouring antiseptic into the punctures and bandaging his wrist, and he had taken a couple of antibiotics. Other than that, there wasn’t much else to be done. They had an epinephrine hypo McKay kept because he was allergic to just about everything;
it would come in handy if John went into respiratory arrest, but it wouldn’t do a damn thing for his other problems.
Head swimming, he pushed himself up enough to see that there was a half-empty water bottle, a couple of power bars, and the medical kit stacked neatly within easy reach. There was no sign of McKay.
He left. Good, John thought, easing back down onto the hammer-stuffed pack. He remembered ordering Rodney to leave, several times. You got your way. He followed your orders. You can lie here and die alone. Yay for you. It didn’t matter. John was history, and Rodney had to stop Dorane from reaching Atlantis.
But was it really a good idea to send an astrophysicist who was an average shot at best and had barely started to learn unarmed combat after a ten-thousand-year-old man who had dozens of genetically-altered Koan to back him up, a puddle-jumper, and who was holding a few of your friends as helpless mind-controlled hostages?
You know, if you sent Rodney off to die, you’ll never know. You’ll die and rot or turn into a Koan and spend your short life eating other Koan, because Dorane didn’t leave any food. Or maybe the smart ones went off into the woods or learned how to fish in the ocean. He didn’t see why they shouldn’t.
Then John hazily remembered that they had seen the jumper go through the ’gate. Dorane would have to come back for the Koan, but that wouldn’t take long. And they were stuck down here, trapped by the Koan Dorane hadn’t wanted to take along. And even if they got up there, how could they stop them? McKay had said he only had one extra clip for the pistol. He tried to sit up again and something fell off his chest. He picked it up, realizing it was a folded square of paper.
It took him a while to get his eyes focused well enough to read it. It said, “Back soon,” and was signed Dr. Rodney McKay, Ph.D., like John might have thought somebody else had left it. He crumpled the note and dropped back on the pack, groaning. “God, Rodney, don’t get yourself killed.”,