With these men’s assistance, Teyla had quickly discovered that the Dalerans’ skills with nets and bolas were not limited to warriors and hunters. One-on-one, few could match the fighting skills of a Wraith. But the nets were an effective way to disable the Wraith long enough to kill the creatures with axes.
As the night wore on and their ranks had been swelled by more and more arrivals, the large square at the base of Lisera’s Station, which had become their new Command Center, filled with the sounds of clanking steel. In their shops, blacksmiths were working overtime to fashion or adjust chest armor, while their apprentices sat without rest at grinding wheels, sharpening axes and other blades. Women brought pots of soup and jugs of weak ale to everyone, or sat around fires braiding nets and fashioning bolas. Every so often, someone would break into song: haunting melodies and sad love songs, including ballads that tolf of Dalera, who had been cast aside by the Ancestors for loving a man.
Amid all of it, there was a sense of renewed hope, for the Shields had been passed around and word was spreading fast. More and more Genes were being discovered each hour. Perhaps they would be enough.
Before long, though, the mood began to shift. In a gathering of this type, any information, good or bad, diffused quickly. Teyla could sense the tone of this news before it reached her. “What is it?” she asked one of the two warriors who now stayed faithfully by her side.
“Reports from the northwest wall,” the young man replied. “The lookouts there have seen the blackwater flowing downstream in unimaginable amounts.”
“That is what we wished to happen.” She was already anticipating the fall of the ‘other shoe,’ as the Major might have said.
The warrior bowed his head. “The blackwater flows down the wrong channel.”
Really, there was no excuse for not having seen the solution sooner. It had to have been all the xylene fumes. Or maybe the toluene.
“Almost there,” came the reassuring voice of the warrior.
“We had better damn well be,” Rodney growled. They’d half-dragged and half-floated the entire boom contraption upstream past the truly obnoxious cascade of oil, which fortunately had the grace to spurt out far enough for them to walk between it and the base of the cliff. Supposedly the water across the shallowest part of the river, a short rapid, had only been waist deep. Because of the spring melt, it had turned out to be chest deep but between them, they’d managed to get the boom across the river, then down the northern bank to where the channels divided.
Rodney released his end of the oil-slicked timber pole, flexed his aching shoulders, and looked out. The men began walking the other end of the boom across the now shallow neck of the North Channel to the beach on the outside of the Citadel’s walls. Then they carried it a few meters south along the embankment to the point that Rodney had been trying to reach an hour earlier. Once the men had tied off their end, the current should grab the end that Rodney held, and push it at an angle across the entrance to the other side of the South Channel, just like shutting a gate. Unless his luck changed drastically, though, there was a chance that the chain of logs was too flexible and would need help. The men waiting on the southern shore couldn’t swim out to retrieve his end if it didn’t quite reach. Rodney glanced up at the planets. They had maybe five hours until dawn.
He had to do this. It wasn’t about self-absolution or self-survival. Well, okay, maybe that was a part of it, because if this failed the chances of him — any of them — surviving… On second thought, what good would come from knowing the odds? Forget it. This was about the fact that the arrogance he’d carried around with him most of his life really wasn’t based on some deep-seated insecurity. He was right, dammit! And the sheer frustration that resulted from people’s inability to see that he was right tended to aggravate the small but persistent kernel of doubt that had dogged him ever since his father had made very certain he understood the depths of his worthlessness.
“If he’d just told me that he’d never wanted me to have a dog in the first place—”
“What?”
“Cats are better, anyway. Here, take this.” Rodney handed the engineer — Artos? Amos? Whatever — his backpack, which was somehow still marginally free of oil. “Meet me on the other side.”
However unwittingly, he’d made some sort of emotional investment in these people, and he’d be damned if he was going to write them off just because the odds against them were so low that they no longer factored into the equation. That had never stopped Sam Carter. “If you could see me now, Colonel,” he muttered, and with a grim smile, grabbed his end of the boom and stepped out with into the river of oil.
Chapter Fifteen
“So far,” Ford reported to John, “more than a hundred Genes, including a lot of women and children, have turned up at the Command Center.”
Over a hundred, huh? Either Kesun had been a busy guy, or alternatively — and given the ages of some of those testing positive, this seemed more likely — some of the other Chosen had also been busy over the generations. Regardless, the gene was considerably more common here than on Earth. “That’s… great,” John replied distractedly, staring at the hive of activity along the eastern wall. Or, rather, where the wall used to be.
“I’ve been implementing the plan,” Ford added. “We’ve been sending pairs of Genes into villages. When one of them returns with the first transport full of evacuees, the second Gene hands his Shield to a warrior for a couple of seconds to blink it on and off. In the first two villages, the Darts started thinking they had the run of the place, and we took down a bunch of them. The Wraith can’t tell when or where the fields are going to activate, or for how long, and it’s confusing the hell out of them. For the moment, at least, they’ve backed off entirely.” Grinning with obvious enthusiasm, he added, “That means they have to assault the Citadel on foot.”
“Yeah, we got ‘em exactly where we want them.”
The tone of his voice must have alerted Ford, whose smile faded. “Sir? You don’t think they’ll strike the eastern wall?”
“Oh, that’s exactly where they’ll attack. Take a look down there.”
Peering through the smoky haze from hundreds of workmen’s torches, Ford said, “I can’t…” His voice trailed off, and he sucked his breath in. “I can see the channel!”
“Yep. What we have, Lieutenant, is a mile long wide open access to the Citadel. And there are two more sections of the wall at least as bad as this.”
Ford’s eyes widened in alarm. “What happened?”
“Another classic case of Murphy’s Law.” John kicked at a loose stone, irritated with himself for not having checked the wall earlier. He could not recall seeing any major breaches when he’d flown over the Citadel, but then it had been difficult to distinguish between the jumbled black rock of the buildings and the surrounding fortifications. Although he had anticipated some damage, it was not until seeing it from ground level that he had understood the extent.
The Lieutenant offered a weak facsimile of his previous grin. “Guess it’s not just the Marines they warn about that law, huh, sir?”
“Murphy was an Air Force captain.”
“Really?”
“I kid you not.” John gestured toward the scene below. “In terms of the Citadel, this is kind of the wrong side of the tracks. The area’s been neglected for years, probably centuries. The Dalerans have been looting the fortifications for building materials. That’s why Kesun gave an order for the engineers and warriors to rebuild this wall, which isn’t something we can finish in the—” He glanced at his watch to check the countdown. “Two hours we have left until dawn. So unless our resident genius pulls off a minor miracle, we’re in trouble.”