SGA - 14 - Death Game (13 page)

Mel shrugged. “I figured. You can’t afford it right now, not knowing whether you’ll even be here next semester. Don’t worry about it. I just thought it might cheer you up.”

“It’s great, Mel. It’s just what I wanted and I didn’t think I should get it because… But it’s just what I wanted. There’s some great stuff on here. Really great.”

She smiled and leaned over, turning the LP boxed set. “I thought you’d like the live versions. I know you’ve got a bunch of albums, but this is really complete.” She was sitting right next to him, and when she leaned forward he could see the edge of her bra, the slight rounding of her breasts.

“You’re really great,” he said. John took a deep breath. “You’re kind of my best friend right now.”

She looked thoughtful. “You’re a really good friend too, John.”

“I was wondering…”

“Wondering what?”

His shoulder touched hers, and it was just a turn of the head to kiss her, to feel her all warm and soft and startled. Curious. Assessing.

And then she drew away, a sad expression on her face.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Did I do something wrong?”

Mel shut her eyes and when she opened them again he thought he saw tears there. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t know that you… I thought we were just friends and I didn’t mean to make you think that…”

“What’s the matter? Is it somebody else?” She’d never said anything about a boyfriend. Maybe she had a boyfriend back in Arizona. Maybe she was having this long distance thing and she’d just never mentioned it and …

Mel took a deep breath. She looked like he thought he had on the phone with his father. “I don’t want you to hate me.”

“I won’t hate you,” he said. “I mean, if there’s some guy in Arizona or at another school…”

“I’m only into girls.” Her face was white.

“Oh.” He opened his mouth and shut it again. “But you don’t do lesbian things. I mean I don’t see you hanging around with the student group or taking women’s studies or…” He ran out of things that he thought lesbians might do.

“Because I’m in the Air Force!” Mel shouted at him. “John, do you have no sense? Do you have any idea what would happen if I got caught?”

“You’d lose your scholarship? A dishonorable discharge?”

Mel grabbed his hand and squeezed. “Having to repay four years out of state tuition is least of my worries. Try two years in Fort Leavenworth as a sex offender for crimes against nature. It’s a prison sentence, John. If you actually get caught after commissioning.”

“Then why the hell are you doing this? This is California…” There were a lot of lesbians in California. That kind of went without saying.

“Because I want to be an astronaut. And the way to be an astronaut is through the Air Force. I want to be an astronaut more than anything else in the world, and nothing is going to stop me from getting there.” Her voice was low and intense. “I’m TAC. I’m good. And I’m going to make it.” Mel blinked. “And now I’ve told you. I’ve put it all in your hands. I never tell anybody.”

“I’m not going to tell anybody,” John said.

She looked at him, and there was something familiar in that quirk of her mouth, an expression he’d seen in the mirror. “Good way to get back at me for turning you down.”

“I’d never do that. I’m your friend.”

“Seriously?”

“No, never.” He patted her hand awkwardly. “Never. I promise. I’ll never tell anybody. We’re friends. Friends stick together. There’s got to be something in life you can count on.”

“Yeah.”

Mel still looked like she was going to cry, and he hugged her. Not you know, boyfriend hug. Just friend hug. “You can count on me.”

“I do,” she said. She saw something in the papers around her, reached for it as he let go. “What’s that?”

“Oh. My scores.” He would have taken it, but she’d already opened the envelope.

“Jesus, John.” Mel unfolded it, skimming all of it. “You’re in the 99th percentile on the AFOQT. Do you have any idea how rare that it?”

“It means 99 guys out of a hundred do worse,” he said.

“It means you’re going to get approved for camp,” Mel said. “Lt. Col. Raymond will take you for sure. You’ll get a scholarship next fall if you want it. It means you might get rated TAC.”

“It’s kind of cool, isn’t it?”

Mel looked at him keenly. “It hasn’t sunk in, has it? With all the shit you’ve got going on?”

“I guess not.”

“This is the last time you grovel,” she said. “You go make nice this semester, and you’ll never have to grovel to your dad again. You won’t have to worry about paying for school, and you’ll have a job when you graduate. You can tell him off if you want to. Like, in May.”

“Yeah.” It ought to make him feel better, but it didn’t.

“And you’ll be twenty in May, right? It’s not like you’re a kid. He can’t do anything about it.”

“Yeah.” That would feel good in May, probably. It just seemed like a lifetime away. A lot further than the day after Christmas.

Mel put the paper in her lap, took his hands. “Look, John. We all make compromises with life. We have to. I have to suck it up and not date if I want to be an astronaut. And you have to suck it up and deal with your dad one more semester. Or we can walk away. That’s the choice. We can walk. But you and me, I think we’d rather fly.”

Chapter Thirteen

Dawn was coming over the sea. Radek thought perhaps it was the slowest dawn he’d ever seen in his life. He had seen dawn many times, studying through the night for an early morning exam to sleep in the afternoon, in a bar with friends laughing or crying over the day’s events, working all night to repair fried circuits while Atlantis’ dawn came up pearl soft, even dawn after a night spent in love. But he had never seen dawn take so long to come as it did clinging to an overturned fishing boat in the midst of an alien sea.

Ronon was silent. Perhaps he’d gone to sleep. Radek could see his chest rising and falling in the dim light, and it was hardly cold enough for Ronon to be succumbing to hypothermia.

At last the sun rose out of the sea, a sliver of unbearable brightness sliding over the horizon, preceded by the pink and azure shades of dawn. This was why the ancients had sung praises of the sun, Radek thought. After a night as long as this, he felt like bursting into hymns himself.

Ronon stirred, one hand dipping over the side into the water. He sat up abruptly, flailing as he woke, and Radek held on tight.

“Don’t move so quickly!” he said. The last thing they needed was to somehow sink their frail refuge.

Ronon grabbed on, centering himself on the hull. “Shit.” The word encompassed a world of disappointment.

“Yes, we are still lost at sea. No, I have not seen a rescue jumper. No, I have not seen anybody,” Radek said.

“Right.” Ronon blinked, looking east into the dawn.

“They will be looking for us by now. But we do not have the radios. Fortunately it is clear and if they fly low enough they may see us.”

Perhaps leaving the island had been…precipitous. Perhaps it would have been better to stay where the rescue team might reasonably have looked for them. But of course they had not meant to lose the radios. And caution had never been his strong suit.

“Yeah.” Ronon considered. “I wonder if we can turn the boat over.”

“We can try,” Radek said. It was clear and the seas were calm. If they could flip the hull, perhaps they could have something like a working boat again. The waterlogged boat would be heavy, but Ronon was strong.

“Let’s give it a go,” Ronon said, and slid off the hull into the water beside.

“Ok.” Radek slid off on the same side. The water was colder than yesterday, but not chill. The storm, no doubt. A thermal layer of cold rainwater that would last until the sun warmed it.

Ronon treaded water holding onto the side of the boat. “Ok, when I say lift, lift. Let’s see if we can flip it over. Lift!”

Radek lifted. It didn’t seem to make much difference. He could not lift higher than his chest without even the ground to push against.

They put it down and considered.

“Let me try something,” Ronon said. “Can you let go and just swim a minute?”

“Of course,” Radek said. He did.

Ronon took a deep breath, then pushed himself down underwater, letting go of the side of the boat. For a long moment he vanished beneath the waves.

Then one hand appeared, grasping at the side of the boat in a strong grip, though Radek didn’t see the rest of him anywhere. It suddenly occurred to him that Ronon had come up under the boat.

With a massive heave, the side of the boat rose from the surface, flipping in the other direction as Ronon let go. Wallowing, it came to rest right side up. Ronon surfaced beside it, flipping the water out of his long braids.

“Fantastic!” Radek exclaimed. “You are Hercules, my friend!”

“Whoever,” Ronon said, and swam the couple of lengths to the side. “Let’s start bailing.” The boat was half full of water, but with the seas calm surely they could bail it clear if they…

“Do we have anything to bail with?”

Ronon pulled himself over the side and pulled up the rusty bucket secured to the boat with a length of sodden rope. “Yes.”

Radek swam over to the side, and Ronon reached down to help him aboard. “Perfect. Our luck has changed!”

They began bailing, and Radek considered how much better the world looked from the right side of the boat. Infinitely better. They might still be lost in the middle of an alien sea, but at least they were no longer swimming. They might get out of this yet, turn this into the kind of story that someday no one would believe.
Once I was shipwrecked with this friend of mine in a storm at night…
No one will credit it, but he would tell it anyway.

***

“They’re not here,” Lorne said.

Rodney fought his way up from strange unsettled dreams, and for a moment he couldn’t remember where he was. Asleep. In the jumper. With early morning sunlight glancing off the front window. The tail gate was down, and he could hear people moving around while a cool sea breeze played around the corners of the seats.

“Dr. McKay?” Lorne shook his shoulder gently. “They’re not here. We’ve looked all over the area around the Ancient ruins. There’s no sign of them now. They were here a while ago, we think. We found some footprints and places where the grass was compressed from someone sitting or crouching, but there’s nobody around at all. I’ve sent Cadman and a team down to the village at the other end of the island in case they went looking for food and they’re hanging around down there.”

“Zelenka and Ronon aren’t here?” Rodney felt he was being a little slow on the uptake.

“No,” Lorne said again patiently. “They’re not here now.” He looked at Rodney with an expression Rodney thought was almost kind. “We let you sleep while we looked around since you’d been up all night. They might have gone down to the village. Cadman’s checking it out, like I said.”

“You let Cadman check it out?” For some reason that sounded alarming to Rodney.

Lorne stiffened. “Look, Cadman’s a good kid. Don’t give her a rough time for something that wasn’t her fault.”

“I wasn’t. I…”

“Good,” Lorne said. “She’s a good kid, and she’ll make contact without shooting up the place. I like that.”

“Yes, of course.” Rodney felt himself perilously close to turning red. It was true that what had happened hadn’t been Cadman’s fault. She hadn’t asked to be sucked up by that Wraith Dart anymore than he had. It wasn’t her fault they’d been stuck sharing a body for three days while Zelenka tried to figure out how to fix it. If it was anybody’s fault it was Zelenka’s. Three days to reverse engineer a Wraith culling beam? He could have done it in two, if he hadn’t had Cadman in his head. But if he hadn’t had Cadman in his head, they wouldn’t have needed to do it.

“There’s no sign of hostiles or any kind of action,” Lorne said. “No casings, no bullet scrapes on the walls. Ronon wouldn’t go down without a fight. I’m guessing that Zelenka and Ronon got sick of waiting around and left. We just need to figure out where they went.”

“The lifesign detector isn’t much use,” Rodney mused. “The planet’s full of humans whose lifesigns are indistinguishable from ours.”

“We’ve been making radio calls periodically,” Lorne said. “No answer yet. If we need to, we can fly a search pattern making calls, but that’s going to take a while. It’s a big planet.”

“And it’s better to pick up Zelenka and Ronon before we start hunting for Sheppard,” Rodney said. “I get that. Especially since with the other jumper Sheppard could be anywhere.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Lorne said. He gave Rodney’s shoulder a squeeze. “You did your bit fixing the jumper, doc. This is my bit.”

Rodney nodded. Coffee would clear his head, but there wasn’t any, and a few hours sleep had left him bleary. Just as well to sit still for a few minutes. There was no need to jump up and run around until Cadman got back from walking however far it was to the village and back. More waste of time, as the jumper could have had her there in moments. But perhaps it would intimidate the villagers the way Cadman on foot wouldn’t.

Lorne sank down into the pilot’s seat. He looked out the windscreen at the Ancient ruins and the pristine sky with something like satisfaction. “There’s some pretty keen stuff around here.”

“If you like alien planets and being shot at,” Rodney said.

Lorne shrugged. “I came here from the SGC, doc. I’ve seen my share of alien planets and been shot at before. I was on P3X-403 when we had that little problem with the Unas.” He leaned back in the seat. “This isn’t all that different, except you never get to go home at night and have a beer.”

“Yes, that would be a big difference,” Rodney said sharply. “I was at the SGC too. It’s entirely different.”

Lorne cocked his eyebrows at him. “Yeah, but I hear you were a lab rat at the SGC. You weren’t on a gate team.”

“If by lab rat you mean scientist,” Rodney began.

Lorne grinned. “By the way, what’s the story about you and Lt. Colonel Carter?”

“Carter?” Rodney gulped.

“I heard you had some big thing going on.”

“Oh, that thing.” Rodney leaned back in his chair, assuming what he liked to think of as a worldly slouch. “Well, you know. Long distance relationships are hard to make work.” He put his head back against the head rest and gave Lorne a mysterious smile. “Sam is certainly hot. And she’s got those gorgeous eyes. But you know how it is. Duty calls. The Atlantis Expedition needed me.”

“Oh.” Lorne looked momentarily confused. “I thought she hated your guts and said she hoped you were transferred to Siberia.”

“She said that?” Rodney sat upright abruptly. “No no no. She did not. It’s just that our working relationship was fraught with unresolved sexual tension. It’s kind of perverse, really, that her admiration for my professional acumen was seasoned both by jealousy and desire.”

“I thought she said you were a jerk and Atlantis could have you.”

“Obviously Sam has very strong feelings about me,” Rodney said with dignity. “And I think that out of regard for her privacy we should probably stop discussing them.”

“Ok.” Lorne still looked confused. “Just asking. You hear all kinds of things at the SGC, and if ten percent of them were true…”

“If ten percent of them were true, every gate team would be an orgy to go,” Rodney said. “And I’m here to tell you it’s not.”

“My team is three Marines,” Lorne said. “I don’t really think we’re in orgy territory.”

Out the front of the windscreen they saw Cadman emerge from the trees, walking quickly toward the jumper.

Lorne got to his feet, and Rodney heard his footsteps on the metal decking in the back of the ship. “What’s the story?”

***

Perhaps, Radek thought, they might survive this. Perhaps they might even get this well in hand. They were in a boat that was right side up, with the sodden and torn sail spread out over it to dry in the sun, and had daylight and calm seas. They had no water, and by now Radek was beginning to get thirsty, but it was not quite yet a pressing problem. Surely many of the heroes of literature had been in similar and worse positions. Edmond Dantes, for example. He had gotten out of a situation very like this one. Only Radek could not quite remember how. He had read the book so long ago.

Ronon shaded his eyes with his hand. Radek couldn’t see what he might be looking at even with his glasses. “What do you see?” he asked.

Ronon squinted. “Shadow on the horizon. Might be an island.”

“That would be good, yes?”

“Yeah, except for the no way to get over there part,” Ronon said. “No oars, and the sail’s not dry enough to get up yet.”

“It will dry soon, surely. And then we can raise it again somehow.”

“The sea’s running pretty strong still,” Ronon said. “It’s hard to tell, but I think we’re being pulled pretty much west at a good speed. We’re going to wind up a whole lot north of where we intended.”

“There is nothing for that, is there?” Radek said. “Once we have the sail to give us speed for steerage, then we can try to use the rudder. But the sail will not dry faster than it will.” He looked at Ronon over the top of his glasses. “This is an exercise in frustration, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Someday we will laugh about this,” Radek said.

“It isn’t funny.”

“You know what I mean.” Radek shrugged and shaded his eyes as well, looking off to the west. He could see nothing. Haze blurred into distance.

“It means you laugh at things that aren’t funny,” Ronon said.

“Sometimes one must laugh,” Radek said. “Don’t you ever laugh at yourself?”

“I’m not funny.”

Radek put his head to the side, not quite certain if Ronon was putting him on or not. “Perhaps you are not,” he said. “But don’t funny things ever happen to you?”

“No,” Ronon said flatly.

Perhaps they did not. There was very little in seven years as a runner that any sane person could find funny. Maybe Ronon’s sense of humor was dead with all the rest of it. And yet he had thought he had heard, in the story in the dark, a different man than the dour one who sat before him. Once he had been a young man, fervent and generous, and perhaps that person lived in him still. He had been only a few weeks in Atlantis. Perhaps the man he had once been was not dead, but only buried within the man he had become.

“Do you like adventure books?” Radek asked.

Ronon looked at him, glancing away from the horizon. “Why?”

“There is a book you might like. I will loan it to you when we get back. I think it will appeal to you.”

He thought Ronon might snort, but instead he shoved his hair back out of his face in the freshening wind. “What’s it about?”

“It’s about a man who is sent to prison for eleven years for a crime he did not commit, accused by his faithless friends. And it’s about how he escapes from prison and gets revenge on them.”

Ronon’s eyebrows rose. “Is there fighting?”

“Quite a lot,” Radek said. “And there is an honor duel. And pirates. And bandits. And a beautiful woman. And a treasure.”

“Ok,” Ronon said.

It took Radek a moment to realize what he meant. “Ok, you’d like the book?”

“Yeah.” Ronon lifted his hand to his eyes again. “That sounds pretty good.”

“Then, my friend, when we get back I shall introduce you to the Count of Monte Cristo,” Radek said triumphantly. “There is even a point in it where he is lost at sea, just as we are now.”