Ars Arboreous, pt 2
*
John hadn’t come up with any workable ideas for escape by the time the aliens came, mostly because at some point he’d fallen asleep. The shuffling footsteps and the growing light roused him. It took some effort to wake up completely; he felt heavy all over, his head buzzed and his eyes felt full of sand. He got himself sitting upright, but spent the time it took the aliens to open the cell and enter fighting down nausea as the room swam.
“Hi,” he said, and then swallowed a couple of times to wet his dry mouth and throat. “Letting me go?”
One of the aliens carried an incredibly bright lamp on a stick; the light half-blinded him at first and made his eyes water. He noticed once he could see again that it also carried a weapon, although the only weapon aimed at him was in the hands of another, lampless alien. The weapons reminded him a little of Ronon’s favorite gun, because the trigger ends were topped with big, red glowy spheres. They were longer, though, and more narrow than Ronon’s gun. He hadn’t seen them in action yet, and he hoped not to.
“Barring that, I wouldn’t say no to something to eat, maybe some water,” he said, and then kind of wished he hadn’t mentioned food. The thought made his stomach both grumble emptily as well as contemplate turning inside out.
In the answering silence he let his eyes wander around the cell, keeping a peripheral eye on the aliens. It never hurt, as far as he was concerned, to demonstrate lack of fear to hostiles, but mostly he just wanted to look around. Now that everything was lit up, he was having all kinds of interesting revelations.
He snapped his attention fully back to his visitors as a third alien approached him. This one had no lamp and no weapon, just an air of determination. John scooted sideways when it crouched down near him and reached for his leg.
“Don’t touch that,” he said. “Especially if you’re the same guy who was fucking around with it before. Not unless you have a really good malpractice lawyer – hey --”
The muzzle of a gun caught him in the chest, pushing him down to his elbows. He refused to drop all the way back, and watched as the unarmed alien took hold of the ankle of his bad leg.
In the close quarters, he couldn’t help but notice how the aliens smelled. It wasn’t a bad smell, but it was sharp, and weirdly familiar. It reminded him a little of the scent inside a sauna, of the heated wood and stone. It also unfortunately got stronger the longer they stayed.
The alien examining his leg was surprisingly gentle. John’s shredded pant leg was stiff and tacky with blood and stuck to his skin, but the alien plucked at it slowly until it came away, exposing the wounds.
John had felt the lumpy dressing in the dark – some kind of gauzy stuff he’d been unable to pick off, trapping a squishy goo over the entrance and exit wounds. Now he saw that the stuff was a revolting yellow-brown, streaked at the edges with the bright red of his blood. His skin around the dressing was pink and a little blistered; no wonder it itched and burned like crazy.
He hissed and flinched as the alien prodded the dressing and the reddened skin and he was surprised to see the alien flinch too. It didn’t just flinch; its gray skin sprung out all over in enormous bluish, bruise-like blotches as it jerked its hand away from his leg and drew back, staring at him.
“Why, yes,” he said. “That did hurt. In fact, I’d really like it if you would just leave my leg the hell alone now.”
He was pretty sure they couldn’t understand him. He’d been wondering if the aliens were telepaths, but at any rate they didn’t respond to the sounds he made or make any sound of their own. So he wasn’t expecting it when the alien did release him. It stood up; something seemed to pass between it and the alien holding the gun on John. Finally, it took the gun and stepped back.
“Ah,” John said as the next alien kneeled beside him and immediately began to flush bright orange. “I remember you. You’re the guy with the really short fuse.”
This time the alien had nothing to bob its head at, and it only stared silently for a while. John figured something unpleasant was about to happen when it began turning red. He tried to block the hand that shot toward him, but the alien batted his hands away and grabbed John by the throat, shoving him back against the wall.
The thing about this guy, John thought as he fought for breath and stars sparkled at the edge of his vision, is that he hasn’t figured out that you can’t interrogate somebody if you keep knocking him unconscious.
Before he passed out completely, though, the alien let go. John coughed, rubbing his throat, as the alien who still looked like a blue-spotted giraffe pulled the red alien away and to its feet. They stood for a moment, locked in a wordless stare-down, and then --
And then, that was it. No more silent non-questioning, no more smacking John around; they simply turned to go.
John watched them a little incredulously. Okay. That was quick and…pointless.
While the lamp-carrying alien did something to lock the door behind them, Blue paused to watch John through the bars expressionlessly.
“Right, thanks for…you know,” he said, and gave the guy a little mock wave. After a moment, the alien mimicked the wave, and then turned to follow the others away down the hall.
The light faded and John was left in darkness again. All in all, though, he decided things were looking up. Sure, he was still injured and a prisoner, and, ever since mentioning food to the aliens, amazingly hungry. He seemed to have made a possible ally, though. And more importantly, he now had an escape plan.
The outline of his cell door, he realized now, matched the outline of the floor-to-ceiling window he’d seen at the front of the Ancient structure they’d come to explore. He’d be willing to bet a steak dinner – and oh god that sounded good – that the aliens had built their own buildings around the abandoned Ancient outpost, flush up against it, on the opposite side of the building from where his team had been. They were using at least portions of the outpost that lined the outside wall; in this case, they’d turned a room about the size of a big storage closet into a cell, removing the window glass to create the cell entrance.
The interior of the room featured the same general design as similar rooms back in Atlantis; regardless of the unusual external architecture, the Ancients had definitely built this place. Nothing seemed to be powered up, but he was familiar on an admittedly basic level with how some Ancient systems could be manipulated even when they were dead. For example, he’d had the chance to jimmy open a couple of powered-down doors in the past, experience that would come in handy now given that the section of indented wall John had been sitting against all this time was a door.
*
The alien sat stiffly on the infirmary bed watching Elizabeth. It had been surprisingly easy to handle, as far as prisoners went.
Waking in a strange place had naturally caused it some agitation. In fact, upon regaining consciousness the first thing it did was tumble out of the bed. It had sprung unsteadily to its feet, and, catching sight of the four Marines surrounding it at a safe distance with weapons ready, had paled to such a shockingly translucent white that Elizabeth and Carson had both thought it was about to have the plant-person version of a coronary.
When no one moved to harm it, though, its color had darkened slowly back to its normal dirty gray. Carson had been able to coax it to sit on the bed, though it refused to lie back down. Every now and then, when someone made a sudden move, it would leap to its feet and spring out all over with white blotches until it realized nothing bad was going to happen, and then it would resume its seat. For its own part, it had not attacked anyone or done anything threatening at all, nor even tried to escape.
Elizabeth and Carson had been sitting with it for hours, trying to communicate with it, and having no luck. They had tried pointing at themselves and at objects and naming them, and eventually the alien had begun pointing, too – at itself, at them, at the same objects – but had made no sound.
Carson had said the alien had the organs necessary to both speak and hear, but he also said that the alien had other apparent vestigial organs left over from the genetic engineering or evolutionary process that were no longer in use. Elizabeth had begun to think that for these aliens audible communication was obsolete, and had started tossing around possible alternatives. They knew the Wraith had telepathic abilities; maybe these aliens did too.
Now…she wasn’t sure. She stopped the recording she’d been making of their session, and skipped back several minutes. Pressing play, she listened to her voice, and then heard herself pause to give the alien a chance to answer. In the silence that followed, Elizabeth saw the alien jump slightly.
Carson slipped back into his seat beside her. “Well, Rodney appears to have made his escape. The on-duty nurse hadn’t even noticed he was gone until I asked her where he was.”
Elizabeth smiled. “He’s getting worse than Colonel Sheppard.”
“Aye,” Carson huffed. “They’re a bad influence on each other. But he’s probably fine. I’ll want to have a look at him before he goes running off on any missions, though.”
Elizabeth nodded. “How are the others?”
“Doing well. I’m going to release Sergeant Mabry this afternoon. Dr. Ackberzie will be here a little longer, but she’s improving too.” He gestured to the alien. “Anything from our friend yet?”
“Actually, I think so.”
Carson blinked, surprised. “Really?”
She set the recording back again, and then restarted it. As it played she pointed to the monitor they had set up to display a visual representation of the sounds being created by their seeming one-way conversation. “This is my voice, pitched at this frequency. Now look at the frequency being picked up during the silence.”
Carson studied the read-out. “I see it. But that sound registers as high as 125,000 Hertz.”
Elizabeth nodded. “If we had any bats in here, they’d be going crazy.”
They both looked at the alien. It was leaning forward, trying to examine from a distance the machine playing back the recording.
“Can we turn the sounds it’s making into something we can hear?” Carson asked.
Elizabeth examined the machine. The tech had shown her how to do practically everything with it. Normally when it came to electronics she tuned out everything but what she needed to know at a given moment, but she’d actually been paying attention this time.
“Oh yes,” she said, punching in a series of commands. “Here we go. Reset the playback parameters…rewind…and –“ She pushed play.
They heard it immediately, and it was beautiful. Layers of humming and guttural clicks picked out melodies and scales in bite-sized pieces. It was absolutely amazing, and utterly incomprehensible. She couldn’t even begin to guess if she was hearing phrases or individual words, much less hope to decipher it quickly. Turning helplessly to Carson, she saw a mix of awe and uncertainty in his eyes.
“What do you think?” he asked quietly.
She shook her head, sagging back into her chair. “Given enough time, I think I’d be able to identify speech patterns, and eventually translate it. But it would take months, at the least. Probably longer.” She switched off the recording, frustrated.
“All right,” she sighed. “This isn’t working. Let’s move on, and determine if the alien has a written language. The Wraith language turned out to be a recognizable derivative of Ancient. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find something similar here.”
*
“You are completely missing the point!” Rodney shouted. He had to close his eyes to yell. Having his eyes open hurt his head; yelling hurt his head; both together hurt his head and made him feel like he was going to throw up.
Radek shouted right back at him. “No! Point is to analyze alien weapon and determine ways to protect jumpers from it! If you were not concussed you would see that is what I am doing!”
“You don’t need to take the stupid thing apart to figure out how to protect the –“
“We need to know how it works –“
“It SHOOTS BIG HOLES IN THINGS using CONCUSSIVE FORCE, how much more do we –“
“But that only tells us ‘boost shield power,’ and we do not know how many more or bigger of these weapons –“
“So boost the shield power A LOT –“
“If you would shut up and listen to me, Rodney –“
Someone cleared his throat from the doorway. Rodney swung around dizzily and he and Radek snapped at the same time:
“WHAT?”
Ronon was completely unmoved by their outburst. Teyla, stepping through the door from behind him, only raised an eyebrow and tried not to smile. They were both getting far too blasé about Rodney’s idiosyncrasies. He didn’t know if he liked that; he was used to being able to either frighten or annoy anyone all the time. But on the other hand it was nice to end conversations without the occasional vague (though always fleeting and completely ignorable) feeling that he should apologize for something.
“We need to talk to you,” Ronon said.
“About what?” Rodney said, exasperated. “And can’t it wait? I’m in the middle of something kind of important here.”
“It can’t wait.” Ronon didn’t answer the other question, instead flicking his gaze meaningfully at Radek.
Radek rolled his eyes. “Yes, yes, take him away, and please keep him. He should be in the infirmary instead of here mucking around in my work anyway.”
“You’re not getting rid of me that easily!” Rodney raised his voice as Radek disappeared into the back room of the lab. “You know I’m right and –“ He started to take a step in Radek’s direction but Ronon stopped him.
“McKay! We need to talk,” he said. “Now.”
Rodney shot a scowl at the back room, and then muttered, “All right, fine, but you’ll have to come in. If I leave the lab he might try to lock me out.” He moved to a stool and collapsed onto it, wincing as his back twinged. Between the headache, his wrenched back and the fact that pretty much his entire body felt like he’d just gone a round in the practice room with Sheppard, he really wished he could take something stronger than a handful of ibuprofen without getting loopy.
Teyla’s brow furrowed as she entered. “You do not look well, Dr. McKay.”
“Oh yes, thank you,” he said. “Is that what you desperately needed to talk to me about? Because I snuck out of the infirmary to get away from that kind of thing.”
“We need to go back to the planet,” Ronon said.
Rodney resisted the urge to throw something. “And what do you think I’m doing here? I’m trying to help Zelenka figure out a way to protect the jumpers from the alien weapons so we can do exactly that. Or I was, until you interrupted me.”
“Ronon believes we should not wait for a jumper to be modified,” Teyla clarified. She spoke very carefully; if Rodney hadn’t been distracted by the fact that suddenly he was seeing two of both of them, he might have noticed and figured out where this was going.
“It’s time to go back,” Ronon said. “We’ve waited long enough.”
Rodney looked back and forth between them. “What do you mean, just…go? Now? Without any modifications to the jumper at all? Dr. Weir authorized that?”
Ronon just looked at him. Teyla shifted ever so slightly, and Rodney got the feeling some kind of ball had just been tossed into his figurative court.
He really wished people would just spell things out for him sometimes. Yes, he was a certified genius, but, hello, concussion. He sighed.
“Okay. Dr. Weir didn’t authorize it?” he tried, watching Ronon’s expression. Of course he read nothing there, he almost never could. Somehow he’d managed to end up on a team with the three most inscrutable people in the Pegasus Galaxy. Jesus.
Although, as far as Ronon was concerned, Rodney had noticed that the more inscrutable he got, the less you would probably like what was on his mind.
“In fact,” he continued slowly, trying to ignore the pounding in his skull. “You haven’t brought it up with her. Were you planning to?”
More inscrutability.
“Oh god.” He pressed his palm against the undamaged side of his forehead and clutched his head. “You’re basically talking about staging a mutiny, aren’t you? Of course you are. Because my week really needs to get worse. And you’re going along with this?” He looked accusingly at Teyla.
“I merely suggested to Ronon that before we do anything we should speak to you and find out how the jumper modifications are going.”
“Yes, well, they’re…going.” He couldn’t stand Ronon’s stare. If the man wasn’t three times his size Rodney thought he really would throw something at him. “Look, it would be beyond stupid to go back there without any kind of shields and risk getting shot out of the sky. Even the alien’s handheld weapon is capable of producing a hard enough blast of force to put a serious dent in the jumper. If they have, say, cannon-style weapons or guided missiles --”
“I’m not going to just stand around and wait this time, McKay,” Ronon said.
That nearly took everything out of Rodney. He shook his head, and swiped a hand down his face tiredly. “Look – just wait. A little longer.”
“I’ll go without you.”
Rodney knew that wasn’t an empty threat. “You can’t fly the jumper.”
“I can walk.”
“You won’t have to if you’d just --” he stopped, squeezing his eyes shut briefly. “Zelenka wants to spend a little more time with the weapon because he has a theory about how it works, and if he’s right we might be able to modify the cloak to absorb the blast instead of just deflect it, which would be a hell of a lot more effective than just turning the cloak into a basic shield.”
“How long will that take?” Teyla asked quickly, cutting off what would have probably been Rodney’s introduction to Satedan slang of the insult-your-manhood variety.
“Too long,” he said. “That’s what I was trying to tell him when you came in. As far as I’m concerned, we need to modify the cloak, boost the shield power enough to withstand the kind of force we’ve speculated a really big version of this alien gun might be capable of, and leave the complicated stuff for later.”
He glanced at the door to the back lab, and then continued more softly. “But if I can’t convince Zelenka, I’ll do the modifications myself. We would get it done faster together, but either way, it will be done my way, which means sooner rather than later. Then I’ll be able to convince Dr. Weir to let us go without having to resort to the kind of thing that’ll get us thrown in a holding cell when we get back.”
He didn’t know if he’d sold them on it, or at least sold Ronon on it. Teyla was willing to be cautious, and her faith in a person, once she’d come to the conclusion they were worth it, was pretty unshakeable. Even after he accidentally blew up the Dorandan solar system she had let him know, in small ways, that he hadn’t lost her trust in him. He had appreciated it. A lot. He was almost certain she’d trust him on this, too.
Ronon, on the other hand, respected warriors and had faith in John Sheppard. Rodney was neither, and at times like these he suspected Ronon wondered why the hell Sheppard kept Rodney on their team.
“How soon?” Ronon finally asked.
Rodney hesitated. Presuming, worst case scenario, that he couldn’t get Zelenka to help him; and presuming, best case scenario, he stopped seeing double… “An hour. Two at the most.”
He expected an argument. Or a brush-off. A right hook, possibly.
Ronon let out a heavy breath, and for a moment something like weariness shadowed his face. “Okay.”
Rodney glanced at Teyla, who nodded. “Okay,” he said quietly. “Now will you both get the hell out of here and let me work?”
*
So the escape plan was not moving along as quickly as John would have liked. He slid carefully to the floor, swearing as the movement tweaked his leg. Once down he slouched tiredly and let his head thump back against the wall.
Obviously, the aliens weren’t stupid enough to co-opt as a prison cell a room with an easy-access back door, but he knew how these doors worked. They used a magnetic lock enhanced by an electric current; even when the current was cut off, a fail-secure mechanism allowed the lock to hold. As long as the aliens couldn’t figure out how to disable it, they’d consider the door permanently closed. Hell, they might not even consider it a door in that case.
But while John knew it could be disabled manually, he’d mostly managed that in the past by shooting out the control mechanism. Trying to do it hands-on -- in the dark, when his mind kept wandering and his hands shook -- was turning out to be more difficult than he’d expected. The fact that he had to keep sitting down to rest didn’t help, either.
He only had one shot at this, though. If he didn’t get the damn thing open and get out before the aliens came back, he was screwed. They couldn’t miss seeing the gutted panel, and they didn’t have to know exactly what he was doing to get pissed off at the fact that he was up to something at all.
Which means, he thought, that it’s time to get back up now.
After a few moments of not getting up, he sighed. “Easy for you to say.”
He tucked his foot under him and grabbed the door jamb and pushed himself up the wall. As had happened every other time, he started toppling sideways, but he was ready for it. He braced himself inside the doorframe with both hands and stood, just breathing, until the head rush passed and his leg stopped screaming at him.
He turned carefully, and hanging onto the wall with one hand felt for the open panel with the other.
He’d already disconnected every wire, filament and crystal he could find, and nothing had happened. Now he explored with his fingertips, tugging on anything sticking out from the metal backing, digging his fingernails into every seam he could find, pushing anything that felt like it could be a button. Nothing. A whole lot of nothing. He slammed his fist hard into the wall below the panel twice, and then drooped, giving the wall a final half-hearted smack.
“Think, John,” he said through gritted teeth. “Just stop and think for a goddamn minute.”
But it didn’t help. He’d manhandled every last piece of anything stuck to the back of that –
Wait wait wait wait wait --
Starting at the bottom, he ran two fingers clockwise around the inside edge of the open panel. As his fingers slid down the side nearest the door he ran into a seam that traced a rectangle in the middle of the metal trim. He pushed on it; it gave a little, and then stuck.
“Shit. Ten thousand year old --” He leaned into it as hard as he could without bending his fingers back at the first joint. “– useless -- piece of –“
The click barely registered, but the soft hiss that followed and the brief movement of the door against his shoulder were unmistakable. He gasped, suddenly buzzing with adrenaline.
“Oh, yes.” He reached out and a breath of air even cooler than the air inside the cell caressed his hand.
“John Sheppard,” he said as he hopped sideways and positioned himself in front of the narrow opening. “How are you so awesome?”
Balancing on his good leg, he slipped his hands into the opening and pulled as hard as he could in opposite directions; the door parted for him slowly but steadily. When he got it far enough open that he thought he could slip through, he stopped, breathing hard, peering into the pitch blackness on the other side.
He had considered the chance that a lot more of the Ancient structure could be occupied, and that he might get the door open only to end up facing a room full of unpleasantly surprised aliens. But, while lack of light didn’t necessarily mean anything, the air spilling into his cell was even more stale and rank than the air in Atlantis had been when they first got there. Nobody had been on the other side of this door in a long time.
After a quick glance out of the cell to make sure nothing had snuck up on him while he worked, he squeezed through.
The darkness on the other side felt empty, old, and utterly complete, and he had no clue where he was in relation to a way out. It would have been nice to have a flashlight. It wasn’t that the dark bothered him; ever since he was little he’d actually liked being in the dark. There was always the unknown, the possibility of something hiding out there, the risk of running into something unseen, but – it was kind of like flying. You worried about what you could control, did your best to stay in the air, enjoyed the trip, and never mind the rest.
But since he’d be limping (if he was lucky; more likely he’d be hopping) his way blind through unfamiliar territory, and he didn’t know how long it would be until the aliens discovered he was gone – a flashlight would be nice.
He couldn’t do anything about that, though. He figured the best thing to do at this point would be to just choose a direction and follow the wall until he got somewhere. Turning right, using the wall as a crutch, he started forward.
*
The various technicians on duty in the control room had been sneaking surreptitious glances at Elizabeth ever since she’d blown through, distracted and handing off everyone who tried to talk to her to Chuck, and locked herself in her office. She paid as little attention to them now as she had then.
She was stuck on an adrenaline high and couldn’t come down. After all that time they had spent trying to talk to the alien – a being that had no mouth, and yet the first thing she tried to do was talk to it. A race created by the Ancients, which to anyone in her right mind would suggest that said engineered race may have inherited things from their creators, such as a written language, but of course she tested that theory last. She had no idea what the SGC and the international board had seen in her that recommended her to lead this expedition, because clearly she was an idiot.
After the failed attempt at vocal communication, she had set two data pads on the bed beside the alien, showing samples of both Ancient and Wraith writing. The alien had zeroed right in on the Ancient writing. It had picked up the pad and stared at it, its skin flashing through a startling array of color, white to yellow to green to dark gray. Then it offered the pad to her and stared silently at her, and she wondered what it was saying.
Taking a guess, and because it was what she intended to do next anyway, she handed it a blank data pad and a stylus. It took both, and after a brief examination of them and a bit of trouble getting the slender stylus situated in its long fingers, scrawled a line of large characters across the pad in a steeply slanted but neat hand. The characters were unmistakably Ancient.
She must have gone white herself, because the next thing she knew a Marine was at her side, holding her elbow and suggesting she may want to sit down for a moment.
A good quarter of an hour later and she had pages and pages worth of words, sentences, paragraphs. She had taken the data pad and told Carson to give the alien whatever it wanted – another data pad to write on, a potted plant to commune with, anything – and escaped to her office.
The fact that much of the writing didn’t make sense when read as strictly Ancient told her that the aliens had made the language their own, evolving different grammatical constructs and different meanings for words. Still, it was so much more than she had hoped for.
“I can do this,” she told herself softly, and dove into the text.
*
At first John thought he’d found a window. He’d been going he didn’t know how long, nearly falling through open doorways into pitch black rooms half a dozen times, and at no point had he found a room or a section of wall that contained a window, grime-covered or otherwise.
Plus, he was so tired – every time he stopped to rest, and leaned his head against the wall, everything started to fade away, and it was harder and harder to shake himself awake and move on. He was seeing things, too, figures that walked out of the darkness and then vanished; and now and then he thought he heard snatches of conversations between people who weren’t there.
So when he noticed that things seemed to be getting brighter, he thought, finally, finally a window, thank you god. It took him a few seconds to connect the growing light and the sound of approaching footsteps and realize what it really meant.
He hopped awkwardly backwards to an open door he had just passed, losing his balance as he made the turn into the room and stumbling to his hands and knees. Dragging himself around a bulky console just inside the door, he tucked himself in the corner between the wall and the console and swung his bad leg around to rest it parallel to the wall. This meant his back was to the door, but at least his foot wouldn’t be sticking out into the middle of the room.
He knew it was the worst hiding place ever. On the other hand, the odds that he’d be easy to track were pretty good anyway – the whole building, including the floor, had to be covered with up to ten thousand years worth of dust and he hadn’t exactly been tip-toeing along.
The footsteps and the light paused at the door. He got a good look at the room – it looked like some of the smaller labs back in Atlantis – and then it was coming in.
He looked up, over his shoulder, and in a moment a pimply, gray, mouthless head came into view.
The alien was alone, and it paused when it saw him. Then, slowly, it stepped around to where they could both see each other clearly, stopping just out of reach.
It was armed, of course. The weapon hung loose in its hand, pointed only vaguely in his direction. It thumped the end of its lamp stick on the ground, and three thick tendrils uncoiled from the base and spread out over the floor, like a tripod; when the alien let go the lamp stood by itself.
The alien also carried a large bag over one shoulder. It reached inside and pulled out a smaller bag, which it tossed to John. The bag landed near him with a surprisingly solid clunk. Then the alien dropped slowly to one knee, set its weapon on the floor, and waited.
This couldn’t be Red, John thought, not unless Red’s personality was a hundred percent different when no other aliens were around. Blue, maybe? All of the aliens looked pretty much the same to him, but this one was doing its best to appear non-threatening, and Blue was the only one who had tried to be friendly so far.
He reached out; his arm felt heavy, and drawing the bag toward him toward him took a little effort. Dragging it onto his lap, he unrolled the top and looked inside.
His jacket was on top; beneath it was his vest. He poked around in the various pockets, hoping to find at least an energy bar, something to eat or drink, but they were all disappointingly empty. Setting them both aside, he looked in the bag again and then froze, stunned.
The alien had given him back Ronon’s gun and one of each of the P90s and 9mms they’d lost to the trees. He pulled out the P90 and checked the magazine; the damn thing was even loaded.
He raised an eyebrow at the alien, who watched without making any move for its own weapon. “You must really want to be my friend,” he said. Or else this was all part of a sneaky plan that involved gaining John’s trust etcetera etcetera. The aliens looked freaky and nightmarish to John; maybe John looked especially moronic to them.
He made sure the safety was off on the P90 and got comfortable with it, aiming it at the alien. The alien appeared completely unconcerned about having a weapon aimed at it, making no move toward its own weapon and instead bending down to root around in its own bag again. John tightened his trigger finger, but didn’t fire, waiting to see what the alien would come up with next.
It drew out several pouches, which it opened and set on the floor between itself and John. The first held a clump of leaves, the next something that looked like a handful of berries. A third was full of lumpy orange things John didn’t even try to identify. The last pouch was double-bagged, and the alien handled it delicately, either with reverence or else with a strong desire not to touch what was in it. John hoped it was the latter, once he saw the contents. It looked like a hunk of raw meat. With fur still attached.
John was seriously hungry – he had no idea how long it had been since he’d eaten anything – but the selection had the opposite effect from appealing to him.
The alien wasn’t done, though. Last, it brought out a round wooden box. Unscrewing the top, it tried to hand it to John.
When John didn’t take the bowl, the alien moved one hand over the top of the bowl, which was filled with some kind of liquid. The tips of its fingers lengthened rapidly, dunking into the liquid, and the amount of whatever it was in the bowl began to decrease.
“Ah,” John said. He sighed. Why did everything in this galaxy have to eat through its hands?
So the alien wanted John to understand the liquid was safe to…drink. Or eat. Whatever – ingest via scary root-like fingers. Giving in to curiosity, John took the bowl and sniffed the contents. He smelled only damp wood; it was water, he realized, and suddenly all he could think about was how dry his mouth was.
“I’m really not supposed to drink alien water,” he said, but, damn. “Carson is going to be furious if I do.” He sloshed the water gently around in the bowl. Maybe a compromise? He wouldn’t eat the strange alien berries or the raw meat, if he could drink the water?
After all, dehydration was becoming a definite issue. Horrible intestinal infestation by alien microbes, on the other hand, was only a possibility.
He took a tentative sip. The action stung his cut lip a little, but other than that, there was no weird tongue tingling or anything else that might indicate poison, pollution, whatever. It tasted fine. No, actually, it tasted fantastic. In fact, as he drank down the rest he was pretty sure he had never, ever tasted anything so good.
*
[My] name is [unknown].
Do you read this.
[You have?] our [writing?] but the word some is wrong.
You [unknown] [me] to [write?] more but I have not the knowledge of what to [unknown].
Why keep [me] here. Where go the [unknown – I think this may be the name of the animals that came through the gate]. One of it is [my] [gift? maybe responsibility?] and if it [is rotten? spoiled? dead?] I take it to the dirt. It is [my] [gift / responsibility].
Do you let [me] leave. I [unknown] of the injury to the wall. I have fear. I have mistake. [Grateful] that body is repaired, [grateful for] good medicine. [Carson will be pleased with this]
I others will not harm you others. I do not be away from [home?]. I others need dirt, I others [is ‘I others’ their version of ‘my people’? makes the most sense] my people need living light, my people need my people to [unknown; close to the word it used for ‘living’ but highly unconventional spelling].
Let [me] return in the false water [probably the Stargate]. I have fear still. I want to go [home?].
Elizabeth’s earpiece came on. “Dr. Weir, this is Dr. McKay. We’ve made progress on the jumper modifications. I think we may be ready to go back to the planet.”
I want to go home.
“Dr. Weir? Did – did I not activate this stupid --”
Elizabeth rubbed her eyes and set down her notepad, tapping her earpiece. “Yes. Yes, I’m here, Rodney. I’ll be up in just a minute.”
*