Archive of Our Own

The ships were cold and stinking, heavy with the smell of hot wiring and unwashed people. That first, hateful dinner aboard Larrin's ship, when John had turned down their food and grimaced at their water, he hadn't realized how gracious she'd been. She'd eyed the blood escaping from his cheek, how he was sweating - stinking - under the strain, and poured him a glass of the recycled piss and blood and sweat and milk of her entire civilization. It had tasted like it. Their system was efficient, but it wasn't pleasant.

He'd grimaced, and set it down, and put his hands all over a plate of food that someone else, he realized later, had probably eaten after him - Silas or Nevik, probably, and the math Larrin did behind her eyes registered that as a horrible waste, three decades of the ship's resources each, eighty gallons of water boiled off into space. Larrin had relied on them, and they had trusted her, and they'd known the risks they faced, but if she could have she would have brought their bodies home. She wouldn't have wasted their effort, or their blood, or their water.

It took him weeks to learn this. He sat in his cell on the new ship, and they delivered him food through a hatch, and Larrin came in every few days to look him over and trade insults. She didn't have a lot of time for insults these days, though. She had a ship to run - and the other thing that he hadn't realized, when he was all smirk and gun and determined to escape and get back to his team, was that of course, of course, a people like Larrin's, terrified for their survival, would put families with children on the newest, safest ship - not all of them, not all of their babies in one basket, but enough.

The minute the background radiation had died down Larrin had brought her own babies on board, a gaggle of little tow-headed children and their tired, colorless caretakers.
"About a third of this ship is a blackened crater," he'd said, standing behind her, and gotten a shove from the guard for his trouble.
Larrin's stare was reptilian-cold, but she turned it on the guard first, and then on him.
"This ship is newer and in better condition," she'd said, evenly. "There might be advantages in splitting up the fleet; I want them onboard."
They were silent for a moment as he watched the group make their way across the hanger. One of the children looked up, waved at Larrin; Larrin lifted her hand back.
"Are they all yours?" John asked, and he felt the sarcasm in his voice, and tightened his shoulders, because he really wasn't in the mood to get punched by the guard. "You don't really look -"
She narrowed her eyes at him; he kept his head down. "One by birth," she said, finally. "His father's dead. So are my brother and the mother of his children."
"I'm sorry," he said, and she tilted her head towards him, one corner of her mouth drawing tight and satisfied, and he realized that she knew exactly what she was doing when she brought him here.

When Larrin's guards let him out for a walk - which they'd started doing more often, lately, and that made him worry that his insouchance was wearing thin - they only took him places with children around. He considered trying something anyway - getting one of their stunners, just a stunner, he wouldn't have to hurt anyone, just threaten his way into one of the escape pods, sit there until Rodney came for him.

He's not one hundred percent sure how long it's been - because the weird drag of time, and the way he's exhausted by the end of day and wakes up halfway through the night, makes him think that ship time is nothing like planetary time. He hopes Rodney and company are actually still out there, somewhere. He wonders if he'd, strictly speaking, be able to find them. He remembers the Atlantis gate, but what planet are they on? It's like the first day of school when his father had gotten transferred again, not knowing his own phone number.

Everywhere they take him there are children, and families with children, and he hates Larrin for knowing him this well, because he's tried to escape, but he's not going to threaten children. The last time he tried to run for it in an empty corridor, he got about twenty yards from his cell before the guards brought him down, anyway.

He wants it to work. He wants Rodney to find him. He doesn't even know if his people are okay.
Larrin's people don't, of course, really speak English, and as the days wear on he's pretty sure he can hear the language they do speak, a hitched blur of consonants and sliding syllables behind the dislocative itch of the translation program. He's brutally bored. He stopped scratching tic-tac-toe into the cell furnishings weeks back, and the guard they put on him - any of a dozen different men and women - will never play twenty questions. And anyway, there's not that much to see besides gray metal. So he starts trying to imitate the sounds he makes himself hear, on the ship's intercom, and at shift change, and when they take him out for his walk.

It's hard. Every so often he'll get a guard who's willing to play, but if he points at a chair, and says "chair", most of the time what he hears back is "chair". He's sure there's an override in there somewhere, because the Ancients were dorks and he's sure some of them were the linguistic kind, but maybe those ones had special software and the rest didn't give a crap as long as the natives did what they said to.

He's been thinking about the Ancients a lot lately. He's not really into having this much time to think, and there is that one guard who he taught to play sudoku, so mostly he lays there and makes sudoku squares in his head.

"You could just drop me in an escape pod," he said, after two weeks of really boring captivity. They were sitting at opposite ends of the long dining table; he wasn't really sure why Larrin kept inviting him to dinner just to establish that she hated him, but maybe awkward formal sit-downs were somewhere in their Geneva Conventions.
"Yeah, I really couldn't." she said, watching him as he took another measured bite of the white, gelatinous protein cake in the middle of his plate. He didn't waste food now.
She leaned back, her arms folded. She did not eat at these interviews. "We drop you out in an escape pod." she said, tapping the fingers of one hand along the elbow of the other. "Then your people find you how?"
"With a subspace..." he stopped.
"Yeah." she leaned forward, putting her hands on the table. "With some kind of signal. Meanwhile, you're sitting there in the escape pod while we get out of there as fast as we possibly can, because damned if we're going to be waiting for whoever comes looking for you. And I got the feeling the Wraith kind of have a grudge where you're concerned." She smiled, completely mirthlessly, and her hair fell over one shoulder as she tilted her head. "So we're out our only gene user, the Wraith know our last location, and, special bonus, you get eaten. Now, I'm not real fond of you, Sheppard," which was fair, he'd been trying his best to piss her off for weeks now - "but not liking you and leaving you for the Wraith, those are two very different things."
"But -"
"No."

The only thing that interrupted his chock-full sitting-in-a-cell schedule was when Larrin hauled him up to the bridge, held a gun to his head, and made him activate things. And he did, because the Wraith were hot on their trail after his first escapade with the subspace transmitters, and there were kids on the other ships in the fleet, families with children, and he wasn't going to stand there and let the Wraith at children.

John woke up in the night to the noise of the engines running, the sound of the fleet running, never holding still, and sometimes it felt like he'd been running all his life and he'd finally found a ship that kept up. He didn't like to examine that feeling.

He got sick of mental sudoku and moved on to mental chess, and then mental chess in three dimensions, and then he did math puzzles that made him miss Rodney so much that he went back to sudoku and reconstructing the first twenty pages of War and Peace in his head. He wondered who they'd promoted to replace him. Lorne, he was willing to bet.

By the time the security team came to hold a gun to his head and make him activate some subroutines, he was humiliatingly grateful to see them.

...

Larrin was nervous. Larrin was overtly nervous, and that made John nervous, because Larrin was a cold-hearted bitch, and so when she got scared enough to see it freaked him out. She hadn't shown up to watch him eat in about a week - which was normal, and kind of welcome, and he reminded himself that he hated her and that he didn't miss the conversation - but tonight she was there, and pacing, the thick heels of her boots thudding anxiously across the floor.
He put up with it most of the way through his bowl of bland space-beans, and then said, evenly, "Can you quit that? It's wrecking my appetite."
She stopped, and turned, pulling out the chair beside him and slinging her leg over it. It was the closest she'd gotten to him in weeks, and he found himself holding very still, his spoon hanging from one hand. She was armed (she was always armed) and he wasn't, and he was worn down. And she was furious.
"We," she said, grating the words out, "have to stop for supplies. The Wraith are on our tail, and we have to decide which planet we lead them to. Do you know why we have to stop for supplies, Sheppard?"
He narrowed his eyes, and hid leaning away from her in a slouch.
"We're in a completely closed system - we have to be - except for what?" He was silent. "Except for what, Sheppard?"
He cleared his throat, pushed a hand into the table, said, involuntarily, "The Wraith?"
She clapped her hands and he flinched at the sound. "Give the man a medal!" she said, pushing herself back, standing again. "We lose air and water every time we're attacked by the Wraith. Especially -" and she had one hand on the table by his plate, and had brought her face down close to his, "especially when people die, Colonel Sheppard. Now, about five weeks back, you lost me two men I'd known my entire life, two people I trained and cared about, but you know what else you lost me?"
She reached out and tipped over his glass, and the measly half-cup of water the guard had given him spilled, ran down across the table, trickled onto the knees of his dirty BDUs, dripped along his calves to the floor. John realized that the guards were watching, hungrily - thirstily - as the puddle moved outward.
"The air in here getting a little dry to you, lately?" she asked, and then turned, and stalked out.

John watched her go, and then he set a cup under the dripping edge of the table, and then the guard hustled him back to his cell. He lay awake all night, aware of the dryness in his mouth, aware of the groan and heave of the ship around him. Somewhere, as a child - television? - he'd seen a whale on the beach, its great, blinking eye, the noises it made as it breathed in the dry air. He listened to the soft burr of the air recycling, the heartbeat thrum of the engines. He looked up into the dark and tried to sleep.

Two anxious days later the ship still hadn't made landfall, and his guards were getting younger, like everyone ranking was tied up in planning. He paced, and tried to teach one of the kids holding a gun and looking bored to play connect-four, and added some cursewords to his vocabulary. He wished the bedding detached so that he could build a fort.
The third night he snapped. "Look, I need to talk to Larrin," he said to the teenage girl with the buzz cut who was guarding his cell, and when she gave a look of blank incomprehension, like he'd asked to talk to God Himself, he said "Or someone who can talk to Larrin, okay? Can you do that?" It was still three hours from the shift change, but she tapped her communicator, watching him warily, like she hadn't been ignoring him for eight hours a day all week. The old guards came to bring him up to the dining room, shoving him a little more than necessary, and there was no food on the table, just Larrin standing at the other end, arms folded.
"Hey!" he said, as the last guard gave him a particularly pointed shove into the chair. "I was being cooperative." He looked up to see Larrin glaring at him. "What?"
"Make it fast, Sheppard," she said.
He pouted - he could feel himself pouting - and he hoped he didn't get punched for it. "After all this time, not even a sit-down chat?" he said, and flinched, but she just looked irritated.
"You're sitting." she said, and then there was silence.
He made himself break it. "Send me down with the trading party."
She stared at him for a second, and then snorted, and pushed herself all the way to her feet and turned to go. "Wait!" John called after her.
She turned.
"I lost you... okay, you know." he said. "You don't want to show yourselves with the Wraith after you. Send me down in the jumper. I'll trade for the goods you need, I've done it before, and I'll bring them back."
"And you'll follow through because of - "
"Well, first, guilt," he said, "and also, you'd be between me and the gate, I'm pretty sure you could stop me if you wanted to."
"My entire fleet would be between you and the gate." she said.
"Right." He swallowed. "And even if I slip by, look, all your systems are online. You're out one extra mouth to feed and one ship you really can't fly. You can keep your fleet in hiding, the people on the planet won't even know you're here. I'm even willing to trade on my own people's credit."
She narrowed her eyes. He could see her considering it. "It's a good deal." he said, finally, pushing just a little. "And if it doesn't work, you can still do whatever you were planning in the first place."
"And in return?"
"You let me go." he said. "Even if the Wraith come, I'll be in a cloaked jumper. I can make my way back to my people."
"No." she said.
"Why not?" he said, stunned.
She paced a step, turned, turned back to him. "You have children, Sheppard?"
He shook his head.
"Fine, you have parents? Siblings? Anybody?"
He thought, unwillingly, of Ronon and Teyla in the mess hall, and then pushed the thought away.
"Right now we have about one and a half things going for us," she said, "and you're the half. And I'm not about to let go of anything that will get my people through this safe."
Disappointment was like a rock in his gut, but he tried to smirk it off. "Wait, I'm a half? What's the one?"
She spread her arms. "My brilliant command style," she said, shaking her hair back, her voice bitter. She nodded at the guards and turned away; one grabbed his arm.
"Wait," he said, and she didn't turn this time, but she paused. "I'm trying -" his voice stopped, and he tried again. "I was an only child. I never -" He took a breath. "I never had kids. But they -" he couldn't look at her. "My people are what I've got."
She didn't turn, and then she left.

"Fine." she said, slamming her hand into the forcefield of his cell, and John jerked upright. It was three-quarters of the way through ship's night, about what John would call three in the morning, and Larrin was standing outside his cell, pissed off as always.
"Huh?" he said insightfully, clutching his blanket to himself, and she eyed him up and down and sneered a little, which, yeah, didn't really make him feel safer.
"You can go to the planet." she said. "And when, and only when, you come back with our supplies, you can go planetside, and wait a few days, and then you can go home."
"Why the wait?" he said, muzzily, and then realized he probably shouldn't argue.
She paused. Her face, if such a thing was possible, softened. She folded her arms.
"I don't want the Wraith following us," she finally said. "But I also don't want them following you back home. You're the ones who might beat them someday."
He lowered his head, uncomfortably aware of his gratitude, and when he looked up, she was gone.

The fleet's quartermaster - a whip-thin, gray-haired old man who wore dusty canvas coveralls and looked like he hadn't left the cargo holds in years - gave John the list on the piece of particleboard packing crate. He looked it over, and then looked it over again.
"What's the problem?" Larrin said, watching him.
"This isn't much." he said finally.
"We don't need much." she said.
He didn't ask where they were heading once the supplies were onboard, and he was pretty sure she saw him not-ask, and approved. Anyway, she smiled, just a little, and walked him down to the jumper bay.
"This is Azel," she said, waving a hand at a muscley, bald sort of guy, "and Murtha," who was a muscley sort of girl with a bad haircut. "They'll help you load up the cargo and, you know. Shoot you if you try to run off."
He wasn't surprised, but he feigned indignation. "We were getting along so nicely," he said, and put the list in his pocket, and ducked through the jumper doors.
God, it felt like having his feet on a piece of Atlantis, and he had a sudden impulse to slam the door shut, shoot his way out of the jumper bay, and run home. He didn't need Azel's gun pressed to the back of his head to remind him that he couldn't, but it helped.
"You don't have to do that, you know," he said flatly, turning on the flight computers. "In fact, it's kind of distracting."
The gun lowered, but not by much. He didn't turn around. "You want to strap in, too. You should learn from that trick I pulled last time. How old are you, kid?"
It was the girl, who was holding her gun a little more casually - and that was more worrisome, not that he was planning anything - who answered. "We don't have planetary years." she said, and then "We count it in thousands of ship's days."
"Thousands," the bay doors opened, and he felt good, going through the departure procedures with something like his ordinary flair, "okay, how many thousands of days?"
"Two thousand, one hundred." she said. "About. Azel, he was born two hundred and twenty-seven days after me."
The gun behind John's head really dropped now. "Murtha, shut up." Azel said, and John did some math and came up at teenagers. Extra points for Larrin; give him young, stupid kids he'd feel guilty about ditching.
"It'll be about an hour until planetfall," he said, drawling. "You might want to get cozy."

It was a planet he'd been to before - M5G-031, a pretty little farming town clustered around the gate, and the Esteemed Leader of Trade - something like that, at least - recognized him, and came out into the square to greet him, and then paused, confused, eyeing the gun-toting teenagers behind him.
"Some new acquaintances," John said, tilting his head towards them, and the balding, canny trading leader pretty much knew what was going on, John figured, he just didn't know John well enough to get involved. John disliked knowing that.
"I'm going to need some stuff on credit," John said, shifting the bag the quartermaster had given him and pulling out his list. "My own credit, and Teyla Emmagen's, can I do that?"
"When can I expect to see payment?" the man asked, eyeing the guns again.
"Look," John ran his hand through his hair, "I don't know, but I'll be back on Atlantis soon, and I'll write you an IOU, okay?"
The man paused, then opened his hands gracefully, nodding, and suddenly the square was crowded again, vendors reemerging from doorways and walled yards, and the trade leader took John's bag and ushered them along the row of booths.
John found the things on the list - sacks of grain, seeds for greens, four live chicken-y things, some mineral ores for extracting nutrients, water rights - quickly, but he lingered over the booths, because sunlight felt so good he wanted to lie down on the ground and never get up, and people spoke to him, politely, but warmly. He found himself buying things on his own credit - a crate of fruit, some spices in pots, a blank book made from the leaves of the ede-grain plant - just for the pleasure of talking to the people selling them. Soon, he told himself, soon, I'll be home soon. Still, he didn't want to get into the puddlejumper, back in the recycled air and gray-blue spacelight.
"How about I give you the jumper?" he asked Murtha as they loaded up the jumper. "I'll get home on foot through their gate."
She paused. "We don't know how to fly this," she finally said, thumping her hand on the metal of the bulkhead. "And we promised Larrin we'd do it her way."
"You could learn," he said, stowing the crate of fruit under the pilot's seat.
"No gene." she said. She was winding up the siphon tube that was attached to the water tanks.
"Yeah." he said. "I guess we shoulda gotten you one of those before."
He should have asked the scientists to start working on the jumper neural interface, he thought as the door closed between him and the green-gold meadows of M5G-031.
He really, really should have.

The planet was falling away green and blue below them, and Azel, finally convinced to do something more useful than glower, had just raised the fleet on the comm when John saw it, the first, needle-silver flash over the horizon.
"Fuck." he said, and then, "Hold on, kids." He hit the accelerator faster than the inertial dampeners could really compensate for, and heard a thud as someone who'd forgotten to strap in was thrown sideways, and one of the cargo crates broke loose and went skidding across the floor. He hoped Azel didn't choose this moment to get trigger-happy.
"What the hell?" Azel yelled from behind him, and there was the sound of a scuffle and the pop of a stunner, and then Murtha yelling into the comm, "Home fleet, we have Wraith incoming, three mark thirty mark eight."
"Have they spotted you?" It was Larrin, impossibly clearheaded, on the comm.
"We're still cloaked," John called back, and Murtha repeated, "We're cloaked, we're cloaked, they didn't see us."
She shoved the boxy handheld radio up by John's head, and he snapped, "I'm kind of busy flying the ship, here, Larrin, can it wait?"
"Sheppard, you listen to me," she said, "If you pull anything funny and don't get my people back to me. I will hunt down your dessicated corpse and I will set it on fire, do you understand?"
"Because I wasn't motivated enough before," John said, scrabbling frantically across the control console.
"I'm serious, Sheppard,"
"You have your people ready," he replied, knowing he sounded infuriatingly casual, "We'll get there when we get there. Sheppard out." He grabbed the comm and thumbed it off, and Murtha made a strange, fearful noise behind him.
"Don't get weird on me now," he said without looking back. "I've flown much worse than this."
"I don't want to get eaten," the girl said, in a panicky voice that shouldn't have reminded John of Rodney but totally did.
"We're not going to." he said, not taking his eyes off the route ahead of him. They were going about twice as fast as they had on the way in, and he was worried about planetary debris at this speed, and - he brought up the flight displays - yes, darts and, was that something bigger? "How's Azel?"
"I stunned him." she said, voice still wavering. "If he shot you we'd be in the shit."
"Good thinking," he replied, and then "Murtha, can you see the back main electrical panels?"
"Yes," she said, "There's a box in front of it, but I can move that."
"Okay," he answered. "There's this thing a guy taught me to get extra speed out of a jumper like this, and we're going to use it."
She didn't ask why, which was probably smart, but he heard her unbuckle and start moving things behind him. His displays were starting to go green with darts, and, fuck, those poor bastards down on the planet -
He thumbed the comm on. "Lyran, I don't want to sound to paranoid, but I think you've got Wraith headed for you, do you read?"
"Shit," it wasn't Lyran, but rather one of the copilots that answered, "We read you, Sheppard, what are you planning -"
"I'm headed back as fast as I can," he replied, "Sheppard out."
"I've got the panel open," Murtha said, "What should I-"
"This friend of mine," he said conversationally, "got kind of interested in jumper power systems, and he showed me this thing -" fuck, spacerock, he swerved - "where you can dump all the power from the jumper's systems into the propulsion at once."
"Is that safe?"
"Well." he had the shipboard computer up, and thank God McKay wasn't here to see him do this - "Mostly." She gave another squeak. "We're forty-five minutes out at a safe cruising speed, Murtha, but if we dump the power into shields and propulsion, we floor the gas, we're home in time for dinner." Except - fuck, he realized - the jumper wouldn't be flying again for weeks. Fuck fuck fuckity. "Now what I need you to do - you see the fifth panel from your left hand?" He heard her pull at a panel, and the ship gave a buck, and he yelled "Other left!"
He remembered McKay showing him this, because he'd been bored and hanging out in the jumper bay eating twizzlers from the latest Daedalus run, and McKay had been up to his elbows in wiring, a glint in his eye and a diatribe on his tongue, showing John the way the propulsion routing clicked together. He'd been using John as a sounding board since Zelenka was down with Alien Flu. He hadn't expected John to remember anything he said.
John shook away the memory of the bright artificial taste of red #40 and concentrated, his hands steady on the navigation array as he repeated what Rodney had said, word for word, except for the bits about John's hair, and everything that had happened after. His throat tightened. "Alright," he called, "now we boot up. Cover that panel and grab the fire extinguisher."
"What?" Murtha snapped.
"Too late to change your mind!" he yelled back over the whine and rattle of acceleration. "Ready?"
He punched the big blue button, and they lurched forward, cutting a bright white arc across the dark. "Well, that blew our cover," he said, "but I think they knew we're here." The green line of Wraith dropped back as he outstripped them, and he saw the gray squares of Larrin's fleet ahead of him, still far out, and -
"Oh, shit." Wraith at five o'clock, a little ahead of him, and he threw the jumper into a roll as the Wraith energy pulses redshifted behind him. He laughed, his heart pounding, and really, he should have tried this before.
"Murtha," he dodged again, "tell Larrin we'll hit deck in about -" he looked at the flight computer - "seven minutes. And you might want to get Azel strapped to something, we'll probably land rough." They were past the first cluster of darts, and he glanced at the power consumption grid out of the corner of his eye and prayed the flying wouldn't get any more complicated. At these speeds, they would have about a minute's worth of power left to decellerate instead of smashing into a pulp. Or smashing right into the ship and out the other side.
"Sheppard," Larrin's voice echoed on the intercom, "I don't know what the fuck you're doing, but I'm really tempted to shoot you right now."
"I don't think you could hit me," shit, more Wraith, where the hell were they coming from? He dodged, which at this speed turned his flight path into a long arc. "I've got it, Larrin, I'll decellerate in time. Trust me."
There was a silence, and then "I trust you as far as I could throw you, Sheppard."
"We're in space, and you've got a killer right hook, so that's saying a lot." he answered, and another spray of Wraith pulses blurring orange to red behind him, and one of the panels exploded in sparks.
"On it!" Murtha yelled, and the jumper filled with the smell of fire-suppressant foam.
"I've got it, Lyran," he said. He could see the white-blue flashes of the ships' weapons, and the yellow flash of drones. The fleet had opened fire on the Wraith. His stomach gave a lurch.
"Sheppard," there was shouting behind her, but her voice was low, "if you start to loose navigation, or you can't decelerate -"
"I'll aim at the Wraith." he was dead serious, and he knew she understood that. He was glad the kids behind him couldn't hear him over the burr of the engines. "See you on the flipside."
He didn't really want to know how fast they were going, except that he did, because if he ever saw Rodney again, he was going to enjoy telling this story. "Strap in and cover your head," he called behind him, "I'm about to hit the brakes." The ships weren't even in visual range yet, but they would be, and he wished he was still the kind of soldier who crossed himself. He punched up the inertial dampeners a second before, and felt odd, weightless, hit the button -
He would have blacked out, except that he couldn't, he couldn't, and he'd always wondered what it would be like to vomit in multiple g's. The gray boxes of the fleet were ahead of him, and he sent the incoming, felt the Atlantean circuitry of the ship respond, nosed the ship towards the opening hanger and willed the jumper to slow, slow, stop -
He hit decking hard, and skidded, throwing up a high, violent shower of sparks to either side. He imagined a cartoon airbag, bubble wrap, parachutes, throw pillows, and maybe the gene did something for him, because the forcefield hooked him in, throwing him sideways and bringing the jumper to a skidding stop.
As he started to black out, he heard Larrin on the all-systems intercom, calling, "They're onboard, go, go!" as the hanger bay slammed shut behind him.

When he blinked awake he thought for a moment that he was on Atlantis - the spare gray architecture of an Ancient infirmary, the sound of the air transfer humming. Then he registered the smells of unwashed clothes and algae beds, and the peculiar echo of a ship in space.
"Are the kids okay?" he asked, without opening his eyes.
"Better than you," someone answered, and he imagined Carson, Keller, someone who'd eaten an apple and watched Scooby Doo and gone to Colorado. He didn't open his eyes. "They had their heads down, for one. You, on the other hand -" a gloved hand, investigating bandages, and John recognized, with a sad grimace, abrasions in the shape of a flight harness - "You're one giant bruise."
Lovely. "Did we get away?"
There was a pause, and then the man answered. "Yeah. We got away."

When John woke up on the third day, Lyran was there. "So that was really stupid," she said, when he opened his eyes. Her eyes were sunken and tired; there was a bruise on one cheek that looked like the corner of a control console, and her dirty hair was combed up under a knit cap.
"It worked," he croaked, and she got up, and brought him the metal canteen of water from the bedside table. "Didn't it?"
"We were right in firing range with, apparently, a good-sized Wraith armada," she replied, "when you hit deck and we ran."
"Are they still -"
She pressed her lips together thinly. Her face was colorless in the ship light, bony and harsh. He remembered, involuntarily, Elizabeth on the next-to-last day of the Wraith bombardment. "We're faster than they are," she said, finally, "and our propulsion systems, at least, are on full power. We'll outrun them. It might take a while."
John nodded, then closed his eyes when that made his head throb. When he opened them she was still sitting there, looking past him, her right knee drawn up to her chin.
"Can you let me go now?" he asked, finally, his voice smaller than he'd like.
Her eyes looked through him, and then at him, and she said, "I'm sorry."
"After all that -"
"We're headed for deep space," she said, "far enough away from the gates that the Wraith can't come for us. It's not the way I'd like it, but -" she raised a hand, let it fall, "There's nowhere to go now."
He closed his eyes, and waited for her to leave.

At least they didn't put him back in the cell. When he was allowed to limp his way out of their infirmary - under the watchful eye of their healer and full-time physical therapist, Nery - two of the men who used to be his guards came and escorted him to quarters in the civilian section.
"Finally, hospitality," he said, and then his back twinged and he had to lean against the wall. Everything was wrenched the whole way down.
"Clothes," one of them said, handing him a folded black bundle.
"I can finally look as stylish as you two?"
The guards looked at each other, shrugged, and left.
He stuck his head through the door and looked to either side. They weren't waiting outside his door. They weren't waiting down the hall. He activated the communicator and went for Lyran's frequency.
"Sheppard. You're up." she said, pleasantly.
"Yeah," he said, shaking out the pants and trying to decide if his dignity allowed him to wear something with a patent-leather seat. "So what's going on?"
"We're running like hell from a malevolent alien force," she replied, and he imagined the sardonic look on her face, "I'm kind of busy. If you fall down and can't get up, page Geris in security."
"Page him? I don't have an entourage anymore?" He looked at his reflection in the bathroom mirror - stained hospital scrubs and a three-week's beard, except where the infirmary crew had shaved it to stitch his chin. Yeah, it looked like patent leather pants were the better option.
"You're free to move about the ship." she said, after a pause. "As long as you don't piss anyone off."
"Really." he said, sardonically.
"No, because I'm in the habit of imprisoning men who risk their lives to save my people," she said, sarcastically.
"Well, the first couple times you could have fooled me," he answered, and she clicked the comm off.

He bathed as best he could in the shower stall, which produced a mist for two minutes, or a steady stream of water for thirty seconds, followed by a two-minute pause - found the Ancient electric razor under the sink, winced as he got dressed around the bruises and still-strained muscles. He had bathed at the sink in the cell; he'd changed his clothes out every day or two. This was very different; he felt like his skin was different, and the foreign clothing was a strange blend of softness and hardness, strain and give. He wandered out into the main room, toweling his hair - starting to grow out, maybe he should do something about that.
He was unguarded. He should run. He should break for the bridge, or for the jumper bay, take Larrin hostage like she'd kidnapped him, demand to be let off the boat. The blue-gray, ugly mottle of hyperspace fell on the bed like light on water. He sat down; then he lay down. Rodney, he thought between one breath and the next. It should have sounded more familiar to him. He closed his eyes, just for a second.
---

When he woke up he blinked at the ceiling, confused, and then he lay there, feeling the aches of fading strains and bruises, watching the blue light shift on the ceiling. In a while, he realized that he was hungry; quite a while after that, he realized that no one was going to bring him food. The thought of leaving his room was scarier than it should have been, and that was all it took to get him on his feet - well, that, and a bit of groaning, and shit, his back was pretty fucked up after all.

He leaned on the wall a little ways through the door, but then he was in the hallway, and some residual caution made him draw up straight, walk with his head up, listening to the clicks and thrums and hisses of the living ship around him. He was in the residential quarters - he recognized the floorplan from the Aurora, a little - and he remembered Rodney onboard, his face flushed with excitement and fear and hope -
He turned away from that memory, and turned the corner, and found himself in the mess hall. It was a gray room, not large, shadowy with the ship's night shift. Maybe a half-dozen people were sitting at the long tables, drinking from mugs, the remains of dinner on their trays.
There was a moment of horrible silence, as John felt six pairs of eyes on him and tensed with fight-or-flight, wishing he had a gun, wishing he had anything. His hands were open and upraised in front of him without thinking about it - and why had he done that, instead of going to his hip, even if there was nothing there? He looked at his hands like he didn't recognize them; he looked at the unexpected, too-large crowd, all six of them, and his mouth went dry.
"I missed dinner, huh?" he said, lamely.
With scrape one of the men pushed his chair back from the table, and John flinched. The man went to the ceramic pot on the side table - never turning his back all the way to John - ladelled soup into a bowl, came forward and set it on an unoccupied table.
"Um." John said. "Thanks." He made himself step forward - as the other man stepped back, step by step - and sit at the table, take up the spoon, take a sip of soup. There was another scrape of chairs; conversation started up again, too-bright, a little forced, John thought, but also, he realized he was starving, and had to make himself slow down, not push his face into the bowl like Ronon on his first day.

He looked around him, trying not to be obvious; none of the men and women reminded him of Ronon, or of Teyla. They were all of a type: pale, olive skin and cropped olive hair, or hair braided close and bound; all in the same black and gray clothes, with the tired faces and slumping posture of ship's crew at the end of a long day. He was incurious, aware of his back facing the door, intimidated by the number of people. He was hungry. When he emptied the first bowl, the same man - who had sat in the corner, feet up on the bench, talking quietly with a man and woman near him - came back, took the bowl - standing a ways off, as if worried that John was going to lunge - and filled it again. John heard the ladle scrape the bottom of the tureen. The soup was watery, with bits of protein cake and algae green floating in it; from the crumbs on the table, there might have been bread earlier, but there were no crusts left on anyone's plates. John ate all of it, then lifted the bowl and drank the broth. It was salty, with a fishy, heavy taste; it was delicious.

When he looked up the tables were starting to clear; the same man was waiting, patiently, for him to finish. "Thanks," he said again, and when he wasn't sure whether to hand it over or leave it the man took it from his hands.
"I'm Ammon," he said, stacking it with the other bowls. "The next meal is at four marks." John must have looked confused, because Ammon nodded towards the bar of lights above the door, which John had been pretty sure were just decoration. "It's eight marks now," he said. "So in six marks, when the day crew wakes up."
"Thanks," John said, and then, feeling churlish, "I'm John."
Ammon raised an eyebrow, and John realized with a lurch that this was probably the first time anyone in the fleet had heard his first name. "John," Ammon said, and then, "The healer'll be by to look in on you at the shift change." The man turned away, balancing the stack of bowls in the crook of his arm, and John pushed himself to his feet, carefully.
"You need help?" one of the women in the group that was just leaving asked. John shook his head; she came forward anyway, nodding at her friends to go on. She had steel-gray hair, cropped short to the curve of her head; she put her hand on his arm, and he flinched.
"I'll walk by you, then," she said, unperturbed, and John didn't argue as he made his slow way to the doorway, and then along the curving gray wall of the corridor. She was silent as they walked, keeping to his speed, and then she said, "Now, Murtha's my emten."
"What?" he said, distracted. It wasn't one of the words he knew, and the translation program apparently didn't have a synonym.
"My mother's cousin's daughter," she said. "You don't have that word?" He shook his head. "That was a pretty bit of flying," They were at his door. "You could have stayed cloaked, gone on back home."
"Your emten would have shot me," John said, leaning up against the doorframe. He glanced at the woman; she was maybe forty, her face thin, her shoulders broad. Engineer, he thought, taking in the rips and stains on the cuffs of her uniform, the half-healed scrape across the back of her hand. He looked back at the floor.
"Maybe," she said, and there was humor in her voice. "Our Murtha's not a bad shot." She moved like she would have touched his arm again; he felt his shoulders curl away, and what was that? Worse'd happened to him in his life than a couple of punches to the face and some time in a ship's brig. She stepped back. "You almost died to bring her on back to us, though."
John looked at the ground, and at the broad scuffed toes of her boots, and finally he inclined his head, almost a nod, and glanced up at her. She smiled, and inclined her head back, a rough gesture with none of the gracefulness the Athosians did it with, and then turned, and walked on down the hall.

There was a polite way to signal entry through the ship's door, he thought as he lurched awake, heart pounding. Larrin's people - and he needed a better name for them - didn't know it.
The banging stopped, and then someone called "Healer, open up."
He took a moment to compose himself - he'd slept in his clothes, but he'd also tried his best to spring into a defensive posture, and ow, back, ow. He levered himself carefully to the edge of the bed, sat with his feet on the floor, thought the door open.
It was the same healer from the infirmary, youngish, with black hair in a buzz cut and a gray uniform that had seen better days. "You missed breakfast," the man said, setting a covered plate on the work table.
"Nice of you to notice," John said, coolly,
"How's the back?" The man came forward, reached his hand out to touch John's shoulder, and John flinched again, and then pressed his lips together at the way that made the strained muscles in his mid-spine spasm. "Stiff in the morning, looks like," he said, unperturbed, and turned away, opening the bag he'd set by the door.
I could jump him, John thought. There's got to be something sharp in this room. I could threaten my way down to the jumper bay, take one of the pods they use for ship-to-ship, convince Larrin to drop me out of hyperspace. I should.
The man turned around, holding a stack of the thick gelpacks John remembered from the infirmary, and John thought, well, there was my chance.
"I'm going to put these in the warming cupboard," he said, "How're the bruises?"
"Yellow," John said.
"I can give you something to relax those muscles," the little man said, reappearing from the bathroom. "It'll be a little strong, though." He came near John again, and John flinched. "Look, I can't do anything unless I can examine your back. I've been treating you in the infirmary for three weeks -"
"Ironically," John said, gritting his teeth, "exactly the period of time your people spent holding guns to my head before they decided we were all best friends."
The healer made a hmmphing noise, and rustled through his bag. "I'm not in charge of that part." He found a small box, shook two yellow squares about the size of chewing gum out into his hand. "You chew these, one every six marks. More often won't hurt you, but we're not exactly oversupplied around here." He looked again at the squares. "I'd cut them in half, even."
John held out his hand and the healer tipped them into his palm carefully; John set them on the bedside table.
"Now lie down," the man said. John looked up at him, a kid, really, with pale, colorless eyes and several day's of stubble. "I'm not going to hurt you," he said, "Well, I am, I'm a physical therapist. You know what I mean. I'm sorry, I've never treated an alien before." John thought of Carson, and shucked his shirt, and laid down.
The kid was still flustered, as he lay down the towels, and then the hotpacks, and John relaxed under the blessed heat on his sore muscles. "Not that you're an alien alien," he said, moving to fill a glass of water, and set it beside the bed. "Just an unfamiliar one. I never go down to the planets, there's too much work up here."
John was drowsing more than he was comfortable with, aware, now that it was easing, of how messed up his back was. "Seriously, Murtha and that kid -"
"I'm seeing them after you." the man answered. "And then the injuries from the battle."
"Lot of those?"
There was a hmm. "We were fully engaged for the Wraith for about two minutes."
"That's a long time, at those speeds." John said. He remembered an instructor from the academy, telling them - drilling into their heads - that most aerial dogfights were over within thirty seconds. "It's mostly bruises," the man said. He was starting to move the hotpacks; John shivered, involuntarily. "Two concussions where people hit their heads. And some plasma burns. The weapons conduits tend to overheat."
"No direct hits."
"No." the man said, and then "Are you alright with me touching your back?"
"Sure," John said, trying not to tense, and then the healer grabbed one of his arms up under the shoulder, braced a palm along John's right shoulderblade, and pushed.
John hissed, and then there was a fairly major pop. "Oh," he said, exhaling. "My people would call you a chiropractor."
That got no response. "I'm going to show you some exercises." the healer said, moving on up John's back. "You're not going to like some of them, but you're going to have to do them."
"Or what, Larrin will throw me out the airlock?"
"I don't think Larrin will be bothered if you're permanently bedridden," the healer said, taking his hands off John's back and taking the warm towels with him, damn him. "You might mind, though. Come on up."
John tried not to groan through the exercises, which - to be honest - he'd done before. Apparently physical therapists were the same all over. Also, apparently back injuries hurt like hell in other galaxies too.
"That'll do you for today," the man finally said. "I'll get you some hot towels."
John sat carefully on the bed, his back twinging. He looked at his hands, which were getting ashy from spending so long indoors; there was still a shiny line along his right thumb from the edge of the control console. He wanted to ask Nery questions; he wanted to demand to know why he was here, and not in the cell, because dammit, last time he'd brought Larrin back from the dead and almost gotten shot for his efforts.

He looked at his hands, and nodded when the doctor told him to drink his full water ration and call if he had problems, and to stretch again before dinner, and to take it easy, and John wasn't sure exactly how he could _not_ take it easy, because he was still stuck in a room on a ship in a vacuum. There wasn't a whole lot to get into.
Except as soon as Nery left, and John had sniffed the yellow things and touched one of them with his tongue - resinous, and he was willing to bet they'd make him loopy as hell - he did get up, and dress gingerly, and make his cautious way down the hall.
He'd gone as far as the mess, last time, and this time he kept walking. It'd been a little more than a month, by his count, and the ship was already lived-in: there were plants in pots, and notices taped to the messhall walls in a script he definitely can't read. The tables aren't as clean as they could be, and there's a baby's bootie sitting on one of the benches, abandoned. He stands for a second, leaning against the wall, and looks at it. He doesn't touch it.
The corridor peels off, and he turns away from the walkway that faces out into hyperspace, because he's seen hyperspace, and starts working his way towards the interior of the ship. The architecture starts to look familiar again - he's sure that's a lab on the left, and when he listens at the door and hears no voices, he looks in and sees rows and rows of that stinking green algae they'll be having for dinner. On his right are the crew quarters, and people have hung plaques inscribed with that strange, angular script by their doors. He wonders if those are names. His back aches; it really aches, and he leans back against the wall and breathes through his mouth for a second, waiting for it to pass.
There is light up ahead, the simulated sunlight of one of the indoor atriums from Atlantis, and children's voices. He pauses, uncertain, and quick as that a man in a security uniform is in front of him, just standing, not even looking at him.
John nods pleasantly, turns around, heads down the other hallway. He's being watched, then; of course he's being watched. He was pretty sure that if he'd tried to get too near the algae tanks the same thing would have happened.
When he gets back to his quarters, finally, his whole body hurting again, he eats the soup on his sideboard - now cold - and chews one of the yellow tabs. He was right; it's less like codeine than his faint high school memories of pot brownies, and he is mercifully glad to fall asleep.

The third night that John limped into the mess hall, late as he could manage, Ammon had saved back a piece of bread for him. John sat in his customary corner, trying to eat politely with unfamiliar implements; the bread helped to sop up the broth, and the water in the pitcher was still cold.
He looked up. Ammon nodded at the empty seat three down from him. Larrin's people didn't recognize shrugs; John tilted his head and flattened his hand, the shipboard equivalent, and Ammon sat down. He didn't say anything. John looked back at his soup; he crumbled the last of the bread in, and sipped from the bowl.
The next night that woman, Murtha's - whatever - sat by Ammon, and they started up a conversation about the routing in the subspace capacitors, and John looked at his bowl and missed Rodney like a punch to the gut.
"John?" He looked up. She, whoever her name was, was watching him, her pale face concerned.
He shook his head, and Ammon said, "I'll go see if there's more bread," and went off to the serving counter.
"You okay?" she asked. He didn't know her name; he was suddenly determined not to. Her face looked alien; the bones were too thin, the skin the sick color of a mushroom, and the smell of the room, the sound of conversation, the angle of arms to bodies and the way people lifted their spoons suddenly made him queasy. He made his face slack; he made his body not rebel right there.
"I'm fine," he said, shoving himself back from the table, and she didn't follow him. He felt Ammon's eyes on his back, heard conversation pause behind him as he stalked out.

---

He sat on the side of his bed with his head in his hands for a very long time, and looked at the row of yellow squares on the bedside table, and picked them up, and put them in the drawer where he couldn't see them. There was no computer in his room; he didn't have any paper. He found the piece of packing crate he'd had in his pocket two weeks ago, when he crashed the jumper. He didn't have any ink. He found the edge of the spoon from the meal Nery had brought him three days ago. He started to press the letters into the cardboard, one by one.

It was an hour or two before there was a knock on his door. He looked up. He'd filled the card, turned it over, and then started filling between the lines sideways; he'd put his goddamn serial number down on it. He didn't really expect that to survive interstellar space, did he?

"It's Meris," a woman's voice said, and he knew her name now. She was Murtha's - whatever. He got up, went to the door, laid his hand on it to open it.
She was unsurprised to find him standing there, and there was a woman in a security uniform glowering a ways down the hall.
"I thought you might be sick," she said, with the hard, flat kindness of a lie.
He shook his head; then he caught himself. That wasn't a gesture of theirs either. "No," he said.
She glanced at the securitywoman. "Can I come in?" she asked, and the securitywoman shifted, her face unhappy, her arms crossed. John stepped back, and Meris ducked inside, and closed the door behind her.
John grabbed her, put his arm to her throat, put his elbow to the join of her spine. "I want to go home," he hissed. "You radio them, you radio them now, and you make them let me off this ship."
Her hands had gone limp by her sides, but she didn't raise them, and her voice was smooth. "I don't know that that'll do you any good," she said, evenly. He hissed, and let her go, and slid down the wall to the floor, ignoring the way his back tried to seize as he moved.
She didn't move, and he looked up. She'd had a knife hidden in her palm the whole time. "Are you done with the fit of temper or do I have to go get the guard to stun you?" she asked, stepping away from him. The knife disappeared. He knew it was there now, anyway.
"Sorry." He pressed his palms into his face.
"No harm done. Don't do it again." Meris pulled out his desk chair, which John had never used. She sat down, facing him. He looked at her scuffed black boots, the grimy hems of her pants. He didn't look up at her face.
"My mother wasn't from the ships," she said, after a silence. "She was from Andari." John made the sign equal to a shrug; Meris added, "No, you wouldn't know it. The Wraith burned it all down before I was born."
He was quiet. He thought of the gray-burned spires of Sateda; he thought of Ronon's face standing on Satedan ground.
"It's hard." she said.
There was another pause. John listened to the comforting thrum of the ship's engines underneath him. She shifted, uneasy. He watched her palm move, reflexively; he was willing to bet she was fidgeting with the knife in her sleeve.
"My son is on the ground," she said, finally. "On Istmus. He was chosen," her voice was bitter, "because his job wasn't vital to the ship's running. We left him behind."
There was another long silence.
"Will Larrin go back for them?" John finally asked.
She snorted. He looked up at her; she wasn't looking at him, but at the wall by his head. "Larrin's not the commander of the fleet, John Sheppard," she said. "She's just the war leader. And if it was her choice, she'd tell us not to bring the Wraith down on our own colony by coming out of hyperspace now."
"Where are we going?" John asked, finally.
"Deep space," she said. "Past where they'll come to find us."
"All in one jump?"
"There're stops." Her hands tightened on the arms of the chair. "Are you going to behave if I leave?"
"I want off this damn ship, Meris." he said, his voice grating in his throat.
"Trust me, we could use the room." she said, and pushed herself to standing. "I've got another half-shift starting in a quarter-mark. Don't do anything stupid."
He nodded, not wanting to agree. She offered him her hand. After a pause, he took it, and let her pull him up.

---

Larrin came storming into the mess hall halfway through tenthday dinner, when there was some watery and in John's opinion awful ale. He was in his corner with Ammon and Meris, and Meris's daughter Verity, and Verity was telling a complicated and apparently funny story about a mixup in the algae tanks, and John was sitting over his half-mug of ale, and eating crackers out of the bowl in the middle of the table, and not looking at anyone. Chips and beer and weekends apparently went together in other cultures too, and Ammon and Meris formed a convenient bulwark between John and the rest of the room.

Larrin came stomping through the doorway, all big boots and tiny pants, and conversation stopped dead. She paused; John could see her collect herself. She nodded to the section leader - Able, John had learned who he was when Meris took him to get proper shoes, and a new bar of soap. Able nodded back, and ostentatiously turned back to his conversation, and the buzz in the room picked up again.

She stalked over to John's table, and said "I need to talk to you."
John spread his hands towards the open spot on the bench. Larrin's brow knit with anger; she glanced at the other people at the table. "A moment, Meris?"
Meris nodded at Ammon and Verity; they slid down the bench, but not by much, and John could see Ammon watching them over his beer.
"Well." She swung her legs over the bench, folded her hands on the table. "Good to see you're making friends."
"They're just keeping an eye on me in case I go bonkers and try to smash the engine housing," he said, holding the bowl of chips towards her. She glanced down at them, and back at him, her lip curled. He shrugged - she knew the gesture, at least, after this long - and popped one in his mouth. "How're things up on the auxilary bridge? Lots of yelling and punching people?"
He really wondered if she was going to punch him. It'd been weeks since she'd seen him. Her tolerance was probably low.
"How's the back?" she said, instead.
He raised an eyebrow. "Doesn't your doctor tell you that?"
"I'm asking you."
"Fine." he said, and then, deciding to be gracious, "better. Man knows what he's doing." The satisfaction on her face at that worried him. "Why?"

--

The auxilary bridge - the only bridge, now - was dark, only a few aides still at their workstation. It was shiftchange, and the end of a week, and he'd been out among the civilians for three weeks now and knew that half the usual crew was off tonight anyway. It would have been a great time to stage an escape, except he had no fucking idea where he was or where he needed to go.
"I'll shoot you in the head, you know I will," she said casually, standing between him and the console.
"Obviously you need me for something," he replied, "unless dragging me up here is your idea of shipboard romance."
She glanced at him; twisted her mouth. "I don't screw prisoners, Sheppard." She was fiddling with the graphics display; curiosity made him try to inch closer, without breaking his slouch.
"I thought I wasn't a prisoner." he said, and he really was trying to get a better look at the control console, but she'd been waiting for an excuse to hold up the gun. She wasn't even looking at him.
"Pay attention." She brought it up on the main screen, the beautiful clear crystal screen, and he knew where they were in the galaxy for the first time in two months. She glanced at him, amused; looked longer. He felt his face go slack with the wonder of the map.
She shook her head. "Okay, Sheppard. So we're -" she indicated. "We have fuel and power for another four months." She shifted, zoomed in; a planetary system, five planets and a dozen moons, and a glowering red sun, the debris belts around a gas giant - "Here." she was pointing to a moon, midway out. "About eighteen hundred years ago, we had a shipyard here. There should still be fuel deposits on the second moon, near the ice caps. We need to send a three-man engineering team out to load up the canisters; there's a robot we use for the ice harvesting."
"And you're telling me this because -"
She smirked, gathered up the hair falling over her shoulder in one hand, wrapped it and let it go down her back. He was uncomfortably aware of the smell of shampoo on her - Larrin didn't wash her hair with yellow soap, he'd bet - the smell of leather and plastic rising off her clothes, the heavy scent of person. He looked at the screen.
"We've got a satellite network in the system," she said, calling up video feed. "I want to show you some footage from a month ago."
"Dinner and a movie," he said, moving away from her, leaning against the far console. "You know how to treat a girl."
She ignored him; it flashed up on the screen, the light of planetrise over a lunar horizon, funny greenish dirt, funny reddish sky.
"What are we looking at?" he asked, finally, and she made a shut-up gesture with her hand. "There." she said, tapping the screen with a fingernail. "Enlarge that."
He looked at her askance, but she couldn't do it with her brain, so he asked the system to zoom in.
It was a thin sliver of silver flashing over the horizon, and he let out a breath, because honestly, he'd been expecting it, or he should have been.
"Patrol darts," he said.
"They knew we'd need to refuel," she said. "But we have hundreds of sites across this side of the galactic rim. They can't watch all of them all the time."
"Are they on a schedule? Do you know how often -"
She shook her head, scrolling through another dataset, calling up another camera. "As far as I can tell they're on a random rotation," she said.
"How long will the refueling stop take?" He bent closer; yes, there: another flash of metal in space. He wondered how good the cameras were, where they were positioned, how they transmitted.
She bit her lip. "Eight marks."
"Almost a full day." He straightened up. "That's a long time."
"Long enough for them to spot us, and long enough for them to get there, even traveling through hyperspace." she said. "We can keep most of the fleet in the shadow of the gas giant, there -"
"Won't they spot that on a systems scan?"
"Radiation interference from the red sun. Which is another reason to stay away from it." She brought up the system map again.
"Won't that blind you, too?"
"Partially. The cameras are mostly orbiting the moon."
He folded his arms. "I don't get it. Why don't they just blow up the fuel dump?"
She laughed, in a very chilly way. "There's a transponder in it that would tell us if they'd moved it. And they want us to come for it." She grinned at him, all even white teeth. "So they can eat us."
"So." he said, flatly "What do you want from me?"
She spread her hands.
"Really? After all the punching me and the part where I almost died?"
"You took out a Wraith cruiser right in front of me." she said. "We don't have anyone that good flying defense."
"You won't take this ship into combat. You can't risk it." He saw it on her face before she could explain. "You want me to fly the jumper?"
"It's fixed up pretty good," and he wished he had Rodney here to not even get started on that one. "Look, we might be there and out before they even know. The radiation scatter keeps darts from broadcasting their position until they get well outside the second asteroid belt. I'm pretty sure you can shoot down one dart in that amount of time."
He looked at her.
"Pretty sure is better than nothing."
He refolded his arms, leaned back against the back of the console chair. "So how do your satellites work if the radiation is so bad?"
She narrowed her eyes. "I'm not telling you how our spy network functions, Sheppard. I just need a yes or no about letting us all die in space."
"I don't know." Her mouth tightened with anger. "No, I really don't know if this is the way to do this. Give me the charts, give me a computer, and I'll tell you."
"We have six hours before we have to start planning where to drop out of hyperspace." She glanced behind him; he turned, and registered the power consumption graph ticking down, and jesus, did that ever bring back memories.
"Well." He looked at the graph, at Larrin, at the planets spinning on the screen in front of him. "Next time, tell me sooner."

"I'm not happy about this," Nery said, for the eighth time. Larrin had come to the infirmary and was sitting on one of the counters, swinging her heels, watching John do his exercises.
"You don't have to be happy about it, just tell me he can do it." she replied.
"I'm right here," John grunted, halfway through a really undignified stretch, and he really would rather not have a hostile audience right now.
Nery sighed, and went to the wall console, and started calling up x-rays. "Look," he said, "he's got major strains -" the rest was medical gibberish, and John was pretty sure that some of it wasn't in any system of medicine he was familiar with, so he tuned out, focusing on relaxing the painfully tight muscles along his midspine, holding the posture that was a little too much like yoga for his sense of masculinity. He remembered Teyla stretching, bending so that her arms folded behind her knees, her nose to her shins, her feet flat on the floor. Teyla would probably know what they were talking about.
"If he crashes again -"
"We've fixed the inertial dampeners," she said. "I don't expect him to have crash to a stop like that again. And, look -" she glanced at him. She knew he was listening. "There are tens of thousands of people counting on us." Her voice lowered; she moved to the other side of the table. Nery had his hand on her shoulder, and John wondered for a second.
"I'll do it," he said, later, after Nery had let him go with another round of painkillers and some strict warnings to stretch at home.
"Good," she said, looking out of the corner of her eye at him as they walked down the corridors. "Because there are fifteen thousand people waiting for me to think of something."
He ducked his head, remembering wide blue eyes and broad hands quick over a keyboard, and the pitch of panic tightening in Rodney's voice. "I have some idea what that's like."
They walked in silence for a while; he listened to the clunk of her thick heels on the decking, the soft sound of his crew boots.
"I wasn't war leader before this," she said, out of nowhere.
"What, you were just closest to my gate?"
"Oh, no, capturing the Ancient ship, that was my idea," she said. "That was completely my idea. And they gave me a five-man crew and the oldest, shittiest of our cruisers to do it with."
"What happened to the old war leader?" he asked.
She paused, turned towards him a little, didn't look at him. "Retired."
"Oh." He hoped it hadn't involved an airlock. "Larrin, I'm not going to risk my life for a crazy political scheme."
"No," she said, turning back, and continuing down the corridor. "But you will for your friends."
"They're not my -"
She cut him off. "And you will because there are men and women and children counting on you."
He really didn't like her. "I really don't like you," he said, voice tight and angry.
"Yeah," she said, shaking her hair out of her face, looking at him with those colorless eyes, "but you'll do what I say because I'm the one with the plan, won't you? Trust me -" they passed a technician, and Larrin stepped out of her way, nodded at her - "I'm kind of used to that."

"Are you sure about this?" Nery asked. He was the last person John would see before he touched deck again on the ship; he'd spent the last six hours trying to rig the pilot's chair in ways that would keep John from reinjuring himself.
John looked up at him, smiled in a way he really didn't feel. "It's kind of what I do."
He fell out of the belly of the ship, cloaked, and he felt space under him and around him, and it felt right. The fleet was arrayed behind him, veed out like a flock of geese, gray in the shadow of the gas giant. He watched the lights blink out, one by one, as the fleet went into blackout.
"Jumper, this is landing crew," it was a woman's voice, scratchy through the radiation interference, "You stick close now, we'll get of range fast in these things."
"Landing crew, I'm on your tail." His hands steered the jumper without thought; he looked up, and out, across the shining debris ring, to where the third, green moon was setting behind the planet. He wondered if he'd ever have come here with Atlantis. He wondered if he could bolt for home, let it take as long as it took. There was food under the bench. The water recycled.
The lander was a gray dot in front of him, and he followed them, heading for the ugly little rock of a fourth moon. "Forest moon of Endor," he muttered under his breath, "Rodney, I'm sorry you're missing this." He looked at his hands, red in the reflected light of the red sun; the jumper's course looped sideways, across the swirling surface of the gas giant, under the silver arc of the debris ring, and John suddenly thought of all the gray, flat places he'd grown up, bound around by fences. He thought about how he'd never expected to see anything but the inside of the same blue sky on the same planet for the rest of his life. He looked back towards the fleet.

The moon was a grape, and then an orange, and then a basketball. It took up a third of his window. He felt the jumper pull downward under him, steady, establish a stable orbit. "Landing crew?" he asked, again.
"Jumper, we're starting our approach." He admired the steady arc of the lander; he didn't know the pilot's name, but she wasn't bad. He turned his sensors as high up as they would go, not that it did much good here, and he waited.

Down below the lander was settling down, he imagined; the ice-harvesting robots he'd watched them load up in the hangers were trundling off, elephantine, to dig into the polar caps, and the space-suited crew was unlocking the fuel dump. He had no idea what it would look like. Larrin wasn't about to tell him a thing like that. Against his will he thought of the people back in the mess hall measuring out water by the milliliter. His own mouth was dry, looking at all that ice.

Ice and craters. He narrowed his eyes at the impact craters that streaked the moon, craned his head to scan the sky. The debris ring was far above him, flashing silver, and he called up the display, zoomed, zoomed again -
They were ships. His hands tensed for a second, then he realized: they weren't Wraith, and they wouldn't be flying any time soon. They were boxes, the formal, ungainly shapes of Larrin's fleet, some of them so big they would dwarf her little cruiser like it dwarfed his puddlejumper.

What was left of them, rather: burnt hulls, spires and support beams trailing off into vacuum, the marks of Wraith weapons clear on their hulls. It was a floating graveyard.
John shivered, and glanced at the time display. It had been a mark and three quarters; he hit the radio. "Lander, this is Sheppard, how's it going?"
"Right on schedule." There was clanging in the background. "How's it look up there?"
"No news." It was a simple patrol pattern; he'd flown it a thousand times. Mostly not in space. The third dimension did make a little more complicated. By the ninth pass, he was comfortable enough that he put the jumper on autopilot and pulled out his packed lunch, and then looked at it, and realized that someone had packed him a lunch.

Of course that was when he spotted it. "Lander," he said, hitting the radio, and he was at the edge of his radio range, and damn, did he hope Larrin was right about undetectable frequencies, "I've got something on the screen."
"Sh----" the static cleared, and then, "Sheppard, you sure?"
"As sure as I want to be," he nudged the jumper closer, and thank god the cloak was working again. One dart. He could handle one dart.
"Lander, I'm gonna sneak up on this thing and shoot it," he said into the radio, "and then we can all go home, you copy?"
"Sheppard, Larrin said to stick close and protect the lander-"
"Which I accomplish by shooting this guy, so hold on and I'll be right down there." He veered, called up the weapons array. He was on the stupid thing's tail; he wished for a second he felt a little guiltier about killing space catfish, and then he pressed the trigger.
The explosion was big and bright and his long veer away carried him back towards the moon, up close to the debris belt, and then he saw it: two more darts, like needles, and no way had they missed that explosion. Fuck.
"Lander, this is Sheppard, we've got trouble." he said. "I need you guys onboard and ready to launch." Another flash, a third dart, and he headed for his five-o'clock, because he was recloaked, and damned if he wanted them to guess where he was. "Kind of right now."
"Sheppard, one of the robots is still out, we've got a quarter-mark left -"
"Is the fuel onboard?" He scanned; he called up the equipment. He put his hand on the display screen and willed it clear, and yeah, Rodney'd been right, John totally sweet-talked the equipment under his breath, because, "that's it, baby -" the greenscreen blipped clear, just for a second, and yes, three darts, only three darts.

He should not feel so fucking relieved. The second he fired, they'd know his position, and if he missed - "Lander -"
"We're at eighty percent," the pilot replied, and John really, really fucking wished he knew her name. "Can you hold them off?"
"I need you all in that ship starting liftoff procedures right now," John said, voice flat. The two darts to his eight drew near, drew near - shit, they starburst out, rushed past him, and he was going to have a hell of a time catching up.
"That's a negative, Sheppard," she said, and fucking pilots with a martyr complex, what the hell? "We've got people down on the surface, we need you to hold them off for -" a pause, "Four more minutes, you got it?"
He really wished he didn't. "Affirmative." Then he had a thought, as he wheeled, trying to keep the planet between himself and the darts. "You got weapons on that thing?"
"Short-range energy canons. That's all."
So much for that. He threw the jumper into a roll, if he timed it right - if he -
He squeezed the trigger, and the drone blurred away from him, and the two Wraith darts that weren't a cloud of smoke converged on the place where he'd just been. "Like hell," he muttered under his breath, and then "Lander?"
"On it." the pilot said, and then, "The fuel's on board, Sheppard, we are initiating liftoff -" her voice was hard, and John made himself not listen to that, because one of the dart had flipped on its tail and darted past him, back towards the planet, and he yelled "Oh hell no," hit the decellerators, spun after it. "I will not -" He fired. There was a puff; there was no sound in space, but he was close enough that he heard the patter of dust hitting the hull, and then it was just one dart and him. It was firing; it was firing everything it had, a crosshatched spray of blue and black marking itself on his retinas, and he couldn't duck fast enough. He veered off. "Lander, you need to get out of there, right now, shields up."
"Got it." He saw the flare of their launch, threw the jumper forward, determined to get between it and the clunky, slow lander. "Shit," he muttered under his breath, "Shit, it's not going to -"
"Sheppard, now," the pilot said, and somehow the great clunky ship lumbered right, fired up at the dart bearing down on it, and Sheppard had squeezed the trigger without knowing it. It hit the dart aftwards, not a clean puff in vacuum, but an out-of-control spin, and John's stomach went queasy.
"Go!" the other pilot yelled, "get out of here!" and John said "That dart's going down, we're fine, we-"
And then he thought about the fuel dump right underneath them, and the Wraith dart falling on fire, and said "Oh." and hit the accelerator.

He stayed even with the lander, though. That was his job now. Down below them, the falling dart cut a streak across the sky, and then -
a puff of dust. A wisp of vapor. And then the jumper was thrown forward by the shockwave, and John scrambled for his instruments, yelling "Lander! Lander!"
"We're here." Her voice was shaken, but clear across the staticky connection. "The fuel dump's gone. Bastard aimed right for it." she said, exhaustion coloring her voice. "God forbid he die harmlessly."
"Are all your people onboard?" John asked, afraid of her answer.
"Yeah," she said, and he felt relief go loose across his spine, loosened his hands on the controls. "All safe and counted up. C'mon, Sheppard. Let's go home."

There was a crowd in the hanger, which John registered, first, as some stupidity - what if he'd had to land like last time? - and only secondly as a welcoming party. When the hatch of the jumper cracked open, he heard the cheering, and he emerged blinking into the white-blue light of the ship and stared, uncertain.
The landing crew, he saw, was not as hesitant, and he finally put a face to the pilot's voice - a woman a few years older than him, with her pale hair braided to her head, swept up in the crowd, a child adhering himself to her leg, a bearded man sweeping her up in an exuberant hug, and John felt queasy.
Nery was at his elbow, and John was unexpectly relieved to see a familiar face. "Are you okay?"
"Inertial dampeners held." John said, clapping him on the back, and then he withdrew his hand, awkwardly. "Are the landing crew -"
"Fine," Nery said, "they're fine."
And then the crowd reached John, and he wasn't sure about this touching thing, because everyone was clapping his shoulder, clasping his hand, and John really wasn't big on that, but they carried him along to the center of the hanger.
"John!" It was Larrin, and he hadn't even known she knew his first name. "John, shit -" she grabbed him by the shoulders, shook him. She looked like she hadn't slept in days. She hadn't, he thought suddenly, and then she let him go and stepped back, a little embarrassed.
He stuck out his hand, and she clasped it, and said, "That was damn fine flying."

The pilot's name was Amity, and she put her arm around John's shoulders, introduced him to her husband - whose hug John only warded off by stepping sideways and patting the man's shoulder in an arm's length sort of way, and the landing crew were Levi and Emmene, and they all had families that wanted to tell John he was awesome.
John stood for it for another five minutes, and then he threw what must have been a pretty desperate look at Nery, who came over and made some noise about checking John's exposure levels - "Did I just get irradiated?" John said, taken aback, as soon as they were out in the corridor, and Nery snorted and said "No, I know critical social exposure when I see it." John expected at least a perfunctory visit to the infirmary, but Nery steered him straight on to John's quarters, and said, "You should take a shower and sleep, is what you should do." And then there was a pause, in the doorway, and then Nery reached out a hand and laid it on John's cheek.

It was a strange gesture, straight-forward in intent, and John thought for a second how easy it would be, let the man nudge him back into his quarters and be touched with intent for the first time in months, wake up in the morning to a whole new set of problems. Something in him flinched back, and Nery's eyes flickered away, and Nery stepped out of John's personal space.
"Sorry," Nery said, looking away. "That was awkward."
John shrugged, easier than he felt. "No biggie."
"You should stretch before you sleep," Nery said, already turning to go down the hall. "I'll have Ammon send food over." He turned back. "Good work today."
"Yeah," John said, and then, "Hey, Nery?"
The man turned around, blue eyes and the spikey hair of a buzz cut growing out and John thought, dammit.
"Thanks," John said, and went inside.

Meris sang, constantly, low, under her breath while she worked. Nery, only a little awkward in his role of doctor now, had ordered John to leave his room, to walk around the ship, and right now people got kind of excited to see him, and John didn't like that much.
"It wasn't that big a deal," he said to Meris, and she answered, "No," and he felt a little stung.
She looked at him sideways, and smiled. "But it was pretty good," she conceded. "And you're someone new to look at, which, it's been a long time."
So he went to work with Meris, mostly, because she was gray-haired and respectable and could send the onlookers scurrying with a well-placed word, and she mostly went from place to place in the ship, repairing wiring, fixing stuck doors, and calculating the endless, enormous equation of power and transmission, heat and water in the ship in space. He could sit, listening to her low hum, to the endless noises of tinkering and adjustment, and imagine he was on a different ship altogether.
He leaned his head back against the bulkhead - he was sitting on the floor, legs drawn up, watching the blink blink blink of the indicator lights against the ceiling of maintainence hutch, and drowsed. After a while he heard her singing again, low and wordless, and then he heard the hum of the engines through the decking, and realized that she was harmonizing.