“Some books, that painting,” Ronon said. “Small things. I didn’t think anybody would have a problem with that.”
John was getting the feeling that anybody here meant dead people, and he wasn’t sure where to even start with the question of whether dead Satedans would have minded them taking their stuff. “You think they’d have a problem with us taking the titanium?”
“I said let’s do it,” Ronon said. “The gate’s in the middle of a city. If you look around, can you find what we need?”
“I think so,” Radek said. “We would want a team of engineers.”
“We need to check it out first,” John said. “As far as we know, there’s nobody living there now, but we don’t want any surprises.”
“It would make a useful base for the Wraith,” Teyla pointed out.
“And that’s the kind of surprise we don’t want. So let’s — ” John stopped himself in mid-sentence. Let’s go check it out. And leave who in command of Atlantis? Colonel Carter, he thought rebelliously, who actually wanted this job, but it didn’t work that way and he knew it. Anyway, Caldwell was senior to Sam, and the idea of leaving the city in Caldwell’s hands wasn’t nearly as attractive.
He started over. “Ronon, why don’t you take Teyla and Radek and go check it out.” Teyla had seniority as team leader, but given that it was Ronon’s home planet, it seemed reasonable for him to run the show this time.
“All right,” Ronon said after a moment. He looked at Teyla and Radek. “So… gear up, and let’s go check it out.”
“Let us do that,” Teyla said, standing up.
“Yes, great,” Radek said, without a lot of visible enthusiasm. “Time to ‘gear up’.”
“The sooner we go, the sooner you can be back in Atlantis building the defense we need against the Wraith,” Teyla pointed out.
“You know, Rodney learned to like offworld missions,” John said as Ronon and Teyla went out. “At least the ones where nobody tries to kill us.”
“Rodney is a crazy person,” Radek said. “And people try to kill you all the time.”
“Only some of the time,” John said. “And some of them are trying to kill Rodney in particular.”
“That is sort of comforting,” Radek said. “I will try to keep that in mind.”
Teyla shouldered her pack and gave Radek an encouraging smile. She and Ronon had wordlessly moved to put the scientist between them, so that they could watch out for him if there was any danger. Teyla privately felt that was unlikely in the extreme, and thought she might have done better to stay at Ronon’s side. It could not be easy for him to have to face again what the years were making of Sateda.
It had not been easy for her to face, and it had never been her home. It was one thing to walk into a village that had been Culled and see the familiar aftermath, buildings burned and crops ruined by dart fire, families grieving the missing. It was another to walk into a city that was bigger than any she had seen before it and see the ruin the Wraith had made of it.
It made her imagine unwillingly what it must have been like when the Wraith had destroyed the cities of Athos. She knew the pain of Cullings well enough, but she had not imagined before what it must have been to leave the dead lying unburned in the streets because there were not enough hands to build pyres for them. She had never walked in the streets of her own ruined cities with broken glass crunching under her feet like snow.
Teyla had seen Sateda twice. The first time was when the Wraith had recaptured Ronon and brought him there to hunt him, like the entertainments on some worlds where wild animals were brought into town to be killed for sport. The second time would not have happened were it not for Rodney.
It was later the same year that they had rescued Ronon from Sateda, on a quiet enough day that there was time for idle curiosity. Rodney was examining Ronon’s pistol, more carefully than he usually examined things because Ronon had told Rodney that he would break his limbs if Rodney broke the pistol.
“I’m not going to break it,” Rodney said. “I’m not sure where I’d even start with trying to build you a replacement ray gun. I don’t suppose there are a lot of these just lying around somewhere on Sateda? Because Sheppard for one would be happy about that.”
“No,” Ronon said. He held out his hand, and Rodney reluctantly returned his pistol.
“It is unlikely that anything so valuable would still be ‘lying around’,” Teyla said.
Ronon nodded. “People had eight years to scavenge things before the Wraith blew up the Stargate.”
Rodney’s brow furrowed. “Before the Wraith did what?”
“I saw the explosion,” Ronon said. “Before the rest of you guys showed up. You can’t dial in now.”
“Huh,” Rodney said. “They probably just knocked the gate over, or maybe a building fell on it or something. If there’s enough junk inside the ring, it won’t dial.”
Teyla glanced sideways at Ronon. She knew it had troubled him that Sateda’s Stargate was gone, and that to ever reach his home planet again he would have to depend on Colonel Caldwell to be willing to take him on Daedalus.
She did not think the people from Earth understood how disturbing the idea was, even if Ronon had no intention of ever actually going there again. The first thing children learned about the Stargates was how to dial their home. She remembered her own father allowing her to touch the symbols on the dialing device for the first time, after she had proved she knew them by heart, his hand over hers. He had told her the Ring of the Ancestors would always bring her home.
“You do not think it was destroyed?” she asked Rodney.
“The Stargates are basically indestructible by anything short of a massive nuclear explosion,” Rodney said, in what for him was a relatively patient tone.
“It looked like a pretty big explosion,” Ronon said.
“And yet you weren’t instantly vaporized. Look, a Mark IX naquadriah-enhanced warhead can take out a Stargate. It has a blast radius of a hundred miles. You’d be a smear of ash in a city-sized crater.”
Ronon nodded slowly. “So you think we can fix the gate.”
“Probably,” Rodney said. “But it’s not like we’re running there every ten minutes. There’s no reason we can’t get there on the Daedalus if we ever need to.”
“Even so,” Teyla said. “We know there are other Satedan survivors. Someone will try dialing Sateda again someday. If the gate will not even open…” She shook her head, not sure how to explain and sure that Ronon would be no better at finding the words. “It will be another blow for people who have already suffered a great deal.”
Rodney shrugged. “So tell Sheppard that. He’ll take looking for ray guns as enough of an excuse to go back.”
“He’s not going to find one,” Ronon said.
“Thus the word ‘excuse’,” Rodney said, and after a moment Ronon nodded in return, thanks he would not say; the two men were little enough alike, but she thought this time they understood each other well enough.
It had been a quick trip, that time. It had not taken long for Rodney to get the gate operational again, and none of them had wanted to linger after that. Ronon had said little, clearly far away in some other time, and John had looked at the city with the pained expression he usually wore when confronted with the aftermath of war. This time they were likely to be there longer.