He wiped the slush from his eyes, still scrambling clear. The vast animal had fallen on its side, writhing in agony. Jar’hram protruded from its hide in every direction and the snow was dark and thick with blood. Ronon’s own spear stuck from its stricken flank, buried deep into the flesh.
Several yards away, Orand regained his feet. His face had the pallor of a man who had stared death in the face too closely. Without saying a word, he pulled a long dagger from his furs. The buffalo seemed no longer capable of gaining its feet. Its bellows sank into long, rumbling cries of distress.
Orand waited for a few moments while the rest of the hunters approached the wounded animal. With effort, Ronon pulled himself to his feet. His vision still swam, but he kept upright, determined not to show weakness in front of the others. Orand walked forward, holding the knife aloft as the rest of the hunting party watched in silence. The only sound was the moan of the endless wind and the increasingly shallow suffering of the buffalo.
Orand approached the huge head of the animal. It had sunk to the ground and was now moving only listlessly. The creature was having trouble breathing, and its flanks shivered as it attempted to suck in the frigid air. Orand positioned himself over its thick neck, and held the knife motionless for a moment. The hunters all bowed their heads. Orand himself seemed to be mouthing a few words under his breath. It looked like he was praying.
Then, in an instant, the knife came down. There was no sound, no cry of distress. The animal died quickly. There was a momentary twitching along its flank, and then it lay still. Orand pulled the knife clear, and withdrew. He wiped the blade carefully in the snow and re-sheathed it.
Ronon felt his body begin to recover. His breathing returned to normal and his vision cleared. He walked over to the Forgotten hunter and Orand came to meet him, smiling broadly. He seized the Satedan in a sudden bear hug, and held him long before releasing him.
“Well fought!” laughed Orand. “That was a mighty blow. I would have died, had you not intervened when you did. You have my thanks.”
“No problem,” Ronon said, embarrassed by the hunter’s effusive praise. “You did the same for me.”
Orand turned to look over the huge carcass.
“It fought well,” he said, quietly. “We honor the buffalo after death. It sustains us. In its death is our life, and we do not forget it.”
The rest of the hunters were gathering together. Each had taken out a long knife.
“There is no time to lose,” he said, in a more matter-of-fact voice. “We’ll butcher the carcass now. If we leave it too long then the meat will freeze solid. There is a cache nearby which we often use. We’ll store the cuts of meat there, and others will come and collect it for storage in the settlement.”
“You leave the meat out here?” asked Ronon. “How come it doesn’t — ”
Then he realized what he was saying. Orand laughed.
“Who would take it?” he said. “No animals but the buffalo can survive out here. And we share everything we have. That is our way.”
“Then we’d better get to work,” Ronon said, looking at the massive carcass. “Got a spare knife?”
Orand drew a second blade from his furs, gave it to him and walked over to the carcass. Ronon paused before following him, checking his equipment. His sidearm was unharmed by the experience of being thrown against the ice by an enraged buffalo. He reached for his radio.
It was gone. At some point in the excitement it must have fallen loose. His stomach suddenly tight, Ronon jogged back the way he’d been chased, feeling the muscles in his legs tighten against the cold.
The snow behind the carcass was a bloody mess of slush and ice-crystals. Broken jar’hram shafts littered its path. And there, sitting in the middle of them, was his radio. The buffalo’s hooves had made short work of it.
Ronon stopped to pick up what was left. The casing fell apart in his hands, spilling fragments of circuit board. Not even McKay could have fixed that.
“Hey, big man!” Orand beckoned him over to the buffalo. “You’re wasting that knife.”
Ronon dropped the remnants of his radio back into the snow, and trudged toward the butchery. It was a waste of a functioning radio, but that was nothing to get too upset about. They’d be back at the settlement before long. No problem.
As he walked, he looked up at the skies. There were heavy black clouds banked up against the horizon. They looked pretty big.
Nothing to worry about.
Chapter Seven
Weir strode down the corridor toward the Operations Center. When she arrived she saw Zelenka and his coterie of scientists hunched over flickering screens. He looked even more disheveled than usual. Weir wondered how much sleep he’d gotten over the past forty-eight hours.
“So what have we got, people?” she said, with deliberate brightness. Zelenka and the others couldn’t be allowed to see how much this was affecting her.
Zelenka looked up from his panel. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his face gray. Had he even gone to bed since the Jumper left?
“We’re in a better place than we were,” he yawned. “But not much.”
Stretching in his chair, he managed to pull a little of his crumpled uniform into shape as he climbed to his feet. “We’ve succeeded in salvaging some equipment from the chamber McKay stumbled into,” he said. “That’s been a help. These things have been the most interesting of all.”
He gestured to a series of objects, each about two feet tall and surrounded by complicated-looking electronics. They looked for all the world like one of McKay’s half-baked engineering projects. None of them seemed finished, or even capable of powering-up.
“They’re not complete, as you can see,” said Zelenka, looking at them with ill-disguised irritation. “But we’ve learned quite a lot about them. They’re remote power-relays — and there are similar mechanisms in the Stargate here.”
Weir regarded the semi-complete devices carefully.
“OK, so the Ancients were working on the Stargate tech,” she said, trying to sound encouraging. “How does that help us?”
“We’ve run some simulations of their potential function.” Zelenka ran his hand through his hair. “We’ve made some guesses, cut some corners, and I’m reasonably sure these were designed to be used on the Jumpers themselves.”
He pressed a button on the console before him, and a graphical simulation appeared on the monitors. “Here,” he said, motioning towards a rolling series of power bars. “When a Jumper enters the Stargate network, the storage and transmission of the energy produces a drain on the system power levels.”
As he spoke, the bars dipped a little.
“Normally, the connected Stargates would compensate almost immediately,” he went on. “There should never, never, be a case of a Jumper materializing within an event horizon. Under normal conditions, it wouldn’t even be physically possible — a transiting object is just a stream of mass converted into pure energy.”
He pressed a second button, and the display changed again. “In this case, the gates were so far apart that the system wasn’t able to adjust. But it seems to me that there was a deliberate partial materialization on this jump. My speculation is that the distance was too great for a standard Stargate node to use, so the system scheduled a ‘drop’ out of the wormhole, ready for a second leg.”
The lines on the computer screen shrank, glowed red, and died. Whether or not Zelenka was right, obviously the numbers on his simulation didn’t add up. Beyond that, the readings were opaque. Weir was no one’s fool, but wormhole physics had never made much sense to her.