“Good,” Ronon said. He looked younger with his hair soaked, less certain and impervious than usual.
“We will just hold on,” Radek said. “And surely they are already on the way with a puddle jumper.” A thought occurred to him and he swore volubly. “The boat is capsized. We have lost my laptop.” All his data. All his personal files. All sinking to the bottom of an alien sea.
“And our supplies,” Ronon said grimly. Of course the backpacks were lost as well. Their food, their water…
There was a worse thought, but he could not put off voicing it. “And our radios,” Radek said. Without the radios, how would the rescue team find them? They were two men adrift in a big sea, and the pilot would not even know where to look.
Night came, and the storm abated. It was no longer raining. That was a small mercy. The upended hull floated on calmer seas. Radek had managed to climb onto it, sitting on the hull rather than clinging to it, which required less energy.
Ronon held the side, despite all invitations to climb on too. “I’m too heavy,” he said. “I’ll tip it over.”
Now, with the waves less jagged, Radek tried again. “It will not tip if you balance,” he said. “You should save your strength. We will need it.” He thought perhaps Ronon was abashed that strength had not been enough. It was all very well to be powerfully built, but that did not compensate actually for not knowing how to sail.
Gingerly, Ronon climbed on top, inching his way forward to lie on the hull on his belly, just breathing for a long moment. Resting.
Radek tried once again to dry his glasses on his sopping wet shirt. It did make them less streaky. He looked up. The clouds were thinning somewhat. Through a break he could see stars. Not a bad storm, then. Just an afternoon thunderstorm of the sort that sent tourists running for the awnings of cafes, that made ship passengers cut short their jogs around promenade decks. If it had been a bad storm they would be dead. Rather than just adrift on an overturned hull, somewhere in the middle of an alien sea, with no supplies and no radios.
Still, this was an archipelago. There were other islands, and indications from the air had suggested they were populated. When the weather cleared and day came there might be other ships, or perhaps the currents would carry them close enough to another island to risk swimming.
He looked at Ronon, who rolled over on his back. He wondered if he looked that tired. Probably worse.
“It is your turn,” he said.
“My turn for what?” Ronon looked up at the scudding clouds, the stars beyond.
“We must stay alert,” Radek said. “It is your turn to tell me a story. I told you one.”
Ronon snorted, and he thought he would not say anything. Radek drew his knees up, getting his feet out of the water. He was surprised when Ronon spoke.
My dad drowned. He was a soldier, an Immortal like me. It was the spring after I turned five. There were late snows in the mountains and then a hard spring rain. Everything flooded. Streams turned into rivers, carrying away houses and trees. The rail lines were cut above Euta when the bed washed out. Lots of people left homeless, lots of bad stuff.
The Chieftain declared an emergency and sent the army in to help. My dad — he crawled out on a bridge. They were trying to do white water rescue, getting people out of this stream that was a hundred times bigger than usual, a family swept away in the current. The bridge washed out and collapsed.
They found his body the next day down at Hougma along with the people he was trying to save. They all died except one kid and the dog. Guess they were the lucky ones. Somebody always is, right?
I lived with my mom and my Nan in the city. There was a pool that people used in the summer time, but I didn’t like it much. I wasn’t really into swimming. I learned because you have to know how to swim to be an Immortal, and that’s what I was going to do. Same thing with school. The Immortals only take the best. If you don’t get good marks you don’t get in. So I worked really hard. My mom wanted me to be a chemist or something instead, somebody who works in a lab or a hospital, not a soldier. But I would have had to find a lot of money for that, and I didn’t really want to anyway.
When I was seventeen I became an Immortal. It was good. It was the thing I wanted, you know? Sometimes there’s something you’re just right for and it all flows along, like water rolling down hill. When you’re on and you’re golden and you’ve got the right thing. That’s what it was like.
That’s what I was. That’s what we were.
My Nan used to say that we live as long as we endure in the memory of our Kindred. If that’s so, they’re all here. Right here, in my chest. Sateda’s here. We’ll rise again. We have before. We know we’ve been laid low before, been plowed under like corpses in a field. But we come back. That’s who we are. Sateda’s strong. The Kindred are strong. It may not be in my lifetime. But it will happen. I’m sure. One day you’ll see what we can do.
“We’ve got a problem!” Carson yelled just as the jumper jolted abruptly in the night sky. They had passed through the Stargate without incident, climbing away from the desert cliffs around the DHD that Rodney could do without ever seeing again, high into the night sky. It was perfectly clear, the stars bright on a calm evening.
The puddle jumper shook, inertial dampers failing to compensate completely for some shock, and Rodney held onto his seat. “Why?” he yelled, pulling up the long range scanners. Surely somebody wasn’t shooting at them.
Carson swore, and the jumper jolted again, a shower of sparks in the back arcing as something blew.
The scan was negative. They were alone in an empty sky.
Alone, except for…
“This planet has an energy shield!” Rodney shouted. “We’ve got to stay below it! If we get too close we’re going to set off a feedback loop and it will start pulling power from us. Carson! We’ve got to get lower!”
“I can bloody well tell that!” Carson yelled back, struggling to control the jumper’s dive. “I don’t have much choice. Main power is offline!”
“Crap!” Rodney flung himself out of his chair, nearly bowling Lorne over in his beeline for the sparking control panels behind.
Secondary power, yes. That could be rerouted. They still had backup… Rodney popped the panel and started pulling crystals. The third one on the left needed to move and then…
The jumper jolted again, but it was a different kind of motion, less as though the ship had struck something and more as though it had jinked in the air, Carson struggling for control without main power. The puddle jumpers were by no means aerodynamic. They weren’t meant for unpowered flight, even for a few seconds.
The crystals were hot, but he could move them with his finger tips… This. And this. Reroute the cloak’s power into the main engines, and…
He seated the crystal and the jumper’s inertial dampeners returned, the flight seeming completely level though he could see through the forward window that they were still plummeting. The engines came to life a second later. Rodney always found it disconcerting how you couldn’t hear them, even when you knew they were only a few feet away on the other side of the hull. He could see the look of strain on Carson’s face as the jumper pulled up, screaming by a scant few hundred feet above the desert.