She shook her head, shading her eyes with her good hand. “I do not know,” she said. “It happened very quickly and I do not know how fast we were moving. I am certain there were settlements that we passed over, and some areas that looked farmed, but I do not know how far. Forty miles? Seventy miles?”
John winced. Whether forty or seventy miles of desert, neither was good news in this heat. And in broad daylight they’d be an easy target. “Settlements?”
“Yes,” she said. “I am sure we are not far from some. I thought I saw a village not long before we crashed. Though I know nothing of the people of this world.”
There were voices behind them, human voices raised in shouts, the sounds of running feet.
Slinging the P90 around, John turned toward the sound. “I think we’re about to,” he said.
Dr. Radek Zelenka lifted his hand to screen his eyes from the bright sun and looked out over the azure sea. The ruins of what once must have been a citadel perched on the edge of a cliff above the waves, providing a magnificent view of sky and sea and a few distant islands beckoning on the horizon. A steep path led down the cliff to a white sand beach, while behind, on the other side of the broken stone walls of the citadel, lush jungle crowded up to the heights. The island was not uninhabited, as they had first thought. A few tendrils of smoke rose from cooking fires on the other side of the island, marking the location of a little fishing village. The scene was, Zelenka thought, idyllic. It looked like the coast of Dalmatia on the Adriatic. If it weren’t in the Pegasus Galaxy the place would be overrun with tourists.
And if the planet weren’t protected by an energy field. They’d seen that before, worlds protected by the Ancients for some purpose of their own. There was a Stargate, of course, a ground gate, not a space gate, otherwise they could not have penetrated the shield, its DHD modified in a way that Rodney had huffed over and eyed suspiciously. He had not been much interested in the shield. They had seen them before. He was all too happy to leave the investigation of the Ancient ruins and the shield generator to Radek.
“It’s going to be just like the one on M7G-677,” Rodney had said. “You know. The planet with all the kids. There’s not much point in poking at it.” His eyes had lit as he ran his hands over the DHD by the gate. “But this! This is really interesting! It seems like there’s some kind of tampering with the control mechanisms…”
And so they had left Rodney to the DHD while he had been detailed to investigate the energy shield, with Ronon to stay with him in case of trouble. Now Ronon came and stood beside him at the edge of the cliff. He thought that Ronon’s expression altered just a tad. Surely the man could not be impervious to so much beauty!
“Glorious, isn’t it?” Radek said.
Ronon nodded slowly. “Yeah.”
Someday, Radek thought, he would hear the Satedan put more than two words together. In the few months since Ronon Dex had joined the expedition in Atlantis he didn’t think he’d ever heard the man utter a complete sentence.
“It reminds me of a place I used to know,” Radek said. “Near a city named Dubrovnik.”
“Home?”
“No,” Radek said. “Somewhere I visited once. The Czech Republic has no coast.” He put his hands his pockets, scanning the far horizon. “A beautiful town, and then I had a beautiful person to see it with.”
Ronon stiffened, and for moment Radek wondered what he could have said that gave offense, but then his eye caught what Ronon had already seen.
The shape of one of the clouds was wrong, and it moved wrong, against the flow of wind, against the flow of the other clouds. It was a Wraith cruiser coming in over the sea, flirting with the edges of the soaring clouds, white against the blue sky.
“Get down!” Ronon yelled, grabbing Radek by the back of the shirt and all but flinging him to his knees. “Stay down!”
They huddled in the shelter of the citadel wall, and for once Radek was glad of the grays and tans of the Atlantis uniform. It was hard to spot from above against gray stone and shadow. Ronon’s brown blended equally well.
The cruiser swept over at a few thousand feet, and the sound of its passage was a roaring in his ears. He watched, waiting to see if it would come around for another pass, Ronon’s hand on his arm to keep him still.
“Wait,” Ronon said, every muscle tensed, his other hand on the energy pistol at his belt.
They waited.
The cruiser faded into the distance. When all was once again still, Ronon unfolded and stood up. “Not good.”
Radek nodded. “Do you think that the jumper, that Sheppard…”
“If Sheppard ran into that thing he had a problem,” Ronon said. “Ten times the firepower.”
“What are the Wraith doing here?” Radek said, scrambling to his feet. “The energy shield should prevent them from getting in, and that ship is much too large to go through the Stargate.”
“I don’t know.” Ronon looked after the cruiser, shading his eyes against the bright sun. “But I think we’re in big trouble.”
Chapter Two
Teyla Emmagan hurried through the trees surrounding the oasis, her shoulder a dull throb of pain. The hot sun beat down on them. They would not evade the inhabitants of this world for long, and perhaps it was foolish to try.
“Colonel,” she said. “There is little point in running. We cannot hope to elude them.” Certainly if they left the trees and took off across the desert they would be easily spotted, and the cover around the oasis was by no means dense enough to hide effectively. “It would be better to seek them out.”
Sheppard stopped, turning back with the P90 ready in his hands. “You have a point,” he said. Sweat stood upon his face and the dressing that covered the wound to his head was already soaked through with blood. He didn’t look good.
There were distant shouts and the sounds of running feet. Someone yelled, “That way!”
They stood together beneath a stand of palm trees, shoulder to shoulder, a quarter turn off each other, covering overlapping fields of fire. It was hard to hold the heavy weapon with her right hand alone, and her left was entirely useless.
“I do not sense the Wraith,” Teyla said. “They are not close. All these are human.” Of course, she thought, she would not sense the Wraith cruiser unless it were near. She was not certain what the range of her Gift was, but surely only a few miles, forty at most, or more likely twenty. But enough to know that there were no Wraith among the pursuers bearing down on them.
“Understood,” John said, nodding sharply. “Let’s see what we can do with these guys.” He did not have to tell her to hold fire. Teyla knew that.
They came out of the trees cautiously, mostly villagers, wearing knee length tunics of light colored cloth, stained with work and toil. They were barefooted, and carried a variety of farm implements, stopping short when they saw her and Sheppard in the shadow of the trees.
Teyla could see the thought cross his face. “It would cost too much,” Teyla said quietly. “We would have to kill dozens to break out.” Possible, with the automatic weapons, but a terrible thing, to shoot villagers who had come to investigate the crash and as yet had threatened nothing.
John grimaced. “I know. I got that a long time ago.” Teyla had learned that it was not the way he did things, had seen it on Athos when the men from Earth first came there. Colonel Sumner thought nothing of her people, regarded them little, but Sheppard always saw them real and whole.
“We are friendly,” Teyla called out. “You see that we are human, and our ship has crashed.”
John gave them his most ingratiating smile, the one Teyla had begun to think of as the Smile of Wrongness, because it only appeared when something was badly wrong. “Hi, everybody.”