“Thanks.” He took the packet from her.
“Is this seat taken?” She gestured vaguely to the chair opposite.
“No.”
“Cool.” Cadman slid into the seat and set her tray down. “Pretty busy, huh?”
“Yeah.” Ronon tore the packet open and split the chopsticks carefully. “When did Carter start carrying chopsticks?”
“I dunno.” Cadman applied herself to her chicken casserole with great gusto. In fact, Ronon wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a woman eat so fast, not even in the Satedan guard.
He was staring, and she stopped and looked up at him. “Something wrong?”
“No.”
“I did a six mile run on the treadmill this morning,” Cadman said. “Kind of worked up an appetite.” She didn’t look like she’d been running, her red-gold hair wound up neatly at the back of her neck. He supposed it did look wet.
“You like the Hammond?” he managed.
Cadman stopped, the food halfway to her mouth. “I do.” She took a bite and swallowed quickly, then smiled. “Colonel Carter’s a lot more of a hard-ass than Colonel Sheppard was. You’d better do it by the book and you’d better have an answer when she asks you, or you get the eyebrow and some scathing comment about being better prepared.” Cadman grimaced. “I’ve never been very good at the book. You know. Lots of people say, ‘Laura Cadman is really enthusiastic and she works hard.’ But not so many say ‘Laura Cadman is really smart.’ So I get that look a lot.” She grinned at Ronon, and it looked like the sun suddenly came out. “So I get questions like ‘What would you do if you were in a shaft filling up with water and you could blow the door with C4 but you didn’t have a fuse?’ And most of the time I’m like ‘WTF? Why would I be in a shaft filling up with water with a locked door and C4?’”
Ronon busted out laughing. “That kind of thing happens,” he said, waving a chopstick at her.
“Maybe to you! Wouldn’t it be better not to get stuck in a shaft filling up with water?”
“Yeah,” Ronon said, still chuckling. “But it happens.”
“So what would you do, Mr. Smarty Pants?” she asked.
Ronon took a long sip of his iced tea, as though carefully considering the problem. “Shaft. Water. C4.” He grinned again. “I’d say, ‘Teyla, how about getting us out of here?’”
Cadman laughed. “Oh that’s a good one. That will sit well with Carter!”
“See, Teyla’s got everything but a field kitchen in that backpack. Tiny little woman, but you get into anything and Teyla says totally calmly, ‘It so happens I have a flare gun, an electric drill, four chickens and a spare Genii uniform right here.’”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.” Ronon took another drink.
“Major Lorne said that back when he did training at the SGC, O’Neill was the one with the final sign off and he was the hard-ass. Carter was the nice one. But Jesus H. on a pogo stick, she’s the one washing people out now! There are four people with transfers pending as soon as we get back. They didn’t cut it. In, like, three months.” Cadman took a bite of her bread. “So I have to watch it. But it’s really nice that Colonel Sheppard asked to borrow me while Major Lorne is on crutches. And that he said in writing that it was because he needed ‘a Marine with a brain.’ That helps a lot.” She paused for another bite. “It sucks that Lorne broke his leg.”
“It sucks a lot more for the people who got fed on instead,” Ronon said.
“That too.” Cadman looked thoughtful but uncowed, and Ronon remembered that she was, after all, the only Marine lieutenant in five years who’d served her whole tour and gone home without a stretcher or a body bag. Cadman was good at getting by. She was like the kids he’d grown up with, the best of them.
“Cadman, why are you a Marine?”
“Laura.” She shrugged, her eyes on her plate as she took another bite. “Call me Laura. And I guess it was because that’s what my school had. It was Navy or Marines, and I don’t like boats.” She looked up, her eyes very bright. “If what you’re asking is why I’m not a graphic designer or something, it’s a long story.”
“Ok,” Ronon said. He liked to hear her talk. And she did, pretty much nonstop.
“My parents are both flakes. I was in junior high when my dad went off to Arizona to find himself and my mom went to Miami with her boyfriend. So I moved in with Nana and Pops in St. Petersburg. Pops used to be in the Navy, so he talked about how much he’d liked it and all. But Nana and Pops didn’t have any money for school, and they thought I ought to do better than the drive-thru, and my grades weren’t good enough for any scholarships. Except the Marines. So they paid for my four years, and then I owed them four years.” Cadman shrugged. “My four years are up, but I like it, so I’m staying in. How many mediocre graphic designers get to go to other planets?”
“Point,” Ronon said.
“Besides,” she said, “you meet some really interesting people. And some of them are pretty hot.”
“What, like Rodney?” Ronon asked, remembering Cadman’s whole mess with Rodney when she’d first gotten there, when a malfunctioning culling beam had left her stuck in Rodney’s body.
Cadman laughed. “No, not exactly.” Then she sobered. “I’m really sorry about Rodney. And I’m glad I get a chance to help get him back. He’s an ok guy.”
Ronon’s eyes met hers across the table. “We may not get him back.”
“It won’t be because we didn’t try,” Cadman said.
Ronon looked away. Something weird like hope was crawling around in him. Maybe they could do this. Maybe it would work. And then everything could go back to normal.
“When we get into it,” he said, “you watch out for Zelenka, ok? We’ve got to take him because we’ve got to have somebody to deal with Wraith tech if we need to, and we can’t count on finding Teyla first. He can’t shoot for shit.”
“I’ll watch out for him,” Cadman promised. “He’s a sweet old guy. Reminds me of Pops.”
One hour until time.
Sam sat down at her desk and took a deep breath, looking up at the pictures held to the metal wall above with cheerful magnets in the shape of bright colored flowers. Cassie in her graduation gown. Daniel in a floppy hat and wire rimmed glasses, Teal’c looking inscrutable beside him in the light of some alien sun — that was an old one, that picture. Daniel didn’t look much like that anymore. Jack in his baseball cap, sitting on the end of his pier with a fishing rod in his hand, looking straight at the camera with a sideways smile.
This was the email she never sent. But it was there, in case someone else needed to send it.
October 16, 2009
Dear Jack,
I’m not sorry. I don’t regret any of it, not one minute, not one second. Not ever.
Your Carter
Her radio sounded softly. “Colonel, we will be dropping out of hyperspace in fifty minutes.”
“Understood, Franklin. I’m on my way.” She carefully hit the save button and closed the laptop, turned off the light and went up to the bridge.
Forty minutes.
“Be prepared to reopen a hyperspace window immediately,” Guide ordered the helmsman.
The hive ship had not yet exited hyperspace, but Guide took no chances. Silent in the center of the control room, Queen Steelflower nodded her assent.
“We are ready, my commander,” the helmsman said, his head bent over the console, half in shiptrance. “We are coming out of hyperspace now.”
They slid through the window, blue streaked stars shifting to the speckled blackness of a normal starfield.