John nodded slowly. “Ok. Carson looks better. Let’s get a meal into everybody and then we’ll go on. It’s cold enough that those reptile things should be out of the picture. I can carry you if I have to.”
“Let us hope you do not have to,” she said.
Which was quite a concession, coming from Teyla. He knew better than to ask if it hurt. Obviously it hurt like hell.
“There are two more MREs in my pack,” he said. “Let’s split one of them. Some energy.”
“Some caffeine,” she said with a smile. “Even if the water is cold the granulated coffee will dissolve. And cold coffee is better than none.”
“Yeah, let’s not get between you and your coffee,” he said.
“It is a tempting vice from Earth,” she said, and her eyes danced with mischief. “Perhaps a vice we could share.”
“I’m good with that.” He dug out the MRE and handed it to her. “I’ll get the water. Carson, how are you holding up?”
They walked on under the bright stars, through the cold night. Carson could walk, though Dahlia stuck close beside him. The bleeding had stopped, and some rest and food seemed to have stabilized his blood pressure some. It probably wasn’t good for him to walk twelve miles, but he could do it.
Teyla could hobble, John’s left arm around her waist to help, but it was slow going on the broken terrain. A walk that might normally take them three or four hours was likely to take twice that. And when the sun rose and the temperatures began to climb again, those lizard things would awaken.
The cold air cleared his head. Or maybe it was a few hours sleep and some coffee. But he felt more like himself.
They halted every hour for ten minutes. By the third halt John thought his left shoulder was going to freeze that way, hunched over so that he could get it under Teyla’s. One disadvantage of her being so much shorter than him.
“We’ll be there soon,” he said.
Dahlia Radim nodded. “This is where the canyon comes out onto the plateau, just there. After that it is not far to the ship, maybe five of your miles.”
“And not too long to dawn.” John looked up at the sky where the stars were already paling.
“I have never seen the lizards on the plateau,” Dahlia said. “Perhaps they only hunt in the canyons.”
“I hope so,” Carson said fervently. He was sweating in the cold air, and he looked clammy.
“Once we get to the ship you can just get comfortable,” John said. “Dahlia and I will take it from there.”
“If the ship will fly,” Teyla said. She refrained from saying anything pointed about Radek Zelenka. Which didn’t mean she wasn’t thinking it. He was.
“I think it will fly,” Dahlia said somewhat indignantly. “If I did not think it would, we would not have made this bargain in the first place.”
“We’ll see when we get there,” John said.
It was a scoutship, smaller than the Orion had been but larger than a puddle jumper. Perhaps it had once carried a crew of fifty to a hundred, but now it lay half covered in sand. The slanting morning sunlight limned its battered hull, streaked and pitted to the color of old sand. No markings remained, blasted away by the sandstorms of thousands of years.
Carson looked gray with exertion. “That’s peachy,” he said, giving voice to the thought John would not. “That thing’s supposed to fly?”
“We have been doing repairs for nearly a year,” Dahlia said. “I have gone as far as I can without someone powering it up.”
“Ok.” John took a deep breath. “Let’s get on with it.”
Teyla set her teeth for the last little distance.
“The hatch we have been using is over here,” Dahlia said.
It opened smoothly, a good sign. Or at least a sign that the Genii engineering teams knew how to lubricate a door.
Dahlia went in first, turning on a battery powered lamp that was sitting in the hall. It cast a yellow glow ahead of them. “We’ve been using these lamps,” she said. “It doesn’t appear that there’s anything wrong with main power, but we can’t initialize it.”
“This is a job for Rodney,” Carson said, leaning on the doorframe.
“Yeah,” John said shortly.
Dahlia turned around. “Where do you want to go first? The bridge or main engineering?”
“Let’s get our people settled first,” John said with a wary look at Carson.
“We’ve been using the crew lounge behind the bridge when we were here,” Dahlia said. “It’s this way.”
Two more of the battery powered lamps illuminated what had once been a fairly small curved room with wide viewscreens along one wall and recessed lighting in the ceiling. Several metal tables and chairs had been pulled together, and some stained white cushions were piled in one corner with a bunch of grey Genii military blankets. The air was stale, but not cold.
Dahlia switched on the lamps. “We have a heater too,” she said, “But it’s down in engineering now since that’s where we were working last. This is where we’ve been staying.”
“It’s perfect,” Carson said, looking longingly toward the pile of cushions. “Just pull one of those down for me, pass me a blanket, and I’ll be a happy man.”
John wrestled one down, spread it with a blanket, and added a second for good measure. He patted Carson on his good shoulder. “Why don’t you have a nap while I see if this baby will fly?”
Carson nodded. “Call me if you need anything.”
“I will stay here with Carson,” Teyla said, sinking onto a second cushion, her left leg stiffly out before her. Which said a great deal about how much this walk had taken out of her.
“Ok.” John looked at Dahlia. “The bridge then.”
The layout was similar to the Orion and the Aurora, but smaller as fitted a smaller ship. The panels had been carefully cleaned, but stood dark. One of them was broken, the viewscreen cracked wildly.
“We couldn’t fix that,” Dahlia said, her voice oddly hushed.
There were no remains. Would there not be after so long, or had the Genii done something with them? Running his hand over the silent consoles, he had to ask.
“We didn’t find any,” Dahlia said. She sounded surprised. “Maybe the survivors of the crash evacuated to the Stargate and took their casualties with them.”
“Maybe,” John said. There was always such a sense of people in the spaces they’d inhabited, even military spaces. When he was a kid they’d gone on a World War II battleship when they were on vacation. It was restored as a museum, tied up at a busy pier next to seafood restaurants selling Calabash clams and t shirts, but below decks in the long, silent corridors he’d still had that feeling, as though all the men who had served there were waiting, and at the claxon would come running out, pulling on shirts and sidearms. They might have been pleased to know their ship was a museum. Hell, maybe they were. Maybe those old guys with beer guts and baseball caps embroidered “Navy” were the same guys. Maybe they were the survivors.
But the Ancients wouldn’t be coming to reclaim this ship. He was the closest thing it was going to get.
John laid his hand on the communications panel. Ok, baby, he thought. Let’s see what you’ve got. Come on. Wake up for me.
With a shudder the panel purred to life, screens and buttons lighting, monitors flickering as power ran down damaged conduits.
He walked left. Weapons control. Tactical. Come on, honey. Wake up.
Lights flickered, the panel humming, something sparking underneath.
Propulsion.
It shivered under his hand, stabilized.
Shields.
Screens lighting, buttons flashing red and yellow alarms ten thousand years old.
Hyperdrive.
Internal systems.
The overhead lights came on, the floor lights around the bridge flared to life blue and white. Somewhere there was the soft sound of air circulation systems starting, blowing cool in his face.
Wake up, baby.
Around him the Avenger came to life.