“I don’t take orders from Wraith,” Ronon said. It was intensely tempting to just pull the trigger. This wasn’t the first time someone had wanted to trust Todd, and it probably wouldn’t be the last time. He could put an end to all that right now. Jennifer couldn’t see him from down in the pit. He could kill the Wraith, see him fall twitching at his feet and watch him finally go still, and then he’d say —
That was where it broke down. Jennifer might believe him if he said that Todd had drawn a weapon on him, but Sheppard would be skeptical enough to ask him outright if it was true. He’d have to lie, which would be wrong, or else have to admit he’d disobeyed orders and live with Sheppard’s disappointment. His hand was clenched on the pistol, his finger shaking with the effort not to squeeze the trigger.
“One of these days I’m going to kill you,” Ronon said.
“Not today,” Todd said. Ronon holstered his pistol in one fast move before he could think better of it and swung himself over the edge of the pit, dropping down to the floor without bothering to use the rope. It was cooler down there, and it smelled dank, although he could feel the air moving in a way that suggested they would be able to breathe.
The trapdoor closed without warning, dirt raining down onto Ronon’s hair. He managed not to flinch, closing his eyes for a moment and breathing out sharply to avoid breathing the stuff.
Jennifer shone the flashlight around, tracing the curve of the walls. Above them, the roof was reinforced by the same bleached tangle that had strengthened the longhouse roof. He thought some of it looked like the antlers of some herd animal, but some of it was clearly old bone, weathered in the open for some years.
The green light was coming from a lantern set into one wall, its wires running up the wall to the trap door in the ceiling. At one end of the long pit, there was a raised platform of earth with a shape lying on it, wrapped in cloth. It didn’t move, no matter how long Jennifer shone her flashlight on it. That was a good thing.
“All right,” Jennifer said, shining the light on a pile of rough wooden boxes at the other end of the pit. “What’s this stuff?”
“Probably stuff he wanted buried with him,” Ronon said. “It sounds like he was planning on getting to use it later.”
“Right,” Jennifer said. “This is creepy.” She climbed up on one of the boxes anyway, crossing her legs and leaning back against the earth wall. “You’re not going to pace like that the whole time we’re down here, are you?”
“I don’t know. Are you going to talk the whole time?”
“I don’t think anybody can hear us down here.”
“I can hear you,” Ronon said.
Jennifer actually looked like that stung. He’d wondered what it would take to get it through to her that he wasn’t happy with her.
“Okay, we don’t have to talk,” Jennifer said. She wrapped her hands around her knees and switched off the flashlight. To conserve the battery, he told himself. Not just to get on his nerves.
The green light threw weird shadows across her face, hollowing her cheeks and the backs of her hands. He didn’t really want to look at that, but there wasn’t much else to look at. Probably the stuff in the tomb said something meaningful about their culture. Teyla would have said they should take pictures for the scientists back in Atlantis, but Teyla was probably sitting in Radim’s office right now being really polite while drinking endless cups of tea.
That was actually starting to sound pretty good.
The silence grew unbearable pretty fast. Staying quiet was made even harder by the fact that for the first time since they’d arrived on the planet, Jennifer felt like it was actually safe for them to talk. For the moment it looked like there wasn’t anyone watching them, at least assuming they weren’t being monitored by some hidden piece of Wraith technology. There wasn’t any way to tell, so she figured there was no point in worrying about that.
This wasn’t how she’d wanted this mission to go. She’d hoped they could make some kind of deal quickly, and get back to Atlantis with a way to find Rodney. She’d also hoped that Ronon would back her up while she tried to make that happen. Instead he seemed determined to argue with her every step of the way.
She couldn’t put off having it out about that any longer, not when they were going to have to work together when Todd returned. She wished she felt like she could. She would have much rather had this talk in her infirmary, surrounded by all the proofs of her own competence, not sitting here in somebody’s tomb.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I think we do have to talk.”
“Fine,” Ronon said, after enough of a pause that she was pretty sure that wasn’t a conventional phrase on Sateda for I’m about to say something you won’t like. He spread his hands. “Talk.”
“You can’t just decide things like ‘we’re going back to the Stargate’ for both of us,” she said. “You can’t tell me we’re giving up on the mission and expect me to accept that without even talking about it first.”
She could just barely see Ronon shrugging in the dim light, his face in shadow. “Sheppard’s not here,” Ronon said. “It’s my call.”
“We’re supposed to be working together,” Jennifer said. “And maybe you don’t like the fact that I’m here, but I am here. It’s my mission, too, and if you aren’t willing to work with me, then you’re the one who shouldn’t be here.”
“You think I want to be here? We’re not getting anything useful, and we never were going to — ”
“Then go!” Jennifer snapped. “If you want to try to get back to the Stargate, or whatever it is you think would be better than what we’re doing right now, then go. I’ll stay here and — ”“And wind up as dead as that guy?” Ronon jerked his head toward the wrapped corpse at the other end of the pit without looking at it. His whole body was tight with anger, his fingers twitching where they rested against the grip of his holstered pistol.
That didn’t seem right. She could see that he was mad at her, but she didn’t think he wanted to shoot her. She flicked her flashlight back on so that she could see him more clearly. He was breathing too fast, and suddenly she wondered if they had adequate ventilation after all. Hypoxia would bring on shallow, rapid breathing, loss of coordination, diminished judgment.
Her own breath was coming easily, though, and she felt fine. He didn’t look fine. If it hadn’t been Ronon, and if he hadn’t seemed fine up until now, she would have said he was terrified.
She wouldn’t have gotten away with ‘seemed fine’ in her clinical training, some critical part of herself pointed out. He hadn’t complained. It was possible that he wouldn’t, no matter how he felt about having to be at close quarters with the Wraith. And after everything they’d done to him, she probably ought to figure that he wasn’t entirely fine about that.
“We’re okay right now,” she said, shifting to the tone she used with her patients. “It’s probably pretty safe down here. There’s only one way in or out, and we’ll certainly notice somebody opening that door.”
“If there’s air circulating, there’s another way out,” Ronon said.
“So, let’s take a look.” She shone the flashlight carefully over the walls. It caught the glimmer of metal in two places, both toward the other end of the pit. “It looks like the fans are set into the wall. There must be ventilation shafts, but…”
“They’re small,” Ronon said. “So, only one way out.”
“Which is a good thing, right? Because that means there’s only one way in.”
Ronon nodded, although he still looked like he was waiting for someone to leap out at him. It occurred to her that it might actually be normal to have a problem sitting around with somebody’s dead body a few meters away. She hadn’t been particularly spooked by cadavers since med school, but a lot of people did find tombs pretty creepy, in more than a ‘haunted house at the amusement park’ kind of way.