Dahlia didn’t even flinch. “You will stay where you are, Colonel Sheppard. And you will compute the course for our homeworld. You will not be able to betray my people this time.”
“Look,” John began, “We’re not trying to double cross you. We’re going to keep our deal. But we’ve got to go to Atlantis first.”
“And you would have me believe that you will then just give us the warship?” Dahlia’s eyebrows rose. “Why would you do that?”
“Because we have an agreement,” John said doggedly.
“And that’s worth what to you?” Not so much as a waver in her voice. He wasn’t getting anywhere. Teyla was frozen, perfectly still, waiting for him to do something…
“If you shoot her, then what?”
John looked around in surprise. Carson was standing by his own chair, a rueful expression on his face. “Oh sure, you can blow Teyla away,” he said. “There’s none of us can stop the shot. But then what have you got?” He paused a moment, his eyes on hers. “If you think that once you’ve shot her, Colonel Sheppard will fly the warship for you, you’ve got another thing coming. You’ll have to kill him too, shoot him in cold blood as you stand there. But you could do it. There’s a full clip in the gun. You could probably take him down before he’d get to you.”
Carson stopped, letting that picture sink in. “And then here we are, lass. Just the two of us with a pair of corpses and an Ancient warship falling apart about our ears that neither of us knows how to fly. We’d certainly not make the Genii homeworld. I doubt I could land it in one piece. We’d die here too, trying to get back down, and no one would have the warship.” Carson shook his head sadly. “My old mum used to say it was better to live to fight another day. You’ve got nothing. Fold your cards and live to come back to the table. You know we daren’t kill you, seeing as you’re Ladon Radim’s sister.” He saw her hand move, and gave her a grave smile. “You could kill Teyla, sure. But it gets you nothing. And you’re not Kolya, to do it in sheer cursedness.”
John saw her waver, hardly dared to breathe.
“Put it away,” Carson said. “And let’s get out of here.”
Slowly, with a look of abject defeat, Dahlia lowered the pistol.
Carson crossed the room slowly and took it from her hand. “There now,” he said with his best bedside reassuring smile. “Let’s get on with it then. Set course for Atlantis.”
Teyla twisted around in her chair, her eyes furious, but Carson forestalled whatever she might say.
“Miss Radim and I are going back to the crew lounge. It’s an internal compartment and the pressure seems stable. We’ll pass the voyage there and see you in Atlantis, Colonel Sheppard.” He gestured for her to precede him to the back and the main bridge doors, a gesture that would have seemed pure courtesy if not for the pistol in his left hand. The doors opened before him, and they passed through, sliding shut behind with the soft sound of seals connecting.
John blinked, adrenaline still surging through his veins with nowhere to go. “What the hell was that?”
“It is called talking,” Teyla said ruefully. “And I thank the Ancestors we have someone who can do it!”
John looked toward the doors. “You think Carson will hold her at gunpoint for the next five hours?”
“Knowing Carson, he probably will not need to.” Teyla took a deep breath, as though she too were trying to still a racing heart. “She had not thought the plan through. She got Carson’s gun while he was sleeping, but she had nothing to bargain with.”
“Except destroying the ship,” John pointed out.
“With her on it?” Teyla shook her head. “She is not Kolya, and she is neither mad nor suicidal. Is death preferable to being held prisoner for five hours and then returned to her brother?”
“But we’re not actually trying to steal the ship!” John protested. “I keep telling her that! We’re not planning to double cross the Genii! We made a deal to trade piloting the ship for them for their information about Rodney. We’ve never planned to not keep the deal!”
“She does not know that,” Teyla said. “An Ancient warship for one man?” Her eyebrow lifted. “It does not seem rational.”
“This is Rodney,” John said flatly.
“I know,” Teyla said. “But she was not there when you diverted the Daedalus to Sateda for Ronon, nor when you dared Michael’s laboratory to come after me.” She shook her head as though the joke were on her. “She does not know you. And I out-clevered myself, telling her of your cruelty. I rendered the truth unbelievable.”
“Why the hell did you do that?” John asked. She didn’t think he was cruel. Probably?
“I thought…” Teyla put her hands to her face, or would have, except that the faceplate of the vacuum suit helmet was in the way. “It does not matter what I thought. You and I have both made mistakes. Let us try to get back to Atlantis before we make any more!”
“Right.” John looked down at the board, the course corrections nearly completed. “You’re going to have to handle damage control. And hope we don’t come apart when we enter hyperspace.”
“Because hoping is about all I can do,” Teyla said with a flash of black humor. “I will hope very hard for you, John.”
“Thanks.” The board cleared, the corrections completed. “Ready as we’ll be.” Hang in there, baby, he thought to the ship, and slid the indicators forward.
The hyperspace window opened before them, and Avenger slipped through.
Chapter Nineteen: Snowbound
After four years in Atlantis, Lorne had learned better than to assume that any deviation from the city’s normal routine was harmless. The problem was defining normal. They’d gotten a lot of strange sensor readings over the years, which had turned out to be — on various occasions — nothing, dangerous natural phenomena, various hostile invaders, Ancient devices someone turned on by accident, freak weather, and alien lifeforms trying to communicate with them.
This time, Lorne would have bet on ‘nothing’, followed by ‘weather’, but Colonel Sheppard didn’t keep him around to gamble. He gestured to the security team to spread out, taking up positions along the length of the corridor. The life signs detector in his hand was still showing multiple small objects on the other side of the storage room in front of them. It looked like whatever they were, they were out on the balcony.
He opened the door, P90 at the ready, and gestured for Jacobs and Hernandez to follow him in. They were both new, and he hoped he and Sheppard had impressed on them firmly enough that pretty much anything could happen at any moment. He’d been trying to walk a fine line between making it clear what the new people were in for and completely freaking them out.
The room was dim enough that he could just make out the shapes of stacked pallets. Across the room, only a little gray light filtered in through the glass in the balcony doors. It looked like it was still snowing out there.
General O’Neill had provisioned them generously but a little weirdly, having clearly transferred over whatever supplies he could get his hands on given the short notice, and they’d opened up new storage rooms for everything from spare bed linens to more breakfast cereal than he hoped they’d be going through anytime soon. He brought the lights up, and heard rustling, and then silence.
He glanced back at Jacobs, who nodded his head sharply; he’d heard something too. He motioned Hernandez up on his other side and moved slowly across the room. There was another rustling noise, fainter now. He tracked it around the side of a pallet, and leveled his P90 to reveal nothing but the crushed corner of a box.