“Okay,” he said. He demonstrated the beginner’s firing stance Sheppard’s people taught, shoulders square and feet apart. He’d learned a sideways stance, body angled away from enemy fire, but this way was better for bracing against the pistol’s recoil. “Keep a firm grip onto the pistol. Don’t jerk the trigger. It’s going to be loud.”
“I am not afraid of the gun,” Radek said. “I am just a bad shot.” He sighted along it and fired. It was a hit on the target, but just barely. Not close enough to the center.
“You want to at least hit within the rings,” Ronon said. “Hit between here and here,” he said, sweeping his hand down his own body from the hollow of his throat to his groin. “It can take two or three chest shots with one of these pistols to drop a human attacker. More than that for a Wraith.”
“Wonderful,” Radek said. He shot twice more, sighting carefully each time. The first shot went way too low, and though Ronon could see him trying to correct with the second one, he over-corrected, missing the target entirely. “I told you I was a terrible shot.”
“You need practice,” Ronon said.
Radek made a noncommittal noise and emptied the rest of the clip, without much improvement.
“Did you teach Rodney to shoot?” Radek said as he was reloading.
“Sheppard did,” Ronon said. “Sheppard’s pretty patient as a teacher.”
“Rodney is not,” Radek said wryly. “If he were, perhaps the rest of you would have learned something of jumper repair these last few years.”
“None of us are scientists,” Ronon said. “And Sheppard’s the only one who knows anything about your technology.”
“It is not our technology. The Ancients built many things we are lucky if we can even use. And, yes, we have needed our own scientific knowledge to determine how things work and how they can be repaired. But it should not require an education in nuclear physics to make repairs we have made a hundred times already. Not everything is a fascinating new unique problem.”
“Maybe we can learn something,” Ronon said. “Right now you’re stalling.”
“Yes,” Radek said with resignation. “Here we go again.”
Radek was trying, Ronon thought, but it wasn’t getting him very far. With the target up very close, he was a fair shot for a beginner. At any distance, he’d be more of a danger to them than to the Wraith. He wasn’t shooting any better at a normal distance by the end of the practice session than he had at the beginning, and Ronon had expected at least some small improvement.
The standard-issue pistols kicked but not too badly, not compared to something like Sheppard’s.45, and Ronon had seen tiny women handle bigger weapons and still shoot accurately. He’d watched the precision with which Radek worked with fragile things, his hands moving surely; he didn’t think he was one of those people who could never make hand and eye work together.
He considered that, and then took the pistol from Radek and drilled a hole neatly into the outer ring at what Sheppard’s people called nine o’clock. “Where did I hit?”
Radek glanced at the target, but didn’t answer. After a moment he smiled without humor, as if he’d been caught out at something.
“You can’t actually see the where the bullet hole is at that distance, can you?” Ronon said. “I thought that was the point of wearing glasses.”
“It is,” Radek said. “Without them it is much worse. It has been a number of years since I had these prescribed. I should most likely see Dr. Keller for an eye examination to see if new glasses would improve my eyesight.”
“But?” Ronon prompted, when the fact that he didn’t go on to actually offer to do it made it clear that there was apparently some complication.
“If it is bad enough that they cannot correct to 20/20, to normal vision, then the rules will say that I am not qualified to be part of this expedition,” he said. “By the book, I should be sent back to Earth and replaced by someone who has not had five years to learn the city and all her quirks. I think right now that would be a fairly big problem.”
“It would.”
“Dr. Weir would have pretended she knew nothing,” Radek said. “I think she bent the rules a number of times when she hired the first expedition members. Of course we would like everyone here to be healthy, but there are not so many experts in wormhole physics that she could really pick and choose. Mr. Woolsey I think has a different philosophy.”
“He let McKay keep the cat,” Ronon said.
Radek shrugged. “There is that.” He still looked reluctant to risk it, and Ronon could see why. It had surprised him when he’d first come to the city how healthy everyone was, and how unscarred the soldiers were. He’d expected to see missing fingers or eyepatches to cover a blinded eye, and to see worse on the soldiers assigned to things like cooking dinners and organizing supplies. Those were things a man could do when he’d lost a leg or worn out his body with too many small hurts over the years, ways to stay in the fight.
At first he’d taken the fact that everyone in the city was young and strong as a sign of how much of an advantage their technology gave them. Then he’d seen one Marine after another come back through the gate with terrible wounds and be sent through it again back to Earth. Most of them didn’t come back to the city. From what Sheppard said, the worst injured weren’t even kept on in the service back on Earth. You get a nice pension, though, he’d said with a smile that didn’t touch his eyes, in the tone of a man who’d rather die.
It wouldn’t mean losing as much for Radek, but losing the city would be no small thing, and losing him would be no small thing for the city. And now they needed him on the team, and for that he needed to be able to see what he was shooting at, and it was all tangled up in the paperwork and regulations that everything on Earth seemed to require. There were times when he felt like dealing with it took half of the energy he had for dealing with anything.
“All right,” he said when he realized Radek had been waiting for a while for him to say something. “Let me talk to Sheppard. Maybe he can fix it somehow.”
“If you think it will do any good,” Radek said wearily.
Ronon shrugged. “It’s worth a try.”
Chapter Twenty-nine: Quicksilver
Quicksilver dreamed, and in his dreams he was far underground. The chamber beneath the earth was vast, vast enough to hold a glittering Stargate. It turned, red chevrons flaring, symbols rotating like a ring of fire.
She was standing next to him, the Queen he remembered, her dark hair pulled back severely, her arms crossed over her chest, watching the gate turn.
“Why am I dreaming you?” Quicksilver asked. Banks of lights danced behind her, strange machines humming and jumping. “Why am I dreaming you?”
She turned to him with a secret smile. “Because you want to, Rodney,” she said.
The gate opened, blue fire erupting like water.
“Where does that gate go?” Quicksilver asked.
“Where do you think?” The Queen who was called Dr. Weir looked at him, her eyes on his. “Do you remember the nanites? Do you remember the first time I was infected? Where do you think it goes?”
“I don’t know,” he said. There was something profoundly disturbing there, something just out of reach. Something he didn’t want to know, didn’t want to remember. “Can you go with me?”
She shook her head sadly. “No. You have to go through that gate alone.”
“Oh,” he said, the surface reflecting before him like ripples of light on water. “Why?”
“Because you’re not dead, Rodney,” she said. “You’re only sleeping.”