Hunt and run

Chapter Six

“We should be safe here — for now.” Nekai had led Ronon away from the forest and into a row of short hills. They had continued on through those, never stopping for more than a minute to catch their breaths and drink from nearby streams, until they had found a rockier plain beyond. The hills were lower and more angular here, and Ronon’s new guide had paid particular attention to their bases — Ronon wasn’t sure what he was looking for until the man had nodded, crouched, and brushed some dirt aside to reveal a small opening. A cave.

They had crawled inside, Ronon going first at Nekai’s insistence, and now they were huddled in a dark, dank little hole within the rock itself. Ronon didn’t like it — he was used to open spaces, and being trapped like this made his skin crawl. It also struck him as strategically lethal — there was only the one entrance. All it would take was the Wraith finding that hole and they would be completely trapped.

“Relax,” Nekai assured him, shifting about and folding his legs in front of him. “You’re thinking like a warrior. Don’t.”

“That’s who I am,” Ronon snapped, though quietly — he was afraid too much noise might cause the ceiling to collapse upon them. “It’s how I think.”

“No,” his new companion corrected him. “It’s who you were. That’s not who you are anymore. Not if you want to survive.”

“I already told you, I don’t care about survival,” Ronon growled back. “I just want to kill as many of them as I can before they take me.”

“And the longer you survive, the more you can kill,” Nekai pointed out. “But in order to do that, you have to change the way you think. A warrior charges into battle, even against overwhelming odds. That’ll just get you killed, and quickly.” He leaned forward, his eyes locked on Ronon’s. “You need to become a hunter.”

“A hunter?” Ronon considered that. “I know nothing of hunting,” he admitted softly. “My people do not hunt. We raise domesticated animals for meat.” He paused. “Or at least we did.”

“I can train you to be a hunter,” Nekai assured him. “You have the reflexes for it, certainly, and the stamina. It’s just a matter of learning a new way to think, a new way to look at situations — seeing things as predator and prey rather than warrior versus warrior.” He shrugged. “Once you learn that, the rest is easy.”

“And to what end?” Ronon demanded.

Nekai grinned, a quick flash of white teeth in the near-darkness. “So you can hunt the Wraith, of course. Isn’t that what you want?”

“They’re the ones hunting me!”

“I know.” The smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “But that’s exactly what makes them vulnerable. They know you’re a warrior — that’s why they made you a Runner. They expect you to stand and fight, just like you did back there. Twice.”

“You knocked me out the first time,” Ronon pointed out, rubbing the back of his head at the memory. It still ached.

“I had to — otherwise they’d have killed you immediately and that would have been the end of it.” Nekai studied him. “I saved your life.”

Ronon could hardly deny it. “I am in your debt.”

His companion waved that off. “I don’t want your debt, Ronon Dex. I want your friendship. I want your skills. I want you hunting at my side, as an equal.” He returned to his original line of thought. “They think you are a warrior. When you become a hunter, you can use that against them. They won’t be expecting it, and so you’ll have the advantage. Prey turned predator.” His grin this time was far nastier. “You’ll be able to take them down before they have time to adapt to the change.”

Ronon studied the man in front of him. Nekai seemed at ease most of the time, his posture relaxed, but he was always alert as well — his eyes were constantly on the move, sizing up the small space around them. His hand never strayed too far from his pistol. And there had been real anger there when he spoke of the Wraith.

“Why do you care so much what happens to me?” Ronon asked softly. “Why should any of this matter to you?”

“Why?” For a second Nekai seemed startled by the question. Then he leaned forward again. “Because, Ronon Dex — I was just like you.” He nodded at Ronon’s expression. “Yes. I am a Runner as well.” Nekai shifted around and raised his jacket and shirt slightly — even in the dim lighting Ronon could see the massive scar across the other man’s back. It looked to be right about where he bore his own recent wound.

“My people, the Retem, resisted the Wraith’s dominance,” Nekai continued, restoring his clothes and leaning against the wall again. “The Wraith slaughtered them and destroyed our planet completely. It is little more than cinders now.” The bitterness in his voice was unmistakable. “Those they did not kill they captured, to serve as slaves — and as food.” He glanced away. “I was one of those they took alive — they felled me before I could throw myself upon my blade. I had been one of our people’s finest warriors, and had killed several Wraith before they were able to subdue me, so they decided to make me an example.” His lips twisted in what Ronon took to be grief and pity and possibly disgust. He was starting to see that there was far more to this man than he had realized.

“They made you a Runner?” Ronon prompted, when Nekai fell silent, no doubt as haunted by his memories as Ronon was by his own.

The question roused Nekai again. “Yes,” he agreed. “Implanted the tracker in my back, just as you have in yours, and released me on the nearest planet. Then they hunted me.” He met Ronon’s gaze again. “I stood and waited for them, just as you did. I wanted nothing more than to throw myself upon them and die in battle, so that I might join the rest of my people in the afterlife of our forefathers.”

Ronon was almost afraid to ask. Almost. “What happened?”

To his surprise, Nekai laughed, a grim sound but one with some genuine humor. “The first Wraith to catch me was too disappointed to kill me. ‘There is no sport in this,’ he complained when I hurled myself at him. ‘Run away, little human, and keep running. Give us a reason to chase you. Show us you are the warrior we took you for, not a sniveling coward who throws his life away for no reason.’ And then he walked away.”

Ronon blinked. “I would have torn his heart out for speaking to me in such a way!”

“I felt the same way,” Nekai agreed. “His contempt made me furious. But then I thought about it, and realized he had been right.” He nodded. “Yes, he was right. Trying to get myself killed like that was the coward’s way out. A true warrior would do as much damage to his enemy as possible, for as long as possible. And that’s what I was determined to do.”

“So you went after him and killed him?”

Nekai shook his head. “No. I ran.” This time his laugh was entirely at Ronon’s expression. “Are you horrified? But if I’d attacked him again right then, he just would have killed me or recaptured me and that would have been that. In order to do serious damage to them, I needed to regain my strength and find a way to fight back. That meant time to plan, time to heal. And in order to gain time, I had to keep out of their reach. So I ran.”

“For how long?”

His companion sighed. “Two years.”

Ronon stared at him. “Two years?”

“Yes. I had little choice — no weapons, no armor, no allies. My only hope was to keep moving and to hope something changed.”

“So what happened?”

“I got lucky,” Nekai admitted. “I found one of the ancestral rings — you know of them?” Ronon nodded — they had the strange circular portals on Sateda as well, and the elders knew the secret of activating them. “I’d seen them back on my homeworld,” Nekai continued, “and when no one else was around I snuck over to this one and managed somehow to get it open. That took me to another world. The Wraith came after me fast, before I had a chance to really get my bearings, but I managed to active the ring again, this time to a different world, and fled through that to one as well. That continued for a while — I’d reach a world and stay only long enough to find whatever food and water I could, then flee to the next before the Wraith could arrive. Usually I just foraged for fruit and nuts and, when I was lucky, meat. But finally one time I passed through and spotted a curl of smoke not far away.” He smiled, remembering. “It was a village. Not big, but big enough for my needs. They were hunters and fishermen, judging by the trappings, and everyone except a few women and children were out when I reached the outermost hut. They were a bit primitive, technologically speaking, but I found a dagger, a spear, and a bow and arrows.” His smile turned sharp. “And now I had weapons.”

“You fought back.” It wasn’t a question.

Nekai nodded. “Oh, yes. The same Wraith came for me, the one who had let me live that first time. He found me huddled over and growled ‘Still you throw your life away? Then this time I will not refuse such a gift!’ And then he grabbed my shoulder, no doubt to drain my life from me and toss my shattered body aside.”

“But you were feinting,” Ronon guessed. “Drawing him in.”

“Exactly. As soon as he touched me I spun around and impaled him on my new spear. Then, while he was staggering back clutching at it, I grabbed his own gun and shot him with it. In the head. Three times.” Nekai’s smile wasn’t pleasant. “Then I cut off his head, just to be sure.”

Ronon nodded. He could hardly blame the other man. If he ever faced the Wraith who had released him, he would no doubt be just as brutal. Some things could not be forgiven.

“Now I had real weapons,” Nekai concluded. “A Wraith pistol to go along with my spear and bow and knife. And I also had this.” He tossed something at Ronon, who caught it reflexively. It was a small tablet, the entire front a small blue screen. There was a grid patterned across it, with a glowing green dot in the center, and around it a pulsing red circle.

“What is it?” Ronon studied the image. “What is this dot and why is it throbbing?”

“It’s not.” Nekai glanced around again, listening carefully. Then he gestured. “Come on.” And he began crawling back out of the cave.

“I thought we needed to stay out of sight,” Ronon asked even as he followed the other man. He was happy to get out of that tight space, to breath fresh air again and to stand up straight, but at the same time he didn’t want to present the Wraith with an easy target. Not now, when he was just beginning to believe that it might be worth surviving a little longer.

“We do, but a minute or two won’t give them enough time to pinpoint us, and I can’t show you how this thing works if we’re that close together.” Once they were out, Nekai moved away, stopping perhaps forty paces from Ronon, who still stood right by the mouth of the cave. “Okay, look at it again.”

Ronon glanced at the screen and saw that now there were two red circles. One was still around the green dot but the other was a short distance away. And neither of them were pulsing — they both glowed steadily.

“It’s a tracking monitor,” Nekai explained. “It shows the tracking devices they implanted in us. This is how they find us.”

“Not much of a range,” Ronon commented, studying the screen again. Given the distance between them, and the spacing on the monitor, he guessed it had an effective range of a mile, perhaps less.

“It’s set to close-range right now,” Nekai replied. “It took me a while when I first acquired it, but I eventually figured out how to scale in or out. Trust me, it’s got enough range to cover the entire galaxy.” He gestured at the device. “That’s how they find me no matter what planet I go to. Once they reach the planet themselves they can zoom in to pinpoint my exact location.”

Ronon frowned. “But before, in the cave, it was pulsing.”

“Exactly!” Nekai started walking slowly back toward him. “Keep your eyes on the screen,” he instructed. Ronon did so, and saw that as the two circles — his and Nekai’s — overlapped, their edges began to waver. They flickered more and more, their shapes wobbling, until Nekai was standing beside him again and the circle was only a faint shape brightening and dimming randomly around the green center dot.

“I met another Runner once,” Nekai said, taking the monitor back from Ronon. “I’d just happened to look at the monitor — not much point in it usually, since it just shows my own location — and there was a second circle! I used the thing to find him, and that’s when I discovered what happens when two Runners are less than ten meters apart. The circles overlap! Apparently the Wraith never expected Runners to meet, so they didn’t take any precautions against it — the tracking devices cancel each other out when they’re this close together.”

Ronon understood the implications at once. “So as long as we stay close, they can’t track us.”

“Exactly!” Nekai grinned, a predatory look, and Ronon knew his own expression matched it. “We can get the drop on them.”

“Excellent.” Something didn’t make sense, though. “What about that other Runner?” he asked. “The first one you found? Where is he? Two are strong but three would be stronger.”

Nekai nodded. “They would, yes.” He looked away. “I found out something else that day, too. Because the first thing we did when we met and realized we were both Runners was agree to remove each other’s tracking devices. Then they wouldn’t be able to track us at all.”

Ronon nodded. It made perfect sense — render the trackers useless, or better yet remove the tracking devices but keep them operational. Then you could use them to bait an ambush. “What went wrong?” Obviously something had, since Nekai still had his tracking device.

“They’re rigged, the devices,” Nekai answered quietly. “If you tamper with them — they explode.” He didn’t have to explain beyond that. “But if we can’t remove them, at least we can negate them,” he added, shaking off the memory. “Which means we can turn the tables on the Wraith.” He studied Ronon. “So, what do you say now? Still want to throw yourself at the nearest Wraith and go out in a blaze of glory?”

Ronon smiled and stroked the pistol at his side. “No. Not any more.” He faced the smaller man. “Teach me how to hunt. Then I will show these Wraith what happens when they allow a Satedan to live.”

“Good.” Nekai clapped him on the back. “We’ll start at once. But for now — ” he gestured to the cave entrance. “We should get back inside. They might have noticed us while we were separated.”

Ronon nodded, but hesitated a second before crouching and ducking back into the cave. “Is this part of being a hunter?”

“What, sitting in narrow spaces for extended periods?” Behind him, Nekai laughed. “Oh yes, my friend. A very big part.”

Ronon sighed. Still, if it meant being able to kill many Wraith, it would be worth it.