The Lost

Chapter Twenty-eight: Proving Ground

They didn't actually race to the Genii homeworld. That would be irresponsible, and John and Sam were both very responsible people. Maybe they were a little competitive, but not quite that competitive, at least John wasn't when he was flying a ship that might fall apart any minute, and that anyhow Sam could dust with one hand tied behind her back.

For once, nothing terrible happened. Despite being on tenterhooks for the whole thirteen hours in hyperspace, there was nothing more dire to report than a few power fluctuations that had Dr. Kusanagi crooning and muttering over the crystals as if she could talk them into behaving. Maybe she did, because everything held together, and they came out of hyperspace exactly where they were supposed to, twenty two minutes after the Hammond. It was a good thing it wasn't a race, because that would have been pretty embarrassing.

Carter had spent a good twenty minutes trying to explain to Ladon Radim that she was there full of good will and happy thoughts, and that the Ancient warship and Dahlia were just behind. He is pretty much stopped believing her and the rhetoric was escalating when John dropped out of hyperspace and Dahlia called down to report that both she and the Avenger were in great shape.

After that things warmed up a bit, and there were a few hours of changeover as they landed on a camouflaged field and the Genii crew came aboard. Then there was a hastily prepared meal with Ladon Radim in a farmhouse that looked like it was straight out of Amish country, built over an underground bunker that generated nuclear power. John really didn't have enough words to express how glad he was that he wasn't the ranking officer in the party, so all the making nice and polite conversation that would be scrutinized for secret clues to Earth intentions was on Sam.

The Genii clearly had a problem with that. The way that some of the senior officers looked straight through her or posed their questions to John instead was pretty obvious. If he's been feeling a little more charitable, maybe he would have done something different, instead of giving everyone what Teyla called The Smile of Wrongness and deferring to Sam on every answer, like he couldn't tie his shoes without her permission. He wasn't sure what the Genii made of that little performance, but it seemed to amuse Sam to no end.

Dahlia Radim made polite conversation for a few minutes, clearly more at ease now that Teyla wasn't around. She kept giving him pitying looks, like a guy you expect to get killed in some awful way any day now, but that you can't say you didn't warn. Or maybe like the looks you give a guy who is blowing up his career by getting serious about the wrong person, but hasn't realized it yet. He's seen that kind of thing back on Earth, and he didn't like it any better here.

It was hours before Sam managed to shut the festivities down on the grounds that they had to get back to Atlantis. There was nice flat bunk waiting in the Hammond's guest quarters, and he sacked out and took a long nap while they left the Genii behind, homeward bound. It was the best sleep he's had in quite a while.

Radek looked at Ronon over the rim of his glasses as they entered the armory. “You know I think this entire thing is a bad idea.”

“I know that,” Ronon said. He refrained from pointing out that Radek had said so more than once in the last fifteen minutes. “But we need a scientist. If we get the jumper shot up, or we wind up on a planet where there’s something wrong with the DHD, or there’s some weird radiation that’s going to make us all mutate if we stay too long — ”

“It would more likely just kill you,” Radek said. “I understand that you must have someone on the team with an understanding of Ancient and Wraith technology. I just wish Sheppard would choose someone else.”

“But given that he hasn’t…”

Radek sighed and squared his shoulders. “Given that he hasn’t, I sense that my future will involve much more shooting at things than I would prefer. So here we are.”

Ronon smiled a little. “Lorne said you did a pretty good job beating up his Marines that time everybody had amnesia.”

“I had the element of surprise,” Radek said. “And my goal was not to overpower an entire Marine team, but to buy time in which to run away.”

“A lot of the time that’s us, too,” Ronon said. “If we get into it with the Wraith, the main thing is for you to be able to defend yourself as we retreat. Teyla will be covering you while me and Sheppard hold them off. You and Teyla are supposed to get back to the gate and dial out for us.”

“Believe me, I will not hesitate in that,” Radek said. Ronon handed him the pistol and watched while he loaded it. He did at least know how to do that competently, which put him ahead of where some of the scientists had started.

It had taken a while for Ronon to make it clear to Sheppard when he first came to the city that he knew how to train people with no combat experience at all, and that he wasn’t going to break them by accident. He always felt wrong teaching people to shoot before how to fight with their hands — you were supposed to teach the foundation skills before you worked with any weapons — but he could see that sometimes it was a necessary evil.

“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.”