STARGATE SG-1 STARGATE ATLANTIS: Points of Origin - Volume Two of the Travelers' Tales (SGX-03) (STARGATE EXTRA (SGX-03))

by Karen Miller

  “We could grab something for the road,” Tyre said, lingering hopefully in the doorway of one shop selling skewers of roasted meat.

  Kell was striding ahead of them, and showed no inclination to slow his steps to indulge dawdling. “There’ll be food on Belkan,” Ronon said.

  “Weird food,” Ara said. “All off-worlders eat weird food.”

  “Weird food is food,” Ronon said, and gave her a not so gentle shove between the shoulder blades to get her moving, grabbing Tyre by the arm and hauling him along as well. “Don’t make us look bad.”

  “You heard what he said,” Tyre said lightly, pitching his voice low enough that Ronon hoped Kell couldn’t hear him over the murmur of the crowd. “He has every confidence in us.”

  “Until we screw up,” Ronon said. “Let’s not screw up.”

  “Of course we’re not going to screw up,” Ara said. “Because if we do, a bunch of people are going to die.” Her voice sounded strange, and he realized that she and Tyre were both clowning around because it was their first real mission, and they were afraid. They would have cheerfully charged into battle against a hundred Wraith, but the idea of screwing up and letting down a bunch of old people and little kids who were trying to sleep under the looming shadow of the dam and wondering if it was going to break…

  “Kell thinks we can do this,” Ronon said. “So we can.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Tyre said, and sped up his steps toward the Ring.

  Going through the Ring on civilian business required making arrangements in advance, but Kell had a word with the guards, and then waved them forward as the guards dialed. It wasn’t Ronon’s first time through the Ring, but despite knowing better, some part of him still expected it to feel like water when he strode forward into the boiling blue light.

  It was an entirely different shock, a cold splash all over his skin and the feeling of rushing forward through an empty space filled with light. Then he was stepping out into a different square, surfacing into warmer air that smelled of animals and burning charcoal and unwashed wool.

  The trading fair sprawled for blocks, lines of bright banners hung between thatch-roofed stalls and more permanent stone shops, shoppers wandering up and down the rows or elbowing each other for position at the busier stalls. Most wore similar woolen jackets and trousers, but he could see knots of visitors who he guessed were from other worlds. Several men in studded leather strode between the stalls looking as dangerous as men carrying large cheeses possibly could. A group of men and women swaddled in richly-colored robes that only revealed their eyes were talking together in a busy knot. Another group wearing only feathers looked like they were shivering despite the warmth of the day. And Ronon could see several other solitary strangers whose dress marked them as out of place.

  Satedan military uniforms were probably an unfamiliar sight, but not one that anyone here was going to find startling. “Spread out,” he told Ara and Tyre. “Look for the Travelers. If they’re here, they’ll be selling better equipment than anybody locally. They’ll probably draw a crowd.”

  He strode down the row of stalls looking for the Travelers or anything that looked like it might be their equipment. It would have made everything simple to find the iron horse itself set out for sale, but he didn’t really expect it. Most of the people here would take the claim that the device could prevent earthquakes as a claim that it could do magic, and they wouldn’t pay much for an off-worlder’s good luck charm. The Travelers would do better selling the device on a world with scientists who would understand proof that the device really worked.

  It was a good question where that might be. Hoff, maybe. Getting it back from Hoff would be even more of a diplomatic mess than demanding it back from the Travelers. There had been rumors lately about another world with modern technology — some gunpowder weapons had turned up on a low-tech farming world without a good explanation for where they’d come from — but as far as he knew nothing solid enough even to be a lead. If the Travelers got away with the device, they’d get away clean.

  The first really crowded stall he reached proved to be selling liquor, but the next one had a more promising mix — he could see what looked like a radio set and several boxy objects that looked like batteries, although the writing on them didn’t use Satedan letters, as well as coils of wire and stacks of sheet metal. He shouldered his way through the crowd, getting an elbow in the ribs from an old woman clutching a market basket who pursed her lips at him when he muttered an apology.

  The girl minding the stall was wearing leather trousers and a patchwork leather jacket that looked like it had been made of the remains of several jackets that had fallen apart from old age, but the energy pistol at her hip was unmistakable. Ronon shrugged his uniform jacket off before she saw him, but knew he still looked distinctly like Satedan military. He turned his back to her, putting other fairgoers between him and the stall owner.

  On the table in front of him, several large light fixtures were stacked, with most fairgoers frowning at them and then passing by; Belkan didn’t have electricity, and most places that did probably didn’t have a shortage of large metal hanging lamps. There was something about them that nagged at him, though, and he picked one up for a closer look.

  “PROPERTY OF THE S.H.A.” was stamped into the metal in familiar Satedan letters. That would be the Satedan Hydroelectric Authority. The light fixtures had come from the dam.

  Ronon rolled his eyes. They’d stripped the light fixtures out of the shrine. Probably they would have taken the concrete walkway, too, if it weren’t too big to move. He let the movement of the crowd carry him some distance away from the stall and then gave a piercing whistle. Heads turned, but no one paid him more than momentary attention. After a few minutes, Ara and Tyre appeared out of the crowd, looking frustrated.

  “If I wanted to buy fava beans, we’d be in business,” Tyre said.

  Ara nodded. “Or scrap metal, or scarves knitted by somebody’s old grandma.”

  “I found the Travelers,” Ronon said. “They have stuff from the dam, but I didn’t see the horse.”

  “Maybe we can have a little chat with them,” Tyre said, taking out a knife and flipping it end over end before sheathing it. “Let them know they may have accidentally walked away with something that didn’t belong to them.”

  “I think we’re supposed to be subtle,” Ara said.

  “That’s subtle.”

  Ronon plowed a path through the crowd for the other two until they reached a vantage point from which they could observe the Travelers’ stall. As they watched, a man ducked in through the rear opening of the stall carrying a box of more assorted junk, spoke for a moment to the girl running the stall, and hefted a sack of grain that somebody had probably given them in trade. He started walking off with it, heading toward the outskirts of the market and the line of trees beyond.

  Ronon slapped Tyre and Ara on the shoulders, starting them moving wordlessly along with him. They trailed the Traveler, Ronon keeping them well back; he wasn’t afraid of losing the trail of a man carrying a heavy weight, and once they got beyond the boundaries of the market, there were only a few trails of footprints leading back and forth through a screen of trees. He waited until the branches had stopped moving, and then followed with Tyre and Ara at his heels.

  As he had expected, beyond the trees was the mechanical bulk of a spaceship. It was bigger than the one that had touched down near the dam, the size of several train cars put together, and a hatch at its rear was open, with cargo piled on the ground around it. The man they were following dropped his sack near the hatch and then headed back toward the market.

  Ronon swore silently and retreated into the trees, crouching low behind a screen of branches. He could hear Tyre and Ara, both making enough noise as they tried to be still that he thought the Traveler would surely hear them, but the man passed
by obliviously.

  “You two are the worst at hiding,” he said finally under his breath.

  “We were fine,” Tyre said. “He’s left that hatch wide open.”

  “Which means there’s probably someone in there,” Ronon said, but it still looked like their best chance of getting the iron horse back. “Remember, we’re being subtle,” he said, and slipped out of the trees heading for the ship.

  A metal grating led up into the hatchway. Ronon ascended cautiously, alert for any sign that the ship was preparing to take off. He had no desire to wind up hurtling through space. The grating led up into some kind of cargo hold, packed with sacks, crates, and unsecured junk of all kinds.

  “There could be a hundred artifacts of the Ancestors in here, and we’d never know,” Ara said.

  “Artifacts of the ancestors that smell like an evergreen forest?” Ronon said. It was a faint scent, just an undertone under the smells of oil and sweat and off-worlder foods.

  “You can’t smell that in here,” Ara said, wrinkling her nose.

  “Yes, I can.”

  “It could be anything they picked up on any world with forests,” Tyre said.

  “Yes, it could.” He was pretty sure it wasn’t, though. Something smelled like wet iron and evergreens and fresh clay. He rifled through the shelf where the smell was strongest and found its upper half to be a cabinet with metal doors that stayed stubbornly shut when he tugged at them. It opened with some kind of keypad, but he could see wires coming from it, and he slashed through them with his belt knife. The lights on the keypad dimmed and went out.

  “There could have been an alarm on that,” Ara protested.

  “But there wasn’t.”

  He had to pry the cabinet open with his knife, but the door eventually swung free, and he was rewarded by the sight of an iron sculpture of a horse, big but not too heavy for him to tuck under one arm. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get out of here before these guys come back.”

  Footsteps echoed on the metal grating, and he realized they were a few moments too late. One glance around told him there wasn’t enough cover to hide. He turned to see three Travelers, the man who’d been carrying grain before and two other men in dark leather. All three of them had energy pistols drawn and leveled at their chests.

  “You’re not Belkans,” one of the men said, a square-shouldered blond with a thatch of stubble and muscles that suggested he spent a lot of time either hefting sacks of grain or punching people in the face. “So it won’t spoil the trading fair for us to show you what we do to thieves.”

  “You stole from us,” Ronon said, brandishing the iron horse. “Do you even know what this thing does?”

  “It prevents earthquakes,” the blond man said. “We’ve got a buyer on Hoff who’ll pay a pretty price for that.”

  “More than we got out of the Satedans for everything we traded,” one of the other men said. He was less massively built and held his pistol less confidently, like he did more engineering than fighting. “Your people are pretty cheap.”

  “Maybe we’re just hard to cheat,” Ronon said. “And this thing you stole is going to cause an earthquake that kills hundreds of people.”

  The engineer and the third, heavier and darker man looked at each other uneasily, but their leader shrugged. “Not our problem,” he said. “Your people should have paid us better, or kept a better eye on their property.”

  “Ladric isn’t going to like this,” the one who looked like an engineer said.

  The blond man rolled his eyes. “So? Does Ladric tell us what to do?”

  “He kind of does, as long as we’re with his fleet? And you know he was dead set on this trade deal with the Satedans —”

  “We’ve traded, for all the good it did us. We’re not going back there for years. And we’re not leaving here without that device.” The blond man flashed Ronon a smile, raising his energy pistol. “Hand it over, Satedan, and we just might go easy on you.”

  “Sorry,” Ronon said, and rushed him, elbowing the man’s gun arm out of the way and swinging the iron horse for the man’s head.

  It connected solidly, and he hoped it was sturdy enough not to be damaged by the impact. The Traveler obviously wasn’t, and staggered back, stumbling to one knee. Ronon put the horse down rather than dropping it, and was rewarded by the Traveler throwing himself at Ronon’s knees and knocking him down before he could get his gun clear of his holster.

  Tyre was wrestling with one of the others for his pistol. The third man’s pistol spat a bolt of energy, and Ara went down, measuring her length on the deck with a thud. Ronon didn’t see blood or burns, and couldn’t spare more of his attention. The man he’d hit tried to knee him in the groin, and then grabbed him by the hair and yanked his head back as he twisted out of the way.

  Ronon had the man by the wrist, grappling for the man’s energy pistol, and managed to block an elbow to the throat with his other arm. His opinion of the Travelers as fighters was going up by the moment. He shoved the man away hard while keeping his grip on his arm, trying to pin his arm behind his back.

  The energy pistol spat again. He could hear two shots in rapid succession and the thuds of two bodies. It only took him a moment to add that up, and he let go of the man he was fighting, pushing him away and rolling clear. The man raised his pistol to fire, and then looked up over Ronon’s shoulder. Ronon enjoyed watching his eyes go wide before Ara dropped him with a third shot.

  “You knew I wasn’t really stunned,” Ara said.

  “Figured that out.”

  “I think I winged Tyre, though,” she added more unhappily. “I can’t get him up.”

  Ronon turned with the iron horse in his arms to see her trying to haul Tyre to his feet. The man was barely conscious, looking like the end of the night in one of those bars they hadn’t gotten to visit. Ronon swore and shoved the iron horse into Ara’s arms, hauling Tyre up himself and getting his arm over Ronon’s shoulders. He and Ara just barely managed to get Tyre down out of the hatchway, but he could hear the sound of distant running feet.

  “One of them must have tripped some kind of alarm.”

  “Or you did cutting that wire,” Ara said.

  “Just move,” he said, and took off for the woods.

  There was thick enough cover to hide them as long as they stayed still. Ronon dragged Tyre down behind a bush and held him down to keep him from blundering around, and he waited as the footsteps passed by. There was the sound of commotion around the Travelers’ ship, and after a long while, the sound of some of the Travelers heading back in the direction of the market.

  “They think we went back to the market,” Ara said under her breath, and Ronon nodded. He didn’t intend to make for the Ring until Tyre could get there under his own power. “Well, good.”

  “They can search the market all they want,” Ronon said. “When they get tired of it, we’ll head home.”

  Ara’s mouth crooked to one side. “So what happened to subtle? I thought we weren’t supposed to confront the Travelers. Because diplomacy, and all that.”

  “We had to get this thing back one way or another,” Ronon said. “And those guys aren’t going to complain to the Satedan government that we stole back the thing they stole from us.”

  “You have a point,” Ara said, and settled herself into the curve of a tree root to wait.

  They got back through the Ring without incident; Ronon wrapped the iron horse in his jacket, and didn’t stand out at all from the streams of market-goers who were heading back through the Ring with various parcels, baskets, and sacks. The Belkan man who was keeping people from crowding the Ring while other travelers were dialing frowned as Ara input the symbols for Sateda.

  “Say, there were some Travelers looking for some Satedans,” he said. “They seemed pretty unhappy with them.�
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  “Wasn’t us,” Ronon said.

  “We never went near the place,” Tyre said.

  “In fact, we were never here,” Ara said. Ronon thrust them both forward toward the Ring before they could practice their skills at deception any further, and followed them into the chill of the event horizon.

  The next few hours back on Sateda seemed to pour away like water. Kell had a special train waiting for them, and it was already moving as they clambered aboard, pulling out of the station and racing through the darkened city toward the countryside. The rattle of the rails seemed too slow, the click-clack of the wheels a leaden clock’s tick. Ronon couldn’t stop imagining what it would look like if the dam broke, the crumbling concrete falling away in a white hammer-blow of water, the white cascade turning to a brown wall of water looming over the towns it was about to destroy.

  When they finally rounded the curve down into the river valley in the blue of early dawn, he let out a breath he had been holding when he saw the river still running low and lazy through the valley, and the little towns still standing. In several they passed, he could see lights above the town and up into the hills, people moving to high ground or camping there for the night.

  The train finally slowed at Ironlode, the first light of morning spilling over the dam but not yet dispelling the shadows of the valley. Ronon climbed down from the train, the iron horse in a pack strapped to his back. There were soldiers posted at the train platform, but Ronon brushed aside their questions.

  “We have to put this back in the shrine first,” he said. “Explanations later.”

  “No one’s going to stop you doing that,” Arvan said, not one of Ronon’s particular friends but a man he’d come to know in training. “It’s spooky down here just waiting for that thing to go.”