by Jo Graham
“Don’t get smart.” She reached for his radio earpiece and divested him of it neatly. She was wearing what looked like a military uniform, dark green and severely cut.
“I don’t think you’re going to be able to fly the jumper either,” he said. “Whatever it is you want, we can talk about it. But how about you put the gun down.”
“That’s what you think,” the woman said. She glanced at the man, who gave her a nervous look from where he sat at the controls.
“I’ve never seen a control panel like this.”
“Figure it out,” she said.
“You see, you’re not actually going to be able to activate any of the Ancient technology… ” Daniel trailed off as the rear door of the jumper closed. “Except apparently you can.”
“Thanks to the medical information your people traded to ours,” the woman said. “You didn’t think that we’d be able to activate the ATA gene successfully. You thought you were cheating us, didn’t you?” She smiled, not pleasantly. “Think again.”
“I actually have no idea who you are.”
“Sora Tyrus,” the woman said. “I take it you’re new.”
“Actually, yes. So whoever it is that you have a problem with in this picture, it isn’t me.”
“I don’t have a problem,” Sora said. “I have a new spaceship. My only question is, should I take you with it, or leave you here?”
“I think you should leave me here.”
“Take you with us it is,” Sora said. “Taka! Come over here and tie him up.”
She held her pistol jammed against his chest while the man snapped handcuffs around his wrists and relieved him of his pistol. Sora handed the man a second pair of handcuffs, which he used to cuff Daniel’s ankle to his chair.
“These controls aren’t much like the pictures you showed me,” Taka said, sliding back into the pilot’s seat. “It’s responding to my commands, but… ”
“This ship is a lot simpler than the Pride of the Genii,” Sora said. “Figure it out!”
“It’s a lot more complicated than a train, too!”
“You’re Genii,” Daniel said. “You’re supposed to be our allies.”
“She’s Genii, I’m not,” Taka said.
“Fly the ship,” Sora snapped. She turned back to Daniel with a scowl. “Ladon Radim is your ally. I’m not his favorite person anymore, or he wouldn’t have sent me out here to watch a bunch of farmers dig in the dirt. He’s not my favorite person, either. But now I’ve got something better than his creaky hulk of a warship that we haven’t figured out how to fly yet.”
“Our jumper,” Daniel prompted. He was getting the impression she was the kind of enemy who craved attention or validation and could therefore be relied upon to brag about her plans to a captive audience. That was always an advantage. The most dangerous enemies just kept their mouths shut and shot you.
“Your jumper is the proof that my friends’ method for activating the ATA gene works,” Sora said. “I was a little worried when it looked like none of the Manarians had even the recessive gene, but checking the Satedans who’ve settled here paid off. And now I’ve got a pilot.”
“More or less,” Taka said.
“Can you fly this thing or not?”
With a shudder, the jumper lifted off the ground.
“Flying a spaceship by trial and error sounds like a really bad idea,” Daniel said. “Anyway, your people have the Pride of the Genii, right? So you can test your ATA gene activation program with its equipment. You don’t need this ship.”
“I don’t have Pride of the Genii,” Sora said. “And Radim doesn’t know that I’ve been conducting my own private tests of our gene therapy ahead of his own glacial schedule. He wasn’t moving fast enough to suit a lot of people. Some friends of mine were willing to step in and move faster.”
“You said this stuff had been tested,” Taka said.
“You’re fine,” Sora said. “Fly the ship.” She slid into the seat next to Taka, leaving Daniel trying to work his hands free of the handcuffs. He found himself actually wishing Vala were there. She would be out of the cuffs in thirty seconds flat with a shrug of her shoulders and an unrepentant smile. Of course, whether she would let him out equally promptly was always a good question.
The jumper lifted the rest of the way off the ground, and began making its way unsteadily toward the gate.
“Dial the gate,” Sora said.
“How?”
“The ship has a DHD,” Sora snapped. As Taka brought the jumper around, Daniel could see running figures making for the gate.
His radio crackled tinnily in Sora’s pocket, and Sora pulled it out and set it on the control panel.
“What is happening?” Teyla demanded over the radio.
“I’m taking your ship,” Sora said. “Get out of my way.”
“Sora. You do not want to do this.”
“I’m tired of being told what I want to do,” Sora said. Taka was still struggling to get the ship lined up level with the gate, and Sora reached over to stab at the buttons of the jumper’s DHD herself.
“Is Dr. Jackson unharmed?” They had reached the gate, and Rodney had thrown himself full length to the ground in front of the planet’s DHD, pulling its maintenance panel open.
“She’s dialing the gate,” Daniel called, which he felt answered the question as well as providing more important information.
“Shut up!” Sora slapped her hand down on the last of the symbols, and the gate began to hum. It lit, the chevrons brightening, and then immediately dimmed again, its rising hum dropping to an anticlimactic thud. She turned on Taka. “What did you do?”
“We’ve disabled the gate,” Rodney said through the radio. “The jumper’s DHD won’t do you any good if the gate doesn’t have any power.”
“Ready weapons!”
“Oh, yes, brilliant idea, fire a drone at the DHD! Only if you’d like to be a permanent resident of Manaria.”
“What weapons?” Taka asked.
“Never mind,” Sora said. “They’re right, we can’t fire on them until they move.”
“If they move out of the way and then you shoot them, how are you intending to fix the DHD?” Daniel asked conversationally.
“It can’t be that hard,” Sora said, but she didn’t sound entirely convinced.
“Land the jumper now,” Teyla said over the radio.
“I don’t think so.”
Ronon was standing directly between the jumper and the rest of the team. He drew his pistol and fired at the jumper, several bolts of energy that rocked the ship when they hit.
“Shields!” Sora demanded.
Taka looked at her sideways. “We have shields?”
“Get us out of here,” she said. “Just get us out of range.”
“I can do that,” Taka said, and the jumper swerved away from the gate, picking up height and speed as it went. “And I think I’ve found the shields.”
“You think?”
“Trains don’t have shields,” Taka said. “And they don’t talk in your head. You’re expecting me to be an expert here?”
“I am warning you, Sora
—” Teyla began over the radio. Sora switched it off.
“You’re going to have to negotiate if you want to get off this planet,” Daniel said into the silence that followed. “Unless you’d like to try to fly the jumper to the nearest solar system at sub-light speeds. That should take, what, a couple of years?”
“I’ll negotiate,” Sora said. She switched the radio back on. “You have five minutes to repair the damage you’ve done to the gate. If it’s not fixed by then, I’m going to shoot Dr. Jackson in the head.”
“This is a very bad idea,” Daniel said evenly as Sora snapped the radio off again.
“It’s a fair exchange,” Sora said. “I don’t really want to be saddled with you, and I do want this ship. I’ll be happy to throw you out unharmed as soon as your people fix the gate.”
“They can’t
just give you the jumper,” Daniel said.
“That’s unfortunate for you.”
“Even if they did, what are you planning to do with it? If you take it back to the Genii homeworld, we’ll know where to find it.”
“And Radim will deny having it.”
“And we’ll tell him that we know you stole it.”
“If I leave any of you alive.”
Daniel winced inwardly. There was nothing to stop her from making a deal for his return and then firing on the rest of the team as soon as they repaired the gate. Although they were experienced enough to demand his return first. Only Sora seemed experienced enough to insist that they fix the gate first. And he’d rather not be the one sitting there with a gun to his head while they tried to figure out that little tactical problem.
“Do you just want me to circle around?” Taka said.
“No,” Sora said. “I don’t want to give them the chance to do anything to sabotage this ship. Put some distance between us and the gate.”
The jumper turned and began flying over rolling farmland, the bright squares and ribbons of cultivated fields set in between rougher patches of pasture land and copses of trees.
“What do you actually want out of this?” Daniel asked. “Are you trying to get back into Radim’s good graces, or trying to show him up, or do you just want the jumper for reasons that have nothing to do with Ladon Radim?”
Sora turned, pressing her lips together tightly. “Why should I tell you?”
“I’m listening. You might say I’m a captive audience.”
“Radim wants me dead,” Sora said. “And right now he has a parade of successes to keep him in power. Things will look a little different if I have an Ancient ship and the only successful program to activate the ATA gene in our people.”
“I thought you said it was Radim’s program.”
“I’ve improved on it.”
“I thought you weren’t a scientist.”
“How would you know?”
“You’re not interested in how the jumper works. And you didn’t try to persuade me that it was your research all along.” Daniel tried to spread his hands, only to have them jerked back by the handcuffs. “It was an educated guess.”
“I have friends who are scientists,” Sora said. Daniel repressed the urge to express surprise that she had friends at all. It really wasn’t the time for that. “And we had help.”
“Help?”
Sora wanted to talk, he could tell, and keeping her busy was probably the best way to give the team back at the gate time to do something. What they were going to do, he wasn’t sure, but at least they had a reputation for being good at improvising.
“What do we do now?” Rodney asked.
Teyla let out a frustrated breath. The jumper was disappearing quickly over the horizon. As impatient as she had been with Daniel, he did not actually deserve to be killed by Sora as part of her continuing grudge against Teyla. “What can you do?”
“I might be able to reprogram the DHD to send her to a different address than the one she dials. It would have to be one that’s recently been dialed.”
“You mean back to Atlantis.”
“And we radio them and tell them to raise the iris,” Ronon said.
“No,” Teyla said. “I do not want Sora dead. Do what you must to get the gate working again.”
Ronon put his head to one side. “She’s going to kill Jackson.”
“He will be equally dead if he is aboard a jumper that is disintegrated when it hits the iris.”
“I’m just saying she’s not a great person.”
“Even so. I would rather not kill her if there is any other choice.”
Rodney turned up his hands. “So, what, we trade her the jumper? We have four minutes to make up our minds.”
“We will trade her the jumper,” Teyla said. “When the DHD is working again, dial an unpopulated planet. Then call Atlantis and tell them to send two more jumpers to intercept Sora when she arrives there.”
“And then reprogram the DHD to send her to that address?” Rodney said. His hands were moving rapidly, his whole body tense with concentration. “We maybe have time to do two of those three things.”
“Then we will not call Atlantis. When Sora goes through the gate, we will follow her ourselves.”
“We’ll be in the same stand-off we’re in now,” Ronon said.
“Except that she will no longer have a hostage, and therefore we will not have a time limit,” Teyla said. “Rodney?”
“I’m working on it,” Rodney said. “Why is it never ‘take all the time you need, nothing bad will happen if you don’t work faster than humanly possible?’”
If he was complaining rather than flatly refusing, it meant that he could accomplish the tasks she had set him in the time they had left. “I have every faith in your abilities,” Teyla said.
“I still think we’d be better off smearing her across the iris,” Ronon said.
“I went to some considerable trouble to save her life when last we met,” Teyla said.
“Funny way of repaying you.”
“That is not why I did it,” Teyla said, and hoped she wasn’t about to regret it.
“I made friends with one of Radim’s researchers,” Sora said. “He was highly motivated to make friends with me after I showed him what I’d found. A device capable of making certain genetic changes in one person’s DNA given a genetic sample from someone else.”
“Interesting. I should tell you that we’ve had some very bad results from using Ancient devices to alter people’s DNA,” Daniel said. “There was the Ascension device that made people keel over dead if they didn’t reach enlightenment fast enough, for one thing. The exploding tumor incident also comes to mind.”
“Exploding what?” Taka demanded. The jumper wobbled perceptibly in the air, banking back and forth hard enough to make Sora grab at her chair to stay in it. It would have been the perfect moment to jump her if he hadn’t been handcuffed to a chair.
“I’m sure nothing like that will happen,” Daniel said.
“How sure?”
“You worry too much,” Sora said. “Besides, I’m not even sure it was an Ancient device. It had a setting that made it provide instructions in the language of the Ancestors, but also in some kind of writing nobody could figure out. And it didn’t look anything like the devices in Pride of the Genii.”
“And it wasn’t Wraith.”
“We’ve all seen Wraith technology before. Give me some credit. I may not be a scientist, but I’m not an idiot.”
“Was the writing – did it look something like this?” He sketched Asgard characters in the air with his fingers, and then shook his head in frustration. “Give me something to write with.” Sora shook her head, and he traced the shapes of the same characters more slowly. “Vertical and diagonal strokes, all the same weight.” He sketched the letters of the first phrase he thought of, “Thor’s hammer,” and then after a moment’s thought, “genetic pattern,” which seemed more relevant.
“That looks like it,” Sora said.
“That’s Asgard. That’s Asgard! And you found a piece of their genetic manipulation equipment? Where did you find it?”
“On Sateda,” Sora said. “It was in the city museum. Gathering dust, because no one who knew anything about science had ever taken a good look at it and figured out what they had.”
“The city museum that your people agreed not to loot as part of your trade agreement with the new Satedan leaders.”
“You looted this from our museum?” Taka said, swiveling around in his chair to face Sora. Daniel wished he wouldn’t, as it only made the jumper’s course more erratic, but he felt any tensions between the two of them were worth encouraging.
“We made a deal for the artifacts we took off Sateda.”
“At gunpoint, the way I heard it,” Daniel put in.
“That’s not true,” Sora said, but Taka was frowning. The jumper’s flight became even less
stable.
“Maybe you should concentrate on flying the ship,” Daniel prompted.
“You said you found the device.”
“We did find it,” Sora said. “We had a deal with Cai and his people on Sateda to salvage machinery that they were in no position to use. Then the Lanteans got in the middle of it and persuaded them to go back on their bargain.” Taka looked like he was at least listening, and Daniel felt it was unfortunate for Sora that she went on, “Besides, what do you care? You’re Manarian now.”
“You don’t understand much.” The jumper pitched hard enough that Daniel would have fallen out of the chair if he weren’t cuffed to it.
“Watch what you’re doing!” Sora snapped.
Taka’s eyes were back on the console, but the jumper’s nose was down, and they were losing altitude fast. “I am,” he said. “But something’s wrong! The controls aren’t responding.”
Sora turned on Daniel, brandishing her pistol. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. I’ve been sitting here handcuffed, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“McKay,” Sora said. “He must have sabotaged the ship somehow.”
“It’s not responding to my commands,” Taka said. “I can’t bring up the displays anymore.”
“Fix it!”
“How?”
“I might be able to fix it if you let me get to the controls,” Daniel said.
“Not a chance.”
“Then we’re going to crash,” he pointed out. The ground was coming up fast.
“Damn it!” Sora scrambled out of her chair and unfastened the cuff on his leg.
“Handcuffs too.”
She bent to unlock them left-handed, holding her pistol on him while she did.
“We’re going down!” Taka yelled.
“All right!” Sora said as she freed his hands. “Get this thing working again!”
“I’ll do my best,” Daniel said, and grabbed for her gun hand.
She brought her knee up hard, and he just barely managed to twist enough for it not to connect in a delicate location. He kicked off from the chair, knocking her down under his weight and rolling as she scrambled to get on top, fighting him for the pistol.
The jumper pitched wildly, and Taka was cursing at the controls. They were going down, and Daniel hoped fervently that Taka could bring the jumper in for a landing that wouldn’t kill them all. If he could, he had at least one advantage – he’d probably been in a lot more crashing ships than Sora had.