SGA-13 Hunt and Run

by Rosenberg, Aaron

  “Barely,” Frayne grumbled, but the orange-haired man looked intact when he stood up a short distance away. “Damn near lost my eyebrows!”

  “That would have been a good look for you,” Setien told him, springing up from behind a small cluster of rocks. She looked completely unfazed, her cheeks flushed and her eyes dancing even though she was covered in dirt and grass and bits of burnt bark. “That was glorious!”

  Adarr was wiping himself off. “I’m fine,” he acknowledged. Then he grinned at Ronon. “Looks like it worked.”

  “Definitely.” Banje looked exactly as he had — if he’d gotten covered in debris it didn’t show. “Nice idea.”

  Turen was fine as well, and crouched to pull a piece of shattered Dart from a nearby tree. “Strange material,” she murmured, running her fingers along it. “Like metal, but not quite.”

  Ronon noticed a piece near him as well, and tugged it from the ground where it had lodged. It was long and narrow and pointy, possible the tip of the Dart’s nose. Held in one hand, it was almost like a naked blade, though one without a handle or hilt. He waved it about a little, considering the heft, a new idea forming.

  “Think you could make something out of this?” he asked Turen, showing her his find.

  The little Hiñati woman examined it, then nodded. “It’s strong and sharp,” she said, “and sturdy enough to withstand deep space. I don’t have all the proper tools, but I could manage to do something with it, yes.” She grinned up at him. “You want a sword.”

  “I do, yes.” Ronon’s people carried swords and knives as well as guns, and he missed the familiar weight of a blade in his hand. “I bet this stuff could cut through Wraith armor, too.”

  “Probably,” she agreed. She began scanning the area, retrieving a few other likely pieces, and Nekai let that continue for a minute before he called them all together again. He had something in his hand as well, and several of them gasped in surprise when they saw what it was. It looked a lot like the consoles that stood beside each ancestral ring, only significantly smaller.

  “This must be how the Dart opens a ring,” Nekai explained, holding it up for them to see better. “I’m thinking it could come in handy.”

  “Definitely.” Adarr was clearly itching to study it. “I could wire it into one of our shuttles and we could fly through rings just like they do! Or we could rig a handle for it, and use it to open them before we reach the clearing, so we can just jump through! Or — ”

  “There are a lot of possibilities,” Nekai agreed, cutting him off, “but we’ll worry about that later. Right now we need to get moving. Killing a trio of hunters is one thing. Destroying a Dart is another. The Wraith will definitely notice that, and they’ll send more Darts to investigate.” He clapped Ronon on the shoulder. “It was an excellent idea, and I’m sure we’ll use it again, but not today. Time to return to base.”

  Ronon nodded and fell in line with the others as they prepared to move out. But he kept the Dart fragment clutched in his hand, and there was a small smile on his face. Shattering that Dart had been his idea, his plan. His kill. Something the V’rdai had never managed to do before.

  Something he fully intended to do again. And again.

  The Wraith would learn to fear him. To fear the V’rdai.

  And then they would die.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Wow.”

  Ronon nodded. Adarr’s unusually short statement more than summed up what he suspected they were all feeling. “Wow,” indeed.

  They stood there, staring down at the devastation that stretched out before them. Ronon had been with the V’rdai, had been part of them, for almost eight months now. They had killed Wraith by the dozens, possibly by the scores, even with Nekai’s caution about making themselves too visible and Banje’s concerns about letting the Wraith track them too long or come too close to their base. He’d gotten used to the ancestral rings, or at least able to walk through one without being disoriented more than a few seconds and capable of approaching one with only a slight shiver. But this was the first time they’d traveled through to any place larger than a small village.

  This was the first time they’d seen a city after the Wraith had finished with it.

  The first time, for Ronon, since Sateda itself.

  He gaped unashamedly at the ruins below. The ring had been placed on a short, wide, flat-topped hill, almost a plateau save for its tough blue-green grass and the tiny yellow and white flowers dotted among it. The city was less than a hundred meters away, obviously built close enough to take full advantage of the ring and its possibilities.

  No doubt that had made them a clear target for the Wraith.

  There was no telling how long it had been, but there was no smoke, no fire. Everything had long since burned out. The buildings were blackened wrecks, what remained of them, and the streets were littered with rubble where those same buildings had been shattered. If there were bodies, Ronon couldn’t see them from here. That, at least, was a blessing.

  Banje reacted first, as usual. Ronon had long since learned that the quiet Desedan was never fazed for long by anything. “Change of plans,” he announced. “Scavenging parties.”

  The others nodded, including Nekai. That was something else Ronon had gotten used to. Nekai led the V’rdai, but more often than not when they were actually on the ground it was Banje who gave the orders. Still, that wasn’t unusual. Ronon had seen similar situations plenty of times before, back on Sateda. Nekai was a commander, a leader, the man with the grand plans and the long-range strategies. Banje was a lieutenant, practical and hard-nosed and good at the minute details and the immediate concerns. And Nekai knew that. He respected Banje enough not to contradict him, and Banje respected him enough not to counter any of Nekai’s plans, or to argue with him in front of the others. It was a good, solid system, and obviously it had served the V’rdai well long before Ronon had arrived. It still worked nicely now.

  They split into three teams: Nekai and Turen, Ronon and Frayne, Banje and Setien and Adarr. Again, smart. Each team had a heavy-hitter: Nekai was a good enough hunter to count, even if he didn’t have the same physical combat skills as Ronon or Setien. Something they’d proven in the ring, Ronon remembered with a grin, thinking back to one of the few times they’d been able to coax the Retemite into joining their sparring matches. He was good, but Ronon had put him on the ground almost immediately. And he and Setien were still a dead match for best hand-to-hand combatant in the unit.

  Each team also had a spotter, since Turen had the best eyes in the V’rdai, with Banje, Frayne, Adarr, and Ronon himself not far behind. Adarr was their only real mechanic, but Frayne knew enough to fake it, especially around anything with an engine. Plus Banje was the only one who could really keep Setien in line, and Turen would sulk if she didn’t get paired with Nekai — the little Hiñati had it bad for their leader, though she was careful to keep things professional. No romance among Runners. It produced too many entanglements, clouded judgment, dulled reflexes, contradicted survival instincts — all of which could be fatal.

  “Move out,” Banje ordered, and the teams scurried down the hill, splitting off only once they’d reached the edges of the city proper. Two-man teams meant their tracking devices would still overlap signals, but it wasn’t as secure as three or more, so they had to move fast. Scout the city, look for anything worth salvaging, regroup, and get out again.

  They’d done this many times over Ronon’s tenure with the V’rdai. But always before it had been a village or town, where they could grab food and maybe some clothes. They had enough weapons, at least in terms of personal armaments, and those places were too small and too primitive to have any decent armor or heavier equipment, so food and clothing were about it.

  This was different.

  Ronon could tell that this had once been a major city. He was guessing a million inhabitants, possibly more. A few buildings still rose as much as ten stories into the air, and their jagged tops proclaimed that once
they had reached far higher, daring to graze the clouds themselves. The streets were broad and straight, the city laid out in a neat grid broken here and there by circles — those might have been for traffic, or for use as parks and gathering places, or perhaps both. They were covered in dust and debris now, of course.

  But a city this size had possessed advanced technology, on a par with the cities of his own world. They’d probably had some sort of security force, both for internal conflicts and for potential invasions through the ancestral ring. Those guards would have possessed body armor, maybe energy rifles, possibly even explosives.

  Things they could definitely use.

  “Come on, come on,” Frayne urged as they scouted down one of the streets. “Let’s go! The sooner we snatch and grab, the sooner we’re back.”

  Ronon laughed at the smaller man’s impatience. “What’s your hurry?” he asked. “You that eager to get your butt whipped in the ring again?” Setien and Frayne had been sparring when Nekai had announced it was time for another mission. Not surprisingly, the orange-haired Yadonite had been losing. Badly.

  “I don’t like places like this,” Frayne grumbled in reply, shrugging off Ronon’s dig. “Remind me too much of home.”

  That one Ronon couldn’t argue, and so saw no need to comment. He’d learned a lot about the other V’rdai over the past eight months, and he was comfortable with all of them now, just as they were comfortable with him. Ever since that first hunt, when he’d led them to taking down their first Dart, he’d been fully accepted as part of the team. Even Frayne had never doubted him again. That didn’t stop the shorter man from griping about Ronon occasionally, but that was just Frayne. He wasn’t happy unless he had something to complain about. And if there wasn’t anything? He would invent something. Ronon was fairly certain it was just a pose, and that it amused Frayne to come across as a constant complainer. Fairly certain.

  In this case, though, Ronon knew the concern was genuine. Frayne’s homeworld, Yadon, had been one of the few worlds the Wraith had allowed to advance technologically, a place of vast oceans and towering cities. The people there flew from place to place because there was no other way — the waters were too turbulent to allow for sea travel, and land was sparse enough that it was completely covered by the metropolises that housed the many Yadonites. That was why Frayne was such a good pilot. As with all his people, he had learned early, and practiced often. Ever since his world’s destruction, however, he had been uncomfortable in anything more populous than their own dome. Even small villages made him jumpy.

  Being in a large city like this, especially one this badly damaged, had him jumping at shadows and starting at the slightest breeze.

  “Been a little while, at least,” Ronon commented, kicking a pile of cloth and bones out of his path. “That’s a good thing.” It was, too. Clearly this city had been hit some time ago, long enough that the bodies had all disintegrated down to the bones. He shuddered to think of walking this giant mass tomb a few months or years earlier, when the corpses were still rotting. “Means no fresh food, though.”

  His companion grunted. “Not likely to find anything like that here, anyway,” he pointed out, his eyes still restlessly scanning ahead of them. “Everything’d be processed.”

  “Right.” Ronon hadn’t thought about that. It had been so long since he’d been in a proper city, and even then he’d been in the military. All of their food had taken the form of hard, long-lasting rations. Whenever he’d been on leave Melena had made salads and other meals with fresh meat and fruit, so he’d simply assumed that was what civilians ate all the time. But of course they hadn’t. He felt a sudden, sharp pang of renewed sorrow. She’d saved the good stuff for when he’d visited.

  “Might be able to find some decent gear, if we can locate a security station,” Ronon pointed out, forcing his thoughts back to the present. “Body armor, weapons — boots.”

  That got a laugh from Frayne. “What, Setien’s work not to your liking?” the little man teased.

  Ronon frowned down at his feet. “She’s good,” he answered. “Not her fault she didn’t have much to work with.” He’d been able to get clean clothes, good and sturdy, from the stores the V’rdai had collected. But they hadn’t possessed any footwear large enough to accommodate him — Adarr had small feet for a man his height, and Setien’s were large for a woman but not for a man, so the team had never had a need to collect bigger shoes or boots. Setien was good with leatherworking — her father had taught her, she’d revealed during one of the rare times she’d talked about the family she’d lost long before the Wraith had appeared — and she had cobbled together a pair of sandals for him at first, so he’d at least have something to protect his soles from rough terrain. Later she’d found enough leather scraps to put together a pair of patchwork boots. They were the right size, and as solid as she could make them, but none of the scraps had been bigger than his fist so there was as much stitching as material protecting his feet. And nowhere near enough cushioning.

  Every chance they’d had since then, Ronon had searched for a proper pair of boots. And every time he did, Frayne had needled him about it.

  But never within Setien’s hearing.

  Still, the orange-haired Yadonite had brought more than one pair of boots to Ronon’s attention. None of them had fit, but the smaller man was trying. That made up for all the teasing.

  They reached one of the circles in the road, and Ronon saw that both his guesses had been correct. The road swept around the space, linking to another road that cut across and creating a wide intersection, but in the center was an area that had clearly been grass and bushes and possibly small benches. Both decorative and functional, restful and productive. Ronon glanced around again, this time noticing how the architecture was handsome and smooth and attractive without being garish or purely ornamental. Whoever these people had been, they had built well.

  But their very prosperity had no doubt attracted the Wraith’s attention. And led to their demise.

  Down the way, Ronon spotted Banje, Setien, and Adarr. They had reached a similar intersection level with his own. “Find anything?” Setien shouted over to him.

  Ronon shook his head. “Nothing so far.”

  “Neither have we.” She waved. “First one to find the fruit gets first dibs!” Then she and her teammates were off again.

  Ronon shook his head, laughing. Setien and her fruit! He hadn’t really believed her the time she’d threatened to beat him for the last fig they’d found on one world — until she’d tackled him and wrestled it from his grip. Now he knew to give her a wide berth when anything like that was involved.

  “We’d better keep up,” Frayne said, and Ronon nodded and followed him further down the road. They both kept their eyes peeled, but so far there was nothing. The buildings all seemed to have been workplaces, not factories or homes, and the ones they did search had nothing in them but rubble and shattered desks and chairs and what must have been monitors of some sort. All completely useless to them.

  “Let’s hope the others are having better luck,” Ronon muttered as they exited enough of the dust-coated offices. “It may be that all the homes and markets were on the other end of the city. And we may not have enough time to reach them before Banje orders a retreat.”

  “Fine by me,” Frayne replied. He shuddered. “Being closed in by all this death gives me the creeps.”

  A sudden flicker of movement caught Ronon’s eye, and he spun, dropping to a crouch even as his pistol cleared its holster and came up, targeting what he was seeing. Then he lowered it again as his brain caught up, resolving the motion into Adarr racing toward them.

  “Come quick!” the tall Fenabian gasped as soon as he was close enough. “We found something!”

  “Something good or something bad?” Ronon asked as he and Frayne closed the distance to their teammate, who spun and headed back the way he’d come, with them right behind him. He figured whatever they’d found wasn’t a threat or he’d hear
gunfire. Unless it was something too big for the three of them to handle in which case Adarr would have cautioned them to quiet. Right now the pale, lanky mechanic seemed far more interested in speed than stealth.

  “Good,” Adarr replied. “Maybe. We need Frayne.” Ronon and Frayne exchanged a quick glance, both of them feeling a rising excitement. Frayne was far and away the best pilot they had — he’d proven that when Nekai had finally let him handle the shuttle on the way to one mission, and he’d set it down so gently they hadn’t even known he’d landed until he powered the engines down. If Banje wanted him specifically, it could only mean one thing — they’d found a ship!

  Ronon had already heard the stories behind the V’rdai’s three existing shuttles. Nekai had found one himself, before meeting any of the others. It had been intact and abandoned, and he had simply taken it and left before anyone could come looking for it. He and Turen and Banje — they had been the first two he’d recruited, at least among the surviving V’rdai — had discovered the second outside a small village by a lake somewhere, a hole through its front and a dead man in the pilot’s chair. The village had contained nothing but bodies, clearly the victims of a Wraith attack. They had managed to repair the damage enough to get the craft spaceworthy again.

  The third one had been discovered only a few months before Ronon’s arrival. Adarr was part of the V’rdai by then, and when the team had happened upon a small spaceport he’d been able to rebuild a working shuttle from the wreckage of the five different ships that had been unlucky enough to be sitting there when the Wraith had struck.

  But if it was a question of checking to see if a craft still worked, they’d want Adarr. So why send for Frayne? Unless they had something they thought could fly, and didn’t know how it worked. If anyone could figure out a spaceship’s controls, it would be Frayne.

  Sure enough, after another ten minutes of running, Adarr led them into a wide, open area to one side of the city. There were a few low buildings here, each one with a pair of wide doors across the front. Hangars. Wreckage littered what had clearly been a landing strip of some kind, and Banje and Setien were checking out a shape that looked surprisingly intact.