Chapter Text
“Hurry up, we don’t have all day.” Rodney complained, he was already waiting in the gate room, his pack and weapons strapped on, pacing impatiently in front of the Stargate,
“Calm down, we’re coming.” John adjusted the straps of his pack slightly, Teyla and Ford followed behind him, all of them just about done with Rodney’s complaining, “I’m sure your gravitational what’s-it will still be there, there’s no rush.”
The mission had been put together at the very last minute, at Rodney’s insistence, and absolutely nobody except for Rodney was at all excited at being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night for something that was decidedly not a life-or-death emergency, just a bunch of astrophysicists and astronomers buzzing around like an angry swarm of hornets.
“You don’t know that.” Rodney snapped, “The anomaly has already faded enough that I can’t track it on the city’s sensors, we need leave right now.” Rodney waved up to the control room, “Start dialing.” He shouted.
John sighed, glancing back at Teyla and Ford to make sure they were ready to go. Ford looked dead on his feet, and Teyla gave John a narrow-eyed look, she was displeased about this situation, but much too polite to complain openly about it. John pulled out his radio and called up to the control room,
“We’re ready to head out.” He reported over the radio,
“Copy that, dialing sequence initiated.” The watch leader in the control room at this hour was Sergeant Michelson, his voice came over the radio popping with static, he sounded way too chipper for this hour.
If not for the near impossibility of acquiring anything stronger than the fake coffee they paid ridiculous prices for on that nice forested planet, Thelos or something, John would wonder if Michelson might be a bit artificially peppy, but no, he was just some kind of freaky night owl who enjoyed being awake at this hour.
John winced at the sudden noise of the gate room alarms starting up, at least he was completely awake now.
“Good luck.” Elizabeth radioed in, John looked up at the control room, but she wasn’t there.
She must be calling in from her quarters, Christ he wished he was her, she could probably get another couple hours of shut-eye after this before she had to be up for the day. John turned to glare at Rodney’s back while their destination was dialed in.
As soon as the wormhole was established, Rodney ran through the event horizon without so much as a backwards glance. John wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Rodney so eager to go out into the field, and all it took was some funky gravitational readings on the long-range sensors.
He walked through the event horizon after him, wondering if he could bribe any of the other scientists to mock up some fake sensor readings that he could use to lure Rodney into the field more often.
The momentary cold of passing through the event horizon didn’t even give him pause anymore, he just tried not to think about the fact that his was being disassembled and reassembled on a molecular level in that split second of freezing darkness before he emerged out the other side.
He was nearly thrown from the event horizon, stumbling in the brilliant sunlight. Teyla came after him, likewise unbalanced, and Ford after her, nearly falling flat on his face.
“Bumpy ride.” John said, squinting in the bright light, and looking the pair over to make sure they weren’t hurt. They looked fine. The Stargate sat in the middle of a large field, surrounded by tall, dry grass, swaying in the cool breeze.
“Check this out.” Rodney called. He hadn’t gone far, just around to the side of the Stargate.
There was a ship there, a small one, barely large enough for a single passenger. It sat at the end of a long trail of upturned dirt and burned grass, and long cables led from an open panel in the side of the ship to the Stargate.
“Maybe they’re trying to jump start their ship.” John suggested.
Rodney gave him a flat, unimpressed look, like he’d said something particularly idiotic, before turning back to the ship, peering into the open panel. John shrugged, he was just trying to be helpful.
Teyla and Ford were securing the area, though there wasn’t much to secure. There was nowhere nearby that any enemies could shelter, except maybe lying down in the tall grass. No trees or rocks within a half mile, no large hills or bluffs, just a big, empty field.
“Major, you think that’s a city out there?” Ford called out, raising an arm to point. Off in the distance, maybe four or five miles out, John could make out jagged shapes rising above the sparse tree line.
“Maybe.” He agreed. It looked like it might be the tops of buildings, but at this distance it was a bit hard to tell, “McKay, what have you got?”
He turned back to the ship, Rodney was already elbow deep in the ship’s innards, pulling at wires and doing god-knows-what to it, “I hope you’re not breaking anything.”
John hadn’t seen any signs of the ship’s owner, but they probably hadn’t gone very far, and John knew he’d be fucking pissed if he went for a walk and came back to find some weirdo pulling apart his ship like this.
“Don’t worry. This thing is a piece of junk, I’m doing a favor for whatever idiot crashed this thing.” Rodney said, not bothering to look up from his inspection. The ship was unusual, it wasn’t the most alien ship John had seen by a long shot, but it didn’t quite look like anything he’d seen on Earth either.
At a glance, he couldn’t tell if it had been designed for flying in or out of atmosphere, the overall shape was sort of a delta wing, but with a snub nose and ridiculous wingtips.
It reminded him a bit of some of the weirder experimental aircraft designs he’d seen, the sort that got passed around by aerospace firms looking for military funding, but which vanished like a puff of smoke the moment someone actually asked to have the damn thing built.
The ship’s exterior was streaked with black soot, and covered in dirt and grass from the rough landing. He could just barely make out that the ship had once been white underneath it all, at least in the places where the outer coating hadn’t been burned off.
The heat shielding on the nose and belly of the ship looked pretty intense, either this thing went really fast, or it had been designed to handle atmospheric reentry in a nose-dive, or close enough to it.
“John, we’re being watched.” Teyla said in a calm, quiet voice. She’d taken up a position out in front of the Stargate, facing the buildings Ford had spotted in the distance. She didn’t point, but nodded her head slightly toward the distant tree line, “I saw movement that way.”
“Wraith?” John asked, he didn’t see any movement, but he trusted Teyla’s judgement, eyes like a fucking hawk. She shook her head,
“No.” She was staring intently at the tree line, “I believe we are being watched, but I don’t think they are hostile.”
“I’ve got some tracks over here.” Ford called, standing in waist deep grass no more than twenty yards from the Stargate. John left Teyla to keep an eye on Rodney and went to check out these tracks.
Ford had found a path through the grass, someone had passed this way at least a few times, stomping down the grass and leaving a few footprints in the mud.
“You sure those aren’t yours?” John asked, kicking up one of his feet to check the bottom of his boot, the pattern didn’t match, but it was pretty close.
“No, Sir, but they look human.” Ford said. They certainly did look human, it looked like someone had been stomping around in rubber soled boots.
“Good job, stay on guard. Teyla thinks we have company.” Ford bobbed his head, looked quite pleased at the praise.
He was a good kid, though John really wondered sometimes what the hell the SGC was thinking letting a twenty-five year old (and barely twenty-five at that) join in on a suicide mission to another galaxy. Ford wasn’t even the youngest Marine on the mission, a few of them looked like they were barely out of high school.
“This thing is useless.” Rodney shouted, kicking the side of the ship, then yelping in pain at the sudden impact of his foot against the metal fuselage.
“I’m sure the owner will appreciate the input.” John just hoped they didn’t end up getting shot at because Rodney sabotaged someone’s ship, “What about your gravitational thingy?” They hadn’t come here to annoy the locals after all.
“Completely gone.” Rodney shouted back, “We weren’t fast enough.” He held up some kind of detector, produced from one of his many pockets.
“We woke up for nothing?”
“Not nothing, maybe we can find the moron who built this thing. Teyla can do her thing and make a new friend or something.” Rodney glared at the ship as if it had done something to personally offend him,
“You think you can fix the ship?” That certainly seemed a better route to making friends than setting Teyla on them.
Teyla was plenty good at the whole diplomacy song and dance, better than John at any rate, but she was a bit intense sometimes. If they were just meeting some poor pilot who’d gotten stranded in the middle of nowhere, it might be better to offer a bit of practical assistance before anything else.
“Look, whoever built this thing had no idea what they were doing. Most of this technology is primitive, nothing you wouldn’t find on the space shuttle, but then there’s this mess,” Rodney pointed at something inside the open panel on the side of the ship, John couldn’t see what he was pointing at and Rodney continued before he could get a good look,
“I think some of this is biological, and I’m not touching that, I don’t want to get some kind of space flu.”
“I thought you said it was primitive technology?” A biological ship sounded lightyears ahead of anything on the space shuttle, that was Wraith technology. Rodney crossed his arms,
“Most of it is primitive. Someone has done some extensive repairs on this ship—several times if I’m right, and I always am. I doubt whoever built it was the same person doing the repairs, the technology is completely different.” Rodney explained,
“And whoever crashed it here was stupid enough to try and hook their ship up to the Stargate, we’re lucky they didn’t blow up the Stargate and everything within a fifteen mile radius along with it.”
John hastily took a few steps back from the Stargate,
“Is that something we need to be worried about?”
“Of course not.” Rodney rolled his eyes, “I already decoupled the cables, they weren’t even hooked up right in the first place. The ship isn’t drawing any power from the gate or vice versa. It’s completely safe.”
“Well, I guess we should go find our missing pilot then.” John already had a good idea where they’d find their man, or person, maybe even an alien—the B-movie kind, not like Teyla, “Let’s start that way.” He pointed off toward the buildings in the distance.
“We’re walking all the way there?” Rodney complained,
”It’s good for you, you brought plenty of protein bars, right?” John didn’t wait to hear Rodney’s answer, of course Rodney had pockets full of protein bars, the man never went anywhere without them these days.
Ford led the way, following the tracks through the grass like a bloodhound, while Teyla offered bits of advice regarding tracking. She’d spent much of her life hunting or being hunted, and seemed quite happy to pass on what she knew.
The day was bright and the sky cloudless, it felt like a crisp spring day. Despite the rude awakening this morning, this was proving to be a pleasant enough mission so far. If all they got out of this was a nice hike, John would be quite happy with the mission. If they helped a stranded pilot, doubly so.