Prologue

Bathed in the warm shafts of sunlight slanting through the trees, the old man toiled. Even the summers on this world were cool, but between the exertion and the rare sunshine, he was almost too warm. He'd stripped off some of his furs and tied his loose leather shirt around his waist, revealing strong arms creased with scar tissue and knotted with muscle from years of physical labor.

His arms rose and fell, rose and fell, scooping the loose soil of the forest floor with a shovel that he had made himself from wood and bone. Every so often, he had to stop to tighten the leather straps holding the handle to the shovel's makeshift blade, his hands moving deftly despite two missing fingers on the left. It was during one of these breaks that he noticed the growing chill in the air, and raised his one eye to the sky. A band of fear constricted his chest when he saw the sun peeking low and red between the trees.

He whispered a soft profanity, throwing the shovel aside and clambering out of his hole. Fear made him clumsy as he gathered up his scattered furs, knapsack, and the crossbow that was never far from his reach. He'd been so engrossed in his work that he hadn't even noticed the gathering dusk under the trees. He was not a praying man; in fact, he couldn't remember the last time he'd done anything other than curse a deity. But he muttered to himself, under his breath, in fervent hope that he hadn't waited too long.

Despite his urgency, he had to pause to look back on his handiwork. He'd made a lot of progress today, but there was no telling when he'd get another sunny day and be able to come down from the hills to dig again. By that time, it might have undone everything he'd managed to accomplish, if it was so inclined. He never really knew. Sometimes, he had returned to find his efforts destroyed, while other times, everything was completely untouched -- and he had no idea why.

But there was no time to wonder about it now, not if he wanted to survive to dig again another day.

Picking up the shovel, he began to run through the trees.

He was in good shape for a man his age -- not out of choice, but necessity. However, it had been a long, hard day, and the ache in his joints grew into a dry, burning pain as he jogged down the familiar forest path. He hissed softly with each breath out, willing himself to breathe through the pain. It was going to be a restless, sleepless night -- assuming, of course, that he survived long enough to have a chance to sleep. Maybe he'd get drunk tonight. His homemade wine was harsh and dark -- matching his moods, most nights -- and had enough kick to deaden not just physical pain, but mental as well.

He had plenty of both kinds, but never enough wine.

Topping a low rise, he paused to catch his breath. The sky was awash with red and purple. He supposed it was probably beautiful, but to him, the colors meant death, because they heralded the coming of night -- and night was its domain. To his left, one of the towers was clearly visible above the trees, mocking him with its silent and inscrutable presence.

Around him, the forest lay eerily silent. He could remember when these trees rang with the calls of exotic birds, and his crude traps were rich with small furry creatures. These days, he had to hunt farther afield in order to find any sort of game at all, and the animals that he could catch were scrawny and wary, driven to the edge of starvation from constant running. Once, he had depended on the birds to warn him of its coming, because they fell silent when it was around. Maybe that was why it had killed them first.

Eventually, he could foresee a time when the only living things in the forest would be him, and the creature that hunted him.

"But it'll never get to that point if you die tonight, you idiot," he whispered to himself, and jogged down the other side of the ridge, towards the creek. He could use the running water to confuse his trail, maybe throw it off the track if it was following him.

He might be lucky. Sometimes weeks, even months went by when he didn't see any sign of the creature. It had to range far and wide in order to meet the demands of a rapid metabolism that demanded frequent, fresh sustenance. But on the sunny days, it would be nearby, because it had learned that he would be outside during the day, and perhaps it hoped that one of these days, he would be too slow returning to safety.

He wondered if it was capable of thinking on that level. Sometimes he doubted it. Other times ... he wasn't so sure.

He wasn't looking up when the sun slipped below the edge of the world, but he could tell from the sharply increasing chill in the air. Exertion helped keep him warm, but he still appreciated the warmth of the fur cloak over his shoulders.

Now that the sun was down, the creature would be abroad. He could only hope that it wasn't in this part of the forest. Wish in one hand, crap in the other, and see which one fills up first. His grandfather used to say that, long ago; and the old man's lips twisted a little at the bittersweet memory.

His leather boots splashed in the shallow waters of the creek, and he jogged swiftly upstream. He left the streambed at a little waterfall, stumbling a bit, and climbed over a field of loose rocks where he would leave few tracks.

At this point, he had a choice to make. Over the years, he'd cultivated a number of hide-holes. They weren't comfortable, but they were safe -- places where he could spend the night when darkness caught him too far from home. If he kept going up, he would come to one of them. It was closer than the modified cave that he currently called home. On the other hand, his aching joints begged for a soft bed, and his stomach growled for something more substantial than the handful of jerky that he carried in a pouch at his belt. And, at home, there was wine.

"Don't try to go home. There's no time. Use the bolt-hole instead."

He didn't flinch when the voice spoke. Didn't acknowledge it in any way. Certainly didn't take its advice. It sounded so real ... as if the speaker stood at his shoulder, as if he could just turn around and see --

A man could go mad that way.

He suspected that he was already halfway to crazy. He thought he was entitled to it, frankly. But that didn't mean he had to go gently, oh no.

"You're not real," he said, aloud, between harsh gasps for air. "And I'm not doing a damn thing you say." His voice rasped in his throat, rough and low -- his vocal cords had been damaged years ago, the larynx bruised and nearly crushed, in the same fight that had cost him the fingers on his hand.

The voice didn't speak again, and he needed no other confirmation that it was merely the product of an aged, lonely and desperate mind. It was just his subconscious voicing his own fears. But he had confidence in himself. He could make it home long before the creature picked up his trail, if it ever did.

He turned the downhill way, scrambling from rock to rock. It was faster this way, moving with gravity rather than fighting against it. All he had to do was make sure not to twist an ankle -- if he did that, his fate would be sealed. But he made it to the bottom intact, and then he ran across the pine needle carpet under the trees with a speed that belied his age.

A low mist was rising, as it always did at this time of evening. Beneath the trees, the shadows had grown deep, and he stumbled on unseen obstacles as he trotted across the rough ground.

Then behind him, far behind him, a shrieking cry rose on the cool evening breeze. It sounded a little like a hawk or eagle. But there were no birds in this forest, not anymore.

No, he thought. It had found his trail.

It couldn't track by scent -- at least, he didn't think it could. Maybe it would lose his trail at the creek. But he pushed himself from a slow trot into a run, as his creaky joints protested.

The hunting cry came again. Closer. It had crossed the creek.

No point in trying to confuse his trail now. All he could do was run. He thought he'd been at his limits before, but he dredged down deep inside himself and found a little more strength. His breath came in ragged gasps as his feet pounded the ground.

Carrying both the shovel and crossbow slowed him down. Reluctantly, he threw aside the shovel. He hated to lose it, because it was a good one and if the creature destroyed it, he'd have a hard time making a new one that worked as well. But he'd need both hands to operate the crossbow, and he had a feeling it was going to come to that. As he ran, he worked his bag of short wooden bolts around to his side where he could easily reach them.

He had fire-making supplies in his knapsack, along with a torch -- a dry stick of pine wood with a knot of flammable resin at one end. Fire would sometimes drive the creature off, though not always. But he didn't dare stop long enough to light the torch.

He was so very close. Just over the next rise.

The forest was so dark now that he almost didn't see the flicker of movement in the woods off to his right.

No. No.

It was quick and sinuous, a black darting shape, here and gone in the blink of an eye. He would never get used to how fast it could move. For an instant he caught the gleam of eyes in the dark, and then he lost sight of it again.

He was reaching the end of his strength. Red spots danced in his vision, and a searing pain split his side. For a fleeting instant he wondered if he might have managed to run hard enough to cause his aging heart to fail. Of all the possible ways to die in this forest, it would not be the worst, by far.

He came over the hill, and there was the heavy wooden door that he'd built into the cliff, half-obscured by artfully placed moss and brush. In the dusk, he almost didn't see the dark shape crouching in front of it -- wouldn't have seen it, if not for the sunset's light reflecting in its eyes, turning them to twin sparks of molten gold in the darkness. It had circled around, gotten in front of him. It was waiting for him.

He could have wept. He'd lived here for nearly a year, always careful, always hiding his tracks. Now he had led it here, yet again, and he would have to find yet another place to live, yet another temporary haven that it would find sooner or later. It always did.

No time to stop, to rest. He couldn't give himself a moment's respite. He charged down the hill, pausing only for an instant to bring up the crossbow and fire.

His aim was good, but then, he'd had lots of practice. The bolt thunked home in the creature's chest. He was already reloading as it let out a shrill cry, more of anger than pain, and leaped towards him, moving so fast it seemed to flicker in and out of his vision.

His second shot went through a leg -- clean through, the bolt penetrating so deeply that it stuck out the other side -- and it stumbled as the leg crumpled under it. A shot like that would only slow it down for a moment, but it gave him the chance he needed. He dashed the last stretch to the door, dropping the crossbow to fumble with the complex bolting system that he used to ensure the creature didn't gain access to his home while he was away.

From the corner of his eye, he saw it pick itself up for another leap. But the door was open; he threw himself across the threshold, slammed the door and flung the bar down just as the creature's body thudded into the wood. The door shook, but the heavy bar held. He'd lost the crossbow, but it wasn't the only one he had.

With violently shaking hands, he began moving the rocks that he kept inside the cave, dragging and piling them until the door was nearly blocked. The dull thudding continued as the creature threw itself futilely against the door, and then that sound was replaced by the gut-shivering scraping of long, wicked claws tearing the wooden planks into dull splinters.

Instinctively he raised a hand to his face, touching the torn flesh where his left eye used to be. He knew firsthand how sharp those claws were.

But the wood of the door was solid and heavy, several feet thick, more of an airlock than a door -- and much more resistant than fragile human flesh. He listened to the muffled sounds of scrabbling, and the high-pitched whining cries of frustration. He knew from experience that it would try all night, until either hunger or the light of dawn chased it away. The amount of damage that he'd inflicted on it with the crossbow bolts wouldn't do more than just make it more determined to reach him. It would be fully healed in a few hours.

It was pitch dark in the cave, but he didn't build a fire yet. Instead, he felt his way over to the pile of furs where he slept, and dug beneath them for the object he knew he would find there. Not the wine -- though that would come later. The thing he was searching for gave him less comfort than wine, but more courage. It reminded him of the reason why he kept fighting, why he kept running, why he kept digging day after day. It was both his shame, and his salvation.

He found it, and his fingers closed over the smooth surface, pulling it out. It was a box, about as wide as the length of one of his hands, and a hand-and-a-half long. He didn't open it, just held it to his chest.

Outside, the creature snuffled and clawed at the door, shrieking its frustration.

Inside, the old man knelt in the dark room, clutching the box like a child's doll. Eventually, despising himself for his weakness, he began to cry.

Chapter One

"Well, this has been a waste of time. Can you say 'Complete waste of time', boys and girls? I knew you could."

Rodney's teammates didn't respond, lost in their own thoughts as the four of them slogged back to the Stargate through a drizzling rain. In lighter times, they might have responded to his incessant complaining with verbal sniping of their own -- but today, they allowed him his own method of coping, as silence was theirs. Several months ago, they had visited this world and agreed to come again at harvest time. Now they had come ... but the world was dead, culled and seared to barrenness where a village had once stood. From the grass growing up through the charcoal remnants of their wooden huts, it looked as if it had happened not long after their first visit.

While Sheppard reported back to Elizabeth through the glowing blue puddle of the Stargate, Teyla sat on a nearby rock, her hands between her knees. From his position by the DHD, Rodney cast concerned glances in her direction.

Ronon knelt next to her. "Wraith?"

She jerked, startled by his presence, and shook her head. "No. They are long gone. It is just ... I had friends here, once."

Ronon didn't answer. He knew of such things, all too well.

Sheppard turned back from the Stargate, looking for his other team members. "Well? Ready to blow this popsicle stand, guys?" His voice was a little too light and loud. This, too, was his way of coping.

After a moment, Teyla shook her head. "If you do not mind, John, I would like to stay and perform a ceremony for the spirits of the dead. It will not take long."

Sheppard looked at her tired face, and nodded. "We can wait. Rodney, shut down the --"

"No, no." She raised a hand. "I would like to do this ... alone. If you do not mind."

"I don't like leaving you alone on a Wraith-culled planet."

Teyla stood and brushed off her pants. Her hair was dark and heavy with rainwater. "There are no Wraith anywhere here. I would be able to tell. I will be perfectly safe, and this ceremony needs to be done in solitude. It is an old one of my people, meant for situations such as this."

Her teammates glanced at each other. Ronon said, "I'll stay with her."

Teyla's sigh was exasperated, but her fond look encompassed all of them. "If you must. I assure you I will be all right."

"Ronon stays." Sheppard's face was grim; clearly, he didn't like splitting up, but he'd learned that the easiest way to lead this particular group of people was to try not to force them to do things they didn't want to do. "How long do you think this will take?"

She shrugged. "Half an hour, no more."

"Okay. If the two of you don't dial into Atlantis in half an hour, we'll come back and get you. Deal?"

"Deal," Ronon said.

Still looking worried, Sheppard turned back to the shimmering gate. "Elizabeth, I'm sending my IDC now. Rodney and I are coming through. Teyla and Ronon have a little business to take care of here, so they'll be along shortly."

"Understood," her small, tinny voice replied.

Sheppard turned to Rodney, made an "after you" gesture. The scientist stepped through the gate, and a minute later, reluctantly, Sheppard followed. The light splintered and vanished behind them, leaving only the still and silent ring of the gate, standing on a small rise in the earth.

"You do not need to stay," Teyla said, looking up at Ronon.

He just lifted a shoulder in a slight shrug. "I'll stay out of the way."

Teyla smiled, and, kneeling on the wet grass, she took a few small items out of her pockets -- herbs, a little candle. She had taken to carrying with her the necessary supplies for the simple form of the ceremony to lay the dead to rest. She did not have to use them often, but one time was far too many ... and this would not be the first time.

She'd just begun to enter a meditative state when the Stargate sprang to life again -- not five minutes after Sheppard and McKay had walked through it. "Damn it!" Ronon hissed, as Teyla scooped up her supplies and sprang to her feet. The two of them made a dash for the trees at the far side of the clearing.

"Why would the Wraith come back?" Teyla asked, unslinging her P90 with her back against a tree. "There is nothing here!"

"Because they're Wraith," Ronon said, and in the Pegasus Galaxy, that was answer enough.

The Stargate field stabilized, but instead of the whine of darts, there was the crackle of their radios and Elizabeth's voice spoke. "Is there a problem on your end? Everything all right over there?"

The teammates looked at each other in confusion. Teyla tapped her radio. "Doctor Weir? I do not know what you mean. We did not call you."

"I know you didn't," Elizabeth said. "But we received Colonel Sheppard's IDC and then the gate shut down without anyone coming through. We were a little worried."

Now the look they exchanged was more than confused -- it was concerned. "Dr. Weir, Colonel Sheppard and Dr. McKay entered the gate a few minutes ago," Teyla said.

There was a brief silence, then Elizabeth said, "And they came straight to Atlantis -- they didn't dial somewhere else?"

"You think we're lying?" Ronon rumbled.

"We are sure," Teyla said, over the top of him. "The gate was dialed into Atlantis so that the Colonel could report to you, and they stepped through it immediately after. They did not have time to dial another address."

This time the silence was longer, and the worry on the other end was palpable. "I see," Elizabeth said. "I'm going to get Zelenka and some of the other scientists down here. Whatever you do, don't use that gate."

"I do not understand," Teyla protested. "My people have been trading with this world for generations. We never experienced any problems, coming or going."

"I understand that, Teyla, but obviously there is some sort of problem, and I'd very much like to know what it is. Just sit tight and we'll call you back in a few minutes. Weir out."

The Stargate's field collapsed, and Teyla, self-consciously, returned her gun to its resting position. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Ronon still held his own gun loose and ready beside his leg. She could have reminded him that there was nothing to shoot here, but this, too, was his way of coping.

"The scientists will determine the problem and find out what happened to the Colonel and Dr. McKay," she told him with considerably more conviction than she felt.

Ronon made a growling sound, deep in his throat.

The mental serenity necessary to properly conduct the Ceremony of Passage had abandoned her, and all Teyla could do was pray quietly to the Ancestors that she would not have to perform such a ceremony for her missing teammates.

"This isn't Atlantis."

Rodney was speaking as Sheppard stepped out of the Stargate. He came to an abrupt halt, staring at the mist-draped tree trunks in front of him.

"No kidding, Rodney? Really? Nice to see you're putting all those advanced degrees to good use." He swiveled around, swinging the P90 in a ready position, by habit, before he even consciously realized that he'd done it.

The Stargate they'd stepped into had been in a clearing, but this one was surrounded by towering evergreen trees, pressing close about them. It was difficult to tell the time of day; the sky -- what could be seen of it through the trees -- was flat and gray, and looked poised to rain. From the moss cloaking the massive tree trunks, Sheppard guessed that rain was not uncommon here. Great. Two rainy worlds in a row. Just my luck. The air was brisk and chilly, with an autumn-like sharpness, although the foliage was still green.

"Er ... Colonel." Rodney's uncharacteristically quiet voice brought Sheppard's attention down from the trees. He followed the physicist's pointing finger to the ground at their feet.

"Well ... that's odd."

A trench had been dug under one edge of the Stargate, probably about five feet deep; the dirt was heaped haphazardly around the gate. Sheppard could see disturbed earth around it where other holes had apparently been dug and then sloppily filled in. Some of the digging looked quite old; there were fallen pine needles drifted over it. The most recently-turned earth, however, appeared to be very fresh, maybe only a few days old.

Rodney took a couple of steps backward, nearly bumping into Sheppard. "This is great. We're on the planet of the mole people."

"I'd say getting out of here would be a nice idea."

Too worried even to argue, Rodney made a beeline for the gate's DHD, but stopped short with a small moan. Sheppard might not be a scientist, but he could certainly see what the problem was. The top of the DHD had been smashed, as if someone had beaten it with a rock -- someone insanely strong. He knew how tough the DHDs were; even bullets from an assault rifle just skittered off, unless they happened to hit at just the right angle.

"The deranged mole people," Rodney groaned. He tapped a couple of the symbols on the DHD. Nothing happened. He tapped again, harder.

"Er, McKay, I think it's broken."

"No, it's not. The damage is only superficial. You could destroy the entire top of the DHD and it would still be able to dial the gate -- granted, picking out your address would be the tricky part." He crouched down and gave a small squeak of dismay.

"What? It's broken?"

Rodney made another dismayed sound. "Oh, yuck -- snails. I hate snails."

"Rodney ..." Sheppard broke off, staring at the top of the DHD. "Rodney," he said again, in a completely different tone of voice.

"Oh yeah, would you look at this. The primary control crystal is missing. Well, that's just great. Deranged, Stargate-sabotaging mole people."

"Rodney."

The urgency in Sheppard's voice finally penetrated. Rodney looked up at him in irritation. "You know, I'm kind of busy here--"

"Look at the top of the DHD."

"I know what it looks like, Colonel --"

"Look again, McKay."

Frowning, Rodney scrambled to his feet. He blanched, and reached out to touch one of the gouges in the mangled surface. "Is that ... er, what I think it is?"

"Looks kinda like claw marks, doesn't it?"

Rodney jerked his hand away as if burned. "That's ... bad."

"Well put. And, y'know, I'd kinda like to leave now, before we find out what can leave claw marks in a DHD. Can you fix it?"

"With what, my magic powers?" He heaved a sigh. "Not without a control crystal, I can't."

"And you don't carry a spare one with you?"

Rodney stared at him. "Are you serious? Where would I get one? I know, Colonel -- the next time we gate to a world, I'll just pull the control crystal and take it with me, so we can't dial home. Honestly--"

"McKay, you can rant later; just fix the damn DHD now."

Rodney paused for a moment, completely derailed, before setting off again.

"I told you I can't! Do you think I'm kidding around? Lying? Without the control crystal, we're totally screwed, Colonel. This isn't random sabotage; whoever disabled this thing knew what they were doing."

"So, what are our options, McKay? Work with me here."

"I don't know!" Rodney threw his hands up in the air. "I don't know why we're here, I don't know how to fix the DHD, I don't know, okay? And I hate it!"

"Well ... let's think, then." Keeping one eye on the forest, and ignoring the dirty look that Rodney sent him, Sheppard began to pace across the small patch of undisturbed earth in front of the gate. "We were dialed in to Atlantis, right? And we didn't un-dial. So we must have --" He broke off, head cocked to one side.

Rodney, oblivious, rambled on. "The wormhole jumped, yes. Obviously. There are a lot of things that could have caused that--"

"McKay, shush."

Rodney's mouth snapped shut; his eyes went wide. "What?" he hissed, sidling behind the DHD. "Monsters? What?"

"Thought I heard something." For just a minute, the sound of the wind in the tree branches had seemed to resolve itself into something like words, although he couldn't make them out. Anxiety, he told himself firmly; just the human mind generating patterns out of chaos. "It was just the wind. Go on, Rodney. You said lots of things could make the wormhole jump gates; like what?"

With a final nervous stare at the woods, Rodney began to tick off on his fingers. "Well, based on the SG mission reports -- it could be gate address confusion due to having more than one gate on the destination planet, which we can pretty much rule out because we know there's not more than one gate on Atlantis's planet; we would have had trouble long before now. There's also the possibility of some kind of device interfering with the correct operation of the gate ... or a solar flare or other disturbance in transit ... or a powerful burst of energy at the event horizon of the originating gate, like a bomb --" He stopped, looked up and met Sheppard's eyes with a look of abject horror. "Teyla and Ronon," he whispered.

"Wait ... wait ..." Sheppard was still trying to catch up. "Okay, you're talking about something like -- like you guys did with the Supergate, right? Which would mean -- okay, no. No way." He tried to shut out the horrifying mental image that had just crawled into his brain: the Stargate dissolving in a sheet of flame, Teyla and Ronon's fragile bodies withering like burning paper ... "No."

After another moment of fixed horror, Rodney's face dissolved in relief. "But no, I don't think it could be that, because the energy flare would've had to have preceded us through the wormhole, and we were already in transit. I think. It's not like anybody's ever done experiments to find out what would happen to a gate team caught in the middle, but it's most likely that we would have come out in Atlantis before the gate jumped, if it was going to do that."

"Great. No bomb," Sheppard said, in a tone that left no room for argument. Teyla and Ronon were fine, and even now trying to find them. He was certain of that. Well, almost certain. "And Atlantis will have noticed that we didn't come through, so they'll be looking for us. Right?"

"Right ... but ..." Rodney waved a hand in the air in time with his racing thoughts. "But we don't know, because it's never happened with a gate team in transit -- and there's a chance, too ... I mean, it's not likely, but there's a chance, if something happened to the gate on the Atlantis end, just long enough to cause a brief instability in the wormhole but not enough to actually shut it down, not if it could re-establish a connection with another gate before the wormhole could collapse -- I don't think it's ever actually happened, but -- oh God, that means Atlantis could be gone --"

"Rodney!"

Wide blue eyes met his. "What?"

"No bomb," Sheppard said firmly.

"No bomb," Rodney repeated in a small voice.

"No bomb. And right now the folks back on Atlantis are trying to figure out where we've gone. So let's help 'em out and see what we can figure out about where we are."

Rodney cast a baleful look at the sky, some of his habitual irritability starting to reassert itself. "We're on yet another rainy planet, from the look of things. Do you realize, we've been caught in the rain on nineteen of our last twenty-two missions? Do you know what the odds are against that?"

"I can't believe that you're actually keeping track." Sheppard squatted down and peered into the hole next to the gate. It looked as if someone or something had been trying to undermine the gate itself. There were a few inches of standing water in the bottom of the hole, a legacy of the most recent rain. "What do you suppose they were doing here?"

Rodney leaned over his shoulder. "The anthropologists would probably say it's religious. That's always what they say when they don't understand something, which is most of the time." There was a world of scorn in his words. If medicine was a soft science to McKay, then anthropology was located clear out on the pseudoscience end of things.

"And your thoughts on the matter?"

"Hmm." He studied the hole, and then raised his head, frowning. Standing up, he made a complete circuit of the gate, murmuring small "mm-hm" noises under his breath. Then he stopped in his tracks, staring off through the trees, and reached into his pocket where he kept the scanner.

Sheppard was getting increasingly fidgety, watching him. He couldn't quite pin down what was making him so nervous -- well, aside from the claw marks in the DHD and the overall creepiness of the place, which should be enough to make anyone nervous. But there was more to it. Sometimes he thought he could hear sounds on the edge of his hearing, like -- whispering? But when he concentrated, there was nothing but the sound of pine needles rustling softly in the breeze.

He didn't like it. He wanted to get out of here.

"Care to share with the rest of the class, Rodney?"

"Mmm," was all Rodney said. He waved a hand at the dig marks around the gate. "Notice anything odd about that?"

"Just one thing?"

This earned him the patented McKay look of scorn. "Oh, ha. No, seriously -- are you telling me you don't see it?"

"My patience is running a bit thin, here, Rodney, and I'm also armed. Just tell me what you're talking about."

"The ditches -- diggings -- places that have been dug, whatever you want to call them ... they radiate out from the gate, like the spokes of a wheel." Rodney spread his fingers and moved them out from his chest, demonstrating.

Surprised, Sheppard pivoted in a full circle. Rodney was right: the scuffed and uprooted ground, where holes had been dug and then filled, generally described a series of straight lines angling outwards from the gate. It wasn't really something you'd notice, just looking at the individual diggings; they were scattered, sometimes a little bit off the actual line, and some of them were overgrown while others were fresher. But if you stepped back and looked at the pattern as a whole, it was pretty obvious. There were six lines -- or, depending on how you looked at it, three lines that crossed at the gate.

"Ley lines," Sheppard said without thinking. He'd had a girlfriend in college who'd been into crystals and things.

This time the scorn in Rodney's stare should have wilted the foliage. "Or something," the physicist said. He pointed along one of the faintly visible lines, his finger aimed at the woods. "What do you see?"

"Trees," Sheppard said, just to wind Rodney up. He tilted his head to the side. And then he did see it -- if you angled in just the right direction, you could catch glimpses of some kind of tower on a hill overlooking the area.

"I'm getting energy readings, too." Rodney held up the scanner -- like that helped. "So faint I can't really pin 'em down. Either the power source is almost depleted or it's in some kind of standby mode. But there is something around here generating power."

Sheppard used the muzzle of the P90 as a pointing device. "There's also something capable of leaving claw marks in a DHD. I'd say our first priority is getting off this world. You can bring back a team of scientists and --"

He stopped cold, because the nearly-inaudible whispering that he'd been hearing from time to time suddenly broke across the threshold of sound.

It said, as clear as day: "Get out of here."

Sheppard jumped, and spun around, his P90 wavering wildly across the dim, mist-draped trees. The voice had sounded so goddamned close. "Rodney, that'd better have been you."

"What? What?" Rodney demanded, shrinking back against the DHD and staring at the gun in Sheppard's hands. "Hey, could you not wave that thing around, please? Scientist working here!"

Sheppard lowered the muzzle, but continued to stare at the trees, his eyes flicking from one shadow to another. With the trees blocking what little light came down from the gray sky, plus the hanging tendrils of fog, it was impossible to make out more than vague shapes in the undergrowth. "You didn't hear something? Somebody whispering?"

"Is that a joke?" Rodney demanded. "This better not be some kind of Air Force hazing ritual -- trick the physicist and drag him to a creepy planet, start telling him ghost stories until you have him running around the woods screaming ..."

"It's not a ghost story, Rodney, and it's sure as hell not a joke! I heard something. Someone. Well, I think I did. Are you sure you don't hear something?" He strained his senses, but all he could hear now was the wind.

"All I'm hearing is the sound of you losing your already tenuous grip on --"

"Hush!" Sheppard stalked to one side of the Stargate, then the other, staring out at the forest. He hated the open, unprotected feeling of having nothing at his back to provide cover. There were only the trees in every direction, completely silent except for the swishing of wind through the pine branches. "It told me to leave."

Rodney paled slightly, but managed to keep the irritated edge to his voice, almost covering up the fear. He jiggled something on the scanner, recalibrating it for life signs. "There's no one here, Sheppard. No one but us. It couldn't be, oh, your radio, maybe?"

"It's not my radio, Rodney." But still, feeling self-conscious and trying to ignore Rodney's smug look, he tapped the control. "Ronon? Teyla? This is Sheppard. Anybody reading me?"

"Anybody other than me, that is," Rodney muttered.

No answer came. Sheppard shook his head. "I know it sounds crazy, McKay, but I swear I heard it."

"What sort of voice, then? Male? Female? Old? Young?"

It disturbed him to realize that he had no idea. He'd been able to distinguish the words, but the voice itself was ... almost a non-voice. As if it was speaking ... "Directly into my mind," he murmured.

"What?" Rodney asked sharply.

"I'm hearing a voice, Rodney, and I know I'm not crazy --"

"-- matter of opinion --"

"-- am not crazy," he reiterated with a glare, "which means something else is going on. We know that people on the verge of Ascension can do some pretty freaky things. Any Ascended Ancients hanging around here, you think?"

Rodney flicked nervous glances at the trees. "You know, I really hate to go trusting strange voices out of nowhere and all, but if it did tell you to leave ... maybe your overly friendly ATA gene has activated some kind of danger detection system, and perhaps it actually knows what it's talking about. In which case standing around speculating about it might not be a good idea."

"Well, if we can't get back through the gate without the crystal, there's not a whole lot of point to sitting around here waiting for a rescue party to show up. At the very least, we ought to look around for someplace to spend the night." Sheppard freed a hand from the P90 to reach into a pocket of his vest -- then, frustrated, dug through a couple more. "Rodney, you got paper?"

"What? Why?"

"I'm leaving a note for Ronon and Teyla, in case they follow us."

"Oh, good idea. 'Dear Ronon, Teyla or monster with huge, DHD-destroying claws, we'll be about two klicks north. Love, Sheppard.'" But he was fishing out a notebook and pen as he spoke, and handed them over.

Sheppard scribbled in large letters: WE'RE OK. CALL US. USE CHANNEL 3. -S. He used a rock to weight down the paper on top of the DHD.

"Taught you that method of hiding your tracks in commando school, did they?"

"Thanks, Rodney."

"That's going to be awfully hard to read if it rains, you know."

"Weren't you the one who wanted to get out of here?" Sheppard raised his eyes to the ominous gray sky. "Hey, you -- we're leaving now, okay? Anything to say on the subject?"

"You're talking to your mysterious voice," Rodney said flatly as they left the vicinity of the gate. Sheppard took point.

"Well, it talks to me."

"Is it talking to you right now?" Rodney demanded, waspishly.

Sheppard closed his eyes for a moment. Give him strength. "No, Rodney. It's not. All it's said so far is 'Get out of here'"

"Well, that's unenlightening. It could at least tell you something useful, like, oh, why. It's like one of those idiotic murder mysteries where the victim lives just long enough to gasp out some utterly unhelpful yet amusingly ironic message, the true meaning of which will be perfectly evident only when they've unraveled all the other clues. Is there some unwritten rule that dying people have to speak in riddles? Once, just once, can't they manage to put the useful information first. 'Bob killed me', not 'The killer is named ... gasp' ... thud."

Sheppard fought a losing battle to keep a smile off his face. "I'll remember that in case something kills me, then."

But as they entered the trees, it suddenly didn't seem funny. The mist curled around the tree trunks and hugged the ground, making the world around them soft-edged and strange. Above them, the trees rustled softly, and moisture dripped from the swathes of moss draping their massive limbs. The temperature was chilly, probably in the fifties, and the dampness made it feel even colder. An overgrown path led away from the Stargate ... and also away from the tower that they'd seen through the trees.

"Ehhhh ...." Rodney made a protesting noise like steam escaping from a teakettle, pointing back the way they'd come, as Sheppard started down the forest path.

"We can investigate later. Right now, I want to get some altitude and get an idea for the lay of the land. This is going up. Coming?"

With a final, reluctant glance over his shoulder, Rodney followed.

The trek through the woods was subdued and quiet. Sheppard strained all his senses, P90 at the ready, but the mysterious voice did not come again, and even the occasional hint of whispering had vanished. Rodney muttered complaints under his breath -- Sheppard caught mention of the cold, the damp, mold, allergies, pneumonia, etc. -- but even he kept it down. And it wasn't hard to see why. The forest was strangely, creepily silent. The only sound was the wind in the trees' branches; the snapping of twigs under their feet sounded as loud as gunshots in the near-total silence. Normally, on their travels through the Stargate, a world with such lush plant life would have had birds and small animals in abundance. Here, there weren't even very many insects.

Usually if a world had a lot of plants but no animals, there was a reason for that.

He decided not to mention this to Rodney. Seeing that the scientist's nose was buried in his scanner, Sheppard asked, "Any luck with those energy readings?"

Rodney made a vexed noise, holding the scanner in one hand while tucking the other one under his armpit to warm it up. "Nada. Zip. Still very faint, very hard to pin down. And very few life signs, either."

"Yeah." Sheppard glanced at the tree trunks surrounding them. "I'd noticed."

The path that they had been following finally petered out completely, to Sheppard's annoyance. He struck off through the forest, up the nearest hill.

"I really hope you can find your way back," Rodney grumbled behind him as they scrambled through wet brush.

"I do have some minimal navigation abilities, McKay," Sheppard retorted sarcastically, ducking under a low-hanging creeper vine.

"I hope so, because it would really suck to try to explain to Elizabeth that we spent two weeks on this planet because we lost the Stargate in a jungle."

"Yeah. Point."

It was starting to get dark, and Sheppard wished they hadn't wasted so much time arguing at the gate. The voice had remained silent since its outburst, but whatever the hell it was, he knew that he hadn't imagined it. The back of his neck prickled in that Afghanistan kind of way -- the feeling that an enemy was out there, somewhere, waiting to kill him, but not knowing where it would come from or how it would strike.

He kept glancing at the scanner until Rodney, annoyed, covered it up with one hand. In the twilight under the trees, the glow outlined his fingers and lit up his face in soft bars. "Quit that. I'll tell you if I see something. There's no one out here but us."

Sheppard flicked on the flashlight of his P90. He knew the light would make them a target in the dark woods, but he trusted Rodney to tell him if a life sign showed up on the scanner, and breaking an ankle in a hole in the ground wouldn't improve their situation at all.

As they climbed the hill, the towering trees in the valley gave way to small, gnarly pines and brush. Finally they emerged on top of the hill in a clearing, and Sheppard flicked off the flashlight, allowing his eyes to adjust to the twilight.

The sun had set, and the clouds were stained reddish in a direction that he presumed must be this world's west -- or east, depending on the way the planet turned. There was still enough light to see a carpet of treetops below them, cut by silver threads of rivers. Mountains arose to their right; the hill on which they stood was clearly a foothill, and Sheppard could see that it went up fast and got steep quickly. In the other direction, there was nothing but rolling hills and eventually flatland. He was able to see the top of the Stargate from up here, glimmering in the fading light in the sky, and he lightly cuffed Rodney's arm in triumph. "See? Didn't lose the gate. Nothing to it."

"Hmph," Rodney grumbled, jerking his arm away and staring at the scanner.

The one thing Sheppard could tell for sure was that nowhere, in that great forest spread out at his feet, were there any signs of current habitation. No glimmers of light, no wisps of smoke. As far as he could tell, they were completely alone on this world. The only indication that anyone had ever lived here was the tower that Rodney had seen through the trees, sitting proud and lonely atop a distant ridge on the far side of the valley that sheltered the Stargate.

No, wait. Not tower, but towers, plural. There was another one on their side of the valley, high on the slope of one of the more distant mountain peaks. And there ... turning, Sheppard could just see the top of another, barely visible over the foothills.

He couldn't really make out any details, even through his small field binoculars. They were featureless and gray, entwined with climbing vines and moss. He couldn't tell from here whether they were made of stone or something more high-tech, but they were obviously very old. The ones that he could see appeared to be equidistant from the gate and from each other.

Rodney was motioning impatiently for the binoculars. Handing them over, Sheppard said, "What do you want to bet that there are six of those things?"

"Mmm." Without taking the binoculars from his eyes, Rodney pointed with the hand holding the scanner. "Then there should be one down there, in the flat country. Assuming there's one for every ..." He trailed off, obviously stumped for terminology.

"Ley line."

"... or whatever, then two of them would be hidden from us by the hills behind the gate -- but we should be able to see another one down there. Ah! There is. It's just that the trees are so tall on the flat land that they're hiding it. In fact ..." Rodney took down the binoculars, then put them back to his eyes, then took them down again. "Maybe I'm imagining things, but do you see anything odd about the trees down there?"

"I'm getting really tired of questions like that, McKay."

"Just ... okay, look." Rodney pointed to the most clearly visible tower. Then his finger traced an invisible line from that one, to the one that couldn't quite be seen with the naked eye. His finger kept moving, up to the one on the mountainside.

And Sheppard did see it, even in the twilight. There was very nearly a visible line in the vegetation. Inside the circle that Rodney had marked off, the trees were noticeably taller than the ones outside.

"Okay ... that's really weird."

"Aha! You see it too!"

Sheppard squinted at the tower on the mountainside, its slender shape backlit by the fading sunset colors in the sky. "I'd really like to know what the hell those things are doing."

"See, that's the weird thing. According to these power readings, I can't imagine that they're doing much of anything. Either they've already done their thing, and depleted their energy source, or ..." He looked over at Sheppard with the wide-eyed, "we're screwed" look that John was beginning to dread. "Or they're just powered down and waiting for new victims to come along."

"A few minutes ago, you wanted to go find one and figure out what it did."

"I still do! I'm me, after all! On the other hand, spending the night here isn't exactly making me jump for joy."

Sheppard looked down at the rolling forest below them. The area circumscribed by the towers was quite large; he guessed each one was about eight to ten miles from the gate. They'd have to hike all night to either reach a tower or get outside their area of influence. Heck, it might take longer, because they'd be walking in the dark through unfamiliar forest with no trails. Finding a place to hole up for the night made more sense.

As if in response to his thoughts, a fat raindrop hit Sheppard on the end of his nose. More pattered down around his ears. Rodney let out a long, pained-sounding sigh. "And here I thought it couldn't get worse -- oh!"

Sheppard looked around; Rodney was staring at his scanner. "McKay? Something?"

"I'm getting a life sign." Rodney frowned, holding the screen up in front of his face. "What the hell? That can't be an animal; it's moving too damn fast. A vehicle maybe? Except there's no energy signature..."

"How fast is fast?" Sheppard demanded.

"I don't know. Fifty or sixty kph, maybe?"

"There are animals that can run that fast."

"Oh sure, maybe, but none that you want coming towards you."

"It's coming towards us?"

"Didn't I just say that?" Rodney fiddled with the controls on the scanner. "The one thing I can tell you for sure is that it's not human, Wraith or anything specific that I know how to calibrate for. It's just fast, and alive, and making a beeline for us."

"Where is it coming from?"

Rodney pointed down into the valley where the Stargate was located. "From back there."

"Then let's not stick around here until it shows up." Sheppard gave Rodney's arm a tug, urging the other man in front of him.

"Where are we going?" Rodney demanded, clutching the scanner.

"Up the mountain. At the very least, we'll have high ground and rock at our backs."

"I don't think you realize how fast this thing is coming, Colonel!" Rodney snapped, though he was already climbing for all he was worth. "It'll be here in just a few minutes!"

"Then how about we don't be?"

As Sheppard urged McKay into a trot, the rain began falling in earnest, lowering a gray curtain over the world and making it impossible to see more than a few feet in front of them even with the flashlight. They forged their way through a band of thick brush and then scrambled up a slope of loose, drifted rocks. Pushing Rodney ahead of him, Sheppard turned back to cover the woods with the P90 while Rodney got to the top of the slope. "Where is it now?"

"Closing fast," Rodney reported from above him, over the sound of clattering rocks as he scrambled up the slope without particular care for where he put his feet.

"What's up there, McKay?" Sheppard demanded as he started to climb, dividing his attention between the unstable rocky slope and the dark woods. "Anything we can use for cover?"

"Lots of boulders," Rodney called down. "Some small trees. Colonel, it's going to come out of the woods any minute now. Get up here!"

"What do you think I'm doing?" His feet slipped on the wet rocks, sending him down to one knee with a jolt of pain.

"Sheppard!"

He looked up as he scrambled back to his feet and saw, with horror, that Rodney was actually coming back down to help him. "No! I'm fine! Get back up there and cover me, damn it!"

He made it to the top without incident and ducked behind a boulder. "Now where is it?" he demanded. Rodney was crouched on the ground, one hand on the P90 clipped to his vest and the other holding the scanner.

"Looks like it veered off when it hit the edge of the woods, rather than coming straight for you. It's circling around. Sheppard, I have no idea how it can possibly be moving this fast." Rodney's words were clipped and tight. Sheppard could tell that the other man was staving off panic with everything he had, and felt a sudden rush of pride for the scientist. Rodney had come a long way from the man he'd met in Antarctica two years ago.

"Circling which way?"

"Left. Er, our left." Rodney pointed. "It's behind those rocks right now."

"Those rocks" were a series of wind-sculpted tors, black shapes framed against the darkening sky. Between the rain and the near-total darkness, it was becoming more and more difficult to see anything at all. Sheppard placed himself between the scientist and the rocks, while casting quick looks around him for anything that could provide more cover than the boulders surrounding them. He couldn't make out a damn thing in the dusk, though -- just the amorphous black forms of more rocks.

"What's it doing now?"

Rodney swallowed. "At a guess, I'd say stalking us, maybe trying to figure out what we are. It's just kind of moving around, back and forth -- Damn it, to your right!"

Out of the corner of his eye, Sheppard caught a dark streak of motion, there and gone. He swung around, trying to track on it with the P90, but he couldn't see where it had gone.

"Behind us," Rodney hissed, turning.

"We have to get to some better cover," Sheppard muttered. "Stay beside me. Try to keep out of my line of fire. And turn the screen so I can see it, dammit!" He began backing up the hill, trying to stay between Rodney and the approximate location of ... whatever it was. Rain pattered in the darkness around them. The screen of the LSD was a dancing, glowing blur in the corner of his vision; every time he glanced down at it, all he could see when he looked back towards the boulders was a purplish blot blocking out his night vision.

A sudden, high-pitched shriek shivered the air. Sheppard jumped and nearly squeezed the trigger on the P90. The sound made him think of the noise that eagles made in old Western movies -- or, more ominously, the hunting cry of Ellia the Wraith. But Rodney had said that it wasn't a Wraith --

"Sheppard!" Rodney yelled, as movement flashed in front of him and he caught the quick gleam of a pair of eyes headed straight for him at an impossible speed. His quick, reflexive clutch at the P90's trigger lit up the rocks with a muzzle flash and he caught a brief glimpse of something dark and lithe and big, dodging to one side as bullets strafed the spot where it had just been.

Sheppard released the trigger and stood in the dark and the rain, totally blind with his night vision washed out by the muzzle flash. His heart was hammering against his ribs. Beside him, Rodney was babbling, "Did you get it? Did you?"

"I don't know. Where is it?"

Rodney checked the screen. "Left. Couple hundred meters away. It's not moving, but the life sign's still strong."

Sheppard flicked on the P90's flashlight and swung the light in that direction, illuminating a thousand tiny streaks of falling rain. The light gleamed off wet rocks and the abrupt flash of two eyes like twin lamps in the dark, there and gone as the creature retreated with a hissing sound.

"It doesn't like the light," Sheppard said softly.

"Good! I wish we'd brought a jumper full of floodlights through the gate with us!"

Sheppard played the light back and forth across the field of boulders, trying to find the creature again. He caught a glimpse of fast, furtive movement across one of the open areas and swung the light quickly, in time to catch sight of a glistening wet back lined with dark stripes that might be matted hair or some kind of short spikes. The creature's head went up sharply, swiveling on a short neck lined with more of the hair or spikes, and then it raced forward with another burst of that impossible speed. Sheppard whipped the light around to follow it, and caught it in the act of going right up the side of one of the granite tors. At the top of the stone pillar, thirty feet or more in the air, it crouched down in a dark lump and screamed at them like a giant bird of prey. A crest of dark spikes bristled on its head and trailed down its back -- Sheppard swore that those had been lying down a minute ago, but now they stood up in an aggressive display.

"Jeez," Rodney whispered, mingled fear and awe in his voice. "It's like the world's biggest gecko."

There was, indeed, a lizardlike quality to its quick, jerky movements. But there was also something very wrong about it ... something about the way the legs bent, the unnatural keenness in its gleaming yellow eyes -- something that ran a fingernail down the raw edge of his taut nerves.

"I don't think it's really sure what to make of us," he said softly, backing up the slope with Rodney sticking to him like glue.

"Let's get out of here before it figures it out, then, shall we?" Rodney was obviously trying for a flippant tone, but his voice cracked in the middle.

In the circle of light cast by the P90, the creature ducked its head to one side and flashed behind the stone.

"Crap! Where'd it go? Rodney?"

Rodney sucked in a breath. "It's coming at us again. Nine -- no, eleven, your eleven --"

Sheppard fired again, blindly, in the indicated direction, and the scream that came out of the darkness was the shriek of an animal in pain.

"It didn't even slow down," Rodney gasped. "It's still coming -- shit --"

Between one heartbeat and the next, it was there -- leaping out of the rain and the dark. Sheppard caught a glimpse of jaws wide open, revealing a double row of discolored and irregular fangs. He brought up the P90 but it was just so impossibly fast. It sprang four-legged, like a leaping dog, and its weight bore Sheppard down to the ground. His gun went flying, spinning out of reach; claws ripped down his side in a blaze of pain. His head cracked against the rocks and stars burst in his vision, but still he was strangely clearheaded -- he could smell it, a musty wet animal smell with a heavy metallic overtone like old rotten blood -- he could feel the strange, unnatural heat of its body, like a furnace on top of him, flattening his chest and crushing the breath out of him -- sharp pain of claws digging into his arm -- bony spines on its body, pressing painfully against him -- he managed to get his free hand around one ankle, holding the claws away from his face, startled by the softness of the dark, velvety hair encircling its wrist -- but with one hand pinned and the other occupied, no hands were left free to protect his face, and the jaws opened over him, its rank breath washing across him, inches away --

A burst of automatic weapons fire barked in his ears, and bits of earth and rock spattered his face with a sharp sting. The creature's scream of pain was earsplitting at close range. It sprang away, the hot body vanishing as cold rain poured down onto him and burned against the wounds its claws had left behind. Sheppard gasped for air, willing his deadened limbs to move and pull him upright.

"Sheppard?" Rodney was leaning over him. "Sheppard, get up. Are you -- did it -- did I --"

"I'm fine." Never mind the hot stickiness down his side. He could move, and Rodney's damp hand helped haul him to his feet. He realized -- his brain taking its time catching up with events -- that it must have been Rodney who shot the animal ... without even hitting Sheppard. "Nice shooting," he said, and meant it.

"It's not dead." Rodney's voice shook. "I saw blood, I got it right in the back, but it's not dead. I was afraid I was going to get you too -- I didn't want to keep firing --"

"You did fine." Wincing, Sheppard bent over to feel around in the dark for his P90. "Where did it go?"

"I don't know." Quick rustle as the scanner was pulled out. "Oh Jesus, it's circling us."

Like a shark. Sheppard's fingers closed over the cold metal of the P90's muddy barrel. He staggered a little as he straightened up, lightheadedness washing over him. Keep moving. It'll pass. "All right, we're going to stay back to back, and we're going up the hill, all right?"

"Colonel, we both shot it and it didn't even slow down." There was raw panic building in Rodney's voice.

"Let me get my P90 between its teeth and we'll see how much that slows it down," Sheppard said grimly. "I'll blow its damned head off."

"What if that doesn't kill it!" Rodney's voice rose in a squeak.

"Then we'll try something else! McKay, move it!"

They moved -- back to back, guns out, creeping sideways up the wet, treacherous slope. It was full dark now, the sky just barely lighter than the dark mass of the mountain above them.

"It's staying away from us," Rodney reported breathlessly, studying the scanner. "It's on your side, maybe thirty meters off, pacing us."

Thirty meters was way too damn close, as fast as that thing could move. "We gotta find someplace to take cover," Sheppard muttered.

"There's nothing up here but rocks. Because some idiot wanted to go up ..."

"We'd have been sitting ducks in the woods, McKay!"

"We're sitting ducks here!"

"How close is it now?"

"About the same," Rodney said, and then, "Oh. Damn. Don't go any farther over this way, please."

"Why?" Sheppard twisted his head around, trying to see.

"Because there's a big frikkin' canyon over here. If we keep going this way, we're going to fall in."

Turning his head to the side, Sheppard could just see the place where gleaming wet rocks turned into a pit of impenetrable blackness in the pool of light cast by Rodney's flashlight. He realized that some of what he'd taken for the patter of rain around them was actually the distant crashing of a stream rushing at the bottom of the canyon.

Which meant they were now trapped between the beast and the cliff. Hopefully the creature wasn't smart enough to figure that out.

"So far your ideas aren't working out all that well, Colonel," Rodney said in a voice that trembled only slightly.

"Give me time here. A brilliant plan doesn't happen overnight."

"It'd better happen in the next five minutes, or I'm thinking we're going to be monster chow."

Now that they were standing still, Sheppard could hear an occasional soft click or rustle as the creature moved in the darkness, just outside the glow of the flashlights, its claws tapping on the rocks like the clicking of a dog's footsteps on linoleum.

"We could try splitting up. You stay still, I'll draw it away --"

"The hell you're leaving me alone in the dark!"

"Rodney --" With their backs pressed together, he found that he could actually feel the physicist's body language -- and right now the lines of Rodney's body were settling into a pose of solid obstinacy. "Fine. Fine. No splitting up."

Rodney relaxed just a little. "Good."

Sheppard chewed on his lower lip, straining his eyes to pierce the darkness where the small rustlings let him know that the creature was still out there, pacing, waiting. "Okay, I've got something. We'll rush it."

Rodney's body went rigid. "How is that a plan?"

"Element of surprise. It obviously doesn't like the light. We use the lights to pin it down and then we both open fire."

"The only problem with that, Colonel, is the fact that it is much faster than either of us, and also, P90 fire doesn't seem to hurt it all that much."

"Well, since you don't like any of my plans, it's your turn to come up with something." Sheppard was starting to shiver slightly as the heat seeped out of him, flowing away down his side, trickling into the waistband of his pants. The rain had died away to a light mist, but they were both soaked to the skin. If that thing doesn't get us, the weather will.

"Okay, fine, I will then. Genius at work," Rodney snapped. After a moment's silence, he said, "It doesn't like the light."

"Doesn't seem to, no."

"Might make sense, if it's nocturnal. The light might hurt its eyes. I don't suppose you have any of those interesting little devices that For-- that you military types used on Dagan to completely blind me."

"Flashbangs ... no, but ..." Sheppard grinned. "I do have a couple of flares. Rodney, I hate to admit it, but sometimes you really are a genius."

"Of course, it's possible that light just makes it furious and homicidal," Rodney muttered.

Sheppard unsnapped the pocket of his vest where he kept the flares. A flare gun would have been better, but all he had were a few of the handheld kind. Still ... it was possible that one of these might be capable of temporarily blinding a nocturnal creature, even chasing it away.

Thinking back to the single-minded intent of the beast charging at him, the way it shrugged off the P90 fire, made him shudder. No ... a flare probably wouldn't be enough to chase it away. But it might give them a chance to escape -- if they had somewhere to escape to.

He glanced over his shoulder at the ravine. But, no ... that wasn't going to help. The creature could scuttle up a sheer rock face as if it were on flat ground; they'd be at its mercy if they tried to climb down.

If only they had a puddlejumper. From now on, he was always taking a jumper through the gate. Always. If you couldn't fly to a world, then they just wouldn't go there.

"It's getting restless," Rodney murmured. "I think it's about to try something."

"Then we'll try something too."

"Colonel!"

Rodney didn't have to tell him -- he saw the rush of movement at the edge of the flashlight's radius. The light jerked around wildly as he struck a flare and lobbed it at the dark blur. The white-hot flash seared an arc into his vision as it hurtled towards the creature --

-- which leaped and batted at the flare like a cat, knocking it back towards the two stunned men. They ducked instinctively, and the flare arced over their heads and briefly illuminated the rim of the ravine before plunging down and vanishing.

Screaming in rage and pain, reeking of scorched fur, the beast sprang. Sheppard raked it with P90 fire, nearly staggering off the edge of the cliff from a combination of recoil and a clumsy attempt to dodge its charge without falling into Rodney. Shrieking, the animal vanished in the rain.

"Way to waste a flare, Sheppard," Rodney snapped, once he got his voice back.

"I didn't know it was going to do that. It's so freaking fast." He glanced over the edge of the ravine. The flare had lodged in some tree branches, where it was sparking and spitting, lighting up the treetop and the canyon floor. He watched for a moment to make sure it wasn't going to set fire to the woods, but it seemed that the branches were too wet.

Although if the creature disliked light, setting fire to the woods actually might not be a bad idea. He decided to hold that back as a last resort, though. Arson might be even harder to explain to Elizabeth than temporarily losing the Stargate, especially if there were people living here after all.

"Rodney --"

"I know, I know: 'Where is it'. I think we really hurt it that time. It's run off that way." McKay pointed with the hand holding the scanner.

"I know I got it with the P90 that last time -- got it good. I saw blood fly." Taking a couple of steps forward, Sheppard knelt down and shone his flashlight over the rocks. There were, indeed, swatches and splatters of blood, swirling as the drizzling rain diluted them. Sheppard touched a spot of blood lightly. It was warm, and charcoal black -- the word ichor came to mind. It looked a lot like Wraith blood. Is it a rule that all alien monsters have to have nasty black blood? Carson might know ...

"Um, Colonel ..." There was a slight quaver to Rodney's voice. "It's circling around. Coming back."

"What, again? I emptied half a P90 clip into it!" Sometimes the universe was just not fair. "It shouldn't be able to walk!"

"It's moving slow, but it's definitely moving."

Sheppard planted himself between Rodney and the great, unknown darkness. Playing his flashlight across the field of boulders, he caught movement between two of them. In the brief glimpses that he could get, he could see that the creature was limping badly. He'd definitely hurt it. But his attack should have blown off a limb. And he was uncomfortably aware that he was running low on bullets. He had a spare clip for the P90, and so did Rodney, but after that they'd be down to the Berettas and if machine guns didn't do the trick ...

The creature hissed at the light and darted off behind another rock with a sinuous, scuttling motion. Something about that nagged at Sheppard's memory; he felt as if he'd run into something like this before, a long time ago. He just couldn't quite put his finger on what, exactly.

"Ideas would be good here, Colonel," Rodney said between his teeth.

Sheppard teased another flare out of his pocket, just in case. Not that it had done much the last time, but now he knew better than to throw it -- at their feet, it might help keep the creature away from them, for a little while at least. "Is it possible to use the scanner to find a cave for us? Something defensible?"

"What do you think this is, a tricorder? I could maybe get some data on the composition of the rocks, but it's not like that's going to help unless you've suddenly developed a hidden talent for geology, considering that I -- oh crap."

"What?" Sheppard swiveled around, feeling Rodney do likewise.

"It went into the ravine--" Rodney began, and then the creature erupted almost under their feet -- and this time it was going for Rodney. A powerful blow smashed into his arm, sending the scanner sailing through the air; it crunched against a rock, and bits of irreplaceable Ancient technology went skittering off in all directions. Rodney let out a yell of mingled pain and surprise.

Before Sheppard could get a clear line of fire on the creature without hitting Rodney, it was gone again, vanishing into the rain and the dark.

Rodney was on his knees on the ground, clutching his arm and gasping in pain. Sheppard knelt next to him, wincing as the movement tugged at his own injury. "I think my arm's broken," Rodney stammered, white-faced.

Sheppard prodded at it. "No, I don't think so. But you'll have a hell of a bruise in the morning."

"If we make it to morning." He seemed to be getting his wits about him; his voice had begun to steady, and through the hand resting on Rodney's arm, Sheppard could feel the trembling beginning to ease. "It went after the LSD, Colonel. It figured out what we were using it for."

Sheppard hauled Rodney to his feet, shaking his head all the while. "No way. It couldn't possibly be that smart."

Rodney just pointed at the scattered guts of the LSD with his good hand. "You explain that, then."

He didn't want to try, didn't want to contemplate the idea of a nearly indestructible monster that was smart enough to understand the functions of a piece of technology it had never seen before, wielded by creatures it had probably never seen before either. "Can you fix it?"

Rodney gave him a very dirty look. "Maybe given a few days, a lab and replacement parts. We hardly even understand how these things work when they are working --"

"Hush!"

Rodney didn't have to be told twice; he shut up immediately. Sheppard turned slowly, trying to orient on the sound he'd heard -- the click of claws on stone, not too far away.

He hadn't realized how much they'd been relying on the LSD. They were totally blind now. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Rodney had crouched down to pick up the pieces of the scanner, and he hissed, "McKay! Don't bother with that!"

"These things don't grow on trees, Colonel --"

Beyond Rodney, eyes gleamed gold in the darkness, closing rapidly on the scientist. "Duck!" Sheppard yelled, and fired over Rodney's head. But the creature anticipated the movement and dodged to one side. It was learning very fast indeed. And then what he had feared, happened -- the hammer fell on an empty chamber. He'd run out of bullets. No time to reload.

"Rodney! Gimme your gun!"

Rodney began struggling with the vest clip on the P90. It was obvious that he wasn't going to get it undone in time, and Sheppard fumbled for the spare clip in his own vest while ejecting the old one.

Motion out of the corner of his eye made his head whip around, just in time to see the creature, graceful and perfectly silent, leap at Rodney. The scientist saw it too, but his P90 was tangled up with the vest clip and pointing in the wrong direction. Rather than shooting, he let go of the gun with both hands and tried to roll away. "Sheppard!" he screamed as the beast landed on top of him, knocking him flat -- and then the cry for help turned into a scream of pain, although from this angle Sheppard couldn't see what it was doing to him.

The spare clip for the P90 slipped from Sheppard's rain-wet fingers as he tried to yank it out of his vest pocket -- too fast, too careless, too worried about Rodney; it bounced off into darkness. With a yell of frustration, he drew his 9-mil and aimed for the back of the thing's skull. It jerked its head as he fired, and his shot winged off its scalp -- but that got its attention, and it spun in a fluid, rippling motion and came at him. He fired again and then it was on top of him, all muscle and teeth and spines and rough scales with occasional patches of coarse fur. The claws burned a trail of fire down Sheppard's shoulder and back. He might have screamed; he wasn't sure. Then the ground went out from under his feet, and he was falling, locked together with the creature.

The cliff wasn't sheer, and it was covered with vegetation, slowing their fall in a series of bruising impacts. They struck and rolled and struck again. Sheppard's leg doubled under him -- Oh God, this is going to be bad -- and then the weight of the beast came down on top of him and he felt bone give way, and this time he knew he screamed, long and loud, even as he caught himself with both hands on the trunk of a tree, arresting his fall.

With his cheek pressed against rough, wet bark, he breathed deeply through the initial wave of lightheadedness. He'd broken bones before, and he knew the feeling. He also knew that he was well and truly screwed -- disarmed, injured, and, now, in an environment more favorable to his enemy than to himself. And Rodney was -- what? Hurt, dead?

He opened his eyes to a flickering, red and black world. For an instant he was completely disoriented; then he realized that he was hung up in some of the trees growing along the canyon's walls, and the flare was providing the dim illumination that enabled him to see a dark network of branches around him.

Rodney, he thought, but as he struggled to get himself upright, spurred by the need to get back to the top of the cliff, he looked up and saw the creature clinging to the treetops above him. For a moment they just stared at each other. He could see the dim flash of its eyes in the guttering light of the flare, the narrow inscrutable slits of its catlike pupils. The dark spines on its head and back bristled like the hackles of an angry dog. One of its forelegs was drawn up against its body, and black blood dripped onto the leaves below it.

"Look, I have no clue if you can understand me, but things seem to have gotten a little out of hand here," Sheppard said, staring into the flat yellow gleam of its eyes. "I realize this is your world and we're just guests here. Still, this is a bit rude, don't you agree? Why don't you go your way, we'll go ours, and we can forget all this ever happened."

It opened its mouth, the double row of jagged fangs flashing in the flare's light, and hissed at him.

"Or perhaps not."

Shrieking, it sprang down onto him. Sheppard drew his knife, the only weapon he had left -- as if he could survive hand-to-hand combat with a creature like this, but he didn't intend to die easy. The weight of its body sent them both crashing through layers of branches and into a tangle of brush. Pain exploded behind Sheppard's eyes; his vision went dark, and then came back in wavering snatches. He was going to die now -- he had to die, he couldn't even move to defend himself. But instead there was -- fire? Had he set the woods on fire after all? He blinked to clear his vision, but all he could see was flickering firelight, painting the trees in shades of orange and gold. And then someone was bending over him, a dark shape against the light of the flames. "Rodney," he whispered, gratefully.

Hands caught him, eased him out of the brush onto flat ground. "Shh. It's all right; you'll be all right." Rodney's voice was low and rough and ... wrong? Somehow Sheppard thought it seemed important that he should figure out why, but he couldn't summon enough energy to care before he passed out.

A/N: The idea of "useful information first" when someone's on their deathbed comes from Connie Willis's novel Passage, which is about researchers studying the afterlife. One of the characters is hung up on the idea that characters in books and movies always start with the least important information: "The locket is hidden in the ..." and then die before they can gasp out the important part. Perhaps Rodney's read the book.

Chapter Two

It was growing dark in the clearing around the Stargate. Teyla had performed her ceremony for the dead, then meditated for a while, and now she was practicing katas -- she didn't have her fighting sticks with her today, so she was using a couple of suitably-weighted pieces of wood that she'd found in the woods.

Ronon had settled against one of the trees at the edge of the clearing. After cleaning and sharpening a truly alarming number of knives, he appeared to have fallen asleep. Teyla had no doubt, however, that he would wake up instantly if anything threatened.

She knew that he hated their enforced inactivity as much as she did. They'd dialed back to Atlantis once, to be told that the scientists still didn't know anything, and Weir had again reiterated her order not to use the gate. No one had heard from Sheppard or McKay since their disappearance hours ago.

So all they could do was wait, cut off from their friends on a dead world. Teyla sighed and tried to lose herself in a particularly difficult spinning maneuver.

The gate sprang to life, the chevrons locking as Ronon and Teyla both fell back into a battle-ready position. But it was only Weir's voice that came through the gate to them.

"Ronon? Teyla? I'm sorry to keep you two hanging."

"We are well," Teyla said. It was untrue, she thought; they were about as far from well as two people could be. But, as her father used to say, the branch still falls in the forest whether or not it makes a sound. No matter what Rodney seemed to believe, a thing was not made less real by complaining about it.

Rodney. Sheppard. Her chest hurt.

Dr. Weir was speaking now. "In all honesty, we're still completely stumped, and while we're trying to figure this out, we don't want you to attempt to return through the gate to Atlantis. The Daedalus has broken orbit and is headed to your location. It will be there in about two days."

"Thank you," Teyla said politely, her stomach twisting inside her. Two days in this place of death, with their friends out of reach, dependent upon dribbles of information trickling through the gate ... she felt ill. Glancing to the side, she could see her thoughts reflected on Ronon's face.

"Wait, wait, I'm not done. Zelenka is going to bring a team through in order to study the gate and DHD on your side. Assuming that he can't get your gate operational, you'll all be picked up by the Daedalus in two days."

"Is that safe?" Teyla asked. "I thought that you did not want us to use the gate."

"Not from your side, that's correct. However, all our readings seem to indicate that it's perfectly safe from our side. And your team went through without incident." She paused for a moment, then continued. "We're going to send a MALP through, just to check, and if that goes well, we'll be sending a puddlejumper with additional supplies and a science team. Does that sound all right on your end?"

"If you are certain," Teyla said. "We do not need supplies; we can forage, if need be, rather than risking other lives."

She could hear the smile in Elizabeth's voice. "Hopefully it won't come to that. Dr. Zelenka seems fairly certain that the gate is safe to use from our end. We're sending the MALP now; please stand by."

A moment later, the MALP rolled out of the gate. "It is here," Teyla told her.

"And it seems to be transmitting back to our end. We're preparing to send the puddlejumper now. Is there anything in particular that you'd like over there? We have food and survival supplies, a tent and so forth ..."

"We require nothing," Teyla assured her.

"Except getting off this planet," Ronon grumbled.

"I'm sorry." Teyla could hear the regret in Elizabeth's voice. "Believe me, I'd like nothing better than to bring you home right now. All of you."

The gate rippled and a puddlejumper broke through its glistening surface, running lights gleaming in the dusk. "It is here," Teyla said, smiling despite herself.

"Dr. Zelenka?" Elizabeth asked over the radio.

"Yes, we are here," the familiar voice said in Teyla's ear. "All present and accounted for. Ready to begin study of DHD."

Teyla smiled again, just a little. Although she did not know him well, next to Rodney she trusted the Czech scientist the best of any on Atlantis's science team -- mainly because she knew Rodney trusted him, even if he would not admit it.

Perhaps now they could find their missing teammates, and go back to the home she had not realized she would miss so much.

Most of the time, Rodney didn't mind not being a fighter. In fact, he reveled in it. His lack of combat skills -- and apparent inability to learn them -- was one of the things that set him and his kind apart from the grunts in the city. It wasn't that he hadn't tried to learn ... well, all right, maybe he hadn't tried all that hard, but he'd still put some definite effort into grasping the basics that Sheppard had tried to teach him about guns, and Teyla about self-defense, and Ronon about wilderness survival. If he wanted to be good at something, he could usually make himself good at it, so anything that he wasn't good at -- like talking to people in a non-scientific context, or hitting what he was aiming at -- must not be worth learning.

But then there were the times he hated it, and cursed himself for a failure.

Times like this.

Picking himself up off the ground, shaking, feeling the hot blood trickling down from his injured shoulder, he felt sick with more than pain. He'd panicked. Lost it. And Sheppard had saved Rodney's ass at great cost to his own. Again.

The sounds of crashing from below had stopped. He didn't know what that meant. Well, all right, he could think of one definite thing that it could mean. But he really, really didn't want to go there.

Either his impact with the ground, or the beast's with him, had torn the uncooperative, useless P90 loose from his vest. It lay near him on the ground, its flashlight still shining a steady beam across the rocks. Rodney bent over stiffly and picked it up, holding his other arm against his chest. He wasn't sure how, or even if, he could fire it one-handed, but at least that way he had some vague, laughable hope of not dying immediately.

Staring at the ruins of the LSD, he took the precious seconds to scrape up a wet, muddy handful of priceless Ancient technology into his vest pocket. It was time he couldn't spare -- time Sheppard couldn't spare -- but it might make the difference between life and death later. Maybe he could fix it, given time.

All was silent down below.

Rodney peered over the edge. At the bottom of the canyon, he could see flickering light illuminating foliage down below him. The flare? No ... it was still up in the tree. This light, a yellower and more natural glow, came from something else.

Gritting his teeth and screwing up his courage, he tried to climb down. It turned into a controlled fall -- a muddy tumble through branches that raked painfully at his face and hair. He crashed to a halt at the bottom, shaky from adrenaline and pain -- staggered from the momentum and crashed face-first into the dirt.

Hell.

Raising his head and blinking, it took his eyes a moment to adjust to the light. Something big and misshapen and hairy was bending over a tangled form on the ground that he presumed to be Sheppard. The light came from a flaming torch that it held in one -- hand? Claw?

"Hey!" Rodney yelled, staggering to his feet. "Get away from him!"

The hairy thing's head snapped up, and Rodney realized to his shock that it was actually a human being. A scraggly, deformed, lumpy human being, but still definitely human.

"Get away from him," Rodney repeated, with a little less conviction this time.

The stranger took a couple of limping steps towards him. What Rodney had taken for a deformed hump on its back actually appeared to be some sort of pack, and it -- or rather, he -- was draped in rank-looking, badly-cured hides. The overall effect was more that of a mobile pile of garbage than a human being. A leather cap was pulled down tight over his head, with wisps of hair escaping from under it, and his face -- what could be seen of it, between the hat and the shadows from the torch -- was primarily a mess of scraggly beard. In the hand that wasn't holding the torch, the hairy guy gripped a crossbow as long as his arm.

After a moment, the stranger spoke in a low, raspy voice -- he sounded like a smoker in the end stages of emphysema. "Quit being an ass and help me move him before it comes back. Fire'll hold it off, but not for long."

Sheppard! Rodney edged around the old guy, keeping as much distance between them as possible, and knelt down beside the Colonel. Sheppard's face was pale in the torchlight and one of his legs was twisted under him at a hideous angle. His jacket was tattered and soaked with blood.

"Colonel?" Rodney whispered, touching his face. It was terrifyingly cold.

"What did I just say?" the mountain man rasped, looming over Rodney. "Stop carrying on like a teenage girl and give me a hand here."

With that, he hooked the crossbow onto a loop on his belt and bent over stiffly, getting an arm under Sheppard's shoulders. The Colonel was a dead weight as the old man bent his knees and hauled him upright. After staring for a moment -- who would have thought that someone who looked like a wino in the final throes of cirrhosis could be so strong? -- Rodney hurried forward and put his good arm around Sheppard from the other side. He hissed in pain as the Colonel's weight came down on his shoulders.

"I'm hurt too, you know," he protested, squirming and trying to find a position where Sheppard's arm wasn't laying across the tears in the flesh of his shoulder.

"Whiner," came the old man's harsh voice from Sheppard's other side. "It won't kill you."

"Easy for you to say --"

But then they were moving forward at a rapid pace, and it was all Rodney could do to hold up his end of the unconscious man slung between them.

Looking back on it later, Rodney saw their flight through the forest with the surreal quality of a nightmare. It was all darkness and flickering light and wet trees dripping on his head. At one point they followed a stream for a little ways; at some other point they squeezed through a crack in the rocks where they had to go single file, handing Sheppard along between them. Sheppard didn't even stir through all of this. Rodney's clothes were smeared with the Colonel's blood along with his own, and he couldn't help wondering what the rough movement was doing to Sheppard's injuries.

The old man said nothing, except occasionally to berate Rodney when he didn't move fast enough. "Oh for -- my sister could run faster than you!"

"Yeah? Well, my sister could kick your sister's ass," Rodney panted. He was quite sure it was true -- Jeannie had been a mean, scrappy little fighter in grade school. "Where are we going, anyway? Because the Bataan Death March school of travel might be fun for you, but some of us --"

"Don't you ever shut up? You see this?"

He turned his head towards Rodney for just a minute, and in the harsh light of the torch, Rodney recoiled from the mass of scar tissue that started under the flap of the old man's leather cap and continued down into his snarled beard. It covered the entire side of his face. At Rodney's reaction, something flickered in the old guy's one remaining, pale-colored eye -- sorrow, shame, anger -- and he turned his head away again quickly, hiding his ruined face in the shadows of the torch.

"That's why you shut up when I tell you to shut up, and run when I tell you to run," he growled. "You want to look like me? No? Then do what I tell you."

Rodney shut up.

During their argument, they had entered a narrow, twisting canyon, strewn with rocks and low, tangled brush. The old man stopped at what appeared to be just part of the canyon wall, and he unloaded his half of Sheppard's weight onto Rodney without a word of warning. Then he reached behind the brush and did something, and suddenly what looked like canyon wall sprang open and turned out to be a very narrow, concealed door. They squeezed inside, and the old man shut the door behind them.

They were inside a cave, or more accurately a crack in the rocks. It was deep but very narrow, only a few feet wide, and clogged with piles of furs and baskets and sticks and other crap that snagged at Rodney's feet and nearly made him pitch forward on top of Sheppard. The air reeked of smoke and a sharp rank smell that was probably all the half-rotten hides everywhere.

The old man pushed past Rodney -- God, he stank too -- and made his way deeper into the cave. The uneven cave floor rose towards the back, and Rodney could see a warm orange glow from that direction, which flared up a minute later as the old man poked some sticks into the glowing bank of coals and then shoved his half-burned torch into it as well.

"Lay him down there," he ordered, pointing to a pile of straw with motheaten furs on top of it.

There was a time to object to being ordered around, and a time to just do what you were told. Rodney lowered Sheppard down as carefully as possible. He looked fragile and broken, his wet hair dark and matted to his forehead, making his skin look even paler by comparison.

The old man pushed past Rodney again, and opened the door. Rodney looked up in shock. "Hey! Where are you going?"

"Gonna get water," the rasping voice drifted back to him. "Stop wasting my time with stupid questions," and the door closed behind him.

Rodney just opened and closed his mouth a couple of times. "And I'm supposed to do what in the meantime?" he demanded, finally, of the closed door. "Anything you have to contribute would be helpful," he added, looking resentfully down at Sheppard. Damn it, he wasn't good at first aid. In fact, he thoroughly sucked at it. His mouth twisted as he plucked at Sheppard's wet jacket and realized that he was going to have to undress him, too. Stupid Sheppard, doing the heroic self-sacrificing thing again, and leaving other people to clean up the mess. Did the man have no common sense at all?

"You're going to owe me one, Colonel." Rodney struggled with the wet jacket, peeling it back from the wounds in Sheppard's shoulder. Oh God. He felt faint. Some of those were horribly deep. "Did I say one? I meant two. Maybe three or four. I'm going to be taking this one out of your sorry hide for a long time to come. You're going to be my personal slave, Sheppard. You thought cleaning my quarters was bad?" He winced at the memory; Sheppard had gotten him back for that one, but good. "When we get back to Atlantis, you're bringing me coffee every single night I have to work late in the labs. None of our missions are going out any earlier than ten a.m. And first pick of pudding in the cafeteria is mine."

Talking helped a little bit, keeping him focused and staving off the panic and pain; he could barely move his arm, and his own uniform clung stickily to his shoulder. Still, Sheppard was so white and limp and ... dammit. He hated to admit it, even to himself, but getting Sheppard warm and dry took priority over dealing with his own injury this time.

The door cracked open; Rodney fumbled around for a gun, any gun, and then relaxed -- though only slightly -- when the old guy squeezed through and shut it behind him, carrying a couple of bundles. By this point Rodney had managed to get most of Sheppard's clothes off, aside from venturing into territory that he had absolutely no intention of crossing. Sheppard could just deal with wet underwear.

The old man knelt beside him and -- to Rodney's shock -- pushed him out of the way with the exact same sort of peremptory callousness that Rodney himself generally used on particularly dull lab techs.

"Hey!"

Rodney received a sharp sideward glare, before the old man quickly looked away again; it was obvious that he didn't like showing his scarred face to strangers, and he'd consistently kept himself angled so that Rodney couldn't look him in the eyes, instead mumbling through his scraggly beard whenever he had anything to say. "You any good at this?" he demanded in his scratchy voice.

"Well," Rodney admitted, "not really..."

"Then move."

With ill grace, he moved. "And I'm sure that you have an advanced medical degree, hm?"

The old man snorted. "Funny what you pick up, living alone." One hand pointed at the fire, and Rodney noticed with a little shudder that two of the fingers were missing. "Get the fire going. He'll need to be warm, and hot water wouldn't hurt."

"I'm not leaving you alone with him."

The rough voice dripped scorn. "You'll be able to watch me every minute, and the sooner you do this, the sooner you can come back."

"Well ... fine, then." Tired and hurting and having no good comeback, Rodney stomped over to the fireplace. It was actually quite ingenious; he was distracted momentarily by the surprisingly clever design. There was a natural cleft in the rocks that had been converted into a makeshift chimney, and another crack to admit fresh air; the end result was that the natural rising of the hot air sucked most of the smoke out of the cave, with fresh air continually leaking in to keep oxygen circulating. Peering up the "chimney", Rodney saw that it twisted and turned; the fire's glow would not be visible from the outside, and the twisty channel in the rocks probably helped hide the smoke, too.

"Huh," he muttered, refusing to admit that he was a little bit impressed. He stared at the fire for a minute, uncomfortably aware that Ronon or Teyla usually tended the team's campfires. Eventually he dropped an armload of wood on the coals -- which promptly guttered and smoked a lot. Were they supposed to do that? He poked at them with a stick in the same manner that he'd seen Ronon do.

"There's a container of water by the fire," the old man said over his shoulder. "Drop some hot rocks in it. You'll find a bone scoop for doing that." After a moment, as Rodney stared nervously at the only evident piece of bone, which looked like some kind of shoulder blade and definitely not something he wanted to pick up -- "You are capable of doing that, aren't you?"

"I happen to be a genius, thank you very much! It's just that my degrees are in astrophysics and engineering, not -- caveman-ology. And of course none of that means anything whatsoever to you," he muttered, wrapping his sleeve around his hand before seizing the piece of bone and nervously teasing some of the rocks out of the edge of the fire. They hissed and crackled when he dropped them in the container of water, which appeared to be -- he looked closer -- an ugly, misshapen basket coated with some kind of dried mud. Eww.

"You done yet?"

"How many rocks?" Rodney asked, watching ashes and dirt swirl away from the rocks into the water. Eww, again.

The old man snorted. "Just bring the water over here -- genius."

Muttering under his breath about crazy old coots and no respect for clear intellectual superiority, Rodney picked up the lumpy, lopsided basket and carried it over to the pile of hides where Sheppard lay.

There was another, similar basket of water next to Sheppard, but rather than ash and dirt, it swirled with blood. Rodney swallowed, and looked away. Using a torn piece of Sheppard's black T-shirt, the old man dipped it in the warm water and dabbed at the ugly gashes on Sheppard's shoulder. To Rodney's surprise, despite his brusque manner and the general air of backwoods insanity that hung over him, the stranger's hands were painstakingly gentle as he cleaned Sheppard's injuries.

"Hand me some of that."

"That" turned out to be one of the bundles that the old geezer had brought back in with him. Rodney stuck his hand into it and recoiled from the wet clamminess. It turned out to be ... moss? He pulled out a lump and stared at it.

"Genius my ass," the old man snapped, taking the moss away from him.

"Hey -- what are you doing? That's hardly sanitary!" Rodney protested as the stranger began to pack moss around Sheppard's injured shoulder and back. "Look, let me explain to you about this little thing called microbes. They're, uh, tiny animals that -- they're magic, okay? Bad magic. They live in the dirt and make people sick, and you're -- hey, are you listening to me at all?"

The old man gave him a look of exasperation before once again turning away. "Listen to me, you obnoxious little twit. If you had the slightest clue what you were doing, you wouldn't be here in the first place. So shut up and let me help him, which you're clearly incapable of doing."

Rodney shut up, stunned temporarily into silence, and watched him continue packing the moss around Sheppard's shoulder, tying it in place with strips of leather. A flash of buried memory came to life: one of Ronon's lectures on wilderness survival, where the Runner was trying to teach him about wilderness first aid. Most of the lessons had been such highly useful things as "how to use a sharp rock to hack off your own gangrenous limb", but one of the things Ronon had told him was that moss made a good dressing for open wounds, and helped prevent infection. This had sounded so patently stupid that he'd asked Carson about it later. He could hear the patient brogue in his head: "Yes, Rodney -- ancient cultures on Earth used sphagnum moss as a dressing for wounds. It's acidic and helps inhibit the growth of bacteria. I suppose there's some specific reason why you're asking...?"

God, he wished Carson were here now, sarcasm and all. Admitting this, even to himself, added a dose of irritation to his already massive load of worry, anxiety and pain, which -- Rodney being Rodney -- led inevitably to talking. "Don't try to put the blame for this off on me, Grizzly Adams. Believe me, we didn't want to come to your soggy little planet and we'll be leaving as soon as I figure out how!"

"So you admit it's due to incompetence on your part," the old man muttered, tying the ends of the leather strap with a little more force than strictly necessary. Sheppard twitched a little, as if the extra force had caused enough pain to penetrate even into his deeply unconscious state. The old man released the strap immediately, and leaned forward to lay his hand lightly against Sheppard's face until the Colonel slipped back into a deeper sleep.

This, of course, annoyed Rodney to no end. Sheppard was his friend, and somebody who looked like Ronon's backwards cousin shouldn't have a better bedside manner than the guy with two PhDs.

"You can't blame me for us being here and you can't convince me it's my fault -- it's an accident! Besides," he added, suspiciously, "what about you, anyway? Where are the rest of your people?"

The old guy didn't answer. He finished knotting off Sheppard's bandages and moved to his leg. "Gonna need your help."

"Oh, is that a sore spot? Did they kick you out because you were too annoying?" Rodney asked snidely. It was better than thinking about the fact that he was going to have to set a broken leg in a minute here. This was far, far above and beyond the call of friendship.

"Put your hands there," the old man ordered. His scratchy voice was cold, and he kept his head down, face hidden by shadows. Rodney got the uncomfortable feeling that maybe he'd pushed just a little too far. He couldn't help thinking of the culled village they'd visited that morning -- the burned-out shells of huts, the bones lying in the streets where scavengers had dragged them. If this guy was the last of his people, then maybe he had adequate cause for acting like a caveman. It worked for Ronon, after all.

Hating this already, Rodney gripped where he'd been told to grip. The old man grasped Sheppard's leg just above the knee. Rodney closed his eyes, then opened them, then -- seeing the horrible deformation of Sheppard's leg -- decided that closing them would be better, because throwing up all over an invalid wasn't very sanitary either.

Luckily it was over quickly. Sheppard sort of woke up in the middle of it -- stirring and tossing his head, making a low keening sound in his throat that went straight to the pit of Rodney's stomach and lodged there. As before, the old guy settled him down with soft touches on his arm, his cheek. Sheppard turned his face into the old man's touch and calmed right down. The gentleness, so much at odds with the old guy's usual demeanor, made Rodney think of Carson again.

"So are you -- some kind of ... I don't know, some kind of healer or shaman or something?" Rodney was beginning to shiver in his wet clothes, despite the growing warmth in the room. He wasn't nearly cold enough to wrap himself up in one of those half-rotten hides, though. The ones covering Sheppard had hanks of hair falling out of them.

"Life's a hard teacher." The old man turned around, and reached out to grip Rodney's arm in his firm, surprisingly deft hands.

"Hey!"

"Hold still."

There was no sympathy in the tone, and the hands lacked the gentleness that they'd had in dealing with Sheppard's more severe injuries. Still, the old guy helped Rodney peel off his shirt, and then cleaned his gashes with rough swipes of a lukewarm rag. It didn't escape Rodney's notice that the old guy kept his scarred face averted while he did this. It was obvious that he didn't like strangers looking at him. Well, when you looked like that, it was understandable.

"Do you think this could be any more painful? You could use sandpaper, maybe?"

"Hm ... not a bad idea," the old man muttered as he scrubbed at the scratches. "There's sand in the creek; I use it for scouring dishes. Maybe it would shut you up."

"A sadist. I'm trapped in the middle of nowhere with a sadist. Ow! You do realize that I need my hands for my livelihood, right? Losing an arm would put a real damper on my career path!"

The old man looked down at his own sturdy fingers gripping Rodney's arm. Rodney, reluctantly, followed his gaze, to see that it was the hand with the two missing fingers.

"Trust me." The tone was a little bit angry, but more weary than anything else. "I've been there."

Rodney shut up, and stayed silent as he was roughly bandaged.

"I'd dry your clothes by the fire, if I were you." The raspy voice had grown even hoarser, until it was barely audible. Clearly, the unaccustomed talking had not been good for whatever was wrong with his throat.

"Hmph." Rodney was shivering in earnest now. Very reluctantly, he picked up a ragged-looking hide and wrapped it around his body so that he could shimmy out of his wet pants. "This doesn't mean that I trust you," he added as he unlaced his sodden boots.

The rough voice sounded amused, though the old guy was kneeling by the fire and Rodney couldn't see his face. "Obviously not."

"I'm McKay," Rodney said after a moment. "Dr. Rodney McKay. That's Colonel Sheppard."

The old man's only acknowledgment was a grunt. He straightened up from the fire with a lit torch, then picked up the baskets of dirty water.

"And you are?" Rodney prompted.

This just got another grunt, as the old guy nudged open the door.

"Let me guess -- they haven't invented manners on your world yet, right? Hey, where are you going?"

No answer. The old man disappeared out the door, and closed it behind him, leaving them alone.

Sheppard drifted lazily between sleep and waking. There was pain in the waking direction. Every time he floated that way, he balked at the wall of hurt and exhaustion that he found waiting for him there. On the other hand ... in a lazy kind of way, he was getting bored as hell. And curious. And worried about someone whose name he couldn't quite remember.

Rain. Running. Claws in the dark.

He wondered if it was safe to wake up.

"It's safe," whispered a soft voice on the edge of consciousness -- the same one, he was sure, that had told him to leave the Stargate earlier.

His eyes snapped open and he started to surge forward, only to fall back with a gasp as his body caught on fire.

There was a sleepy grunt beside him, then a mumbling voice. "Oh, good one, Sheppard. I guess this is why they pay you the big bucks, hm?"

Hands settled on him, warm and clumsy and gentle, pressing him down until he stopped trying to struggle. He tried to sort through his memories: Rodney, wearing a fur hat and old and sad and scarred, horribly scarred. No, wait. That was someone else, wasn't it? Things were all jumbled. Rodney was ... Rodney was ...

... Rodney was supporting him and holding a cup of water to his lips. A strange cup, with a rough-feeling edge ... he sipped from it, and then small oblong tablets were pressed lightly onto his tongue.

"Tylenol," Rodney's voice said, "and antibiotics from your first-aid kit. Take 'em. Grizzly Adams has a peculiar approach to first aid, and if you don't want to suffer from some sort of horrible alien disease, you might want to take your meds."

He swallowed. The world spun as he was lowered back onto something soft. He stared up at a ceiling that was strangely uneven, lumpy and dim. The air smelled ... thick. Smoky.

"Is something on fire?" he managed to whisper.

He heard a soft laugh from Rodney. "Yeah, Mr. Mensa. That would be the fire."

Oh. He stared at the unfamiliar ceiling and waited for things to make sense. Nothing did. But the pain faded a little, and along with it, the dizziness and nausea. He blinked. After a moment, he had to determine how much of what he remembered was a dream, and how much had really happened.

"Hey ... Rodney?"

"mmm?" Sleepy sound from beside him.

"Where are we?"

There was a silence and then Rodney mumbled, "Cave."

Sheppard shut his eyes for a moment.

"I can see that, Rodney."

"Well, then ..." sounding a little more awake this time, "why did you ask?"

Sheppard had once sworn to Elizabeth that every single gray hair in his head was because of Rodney McKay.

"McKay, I remember something with big claws jumping on me. Did that happen?"

Soft rustlings from beside him. "Yeah," Rodney said.

"I also remember you dressed up like Ronon, with some kind of freaky scar on your face."

Rodney sighed. "Er, no. That would be our host, who has currently disappeared somewhere, possibly to sacrifice chickens or look up recipes on how to cook fatted Atlantean or ... who knows."

Sheppard blinked, and got himself together enough to roll his head to the side and focus on Rodney -- a Rodney propped up on his elbow, looking quizzical and sleepy, with straw in his hair. "Rodney, where are we? What happened?"

Now Rodney looked quizzical, sleepy and worried. "The Stargate bounced us to a random planet, and a freaky lizard thing attacked us, and we were rescued by a Pegasus Galaxy version of Daniel Boone who had some kind of accident involving his face and a wood-chipper in his youth. Any of this ringing a bell?"

Sheppard thought about this. "Yes," he said, finally.

"Oh good." Rodney dropped his head back down onto the straw.

"There was some kind of fast-moving critter with big teeth."

"Yep."

"And you suggested that I throw a flare. Which worked like ass, really."

"Excuse me? You were the one who came up with the throwing part all on your own, thanks. I merely pointed out that you had flares. And honestly ... 'worked like ass'? Are you twelve?"

Sheppard just laughed a little, and closed his eyes again. He thought he remembered Rodney getting attacked by the creature, but if the scientist was complaining then he must be feeling all right.

He wasn't so sure about himself, though. His body felt hot and unresponsive. Cautiously he moved a hand. There was something stiff and heavy on top of him, and it smelled weird. Animal hide, he decided, running his fingers across it. He worked his hand up to the top of the hide, and probed lightly at his shoulder. Something was covering it, something rough and bulky that he couldn't quite identify. He probed harder, and sucked in a pained breath.

"What are you doing over there?"

"Trying to figure out how bad I'm hurt." Opening his eyes, he saw a dark, vaguely Rodney-shaped blur looming over him. "How bad am I hurt?"

He didn't like the hesitation before Rodney answered. "Well, your leg's broken, for one thing. And you got scratched up pretty bad. In the infirmary, with antiseptic and actual technology, it would probably be no big deal. Here, on the other hand ..."

"A broken leg is no big deal to you, McKay?" He touched his leg lightly, feeling the makeshift splinting job. It itched. He tried not to squirm, because that hurt, and the Tylenol wasn't doing much. The puddlejumper first aid kits included morphine, but not the smaller kits that they carried in their field supplies. He'd have to do something about that when they got back.

"You know what I mean," Rodney snapped. "It's nothing modern medicine can't take care of. Given present circumstances, however -- well, let's just hope the antibiotics work. Oh, and I'm hurt too, by the way. Thanks for asking."

"Damn, I forgot." In the slowly coalescing blur of his memories, he recalled hearing Rodney scream. "How bad?"

"Well, I guess you were right about the arm," Rodney admitted. "It's not broken. Hurts like hell, though. And that damn thing clawed my back and I think I'm getting infected."

"You're taking antibiotics too, right?" He had a moment's horror that Rodney had been saving all the pills for him.

"Of course I am. But we don't have very much, and it's the Pegasus Galaxy, so there could be flesh-eating and antibiotic-resistant bacteria setting in even as we speak."

Sheppard opened his mouth to comment on how reassuring that wasn't, but there was a soft click off to his left, and his hand went instinctively towards a gun that was simply not there. Rolling his head towards Rodney, he saw the scientist propped up on his elbow and looking off to the side -- and, beyond him, he caught a glimpse of a door closing.

"Yeah," Rodney said. "That would be our host. He kinda ... comes and goes." The straw rustled as he got up. Sheppard gritted his teeth and pushed himself to an angle from which he could see Rodney kneeling and inspecting what had just been left for them. "Hmm, water and a pile of sticks. For the fire, no doubt. My heart skips a beat at the hospitality around here."

"So is this guy avoiding us, or what?"

"I think we freak him out." Rodney straightened up, stiffly, with an armload of sticks. "He's obviously been living here alone since, well, his world's Armageddon happened, or whatever, and he's gotten ... strange. Actually, 'strange' hardly does justice to it. Let's just say he's gone off."

"Off? Like milk?" Sheppard felt dazed and slow. He could feel his tenuous grip on consciousness spiraling away again, and wondered if it was safe to leave Rodney alone with this guy, whoever or whatever he was.

"Sure, whatever floats your boat, Sheppard." Rodney dropped his load of sticks by the fire, and for the first time Sheppard realized that the scientist was wearing some sort of shapeless, vaguely Ronon-esque hide garment.

"Rodney, what are you wearing?"

Rodney's shoulders stiffened. "Let he who is not festooned with dead animal parts cast the first stone, hmm?" He jabbed at the fire with a stick. "And go back to sleep, why don't you. It's the middle of the night."

Sheppard did so.

He woke to an argument, a rapid exchange in low voices at the foot of his straw bed. Caught halfway between sleep and wakefulness, he thought for a moment that Rodney was arguing with himself -- the two voices spoke with the same rapid-fire, annoyed cadence -- until he woke up enough to recognize the back-of-the-throat raspiness of the second voice, and realized that their host, when agitated, could talk almost as fast as Rodney. Sheppard hadn't realized that was possible. He grinned slightly, with his cheek pressed against the straw. Rodney's ability to bring out that side of everyone he came in contact with was something that never ceased to amaze and amuse him.

"-- gone completely crazy, sitting around in your cave, eating bugs and sticks!"

"You go out there by yourself and you'll die, moron. Not that it'd be as much of a loss to the universe as you think it would --"

"Well, excuse me for wanting to get off this piece-of-shit world!"

"Believe me," the old man growled, "it's not possible for you two to want to be gone more than I want you out of here!"

Sheppard propped himself up on the elbow of his good arm. The door of the cave was open, and wan gray daylight streamed in around the bulky shape of the mountain man in his fur garments.

Rodney spoke very slowly and precisely, in his "speaking to children and idiots" tone. "Then take. Me. To. The. Stargate."

"Not unless you're suicidal," the old man snapped, "and if only we would all be so lucky!" He flung something onto the floor of the cave and vanished from Sheppard's field of vision.

"Get back here, you annoying, smelly old bastard!" Rodney yelled after him. Muttering, he spun around and froze when he saw Sheppard watching him. "Oh, quit smirking at me."

"I wasn't," Sheppard protested innocently as he did his best to wipe the smirk off his face.

"Nice to see you're feeling better." Rodney bent over whatever had been thrown onto the floor of the cave. With a grimace of disgust, he straightened up holding a small silvery fish at arm's length. "Oh, look. The breakfast of champions."

Sheppard pushed himself somewhat more upright, clenching his teeth as the movement jarred his leg and the ache flared up into sharp, hot pain. "What was that all about, anyway?"

Rodney snorted. "Crocodile Dundee -- who, I might add, has been God knows where all night -- comes waltzing in here with an armload of dead fish ... I very politely mention that I'm going to head over to the Stargate later today and wonder which direction it is from here, and he tries to order me to stay in the cave. Which, believe me, normally I'd be more than happy to do, considering what's out there" -- he shuddered -- "but I'd also like to get off this planet before both of us get gangrenous."

"I thought you couldn't fix the DHD without a control crystal."

Rodney's lopsided smile appeared. He looked insufferably pleased with himself. "Yeah, but guess what?"

"You found a control crystal?"

Rodney stared. "What? In here?" He swept a hand scornfully around the cave. "Why yes, and I also found a puddlejumper and a transporter. No, no -- I'll give you a hint -- guess what's inside a busted life signs detector?"

Sheppard raised an eyebrow. "A control crystal?"

Rodney sighed. "Have I ever told you that you have a one-track mind? No, not a control crystal as such, but between all the components in the LSD that are now completely useless to us, there's a chance I could jury-rig something that might work long enough to dial the gate." He grimaced. "The problem is, I won't know if they're compatible unless I have it in front of me, and our hairy friend won't let me leave the cave."

"The thought cross your mind that there could be a good reason for that? Rodney, that creature's still out there. Assuming there's only one of them."

Rodney marched over to the fire, carrying the fish by its tail, and indifferently threw some sticks onto the coals. "This, coming from Colonel Kamikaze," he snapped over his shoulder.

Sheppard himself couldn't believe that he was actually on this end of this particular argument -- with Rodney, of all people. "The hell you're running around out there by yourself, McKay! We didn't exactly come through with flying colors the last time we went up against that thing, when we were both healthy and fully armed. That guy presumably knows this planet a lot better than we do. I'd say, if he says stay put ... then we stay put, at least for the time being."

"So you're on his side now? Figures." Rodney poked at the coals of the fire with sharp, irritated jabs of a stick of firewood. He seemed to notice, belatedly, that he was still holding the fish, and shuddered. "Er ... how do you cook these things? Just throw it in the coals, d'you think? Seems suitably barbaric."

Sheppard hauled himself to a sitting position. He swallowed as the cave swam around him. "Rodney, don't tell me that neither Ronon nor myself have ever taught you how to clean a fish?"

The sound of Rodney grinding his teeth was actually audible. "And why would I need to learn? One of you is always available for that purpose."

Sheppard sighed. "Bring it over here."

After a brief lesson in "Fish Processing 101" with Sheppard's survival knife, the fish was spitted above the coals and Rodney was scrubbing his hands in a clay-covered basket of water.

Sheppard poked a finger at the basket. The basic design was crude and ugly -- it looked like a kindergartner had made it. However, the twigs forming the basic shape of the basket did hold together, though it seemed to defy gravity by doing so, and the badly cured clay plastered on the outside was obviously capable of holding water.

"This reminds me of something."

"Lucius's gourd," Rodney said promptly, with a sour look on his face.

"Yeah. That's it. Where did that thing get off to, by the way?"

Rodney cringed. "Don't ask me. I always assumed that you took it, for blackmail purposes."

"Come on, McKay; I'm not that cruel."

"Yes you are."

Sheppard tried to shrug, but stopped with a grimace when it tugged at his bandaged shoulder. He felt hot and achy and unpleasant, and a deep pain throbbed in his leg. He settled carefully back down onto the straw, trying not to think about infection and all the things that could possibly go wrong with injuries like theirs on a planet without medical facilities. "All right, you got me. Someone made off with it before I could. I think Elizabeth might have thrown it away."

"Good for her." Rodney poked at the sizzling fish, then jerked his fingers back as hot grease seared his fingers. "Ow! Not a word out of you," he added quickly, hearing Sheppard snicker.

"Patience is a virtue, McKay."

"I'm hungry, damn it. And charred fish really isn't going to cut it for breakfast, I think." Rodney hunted for his vest in the dim cave. Sheppard heard the crinkling of a powerbar wrapper. After a moment, something sticky was shoved into his hand ... half of Rodney's powerbar.

"Chocolate? I'm touched." Actually, he sort of was. He was also somewhat surprised to find that he was genuinely hungry.

"Don't let it go to your head. I just don't want to have to drag you around the woods if you keel over. Again."

Sheppard propped himself up on the cave wall and ate his half of the powerbar while Rodney restlessly prowled the cave, waiting for the fish to cook. The scientist picked up and then set down various objects: baskets, bowls, tools. All were crudely handmade of various natural materials -- wood, stone, plant fiber, bone -- and all had something else in common, too.

"Ugly as hell," Rodney summed it up, as he turned a sloppily made wooden bowl over in his hands. At least, Sheppard thought it looked like a bowl. Sort of.

"Maybe he failed the local equivalent of home-ec," Sheppard offered, tugging lightly at a handful of scraggly fur on the hide covering his legs. Some of it fell out. "Maybe there's not a whole lot of time to make decent baskets when you spend your life trying to avoid monsters."

"He has a crossbow that looks fairly lethal." Rodney picked up one of a pile of crossbow bolts that rested beside the door to the cave. These were made with more care than anything else in the cave -- it was evident that quite a bit of time had gone into shaping and balancing them.

"If I'm bowhunting an indestructible killing machine, I'd want to put a bit of effort into my weapons, too."

"This is giving me less than total faith in his first-aid skills." Rodney cast a nervous glance down at his own, bound shoulder.

"Er, Rodney ..." The smell of scorching fish had begun to fill the cave.

"Oh, damn it." Rodney's less-than-stellar attempt to follow Sheppard's instructions at building a fish spit had caused their breakfast to slide down into the fire. He rescued it with a couple of sticks and stared at it ruefully.

"It's only burned on the outside; it'll still be edible."

"I hate camping," Rodney grumbled as he divided the fish between two lopsided bowls. "I've always hated it, ever since I was a kid. I used to loathe summer camp. The food's terrible, the sleeping accommodations are barbaric, and don't even get me started on the bathroom facilities. Never could figure out why people do this sort of thing for fun." He handed Sheppard a bowl of fish.

Sheppard tried to imagine Rodney as a child at summer camp ... a pasty, incredibly unathletic, kvetching child. "They say food tastes better when it's cooked outdoors."

"No ... food tastes better when it's prepared in an actual, sanitary kitchen, by trained cooks rather than amateurs squatting around a campfire." Rodney picked up a piece of charred fish and glared at it. "Case in point."

Under its overdone exterior, though, the fish wasn't bad. It was pale, with a flaky texture. "How long was I asleep?" Sheppard asked, as he picked out the edible bits from the blackened fish skin.

"Like, fourteen hours or something. It's the middle of the day." Rodney glanced at his watch. "Assuming their day is about as long as one of ours."

He was surprised it had been no longer. They'd spent less than a day on the planet so far. A sudden thought occurred to him and he brought his hand up swiftly to the side of his head, feeling bare skin and hair where his radio should be.

Rodney shook his head. "He's dead, Jim ... Sorry. It broke in the fall. You must've fallen on it." He touched his own. "Still got mine, though, and nobody's called us."

Sheppard grimaced. The fish and half-powerbar sat like a lump in his stomach. No one had followed them through the gate, no one had even dialed in to this world to look for them -- which meant that no one knew where they had gone. Or no one's left to look.

He tried to remind himself that no one gets left behind. There was a fierce conviction behind it, and for just a moment he wasn't absolutely, one hundred percent sure that it was his own thought. He paused -- focusing, concentrating, straining his senses -- and thought that once again he caught the faintest hint of ... something, a broken pattern that was almost but not quite words. It faded in and out like a radio signal at the very edge of reception, and then it was gone.

Sheppard closed his eyes, squeezed them shut, and opened them again, to see Rodney staring at him with undisguised worry.

"Voice," he explained, tersely.

He meant this to be reassuring -- I'm fine, I'm not in pain -- but instead, the frown line between Rodney's brows deepened. "Since I didn't hear anything, I presume you're talking about the voice in your head."

"Yeah, the same one I heard at the Stargate, I think." He grinned just a little. This shouldn't be funny, but he had to laugh, because the hairs were standing up on his arms and it was better than screaming. "It's not just in my head, Rodney. I think it's something real -- something external."

"And I can't hear it, because ...?"

"I don't know! Because of my gene, maybe?" Sheppard pushed away the bowl with the remaining pieces of fish; he'd lost his appetite.

Rodney eyed it. "You gonna eat that?"

"Go ahead." So much for all his complaining about campfire food, Sheppard thought with an inward grin.

"Have you tried talking back?" Rodney asked through a mouthful of fish.

"Isn't that supposed to be one of the warning signs that you're going crazy -- when you start answering the voices you hear?"

Rodney gave a small laugh. "What? If you really think something or someone is talking to you, how do you expect to find out what it wants if you won't talk to it?"

Huh ... he did have a point. Still, Sheppard felt highly self-conscious at the idea of having conversations with thin air -- particularly with Rodney there, listening and probably snarking merrily at every word. "Maybe we'll do that later." When I don't have an audience. "Right now ..." He started struggling with the furs covering his legs.

"Hey, where are you --"

"It's been a long night, Rodney ... I hope I don't have to explain."

Rodney looked away hastily. "For God's sake, put some clothes on! My eyes!"

With his leg sore and swollen, it turned out to be impossible to get his pants on, at least by himself -- Rodney refused to help, and frankly, Sheppard didn't really want him to -- so he wrapped himself up in furs. Leaning heavily on Rodney's shoulder and trying not to jar his leg too badly, he hopped to the door. He held their one remaining P90 awkwardly against his side, loosely gripped in his bad arm; he needed the good one to hold onto Rodney's neck.

"I'm thinking crutches would be a good idea," Rodney said thoughtfully as he opened the door, pausing to stare at its design. The thing was at least three feet thick, made from several layers of wooden planks bound together.

"Maybe Grizzly Adams has a few spare sticks laying around." Sheppard's voice was a lot more faint and breathless than he'd like. It had been awhile since he'd had to move around with an unset broken bone. He'd forgotten how much it sucked.

The world outside was much as it had been yesterday -- gray, cold, misty, damp. Through a layer of thick brush and trees, a stream was just visible, and a steep cliff rose beyond it. The air smelled wonderfully fresh and clean after the closeness inside the cave. Rodney leaned Sheppard against a tree a few feet from the cave entrance. "I seriously hope you can take things from here." His voice was hushed.

"I think I can manage." Sheppard handed him the gun.

"Hey, wait, what --"

Sheppard managed a grin, despite the pain. "Cover me."

"Oh, this is fun." Reluctantly accepting the P90, Rodney turned his back and stared up at the gray sky.

"You didn't manage to bring the other one, did you?"

"What, the other gun? I was a little preoccupied with bringing you."

"I lost a clip, too, damn it, and my 9-mil, which means we're basically down to the weapons you've got. I don't like those odds." Finishing up his business, Sheppard leaned on the tree and looked out across the creek. The forest floor was soft and damp under his bare feet. It was actually kind of peaceful here, at least when nothing was trying to kill them.

"Having both guns didn't seem to help us much."

Peaceful, that is, except for Rodney. "Way to look on the bright side, McKay."

"There's a bright side?"

"Come on, you're a genius, as you keep insisting -- how hard can it be to find the --" Sheppard paused, as he turned his head to the side. He'd just realized that they were being watched.

"What's the matter with you? Voices in your head again?" There was an element of worry in Rodney's voice as he turned around -- reluctantly. Then he followed Sheppard's line of sight.

The old man was standing in the edge of the woods, just watching them. It was the first time Sheppard had gotten a look at him in daylight. It was hard to discern much under all the furs he'd draped himself with; but Sheppard could see, even from here, the terrible scar covering the side of his face -- that, and the wistful, lonesome, almost hungry look in his one remaining eye.

Seeing them both looking at him, he seemed to shrink almost imperceptibly deeper into his furs, lowering his head to avoid their eyes. He cleared his throat. "Guess you probably want this back," he said, and pushed back the fur cloak draped over his shoulder, revealing Sheppard's P90 slung by its strap over his shoulder, the muzzle pointed forward and down.

Sheppard tensed and instinctively started to move in front of Rodney -- forgetting about his broken leg. A strangled scream of pain was startled out of him when he started to bring his weight down on it. He grabbed for the nearest tree, managing to stop himself from crashing to the ground.

Rodney appeared at his side in worried haste. "What's the matter with you?!"

"Rodney ..." Sheppard prompted through clenched teeth, clinging to the tree and jerking his head at the P90 held loosely in the physicist's hands, then at the old guy -- hopefully managing to express the concept Don't worry about me, worry about the crazy guy with the gun!

"You idiots