Free SGA - 14 - Death Game by Jo Graham Page A

mom and dad, in their own ways. They’re both so sure that it could all be true. So I guess it wasn’t much of a shock to me to find out it was. The first time I walked into that gateroom in Cheyenne Mountain, it was like coming home. Yeah. This is the thing. This is the real thing, the thing I’m doing. Cause anything can be true if you make it so.

Chapter Eight
     
    Afternoon came. The barge glided onward, drawn by plodding oxen.
    John had been trying to chat up one of the guardsmen, but he came back at last and sat down with Teyla beneath the awning, on the right side of the barge now, out of the sun. “Three more hours or so,” he said, rubbing his stubbled chin. “If I got that right. So not too much farther to Pelagia.”
    Teyla stretched out her legs flexing her bare toes, her boots and socks piled neatly beside the bench. “Not much longer then.”
    John looked like he’d like to take his shoes off, but didn’t. “Not too much.” He had another drink of the lukewarm water they’d been provided and took his sunglasses off to wipe them on his shirt.
    “It is your turn,” Teyla said.
    “My turn for what?”
    “To tell me a story,” she said, and gave him an offhanded smile. “I told you one last night. We have three hours with nothing to do except sit here. It is your turn to tell a story.”
    “I don’t know any stories,” he said.
    It was on the tip of her tongue to ask when he had journeyed in the desert before and what had befallen him there, but Teyla thought that it was probably not a happy story, not a story for a time like this, and so she asked instead for something she thought he might actually answer. “It is your turn,” she said tranquilly. “You must tell one. I would like the story of how you came to Atlantis.”
    ***
    Antarctica is really quiet. It’s just miles and miles of snow, miles and miles of nothing. No towns, no cities, no highways. No people. Nothing. It’s quiet. Even in good weather you have to rely on instruments. The ground pretty much looks the same, just mountains and glaciers, and the outposts are so small that you could miss them and just keep on flying until you ran out of gas in an endless sea of clouds and snow that all blend together.
    I liked it. Like I say, it was quiet.
    My duties were pretty minimal, just flying some brass and some scientists around, a fifty mile hop out to an advance research post on the ice. Fly ‘em out, sit around while they did whatever they did, fly ‘em back. It’s the kind of job you give a guy who’s too flaky to handle anything else. I didn’t mind that. It was probably true.
    One time it was this guy, General O’Neill. We were just cruising along, everything pretty normal, and suddenly the radio was reporting incoming, some kind of rogue missile that could acquire a target on its own. I had a hell of a time dodging the thing, and it would have gotten us if it hadn’t shut down by itself suddenly. I’d never seen anything like it.
    Didn’t know then that I had Carson to blame. He was messing around with the command chair and accidentally fired an Ancient drone. But at least he turned it off before he blew me and O’Neill to kingdom come.
    So I was screwing around while O’Neill met with a bunch of people, got to talking to Carson, and there was this thing. You’ve seen our chair. You know how it looks. This one was just like it, cold and strange and eerily beautiful, like it was carved out of a snowflake.
    And I wanted it. I don’t quite know how else to put it. It’s like it needed to be touched. It needed me to touch it. I couldn’t stop looking at it. It looked like something out of a fairy tale, or like something I’d dreamed a long time ago but forgotten. And so I sat down.
    You know what happened then, right? It turned on. It turned on because of the ATA gene, because I have this gene, because I’m descended from some Ancient who went native on Earth thousands of years ago. And then everybody rushed in,