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

and Rodney said, “Imagine where we are in the solar system,” like that was some big thing. Anybody can do that, right? It’s like knowing your own address.
    But it didn’t look like just anything, lines of force and gravity drawn in blue fire like the best heads-up display ever invented, planets and asteroids and comets tracing perfect ellipses, streaming datapoints by the thousands eager and ready and waiting. I’d never seen anything like it. Never felt anything like it, an interface that moved like my thoughts, faster than any game, faster than anything I ever flew.
    I looked at O’Neill, and I saw a shiver pass over his face. He was the only one who knew. He was the only one who felt it. He was the only one who knew what it could do, and what it felt like to do it, like sitting on top of turbos open all the way, an elevator ride straight to the top, charging for the ceiling like a bat out of hell. He knew. He knew how it could eat you, seduce you, pull you in and fill you up. I can’t explain what it feels like, Teyla. I don’t have the right words. An interface like that—you own it and it owns you, like being one thing, one consciousness.
    And so Dr. Weir decided she wanted me on the Atlantis Expedition, kind of a human lightswitch to deal with Ancient technology. She asked O’Neill for me, and I guess he figured it was her party. He must have had a look at my record, but maybe that didn’t carry any weight with her. I don’t know.
    I almost didn’t go. He tried to talk me into it. “I think anybody who doesn’t want to walk through a Stargate is crazy.” Sounded a lot like you, actually.
    I flipped a coin.
    It’s how you decide when you don’t care what the outcome is, when you figure why the hell not. Leave it to chance or fate or whatever. I flipped the coin and I waited a second, looking at my hand clasped against my wrist, wondering which one I wanted it to be. Stay, go back to Antarctica and fly in that quiet dream, go back to sleep and let the snow roll over me. Kind of a quiet life, actually. Stay stuck in grade until I’ve got my twenty years and then get out and do…something. Some kind of security work, maybe. Or be a private pilot for a corporation, flying guys like my dad from a meeting in Austin to a meeting in Tampa on their Lear Jet. That’s not so bad, really.
    Or walk through a Stargate. Take a one way trip to a place you know nothing about, a place that could be anything.
    Most of these guys did it out of curiosity. They wanted to know something so much—these scientists and engineers and Dr. Weir most of all—that nothing else mattered. Rodney and Zelenka and the rest—they’ve got some balls. They signed up for this knowing they were probably going to get killed and they wouldn’t even get a shot off at what took them down. Disease. Hostiles. Drowning in the gate room when the shield failed and the city died.
    I did it on a coin toss. I watched it spin, and I knew which way I wanted it to fall.
    Why the hell not?
    ***
    He looked away, across the broad canal to the desert, shrugged.
    “Do you miss it?” she asked quietly.
    “Antarctica?” John stood against the side of the barge. “I don’t know. Atlantis isn’t exactly quiet.” He looked at her sideways, the corner of his mouth twitching as though he would smile. “I guess I miss that a little bit.”
    “I meant your homeworld,” Teyla said. “Earth. Your family, your friends.”
    His face stilled, but it didn’t harden as it often did when someone talked about home. “I don’t really have anybody to miss,” he said, and his eyebrows drew together.
    “You have no children, no sons and daughters?” It was strange to think not. A man of his age ought to be the father of children well grown, daughters learning to hunt and sons to till the soil. Unless some tragedy had intervened. She hoped she had not touched on that.
    “It was never the right time,” he said, his eyes eliding from hers.
    “Surely your