At The Sign Of The Happy Helg

Chapter 14

Rodney kicked at the damp, leaf-strewn ground, digging the toe of his boot into the dirt.  There was nothing he could do, nothing to fix, no solution that could spring, fully-formed, from the seething mass of his panic-heightened intellectual processes.  He felt useless.

Elizabeth and the Manarians had cooked up a plan between them to allow Smeadon to go through the Gate, but to have forces ready to intercept him on each of the planets where he had established alternative covers.  When Gard had heard about the plan, he had shaken his head.

"He'll not go to any of those," he said.  "He'll have had word that I've been there, sniffing around after him.  Unless the Manarians know some places that I didn't find, which is unlikely."

They waited, Lorne's team staking out  the farmhouse and Stackhouse and his men covering a perimeter around the cave entrance.  Gard had gone and Rodney hoped he wasn't planning his own ambush, which could put John and Teyla's lives in danger.  Rodney and Carson waited in the camp, trying to keep the fire going; the locals had already departed.  Two of the three hours were up, and Rodney was twitching with nerves, wanting to do something, to provide some kind of viable alternative.  He felt a tug at the sleeve of his jacket.

"Not now, Boudicca."

The tug came again, accompanied by a small growl.  Rodney looked down into the priss's narrowed eyes, the glare conveying impatience and urgency.  She bounded around him and began pushing him with her head and paws.

"I'd say your friend wants to play!" said Carson.

"No, she doesn't.  Do you?"

Rodney crouched down so that he was on Boudicca's eye-level.  She gave a long, throaty growl, followed by a decisive snarl.

"That's the first sensible thing I've heard in hours," said Rodney.  He checked and reholstered his Beretta.  "Carson, bring your kit.  We're going."

"What?  Going where?"

Rodney scrambled to keep up as the priss disappeared into the sparse, scrubby woodland, her tail low, her carriage the slink of a stalking predator.  He turned to check that Carson was following, and then plunged between the thorn trees.

oOo

Their hands were not tied, and yet there were no opportunities for escape.  Eyes followed John and Teyla as they were directed, at gunpoint, through the cavern; many pairs of eyes and most of them hostile.  The soldiers were clustered in small groups of bedrolls, each around a campfire, over which were suspended cooking pots.  John looked up at the roof of the cavern: blackened, as if the fires had been in place for quite a while.  There were woodpiles here and there.  John scanned the bedrolls: a couple of hundred, he estimated.  The logistics of this haphazard and ill-supplied operation made John frown.  Having signed-off on many re-supply forms for the Atlantis kitchens, he knew very well exactly how much food a force of this size would consume.  Where was it all coming from?  And the firewood; how many trees had they cut down to keep this area of the cave complex habitable?  Something told John the answers to these questions were important.

"Move!"  John felt a sharp jab in his back and tried to pick his way through the groups of soldiers more quickly.  Where was Karron taking them?  There were at least two entrances to the cave complex, John thought; one where they had entered in the armoured vehicle and one where they had been taken to Smeadon.  They hadn't actually seen an entrance that way, but the room had given the impression of a cellar.  If Karron was betraying his leader, he couldn't take them either way; there would be troops loyal to Smeadon at both entrances, which implied that there was some kind of back door.