stargateatlantisseasonsix

Episode Three- The Ruins- Front Cover

Posted on April 19, 2013 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

(This story is the idea that won me First Prize at Creation Entertainment’s Vancouver Stargate 2010 Convention.)

There are secrets hidden in…

Following two tense missions, Atlantis’ Commander Richard Woolsey orders his flagship team and their new fifth team member on what should be a quiet mission, check out a potential Beta Site.

However, tensions run higher than ever before when Lieutenant Ursula Kenmore goes rogue again and leads the team to a different planet entirely, Athosia. And things only go from bad to worse on the homeworld of beloved Expedition member Teyla Emmagan when Lieutenant Kenmore and Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard are abducted.

Without hesitation, Teyla, Ronon Dex, and Doctor Rodney McKay go after their teammates and in doing so they’ll discover even more secrets kept from them about the Ancients that once inhabited their city, how the Lieutenant’s unique DNA came to be, and an even darker and greater secret that Teyla Emmagan has desperately wanted to know since she was a child…what really happened to her father!

Posted in Season Six- Episode Three | 1 Comment

Episode Two- The Fires- Epilogue and Acknowledgements

Posted on April 12, 2013 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Epilogue

Sheppard walked up the ramp of the jumper, his boots clanging loudly on the little vessel’s metal. He glanced at Kenmore as he passed through the rear interior of the jumper and continued walking towards its front. She took her usual seat on the left side bench. Then she slumped on the bench, her arms resting over her vest, her legs extending out in front of her and crossing at the ankles in a lazy day-off sort of posture. She was planning on resting back here. How dare she not at least look bereaved or apologetic or something other than at ease, complacent enough with what she’s done to finally get some rest like the rest of them wished they could. He turns his disapproving eyes back to the jumper’s now lighting up command controls as he hears the rest of his team clanging into the jumper behind him. There was no hesitation in the sounds he heard as he took his seat in the pilot’s chair and he caught sight of his team assuming their regular seats without comment or a single lingering look back at Kenmore out of the corner of his eyes as he began starting up the jumper for its backup flight through the Stargate to Atlantis. Good, other than Ronon unceremoniously kicking her feet out of his way, none of them were giving Kenmore the time of day. How could they after she assassinated a world’s leader, one of their few allies, one that they’d needed the most?

Once the jumper’s ramp was up, John finally dialed Atlantis’ gate address. The Heads Up Display came up over the jumper’s windscreen to tell him the wormhole had established. With a frustrated, tired, tense sigh, he reached out over his console, pressed the button, and spoke…

“Atlantis, this is Jumper One—“

“Colonel Sheppard?”

Woolsey spoke the rank and name enough like a worried question that John looked over beside him at Rodney and then back a little at Teyla and Ronon sitting in the chairs behind only to find the same thing going on: they were all exchanging really confused looks between the four of them.

“A half-hour ago the gate was activated, but it just as quickly deactivated. All we could tell was that a jumper was responsible for it. Is there anything wrong,” Woolsey went on before John could even respond to the question of his own name first.

John turns his chair to the rest of his team and catches it in all of their eyes. The team is stunned, shocked by the new news. She had simply dialed back to Atlantis. They slowly turn their chairs in unison to look back at Kenmore.

Sheppard turns back around to face the jumper’s controls. He only had one order and he wanted to make it absolutely explicitly clear without growling his commander into a subordinate position in public. He had to calm himself a moment.

* * *

The team, with Kenmore trailing a handful of feet behind them, slowly walks down the access corridor from Atlantis’ jumper bay. It had been distinctly emptied at Sheppard’s request over the jumper’s radio as he landed the craft in its regular slot in the bay. As if on cue, Richard Woolsey came rushing up to them, the man was trying to keep up the façade of confident command with a strong walk, but he was rushing.

“What is it? What happened over there,” he asks them.

Sheppard can’t bring himself to say it. Teyla like all the other members of her team look over to see their leader deliver his bad tidings…and sees his hesitation, his complete resistance, his shame at the situation. She feels for him like she had often felt for Elizabeth Weir, the difficult position of command, and she also feels that it is her obligation to do this for him. After all she was a fellow village leader in the Pegasus Galaxy…

“Shiana is dead.”

The stun surges over Woolsey’s face. There’s a moment of silence—like there needed to be another one since they’d found Kenmore in the armory hut and she’d put the weapon she had modified then unmodified back—as his brain processes whether or not it can form words and send them to his mouth anymore. Teyla takes in the silence, she had not meant to put that so bluntly, but she could not figure out a way to tell the news other than plainly. She did not believe there was another way.

“How,” the administrator finally breathes.

John’s time has come, it was nice of Teyla to stall for him, perhaps she felt an obligation to Shiana, a leader thing, but his time has come. He’s the leader of this team and, although he doesn’t consider Kenmore a part of it, she was his responsibility on this mission and he had ultimately failed to keep an eye on her. He turns to look back at her, the others do as well, and Woolsey follows their eyes. John can practically feel the man’s mind screaming ‘No, no, no!’

“Kenmore assassinated her,” John said in a low voice, as if the volume could undercut the weight of his words.

Woolsey is silent. John can’t even hear him breathing anymore and he is definitely not looking back to see what emotion has taken hold of the man’s face now. Suddenly John hears scuffling footsteps racing towards them. He looks back in Woolsey’s direction and sees Kenmore’s blonde-haired, brown-eyed little boy running up to them behind him with Czech scientist Doctor Radek Zelenka right on his heels. John knew Zelenka really wasn’t one for hanging out with kids anymore than Rodney was, but he never thought in a million years that the Czech scientist was uncomfortable enough with them to break John’s demand for an empty hallway. How bad was time with a kid that you had to race him down here despite my specific orders, Radek? What the hell do those kids on that planet do to you? No amount of face painting and hair dye warranted this.

Little Michael Kenmore races past Woolsey and in between John and Teyla to his mother, who kneels down to the floor and scoops him into her arms. At sight of the kid’s happy face, John figured that had been his heart’s little goal all along: reach Mommy. But somehow John had hoped that at seeing how everyone else in front of him was acting, the looks on their faces, would seep into the boy’s brain and Michael’d hit the brakes, turn around, and run back the way he’d came.

John looks over at Zelenka as the man comes to a breathless stop behind Woolsey. The scientist immediately starts trying to catch his breath enough to speak, at least he’d obviously caught sight of the expression on John’s face.

“I’m sorry Colonel…the moment…he heard you…were back. He…ran… away…from…me,” finally the need to stop completely for air took hold.

John nodded just to pacify Zelenka and give him the signal it was okay to stop and catch all of his breath back. Zelenka nods back gratefully and doubles-over completely gasping for air and working hard to get as much of it all back in as he could.

“You’re home Mommy. You’re home,” came Michael’s happy voice to John’s ears.

“Yes,” Kenmore answers calmly then, “Mommy has to tell you something.”

Immediately John’s head shoots back to her. Is she going to do what he thinks she’s going to do?

“What Mommy?”

Kenmore takes her young son’s hands in hers and stares at them for a moment before she gives them a few shakes, looks up into his eyes, and says in a quiet, subdued voice none of them had heard from her before, “Do you know why Mommy doesn’t sleep at night?”

The boy nods knowledgeably, “Because you miss Daddy.”

John never knew that. Is that why she passed out? Exhaustion? Sleep deprivation…because of the mourning process. They didn’t have to be close friends of hers to know she still considered herself married to her dead husband. Clearly that wasn’t just something she said.

Kenmore nods at him then she becomes reserved again, pursing her lips together to make them temporarily disappear, thinking of her next words. Her eyes return to him, “What if Mommy didn’t stop going to sleep as a way of missing Daddy? Do you know what might have happened then?”

Michael quirks his eyes at his mother with a tilt of his head like he’d never thought of that before, “No.”

“Mommy got very sad when Daddy died,” for a moment Kenmore’s throat caught, she took a moment to get it back—Oh God, John thought, she didn’t sleep because she kept seeing her husband, kept reliving his loss; waking up every time realizing that the other half of your bed was empty and remembering why each and every time, John could understand how’d someone would never want to go to sleep again in order to never wake up again—, “and there was a woman at the village we went to that…was just as sad.” The boy waited for his mother’s words and listened intently, “But instead of not sleeping anymore, she decided to hurt other people.”

“What happened,” he was frightened.

“She was setting people on fire…because she couldn’t go with her children or their Daddy.”

“What did you do,” Michael asked. His body suddenly tense at the sound of people being set on fire, he obviously understood what that meant.

“Mommy had to kill her to make her stop hurting her people.”

There’s a moment’s pause as Michael processes the information. They all look on in stunned silence. Waiting like Kenmore was. Could he, could a child his age possibly fathom what he was being told? Then the boy asked…

“Are the people okay now?”

Kenmore nods, “Yes, they’re safe now. They have a new leader and he’s not going to hurt anybody anymore.” She referred to the swift ironic election of the tall, skinny man that had brought a pitchfork to defend Shiana and a starving little boy against Kenmore.

The boy nodded at the ground. Comforted by the news that the people were safe. Then he looks into his mother’s eyes…

“Mommy?”

“Yes,” Kenmore answered, attentively.

“Are they not going to sleep anymore either?”

“I don’t know,” she answered her son honestly, “I don’t know.”

The boy nods his head again, accepting the knowledge of the answer, and, with that, the Lieutenant stands up with one of her son’s hands still in hers. They walk casually up to the team. Kenmore keeps her eyes intently focused on Woolsey.

“Mommy, are you in trouble,” came Michael’s voice from beside her.

Her eyes stayed on Woolsey, there was no threat in them but there wasn’t any backing-down frailty in them either. She wasn’t gun-shy, that was sure as Hell. The team look to Woolsey. Wasn’t he going to stop her? They did have brigs here. Wasn’t she going to one of them? She assassinated a friendly planet’s leader.

But Woolsey doesn’t say anything as Kenmore and her son walk past him…and past Zelenka…and down the hallway…and into the rest of Atlantis without a single word of reprimand.

THE END.

Acknowledgements

As always, thanks go out to everyone associated with Stargate Atlantis from the crew to the cast. It was wonderful television while it lasted, sadly far far too short, and it makes for wonderful reading now, and hopefully for much much longer. For this story in particular, huge thanks go to the creators of and everyone associated with the fifth season episode “Inquisition” in particular for the creation of the Shiana character that makes this book possible. Even though it’s one of those quintessential budget saving episodes known as recap episodes, it gave Atlantis one of the most interesting characters to its viewers: Shiana. She was the first person ever met that had suffered through what the reactivated and reprogrammed Asuran Replicators had done as part of their war against the Wraith. The fact that that established so much untold history for this character and, with the episode’s resolution, so much potential for her to re-encounter Team Atlantis, it was all just too inviting an opportunity to pass up. It would be tough to bring up so much with so little actual background for a character but actress Kaaren de Zilva did fantastic. And too her as well as writer Alex Levine and director Brenton Spencer, thanks for the writing and performance that made me never forget the potential of this character to be ground-shaking for Team Atlantis! Thanks to Propworx for their production description of Shiana’s outfit that they auctioned off. It was so spectacularly detailed it made the first description of this character in this story practically perfect. Trust me, Propworx, your description always help me far more than you may ever know, thank you. Another thank you goes out to the writer of “The Tao of Rodney” third season episode, Damian Kindler, for the hysterical scene of Rodney levitating Carson that made that moment of interior monologue of Sheppard’s have such amusing potential. It gave me a great way to portray how the Sheppard character might deal with situations like that and the influences he might bring to the table in order to do it. Another hysterical thanks to Carl Binder for his teleplay of the story both Brad Wright and he came up with, the second season “Critical Mass” episode the end of which featured the appearance of a children-decorated Radek Zelenka, that made that moment such a defining one for the character from there on out and one I couldn’t just pass up remembering either. And I also owe a third debt to Carl Binder as the writer of the “Letters From Pegasus” first season episode for the SG designation for said children’s planet as well as some of Teyla and Sheppard’s exchange that comes back to haunt the Colonel’s thoughts. I also owe another debt of gratitude to Stargate SG-1/Atlantis Magazine Issue #10 and K. Stoddard Hayes for “The A to Z of Teal’c” article which featured a zat’nikatel for the letter Z where I got the spelling for the weapon, although there a numerous spellings for this weapon, I’m taking this spelling as the definitive one. I’d also like to acknowledge writer Martin Gero for the second season finale episode “Allies” for the filler scene he wrote in which Sheppard wants to make sure Teyla is onboard with their plan to ally with the Wraith to dispense the retrovirus as a weapon. Although, according to the episode’s audio commentary, this scene was originally larger and had been cut for time only to be added back in, watered down, for time, this is still a great scene that I thought added to more of Sheppard’s haunted moments especially where arguing with Teyla is concerned. It just added another depth and a sense of old familiarity to the background of their interaction that I think should never go away and am proud to include in this story. And as far as acknowledgements and an incredible amount of thanks goes, I would be remiss in not giving some to writer Martin Gero (again), director Martin Wood, and actor Joe Flanigan for their work in the fourth season premiere episode “Adrift” and in particular the scene in which Rodney and Sheppard fight. It really showed that no matter how stressful the situation is, how far to his limits and convictions he’s pushed, Sheppard is someone who gets the sort of angry where he yells in someone’s face, just like everybody else, but never physically lashes out. I think it added depth to the character to take him that step further and show him literally at that edge and going beyond it, especially where it puts Sheppard’s sense of chivalry in danger. Kudos to Martha Wells for her own Stargate Atlantis novel Reliquary, my favorite one of all the Atlantis novels Fandemonium has published. I couldn’t help but put in a reference to your work, it provided such a help to make Kenmore’s crazy plan actually work. And as I said before, thank you so much for my favorite Stargate Atlantis novel. It’s just as much a fun escape as any episode of the show, you did the series proud. Thanks for the sweet escape. I’d also liked to thank everyone involved in the creation of the fourth season episode “Be All My Sins Remember’d”, especially writer Martin Gero (yet again) and director Andy Mikita for the scene where Teyla tells Sheppard and Ronon about her pregnancy in particular. It went such a long way to the interior thoughts and monologue for Ronon. It made it possible to convey how much Ronon observes situations and how much of his thoughts and opinions of them he keeps inside. It helped me convey how much the character is like a glacier, what he lets you see and what he allows himself to say is so much less than what he keeps below the surface and having a character like that is both a treasure and a joy. Characters like Ronon Dex are a writer’s dream just as much as they are an actor’s. Orlando Bloom once said that the character of Legolas was the most complicated and challenging he had ever had as an actor because he never talked in most scenes, it forced him to exude all that he could in the stature of the character and convey that much more in the simple and few sentences he was given. Writers like to be able to write characters like that; they feel, they remember so much in a scene, but they say very little and their expressions and they way they carry themselves in the scenes have to have all the gravity. Thank God, actor Jason Momoa was up to the challenge of Ronon Dex and the writer’s gave him scenes like that one. Actor’s love to react, us writers love to make character’s like Ronon Dex think. And thank you all so much for that. And, as always, my final thank you goes to my Mother, for being the first person to put a pen in my hand and telling me to go have an adventure. I love you and can’t thank you enough for it. I hope you like this adventure, there’s more to come.

Posted in Season Six- Episode Two | Tagged "Adrift", "Be All My Sins Remember'd", "Critical Mass", "Inquisition", "Letters From Pegasus", Alex Levine, Andy Mikita, Brenton Spencer, Carl Binder, Damian Kindler, Doctor Elizabeth Weir, Doctor Radek Zelenka, fan fiction, Fandemonium Publishing, Jason Momoa, Joe Flanigan, John Sheppard, Jumper One, K. Stoddard Hayes, Kaaren de Zilva, Legolas, Lieutenant Ursula Kenmore, Martha Wells, Martin Gero, Martin Wood, Michael Kenmore, Orlando Bloom, Propworx, puddle jumper, Reliquary, retrovirus, Richard Woolsey, Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex, Season Six, Shiana, Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1/Atlantis Magazine, Teyla Emmagan | Leave a comment

Episode Two- The Fires- Chapter Thirteen

Posted on April 5, 2013 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Thirteen

The klaxons had been immediate and blaring. Radek had already been in the area and had charged in with little Michael Kenmore right behind him; he had been showing the boy the finer points of transporter maintenance, part of his to-do list from Rodney, when the sirens sounded. Radek had just enough time to take his seat at the console next to Chuck and Michael hurriedly dive under the console and take refuge clinging to the front of Radek’s bent legs when Richard Woolsey entered Atlantis’ Command Center and Atlantis’ Stargate flushed to life then sucked itself back in to a stable wormhole.

“Who is it?”

Everyone worked frantically at their controls in order to answer their leader’s question. Chuck shook his head, he wasn’t getting anything immediate.

“Put up the iris,” Woolsey ordered.

Chuck reached for the button and had no sooner pushed it and sealed the wormhole over with its peacock iridescent shield then suddenly the gate shut down.

They all stared at it. Each one of them frozen in place.

“I said put up the iris not deactivate the gate,” Woolsey leaned over to Chuck, “Someone might have been in there.”

Chuck, wide-eyed and slack-jawed in astonishment, shook his head slowly from side to side, “I didn’t do it, Sir. It deactivated on the other end.”

They keep staring at the sealed over hollow gate, the tangible feeling of ‘Oh dear God’ in the air now. If that had been one of their teams, something really, really terrible met up with them before they could escape into the relative freedom of the gate back to Atlantis. Only Zelenka took comfort in the feel of Michael’s tiny little hands wrapped around the fabric of his pant’s leg. He carefully lowered his eyes and saw the little boy’s brown ones staring cautiously back up at him and trying to angle to see Woolsey standing in between Zelenka and Chuck. Quietly, Radek slid his foot forward, scooting the child back further underneath, and returning his eyes to his console. His part of the answer to Woolsey’s question had finally come up on its screen. Radek tapped a few buttons, the staccato clicking sounds of his working drawing all eyes to him. He glances up and catches Woolsey’s attentive stare, the question repeated in the intensity of the man’s shoulders beneath his crisp Atlantean uniform.

“All I can tell you is that the dialing sequence came from a jumper,” Zelenka answered in surrender, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.

The wave of everyone exchanging confused looks with each other spreads across the darkened, computer-lit room. Woolsey looks at the Stargate again…But the only jumper out is Colonel Sheppard’s.

Michael leans closer to the front of Radek Zelenka’s legs again and carefully peers out from underneath the lip of the console at Richard Woolsey.

* * *

The gate shuts down just before Ramses and Ramirez break into the area. They stare at it and immediately split up, Ramses going to the clearing’s edge and looking into the forest and Ramirez moving to stand in front of the gate. There’s no one here. Ramirez hisses and makes a rude gesture at the empty gate. Then he bows his head and sighs. Not a single thing. He reaches up to his shoulder radio…

“Ramirez to Major Lorne.”

Teyla and McKay kneel beside Shiana’s body while Keller checks the fallen leader as Sheppard looks on. Jennifer looks up at him, shock jarring her smooth semi-porcelain features.

“She’s dead.”

“What,” Rodney gapes, “But all a Wraith stunner can do is just that, stun?”

Sheppard eyes Jennifer then the body then turns and steps back over to Lorne listening to his shoulder radio. Ramirez’s voice was coming through loud and clear with the bad news…

“We were too late, Sirs. They gated out just a moment before we got here. I’m sorry.”

Lorne and Sheppard look at each other then Sheppard looks back at Shiana’s body again.

“That’s okay, Ramirez,” Lorne tells him, “You and Ramses keep a lookout just in case they decide to come back. I’m coming to you.”

“Will do, Sir. Ramirez out.”

Lorne releases the transmitting button on his radio.

“Rodney,” Sheppard calls out, “you go with him. Do whatever you have to do to the DHD to figure out where they came from. I’ll send Ronon with you. If anyone can find some Wraith left behind,” Sheppard reaches up to his shoulder radio…

And discovers there’s nothing there. He looks at the empty pocket.

“Where’s my radio,” he asks. Then starts looking around the ground, more than a little bit confounded. He hadn’t thought the frenzy of the Wraith attack had caused him to be physical enough to dislodge and lose the damn thing while going for cover…

He vaguely recollects the sound of tearing…Suddenly Sheppard freezes. His eyes go wide. Immediately he bolts full tilt up the avenue into the heart of the village. Teyla and Rodney run after him, leaving Lorne behind with Keller kneeling over Shiana’s body.

“Colonel,” Teyla yells after him, “John! What is it?”

Ronon maintains his surveillance from his post when a frightened old woman hobbles into the area and croaks…

“The Wraith! The Wraith have killed Shiana!”

Ronon stares as the villagers all descend into mourning. He’s not sure he believes that. If Wraith had really fired on the village, his teammates would have called him into action. Someone would have told him. Someone would have come and gotten him…At least that was what he’d convinced himself of. He reaches down and wraps his hand tightly around the handle of his weapon. But still, he’d heard the blasts and the screams and had instinctively coiled his body and ran a few gigantically long strides away from the hut’s door when he stopped himself and looked back at its abandoned door. A sudden returning vision of Kenmore running past him, unchecked, in that warehouse then running away from their team past a barricade of Wraith. He had wanted to stop her then, trip her maybe, but he had fought the urge to put the Lieutenant in her place himself and had let Sheppard handle it. What a disaster that had been. He regretted not intervening then, he would be damned if he didn’t trip the little brat up given this second opportunity.

Nevertheless…if it were true…if he had only been there, but no. He felt it was more important to keep the little uniformed brat out of the mix. They needed to help the people of this world, not worry about Kenmore pulling another one of her stunts that always put herself and others in even greater danger than they were already facing. And besides if she tried to make a move to get out, then that meant he got to shoot her…

Still…

If he had only been there, the Wraith would not have gotten the chance to attack this village, kill this village’s leader. He could have helped, he could have done something. When he’d been a Runner, he’d witnessed a lot of leaders who’d faced death at the hands of Wraith when they had hunted him from planet to planet. He had been powerless to save them then, his only help was to lure the Wraith with him through the Stargate but that never worked, only a few would follow him through, the hive ships and darts would stay and wreak their vengeance on those that would help their prey…He had a lot of favors to return to people who no longer existed. At least one favor he could have returned today…Damn this little brat. Ronon’s already dark glare darkens even further. An old sense of murdering menace shadows back into them as he stares blindly ahead of him. His thumb flicks his weapon over from stun to kill. Suddenly Sheppard races up to him followed distantly by Teyla and McKay.

“Where is she,” Sheppard shouts at him.

Ronon stares at Sheppard. That was not the question nor the expression he had been expecting. Sheppard looked like…

“Where is she,” Sheppard yells at him again.

“In there,” Ronon, confused, points back at the door behind him, “She was running her mouth, but she shut up a while ago. Why?”

Sheppard suddenly yanks at his friend’s arm, clawing to get him out of the way. Ronon obliges, but looks to Teyla for help as she and McKay finally reach them. Her expression tells him she doesn’t understand what’s going on with Sheppard any more than he does and neither does McKay. Sheppard yanks open the door and looks inside. He freezes in the doorway, rendered motionless by shock, like his worst fears were confirmed. Ronon stares at him.

“What? What is it?”

Sheppard can’t speak. His jaw works inside his closed mouth. He wants to speak. He just can’t bring himself to do it. They’ve never seen him do that. Never. Gradually, his team form up around him and stare inside.

The room is empty except for Sheppard’s radio…duct-taped and standing on the table just across from a window…with its cut ropes dangling uselessly from its mud and hay-made frame.

No, Ronon stared at it, No, she couldn’t have done this. He could have sworn the window had glass in it. I couldn’t have—I can’t have let her do this. She could not do this to me! Me!

“Where is she,” McKay asks, perhaps his mind couldn’t process what he was seeing properly or perhaps the scientist wasn’t about to admit to that.

“Where did those villagers come from, the ones that were armed,” Sheppard finally manages to demand. Sheppard was seething, the last time Ronon saw him seethe like this Sheppard had scolded Teyla for being pregnant, it had taken him a while to find the words then too, at first Sheppard had thought Teyla was joking, and threw her off the team in the very next breath. Ronon had had to escort a shocked and hurt Teyla away to the infirmary to be checked out.

Ronon points, just as reticent at the sight of Sheppard this way and unwanting to get in the man’s way as he had been then, “Over there.”

Without hesitation, Sheppard bolts again and the others follow.

Sheppard runs up to the hut with the rest of his team a few feet behind him and without hesitation flings open the door. He freezes on its threshold again. The others join him as they had before and are stalled by the sight. Inside Lieutenant Kenmore sits quietly on the table with her packaged set of screwdrivers laid open beside her, one of them in her hand, as she carefully fiddles with the splayed open interior of a Wraith stun pistol.

“Modifying that, are we,” McKay asks grimly.

Kenmore doesn’t even bother to look up from her work, “Nope.”

“Then what are you doing,” he asks.

“Putting it back the way it was.”

Then she holds the screwdriver aside in her fingers, pinches a mechanism inside the pistol, and turns it. The tiny high-pitched whine that had been coming from the weapon lowers down to the hum that it usually emitted in the hands of its user. Then Kenmore slips the organic casing back over the weapon’s energy converter/stun emitter and starts wedging it back into place underneath the weapon’s more bone-like materials with the tip of her scrawny little eyeglass’ screwdriver.

Sheppard’s stun turns, making his words come across as more restrained bristling rage than flat-out anger, “And what episode of MacGyver did you get this from?”

“Actually I got it from a book.”

“And whose book would that be? Gavrilo Princip? Or André Dallaire maybe,” McKay snarks. Both were young psychos, to Rodney’s way of thinking; the first had assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand and started the first World War, the other had tried to assassinate Canada’s Prime Minister and was just plain nuts. Either description fit the Lieutenant to him.

With the last click of the final piece of casing slipping back into place, Kenmore finally looks up at them.

“Actually it’s a page from Sam Carter’s book.”

Rodney suddenly pales, looking decidedly uncomfortable with the idea of that. Sheppard swallows hard, suddenly he found it far more rattling that their, yes he would go so far as to call her beloved, Colonel Samantha Carter, their one-time leader of a year, had a metaphorical book in her military/scientific repertoire that included assassination, and it was a book, a repertoire that Kenmore had been drawing on. The team continues to stare at her in silence.

Kenmore puts the screwdriver back in its little slot, closes up the tool case, and puts it back in her vest. Then she gets off the table and walks the pistol back over to the damaged chest it had been in. To anyone on the outside, it’d look like an overzealous villager had panicked in the firefight and broke into the chest, but far too late to have done them any good as defender of their beloved leader Shiana. Kenmore opens the chest up and lays the pistol and it’s ammo vials, she had only needed one of them, back inside it. And shuts a lid on the whole thing.

Posted in Season Six- Episode Two | Tagged Chuck Campbell, Doctor Radek Zelenka, fan fiction, Jennifer Keller, John Sheppard, Lieutenant Ursula Kenmore, Major Lorne, Michael Kenmore, puddle jumper, Richard Woolsey, Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex, Season Six, Shiana, Stargate Atlantis, Teyla Emmagan, Wraith | Leave a comment

Episode Two- The Fires- Chapter Twelve

Posted on March 29, 2013 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Twelve

Sheppard keeps up his walking, bouncing from recovering villager to recovering villager along the village’s main avenue. He occasionally stopped to talk with the patient’s friends or family or friends and family if they so happened to be visiting when he stopped by. He felt a smile threaten to creep back in on his face and he indulged in the idea behind the good mood it might be bringing with it. It was so nice not to have Kenmore wreaking havoc or Shiana screaming bloody murder all over the place, let alone revolution. It was nice for once—in a long time—just to walk a village hustling and bustling with life…Thank God life.

He heard Teyla walk up and fall in step beside him. She was still silent, cautious feeling around him. He could hear it in the way she was walking, she was carrying herself stiffly. But he was much calmer now.

“So how’s everybody doing,” he asked, back to his old self.

“Jennifer says they are much improved. Major Lorne and Rodney are just finishing delivering further supplies to her,” she answered evenly, measuring his temperament.

John nodded, a smile back on his face. And with that, the tense muscles in Teyla’s shoulders released. She seemed to be relieved that he had lost his anger, although he would have defined it as rage, from a couple of hours ago—two did seem to be his lucky number with the ‘walking it off” thing. And he was relieved she was staying clear of the subject of Lieutenant Kenmore period.

He looked up ahead and as usual Teyla was right. There was Rodney and Lorne coming around the corner from the rest of the village, they looked happy enough. Then twenty yards or so passed and he saw her coming: Shiana the leader of one of the Tribes of Santhal. His stomach dropped. She looked determined, not necessarily on a warpath, but not exactly like a leader just casually strolling among her people dispensing comfort and assurance either.

John stops in his tracks. His smile gone. Oh this can’t be good. When Lorne and Rodney stop in front of him, they look up, see John’s face, and look behind themselves. Thankfully both men fall away to take up position on John’s free side. It takes a moment, but sure enough Shiana stops right in front of John before she finally looks up from the ground and stares him down with fierce anarchist eyes. Oh yeah this was not going to be good.

“More,” she was livid with him, “You have brought more weapons to poison my people with.”

Okay so same song, new lyrics. Beside Sheppard, Rodney rolled his eyes in exasperation. Great that was all John needed, Rodney to lose his temper too. Please don’t piss her off even more, John silently prayed to whatever deity might be listening.

“For the last time,” the scientist started in, “they are not weapons, they are medical equipment. And it is not poison, it is medicine.”

“So say you,” she reprimanded.

“So says doctors,” he countered, “You do know what doctors—“

“The equipment and medicines are simply things that help us help your people,” Sheppard interrupts, jumping in before Rodney could help the irate tribal leader take things out of hand in front of her people again, “Isn’t that a good thing?”

“Good for you maybe to see us all die,” she condemned, “and how fittingly at your hands.” She finished off daintily.

Ding, ding, ding. Round I’ve lost count. John takes a deep breath then starts back in. Now his neck muscles were tensed up.

* * *

Kenmore sits up at the sight of Shiana in her binoculars. She’d been watching Sheppard bounce dutifully from hut to hut at the front of the village for an hour before he started bouncing from carried-out patient to carried-out patient lying along the main avenue again for another hour after that, desperately trying not to report in like she knew he was supposed to, just like she’d hoped he’d do, and equally trying not to run back into the crazy leader chick, again just like Kenmore’d hoped he’d do. And again, just like Kenmore hoped, Shiana hadn’t waited for Sheppard to come to her, she’d come after him. At the soonest possible excuse, like Lorne and McKay lugging medical supplies to Doc Keller, Kenmore’d seen them of course. And, of course, the pissy leader followed Lorie and the scientist right to Sheppard to pick another fight and dredge up another rousing chorus of her own personal rendition of Les Marseilles. Jesus, some people…

Keeping the binoculars to her eyes, Kenmore balances herself carefully as she reaches behind her with her free hand and slips it underneath the bottom of her tactical vest. She carefully fumbles her fingertips around underneath her waistband until they touch on the Wraith pistol. She wriggles her fingers in further behind her waistband to wrap around the bone handle. She gingerly slips the weapon out from its safe keeping place and slowly holds it out in front of her. In her binoculars’ line of vision, she can just barely see the fuzzy horizon of the top of the pistol in her hand. She pulls her face away from the binoculars for a moment to make sure of what exactly she was looking at on the pistol and its angle. Okay good. She puts her eyes back to the binoculars.

Shiana’s laying in to Sheppard again. Arms flailing in great big grand gestures, that even to the un-cinematically trained eye, were overdramatic; purely for show. Jaw dropping in what was obviously a belting out of whatever it was she was claiming at the top of her voice, again for the whole village to hear whether or not there was a chance in Hell they weren’t in earshot; again purely for show. Silently, Kenmore pulls back the trigger and holds it. She hears the weapon start to rev up and waits…

A half-dozen feet from him, Shiana throws up her hands in what Sheppard has come to expect as her traditional soap box I’m-defending-my-people-and-I-want-them-all-to-know-it flail and of course roaring so loud no one was going to miss it either…

“You have not brought help to my people,” she screams at the top of her lungs, “You have rained down death and destruction on them again!”

And the green blast shot out of the forest, high and from one of the hills. It flew straight on a smooth, slightly descending angle towards Shiana and erupted against the side of her skull. She went down and out cold. Then came the scream…

“Wraith!”

Sheppard, Lorne, Rodney, and Teyla immediately drop to their individual defensive stances and get to cover after the middle-aged woman’s thoroughly unneeded announcement. Sheppard and Lorne hide behind a pair of fat barrels full of God knows what. Aim their P-90s towards the hill and start returning fire. Teyla and Rodney sticking close to each other’s back, having long ago abandoned their weapons in order to better provide medical attention to the wounded and recovering, hide nearby under the cover of the low overhanging thatch of a hut. Teyla keeps her keen eyes on the hill and all the ground in between. Peering, straining to see if drones were marching through the forest. Rodney pulls out his detector and starts scanning. Every single one of the villagers immediately starts screaming and running for cover as more green Wraith blasts blow plods of the dirt road up into the air like geysers or splintering the corners of random huts in their general vicinity the way funnel clouds touching down tore paths through cornfields in Oklahoma. Lorne gets on his radio.

“Ramses, Ramirez, get to the gate! We’ve got Wraith!”

Sheppard and Lorne watch as multiple blasts come from different start points in the same general area of the hill.

“There’s more than one of them,” Sheppard announces over the raucous, “Damn it, how could they have sneaked up on us? Teyla, didn’t you sense them?”

“I do not sense them now,” she tells him.

The men look at her.

“Don’t tell me the Wraith have actually managed to figure out a way around your ability to sense them coming? Please don’t,” Rodney begs, his slackened lower lip quivering.

John looks just as scared by the prospect too.

Kenmore lowers both her weapon and binoculars and dusts splintered wood fragments off of herself…Well not all their shots had gone wide. She can still hear the villagers’ screaming from here and sees little blurs scattering like crazy. Then she quietly turns her head and looks over at the Stargate…and the jumper.

Okay, according to Doctor McKay’s report and Sheppard’s from one of their first mission reports in Atlantis called Reliquary. All she had to do was think at it. She hoped this concept had a long range on it. If not, she was crap up a creek—well, tree…Kenmore stares at the jumper and thought of it coming on. Suddenly its ramp started to lower. Wait, no, no, not that. Suddenly the ramp immediately starts back up again. Okay it worked, but she didn’t have a lot of time left for this.

Kenmore closes her eyes…focused on the jumper, pictured it in her mind…the olive drab coloring of its flattened cylindrical body, raised geometric shapes, angled front and back…went inside, gray vinyl covered benches, racks made out of black webbing, gray armored briefcases, black plastic containers…pictured the front compartment…painful looking chairs she’d never sat in, light panels of intricate designs that meant nothing, indicated nothing to her, panels…the command console…the DHD. Then she hears it, clunk, even from here, clunk, the sounds of the gate locking chevrons into place, clunk clunk clunk clunk clunk. Kenmore opens her eyes as the gate flushes to life.

Suddenly men’s shouts come from the forest below her, far off still, obviously on the villager’s path, but still close enough to draw her attention. She shrinks back against the trunk and remains still, watching the gate area and thinking the jumper should shut the gate down now and turn itself off. Thankfully, it does. The gate shuts down and the jumper goes dark and quiet.

Suddenly two SGC personnel with weapons raised enter the gate area. They charge the Stargate. But they’re too late in more ways than just one way. They look around, spreading out…sort of. There’s only two of them. Can’t really spread out with just two. Obviously Sheppard wanted the others to guard the villagers in case things got really nasty. Kenmore watches one of the soldiers stand in front of the gate and make a gesture. She smiles. It was funny how you could tell what finger was being raised from a person’s fist even from here.

Posted in Season Six- Episode Two | Tagged fan fiction, John Sheppard, Lieutenant Ursula Kenmore, Major Lorne, puddle jumper, Reliquary, Rodney McKay, Season Six, SGC, Shiana, Stargate Atlantis, Teyla Emmagan, Wraith | Leave a comment

Episode Two- The Fires- Chapter Eleven

Posted on March 22, 2013 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Eleven

Lieutenant Ursula Kenmore casually picks her way through the forest, not bothering to slow her speed any to be particularly quiet. She was being sufficient enough though, not too loud to draw too much attention, but just enough sound and attention, she personally felt, to be thought of as an animal skittering around the underbrush. And thank God that this world’s concept of underbrush meant saplings growing as high as her chest, little foot, foot-and-a-half tall sprouting shards of seedlings yet to sprout themselves to sapling status, and what on Earth was considered normal pine forest underbrush bushes of big fronded ferns, relatively giant leaves that reminded her of skunk cabbage, but they didn’t smell any, and, funny enough, a few things that looked really, really similar to Devil’s Club, Old Man, Kenni-ka-knick, and thimbleberry bushes. She used to play around those back on mother’s ranch when she was little. She kept heading straight then her feet found where the ground started to head up, the part of the hill she’d skidded down when she first got to this planet. This part was one of the halves that made the valley the gate was in. Kenmore heads up it.

Good Lord, this was boring. Skitta marinky dinky dink, skitta marinky doo, I love you! She needed something to take away the monotony and she’d loved that song when she was a kid. But she couldn’t sing it out loud in the stillness of the forest and keep up her ruse. She’d even caught herself humming it a couple of times when her mind had accidentally wandered back into the monotony of the trek even if her mouth hadn’t followed. But she’d put a stop to the muffled vocalizations as soon as she realized she’d been doing it, didn’t need the big guy coming in and telling her to shut up.

After about ten, fifteen minutes or so she enters a clearing, one that offers her a view of the place mostly due to the fact that the trees below here had grown too short to block it from her. A nice little patch of saplings, seedlings, and underbrush bushes. Kenmore takes a moment to stop and look out. Off to her left she could see the village stretched out from the base of the two hills and the valley they created. For such a short time, it looks like she’s gone a good distance from the village. A cluster of pale-thatched huts and small roads branching off from a double-wide main avenue going through the center of the whole thing and heading straight up to the start of the valley. Funny, it was smaller than she’d thought it looked when she was in it. She’d could have sworn there were more huts than that, more alleys.

Off to her right, in the distance far closer than the village, sat the Stargate with their jumper parked by it and no guards. Clearly no one had thought there was going to be any unexpected company and that was what Kenmore had counted on: exactly what she had expected from Sheppard and Woolsey’s ideas of “peacekeeping” missions. Let’s just leave our butts hanging out in the wind with big ole targets plastered across ‘em. Sure, what could possibly happen? Clearly neither had spent enough time in the SGC to realize how bad one of these things could go whether you planned it, like she was, or not, like they were.

…This was her spot then. Kenmore turns around and looks for the nearest tree with a trunk big enough and fat enough to hold her weight. Plenty of thick branches too to help her up and they also had to be big enough and fat enough to hold her weight. And the sucker had to be tall too. She needed the height, mind tricking height. That was going to be the only way this was going to work.

Kenmore finished pulling herself up the rest of the way up the tree. It hadn’t taken much looking to find it. She’d turned around and the somewhat tall tree she stopped in front of was too skinny and didn’t have any branches within her reach even when she jumped…and the branches had been to spindly even if she could have reached them. But when she looked around behind that tree, she’d found this one. She glances back out the clearing, which apparently became more considerable when you actually climbed a tree, especially one that had outgrown the one in front of it by a hundred feet at least and all that was left in front of you now were spindly little bits of treetop. Perfect camouflage. Yep, this was the spot.

She turns and sits, settling herself on the thankfully big, thick branch with her back nestled against the even bigger, thicker trunk. Okay, this was going to take some time. She had to wait for the perfect moment.

Kenmore takes out her binoculars and looks towards the village. Everybody looked like little ants from here. She puts the binoculars to her face and adjusts their range. Okay better, she adjusts again, okay now it looked like the range of a regular scope.

And now…she waits.

Posted in Season Six- Episode Two | Tagged John Sheppard, Lt. Ursula Kenmore, Richard Woolsey, Season Six, SGC, Stargate Atlantis | Leave a comment

Episode Two- The Fires- Chapter Ten

Posted on March 15, 2013 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Ten

Keller didn’t believe in keeping too many people in one tight space; she feared disease outbreaks that, in these rural areas, she might not be able to control. And so John Sheppard continues on down the line of triaged locals now lining the main avenue of the village again. His gait is still strong and determined and he’s still pissed about Kenmore, but his temper has cooled a bit. At least Teyla wasn’t acting like a frightened cat around him anymore.

Walking it off always helped him like that, he remembered walking for hours after Nancy told him she wanted a divorce and simultaneously handed him the papers for one. He actually remembered it quite clearly. The air was crisp and cold and the sky was a frosty shade of clouded over silver, perfect for the autumn day so near to winter it had been. His boots crunched on the sidewalk. Leaves, yellow, orange, and red, were falling from the neighborhood trees with almost every pissed step he took…and that was a fast as hell pace. He’d honestly believed that if he walked quickly enough it’d be like that one scene in the first Superman movie and he’d somehow manage to reverse the rotation of the planet, go back in time, and stop the bad thing from happening. He wouldn’t have had to reverse it long, just twenty minutes back or so. Then he would have been able to stop Nancy from handing him those damn papers in her hands and saying what they were for before John could even think.

What a welcome home? She’d given him enough time to set down his duffel bag and go into the kitchen to get a nice frosty beer—God after that damn desert that was the best sounding thing in the world to him—out of the fridge before she’d come downstairs and did what she did to him. He’d just stood there for a moment, the beer just freshly tapped and waiting in his hand, then he just dropped it, walked right past Nancy, and out of the house. Now—then—he was freezing his butt off. No jacket, just anger and that wasn’t burning hot in him, it was burning god damn blizzard cold…Sonuvabitch, he’d thought then.

He was a soldier when they married, why now was she—then—had she suddenly become overwhelmed by that? Why? How? When his gritted teeth started chattering uncontrollably in his skull and that wasn’t giving him a headache anymore but giving him the biggest friggin’ migraine ever, he’d decided to head back. The house had been empty. She’d must have been packing when he’d gotten home the first time. Sonuvabitch, he’d thought then. He’d just gotten back from Iraq that morning and two hours after he’d stormed around the neighborhood and two hours later of him stewing and storming laps throughout the house, there was a knock at the door. He’d thought she’d come back, come to her senses that this was what she had signed up for when she uttered the words “I do” and put the ring on his finger and he put the ring on hers. When he opened the door, there had been a thickly-built, dark-skinned guy his height on the other side dressed in a crisp neat blue uniform: Air Force. And he handed John an envelope, signed, sealed, stamped, and now—then—delivered. Then the man saluted and walked back to his black non-descript sedan and drove away. John opened the envelope and read the letter inside, he had just been given the word that he was going to Afghanistan. Sonuvabitch, he’d thought then; God damn it, he thought now.

But that was beside the point. What he needed to do right now was keep himself busy, keep the hell away from Kenmore, and put on a good show for Shiana, especially Shiana, and her people. Be the good little soldier. But John wasn’t sure he could recover anything from this. Villagers wielding pitchforks at them was about as bad as it could get, they were just a step down from pitchforks and torches, but he’d try anything and everything right now. John suddenly paused, okay maybe he’d draw the line at groveling which he figured wouldn’t be entirely out of Shiana’s realm of thinking, it’d probably be her preference actually. But anything and everything else, sure.

He starts walking again; his eyes never left up ahead of him, it was part of the whole ‘walking it off’ thing. But it suddenly dawned on him if he kept going straight, he’d walk the villagers’ path right up to the Stargate. Did he really need to go report this now? He would have to make his usual report in a couple of hours anyway, Sooo…John immediately turns and walks into one of the huts. No.

* * *

Kenmore examines the Wraith stun pistol in her hands. It doesn’t look any different. She puts her tools’ case back in its pocket on her tacvest then walks back to the ‘window’ she broke in through. She takes a peek into the outside, left and right and basically everywhere in between a couple of times. But no one was there. Slipping the pistol underneath the back of her tacvest and beneath the lip of her pants where she normally kept her Beretta, she’d long ago ditched the sidearm incase a patient got physical with her and she didn’t need someone pulling her own weapon on her, Kenmore hefts herself up onto the ledge of the window again. She had had a zat with her, but apparently Sheppard had stripped her of it when she’d passed out…which actually made this easier…She glances back at the door. Guess no one was coming…on either end.

“Okay, fine. I’ll shut up…now.” Hopefully that sounded enough like she had finally run out of steam.

Kenmore slips her legs back out of the storage hut and drops out of the window, falling low to the ground. She looks left then right once more. Still clear. She moves forward, slipping into the dense forest and disappearing into it.

Posted in Season Six- Episode Two | Tagged Afghanistan, fan fiction, Iraq, Jennifer Keller, John Sheppard, Lieutenant Ursula Kenmore, Nancy Sheppard, Season Six, Shiana, Stargate Atlantis, Teyla Emmagan | Leave a comment

Episode Two- The Fires- Chapter Nine

Posted on March 8, 2013 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Nine

Kenmore creeps up behind the edge of a hut that has its back against the forest and peers out on the street from between it and another hut a few feet across from her. People were milling about. Some going about their business. Some providing care. Others, yeah, she recognized those guys, eyeing the hut she had just vacated…Kenmore looks over. Just like she’d expected Sheppard had appointed the big guy to guard her door. That explained why there had been enough resistance behind it to break a chair; Damn, King Kong was hard to move. But with the comfort of the two radios playing telephone between each other, Kenmore had no problem speaking her mind about it, although she does maintain a far quieter volume in order to not draw attention to herself while she was out and about…

“Oh please big guy like you’re really enough to shut me up.”

She saw Ronon’s scowl deepen and allowed herself the smile of knowing the radio trick was actually working.

Kenmore turns her head and looks around at the village outskirts on the left. She saw those guys run off and come back with weapons from somewhere over there. She’d have to take her biggest risk here while she’s waiting: she keeps talking. If she didn’t, the big guy might get suspicious.

“All I need is a weapon. Anything’ll do.”

Kenmore watches the villagers, those same itchy trigger finger guys, eyeing her vacated hut like they were just waiting to break out the torches and pitchforks again. They were going to be her key.

“Come on. Just look. Just one look to tell me where to start.”

And she gets it. One of the men, the tallest, thinnest, and the one that had been the most at the beck and call of Shiana, glances over at a hut, the exact copy of the storage one, far off to his left then returns his eyes to Ronon. Kenmore smiles and sneaks across the gap to the back of the other hut and continues hurrying along the perimeter of the village’s back.

“Well that was a big help, make it easy for me why don’t ya’.”

Kenmore keeps silent count from hut to hut until she comes up on the back of a hut that has a window, just like the storage one had. They really had made it easy for her. All the other huts didn’t have windows onto the forest, probably a security feature for huts that contained people rather than food stores. Although you never know…Hopefully this indicated her count had been correct and this was the hut she needed.

“Okay, have to make this good,” she says into her microphone/radio.

Kenmore squats down even further and slips across the ground to come up underneath the window. The window’s paneless but not frameless, and it’s got cording quadranting it off. Just like the storage one had. Please let it be just like the storage hut…She turns her head and presses her ear against the hut’s exterior, just on the off chance someone was in there. She holds her breath for a few seconds; Lord knows SG personnel had crappy luck like that with harebrained schemes like this. She doesn’t hear anything even vaguely trying to scurry around inside. She angles her head back at what she personally considered to be a contortionist’s angle and lifts up a little on the balls of her booted feet to look inside. Initially, no one. A brief scan, God this was hurting, still no one. Kenmore comes out of her extremely uncomfortable position and turns around, making sure to get a quick look around her as she did so…

“All clear. Here we go.”

Kenmore stands up, pulls out her pocket knife, and cuts the cords, still keeping an eye out. Then she heaves herself up on the window’s sill. There was a chair stationed right under the ‘window’, good enough…and convenient. She takes one last look around outside then swings her leg over and steps onto the seat of the chair…and her leg goes straight through the thin wooden weave with a loud crunch that she knew just had to have been heard over the radio. So she tells Specialist Dex exactly what she thinks about that too…

“Oh, God damn it,” she hisses, “That hurt.”

Then she waits. Nothing happens over the other end of the radio that she can hear and there’s no roar of indignation echoing around the village outside, so…She figured—hoped—he’d let her stew with her owwie and not lift a finger to check on her, barely shifted a finger standing outside probably except for maybe a grin showing up on his face. Thank you Big Guy. She grins for a moment too then swings her other leg as well as the rest of herself clear of the mess of the no longer usable for sitting chair and hops her somewhat stuck leg out of it. She shakes off broken woven seat remnants for a moment as she looks around the hut.

Although it did have a look-alike table and chairs in the middle of the space, probably someone’s attempt at a war room, this hut didn’t have shelves all over the walls like the other one had. But what was proving to be universal of armories, no matter where in what galaxy, is the perimeter of the hut’s walls are lined with racks of the weaponry she had expected to find here: bows, quivers of arrows, spears…yadda, yadda, yadda. And on the floor sitting against the walls beneath the racks are trunks. She looks over to her left. One of the trunks over there has a lock on it. It’s made of a slim crescent of silvery metal and a big ole hunk of scarlet wax, but it’s still a lock and the only trunk she could see, she takes another glance around the room just to be sure, with one on it.

“Well what do we have here.”

She walks over to it and squats down for a closer look. She turns the thick clunky lock in her hands as much as it can turn while still attached to the trunk. There’s a lone symbol that meant nothing to Kenmore raised in the wax on both of its sides. She lets the lock fall lazily out of her hand to continue its dangling on the trunk’s front. Then she stands up and takes a moment to analyze the degree of angle required then slams her foot down on the lock and its latch. The leather of the trunk easily tears down with the force and angle of her stomp.

“Aww, sukey, sukey now.”

Kenmore opens the now relatively useless lid—and basically the front for that matter—and looks inside. There are Wraith weapons. A store of highly precious Wraith weapons and ammo nodules to be exact. No wonder there was a lock. These were ‘in case of special emergencies’ weapons most likely collected from Wraith they actually managed to defeat over the hopefully recent years. She reaches in and pulls out the most familiar weapon to her, a Wraith pistol, and a few of the smaller energy cell nodules. She pockets the nodules in one of the breast pockets of her tacvest then stands up as she looks the pistol over in her hands. Casually, she walks over to the table.

“Well, you’re certainly familiar. I think you might be able to help me.”…And hopefully that didn’t just trigger Big Guy’s curiosity enough for him to actually look in on me. She’d feel really stupid if she’d managed to get this far only for something like her word choice to shoot her in the foot now.

But there again, she wasn’t hearing anything over her radio and no barbaric roar of rage bouncing off the trees outside the hole in the wall, Sooo. She quietly sits down on the edge of the table and reaches for one of her lower vest pockets. She thumbs the Velcro holding the pocket’s flap closed over its contents apart and pulls out a thin, black, plastic box, kind of like a wide cigarette case. Kenmore easily pops the case open, revealing the set of small screwdrivers, the sort meant for eyeglasses, inside to her fingertips.

“Let’s hope we might be able to pry you open.” Again there was no disturbing news coming from the other end of her radio, apparently the big guy didn’t think there was anything in the storage hut that could pose a substantial threat as a weapon or be made to be one. And he would have been right, what was she going to do? Assault him with alien eggplant?

Kenmore lays the screwdriver case on the table beside her and blindly digs one of the screwdrivers out with her right hand as she runs her left thumb over the pistol. Her eyes focused intently on the weapon. Every sinew of its organic components. Every curve of its bone matter. Every possible facet of the mechanical elements that normally glowed beneath a thin film of organic material. But there just isn’t anything standing out to her as a means of opening this thing up. She turns the pistol over in her hand and runs her eyes and thumb along the weapon’s side again. There’s nothing on this side either.

“Okay, maybe not.”

She runs her thumbnail along it. Maybe all the biological elements on the thing make it so that it can only operate when it recognizes fellow Wraith DNA. Like the Ancients had their Ancient Touch Activation.

“Okay I don’t have that, Glenda the Goodwitch of Atlantis has that, but I don’t have that.”

But it was reported in numerous missions that Sheppard had handled one pretty well and another team member, Lieutenant Aiden Ford, had as well on countless occasions over the Expedition’s five, almost six years now…as well as their fellow Atlantis Expedition members. And Sheppard has the so-called Ancient gene and Ford didn’t have any Ancient gene at all, he hadn’t been born with it and his body had rejected the gene therapy that might have been able to activate that particular part of his genetic code, let alone either one of them having any Wraith DNA between them. So…she should be able to operate this thing. She looks it over in her hand again. But operating the pistol and being able to get inside it are two different things, apparently. Well…if she had to carve into the bio-elements, would the thing still be able to work?

“Wow, this is tricky,” she was genuinely shocked by this.

She runs her thumb past the larger rim of the weapon next to where the nodules were supposed to go and digs her nail into the slight groove she felt there. It does give a little at her attempt. Okay, I’ll start there, but…Before moving on, she takes one last glance over the weapon. As harebrained schemes go, this one was one of her least well thought out, which was the backbone of harebrained schemes, no well thoughts involved except for the loose cannon kind, but this was also one of her least knowledgeable ones, which wasn’t a part of harebrained schemes at all and never should be. One should never plan on utilizing a plan where they had no clue how half of the crap they were relying on was supposed to work. Perhaps she had been spoiled by Goa’uld technology; flick button, snake snaps open, press button, snake fires, flick button again, snake recoils. Easy-peasy. There was another opening at the tip of the Wraith pistol exposing how the unit converted the energy it generated into the focused stun beam it emitted…and it looks like the only way to get to that part of the gun was to dig in right here. Kenmore finally nods to herself.

“Well here it goes.”

And she pries the screwdriver’s small tip in underneath the bony rim where her fingernail had managed to split a big enough gap for the slim wedge of metal to just barely fit into.

Posted in Season Six- Episode Two | Tagged Ancient Touch Activation, fan fiction, Goa'uld, John Sheppard, Lieutenant Ursula Kenmore, Lt. Aiden Ford, Ronon Dex, Season Six, Stargate Atlantis, Wraith DNA | Leave a comment

Episode Two- The Fires- Chapter Eight

Posted on March 1, 2013 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Eight

Kenmore eyes the door. Apparently no one’s gonna come in and tell her to either shut up or just flat out guard her to her face. Oh thank God, Kenmore breathes a sigh of relief and promptly jumps her legs off the other chair’s seat and back onto the floor. She leans on the table with Sheppard’s radio in her hand and starts retuning the thing to a frequency not normally used either for regular team service, multiple team service, or even emergency service. It was perfectly convenient or at least as convenient as she needed it to be. Then she stood the radio on the table in front of her. She glances at the door again.

“I can’t believe you people’d do this,” she yells at it, distinctly reducing her volume to sound more like she’s frustratedly venting, “All this crap to me, me, about helping others. Good God! The hypocrisy of you people.”

The Lieutenant reaches down beside her and pulls the radio out of her pant’s pocket and starts retuning it as well. She was hoping someone could here this. She heard Sheppard put someone out there, she just wasn’t sure who yet…but she had a pretty good guess. As soon as the radio was calibrated, Kenmore gets up and walks over to the window.

“Of course, what could I expect from people under Woolsey’s command. If you can put a price tag on a doctor’s life,” Janet Frasier, the bastard…, “what sort of price tag do you put on a whole village,” she calls back over her shoulder to the door.

Her eyes stay intently on the window. She hoped she was right about this. She reaches up like she’s about to lay her palm on its pane…and her hand goes through one of the spaces between the quadranted opening in the wall to feel the cool breeze just barely blowing now outside. The village didn’t have glass, just the idea of windows. It was what she had figured going from hut to hut glancing up at their windows last night and seeing no glare of her reflected self staring back at her from the black that should have been on the window’s other side or this morning when there hadn’t been a reflection cast on it by the day’s light. The hole was divided by woven cording like the sort that held the thatch of their roofs together. Kenmore pulls out her pocket knife and easily cuts the cords. Who ever heard of locking up a prisoner and letting them keep their gear?

“Oh, of course, let’s not muddle up an already bought and paid for alliance with something so benign and trivial as tribal genocide,” she kept up the charade, “No. Gee, what the hell was I thinking? So how big a price did Woolsey pay for you guys! A village here, a city there…”

Oh, that one got to him. Ronon was not a man to be bought and paid for. Neither was anyone else from Atlantis. Ronon’s smile disappears. They were all kind people. Like the kind people Ronon had met when he was a Runner. Random worlds, random villages filled with people leery of strangers, but there was always a handful that felt, believed with every fiber of their being that everyone needed to help others because, after all, they were all victims of the Wraith. Teyla was one of those people, and so had been Doctor Weir. They would die before they’d ever hand someone, anyone over to death. Ronon remembered villages like this, ones that reminded him so much of the Athosians, and the villager who would always come out of safety to help him, usually a woman. Women it seemed never feared anything, they always had large hearts that could take in anyone no matter what might eventually happen to themselves…Death, it was always death. Death would come for the women who would help him. And always he’d be reminded of his fiancé, Melena, on Sateda…and he’d remember the fire from Wraith weapons shatter the window that had been behind her and it’s fire engulf her, taking her away from him…The way the Replicator’s weapons had taken Doctor Weir. She may not have reminded him so strictly of Melena, but she had a maternal quality to her that brought back memories of Melena being a nurse and, of course, his own mother…Ronon’s lips pucker. That was a sour memory. His mother had been taken by the Wraith. Ronon had been about the same age as Teyla had been when her father had been taken. It was terrifying to see his mother be swept up by the culling beam after shoving him into the safety of a storefront’s doorway. He had reached out to her, but she had shunned his reach and screamed for him to stay down, stay away, stay safe. Ronon blinked, there was stinging pricking at the back of his eyes. He’d stayed there, small and frightened and crying in the shadows, not knowing what to do next except to live for the strong woman that had sacrificed herself in order to ensure that her son survived. Always the strong women died first, died young…and now there was this little brat, who couldn’t care about that, didn’t care about anyone but herself, her own selfish attitude. He shifts from foot to foot, Didn’t Sheppard say I could shoot her? He did say I could shoot her…

Kenmore steps up on the surprisingly strong shelf, it holds her weight for the moment she needs it to, then she sits on the thick sill.

“…a weapon somewhere,” she finishes her sentence.

She reaches into one of the pockets on her tactical vest and comes out with a small roll of duct tape. Quietly and quickly, she pulls and tears off a couple of inches, leaving the strip to dangle off the edge of her pinky’s fingertip as she used her index finger and thumb to smooth the roll over and slip it back into its pocket on her vest. She slowly spreads the small sticky strip across the transceiver button on her radio, pinning it open. It lets off a screech that causes Kenmore to wince and cringe, Aw, damn it. She was too close to Sheppard’s radio on the table. She shoves her arm as far out the ‘window’ as she can while her cringing body braces against the hole in the wall’s sides. The screeching subsides. Her radio was out of range, but there was no way in hell someone didn’t hear that…

“Ow. God damn it, Sheppard, you bastard. Did you do that? Did you change the frequency so I can’t call anyone? Sheppard? Sheppard!” Hopefully that covered enough for her. She waited…nothing; yep, it did.

She slowly slides her hands on to the wall acting as the window’s frame like a tree frog gripped wood and leans herself out to the radio. She carefully slips it only halfway back into its regular pocket on her tacvest’s shoulder, making sure to keep its speaker wide and clear and as close to her mouth as to practically make the thing a microphone. Now, at least, she didn’t have to yell herself hoarse anymore.

“If you think that’s gonna keep me quiet,” she said in her regular volume of voice, “you’ve got another thing coming. I can yell a lot louder than a radio can pick up!”

Kenmore heard her voice echo slightly over Sheppard’s radio on the table

…and smiled. It may have sounded weird to her right here in front of the thing, but through the density of the wood door, the half a heartbeat lag time would have been more than muffled enough.

“You bet your ass I can.”

And she slides the rest of her body gingerly out the window. She slips down to the ground, keeps low, and runs away from the hut, using the tree line as cover.

* * *

Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard storms down the main avenue of the village with Teyla Emmagan trailing a few steps behind him as Major Evan Lorne and Doctor Rodney McKay run up to them.

“What is it,” McKay asks, “What happened?”

Sheppard storms right between the two men.

“Kenmore,” he growled and the way he did it did not invite anyone to ask him anything further.

They look back at Teyla, she catches their eyes, but doesn’t answer. They keep pace with her, watching Sheppard’s back. After a few steps, McKay leans over to her…

“Okay, so what exactly happened?”

Sheppard suddenly rounds on them.

“What exactly happened, Rodney, is what always happens. Kenmore started crap with Shiana and I finished it. Now I have to go and fix more crap I wouldn’t have had to deal with if that,” he points back the way he came from, struggling, fighting to control his anger, “brat,” he spits, although he wanted to say something else that started with a ‘b’ but he wasn’t going to go that far with Teyla in front of him, “weren’t here!”

Sheppard turns and continues storming down the avenue. McKay stares after him, slack jawed and wide-eyed. John’s never yelled at him, he’s yelled at John, but—well there was that time John had the bug stuck to his neck. But even then John hadn’t really yelled at him. John Sheppard, although he had had plenty of times when it was totally called for over the past almost six years, had never yelled at Rodney McKay. It just wasn’t the man’s style. Rodney remembered when John took him to task over reactivating the nannites in Elizabeth Weir’s body in order to save her life, there had been a few shouts, but even then John’s anger, rage even, had been cool and frosty and rather calm in its intimidation, strict and stern but still calm. He’s never seen John Sheppard like this. He looks over at Teyla.

“What did she do?”

“Apparently Lieutenant Kenmore offered some food to a child.” Inside Teyla started at her own words…

It sounded so benign when put that way.

Lorne nods, “Sounds like Urs.”

Teyla and McKay look at him. It wasn’t like any Ursula Kenmore they had seen or met yet. Teyla looks back at Rodney.

“Shiana objected,” she went on, “She believed Lieutenant Kenmore was trying to poison the boy. Things…got out of hand.”

“How out of hand,” Lorne asks.

“Some villagers came to Shiana and the boy’s defense armed.”

The three of them look back at Sheppard’s quickly fleeing back.

“This is not going to go good,” Lorne says, “Is it?”

Posted in Season Six- Episode Two | Tagged Athosians, Doctor Elizabeth Weir, Doctor Janet Frasier, fan fiction, John Sheppard, Lieutenant Ursula Kenmore, Major Lorne, Melena, Replicators, Richard Woolsey, Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex, Runner, Sateda, Season Six, Shiana, Stargate Atlantis, Teyla Emmagan, Wraith, Wraith culling | Leave a comment

Episode Two- The Fires- Chapter Seven

Posted on February 22, 2013 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Seven

The hut has a single window directly across from its only door. Its walls, even under the window, are lined with shelves of food being stored in either baskets made of woven grass or brick-colored clay pots. And in the middle of the room is a table, undoubtedly for food preparation and just some place to temporarily put the baskets of stuff for inventory or whatever until it got its permanent home on one of the shelves, made of what looked to be stripped, polished, and carved white maple—alien white maple. Each side of the wooden table has an equally handmade wooden chair, also made of the alien white maple. Well, each side had had a chair—Kenmore looked down at the broken remains of the one she had thrown at the door, which had gotten the thing to open about an inch. But Sheppard had put a stop to that real quick. Then she looks back up at the door.

“You can’t do this,” she shouts at it. “If you let her kill these people, you’re just as much a butcher as she is! You hear me! A butcher! You can’t let her kill them! We didn’t come all this way to this galaxy just to murder whole planets just because they survived! Sheppard? Sheppard? Sheppard!”

Kenmore turns and starts looking around.

“You have to intervene! You have to! I don’t care what this alliance says! You can’t just let a tyrant start massacring her own people!” Kenmore keeps yelling as she walks over to the other side of the table and brings its chair over to the newly vacated front side of the table, careful to keep what was in one of her hands from getting damaged or accidentally activated prematurely. Then she walks to the end of the table and turns its chair at an angle towards the other.

“You can’t just stand idly by and let it happen! We’re here to help!!”

Then she sits down on the end chair, puts her legs up on the angled chair, leans back, and crosses her arms over her chest, finally bringing to light the radio she had been so carefully protecting in her hand.

“Fine! I’ll just sit here and wait for you to come to your senses,” or figure out I snatched your radio off your shoulder, “while a psycho goes around killing people out there! Don’t expect me to hold my breath!”…or actually wait around for you to come to your senses.

Ronon rolls his eyes, Pleease let her hold her breath, but his smile didn’t waver for a moment.

Posted in Season Six- Episode Two | Tagged fan fiction, John Sheppard, Lieutenant Ursula Kenmore, Ronon Dex, Season Six, Stargate Atlantis | Leave a comment

Episode Two- The Fires- Chapter Six

Posted on February 15, 2013 by stargateatlantisseasonsix

Chapter Six

Kenmore comes to on a cot with Doctor Jennifer Keller kneeling beside her and Sheppard and his team gathered around a few steps behind the good doctor, waiting. Kenmore glances up at the window in the wall just above her and sees the daylight of the light blue sky outside. She tries to get up as quickly as she can possibly scramble…

“Oh good God, the patients,” she gasps.

Keller tries to push Kenmore back down.

“Relax, they’re fine,” she applies her soothing voice and deeply dimpled smile.

“What happened,” Kenmore asks.

“You passed out,” Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard tells her.

“How long has it been since you’ve slept,” Doctor McKay asks.

Kenmore looks uncomfortable as she leans back on her straightened arms behind her, allowing her to sit up for this.

“Ninety-six hours,” she finally admits like a child confessing they stole a cookie from the cookie jar before they’d had dinner first.

McKay gapes at her, even Sheppard starts.

“Are you out of your mind?”

Kenmore doesn’t look at the scientist as she tries to get herself up the rest of the way.

“I don’t sleep much,” she grumbled, trying to dismiss them from asking about the reason why she doesn’t sleep much.

Keller tries to reach out to her again but Kenmore suddenly grabs her wrist, not tightly just firmly enough to make the doctor think twice. Ronon starts and John puts his hand out in front of the Satedan to stop him. Kenmore looks at Keller.

“Don’t,” and for once the word didn’t come out as a direct threat, “I don’t like to be touched, okay. Just…don’t.”

Jennifer nods. The Lieutenant releases her wrist and the doctor backs up. Kenmore swings her legs over the edge of the cot and pushes herself up to a standing position. The doctor stands up as well.

“You should get some rest,” Jennifer warns her.

“I’m fine.”

“Perhaps I didn’t explain myself. You need to get some rest. It’s not good for your body to be starved of it like that.”

“I scanned her,” McKay says with the lifesigns detector still in his hand, “It’s not showing anything wrong with her anymore, not even the exhaustion it had previously registered. She’s fine.”

Kenmore glowers at him.

“Like I needed your little palm pilot to figure that out.”

The Lieutenant heads for the hut’s door.

“I didn’t clear you to return to active duty,” Jennifer Keller calls after her.

“Like I need you to,” the Lieutenant calls her response back without looking.

“I didn’t clear you to return to active duty,” Sheppard tells her sternly.

That makes Kenmore finally stop just in front of the hut’s door.

“Yes, because of course it’s always a good idea to be a man down when you’re resources are stretched to the limit and you have no back up.” She turns slightly and aims an ‘Are you seriously kidding me?’ look back at the Colonel. Then she walks out.

God dammit, Sheppard stared at the hut’s entrance, barely managing to hold himself in, she’s going to do it again, isn’t she?

Sheppard’s team and Keller walk out of the hut and eye Kenmore on the other side of the avenue, standing with Lorne and some of his men. Jennifer sighs as Kenmore slips on her green BDU shirt and starts buttoning it up.

“You know she’s right,” Jennifer says, “but I’m right too. If she tries to push herself, it’ll force you to be a man down.”

Kenmore reaches down by one of the sitting soldiers and picks up her tacvest and throws it on.

Sheppard nods, “Oh, she’ll push it. She’s got that look again.”

Kenmore zips up the vest and starts to snap its two front snaps shut.

“What look,” Rodney asks.

Kenmore gives her body a once over.

“The same look she gave before she ran off and half a warehouse wall fell on her,” John tells him, “She’s planning something.”

“Should I keep an eye on her,” Ronon asks.

Sheppard nods.

“Well, whatever you watch her do, make sure you watch her eat at some point in time. If she’s going to push herself again, she’s going to need to eat to keep up what little energy she has,” Jennifer sighs again. “I’ve got more patients to see. Rodney, come with me, I’ll need the detector.”

Sheppard nods him on and Rodney leaves with his girlfriend. Ronon comes up beside Sheppard, Sheppard glances over at him, an unspoken cue is given, and Ronon starts across the main avenue of the village towards Kenmore. Teyla moves closer to the remaining member of her team, keeping her eyes on the Lieutenant.

“What do you suspect she will do,” Teyla asks.

Sheppard shakes his head, “I don’t know, but whatever it is, it won’t be good.”

Teyla nods beside him.

“While Ronon tails Kenmore, we should follow Shiana…just in case.”

“I agree.”

“Where is she,” Sheppard asks.

Teyla gestures down and across the avenue.

“One of the villagers visiting another patient near Lieutenant Kenmore’s bed mentioned that he had seen her just starting her rounds in the first hut on that side.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Fifteen perhaps twenty minutes ago.”

Sheppard eyes the hut, “How many people are in that hut?”

“Twenty, I believe.”

John nods.

“Good, so say she spends at least one maybe two minutes with each villager…so she’ll probably still be there.”

Teyla nods, any leader would want to spend as much time with her people as she could while still allowing for time to be with them all at least once throughout the day. John turns to her with one of his playfully charming smiles and bows slightly, gesturing her on. She smiles at him, indeed playfully charmed, and accepts the gentlemanly offer.

* * *

Kenmore reaches out a hand to Lorne right beside her. He looks at her. She smiles at him. He smiles back and shakes her hand. Then she turns and starts up the village’s main avenue, towards the nearest hut. Ronon continues across the road and follows Kenmore using the quickly crowding street as more than adequate cover for his skills. A few huts down, Kenmore reaches into one of her vest pockets, pulls out a Powerbar, and unwraps it. She starts to take a bite, but when she looks up, she stops. A small boy wearing clothes that had been scorched and burned into rags by whatever introduction to the fires he had had is standing in front of the entrance to the next hut. He looked like he was waiting, looking, for someone, but the expression on his face told Kenmore he really didn’t expect to find anyone, let alone see them. But he was still there, hoping. Then he turned to look around some more and saw Kenmore, frozen in place with a Powerbar halfway into her mouth, and he stared at her…Rather, he stared at the hovering Powerbar and licked his lips like any other starving creature at the sight of anything even remotely edible. Kenmore took the bar out of her mouth and looked down at it then back up at the boy then back at the bar then she smiles and starts walking forward again.

* * *

Sheppard walks out of a hut, sighs, and starts looking around disgruntled. He hears a rustle off to his right and his head snaps to look over at it. But it was not the person he’d been hoping it was. Teyla steps out of another hut, letting the doorflap she had lifted fall closed behind her, and walks up to him.

“Shiana was not in there and none of her people know where she might have gone.”

Damn it.

“Same here,” he said instead.

He looks around again. This was exactly what he had planned on avoiding: losing Shiana in the growing crowd of concerned remaining villagers now feeling comfortable enough to either go see injured friends and family or go about their daily business.

“I didn’t think she could move that fast,” John complains, “I mean, wouldn’t you stop and take some time with your people if they were sick or injured?”

“A leader seeks to ensure the safety of her people.”

Sheppard looks at her. He knew that tone of voice.

“We are keeping them safe. She had them dying in fires before we came here,” he defended.

“I know,” Teyla said calmly in that benevolent voice of hers that sounded like the image the name Mother Earth could conjure up.

“Then what’s the problem?”

“She does not believe that,” Teyla stated matter-of-factly, understanding as a fellow leader of village-life in the Pegasus Galaxy would.

“That’s why you’re with me,” John tells her, again trying to smooth over things—And why was Rodney the only one not giving him problems today?—he hadn’t expected he’d have to smooth over, “We are going to talk to her and try to convince her we don’t mean anyone any harm. You from a leader-to-leader position and me from a Representative of Atlantis position.”

Teyla nods, silently and respectfully, but he sees the look in her eyes that ghosts the same look she gave him when he refused to help save Orin’s family during a massive Wraith culling practically six years ago now, when he made the decision to leave Kenmore to her own devices in that warehouse a week ago. Like there was looming catastrophe on the outside as well as the inside. An exchange comes back to haunt him…What else do you want from me? Too much I fear…Words and movements come back…No, Colonel, she had said politely enough with a shake of her head that fluttered the upraised tips of her shoulder-length amber hair, I chose to place my trust in you. She tilted her head to deliver the warning, There is a difference. John had lost that exchange as well. Teyla had walked away from him leaving him realizing that one of the most important members of his team, most important to him, believed his judgment was flawed but she was following him into the obvious oblivion anyway. And John had hated that feeling, still did. He looks her in the eye and opens his mouth, but before he can say anything, a marine comes running down the avenue, shouting for him…

“Colonel Sheppard!”

Their heads snap to the marine.

“What is it?”

“Lieutenant Kenmore’s in a confrontation, Sir…with Shiana.”

God damn it. That’s what Ronon was supposed to put a stop to. The marine skids to a stop as Sheppard and Teyla rush up to him. He ushers them past him and then runs full tilt behind them.

Sheppard runs up to the wall of a screaming, yelling mob of villagers and starts to push his way through to the fracas at the center of it all. He sees some of the villagers on the far right side of the mob break off and run towards a hut nestled at the end of an alley created by two other larger huts at the forest’s edge. He pushes his way harder and breaks into the small birth given to Shiana freely standing her ground in front of her people, in particular a small malnourished-looking boy, and Kenmore. John was thankful to see the Lieutenant was being held back and up off the ground by Ronon, although she was kicking and fighting against the Satedan’s strength. She looked like she was being quite the handful to him, but at least she wasn’t being the handful in Shiana’s arms or grappling with Shiana down in the mud in front of her people. But there again, both women were screaming at each other, and that wasn’t good in front of Shiana’s people either. Subsequently, John was also grateful to see a few SGC soldiers trying to keep the peace behind Ronon and Kenmore. The Colonel steps forward.

“What the hell is going on here!”

The crowd quiets down, even Shiana does, so does Kenmore, but she still keeps fighting Ronon’s uplifting grip on her. Shiana’s breathless fury is back in her eyes. Huffing and puffing, she points an accusatory finger at Kenmore…

“I caught her trying to poison this boy!”

Sheppard looks at the emaciated child being held back from the fray by the villagers behind her again, Okay, that explains him…And? Sheppard turns to Ronon, from behind Kenmore’s ornery failing Ronon stares back at him, and Sheppard nods. Ronon puts the ornery Lieutenant down. She’s huffing and puffing just as much as Shiana is. She regains her balance from her semi-stagger to get the hell out of the Satedan weapons specialist’s reach and stands there glaring at the tribal leader. Her puffs of air rhythmically fluffing dislodged strands of her hair that had fallen across her face.

“I was not. I was giving him my Powerbar,” Kenmore snaps.

Sheppard glances at Ronon for confirmation.

Ronon begrudgingly nods.

“She’s right,” he tells the group in his gravelly voice.

Shiana laughs sourly, “Of course you would lie to save one of your own.”

Wow this woman had a lot to learn, Sheppard thought, Ronon would have gladly thrown Kenmore to the wolves, but apparently he draws the line at lying to do it. Good thing to know.

Sheppard turns to address Shiana and sees that the villagers he had seen run away have pushed their ways back to the front of the crowd behind her and they’ve come back armed. We don’t need any of that…

“He’s not,” he needed to defuse the situation quickly, “Look, where we come from a Powerbar is a source of nutrition. It’s food. Apparently she was trying to feed him. It’s alright.”

Shiana scoffs.

“We do not need your food. We can feed ourselves!”

The vehement leader turns to the crowd gathered behind her, all their eyes are focused on her. She nods at the armed men then reaches forward, takes the boy, and walks away, clearly feeling she’d won that one in the polls of public opinion. And judging by the way the crowd disperses with her, both John and Shiana knew she had it; it was now only a matter of time before she’d have the Atlantis personnel tucking tail and running back through the gate to their beloved Lost City of the Ancients. John watches Shiana’s back, the boy practically being dragged along beside her because his legs are just too short to keep up the strong, quick pace of hers.

The little boy’s eyes turn and look back longingly at the partially eaten, partially unwrapped Powerbar lying in the dirt of the road. The boy licks his lips at the image again, salivating, so desperate. Sheppard has no doubt that later the kid’ll probably sneak away from Shiana, come right back here, and eat the bar no matter how dirty or stepped on it would be by then, how it was now. Sheppard eyes the kid knowing if Kenmore hadn’t started causing problems, they could probably have given the kid a full MRE right now without a single squabble about it—well, maybe not without a single squabble but at least a hell of a lot less of one than this had been.

Sheppard walks forward up to Kenmore and Ronon, but shifts his eyes to the armed men. They’re staying behind, watching the SGC members.

“‘Apparently’,” Kenmore repeats angrily beside him.

Sheppard keeps his eyes coolly on the men. It was just the men and them left in what had once been the first circle of the mob. With the crowd fully dispersed now, the armed men finally heft their weapons onto their shoulders and take them back to the nestled, semi-secret hut. Sheppard watches them go in then walk back out again, unarmed. Okay, so there was an armory here. Great, that was a big help. At least now he knew where to find the villagers if and when the boiling point broke the thermometer. John still hoped he could salvage this operation, he had to; there was just one problem left, if he could get rid of it…

“There was nothing ‘apparently’ about it,” Kenmore keeps going beside him, “Don’t try and cover my ass.”

Suddenly Sheppard, tensed taut face and gritted teeth, turns on her. He viciously grips Kenmore’s upper arm and starts dragging her over to the nearest hut. An empty one used for storage that he’d stumbled across last night with Teyla by accident thinking it held casualties. They’d thought it was another hut of flame refugees, their last of the night; thank God it wasn’t and they were blessedly given an earlier night to eat and rest. Thank God it would do just fine for him…

“What the hell are you doing,” she snaps.

“Covering my ass,” John finally allows himself to growl at her as much as he really wanted to. To be as mad as he wanted to. To be as hateful of her as he wanted to be.

He opens the hut’s door. And it is an actual door at that, despite its scraggly appearance. With a knob made out of knotted rope and everything. And throws Kenmore in. She bumps into the chairs and table in the center of the room. She turns around.

“Now you stay here and—”

Kenmore lunges forward, trying to get out. Sheppard throws himself in the doorway. There’s a struggle as Kenmore tries to shove her way past him. He absolutely refuses to let her do it, even if he has to hogtie her in the middle of the room to do it…Then he hears it. Some Velcro give somewhere on his body. That’s it! He brings his leg up in between them and shoves with all his strength, attitude, and anger. Kicking Kenmore back. Kenmore staggers against the chairs and table harder this time. Her hands come out behind her to stop herself from falling as one of the chairs crashes to the floor and the table gives behind her a little. Sheppard steps back out the doorway and slams it shut. It bounces wobbly off of its frame slightly, stunned by its own ferocious velocity. If he couldn’t finish what he wanted to say, fine! Let the brat stay there!

Suddenly he grabs Ronon’s jacket lapel and drags his friend the two steps over to stand in front of the door. Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard was fuming.

“You stand right here and don’t move,” he yells in Ronon’s face, slamming his extended index finger downward.

Suddenly the door tries to shoot open with a loud wooden crack. It doesn’t open very far. It runs into some of Ronon’s unmoving mass. Sheppard right hooks the door closed again and Ronon steps back fully against it to make sure it has absolutely no room to open whatsoever. Sheppard, seething, jabs his finger at the door right beside his friend’s head…

“And if she tries to get out again, shoot her! I don’t give a damn what Woolsey thinks! I don’t give a damn she has a kid in Atlantis! Just shoot her!”

He storms off back into the rest of the village. Teyla in shock watches him go then glances at Ronon, who was smiling happier than she had seen him smile in a long time. And that was a bad thing, Ronon looked like he was on the hunt again. She hurries after Sheppard. After a moment, the door starts to rumble again and Kenmore can be heard yelling behind it. Ronon’s grin broadens.

Teyla pushes her way past people and between them as gracefully and considerately as possible as she hurries through the dispersing crowd.

“John,” she calls after him.

He keeps going, “I don’t want to hear it Teyla.”

Suddenly he rounds on her and shoves an irate finger in her shocked face. They stop dead in their tracks.

“I’ve had enough of her, okay. Enough! And if I have to lock her up or shoot her, then fine. I’m gonna do that.” He storms off again, leaving Teyla behind. Stunned in his wake.

Posted in Season Six- Episode Two | Tagged fan fiction, Jennifer Keller, John Sheppard, Lieutenant Ursula Kenmore, Major Lorne, Orin's village, Powerbar, Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex, Season Six, Shiana, Stargate Atlantis, Teyla Emmagan | Leave a comment

	Mathias on Episode Five- Bloodline- Chapt…
	Diabetes Cure on Episode Five- Bloodline- Chapt…
	coquine sexy on Episode Five- Bloodline- Chapt…
	www.Kidstaff.ru on Episode Five- Bloodline- Chapt…
	Miranda on Episode Five- Bloodline- Chapt…

stargateatlantisseasonsix

Episode Three- The Ruins- Front Cover

Episode Two- The Fires- Epilogue and Acknowledgements

Episode Two- The Fires- Chapter Thirteen

Episode Two- The Fires- Chapter Twelve

Episode Two- The Fires- Chapter Eleven

Episode Two- The Fires- Chapter Ten

Episode Two- The Fires- Chapter Nine

Episode Two- The Fires- Chapter Eight

Episode Two- The Fires- Chapter Seven

Episode Two- The Fires- Chapter Six

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Categories

Meta