East Coast Gazette

Title: Shift
Rating: R

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Happy reading!

*

“Oh thank God,” Rodney says when John picks up, says hello, “I thought I was going to die on this line waiting for somebody who wasn’t a recording to answer.”

Rodney held out longer than John anticipated he would, but he does call, and with an under-the-skin tension that makes John wish he was near enough to cuff Rodney on the back of the head, because saying, “Hey, it’ll be okay, buddy,” might sound kind of gay without a near-drowning to justify it.

So he just leans back in his seat, kicks his feet up on his desk–heels on a pile of acquisition forms–looks to his left and wonders what the weather is like until he remembers suddenly he no longer has a window–that he’s underground.

“It’s part of the Air Force’s tactical defense,” he tells Rodney, feeling his shoulders go loose and his throat go tight. The odd stillness beneath his feet is Earth, and not the sweet, slow rock of Atlantis on the sea, and it makes something in his stomach roll with reverse motion sickness.

Rodney huffs over the line. “Well, it’s ingeniously cruel. In case you’re wondering about the constant droning in the background–” John can’t ear any droning at all; he doesn’t know if anybody ever told Rodney, but his voice fills all the space in the phone call, usually fills all the empty spaces in a room “–its’ the sound of my very own turbine, generating my very own electricity for my very own very important experiments.”

John laughs because Rodney is Rodney is Rodney, and he will never change. He shifts in his seat, pulls his new SGC-issued cell phone out of his pocket–it’s a Blackberry Pearl, which just means that his emails can follow him wherever he goes–and tosses it across his desk. On Atlantis, he and Rodney had agreed that their accidental discovery of the city-wide text-message system was the most dangerous thing ever discovered and made a blood pact never to tell what they had found.

“So,” he says, and his own syllables sound awkward in his mouth without the crackle of radio static. He doesn’t think he’s ever talked to Rodney on a landline before this moment. “You’re settling in okay?”

“Of course,” Rodney snaps at him, because John thinks that if Rodney can convince himself, it might convince them both. “All of my lab assistants like me, you know.”

John rolls his eyes. “It’ll pass.”

The Blackberry buzzes across the desk and John curses under his breath when he sees SMOOTH TRANSITION?? in the subject line, and when he blinks and refocuses, Rodney is squawking in his ear, “What, what?”

John closes his eyes and flips the Blackberry over: he doesn’t want to think about giving tips to the Ancients who’d left Atlantis; he doesn’t want to be a diplomat, their friend, an ambassador. Before stepping through the gate that last time, standing in the gateroom watching Atlantis glow blue and green and heartbroken, her murmuring whispers clinging, he’d thought about staying–or at least keeping Rodney, taking Teyla and Ronon with him to Colorado. But Rodney deserves Area 51 and his enormous lab and his enormous turbine and Teyla and Ronon would never abandon Pegasus and John maybe was always meant to be by himself.

“Nothing,” John says, because telling Rodney when he’s upset is tantamount to inviting the cavalry to ride to the rescue–Rodney always wants to save him and sometimes, it’s more than John can stand to watch Rodney put himself out there like that: eyes big and mouth slack and heartbroken. “It’s fine.”

There’s a long moment before Rodney says, “Um. Have they assigned you a team yet?”

John thinks about his new team, and he can’t help but laugh. “You’ll love this,” he tells Rodney. “I’ve got a botanist.”

Bambus, who had been hired by the SGC despite a lifetime entanglement with ELF and who spent the first twenty minutes of their meeting staring at John with wide, wide gray eyes–John couldn’t tell from fascination or fear–not unlike the first time John met some of Atlantis’ botanists, who turned out to be veritable cowboys compared to the guys at headquarters.

“Oh, my God,” Rodney sneers. “Who? Parrish? He’s a member of NORML, you know.”

Rodney has to be the only guy who never spent a weekend eating Doritos and watching thinking Spinal Tap was high art in college, John thinks in resignation. It’d be immature to trick Rodney into getting stoned and giving him six boxes of Ho-Hos now, but it doesn’t mean John’s not tempted. “He also has a degree in chemical engineering and has kicked your ass during science relay events two years running,” John points out. “And no, it’s not Parrish.”

“Oh,” Rodney says, odd. Like that doesn’t sit well with him, and John’s about to make a joke about, what, Rodney’s suddenly condoning marijuana advocacy or something? when Rodney adds, “Do you think he’ll–?”

But then John’s Blackberry is buzzing again, whirring against his piles of papers and unfinished business, skidding across his desk with increasing urgency and John can nearly feel General Landry on the other end of the line and he feels tired to his bones all of a sudden.

He says, “Hey, Rodney? Sorry, I don’t mean to be a jerk here but I’ve got a lot to do before they let me out of the mountain tonight and I’m sure you’ve got people to yell at, so I’ll talk to you tomorrow, right?”

“Right, Right,” Rodney agrees, and John realizes he’s still holding the telephone when he hears the click on the other end of the line–Rodney putting down the receiver, that this isn’t a two-way radio. He slams his phone down and snatches up the Blackberry, stalks to the door and hesitates before he snatches the knob and opens it: it’s like, John think, seeing the world distorted through aged glass, the same but different, and all wrong to the naked eye.

*

The meeting with Landry is equal parts humiliating and anti-climactic. It’s hard to come down from a leadership position, even one he didn’t want, and John wants to say, “You realize that’s bullshit scheduling,” and “That’s inefficient use of resources,” but that’s not his place; his new job is to smile pretty and toe the line–at which he has failed peerlessly in the past and will continue to do so in the future, he bets. Earth is rich with things John forgot he had unlimited access to before Pegasus: power, guns, bullets, staples–he wonders if Rodney’s raiding the supply closet in Area 51 the way John wants to say something about how weapons don’t grow on trees. At the SGC, they might as well, and switching off the part of John’s brain that’s constantly calculating, constantly counting, is hard.

Landry’s saying something about starting off with softer missions, until John’s gotten into the rhythm of interplanetary diplomacy in the Milky Way galaxy, and John just bites his tongue and nods “sure,” because he feels like there’s still lead in his bones from the jet and galaxy lag, and he barely has the energy to stay awake.

“M3X-097 isn’t established, per se,” Landry’s telling him, “as a trading partner, but they’re willing. You’re being sent as a goodwill ambassador, basically, and Bambus has been promised to examine some of their agricultural issues.”

John blinks. “Is there a water distribution problem?” he asks, and in the back of his head he’s thinking desalinization kit, aid, irrigation help and if we trade Marks and Batton for a week to design systems we can get this tonnage of– before he can even stop himself, and Landry is telling him:

“I’m not too clear on that, Colonel–and anyway, it’s mostly a courtesy check; M3X doesn’t have much in the way of agriculture we’re interested in so much as component ore, and first-run geologists already confirmed that.”

John swallows a protest and nods, and Landry stands up.

“Good,” Landry says. “You leave tomorrow, 0800.”

They do, and they spend most of the three mile trek through the lush rolling forests on M3X-097 trying to keep Bambus from chasing after what Lance Corporal Wallace calls “a freaking mutated rabbit,” and Sergeant Holder chooses to describe simply as “fucked up.” Bambus, though, like most of the scientists John has known and babysat and loved and hated viciously, has tons of excuses and reasons and a digital camera–and all John has is the threat of tying him up and letting the marines carry him to their destination. “Don’t think the extra weight would deter them,” John warns Bambus, who’s giving him that big-eyed look again, “they’re marines, they’d like it.”

Bambus looks at Wallace and Holder, and they grin back, teeth a white, bright crescent on their tanned faces.

“Go for it, princess,” Holder says, and winks. Wallace blows Bambus a kiss.

“See,” John tells Bambus, grabs him by the scruff of his tac vest and starts dragging him forward.

An hour and a mile and a half later they’ve been in and out of the brief and polite diplomatic meeting; Bambus has been dispatched to discuss desalinization and effective field irrigation and John and Holder and Wallace are standing around looking at the massive slave market. There’re people of every skin color and hair color and language, a cacophony of sounds that makes John think about the bird markets in Asia: the brown, unremarkable sparrows and preening exotics, their voice like nails on a chalkboard, and the coquettish parakeets, flirting in mimicked English and Cantonese. Here is the same, the slaves in bamboo-stick cells and branded, beautiful women and men in gilded cages.

“You ever seen anything like this in the Pegasus Galaxy, sir?” Wallace asks, wide-eyed. It’s his third trip through the gate and second time anywhere inhabited; he’s so new John can hear him squeak when he walks.

“Something like this,” John says dispassionately, and thinks of the slave catalog on P6X-001, the photographs and product descriptions, and how Rodney had said, “I think I’m going to be sick,” when they offered gate team one a 20 percent discount on a 13-year-old–since he limped in one leg. But long before Rodney managed to alienate everybody about the slave market, Rodney had gotten them pitched off the planet by alluding to having indulged in premarital sex. “They can’t offer to sell us babies and then get mad for us not saving ourselves for marriage,” Rodney had sputtered, demanding, “I mean–I used a condom! It wasn’t even good premarital sex!”

“This is messed up, sir,” Wallace says, flushing at a gaggle of naked dancers–a dozen of whom giggle and wave as they pass. “I mean–shouldn’t we do something about this?

Wrong and right is all one giant, nebulous gray smear, really, and Bambus is down with the Minister of Agriculture tricking them into thinking Earth’s making a commitment to solving their food-supply problems so they can get their hands on rich veins of high-energy ore. Nobody in the slave market–from buyers to sellers to slaves–looks half as miserable as John felt leaving Atlantis, so what the hell is wrong or right, anyway? But Wallace will figure that out eventually, the first time he sees little girls, forced into marriage, or acts of courage and generosity that close up his throat in astonishment–it’s all just gradations.

Holder just smirks, wry and all-knowing, an old hand, and says, “Maybe next time, Wallace.”

John thinks it’s unfair he doesn’t like these guys. If they had been in Atlantis, if they had come to him instead of the other way around, everything would be different.

And that’s when someone approaches them, robes askew and covered in dirt, and asks, “Excuse me–you wouldn’t happen to be Taur’i? Would you?”

Back in the Pegasus Galaxy, people had threatened and kidnapped Rodney plenty–his patented combination of brash jackassery and brilliance proving irresistible. People wanted Rodney to die for his blasphemy, suffer for his arrogance, they wanted him to fix things or make things. And one time, they had wanted Rodney to make dozens of little genius babies, a fate from which Teyla had been compelled to save him only she and Ronon and John were able to peel themselves off of the floor–where they’d fallen, clutching their stomachs laughing. Still, despite a pretty hairy record, John had never been asked to trade his scientist–any scientist–into slavery.

“Excuse me?” John asks, feeling Bambus’ fingers knot into the back of his tac vest.

The merchant–H’Rong, from Hrung, and it’d taken every iota of professionalism in John’s soul not to ask if anything had collapsed back home–beams, waving over John’s shoulder. “Your slave! The ministers found him terribly delightful.”

“Er,” John says, because this sort of thing has–weirdly–never happened to him before, and he thought he’d run out of opportunities ever to say that again. “I mean, thanks for the offer, but we’d rather not.” H’Rong looks devastated. “The Missus would never forgive me,” John goes on, inventing rapidly. “He’s our favorite.”

Looking disheartened, H’Rong nodded. “I suppose,” he agreed. “Not even for knowledge of the Orii? We have heard the Taur’i long for such intelligence.”

“Maybe we could rent him,” Wallace sugdgests.

“Wallace,” Holder sighs, “shut up.”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” John tells him, and turns back to H’Rong, who only spares a moment to look hopeful before John says, “Really–we’re flattered you like him so much, but the kids like him so much we couldn’t possibly.”

“Oh, for–Bambus will you breathe?” Holder says on their hike back to the gate, having missed two check-ins. “We are not selling you.”

“He wanted to rent me out,” Bambus says, venom in his voice.

“Please, don’t fake like you don’t like the attention,” Wallace chirps–all fifth grade and fingers itching for pigtails.

John starts a list in his head, thinks that if he ever gets back to Atlantis, he’s taking Wallace and Holder and Bambus with him, for no other reason than the inevitable entertainment value of seeing Cadman threatening to snatch all the hair of out Wallace’s head, and seeing how long it took before the rest of the botanists rolled Bambus around in Pegasus poison oak in one of their cruel and unusual hazing rituals. And Holder, John thinks, because Lorne really, really needs an ally out there.

*

TBC