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The Wraith set him loose. They even gave him a blade, a filthy, sticky thing. Everything about it was repulsive and alien— too heavy for a belt knife, not balanced for a human hand. By the time he found a decent replacement he'd killed two Wraith with it, though.
The Wraith said there was one rule: that he couldn't return to his home planet. He was to have no communication with his people. He kept his eyes down so that they couldn't see that what they'd meant as cruelty had actually sparked hope, the possibility of— someday— a rescue, an escape.
They hunted him.
He ran.
He had it easy at first. Relatively easy. They toyed with him, but it might be weeks between encounters, maybe even longer. They didn't send darts, rarely used scanners. The ones that did come seemed clumsy, sleepy, too eager. They weren't like any Wraith infantry that Ronon had ever seen, the ones he'd encountered guarding sleeping hives or stalking through burning fields on other worlds to glean the hidden survivors on the morning after a small culling.
Maybe they were young. It made sense. He wasn't food; he was a game, a toy for when they were bored.
He kept moving. In those days he wasn't any good at being hungry and he was almost always half-delirious from lack of sleep. Once, an unexpected burst of cold rain suddenly turned to pelting, stinging hail and the Wraith who had been slowly tracking him for hours got irritated and gave up, turned around and walked off and didn't come back. If it hadn't been for that stroke of luck, that would have been the end of it, trapped in a dead-end canyon, scrabbling at wet stone suddenly too slippery to climb. Ronon knew that he had to actually lie down and sleep well at some point or he would die, but it was hard to convince himself to do it. He told himself he was being paranoid. Wraith knew what sleep was. Why else did small cullings always come in the night? They weren't going to swoop in the first time he stopped moving for six hours. What fun would that be?
He had to sleep. The alternative was mistakes, hallucinations and then death, and he wasn't going to do the Wraith's job for them. Kell used to shout that at new recruits if he caught a scuffle turning into a real fight, or worse, someone handling a weapon recklessly, taking careless shortcuts charging an energy cell. Now tell me, why would you want to do the Wraith's job for them?
It was almost funny, in retrospect. Almost.
He wasn't eating regularly or well, and he didn't have bandages or medicine. Still, the scar from what they'd done to him had long healed up and almost started to fade by the time Ronon risked raiding an off-world military supply cache. Clouds were gathering thickly over the rocky valley as he arrived. The sun was close to the horizon, blurred by low clouds. He couldn't tell if it was evening or morning. The Ring was surrounded by rough outcroppings of shale and small patches of grass that fluttered in a chilly breeze. Ronon scanned for tracks but didn't see any.
If he remembered correctly, the cache wasn't too far from the Ring. He climbed to a high ridge and got his bearings, then headed down and started searching. Eventually he found it— a rockfall, seemingly natural, but slightly out of alignment with the way rocks would have actually fallen from the cliffs above.
Ronon ran his hands over the surface until he found one loose stone. He pulled it out, and in the gap was a handle set into a flat surface made of dark Satedan steel. He gripped and twisted, and a whole layer of rock came towards him and then slid aside on rails. Underneath was a square hatch with an old-fashioned analog combination lock. His hands were shaking, but he managed to dial his Planetary Forces unit code.
Nothing happened. Then he heard a click and the hatch cracked open. The stale air smelled familiar, like the depot stores. He opened the hatch, seeing nothing but darkness, and breathed. Finally, ignoring the ladder built into the wall below, he just dropped down into the space. It was just spacious enough for him to stand up straight without his head brushing the ceiling— and then something in the darkness touched his face and he jerked back, drawing his knife. It was just the cord-pull for a light in the ceiling. He grunted, heart racing, and pulled it, gently.
The supply cache had everything— sidearms, rifles, knives, grenades, trip flares, solar-powered lamps and hand-cranked radios, coats and blankets and boots, tents and sleeping bags, emergency rations, candles, boxes of food in cans and jars, even a stacked pile of sealed bags of grain and rice. There were several crates filled with packets of portable trade goods: spices, salt, hand tools, glass beads, antibiotic powders, sewing kits, metal ingots. That was just what he could see along the two walls he was facing. He could feel his chest getting tight, and he sat down on the dusty floor and closed his eyes and tried to breathe properly.
Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, but it took a long time to realize what felt wrong.
The Wraith had come for Sateda. Not for a small culling, but a great devastation, the end of an age. Ronon couldn't think about it too much or it sapped his strength away. How many had they left behind— as many as five thousand? How many would have survived beyond the remnants the Wraith had spared? On paper there were enough shielded evacuation shelters on Sateda to hide fifteen thousand people from the Wraith for two full days, but that was if everything went perfectly: no tunnels caved in, no air shafts blocked, everyone knowing their assigned shelter and getting there quickly and calmly. Every town or municipal sector of a certain size was supposed to run a full drill often enough that the average person would have experienced an evac at least once or twice in their lives, but there were always people who blew off the drills and stayed working, people who panicked and rushed home to their loved ones or just tried to flee their city and get out into the wilderness. And then even with the penalties being what they were, there were still occasional scandals, corrupt rural administrators embezzling maintenance funds or handing out construction contracts to cronies who threw a thin roof and a layer of sod over a hole in the ground and called it good.
But there would be— thousands, at least. Maybe ten. Maybe twelve thousand all together. They'd need supplies. It was odd that this cache was still fully stocked. Probably things back home were too chaotic. People would still be regrouping, figuring out what they'd need to trade for, what might be salvageable from Sateda itself. They'd be short on manpower. Maybe it wasn't worth it to send a squad to retrieve a truckload or two of supplies. It would hardly be anything split up among a few platoons, let alone thousands of refugees. Still, looking around the little room dug into the hillside, it felt blasphemous to imagine that it wasn't enough for anyone to care about. Ronon felt like an emperor, rolling in luxury. He wanted to take everything, but he knew he could only take what wouldn't weigh him down.
He filled a pack but it was too heavy, so he put it all back again and started over. An extra pair of bootlaces, a tube of antiseptic, a water filter, some rations, two good knives and a coil of razor wire. An encrypted list of Ring addresses and descriptions of what he'd find there. It would last him a while. He unrolled a sleep-roll and slept on it that night, and in the morning he shook it out, rolled it back up and left it where he'd found it.
As he was leaving something nagged at him and he laughed, realizing that he was thinking: forgot to sign the logbook. You always noted whatever you took and signed out in the logbook. Better not to risk it. Could the Wraith even read? Wraith worshippers probably could. And they'd told him, no communication with his people. So.
As he set out for the Ring, belly full, well-rested, he considered that he was actually pretty lucky. A lot of other caches had probably already been emptied. It was possible this one was only still stocked because everyone who knew about it happened to be among the dead.
He went from one empty world to the next. As part of his specialist-level survival training he'd taken a course on living off the land, mostly how to identify commonly edible plants, how to track animals, build snares. Now he started really learning, through painful trial and error, through practice and repetition. He started setting traps for Wraith, a length of fishing line drawn taut that would break a dry branch or make rocks fall against other rocks when stepped on, anything to give him enough time to snap awake and be ready.
He started sleeping better. He started dreaming again. Standing in the market square of the neighborhood he'd grown up in, breathlessly staring at men and women in patched coats lined up outside shops with boarded-up windows, children shouting and kicking a ball in the street. This was Sateda, badly beaten but fighting to live, and Ronon shouldn't be here— he turned, looking for the Ring he'd just stepped through, but there was no Ring here, it was miles away, and as he ran for it the streets betrayed him, crooked and twisting, blocked by debris. The shadow of the hive ship loomed over his shoulder. He couldn't look up.
Sometimes he found the Ring, but the dialing device wouldn't work, or the symbols were all unfamiliar, nonsense shapes. Sometimes he'd manage to dial out and then as soon he stepped towards the Ring the light died and he had to go back and start over, and always the hive ships were coming, closer, closer—
The Wraith hunters got better. He couldn't depend on them to make as many careless mistakes as they had before. He avoided the cache, only going there when he was truly desperate, and he never stayed for even a heartbeat longer than it took to get in, resupply, and get out.
He didn't know whether the Wraith were tracking him minute by minute in real time, whether they could go back and look at a record of everywhere he'd ever been, or whether they just checked in on him sometimes and didn't care where he went in between. Did the hunters ever talk to each other, report back on what they found? Could they tell when he got new boots, did they notice that sometimes the fine details of his tracks changed in between hunts? He wasn't sure.
One night Ronon dialed into what he remembered as a world of stone cliffs, too barren to settle, too cold to attract visitors. He emerged into a wild, colorful maze of tents and wagons, alight with bonfires and strings of colorful lanterns. So many people, so many, weaving between the structures carrying lamps or bundles or children, waving sticks with bunches of ribbons tied to them. So many voices and sounds that it was just noise, deafening, sending shudders through him.
More people were gathered in the cramped space they'd left open around the Ring, all bundled up in long skirts and coats and cloaks. Knots of them circled and twirled around musicians, drummers, singers. Someone was cooking meat on a grill. Some were sitting clustered on blankets and pillows, talking, drinking, playing card games. A few scattered cheers went up as Ronon stepped out onto the stone dais, and Ronon instinctively ducked down into the crowd, training taking over: you were never more vulnerable to enemy fire than in the first second on a new world, a perfect dark silhouette framed against the living Ring.
He'd heard of people out there in the galaxy who never settled on a single planet, or so they claimed. Nomads, constantly circling from world to world, never staying more than a season. They were good healers, good midwives. They did beautiful tattoo work, delicate and colorful, but either they didn't tattoo themselves, or they just didn't mark themselves anywhere that a stranger might ever see. They knew a lot of old songs that were lost everywhere else. People said they knew a lot of other secret things, too. Things that other people didn't know.
He tried not to step on anyone or shove too roughly through the crowds, heading for the dialing device. If he left quickly enough, it was just possible that Wraith wouldn't ever know he'd been here. There was a pair of guards hanging out next to it, a man with a long knife at his belt and a woman with a rifle slung across her back. Ronon glanced up at their faces and flinched to see them already looking at him. They stepped back from the dialing device as he approached— intimidated, or maybe they realized Ronon didn't belong there, or maybe they were open to visitors and simply didn't care who came or went, or for what reason.
Ronon turned towards the Ring, already reaching out to dial, and his eyes caught on a large round cream-colored tent, set up just to the left of the Ring, with the ancient sign of a healer painted on its side.
He hadn't even been there a minute. If they could get it done fast—
The healer was a middle-aged woman with dark, beady eyes, sleeves rolled up above her elbows despite the cold. Her tent smelled of antiseptic, and her knives looked sharp. He showed her the scar, told her there was a tracking device in him and he wanted it out. He was short on trade goods, but he offered her two of his knives and his firelighter, stumbling over his words, telling her he knew where she could get more like it— a lot more— weapons, medicines, equipment— She looked into his eyes, frowned when he looked away. Told him to stop talking, take off his shirt and lie down.
He laid face-down on a low table. She turned on a few bright lamps and used a flat stick to smear his back with something that numbed him. Her assistant, a young man, put a smoldering cone of what looked like incense in a shallow bowl and set it beneath Ronon's face, and told him to breathe deeply.
"Will it make me sleep?" he said, tensing.
"No," the healer said, "but the pain will feel far away."
Maybe they had different definitions of 'far away'. It felt like she was using a plowblade, like she was cutting straight through him to the other side. Every muscle in Ronon's back clenched against the invasion. He curled his hands into fists and tried to keep still, wishing they'd given him something to hold onto.
The young man took him by the wrists, crouching down and leaning his whole weight on his hands so that Ronon was pinned. He leaned close and started talking. "You have suffered greatly. Why would your people do such a thing?"
"Not my people," Ronon gritted out. "I was taken."
"Ah, then where are you from, stranger?" he said, and maybe it was the drugs, but it didn't occur to Ronon to lie about that.
"Sateda."
The young man didn't say anything. The pressure on Ronon's wrists grew. It decreased. He could hear them whispering over his head. That ought to worry him.
"We're a strong people," Ronon said. "We survive."
The healer stood. Something clattered onto a tray. For one moment, eyes stinging, Ronon thought it was the tracker, and then he blinked and saw that it was her knife, red with his blood.
"What's done is done," she said softly, "it can't be helped," and the young man leaned harder on Ronon's hands as she braced herself, leaned down and covered his mouth and nose with a cloth that reeked with the stench of that smoke. He struggled. It didn't help. All the lights went out.
When Ronon woke, shuddering with the cold his mouth was dry, his head throbbing. He was face down on a thin blanket laid out on the stone dais in front of the Ring. Someone had thrown his coat and another blanket over him. The wind was howling in the cliffs and canyons. He sat up.
Everyone was gone. There were signs of a fast evacuation— tent pegs still in the ground, random items dropped and scattered— a glove, a cup, a scarf— footprints and wagon-wheel ruts and tire tracks flowing up towards the Ring from every direction. His back was throbbing. He reached back, touching a rough patch of bandages. It hurt like fuck, but he didn't think she'd cut deep enough, nowhere near deep enough, a sickening realization— and besides, if they'd removed it, why leave?
Maybe they knew about Runners, and thought it was too risky to help him. If so, it was still strange. Why not just put him through the Ring? Why abandon this place? His people had never had any problems with the nomads as far as Ronon knew. But— he'd been gone for so long. Sateda would be different. Maybe things had changed.
It didn't matter. He couldn't ask them. They were gone.
He tried again, he tried again. It never worked.
He talked to himself, sang to himself, dredged up every song he knew, every poem he'd ever written or learned to recite, even the awful tripe he'd turned in for school assignments as a boy. He recited call-and-response drills, all the regulations he'd ever memorized: the objective of the third stage is to disrupt Wraith offensive capabilities, not to secure prisoners or recover the taken—
Then one day he startled a flock of birds away as he silently approached a watering place and realized that although he'd been moving stealthily, he'd been mumbling without meaning to, not even hearing himself. He stopped, heart pounding, and deliberately swallowed, pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth. Made himself aware of himself.
He put the songs out of his head and left them behind.
A thousand days, more or less. Not that a day really meant anything when the seasons changed and the sun jumped in the sky every time you went through the Ring. Once he'd had some complex calculation of when it counted as a new day based on how often he got hungry or thirsty, how how often he felt like he got through a full sleep cycle, but after a thousand days even those things weren't the same. Then sometimes he'd forget for a few days, add three or four to the last number he remembered. Forget for a week and add ten more. Eventually he gave up counting. Not quite yet, though.
He'd built up a whole library of Ring addresses, stored in his head. He could move strategically, studying how different environments affected them. Wraith handled hot humid places better than humans, but very cold or very dry places seemed to sap their strength, made them breathe slower, louder. He found planets where his compass spun madly and the Wraith scanners— they were using scanners now— didn't work any more, so they had to track him the old-fashioned way.
He tried to stay honorable, by his own lights. He couldn't carry much extra weight, but if he came out near a settlement or a camp at night and they had something he needed, he always left something behind in exchange, even if it was just a bracelet or a knife. A quality knife was a valuable trade good just about anywhere. If he came through the Ring and the people there were suspicious and hostile, he just tried to leave, but sometimes they got in his way and he had to fight them. He tried so hard to pull his punches, not to hurt anyone too seriously. The Wraith had made him a liar, a sneak-thief— he wasn't going to let them turn him into a deliberate murderer.
He tried, he really tried.
The Ring was right outside the walls of a city and apparently Ronon had stumbled in at a bad time. A new regent had just been named, or was being overthrown, and they thought he was an assassin. Take him to the cells, he'd heard the order as the guards closed in, I've no time to deal with this now. I'll question him personally, after the— inauguration, execution, whatever. He fought hard, but the guards were well-trained and managed to throw a net over him and drag him down. He woke in a stone room with a stranger. High above them, set into the wall, a narrow slot of a window let in the moonlight. The guy in the cell with him was a stocky dark man with close-cropped hair. Also an unexpected visitor, judging by his clothes: dark well-tailored leathers with fine stitching, nothing like what the locals had been wearing.
“Kill someone?” the guy asked.
"God, I hope not," Ronon said, too honest, too tired to hold it back. The guy looked at him funny.
"Hey, careful," he said as Ronon slowly tried to see if he could get up. "You got kicked around pretty bad—" Ronon found that he could stand. He shot the guy a look, and he shut up. The door was thick, wooden and barred. Ronon slammed his shoulder against it and it hurt like shit and the door didn't give at all.
They'd missed a small knife tucked into his belt but he didn't think he was going to be able to carve his way through. He tucked himself into the corner of the room, slid down the wall, pulled the knife out and toyed with it idly.
He'd thought a lot about what he might do if this happened.
"Anything you want to share?" the guy asked.
"The Wraith are going to come for me," Ronon said slowly. "But I don't know if the tracker just tells them where I am. They might not realize I'm dead. They might come anyway."
"What?" the guy said, staring.
"If I cut my throat right now because I'm afraid of them, that's a cowardly act," Ronon said, almost to himself. Words were always so useless when you talked about the big things, life and death, love and honor and sacrifice. A person either understood those things or they didn't, and if they didn't, there was no point in trying to explain. "But they might give up if I'm dead. They might not come. Then it would be the right thing to do," he said, turning the knife over in his fingers. "But I don't know."
"Hey, don't do anything too hasty," the guy said, then leaned forward and whispered, "Listen, my people are coming, okay?" He leaned back, staring at Ronon. "The Wraith, how do they come? A hive ship? Darts?"
"Through the Ring," Ronon said. "A hunting party, with scanners."
The man swore under his breath, rolled up his sleeve and checked something that looked like a cuff bracelet. One flat surface lit up as he touched it. "Any minute," he said, looking up, catching Ronon's eyes. "Any minute, I swear it."
"Okay," Ronon said. He could wait a little while.
They sat in silence until a low rumble shook the walls. Footsteps pounded down the hall. There was a noise like an energy blast, like a Satedan Planetary Force rifle— a section of the door crumpled, splintering inwards. A tall yellow-haired woman kicked it in, tossed the stranger an oversized hand weapon with a glowing orange cell near the rear sight. He stood, motioning to Ronon. "Him too. Give him a hand."
"You know we don't take in strays," the woman said, eyeing Ronon warily. She didn't offer him a hand up.
He fell in behind them anyway. The strangers shot two guards as they approached, red bolts of energy sending them crumpling to the ground, and calmly walked past their bodies. They shot one more eating soup in the guardroom. He collapsed into his seat, slumping face down into his bowl, and the man reached over as they passed, missing a step so that he could shove him out of his seat to collapse on the floor.
"They're not dead," he said, seeing something in Ronon's face. "Just stunned."
Ronon nodded.
The woman was hissing something at her friend as they made their way towards the city gate, stars gleaming overhead, telling him he had to ditch Ronon sooner rather than later. He pushed the words away, trying to listen for footsteps, movement.
"Yeah, I know, I get it," the guy was saying, "but I couldn't just—"
A Wraith materialized from the mouth of a dark alley and took him by the lapel of his jacket, flinging him aside. He hit the wall of a building; Ronon heard bone snap and the stranger cried out, the blaster dropping from his hand and skittering across the cobbles. Ronon flung his one last small stupid knife into the Wraith's face before it could turn back towards him and it screamed, ichor streaming across half its face. He'd been aiming for its eye but it had lowered its head at the last second.
He hit the cobbles in a roll and scooped up the weapon. It was warm in his hand and he aimed it at the Wraith and shot it, again and again, until it fell. He wasn't sure it was dead, so he jammed the blaster into his belt, let himself fall with all his weight, knees first, into the Wraith's ribcage. He took it by the head and twisted until its neck snapped.
"Is that a Wraith? Is that what they look like?" the man was saying, voice tight with pain, the woman crouching over him.
He looked at them, hand stealing to the warm hand grip of the blaster.
"I'm keeping this," he said. "Thanks. Sorry."
He ran for the Ring.
The blaster helped give him an edge, and by this time he felt like he was actually getting really good at killing Wraith. Anyone with the right equipment could do it, really. Shoot them enough times and they fell down and stopped moving, like anything else. He remembered the first time the strike team had taken a Wraith, all six together, Marika hurling flashbang grenades, Ronon and Ara and Tyre firing away at center of mass, Rakai's boots tracing furrows in the dirt, bracing Hemi so she didn't fall down as she blasted it with an experimental sonic weapon that afterward they figured hadn't really done anything except rattle one of her fillings loose— but they'd killed it, they'd won. Afterwards they'd felt like ancient gods, glowing with power, drunk with triumph even before they got back to Sateda to tell of their grand victory.
But there was a difference, Ronon was starting to realize, between being able to kill Wraith and being really, really good at it.
He started figuring out their blind spots, their weaknesses. He started being able to judge what kind of hunter they were, watching them from a distance as they came out of the Ring, seeing how they reacted to the light, the wind, whatever environment they found themselves in. He learned to judge from their body language and their gestures how smart they were, what they would enjoy. They weren't all the same. Maybe they wanted to jolt him into a panic with loud noises or bright lights so they could chase him as he bolted. Maybe they wanted to stalk him quietly, savoring his ignorance, so they could sneak up and take him unawares. Some would let him get in close for a fight, play with him, let him get a hit and then throw him back into the dirt. Others he learned to stay far away from, the ones who would go for the kill as soon as they saw him.
He kept setting traps. Figuring out which kinds worked better than others. Pit traps took too much time and effort, unless he could find something in the landscape itself— a crumbling bank near a swift stream, a boggy patch of sucking mud that he could cover so it looked like solid ground. Weighted snares worked, although Wraith were a lot heavier than they looked. He hadn't figured out quite yet how to set a trap that would kill a Wraith outright, but he could disorient them for a few moments and then move in close with blade or blaster.
Every little bit helped.
Once, so far back he could barely remember it, he'd dreamed up vague, improbable scenarios— stumbling across Kell by coincidence on some random world, taking his best shot at vengeance for the fallen. Wherever he was, Kell was probably prepared for such an attack. He'd have well-trained, well-paid guards in case anyone like Ronon came after him. In Ronon's current state he could have mowed through them like a scythe through wheat, but he didn't want to kill guards and mercenaries. He wanted to kill Kell. Even if he failed— what a good death it would be, giving his life to try and avenge his people. What a sweet death.
He kept running. After he'd emptied his first supply cache he'd found another, then another. None of them had ever been touched. None of the logbooks had been written in since before the great culling.
It made no sense. There were myths about the Wraith obliterating entire worlds, leaving no one alive, but that was all they were: myths. Stories to frighten children. Even the most fearful and compliant worlds didn't believe it had ever really happened. Why would the Wraith do such a thing? They were monsters, not fools. Why kill so many, more than they could ever eat, and leave no one to repopulate the world? It just didn't happen like that. It couldn't.
The fear metastasized inside him. He couldn't look at it directly. He'd lost his whole strike team, been the sole survivor of six. He hadn't been able to save Malena. Kell had turned traitor. Wasn't that enough? Did he have to carry— the whole world? He couldn't. Who could?
He kept running. He stopped thinking of home. It was the only way to keep it safe— to push it down so deep and so far into the dark that he couldn't imagine— couldn't know.
He went forward. He didn't look back. He stopped counting days. He almost made it to two thousand, but what was the point? Why? Who would ever care?
He got sick. He thought it was nothing, a cold. By the time he realized it was serious he was far gone enough to make another stupid mistake, spending two hours slogging through wet fields of tall golden-yellow grass only to find a half-empty cache that he'd already looted of any medicine that could have helped him. He remembered dividing up the pill bottles and packets among smaller caches, hiding them elsewhere. Where? He couldn't think, couldn't breathe. The sun was beating down on him. Ronon's blood was cold in his veins.
This place was too open, too flat. He needed somewhere he could hide.
It was night when he arrived. He should have turned around and gone back when he saw tracks near the Ring, but he didn't. He followed them. Every breath was a stabbing pain. He could barely smell the woodsmoke, the meat cooking, until he was at the perimeter of the little ring of huts. Death had finally come for him. Ronon was sure of it. Was it so wrong— was it such a terrible crime— to want to be warm, to hear a human voice saying something kind, before—
Weakness. Self-deceit.
He did his best not to think about what happened to the girl who took him in. He tried not to dwell on what happened to her people.
You can't change the past.
All of that, all of that that was a long time ago. Ronon stopped imagining rescues or escapes. He stopped dreaming about vengeance. He wasn't getting out of this. That person that he'd been— that person was gone. He was just death, now. Death wherever he went.
He couldn't imagine something... after this. Something that wasn't this. His life.