Whatever answer she might have given him was forestalled as Linnian returned to the cabin. There was a commotion visible in the compartment beyond and Beckett felt his stomach lurch as the flyer dropped toward the ground. "My Lady, one of our observers spotted the body of the Runner from the air. We are descending to make a closer inspection."
"The body?" Carson pushed out of his chair, aware of Staff Sergeant Mason coming up with him. "Is he alive?"
"That is not clear. You should remain on board until we-"
"Not bloody likely, mate," grated Mason, and shoved the adjutant aside as the aircraft's landing skis bumped against the ground.
Beckett grabbed the strap of his medical kit and hauled it after him, following Mason as the SAS soldier cut a wedge through the wary Halcyonite troopers.
The staff sergeant roared out orders to the riflemen with such force behind them that the conscripts jumped to obey him without even thinking, their years of unquestioning service to their superiors conditioning them for instant obedience. Mason led Beckett through a stand of knee-high grasses, a clearing that slanted down toward rocks and tall trees. The rattle of the gyro-flyer's rotor blades beat at his back in throbbing pulses of wind.
"Watch it!" snapped the sergeant, pulling the doctor to one side to avoid a headless corpse sprawled on the ground. "Clean kill," Mason noted dispassionately.
Carson grimaced at the decapitated Wraith and moved on, catching sight of a slumped shape in leather and buckskin. "There! Over there!"
Ronon Dex's complexion was sallow, and Beckett pressed a finger to the carotid artery in the man's neck. Something fluttered weakly against his fingertip and Carson blew out a breath. "He's alive."
"Been shot," noted Mason, pointing at the concentric rings of scorching on Dex's tunic. The soldier recovered something from the grass; Ronon's pistol. "With this, I reckon." Mason peered at the weapon. "Set for stun, looks like. Lucky for him."
The doctor stood and shouted at Linnian's men for help. Quickly, they had Ronon inside the flyer and Beckett jammed an injector full of stimulants into the meat of the Satedan's thigh.
Dex moaned and his eyes fluttered open. "Who...?"
"Ronon, it's Dr. Beckett. Take it easy, laddie, you've been out for who knows how long."
The Runner growled and hauled himself up. "Give me room," he snarled. "Where... Where's the Wraith?"
"What Wraith?" said Erony.
"Scar!" he spat. "Wanted to kill me. Didn't see me switch modes on the gun. He has Sheppard and Teyla."
Mason frowned. "Where's Private Bishop?"
Ronon shook his head. "Dead."
"We came here as soon as we could," continued Carson. "Colonel Sheppard had a Puddle Jumper, do you have any idea where it is?"
"No." Dex leaned heavily against a seat and shook his head, fishing in his pocket. He produced the hand-held scanner that he had taken from the Jumper. "Track the ship with this."
Carson took the device. "Aye, that would work..." The doctor's words trailed off as he glanced down at the screen on the Ancient scanner. Trails of energetic waveforms like electroencephalograph patterns flexed across the panel, becoming more energetic by the second. The device gave out a warning chime and the readings went off the scale. At the same instant, Beckett heard a cry of alarm from one of the riflemen still outside the grounded flyer.
He turned in time to see a brilliant flash wash through the portholes on the starboard side of the aircraft. Linnian reeled backward, clutching at his eye.
"What the hell was that?" demanded Mason, "a nuke strike?"
Erony's face went deathly pale. "The... The dolmen..."
A thunderous wall of displaced air rolled over them from the tree line and suddenly the flyer was rocking on its skids, buffeted by a hurricane-force wind.
Carson fell hard against Erony and heard inhuman screams filling the flyer's cabin. His blood ran cold as he realized that it was the Hounds that were howling, the clawed nails of the armored Wraith tearing at their steel helmets and twitching in fury.
With a screech of bending metal, the Wraiths peeled back the howling canine faces of their headgear and revealed their own terrible aspects. Carson had never seen such an expression of utter, animal hate on a Wraith as he did now; the vicious arrogance of the aliens he had witnessed before was absent, and it its place was something base and malignant. He felt as if he were seeing the black hate for all life at the heart of every Wraith, incarnate there in their eyes.
They exploded into violent motion. Moments earlier the cabin of the royal flyer had seemed wide and open; now it was a cramped killing floor, the two mad Wraiths eager to murder every human inside. Carson heard the sickening crack of a broken neck as the nearest of the Wraiths punched into the spine of a riflemen caught fleeing for the open hatchway. The other launched itself at Linnian's cowering form in the aisle beside the starboard seating. Heedless of his own injuries, Ronon Dex crashed into the Wraith and wrestled it away, smashing through ornate stained-glass lamps on the cabin walls.
The report from a long-lance rifle bellowed inside the flyer and Carson tasted acrid steam in the air. The nearer Wraith screeched and attacked the rifleman who had fired at it, ignoring the collection of needle-shot embedded in its chest. The discharge was horribly loud inside the cabin and Beckett's hearing rang with the echo.
He grabbed Erony's arm. "Is there another hatch?"
"This way!" she nodded, pulling him toward the back of the gyro-flyer.
Carson hazarded a glimpse over his shoulder, and immediately regretted it. The Wraith dispatched the rifleman with a ripping slash from its claws, but it did not stoop to feed upon the soldier. Instead, it came over the opulent velvet chairs like a raptor. Beckett swung his medical bag at it, but the Wraith was moving with insane speed, and it batted him away. Carson lost his footing and collided with a support stanchion. The alien punched Erony, knocking a push-dagger from her grip, and the woman skidded back against the curved inner walls of the compartment. Beckett heard the Wraith give out a shrieking hiss. Orange fire flashed at the periphery of his vision and brass car tridges glittered as someone discharged a weapon, but Carson's attention was locked on the angry Wraith as it made ready to claim the Halcyonite noble as another victim. Beckett reacted, all the frustration and annoyance of the past few days forming into fists. "Get off her, ya scunner!" he shouted, and punched the attacker hard in the rib. "Picking on girls, eh?"
He regretted the words the moment he said them. The Wraith yowled like a wildcat and spun about, pouncing on him. The air in Beckett's lungs came out of him in a whoosh as the alien slammed him against the carpeted decking, lighting sparks of pain behind his eyes. Foul, acidic breath caressed his face and the Wraith showed its teeth, hissing.
Carson was not an aggressive man, but he had grown up in a tough neighborhood, among those who liked to live up to a belligerent reputation, and he understood very well the principles of violence. Beckett brought his shoulders forward and butted the Wraith hard on the nose, with a satisfying crunch of bone. The alien reeled back, put off by such a sudden attack from its prey and hesitated a moment too long.
From behind him, staff sergeant Mason jerked the trigger of his L85 assault rifle and blew the creature off its feet with a stuttering discharge of bullets.
Carson rolled over and came face to face with the second Wraith, its neck twisted at an incorrect angle. Ronon Dex was hunched nearby, panting and sweating.
Erony came to him and helped Beckett into a chair as Mason and the riflemen dragged the dead Hounds out of the flyer. He looked up and found Ronon watching him. The Satedan had the ghost of a smile on his lips.
"Not bad, little man," said Dex. "I didn't think you had that much fight in you."
"I'm Scottish," he said glumly, "it's genetic."
"You attacked a Wraith bare-handed," added Erony, "you fought well."
"Only because I had no choice," Carson insisted, wincing at the building headache in his skull. "You want to understand us
, lassie? That's it, right there. We don't fight because we want to. It's our last choice."
"On my world, it is always the first," admitted the woman.
"Now you're getting it."
Mason climbed back into the cabin as Beckett moved to Linnian's side, examining the adjutant's injured eye. "Doc, I did a sweep of the clearing. Jumper put down here, like Ronon said it did, but it's long gone now. We got no rads in the air, but the weather's going mad out there."
"Wound's sake," breathed Erony as she peered out at the threatening, turbulent sky, "had we been airborne when the shockwave struck, we would have been thrown into the trees."
Dex gathered up the Ancient scanner from where it had fallen in the melee, working the device. "If I read this right, then it looks like Sheppard headed north."
"What about this Wraith, the one called Scar?"
Ronon frowned. "He had Teyla captive. My guess is he made the colonel fly them out of here."
"But where to?"
Erony's lips thinned to a line. "North, you say?" She sighed. "I know where they are going."
"Highness, do not speak further!" Linnian managed weakly. "These outworlders must not be party to such important matters!"
"Hush," insisted Carson. "Erony? Is there something we should know?"
The noblewoman threw a look to one of her riflemen. "Inform the pilots to raise the flyer and take us northwards. Our destination will be the protected lands of the Fourth Dynast." The soldier saluted and disappeared into the cockpit. "At best speed, we will reach them quickly, but I have no doubt your colonel's aircraft will be there before us."
"Mistake," whined the adjutant. "Do not speak of it!"
"There is a truth," she began, as the aircraft left the ground, "a hidden truth that my Dynast keep from the world, a truth that even I am not fully party to." Erony sagged, as if the weight of what she was about to reveal was dragging her down. "I gave my oath to hold this sacred, but now I fear more silence may doom my planet to extinction."
Beckett took a seat across from the young woman, and listened carefully as she told them the Lord Magnate's best-kept secret.
The ship had been constructed before any of the Wraith that now called it home had even been born; although `constructed' might not have been the right way to describe it. Wraith vessels were not so much things of iron and steel, of plastic and glass, creations of artificial materials like the vessels built by the humans, the Goa'uld, the Asgard or the Ancients. Wraith craft were hatched; they were spun and carved into being, melded together out of matter more akin to bone and gristle than to titanium plate and silicon wafer. Electrochemical processes and nerve ganglions transmitted data and commands about the flesh of the Wraith Hive Ship. Organic bioluminescence and exothermal chemistry provided light, heat and breathing gasses. Skeletal matter formed the hull spaces and fuselage. The Wraith were parasites inside the gut of the craft, they probed and manipulated the simple brain to perform its flight tasks for them. And even, with a science now lost to all but a few castes of their kind, they found a way to warp the structure of reality so that rips into hyperspace could carry them from world to world, feeding, multiplying, culling.
This ship's mind had long since faded into docility, anything but the most basic cognitive functions still active, poked and prodded by the idiot flailings of the men-apes that discovered it. Once, at the heights of its prowess, the ship had been a living embodiment of fear. The vast shape of its insectile form, a giant mirror of the Iratus that had given birth to Wraithkind, it would drift above human worlds and strike terror into every prey that saw it. It had been glorious, then. To feed and feed, unfettered by everything except hunger. The Hive ate well and prospered; until the Enemy opposed them.
So began the long war, and along the way the Wraith lost something of themselves. The more they fought, the more they broke apart into factionalism, clan against clan, jockeying for the best feeding sites. In the end they had their victory, but the price was a high one. With the Enemy scattered, the galaxy was theirs-but food became scarce and the divisions of the war split wide. Wraith fought Wraith, and all the while the survivors of the great adversary sniped at them from every shadowed corner. Word of the Sleep began to spread. The Wraith were to embrace slumber and allow their feeding grounds to lie fallow and rebuild. Some would stay to stand sentinel; the rest would take the Sleep of millennia.
And so this Hive Ship came to this world for one final feast before venturing into hibernation; but the Enemy were waiting, and they had poisoned the prey, shielded them with their hateful technology. In the end, after many on both sides had fought and died, the vessel had fallen to earth and lay there, a wounded behemoth, its crew going insane with rage and hunger. Their only escape was to Sleep. The ship would wake them when it was time.
That time was now.
Inside the hibernation vault, the cells where Wraith still lay dormant took on a tepid white glow. First in ones and twos, then in clusters that faded into life, the neural links between the sleeping aliens and their vessel bringing both into gradual wakefulness.
Daus's elite corps of riflemen, his personal guard, had been deployed throughout the Hive Ship on his arrival. A contingent of them was stationed in the chamber, standing in a nervous ring on the bone walkway that extended across the open space. Their heads lifted to watch the patterns of light moving over the hexagonal hive cells. Sounds like eggshells cracking hissed and sputtered through the metallic air of the vast room. Wraiths, their minds shocked out of cold-sleep by the discharge from the shattered dolmen, reached out to peel back the fibrous sheaths that held them in stasis, spilling glutinous suspensor fluids out in a thick, cloying rain.
Naked, hateful and starving for the taste of their prey, the crew of the Hive Ship began to awaken. They had not fed in thousands of years, and the hunger they felt overwhelmed any reason they might have had. Pale and muscular bodies ripped themselves from the hibernation cells and scrambled across the walls, guttural screeches echoing as they spat out hunting calls.
The riflemen shone lamps into the darkness, casting pools of yellow sodium glare across the fluted curves of the bone walls. Shadows jumped and moved, drawing blares of nervous gunfire from fearful men. The Halcyons were used to being the hunters, the superiors in their dealings with the Wraith; but today those roles were reversed. The aliens swarmed upon the men in their black greatcoats, corpse-white forms rising up from beneath and falling upon them from above. In short order the crashes of gunfire were silenced and replaced with the howls and chatter of a feeding frenzy.
It was hard to make out details of exactly what was going on inside the hibernation vault. The screen in the Hive Ship's nexus chamber relayed visual data from one of hundreds of optical sensor orbs about the vessel's interior, and the images were attuned for Wraith eyes, not human ones; nevertheless, the shocked silence that hung in the room was proof enough that the Halcyon scientists were more than clear about the fate of the riflemen.
Rodney McKay's hand crept to his mouth. "We are so dead."
Kelfer was slumped beside him, the science minister now a paper-thin sketch of the man he had been. The scientist could not bear to watch the horrors unfolding on the screen. What he had witnessed in the past few days had finally broken him, as the facts he based his life around had come to pieces. McKay might have been able to spare a moment of pity for the guy, had he not been partially to blame for the danger that everyone on Halcyon was now facing.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Rodney had been clinging on to the idea that he would, as he so often did, blossom under the pressure of the situation and come up with a brilliant solution that saved his life and those of everyone else around him; but as he watched the shadowy forms of the Wraith butchering those hapless soldiers, his heart felt like a fist of ice in his chest and the intellect he loved to trumpet was frozen with horror.
Everyone in the nexus chamber turned in fright as the hatch irised open, all of them expecting a flood of Wraith to boil in th
rough the doorway; instead the Lord Magnate stalked in, followed by Vekken and a gaggle of panicked soldiers. All the men had their weapons out and Rodney saw smears of oily alien blood on their tunics.
Daus spied McKay and aimed a swordgun at the scientist. "You!" he thundered. "You did this to defy me, eh? You set them loose!" He advanced, fingering the trigger mechanism in the bowl hilt of the wicked blade.
Rodney recovered just enough to be incredulous. "What? No! That's insane! You think I'd wake up the Wraith just to get at you? I don't want them loose any more than you do!"
The Magnate's swordgun quivered. His fury was barely under his control and he wanted someone to take it out on, someone to blame no matter how undeserving they were. Daus roared wordlessly and dashed a trolley of equipment to the deck, stamping to his adjutant's side. "Vekken! Gather all the men and corral these alien abominations, force them back into their hives at blade point if you must, but do not let them run wild! This is my ship! Mine!"
McKay listened to the man's rantings and just like that, he had a solution. He crouched, speaking quietly into the First Scientist's ear. "Kelfer, listen to me. Vekken's troopers won't be able to stop the Wraith, we both know that. It's up to us to deal with this, you and me."
"How?" moaned the other man. "We are doomed."
"Help me with this." Rodney gestured to the control console. "You've been poking around in this derelict for years and you know the layout better than me. Help me access the main nerve cluster for the power systems."
Kelfer's eyes focused on him. "For what reason?"
"Hive Ships draw power from bio-reactors. If we alter the energy flow, unbalance the reaction, we could create a feedback loop."
McKay saw the light of understanding in the other man's expression. "A chain reaction. Yes. It could be done."
"Help me do it, Kelfer."
The scientist got shakily to his feet. "McKay," he husked, "this... This deed will be most destructive. It will destroy every living thing inside the vessel." Kelfer hesitated. "Us."
Stargate Atlantis: Halcyon Page 25
