Nightfall

by Stargate

  Jennifer glanced around the room, shaking her head “Colonel, these people —”

  “— Are not going to be helped by you staying here.” He spoke over her. “You’re going back to Atlantis. And just in case you’re not certain, that’s an order, Doctor.”

  “John,” McKay began to speak, but he was silenced by an uncompromising glare from his friend.

  “We’re not getting dragged into another local fight, Rodney. This has happened way too many times on my watch, and it’s not gonna happen again here.” He turned toward the yawning doors.

  Aaren snarled. “Sheppard! I am a senior elder! You cannot walk away from me!”

  He answered without turning around. “Watch me.”

  The bald man halted in front of a larger set of hatch doors and pointed at it. His face retained the same bland nothingness; it was impossible for Teyla to read anything from him, no emotional cues, not a single spark of self. She chewed her lip. Even the Asuran Replicators, pure machine life forms, copied human nature enough to have expressions and emotions visible on their faces. The Athosian felt a moment of sorrow for the man; was this mindless state the condition of every Heruuni who became one of the Taken?

  Ronon gestured at the doors and they parted; beyond was a short length of corridor, apparently undamaged, ending in another hatchway. The man continued to point. “That way?” Dex asked. “Open it.”

  By way of assent, the bald man walked on, toward the other doors. Ronon followed him, but Teyla hesitated just inside the threshold. Something seemed…wrong.

  Ronon eyed her. “Teyla? What is it?”

  “I don’t know —”

  The ellipse in her hand glowed, flashing a green-red. Before she could react, the doors they had just stepped through slammed shut. She heard a faint squeal as a pressure seal locked.

  A sudden and terrible thought formed in her mind. “Oh no.” She launched herself toward the bald man, who was doggedly working a crystalline touchpad in the far wall. “Stop him!”

  She was not quick enough. The far hatch clicked and began to open. From nowhere, a horrific tornado blasted through the chamber, knocking the three of them to their feet. The wind was made of ice and razors and it tore at Teyla and Ronon, dragging them across the smooth floor.

  Panting, the very breath in her lungs being sucked out through her mouth, Teyla chanced a glance over her shoulder towards the ever-opening doors. Out beyond them, she saw a stark monochrome landscape; a mottled grey-white landscape, a black sky, and hanging in it the globe of a clouded brown world ringed by a glittering halo.

  Heruun.

  Then her eyes began to prickle as needles of pain lanced into them, the fluid in the soft tissues dropping toward freezing point. Teyla saw the bald man tumble silently out through the widening gap, to tumble into the white dust beyond. A stream of reddish fluid followed him down, droplets from his nostrils and mouth becoming crimson pearls as they flash-froze in the vacuum.

  She tried to scream, but the wind was too loud. The terrible chill crept into her, and she was dimly aware of something holding on to her, a strong hand around her wrist. Every movement an effort now, Teyla looked back to see Ronon gripping her arm, his other hand locked around a curved stanchion in the wall. His bare arms were covered in patches of frost, and his beard was turning white. She saw his lips moving.

  Hold on.

  Teyla managed a nod, but it was all she could do. The sudden, punishing cold was leaching the life from her, draining away her energy. She felt icicles of blood forming on her cheeks, cutting into her. All she could think of was Kanaan and their unborn child.

  Her vision fogged, turned grey.

  Turned black.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The landscape was a rusty blur through the canopy of the Puddle Jumper, broken only by the low clumps of trees and long lines of sharp-spined hills. The heads-up display projected a ghostly grid of map lines, marking the small vessel’s passage across the search zone with a blinking blue glyph.

  “Coming up to the edge of zone two,” said McKay. He gave a minute sigh. “No reading.”

  “Right.” Sheppard ran his hands over the Jumper’s controls and it banked to starboard. “Moving to zone three.”

  They’d been up for an hour or so, and the two of them had spoken little in that time. Sheppard had to admit it was actually quite a novelty to be in a room with Rodney McKay and actually have the guy be quiet for more than five minutes at a stretch.

  McKay sighed again, tapping at the portable computer on his lap. Okay, so he wasn’t actually being totally quiet. He kept doing the sighing thing, and it was starting to grate on Sheppard as time went on.

  When he did it again, it was like the colonel’s tolerance meter suddenly flipped from full to empty. He shot the scientist a glare. “If you have something to say to me, Rodney, spit it out. Otherwise, the next time you sigh, I’m dropping you off in the middle of the next lion pack I find.”

  McKay gave him an affronted look in return. “I can’t help it if I exhale noisily. But now you mention it, yes, maybe I do have something on my mind.”

  Sheppard kept his eyes on the horizon. “Well?”

  Rodney took a breath and launched into the speech he’d clearly been holding in since they took off from the Stargate. “Keller was right. These people need our help.”

  “Our people need our help,” Sheppard countered. “Teyla and Ronon, remember them? They’re the priority. Two Atlantis team members in harm’s way —”

  McKay broke in. “Yes, I heard what you said to Colonel Carter, you don’t have to repeat it. And clearly she agrees with you, otherwise she wouldn’t have authorized the use of this Jumper.”

  Sheppard frowned. He felt fatigued and worn out by the heat and the events of the past day. He couldn’t remember the last time he slept, and it was making him irritable. He glanced at McKay again. “Don’t make me out as the bad guy. Tell me you’re not going to play the ‘civilians versus the military’ card. Keller’s still a newbie out here and from her I could forgive it, but you? After everything we’ve been through, I thought you knew me better than that.” He paused. “And for the record, Carter was not an easy sell about the Jumper.”

  “It’s just… You’re leaving these people twisting in the wind,” Rodney went on. “They need medical attention, and someone to stand up to that blowhard Takkol.”

  “And that has to be us? When we moved into Atlantis, I don’t recall signing up to put out every fire in the Pegasus galaxy! We have enough problems of our own, dealing with the Wraith and the Replicators and everyone else who wants us dead, without taking on the troubles of every planet we visit!” He shook his head. “I knew this mission was a bad idea from the get-go.”

  McKay folded his arms. “That’s it, is it? You’re just going to stick around until we find Ronon and Teyla, and then leave? What about those Wraith ships that imploded, what about this Aegis thing and the sickness?” He leaned forward. “What would Elizabeth have said about that, John?”

  The thought of Elizabeth Weir brought Sheppard up short. “She would have agreed with me,” he replied, with less conviction than he would have liked.

  “That’s not true, and you know it.”

  The colonel grimaced. “You think I want to make this call, Rodney? But if the local government here doesn’t want our help with the sickness, we can’t force it on them. And I sure as hell am not getting suckered into doing Aaren’s strong-arm work for him, not again.”

  “Well, maybe it’s time for a regime change…”

  Sheppard eyed him. “You know that for sure, huh? You’ve been on Heruun less than two days and you’re ready to make that judgment? We can’t get that sort of thing right on our own planet, what makes you think we can do it right here?” He looked away; his tone had risen as he spoke, and the colonel had to admit a good amount of his annoyance was directed inward as well as at his friend.

  “And of course there’s the whole reason we came here in the first place
. Hive Ship in the ’hood, remember?”

  “I haven’t forgotten that,” Sheppard replied.

  “Maybe now we should tell the locals about it?”

  “Wait.” On the upper range of the detection grid, something glittered and then vanished just as quickly. “What was that?”

  McKay was immediately tapping at his computer. “Extending the scan envelope…” The target returned. “There! Refined metals, plastics, some organic matter…” He paused, frowning. “But it’s not on the ground. It’s above us.”

  “In orbit?”

  Sheppard got a nod in return. “Seems that way. I think it could be part of a vessel…”

  “Let’s take a look-see.” He worked the Jumper’s controls and peeled off from the low-level flight pattern, into a steep climb, pouring power to the thrusters.

  McKay shot him a look. “By the way, that conversation we were having? It’s not over.”

  “It is for now,” said the colonel. Outside the canopy, the dusty blue of Heruun’s sky became the black of space.

  The darkness went away for a while, and in pieces Teyla felt herself awaken; but not all at once. The moments faded in and out, falling from her grip like sand between her fingers.

  The face of one of the humanoids loomed over her. Two more stood behind it, all of them wearing the same blank expression. The lipless mouth opened and she heard words, a rough, unfinished voice with a quizzical edge to it. “Why did you attempt to terminate yourselves?”

  She forced air through her lungs, ignoring the pain. “You… Can speak…”

  One of the other aliens blinked. “I have many methods of communication.”

  “We… Wanted to escape.” She coughed, and it hurt like fire.

  The closest of the creatures moved one of the glass eggs over her. Teyla flinched, tried to shy away from it, but the faint yellow ray it cast left no paralysis in its wake, only a warmth. A warmth and the absence of the pain.

  “Your choice was foolish,” said the first alien. Its powdery, pale skin seemed ashen and pallid, like the flesh of a drowned thing. “You acted without consideration. You did not understand where you are.”

  Teyla remembered the snarling words of the Wraith warrior in the cells. You can’t escape this place! The Wraith had known exactly where they were. “A base…? On a moon… A moon of Herrun.”

  “A ship,” corrected the third humanoid. Each of them spoke with identical tone and inflection, the words pitched strangely as if verbal speech was uncommon to them. “On the surface of the primary satellite.”

  “Where is my friend?” she demanded, gasping in air as the chill in her bones began to recede.

  “Unhurt. The other with you who ventured outside could not be recovered.” It bowed its head. “Unfortunate.”

  Abruptly, Teyla realized she was in motion, being carried along one of the metallic corridors on some sort of platform. She tried to rise, but her body was too weak. “Where are…you taking me?”

  “Do not be afraid,” came the reply. “This is necessary.”

  The exertion was too much, and Teyla felt the effort of everything pulling her back towards the darkness. “What are you?”

  The alien touched its chest in an all-too human gesture. “This is a Risar,” it explained.

  The strange name followed her into unconsciousness.

  Tiny particles of dust peppered the Jumper, with the occasional larger, fist-sized lumps thudding off the hull as Sheppard guided the ship toward the object they had detected. McKay leaned over the monitor of his laptop. As they climbed into low orbit, he began to see more sensor returns, a whole stream of them lying across the scanner range in a diffuse strip.

  “It’s a debris field,” he realized. “The gravity from the planet has a hold on it, it’s dragging it apart.” Rodney moved his hands to illustrate, as if he were pulling on a string between them.

  “Debris from what?”

  The Jumper’s sensor grid obediently opened another window in on the holographic HUD and text spooled down it. Rodney nodded slowly, the data confirming what he was already certain of. “A Wraith ship.”

  “A Hive?”

  He shook his head. “No, there’s not enough mass. But too much to just be a dart. It has to be one of those scouts we detected back on Atlantis.

  The Jumper slowed as it approached the chunk of wreckage. It turned slowly, catching reflected sunlight from the planet below. McKay couldn’t recognize the form or function of the fragment, but it was undoubtedly Wraith in origin. It looked like a broken tooth from some monstrous beast’s mouth, jagged and ragged along the bony white edges, in other places blackened by carbon scoring.

  “I’m not gonna cry a river over one less Wraith warship,” Sheppard noted, “but it begs the question… What did that to them?” Both men knew that the hard bio-matter hulls of Wraith craft could take a pounding before they collapsed; anything capable of crushing one into pieces was not to be taken lightly.

  Rodney gave an involuntary shiver. “And is it still around?” He shook off the worrying thought and worked the computer through a spectrographic scan sequence. Spikes immediately began to appear on the electrochemical analysis display. “Energy weapons…”

  “That would explain the burn marks,” noted Sheppard, craning his neck to get a better look at the wreckage. “Asuran tech, maybe?”

  McKay gave a slow shake of the head. “No, actually.” He pointed at the readout on the screen. “The radiation pattern doesn’t match any known beam weapon used by the Replicators, or the Wraith and the Travelers, not even the Ancients… In fact, it’s not like anything we’ve encountered in the Pegasus galaxy.”

  “Great,” Sheppard made a face. “We have a new player, then. That’s all we need.”

  He was still poring over the data. “Decay rate indicates this happened years ago… Maybe even decades.” McKay looked up at Sheppard. “The Aegis did this. There’s no other explanation.”

  The colonel nosed the Puddle Jumper into a different attitude, and feathered the throttle. “I’m going to move us into a higher orbit. See if you can cast a wider net with the sensors, get a better angle on what happened up here.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea? I mean, if this Aegis thing is blasting ships out of the sky?”

  “We have something the Wraith don’t — a cloaking device.”

  McKay blew out a breath. “Let’s hope that’s enough.”

  When she came to again, Teyla had a firmer grip on wakefulness. She became aware that the aliens — the Risar — had brought her to a wide circular chamber, with an arching domed roof that mirrored the design of ship’s corridors. Her mind raced; she had a vague recollection of being taken from the surface of Heruun and transported the distance to the lunar surface, some faint impression of a silver craft, a cramped interior…

  She shifted, moving carefully. They had left her on the floating platform used to bring her here; and there, across the chamber, was an identical platform and on it, Ronon Dex.

  He was still, only his chest rising and falling. As she watched, one of the Risar approached him and worked the healing device over blackened patches of frostbite on his skin.

  There were several of the humanoids in the chamber, some of them tending to wide, inswept consoles made of bronze and copper. They manipulated shapes and panes of light appeared in the air, showing images she did not recognize and streams of angular glyphs.

  She studied the Risar for long moments, their movements and behavior. Like those they had glimpsed in the corridors, they did not correspond with one another, they simply went about their tasks, never crossing paths, always focused on their silent intention. Yet, some of them seemed different. Two of those she watched moved more slowly than the others, in the way of an elderly man whose joints were paining him. They seemed less able than the rest, and their skin tone was not the blue-green hue of the others, but a deep slate grey. They appeared, for want of a better word, sickly. Teyla filed the observation away for later
consideration.

  As she watched, a pair from the group gathered around the console closest to Ronon. With a whisper of metallic leaves, an iris aperture opened in the floor and a grey orb atop a jointed arm extended upward until it stood over the Satedan’s platform. One of the Risar manipulated a control and the orb rotated and shifted, coming around on itself until it hung above Ronon’s head. Teyla felt her pulse quicken, instinct warning her that whatever was to happen next, it would not be good.

  Panels on the side of the orb opened to allow a forest of needle-thin probes to emerge, reaching toward Ronon’s face. He murmured in his enforced slumber, unaware of the threat.

  “No!” Teyla shouted, and tried to force herself from the platform where she lay, ignoring the pain in her joints and the echo of nausea. She could not bring herself to sit up; although there were no physical restraints holding her down, the Athosian woman felt a sudden increase in gravity, a great invisible weight pressing on her chest. The Risar had some form of force field trapping her in place. Teyla mustered as much effort as she could, trying to find a breaking point, but for every ounce of strength she put against the invisible confinement, it was turned back against her tenfold.

  One of the Risar detached from the group and approached her. “Desist,” it told her. “You may injure yourself.”

  “Leave him alone!” she barked. “Do not hurt him!”

  The Risar glanced in the direction of Ronon. “That has never been my intention. The male will not be harmed.” It cocked its head slightly. “You are greatly concerned for his wellbeing. Is he your mate?”

  “He’s my friend!”

  “Your friend will not be damaged by the regulation process.”

  Regulation? The toneless way the alien said the word made Teyla’s blood run cold.

  “It is a safety protocol,” continued the Risar. “It will prevent any further accidents or unauthorized sojourns. It is applied to all transients.”