by Stargate
Carter was damned if she was going to be that.
The way to beat the Wraith mind games was to concentrate, to burn through it. Fail, and it was a downward spiral; once you were convinced there were more of them, or that they were hiding in every dark corner, they had you. Sam’s eyes narrowed and she focused everything into the small cone of vision down the iron sights of her P90. The fogging flickered, faded —
“Gotcha,” she snapped.
A tongue of muzzle flare leapt from the barrel of her weapon, a fully automatic storm of hollow point bullets ripping into the torso of the alien, shredding the ragged leather jerkin and hammering it backwards. Carter moved up from the partial cover of a console and nudged the Wraith with her boot. The acrid smell of cordite was strong, along with the battery-acid stink of the Wraith themselves.
Black, oily blood pooling in its mouth, the alien fixed her with a glare and did something she wasn’t expecting. It grinned.
“I… Can only die once,” it managed, coughing. “But the Queen… Will take you to death and bring you back, over and over. Kill you a hundred times...” A spasm ran through the Wraith and it fell silent.
“The Queen,” repeated Carter. Ice formed in the pit of her stomach. “Major Lorne!” she shouted. “This isn’t over yet!”
The alert siren was a peculiar ululating whoop, and it reverberated through the chamber. The sound startled Teyla for a split second, and she flinched, ready for the blow that her momentary distraction would allow the Wraith warrior to inflict.
It never came. The warrior grunted with amusement and dropped its guard, clawed fingers flexing as its hands fell to its sides. Teyla held her fighting sticks to the ready, unsure of how to react. What kind of ploy was this? Surrender? A Wraith would only do such a thing if grossly outmatched, and she, as much as Teyla was sure of her fighting skills, was at best only an opponent of level prowess.
The hatchway opened and a quartet of Risar lumbered into the chamber.
“Teyla Emmagan,” said one of them. “Step away from the prisoner.”
“I have the situation in hand,” she panted.
The Wraith chuckled again. The noise was a rattle, like stones in a can. “Nothing could be further from the truth. If you have any intelligence, you will surrender to me now.”
“I see no reason to do so,” retorted the woman, adrenaline still coursing through her.
“No?” It cocked its head, and Teyla felt a brief moment of pressure deep inside her skull. “Ask your friend.” The warrior gestured at the cryogenic pod.
Fenrir’s projection reformed in a whirl of photons. “We are in danger,” said the Asgard urgently. “We must retreat. A battle cannot be won in this state against such odds.”
“What are you talking about?” she demanded, even as a spidery sensation crawled along the flesh of her spine. “No…”
“Oh, yes,” rumbled the Wraith. “Reach out, Teyla. Reach out and know that your defeat is coming.”
A holo-screen sketched itself in above the consoles in the room, displaying an image of Heruun turning slowly beneath a black sky. A shape, a massive insectile form of bone and chitin, crawled inexorably up over the horizon from the planet’s far side, homing in on the orbit of the Aegis.
“Hive Ship,” she breathed, her blood chilled.
The Wraith nodded. “My Queen approaches.”
In the drive core, the siren was accompanied by red-orange strobes that gave the room a hellish, otherworldly glow.
“Teyla!” Carter spoke into her radio. “What’s going on up there? The power systems are ramping up to maximum. What’s Fenrir doing? We haven’t even tested them at half-capacity yet!”
In reply, a flash of light signaled the appearance of the Asgard’s holographic avatar. “Colonel Carter, the status of main weapons and shields remains inactive. Auxiliary craft offensive capabilities are insufficient to match threat. This vessel cannot resist.”
“What threat?” demanded Lorne.
“At a guess, a Hive Ship…” said Carter, fixing the image of the alien with a hard glare. “Or worse.”
“Worse would suggest there is a greater extant threat to the safety of this ship at this time.” Fenrir glanced at one of the control consoles and it lit up, streams of indicators turning a stark blue.
The spinning rings of the power train moved faster and faster, becoming a blur. “Fenrir, what are you doing?” said the colonel. “The sub-light engines may not be able to handle full thrust.”
“I do not intend to employ the sub-light engines,” came the reply. “I would suggest you prepare yourself. Many of the required safeguards are not in place. You may find this displacement uncomfortable.” The avatar winked out, leaving them alone in the engine room.
In that moment, Sam knew exactly what was going to happen. “No—!”
In the skies above Heruun, a skein of coruscating blue-white energy rippled into existence, spilling out from the gap between quantum states, bleeding icy color across the void. The hammerhead shape of the Asgard vessel Aegis turned in a steep, ungainly banking turn and fell toward the phenomenon, retreating from the questing lines of plasma fire reaching out from the encroaching Hive Ship. The vessel touched the ephemeral interface between space and hyperspace, and vanished into it with a silent collision of unreal forces.
Now alone in orbit over the brown and green planet, the Hive Ship paused; then it turned to face its serrated prow at the surface, and from its flanks fell sharp arrows of bone, primed for the hunt.
He was dreaming of Sateda, of safety and quiet. He was dreaming of a place where he could rest, where it was all right for him to be fatigued and weakened, a place where he could just let go, heal up, and forget the war.
They took that from him. The sound, in the sky, crashing down around him, lancing into his thoughts. Ronon heard the razor-edged keening, the nerve-shredding buzz of the enemy; but it was just a dream.
Just a dream —
“Ronon!” He blinked back to wakefulness with a gasp of effort. Sleep and the heavy pull of the sickness dragged on him, threatening to draw him down again to soft oblivion. He shook his head, and it felt like it was full of sand.
Keller pressed something to his throat and he felt a pinprick of pain. In a moment it was gone and some vague semblance of clarity returned to him
“What did…” At first he found it hard to form the words.
“A stimulant,” she explained. Her voice was high and tight with fear. “Ronon, we have to get out of here.”
It was then he realized he could still hear the sound of the Wraith Darts crowding the sky.
Ronon threw himself from the bed, using a support stanchion to haul his body to its feet. He grabbed at his pistol and pushed his way outside, into the morning light. The gun felt good and familiar in his grip. It gave him a point of reference, something to focus his anger through. It was a lens for his revenge.
“Stay back!” he threw the words at Keller, waving her away as he staggered out of the sick lodge and on to the settlement’s wide wooden boulevard. His gaze found Laaro, the boy huddled in the shadow of a tree bough, eyes fixed on the sky. White shapes with needle prows and bladed wings shrieked past overhead.
“The Wraith…” said the youth in disbelief, his trembling lips almost unable to form the words. “The Aegis has forsaken us. The Wraith have returned!”
“Get inside,” he growled, and then shouted at the top of his lungs to all the Heruuni who stumbled and panicked in the street. “Get inside your homes! Don’t let them catch you in the open!” He grabbed Laaro’s arm and pulled him back toward the sick lodge.
Above, the Darts wheeled and turned, sweeping back and forth in patterns that cross-hatched the sky.
The healer Kullid pushed his way to the door to stand by Keller’s side. “They have come back, after all this time…” He spoke in hushed, awed tones, fascination in his eyes.
Ronon shoved the boy toward Keller and hesitated on the steps of the lodge, kneading
the grip of his pistol. Something was wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was something missing… Annoyed with himself and cursing the Asgard for making him sick, Dex shook his head, as if the gesture would force away the fog in his thoughts.
The realization struck him like a slow bullet. “They’re not… Culling.” None of the Darts weaving above them were streaming the capture beams from beneath their hulls, sweeping the settlement for prey. None of them scooped up the frightened and the terror-struck, they only moved in lines and circles.
“What are they doing?” said Keller
Ronon nodded to himself. He had seen this behavior before, on wilderness hunt-worlds when he had been a Runner. “They’re searching for something.”
The Puddle Jumper blew through the open Stargate and into the middle of chaos. Rodney ducked instinctively as a white streak of energy slammed into the canopy of the ship, and he saw the sparks of automatic weapons fire flash by as they swept up and away from the valley where the portal was located.
“Did you see that?”
Sheppard didn’t reply; instead he turned the barrel-shaped ship around in a tight stall-turn and swept back the way they had come.
McKay saw more clearly now. The valley was being swarmed by Wraith warriors, a cluster of the steel-armored, blank-faced creatures storming forward with weapons blazing.
The colonel spoke quickly into his headset. “Jumper Three to all units, this is Sheppard, respond!”
Rodney’s stomach tightened as he heard Sergeant Rush’s voice over the radio. Gunfire was thick and noisy in the background. “Colonel! They came out of nowhere, sir, we’re being overrun! We’re gonna lose the gate!”
“But, the Asgard ship…” began Rodney. He picked out the figures of men in Atlantis uniforms lying sprawled out on the ruddy dirt below them.
“Rush, disengage and retreat through the wormhole! Get back to Atlantis, double-time!”
The sergeant’s voice wavered. “No can do, sir. They’ll take us down before we make it ten feet! You have to shut it down! We can’t let them get to the city… Tell Atlantis to shut it down!” The hiss of Wraith blasters crackled through the air and suddenly the channel went dead.
“Sergeant? Sergeant, do you read me?” Sheppard cursed the static that answered him.
Energy pulses reached up from the ground toward the Jumper as the Wraith took aim at a new target. McKay saw alien figures break from the group and run towards the glittering vertical pool. He spoke into his headset, shouting down the base channel with frantic urgency. “Atlantis, McKay! Condition Black! Condition Black!”
The Wraith were almost at the Stargate when the wormhole evaporated, the connection cut. The code-phrase had done its job; the gate technicians back on Atlantis had severed the wormhole, and until a set of pre-determined security protocols were cleared, it would remain locked out of the dialing computer.
“Good call,” said Sheppard grimly. He reached forward and toggled a control. “I’m cloaking the Jumper.” A glassy shimmer hazed the exterior of the craft and rendered it invisible; the Wraith continued to fire, shooting wild in hopes of clipping the Ancient ship as it sped away.
“Rush,” said Rodney, his breath tight in his chest. “And the others… Oh god, what did I just do?”
“The right thing,” said Sheppard. “Atlantis has to come first. We lose that, we’re all dead. Those men know that.”
Rodney nodded stiffly. He knew John was right but that didn’t make him feel any better. “We… We have to find the others, Sam and Jennifer, Ronon…”
The Jumper was rising high into the air. “Already on it. I’m gonna get some altitude, run a sensor sweep.” Sheppard brought up the HUD overlay and swore for the second time. “Oh, that’s not good.”
McKay glanced up and choked on the other man’s understatement. Toward the settlement, the display showed multiple glyphs moving and swooping around the tree-city. “Darts…”
Sheppard pointed at another glyph, a lone object out in low orbit. “And there’s home base. A Hive Ship. Seems like they got tired of waiting.”
“Long-range interstellar jump,” said the scientist, “if they entered hyperspace in the shadow of a planet and then dropped out again close to Heruun, the galactic sensors on Atlantis might have missed it.” He shook his head. “But to do that, they’d have needed to know exactly, precisely where they were going to emerge.”
“A scout. They must have had a scoutship out here, scoping the whole damned planet.” The colonel frowned. “And we never even knew it.”
“Uh, Sheppard?” said McKay, scrutinizing the tactical display. “There’s only one starship up there. Where’s the Aegis?”
The Darts had been joined by more of their kindred. Ronon could see them coming, the impassive, eyeless masks of Wraith warriors marching up the ramped concourse catching the dull sunlight. Stunner bolts flared, striking any Heruuni who ran in the back and laying them down hard.
Those who tried to fight — men in the robes of the guards he’d seen with Takkol and Aaren — did little to slow the advance. Ronon saw the spark of rounds from the primitive rodguns as they ricocheted harmlessly off Wraith body amour; he heard the howl of mai cats as the aliens cut down the guardian animals.
At his side, Lieutenant Allan gave him a hard look. “We can’t take them all on.” Her face was still pale from the effect of the serpent venom in her system, but Dex didn’t comment on it. He knew he had to look just as bad, if not worse. Every moment he stood still, the sickness pulled at him, threatening to drown him in fatigue.
“We’ll see,” he replied, through gritted teeth. Ronon turned and pressed a Beretta pistol into Doctor Keller’s trembling hands. “You know how to use this, right?”
The woman blanched. “It’s not really my thing —”
“It is now,” Ronon cut her off. Without waiting for a reply, he pushed off from the sick lodge doorway and came out firing, shooting over the heads of the guards who fired from cover or bended knee. The lieutenant moved with him, her P90 at her shoulder, marking off three-round bursts into the advancing line of the enemy.
The particle magnum spat red energy, knocking every Wraith they touched into a heap; but Ronon was hissing with annoyance as he missed with one shot for every two that hit home; the creeping malaise was affecting his aim.
The Wraith squads scattered, realizing that this new enemy was a more serious threat to them. He saw them make for cover, regrouping. A larger troop of them held back in a tight cordon. Protecting something? he wondered.
A stun blast shrieked past him and threw a Heruuni guard off his perch on a support rail, his rodgun firing wild. Allan dodged and emptied the rest of her clip at the assailant. “Reloading —”
She never finished the sentence. Ronon saw it coming, but something in him was just too slow to react. He saw a Wraith officer point a pistol her way and even as a warning cry was forming on his lips, the white flash crossed the distance from the muzzle of the alien weapon to the woman’s chest. She didn’t even have time to cry out; instead she fell silently to the boardwalk.
A storm of stunner fire converged on Ronon Dex, streaking past him, snapping at his heels as he forced himself to run. All the Wraith, so it seemed, now had him in their sights. He dove for the lieutenant’s fallen submachine gun, but still he was too sluggish. Too slow!
A stun bolt caught his arm and spun him with the shock of it. Dimly he was aware of his particle magnum turning to dead weight in the insensate flesh of his hand. The cold, numbing sensation swept down the side of his body, wiping out feeling from his nerves. He sagged, swearing a gutter oath as his legs gave out and let gravity take him.
The next moment he was prone, the instant between the hit and the fall gone to him. Ronon tried to drag himself up, toward the pistol that lay just beyond his reach. His fingers touched the warm metal; but then a heavy boot came down on the barrel, holding it in place.
He looked up into the leering face of a Wraith officer; clos
er now, and he could pick out the clan sigils that identified the male as the commander of a scoutship. “The Runner,” it said, cocking its head. “A good catch.”
“Bite me,” he spat. Rough, pale hands dragged him back to his feet.
The commander grinned. “Show some respect,” it told him. “You’ll live longer.” The alien stepped away as the cluster of warriors parted to reveal a figure standing in among them, the person they had been protecting.
She was Wraith; that was to say, she was the very essence of what they were, distilled into a single being. Lithe and sinuous, her flesh was a glistening greenish-grey the color of a bruise, and dark, oiled hair cascaded down around her shoulders. She wore a close-cut outfit made of some form of tanned hide that did not invite too close a scrutiny. But more than anything, it was the manner in which she carried herself that identified her, gave her name. The female was haughty and sinister by equal measure; she was every inch a Wraith Queen.
She gave Ronon an arch, disdainful glare, which by moments slowly transformed into a ready, fang-toothed smile. “Where is the alien vessel?” she demanded.
The Satedan gave a rough shrug. “The what?”
“I know who you are, Ronon Dex,” she continued, stalking slowly around him. “I know of you and your cohorts from Atlantis. I can imagine why you are here. You want it as much as we do.”
From the corner of his eye he saw movement and his heart sank. The commander was directing a group of Wraith to push people out of the sick lodge and on to the boulevard; first among them was Keller, the boy Laaro and Kullid. The healer was open-mouthed at the sight of the aliens, too fascinated by what he was seeing to understand the danger he was in.
Ronon made a play of yawning. “Let’s get this over with. You wanna go straight to the threats, or what?”
