by Stargate
“You fought them.”
“Yes. I deployed Risar aboard remote auxiliary craft and used my technology and skills to dispatch them. They were formidable adversaries.”
Teyla nodded. “And in doing so, you preserved the lives of all the humans on Heruun. You protected them.”
Fenrir leaned back, his expression tightening. “Despite whatever the Herunni believe, I engaged the Wraith in combat only to protect my vessel and myself, not them. I turned the Wraith to my use as I did the human tribals. I could not construct replacements for certain elements of my ship’s systems, so I used recovered pieces of their bio-technology to fulfill the same function.” He looked away. “I am not a guardian or a god. The Asgard have played that role all too often and it has only ever brought us difficulty.”
Teyla opened her mouth to speak, but Fenrir’s avatar moved away. “I must ensure that the Wraith do not surprise me again. Bring the warrior here.” The last words were directed at the three Risar surrounding the lone captive Wraith.
“Obeying,” The clone creatures spoke the word with one voice, and deactivated the paralysis field. The warrior gasped and stumbled forward a step.
At the engineering console, Colonel Carter reacted by snatching up her P90. “What’s going on?”
“I am not certain,” said Teyla; but she suddenly had a creeping sensation across the flesh of her back.
“I cannot risk any compromise of my work,” said Fenrir. “It was my error to let this creature live. To sever any possible telepathic conduit to this ship, it must be put to death.”
The Risar raised the orb-devices in their hands and aimed at the Wraith; in turn, the warrior threw up its hands in self-defense. “Wait!” it shouted. “Wait! Do not kill me, Asgard…”
Teyla hesitated. “It knows his species…”
“It could have heard any one of us say that,” said Carter.
“Fen…rir!” The Wraith ground out the name between gasping breaths. “You are… Fenrir… Asgard!”
All at once there was something else in the room with them. It was nothing tangible or visible, nothing seen by Colonel Carter, Fenrir and his Risar or the sensors of the Aegis; only Teyla and the Wraith could sense it, a stygian tide of bitter thought pressing its way out through the void, and into their minds. Teyla forced the gates of her own consciousness shut, holding them fast by sheer will. A groan escaped her lips.
“Teyla?” Carter saw her distress. “Are you okay?”
“The Queen…” she grated. “She is…searching.”
“Searching,” repeated the Wraith warrior. “Speaking.”
Fenrir pointed at the Risar. “Terminate it, now!”
“I have a message!” shouted the Wraith. “Hear me out! The Queen speaks… Speaks… Through me!”
The Asgard hesitated, a questioning cast to its face. “Then speak,” he said finally.
“This is a mistake,” said Carter.
“My Queen wishes to speak to you, Fenrir… Under a banner of truce.”
“Truce?” echoed Teyla, her head pounding from the psychic undertow. “The Wraith do not understand the meaning of the word!”
The warrior gave a shudder, and his body language changed as the pressure inside Teyla’s skull lessened until it was a distant background throb. The alien moved jerkily, like a puppet worked by a hesitant master. “Hear me,” it said, in a breathy murmur. “I speak through this instrument… I ask for truce… With the Asgard Fenrir.”
“To what end?”
“The disclosure of information… To mutual benefit… Do you accept?”
“You can’t trust the Wraith,” Carter told him.
The warrior turned blank eyes toward the colonel. “No, human, it is… Your kind that he should not trust. The… Atlanteans are the ones who… Keep secrets… Not us.”
“What secrets?” demanded Fenrir. “Explain yourself.”
“Not yet, Asgard,” gasped the warrior. “When… We meet.” The puppet’s telepathic strings were abruptly severed, and the Wraith collapsed to the deck, shuddering and panting.
Teyla shot Carter a worried look, the memory of the conversation in the lodge coming back to her with grave force. When she turned back the holographic avatar was staring at her.
“What did she mean?” asked the Asgard.
“I do not know,” Teyla lied.
The two ships met in the void, Heruun a distant sphere beneath them lit dull brown by the reflected glow of the far sun.
They came together, closing the distance, prow to prow; they were a study in contrasts, two vessels built by races galaxies apart from one another, from philosophies that were utterly unlike.
The Asgard cruiser Aegis, heavy and armored in appearance but more agile than anything so large had the right to be, drifted to a halt, the maws of weapons tubes and the lenses of beam weapons open wide in apparent ready threat; although the reality was very different. The Aegis was many centuries old by human standards, and yet the enduring steel and iron of its hull was still sturdy; the marks that aged it were a handful of half-patched wounds from plasma fire.
The Wraith Hive Ship moved to mimic the motion of the other craft, the wide spear tip profile of the bony fuselage broken by the spider-leg spars of great antennae extending out behind its hull. It did not have a name, for Wraith did not give their craft appellations as other species did; Wraith simply knew their ships by the trace and the texture of them, as an animal would know its lair by the scent it had laid there. Grown from bone-seeds in vast pools of sluggish blood media and liquid cartilage, the Hive Ship was almost a living thing, made of meat and bone, nerve and sinew.
Asgard and Wraith turned slowly around one another, each taking the measure of their opposite.
“I’m warning you,” said Sam, “these creatures are the most dangerous predators in Pegasus.”
Fenrir’s avatar did not look up from its console. “I have faced the Goa’uld, the Replicators and a dozen other threats from five different galaxies, Colonel Carter. I am fully capable of meeting the Wraith face-to-face.”
“Hive Ship has come to a full stop,” reported one of the Risar. “Scanning.”
The oval screen on the wall became a graphic of the alien craft. Carter studied it; the display showed an even power distribution throughout the Hive Ship; there was no sign of any of the telltale energy spikes that might signal weapons being charged or Dart bays about to launch their deadly payloads.
“Target vessel remains in quiescent mode,” said another of the clones.
“You see?” said the Wraith warrior. His voice was still hoarse from before, when his mistress had used him as a telepathic conduit. Dried streaks of black blood marked his face about his flared nostrils. “We come in peace.”
“I doubt it,” noted Teyla. She gave Carter a look. “Fenrir,” she began, maintaining eye contact with the colonel but addressing the Asgard. “Before you go any further, there is something you must know.”
“Teyla…” Carter warned.
“Transport system ready,” said a Risar.
Fenrir didn’t wait for Teyla to continue, “Engage transport.”
There was a flash of white light and columns of energy fell from the air, a curtain of lightning that flared and faded to reveal a disparate group of figures. Carter felt a moment of relief at the sight of Sheppard and McKay among them, but that quickly evaporated when she saw the look on their faces. The rest of the group were mostly Wraith warrior-drones, stood in a tight circle around a male in the garb of a scientist and a stately, angular female; the Queen. Almost out of sight at the rear of the group was a lone figure wearing manacles, face hidden in the folds of a hooded robe.
The Queen inclined her head and gave Fenrir a level look. “So you are an Asgard, then.” She smiled, showing teeth. “Your kind is known to me. I have been learning so much about you recently, I feel as if I already know your species intimately.”
“I am Fenrir,” he replied bluntly. “Understand immediately that I w
ill react to any assault against my vessel or my person with utmost severity.” To underline his words, the Asgard’s Risar disengaged from their consoles and turned to face the Wraith party, each one raising an orb device.
The Queen studied the Asgard for a moment, considering. “Real and yet not real,” she remarked. “If I could smell blood or hear heartbeat I would think you a living being. Will you not show yourself to us, Fenrir? Do you fear us?”
“I show you all of myself that I am willing to. And I have no reason to fear you,” he replied, “as the number of Wraith ships I have obliterated will attest.”
Carter heard the scientist give a low growl, but the Queen shot him a hard look and he fell silent. “Just so. Clearly you have great power. I respect strength. As a gesture of that, and to show my peaceful intent, I have brought two of the Atlanteans with me as my guests, unharmed.”
“Oh yeah,” said Rodney, sarcasm dripping from every word, “she’s really been the hostess with the mostess.”
The Wraith honor guard stood away, allowing Sheppard and McKay to move across to where Carter was standing. “Colonel?” she said, in a low voice.
“We have a very big problem,” Sheppard didn’t wait for her to question him further. “Be ready. Things are going to go south very fast.”
“And then some,” added McKay. “They cut through the encryption like it was made of tissue paper.”
“Encryption on what?” But Carter’s question was answered when she laid eyes on the device in the hands of the Wraith scientist; an Atlantis-issue data pad. “Oh.”
Sheppard leaned closer. “Trust me, however bad you think it is, it’s worse than that.”
Fenrir was speaking again. “You have made claims about your peaceful nature, and yet it was your vessels that attacked me on my arrival in the Pegasus galaxy.”
The Queen shook her head. “Those were craft of another cadre, Fenrir. We Wraith are a clannish culture with many factions. I represent one of those with a less… Reactionary mindset.”
“Indeed? Then tell me what it is you and your clan want with me.”
The alien female threw back her head in a basso chuckle. “I want to help you, Asgard. I know much about you. I know many things you should know.”
Carter watched the Wraith scientist tap at the data pad. “They took it,” she said. It was a statement, not a question. “They broke the coding.”
“Kullid betrayed us,” said McKay bitterly. “He’s a Wraith worshipper, near as we can tell.”
Sam cursed silently, her mind racing. They had lost control of the situation here, and soon it would be too far gone for the Atlanteans to regain it.
“I know about your long and brutal war,” continued the Queen. “For, you see, in a very real way we share the same enemy.”
“What are you doing?” demanded Teyla, but the Wraith ignored her, instead bringing the hooded figure forward.
“Who is this?” snapped Carter.
“No idea,” McKay admitted, “they just dragged this guy up from the holding decks and brought him along with us.”
With a flourish, the Wraith scientist tore the hood away to reveal a human male in a bland, sand-colored tunic and trousers. He stumbled forward, his face furious.
“Do you know what this is?” grinned the Queen. “No? Let me enlighten you?”
Sam and the rest of the Atlanteans knew exactly what the prisoner was, however; a captured Asuran, doubtless one of many the Wraith clan had taken during their recent ongoing battles with the artificial beings.
The holographic avatar looked on, Fenrir’s alien face caught in peculiar moment of wonderment and distress. The Queen nodded at her warriors and as one they turned and gunned down the Asuran, pouring a huge salvo of energy bolts into the prisoners body. Overloaded, the Asuran screamed and disintegrated, becoming a heap of metallic powder.
“A Replicator…” whispered the Asgard. “A humanoid-form Replicator.” He shook his tiny head, blinking. “We had always suspected they might evolve toward this level of sophistication, but never…” He halted, gathering himself. “How did they come to this galaxy?”
“They’re called Asurans,” Carter called out. “They’re not the Replicators that you know of. They evolved separately, here in Pegasus. Similar, but different.”
“Different, yes,” said the Wraith scientist, “but still the same in their programming. Destroying organic life, spreading like a virus.”
“You speak of yourself,” said Teyla. “The Asurans were made to fight the Wraith!”
The Queen snarled at her. “But now they kill everything, so what does it matter?” She took a step toward the silent avatar. “Our war is your war, Fenrir. Do you not see that simple truth?”
Fenrir nodded once, still staring at the Asuran’s ashen remains. “I … See it.” Suddenly he turned to glare at the humans, a new hardness in his dark eyes. “You knew of the existence of these… Asurans, and yet you said nothing of it. You know of the Asgard’s conflict with the Replicators and yet you kept silent!” Fenrir’s voice rose in pitch. “You concealed the presence of my most hated enemy from me. Why?” He turned to face the Athosian woman, almost pleading. “Why, Teyla? Why would you do this?”
The Queen’s expression grew grave. “That is not all the humans have kept from you,” she intoned.
“Here we go,” McKay muttered.
“Explain!” barked Fenrir, the word echoing from the lips of every one of the Risar; his anger spilled over into the body language of the clones, turning their stances aggressive and threatening.
“That’s enough, right there!” snapped Sheppard, coming forward. “Okay, we admit it, we were a little economical with the truth, but so were you!”
“The Asgard High Council didn’t send you out here on any research trip,” noted McKay.
The Risar crowded toward them, raising their orb-weapons. “Silence!” Fenrir’s voice thundered around the chamber. “No more lies, no more secrets! Tell me!” His avatar shimmered and trembled, moving toward the Queen. “Tell me!”
Carter saw the Wraith female smother a faint smile with a carefully constructed look of sadness. She glanced at her scientist and the other Wraith produced a compact storage module from a pocket; Sam knew the type, the Wraith equivalent of a portable ultra-high density hard drive. Teams from Atlantis had recovered them from Hive Ships and alien bases on several occasions. “See for yourself,” said the scientist.
A Risar took the device and slotted it into the console beneath the oval screen.
“Fenrir,” said Teyla. “Don’t look at it. This isn’t the way, not like this.”
The hologram ignored her and gestured in the air; the data module glowed blue and information transfer began.
“It gives me no pleasure to be the one to bring this news to you,” said the Wraith Queen. “But I must.”
On the screen, a wave of flash-frame images raced past; Carter registered views of the planets Hala and Orilla, a swarm of beetle-like Replicators, genetic schematics of an Asgard, a complex octo-helix of alien DNA, a dying star, and more.
“My people…Are dead,” said the Asgard. His synthetic voice crackled and wavered as if something were breaking up the projection.
The contents of the module sank into the memory core of the Aegis itself, and with his mind connected directly to the starship, into the conscious mind of Fenrir’s physical body. Sam felt a sense of great empathy for the alien; the Asgard did not even have the luxury of processing and assimilating the great loss in his own time. One moment he did not know, the next he knew it all, in complete and total detail.
The diminutive, child-like body of the avatar flickered, frozen for long seconds. Then he was moving again. The narrow, sharp edges of the Asgard’s face were rigid and taut with an emotion Carter had never thought his kind capable of displaying. He stared at her with real hatred in his eyes.
“You were there,” he husked. “You saw my species perish.”
“I’m so sorry,” said
Sam. She could find no other words to say.
The Queen gave a derisive snort. “Now she admits it. You see, Fenrir? The humans cannot be trusted. Only you and I, Asgard and Wraith have spoken in truth. Even when my kind attacked your ship, it was not subterfuge, but an honest reaction to an intrusion…” When Fenrir didn’t answer, she came closer to him. “Don’t you see? We have a common foe in the Replicators, no matter what their origin. We have a foundation of truth between us…” She shot a look at Carter. “Not lies.”
“Leave me…” The words were so quiet that Sam almost missed them.
“Asgard, you must listen to —”
Fenrir turned about and the Risar surged forward. “I told you to leave me!”
From nowhere came a brilliant surge of white rising from the deck around them. Carter jerked as the power of the transporter took her, dragging her away from the Aegis along with every other human and Wraith who stood there.
All but one.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
From the smell of it, the cages had actually been built as animal enclosures of some kind, a long line of them radiating off an enclosed corridor that ran the length of one of the tree-settlement’s vast boughs. There were other people in other cages ranged around them, most of them the airmen from the squads brought through the Stargate by Major Lorne and left behind to act as security. They had been overwhelmed by Wraith shock troops; the diminishment of their numbers made it clear how many of them had fought until they fell. The doctor caught the eye of Lieutenant Allan and the woman nodded grimly back at her.
“I have really had it with being locked up,” said Jennifer, testing the heavy knurled branches that formed the bars of the wide enclosure where they had been confined. Through knotholes in the planks that made up the floor, Keller glimpsed green leaves waving in the wind and far below the brown earth at the foot of the massive tree complex. They were below the main tier of the settlement, down in the underlevels beneath the lodges and the main square.
