by Stargate
“You get used to it after a while,” said Ronon, laboring his breaths. He looked pale and drawn, and he sat in the shade, avoiding the shafts of orange sunlight coming down through the slatted ceiling.
She went to him and crouched by his side; in turn the Satedan looked away, irritated. “How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Bored,” he retorted listlessly, “Bored with you asking me how I feel.” He stifled a cough and glared at her, as if it were her fault he was unwell.
The doctor rolled her eyes. “Tough guys are always the worst patients. You do know that it doesn’t make you a wimp if you’re sick, right?”
“Of course I do,” Ronon snapped. “But I don’t have to like it.”
“How do you feel?” she asked again.
He blinked. “Light’s too bright. Headache. I just need to get out of this place, that’s all.”
“Tall order,” grumbled the lieutenant, looking around at all the dense wood surrounding them.. “I’d give my right arm for a hacksaw. They took all our weapons.”
“All yours,” noted Dex, palming two small spade-shaped throwing blades from a hidden pocket in the lining of his tunic. “Not all mine.”
“Great, a pair of fruit knives,” said Keller. “That’s really going to intimidate them.”
“Company coming,” called the lieutenant, as movement at the far end of the corridor signaled a new arrival. One of the elder’s guards, nervous and sweaty, hustled Laaro toward them; the boy had a barrow laden with clay bowls and a massive gourd the size of an oil drum filled with water. The youth moved from cage to cage, doling out bowlfuls of the brackish liquid. Allan took one and sniffed it.
“Safe to drink?” said Keller.
“The Wraith took all our gear, including our purification tabs.”
Laaro tapped the gourd. “The water is clean, I promise you.” To demonstrate, he took a deep draught himself.
Keller passed a bowl to Ronon and he sipped it gingerly. “What’s going on out there?” she asked the boy. The doctor kept her voice low so the guard would not hear them talking.
Laaro’s young eyes were fearful. “Everyone is very afraid,” he began. “The Queen has left many, many Wraith behind, here in the settlement, some out at the valley of the gateway. Kullid has been talking for them.”
“Collaborator,” spat the Satedan. “I wasn’t looking hard enough. Should have guessed…”
“None of us guessed,” said Keller. She could see that Laaro was more shocked than any of them by the healer’s secret allegiance. “What was he saying?”
“Kullid spoke of the old stories of the Wraith, and said that they were lies. He said that many people have known this, but they never spoke up for fear of incurring the wrath of the elders.” Laaro sighed. “He was right. Kullid is not the only one to have declared himself subject to the Queen.”
Keller considered this for a moment; the Atlanteans had encountered worlds before where the Wraith were feared and revered in equal measure, and reluctantly she realized that Heruun was no different. Even after all the horror the Wraith brought with them, there would always be some souls who saw such power over life or death as a thing to be venerated.
Laaro went on. “Kullid said that the Wraith have come back and freed us from the tyranny of the Aegis. He told the whole township that they must show the Queen the fealty she deserves…”
“And if they don’t?” said Allan. “I bet I can guess the alternative.”
“He said those with the sickness will be healed by the Wraith.”
Keller stopped. “They don’t heal. The Wraith kill.”
“Kullid promises otherwise.” There was a note of forlorn hope in Laaro’s voice that cut the doctor like a knife. “Many of those who did not go to the sick lodge have now ventured there on his assurance.”
“It’s a lie,” growled Ronon. “Never forget that.”
The boy’s hand trembled slightly as he passed Keller a bowl through the wooden spars. “My mother… Thinks differently.”
“Jaaya?” said Keller.
“She has gone to the lodge with my father.” He shot her a sudden, hard look, his eyes shining with barely-contained tears. “I told her the voyagers would save him, but she did not listen!”
“Laaro!” called the guard. “You are finished here. Come!” The burly man in robes came forward and tugged on the boy’s arm.
Keller gave him a rueful smile. “It’ll be okay,” she told him. “We’ll get through this, believe me.”
“Do not forsake us, voyager,” said the youth, as he pushed away the barrow.
At the entrance, the door banged open once more and new figures entered, pushing Laaro aside and tipping the dregs of the water-gourd over the floor. A cluster of men in the robes of high office were shoved forward; each of them were elders, with their characteristic clothing ripped and torn, and their gold circlets and bangles broken or missing. A pair of Wraith warriors marched them in at the tips of stunner rifles, slamming the weapons into their backs when they didn’t move quickly enough.
A trio of the elders were forced into the cage next to the one where Keller, Ronon and Allan had been placed. They fell to the floor and scuffled, desperate to plead for their freedom. Only one of them did not beg their new jailers for release; he sat on his haunches, staring at the floor.
“Takkol?” Keller recognized the man from the feast of the Returned, but he seemed a pale shadow of the proud and haughty chieftain who had looked down his nose at the contingent from Atlantis. He seemed smaller, lost in the dark pool of his tattered robes, his finery tainted. The elder raised his head slightly and saw her.
With sudden animation he scrambled over to the cage wall, reaching through the bars toward her. “Voyagers!” he implored. “Please, you must take me with you!”
“Take you where?” said Ronon. “We’re prisoners too.”
Takkol didn’t seem to hear him. “Please, take me with you through the Gateway, to your Atlantis! I cannot stay here… They will…” His voice fell to a whisper. “Cull me.”
“Nobody goes back to Atlantis,” said Ronon. They had all heard McKay’s use of the ‘condition black’ emergency code over the radio channel, and they all knew what it meant.
Takkol shook his head furiously. “No, no. You must understand, I have been cast out, and I will be murdered before the day is done! Aaren betrayed me, the filthy traitor!”
“How’d that happen?” said the lieutenant, with grim irony that went totally unnoticed by the fretting elder.
“He defected to the Wraith,” hissed Takkol. “I… I think he may have always harbored a secret admiration for them… Certain things he said, deeds he did… In the light of recent events, they take on new meaning.” He sighed. “Aaren is Senior Elder now, with the collusion of Kullid and the blessing of the predators.”
One of the other minor elders spun away from the bars and snarled at the Atlanteans. “You brought this upon us! You knew the Wraith were coming here, didn’t you? You knew it and you did not warn us! And now we will all perish!”
Keller said nothing.
The energy wash of the teleportation effect was so strong that Teyla was knocked off balance, and she found herself leaning against a metal console, blinking away the after-images seared on her retina. Her throat was dry and she swallowed, fearful that the first image she would see when her vision cleared was the arid landscape of Heruun or worse, the gloom of a Wraith vessel; but she quickly realized that she had not been transported with all the others.
She was still in the command chamber of the Aegis, still surrounded by the shambling Risar moving to and fro at their tasks, still before her the wide, low shape of Fenrir’s cryogenic capsule lying in a pool of white vapor.
“Where did you send them?” she demanded, her voice echoing. “Fenrir? Answer me!”
The Asgard’s holographic image was gone.
“I know you can hear me!” She moved to the capsule and beat a fist on the thick crystalline glass,
beneath which slumbered the flesh of the alien being. “Where are my friends?” Her voice became a shout.
The eyes of the sleeping Asgard snapped open for one brief moment, then closed again just as swiftly. Suddenly there was a Risar at her side, firmly taking her arm and pulling her away. She spun about, ready to attack, and came face to face with a second of the creatures brandishing an orb.
“Why did you lie to me?” The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. “I… Had begun to believe that I could trust you, Teyla Emmagan. I believed we had developed a rapport.”
“If you have injured Sheppard and the others —”
“They are unhurt,” came the sharp reply. “I sent them to the Hive Ship.”
Teyla gasped. “Then my friends are as good as dead! The Wraith Queen will destroy them!”
“No,” said the voice. “External sensors register the presence of locating tracer devices similar to the one I detect upon you. Sheppard, Carter, McKay and the others… They live still.”
“You must bring them back!”
A flash of color and light signaled the formation of Fenrir’s avatar. The Asgard’s face was pinched and his eyes clouded with anger. “Do not presume to tell me what I must do. I have only to form a command in my thoughts and you will be sent to join them, human.”
Teyla spread her hands. “Then do it. Send me to the Wraith, send me and my unborn child to our deaths!”
“You will not leave until I have my answer!” raged the Asgard, fury and dejection warring in his words. “Why did you lie?” The question resonated in the cold air of the chamber like distant thunder.
The Athosian let out a long breath. “Because I felt sorry for you. I have lost all of my people in recent months, and unlike you I do not even have the mercy of knowing what fate befell them. The pain and loss I feel… I did not want to inflict it on another living being, even as I knew that we were wrong to keep this from you.” She was unable to meet the alien’s unwavering gaze. “There is no excuse, Fenrir. I am sorry that we kept this secret.”
The avatar paced the room. “My people, gone forever… The Replicators dead but a new breed of their kind running wild here in Pegasus… It is all so much to comprehend. And all the work, everything I did was all for nothing.”
“The work,” repeated Teyla. “When I asked you about that before, you would not speak of it to me. What do you mean by that?”
Fenrir halted, his thin fingers knotting together. “I have created such horror, Teyla Emmagan. In the pursuit of war, such great darkness. But all I wanted was a chance to find redemption… And now that has been denied to me.”
Teyla’s blood ran cold. “What horror?”
Lorne picked at the matted, fibrous webbing across the entrance of the cell, but the pliant material refused to budge. He stared out into the corridor beyond, where four Wraith warriors stood silently on guard, stunner rifles cradled in their grips. “So,” he said, turning back to face McKay, Sheppard and Carter, “forgive me for saying so, but if I understand it correctly, we have gone from our normal kind of being in serious trouble to a whole new level of how screwed we are.”
“Yeah,” sighed McKay. “That’s about it.”
Sheppard gave Lorne a hard look. “Show a little optimism, will ya? We’ve been in worse situations.”
Carter raised her eyebrows. “Have you? Really?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Like what?”
“Uh…” Sheppard hesitated. “Well, there was this one time —”
McKay made a loud, wordless sound that was half annoyance and half exasperation. “What do you two want, a scorecard? Can we concentrate on the problem at hand?”
“Which one, Doc?” Lorne said in a deceptively light tone. “We’ve sure got plenty to choose from.” Things had moved quickly when the Asgard had done his beaming thing; one second all the Atlantis team members were on the Aegis, the next they were on the Hive Ship. The Wraith Queen had been ready for them — maybe she used her telepathy to raise the alarm the second before they appeared on her ship, or something — and Evan Lorne and his colleagues found themselves disarmed and languishing in Wraith Jail. Again.
Still, at least they weren’t strapped up and glued into one of those feeding chambers along with a bunch of desiccated corpses. Not yet, anyway. He sighed; hopefully Ronon Dex, Doc Keller and the rest of the squad down on Heruun were having better luck.
“I am so sick of seeing the inside of these places,” grumbled McKay. After the Wraith had thrown them in the cells and left them to rot, it was the scientist who sheepishly added the new and alarming pieces to the jigsaw puzzle of what was happening around here. It was bad enough the Wraith had taken the upper hand, tactically speaking, but all this stuff about the little grey guy being some kind of mad scientist convict was not a welcome revelation.
Colonel Carter had not said much since McKay mentioned the word ‘collapsar’. The look of abject shock on her face had been more than enough to worry Lorne, and Sheppard had helpfully cemented that by explaining still further.
“Fenrir made a black hole bomb,” he said bluntly. As much as Lorne thought about that string of words, the scope of something so destructive was just out of his comprehension. He’d seen naquadria-laced super-nukes detonate and those were incredible enough to behold; what Sheppard was talking about dwarfed that by an entire order of magnitude.
Not for the first time, the major found himself wondering whatever happened to the Air Force that he had joined out of high school, the nicely earthbound military with jet planes and that kinda stuff. Just when did serving my country turn into a science fiction movie?
McKay held his chin in his hands. “I’m not sure how much she gave him of the files I recovered from the Asgard core aboard Odyssey,” he noted, “but there was a lot of content on that Wraith data module.”
“I saw tactical plots of Asuran forces in Pegasus flash up on that big screen,” said Carter. “We have similar information back at Atlantis.”
“Showing him where the enemy is,” added Sheppard. “You saw how Fenrir reacted when the Queen did that little show-and-tell with a captive Replicator. I’ve never seen that look on an Asgard’s face before.”
Carter nodded “I have. Thor had the same expression when the bug-form Replicators took down the Beliskner. They may seem alien, but they have the same emotions as we do. Fear and terror, hate and anger.”
“Enough to want revenge?” said Lorne. The tech stuff was out of his league, but understanding the simple need to take some payback… He knew that all too well.
The colonel nodded again.
Much of what Fenrir said ranged far beyond her ability to grasp, but among the terms and complex sciences he spoke of, Teyla swiftly found a route to understanding; and with it, an icy dread deep in her chest.
She asked the Asgard to speak of his ‘work’ and he told her, unfettered and without concession. The old Athosian myth-tale of the Nightfall gained new power as Fenrir spoke of the weapon he had created in the war against the other strain of Replicators, this ‘collapsar’ device. Teyla had seen and experienced much that had challenged her view of the universe since joining John Sheppard’s team; but there was little she could bring to mind that so frightened her as Fenrir’s clinical, metered description of a weapon that could put out a sun and turn whole worlds to ashen ruin.
He spoke of the accident and his arrogance, of his responsibility and the pariah’s mark placed upon him by his own kind, a sentence of exile that spanned generations by human reckoning. Teyla listened, unable to speak, struck silent by the enormity of it. Fenrir continued, and she sensed that for him, this was no longer an explanation. It had become a confession. In all the time he had been alone aboard this ship, crossing the void with nothing but crude reflections of himself for companionship, he had wanted nothing more than the chance for some kind of salvation. She felt a sorrow for Fenrir that matched her fear of his dark science.
“After a time, I came to understand my m
istakes. The totality of it was made clear to me. And so I rejected my works as a weaponsmith and returned to the discipline that I had known first, known best. The science of life and biology.” The avatar glanced down at its photonic hands. “Our people, Teyla, we had traveled so far down the road of genetic alteration that we had transformed the very matter of ourselves beyond recognition. We could no longer reproduce, only duplicate, and even then with greater and greater errors of replication in each iteration.”
Teyla thought of the images she had seen cast from the Wraith data device. She found her voice again, in a whisper. “Your race was dying.”
He nodded once, a curt gesture of utter finality. “I made it my goal to search for a solution. And… I believe I came close to it.”
“How?”
“The Wraith.” Fenrir gestured toward the oval screen, where a visual of the Hive Ship drifting nearby was displayed. “They possess such unprecedented physical capabilities. Their capacity for cellular regeneration… It was only by chance I came here, by chance I captured them and dissected one of their kind… Or perhaps fate, if such a thing exists…” He paused, musing. “ I believe… I believed that their genetic structure might provide the missing piece of the puzzle. I wanted to draw from them, weave that potential into the Asgard DNA helix and give my race the chance to live again.”
Fenrir fell silent once again; he seemed to have the weight of the ages upon his thin, frail form. He was a digital ghost, the manifestation of a lost soul. Fenrir’s terrible solitude came from him in a mute wave, and Teyla’s breath caught in her throat in a moment of pure empathy.
“But now that data is worthless,” he said. “And my life has no meaning. All I have left is my sorrow… And my fury.”
“Why do you think we’re still alive?” said Rodney, picking at the scabby flesh of the cell walls and grimacing. “And please don’t say ‘lunch’.”
“This Queen doesn’t seem the type to waste an opportunity,” said Sam. “She said her clan was a small one. She’s probably looking at the bigger picture. She wants to know what we know.”
