by Stargate
The smooth metallic lines of the control chamber lit by cool yellow-white illumination were gone, replaced by something dirtied with oily residue. There was a smoky, cloying burnt-meat stink that hung in the air.
Teyla shoved the sparking remains of a computer panel off her legs and struggled to her feet. She shuddered as she surveyed the room; the Queen’s suicidal attack would have killed her just as it had torn apart Fenrir’s Risar, had she not sensed that tiny moment of thought before the implanted bio-charge exploded. It was horrific to conceive; the Wraith Queen had willingly given her own life in order to destroy the command centre of the Aegis, and although she had not fully succeeded — a testament to the resilience of Asgard technology — the consoles and holographic screens all around the chamber were flickering and incoherent. The alien had done much damage.
And for Fenrir’s cryogenic capsule was at the heart of it all, the impact point of the detonation. Coolant pipes spat foam, forming hazy clouds of ice crystals in the frigid air. The whole forward section of the suspension module had been ripped open and blackened by thermal damage, heat-warped fingers of broken metal twisted and bent by the force of the blast.
Teyla’s hand went to her chest. He had to be dead. He could not have —
“Tey…la…” The voice was faint and labored. It took her a moment before she realized it was not a synthetic echo, but the real thing.
“Fenrir?” She rushed forward, slipping over newly-formed patches of ice and shallow drifts of broken glass. She found a foothold on the side of the ruined cryo module and pushed up until she was kneeling atop the frost-rimed surface of the machine.
From this angle, it appeared as if a monstrous blade had slashed along the length of Fenrir’s capsule. The pod, sealed closed for generations, was open to the air and ruined, the fragile life within moments away from death. She glimpsed pallid flesh moving amid the smoke and vapors, and Teyla fanned them away.
A spindly, childlike hand emerged from the cold fog and grabbed her wrist. She reached down into the flickering glow of the pod’s interior and found the alien there, his chest fluttering as he fought to breathe. Teyla’s eyes were stinging and she blinked furiously. She tried to pull Fenrir up, but he was caught beneath a distended piece of machinery; his bird-thin limbs were atrophied and weak, so much so that she feared she would snap his bones if she pulled too hard.
The Asgard’s head turned, revealing a half-coronet made of hair-like wires and smooth crystal spheres about the back of his skull. Snaking cables that pulsed with light extended away, doubtless toward the interface that married Fenrir to the systems of the Aegis.
“Teyla,” he repeated. “I am sorry I deceived you. Perhaps now I have done my penance…” The Asgard gasped as pain lanced through him. “We should…have been open with each other… Perhaps this is fitting. I will go to be with my kindred…and be forgiven.” He blinked, his heavy lids closing slowly.
“Fenrir, no!” cried Teyla. “Please, you must hold on! If you perish, there will be no-one to control this ship, it will be lost! The Wraith are already on board…”
He gave a pained nod. “I sense them. Yes. Moving. I cannot stop them.”
She squeezed his frail fingers. “Then help me stop them! Hold on!”
“You…cannot do that alone.” He sucked in a shuddering breath. “I will…bring you the help you require.”
The crystal spheres clustered around the interface crown began to glow.
McKay followed the others to their feet as the webbing across the cell door vibrated and reeled back into the chitinous walls. The four Wraith warriors on guard had been joined by the scientist-type he remembered encountering down on Heruun. The alien glanced at them all in turn with sly, open avarice.
“My Queen has opened the way. The Asgard ship will soon be under the control of my clan. If you wish to live, you will help us understand its mechanisms.”
Sheppard shrugged. “Hey, I can barely change a light bulb. Can’t help you with any space doohickeys, pal.”
This seemed to amuse the alien. “Not you.” He nodded at Lorne. “Nor you. You are warrior drones, without the intellect required for such tasks.”
“I’ll have you know I’m an ace at sudoku,” Lorne sniffed, moving to join Sheppard where he blocked the path toward Carter and McKay.
The Wraith scientist pointed at the others. “These two, the female and the inferior male.”
“Inferior?” echoed McKay. “I resent that!”
“We won’t help you,” Carter said firmly. “We’ll resist you every inch of the way.”
The Wraith grunted. “And how will you do that?”
Carter was about to say something more, but from nowhere a white nimbus of light surrounded her and vanished with a humming crackle.
“Huh,” said Sheppard, a grin forming on his lips. “That way, maybe?”
The alien shouted out a command, but it was too late; the transport effect flared again, and when it faded he was alone inside the cell.
The Wraith commander advanced, the corridor’s floorboards creaking as he came ever closer. His head turned, lips peeling back to show wet fangs. “Surrender. It will pass quicker if you do not fight us.”
Ronon Dex was aware of his heart hammering in his chest, his pulse rushing in his ears; the sickness in his blood was sapping his strength, draining his will even as he stood here and did nothing. He shook his head to dispel the miasma in his thoughts; he rejected the fatigue in his bones, the desperate need to slump to the wall and let the blackness take him.
No. He was Satedan. He would die on his feet, meeting death as he had life, head-on and without compromise.
A strange calm came over him, and he felt a smile pull at the corner of his lips. In the rare moments of introspection spared him by the world, Ronon had always suspected that his end would come in battle, and at the hands of the Wraith. No simple, quiet ending for Specialist Dex, no soft and restful deathbed. From the moment they had smashed his world and made him a Runner, Ronon had known he would die with blood in his teeth, his hands around the neck of his enemy. He nodded to himself. There was something right about it.
He glanced at Keller, her pretty face pale with fear. His only regret was the others would share his fate; they deserved better, not to die out here, thousands of light years from their homeworld.
“Surrender!” hissed the Wraith again.
“Come and make me,” he snarled, spreading his arms.
But without warning Keller’s hand was on his arm, pulling back. “Ronon!” she cried. “The floor!”
He had a moment to register what she said before the slats below them shattered, as stone hammers crashed into the wood from beneath, sending storms of splinters flying.
Sam gasped in surprise as the Wraith holding chamber shifted and reformed into the command deck of the Aegis. “Huh,” she managed “Well, that was unexpected.”
The acrid tang of melted plastic and stale smoke wreathed the air around her and she coughed.
“Colonel!” shouted Teyla, from across the room. “You’re safe!”
“Thanks to you, I imagine.” She glanced around. “What happened in here?”
“The Wraith Queen destroyed herself, with an explosive device implanted in her body. She was trying to kill Fenrir.”
“She…succeeded.”
Carter was startled by the second voice; she immediately recognized the thin, reedy accent of the Asgard. “But the cryo pod…” She pointed at the wrecked device, still spewing icy foam.
Teyla’s expression was grim. “He does not have very long.”
Sam nodded and picked her way around a fallen stanchion to one of the consoles that was still operable. “You brought me back… What about Colonel Sheppard and the others on the Hive Ship?”
“There was a power fluctuation…” Fenrir managed. “They are aboard, on the lower decks…”
She moved her hands over the bowed control panel, shifting the oblate key-spheres back and forth. “The
Wraith sent over boarding parties,” she began.
“I am…aware,” said the Asgard. “They slipped in…undetected. Pierced the hull…” He coughed, as if he felt the wounds to his ship as much as if they were injuries to his flesh.
Carter frowned as she tried to navigate the complexities of the Asgard system; parts of it were familiar to her, but others were labyrinthine, layered puzzles that she had never encountered before. She could sense Fenrir was trying to open the Aegis to her, but he was faltering with every breath. On a tertiary hologram screen, she saw a cluster of dots indicating the trackers belonging to Sheppard and the others, in a corridor close to the main engineering decks; the Asgard had been as good as his word. But she could also see other dots clustered nearby — Wraith. The alien trace was fuzzy and indistinct, wavering between a ghost-image and solidity. Something about the aliens was making it hard for the ship’s already-damaged internal sensors to read them.
She automatically reached for her radio, only to remember that it had been taken along with all the equipment they had on them when they appeared on the Hive Ship. Without any weapons to defend themselves, Sheppard and his team would be easy prey for the Wraith invaders.
A thought suddenly occurred to her. “Fenrir! This ship has a data-matter converter, right? You can construct objects from stored information patterns…”
The alien nodded jerkily. “I will provide you with… That facility.”
“And access to the transporter system records,” she added, thinking aloud. “When you beamed us off the ship, the matter patterns of everything we had on us would have been recorded…” Carter gave a quick grin as she found what she was looking for.
A few quick commands and an object shimmered into being on the panel before her; an Atlantis-issue walkie-talkie, synthesized from the ground up, molecule by molecule. She picked it up and turned it over in her hands. “Just like the real thing. Let’s see if this works.” Carter ran the converter again, this time sending a newly-formed device elsewhere.
Sheppard gingerly picked up the radio from where it had appeared on the floor before them, holding it by the antenna as if it were the tail of a poisonous snake. “Okay, that’s odd,” he admitted.
A short way up the corridor, Major Lorne leaned in against the side of an intersection, peering into the dimness. “There’s a whole bunch of them up there, Colonel,” he reported. “Half a dozen Wraith, I’d guess.”
“Oh, great,” said McKay. “Out of the frying pan.”
“Rodney —”
“Colonel Sheppard?” Carter’s words crackled from the walkie-talkie. “Do you read me, over?”
“Sam?!” said McKay. “Where is she?”
“Quiet!” Sheppard retorted, and raised the radio to his lips. “I’m here, Colonel. Are you okay?”
“I’m a few levels above you, on the command tier with Teyla and Fenrir. He’s badly hurt, John. The Queen tried to kill him.”
His lips thinned. “Understood. We got a situation ourselves. Wraith, a whole bunch of ’em blocking our path. There’s no way we can get past.”
“I have intermittent internal sensors, I see them.”
“Feel free to beam them out into deep space, if you’d like,” said Lorne.
“No can do, Major,” Carter replied. “The internal sensors can’t lock on to their bio-signs…” She paused. “Stand by, I’m sending you some ordnance. Wait one.”
“How’s that gonna work? We lost all our stuff on the Hive,” said McKay. The question had barely left his mouth when a flash of transporter glow blinked in the middle of the floor, revealing a couple of G-36 assault rifles and a P90, along with a pile of ammunition.
“Never mind.” The Major’s face creased in a grin and he grabbed one of the rifles, slamming a twin-drum cyclic magazine into the G-36. “Merry Christmas!”
Sheppard took the other rifle and tossed the submachine gun to McKay. “Thanks for the care package,” he said to the radio. “We’ll deal with these creeps and then rendezvous with you.”
“Negative,” said Carter. “I’m plotting the movements of the Wraith from up here. It looks like they’re moving toward the computer core.”
“They could shut down the ship,” noted McKay, “or worse.”
“Rodney’s right,” came the reply. “The primary matter converter array is down there. If they take control of that, they can make copies of anything in the Asgard database.”
“Oh crap,” said Sheppard. “Like weapons?” He hefted the assault rifle in his hand.
“Like weapons,” Carter repeated. “For starters.”
Color drained from McKay’s face. “The collapsar device. The blueprints will be in Fenrir’s database!”
“Can’t it be shut down from the bridge?” asked Lorne.
McKay shook his head. “It’s a stand-alone system, like the Asgard core on the Odyssey. Even if you isolated it from the rest of the Aegis, it can still operate independently.”
Sheppard spoke into the radio once again. “Colonel? I copy your sitrep, over. We’ll move in and take the converter out of commission.”
“Roger that. I’ll do what I can to help you from up here. Good luck.”
The survivors reeled backward as part of the floor of the animal enclosures gave way, planks ripping and falling into space, cascading down over the boughs from the main trunk of the city-tree. The Wraith went with them, screaming and howling. Through the gaps Ronon saw men hanging from ropes of vine, swinging back and forth beneath the enclosure. Some of them had rodguns that chattered rapid-fire rounds into the aliens, knocking them off their handholds and tearing them open.
The Wraith commander was still clinging to a broken support beam, his claws digging into the wood as he pulled himself back up, inch by shuddering inch.
“Stay back from the edge,” said Lieutenant Allan. “It could give at any second.”
“Maybe,” Ronon ignored her advice and stepped forward, feeling the twisted flooring bow beneath his weight.
The commander met his gaze and spat at him. Clinging to its handhold with one arm, it snatched at the pistol holster on its belt, grabbing at a stunner weapon. Balance lost, the Wraith began to lose its grip.
Ronon shook his head “Bad choice,” he said, holding out a hand to assist the alien.
There was a moment of surprise on the Wraith’s face when he could not understand why a mortal enemy would offer to save his life; then Ronon grinned wolfishly.
“Nah,” he said, the open hand curling into a fist, “just kidding.” He put all his effort into a savage punch to the Wraith’s face. The impact dislodged the commander’s grip, and with a hate-filled snarl, he fell, down and down toward the rusty landscape below. The alien vanished into the lower canopy of trees and was gone.
The figures on the rope-vines swarmed up toward the wrecked enclosure and clambered inside. Ronon blinked as one of them pulled a thin cloth scarf from around his face.
“Ronon Dex,” said Soonir, with a cocksure smirk. “We saw the Wraith coming. I thought you and your people could use the help of me and mine.”
“How did you do that?” said Keller.
“The lower enclosures are the oldest structures in the settlement,” he noted. “The stone hammers are used when we must demolish them.” The rebel leader grinned. “This seemed the most expedient way to deal with the Wraith.”
“You could have killed us all!” shouted Takkol, forcing his way forward. The decking beneath his feet gave an ominous moan and he faltered, his fury waning for a moment.
“I could have left you all to perish,” Soonir retorted. “It is your idiocy that has led our world to this invasion!”
“Hey!” shouted Keller, her strident tone surprising everyone, Ronon included. “Now is not the time for this! We need to get out of here before this place comes down around us!”
Soonir gave a nod. “The healer’s point is well made.” He signaled to his men to draw up the ropes. “Follow the tethers. My men will lead you to a plat
form below this one.” He offered a vine to Ronon, and eyed him. “That is, if you can manage it…” Soonir was staring closely at Dex’s face, at his pale, drawn features.
Ronon ignored the pounding headache in his skull. “I can manage,” he replied, and snatched the rope from the other man’s hand.
Sam heard the sound and turned away from the bridge console. It was unlike any cry she had ever heard before, an alien moan from an alien throat.
“Fenrir…” Teyla tried to hold the Asgard up, but he was limp in her hands. Carter saw his chest rise and fall in ever slower stutters, his breath whispering from his tiny mouth in puffs of vapor. “We have to help him!”
Carter came closer. “I’m sorry, Teyla. There’s nothing we can do.”
“Humans,” came the whisper. “You are so like us and so unlike us.” The Asgard’s expression was pained as he worked to force out every word. “We share so many things. Wonder and daring. Greatness and folly. Sorrow…and regret.”
“The Wraith will not take this ship,” Carter said quietly. “I promise you that.”
“I believe you.” Fenrir’s head lolled and his dark eyes found Teyla. “You… You must survive, Teyla Emmagan. Guard the new life within you, nurture it.” His thin hand fell to her belly. “It is your future.”
“I will,” she told him. “I can do nothing else.”
And then there were no more breaths from the Asgard’s silent form, no more words. In a very human gesture toward so alien a being, Teyla reached up and closed Fenrir’s eyes, then gently lay him down inside the broken cryo capsule.
Sam felt the ghost of the same hollow feeling she had experienced when the planet Orilla had destroyed itself in front of her; it was a terrible emotion to consider, the raw loss of being a witness to the extinction of an entire species.
“Now they are truly gone,” said Teyla quietly. “The Asgard are no more.”
Sam spoke again after a moment. “If I have learned anything after over a decade in this job, it’s that the universe has ways of confounding your expectations.” She reached out and touched the other woman’s arm. “Come on. He protected us. Now we have to do the job of the Aegis, protect Heruun and our people down there.”
