by Stargate
Teyla let out her breath in a gasp. The realization was so hard and fast it felt like a punch to the sternum. There was a chance. Yes! A means of escape! “I have been so blind…” she muttered, turning toward Carter.
Sam’s face was dirty with smoke and among the flickering ruins of the damaged holo-screens, the colonel looked like more like a war-weary specter than a living being. Teyla could see by the expression on her face that Carter had been just as surprised that her tactic worked as anyone.
“The hyperdrive field won’t initiate,” she snapped. “Come on! We’ve got the Wraith right where we want them, come on!” Carter slammed the heel of her hand into the console before her and the screen shimmered, then stabilized. She worked the activation sequence again, her brow furrowed.
Teyla’s panel showed static-laced images of the Aegis’s bow, rendered in simple digital frames. As she watched, a spill of blinking red indicators swarmed around the ragged edges of the ship’s damaged zones, and began to penetrate inside. The hazy graphic reminded her of screens in Atlantis’s infirmary, images showing viral colonies infecting healthy flesh. “The Wraith are reacting,” she said, “warrior drones are massing near the hull breaches. They’re coming aboard.”
“I’ll say this for them, they’re tenacious,” growled Carter. Once more the hyperdrive activation sequence stalled in mid-program and she hissed through her teeth.
The constant background shudder through the deck plates was now a steady throbbing rumble; the ships were falling into the atmosphere, doubtless cutting a fiery streak across the sky of Heruun that could be seen across the planet.
Sam shot her a look. “One way or another, we’re going to end this. Either out there, or we burn up on re-entry.”
Teyla shook her head. “No, Colonel, I think there is another way.”
Carter blinked in surprise. “I’m open to any ideas, but make it quick.”
“Fenrir’s auxiliary ships, the triangular craft he used to seek out and capture the abductees from Heruun. There may still be some on the hangar level. I believe the craft possess a short-range version of the —”
“Asgard transporter!” Sam’s eyes flashed with sudden understanding. “But the hangar is two decks down from here.” Her face clouded as she glared at her console. “And if I leave this —”
“I was not suggesting you accompany me,” Teyla said, stooping to gather up a fallen weapon from the deck. “I will go alone. If I am successful, then I will transport you away. If not…” She sighed. “It will matter little.” The Athosian gestured around the wrecked command deck. “I can do nothing else to help you here, Colonel. Let me do this.”
Sam saw the determination in her and nodded. “Okay, go. But I’m not having you do it by yourself. I’ll get you some help.”
“She is beyond insane!” shouted McKay, pushing himself off the deck from where he had landed.
The impact of the collision had sent all of them to the floor, even though they had been ready for it. Sheppard dusted himself down and recovered his rifle and a pair of Wraith stunners, nodding slightly. He had to admit, Rodney had a point. Ramming ships… Hadn’t that kinda thing gone out of fashion along with Viking longboats?
“Whatever you think of Carter,” ventured Lorne, “she’s gutsy.”
“I want my guts to remain where they are, inside here!” McKay ranted, patting his belly. “Just because this ship looks like a mallet, you don’t have to use it like one!”
“My grandfather used to say, ‘if all you got is a hammer, pretty soon everything starts to look like a nail’,” said Sheppard. “Never really got what he meant by that until just now.” He blinked and massaged a crick in his neck.
“Colonel Sheppard, do you read?” Carter’s voice crackled through the air.
Lorne found the radio where it had fallen and tossed it to his commander. “I read you,” Sheppard said wearily. “We’re all still in one piece down here.”
“Speak for yourself!” snapped McKay, lurching toward one of the active computer consoles.
“John,” came the reply, and Sheppard knew things were at their most serious. Carter didn’t often call him by his first name, and the fact that she did it now meant that she wanted his full and absolute attention. “Teyla’s on her way to the hangar bay on tier three, that’s a deck above you. There are Wraith swarming the ship through the hull breaches. Rendezvous with her and see if you can find a working shuttle.”
“Got it.” Sheppard’s thoughts raced. Those freaky UFOs that had dragged the Puddle Jumper from the lunar surface… If one was still working, it could be their ticket off this tub. “Lorne, McKay! Gear up. We’re moving out.”
“No,” said Rodney, in a low, serious voice. He didn’t look up from his panel. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“What?” Lorne blinked. “Uh, doc? Hello? Escape route?”
McKay snatched the radio from Sheppard and spoke quickly into it. “Sam. I’m at the secondary drive monitor down here. I can see the hyperdrive program… It’s not initiating.”
Carter sighed. “Confirm that. I’m trying to re-program it on the go from here.”
The scientist shook his head. “That’s not going to work. Too many variables. With all the damage its taken, without an Asgard to program the transition, that’s never going to work. The wave-form won’t coalesce…” He stopped and shot Sheppard a look. “I can help. If we do it together, Sam up on the bridge and me down here, in tandem we might be able to get the drive to accept the activation program.”
“Rodney…”
A crooked, terrified smile crossed the other man’s face. “Hey, look, I told you you’d need my help sooner or later. You’re not as smart as you think, Carter.”
“You sure about this?” said Sheppard. “We… We may not be able to come back for you.”
McKay looked away and made a dismissive gesture. “Go away. Let me do my thing and you do yours.”
The colonel threw Lorne a nod and the two men raced toward the chamber doorway and the corridor beyond.
Rodney called out as the hatch opened. “And you better be kidding about the ‘not coming back’ part!”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The hangar bay was a wide space with a low ceiling, supported by the same curved stanchions of steel that ribbed the corridors throughout the interior of the Asgard ship. The interior illumination was poor, most of the glow strips set in the corners of the deck dead or dying. Colonel Carter’s surprise attack upon the Wraith hive had put the interior of the Aegis into disarray; gantries and pieces of the roof were toppled and lay in shattered piles. There were perhaps a dozen of the strange, manta-shaped Asgard shuttlecraft scattered about the chamber, most of them damaged where they had shifted in the colossal impact. Teyla saw one of them flipped over against another, the glowing coils of its drive matrix blinking and fading.
The air inside the hangar was acrid with the smell of burned plastic, and cold. Life support functions on this tier were failing, and she could see the first rimes of hoarfrost forming in white patches across the decking, the puffs of vapor from her breaths. Beneath her boots, the metal flooring creaked and vibrated.
To the far side she spotted a craft that appeared intact, the dim glow beneath it illuminating the area around it in a pool of radiant light. The sight of it gave her pause, and Teyla felt her adrenaline spike; it was a moment of primal fear-reaction, recalling the terror she had felt when the Asgard’s gene-drones had captured her on Heruun. For an instant she remembered the horrible sensation of paralysis as the rays from the orb device engulfed her, her own body resisting her as the aliens gathered her up and took her away. She shuddered and forced the recollection away.
The memory had distracted her; even as she realized it, the attack came.
A giant humanoid shape threw itself from the shadows of an overhead support frame, and Teyla spun away, hearing the rush of air as it fell toward her. She was quick enough to avoid being flattened by the enraged Risar, but not quite enou
gh to get out of its reach. It cuffed her as she turned to aim a stunner, and the impact made her howl with pain. The Wraith pistol flew from her grip and was lost in the shadows beneath another of the saucer-ships.
Landing with a heavy thud, the Asgard clone-creature went for her with its spindly, taloned fingers raised in claws. It was mumbling incoherently, staggering even as it advanced. Teyla saw it was wounded and sickly, but still she did not doubt that the Risar could kill her easily enough. In sheer body mass alone it was twice her size, and beneath its pale torso, ropey muscles bunched whenever it moved.
She backed away, raising her hands in a fighting stance. Teyla searched the blank-eyed face of the Risar for any kind of recognition or intelligence and found none. With Fenrir dead, whatever advanced technology the Asgard had used to control his towering proxies was inoperative, and now the clones had been reduced to mindless automatons, savage things that knew only madness.
There was dark blood on its fingers; the mark of kills it had already made, perhaps human, perhaps Wraith or other Risar, it was impossible to know. The creature made a gurgling sound and rushed her.
“Move forward!” Ronon shouted, pushing out from behind the shade of the nearest tree trunks. Behind him, he sensed Keller moving quickly, keeping low and going from cover to cover, and past her the mixed group of Takkol’s guards and Soonir’s rebels. Lieutenant Allan was at his side, firing and moving. Her face was haggard and worn, and as they both paused for breath behind an overturned cart, she threw him a glance.
“You look like I feel,” she told him.
“I’m fine,” he snapped back angrily. “If you can’t cut it, then stay here.” He ducked as pulses of stun-fire shrieked past them, answered seconds later by the rattle of a returning rodgun salvo.
Something caught his eye and he glanced up. High above, way beyond the clouds and into the deep reaches of Heruun’s sky, there were streaks of dark color and fire, crossing from horizon toward horizon. He’d seen the like before; wreckage from low orbit, burning up as it plunged through the atmosphere on re-entry. There was no way to know if they were pieces of Wraith or Asgard starship; but whatever they were, it was a grim signal that battle had been joined out in space.
Allan was looking up as well. “You think — ?”
“I think Sheppard and Carter won’t go down without a fight,” he rumbled. “And neither will we.”
Keller pressed closer to them. She had a gun in her hand, but Ronon knew she wouldn’t fire it unless circumstances were at their very worst. The doctor fixed him with a measuring stare. “Maybe we should let the locals handle this,” she said, and nodded in the direction of the sick lodge just up ahead along the wooden boardwalk.
Ronon peered through a gap in the wagon’s slats. “They’ll get cut to pieces,” he growled. From his vantage point he could see the shapes of a handful of Wraith warriors moving behind the open windows of the lodge. The odds were bad, but he’d faced worse; and inside that building were dozens of civilians who, out of foolish choice or coercion, had become prisoners — and therefore prey — of his old enemy. He couldn’t let that stand.
Keller spoke so only he could hear her. “Ronon. On your neck there, the skin.” She touched her throat to indicate the place she meant. “There are lesions… I saw them before, on the Returned. It’s an indicator, a sign of the last stage of the sickness.”
Ronon blinked hard. His head felt leaden and heavy, and each breath he took tasted strange, tainted. The Satedan had said nothing of this to anyone else, not of that or the shooting pains in his joints that were growing worse with every passing hour. “I can deal with it,” he grated.
“Ronon —” she began.
“I said I can handle it, Teyla!” he snapped.
Keller frowned. “Ronon, it’s Jennifer. Teyla’s not here, remember?”
He hesitated, his head swimming. For a moment, the face of the woman before him became shadowy and indistinct. Angry with himself, he shook off the instant of confusion and gripped his particle magnum tightly, enough so the tremors in his hands were not evident. Ronon eyed Keller. “Whatever is wrong with me, I’m not going to lie down and wait for it to take me. That’s not my way.”
Without waiting for an answer, he grabbed the side of the wagon and vaulted up over it with a howl of effort, leading with his pistol. Ronon landed hard on the wooden deck on the other side and fired as he ran, some shots going wide, but enough of them hitting their marks to knock down the Wraith guarding the doorway.
“Follow the voyager!” shouted Soonir. “Advance! Advance!”
The pain blazed through Ronon, stinging like poison, but he cursed it and kept on going, driven on by pure fury. He kept expecting the next stun bolt that crackled through the air to be the one that struck him down; but the numbing cold of the energy discharge never came, and suddenly he was at the sick lodge’s entrance, cracking the faceplate of a Wraith warrior with a slamming blow from the butt of his gun. Even as the alien fell, there came a ragged battle cry from behind him as the men and women of Heruun took the fight to their invaders.
Another wave of fatigue swept over him and he gritted his teeth. I just need to hold on, he told himself, just until the fight is over.
Teyla had nowhere to go; the Risar had backed her into a corner formed from a fallen cargo module and the canted fuselage of another shuttlecraft. She dodged, bracing herself off the saucer-ship’s wing and kicking away. Teyla spun and put all her effort into a sweeping blow from her foot, connecting with the Risar’s arm. Bone snapped and the clone gurgled again, ignoring the hit and slashing at the air with its good arm. The very tips of razor-sharp claws caught the front of her tunic and tore through leather and cloth, a scant hair’s breadth from the flesh of her throat. She bobbed and shifted on the balls of her feet, but the Risar kept on coming, waving those gangly arms. Teyla could see no escape route that would not have her clawed and torn should she take it.
In that moment there was movement. More shapes in the half-light, behind the Risar and coming closer. For one fearful second, she thought the creature would be joined by more of its kind; but then a familiar and welcome voice cried out her name.
“Teyla!” called Sheppard. “Hit the deck!”
The Risar turned angrily, irritated that it had been disturbed. The Athosian woman did not question the colonel’s command; she dropped and struck out again at the Risar’s legs, this time hitting the mark.
Momentarily caught between two targets, the clone-creature snarled and hesitated, raising it’s uninjured hand. With Teyla clear of the line of fire, Sheppard brought the stunners he held in either hand to bear and fired twin bursts of white fire into the Risar’s torso. Incredibly, it took the first two hits without pause and staggered toward the colonel, lowing and hooting.
Teyla pivoted into a crescent kick that went up and connected hard with the clone’s head. The stunning impacts finally registered in the Risar’s maddened mind and it toppled, falling toward a snarl of wreckage on the deck. The creature collapsed against a broken stanchion and coughed out a final gasp of air, the metallic support beam impaling it like a spear.
Lorne extended a hand to help Teyla to her feet, but she waved him away with a thin smile. “It did not injure me.”
“Glad to see you’re still in once piece,” said Sheppard. He sounded tired and crack-throated. “And that was a good call about these UFOs. Never woulda thought of that.”
She blinked “You-eff-oh? I do not understand the term?”
“Never mind,” he told her, pointing back the way they had come. “I’ll dig out a copy of Independence Day when we get back to Atlantis, that’ll explain everything. Come on, I think I found us a ride.”
Sheppard led them toward the lone craft she had spotted earlier, and Teyla nodded. “I confess I have only a basic grasp of Asgard technology. I hope we will be able to operate this vessel.”
“The colonel once told me he could fly anything,” said Lorne. “Time to see if he was just bragg
ing, I guess.”
Another threatening rumble resonated through the decking and a segment of the steel ceiling broke away and collapsed with a ringing concussion.
“I said anything with wings,” Sheppard retorted, stepping up to the hull of the ship, feeling across the surface with the flat of his hand. “This doesn’t count.” He frowned. “No seams. Where’s the damn hatch?”
“There will be a touch point,” Teyla noted.
“I got it.” Sheppard moved his fingers over a shallow oval indent in the hull metal and part of the steel fuselage folded in on itself. “There —”
Whatever he was going to say next was lost as the Risar inside the shuttle came through the hatch and slammed Sheppard into the deck.
“Let me through!” Keller shouted, and shoved her way past the men collecting at the sick lodge’s door. She felt a hand on her shoulder — Lieutenant Allan — and heard her call out a warning, but Jennifer shrugged the other woman away and kept going. Allan cursed and coughed; the USAF officer was still weak with spent effort and the aftershock of losing decades of her life to a hungry Wraith.
