Nightfall

by Stargate

  The bodies of a dozen dead warriors littered the floor, and a dozen more aliens were being held on their knees by rebels from Soonir’s forces; the renegade leader himself and his opposite number in the elders stood close by. No-one was moving; the air was heavy with tension, laced with the smell of ozone and sweat.

  She found who she was looking for; Ronon Dex stood with his gun drawn and aimed at a cluster of fearful Heruuni, who stood in a close cluster. For a moment, she couldn’t understand what was happening, until she heard a familiar voice issue out from behind the trembling group.

  “Get out!” shouted Kullid. “You have no right to be here! You do not believe!”

  Keller’s hand went to her mouth in shock. The young healer, the charming and handsome man whom she had thought might become a friend, a kindred sprit… He was using his own people as a human shield to prevent Ronon from shooting him where he stood.

  “I believe this,” Ronon told him. “If you don’t toss out that rodgun and step away, I’ll put a beam right between your eyes.”

  Her gaze was drawn to the Satedan’s outstretched gun. It should have been rock-steady, but instead Ronon’s hand was trembling with palsy. The sickness, she thought. On any other day he could make the shot, but today?

  “You will not fire!” Kullid snarled. “You will kill an innocent if you pull that trigger…”

  Ronon hesitated; he knew that the healer was correct.

  “Kullid,” ventured Jennifer. “Please, stop this. You’ve lost. Just tell us where the others are.”

  “Yes, where are the rest of the Wraith?” demanded Takkol from nearby. “The voyagers are right. Your foolish devotion to these monsters is ended! Surrender!”

  “No!” Kullid shouted, and Keller saw him moving behind his wall of hostages. “I have lived a lie for my entire life! I worship the Wraith, and I am not alone in that!”

  “Are you sure?” said Soonir. “Where is Aaren and the rest of your miserable adherents? They have abandoned you.”

  “Aaren has been granted the blessing,” retorted Kullid. “The Wraith take life but they give it as well! Only gods can do that!” He was ranting now, and his hostages reacted with fear. Among them, Keller glimpsed the tear-streaked face of Laaro’s mother, Jaaya. The woman met her gaze, imploring her for rescue.

  “Enough of this,” said Takkol, swaggering as he stepped forward. “You are like a child, Kullid! You could not defeat the sickness on your own, so rather than admit defeat like a man, you place your faith in these monsters! But they are the killers, you fool! We have known it since the beginning! Without the Aegis to protect us, we would have been culled by them long ago!”

  “No! No!” Kullid’s ire rose by the second. “You are a liar! You have always been a weak, venial man, and you do not deserve to see their glory!” The hostages cried out as Kullid surged forward. Keller saw him moving, the thin shape of a rodgun rifle in his hands.

  She felt Ronon’s firm hand at her back. “Get down!” he shouted.

  And then she was falling, pressed to the floor; what happened next was so fast it was nearly a blur.

  Kullid took aim at Takkol and fired, the rodgun clattering angrily in the close confines of the sick lodge wardroom. She saw Soonir react and shove the other man out of the way; then in the same heartbeat a bloom of crimson flaring on the rebel’s chest, a yell of pain, the stink of spent cordite.

  Then Soonir falling, the hostages screaming. Kullid turning toward her, his handsome face now something ugly and hateful, animated by zealous rage.

  She turned away from him and heard the flat crack of Ronon’s pistol as it discharged a single, fatal pulse of red light. Kullid took the shot in the torso and was blown backwards off his feet, collapsing into a nerveless heap against the far wall. The rodgun fell from his grip, and she knew he would not rise again.

  Like a thread snapping, time seemed to contract and the long seconds that had elapsed were gone, lost and fading. Keller scrambled shakily to her feet and ran to Soonir’s side.

  The rebel leader looked up at her and blinked. “Ah,” he wheezed. “That will be the end of me.” Pink foam collected at the corners of his lips.

  “I need a medical kit!” she called. Allan moved into the lodge, scouring the benches for any of the gear that the Atlantis team had brought with them before the Wraith had arrived.

  A shadow covered Soonir. Keller looked up and saw Takkol standing over them. The elder’s face was twisted in confusion. “Why?” he demanded. “Why did you do that? You stupid fool, did you think yourself noble? If you had just stood your ground —”

  “You would be lying here, yes,” rasped the rebel, “and you would die instead of me.”

  “Soonir, no,” said Keller. “Just hold on.” Allan returned at a run, and thrust a medical case into her hands. The doctor dumped the contents on the floor and grabbed at bandages and a hypodermic gun.

  “Ah, healer. Voyager. You are too late.” Soonir blinked slowly. “I did this not for him.” He nodded toward Takkol. “I did it for Heruun. Everything I did, I did… I did…” He gave a wet cough and fell silent.

  Keller touched a finger to a vein in his neck and felt nothing. She let out a sigh. “He’s gone.”

  “No,” insisted Takkol, “he must not die. He has crimes that must be paid for, he must answer for all the things he has done.”

  “The man is dead,” husked Ronon. “If you ask me, you ought to be thankful that it wasn’t you.” The Satedan turned away and beckoned Allan to him. “We need to secure this building. The rest of the Wraith have to be here.”

  She nodded. “Roger that. If they call in reinforcements from the hive, we’re in big trouble.”

  Jaaya detached herself from the group of former hostages spoke up. “That way,” she said, indicating a carved wooden corridor that led deep into the central trunk of the city-tree. “They took my husband, Aaren and others…”

  “Why?” said Keller.

  Jaaya’s voice trembled. “They said they would give them the cure.”

  The weight of the towering clone-creature flattened Sheppard’s chest and his breath came out in a half-yell, half-grunt.

  “John!” Teyla was at his side in an instant. “Are you all right?”

  “Get this thing off me!” The Risar was very dead, but it was still damned heavy, and he had trouble breathing. The drone’s lipless mouth was pulled back in a rictus grin revealing bony ridges where humans would have teeth, its face scarred with oozy scratches caked with dark fluid. And its eyes; they were ragged holes in the skull. Sheppard’s gut twisted as he realized the thing must have gouged out its own eyeballs.

  With effort, Teyla and Lorne dragged the corpse off him and the colonel got back to his feet, wincing with the pain of a dozen new bruises.

  Teyla studied the clone for a moment. “It must have been trapped inside the craft when Fenrir died. It went insane in there, killed itself.”

  “Just as long as it didn’t smash the controls.”

  Lorne peered cautiously inside the shuttlecraft, leading with his gun. “It’s a little messy in there, but I don’t see any structural damage.”

  Ignoring the new bloodstains streaking his gear vest, Sheppard moved past the major and entered the vessel. The interior mirrored the design of the Aegis bridge, replicated on a much smaller scale. There were no chairs, only curved vertical consoles with the familiar control spheres upon them. “Okay. Clock’s running. We’ve gotta move.” He found the centre-most console and laid his hands on it. The panel glowed and a deep thrumming sound issued from the walls of the shuttle. “Contact.” Sheppard shot Teyla a look. “Hey, you know what the transporter controls look like?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Lorne, help her. I’m gonna earn my pay.” He blew out a breath and concentrated on the unfolding hologram in front of him. A web of complex shapes, all circles and rods, shimmered into the air. It was nothing like any flight controls he had ever seen before.

  “You sure you ca
n do this, sir?” Lorne said in a low voice. He must have seen the flash of doubt on the colonel’s face.

  “If I can’t,” Sheppard said bleakly, “we won’t have much time to be sore about it.”

  Aaren’s desiccated corpse collapsed to the floor in front of Errian, a puff of dust issuing from its mouth. He hardly recognized the wizened, shrunken carcass that used to be the elder. Aaren’s plump face of tawny skin was now a hollow, pallid thing, the flesh of his cheeks drawn tight over the bones of his skull, knots of blackened matter staring back at Errian from deep inside cavernous eye sockets. Still clad in the rich, heavy robes of his high status within the community, the many golden bangles of his rank clattering against the bony, fleshless sticks that were the dead man’s arms, the form that used to be the elder looked as if it were something exhumed from an ancient grave, not a man who had been breathing only moments earlier.

  Errian wanted to look away, but he could not bring himself to do so. The horror of what he had seen transfixed him, held him fast. It was more terrifying that the paralyzing touch of the Giants when he had been Taken, because it was his own mind stopping him from motion. He simply could not believe what he had seen; Aaren kneeling before the Wraith warrior, and then the white-skinned monster clawing at the man’s chest. There had been screaming; from Errian, from the others who cowered in the corners of the chamber, and eventually from Aaren, who at first had thought he was about to be given some kind of benediction.

  Errian had watched it all, shocked rigid as the Wraith sucked life itself from the elder, draining him dry.

  And he knew that he would be the next to join him.

  Around him, the group of Wraith who had shepherded them down the wooden corridor and into the carved chambers deep within the core trunks of the city-tree pulled at the victims they had chosen. Some of the people had implored the Wraith to let them come with them, those who were their secret worshippers revealing themselves, those desperate for a cure to the sickness or just too cowardly to resist fearfully trailing along with the crowd; and to Errian’s shame he counted himself among the latter.

  One of the aliens turned a baleful gaze on him and dragged him into a shaft of light falling from a lantern above. All the Wraith seemed agitated, violence in their every motion. Something was awry.

  “Please,” he managed. “I have a wife and son.”

  The Wraith cocked its head and hissed. He was unsure if it could actually understand him. It studied the flesh of his throat quizzically; there were welts and lesions there in abundance, the mark of the sickness in its final phase.

  “I only wanted to be well… For them…” He blinked. The pain of the sickness rose and fell though him like waves upon the lakeshore, but his terror towered over all other physical sensations. Perhaps this is for the best, he wondered. I will die and the pain will cease, and I shall not burden my family again. Tears prickled in his eyes. My dearest Jaaya, my brave Laaro.

  The alien reached down toward his breast and Errian saw a serrated maw opening in the palm of the Wraith’s hand, glistening with threads of fluid.

  He turned his head away so he would not see it happen, ashamed once more of his own fear.

  And without warning a bolt of fiery red light streaked by his face, so close that his skin was singed by its passing. He heard the Wraith give a screaming hiss and it fell away, clutching at its forearm where burned skin trailed wisps of meat-smoke.

  “Nice shot,” said the lieutenant, hobbling alongside the Satedan. “You winged that sucker pretty good.”

  Ronon spat angrily. “I was aiming for his head.” He cursed under his breath. “These damned shakes…” He glared across at the Wraith, panning his pistol across them. “Give me a fight,” he bellowed. “Go on. I dare you.”

  Keller moved with them, blinking as she surveyed the chamber they found themselves in. Cut into the living heart of the great tree that supported the Heruuni settlement, it was one of dozens of interior spaces inside the great trunk, doubtless part of the community’s infrastructure. It made sense that the Wraith would have retreated here to feed; there were few ways in or out, and warm, gloomy atmosphere was similar to the environments aboard their semi-organic starships.

  A couple of the Wraith made combative motions and they were killed where they stood, eliciting cries of fear from the cowering Heruuni scattered around the chamber. Keller spotted Laaro’s father among them and felt a moment of relief for the boy; but that soon faded when she saw the lesions on his skin. Unconsciously, she shot Ronon a look and frowned.

  “Aaren…” Surrounded by a phalanx of his men, Elder Takkol moved to what seemed like a heap of rags lying in the middle of the floor. With distaste, Jennifer realized that she was looking at human remains; whatever it was that was left behind after a Wraith had taken its fill from a living being. Takkol was silent for a long moment. “This was the price of Aaren’s weakness,” he intoned. “It is a fitting death.” The elder spun about and addressed the other Heruuni in the chamber. “You see? Do you see now? There is no cure for the sickness! It is a wound we must bare in exchange for the blessing of the Aegis!”

  “Your ‘Aegis’ is just as alien as they are!” snarled Ronon, stabbing a trembling finger at the sullen pack of Wraith. “Don’t you get that yet? No great being hiding in the sky will protect you! You have to fight for yourselves.” The Satedan paused and paled, as if the effort of shouting was nearly too much for him.

  One of the Wraith — the one Ronon had wounded — saw the moment of weakness and shifted on the balls of his feet. Lieutenant Allan raised her rifle and shot the alien a hard look. “Don’t,” she told it. The Wraith growled and stood still.

  Ronon was breathing heavily and he sagged against a wall, blinking sweat away from his eyes. “Damn it…” he mumbled.

  “The sickness…” husked Errian. “The voyager is close to the end, as are we all.”

  All at once, Jennifer Keller felt furious; the emotion came up from nowhere and it engulfed her. Her hands contracted into fists. She had been in this place too many times in her medical career, forced to watch her patients slip away because they were beyond her help, even after they had fought and clawed their way through every last shuddering breath. There was no cure for the nanite infection. The monumental unfairness of it all pressed down on her and her jaw tightened; No, she told herself, I refuse to let Ronon die. I refuse to let these people die. Keller was not willing to be beaten now, not after all this. I didn’t let Elizabeth Weir die when everyone thought she would. I’m not going to give up here, either!

  There had to be some way to bring Ronon and the others back from the brink, let their bodies heal themselves, some way to fight this slow death with life —

  The Wraith take life but they give it as well!

  Kullid’s angry pronouncement echoed in her thoughts, the import of it hitting her like a wash of icy water. She stared at the knot of brooding, surly aliens. Each of them had fed a short time ago, she could tell by the blush of sickly green across their ghost-pale faces; and the bodies in the chamber attested to exactly how recently.

  The doctor’s thoughts raced; she had read the reports made by her predecessor Doctor Carson Beckett on the Wraith’s unusual abilities, most notably one file that had pulled at her reason with its incredible possibilities. John Sheppard had once been fed on by one of the aliens, but later that same Wraith had somehow returned what he had stolen from the colonel, effectively regenerating his damaged, prematurely-aged tissues. There were even unsubstantiated reports of healthy humans receiving the same regenerative ‘gift’ from Wraith.

  And if that were possible… If Kullid had been right, and the Wraith really could give life as well as take it…

  Keller snapped her fingers at the Wraith to get its attention. “Uh, you,” she said. “Listen to me. You understand that you’re all out of options, right?” She jerked a thumb at the ceiling. “There’s a battle going on up there. Your buddies aren’t coming.”

  “Are you certa
in of that?” The injured Wraith spoke for the first time.

  “Are you?” Ronon retorted.

  The doctor sucked in a shaky breath. “So if you want to get off this planet alive, you better listen to me.”

  Takkol bristled. “You have no right to offer these monsters any amnesty!”

  Allan waved her weapon at the elder. “Hush up, now. Let her finish.”

  Ronon crossed to her, walking with difficulty. “What do you think you are doing?” he said quietly.

  “My job,” she told him, then gave the Wraith a level look. “We’ll let you gate off this planet.”

  The Wraith cocked its head. “In return for what?”

  She nodded at Ronon and the others. “Make them well. Give them your ‘gift of life’.”

  The Satedan looked at her for a long moment, and Keller thought he would explode with rage at such a suggestion. He hated the Wraith more than anyone else in the room; but Ronon Dex wasn’t a fool. Beneath his pride, he had a soldier’s pragmatism — and like the Wraith, he had to know it was his only shot at survival.

  A slow, cold smile appeared on Ronon’s face as he made his peace with the idea, and with care he took aim with his pistol, pointing it at the Wraith’s head. “Of course,” he husked. “There is the other option. To be honest, part of me is hoping you turn her down.” Ronon’s smile became a wolfish grin. “What’s it gonna be?”

  Rodney McKay held on to the console before him for dear life as the computer chamber shook, every loose piece of broken paneling or shattered crystal-glass rattling against the metallic decking. He tried very hard not to think about what was going on outside, about the twisted wrecks of this ship and its Wraith adversary, locked together like a pair of doomed dancers spinning their way into the inferno of re-entry. He kept his eyes glued to the holographic screen, pouring his entire focus into the single task of making the hyperdrive activation program work.

  Normally, the staggeringly complex task of collating the trillions of data points needed to make a faster-than-light transition were done by computers, and outside involvement was hardly required. It was all ‘point and click’; want to jump from Sol to Barnard’s Star? Sure, no problem. Just tap the big red button marked ‘Go’. Someone else will do the math for you.