Stargate Atlantis: Halcyon

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Stargate Atlantis: Halcyon Page 21

by James Swallow


  "Our hive, our home, was crippled," he husked, looking inward, "the interstellar translation drives were damaged beyond repair. The Enemy fared little better, fleeing. They vowed to return with reinforcements to finish us. But they never came back."

  And then it was all there in her mind, as if she had lived through it herself. Teyla retched, bringing up thin, watery bile, her body rebelling as the shape of the alien memories tried to impose themselves on her recall. "You... Went into hibernation, where the dolmen's power could not affect your minds. Waiting." The woman shook her head, trying to rid herself of the cascade of horrific sensations.

  Scar showed all his serrated teeth in a malicious smile. "Ah. You understand. But with each passing year the Enemy's defense wanes in strength. Enough that we can rise against it. Enough."

  "Teyla..." called Bishop, a warning in his tone. He'd seen the flare of anger in her eyes.

  "You will fail," she spat. "A handful of mindless beasts are all you have! The Halcyons will gun you down the instant you show your ruined face to them!"

  The Wraith growled and ran a finger over the scar on his cheek.

  "The Ancients beat you ten thousand years ago!" Teyla snarled. "You ran like wounded quarry! You will fare no better today!"

  Scar chuckled. "Mistake. We were not beaten, Tey-lah. We merely took our rest." He rose, tucking the gun into his tunic. "That time has passed." At his gesture, one of the other Wraiths came out of the shadows with a metallic ring in its hands. Scar turned the hoop of discolored silver and with a click it split open. He brought it back to Teyla and offered it to her, like a suitor giving a gift.

  She saw the intricate cogs and metal spars on the inner face of the ring and understood at once what it was. Teyla tried to back away, but there was nowhere she could go. Scar fastened the metal collar around her neck and it made a clicking sound as the mechanism inside constricted to fit her. The woman coughed as it tightened, settling to a diameter that lay uncomfortably on her throat.

  "Ah," Scar said, amusement in his tone. "Now you can be my Hound, human."

  Bishop barked out a string of invective that would have earned him a week in the glasshouse if he had said it in earshot of an officer. Scar turned indolently toward him and gave a hollow yowl to the other Wraith in his pack. All of them sprang at the bound soldier with sudden, appalling speed, falling on the man and ripping into him.

  "No!" Teyla screamed, but she was powerless to save him. The trooper shuddered and wailed as the Wraiths fed, each of them fighting to draw his living energy from him. She found she could not look away from the horrific display as Bishop's hand snatched at the air, with each second the skin becoming papery, the muscles losing definition, the color draining from him.

  After a moment, Scar made another sound and the Wraith pack reluctantly withdrew. Tears spiked Teyla's eyes as she realized that Bishop was still alive, his face sunken and skeletal, each breath a rattling gasp of air. He looked like an old man, decrepit and feeble. Scar bent across the soldier and carefully placed his palm over Bishop's heart. Then, with his tongue flicking out between his pallid lips, the Wraith fed greedily on the last moments of the man's life, taking the sweetest and most succulent nourishment for himself.

  "I am not going to die on a Wraith Hive Ship," Rodney managed, trying very hard to keep his voice from turning into a whimper. "I am going to die of old age surrounded by... by... nubile graduate students. Nobel Prizes!" His skin crawled and he bunched his fists, hugging himself in a desperate attempt to stave off panic-induced shivers. "I am not going to die," he insisted to the empty cell. "I am going to die on a Wraith Hive Ship-" McKay halted and shouted out loud, abruptly angry with himself. "Not! Not! Not going to die! I am not going to die on a Wraith Hive Ship, you can't make me, I don't want to, so there! So there-"

  He heard the ringing clatter of footsteps approaching along the corridor beyond the webbed doorway of his confinement, and Rodney shrank back into the corner of the cramped space, frantically trying to fight down the rising wave of abject terror building inside him. He wanted so much to hold on the rational and intelligent part of himself, the piece of Rodney McKay that was smart and clinical, capable of cutting through scientific conundrums like a laser; but that bit of him had gone bye-bye and all that was left was the panicking idiot portion who hit like a girl and barely knew one end of a gun from the other. Not that he had a gun, anyway.

  The cell wall hit him in the back and McKay stiffened. He was staring death in the face again, any moment now. Why was he still terrified? This had happened to him so many times, surely by now he should have been used to it?

  Two Wraiths halted outside the doorway and one of them did something to a control surface. The spider web of cords blocking him in twitched and retracted into the walls. The other came into the cell and grabbed Rodney, dragging him out into the corridor.

  "Please don't suck the life out of me," he managed, and the denial sounded totally pathetic in his ears. As if they were suddenly going to say `Oh, okay then, 'and shove Inc back in there.

  The aliens didn't acknowledge his words, and simply propelled him forward, pushing McKay away and down the twisting tunnels of bone. The Wraith guards marched him quickly through open spaces and atriums, some lit with dim bioluminescence, others black and dead. Rodney's mind was running at full tilt, his thoughts racing thanks to the surge of terror-induced adrenaline in his bloodstream. Something felt different about this ship. He tried to put his finger on it.

  The usual sense of motion, the slight giddiness of acceleration, wasn't there. Perhaps they were in orbit, or drifting in space? But as he stumbled onward, he felt strangely heavier than he expected to. Every other time McKay had been inside a Wraith vessel, the gravity had been just a shade less than the Earth-equivalent of habitable, Stargated worlds. He remembered that Zelenka had posited that the Wraith liked a lowgee environment. If he felt heavy-that was to say, normal weight-here, maybe this ship wasn't actually in space but grounded on a planet? What the hell did that imply? Why was he even here? The men who had attacked the dolmen, who shot him, they wore gray battledress and they certainly hadn't been Wraiths. Had they?

  However, that train of thought went totally off the rails as the guards shoved him through another doorway and along a narrow catwalk over a vast open space in the alien craft's interior. Ranged up above and down below him along the curved inner surface of the chamber there were hundreds, if not thousands of individual cells. Not the same kind of cell as the holding area where he'd been confined, but roughly hexagonal compartments that looked like something from inside of a hornet's nest. Many of them were dark, but a lot-an awful lot-were aglow with pale light, and through the thick matter of their translucent walls McKay could see the humanoid forms of quiescent Wraith. Now and then, the occasional one would twitch in its hibernative sleep. But what caught Rodney's attention was where the cells were marked, where they had been cut open with what must have been blowtorches. Good grief why would anyone actually want to deliberately decant a dormant Wraith?

  He turned to look at the alien guards and saw a glitter of light at their necks. Each of the Wraiths had dull, lifeless eyes, and heavy steel torcs that were the twin to those worn by Daus's indentured servants. "Hounds?" The word tumbled from McKay's lips.

  Another hatch dilated before them and with one final shove, Rodney's Wraith chaperones pushed him through it. He recovered from a near stumble and came to a halt, his jaw hanging open in shocked surprise.

  McKay had never seen the interior of a Wraith Hive Ship's control nexus before, but based on the experience of several Atlantean off world teams, he'd built up a picture of what they had to look like. He was pleased on some level that he'd been so close to the mark, but unhappy on another that he had to make that judgment in person. Standing in the chamber was like being inside a hollowed-out skull, a large bone enclosure with two open orbits that peered out from the dorsal surface of the vessel like eye sockets. As he had surmised, the view from the ports wasn't
the black void of space or the shimmering blue of a hyperspatial tunnel, but a pale sky and a lightly forested hillside. The now-familiar yellow-white sun visible in the clouds told him that he was still on Halcyon. And if that's the closest thing I've had to good news all day, then I really am in trouble.

  There were multiple levels inside the nexus with steep ramps leading up and down to them. Skeletal formations here and there had grown around the glossy shapes of control consoles and the quivering organic lenses of monitor screens. It was all seamless and quite unpleasant in its design, like the folds of natural armor on a scorpion's thorax or the shiny bones of some dead deep-ocean predator. But what shocked him more than the alien lines of the Hive Ship's command center were the chunks of brazen, blocky metal retrofitted into the walls. Festoons of fat, sparking cables trailed back and forth across the deck, and there were puddles of yellowy organic fluid collecting where arrays of glass valves and other primitive electronics had been surgically inserted into the consoles. Hardware better suited to the laboratory of Dr. Frankenstein had been rammed brutally into the slick, inhuman forms of the Wraith consoles.

  Men in work tunics were busy at the controls, or in tight groups at wooden benches set up in the avenues between the alien hardware. They all wore the black flash on their tabards marking them as standing in the service of the Lord Magnate.

  A familiar and utterly unwelcome face emerged from one of the groups, beaming a supercilious grin. "Kelfer," sneered Rodney, turning the man's name into an insult. "What. Are. You. Doing?"

  "Dr. McKay. Welcome." The chief scientist clapped his hands. "Firstly, I must apologize for your mode of arrival here. I trust you did not find it too... Dramatic?"

  Rodney waggled a finger at him. "You kidnapped me!" It came to him in a rush. "That's why you left Erony and me inside the dolmen! You went outside to, what, send a signal to your goon squad? Where is she? Did you hurt her?"

  Kelfer rolled his eyes. "As if I would dare to leave a mark upon the daughter of the most powerful man on the planet. The Lady Erony is uninjured."

  "Scumbag!" It was the first insult that came to mind, and although it wasn't as nasty as he would have liked, McKay put plenty of venom behind it.

  "Doctor, please calm yourself. You were struck by a Wraith Stunner. The effects can be quite troubling."

  "Don't patronize me!" he barked. "When your lordship finds out that you're working with the Wraith-"

  It was Kelfer's turn to butt in. "Working with the Wraith?" he laughed harshly. "Great blades, man, have you learned nothing while you have been on Halcyon? We despise those beasts!" He nodded at the two Hounds. "They serve us! Never the reverse! That is the whole point of this endeavor." He opened his hands, taking in the ship around them. "And be certain that the Lord Magnate would hardly be uninformed about what transpires here, on land that has been a part of his ancestral holdings since the Age of Unification!"

  Rodney took that nugget of information in, his fingers fluttering at the air. "I return to my original point, then. What are you doing here, you moron?"

  Kelfer's face hardened at the insult, but he answered nonetheless. "We are learning the secrets of the Wraith," he bit out, "decoding their language, turning their technology to our own ends, examining their physiology to find new ways to condition them and kill them." He puffed out his chest. "It is the single most important undertaking of our race."

  But McKay wasn't listening to him preen. The Atlantean scientist's analytical mind was racing ten steps ahead of what Kelfer was telling him, putting together everything he had seen and heard, and following it toward the inevitable conclusion. "Wait. Wait wait. Linnian told Teyla that Daus's rule of Halcyon was unchallenged."

  "Lord Daus!" snapped Kelfer.

  McKay's thoughts spilled out, raw and unfiltered. "His rule was unchallenged because he had the biggest army of tame Wraith in his doghouse, and no one would ever dare to go up against someone who could send in so many Hounds, right? And I couldn't help wondering where he got his fresh recruits from, and now you show me this-" Rodney's brain finally caught up with his mouth and stumbled over the words. "Oh no. No, no, no-no." He took a warning step toward Keifer, indignation and anger building as he realized the depths of trouble they were in. "Please tell me that you were not so completely, so unreservedly, entirely downright mind-bogglingly dim-witted, that you have actually been waking up those Wraith on purpose?"

  The control room fell silent as McKay's tirade rose in volume. The Halcyon chief scientist just blinked.

  "That's how the Fourth Dynast have kept themselves in power for so long, isn't it? Not by hunting Wraith on other planets and bringing them back like the other clans do, but by decanting them from this Hive Ship, like it's some kind of private wine cellar!" The arrogance of such a thing drained the ire from him in a second. "Do you realize that your ham-fisted efforts tinkering around in here may very well have doomed your entire planet to being the main course at a Wraith barbecue?"

  Kelfer composed himself and straightened his tunic with a self-conscious cough. "Dr. McKay, you have been brought here on the direct instruction of His Highness the Lord Magnate to assist me in my work on the Hive Ship's mechanisms. By your own admission, you have stated that you possess some knowledge of these craft and their technologies."

  "It's a lot more than just some, okay?" Although he probably should have kept quiet about it, Rodney couldn't resist the chance to get in another dig at the pompous man. "The biggest expert on the Wraith this side of an Ascended Being," he pointed at his chest with both hands, "right here!"

  "Indeed," continued Kelfer, and it was clear that for the scientist, admitting McKay's superiority in any matter was like chewing on broken glass. "And with that in mind, you will immediately address yourself to the functioning of the Wraith hibernation chambers aboard this vessel."

  "Why?" McKay knew the moment the question left his lips that the answer would not be a good one.

  Kelfer's lips thinned. "In centuries past, the Fourth Dynast's scientists were able to remove docile Wraith from their capsules and put them to the collar with only minimal incident. However, in recent cycles, more and more of the sleeping Wraith have been emerging on their own, despite our best efforts to contain them. Every attempt to stem this chain of events has failed. We cannot stop them awakening. We do not know why this is."

  Rodney knew, but he wasn't about to tell Kelfer. He wasn't willing to admit that it had been Colonel Sheppard's ill-fated venture into the heart of a Wraith Hive Ship just like this one that started a ripple effect, waking up the dormant aliens all across the Pegasus Galaxy. "And you want me to do something about it, is that it? Clean up your, uh, mess for you?"

  The scientist sighed. "You will find a way to put the Wraith back to sleep, McKay. If you do not, then your associates will suffer."

  "Suffer?" Rodney blinked. "What do you mean by that, exactly?"

  "I mean die, exactly. At the hands of my Lord's Hounds."

  "I don't see anything," said Ronon, peering through the binoculars, "not that I've got a wide field of view out the canopy."

  "Uh-huh," Sheppard replied, his attention on the screen in front of him. "Damn."

  "You have something?"

  The colonel shook his head. "For a second, I thought I did. I tried using the Jumper's sensors to track that Ancient hand-held doohickey I gave to Teyla, but I'm getting nada. There was the ghost of return for a moment, but then it faded."

  Ronon leaned closer. "Where?"

  Sheppard grabbed the paper map of the hunt enclosure and tapped it. "Here, I think. Sensors didn't get enough time to lock down an exact location."

  "That's a start. At least we have somewhere to look for them."

  "Yeah." John touched controls on the ship's console. "Activating cloak. I'm going to take us up to tree-top level and start running a search pattern."

  Dex nodded and attended to his weapons. "Daus didn't give us the whole story about the Wraith here," he noted.

  "I think
we're way past expecting the truth from that guy, don't you? `A planet full of liars', right?"

  "I don't think he sent us here for Scar. He sent us here to get killed. You saw how those Wraiths were moving. They were feral, but they weren't stupid."

  Sheppard turned the yoke as the Puddle Jumper rose above the forest canopy. "The Wraith are a lot of things, but dumb has never been one of them."

  "You don't follow me," said Ronon. "They were working in a coordinated pattern. Attack, retreat, feint, attack. That's not how a mind-blanked animal would do it." He pointed into the trees. "They went for our team and Teyla's at the same time. They had a plan. A leader."

  "Scar."

  "No doubt."

  "Well, that's great. So he's not only a super-tough Wraith, he's super-smart as well, out here in the trees with his private militia like some kinda alien Marlon Brando. And I get to be Martin Sheen." He glanced at Dex. "You could be Dennis Hopper, if you like."

  The other man made a face. "That psychic jamming device in the dolmen is supposed to fog their brains, but I don't think it's as powerful as the Halcyons think it is. Maybe the ZPM powering it has run down, and those Wraith are just playing along. Waiting for the right moment to strike."

  The possibility that Dex could be right about that sent an icy shiver down the colonel's spine. Sheppard shot him a hard look. "One problem at a time, Ronon. One damn problem at a time."

  The gyro-flyer rocked as the aircraft caught a sharp updraft, and Lady Erony put out a hand to steady herself. She craned her neck to peer out of the window-slit by her chair and saw the smokestacks and tenement towers of the lower city flash by.

  Linnian's fingers knotted and unknotted as he hovered beside her. At length, he gave a theatrical sigh. "Highness, would not it have been simpler to dispatch a messenger to carry your news to Dr. Beckett? Such a method would have much greater alacrity." He forced a smile. "See here, if we return to the High Palace, a courier could reach him in only a few minutes from your word of dispatch-"

 

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