Stargate Atlantis: Halcyon

by James Swallow

  "We cannot land!" called the pilot from the cockpit compartment. "Your Highness, the ground is unstable!"

  Ronon pushed Linnian aside and pressed his face to the glass oval of the gyro-flyer's porthole. Beneath them he could see low buildings, the green cylinder of a parked Puddle Jumper. As he watched the surrounding trees wafted back and forth as if a stiff wind was blowing. One of the watchtowers crumpled abruptly at the midpoint and fell away, collapsing in a heap. "It's an earthquake."

  "This region is geologically inactive," Erony countered. "It's the vessel."

  The doctor crowded in beside the Satedan. "Oh my. Do you see there?" He pointed to the hillside. "Landslide."

  Dex followed his direction and saw great clods of earth falling away from the shallow hill, uprooting trees as they disin tegrated. Pale, bluish-white rock was revealed underneath; but no, not rock. It glittered dully in the daylight, the color of oiled, beaten metal. "They're raising the ship," he said it aloud, unable to believe the evidence of his own eyes. Ronon shouted out a command down the length of the cabin. "Back us off, now! Get us away from the hill!"

  The gyro-flyer's rotors buzzed and the aircraft retreated into a hover, just as coils of dust and earth boiled up from around the perimeter of the concealed craft. The ground cracked apart with a hoarse roar, and the Hive Ship's drives swelled to optimal power. Ronon watched the hill rise from its setting and tremble, shaking off the accumulated camouflage of countless years. Stone and wood, earth and grass fell away and flocks of birds were unseated from their roosts.

  Erony's pilot kept them level with the craft as it slowly rose above the tops of the trees, a deluge of rendered soil raining down across the landscape. Torn free from its hiding place, the Wraith Hive Ship cast a monstrous arachnid shadow, the ponderous and deadly mass drifting upward into the sky in defiance of gravity.

  "We are too late," breathed the woman.

  eckett blinked. "Well. It's not every day of your life that you get to see a hill take off and fly away."

  "How long must've that ship been down here to get grown over like that?" demanded Mason. "Two hundred years? Five hundred? More?" He fixed Lady Erony with a hard, angry stare, daring her to answer him.

  "The vessel has been here on our lands since before the Wars of Unification. I was never permitted to visit it." Her words caught in her throat. The noblewoman was like everyone else on the gyro-flyer, dwarfed by the horror of the reborn Hive Ship.

  Ronon gave the Wraith vessel one last look and then ran his hands over his tunic, checking his gear. The drifting alien hulk hung like a storm front, moving against the wind, the throbbing hum of the gravity drives gradually increasing in pitch. The craft was elderly and still shaking off the throes of sleep, he reasoned, but it would not take long for the Hive Ship's systems to return to full capacity. Once that happened, it would outpace this flying machine in seconds, rise to orbit and be free to do whatever Scar commanded. Contact other Hive Fleets, launch bombardments or flights of Darts. The prospect chilled him, even if on some level Dex's sense of justice told him the Haleyons were fully deserving of such a fate.

  There wasn't time to touch down and get to the Puddle Jumper; and even if he did, he only had the doctor to fly the craft for him. No. It was up to him to stop this.

  Ronon pulled his way up the cabin to the cockpit hatch and summoned the flyer pilot's attention. "You. Get us closer."

  The aviator's jaw dropped open. "Closer? Are you mad?"

  The Satedan made a show of checking the power cell on his particle magnum. "Take us over the dorsal hull, close to the spinal ridge. Hurry, before the autonomic cannons wake up and start shooting."

  The pilot nodded woodenly and pushed the steering yoke forward. The flyer pitched and the leviathan starship loomed to fill the glass canopy.

  Ronon met Mason at the main hatch. "What do you think you're up to, son?" snapped the soldier. "I'm the ranking-"

  "Get out of my way." Dex yanked on a control lever and the steel hatch yawned open, letting wind and the unearthly drone of the Hive Ship's engines fill the cabin. He pulled two keen battle daggers from a concealed holster.

  "You're gonna kill yourself," Mason told him.

  "There's plenty of Wraith who will do that for me." Outside of the hatch, he saw the bony hull of the Wraith ship come into view as the flyer drifted into near-collision distance. He threw a quick look at Beckett. "Keep your distance from the ship. I'm going inside."

  "And just how are you going to do that?"

  Ronon felt the kick of adrenaline rush into him and he couldn't stop the flicker of a grin as he stepped up. "Watch."

  The knives raised, Dex threw himself out of the gyro-flyer and into the bitter air, the tree tops fluttering a thousand feet below.

  "We are airborne." At first Teyla had thought the tremors passing through the Hive Ship were something else, perhaps an attack of some kind. She half-hoped that were the case, wishing that the Halcyons had seen sense and brought their air-battleships to smash the dormant vessel into wreckage; but the shift in gravity told her otherwise, as the decking seemed to become softer beneath her feet, the g-force lessening as the mammoth vessel discarded its cover. The corridors of the Wraith craft were taking on a different hue, the dead and ashen white of fleshy processing conduits along the walls changing to a cold blue-green. They pulsed like veins as life returned to the alien ship.

  Scar's retinue of Wraiths had become muted ever since they boarded the hive. Teyla saw some of them sniffing at the walls or licking at scent-traces that only they could detect. The anxiety the aliens had demonstrated before the dolmen and inside the Jumper was completely gone. These beings were in their own element now, moment by moment regaining the poise that their leader demonstrated. She had no doubt that in days, perhaps even hours, the Wraith once tormented and made feral by the Ancient device would become their former selves; and when that happened she pitied the people of Halcyon. The Wraith were frightening enough when they preyed upon you just to fulfill their needs for sustenance; Teyla shuddered beneath her choke collar as she contemplated of the depths of cruelty they would show to a people who had made them slaves. She swallowed, trying to soothe her bruised throat. Breathing was difficult, even with the heavy Hound collar's cogs in a relaxed mode. "Ali," she gasped. "Gods protect me..."

  Scar heard her whisper and cocked his head. "Your deities will not hear you in this place, Tey-lah. Of that, you must have no doubt." He sniffed the air. "Only my wishes will be answered today."

  Teyla had never considered that Wraiths might have gods of their own. What kind of creator would they worship? she wondered; but it was more likely that Scar was simply mocking her. She was reduced to this, a pet for her most hated foe's amusement. Teyla caught the spark of revulsion that thought kindled inside her and held on to it, letting it warm her.

  A warning yowl from one of the other Wraith brought them all to a halt. The alien dropped to a crouch and lapped at the chilly air, glancing back over its shoulder with a wary grimace. Scar became very still, and his cohorts followed suit. "Listen," he murmured, "can you hear them? Can you feel them, Teylah?"

  She didn't want to. She did not want to acknowledge the swarming presence in the corners of her mind, the insect crawl of alien thought scratching at the insides of her skull; but they were there, the fierce colors of other Wraith psyches pushing in on her, tight and constricting. They were so very close now, in the walls, the floor, crowding out the sound of her heartbeat.

  Man-shapes moved at the far end of the corridor, things that loped and hissed shifting away from bone alcoves in the walls. Some wore scraps of armor, some even carried weapons aglow with lethal power.

  Scar made cracking, spitting sounds that were returned by the newcomers. Her heart pounding against the inside of her ribs, Teyla shrank back against a skeletal pillar as the newly awakened Wraiths came to walk among their brethren. Scar moved close to a female with blood-red hair that came to her knees. In the sallow glow of the corridor's bio
luminescence, she could pick out black curves and loops of tribal tattoos on the female's bare shoulders. Scar had the same patterns about his neck and cheeks.

  The female caught sight of Teyla and her nostrils flared. She jerked and spat, angry and hungry at the sight of a live human. The Athosian woman tensed, ready to fight off the Wraith, but Scar made a grumbling sound and the female demurred, backing off. One of the female's group presented its weapon to Scar, cementing his place as the alpha in the newly enlarged pack. Teyla recognized the shape of a Wraith stunner rifle, the long gun fat and rounded like a huge silver maggot, the emerald glow of energy cells along its flanks and the wicked barb at the end. Scar accepted it and tugged on the cable leash connected to her collar. Teyla moved with them as the pack pressed deeper into the ship.

  It was difficult to do anything other than put one foot in front of the other, hard for her to keep herself held strongly in the grip of her own will. From all sides, the boiling invisible hate of the Wraiths pressed down on her. Teyla knew that with one single moment of weakness from her, the pressure would overwhelm her mind with raw, inchoate fear.

  There was a moment when Ronon thought he was going to miss it; but then the wind caught him and the Satedan saw the glistening flank of the Hive Ship there in front of him. He struck hard and found no purchase on the slippery fuselage. The curved hull plates were broad and interlocked, lapping over one another in the same fashion as the carapace of an armored beetle. Instantly he was sliding away, down toward the lip of the fuselage and the sheer drop into the Halcyon woodlands. Ronon lashed out with the battle daggers with all his might and felt the blade tips bite into the hull. Bone squealed at the impact points and threatened to tear the knives from his hands, but he hung on grimly, snarling with effort. The wind pulled at him, whipping his hair about his face. His slide slowed and he felt air beneath his feet; Dex was almost off the edge of the drifting Hive Ship.

  With a savage grunt of effort, Ronon used the daggers as pitons, advancing up and away from the brink in a march of cutting wounds across the organic hull. He knew from past experience that Wraith craft were sheathed not with rigid and inflexible matter, but with fleshy material that could bend and deform under impacts from micrometeorites or ballistic weapons. He found a shallow duct and scrambled into it, breathing hard. The wind was rushing over the hull now, as the Hive Ship began to pick up speed. Ronon cast around and saw the gyro-flyer, below and to the starboard side, the rotor blades chopping through the air as it raced to keep up.

  Sheathing the daggers, Dex swallowed down his tense adrenalin aftershock and fired his pistol point-blank into the skeletal duct. Bone and cartilage shattered around the intake, and almost as quickly a thick gel began to ooze over the new wound, hardening to scab it closed. Ronon drew his short sword, took a deep breath, and plunged himself into the cut, forcing his way through the exterior hull.

  Sheppard found himself wishing for a ball of string or a piece of chalk. "A bag of bread crumbs, even," he said to the air, "or better yet, a deck plan." He had a pack of chemical glow-sticks, but nowhere near enough that he would have been able to mark the path. At what seemed like the hundredth T-junction he'd passed in the past ten minutes, the colonel halted and flashed the P90's torch down the branching corridors. He found himself thinking of the adventure games he used to play as a kid on his cousin's computer. "You are in a maze of tunnels, all alike," he grimaced. "Huh. I always liked first-person shooters better, anyhow."

  In answer, a pulse of sound echoed down the corridor to his right, followed by a faint crash of impact noise. It sounded suspiciously like gunfire. "I was just kidding," added Sheppard, training his weapon. The sounds repeated, this time in rapid succession. The colonel strained to hear. He couldn't be sure, but one of the noises sounded a lot like a Wraith blaster, and the other some kind of energy weapon.

  It came again, and with it an angry snarl. An angry human snarl.

  "Ronon?" Sheppard flicked the P90's fire select switch to fully automatic and set off at a swift pace, homing in on the sounds of the firefight.

  The passageway opened out into an inverted bone bowl, a strange colonnade where other corridors fed away like threads from the center of a web. There were glistening lens-screens on some of the walls and Scar moved to them, manipulating controls with quick, deft motions. Liquid sounds came from some of the doorways as irises made from leaves of razor-edged chitin worked shut, closing off avenues of approach behind them. Teyla watched Scar working the controls. That he knew this ship intimately was obvious, and she had no doubt he had been fully aware of how the vessel would be affected by the destruction of the dolmen. He was waiting, she realized, biding his time out in that enclosure, looking for the tools he needed to reanimate his ship, his crew. And Daus gave them to him without knowing it. He gave him us. The cruel irony of it was heavy in her chest. The arrival of the Atlanteans had merely allowed the Wraith commander to advance his plans, instead of waiting for the return of his kindred. Teyla tried to imagine the depths of hate it would take to live for so long, to hold out against the animal madness broadcast by the dolmen. There could be no other feeling inside that being but the need for revenge.

  Scar noticed Teyla watching him and paused. "Speak," he told her.

  "Where are you taking me?"

  He ran a finger over a spot on the screen. "To my rightful place. To my throne," Scar smiled, the word entertaining him. "These prey rule their world through force of arms, and so by that measure I will soon be the new Lord Magnate of Halcyon." He clicked with soft laughter, but beneath the studied amusement was a dark streak of lethal antipathy, surfacing in his eyes. "I'll take the title just before I raze this planet to ashes."

  Teyla saw a glimmer of imagery flash past on the screen, a display of the Hive Ship's internal spaces. Green glows surrounded a section several compartments away, nestled in the dense core of the vessel's meat. She felt an abrupt stab of understanding. They were moving toward the heart of the Hive Ship, toward what could only be the vessel's command center.

  A pattern of blinking dots overlaid itself across the image and Scar gave an annoyed growl. He waved his hand over the console and it went dark. He spat out more commands in the Wraith language, and suddenly the pack were melting away, falling into shadowed corners or pressing themselves into alcoves where the corridor's gloomy illumination did not fall. In moments, it was almost as if Teyla and Scar were the only two in the room. She sensed their anticipation, stinging at her mind as the charged air before a thunderstorm might prickle her bare skin.

  Now there were new sounds filtering up through the corridors that remained open to the chamber. Voices and footsteps, the sound of heavy boots against the deck plates. She looked at Scar and with theatrical indolence, the Wraith placed a hand to his lips in a gesture of silence.

  The moment snapped and Teyla realized that the alien was laying an ambush for whomever it was that approached them. She bolted forward, opening her mouth to cry out, and the choke collar reacted instantly. The rings around her neck contracted to half their diameter, turning her shout into a wordless yap of noise, no more human than the bark of a graywolf. Furious, Teyla spun about, digging her fingers into the flesh of her throat, her nails scratching at her tawny skin as she pulled at the strangling necklet. Every noise she tried to make was incoherent, and the agony of the device was terrible.

  Her vision fogged. Scar was gone, hidden away like his kindred, leaving Teyla wheezing like an elderly woman. She sagged against the curved wall as the first of the men came into the circular room. They had gas lanterns that popped and fizzed in the half-light.

  "There!" A voice cried out and yellow glows hovered toward her. "Don't fire, she's not one of them..."

  Another person spoke, a stiff voice used to wielding authority and being obeyed. "What in wound's sake is going on here? Get her over here."

  Teyla held up her hands to warn them off, shaking her head and mouthing `No,' over and over. She backed away but they followed her in,
unaware.

  "It's all right, girl, we won't hurt you," said the first voice, and now she could make out the silhouettes of Halcyon riflemen, their high hats, brocade coats and their long-lance rifles.

  "Stay away," she forced the words to her lips but the sound that emerged was a rattling hiss; and then it was too late to stop it.

  Shapes moved in the deep shade of the chamber, fast and deadly. Men cried out and screamed. Teyla dropped to the floor as gunshots rang out, ripping swarms of needle-rounds cutting past her and white sheens of stunner fire answering them back. Blood glistened as a lantern was tossed into the air, the pool of yellow light whipping around and catching frozen images of the Wraith attack before it shattered against the deck. A heavy form crumpled into a heap close to her and she came face to face with a dead man, the papery skin of his cheeks hollow against the bones of his skull. The Wraith had fallen on the trooper in an instant, a dozen of them ripping the years from his life before his body could hit the ground.

  He had something held in the death-grip of his fingers; a curved fighting knife with a serrated edge. Blocking out the terrible melee around her, Teyla pushed forward and grabbed the weapon, taking it and folding it to her chest. Hope flared inside her. If she could get away while they were still feeding, perhaps the blade might be enough to work open the collar's locks.

  She came up into a crouch, tensing her muscles for flight, as the last of the riflemen perished with a scream, his lantern dying with him. Too late. Bodies lay about the chamber, spindly with sudden rigor.

  The Wraith chittered with post-kill excitement, but Scar was not among them. He crossed to Teyla and found the end of the steel leash where it trailed upon the floor. "What do you have, Tey-lah?" he demanded, holding out his hand. "Show me." Scar manipulated the leash's control and the collar relaxed again.