Stargate Atlantis: Halcyon

by James Swallow

  Daus's eyes flared with annoyance. "She was quite impressed with you, Doctor. `He can help us', she said. `He is a good man'." The Magnate spat. "Such pitiful sentiment! To think, my own daughter would have the temerity to suggest that Halcyon's supreme ruler place himself in the debt of another?"

  Perversely, McKay felt a surge of gladness. "Then... You're saying she didn't tell you to kidnap me?"

  If anything, it seemed that every word Rodney spoke made Daus even angrier than before. "Of course not! It is my greatest disappointment. Erony is weak, you fool, weak like her mother. So beautiful and perfect, so sharp and intelligent, but where is her killer instinct?" He raged on, eyes unfocussed, caught in the whirlwind of his own tirade. "A ruler must be heartless to truly lead a nation. Pity is not for the strong. I could never trust her to take the throne. Erony cannot wield the sword with dispassion, she feels the death of each lesser as if it actually mattered... And you!" Daus's fist hovered an inch from McKay's face, and he flinched back. "You have brought it all to the surface, with your ridiculous talk and your interference. She should have left you to die on the ice moon. You made my daughter weak!"

  "You're her father and you don't even know her," Rodney managed, but the Magnate didn't hear him, too deep in fury.

  "My world... My world and my precious child are ruined!" he said in a wounded snarl.

  "And who is to blame?" The voice cut through the air, laden with static. McKay and every other person in the room turned to hear the retort that emerged from the discarded radio. "You are, father!" cried Erony's voice. "You and you alone!"

  Daus picked up the device as if it were a poisonous animal, and Rodney saw clearly the indicator light showing that the channel had been open all along. For the first time, McKay saw real fear in the eyes of the Lord Magnate.

  The tension inside the flyer's cabin was as thick as smoke. Beckett reached a gentle hand out to touch the young woman's arm, but she shook it off, gripping the radio handset and fixing all her energy upon it. Anger and sadness made her eyes shine brightly.

  "Daughter...?" came a voice, whispers of interference beneath it.

  "`The Magnate is Halcyon; Halcyon is the Magnate.' Do you remember those words, father? The first line of the Ceremony of the Throne, the words my grandfather spoke to you when he abdicated? We are not the masters of our world, we are its servants! You have turned our noble clans into a pack of squabbling beasts, fighting each other and living off the backs of the commoners. Your cruelty has become our people's... Halcyon is a mirror for the worst facets of your nature."

  "I did what I had to do to keep us strong."' insisted Daus. "There was no choice!"

  "There's always a choice," murmured Beckett. "It's just not always the easiest one."

  Tears ran in streaks down Erony's face, lines of black forming as the formal make-up she wore smudged. "You pit the nobles against themselves to secure your power. You opened that wound-cursed Hive and let our greatest enemy walk among us, masked and leashed as if that excused it!"

  "Halcyon would be ashes if not for me!" retorted the Magnate. "Ashes and prey, dead and forgotten!"

  Not a single person dared to speak as Daus roared and thundered into the radio. His lips trembled and his words came out in strident barks, but Rodney saw the conflict crossing his face. The man was still, in his heart, the doting father of his daughter, even if the way he showed it was twisted and harsh to McKay's eyes. "I did this for our people, for your mother, for you!" he insisted, shouting to the ghostly voice of his daughter. "I did it out of love, do you not understand?"

  "Love?" The sheer bitterness of the word aged Erony's father in a heartbeat, the color draining from his florid cheeks. "Love was left behind when you created this society for us, father. It is a weakness you have expunged. Halcyon has nothing now but hate and anger"

  The radio fell silent, the static hiss dying away to nothing as Erony ceased her transmission. McKay watched the man standing before him, the way he cradled the radio in his hands as if it might still give him some answer, some respite from the emotions churning inside him.

  McKay watched the man and felt nothing but sadness and pity for him.

  Her vision tunneled, the black shadows of the chamber encroaching on Teyla's sight, thickening, leaching the color from her world. The buzzing pain in her skull blotted out everything, all rational thought. She had sparks of memory burst before her, flaring and then gone as quick as the harvest festival fireworks on Athos. Dr. Weir had once told her how Earthers had a belief that a person's life would pass before their eyes in the moments prior to death; Teyla rebelled against the notion, trying to pull the last molecules of air into her lungs, but there was nothing but acid there now.

  She saw the fields of rikka-wheat outside the village where she ran and played as a girl; a smile on the face of little Jinto as he offered her a cup of water; the rain on the day her father died; Sheppard speaking of his `Ferris Wheels'; Elizabeth's friendly smile; and more.

  Teyla thought of her friends, of John and Ronon, of how she would never see them again, and that cut more deeply than anything. The tunnel closed in over her, blood-warm and enveloping -

  -and brought fire and agony. New pain ripped into her neck and she choked, a fierce blow as hard as a blacksmith's hammer resonating through her bones. Teyla felt a pressure against her lips, and a rush of aches from her battered throat as air was forced down it. Her chest rose in stutters as hot breath flooded in to fill the void. She gasped and the shock that came with it made her eyes prickle with tears.

  "Teyla?" She felt the words on her cheeks. "Teyla, come on! Talk to me!"

  "John." It hurt to speak, but she managed it. Her eyes fluttered open and a face faded into view, a hand's span away. "John?"

  "Easy," he replied, his face drawn with concern. "Take it slow. You'd stopped breathing." He gestured to the side and Teyla saw the metal collar broken open on the floor, a bullet hole in the mechanism. "Had to risk it."

  Teyla touched her lips. "You gave me your breath?"

  Sheppard colored a little. "Uh. Yeah. Sorry. It was for the, uh, CPR."

  She picked out Ronon standing nearby, arms folded and a discontented look on his face. "Are you two going to exchange bonding vows, or are we going to move on?"

  "Right." The colonel pulled her to her feet and Teyla took a moment to get her bearings. "It's blind luck we found you. Another minute more, and..."

  "Thank you," she said with a nod, "both of you. Have you located Rodney?"

  Sheppard nodded. "Command center. Scar's probably there already, though."

  "Good," Teyla said. "I have a debt to repay him."

  The ascent program was almost complete.

  Bio-reactors running at optimum power, the crystal-organic components of the gravity drive swelling with energy, the Hive Ship flexed and stretched as a waking beast would shake off the last vestiges of sleep. The engineered neural matrices of the flight brain and the nerve ganglia were alight with flurries of commands, new growths of bone sprouting to cover centuries of decrepitude and inactivity. Wounds in the hull were knitting closed and healing, the gash carved by the Fourth Dynast so long ago now a pale white dash of scar tissue, the gouge cut by Ronon Dex already a dark, shiny scab.

  The rush of atmosphere over the blunt hull became thinner by the second, Halcyon's grip on the Wraith vessel diminishing as the drives pressed the craft up toward orbital velocity and away from the hand of gravity. The Hive Ship's hull embraced the icy kiss of space and silence flooded over it, the rumble of air fading away to nothing. The planet that had once held it prisoner turned beneath the twitching maws of energy cannons, optic sensors opening to study the sprawl of prey-life below, calculating and planning.

  The ship had returned to its natural environment, the heavy and threatening mass that seemed so wrong trapped in Halcyon's watery skies suddenly free. It became the predator it once was, a lethal arrowhead of edges and spines, ready for the hunt. For the kill. For the culling to begin anew.
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br />   s one, every monitor screen tied into the Hive Ship's internal optical sensor went blank, the views of the corridors and shadowed chambers hazing over into milky gray nothingness.

  McKay saw it happen and his chest tightened. "Oh, that is not a good thing," he breathed, and his hand clutched at the empty holster on his thigh in reflex, grasping for a pistol that wasn't there.

  The Lord Magnate's eyes were still distant and unfocussed, the harsh words of his daughter still echoing in his mind. Vekken flashed him a look and then grabbed Rodney by the shoulder. "The screens," he said urgently, "what is the meaning of that?"

  "A Wraith who was the former commander of this ship is on board, a Wraith who knows more about how this ship operates than every person in this room." McKay shook off the man's grip. "You figure it out."

  "He's going to attack."

  "If we're lucky. If we're not, he'll switch off the gravity in here, or vent all the air to space or something equally nasty." Rodney thought it through. "Unless... Unless he needs access to this chamber to fully take control of the ship..."

  But Vekken was already moving across the nexus chamber's atrium, calling out orders to his riflemen. "Close all the entry points to this room! Set up firing positions! Prepare for enemy incursion!"

  The scientist cast around the chamber, watching Kelfer's people milling in an anxious knot. Those idiots have no idea what they're up against. Halcyon troopers were quickly falling into kneeling stances, aiming their steaming long-lance rifles at the iris doors leading out to the ship's other decks. On the upper levels he noticed more figures moving, carefully taking up positions. They were difficult to see because of the asymmetrical way the Hive Ship's bio-lumes threw chilly blue light about the walls.

  "I failed her." The whisper came from Daus's lips.

  "What did you say?"

  "I failed... Her. Both of them." The Magnate did not look at him. He seemed smaller somehow, all of a sudden the bluster and fury gone from his body. "I wanted... Wanted strength."

  "Now is not the time for a crisis of confidence," grated Rodney. He dithered over his laptop. The control protocols where still displayed there, the setting to unbalance the bio-reactor and complete the sequence Kelfer had died trying to input. He looked again into the face of the man who had killed the Halcyon scientist and could hardly believe Daus was the same person; that such a man could be broken by something as simple as the words of his daughter.

  Riflemen on the main level of the nexus chamber called out their readiness to Vekken, and the adjutant acknowledged them, pausing to load the heavy pistol in his gloved hand. "Steady, men. You will hold this line in the name of the Fourth Dynast, in death or victory!"

  "Death or victory!" came the chorus of replies.

  Rodney grimaced at the zealous sentiment. "Please! All the gung-ho crap in the world won't keep those things out." His words died off, as it occurred to him that the men up there in the shadows on the highest levels of the chamber had not responded along with the others.

  Among the scattered gear from his Atlantis kitbag was a compact flashlight and McKay snatched it up, turning the beam on the raised gantries. The halo of illumination caught a pale face hidden behind clawed hands, and behind it the yawning maw of an open vent shaft.

  "They're already inside..." he gasped. "They're already inside!" The words became a shout as Scar's Wraith began their attack.

  Stunner pulses rained down in bright streaks of white, knock ing riflemen from their cover by the hatches. Vekken was screaming out orders, firing blindly into the overhead walkways. His men reacted quickly, but the Wraith were already pouring down, some flinging themselves from the higher catwalks to pounce on their victims.

  Rodney did a rare thing; he reacted without thinking about it, and dragged the bewildered Magnate out of the line of fire, forcing him into the cover of a bank of sputtering electromatic valves. He was at a loss to explain the sudden impulse that made him save the life of a man who was a killer and a tyrant.

  He thrust the uncomfortable thought away. "A weapon! You've got a weapon, right? Use it!"

  Daus drew his swordgun and looked at it as if he didn't recognize it. "How can I... So much. So much blood on my hands." He made a stifled sound like a sob. "Erony was right. Great blades, I did not hear her..."

  McKay took the swordgun and gripped the gold-plated pommel, fingering the trigger mechanism. It was heavy and unwieldy in his grip. Nervously, he dared a look around the valve rack and saw the melee in full frenzy.

  The Wraith moved through the nexus chamber like a tornado, killing and feeding, some of them struck down by rattling chugs of needle-shot and left by their fellows, others taking up the guns of their fallen human prey and smashing them against the consoles. Vekken fought with unchained violence, the curved half-moon blade along the breech of his pistol cutting into his foes, the gun howling with each shot he placed into the heart of a Wraith; but he was just one man, and the Wraiths, the freed Hounds, the newly awakened and the wild and untamed, they fell upon him and he vanished under a dozen screeching attackers.

  Rodney let the swordgun go. It was useless in his hands, he realized. He had to run, get away from this carnage, find some other way to strike back at these creatures. To stay and fight would mean death, or worse.

  He grabbed at Daus's thick, ornate tunic. "Time to go!" he snapped. "Before they find us, we have to get out of here!"

  "Where would you go, prey?" asked an oily, menacing voice. "On my ship, tell me, where would you run to?"

  "S-Scar," murmured Daus.

  The Wraith commander circled around Rodney and the Magnate, apparently uninterested in the hoots of pleasure from his pack. He had a pair of ex-Hounds with him, their pristine silver armor now dirty and fouled. Scar cocked his head as he examined McKay, looking him up and down. The alien tapped his ragged tunic, indicating Rodney's Atlantis uniform jacket. "Another one. Another not-native. Wherever I turn I come across your kind. How interesting."

  "Yeah, there's a lot of us," McKay found his mouth running away, babbling before he could stop himself. "Hundreds, thousands even, a whole army of, uh, us. You better not kill me, because there would really be trouble."

  The other Wraith became calmer as Scar snarled out new orders. "Agreed. A kill is a waste of good nourishment." His eye narrowed as his gaze settled on Daus, the scar across his face dark with anger. "A waste of good vengeance."

  One of the Hounds gripped Daus firmly and presented him to Scar. "It is you," husked the Magnate. "Still alive. Haunting me for my failures."

  Scar sneered. "That is as good an explanation as any other. You cannot know how much it pleases me to find you here, Lord Daus." The alien poured scorn on the nobleman's title. "I wonder if you can understand the depths of hatred you engendered in me. The agony of living day after day with that accursed dolmen screaming in my head, doomed to watch my kindred made into primitives, fighting every moment to hold my psyche intact!" The raw anger coming from Scar was a palpable force, and McKay watched as he forced it from himself, grimacing with each breath. Rodney became aware of a horrific wound in the Wraith's chest, although Scar seemed to revel in the pain of it.

  "You should be dead a hundred times over," Daus whispered. "Dead and dead and dead and dead..."

  "Not before this," replied the Wraith, and his arm lashed out like a striking snake, ripping into the soft flesh of Daus's face.

  Sickened, Rodney flinched away as Scar meticulously blinded the Magnate's right eye, ruining his face in the same manner that Daus had ruined the Wraith's on a hunt long since past. McKay felt his stomach rebel and swallowed hard, fighting down the urge to throw up. He lurched to a console and hung on to it, his head swimming.

  "Now we are in balance," said Scar, over a strangled whimper from the nobleman.

  Rodney blinked and his gaze fell on the control screen directly in front of him. He recognized it as part of the Hive Ship's sensor mechanisms, a monitoring station tied into the vessels array of passive detectio
n systems. It could detect perturbations in various energy fields-magnetic, thermal, and gravitational-through reactions along organic gossamer webs, which trailed from the Hive Ship's spines in molecule-thin strings.

  The console was juddery and kept failing to maintain a coherent image; Rodney could see where Kelfer's blundering experimentation had damaged the device, making its display foggy and riddled with ghost readings. A glow of light puckered into being on the glassy screen and something large registered on the gravity curve. The shape was ill defined but it was big, and it was moving somewhere out beyond the orbit of Halcyon's second moon.

  "A ship." His heart sank as the words left his mouth. "A ship just came out of hyperspace."

  He smelled the acid breath of the Wraith as Scar approached. "You are correct, prey. It seems my call for the Hives was heard after all. My kindred are coming to join the cull." The smile behind the words was chilling. "The fate of this world is sealed."

  "It's sealed," frowned Ronon, running the flat of his palm along the leaves of the iris hatch. "No way we're going to get this open from here."

  "Oh ye of little faith," retorted Sheppard, dropping into a crouch. "I brought a party favor from the Jumper before I came on board." From a pocket on his gear vest he pulled a small brick sealed in plastic and waggled it in the air. "C4."

  "I thought you were bluffing when you told the Wraith you had explosives."

  "Yeah, kinda. I just got the one." The colonel fixed the charge to the point on the hatchway where the detonation would do the most damage, and pressed a compact digital timer into the soft clay-like block.

  "The gunfire inside has stopped," said Teyla, her voice still rough from her experience with the choke collar. She hefted a long-lance rifle she had appropriated from a fallen trooper. "We cannot tarry, colonel. Every moment Scar is in there, Halcyon is in danger."

  "Fire in the hole!" The timer beeped. "Thirty seconds and counting." Sheppard waved them away. "Into cover, quick!"

  Ronon checked the charge on his pistol and John slipped a full clip of ammunition into the P90. He glanced at Teyla and got a curt nod in return. "Hey, anyone got any flash-bangs left?"