Ronon nodded, producing a couple of stun grenades. "Two."
"Good," said Sheppard. "Use `em."
The Wraith began herding the survivors across the chamber to the starboard side, dragging injured riflemen from where they had fallen and shoving them together with the few panic-stricken scientists who had not been cut down in the earlier crossfire. Others picked at control panels, illuminated systems that had laid silent for hundreds of years. Long-dormant gun turrets and beam cannons along the Hive Ship's ventral hull twitched and came back to life, lifeblood flowing back into them as they began the first stages of preparation for a planetary bombardment. Scar watched the activity with callous smugness.
"Is it too cliche for me to ask what it is you're going to do with us?" said McKay, trying to keep a whine from his tone. "Or is that a question I would be better off not raising?"
"There are many mouths to feed on my ship." The Wraith said it almost as if he were bored with the whole experience. "The malign influence of the Enemy's device will have affected many of my kindred. They will need to replenish their strength in order to return to their former temperaments."
"Yeah, I guess you wouldn't want to appear sickly when your buddies arrive, right? They might get the pick of the cull, and that would make you look a little stupid."
"Indeed." Ice formed on the word.
"Sorry. Sorry," McKay gulped. "Sometimes I babble when I'm nervous. Like now."
Scar eyed Rodney's laptop and the crude splice into the Hive Ship's systems. "What were you doing to my vessel, prey? Answer me."
"We... Wanted to..." McKay blinked, trying to think of a convincing lie and failing miserably. "Phone home?"
The Wraith commander snarled and came at him; but in the next second a wall of sound blasted out across the chamber and knocked all of them off their feet.
The charge did its work. The petals of the iris hatchway were either blown completely away or bent back in burnt, tattered shreds. Ronon leapt into the coiling smoke instants after the blast occurred, hurling the flash-bangs through the ruined doorway.
Inside, Rodney saw the familiar black cylinders arc through the hazy air and clatter across the deck. He spun away and covered his face with his arms just as the stun grenades blew. Brilliant magnesium-white flashes of light strobed inside the nexus chamber, throwing stark, sharp-edged shadows across the walls.
Ronon came in first, red bolts of energy issuing from the barrel of his gun. Sheppard took the right, laying down bursts of machinegun fire, and Teyla moved left, firing the steam-rifle from the hip in blaring chugs of discharge.
The ex-Hounds at Scar's sides were downed by the first broadside of shots, but the rest of the aliens reacted faster than the Atlantis team expected, shooting back with stunner rifles and blasters liberated from the Hive Ship's weapons pods. The flash-bangs had done the trick, however, and all the human sur vivors were flat to the floor or behind cover as the firefight raged across the control deck.
All except Rodney McKay, pressed up against a bone pillar that was barely wide enough to hide him. He glimpsed Scar, a blaster pistol in each hand, fanning stunner bolts back and forth, trying to catch the Atlantis team with a glancing hit. His mind raced. John and the others were turning the tide, but if that was another Wraith ship inbound, it wouldn't matter if they did win the day here. He could make out the sensor console from where he crouched; the mystery contact was coming closer, on a direct intercept course.
And if he could complete the reactor overload sequence Kelfer had started, by the time the other Hive Ship knew what was happening, it would be too late. The blast would engulf the other vessel. Two birds with one big thermonuclear stone.
But something seemed wrong, out of place. The silhouette of the new contact didn't move like a Wraith craft. Back on Atlantis, Rodney had pored over hours of sensor log footage of Hive Ships in the aftermath of the siege, hoping to find something of use if they ever came back. He knew how the Wraith slipped through space, and this craft wasn't doing that. It was coming in hard and fast, clearly primed for battle. The shape was all wrong, too, blocky and angular. It almost looked like the-
"Daedalus?" McKay's face split in a manic grin. "It's the Daedalus! Ha! We're saved! Weir sent them to get us!" But as fast as the bolt of euphoria raced through him, it vanished. No, we are not saved. The sensor return from the SGC Deep Space Carrier didn't show a ship about to mount a boarding operation or a rescue; Daedalus was on an attack vector, her rail guns running hot. To Colonel Caldwell and his crew, what they saw on their scopes was a Hive Ship preparing to annihilate a slew of defenseless ground targets. They'd have no idea that the Atlantis team were on board. Daedalus was looking at a clear and present threat to the planet Halcyon; and McKay knew Steven Caldwell enough to know that he wouldn't hesitate to shoot first and ask questions later.
"Sheppard! Anyone!" He shouted. "Warn them off! Tell Caldwell to hold his fire!" But the din inside the nexus chamber flattened his every word, the crash of gunfire blotting them out.
Then Rodney saw the radio where Daus had dropped it, sitting there in the middle of the deck as bullets and energy bolts criss-crossed in the air around it
It was mayhem in here. John moved from cover to cover, taking advantage of consoles or pillars where he could, squeezing off three-round bursts at anything that looked Wraith. He heard the thunder of a long-lance and the sound brought the madness of the bound battle back to his thoughts, the sudden recollection of the scream of shot and the blurry frenzy of one long firefight. This was worse, as if someone had taken that skirmish and rolled it up, stuffed in a can and shook it. Enemy fire was coming from everywhere and the colonel's mind screamed at him to just react, to protect himself; the primitive fight or flight reflex warred with the trained, expert solider part of his brain, the part that pushed him on, forward, that stopped him from being pinned down.
Teyla made an angry noise at the Halcyon steam-rifle in her hands, the breech hissing open as the last cluster of needle-shot fed from the ammunition hopper. Hot vapor and droplets of condensation coiled from the muzzle, and without hesitation she turned the long gun into a club, striking a Wraith attacker across the head with it. The barrel broke, but the alien fell and did not rise again. The woman swung low and scooped up a discarded swordgun and brought it back up in a battle stance.
Sheppard wasn't worried. Teyla Emmagan could have taken on a dozen Wraiths with just a butter knife and he still would have put his money on the Athosian; and today she had a fury in her eyes that he had only seen on rare occasions. Scar's abuse of her with that damned collar had brought Teyla's darkest anger to the surface.
The chamber was filling with a haze of acrid chemical smoke, flames licking from places where missed shots had shattered Wraith screens or caught banks of combustible Halcyon technology alight. There was a moment when John was sure he heard a voice crying out over the noise of gunfire -McKay, maybe? -but then a couple more ex-Hounds came snarling over the tops of the control panels at him, and Sheppard found himself side by side with Ronon, fighting to stay alive for another minute longer.
Each time Rodney dared to think about leaving his cover, energy bolts rained past him or Wraith in battle frenzy screeched by. I'm so close! He could almost reach out and touch the radio, just a few feet more, maybe.
"So near and yet so far," murmured Daus, cradling his bloody face in one palm. The Magnate sat slumped against a panel, watching McKay with his remaining good eye. "It will not save you." He shuddered through the words, morose and pained. "The truth only wounds."
"I have to get to the radio!" Rodney blurted. "No one has to die! If I can get to it, no one has to die, you understand?"
A shadow passed over Daus's face, and he dropped his hand, letting McKay see the ruin of his blinded eye. "No one has to die," he repeated, traces of the ruler's former iron will surging in his voice. "You are wrong." The Magnate propelled himself up from the deck with a hard shove and heaved his bulk across the chamber, falling through the
crossfire toward Scar. The Wraith reacted a heartbeat too slowly and the two of them collided, spinning around in a vicious dance.
On all fours, Rodney scuttled out from behind the bone pillar and snatched up the military radio, his heart in his mouth as he dove back before the moment of misdirection was lost.
Daus's blood-slick hands clamped tight around the Wraith commander's throat and he pressed every last ounce of his weight into the alien. "This hunt ends here," he snarled, "for my world and my daughter!"
Scar choked and wheezed, his eye bulging as the Magnate strangled the air from him. His pistols lost, the Wraith flailed at the man's torso, ripping the elegant silks of his jacket to ribbons, slashing into the meat of his broad chest. Scar spat curses in his own language, fighting against the Halcyonite's strength.
"No more!" Daus roared. "No more death!"
"No more life!" the alien spat back, plunging the saw-edged feeding maw in his palm straight into the cuts above the Magnate's racing heart. Scar's muscles jerked in a spasm of ecstasy as the Wraith tore Daus's life violently from him. Normally, a single Wraith would take their time over a feeding, savor it and make it last, but now the alien wanted nothing more than to turn this arrogant human into a husk, a hollow sack of skin and bone.
Daus's death-grip about Scar's throat lessened as the muscle and flesh on his skeleton shriveled away, the flesh puckering and turning tissue-thin. His last breath carried one last word from his lips. "Erony,"
Scar threw the corpse off him and let loose a screeching roar. "We are the Wraith!" he bellowed. "We are the hunters and you are the prey! We-"
A figure emerged from the choking smoke. "You talk too much!" snarled Teyla, and lunged with the swordgun. Scar spun, tried to turn the blow, but the Athosian woman was too quick, fuelled by her fury, and she ran him through. Gasping, twitching, Scar fell hard against the control console, bleeding out his last.
Teyla spat. "That's an end to it."
Ronon and Sheppard came to her side. "Left any for me?" asked Dex, glancing around. The Atlanteans had survived, for the moment.
Sheppard pulled a face. "Let's not forget, there's still a bellyful of Wraith in the hibernation cells on this ship." He gestured to the Halcyonite survivors. "You people, get over here. We're gonna find a way off this ship, right now."
"You have a plan?" said Teyla, turning away.
"Oh sure," lied the colonel. "I'll let you know as soon as I've ironed out all the details." He waved at Rodney. "McKay! Stop messing with that radio, this is a rescue."
McKay paused with the walkie-talkie in front of his lips for just long enough to shoot Sheppard a withering glare. "Daeda lus, this is Dr. Rodney McKay, do you read? We are on board the Hive Ship, do not engage! I repeat, do not fire on the Hive Ship ! "
The other team members approached the front of the nexus chamber, and there through the wide oval view ports above them the sliver shape of the SGC starship was visible as a glittering barb, turning to aim straight at them. "Daedalus?" repeated Sheppard. "How about that." He grinned at Teyla. "I told you I had a plan."
"I'm not getting any reply!" Rodney's voice was a terse yelp. "Maybe the radio's damaged, maybe the Hive Ship's interfering with the signal..."
To his credit, Sheppard grasped the gravity of the situation immediately and spoke urgently into his own radio. "Colonel Caldwell, do you copy? Wave off!"
"What's wrong?" Teyla asked wearily.
"Our own people are about to blast this ship, that's what's wrong!" Rodney blurted.
"Hah." The voice was thick and oily, a gurgling death rattle. Scar hung there, clinging to the console, Daus's discarded sword still buried in his chest in some mad parody of murder. "How entertaining. You prey seem to excel in killing one another."
Ronon turned his pistol on the alien. "What does it take to put this creep down?"
The Wraith had his hands on Rodney's computer. "I understand this device. So we. Will die together. You and I. My ship..." He nodded at the Daedalus as it came into range. "And yours."
"Stop him!" shouted Rodney.
Sheppard and Ronon opened fire, too late to stop Scar's finger tracing across the execute control.
Master Scientist Kelfer had made many mistakes during his studies of the Wraith craft. It had been his error that released the ship's commander, his errors that led to the uncontrollable awakenings of the dormant crew; but what Kelfer had understood was the horrific power that the alien vessel represented, and the lethal potential it possessed if it raged out of control. His overload program, hammered into the Wraith command matrix like a steel spike through bone, worked just as he had hoped it would.
In the Hive Ship's bio-reactor cores, chemical bladders filled with fluids to moderate and control the energetic effects of the power plant abruptly closed themselves off. Regulator valves and sphincters sealed tightly and outputs spiked. The coruscating energy, normally metered and synchronized to the Wraith vessel's moods and conditions, churned like magma. Crystalline monitors cracked and shattered, conduits full of plasma-like processing fluids split open and gushed superheated liquid across the chitin decks, warping the bone and cartilage forms that made up the structure of the starship.
Whole decks of the Hive Ship instantly vented to space, burnt through by hyper-acidic reactions. Oxygen and breathing gasses combusted, firestorms rushing up every corridor. Wraiths were boiled alive in the amniotic baths of their hibernation cells. Organic sense-gels and nerve ganglia crisped and disintegrated.
Then finally, some tiny, critical element inside the bioreactor perished, unleashing all the pent-up power of the Hive Ship's core in one single, fatal eruption of heat and radiation.
Erony stood alone on the lip of the shattered hillside, staring down into the huge bowl-shaped depression where the Hive Ship had stood only hours earlier, her face gray with the drain of emotion. Carson hesitated to approach her, and stood a few meters away, not wanting to intrude on her introspection, but conflicted by his need to help someone he saw was in pain.
Static crackled in his headset. Ever since they had landed back at the encampment, he had been unable to reach Sheppard or the others on the alien vessel. The hand-held radios only had a limited range, and if the Hive Ship was in orbit it was unlikely he would be able to get a signal to John and the others. He hesitated; perhaps if he went back to the Puddle Jumper, the shuttle's more advanced communications might do the trick.
"Such a great wound." Erony spoke quietly, almost to herself. "How can we heal such an injury as this?"
The noblewoman was staring into the gouge in the ground, but Carson wondered to which `wound' she referred. This one, or one more personal? "Healing's my specialty, love. I'd be glad to help." Beckett wanted to mean it, but in truth, he was already thinking of how to broach the subject of evacuation to the young lady. How was he going to frame it? There was no easy way to tell a princess that she might have to lead her people from their home planet to some other, alien place.
The doctor turned as he heard urgent footsteps approaching. Linnian, drawn and sweaty, scrambled across the scattered dirt toward them. "My... My Lady," he puffed, "the camp's telekrypter was intact... I contacted the capital and First Minister Muruw had news. A ship, Milady! The observatories spotted a second space vessel in orbit. He counsels your return to the city with all due alacrity."
Erony faced them both. "Another ship? Have the Wraith returned?"
Carson opened his mouth to speak, but he stopped before he could take a breath, and pointed. High in the sky, a piercing, brilliant pinpoint of light flared. A ripple of static joined it on the open radio channel, and Beckett's blood ran cold. A nuclear explosion? "Oh no," he managed.
"What is that?" said Linnian.
"They destroyed themselves," whispered Erony, "they did it to save our planet."
The doctor grabbed the noblewoman's arm, the shock of the flash racing through him, bringing fear in its wake. "Erony, listen to me! We have to get to safety!"
Her eyes m
et his. "Where might that be, Doctor? Tell me, what place is safe from the Wraith?"
Beckett tried to give her an answer, but he found he had nothing.
Then from the hissing static, a very different reply formed in his ear. "Atlantis team, respond." The voice was curt and businesslike. "Atlantis team, this Colonel Steven Caldwell. What is your situation, over?"
"Colonel Caldwell." Beckett's voice was heavy with fatigue. "I was afraid the next voice I heard would be a Wraith one. The locals spotted your approach and thought it was another Hive..."
"Sorry to disappoint you," Caldwell said dryly. "We got here as soon as we could. Looks like we arrived in time for the fireworks, though." The colonel frowned as crewmen darted about the Daedalus's bridge with portable fire extinguishers and damage control equipment. The shockwave from the detonation of the Hive Ship had flipped the carrier over and blown out the energy shields in a single surge of lethal power. Systems were down throughout the vessel and reports of injuries and hull breaches were still coming in.
"You blew up the Hive Ship?"
"Negative, Doctor, that ship did a fine job of destroying itself. Almost got us too into the bargain." Caldwell threw an aside to his executive officer. "Remind me to thank General Landry for insisting on those shield upgrades."
"Colonel," began Beckett, "we had people on that Wraith ship,"
"The operative word being `had', Doctor. Hermiod pulled every human bio-signature with the Asgard transporters before the explosion."
"Yeah, he's our new hero," Sheppard walked on to the bridge with McKay following behind. "I thought Rodney was gonna hug the little guy."
The scientist made a face. "He just has that weird Roswell vibe..."
Sheppard nodded to the Daedalus commander. "Great timing, as always, Colonel."
"Pulling your backside out of the fire is starting to get habitforming," replied Caldwell, turning his attention to a report from a junior officer.
Stargate Atlantis: Halcyon Page 30