by Stargate
The needles reached for Ronon, adjusting their position. The Taken sleep a long sleep and remember nothing. Laaro’s earlier words returned to her, along with a cold, sudden understanding. The docile, drone-like abductees they had come across in the corridors — this process was the means used to bring them to that state!
“Stop this!” she shouted, unable to do anything else.
The Risar peered at her and said nothing. Teyla heard the whisper of skin being pierced and reflexively looked away.
But only for a moment. A loud, abrupt roar sounded across the chamber and she turned to see Ronon Dex crying out, his back arching in agony. The Satedan’s hands clawed at the orb device, tearing at it in feral rage. The pain, she realized, it must have shocked him awake!
The Risar creatures hesitated, as if they were unsure how to proceed. “You said you would not hurt him,” Teyla snapped.
“This is…irregular,” admitted the creature.
Ronon punched at the orb and the device withdrew — but not quickly enough. The Satedan smashed a fist into it again and the machine stuttered. Warning chimes sounded from the console.
“Rejection,” stated the Risar at the console. “Physiology mismatch.”
Ronon was gasping, struggling to get up and failing just as Teyla had. She called to him and he saw her. He was pale and drawn, thin streaks of blood marking his face where the orb had injected him.
Another of the creatures, one of the less able of their number, moved closer to the Satedan. “Rejection,” it echoed, “this one is unusable and should be return —”
The alien never got the change to finish its sentence. With all his might, Ronon lashed out and grabbed the creature by the throat. The sheer stamina it must have taken to press through the gravity field between them was amazing.
Dex snarled in fury and the Risar’s neck gave a hollow cracking sound; the creature’s eyes went dull and it collapsed, falling to the metal deck.
For a long moment, Teyla expected the other Risar to react with violence in return, but they paid little interest to the fallen one of their number.
“Neutralize,” said the one at the console. It touched a control and a flicker of blue-white light enveloped Ronon. He managed to match gazes with Teyla for one final moment before he went slack and fell unconscious once again. Another Risar touched a control on the floating platform and guided Dex away, off through a low doorway across the chamber. After a moment, almost as an afterthought, one of the creatures gathered up the dead Risar and carried it into an antechamber.
Teyla glared at the alien that had spoken to her. “Where are you taking him?” The term ‘rejection’ carried with it the scent of something ominous and final. The Athosian woman had visions of Ronon being vented to space as if he were nothing more than waste material.
Her answer was a shifting of the platform that she lay upon. With growing apprehension, she tried to shrink back as the floating table moved to occupy the same position as Ronon’s had. The orb hovered nearby, another of the Risar examining it for damage.
“I will not submit to you!” she shouted, fighting to keep a tremor from her voice. “You will have to reject me too!”
The Risar that had spoken glanced at its twin beside the console. “Deep scan. There may be issue with the female as well.”
“Acknowledged,” came the reply.
The orb hove into place over Teyla’s head and halted. A thin slice of laser light issued from a slot on the surface of the sphere and traveled the length of her body; where it touched her she felt a peculiar tingle in her flesh. The sensor beam halted over her belly and her breath caught in her throat.
“Anomaly,” reported the Risar at the console. She was certain she could detect an air of surprise in the alien’s words. “Unexpected complexity detected.”
The other Risar moved into her line of sight, watching her. “You are pregnant.”
“Yes.” There seemed little point in hiding the fact.
“There is more,” continued the other creature. “Traces of genetic modification across scan reading datasets. Correlation match with alternate DNA source.”
The first Risar blinked, as if it were thinking. “You are a human. Yet you possess a quanta of genetic material sourced from the species colloquially known as ‘Wraith’. This is an anomaly.” It leaned closer. “Explain.”
She saw an opportunity. “Release me first.”
The Risar didn’t consider her demand worth answering. “I have never encountered this irregularity before. I wish to know more.”
“As long as you hold me as your prisoner,” she spat, “I will give you nothing!”
Again, the alien made the strange quizzical motion of its head. “You are not a prisoner,” it explained, as if it were speaking to a particularly slow child. “You and the others have been brought here to help me. When tasks are completed, you will be returned.”
“You are the Aegis, then,” Teyla retorted.
“Aegis.” The Risar repeated the word. “I have been addressed by the term before. It is not entirely incorrect.”
A low tone sounded through the chamber, and at once every Risar in the room stopped what they were doing. Teyla shifted on the floating platform to follow them as they moved as one to the middle of the chamber.
A dash of white light flickered in the air over their heads and a holographic panel unfolded, streaming with more glyphs. The text was unlike the writing of the Earth people or the Ancients; it reminded the Athosian of the angular footprints made by birds. The writing shimmered and was replaced by an exterior view. Heruun and its rings lay to one side of the display, and beyond there was nothing but the black of space… Teyla shifted again, the gravity field pressing down hard on her as she turned in place, craning her neck.
A reticule swept across the holo-screen and circled a fast-moving dot. It had to be a ship; it was drifting right and left in a zigzag course, gradually closing on the larger moon.
Hope bloomed in her thoughts, but Teyla was afraid to form the words she wanted to say in case she was mistaken; but then the screen shimmered and shifted again, magnifying the image. There, clear and unmistakable, was the barrel-shaped form of a Puddle Jumper. Fear and elation pulled at her in equal measure; suddenly the chance for rescue was very real — but at the same time she had no way to communicate with the ship, no way to tell them where she was, or to warn them of the dangers of the Risar.
A voice issued out of the air; it was the same voice all the Risar spoke with. “New priority task. Isolate unidentified craft and capture for disassembly and repurposing.”
The aliens broke apart from their group, ignoring the work they had been conducting, and Teyla found herself being carried away once more, back down along the endless, featureless corridors.
The chorus of beeps from Rodney’s computer drew Sheppard’s attention immediately. “Got something?”
McKay gave a slow nod, his fingers dancing over the keyboard of the silver laptop. “A particle trace, leading away from the planet.” The scientist’s brows knitted for a moment. “Yeah, I got it. It’s faded almost to nothing, but it’s a trail. From a ship, most likely.”
“Leading where?” Sheppard turned the Puddle Jumper to angle up and away from Heruun, the sweep of the glittering ice rings falling below the prow of the ship.
Rodney glanced up and pointed toward the larger of the planet’s two moons, now drifting into the middle of the canopy’s view. “Right there, in fact.”
The colonel eased the throttle control up a notch and the Jumper broke orbit, crossing into cislunar space without a bump. Within moments, the ship’s scanners registered something moving up from the surface of the airless moon.
“Cloaking device!” Rodney insisted, his voice rising an octave at the sight of the new arrivals.
Sheppard agreed. “Yeah, good call.” He tapped a control pad and a faint ripple of warped light glittered through the canopy as the Jumper became invisible.
There were three ob
jects, discernible as bright metallic shapes as they closed the distance. McKay’s gaze flicked between the laptop and the viewscreen. “Wait. No. What?”
“I need a bit better intel than that, McKay. What are they? Darts?”
“Not even close,” Rodney replied. “Scans are coming back garbled, like they’re being partially reflected off of… Well, something.” He sucked in air through his teeth. “This is a whole different style of technology.”
“So unless the Wraith stole themselves some new hardware — which, knowing them, isn’t impossible — we’re looking at something new. The Aegis.” Sheppard could see the alien craft more clearly now, moving in line formation. They were strange shapes, vaguely triangular in cross-section, but curved like an inverted dish. Or a saucer. He blinked as the odd thought popped up in his mind
What happened next was so quick that he almost missed it; in total violation of the laws of physics, the three ships broke apart in three different directions, each one moving away at a ninety-degree angle to its initial course with no loss of speed or any sign of a thruster discharge. A heartbeat later, great radial plumes of energy bloomed on the Jumper’s HUD, expanding out from each of the craft.
“What the hell…?” Sheppard’s pilot training took over and he automatically jinked, throwing the ship into an evasion pattern.
More pulses followed the first waves. The sky above the Heruuni moon was rapidly filling with the discharges. “They know we’re here…” said McKay suddenly.
“They’re beating the bushes,” said the colonel. “Like a surface ship using sonar to flush out a submarine.”
“I’d rather not be flushed by anything,” McKay retorted.
“You may have a point there, Rodney,” Sheppard offered, vectoring the Jumper around. He upped the throttle a notch more, navigating via the HUD, trying to thread the ship between the expanding balloons of energy. The Jumper turned as fast as he could make it, but against the staggered, irregular motions of the alien ships it was a whale among sharks.
Another trio of pulses throbbed across the darkness and enveloped the Jumper before Sheppard could turn away. The instant they touched the hull, a wash of crackling sparks raced down the length of the cabin. The colonel cursed as he snatched his hands back from the flight controls, and at his side McKay gave a yelp as his laptop vomited smoke and crashed.
“Sonar, my butt!” Rodney snapped. “That was some kind of the disruption field!” The acrid smell of flash-burned plastic filled the cockpit.
“We lost the cloak,” Sheppard saw the glowing glyph on the console blinking its shutdown warning. The other systems stuttered and rebooted; when the short range scanner came up, it showed three targets converging on the Jumper’s flight path at high velocity.
The alien ships fell toward the Puddle Jumper, disruption beams stabbing out into the dark, tracking like searchlights toward their target. The Jumper turned into a spiraling course, crossing through the fire zone and emerging safely by only the narrowest of margins.
The triangular craft broke apart once more, the formation shattering. A single ship continued the pursuit while the other two cut sharp-edged courses through the dark, moving ahead and to the fore of the Jumper in an attempt to box it in and cut off any chance of escape.
The Ancient ship’s outriggers flared, the glow of the twin thruster grids a bright yellow-white. It twisted into a hard kick-turn, coming about to face the craft behind it. Compared to the uncanny abilities of the alien vessels, however, it was a slow and languid maneuver.
Without pause, the alien ship was suddenly moving backwards, away from the Jumper; with no visible means of determining which end of the craft was prow or stern, no obvious engine pods or other identifying structures, the vessel was a lethal enigma.
Behind the Jumper, its two sister ships came in like loosed arrows.
“They’re almost on us,” said Rodney. “Now’s the time for some of that impressive Han Solo pilot stuff. Any time now, Sheppard. Any time.”
“Quiet,” the colonel growled. He sent a mental command to the controls in his hands and from the rear of the Jumper came the smack-whump sound of the drone launchers. Twin streaks of yellow shot away, spinning along corkscrew paths toward the fleeing alien craft. The first drone closed to impact range, but suddenly found itself tumbling through empty space as the target abruptly changed from a horizontal flight path to a vertical one. The second drone looped in and detonated, switching at the last second to a proximity fuse. A globe of fusion fire expanded outward and clipped one apex of the fleeing craft; it flipped over and began to zigzag, a plume of gas crystals trailing out behind it.
“Hit but no kill,” Sheppard said aloud.
“Two more —” began McKay.
“I’m on it,” he replied, flinching as a disrupter beam flashed across the Jumper’s blunt nose. Sheppard tuned out everything else and let himself feel the genetic connection to the Ancient ship’s flight controls; at times it was almost as if the Jumper could respond to him before he had fully formed a thought in his brain, but it wasn’t something he could just force to happen. It had to come through instinct, through pure reflex.
“Sheppard!” Out beyond the canopy, the surface of the moon was looming as the engagement brought them ever closer to Heruun’s primary satellite.
“Hush.” In his mind’s eye he saw the two alien attackers closing the distance, the beam weapons lashing out. The colonel’s hands worked the controls, letting his training take over. Don’t think about it, John, just do it.
In a split-second he cut forward thrust and applied it in reverse, dropping the Jumper’s velocity from blindingly fast to almost nothing. The gravity generators inside the cabin whined as they tried to bleed off the energy state change without smearing Sheppard and McKay over the inside of the canopy.
The alien ships were quick and they reacted, vectoring away in opposite directions; but that was what Sheppard wanted them to do. This time, four drones were unleashed after the ship to the port and before it could jink away, the missiles bored into it and exploded. The blast wave clipped the Jumper and the ship bucked like a loosed bronco.
McKay gripped the console in front of him, white-knuckled. “Gee, do you think you could get a little closer to the fireball next time?” His words dripped acid sarcasm. “I felt that! I could have burned my eyebrows off!”
Sheppard was already applying power to the drives as the undamaged craft came back toward them; wary now, it flicked to the right and left, up and down, while still maintaining a lock at the six o’clock position behind the Puddle Jumper.
The colonel searched for the ship that had taken the near-hit and dove at it. As he predicted, it was sluggish, the sharp, gravity-defying course changes it had made before now reduced to twitching, stuttering motions that skidded across the black sky.
His eyes narrowed. “You’re not going anywhere, buddy,” he said quietly. At the last second, Sheppard released two more drones and pivoted the Jumper; it was a risk, but his options were shrinking by the second, and he knew that the alien ships only had to be lucky once to turn the Jumper into a drifting, frozen wreck.
The drones hit the damaged ship and destroyed it. The resultant flash of fusion discharge flared in the dark and buffeted the Jumper. Sheppard turned into a jousting head-to-head with the last alien ship, riding the shockwave. He gambled that the detonation would fog any sensors on the other craft long enough for him to gain the advantage.
He was right; but he was wrong.
The alien ship did something unexpected, veering sharply away from the blast — but not toward open space. Instead, it swept past the Puddle Jumper so closely that Sheppard had a momentary glimpse of his own face, a distorted reflection off the silvery triangular hull as it flashed by.
The alien craft blindly clipped the Jumper’s port side outrigger and ripped it away with a concussive screech. Power rose and fell and the Ancient vessel moaned like an injured animal. Sheppard flinched as a spike of sympathetic pain
shocked him. The enemy ship vanished behind them, coming apart from the force of the collision; the Jumper was more hardy.
Outside the canopy, the black of space became the washed-out grey of lunar regolith. Sheppard cursed as the controls refused to answer his inputs.
“We’re going down!” said Rodney, finding his voice again.
“Yeah,” said the colonel, through gritted teeth. “I think that’s a given.”
The Risar remained mute as it carried Teyla back to the holding chamber. The cell could have been the very one she and Ronon had been deposited in upon their arrival; it seemed as if every chamber in the alien ship was constructed from a modular palette of identical components. The restraint field snapped off and she gasped in a breath of air, but before she could react the platform tilted to dislodge her, and she staggered to stop herself falling over. If she had considered it, Teyla might have had a chance to try a second escape attempt before the door slid silently shut, but her attention was taken by a more immediate matter.
On one of the formless sleeping pads lay Ronon Dex, his skin waxy, his breathing shallow. There was a water dispenser nozzle fitted into an alcove on the far wall and she cupped a little in her hands, bringing it to him. His eyes flickered open and he drank.
“Teyla?” He blinked at her, as if he was waking from a deep slumber. The Satedan’s brow furrowed, half in annoyance, half in confusion. “Where…?”
“The cell, again.” she explained. “They tried to do something to you…”
“Who?” Ronon winced, as if trying to remember was painful to him. “We… Should be on Atlantis…”
“Atlantis? Ronon, we’re on Heruun. We were on Heruun,” she corrected herself, frowning again. “The Risar captured us.”
“What?” He shook his head. “I don’t… I can’t think straight…” Ronon’s hands tightened into claws and he attempted to pull himself up to a sitting position. When Teyla helped him, he tried to push her away, but there was no strength in him. It was a troubling thing to witness; Ronon was one of the strongest, most vital men Teyla had ever met, but now here he was, weak and vulnerable, laid low by the technology of the Risar.