by Stargate
She smiled slightly. “You sound like my mom. She said I always had to find the sunny side of things, no matter how grim.”
Kullid shared a warm smile. “She sounds like a wise woman.”
“She was.” Keller looked away. “She’s been gone a while now.”
He touched her arm. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
Jennifer’s smile returned. “It’s okay.”
“Your mother was right,” Kullid continued. “Both of us strive to help others find the strength within to deal with whatever has struck them down. But there are some sicknesses that come from outside the body. Some things that cannot be cured. At least, not by mere humans like us…”
“What do you mean?”
“The virus of fear. Takkol knows it well. He knows that the fear of the Aegis cannot vanish overnight. Something must fill the void.”
“You think the protection that the Asgard…” She halted, correcting herself. “The Aegis gave this planet is going to end, is that it? Because we intervened?”
“Some believe so. That is why Takkol tries to soothe them with another false celebration. But he cannot stop them from wondering what will happen next. And Soonir does not help matters with his rhetoric.”
“Soonir?” Keller recalled the look on the rebel leader’s face the last time she had seen the man. “He’s in the settlement?”
“It is possible, he has hiding places everywhere. I have heard that he is rallying his supporters to have Takkol’s rank and status taken from him. Without the Aegis to back his rule, the senior elder is weak.” He gave a solemn nod. “Some say it is only a matter of time before the Wraith return.”
Keller shook her head. “That’s not going to happen.”
“Can you be sure? You have crossed their paths, yes?” Kullid seemed suddenly eager to hear more.
She nodded. “That’s one way to describe it.”
Kullid’s voice dropped to a hush. “I have heard it said they have the power of life and death in the palm of their hand. The mastery of the energy of the body itself.”
“They’re predators,” she told him. “Believe me, you don’t ever want to be face to face with one of them.”
“I would imagine so,” he replied carefully. “But without the Aegis, that may not be our choice to make.”
Keller wanted to give him an answer, but she had no assurances to give him. The young man’s dark face softened, answering her silently.
“Doctor?”
Jennifer turned to find Major Lorne standing in the doorway. “Is something wrong?”
“No, ma’am. Colonel Carter asked me to come get you. She’s assembling the senior staff for a meeting at Jaaya’s lodge.”
Keller nodded at the radio on the table. “She could have just called me.”
“After all that’s gone on here, we’re not taking any chances with anyone moving around unescorted.” Lorne beckoned her to him. “If you’ll come with me?”
Keller glanced at Kullid. “This may take a while.”
“I understand.”
Lorne spoke to a female Marine officer at his side. “Allan, make sure this building is secure.”
“Sir!” The lieutenant saluted and pushed past Keller on her way out.
“What’s this about?” said the doctor quietly.
Lorne shot a look up at the sky. “Take a wild guess.”
“He doesn’t know,” said Sheppard, peering out through the slats of the window. The mingled scents of a cook fire and night-blooming flowers reached Teyla’s nostrils as she waited for one of the others to speak.
At the doorway, Major Lorne seemed to take this a cue to answer. “If anyone is worried about talking openly, don’t. I swept the house earlier today.”
“I’m sure the only bugs in this place are the six- or eight-legged kind,” noted McKay.
“How did Jaaya take that?” asked Keller, cradling a cup of water.
“We came to an understanding,” Lorne noted. “A few MREs go a long way.”
“Thank you, Major,” said Carter, casting around to look at all of them in turn. “I’m sure I don’t have to underline to everyone here the seriousness of the situation.”
Sheppard turned to face the assembled group. “He doesn’t know, Colonel. Fenrir…” He stopped, trying to frame the enormity of it. “His people… The entire Asgard race are dead, and he doesn’t know it.”
“We can’t be certain of that,” said McKay.
“C’mon, Rodney,” Sheppard shot the scientist a look. “He said he wanted to go home to Hala. If I remember rightly, that whole planet was destroyed in the war with the Replicators.” He stepped into the middle of the room. “Look, the Asgard committed mass suicide over a year ago to stop their technology from falling into the hands of the Ori —”
“They did give us a copy first,” McKay added.
“They blew up their second home planet in the process. They wiped themselves out.”
“Orilla.” Teyla saw a distant look in Carter’s eyes as she remembered that moment. “I was there when it happened.”
“So why doesn’t Fenrir know anything about that? Why wasn’t he called back to the home planet before the end, like all the rest of his kind?”
“There could be a hundred reasons,” said Teyla. She felt the urge to defend the alien, although she couldn’t fathom where the sudden impulse had come from. “The damage from the battle with the Wraith may have destroyed his communications system. He may have been out of range…”
Carter shook her head. “This is the Asgard we’re talking about here. They don’t make mistakes like that.”
“Maybe they thought he was already dead,” offered Keller.
“The fact is, as far as we know, Fenrir is the only living member of his species. The last Asgard.” Sheppard shook his head at the thought.
“We cannot keep this from him,” said Teyla. “He has a right to know.”
“That might not be a good idea,” said McKay. “We can’t be sure how he’s going to react.”
Teyla gave Rodney an appalled look. “Are you suggesting we lie to Fenrir, after everything it took to make an ally of him? You are all correct that this is a terrible, terrible truth, but he must not remain ignorant of it!”
“McKay is right,” said Carter. “We have to chose the right moment. We can’t just drop it on him.”
“Hey Fenrir, great to meet you, oh, sorry about your whole species being dead and all,” Rodney mimicked. “He’s going to love hearing that.”
Keller stared into her cup. “Shock can make people do strange things. And I’m not even sure how to begin to gauge the mental stability of an Asgard.”
“So if not now, then when do we tell him?” demanded Teyla. “When his ship is ready to travel, when he sets a course home, when he reaches Hala and finds nothing there but dead space?”
“Teyla —”
“What if it were your world, your people, Colonel Carter? Would you not wish to know?”
“This isn’t just about the extinction thing,” McKay broke in. “This is about trust.”
Carter nodded. “I have to admit, I don’t get the same feeling with Fenrir I did with Thor and the others. He’s different somehow.”
“Yeah, he abducts people and the unlucky ones get a dose of nanites,” noted Lorne.
“And then there’s that name,” said McKay. “I took the liberty of chatting to Professor Gudrunsdottir in the xenobotany lab on Atlantis. Turns out, she’s a bit of a Norse mythology expert on the side. And let me tell you, Fenrir is a name to conjure with.” He drew out his data pad and Keller took it from him.
“Fenrir, also known as Fenris or Fenrisulfr,” she read aloud. “The son of the trickster god Loki.”
“Loki…” Carter repeated. “He was a troublemaker.”
Keller continued. “According to Viking legends, Fenrir is a gigantic wolf that will continually grow until it gets so big that it will break the chains the other gods used to bind it.”
Shep
pard’s lip curled. “Those little grey guys never go for the low-key, do they?”
“Oh, it gets better,” said McKay. “Gudrunsdottir told me that our pal Fenrir the wolf ushers in the end of world by eating the sun. The Norse people called it Ragnarok, the darkness and the eternal winter that destroys everything.”
“The Nightfall.” Teyla’s breath caught in her throat. “On Athos… Some of the tribes there tell a similar story, of a monster who swallows up the stars.” She gave an involuntary shiver; she hadn’t heard those tales since she was a small girl, but they still held a primal power over her.
Lorne folded his arms. “At the risk of thinking above my pay grade, aren’t we just talking about a bunch of stories written by crazy Norwegians, a thousand years ago, on a planet in a completely different galaxy?”
Carter smiled dryly. “Yeah, I used to think like that, Major. But I learned the hard way that myth is built on truth, at least to some degree.” Her smile faded. “I contacted the SGC and had a message relayed out to the Odyssey, where the Asgard Core is located.”
“What is that?” asked Teyla. The term was unfamiliar to her.
“Before the Asgard died, they loaded the sum total of their knowledge into a computer system that was installed aboard the starship Odyssey,” said the colonel. “I asked them to run a search through it for anything about Fenrir.”
“What did they find?” said Keller.
“Nothing.”
McKay shook his head. “That’s impossible. They must have screwed up the search routine.”
“Maybe the Asgard forgot to upload that disc,” said Lorne.
“No,” Carter tapped the data screen. “That information is there. My guess is, it’s buried deep, possibly encrypted.”
Teyla looked away. “Why would it be hidden?”
“Why indeed…” murmured Sheppard.
“We need to get someone out to the Odyssey to take a look-see,” McKay went on, addressing Carter. “What about your buddy, Jackson? He’s good.”
“He’s also busy, on a covert operation chasing down one of the last renegade System Lords.” She fixed Rodney with a hard look. “That’s why I’m sending you back via the Midway gate bridge to rendezvous with Odyssey and recover those files.”
“Oh. Right.” McKay seemed a little nonplussed at the sudden orders. “Okay.” A slow smile formed on his face as he realized what he would be granted access to. “Okay…”
“Colonel?” Keller leaned forward. “I’d like to add something to that. These nanites I’m dealing with, I need all the help I can get, so if Rodney can bring back everything you can find on Asgard nanotechnology…”
McKay nodded. “I’ll do what I can.”
“All right.” Carter stood up, signaling that the meeting was over. The group began to file out, but Teyla hesitated, unsure of how she should feel about what she had heard. Her thoughts about Fenrir were conflicted; strangely, she felt a pang of sympathy for the alien. Ever since the disappearance of her people from New Athos, Teyla had harbored a secret fear that they might be lost to her, that she might be all that remained. For a moment, she saw her own darkest dread reflected in Fenrir’s circumstances.
Carter was speaking to Sheppard. “Colonel, I want you to escort Rodney to the Odyssey rendezvous. I’ve seen the knowledge contained inside the Asgard Core, and it’ll be like giving him the keys to the candy store. I need someone to keep him on-mission.”
Sheppard hesitated. “With all due respect, Colonel, I’m on-mission here. I don’t like ducking out in the middle of this.”
“I’ve got it covered at this end, John. And that’s not the only reason. I want a military officer there as well, someone who can make tactical sense of what he sees… In case we have to take steps.” Sheppard nodded grudgingly as she spoke.
“Steps?” said Teyla. “Against Fenrir? You speak about him as if you have already decided he is a threat to us.”
“We don’t know what he is,” Sheppard replied. “All we do know it that he kidnapped people against their will, you and Ronon among them, and exposed them to toxic nanites either deliberately or by accident.”
“I do not believe it was intentional,” Teyla insisted. “That is my… My instinct.”
Carter turned away. “I’m sorry, Teyla,” she said, “but I’m going to need more than that.”
CHAPTER NINE
A silent landslide began on the surface of Heruun’s prime moon. Streams of powdery stone and lunar dust shifted and fell away in slow floods, seeping back towards the crater basin beneath the concealed Asgard starship.
On landing, all those years earlier, the vessel’s automatic defensive systems had scanned the descent site and activated a camouflage subroutine. Tailored gravity wave generators drew the grey sand over the ship like a blanket, an emergency defensive measure to protect it from cursory visual detection; but now the vessel was shrugging off sleep, rising with stately power from its resting place. It was a steel phoenix clawing its way from the ashes.
Damage that would have taken years more to repair using the Taken and the Risar had been completed in days, thanks to the intervention of the Atlanteans, although the vessel was still far from being fully operational; but once more it returned to the ocean of space, the airless void where it belonged. Such craft were not made to be shackled by the forces of gravity — the starships of the Asgard were their art as much as they were their conveyances — and Fenrir’s vessel seemed to welcome its freedom, the huge hammerhead prow turning to catch the light from the sun.
In profile, the Asgard ship resembled a massive iron claw, vertical fins extending from the dorsal and ventral hulls, and curved wing-like sections fanning out from the main fuselage. The light of new energy glittered through numerous viewports along the length of the craft, and at the stern the thruster grids of the massive sub-light engines glowed a soft honey-yellow as they idled at station keeping. But still the ship’s ascent, quicker now, a falling feather in reverse, was marred by the lines of damage across the steel-grey hull metal. Great scratches carved by the burning touch of Wraith energy weapons were visible across the bows and along the starboard side, mute reminders of a salvo delivered by a Wraith cruiser’s broadside batteries. The enemy that had inflicted those wounds was long destroyed, ashes and wreckage that had burned up in Heruun’s atmosphere, lighting the night as falling stars.
The moon dropped away and at last the ship was in free space, drifting in the orbit between the satellite and the mother planet. Turning in a long, steady arc, the Asgard ship brought itself to bear on Heruun. The thruster glow grew brighter and it coasted forward at a fraction of its available power, moving toward the slow-turning world.
The ship that bore the name Aegis took up a high orbit above the planet and the people it had protected, and like an animal awakening from hibernation, it began to stretch its muscles and test its boundaries.
“Have we been detected?” spat the commander, glowering at the scientist.
The other Wraith shook his head, the long white streaks of his hair plastered to his face with fear-sweat. “No… No.”
The uncertainty in the words made the commander’s lips peel back, revealing his fanged mouth. “Be certain!” he snarled. “If we are found, we are dead!”
“We are safe.” The scientist turned from his console and gave the commander a defiant look. “For the moment, at least.”
The ship’s master glared at the flickering image on the viewer lens before him. The gunmetal alien craft turning, moving slowly through the darkness. It was a battleship, of that he had no doubt. The design of it was all threat, a brute force expression of menace. Unlike the graceful sculpting of a Wraith cruiser, with its spindly arachnid lines, this vast craft was a war hammer, a weapon poised to smash its enemies. As he watched it move, the commander understood why so many of his clan had been killed by this intruder; it radiated power. Nothing so large should have turned so quickly… It seemed wrong that such agility could be present in such a b
ehemoth.
Fear was a rare commodity for a Wraith to experience; so much of their existence was spent in the creation of that emotion in their prey that they seldom experienced it themselves. And yet… A cold prickle lanced through the commander’s flesh as he grasped the scope of the alien ship’s power. His tiny scoutship was no match for the intruder. It would crush it like an insect.
But fear was not the only sensation that came to him. Quickly, the first was overpowered by a second, greater emotion. Avarice.
The scientist shared it with him. “What secrets it must hide,” whispered the other Wraith. “What power. If our clan could possess it —”
The commander gave a terse nod. In the war with the hated Asuran machine-beings, a ship of such magnitude could tip the balance; and it would seal the ascension of their clan above the others of their species. “Our Queen must know of this. Plans must be drawn, and quickly. It is time for us to depart.”
“Is that possible?” The scientist was fearful again. “If we move from our hiding place in the rings, we will be detected!”
“If we do not, we will be found cowering and culled like humans!” he snapped back. “Observe the alien’s aspect; it has yet to reach orbital stability. Until then, we have a window of escape open to us that will soon close.” The commander nodded to the drone at the navigation podium. “Set a stealth course. Follow the rings around to the far side. We will place the planet’s mass between us and the intruder craft. Even if our hyperspace transition is detected, they will not have time to intercept us.”
“The risk is great,” grumbled the scientist.
“You are correct,” agreed the commander, as he studied the alien vessel once again. “But the reward will be so much greater.”
“This vessel is…impressive,” said Teyla. The word hardly seemed enough to encompass the ship’s quiet power. She glanced at the unmoving figure in the stasis capsule; it felt odd speaking to a holographic avatar when the real being was lying nearby in suspended animation.
The simulated Fenrir turned from the screen in front of them. “The Aegis is a Beliskner-class starship, the mainstay of the Asgard starfleet. An old design but a reliable one.”