by Stargate
But here and now that someone was McKay, and working in tandem with him several decks above, Sam Carter. The whole thing would have been a hell of a lot easier if they weren’t in the middle of crashing to their deaths on an alien starship riddled with catastrophic damage.
Together they had failed three times in a row to correctly compile and initiate the tunneling dimensional reaction, which would soften the barrier between real space and the warped sub-reality of hyperspace. There was simply too much data to handle at once; even with two people as smart at they were in the equation, it was impossible. It just couldn’t be done.
“It’s done,” said Sam, blowing out a breath.
Rodney blinked in surprise. She wasn’t wrong. Even while part of him was ticking off the seconds left before his fiery death, something deeper — call it his mathematical subconscious — was on the job. “Wow. I’m even smarter than I thought I was.”
The jumble of Asgard text and symbology on the holograph shifted and changed, becoming smooth and even. A countdown rune blinked down toward zero, and the activation of the hyperdrive. Even with the damage the Aegis had sustained, it would be enough to throw it through the subspace portal and across light years. Carter had programmed the vessel to get as far away as it could in the shortest possible time; the de-fold location was in the middle of deep space, nowhere near anything that could possibly sustain life or feed the ravenous reaction of the isa device’s detonation.
He released a shuddering breath. Together, they had just saved the lives of everyone on Heruun. And the cost was their own.
Rodney listened to the moaning of the Aegis as it inched toward its own ending, and when he spoke into his radio, his throat was dry. “Uh, Sam?”
“I’m here,” said Carter. “Sixty seconds to jump.”
“Sam, I’m sorry.” The words gushed out of him. “I’m sorry you had to be here for this.”
“It’s not your fault, Rodney. It’s mine. I played this mission wrong from the start. Too many secrets. And look where it took us.” Regret clouded her words.
McKay blinked and looked at the destruction and the dead around him. He felt more alone than he ever had in his life; but suddenly, not afraid. Not afraid at all. “I-I’m glad I got the chance to know you,” he went on. “I know we had our differences early on —”
He heard her smile. “What, that you thought I was an idiot and I thought you were an arrogant ass?”
“Yeah, that,” he nodded. “I’m glad I got to prove myself wrong. I’m glad I got to know you better.”
There was a moment’s pause. “Thanks, Rodney. I was always a little worried you thought I had come to Atlantis to steal your thunder. But I never wanted that. I just wanted to be a part of… All this.” She sighed. “Thirty seconds. The truth is, I liked working with you. You’re the smartest person I know. I feel like I need to run to keep up and that’s exhilarating. It reminds me of why I love science.”
He swallowed, touched by the her honesty. “Funny,” Rodney replied. “I was just going to say the same thing about you.” The rumbling was growing louder by the moment and he blinked as rains of dust cascaded down around him. McKay went to add something more but Carter spoke again.
“Twenty —” Her voice abruptly disintegrated into a humming crackle of static.
Rodney’s stomach tightened in shock. “Sam? Sam? Can you hear me? Sam!” An answer did not come. “Oh no.”
He gripped the radio in his hands as the dying starship’s death throes grew deafening; then there was a deep, droning buzz and his senses were smothered with white.
The hyperspace portal formed so close to Heruun’s outer atmosphere that it triggered the instantaneous creation of a high-altitude storm cell, the mighty thunderhead sweeping down to bring precipitation to a savannah wilderness that had not known a rainy season for decades.
The ragged-edged rip in space-time yawned open, spilling glowing radiation into the darkness; and together, the Aegis and the Hive Ship fell screaming into the shimmering maw, which snapped shut behind them in a shower of spent photons.
The displacement shockwave rode out beyond the collapsed portal, batting away trailing fragments of hull metal and wreckage from the two mighty starships, sending them into new orbits that would decay and immolate them against the planetary atmosphere.
All except one shining sliver of alien steel, a curved shape something like a saucer, or perhaps a manta ray. Swift but unsteady, the object described a wide arc away and down toward the planet’s surface.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
In the space between stars, in a place where only the light of far distant suns fell, where there were no worlds, nothing but the merest scattering of cosmic dust, there was a brief storm of energy.
From the nothingness came a tear in the fabric of reality, as engines of alien technology sliced open a hole in the black and let glowing streamers of blue-white luminosity issue forth. A jagged collision of metal and bone exploded from the newly-formed portal and tumbled back into normal space, illuminated for a brief instant by the strange fires of hyperspace; then the portal vanished and the battle-scared hulks of the Asgard warship Aegis and its Wraith adversary were alone, adrift in the interstellar void, hundreds of light years from the Heruun star system.
The shock of the transition was felt through both craft; each of the ships were mortally wounded and dying by degrees, the few remaining beings that formed their crews mad with rage, or pain, or simple animal panic.
In the command nexus of the Hive Ship, the Wraith scientist who had for so long dreamed of taking the Aegis for his clan staggered to his feet. He ignored the burning agony from the bone shard lodged in his shoulder, a fragment that had blown from a nerve conduit behind him in a concussion that had killed a dozen of his cadre’s best drone-warriors. Most of the lens-screens before him were dead eyes leaking watery processor fluid, no longer operable. The control surfaces were twitching and writhing as the Hive Ship’s crude brain suffered agony from every spot of damage throughout the vessel, the pure sympathetic hurt leaching into the blood-warm air.
The Wraith made it to the panel and hissed through his teeth. His vessel was eating itself alive, reservoirs of acidic bile flooding the lower decks, plasmatic reactors stalled or worse, cycling toward a burning overload; and in the places where the Hive Ship had been violated by the deliberate impact of the Asgard vessel, gelatinous matter gurgled and bubbled as the craft’s autonomic antibodies ran wild and uncontrolled. Like an animal that had caught itself in a snare, the Hive Ship was gnawing on its own extremities in a vain attempt to free itself.
Only one set of systems appeared to be working correctly; the external sensors. The Wraith clung to the console, blinking through the caked blood gumming its eyelids and read the stuttering chain of text spilling over the lens-screen. Out there aboard the alien ship, a sphere of radiation was stirring, growing by the second in power and potency. With dawning horror, the Wraith scientist realized what it was he was seeing. Like the others of his caste, the late queen had made him aware of the data she had taken from the humans, and with it the full possibilities of the technology that belonged to these ‘Asgard’.
The Wraith watched the energy trace grow and cursed its fate, knowing that his clan’s greed was about to kill them all.
Lying amid the wreckage of the computer core, the spinning rings of color around the circumference of the isa device reached a pitch of such speed that they became a solid band of glowing red; and at that moment the countdown ended.
Fenrir’s lethal creation reached inside itself and drilled down, through the layers of normal space into unknown, extradimensional realms of energy. Drawing on levels of cosmic power strong enough to cut through the barriers of quantum reality, it twisted gravitation into a lens and blew it outward , forming a sphere of fast-time. In nanoseconds, the orb of altered space ballooned into a perfect globe a dozen kilometers across.
Outside the shimmering edge of the isa effect, time passed normally,
second to second, moment to moment; but within the clock ran a million, a billion, a trillion times faster. Monumental ages, lengths of time so vast they could encompass the birthing and dying of entire civilizations, flashed past inside the sphere. Caught at the very epicenter, the Aegis and the Hive Ship experienced it at full force.
Every living thing aboard the wrecked vessels became wisps of ash and dust, organic matter, even bone and teeth and claws turning to powder. Unhatched in the Hive Ship’s birthing crèche, the cadre’s nascent newly-quickened Queen died before she was fully formed, perishing along with her warriors and her scientists. Aboard the Aegis, the Risar stopped their mad rampage and died in silence, swept away by the hand of their creator.
Then the ships themselves were ended, as eons passed in milliseconds. Metals and plastics designed to withstand the punishing forces of the stellar void wore thin and became like paper, splitting, breaking, ultimately disintegrating beneath their own weight.
A full ten seconds elapsed before the isa effect dissipated. Without the mass required to create a singularity, it spent itself and faded to nothing. The sphere melted away into the background radiation of the sky and left nothing but a drift of free atoms to mark its passing.
Sheppard pressed down the hemisphere in the middle of the podium with the heel of his hand and behind him the Stargate roared open, sending a plume of energy rushing out and back across the shallow valley.
The unkempt cluster of Wraith standing on the steps to the portal hove closer together, some of them throwing up hands to shield themselves from the sudden wash of silvery light. Many of them averted their faces, the brightness hurting their eyes.
Nearby, Ronon made a snorting noise and folded his arms, the pistol in his hand dangling toward the ground in a deceptively casual grip. He stood squarely, clear-eyed and straight-backed, enjoying the feel of Heruun’s hard sunlight on his face. Any lasting trace of the Asgard-inflicted nanite ‘sickness’ had been banished from him, neutralized by the life-giving effects of an energy transfer from their Wraith captives. It was hard to believe that when all other attempts at a cure had failed, in the end it had been an enemy that had been able to save Dex and all the others. The irony wasn’t lost on the colonel. Sheppard caught his friend’s gaze and the Satedan raised an eyebrow.
“What?” he asked.
“You feel any… Different?”
In spite of himself, Ronon’s free hand wandered to his chest, to a spot over his heart, to scratch at some imaginary itch. The big man didn’t seem aware that he was doing it. “No,” he said tersely, “Did you?”
Sheppard shook his head quickly. “’Course not. I was just, y’know, checking.” In truth, for several days after gaining his freedom from being imprisoned by the militant Genii along with a Wraith he’d nicknamed ‘Todd’, Sheppard had felt a little strange. The Wraith had made an uneasy ally — one that had crossed the path of the Atlanteans a number of times since — and John had been both surprised and shocked when the alien had healed him after all the times he had preyed on Sheppard during their captivity. It wasn’t anything physical, nothing like the strange addiction that Wraith worshippers craved from the touch of their alien masters; it was a sense of invasion, almost a mark on the soul, if you wanted to get metaphysical about it. Even though he had been certified well, it took him a long time to wash off the stain, so to speak.
Sheppard didn’t doubt that Ronon felt the same way; but getting the Satedan to admit it would not be likely. He kept his own counsel over that sort of thing. The colonel’s gaze drifted over to Lieutenant Allan; along with Ronon and all the rest of the Heruuni infected with the sickness, she had also taken the unusual ‘cure’, but in her case it had been to reverse the effects of a feeding. She gave Sheppard a respectful nod; there was a look on her face that he had seen in the mirror once or twice, a kind of confused-but-pleased surprise at the fact you were still alive.
He crossed towards the group of Wraith, who stood under the watchful eye of Major Lorne, and a few of the rebels under the orders of Soonir’s former second-in-command, Gaarin. A pair of growling lion-cats on thick leashes held them in check, stalking back and forth with paws flexing and claws bare.
The pale-skinned aliens were the sorriest-looking bunch of their kind Sheppard had ever seen. The usual arrogance and swagger he associated with the Wraith was nowhere in sight. Instead, they stood in a scowling, morose knot, some of them clenching and unclenching their clawed fingers, others moving with difficulty, hobbling. Their weapons and gear had been taken from them, down to the smallest blade; that had been a job that Ronon had taken on with obvious relish.
Every one of the Wraith looked sickly and emaciated, even more so than their typical air of perpetual hunger allowed. They looked, for want of a better word, as if they had been starved, and with good reason. The spur-of-the-moment bargain Doctor Keller had struck with them in Sheppard’s absence had been both radical and clever. In return for letting the handful of survivors from the Hive Ship leave with their lives, they had been forced to use their alien physiology to give back what they had stolen — the raw energy of life — and in the process counteract the infection that crippled the abductees taken by Fenrir. Of course, giving it up to so many people had taken its toll. Now it was the turn of the Wraith to understand what it was like to have the flesh go limp on your bones, to have the breath practically stolen out of your lungs. As object lessons went, it was a pretty good one.
Sheppard had to admit that he never would have come up with such an idea, and the fact that a woman like Jennifer Keller had forced him to re-evaluate his first impressions of the young doctor. Ever since she and McKay had gone against his orders with Elizabeth and that whole replicator thing, John had kept Keller at arm’s length, but now he saw that she wasn’t someone who made the hard calls blithely. In the face of certain death, she had saved lives, albeit in a very unconventional manner — something the IOA would be sure to bitch about when his report went back to Earth.
One of the Wraith showed yellowed fangs as he approached. “You will kill us?” he demanded. “Now you have what you want from us?”
Ronon toyed with his pistol. “Hey, that’s an idea.”
The alien shot him a venomous glare. “I saved your life!”
“And that’s why you’re still walking and talking,” Sheppard broke in. “When we make a deal, we keep our word.”
Lorne nodded in the direction of the open Stargate. “That’s your exit. If I were you, I’d take it.”
Sheppard mirrored the major’s nod. “What he said.”
“What about our weapons, our communications devices?” said the Wraith. “We need them.”
“No you don’t,” the colonel replied. “Use your psychic hotline to dial up a rescue.”
“How do we know the place you are sending us to is not a death-world?”
Ronon grunted. “Huh. I should have thought of that.”
“You’re just gonna have to trust us.” Sheppard replied. He gave Gaarin a nod and the Heruuni drew back the big cats, making a path for the prisoners. “Listen, it’s last call for you guys. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” To underscore the statement, Ronon brought up his particle magnum and gestured with it. John continued. “You healed my people and Gaarin’s people, and for that you get a free pass. That’s the extent of the conversation that you and me are going to have. Do I make myself clear?”
The Wraith exchanged looks with its kindred, and then without further comment, they shuffled up the steps and began to file through the shimmering wormhole.
Sheppard waited until the talkative one was about to step up and called out. “Oh yeah, there’s just one other thing.” The alien paused on the threshold, eyeing him coldly. “The Aegis may be gone, but this planet is now under the protection of Atlantis. So if you’re thinking of hooking up with some of your buddies and swinging by for a little payback, don’t. ’Cos we’ll know about it, and that’s not something you want.”
/> The Wraith paused, letting the others of its cadre pass through the gate and away, until it was the last one on Heruun. “Enjoy your victory while you can, human,” it said. “But remember this. Sooner or later, the Asurans will turn their attacks from my kind to yours, and when that day comes, you will wish that you had let us take the Asgard’s weapons to defeat them.” Without waiting to hear a reply, the alien stepped through and vanished into the ripples.
Sheppard gestured to Allan and the lieutenant severed the wormhole from the DHD podium.
He heard Lorne give a dry chuckle. “Sore losers.”
The colonel didn’t look away from the silent Stargate, the Wraith’s words echoing in his mind. “Yeah. Guess so.”
Carter watched the people working around the fringes of the settlement’s central oval, clearing the wreckage created in the attack by the Wraith, starting down the path toward setting their lives back on track. The young boy Laaro wandered past and threw her a serious nod, which she returned along with a grin. The youth tried very hard to pretend he was old beyond his years, but she had seen him revert to the child he really was when Sheppard had reunited him with his mother and father. The raw, open happiness Sam witnessed there had brought a lump to her throat.
We did some good here, she thought to herself. In the end. For a moment, Carter wondered what she would have done differently, if she could step back to before the mission to M9K-153 had been given the go. She looked away and shook her head. Second-guessing yourself won’t fix anything you do wrong. General Hammond had told her that the first time she had taken command of SG-1. Every leader makes mistakes. The real test is if you don’t make them again.