Halcyon

Chapter Nine

The cavern was dank and smelled faintly of rotting meat. No human hunter had ever dared to venture this deep into the core of the enclosure; or at least if they did, they never returned to speak of it.

The Wraith that the Halcyons had christened `Scar' toyed with some of the items his pack mates had stripped from the prey, picking them up and sniffing them, moving them about with a clawed finger. Presently, he gathered up a pistol made of black steel and turned it in his hand. The weapon was interesting. Scar recognized the shape and form of a primitive ballistic firearm, but at the same time he could see that this was far more advanced than the guns carried by the hunters they usually culled. He licked the frame, tasting sweat and the smallest remnants of flesh-scent there. Scar had always been fascinated by the machinery of lesser species, the way that they forced metals from the ground into hard shapes instead of fashioning organics, bone and bio-matter as the Wraith did. It was a peculiarity of his, an affectation his kindred rarely shared.

One of the pack spat angrily as it came upon something in the pile, and Scar snatched it from his grip. The Wraith growled; the device was a small screen with buttons about its frame, made from some sort of crystalline material that glowed with an inner light. Scar knew the origin of it immediately. The old enemy, his kind's most ancient foe, had fabricated this. With a sudden jerk of motion, the Wraith threw the device into the air and fired the human weapon at it. Sharp retorts of sound echoed around the cave with yellow flashes of discharge from the barrel. The pack snarled at the noise, but Scar grinned widely as the Ancient scanner struck the rock in a rain of broken fragments.

The gunfire jerked Teyla from her painful slumber and she twitched against gooey bonds that held her hands behind her back. The Athosian blinked and tried to make sense of where she was, remembering the trapdoor and the black pit beneath it. She looked around. A cave. No way to know how much time has passed. She caught sight of Bishop, similarly secured a few feet away. He was wavering on the edge of alertness, his head lolling. Teyla tried to work her wrists free, but she had no success. The thick, gelatinous matter that ensnared them was some kind of secreted web, pliant but impossible to break.

Then she shivered, and not through the cold. In her head there were growls and snarls, a wild animal chorus of base, bloodhungry minds. She saw the Wraith, clustered around each other, and before them the single male in ragged clothes with her handgun in his fist. The alien's garb was similar to the coats and battle gear she had seen before on other high-ranking Wraith, but it was ripped and torn, ravaged by combat and years of life as a fugitive. He came closer to her, and in the dimness Teyla saw his scarred and ruined cheek, his single blinded eye.

"What," husked the alien, working at the word. "What are. You?" He spoke haltingly, as if he had not had to form proper speech in a long time and the manner of it had become unfamiliar to him. "What are you?" repeated Scar. "Not the hunters. Not… Not the Enemy. You have their machines… But you are not one of them."

Once, when she was a girl, Teyla had seen her father put a whitehorn to death because it had escaped from the corral and gorged itself on poisonous fruit. In the moments before he had put the animal out of its misery, it had looked directly at her and the Athosian had seen the light of bestial madness in its gaze. She saw the same thing now on the face of the Wraith that confronted her.

Teyla marshaled her resolve and stared him in the eye, refusing to give the Wraith anything. Scar brandished the Beretta pistol under her nose, and she flinched from the stink of hot cordite. "You… Are different from that male." He jerked his head at Bishop, and she could feel him in her thoughts again, the same black slick of consciousness that had caressed her psyche out in the forest. "You are touched by us." Scar rocked back on his haunches and made a clicking noise in his throat, what must have been the Wraith equivalent of a chuckle. "How lucky you are."

She couldn't stop herself. Teyla pulled hard against her bonds, slamming forward a few inches before the sticky ropes went tight and reined her in. Still, she took a little reward in the momentary recoil on the Wraith's face. Scar sneered and composed himself. "I know you. Sensed you." She felt him pushing at her mind and fought to hold him out; fought and failed.

"Tey-lah," said Scar, drawing the word from her. He sounded out the syllables of her name, savoring the resonance of them. "You are far from home, prey." Hate washed over her from him, thick and oily, cold as the kiss of space itself. She gagged.

"Why don' you pick a fight with a bloke, bozo?" Bishop said thickly. "Ought to get yourself a new haircut while you're at it. Th' metal band look went out with Bon Jovi."

The Wraith gave the soldier a sideways look but didn't respond to him. "They want to feed," he told Teyla, jerking his head at the rest of his kindred. "Soon I will let them."

"I do not fear you, creature." The words came up of their own accord.

Scar made the clicking noise again. "Lie."

"If I perish, it will be knowing that a hundred thousand Wraith corpses line my way to the afterlife, all of them dead by my hand!"

He cocked his head. "Oh. A warrior, then, Tey-lah? Proud and strong." He sniffed. "Still prey, at the end."

She watched the glitter of intelligence in Scar's eyes. Daus had been right when he said this Wraith was not like the others on Halcyon. Where his pack mates loped and snapped at each other like primitive simians, Scar was cogent and clever. But there was something else in there, a peculiar need that went beyond his desire to feed off them. The fragmented psionic connection Teyla shared with the Wraith was a two-way street, and she could feel a churn of conflict in the alien's mind. Something akin to loneliness, a sad little streak of arrogance that boiled away just below the surface. She saw broken pieces of thought, there and gone like reflections in shards of a shattered mirror, and an abrupt realization came to her. Scar was concealing something, an old and dark hatred buried deep in his psyche. He was nursing it, cupping the flame of a rage that had been burning for countless years. He had a plan.

The Wraith sniffed at the air and toyed with the pistol. "Brutal and direct," he said, considering the gun. "The simplicity of it amuses me." Scar leaned closer and she caught a whiff of his alien odor. "You are not of the Enemy, but you have their devices. Tell me now. Are they dead? Are the Gatebuilders dead?" When Teyla did not answer, he gave a guttural chug and one of the other Wraiths scrambled over to Bishop, brandishing its feeding maw. The pack mate hovered over the soldier, raw desire bright in its dead eyes. "Answer, or the male is ash."

"Don't tell him nothing," spat the soldier.

Teyla licked dry lips. There was no doubt in her mind that Scar would have Bishop killed if she did not answer him. "The Ancients are gone. We don't know where. They abandoned their cities, vanished."

"Gone." Scar considered this for a moment. "It is fitting. The Enemy died while I slept…"

There was another blink of his memory there in her brain, hard and brittle, of a cold sleep in the chambers of a Hive Ship. The aftermath of a battle, many lives lost and great destruction wrought. She was seeing into him.

Scar glanced at her. "Yes," His words were a gentle hiss. "We came to cull these worlds and found the Enemy here, lying in wait for us. They poisoned the air with their device. Shielded the prey with it. We could not land, could not feed."

"The dolmen," Teyla spoke without meaning to. "The Ancients placed it on Halcyon to protect the natives from you."

The Wraith's head bobbed. "At the height of its power, it drove us mad to be near it. So we remained in space."

Teyla heard noises, half-whispers that came across an impossible distance, across thousands of years. Weapons fire, the roars of combatants and the screams of the dying. Scar was showing her flashes of his past, of a great conflict.

"Our hive, our home, was crippled," he husked, looking inward, "the interstellar translation drives were damaged beyond repair. The Enemy fared little better, fleeing. They vowed to return with reinforcements to finish us. But they never came back."

And then it was all there in her mind, as if she had lived through it herself. Teyla retched, bringing up thin, watery bile, her body rebelling as the shape of the alien memories tried to impose themselves on her recall. "You… Went into hibernation, where the dolmen's power could not affect your minds. Waiting." The woman shook her head, trying to rid herself of the cascade of horrific sensations.

Scar showed all his serrated teeth in a malicious smile. "Ah. You understand. But with each passing year the Enemy's defense wanes in strength. Enough that we can rise against it. Enough."

"Teyla…" called Bishop, a warning in his tone. He'd seen the flare of anger in her eyes.

"You will fail," she spat. "A handful of mindless beasts are all you have! The Halcyons will gun you down the instant you show your ruined face to them!"

The Wraith growled and ran a finger over the scar on his cheek.

"The Ancients beat you ten thousand years ago!" Teyla snarled. "You ran like wounded quarry! You will fare no better today!"

Scar chuckled. "Mistake. We were not beaten, Tey-lah. We merely took our rest." He rose, tucking the gun into his tunic. "That time has passed." At his gesture, one of the other Wraiths came out of the shadows with a metallic ring in its hands. Scar turned the hoop of discolored silver and with a click it split open. He brought it back to Teyla and offered it to her, like a suitor giving a gift.

She saw the intricate cogs and metal spars on the inner face of the ring and understood at once what it was. Teyla tried to back away, but there was nowhere she could go. Scar fastened the metal collar around her neck and it made a clicking sound as the mechanism inside constricted to fit her. The woman coughed as it tightened, settling to a diameter that lay uncomfortably on her throat.

"Ah," Scar said, amusement in his tone. "Now you can be my Hound, human."

Bishop barked out a string of invective that would have earned him a week in the glasshouse if he had said it in earshot of an officer. Scar turned indolently toward him and gave a hollow yowl to the other Wraith in his pack. All of them sprang at the bound soldier with sudden, appalling speed, falling on the man and ripping into him.

"No!" Teyla screamed, but she was powerless to save him. The trooper shuddered and wailed as the Wraiths fed, each of them fighting to draw his living energy from him. She found she could not look away from the horrific display as Bishop's hand snatched at the air, with each second the skin becoming papery, the muscles losing definition, the color draining from him.

After a moment, Scar made another sound and the Wraith pack reluctantly withdrew. Tears spiked Teyla's eyes as she realized that Bishop was still alive, his face sunken and skeletal, each breath a rattling gasp of air. He looked like an old man, decrepit and feeble. Scar bent across the soldier and carefully placed his palm over Bishop's heart. Then, with his tongue flicking out between his pallid lips, the Wraith fed greedily on the last moments of the man's life, taking the sweetest and most succulent nourishment for himself.

"I am not going to die on a Wraith Hive Ship," Rodney managed, trying very hard to keep his voice from turning into a whimper. "I am going to die of old age surrounded by… by… nubile graduate students. Nobel Prizes!" His skin crawled and he bunched his fists, hugging himself in a desperate attempt to stave off panic-induced shivers. "I am not going to die," he insisted to the empty cell. "I am going to die on a Wraith Hive Ship-" McKay halted and shouted out loud, abruptly angry with himself. "Not! Not! Not going to die! I am not going to die on a Wraith Hive Ship, you can't make me, I don't want to, so there! So there-"

He heard the ringing clatter of footsteps approaching along the corridor beyond the webbed doorway of his confinement, and Rodney shrank back into the corner of the cramped space, frantically trying to fight down the rising wave of abject terror building inside him. He wanted so much to hold on the rational and intelligent part of himself, the piece of Rodney McKay that was smart and clinical, capable of cutting through scientific conundrums like a laser; but that bit of him had gone bye-bye and all that was left was the panicking idiot portion who hit like a girl and barely knew one end of a gun from the other. Not that he had a gun, anyway.

The cell wall hit him in the back and McKay stiffened. He was staring death in the face again, any moment now. Why was he still terrified? This had happened to him so many times, surely by now he should have been used to it?

Two Wraiths halted outside the doorway and one of them did something to a control surface. The spider web of cords blocking him in twitched and retracted into the walls. The other came into the cell and grabbed Rodney, dragging him out into the corridor.

"Please don't suck the life out of me," he managed, and the denial sounded totally pathetic in his ears. As if they were suddenly going to say `Oh, okay then, 'and shove Inc back in there.

The aliens didn't acknowledge his words, and simply propelled him forward, pushing McKay away and down the twisting tunnels of bone. The Wraith guards marched him quickly through open spaces and atriums, some lit with dim bioluminescence, others black and dead. Rodney's mind was running at full tilt, his thoughts racing thanks to the surge of terror-induced adrenaline in his bloodstream. Something felt different about this ship. He tried to put his finger on it.

The usual sense of motion, the slight giddiness of acceleration, wasn't there. Perhaps they were in orbit, or drifting in space? But as he stumbled onward, he felt strangely heavier than he expected to. Every other time McKay had been inside a Wraith vessel, the gravity had been just a shade less than the Earth-equivalent of habitable, Stargated worlds. He remembered that Zelenka had posited that the Wraith liked a lowgee environment. If he felt heavy-that was to say, normal weight-here, maybe this ship wasn't actually in space but grounded on a planet? What the hell did that imply? Why was he even here? The men who had attacked the dolmen, who shot him, they wore gray battledress and they certainly hadn't been Wraiths. Had they?

However, that train of thought went totally off the rails as the guards shoved him through another doorway and along a narrow catwalk over a vast open space in the alien craft's interior. Ranged up above and down below him along the curved inner surface of the chamber there were hundreds, if not thousands of individual cells. Not the same kind of cell as the holding area where he'd been confined, but roughly hexagonal compartments that looked like something from inside of a hornet's nest. Many of them were dark, but a lot-an awful lot-were aglow with pale light, and through the thick matter of their translucent walls McKay could see the humanoid forms of quiescent Wraith. Now and then, the occasional one would twitch in its hibernative sleep. But what caught Rodney's attention was where the cells were marked, where they had been cut open with what must have been blowtorches. Good grief why would anyone actually want to deliberately decant a dormant Wraith?

He turned to look at the alien guards and saw a glitter of light at their necks. Each of the Wraiths had dull, lifeless eyes, and heavy steel torcs that were the twin to those worn by Daus's indentured servants. "Hounds?" The word tumbled from McKay's lips.

Another hatch dilated before them and with one final shove, Rodney's Wraith chaperones pushed him through it. He recovered from a near stumble and came to a halt, his jaw hanging open in shocked surprise.

McKay had never seen the interior of a Wraith Hive Ship's control nexus before, but based on the experience of several Atlantean off world teams, he'd built up a picture of what they had to look like. He was pleased on some level that he'd been so close to the mark, but unhappy on another that he had to make that judgment in person. Standing in the chamber was like being inside a hollowed-out skull, a large bone enclosure with two open orbits that peered out from the dorsal surface of the vessel like eye sockets. As he had surmised, the view from the ports wasn't the black void of space or the shimmering blue of a hyperspatial tunnel, but a pale sky and a lightly forested hillside. The now-familiar yellow-white sun visible in the clouds told him that he was still on Halcyon. And if that's the closest thing I've had to good news all day, then I really am in trouble.

There were multiple levels inside the nexus with steep ramps leading up and down to them. Skeletal formations here and there had grown around the glossy shapes of control consoles and the quivering organic lenses of monitor screens. It was all seamless and quite unpleasant in its design, like the folds of natural armor on a scorpion's thorax or the shiny bones of some dead deep-ocean predator. But what shocked him more than the alien lines of the Hive Ship's command center were the chunks of brazen, blocky metal retrofitted into the walls. Festoons of fat, sparking cables trailed back and forth across the deck, and there were puddles of yellowy organic fluid collecting where arrays of glass valves and other primitive electronics had been surgically inserted into the consoles. Hardware better suited to the laboratory of Dr. Frankenstein had been rammed brutally into the slick, inhuman forms of the Wraith consoles.

Men in work tunics were busy at the controls, or in tight groups at wooden benches set up in the avenues between the alien hardware. They all wore the black flash on their tabards marking them as standing in the service of the Lord Magnate.

A familiar and utterly unwelcome face emerged from one of the groups, beaming a supercilious grin. "Kelfer," sneered Rodney, turning the man's name into an insult. "What. Are. You. Doing?"

"Dr. McKay. Welcome." The chief scientist clapped his hands. "Firstly, I must apologize for your mode of arrival here. I trust you did not find it too… Dramatic?"

Rodney waggled a finger at him. "You kidnapped me!" It came to him in a rush. "That's why you left Erony and me inside the dolmen! You went outside to, what, send a signal to your goon squad? Where is she? Did you hurt her?"

Kelfer rolled his eyes. "As if I would dare to leave a mark upon the daughter of the most powerful man on the planet. The Lady Erony is uninjured."

"Scumbag!" It was the first insult that came to mind, and although it wasn't as nasty as he would have liked, McKay put plenty of venom behind it.

"Doctor, please calm yourself. You were struck by a Wraith Stunner. The effects can be quite troubling."

"Don't patronize me!" he barked. "When your lordship finds out that you're working with the Wraith-"

It was Kelfer's turn to butt in. "Working with the Wraith?" he laughed harshly. "Great blades, man, have you learned nothing while you have been on Halcyon? We despise those beasts!" He nodded at the two Hounds. "They serve us! Never the reverse! That is the whole point of this endeavor." He opened his hands, taking in the ship around them. "And be certain that the Lord Magnate would hardly be uninformed about what transpires here, on land that has been a part of his ancestral holdings since the Age of Unification!"

Rodney took that nugget of information in, his fingers fluttering at the air. "I return to my original point, then. What are you doing here, you moron?"

Kelfer's face hardened at the insult, but he answered nonetheless. "We are learning the secrets of the Wraith," he bit out, "decoding their language, turning their technology to our own ends, examining their physiology to find new ways to condition them and kill them." He puffed out his chest. "It is the single most important undertaking of our race."

But McKay wasn't listening to him preen. The Atlantean scientist's analytical mind was racing ten steps ahead of what Kelfer was telling him, putting together everything he had seen and heard, and following it toward the inevitable conclusion. "Wait. Wait wait. Linnian told Teyla that Daus's rule of Halcyon was unchallenged."

"Lord Daus!" snapped Kelfer.

McKay's thoughts spilled out, raw and unfiltered. "His rule was unchallenged because he had the biggest army of tame Wraith in his doghouse, and no one would ever dare to go up against someone who could send in so many Hounds, right? And I couldn't help wondering where he got his fresh recruits from, and now you show me this-" Rodney's brain finally caught up with his mouth and stumbled over the words. "Oh no. No, no, no-no." He took a warning step toward Keifer, indignation and anger building as he realized the depths of trouble they were in. "Please tell me that you were not so completely, so unreservedly, entirely downright mind-bogglingly dim-witted, that you have actually been waking up those Wraith on purpose?"

The control room fell silent as McKay's tirade rose in volume. The Halcyon chief scientist just blinked.

"That's how the Fourth Dynast have kept themselves in power for so long, isn't it? Not by hunting Wraith on other planets and bringing them back like the other clans do, but by decanting them from this Hive Ship, like it's some kind of private wine cellar!" The arrogance of such a thing drained the ire from him in a second. "Do you realize that your ham-fisted efforts tinkering around in here may very well have doomed your entire planet to being the main course at a Wraith barbecue?"

Kelfer composed himself and straightened his tunic with a self-conscious cough. "Dr. McKay, you have been brought here on the direct instruction of His Highness the Lord Magnate to assist me in my work on the Hive Ship's mechanisms. By your own admission, you have stated that you possess some knowledge of these craft and their technologies."

"It's a lot more than just some, okay?" Although he probably should have kept quiet about it, Rodney couldn't resist the chance to get in another dig at the pompous man. "The biggest expert on the Wraith this side of an Ascended Being," he pointed at his chest with both hands, "right here!"

"Indeed," continued Kelfer, and it was clear that for the scientist, admitting McKay's superiority in any matter was like chewing on broken glass. "And with that in mind, you will immediately address yourself to the functioning of the Wraith hibernation chambers aboard this vessel."

"Why?" McKay knew the moment the question left his lips that the answer would not be a good one.

Kelfer's lips thinned. "In centuries past, the Fourth Dynast's scientists were able to remove docile Wraith from their capsules and put them to the collar with only minimal incident. However, in recent cycles, more and more of the sleeping Wraith have been emerging on their own, despite our best efforts to contain them. Every attempt to stem this chain of events has failed. We cannot stop them awakening. We do not know why this is."

Rodney knew, but he wasn't about to tell Kelfer. He wasn't willing to admit that it had been Colonel Sheppard's ill-fated venture into the heart of a Wraith Hive Ship just like this one that started a ripple effect, waking up the dormant aliens all across the Pegasus Galaxy. "And you want me to do something about it, is that it? Clean up your, uh, mess for you?"

The scientist sighed. "You will find a way to put the Wraith back to sleep, McKay. If you do not, then your associates will suffer."

"Suffer?" Rodney blinked. "What do you mean by that, exactly?"

"I mean die, exactly. At the hands of my Lord's Hounds."

"I don't see anything," said Ronon, peering through the binoculars, "not that I've got a wide field of view out the canopy."

"Uh-huh," Sheppard replied, his attention on the screen in front of him. "Damn."

"You have something?"

The colonel shook his head. "For a second, I thought I did. I tried using the Jumper's sensors to track that Ancient hand-held doohickey I gave to Teyla, but I'm getting nada. There was the ghost of return for a moment, but then it faded."

Ronon leaned closer. "Where?"

Sheppard grabbed the paper map of the hunt enclosure and tapped it. "Here, I think. Sensors didn't get enough time to lock down an exact location."

"That's a start. At least we have somewhere to look for them."

"Yeah." John touched controls on the ship's console. "Activating cloak. I'm going to take us up to tree-top level and start running a search pattern."

Dex nodded and attended to his weapons. "Daus didn't give us the whole story about the Wraith here," he noted.

"I think we're way past expecting the truth from that guy, don't you? `A planet full of liars', right?"

"I don't think he sent us here for Scar. He sent us here to get killed. You saw how those Wraiths were moving. They were feral, but they weren't stupid."

Sheppard turned the yoke as the Puddle Jumper rose above the forest canopy. "The Wraith are a lot of things, but dumb has never been one of them."

"You don't follow me," said Ronon. "They were working in a coordinated pattern. Attack, retreat, feint, attack. That's not how a mind-blanked animal would do it." He pointed into the trees. "They went for our team and Teyla's at the same time. They had a plan. A leader."

"Scar."

"No doubt."

"Well, that's great. So he's not only a super-tough Wraith, he's super-smart as well, out here in the trees with his private militia like some kinda alien Marlon Brando. And I get to be Martin Sheen." He glanced at Dex. "You could be Dennis Hopper, if you like."

The other man made a face. "That psychic jamming device in the dolmen is supposed to fog their brains, but I don't think it's as powerful as the Halcyons think it is. Maybe the ZPM powering it has run down, and those Wraith are just playing along. Waiting for the right moment to strike."

The possibility that Dex could be right about that sent an icy shiver down the colonel's spine. Sheppard shot him a hard look. "One problem at a time, Ronon. One damn problem at a time."

The gyro-flyer rocked as the aircraft caught a sharp updraft, and Lady Erony put out a hand to steady herself. She craned her neck to peer out of the window-slit by her chair and saw the smokestacks and tenement towers of the lower city flash by.

Linnian's fingers knotted and unknotted as he hovered beside her. At length, he gave a theatrical sigh. "Highness, would not it have been simpler to dispatch a messenger to carry your news to Dr. Beckett? Such a method would have much greater alacrity." He forced a smile. "See here, if we return to the High Palace, a courier could reach him in only a few minutes from your word of dispatch-"

"Must you continue to chatter on the same issue over and over again?" she snapped, silencing the adjutant. "I do not wish it! "

Linnian took a breath. "But, My Lady, your father has made it quite clear to me on many occasions that he does not look with favor on any ventures into the common quarters."

Erony made a show of looking around. "Is my dear father here on this vessel?"

"Ah, well, no, Highness."

"And is his adjutant Baron Vekken here, carrying his word and authority in the Magnate's stead?"

The man looked at the deck. "No, Highness. He has joined the Lord Daus on a errand of state in the Great Ward."

"Then by your own admission, it appears that I am the noble of highest rank on board this aircraft, and as such my word is the law."

Linnian bowed, suitably intimidated. "I meant no disrespect, My Lady. It is merely that I am confused by your sudden desire to visit so base and squalid a place as the environs of the lower city." He sniffed archly. "It is beneath one of your great standing."

The flyer was banking over the dockside district now, circling as the pilot searched for somewhere suitable to put down. Erony returned to the view through the window-slit as the sunlight shifted around the cabin. Although she would never admit it to him, her adjutant's words were correct, and she had no doubt that if her father were to discover that she had set out on this jaunt, his anger would be great indeed. Many was the time that Lord Daus had imposed his beliefs on his daughter, that the commoners be left to live their lives and that the nobles were not to walk freely among them. The people, he had often told her, should only be able to lay their eyes on the scions of the Fourth Dynast on annual occasions such as Unification Eve or when a funeral or betrothal was enacted. He stressed the importance of the places Halcyon's society had for them, and for Erony. To ignore the barrier between them, he said, was to invite chaos and confusion among the simple folk of the cities. It was for their own good.

And yet… Since she was a youth, Erony had observed the lower city second hand, through telescopes and the overheard chatter of her servants. In her more private moments, she had wondered if it were fair that she should live elevated above them, while the common folk endured fresh hardships with each new dawn.

But it grew easy to ignore those voices that prickled her conscience. Erony's life was a world where she wanted for nothing, insulated and safe. But the arrival of these people from Atlantis had stirred up long-forgotten feelings. They were so close to the surface, these Atlanteans, so direct in thought and deed. They could not stand to see an injustice go unanswered, even if it would put them in harm's way to challenge it. These were men and women who saw no class or boundary, they worked as a team despite their diverse backgrounds. Educated men like Rodney McKay and the good Dr. Beckett side by side with rough soldiers, tribals even like the Runner and the huntress from Athos. She admired the easy bond they so clearly shared, and she felt jealous of it.

Erony glanced at Linnian. He had been her adjutant since she was a child, and yet she had never once felt in all those years that they were friends, that she might be able to trust him. On Halcyon, the children of noble families were taught the rules of their society from the earliest age, learning the manners of polite intrigue and courteous back-stabbings. They were taught that they were superior, and that their wealth and power was not just deserved, but their birthright.

The gyro-flyer dipped towards the rooftops, and Erony caught sight of figures huddling in doorways to shield themselves from the aircraft's prop wash. But what birthright do these people have? she asked herself.

The rotors were still chopping at the air as Linnian dropped the hatch and fairly bounded out of the flyer with two armed riflemen at his sides. Immediately he began shouting warnings to the commoners, the braver ones who had dared to approach the grounded aircraft. Erony pulled the ornate shawl about her shoulders and kept the half-veil of her traveling hood over her eyes as she followed him out. Deliberately, she had left her clan sword in her chambers and carried nothing but a compact gold revolver on her hip. The gasps of the citizens at the sight of her made Erony feel suddenly vulnerable and afraid. Perhaps Linnian is right, perhaps I should go back, it's not safe here…

"Lady Erony?" From the open doors of a wide, low warehouse came Dr. Beckett, his sand-colored jacket standing out among the darker hues of the people around him. The soldier who had been injured at the dolmen followed him cautiously. "I'm, ah, surprised to see you here."

"I have brought news…" Her words dried up in her mouth as she caught sight of the commoners milling around the entrance to the warehouse. This place was one of the locations where Beckett had set up a treatment center for the victims of the bone-rot, and Erony found her fright rising as she realized that these poor, hobbled souls were all suffering from the terrible malaise.

The doctor saw the question in her eyes. "Oh aye, that's your bone-rot, right there. We call it `rickets' on my planet. It used to be quite widespread hundreds of years ago, but now it only turns up in places where there's contaminated food and water."

"Contaminated," she echoed, unable to take her eyes from the twisted limbs of the people around her. She felt a sudden jab of shame as a few of the younger ones bent and shivered. They were trying to bow to her, to show the proper obeisance to a noble, even though it must have pained them severely to do so. Erony shook her head. "No. Tell them, they do not need to do that."

"My Lady," began Linnian, "protocol demands-"

"It is all right," she continued, addressing the commoners directly. "You do not need to bow."

Beckett came closer. "Why don't you come and see what we're doing here? These people have you to thank, after all." He offered his hand to her.

Linnian interposed himself between them. "You will not touch the person of a noble."

The doctor gave the adjutant a withering stare. "I've told you once already, wee fella, don't get in my way, not when I'm doing my job."

"Linnian," said Erony, and he stood aside. "Doctor, please continue."

A pregnant hush moved before them as Beckett led her into the dank interior if the warehouse, inside the sharp tang of the nearby river waters mingling with medicinal odors and human sweat. She saw another Atlantean soldier opening crates of supplies. Beds made of canvas squares and metal rods had been set up here and there, and the doctor's female assistant was hard at work moving between them. Erony watched her smile warmly at a worried young boy as she applied a gun-shaped device to his bare shoulder. The apparatus coughed and the boy rubbed at a red mark where the gun's nozzle had touched him.

"The nurse is giving him a booster shot of vitamins and calcium enhancers," explained the doctor. "It's a stop-gap measure but it will hopefully be enough to reverse the spread of the ailment in most patients. Others… Well, it's already too late for a lot of folk here."

She saw a youth in the brown robes of a palace servant helping an older man secure a brace to his twisted leg. "Who is that?" Erony didn't know his name, but she'd seen the young man before, engaged in servitude on board the royal conveyor.

"We asked around for some volunteers," noted Beckett. "Corporal Clarke organized a few locals to help us set things up."

"Very impressive," offered Linnian in a bored tone.

Erony ignored him and lent closer to Beckett. "And once you are finished here, this bone-rot will no longer trouble them, yes?"

The doctor frowned. "Well, no, lass. What we're doing here is holding things back a little. But it's not a cure. For that, you need to seriously re-think your city's food, water and medical infrastructure."

She watched the man with the brace struggle to get back to his feet. With his deformed bones, he looked like a wire doll that had been twisted about by a petulant child. Cold certainty flooded her veins, the shocking realization coming at once that she was responsible for this. Erony, her father, her Dynast, all of the nobles. The pain of these commoners was the product of their arrogance. Her earlier thought returned to her. What birthright do these people have?

"My Lady," said the adjutant with a sniff. "I think this visit is at an end. We should return to the palace."

Erony blinked hard, and pulled back her veil, giving Beckett her full attention. In her distraction, she had almost forgotten the very excuse that she had used to journey down here. "Doctor, forgive me, I am remiss. I came here to give you urgent news of Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard and your friends."

Beckett's face paled. "What's wrong?"

"My father has observers following their hunting venture from the enclosure's observation towers. Gunfire was reported in several locations, after which the group was lost to sight. The observers also reported increased Wraith activity in the area." Her lips thinned. "I fear for the safety of your comrades."

The older soldier, the one called Mason, spoke into the communications device on his tunic. "Jumper Three, this is Mason, respond. Colonel Sheppard? Do you copy my transmission?" The communicator hissed back at him.

"They're out of range," said the trooper with the bandaged arm. "Could be in trouble, Staff."

Beckett looked at her. "Erony, this has gone far enough. We cannae stand by and do nothing. You have to help us put a stop to all this."

She answered without stopping to consider it. "I will."

"Highness!" protested Linnian, but she ignored his outburst.

"You," she said, pointing at one of the blackcoat riflemen. "Disarm yourself and take Dr. Beckett's place here. You will do whatever his nurse tells you to, and render whatever assistance she demands, as if the words came from my lips. Is that clear?"

The rifleman bowed. "By your command, Milady."

Erony turned to Beckett. "Come with me, Doctor. Bring one of your warriors, if you wish. My gyro-flyer is a racing model, and with it we can reach the enclosure with great speed."

Her adjutant spluttered. "My Lady, I must protest! This is most irregular!"

"Linnian," replied the woman, putting every ounce of her noble will behind the word, "relay my instructions to the pilot and do not tarry."

"But-"

"Now."

The man threw Beckett an acid stare, bowed, and then scuttled away.

"Clarke," snapped Mason, "keep watch here, got it? You don't hear back from us by nightfall, you evac the civvies and get your arse through the Stargate."

The soldier saluted. "Yes, Staff."

"Thank you, Erony," said the doctor.

She gave her sick and ailing subjects a last look and then nodded. "Follow me."