Nightfall

Chapter Ten

“Jennifer?” Laaro held out a sample vial to her. “I was told to give this to you.”

She gave the young boy a quick smile. “Hey, thanks.” Keller turned the tube in her hand and read off the numbers written on the side. Another disappointment.

Her thoughts clearly showed on her face. “I’m sorry,” said Laaro, as if the failure of the test solution was his fault.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “We’ll just try again.”

He watched her work for a moment. “Why did you choose this path, Jennifer?”

“Why did I become a doctor, is that what you mean?” She sighed. “I guess because it’s what I’m best at. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you find a… A path that leads you where you need to go. And along the way you can help people.” Keller paused and gave a self-conscious smirk. “Does that make sense?

Laaro nodded solemnly. “It does. Do you think I could become a healer?”

“I don’t see why not.”

He nodded again, his eyes losing focus. “I… Want to help people. Like you do, like Kullid does.”

Keller realized where this was coming from; Errian’s condition had grown worse over the last day, and Laaro’s fears for his father’s wellbeing were bearing down on him. It was a lot for a child of his age to shoulder.

Kullid approached and the two healers shared a look. “Laaro,” he began, “it’s getting late. You should head home. Jaaya will worry about you.”

“I can help here,” insisted the boy, “at home I can do nothing.”

“You can help your mother,” came the reply. “Go on, go.”

“It’s okay,” Keller added. “We can talk more later.”

Laaro nodded dejectedly and left without another word.

Keller watched the youth go. “It can’t be easy on him,”

“It isn’t easy on anyone,” Kullid said, his kind eyes fatigued. “The sickness touches those who are well as much as those afflicted.”

“We will fix this,” Keller insisted.

“I know you believe that. But I wonder if it is time to seek out another resolution…”

There was a clattering sound from the sick lodge’s doorway, and the wooden slats came open awkwardly. Lieutenant Allan stood there, her face pale. “I, uh…” She took an unsteady step into the room.

Ronon rose quickly from the nearby sleeping pallet where he had been resting. “You all right?”

The officer blinked owlishly. “Not sure,” she slurred. “Everything’s all kinda… Colorful.” Without warning, her legs gave out from under her, and Allan tipped forward, her eyes rolling back into her head, her P90 dropping from her fingers. Ronon was there to grab her before she hit the deck. She gasped and went limp.

Keller was instantly at the woman’s side. “Give her some air,”

“The sickness —” began Kullid.

Jennifer shook her head. “She wasn’t taken.”

Ronon lay the lieutenant down on the pallet and swore beneath his breath. He turned her head and exposed a thin wooden blow dart in the flesh of her neck. “We got trouble.” He went for his weapons, grabbing his gun belt where it lay across a stool.

Kullid removed the dart and sniffed the tip. “Fermented venom from the tepkay serpent. I use it myself to ease the pain of those with severe injuries. It will make her sleep deeply for a few hours.”

Ronon came up with the particle magnum in his hand. “Get away from the doors and windows,” he snapped, blinking away a twinge of pain.

From out of the evening shadows came a hooded figure, advancing slowly on the sick lodge. Keller became aware of more shapes through the slatted windows all around. The patients who had come awake at the sudden commotion shrank back towards the walls.

Jennifer reached out toward Allan’s gun and a voice called out to her. “I wouldn’t do that, Doctor. We don’t want to fill this place any more, do we?”

“Soonir…” She recognized the intonation immediately.

The figure in the doorway glanced at Ronon and folded back the hood; the rebel leader gave him a cold look, as if daring him to shoot.

Keller placed a hand on the Satedan’s arm. “It’s okay.”

“I don’t think so,” Dex grated. “He attacked the lieutenant.”

“She will wake by dawn with an aching head but no other ill-effects,” Soonir replied. “It was necessary to silence your guardian. She would have raised the alarm.”

“What makes you think I won’t?” Ronon stifled a hollow cough.

Soonir studied him. “You have the sickness. You can barely aim that pistol. You’re more likely to injure yourself than me.”

A cold smile crossed Ronon’s lips. “I’m not that sick. But go ahead, try your luck. I could use something to break the boredom.”

“I won’t have violence here!” said Kullid. “This is a place of healing!”

“Quite so,” said Soonir. “And the sickness is what I have come to speak of.” He stepped inside, a pair of men emerging from the branches nearby to flank him.

With a scowl, Ronon let his gun drop away from a firing stance; but he did not return it to its holster.

Soonir glanced at Keller. “The truth is in short supply on Heruun, doctor. Takkol ensures that this is always so. I come to you because I believe you will not deceive me.”

She met his gaze. “You’ve changed your tune. Last time I saw you, you were calling Rodney and me liars.”

Soonir’s face clouded for a moment. “I have since had opportunity to reflect on what took place at the lake. Perhaps I was too quick to draw conclusions.”

“Or maybe you just realized that you’re running out of friends?” offered Ronon.

“The only matter of importance is the freedom of my people,” Soonir replied. “The events unfolding in the skies above our world have shifted the balance of our society and it is reeling! If we are to find any kind of stability, the full truth must be known!”

“And you are the man to tell it?” said Kullid.

The rebel leader shrugged off the cloak he wore. “Who else will do it? Aaren?” He snorted. “Takkol? Doctor Keller, let me ask you. Since the Returned were freed by your Colonel Sheppard, has Elder Takkol come to you, asked you to explain what happened up there?” He stabbed a finger toward the window and the night sky beyond. When Jennifer didn’t reply, he smiled grimly. “No, I thought not. He does not want to know! He is afraid that the threat of the Aegis that backs his rule may be gone!” Soonir came closer, and Ronon moved to interpose himself between them. “I want to know if the rumors are more than fantasy, Doctor! Is the great power in the sky really a falsehood? Is it true that the Aegis is merely a living being like us, not some god or demon?”

Keller gave a slow nod. “What you know as the Aegis is a being called an Asgard. He’s not like us, he’s from a world very far from this one. But his people were extremely advanced. Their science is thousands of years beyond ours.”

Soonir faltered for a moment, taking in her explanation; clearly he had not expected Keller to be so open, so quickly. “You Atlanteans are ranged far beyond the learning of all Heruun, and so if this Asgard dwarfs your knowledge, then it must be great indeed…”

“You said ‘were’ extremely advanced not ‘are’,” noted Kullid. “What happened to them?”

“He’s the last one left of his kind,” said Ronon, with a sneer. “And after what his Risar freaks tried to do to me, if I had my way he’d be as dead as all the rest of them.”

“The last…” echoed Kullid, musing.

“But why did this being take our people?” said one of the rebel guards. Keller thought he looked familiar; she was sure she had seen him at Takkol’s lodge. “Why did it blight us with the sickness?”

“Yes,” said Soonir. “The Taken are Returned and Takkol tells us it will never occur again, but the sickness remains! The curse of the night!” He gestured at the people in the sick lodge.

“The Atlanteans aid us in the search for a cure,” said Kullid. “We are close —”

Soonir waved him away. “You have searched for a treatment for years, healer, and found nothing.”

“That’s because he didn’t have our help,” Keller broke in. “The sickness is… It’s a taint in the blood of the Returned. An accident. Once we can figure out how to purge it, it will never come back.”

“An accident?” Soonir clearly found that difficult to accept.

“Doctor McKay has ventured back through the Gateway,” added Kullid. “He will bring back new learning that will make the cure a reality.”

The rebel leader was silent for a long moment. “I do not doubt your intentions, healers,” he said, at length. “But until I see the sick restored, I remain unconvinced. And you should know that for all the false cheer Takkol demands, there is unrest here.”

“Meaning what?” said Ronon.

“The people do not know what they should believe, voyager. Some fear Takkol and the other elders are in league with you and a new tyranny is on the rise. Others are afraid that the Aegis is dead and the shadow of the Wraith will soon fall across our world once more. There are even those who would welcome such a thing, those who believe it is fated.” One of Soonir’s men suddenly moved to the doorway, drawing his leader’s attention. “There is confusion,” he concluded, “and where that leads, violence is certain to follow.”

“Guards are coming,” said the man at the door. “We must go.”

Soonir gave Keller and Ronon a hard glance. “Remember what I have said. Tell your Colonel Carter.” He pushed past and moved toward the back of the lodge, vanishing into the darkness. “And be watchful.”

Kullid shook his head. “What shall we do?”

“Keep quiet,” Ronon growled, as the doorway crashed open under the force of a boot heel.

Sheppard entered the core compartment, rubbing at the sore spot on his arm. “McKay?”

Across the room, panes of shimmering holographic text hung in the air, crowding around the sloped console of the Asgard supercomputer. “Over here,” said Rodney, over the rapid-fire tapping of fingers across a keyboard. McKay gave him the briefest of looks. “Let me guess. Blood test?”

Sheppard nodded, navigating through the floating screens. “I’m surprised they didn’t ask me for the fillings in my teeth and my first-born child as well.”

“Yeah, I bet SG-1 wouldn’t get the same treatment…” He reached up and touched a screen, making it turn in virtual space. “Look at this. I found our little grey buddy. Chapter and verse, right here.”

Sheppard studied the picture of an Asgard for a moment, his lip curled. “They all look the same to me.”

“That’s because they are all the same, more or less.”

“Why didn’t these files open for the Odyssey crew?”

“Encryption,” replied McKay, with a smug smile. “The Asgard use layered structures inside their computer architecture, and they encode each tier with a different cipher. The lower levels are so heavily coded that unless you know they’re there, you’d never find them.”

“Nice work,”

“Yes, I like to think so.”

Sheppard stood in front of the console; with all the holo-screens around them, it was like being in a hall of mirrors; except instead of reflections, there were streaming waterfalls of dense alien text. “So, what’s the scoop on Fenrir.”

The momentary grin on Rodney’s face slipped. “I don’t think he’s been entirely forthcoming with us, that’s for sure. The reason Fenrir’s records were so hard to find was because they didn’t appear in the central registry. They were in a subframe belonging to the Asgard equivalent of the, ah, correctional system.”

The colonel’s eyes narrowed. “He’s a convict?” Sheppard had a crazy mental image of the diminutive alien wearing an orange prisoner’s jumpsuit. “I thought they were too advanced for all that kind of thing, y’know, lawbreaking and stuff.”

“We know there have been other renegade Asgard. There was Loki, who conducted human biological experiments on Earth…” Rodney paused. “To be honest, I think the Asgard hid these files because they were an embarrassment to them.”

“What did he do, McKay? I’m guessing from the look on your face that it’s something big.”

“You’re not wrong.” The scientist got up and came around the console, bringing a data pad with him that trailed glowing cables from an interface socket on the core. “From what I can see, Fenrir was originally a bio-researcher working with some of their biggest brains — Heimdall, Sigyn, Thor, those guys — on their life-extension project. But then the Replicators became a problem and he switched majors, so to speak. After one of their main colony worlds was consumed, it says here, he began work on a crash development program.”

“Military research?”

“Bingo.” McKay began manipulating the pad, and the holographic projectors in the core moved the screens out across the room, the panels growing wider and larger. Sheppard saw images of a blue-white world of large oceans and massive ice sheets webbed by Asgard mega-cities, then time-lapse scans of the surface turning dark as a tide of Replicators advanced across it. By the time the short animation concluded, the planet was a wasteland. Rodney continued; “Whatever he was working on, it was big. The data is buried so deep I need a jackhammer to dig it out…” Red runes in the Asgard language flared brightly around them as McKay hacked the security codes keeping the files closed. “Wait. Wait. No. I’ve got this.”

Like a dam bursting, all the holographic screens flooded with data as Rodney broke the lock and released the files. Sheppard picked out fleeting schematics for an Asgard warship, the complex orbital structure of a solar system, a cutaway globe showing the interior of a star; and repeating over and over was a symbol, a stark vertical line on a dark background. He pointed into the hologram. “What does this mean?”

When McKay looked up from the data pad his expression was bleak. “It’s a warning. An Asgard rune. It’s the character ‘Isa’, it means ice, entropy…the end of the universe.”

Elder Aaren and a group of armed guards crowded into the sick lodge’s anteroom.

“Where is he?” Aaren demanded. Without waiting for an answer, he bellowed an order at his men. “Find him, bring him to me!”

The guards barged in and began a forceful, careless search.

“Hey, watch it!” snapped Keller, as one of the men almost tipped a table of lab gear on to the floor.

“Where is Soonir?” snapped the elder.

Ronon made a show of sitting down. “Who?”

“I know he was here.” Aaren turned and glared at Keller. “Again we find you in his company, Doctor! Why does a healer collude with a militant, answer me that?”

Jennifer drew herself up. She didn’t like this guy’s attitude. “The only thing I am doing is trying to protect people. The way I see it, the only thing you’re protecting is your…self!”

Aaren’s nostrils flared in annoyance and he took a threatening step toward her. Ronon leaned forward and flicked his pistol around in a spin; the simple action stopped the elder cold. His expression changed, becoming one of false kindness, but Keller could see the fury boiling away just underneath the surface.

“Perhaps I was mistaken. Forgive my zeal.” He snapped his fingers and his men returned to him; it was clear by now that Soonir was long gone. He paused on the threshold and glanced over his shoulder at the doctor. “Soonir is a dangerous man. The people need protection from someone like him. Anyone who associates with that man will be considered to be his accomplices and treated as such… No matter who they are or where they come from.”

Pages of data from Fenrir’s research projects hung around the walls of the compartment, mute representations of the ruthless science the Asgard had employed in his studies.

“Talk to me, Rodney,” said Sheppard. “Tell me what this stuff all means. You’re the only person in the room with a PhD, remember?”

McKay’s free hand turned in the air. “Several, actually,” he said absently. “Oh boy. This is… Incredible.”

“And not in a good way. I’m getting that.”

“Fenrir’s new project was a super-weapon, something so powerful it was capable of obliterating entire star systems…” Rodney shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe what he was reading. “A sun killer. Good grief. He built a collapsar bomb.”

“Nightfall,” murmured Sheppard.

McKay waved the data pad at a graphic of a device, a cylindrical module bearing the ‘isa’ rune that had appeared earlier. “That’s it.”

“How does it work? Is it a beam, a missile?”

McKay shook his head. “It’s the ultimate in scorched-earth devices. I mean, forget your nukes or your fusion warheads, those are like firecrackers compared to a collapsar device.” He stuffed the data pad under his armpit and made a globe with his hands. “Every star has a finite life span, right? After so many billions of years they burn out and implode —”

“Collapse.”

“Right. But some go beyond that super-compacting level, they go past the point of no return and become a singularity, a collapsar!” Rodney was speaking rapidly now, animated by the lethal power of what he was describing. “A gravitational maelstrom so powerful that nothing can escape it, not even light itself, something that is literally a death star!” He closed his hands into tight ball. “A black hole.”

Sheppard turned back and looked at the solar system model he had seen earlier, a small orange star orbited by a spread of six planets. “And that would be goodnight for any planets in the vicinity.”

McKay nodded. “See, that kind of stellar collapse takes a long time to come about. I mean, most species would have either evolved far enough along to leave their planet behind before this could ever happen to them, or else they’d have been exterminated in one of their star’s earlier expansive phases. But Fenrir figured out how to make a sun go black in minutes.”

“How is that possible?”

He worked the pad and brought the cutaway of the star to the front of the forest of images. “We know the Asgard have an deep understanding of cosmology, temporal physics, matter-energy transfer… This is a merging of all three.” He pointed at the heart of the star where a diamond-shaped glyph had appeared. “The collapsar bomb is beamed into the middle of the star and it generates a fast-time field.” Sheppard watched as a globe of white energy expanded out of the device. “Everything inside that radius experiences the passage of time at a vastly accelerated rate, we’re talking a trillion years in a nanosecond.” The image expanded until it was filling the room.

Sheppard nodded grimly as the enormity of what he was watching became clearer. “It eats the heart out of the sun. Turns it rotten inside.”

Suddenly the graphic vanished and became a hyper-detailed image of the star and its worlds, moving about their orbital paths, turning before them in silence.

He felt giddy for a moment at the stark transition and rocked back on his heels. The colonel felt as if he could reach out and touch the glowing sun.

“And then…” McKay’s voice was hushed. “Instant stellar collapse.”

Silently, the star died in front of them. The glowing sphere seemed to shake, trembling like a soap bubble in a breeze, suddenly vulnerable. Flares erupted all over its surface, turning it into a furious churn of energy; the color of the sun shifted, darkening as its spectra was broken apart. Sheppard’s breath caught in his throat as the orange star flickered and contracted, as if an invisible hand were tightening around it.

Then came the flash; the murdered sun pulsed brilliant white, the image throwing stark, hard-edged shadows across the walls of the compartment. He reflexively looked away, the intense light pricking his eyes.

“X-rays,” said Rodney. “An output equal to billions of hydrogen bombs.”

Sheppard blinked away the purple after-image from his retinas, and watched an expanding sphere of the radiation shockwave swell. It crossed the orbits of the inner worlds first, then reached inexorably toward the larger planets and the gas giants further out. He saw one desert globe as it passed within arm’s length of his face; the wave kissed it and it turned black. “Nothing could survive that.” His throat was dry.

McKay shook his head. “Any habitable world is burnt to a cinder. The radiation turns the atmosphere into plasma. A planet-sized firestorm.”

Now the star began a final, inexorable spiral toward implosion, the wreckage of the sun and the halo of stellar material crowding it drawing back, retreating inward. The single point of light grew darker and darker, the orbits of the devastated worlds twisting as gravity grew stronger. The shattered planets coiled in, falling toward a second death.

There was a final, brief eruption of color, and then the star was gone; in its place, a featureless ball of blackness surrounded by a disc of dead matter.

Abruptly, the image froze and Sheppard gasped; without realizing, he’d been holding in his breath. “That’s a pretty damned final solution,” he admitted. “Deploy that in a system infested by Replicators and you’d wipe them out. The speed that happened, they’d never even have the time to jump into hyperspace.” He turned to Rodney. “But this has gotta be a theory, though, right? I mean, tell me they didn’t actually build this thing?”

The color drained from McKay’s face and he looked up from the data pad in his hand. “John… What we just saw… That wasn’t a simulation. That was a recording of an actual real-time sensor log. Fenrir’s weapon killed six planets. One of them had a pre-industrial culture living on it.”

A hot flare of anger struck him. “Why the hell would he do that?”

The panes of text returned, the image of the dead sun vanishing. “It was a error. A misfire.”

“An error?” Sheppard snapped. “A whole star system ripped apart by mistake? That’s a pretty damned big screw up!”

McKay nodded. “There’s a report here, written by none other than Thor himself.” He paused, reading. “Fenrir was running a test of the collapsar device’s deployment system, against the advice of the Asgard Council. He had been warned that it wasn’t ready, but Fenrir didn’t agree. He wanted to certify it ready to use against the Replicators. It was never supposed to trigger.”

“But it did.” Sheppard ran a hand down his face. “Holy crap, how do we know he doesn’t have more of these things on board that ship of his?” He moved to the intercom panel. “I’m calling the bridge. We’ll get Odyssey to send Atlantis a flash traffic message, warn Carter —”

“Wait!” McKay grabbed his arm. “This is an Asgard we’re talking about, remember? Don’t forget, most of the cutting edge tech on our ships is based on hardware they gave us! And that includes our FTL communications.”

“Meaning any signal we send Fenrir could read and decrypt.” Sheppard was silent for a long moment. “We have to go back, then, warn Atlantis in person. Download everything you can pack into a hard drive. We gotta jet, right this minute.”

But McKay’s attention was on the screens of data. “Just a second,” he said, his eyes widening. “There’s more here. Another holographic file, bearing Thor’s personal seal.”

Sheppard hesitated; what he had seen troubled him greatly, and he couldn’t get the image of the dying star from his mind, imagining the same horror unfolding inside Atlantis’s sun, the same monstrous storm of boiling atmosphere engulfing the ocean planet and the city of the Ancients. But too he understood that they needed to know the whole story before they returned the Pegasus galaxy.

“Okay,” he said. “Run it.”

“So,” said Corporal Kennedy, “you’re an Asgard, then.”

The tall alien creature standing across the corridor from him gave the soldier a curious, doll-eyed look. “This is a Risar,” it explained. “It is a fabricated short-span genetic construct drawn from optimized Asgard DNA, retro-evolved for greater physical strength and motility.”

“Right. Thanks for clearing that up.” Kennedy gave a nod, and scratched at his arm. He felt a faint crawling sensation on his flesh and dismissed it. The aliens on this ship had precious little to say, and so far all his attempts at a conversation had been non-starters. He glanced away down the corridor. He still had half his shift to go before Major Lorne sent someone to relieve him, and like most guard duty, this job had nothing to break up the monotony. The interior of the Asgard ship was almost identical throughout; Kennedy idly wondered if maybe the aliens saw colors in a different way to humans, and what looked like plain metal to him was actually highly decorated to the Asgard. Or Risar, or whatever they want to call themselves —

The sound was so quick, so fleeting that he almost missed it. A scratching, skittering, something with too many legs running across bare steel. His hand went to the grip of his P90. “Did you hear that?”

The Risar cocked its head. “I heard nothing.”

The corporal sighted down the barrel of the submachine gun, bringing the butt plate tight to his shoulder. For a moment, he thought he saw a blurred shadow at the corner of his vision. “Over there…”

Then the sound again, this time from the other end of the corridor. He spun in place, bringing the weapon to bare. Suddenly he was sweating. Kennedy thumbed off the safety catch. In the places where the glow-lamps on the walls didn’t work shadows fell in deep patches. He saw movement, arachnid shapes with shiny chitinous carapaces and iridescent wings.

The Risar watched him in expressionless silence.

He glared at the alien. “Are you blind?” he demanded. “Don’t you see them?”

“I do not understand what you are referring to,” it replied.

The tap-tap-tapping became a rattle, then a thunder. The shadows were marching closer, thickening, growing in depth, coming at him with needle-sharp mandibles and scraping claws. Both ends of the corridor were choked with insects, a tidal wave of them, threatening to engulf him. Kennedy squeezed the trigger and fired bursts of rounds into the darkness, but the bullets whined away harmlessly.

Suddenly the Risar was upon him, strong, slender fingers grabbing at his weapon. “Cease fire,” it said. “There is no enemy here.”

“Get off me!” he shouted, and brought his head forward, butting the alien in the chin. It grunted and staggered from the impact, but didn’t release him. “They’ll kill us both!” The insect-sound was everywhere now, inside his head, echoing through his bones, and his flesh crawled with the proximity of them.

He had to escape. Had to find somewhere safe, a place where the monstrous bugs could never get inside.

On the Risar’s belt was a glowing yellow-white orb. Kennedy snatched it up and brandished it at the door to his back.

“Desist,” said the alien, but he was already at the hatch. With a hiss, the doors to the cell parted and the corporal stumbled inside, dragging the Risar with him. The creature clawed at his arm and he swatted it away, slamming it into the wall with a roundhouse punch.

But the sound did not abate; if anything, it grew louder. He was dimly aware of three figures standing in the centre of the chamber, hands palm-to-palm like the members of some strange séance. Wraith, said a far distant voice in his mind, an echo of something Major Lorne had once told him, they mess with your head.

“No,” he snarled, forcing the sound away, trying to focus. His fingers felt slippery around the P90, and when he looked down the weapon was covered in blurry, crawling shapes, indistinct ghost-things that nipped and whispered over his hands.

He cried out in alarm, and it seemed to break the spell; the trio of Wraith turned from their circle.

In one fluid movement they fell upon him, razor-toothed maws in the palms of their hands reaching for him. Together, they tore the life from his flesh, feeding until he was ashes. The Risar, bleeding thin grayish fluid from a cut on its head, died next, caught as it stumbled away down the corridor.

Giddy with the violent pleasure of the nourishment, the three Wraith paused, listening to the serene voice in their heads.

It is time, it told them. Do as I command you.

She felt the pain again, and this time it almost forced her to the ground. Teyla staggered and fell against one of the control room’s consoles for support. A tight gasp escaped her lips.

Fenrir’s hologram materialized next to her. “Are you unwell?” There were a pair of Risar in the chamber, and as one they turned to face her, ready to follow any orders the Asgard would give.

“Something is wrong.” She bit out the words. The agony lanced through her head, bringing tears to her eyes. Amid the pain she could sense the echo of a voice, a thought, a feeling. A cold, calculating anger. “The Wraith…”

One of the consoles chimed and a Risar glanced at it. “Warning,” it explained, likely more for Teyla’s benefit than any other reason. “Weapons fire detected, tier nine.”

Fenrir’s face stiffened. “The holding cells.” The holographic image froze for a split-second as processing power was diverted to some other task. When it refreshed, the Asgard’s dark eyes were drawn into tight slits. “A Risar is dead.”

The blinding headache suddenly abated, and Teyla drew in a gasp of air. “The Wraith have escaped.”

“You seem to be certain of this.”

She nodded. “The Wraith elements in my DNA provide me with a certain…insight.” Teyla took a deep breath. “Before, I sensed something, but it was so fleeting I couldn’t be sure.” The moment of psychic contact she sensed had to be overspill from a communication directed to the prisoners, a telepathic message so strong it could be sent over interstellar distances. Only a Hive Queen was capable of such a feat.

“Extrasensory perception,” remarked Fenrir, “a most unique phenomenon.”

“This is not random,” she told the Asgard, reaching for her radio. “They have chosen this moment for a reason.”

“Attempting to isolate intruders,” said the other Risar. “Scans are inconclusive. Repairs to internal sensors remain incomplete. Unable to locate targets.”

Teyla raised the walkie-talkie to her lips. “Colonel Carter, do you read me? We have a situation.”

Lorne gave the colonel a look; both he and his commander heard the warning in the Athosian’s tone.

“Carter here,” said the colonel, raising her voice to be heard over the thrumming of the engine core. “Teyla, what’s going on? Corporal Kennedy missed his check-in.”

“The Wraith prisoners are free,” came the dour reply. “The corporal has most likely been killed.”

Lorne swore under his breath and ratcheted the slide on is P90. He grabbed his radio and toggled it to the all-units guard frequency. “All teams, go to alert. We have Wraith targets in the clear, repeat Whiskey-Tangos loose on the ship. Weapons free.”

He had barely said the words when the chatter of gunfire sounded from the upper level of the engine chamber.

“Contact!” snapped Carter.

The hatches hissed open and a trooper fell backwards into the room, retreating along the upper gantry, his assault rifle firing bursts from the hip. A pair of ragged Wraith hurtled after him; one held a pistol in either hand and came on, blazing away with each weapon; the other marched a dying man in before him as a human shield, feeding on his fresh kill even as he moved.

The major and the colonel took aim and opened fire, their shots flashing off the metal and plastic of the raised platform; but the predatory aliens were moving fast, dodging and slashing with their claws.

The second Wraith snarled and pitched the near-dead corpse of its feeding victim into the air, off the gantry and down. The soldier bounced off the protective field around the spinning energy-exchanger rings of the drive core, and fell with a sickening crack into a heap.

Lorne saw the soldier with the assault rifle take a round in his leg and stumble. The armed Wraith dove at him, wild for new prey. He led the target and bracketed it with a full-auto discharge, knocking it down; but incredibly, the alien was still alive. The major ripped out a spent stick of ammunition and slammed a fresh clip into the breech.

“There’s two,” shouted Carter, firing and moving, trying to draw a bead on the other attacker. “There were three in the cell! Where’s the other one?”

The door hummed opened and a dead Risar was thrown into the chamber. Teyla saw the two flash bang grenades that had been stabbed into its flesh and instinctively threw herself away from the corpse, down behind the cover of a console.

The concussion wave clipped her as she moved, the magnesium-bright flare of white light blazing through the room.

Unprepared for the shock effect, the two Risar gave off strange, low groans and touched their faces in a peculiarly human gesture. They blundered about, dazzled and stunned.

Teyla smelled the Wraith before she saw it, sensed it entering the smoke-wreathed room behind her. Snatching the stunner pistol from her belt holster, she pivoted, turning to come up on one knee.

She heard Fenrir call her name in warning. The alien warrior was already upon her, and with a savage kick, it connected with her wrist and knocked the gun flying. She staggered, stumbling backwards, trying not to lose her balance.

It was the same Wraith she and Ronon had encountered in the cells. He gave a hissing chuckle. “You again. I thought I could feel you.” It tapped its head. “In here.” The alien drew two blades from its belt; they were USAF-issue combat knives, and one of them was still wet with human blood. “I wonder, what will it feel like when I kill you?”