Nightfall

Chapter Thirteen

From the smell of it, the cages had actually been built as animal enclosures of some kind, a long line of them radiating off an enclosed corridor that ran the length of one of the tree-settlement’s vast boughs. There were other people in other cages ranged around them, most of them the airmen from the squads brought through the Stargate by Major Lorne and left behind to act as security. They had been overwhelmed by Wraith shock troops; the diminishment of their numbers made it clear how many of them had fought until they fell. The doctor caught the eye of Lieutenant Allan and the woman nodded grimly back at her.

“I have really had it with being locked up,” said Jennifer, testing the heavy knurled branches that formed the bars of the wide enclosure where they had been confined. Through knotholes in the planks that made up the floor, Keller glimpsed green leaves waving in the wind and far below the brown earth at the foot of the massive tree complex. They were below the main tier of the settlement, down in the underlevels beneath the lodges and the main square.

“You get used to it after a while,” said Ronon, laboring his breaths. He looked pale and drawn, and he sat in the shade, avoiding the shafts of orange sunlight coming down through the slatted ceiling.

She went to him and crouched by his side; in turn the Satedan looked away, irritated. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Bored,” he retorted listlessly, “Bored with you asking me how I feel.” He stifled a cough and glared at her, as if it were her fault he was unwell.

The doctor rolled her eyes. “Tough guys are always the worst patients. You do know that it doesn’t make you a wimp if you’re sick, right?”

“Of course I do,” Ronon snapped. “But I don’t have to like it.”

“How do you feel?” she asked again.

He blinked. “Light’s too bright. Headache. I just need to get out of this place, that’s all.”

“Tall order,” grumbled the lieutenant, looking around at all the dense wood surrounding them.. “I’d give my right arm for a hacksaw. They took all our weapons.”

“All yours,” noted Dex, palming two small spade-shaped throwing blades from a hidden pocket in the lining of his tunic. “Not all mine.”

“Great, a pair of fruit knives,” said Keller. “That’s really going to intimidate them.”

“Company coming,” called the lieutenant, as movement at the far end of the corridor signaled a new arrival. One of the elder’s guards, nervous and sweaty, hustled Laaro toward them; the boy had a barrow laden with clay bowls and a massive gourd the size of an oil drum filled with water. The youth moved from cage to cage, doling out bowlfuls of the brackish liquid. Allan took one and sniffed it.

“Safe to drink?” said Keller.

“The Wraith took all our gear, including our purification tabs.”

Laaro tapped the gourd. “The water is clean, I promise you.” To demonstrate, he took a deep draught himself.

Keller passed a bowl to Ronon and he sipped it gingerly. “What’s going on out there?” she asked the boy. The doctor kept her voice low so the guard would not hear them talking.

Laaro’s young eyes were fearful. “Everyone is very afraid,” he began. “The Queen has left many, many Wraith behind, here in the settlement, some out at the valley of the gateway. Kullid has been talking for them.”

“Collaborator,” spat the Satedan. “I wasn’t looking hard enough. Should have guessed…”

“None of us guessed,” said Keller. She could see that Laaro was more shocked than any of them by the healer’s secret allegiance. “What was he saying?”

“Kullid spoke of the old stories of the Wraith, and said that they were lies. He said that many people have known this, but they never spoke up for fear of incurring the wrath of the elders.” Laaro sighed. “He was right. Kullid is not the only one to have declared himself subject to the Queen.”

Keller considered this for a moment; the Atlanteans had encountered worlds before where the Wraith were feared and revered in equal measure, and reluctantly she realized that Heruun was no different. Even after all the horror the Wraith brought with them, there would always be some souls who saw such power over life or death as a thing to be venerated.

Laaro went on. “Kullid said that the Wraith have come back and freed us from the tyranny of the Aegis. He told the whole township that they must show the Queen the fealty she deserves…”

“And if they don’t?” said Allan. “I bet I can guess the alternative.”

“He said those with the sickness will be healed by the Wraith.”

Keller stopped. “They don’t heal. The Wraith kill.”

“Kullid promises otherwise.” There was a note of forlorn hope in Laaro’s voice that cut the doctor like a knife. “Many of those who did not go to the sick lodge have now ventured there on his assurance.”

“It’s a lie,” growled Ronon. “Never forget that.”

The boy’s hand trembled slightly as he passed Keller a bowl through the wooden spars. “My mother… Thinks differently.”

“Jaaya?” said Keller.

“She has gone to the lodge with my father.” He shot her a sudden, hard look, his eyes shining with barely-contained tears. “I told her the voyagers would save him, but she did not listen!”

“Laaro!” called the guard. “You are finished here. Come!” The burly man in robes came forward and tugged on the boy’s arm.

Keller gave him a rueful smile. “It’ll be okay,” she told him. “We’ll get through this, believe me.”

“Do not forsake us, voyager,” said the youth, as he pushed away the barrow.

At the entrance, the door banged open once more and new figures entered, pushing Laaro aside and tipping the dregs of the water-gourd over the floor. A cluster of men in the robes of high office were shoved forward; each of them were elders, with their characteristic clothing ripped and torn, and their gold circlets and bangles broken or missing. A pair of Wraith warriors marched them in at the tips of stunner rifles, slamming the weapons into their backs when they didn’t move quickly enough.

A trio of the elders were forced into the cage next to the one where Keller, Ronon and Allan had been placed. They fell to the floor and scuffled, desperate to plead for their freedom. Only one of them did not beg their new jailers for release; he sat on his haunches, staring at the floor.

“Takkol?” Keller recognized the man from the feast of the Returned, but he seemed a pale shadow of the proud and haughty chieftain who had looked down his nose at the contingent from Atlantis. He seemed smaller, lost in the dark pool of his tattered robes, his finery tainted. The elder raised his head slightly and saw her.

With sudden animation he scrambled over to the cage wall, reaching through the bars toward her. “Voyagers!” he implored. “Please, you must take me with you!”

“Take you where?” said Ronon. “We’re prisoners too.”

Takkol didn’t seem to hear him. “Please, take me with you through the Gateway, to your Atlantis! I cannot stay here… They will…” His voice fell to a whisper. “Cull me.”

“Nobody goes back to Atlantis,” said Ronon. They had all heard McKay’s use of the ‘condition black’ emergency code over the radio channel, and they all knew what it meant.

Takkol shook his head furiously. “No, no. You must understand, I have been cast out, and I will be murdered before the day is done! Aaren betrayed me, the filthy traitor!”

“How’d that happen?” said the lieutenant, with grim irony that went totally unnoticed by the fretting elder.

“He defected to the Wraith,” hissed Takkol. “I… I think he may have always harbored a secret admiration for them… Certain things he said, deeds he did… In the light of recent events, they take on new meaning.” He sighed. “Aaren is Senior Elder now, with the collusion of Kullid and the blessing of the predators.”

One of the other minor elders spun away from the bars and snarled at the Atlanteans. “You brought this upon us! You knew the Wraith were coming here, didn’t you? You knew it and you did not warn us! And now we will all perish!”

Keller said nothing.

The energy wash of the teleportation effect was so strong that Teyla was knocked off balance, and she found herself leaning against a metal console, blinking away the after-images seared on her retina. Her throat was dry and she swallowed, fearful that the first image she would see when her vision cleared was the arid landscape of Heruun or worse, the gloom of a Wraith vessel; but she quickly realized that she had not been transported with all the others.

She was still in the command chamber of the Aegis, still surrounded by the shambling Risar moving to and fro at their tasks, still before her the wide, low shape of Fenrir’s cryogenic capsule lying in a pool of white vapor.

“Where did you send them?” she demanded, her voice echoing. “Fenrir? Answer me!”

The Asgard’s holographic image was gone.

“I know you can hear me!” She moved to the capsule and beat a fist on the thick crystalline glass, beneath which slumbered the flesh of the alien being. “Where are my friends?” Her voice became a shout.

The eyes of the sleeping Asgard snapped open for one brief moment, then closed again just as swiftly. Suddenly there was a Risar at her side, firmly taking her arm and pulling her away. She spun about, ready to attack, and came face to face with a second of the creatures brandishing an orb.

“Why did you lie to me?” The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. “I… Had begun to believe that I could trust you, Teyla Emmagan. I believed we had developed a rapport.”

“If you have injured Sheppard and the others —”

“They are unhurt,” came the sharp reply. “I sent them to the Hive Ship.”

Teyla gasped. “Then my friends are as good as dead! The Wraith Queen will destroy them!”

“No,” said the voice. “External sensors register the presence of locating tracer devices similar to the one I detect upon you. Sheppard, Carter, McKay and the others… They live still.”

“You must bring them back!”

A flash of color and light signaled the formation of Fenrir’s avatar. The Asgard’s face was pinched and his eyes clouded with anger. “Do not presume to tell me what I must do. I have only to form a command in my thoughts and you will be sent to join them, human.”

Teyla spread her hands. “Then do it. Send me to the Wraith, send me and my unborn child to our deaths!”

“You will not leave until I have my answer!” raged the Asgard, fury and dejection warring in his words. “Why did you lie?” The question resonated in the cold air of the chamber like distant thunder.

The Athosian let out a long breath. “Because I felt sorry for you. I have lost all of my people in recent months, and unlike you I do not even have the mercy of knowing what fate befell them. The pain and loss I feel… I did not want to inflict it on another living being, even as I knew that we were wrong to keep this from you.” She was unable to meet the alien’s unwavering gaze. “There is no excuse, Fenrir. I am sorry that we kept this secret.”

The avatar paced the room. “My people, gone forever… The Replicators dead but a new breed of their kind running wild here in Pegasus… It is all so much to comprehend. And all the work, everything I did was all for nothing.”

“The work,” repeated Teyla. “When I asked you about that before, you would not speak of it to me. What do you mean by that?”

Fenrir halted, his thin fingers knotting together. “I have created such horror, Teyla Emmagan. In the pursuit of war, such great darkness. But all I wanted was a chance to find redemption… And now that has been denied to me.”

Teyla’s blood ran cold. “What horror?”

Lorne picked at the matted, fibrous webbing across the entrance of the cell, but the pliant material refused to budge. He stared out into the corridor beyond, where four Wraith warriors stood silently on guard, stunner rifles cradled in their grips. “So,” he said, turning back to face McKay, Sheppard and Carter, “forgive me for saying so, but if I understand it correctly, we have gone from our normal kind of being in serious trouble to a whole new level of how screwed we are.”

“Yeah,” sighed McKay. “That’s about it.”

Sheppard gave Lorne a hard look. “Show a little optimism, will ya? We’ve been in worse situations.”

Carter raised her eyebrows. “Have you? Really?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Like what?”

“Uh…” Sheppard hesitated. “Well, there was this one time —”

McKay made a loud, wordless sound that was half annoyance and half exasperation. “What do you two want, a scorecard? Can we concentrate on the problem at hand?”

“Which one, Doc?” Lorne said in a deceptively light tone. “We’ve sure got plenty to choose from.” Things had moved quickly when the Asgard had done his beaming thing; one second all the Atlantis team members were on the Aegis, the next they were on the Hive Ship. The Wraith Queen had been ready for them — maybe she used her telepathy to raise the alarm the second before they appeared on her ship, or something — and Evan Lorne and his colleagues found themselves disarmed and languishing in Wraith Jail. Again.

Still, at least they weren’t strapped up and glued into one of those feeding chambers along with a bunch of desiccated corpses. Not yet, anyway. He sighed; hopefully Ronon Dex, Doc Keller and the rest of the squad down on Heruun were having better luck.

“I am so sick of seeing the inside of these places,” grumbled McKay. After the Wraith had thrown them in the cells and left them to rot, it was the scientist who sheepishly added the new and alarming pieces to the jigsaw puzzle of what was happening around here. It was bad enough the Wraith had taken the upper hand, tactically speaking, but all this stuff about the little grey guy being some kind of mad scientist convict was not a welcome revelation.

Colonel Carter had not said much since McKay mentioned the word ‘collapsar’. The look of abject shock on her face had been more than enough to worry Lorne, and Sheppard had helpfully cemented that by explaining still further.

“Fenrir made a black hole bomb,” he said bluntly. As much as Lorne thought about that string of words, the scope of something so destructive was just out of his comprehension. He’d seen naquadria-laced super-nukes detonate and those were incredible enough to behold; what Sheppard was talking about dwarfed that by an entire order of magnitude.

Not for the first time, the major found himself wondering whatever happened to the Air Force that he had joined out of high school, the nicely earthbound military with jet planes and that kinda stuff. Just when did serving my country turn into a science fiction movie?

McKay held his chin in his hands. “I’m not sure how much she gave him of the files I recovered from the Asgard core aboard Odyssey,” he noted, “but there was a lot of content on that Wraith data module.”

“I saw tactical plots of Asuran forces in Pegasus flash up on that big screen,” said Carter. “We have similar information back at Atlantis.”

“Showing him where the enemy is,” added Sheppard. “You saw how Fenrir reacted when the Queen did that little show-and-tell with a captive Replicator. I’ve never seen that look on an Asgard’s face before.”

Carter nodded “I have. Thor had the same expression when the bug-form Replicators took down the Beliskner. They may seem alien, but they have the same emotions as we do. Fear and terror, hate and anger.”

“Enough to want revenge?” said Lorne. The tech stuff was out of his league, but understanding the simple need to take some payback… He knew that all too well.

The colonel nodded again.

Much of what Fenrir said ranged far beyond her ability to grasp, but among the terms and complex sciences he spoke of, Teyla swiftly found a route to understanding; and with it, an icy dread deep in her chest.

She asked the Asgard to speak of his ‘work’ and he told her, unfettered and without concession. The old Athosian myth-tale of the Nightfall gained new power as Fenrir spoke of the weapon he had created in the war against the other strain of Replicators, this ‘collapsar’ device. Teyla had seen and experienced much that had challenged her view of the universe since joining John Sheppard’s team; but there was little she could bring to mind that so frightened her as Fenrir’s clinical, metered description of a weapon that could put out a sun and turn whole worlds to ashen ruin.

He spoke of the accident and his arrogance, of his responsibility and the pariah’s mark placed upon him by his own kind, a sentence of exile that spanned generations by human reckoning. Teyla listened, unable to speak, struck silent by the enormity of it. Fenrir continued, and she sensed that for him, this was no longer an explanation. It had become a confession. In all the time he had been alone aboard this ship, crossing the void with nothing but crude reflections of himself for companionship, he had wanted nothing more than the chance for some kind of salvation. She felt a sorrow for Fenrir that matched her fear of his dark science.

“After a time, I came to understand my mistakes. The totality of it was made clear to me. And so I rejected my works as a weaponsmith and returned to the discipline that I had known first, known best. The science of life and biology.” The avatar glanced down at its photonic hands. “Our people, Teyla, we had traveled so far down the road of genetic alteration that we had transformed the very matter of ourselves beyond recognition. We could no longer reproduce, only duplicate, and even then with greater and greater errors of replication in each iteration.”

Teyla thought of the images she had seen cast from the Wraith data device. She found her voice again, in a whisper. “Your race was dying.”

He nodded once, a curt gesture of utter finality. “I made it my goal to search for a solution. And… I believe I came close to it.”

“How?”

“The Wraith.” Fenrir gestured toward the oval screen, where a visual of the Hive Ship drifting nearby was displayed. “They possess such unprecedented physical capabilities. Their capacity for cellular regeneration… It was only by chance I came here, by chance I captured them and dissected one of their kind… Or perhaps fate, if such a thing exists…” He paused, musing. “ I believe… I believed that their genetic structure might provide the missing piece of the puzzle. I wanted to draw from them, weave that potential into the Asgard DNA helix and give my race the chance to live again.”

Fenrir fell silent once again; he seemed to have the weight of the ages upon his thin, frail form. He was a digital ghost, the manifestation of a lost soul. Fenrir’s terrible solitude came from him in a mute wave, and Teyla’s breath caught in her throat in a moment of pure empathy.

“But now that data is worthless,” he said. “And my life has no meaning. All I have left is my sorrow… And my fury.”

“Why do you think we’re still alive?” said Rodney, picking at the scabby flesh of the cell walls and grimacing. “And please don’t say ‘lunch’.”

“This Queen doesn’t seem the type to waste an opportunity,” said Sam. “She said her clan was a small one. She’s probably looking at the bigger picture. She wants to know what we know.”

“Drain us of intel before she drains us of life,” noted Lorne. “Nice.”

Sheppard folded his arms. “We may have already given her way too much of that already.”

“I’m sorry!” snapped McKay, feeling heat rise in his cheeks. “How was I to know that data pad would be hijacked the moment we got here? Quadruple 128-bit encryption seemed like it would be good enough —”

“It’s not your fault,” Carter broke in. “We have to fix the problem, not the blame, Rodney. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

Lorne nodded. “The Wraith will do that for you.”

Sheppard gave the major an acid glance. “The way I figure it, Queeny and her gang here didn’t come looking to pick a fight with Fenrir. You saw how she spoke to him. She knows they don’t have the grunt to beat the Aegis in a stand-up fight.”

“Lucky for Fenrir she didn’t know the combat systems were damaged,” Carter threw in.

“I think she wants that ship intact, or at least as in as few pieces as possible. I mean, think about it. Forget the collapsar bomb for a second, even without that an Asgard warship is some pretty heavy iron. Intergalactic hyperspace capability, transporters, advanced weapons and shields.”

Carter considered this. “Enough to tip the balance in a battle, that’s for certain.”

McKay saw where Sheppard’s train of thought was leading. “They take the Aegis and become Wraith Clan Number One…”

“Maybe even turn the tide of battle against the Asurans,” added Lorne. “But if the Queen knows about the bomb… She’s not going to let that slide. She’ll want that too, the whole nine yards.”

All of them were quiet for a while. McKay knew that Carter, Sheppard and Lorne were all thinking the same thing he was, imagining a war-torn Pegasus galaxy ripped open by collapsar weapons and pirated Asgard technology, set afire by the battles between the Wraith and the Replicators; and beyond that, the threat of the vampiric aliens venturing further, perhaps to the Milky Way galaxy as well.

“The Wraith cannot, under any circumstances, be allowed to possess that ‘isa’ device or the Aegis.” Sam’s voice was low and grim. “We have to do whatever it takes to deny it to them.”

Rodney wandered over to the cell entrance and glared at the web holding them inside it. “The only question is, how?”

“A communication,” said the Wraith scientist, pausing in his work. “From the Asgard.”

The Queen heard his words but did not acknowledge them. She lay back in repose upon the command throne at the centre of the Hive Ship’s control chamber, her subordinates working over the open incision in the flesh of her abdomen. The pain from the live cut was harsh and constant, but it focused her thoughts in a way that nothing else could. Because of the quickened nature of her species and the lightning speed with which Wraith could heal, it was necessary for one worker drone to constantly slice at the edges of the slit to stop the bleeding edges from knitting back together before the surgery could be completed. “Finish it,” she hissed, savoring the pain.

He bowed slightly. “Just so, mistress. It is almost done.”

She felt a slick, dense shape as it was slipped beneath the epidermis of her torso. In seconds, the matter of her flesh was meshing around it, making the implant part of her.

The scientist backed away and bowed again, oily lines of royal blood staining his fingers. “Complete,” he breathed. “You shame us all by your willingness to accept this burden, my Queen.”

She looked down and waved the other drones away, watching the wound pull itself tight and scab over, the flow of seeping blood slowing, stopping. “We are Wraith,” said the Queen. “And no matter what caste we are born into, we still serve the greater good of the clan at day’s end.” With difficulty she stood up, wincing at jagged darts of agony from her abdomen. “Ah. I will bear this duty proudly.”

The scientist brought his hands together. “My colleagues labor below in the egg orchard,” he noted, referring to the protected chamber in the heart of the Hive Ship where knots of genetic material that were Wraith yet to be born were formed. “The pheromones have been injected into a suitable zygote. Birthing of an alternate will commence when… When…” Suddenly the Wraith halted and gave a shuddering sigh, something akin to a human sob. “Why must you do this?” he demanded sorrowfully. “Why must it be you?”

The Queen reached out and cupped his chin in her hand. “Because only I can.” She bared her teeth at him. “Do not be afraid. I do this for you all, for the clan.” The female Wraith spread her hands to take in the whole of the chamber and all the drones and warriors working about her. “I do this because I love you all.”

She stepped down from the throne’s dais and stood in front of a flickering lens-screen. “Prepare the warriors and open a channel,” she ordered, buttoning her tunic closed. “I will speak with the Asgard now.”

“As you command.” The scientist touched a fleshy nerve-control and the screen resolved into an image of the dark-eyed alien.

“Fenrir,” said the Queen, noting without comment that the human female Teyla — the one whose genetic matrix had been marked by one of the other clans — stood behind him. She had been slightly disappointed when the woman had not been given to her as the other humans had; but it was becoming clear to the Queen that the Asgard viewed these lessers as some sort of pets. Perhaps this Teyla was his favorite…

“I will hear what you wish to say to me,” said the Asgard, without preamble. “Under truce, as you requested.”

The Queen gave the scientist a sideways glance and he nodded. Everything was proceeding as she had expected it would. “I will speak to Fenrir,” she replied. “Only to Fenrir.”

“Whatever you have to say can be heard by Teyla Emmagan,” said the Asgard. “In the interests of balance, I will hear you both.”

The Queen flicked at a long, talon-like nail. “Very well. But I will not address you from a distance. If I must speak to you in this manner, it will only be face to face.”

“I cannot accommodate you,” retorted the spindly humanoid. “I can communicate only through this avatar —”

“And I have only the word of a simulation that it is indeed the real Fenrir!” Her voice rose. “I trust nothing,” she continued, “only the evidence of my own eyes. Face to face, Asgard, or you will never know what I have to offer you.”

There was a long moment when the image froze, and briefly the Queen entertained the thought that she might have misread the little alien’s emotional state; but then Fenrir’s avatar flickered and changed, nodding once. “Very well,” it replied, “but none other than you.”

“That is all that will be needed,” she noted. The screen went black and she turned quickly to the scientist. “You know what to do. No thrusters, use only —”

The rest of her command disappeared into the humming rush of a teleport discharge.

Teyla watched the Queen bow stiffly toward the Asgard and in turn Fenrir’s avatar inclined its head. She stood nearby and did nothing, never taking her eyes off the alien female. Her nostrils twitched; the moment the Wraith appeared in the teleporter flash, she had detected the faint odor of blood — but Wraith blood, not human. She wondered what might have transpired on the Hive Ship and fought down the desire to shout out and demand to know the fate of Sheppard, Carter and the others.

“Speak,” said the avatar.

The Wraith Queen glanced casually at the Risar standing about the chamber and walked toward the cryogenic capsule. “Fascinating technology,” she began. “Your flesh-form is in suspended animation, yes? And yet you are capable of communication through this instrumentality,” she nodded at the holograph, “and these organic drones. Your knowledge is far superior to ours. We Wraith are utterly dormant when we enter a slumbering state.”

“I will not grant you that technology,” Fenrir replied. “The Asgard do not share their knowledge with strangers.”

“But you shared it with the humans,” she noted. “And ‘the Asgard’? Do you mean the High Council, Fenrir?”

Teyla saw his dark eyes narrow at the mention of his peers.

The Queen continued. “They are dead, my friend. All that is Asgard exists here now.” She chuckled. “You can decide what is and is not to be shared, or with whom.”

“The Wraith want only to feed and to rule,” snapped Teyla, no longer able to remain silent. “Anything you give them will be turned to that goal!”

To her surprise, the Queen gave a slight nod. “The human is almost correct. Yes, we do seek superiority, but only against our enemies. We wish to end our war with the Asurans, the Replicators. You could help us do that. With this ship.” She licked her lips. “With the isa device.”

“How do you know of that?” Fenrir demanded. The Risar mumbled the same words beneath their breath, coming forward in a threatening manner.

“Does it matter? The humans were careless. I know that you have the power to blind suns. If you granted that to my clan, we would be able to wipe out the Asurans in weeks.” She inclined her head. “Think of it, Fenrir. The Replicators, the scourge of galaxies, finally wiped out forever! Is that not fitting?” The Queen came closer, her voice thickening with venom. “After all that they took from you, after all the destruction they wrought across the worlds of your kind, is it not right that a child of Asgard extinguishes their blighted kind from the universe?”

Fenrir’s image trembled. “I… Am the last…”

“You cannot give them the collapsar!” cried Teyla. “Once they have destroyed the Asurans, what then? Will the Wraith stand down, or will they use your technology to plunder? The hunt… The cull is all they know!” She moved toward the avatar. “Pegasus will burn in their wake, and no life will be safe from them. They will claw across the void and pillage every world they find.”

“We have no interest in empires!” snarled the Queen. “Only justice for our dead and an end to the Replicator menace!”

“She lies!”

“And she is afraid!”

“You will both be silent,” growled Fenrir. “I… Have made my choice.” He wandered to the oval screen, where a vast intergalactic map was displayed, a red line showing the course the Aegis had taken on its penal cruise, from the Othala star cluster, through the Kalium and Andromeda galaxies to distant Pegasus. The Asgard seemed lost in the image. “My world is dead. My people gone. There is nothing here for me now.”

With those words, Teyla sensed some terrible fraction of the distance in Fenrir’s heart, and it robbed her of her breath.

On the screen, the red line extended, moving up and away into the starless void between galaxies, projecting a course into an infinite dark. “You will both be put off my vessel. I will leave this quadrant of space and never return.” He paused. “I want nothing more to do with war. Perhaps I will find solace in other places… Other universes…”

“A pity,” said the Wraith, glancing at the Athosian. “That was not the answer I had hoped for. But in truth, I suspected the human cattle might have swayed you.”

“Fenrir’s choice was his own!” Teyla retorted.

“Do not attempt to employ force against me,” warned Fenrir. “My Risar have completed repairs on the weapons systems of the Aegis. I can disable your Hive Ship with a single command.”

The Queen gave a long, staged sigh. “Yes, I noted the damage to your vessel… I wonder what systems still do not function? Matter transporters? Force shields?” She grinned. “Internal sensors?”

“What do you mean?” Teyla whirled as the oval screen morphed into a display of the ship’s interior; as before, may parts were still blacked out.

“I took advantage of your weakness, Asgard,” she purred. “While we have spoken, my clan has inserted clusters of warriors aboard this ship.”

“I have detected nothing. This is a bluff.”

The Queen wandered toward the centre of the room, the Risar moving to encircle her. “Believe that if you wish. But the reality is, my clan will not let this ship or its bounty slip from our grasp. We are going to take the Aegis, with or without you.” She reached down and undid her tunic as she spoke, pressing at a bulge in her stomach. “This prize will ensure our mastery of all Wraith…”

In the depths of Teyla’s mind there was a sudden jolt of pure, black emotion, resonating out from the thoughts of the Queen. “No —”

“That victory,” said the alien, “is worth any sacrifice.” With a strangled yell, she twisted the knot of flesh in her gut and leapt toward the cryogenic capsule.

Even before she was aware of doing it, Teyla flung herself in the other direction, diving for the cover of a control console.

In the churning core of the organic implant inside the Queen’s abdomen, bio-chemicals mingled with Wraith blood and triggered a catastrophic release of burning energy.

In less than a heartbeat, the alien evaporated, becoming the core of an exothermal detonation that ripped apart Fenrir’s Risar and tore into the Asgard’s vital life-support frame.