Nightfall

Chapter Sixteen

The hangar bay was a wide space with a low ceiling, supported by the same curved stanchions of steel that ribbed the corridors throughout the interior of the Asgard ship. The interior illumination was poor, most of the glow strips set in the corners of the deck dead or dying. Colonel Carter’s surprise attack upon the Wraith hive had put the interior of the Aegis into disarray; gantries and pieces of the roof were toppled and lay in shattered piles. There were perhaps a dozen of the strange, manta-shaped Asgard shuttlecraft scattered about the chamber, most of them damaged where they had shifted in the colossal impact. Teyla saw one of them flipped over against another, the glowing coils of its drive matrix blinking and fading.

The air inside the hangar was acrid with the smell of burned plastic, and cold. Life support functions on this tier were failing, and she could see the first rimes of hoarfrost forming in white patches across the decking, the puffs of vapor from her breaths. Beneath her boots, the metal flooring creaked and vibrated.

To the far side she spotted a craft that appeared intact, the dim glow beneath it illuminating the area around it in a pool of radiant light. The sight of it gave her pause, and Teyla felt her adrenaline spike; it was a moment of primal fear-reaction, recalling the terror she had felt when the Asgard’s gene-drones had captured her on Heruun. For an instant she remembered the horrible sensation of paralysis as the rays from the orb device engulfed her, her own body resisting her as the aliens gathered her up and took her away. She shuddered and forced the recollection away.

The memory had distracted her; even as she realized it, the attack came.

A giant humanoid shape threw itself from the shadows of an overhead support frame, and Teyla spun away, hearing the rush of air as it fell toward her. She was quick enough to avoid being flattened by the enraged Risar, but not quite enough to get out of its reach. It cuffed her as she turned to aim a stunner, and the impact made her howl with pain. The Wraith pistol flew from her grip and was lost in the shadows beneath another of the saucer-ships.

Landing with a heavy thud, the Asgard clone-creature went for her with its spindly, taloned fingers raised in claws. It was mumbling incoherently, staggering even as it advanced. Teyla saw it was wounded and sickly, but still she did not doubt that the Risar could kill her easily enough. In sheer body mass alone it was twice her size, and beneath its pale torso, ropey muscles bunched whenever it moved.

She backed away, raising her hands in a fighting stance. Teyla searched the blank-eyed face of the Risar for any kind of recognition or intelligence and found none. With Fenrir dead, whatever advanced technology the Asgard had used to control his towering proxies was inoperative, and now the clones had been reduced to mindless automatons, savage things that knew only madness.

There was dark blood on its fingers; the mark of kills it had already made, perhaps human, perhaps Wraith or other Risar, it was impossible to know. The creature made a gurgling sound and rushed her.

“Move forward!” Ronon shouted, pushing out from behind the shade of the nearest tree trunks. Behind him, he sensed Keller moving quickly, keeping low and going from cover to cover, and past her the mixed group of Takkol’s guards and Soonir’s rebels. Lieutenant Allan was at his side, firing and moving. Her face was haggard and worn, and as they both paused for breath behind an overturned cart, she threw him a glance.

“You look like I feel,” she told him.

“I’m fine,” he snapped back angrily. “If you can’t cut it, then stay here.” He ducked as pulses of stun-fire shrieked past them, answered seconds later by the rattle of a returning rodgun salvo.

Something caught his eye and he glanced up. High above, way beyond the clouds and into the deep reaches of Heruun’s sky, there were streaks of dark color and fire, crossing from horizon toward horizon. He’d seen the like before; wreckage from low orbit, burning up as it plunged through the atmosphere on re-entry. There was no way to know if they were pieces of Wraith or Asgard starship; but whatever they were, it was a grim signal that battle had been joined out in space.

Allan was looking up as well. “You think —?”

“I think Sheppard and Carter won’t go down without a fight,” he rumbled. “And neither will we.”

Keller pressed closer to them. She had a gun in her hand, but Ronon knew she wouldn’t fire it unless circumstances were at their very worst. The doctor fixed him with a measuring stare. “Maybe we should let the locals handle this,” she said, and nodded in the direction of the sick lodge just up ahead along the wooden boardwalk.

Ronon peered through a gap in the wagon’s slats. “They’ll get cut to pieces,” he growled. From his vantage point he could see the shapes of a handful of Wraith warriors moving behind the open windows of the lodge. The odds were bad, but he’d faced worse; and inside that building were dozens of civilians who, out of foolish choice or coercion, had become prisoners — and therefore prey — of his old enemy. He couldn’t let that stand.

Keller spoke so only he could hear her. “Ronon. On your neck there, the skin.” She touched her throat to indicate the place she meant. “There are lesions… I saw them before, on the Returned. It’s an indicator, a sign of the last stage of the sickness.”

Ronon blinked hard. His head felt leaden and heavy, and each breath he took tasted strange, tainted. The Satedan had said nothing of this to anyone else, not of that or the shooting pains in his joints that were growing worse with every passing hour. “I can deal with it,” he grated.

“Ronon —” she began.

“I said I can handle it, Teyla!” he snapped.

Keller frowned. “Ronon, it’s Jennifer. Teyla’s not here, remember?”

He hesitated, his head swimming. For a moment, the face of the woman before him became shadowy and indistinct. Angry with himself, he shook off the instant of confusion and gripped his particle magnum tightly, enough so the tremors in his hands were not evident. Ronon eyed Keller. “Whatever is wrong with me, I’m not going to lie down and wait for it to take me. That’s not my way.”

Without waiting for an answer, he grabbed the side of the wagon and vaulted up over it with a howl of effort, leading with his pistol. Ronon landed hard on the wooden deck on the other side and fired as he ran, some shots going wide, but enough of them hitting their marks to knock down the Wraith guarding the doorway.

“Follow the voyager!” shouted Soonir. “Advance! Advance!”

The pain blazed through Ronon, stinging like poison, but he cursed it and kept on going, driven on by pure fury. He kept expecting the next stun bolt that crackled through the air to be the one that struck him down; but the numbing cold of the energy discharge never came, and suddenly he was at the sick lodge’s entrance, cracking the faceplate of a Wraith warrior with a slamming blow from the butt of his gun. Even as the alien fell, there came a ragged battle cry from behind him as the men and women of Heruun took the fight to their invaders.

Another wave of fatigue swept over him and he gritted his teeth. I just need to hold on, he told himself, just until the fight is over.

Teyla had nowhere to go; the Risar had backed her into a corner formed from a fallen cargo module and the canted fuselage of another shuttlecraft. She dodged, bracing herself off the saucer-ship’s wing and kicking away. Teyla spun and put all her effort into a sweeping blow from her foot, connecting with the Risar’s arm. Bone snapped and the clone gurgled again, ignoring the hit and slashing at the air with its good arm. The very tips of razor-sharp claws caught the front of her tunic and tore through leather and cloth, a scant hair’s breadth from the flesh of her throat. She bobbed and shifted on the balls of her feet, but the Risar kept on coming, waving those gangly arms. Teyla could see no escape route that would not have her clawed and torn should she take it.

In that moment there was movement. More shapes in the half-light, behind the Risar and coming closer. For one fearful second, she thought the creature would be joined by more of its kind; but then a familiar and welcome voice cried out her name.

“Teyla!” called Sheppard. “Hit the deck!”

The Risar turned angrily, irritated that it had been disturbed. The Athosian woman did not question the colonel’s command; she dropped and struck out again at the Risar’s legs, this time hitting the mark.

Momentarily caught between two targets, the clone-creature snarled and hesitated, raising it’s uninjured hand. With Teyla clear of the line of fire, Sheppard brought the stunners he held in either hand to bear and fired twin bursts of white fire into the Risar’s torso. Incredibly, it took the first two hits without pause and staggered toward the colonel, lowing and hooting.

Teyla pivoted into a crescent kick that went up and connected hard with the clone’s head. The stunning impacts finally registered in the Risar’s maddened mind and it toppled, falling toward a snarl of wreckage on the deck. The creature collapsed against a broken stanchion and coughed out a final gasp of air, the metallic support beam impaling it like a spear.

Lorne extended a hand to help Teyla to her feet, but she waved him away with a thin smile. “It did not injure me.”

“Glad to see you’re still in once piece,” said Sheppard. He sounded tired and crack-throated. “And that was a good call about these UFOs. Never woulda thought of that.”

She blinked “You-eff-oh? I do not understand the term?”

“Never mind,” he told her, pointing back the way they had come. “I’ll dig out a copy of Independence Day when we get back to Atlantis, that’ll explain everything. Come on, I think I found us a ride.”

Sheppard led them toward the lone craft she had spotted earlier, and Teyla nodded. “I confess I have only a basic grasp of Asgard technology. I hope we will be able to operate this vessel.”

“The colonel once told me he could fly anything,” said Lorne. “Time to see if he was just bragging, I guess.”

Another threatening rumble resonated through the decking and a segment of the steel ceiling broke away and collapsed with a ringing concussion.

“I said anything with wings,” Sheppard retorted, stepping up to the hull of the ship, feeling across the surface with the flat of his hand. “This doesn’t count.” He frowned. “No seams. Where’s the damn hatch?”

“There will be a touch point,” Teyla noted.

“I got it.” Sheppard moved his fingers over a shallow oval indent in the hull metal and part of the steel fuselage folded in on itself. “There —”

Whatever he was going to say next was lost as the Risar inside the shuttle came through the hatch and slammed Sheppard into the deck.

“Let me through!” Keller shouted, and shoved her way past the men collecting at the sick lodge’s door. She felt a hand on her shoulder — Lieutenant Allan — and heard her call out a warning, but Jennifer shrugged the other woman away and kept going. Allan cursed and coughed; the USAF officer was still weak with spent effort and the aftershock of losing decades of her life to a hungry Wraith.

The bodies of a dozen dead warriors littered the floor, and a dozen more aliens were being held on their knees by rebels from Soonir’s forces; the renegade leader himself and his opposite number in the elders stood close by. No-one was moving; the air was heavy with tension, laced with the smell of ozone and sweat.

She found who she was looking for; Ronon Dex stood with his gun drawn and aimed at a cluster of fearful Heruuni, who stood in a close cluster. For a moment, she couldn’t understand what was happening, until she heard a familiar voice issue out from behind the trembling group.

“Get out!” shouted Kullid. “You have no right to be here! You do not believe!”

Keller’s hand went to her mouth in shock. The young healer, the charming and handsome man whom she had thought might become a friend, a kindred sprit… He was using his own people as a human shield to prevent Ronon from shooting him where he stood.

“I believe this,” Ronon told him. “If you don’t toss out that rodgun and step away, I’ll put a beam right between your eyes.”

Her gaze was drawn to the Satedan’s outstretched gun. It should have been rock-steady, but instead Ronon’s hand was trembling with palsy. The sickness, she thought. On any other day he could make the shot, but today?

“You will not fire!” Kullid snarled. “You will kill an innocent if you pull that trigger…”

Ronon hesitated; he knew that the healer was correct.

“Kullid,” ventured Jennifer. “Please, stop this. You’ve lost. Just tell us where the others are.”

“Yes, where are the rest of the Wraith?” demanded Takkol from nearby. “The voyagers are right. Your foolish devotion to these monsters is ended! Surrender!”

“No!” Kullid shouted, and Keller saw him moving behind his wall of hostages. “I have lived a lie for my entire life! I worship the Wraith, and I am not alone in that!”

“Are you sure?” said Soonir. “Where is Aaren and the rest of your miserable adherents? They have abandoned you.”

“Aaren has been granted the blessing,” retorted Kullid. “The Wraith take life but they give it as well! Only gods can do that!” He was ranting now, and his hostages reacted with fear. Among them, Keller glimpsed the tear-streaked face of Laaro’s mother, Jaaya. The woman met her gaze, imploring her for rescue.

“Enough of this,” said Takkol, swaggering as he stepped forward. “You are like a child, Kullid! You could not defeat the sickness on your own, so rather than admit defeat like a man, you place your faith in these monsters! But they are the killers, you fool! We have known it since the beginning! Without the Aegis to protect us, we would have been culled by them long ago!”

“No! No!” Kullid’s ire rose by the second. “You are a liar! You have always been a weak, venial man, and you do not deserve to see their glory!” The hostages cried out as Kullid surged forward. Keller saw him moving, the thin shape of a rodgun rifle in his hands.

She felt Ronon’s firm hand at her back. “Get down!” he shouted.

And then she was falling, pressed to the floor; what happened next was so fast it was nearly a blur.

Kullid took aim at Takkol and fired, the rodgun clattering angrily in the close confines of the sick lodge wardroom. She saw Soonir react and shove the other man out of the way; then in the same heartbeat a bloom of crimson flaring on the rebel’s chest, a yell of pain, the stink of spent cordite.

Then Soonir falling, the hostages screaming. Kullid turning toward her, his handsome face now something ugly and hateful, animated by zealous rage.

She turned away from him and heard the flat crack of Ronon’s pistol as it discharged a single, fatal pulse of red light. Kullid took the shot in the torso and was blown backwards off his feet, collapsing into a nerveless heap against the far wall. The rodgun fell from his grip, and she knew he would not rise again.

Like a thread snapping, time seemed to contract and the long seconds that had elapsed were gone, lost and fading. Keller scrambled shakily to her feet and ran to Soonir’s side.

The rebel leader looked up at her and blinked. “Ah,” he wheezed. “That will be the end of me.” Pink foam collected at the corners of his lips.

“I need a medical kit!” she called. Allan moved into the lodge, scouring the benches for any of the gear that the Atlantis team had brought with them before the Wraith had arrived.

A shadow covered Soonir. Keller looked up and saw Takkol standing over them. The elder’s face was twisted in confusion. “Why?” he demanded. “Why did you do that? You stupid fool, did you think yourself noble? If you had just stood your ground —”

“You would be lying here, yes,” rasped the rebel, “and you would die instead of me.”

“Soonir, no,” said Keller. “Just hold on.” Allan returned at a run, and thrust a medical case into her hands. The doctor dumped the contents on the floor and grabbed at bandages and a hypodermic gun.

“Ah, healer. Voyager. You are too late.” Soonir blinked slowly. “I did this not for him.” He nodded toward Takkol. “I did it for Heruun. Everything I did, I did… I did…” He gave a wet cough and fell silent.

Keller touched a finger to a vein in his neck and felt nothing. She let out a sigh. “He’s gone.”

“No,” insisted Takkol, “he must not die. He has crimes that must be paid for, he must answer for all the things he has done.”

“The man is dead,” husked Ronon. “If you ask me, you ought to be thankful that it wasn’t you.” The Satedan turned away and beckoned Allan to him. “We need to secure this building. The rest of the Wraith have to be here.”

She nodded. “Roger that. If they call in reinforcements from the hive, we’re in big trouble.”

Jaaya detached herself from the group of former hostages spoke up. “That way,” she said, indicating a carved wooden corridor that led deep into the central trunk of the city-tree. “They took my husband, Aaren and others…”

“Why?” said Keller.

Jaaya’s voice trembled. “They said they would give them the cure.”

The weight of the towering clone-creature flattened Sheppard’s chest and his breath came out in a half-yell, half-grunt.

“John!” Teyla was at his side in an instant. “Are you all right?”

“Get this thing off me!” The Risar was very dead, but it was still damned heavy, and he had trouble breathing. The drone’s lipless mouth was pulled back in a rictus grin revealing bony ridges where humans would have teeth, its face scarred with oozy scratches caked with dark fluid. And its eyes; they were ragged holes in the skull. Sheppard’s gut twisted as he realized the thing must have gouged out its own eyeballs.

With effort, Teyla and Lorne dragged the corpse off him and the colonel got back to his feet, wincing with the pain of a dozen new bruises.

Teyla studied the clone for a moment. “It must have been trapped inside the craft when Fenrir died. It went insane in there, killed itself.”

“Just as long as it didn’t smash the controls.”

Lorne peered cautiously inside the shuttlecraft, leading with his gun. “It’s a little messy in there, but I don’t see any structural damage.”

Ignoring the new bloodstains streaking his gear vest, Sheppard moved past the major and entered the vessel. The interior mirrored the design of the Aegis bridge, replicated on a much smaller scale. There were no chairs, only curved vertical consoles with the familiar control spheres upon them. “Okay. Clock’s running. We’ve gotta move.” He found the centre-most console and laid his hands on it. The panel glowed and a deep thrumming sound issued from the walls of the shuttle. “Contact.” Sheppard shot Teyla a look. “Hey, you know what the transporter controls look like?”

“I believe so.”

“Lorne, help her. I’m gonna earn my pay.” He blew out a breath and concentrated on the unfolding hologram in front of him. A web of complex shapes, all circles and rods, shimmered into the air. It was nothing like any flight controls he had ever seen before.

“You sure you can do this, sir?” Lorne said in a low voice. He must have seen the flash of doubt on the colonel’s face.

“If I can’t,” Sheppard said bleakly, “we won’t have much time to be sore about it.”

Aaren’s desiccated corpse collapsed to the floor in front of Errian, a puff of dust issuing from its mouth. He hardly recognized the wizened, shrunken carcass that used to be the elder. Aaren’s plump face of tawny skin was now a hollow, pallid thing, the flesh of his cheeks drawn tight over the bones of his skull, knots of blackened matter staring back at Errian from deep inside cavernous eye sockets. Still clad in the rich, heavy robes of his high status within the community, the many golden bangles of his rank clattering against the bony, fleshless sticks that were the dead man’s arms, the form that used to be the elder looked as if it were something exhumed from an ancient grave, not a man who had been breathing only moments earlier.

Errian wanted to look away, but he could not bring himself to do so. The horror of what he had seen transfixed him, held him fast. It was more terrifying that the paralyzing touch of the Giants when he had been Taken, because it was his own mind stopping him from motion. He simply could not believe what he had seen; Aaren kneeling before the Wraith warrior, and then the white-skinned monster clawing at the man’s chest. There had been screaming; from Errian, from the others who cowered in the corners of the chamber, and eventually from Aaren, who at first had thought he was about to be given some kind of benediction.

Errian had watched it all, shocked rigid as the Wraith sucked life itself from the elder, draining him dry.

And he knew that he would be the next to join him.

Around him, the group of Wraith who had shepherded them down the wooden corridor and into the carved chambers deep within the core trunks of the city-tree pulled at the victims they had chosen. Some of the people had implored the Wraith to let them come with them, those who were their secret worshippers revealing themselves, those desperate for a cure to the sickness or just too cowardly to resist fearfully trailing along with the crowd; and to Errian’s shame he counted himself among the latter.

One of the aliens turned a baleful gaze on him and dragged him into a shaft of light falling from a lantern above. All the Wraith seemed agitated, violence in their every motion. Something was awry.

“Please,” he managed. “I have a wife and son.”

The Wraith cocked its head and hissed. He was unsure if it could actually understand him. It studied the flesh of his throat quizzically; there were welts and lesions there in abundance, the mark of the sickness in its final phase.

“I only wanted to be well… For them…” He blinked. The pain of the sickness rose and fell though him like waves upon the lakeshore, but his terror towered over all other physical sensations. Perhaps this is for the best, he wondered. I will die and the pain will cease, and I shall not burden my family again. Tears prickled in his eyes. My dearest Jaaya, my brave Laaro.

The alien reached down toward his breast and Errian saw a serrated maw opening in the palm of the Wraith’s hand, glistening with threads of fluid.

He turned his head away so he would not see it happen, ashamed once more of his own fear.

And without warning a bolt of fiery red light streaked by his face, so close that his skin was singed by its passing. He heard the Wraith give a screaming hiss and it fell away, clutching at its forearm where burned skin trailed wisps of meat-smoke.

“Nice shot,” said the lieutenant, hobbling alongside the Satedan. “You winged that sucker pretty good.”

Ronon spat angrily. “I was aiming for his head.” He cursed under his breath. “These damned shakes…” He glared across at the Wraith, panning his pistol across them. “Give me a fight,” he bellowed. “Go on. I dare you.”

Keller moved with them, blinking as she surveyed the chamber they found themselves in. Cut into the living heart of the great tree that supported the Heruuni settlement, it was one of dozens of interior spaces inside the great trunk, doubtless part of the community’s infrastructure. It made sense that the Wraith would have retreated here to feed; there were few ways in or out, and warm, gloomy atmosphere was similar to the environments aboard their semi-organic starships.

A couple of the Wraith made combative motions and they were killed where they stood, eliciting cries of fear from the cowering Heruuni scattered around the chamber. Keller spotted Laaro’s father among them and felt a moment of relief for the boy; but that soon faded when she saw the lesions on his skin. Unconsciously, she shot Ronon a look and frowned.

“Aaren…” Surrounded by a phalanx of his men, Elder Takkol moved to what seemed like a heap of rags lying in the middle of the floor. With distaste, Jennifer realized that she was looking at human remains; whatever it was that was left behind after a Wraith had taken its fill from a living being. Takkol was silent for a long moment. “This was the price of Aaren’s weakness,” he intoned. “It is a fitting death.” The elder spun about and addressed the other Heruuni in the chamber. “You see? Do you see now? There is no cure for the sickness! It is a wound we must bare in exchange for the blessing of the Aegis!”

“Your ‘Aegis’ is just as alien as they are!” snarled Ronon, stabbing a trembling finger at the sullen pack of Wraith. “Don’t you get that yet? No great being hiding in the sky will protect you! You have to fight for yourselves.” The Satedan paused and paled, as if the effort of shouting was nearly too much for him.

One of the Wraith — the one Ronon had wounded — saw the moment of weakness and shifted on the balls of his feet. Lieutenant Allan raised her rifle and shot the alien a hard look. “Don’t,” she told it. The Wraith growled and stood still.

Ronon was breathing heavily and he sagged against a wall, blinking sweat away from his eyes. “Damn it…” he mumbled.

“The sickness…” husked Errian. “The voyager is close to the end, as are we all.”

All at once, Jennifer Keller felt furious; the emotion came up from nowhere and it engulfed her. Her hands contracted into fists. She had been in this place too many times in her medical career, forced to watch her patients slip away because they were beyond her help, even after they had fought and clawed their way through every last shuddering breath. There was no cure for the nanite infection. The monumental unfairness of it all pressed down on her and her jaw tightened; No, she told herself, I refuse to let Ronon die. I refuse to let these people die. Keller was not willing to be beaten now, not after all this. I didn’t let Elizabeth Weir die when everyone thought she would. I’m not going to give up here, either!

There had to be some way to bring Ronon and the others back from the brink, let their bodies heal themselves, some way to fight this slow death with life —

The Wraith take life but they give it as well!

Kullid’s angry pronouncement echoed in her thoughts, the import of it hitting her like a wash of icy water. She stared at the knot of brooding, surly aliens. Each of them had fed a short time ago, she could tell by the blush of sickly green across their ghost-pale faces; and the bodies in the chamber attested to exactly how recently.

The doctor’s thoughts raced; she had read the reports made by her predecessor Doctor Carson Beckett on the Wraith’s unusual abilities, most notably one file that had pulled at her reason with its incredible possibilities. John Sheppard had once been fed on by one of the aliens, but later that same Wraith had somehow returned what he had stolen from the colonel, effectively regenerating his damaged, prematurely-aged tissues. There were even unsubstantiated reports of healthy humans receiving the same regenerative ‘gift’ from Wraith.

And if that were possible… If Kullid had been right, and the Wraith really could give life as well as take it…

Keller snapped her fingers at the Wraith to get its attention. “Uh, you,” she said. “Listen to me. You understand that you’re all out of options, right?” She jerked a thumb at the ceiling. “There’s a battle going on up there. Your buddies aren’t coming.”

“Are you certain of that?” The injured Wraith spoke for the first time.

“Are you?” Ronon retorted.

The doctor sucked in a shaky breath. “So if you want to get off this planet alive, you better listen to me.”

Takkol bristled. “You have no right to offer these monsters any amnesty!”

Allan waved her weapon at the elder. “Hush up, now. Let her finish.”

Ronon crossed to her, walking with difficulty. “What do you think you are doing?” he said quietly.

“My job,” she told him, then gave the Wraith a level look. “We’ll let you gate off this planet.”

The Wraith cocked its head. “In return for what?”

She nodded at Ronon and the others. “Make them well. Give them your ‘gift of life’.”

The Satedan looked at her for a long moment, and Keller thought he would explode with rage at such a suggestion. He hated the Wraith more than anyone else in the room; but Ronon Dex wasn’t a fool. Beneath his pride, he had a soldier’s pragmatism — and like the Wraith, he had to know it was his only shot at survival.

A slow, cold smile appeared on Ronon’s face as he made his peace with the idea, and with care he took aim with his pistol, pointing it at the Wraith’s head. “Of course,” he husked. “There is the other option. To be honest, part of me is hoping you turn her down.” Ronon’s smile became a wolfish grin. “What’s it gonna be?”

Rodney McKay held on to the console before him for dear life as the computer chamber shook, every loose piece of broken paneling or shattered crystal-glass rattling against the metallic decking. He tried very hard not to think about what was going on outside, about the twisted wrecks of this ship and its Wraith adversary, locked together like a pair of doomed dancers spinning their way into the inferno of re-entry. He kept his eyes glued to the holographic screen, pouring his entire focus into the single task of making the hyperdrive activation program work.

Normally, the staggeringly complex task of collating the trillions of data points needed to make a faster-than-light transition were done by computers, and outside involvement was hardly required. It was all ‘point and click’; want to jump from Sol to Barnard’s Star? Sure, no problem. Just tap the big red button marked ‘Go’. Someone else will do the math for you.

But here and now that someone was McKay, and working in tandem with him several decks above, Sam Carter. The whole thing would have been a hell of a lot easier if they weren’t in the middle of crashing to their deaths on an alien starship riddled with catastrophic damage.

Together they had failed three times in a row to correctly compile and initiate the tunneling dimensional reaction, which would soften the barrier between real space and the warped sub-reality of hyperspace. There was simply too much data to handle at once; even with two people as smart at they were in the equation, it was impossible. It just couldn’t be done.

“It’s done,” said Sam, blowing out a breath.

Rodney blinked in surprise. She wasn’t wrong. Even while part of him was ticking off the seconds left before his fiery death, something deeper — call it his mathematical subconscious — was on the job. “Wow. I’m even smarter than I thought I was.”

The jumble of Asgard text and symbology on the holograph shifted and changed, becoming smooth and even. A countdown rune blinked down toward zero, and the activation of the hyperdrive. Even with the damage the Aegis had sustained, it would be enough to throw it through the subspace portal and across light years. Carter had programmed the vessel to get as far away as it could in the shortest possible time; the de-fold location was in the middle of deep space, nowhere near anything that could possibly sustain life or feed the ravenous reaction of the isa device’s detonation.

He released a shuddering breath. Together, they had just saved the lives of everyone on Heruun. And the cost was their own.

Rodney listened to the moaning of the Aegis as it inched toward its own ending, and when he spoke into his radio, his throat was dry. “Uh, Sam?”

“I’m here,” said Carter. “Sixty seconds to jump.”

“Sam, I’m sorry.” The words gushed out of him. “I’m sorry you had to be here for this.”

“It’s not your fault, Rodney. It’s mine. I played this mission wrong from the start. Too many secrets. And look where it took us.” Regret clouded her words.

McKay blinked and looked at the destruction and the dead around him. He felt more alone than he ever had in his life; but suddenly, not afraid. Not afraid at all. “I–I’m glad I got the chance to know you,” he went on. “I know we had our differences early on —”

He heard her smile. “What, that you thought I was an idiot and I thought you were an arrogant ass?”

“Yeah, that,” he nodded. “I’m glad I got to prove myself wrong. I’m glad I got to know you better.”

There was a moment’s pause. “Thanks, Rodney. I was always a little worried you thought I had come to Atlantis to steal your thunder. But I never wanted that. I just wanted to be a part of… All this.” She sighed. “Thirty seconds. The truth is, I liked working with you. You’re the smartest person I know. I feel like I need to run to keep up and that’s exhilarating. It reminds me of why I love science.”

He swallowed, touched by the her honesty. “Funny,” Rodney replied. “I was just going to say the same thing about you.” The rumbling was growing louder by the moment and he blinked as rains of dust cascaded down around him. McKay went to add something more but Carter spoke again.

“Twenty —” Her voice abruptly disintegrated into a humming crackle of static.

Rodney’s stomach tightened in shock. “Sam? Sam? Can you hear me? Sam!” An answer did not come. “Oh no.”

He gripped the radio in his hands as the dying starship’s death throes grew deafening; then there was a deep, droning buzz and his senses were smothered with white.

The hyperspace portal formed so close to Heruun’s outer atmosphere that it triggered the instantaneous creation of a high-altitude storm cell, the mighty thunderhead sweeping down to bring precipitation to a savannah wilderness that had not known a rainy season for decades.

The ragged-edged rip in space-time yawned open, spilling glowing radiation into the darkness; and together, the Aegis and the Hive Ship fell screaming into the shimmering maw, which snapped shut behind them in a shower of spent photons.

The displacement shockwave rode out beyond the collapsed portal, batting away trailing fragments of hull metal and wreckage from the two mighty starships, sending them into new orbits that would decay and immolate them against the planetary atmosphere.

All except one shining sliver of alien steel, a curved shape something like a saucer, or perhaps a manta ray. Swift but unsteady, the object described a wide arc away and down toward the planet’s surface.