Nightfall

Chapter Six

The landscape was a rusty blur through the canopy of the Puddle Jumper, broken only by the low clumps of trees and long lines of sharp-spined hills. The heads-up display projected a ghostly grid of map lines, marking the small vessel’s passage across the search zone with a blinking blue glyph.

“Coming up to the edge of zone two,” said McKay. He gave a minute sigh. “No reading.”

“Right.” Sheppard ran his hands over the Jumper’s controls and it banked to starboard. “Moving to zone three.”

They’d been up for an hour or so, and the two of them had spoken little in that time. Sheppard had to admit it was actually quite a novelty to be in a room with Rodney McKay and actually have the guy be quiet for more than five minutes at a stretch.

McKay sighed again, tapping at the portable computer on his lap. Okay, so he wasn’t actually being totally quiet. He kept doing the sighing thing, and it was starting to grate on Sheppard as time went on.

When he did it again, it was like the colonel’s tolerance meter suddenly flipped from full to empty. He shot the scientist a glare. “If you have something to say to me, Rodney, spit it out. Otherwise, the next time you sigh, I’m dropping you off in the middle of the next lion pack I find.”

McKay gave him an affronted look in return. “I can’t help it if I exhale noisily. But now you mention it, yes, maybe I do have something on my mind.”

Sheppard kept his eyes on the horizon. “Well?”

Rodney took a breath and launched into the speech he’d clearly been holding in since they took off from the Stargate. “Keller was right. These people need our help.”

“Our people need our help,” Sheppard countered. “Teyla and Ronon, remember them? They’re the priority. Two Atlantis team members in harm’s way —”

McKay broke in. “Yes, I heard what you said to Colonel Carter, you don’t have to repeat it. And clearly she agrees with you, otherwise she wouldn’t have authorized the use of this Jumper.”

Sheppard frowned. He felt fatigued and worn out by the heat and the events of the past day. He couldn’t remember the last time he slept, and it was making him irritable. He glanced at McKay again. “Don’t make me out as the bad guy. Tell me you’re not going to play the ‘civilians versus the military’ card. Keller’s still a newbie out here and from her I could forgive it, but you? After everything we’ve been through, I thought you knew me better than that.” He paused. “And for the record, Carter was not an easy sell about the Jumper.”

“It’s just… You’re leaving these people twisting in the wind,” Rodney went on. “They need medical attention, and someone to stand up to that blowhard Takkol.”

“And that has to be us? When we moved into Atlantis, I don’t recall signing up to put out every fire in the Pegasus galaxy! We have enough problems of our own, dealing with the Wraith and the Replicators and everyone else who wants us dead, without taking on the troubles of every planet we visit!” He shook his head. “I knew this mission was a bad idea from the get-go.”

McKay folded his arms. “That’s it, is it? You’re just going to stick around until we find Ronon and Teyla, and then leave? What about those Wraith ships that imploded, what about this Aegis thing and the sickness?” He leaned forward. “What would Elizabeth have said about that, John?”

The thought of Elizabeth Weir brought Sheppard up short. “She would have agreed with me,” he replied, with less conviction than he would have liked.

“That’s not true, and you know it.”

The colonel grimaced. “You think I want to make this call, Rodney? But if the local government here doesn’t want our help with the sickness, we can’t force it on them. And I sure as hell am not getting suckered into doing Aaren’s strong-arm work for him, not again.”

“Well, maybe it’s time for a regime change…”

Sheppard eyed him. “You know that for sure, huh? You’ve been on Heruun less than two days and you’re ready to make that judgment? We can’t get that sort of thing right on our own planet, what makes you think we can do it right here?” He looked away; his tone had risen as he spoke, and the colonel had to admit a good amount of his annoyance was directed inward as well as at his friend.

“And of course there’s the whole reason we came here in the first place. Hive Ship in the ’hood, remember?”

“I haven’t forgotten that,” Sheppard replied.

“Maybe now we should tell the locals about it?”

“Wait.” On the upper range of the detection grid, something glittered and then vanished just as quickly. “What was that?”

McKay was immediately tapping at his computer. “Extending the scan envelope…” The target returned. “There! Refined metals, plastics, some organic matter…” He paused, frowning. “But it’s not on the ground. It’s above us.”

“In orbit?”

Sheppard got a nod in return. “Seems that way. I think it could be part of a vessel…”

“Let’s take a look-see.” He worked the Jumper’s controls and peeled off from the low-level flight pattern, into a steep climb, pouring power to the thrusters.

McKay shot him a look. “By the way, that conversation we were having? It’s not over.”

“It is for now,” said the colonel. Outside the canopy, the dusty blue of Heruun’s sky became the black of space.

The darkness went away for a while, and in pieces Teyla felt herself awaken; but not all at once. The moments faded in and out, falling from her grip like sand between her fingers.

The face of one of the humanoids loomed over her. Two more stood behind it, all of them wearing the same blank expression. The lipless mouth opened and she heard words, a rough, unfinished voice with a quizzical edge to it. “Why did you attempt to terminate yourselves?”

She forced air through her lungs, ignoring the pain. “You… Can speak…”

One of the other aliens blinked. “I have many methods of communication.”

“We… Wanted to escape.” She coughed, and it hurt like fire.

The closest of the creatures moved one of the glass eggs over her. Teyla flinched, tried to shy away from it, but the faint yellow ray it cast left no paralysis in its wake, only a warmth. A warmth and the absence of the pain.

“Your choice was foolish,” said the first alien. Its powdery, pale skin seemed ashen and pallid, like the flesh of a drowned thing. “You acted without consideration. You did not understand where you are.”

Teyla remembered the snarling words of the Wraith warrior in the cells. You can’t escape this place! The Wraith had known exactly where they were. “A base…? On a moon… A moon of Herrun.”

“A ship,” corrected the third humanoid. Each of them spoke with identical tone and inflection, the words pitched strangely as if verbal speech was uncommon to them. “On the surface of the primary satellite.”

“Where is my friend?” she demanded, gasping in air as the chill in her bones began to recede.

“Unhurt. The other with you who ventured outside could not be recovered.” It bowed its head. “Unfortunate.”

Abruptly, Teyla realized she was in motion, being carried along one of the metallic corridors on some sort of platform. She tried to rise, but her body was too weak. “Where are…you taking me?”

“Do not be afraid,” came the reply. “This is necessary.”

The exertion was too much, and Teyla felt the effort of everything pulling her back towards the darkness. “What are you?”

The alien touched its chest in an all-too human gesture. “This is a Risar,” it explained.

The strange name followed her into unconsciousness.

Tiny particles of dust peppered the Jumper, with the occasional larger, fist-sized lumps thudding off the hull as Sheppard guided the ship toward the object they had detected. McKay leaned over the monitor of his laptop. As they climbed into low orbit, he began to see more sensor returns, a whole stream of them lying across the scanner range in a diffuse strip.

“It’s a debris field,” he realized. “The gravity from the planet has a hold on it, it’s dragging it apart.” Rodney moved his hands to illustrate, as if he were pulling on a string between them.

“Debris from what?”

The Jumper’s sensor grid obediently opened another window in on the holographic HUD and text spooled down it. Rodney nodded slowly, the data confirming what he was already certain of. “A Wraith ship.”

“A Hive?”

He shook his head. “No, there’s not enough mass. But too much to just be a dart. It has to be one of those scouts we detected back on Atlantis.

The Jumper slowed as it approached the chunk of wreckage. It turned slowly, catching reflected sunlight from the planet below. McKay couldn’t recognize the form or function of the fragment, but it was undoubtedly Wraith in origin. It looked like a broken tooth from some monstrous beast’s mouth, jagged and ragged along the bony white edges, in other places blackened by carbon scoring.

“I’m not gonna cry a river over one less Wraith warship,” Sheppard noted, “but it begs the question… What did that to them?” Both men knew that the hard bio-matter hulls of Wraith craft could take a pounding before they collapsed; anything capable of crushing one into pieces was not to be taken lightly.

Rodney gave an involuntary shiver. “And is it still around?” He shook off the worrying thought and worked the computer through a spectrographic scan sequence. Spikes immediately began to appear on the electrochemical analysis display. “Energy weapons…”

“That would explain the burn marks,” noted Sheppard, craning his neck to get a better look at the wreckage. “Asuran tech, maybe?”

McKay gave a slow shake of the head. “No, actually.” He pointed at the readout on the screen. “The radiation pattern doesn’t match any known beam weapon used by the Replicators, or the Wraith and the Travelers, not even the Ancients… In fact, it’s not like anything we’ve encountered in the Pegasus galaxy.”

“Great,” Sheppard made a face. “We have a new player, then. That’s all we need.”

He was still poring over the data. “Decay rate indicates this happened years ago… Maybe even decades.” McKay looked up at Sheppard. “The Aegis did this. There’s no other explanation.”

The colonel nosed the Puddle Jumper into a different attitude, and feathered the throttle. “I’m going to move us into a higher orbit. See if you can cast a wider net with the sensors, get a better angle on what happened up here.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea? I mean, if this Aegis thing is blasting ships out of the sky?”

“We have something the Wraith don’t — a cloaking device.”

McKay blew out a breath. “Let’s hope that’s enough.”

When she came to again, Teyla had a firmer grip on wakefulness. She became aware that the aliens — the Risar — had brought her to a wide circular chamber, with an arching domed roof that mirrored the design of ship’s corridors. Her mind raced; she had a vague recollection of being taken from the surface of Heruun and transported the distance to the lunar surface, some faint impression of a silver craft, a cramped interior…

She shifted, moving carefully. They had left her on the floating platform used to bring her here; and there, across the chamber, was an identical platform and on it, Ronon Dex.

He was still, only his chest rising and falling. As she watched, one of the Risar approached him and worked the healing device over blackened patches of frostbite on his skin.

There were several of the humanoids in the chamber, some of them tending to wide, inswept consoles made of bronze and copper. They manipulated shapes and panes of light appeared in the air, showing images she did not recognize and streams of angular glyphs.

She studied the Risar for long moments, their movements and behavior. Like those they had glimpsed in the corridors, they did not correspond with one another, they simply went about their tasks, never crossing paths, always focused on their silent intention. Yet, some of them seemed different. Two of those she watched moved more slowly than the others, in the way of an elderly man whose joints were paining him. They seemed less able than the rest, and their skin tone was not the blue-green hue of the others, but a deep slate grey. They appeared, for want of a better word, sickly. Teyla filed the observation away for later consideration.

As she watched, a pair from the group gathered around the console closest to Ronon. With a whisper of metallic leaves, an iris aperture opened in the floor and a grey orb atop a jointed arm extended upward until it stood over the Satedan’s platform. One of the Risar manipulated a control and the orb rotated and shifted, coming around on itself until it hung above Ronon’s head. Teyla felt her pulse quicken, instinct warning her that whatever was to happen next, it would not be good.

Panels on the side of the orb opened to allow a forest of needle-thin probes to emerge, reaching toward Ronon’s face. He murmured in his enforced slumber, unaware of the threat.

“No!” Teyla shouted, and tried to force herself from the platform where she lay, ignoring the pain in her joints and the echo of nausea. She could not bring herself to sit up; although there were no physical restraints holding her down, the Athosian woman felt a sudden increase in gravity, a great invisible weight pressing on her chest. The Risar had some form of force field trapping her in place. Teyla mustered as much effort as she could, trying to find a breaking point, but for every ounce of strength she put against the invisible confinement, it was turned back against her tenfold.

One of the Risar detached from the group and approached her. “Desist,” it told her. “You may injure yourself.”

“Leave him alone!” she barked. “Do not hurt him!”

The Risar glanced in the direction of Ronon. “That has never been my intention. The male will not be harmed.” It cocked its head slightly. “You are greatly concerned for his wellbeing. Is he your mate?”

“He’s my friend!”

“Your friend will not be damaged by the regulation process.”

Regulation? The toneless way the alien said the word made Teyla’s blood run cold.

“It is a safety protocol,” continued the Risar. “It will prevent any further accidents or unauthorized sojourns. It is applied to all transients.”

The needles reached for Ronon, adjusting their position. The Taken sleep a long sleep and remember nothing. Laaro’s earlier words returned to her, along with a cold, sudden understanding. The docile, drone-like abductees they had come across in the corridors — this process was the means used to bring them to that state!

“Stop this!” she shouted, unable to do anything else.

The Risar peered at her and said nothing. Teyla heard the whisper of skin being pierced and reflexively looked away.

But only for a moment. A loud, abrupt roar sounded across the chamber and she turned to see Ronon Dex crying out, his back arching in agony. The Satedan’s hands clawed at the orb device, tearing at it in feral rage. The pain, she realized, it must have shocked him awake!

The Risar creatures hesitated, as if they were unsure how to proceed. “You said you would not hurt him,” Teyla snapped.

“This is…irregular,” admitted the creature.

Ronon punched at the orb and the device withdrew — but not quickly enough. The Satedan smashed a fist into it again and the machine stuttered. Warning chimes sounded from the console.

“Rejection,” stated the Risar at the console. “Physiology mismatch.”

Ronon was gasping, struggling to get up and failing just as Teyla had. She called to him and he saw her. He was pale and drawn, thin streaks of blood marking his face where the orb had injected him.

Another of the creatures, one of the less able of their number, moved closer to the Satedan. “Rejection,” it echoed, “this one is unusable and should be return —”

The alien never got the change to finish its sentence. With all his might, Ronon lashed out and grabbed the creature by the throat. The sheer stamina it must have taken to press through the gravity field between them was amazing.

Dex snarled in fury and the Risar’s neck gave a hollow cracking sound; the creature’s eyes went dull and it collapsed, falling to the metal deck.

For a long moment, Teyla expected the other Risar to react with violence in return, but they paid little interest to the fallen one of their number.

“Neutralize,” said the one at the console. It touched a control and a flicker of blue-white light enveloped Ronon. He managed to match gazes with Teyla for one final moment before he went slack and fell unconscious once again. Another Risar touched a control on the floating platform and guided Dex away, off through a low doorway across the chamber. After a moment, almost as an afterthought, one of the creatures gathered up the dead Risar and carried it into an antechamber.

Teyla glared at the alien that had spoken to her. “Where are you taking him?” The term ‘rejection’ carried with it the scent of something ominous and final. The Athosian woman had visions of Ronon being vented to space as if he were nothing more than waste material.

Her answer was a shifting of the platform that she lay upon. With growing apprehension, she tried to shrink back as the floating table moved to occupy the same position as Ronon’s had. The orb hovered nearby, another of the Risar examining it for damage.

“I will not submit to you!” she shouted, fighting to keep a tremor from her voice. “You will have to reject me too!”

The Risar that had spoken glanced at its twin beside the console. “Deep scan. There may be issue with the female as well.”

“Acknowledged,” came the reply.

The orb hove into place over Teyla’s head and halted. A thin slice of laser light issued from a slot on the surface of the sphere and traveled the length of her body; where it touched her she felt a peculiar tingle in her flesh. The sensor beam halted over her belly and her breath caught in her throat.

“Anomaly,” reported the Risar at the console. She was certain she could detect an air of surprise in the alien’s words. “Unexpected complexity detected.”

The other Risar moved into her line of sight, watching her. “You are pregnant.”

“Yes.” There seemed little point in hiding the fact.

“There is more,” continued the other creature. “Traces of genetic modification across scan reading datasets. Correlation match with alternate DNA source.”

The first Risar blinked, as if it were thinking. “You are a human. Yet you possess a quanta of genetic material sourced from the species colloquially known as ‘Wraith’. This is an anomaly.” It leaned closer. “Explain.”

She saw an opportunity. “Release me first.”

The Risar didn’t consider her demand worth answering. “I have never encountered this irregularity before. I wish to know more.”

“As long as you hold me as your prisoner,” she spat, “I will give you nothing!”

Again, the alien made the strange quizzical motion of its head. “You are not a prisoner,” it explained, as if it were speaking to a particularly slow child. “You and the others have been brought here to help me. When tasks are completed, you will be returned.”

“You are the Aegis, then,” Teyla retorted.

“Aegis.” The Risar repeated the word. “I have been addressed by the term before. It is not entirely incorrect.”

A low tone sounded through the chamber, and at once every Risar in the room stopped what they were doing. Teyla shifted on the floating platform to follow them as they moved as one to the middle of the chamber.

A dash of white light flickered in the air over their heads and a holographic panel unfolded, streaming with more glyphs. The text was unlike the writing of the Earth people or the Ancients; it reminded the Athosian of the angular footprints made by birds. The writing shimmered and was replaced by an exterior view. Heruun and its rings lay to one side of the display, and beyond there was nothing but the black of space… Teyla shifted again, the gravity field pressing down hard on her as she turned in place, craning her neck.

A reticule swept across the holo-screen and circled a fast-moving dot. It had to be a ship; it was drifting right and left in a zigzag course, gradually closing on the larger moon.

Hope bloomed in her thoughts, but Teyla was afraid to form the words she wanted to say in case she was mistaken; but then the screen shimmered and shifted again, magnifying the image. There, clear and unmistakable, was the barrel-shaped form of a Puddle Jumper. Fear and elation pulled at her in equal measure; suddenly the chance for rescue was very real — but at the same time she had no way to communicate with the ship, no way to tell them where she was, or to warn them of the dangers of the Risar.

A voice issued out of the air; it was the same voice all the Risar spoke with. “New priority task. Isolate unidentified craft and capture for disassembly and repurposing.”

The aliens broke apart from their group, ignoring the work they had been conducting, and Teyla found herself being carried away once more, back down along the endless, featureless corridors.

The chorus of beeps from Rodney’s computer drew Sheppard’s attention immediately. “Got something?”

McKay gave a slow nod, his fingers dancing over the keyboard of the silver laptop. “A particle trace, leading away from the planet.” The scientist’s brows knitted for a moment. “Yeah, I got it. It’s faded almost to nothing, but it’s a trail. From a ship, most likely.”

“Leading where?” Sheppard turned the Puddle Jumper to angle up and away from Heruun, the sweep of the glittering ice rings falling below the prow of the ship.

Rodney glanced up and pointed toward the larger of the planet’s two moons, now drifting into the middle of the canopy’s view. “Right there, in fact.”

The colonel eased the throttle control up a notch and the Jumper broke orbit, crossing into cislunar space without a bump. Within moments, the ship’s scanners registered something moving up from the surface of the airless moon.

“Cloaking device!” Rodney insisted, his voice rising an octave at the sight of the new arrivals.

Sheppard agreed. “Yeah, good call.” He tapped a control pad and a faint ripple of warped light glittered through the canopy as the Jumper became invisible.

There were three objects, discernible as bright metallic shapes as they closed the distance. McKay’s gaze flicked between the laptop and the viewscreen. “Wait. No. What?”

“I need a bit better intel than that, McKay. What are they? Darts?”

“Not even close,” Rodney replied. “Scans are coming back garbled, like they’re being partially reflected off of… Well, something.” He sucked in air through his teeth. “This is a whole different style of technology.”

“So unless the Wraith stole themselves some new hardware — which, knowing them, isn’t impossible — we’re looking at something new. The Aegis.” Sheppard could see the alien craft more clearly now, moving in line formation. They were strange shapes, vaguely triangular in cross-section, but curved like an inverted dish. Or a saucer. He blinked as the odd thought popped up in his mind

What happened next was so quick that he almost missed it; in total violation of the laws of physics, the three ships broke apart in three different directions, each one moving away at a ninety-degree angle to its initial course with no loss of speed or any sign of a thruster discharge. A heartbeat later, great radial plumes of energy bloomed on the Jumper’s HUD, expanding out from each of the craft.

“What the hell…?” Sheppard’s pilot training took over and he automatically jinked, throwing the ship into an evasion pattern.

More pulses followed the first waves. The sky above the Heruuni moon was rapidly filling with the discharges. “They know we’re here…” said McKay suddenly.

“They’re beating the bushes,” said the colonel. “Like a surface ship using sonar to flush out a submarine.”

“I’d rather not be flushed by anything,” McKay retorted.

“You may have a point there, Rodney,” Sheppard offered, vectoring the Jumper around. He upped the throttle a notch more, navigating via the HUD, trying to thread the ship between the expanding balloons of energy. The Jumper turned as fast as he could make it, but against the staggered, irregular motions of the alien ships it was a whale among sharks.

Another trio of pulses throbbed across the darkness and enveloped the Jumper before Sheppard could turn away. The instant they touched the hull, a wash of crackling sparks raced down the length of the cabin. The colonel cursed as he snatched his hands back from the flight controls, and at his side McKay gave a yelp as his laptop vomited smoke and crashed.

“Sonar, my butt!” Rodney snapped. “That was some kind of the disruption field!” The acrid smell of flash-burned plastic filled the cockpit.

“We lost the cloak,” Sheppard saw the glowing glyph on the console blinking its shutdown warning. The other systems stuttered and rebooted; when the short range scanner came up, it showed three targets converging on the Jumper’s flight path at high velocity.

The alien ships fell toward the Puddle Jumper, disruption beams stabbing out into the dark, tracking like searchlights toward their target. The Jumper turned into a spiraling course, crossing through the fire zone and emerging safely by only the narrowest of margins.

The triangular craft broke apart once more, the formation shattering. A single ship continued the pursuit while the other two cut sharp-edged courses through the dark, moving ahead and to the fore of the Jumper in an attempt to box it in and cut off any chance of escape.

The Ancient ship’s outriggers flared, the glow of the twin thruster grids a bright yellow-white. It twisted into a hard kick-turn, coming about to face the craft behind it. Compared to the uncanny abilities of the alien vessels, however, it was a slow and languid maneuver.

Without pause, the alien ship was suddenly moving backwards, away from the Jumper; with no visible means of determining which end of the craft was prow or stern, no obvious engine pods or other identifying structures, the vessel was a lethal enigma.

Behind the Jumper, its two sister ships came in like loosed arrows.

“They’re almost on us,” said Rodney. “Now’s the time for some of that impressive Han Solo pilot stuff. Any time now, Sheppard. Any time.”

“Quiet,” the colonel growled. He sent a mental command to the controls in his hands and from the rear of the Jumper came the smack-whump sound of the drone launchers. Twin streaks of yellow shot away, spinning along corkscrew paths toward the fleeing alien craft. The first drone closed to impact range, but suddenly found itself tumbling through empty space as the target abruptly changed from a horizontal flight path to a vertical one. The second drone looped in and detonated, switching at the last second to a proximity fuse. A globe of fusion fire expanded outward and clipped one apex of the fleeing craft; it flipped over and began to zigzag, a plume of gas crystals trailing out behind it.

“Hit but no kill,” Sheppard said aloud.

“Two more —” began McKay.

“I’m on it,” he replied, flinching as a disrupter beam flashed across the Jumper’s blunt nose. Sheppard tuned out everything else and let himself feel the genetic connection to the Ancient ship’s flight controls; at times it was almost as if the Jumper could respond to him before he had fully formed a thought in his brain, but it wasn’t something he could just force to happen. It had to come through instinct, through pure reflex.

“Sheppard!” Out beyond the canopy, the surface of the moon was looming as the engagement brought them ever closer to Heruun’s primary satellite.

“Hush.” In his mind’s eye he saw the two alien attackers closing the distance, the beam weapons lashing out. The colonel’s hands worked the controls, letting his training take over. Don’t think about it, John, just do it.

In a split-second he cut forward thrust and applied it in reverse, dropping the Jumper’s velocity from blindingly fast to almost nothing. The gravity generators inside the cabin whined as they tried to bleed off the energy state change without smearing Sheppard and McKay over the inside of the canopy.

The alien ships were quick and they reacted, vectoring away in opposite directions; but that was what Sheppard wanted them to do. This time, four drones were unleashed after the ship to the port and before it could jink away, the missiles bored into it and exploded. The blast wave clipped the Jumper and the ship bucked like a loosed bronco.

McKay gripped the console in front of him, white-knuckled. “Gee, do you think you could get a little closer to the fireball next time?” His words dripped acid sarcasm. “I felt that! I could have burned my eyebrows off!”

Sheppard was already applying power to the drives as the undamaged craft came back toward them; wary now, it flicked to the right and left, up and down, while still maintaining a lock at the six o’clock position behind the Puddle Jumper.

The colonel searched for the ship that had taken the near-hit and dove at it. As he predicted, it was sluggish, the sharp, gravity-defying course changes it had made before now reduced to twitching, stuttering motions that skidded across the black sky.

His eyes narrowed. “You’re not going anywhere, buddy,” he said quietly. At the last second, Sheppard released two more drones and pivoted the Jumper; it was a risk, but his options were shrinking by the second, and he knew that the alien ships only had to be lucky once to turn the Jumper into a drifting, frozen wreck.

The drones hit the damaged ship and destroyed it. The resultant flash of fusion discharge flared in the dark and buffeted the Jumper. Sheppard turned into a jousting head-to-head with the last alien ship, riding the shockwave. He gambled that the detonation would fog any sensors on the other craft long enough for him to gain the advantage.

He was right; but he was wrong.

The alien ship did something unexpected, veering sharply away from the blast — but not toward open space. Instead, it swept past the Puddle Jumper so closely that Sheppard had a momentary glimpse of his own face, a distorted reflection off the silvery triangular hull as it flashed by.

The alien craft blindly clipped the Jumper’s port side outrigger and ripped it away with a concussive screech. Power rose and fell and the Ancient vessel moaned like an injured animal. Sheppard flinched as a spike of sympathetic pain shocked him. The enemy ship vanished behind them, coming apart from the force of the collision; the Jumper was more hardy.

Outside the canopy, the black of space became the washed-out grey of lunar regolith. Sheppard cursed as the controls refused to answer his inputs.

“We’re going down!” said Rodney, finding his voice again.

“Yeah,” said the colonel, through gritted teeth. “I think that’s a given.”

The Risar remained mute as it carried Teyla back to the holding chamber. The cell could have been the very one she and Ronon had been deposited in upon their arrival; it seemed as if every chamber in the alien ship was constructed from a modular palette of identical components. The restraint field snapped off and she gasped in a breath of air, but before she could react the platform tilted to dislodge her, and she staggered to stop herself falling over. If she had considered it, Teyla might have had a chance to try a second escape attempt before the door slid silently shut, but her attention was taken by a more immediate matter.

On one of the formless sleeping pads lay Ronon Dex, his skin waxy, his breathing shallow. There was a water dispenser nozzle fitted into an alcove on the far wall and she cupped a little in her hands, bringing it to him. His eyes flickered open and he drank.

“Teyla?” He blinked at her, as if he was waking from a deep slumber. The Satedan’s brow furrowed, half in annoyance, half in confusion. “Where…?”

“The cell, again.” she explained. “They tried to do something to you…”

“Who?” Ronon winced, as if trying to remember was painful to him. “We… Should be on Atlantis…”

“Atlantis? Ronon, we’re on Heruun. We were on Heruun,” she corrected herself, frowning again. “The Risar captured us.”

“What?” He shook his head. “I don’t… I can’t think straight…” Ronon’s hands tightened into claws and he attempted to pull himself up to a sitting position. When Teyla helped him, he tried to push her away, but there was no strength in him. It was a troubling thing to witness; Ronon was one of the strongest, most vital men Teyla had ever met, but now here he was, weak and vulnerable, laid low by the technology of the Risar.

“Colonel Sheppard is searching for us,” she told him. “He’ll come for us.”

Ronon managed a nod; even the effort of that seemed to drain him.

With a cloth from her pocket, she dabbed at the drying streaks of blood on his face. As she did so, a new and troubling thought occurred to her, a moment of unpleasant clarity as she realized what the Satedan’s condition reminded her of; the people in Kullid’s sick lodge. Weakened and disoriented, touched by the malady of the Aegis.

“Need to rest,” Ronon husked. “Just a while. Tell Sheppard… I’ll be there.”

Teyla nodded, fighting down her fears. “I’ll tell him.”

McKay didn’t really remember the moment when the Puddle Jumper actually hit the surface of Heruun’s primary moon. Perhaps that might have been a good thing, in retrospect, maybe some basic animal part of his hindbrain taking pity on the rest of him, blotting out the bone-crushing hell of the impact so he would be spared the trauma.

But he remembered what the screeching meant. The high-pitched, screaming whistle coming from the hairline crack slowly making its way down the short axis of the canopy glass. Beside him, Sheppard was lolling over the pilot’s station, blinking away the shock of what could only be called a ‘landing’ by the most generous of critics.

“Any one you can walk away from,” he muttered.

“Congratulate yourself later,” Rodney told him. “We’ve got a big problem.” McKay vaulted from his seat, discarding his useless, still-smoking laptop, and scrambled toward the back cabin of the Jumper. He pulled at equipment lockers, snatching open doors and not finding what he wanted, panic threatening to rise up and overtake him.

And then he found them, in the long footlocker beneath the wire-frame bench. Sheppard came down the canted deck toward him, his expression grim. “Controls are a mess,” said the colonel. “and the mid-hatch is off line. When that canopy breaks, we’ll lose all the air in here.”

“I saw. Here.” Rodney thrust a hard plastic container into the other man’s hands. He didn’t wait for Sheppard to open it; he took another identical case and flipped the latches, dumping the contents on the deck — a plastic fishbowl helmet, a backpack and an oversuit of bright orange material.

“A spacesuit?” Sheppard asked. “I didn’t think Jumpers carried —”

“Not as standard, no,” Rodney was speaking quickly, talking so his mind wouldn’t have the chance to catch up to the idea of how screwed they were. “But I always make sure they’re on board a Jumper any time I’m on it.” He made a flapping gesture with his hand. “Be prepared, right?”

The pitch of the air leak was growing deeper by the second as the crack widened, and it was enough to encourage them both to talk less and work faster. The suits were lightweight experimental models developed by Stargate Command for use aboard starships, low-duration quick-deployment rigs that had half the mass of the NASA legacy gear they typically used.

Rodney felt a flash of claustrophobia as he twisted the lexan helmet into place over his head. He didn’t want to think about what ‘low duration’ meant in terms of how much air you got before you choked to death.

Sensing movement, he turned to Sheppard and realized belatedly that he couldn’t hear what the other man was saying. The colonel grabbed him and the bubbles of the suit helmets clanked together.

“I said hang on to something!”

McKay had enough time to see the canopy become a spider web and then disintegrate; the next second they were in the middle of a hurricane.