James Swallow - Nightfall

“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?”