James Swallow - Nightfall

“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.