James Swallow - Nightfall

The aliens were still intent on their deadly task. He saw what was coming, and he knew he was too far away to stop it. Sheppard dumped the unwieldy Wraith rifle and grabbed at his G-36, inserting the last clip of ammunition he had on him. He had to make this count.

The warrior Wraiths dropped the collapsar unit on to the pad. From where he stood, Sheppard could see the pulsing rings around its circumference. It was armed and ready to be deployed.

The colonel raised the rifle to his shoulder and took a breath; he had just one shot at this, and if he did it wrong… Hell, he had no idea what would happen, but it probably would be very, very bad.

The Wraith veteran spotted him, drew his pistol and took aim. Sheppard’s thinking time had run out.

They both fired and moved at once, dodging away from one another; but John Sheppard wasn’t aiming at the alien with the gun. He had drawn a bead on the Wraith scientist. The trigger pulled hard to the stop, the colonel unloaded a burst into the black-jacketed alien and the console before him, praying he would hit something vital.

The alien scientist jerked and spun as the discharge ripped into him; the delicate fusion of Asgard crystal-metal construction before him blew apart, even as the power of the transporter field surged through it.

Distantly, Sheppard was aware of McKay shouting out a warning. He had only a moment to register one thought. Looks like I broke something expensive .

Then the teleporter control panel detonated like a bomb and a shockwave of released energy flashed across the core chamber, blowing out circuits and tearing into anyone who stood in its path. Sheppard felt the deck fall away underneath him and he was carried backwards, the crackling, murderous heat searing his palms as he brought up his hands to protect his face.

Pain made him cry out as he slammed into the far wall. There were a few seconds where he teetered on the edge of passing out, but he was ready for it, and sucked in a shuddering breath. Sheppard coughed and shook his head, sending a rain of dust and tiny crystal splinters falling away to the floor. Using the rifle as a prop, he hauled himself up, ignoring the spikes of agony from his knees. Through the soles of his boots he could feel the deck of the Aegis vibrating constantly now, juddering like a badly-maintained engine. Did I cause that? he wondered. Carter will be pissed if it turns out I bent the ship.

“McKay?” He managed a dry-throated yell. “Lorne!”

“Still alive,” moaned a familiar voice. “I think.”

He lurched across the chamber, avoiding the corpses of the two burly Wraith warriors. They had unwittingly saved Sheppard from being immolated, largely because they had been standing between him and the energy surge. The front of their bodies, the silver-grey amour plate and oily, burned skin, had become molten and run together like hot wax.

Sweet-smelling chemical smoke from fried components wreathed the floor, each step disturbing it. The colonel coughed and flinched as a shape rose abruptly from the deck and stumbled away from him, toward the blackened ruin that was all that remained of the teleport pad. Back-lit by the firefly-flicker of the wounded computer core, the Wraith veteran dragged itself toward the alcove.

Resting there on its side in a snowdrift of glass shards was the collapsar device, damaged but clearly still operable. The Wraith moaned as it moved, one whole side of its body a mass of seared flesh. Driven on by hate and fury, it clawed through the thick air toward the weapon.

“Stand back!” Sheppard shouted, bringing his rifle to his shoulder.

The Wraith threw him a look over its shoulder, one eye blazing with anger, the other a ragged, empty socket. It hissed at him and stepped forward, its one good hand snatching at a control wheel on the device’s upper surface.

This time there was no hesitation, and Sheppard shot him through the head.

McKay and Lorne emerged from behind a long, wide control panel. In the flickering dimness of the chamber, the two men looked like a pair of grim-faced ghosts. The major’s skin was streaked with blood; his right cheek and his ear were covered in hundreds of tiny lacerations where fragments of glassine crystal had buffeted him in the blast wave.

Sheppard eyed him. “You should try an electric shaver next time,” he deadpanned.

“With all due respect, sir,” Lorne replied, “bite me.”

McKay pushed past them and gingerly nudged the dead Wraith off the top of the collapsar device where it had fallen. Sheppard saw that the red rings were pulsing in a new configuration, growing quicker with each cycle.

“Oh no.” Rodney’s voice was a whisper. “Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.” His fingers scrambled over the surface of the Asgard weapon, stabbing at keys without apparent rhyme or reason.

“I really hate it when he does that,” Lorne grated.

McKay looked up, his eyes wide with horror. “They weren’t going to wait. They started it up before it was even ready to deploy. Oh, this is bad. It’s already building to criticality.”

“But you can disarm it, right?” Sheppard leaned in. “I mean, you’re Rodney McKay, genius guy. You do this sort of thing all the time. You thrive on it!”

“The thing I thrive on the most is not being reduced to my component atoms,” he replied, his voice cracking. “which this thing will do, along with yours, this ship’s and anything else nearby when it implodes.”

“But that thing needs a star to make a black hole,” insisted Lorne. “Right?”

McKay bolted back up to his feet. “Yes, but even without one it will make a hell of a mess. Like, blowing a chunk out of a planet or the aforementioned reducing-to-atoms thing.” He paused, rubbing his hands together. “Oh no.”

“Stop saying that,” Sheppard snapped. “It’s not helping.”

The major winced. “How long until… Well, until it does what it does?”

“Maybe fifteen minutes, I think. These Asgard numerals all look the same.”

“What happens if this thing goes off in deep space?” Sheppard nudged it with his boot. “I mean, nowhere near any planets or stars or stuff?”

“Please do not kick the alien super weapon while it is counting down to gigadeath,” said McKay. “And in answer to your question, it would create a bubble of hyper-accelerated space-time around it that would instantly age everything inside a ten kilometer radius by a factor of several billion years.”

“Then what’s the problem?” said Lorne. “Let’s just use the Asgard transporter and beam it as far away as we can.”

“Great idea, brilliant solution, first class,” snarled McKay, “except for the one small detail that Colonel Trigger Happy here just destroyed the central teleportation matrix!”

“Oh no,” said Sheppard.

Like a hammer cast down by some mythic titan, the blunt bow of the starship Aegis slammed through the drifting halo of ice and dust surrounding the planet Heruun, the force field beyond the curved wall of grey steel smashing frozen shards the size of buildings into glittering pieces. Behind it, a trail of frigid gas and swirling particles spread in a sharp-edged wake. Energy cannons arrayed in omni directional turrets along the curved wings and towering fins of the Asgard vessel tracked to aim backward, and loosed a shower of lightning bolts at its pursuer.

The Wraith Hive Ship paced the Aegis , undeterred by the storm blazing around it, its defensive shields sparking where each hit landed. Random blasts penetrated the ethereal energy envelope and carved wounds in the bony hull, and gouts of blood-like processor fluid spat into the void where they instantly became ice. But the wounds seemed to do nothing but enrage the Wraith vessel, and it fell after the Asgard craft, vomiting back fat streaks of superheated plasma in furious retort.