James Swallow - Nightfall

“Speak for yourself!” snapped McKay, lurching toward one of the active computer consoles.

“ John, ” came the reply, and Sheppard knew things were at their most serious. Carter didn’t often call him by his first name, and the fact that she did it now meant that she wanted his full and absolute attention. “ Teyla’s on her way to the hangar bay on tier three, that’s a deck above you. There are Wraith swarming the ship through the hull breaches. Rendezvous with her and see if you can find a working shuttle. ”

“Got it.” Sheppard’s thoughts raced. Those freaky UFOs that had dragged the Puddle Jumper from the lunar surface… If one was still working, it could be their ticket off this tub. “Lorne, McKay! Gear up. We’re moving out.”

“No,” said Rodney, in a low, serious voice. He didn’t look up from his panel. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“What?” Lorne blinked. “Uh, doc? Hello? Escape route?”

McKay snatched the radio from Sheppard and spoke quickly into it. “Sam. I’m at the secondary drive monitor down here. I can see the hyperdrive program… It’s not initiating.”

Carter sighed. “ Confirm that. I’m trying to re-program it on the go from here. ”

The scientist shook his head. “That’s not going to work. Too many variables. With all the damage its taken, without an Asgard to program the transition, that’s never going to work. The wave-form won’t coalesce…” He stopped and shot Sheppard a look. “I can help. If we do it together, Sam up on the bridge and me down here, in tandem we might be able to get the drive to accept the activation program.”

“ Rodney… ”

A crooked, terrified smile crossed the other man’s face. “Hey, look, I told you you’d need my help sooner or later. You’re not as smart as you think, Carter.”

“You sure about this?” said Sheppard. “We… We may not be able to come back for you.”

McKay looked away and made a dismissive gesture. “Go away. Let me do my thing and you do yours.”

The colonel threw Lorne a nod and the two men raced toward the chamber doorway and the corridor beyond.

Rodney called out as the hatch opened. “And you better be kidding about the ‘not coming back’ part!”

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.”