James Swallow - Nightfall

“Are you sure?” said Soonir. “Where is Aaren and the rest of your miserable adherents? They have abandoned you.”

“Aaren has been granted the blessing,” retorted Kullid. “The Wraith take life but they give it as well! Only gods can do that!” He was ranting now, and his hostages reacted with fear. Among them, Keller glimpsed the tear-streaked face of Laaro’s mother, Jaaya. The woman met her gaze, imploring her for rescue.

“Enough of this,” said Takkol, swaggering as he stepped forward. “You are like a child, Kullid! You could not defeat the sickness on your own, so rather than admit defeat like a man, you place your faith in these monsters! But they are the killers, you fool! We have known it since the beginning! Without the Aegis to protect us, we would have been culled by them long ago!”

“No! No !” Kullid’s ire rose by the second. “You are a liar! You have always been a weak, venial man, and you do not deserve to see their glory!” The hostages cried out as Kullid surged forward. Keller saw him moving, the thin shape of a rodgun rifle in his hands.

She felt Ronon’s firm hand at her back. “Get down!” he shouted.

And then she was falling, pressed to the floor; what happened next was so fast it was nearly a blur.

Kullid took aim at Takkol and fired, the rodgun clattering angrily in the close confines of the sick lodge wardroom. She saw Soonir react and shove the other man out of the way; then in the same heartbeat a bloom of crimson flaring on the rebel’s chest, a yell of pain, the stink of spent cordite.

Then Soonir falling, the hostages screaming. Kullid turning toward her, his handsome face now something ugly and hateful, animated by zealous rage.

She turned away from him and heard the flat crack of Ronon’s pistol as it discharged a single, fatal pulse of red light. Kullid took the shot in the torso and was blown backwards off his feet, collapsing into a nerveless heap against the far wall. The rodgun fell from his grip, and she knew he would not rise again.

Like a thread snapping, time seemed to contract and the long seconds that had elapsed were gone, lost and fading. Keller scrambled shakily to her feet and ran to Soonir’s side.

The rebel leader looked up at her and blinked. “Ah,” he wheezed. “That will be the end of me.” Pink foam collected at the corners of his lips.

“I need a medical kit!” she called. Allan moved into the lodge, scouring the benches for any of the gear that the Atlantis team had brought with them before the Wraith had arrived.

A shadow covered Soonir. Keller looked up and saw Takkol standing over them. The elder’s face was twisted in confusion. “Why?” he demanded. “Why did you do that? You stupid fool, did you think yourself noble? If you had just stood your ground —”

“You would be lying here, yes,” rasped the rebel, “and you would die instead of me.”

“Soonir, no,” said Keller. “Just hold on.” Allan returned at a run, and thrust a medical case into her hands. The doctor dumped the contents on the floor and grabbed at bandages and a hypodermic gun.

“Ah, healer. Voyager. You are too late.” Soonir blinked slowly. “I did this not for him.” He nodded toward Takkol. “I did it for Heruun. Everything I did, I did… I did…” He gave a wet cough and fell silent.

Keller touched a finger to a vein in his neck and felt nothing. She let out a sigh. “He’s gone.”

“No,” insisted Takkol, “he must not die. He has crimes that must be paid for, he must answer for all the things he has done.”

“The man is dead,” husked Ronon. “If you ask me, you ought to be thankful that it wasn’t you.” The Satedan turned away and beckoned Allan to him. “We need to secure this building. The rest of the Wraith have to be here.”

She nodded. “Roger that. If they call in reinforcements from the hive, we’re in big trouble.”

Jaaya detached herself from the group of former hostages spoke up. “That way,” she said, indicating a carved wooden corridor that led deep into the central trunk of the city-tree. “They took my husband, Aaren and others…”

“Why?” said Keller.

Jaaya’s voice trembled. “They said they would give them the cure.”

The weight of the towering clone-creature flattened Sheppard’s chest and his breath came out in a half-yell, half-grunt.

“John!” Teyla was at his side in an instant. “Are you all right?”

“Get this thing off me!” The Risar was very dead, but it was still damned heavy, and he had trouble breathing. The drone’s lipless mouth was pulled back in a rictus grin revealing bony ridges where humans would have teeth, its face scarred with oozy scratches caked with dark fluid. And its eyes; they were ragged holes in the skull. Sheppard’s gut twisted as he realized the thing must have gouged out its own eyeballs.

With effort, Teyla and Lorne dragged the corpse off him and the colonel got back to his feet, wincing with the pain of a dozen new bruises.

Teyla studied the clone for a moment. “It must have been trapped inside the craft when Fenrir died. It went insane in there, killed itself.”

“Just as long as it didn’t smash the controls.”

Lorne peered cautiously inside the shuttlecraft, leading with his gun. “It’s a little messy in there, but I don’t see any structural damage.”

Ignoring the new bloodstains streaking his gear vest, Sheppard moved past the major and entered the vessel. The interior mirrored the design of the Aegis bridge, replicated on a much smaller scale. There were no chairs, only curved vertical consoles with the familiar control spheres upon them. “Okay. Clock’s running. We’ve gotta move.” He found the centre-most console and laid his hands on it. The panel glowed and a deep thrumming sound issued from the walls of the shuttle. “Contact.” Sheppard shot Teyla a look. “Hey, you know what the transporter controls look like?”

“I believe so.”

“Lorne, help her. I’m gonna earn my pay.” He blew out a breath and concentrated on the unfolding hologram in front of him. A web of complex shapes, all circles and rods, shimmered into the air. It was nothing like any flight controls he had ever seen before.

“You sure you can do this, sir?” Lorne said in a low voice. He must have seen the flash of doubt on the colonel’s face.

“If I can’t,” Sheppard said bleakly, “we won’t have much time to be sore about it.”

Aaren’s desiccated corpse collapsed to the floor in front of Errian, a puff of dust issuing from its mouth. He hardly recognized the wizened, shrunken carcass that used to be the elder. Aaren’s plump face of tawny skin was now a hollow, pallid thing, the flesh of his cheeks drawn tight over the bones of his skull, knots of blackened matter staring back at Errian from deep inside cavernous eye sockets. Still clad in the rich, heavy robes of his high status within the community, the many golden bangles of his rank clattering against the bony, fleshless sticks that were the dead man’s arms, the form that used to be the elder looked as if it were something exhumed from an ancient grave, not a man who had been breathing only moments earlier.

Errian wanted to look away, but he could not bring himself to do so. The horror of what he had seen transfixed him, held him fast. It was more terrifying that the paralyzing touch of the Giants when he had been Taken, because it was his own mind stopping him from motion. He simply could not believe what he had seen; Aaren kneeling before the Wraith warrior, and then the white-skinned monster clawing at the man’s chest. There had been screaming; from Errian, from the others who cowered in the corners of the chamber, and eventually from Aaren, who at first had thought he was about to be given some kind of benediction.