James Swallow: Halcyon

The leader moved, the wound she had inflicted bringing a snarl to its face. This creature had a peculiar weapon of its own, a hybrid of handgun and short sword that came up so quickly she felt the blade point strike home in her stomach. The pain made her furious and she backhanded the weapon from the leader and kicked it to the ground. The flood of aggression fuelled her hunger, and she leapt on the winded creature, her tongue flicking out of her mouth. The pistol forgotten, with one viselike grip she wrapped her pale fingers around the leader's neck and held tight; and then, with her heart racing in excitement, she opened her palm wide and let the serrated feeding cavity in her hand unfold, shiny with enzymatic fluids. In a single brutal thrust, she plunged her hand through the shredded material of the leader's jacket and felt the warm human flesh underneath. She gave a little shudder as the feeding began, the nourishing torrent of organic energies drawing up into her. The adrenaline in the man's veins made it delicious.

But too late she understood that she had been careless, that she had made the same error as her fellow Wraith; she had underestimated the resilience of the prey. The second hunter, the one she had cast aside, shook off the effect of the blaster and leveled its rifle. She had assumed that the weaker-willed human would not attack while she was so close to its leader for fear of striking it. The pitiless look it returned her showed otherwise. It no doubt believed that it was performing a mercy on the other man-prey by ending its life before her feeding could be completed. The second hunter's gun spat puffs of gas and vapor, releasing a volley of razor-edged needles. The scatter-shot blast tore her off her victim and threw her into the snows.

She felt the burning spines deep in her tissue and understood abruptly that this was death. As much as she tried to fight it off, to decry it, the ripple of fear returned tenfold and dragged her down.

The Wraith perished, her fangs bared to the icy sky above.

She made a point, whenever she could, to watch the sun rise. From the high balcony atop the central tower of Atlantis, there was no better view of the pale golden disc as it emerged from below the horizon, the first rays of light turning the dark ocean into a sheet of glittering, beaten copper. The thin cirrus clouds overhead glowed pink underneath, drifting frames around the star as it climbed into the teal blue sky. There was ozone in the air and the strange salt tang of alien seas.

If ever a day comes when I forget why we are out here, I can just walk up and look at this. Elizabeth Weir smiled to herself and turned her head, looking around at the angular minarets and steeples of the floating city. Atlantis was a work of art in many ways, as much an expression of the character of the Ancients who built it as the scientific legacy they had left behind. Seen from the air, it drifted atop the ocean like a silver brooch on a vast indigo cloak. Up close, the city-complex was all glass and steel spires reaching up into the heavens. The shapes of the towers reminded Elizabeth of origami, turned straight edges and seamless folds of brushed metal. It was a metropolis built by cool and studied minds, and while it wasn't a clinical place, she sometimes felt that Atlantis lacked the warmth and the small chaos of cities on Earth. She thought of the senses she had of New York, of London and Paris, Delhi, Moscow or Hong Kong; Atlantis felt lonely in comparison, even after more than a year of human occupation, and she wondered if that would ever change. The Ancients lived here once upon a time, so why couldn't we? The smile broadened as she imagined the sights of children going to school on Atlantis's metallic boulevards, dogwalkers, baseball games and couples in the parkland, markets in the great atrium. Maybe one day.

It was in moments like this, when she was alone with the city's melancholy quiet, that Weir felt closest to the people who had made this place. Back home, it was something she hadn't really been able to understand, not completely; she'd seen the look in the eyes of astronauts who'd been to the Moon, she'd seen it in people like Samantha Carter and Daniel Jackson when they spoke about other worlds. Now she saw the same look in the mirror, in a wiser face framed with dark hair, a kind of insight about Earth and mankind, about how small and precious they were.

After months of being here, they were still only paddling in the shallows of the great oceans of knowledge left behind by the Ancients, and sometimes Elizabeth wondered if there was still something left of them in these walls, watching silently. In any other place, such a thought might have been eerie and disturbing, but she found it the opposite. If the Ancients were the progenitors of humankind, then the Pegasus expedition team were the children returning to the birthplace of their parents and making it their own. Perhaps it wouldn't be within her lifetime, but one day Earth's people would know all the secrets of this place; and the bright future that knowledge would bring would make everything they had endured here worthwhile.

That is, if the Wraith don't destroy us first. She frowned at the dissenting voice in the back of her mind. Or the Genii, or any one of a dozen other threats… "We never thought it would be easy," she said aloud, and reached for the steel mug at her side to take a sip of tea. Weir looked down; on the lower tiers she could see people moving around, going about their duties. Out by the western atrium, Dr. Kusanagi and her group were setting up an air-monitoring experiment that would give them a better handle on the planet's weather systems. Directly below, she could hear the echoes of barked orders where some of the military contingent were sparring on a lower level; the recent additions of troops from the Russian Federation and the United Kingdom-part of a treaty agreement surrounding the Stargate program-were meshing well with the existing Atlantis Marine Corps garrison. And out on one of the spade-shaped `petals' that formed the outer districts of the city, a maintenance team were preparing the landing platform for the arrival of the Daedalus, the starship that in recent months had become the lifeline for the outpost.

The regular returns of the vessel were now an important part of life on Atlantis, with a palpable rise in the morale of the people here in the days running up to its landing. Daedalus brought news and mail from home, supplies and new faces, and most importantly the ship made the Atlantean contingent feel connected. A year of isolation and a Stargate they could never use to dial home had taken its toll, but with Daedalus Earth was only a hyperspace journey away. Each cargo she brought made that distance seem a little less; out here in the Pegasus Galaxy, even seemingly tiny things like replacement toothbrushes or toi let paper took on a great level of importance-it was the small, mundane details like those that helped keep the human presence in Atlantis on an even keel, helped the people working and living here to forget that they were Earth's most distant outpost of mankind. Despite the friction that seemed a regular part of her interaction with Daedalus's commander, Colonel Caldwell, Weir had to admit that the sight of the ship always raised her spirits. Daedalus, with her blunt, aircraft carrier lines, might lack the crystalline beauty of Atlantis, but her mere presence conveyed an important message. You're not alone out here.

The data pad at Elizabeth's side chimed and she gathered up the device. The flat screen portable computer terminal seemed never to be more than arm's length away from her, constantly feeding information from the city's heart-and sometimes distracting her with games of Solitaire or Minesweeper. An alarm window was open; Weir had set the prompt to remind her of the morning's departures through the Stargate. Three teams were outbound today on missions to target worlds from the city's vast database of addresses, basic reconnaissance jaunts to search for new allies, Ancient artifacts or to just plain explore. She scanned down the list and saw the name of the commander of the team assigned to the next transit through the Gate; Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard.