James Swallow - Halcyon

"That would be regicide. I'm not quite ready to go killing kings yet."

"I didn't say kill him," Ronon continued. "Throw him into space for a couple of seconds, then beam him back in. That'll make anyone talk. Might have to do it a few times, though. He looks like a sturdy guy."

Sheppard sighed. "We don't even know if Daus is behind it." But in all honesty, the colonel knew how lame his denial sounded.

"That's how we would find out."

John turned in his chair. "We are not doing the airlock thing, okay? End of discussion."

"Just trying to be helpful."

On the canopy display, a glowing red dot emerged from the far side of Halcyon's day-night terminator. "Wait a second. What is that?"

"A satellite?" Ronon glanced at the sensor console. "Daus's people put something in orbit?"

The colonel shook his head. "They don't have the technology to build rockets that would get up this far…" He studied the display. "It's smaller than the Jumper. It's definitely some thing artificial." Sheppard changed their heading and eased the throttle forward. "Let's go take a closer look."

The object grew from a glittering dot and began to take on a clear shape and form. Ronon rose from his chair to stand at Sheppard's shoulder as the colonel brought the Puddle Jumper up into a matching orbit. Dex studied the vaguely ovoid shape of the thing, his mind racing to place it. He had seen things like it before, a long time ago, in the skies over other worlds.

A pair of spindly solar panels turned as he watched it grow larger, catching a glimmer of pale light from Halcyon's star. Ronon could make out detail now, the fluted curvature of the object's structure, the peculiar asymmetrical contours like carved bone.

A shock of icy cold flooded his veins. "Wraith!" he snapped. "It's a Wraith satellite!"

Sheppard was already reacting, veering away as the readings on the Jumper's sensors changed. The Satedan had the fleeting impression of a flower blossoming as the alien machine opened to reveal a cluster of gun muzzles. Energy flashed and abruptly the blackness around them was bright with a deadly storm of photons.

The pilot threw the ship hard over, then back again, and the inertial dampers struggled to compensate. Ronon lost his footing and fell heavily into McKay's chair, grabbing the sensor console to steady himself. Dex had left the scanners running in full spectrum mode, and they were dutifully gathering data, rains of information trickling down the screen as the satellite re-oriented itself and fired again.

Glancing shots sent electrical surges through the glowing panels either side of the cabin, and an emerald pane spat sparks and went dead. Sheppard brought the Jumper around in a tight arc and the Wraith construct loomed large. Targeting cues bracketed the object on the heads-up display and John grinned. "I got tone." He squeezed a trigger bar and Ronon heard the snap-hiss of a drone launch. A pair of glowing missiles looped away toward the satellite, their odd squid-like profiles cutting an unerring course through the black.

Puffs of thruster gas jetted from the satellite as the machine attempted to dodge the incoming fire, but the drones split apart and came in at the Wraith device from two different points on the axis. The satellite was caught between them and shattered in an explosion of light and fragments. Pieces of bony matter and warped twists of metal clattered off the hull as the Jumper swerved away from the blast.

"dice shot," noted Dex.

Sheppard accepted the compliment with a nod. "I thought so.

Ronon blew out a breath, the adrenaline rush of the brief battle waning. He studied the sensor screen. The data there was dense and largely beyond his understanding, but there were parts of the readings that he could decipher.

"That was a close call," said the colonel. "Lucky for us you recognized that thing."

"It's a marker beacon," he noted, "a bigger version of that device we found in the tavern on M3Y-465."

"That doesn't sound promising. What's it doing here?"

"The Wraith use them to tag a planet. Their scout craft scope out systems where there might be large populations and then leave one of those behind. Hive ships come in later and do the actual culling."

Sheppard turned the Jumper's sensors to run a wide scan of the surrounding space. "No sign of any other vessels in the system. It can't have been put there recently."

Ronon frowned at the console. "Might be able to get a reading…" He hissed a particularly nasty Satedan curse under his breath. "Why couldn't he have made working this thing simpler?"

"You got something?"

"Wait!" snapped Dex. "I'm not as smart as McKay, I can't figure this out as quickly!" He was silent for a few moments, working through the data. At last, the console gave an answering beep. "Here. Radiation scan indicates that thing was at least ten thousand years old."

"It must have been dropped here when the Ancients and the Wraith were still duking it out for the galaxy," Sheppard opined. "Question is, has it been talking to any of its friends in the meantime?"

Ronon shrugged. It annoyed him that this was beyond his skills. "I don't know, I can't decipher this. Maybe Teyla…"

The colonel was silent for a moment. "All right, we're going back down. Daus will have to be told what we found. We can't detect Rodney from up here anyhow." The Jumper's engines rose in pitch as the spacecraft turned about and dipped back into Halcyon's gravity well. "We're going to have to find another way to get to him."

"One thing," rumbled Dex, "when we find McKay, don't tell him I said he was smarter than me. If you do, I'll break your legs."

Sheppard rolled his eyes. "Whatever you say."

Dr. Rodney McKay rolled awake and sneezed violently, his entire body contorting in a sharp spasm. His hands came up to his chest in claws and he gagged; the entire effect was as if he was attempting the comical impersonation of a rat. It was this unfortunate physical tic that had earned him the nickname `Rodent' from some of the more unpleasant pupils who had shared his time at junior high school.

Of course, that was in the days before he had left them all behind, before his teachers had finally had the intelligence to move him from the category of `bright' to `child prodigy' and then to `quite staggeringly clever'. So what if they said it had stunted his social skills, so what? He was smarter than them. The jocks and popular girls who had called him names, what were they doing with their lives now, huh? Living in some dreary suburban nowheresville with their stupid gas-guzzling SUVs, their drink problems, their spiraling debts and their two-pointthree ugly children, while Rodent-no, damn it, my name is Rodney'-got to make world-changing science, travel through wormholes, visit strange new worlds and get shot-

Get. Shot.

It all came thundering back to him and he blinked out of his half-aware daze. He remembered the heavy metal weight of the pistol in his hand, the way it bucked and snapped when he fired blindly at the men in gray fatigues. He remembered Erony screaming, calling out his name. And most of all, he remembered the blunt prow of the stunner pistol tracking toward him, the sliver weapon lit by the sullen green glow of its power cell.

Rodney went tense as his muscles recalled the horrific, heartstopping shock as the energy blast took him, consciousness flooding out as the unblemished floor of the dolmen's control room rose up to meet him. Then darkness, black and cold. And now here.

He blinked; his vision was blurry but it was improving with every passing second. Feeling with his hands, McKay found a wall and used it to get to his feet, fighting down the woozy after-shock as he dragged himself up it. The wall was cold and clammy, and it gave a little in the way that something organic might.