James Swallow - Halcyon

"Orders received and understood, ma'am," replied the soldier.

"Carson?"

"Go ahead."

"Try to keep out of trouble. In the meantime, I'm going to see if I can get you another ride, understood?"

Beckett and Mason exchanged glances, an unspoken communication passing between them. There were some things that Weir wasn't willing to discuss on an open channel, but her meaning was clear.

"Understood," replied the doctor, the stress of the last few hours abruptly settling on him. "Halcyon out."

Elizabeth turned to Zelenka, to find the scientist already working at a control console, his hands flying over the glassy Atlantean keypad, then to a laptop, then back again. "Radek, can you pinpoint the-"

"Location of the Daedalus?" A semi-transparent screen shimmered and solidified into a display of the Pegasus Galaxy's interstellar region. Zelenka touched a control and three cursors illuminated. "This is us, Atlantis. This is Daedalus. This is the Halcyon star system."

Weir gave a small smile at the man's ability to anticipate her request; but then he was a genius, like so many of the experts that had come with her from Cheyenne Mountain. "It's within their hyperspace transit range. We may have another option after all." She gestured to the duty technician. "Get sub-space communications on line for me. Send a priority one flash message to Colonel Caldwell."

"On it," came the reply.

"How long do you think it would take them to make the journey?"

Zelenka licked his lips. "That all depends on the energy flux curve they've been operating on during this voyage. You see, if it's a high co-efficient, then there could be a ten to twenty percent variation in the muon-"

"A ballpark figure, Radek," she broke in. "I don't need the decimal places."

"Oh. Of course. Ball-park." He hesitated, considering. "Thirty, perhaps thirty-five hours."

Weir studied the screen. "Is there nothing they could do to shave some time off that?"

Zelenka shook his head. "Even if they run the drives hot, it still wouldn't make more than a couple of hours difference. Hyperspace travel doesn't work like conventional rockets. It is all gravity curvatures and boson intersections." He gave her a weak grin. "As a famous engineer once said, `you cannot change the laws of physics."'

"A famous engineer?"

"Yes. I believe he was from Moscow."

"Dr. Weir?" The technician called out. "I have Daedalus on the comm."

She tapped her headset. "Colonel Caldwell?"

The voice of the starship's commander crackled from a hidden speaker. "Doctor. You're lucky you caught us. We've been conducting experiments on the edge of a Jovian planet's atmosphere, using the hydrogen ram scoop array developed by Colonel Carter"

Even though she couldn't see him, Weir held up her hand for quiet. "Colonel, as much as I would usually be fascinated by such an interesting scientific endeavor, I'm afraid I have to ask you to cut it short. We have a situation in the Halcyon system, a few parsecs from your current location." She entered a data string on her computer. "I'm sending you galactic co-ordinates for the system on a side channel, along with everything we have up until now on the mission there."

"Let me guess," Caldwell said dryly. "Sheppard 's team is in trouble?"

"For starters."

At another time, Caldwell might have argued the matter with her or made an issue of Sheppard's involvement; but the professional relationship between Weir and the captain of the Daedalus had now grown to the point where each had a level of respect for the other, and to Caldwell's credit he accepted her orders without question. "Tell inc what I need to know, Doctor, and we'll be on our way."

"There's a good possibility that the planet Halcyon is under imminent threat of Wraith attack, and right now our people can't Gate off world. You are to proceed to Halcyon at full military speed and offer all assistance needed to Colonel Sheppard and his team… And be prepared to engage the Wraith in force when you get there."

She heard Caldwell take a deep breath. "All right. Daedalus concurs." After a moment, the colonel spoke again, quietly so that only Weir could hear him. "Elizabeth, that planet's a day and a half away even at full throttle. If the Wraith are heading there, we may already be too late."

"I know, Colonel," she admitted. "Good hunting, Daedalus. Atlantis out."

The cavern was dank and smelled faintly of rotting meat. No human hunter had ever dared to venture this deep into the core of the enclosure; or at least if they did, they never returned to speak of it.

The Wraith that the Halcyons had christened `Scar' toyed with some of the items his pack mates had stripped from the prey, picking them up and sniffing them, moving them about with a clawed finger. Presently, he gathered up a pistol made of black steel and turned it in his hand. The weapon was interesting. Scar recognized the shape and form of a primitive ballistic firearm, but at the same time he could see that this was far more advanced than the guns carried by the hunters they usually culled. He licked the frame, tasting sweat and the smallest remnants of flesh-scent there. Scar had always been fascinated by the machinery of lesser species, the way that they forced metals from the ground into hard shapes instead of fashioning organics, bone and bio-matter as the Wraith did. It was a peculiarity of his, an affectation his kindred rarely shared.

One of the pack spat angrily as it came upon something in the pile, and Scar snatched it from his grip. The Wraith growled; the device was a small screen with buttons about its frame, made from some sort of crystalline material that glowed with an inner light. Scar knew the origin of it immediately. The old enemy, his kind's most ancient foe, had fabricated this. With a sudden jerk of motion, the Wraith threw the device into the air and fired the human weapon at it. Sharp retorts of sound echoed around the cave with yellow flashes of discharge from the barrel. The pack snarled at the noise, but Scar grinned widely as the Ancient scanner struck the rock in a rain of broken fragments.

The gunfire jerked Teyla from her painful slumber and she twitched against gooey bonds that held her hands behind her back. The Athosian blinked and tried to make sense of where she was, remembering the trapdoor and the black pit beneath it. She looked around. A cave. No way to know how much time has passed. She caught sight of Bishop, similarly secured a few feet away. He was wavering on the edge of alertness, his head lolling. Teyla tried to work her wrists free, but she had no success. The thick, gelatinous matter that ensnared them was some kind of secreted web, pliant but impossible to break.

Then she shivered, and not through the cold. In her head there were growls and snarls, a wild animal chorus of base, bloodhungry minds. She saw the Wraith, clustered around each other, and before them the single male in ragged clothes with her handgun in his fist. The alien's garb was similar to the coats and battle gear she had seen before on other high-ranking Wraith, but it was ripped and torn, ravaged by combat and years of life as a fugitive. He came closer to her, and in the dimness Teyla saw his scarred and ruined cheek, his single blinded eye.

"What," husked the alien, working at the word. "What are. You?" He spoke haltingly, as if he had not had to form proper speech in a long time and the manner of it had become unfamiliar to him. "What are you?" repeated Scar. "Not the hunters. Not… Not the Enemy. You have their machines… But you are not one of them."

Once, when she was a girl, Teyla had seen her father put a whitehorn to death because it had escaped from the corral and gorged itself on poisonous fruit. In the moments before he had put the animal out of its misery, it had looked directly at her and the Athosian had seen the light of bestial madness in its gaze. She saw the same thing now on the face of the Wraith that confronted her.