James Swallow - Halcyon

"Not bad, little man," said Dex. "I didn't think you had that much fight in you."

"I'm Scottish," he said glumly, "it's genetic."

"You attacked a Wraith bare-handed," added Erony, "you fought well."

"Only because I had no choice," Carson insisted, wincing at the building headache in his skull. "You want to understand us, lassie? That's it, right there. We don't fight because we want to. It's our last choice."

"On my world, it is always the first," admitted the woman.

"Now you're getting it."

Mason climbed back into the cabin as Beckett moved to Linnian's side, examining the adjutant's injured eye. "Doc, I did a sweep of the clearing. Jumper put down here, like Ronon said it did, but it's long gone now. We got no rads in the air, but the weather's going mad out there."

"Wound's sake," breathed Erony as she peered out at the threatening, turbulent sky, "had we been airborne when the shockwave struck, we would have been thrown into the trees."

Dex gathered up the Ancient scanner from where it had fallen in the melee, working the device. "If I read this right, then it looks like Sheppard headed north."

"What about this Wraith, the one called Scar?"

Ronon frowned. "He had Teyla captive. My guess is he made the colonel fly them out of here."

"But where to?"

Erony's lips thinned to a line. "North, you say?" She sighed. "I know where they are going."

"Highness, do not speak further!" Linnian managed weakly. "These outworlders must not be party to such important matters!"

"Hush," insisted Carson. "Erony? Is there something we should know?"

The noblewoman threw a look to one of her riflemen. "Inform the pilots to raise the flyer and take us northwards. Our destination will be the protected lands of the Fourth Dynast." The soldier saluted and disappeared into the cockpit. "At best speed, we will reach them quickly, but I have no doubt your colonel's aircraft will be there before us."

"Mistake," whined the adjutant. "Do not speak of it!"

"There is a truth," she began, as the aircraft left the ground, "a hidden truth that my Dynast keep from the world, a truth that even I am not fully party to." Erony sagged, as if the weight of what she was about to reveal was dragging her down. "I gave my oath to hold this sacred, but now I fear more silence may doom my planet to extinction."

Beckett took a seat across from the young woman, and listened carefully as she told them the Lord Magnate's best-kept secret.

The ship had been constructed before any of the Wraith that now called it home had even been born; although `constructed' might not have been the right way to describe it. Wraith vessels were not so much things of iron and steel, of plastic and glass, creations of artificial materials like the vessels built by the humans, the Goa'uld, the Asgard or the Ancients. Wraith craft were hatched; they were spun and carved into being, melded together out of matter more akin to bone and gristle than to titanium plate and silicon wafer. Electrochemical processes and nerve ganglions transmitted data and commands about the flesh of the Wraith Hive Ship. Organic bioluminescence and exothermal chemistry provided light, heat and breathing gasses. Skeletal matter formed the hull spaces and fuselage. The Wraith were parasites inside the gut of the craft, they probed and manipulated the simple brain to perform its flight tasks for them. And even, with a science now lost to all but a few castes of their kind, they found a way to warp the structure of reality so that rips into hyperspace could carry them from world to world, feeding, multiplying, culling.

This ship's mind had long since faded into docility, anything but the most basic cognitive functions still active, poked and prodded by the idiot flailings of the men-apes that discovered it. Once, at the heights of its prowess, the ship had been a living embodiment of fear. The vast shape of its insectile form, a giant mirror of the Iratus that had given birth to Wraithkind, it would drift above human worlds and strike terror into every prey that saw it. It had been glorious, then. To feed and feed, unfettered by everything except hunger. The Hive ate well and prospered; until the Enemy opposed them.

So began the long war, and along the way the Wraith lost something of themselves. The more they fought, the more they broke apart into factionalism, clan against clan, jockeying for the best feeding sites. In the end they had their victory, but the price was a high one. With the Enemy scattered, the galaxy was theirs-but food became scarce and the divisions of the war split wide. Wraith fought Wraith, and all the while the survivors of the great adversary sniped at them from every shadowed corner. Word of the Sleep began to spread. The Wraith were to embrace slumber and allow their feeding grounds to lie fallow and rebuild. Some would stay to stand sentinel; the rest would take the Sleep of millennia.

And so this Hive Ship came to this world for one final feast before venturing into hibernation; but the Enemy were waiting, and they had poisoned the prey, shielded them with their hateful technology. In the end, after many on both sides had fought and died, the vessel had fallen to earth and lay there, a wounded behemoth, its crew going insane with rage and hunger. Their only escape was to Sleep. The ship would wake them when it was time.

That time was now.

Inside the hibernation vault, the cells where Wraith still lay dormant took on a tepid white glow. First in ones and twos, then in clusters that faded into life, the neural links between the sleeping aliens and their vessel bringing both into gradual wakefulness.

Daus's elite corps of riflemen, his personal guard, had been deployed throughout the Hive Ship on his arrival. A contingent of them was stationed in the chamber, standing in a nervous ring on the bone walkway that extended across the open space. Their heads lifted to watch the patterns of light moving over the hexagonal hive cells. Sounds like eggshells cracking hissed and sputtered through the metallic air of the vast room. Wraiths, their minds shocked out of cold-sleep by the discharge from the shattered dolmen, reached out to peel back the fibrous sheaths that held them in stasis, spilling glutinous suspensor fluids out in a thick, cloying rain.

Naked, hateful and starving for the taste of their prey, the crew of the Hive Ship began to awaken. They had not fed in thousands of years, and the hunger they felt overwhelmed any reason they might have had. Pale and muscular bodies ripped themselves from the hibernation cells and scrambled across the walls, guttural screeches echoing as they spat out hunting calls.

The riflemen shone lamps into the darkness, casting pools of yellow sodium glare across the fluted curves of the bone walls. Shadows jumped and moved, drawing blares of nervous gunfire from fearful men. The Halcyons were used to being the hunters, the superiors in their dealings with the Wraith; but today those roles were reversed. The aliens swarmed upon the men in their black greatcoats, corpse-white forms rising up from beneath and falling upon them from above. In short order the crashes of gunfire were silenced and replaced with the howls and chatter of a feeding frenzy.

It was hard to make out details of exactly what was going on inside the hibernation vault. The screen in the Hive Ship's nexus chamber relayed visual data from one of hundreds of optical sensor orbs about the vessel's interior, and the images were attuned for Wraith eyes, not human ones; nevertheless, the shocked silence that hung in the room was proof enough that the Halcyon scientists were more than clear about the fate of the riflemen.

Rodney McKay's hand crept to his mouth. "We are so dead."

Kelfer was slumped beside him, the science minister now a paper-thin sketch of the man he had been. The scientist could not bear to watch the horrors unfolding on the screen. What he had witnessed in the past few days had finally broken him, as the facts he based his life around had come to pieces. McKay might have been able to spare a moment of pity for the guy, had he not been partially to blame for the danger that everyone on Halcyon was now facing.