James Swallow: Halcyon

Rodney did a rare thing; he reacted without thinking about it, and dragged the bewildered Magnate out of the line of fire, forcing him into the cover of a bank of sputtering electromatic valves. He was at a loss to explain the sudden impulse that made him save the life of a man who was a killer and a tyrant.

He thrust the uncomfortable thought away. "A weapon! You've got a weapon, right? Use it!"

Daus drew his swordgun and looked at it as if he didn't recognize it. "How can I… So much. So much blood on my hands." He made a stifled sound like a sob. "Erony was right. Great blades, I did not hear her…"

McKay took the swordgun and gripped the gold-plated pommel, fingering the trigger mechanism. It was heavy and unwieldy in his grip. Nervously, he dared a look around the valve rack and saw the melee in full frenzy.

The Wraith moved through the nexus chamber like a tornado, killing and feeding, some of them struck down by rattling chugs of needle-shot and left by their fellows, others taking up the guns of their fallen human prey and smashing them against the consoles. Vekken fought with unchained violence, the curved half-moon blade along the breech of his pistol cutting into his foes, the gun howling with each shot he placed into the heart of a Wraith; but he was just one man, and the Wraiths, the freed Hounds, the newly awakened and the wild and untamed, they fell upon him and he vanished under a dozen screeching attackers.

Rodney let the swordgun go. It was useless in his hands, he realized. He had to run, get away from this carnage, find some other way to strike back at these creatures. To stay and fight would mean death, or worse.

He grabbed at Daus's thick, ornate tunic. "Time to go!" he snapped. "Before they find us, we have to get out of here!"

"Where would you go, prey?" asked an oily, menacing voice. "On my ship, tell me, where would you run to?"

"S-Scar," murmured Daus.

The Wraith commander circled around Rodney and the Magnate, apparently uninterested in the hoots of pleasure from his pack. He had a pair of ex-Hounds with him, their pristine silver armor now dirty and fouled. Scar cocked his head as he examined McKay, looking him up and down. The alien tapped his ragged tunic, indicating Rodney's Atlantis uniform jacket. "Another one. Another not-native. Wherever I turn I come across your kind. How interesting."

"Yeah, there's a lot of us," McKay found his mouth running away, babbling before he could stop himself. "Hundreds, thousands even, a whole army of, uh, us. You better not kill me, because there would really be trouble."

The other Wraith became calmer as Scar snarled out new orders. "Agreed. A kill is a waste of good nourishment." His eye narrowed as his gaze settled on Daus, the scar across his face dark with anger. "A waste of good vengeance."

One of the Hounds gripped Daus firmly and presented him to Scar. "It is you," husked the Magnate. "Still alive. Haunting me for my failures."

Scar sneered. "That is as good an explanation as any other. You cannot know how much it pleases me to find you here, Lord Daus." The alien poured scorn on the nobleman's title. "I wonder if you can understand the depths of hatred you engendered in me. The agony of living day after day with that accursed dolmen screaming in my head, doomed to watch my kindred made into primitives, fighting every moment to hold my psyche intact!" The raw anger coming from Scar was a palpable force, and McKay watched as he forced it from himself, grimacing with each breath. Rodney became aware of a horrific wound in the Wraith's chest, although Scar seemed to revel in the pain of it.

"You should be dead a hundred times over," Daus whispered. "Dead and dead and dead and dead…"

"Not before this," replied the Wraith, and his arm lashed out like a striking snake, ripping into the soft flesh of Daus's face.

Sickened, Rodney flinched away as Scar meticulously blinded the Magnate's right eye, ruining his face in the same manner that Daus had ruined the Wraith's on a hunt long since past. McKay felt his stomach rebel and swallowed hard, fighting down the urge to throw up. He lurched to a console and hung on to it, his head swimming.

"Now we are in balance," said Scar, over a strangled whimper from the nobleman.

Rodney blinked and his gaze fell on the control screen directly in front of him. He recognized it as part of the Hive Ship's sensor mechanisms, a monitoring station tied into the vessels array of passive detection systems. It could detect perturbations in various energy fields-magnetic, thermal, and gravitational-through reactions along organic gossamer webs, which trailed from the Hive Ship's spines in molecule-thin strings.

The console was juddery and kept failing to maintain a coherent image; Rodney could see where Kelfer's blundering experimentation had damaged the device, making its display foggy and riddled with ghost readings. A glow of light puckered into being on the glassy screen and something large registered on the gravity curve. The shape was ill defined but it was big, and it was moving somewhere out beyond the orbit of Halcyon's second moon.

"A ship." His heart sank as the words left his mouth. "A ship just came out of hyperspace."

He smelled the acid breath of the Wraith as Scar approached. "You are correct, prey. It seems my call for the Hives was heard after all. My kindred are coming to join the cull." The smile behind the words was chilling. "The fate of this world is sealed."

"It's sealed," frowned Ronon, running the flat of his palm along the leaves of the iris hatch. "No way we're going to get this open from here."

"Oh ye of little faith," retorted Sheppard, dropping into a crouch. "I brought a party favor from the Jumper before I came on board." From a pocket on his gear vest he pulled a small brick sealed in plastic and waggled it in the air. "C4."

"I thought you were bluffing when you told the Wraith you had explosives."

"Yeah, kinda. I just got the one." The colonel fixed the charge to the point on the hatchway where the detonation would do the most damage, and pressed a compact digital timer into the soft clay-like block.

"The gunfire inside has stopped," said Teyla, her voice still rough from her experience with the choke collar. She hefted a long-lance rifle she had appropriated from a fallen trooper. "We cannot tarry, colonel. Every moment Scar is in there, Halcyon is in danger."

"Fire in the hole!" The timer beeped. "Thirty seconds and counting." Sheppard waved them away. "Into cover, quick!"

Ronon checked the charge on his pistol and John slipped a full clip of ammunition into the P90. He glanced at Teyla and got a curt nod in return. "Hey, anyone got any flash-bangs left?"

Ronon nodded, producing a couple of stun grenades. "Two."

"Good," said Sheppard. "Use `em."

The Wraith began herding the survivors across the chamber to the starboard side, dragging injured riflemen from where they had fallen and shoving them together with the few panic-stricken scientists who had not been cut down in the earlier crossfire. Others picked at control panels, illuminated systems that had laid silent for hundreds of years. Long-dormant gun turrets and beam cannons along the Hive Ship's ventral hull twitched and came back to life, lifeblood flowing back into them as they began the first stages of preparation for a planetary bombardment. Scar watched the activity with callous smugness.

"Is it too cliche for me to ask what it is you're going to do with us?" said McKay, trying to keep a whine from his tone. "Or is that a question I would be better off not raising?"

"There are many mouths to feed on my ship." The Wraith said it almost as if he were bored with the whole experience. "The malign influence of the Enemy's device will have affected many of my kindred. They will need to replenish their strength in order to return to their former temperaments."