Stargate SG-1 & Atlantis - Far Horizons (7 page)

He watched her hand the bottle back to Dughan. “Quickly, Elder,” she said. “Before I sleep.”

Dughan gazed down at her for a moment, his eyes brimming with what looked to Sheppard very much like pride. Then he reached out to a panel on the wall and hit it hard with the side of his fist.

The panel chimed dully, a thick, rasping sound as the transparent shell began to grind painfully upwards. The chamber was in poor repair, Sheppard realized, just like the rest of the ship. Hundreds of Wraith must have already died there, trapped, suffocated or starved as their support systems failed.

This one, though, was very much alive. Sheppard saw it lurch out of the chamber, massive fists bunching. Its masked head dipped towards Ceana.

“Master,” Dughan said, bowing and gesturing to the girl. “She is for you. Feed, and be strong.”

There was no doubt now. The villagers were engaged in some sickening bargain with the Wraith trapped here, waking them one by one, offering their children as meals with only a soporific draught to dull the pain of their ending. In return, their village was spared.

That bargain ended tonight. Sheppard stepped around the corner, smooth and fast, the P90 centered on the Wraith’s center of mass and his teammates spilling out after him. “Back off, pal. Breakfast is cancelled.”

The creature snapped around to face him. In front of it, Ceana stood with eyes wide, her mouth open in shock. “John? What are you doing?”

“Trying to save your life.” The Wraith was too close to her. If he opened fire the ricochets from its armor would tear her apart. “So meet me halfway and get away from that thing.”

“No!” she screamed. “Go away!”

Before he could answer the chamber was full of bodies, all yelling at each other. Keller was reaching out to Ceana, trying to coax the child away from the hulking alien at her back. McKay was moving towards a vantage point closer to the hibernation chamber, while Wright was circling the group, trying to get a clear shot around the shouting, confused villagers.

Only the Wraith was still.

The situation had gone very bad, very quickly. Sheppard cursed himself. He should have listened to Wright, intervened earlier. “Ceana…”

She was shaking her head at him. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Just let us help you!”

“You can’t,” she said dully, and then the strength went out of her. She sank to her knees.

Fleetingly, Sheppard had a clear shot over her head. He squeezed the trigger, sent a clattering burst into the Wraith’s shoulder, but then Marchal was in the way, running towards his daughter, howling her name.

The Wraith caught him by the jaw, stilling his cries. Then it span him clear around and smashed the flat of its other hand into his back.

The blow was perfectly aimed, brutally delivered. It took Marchal off his feet, whirled him through the air and straight into Sheppard.

He tumbled in a tangle of limbs and curses, the weight of the villager’s body slamming him backwards into the passage, knocking him to the floor. He heard a yammer of gunfire as he fell, Wright’s or McKay’s, possibly both. Then a solid impact, a cry of fear.

Sheppard rolled out from under Marchal, dived back into the chamber.

Wright was down, sprawled, and the Wraith had Dughan by the throat. Sheppard brought the P90 up again but there wasn’t even time to aim before the creature leapt, the old man still in its grip, down into a gaping rent in the deck.

He ran to the edge, saw no movement. “Aw hell.”

“Okay,” McKay muttered, aiming nervously down alongside him. “That didn’t go so well.”

Wright was sitting up. “Sorry, sir, it was just too fast.”

“Ceana’s drugged,” Keller called, from the other side of the chamber. “But she’s all right. Marchal’s in bad shape, though.”

“See what you can do for them.” He slung the P90, looking for a route down through the tangled wreckage. “Wright, stay with her. Once Marchal’s stabilized, get everybody back to the jumper.”

McKay stared at him. “Where are you going?”

“After Dughan. Come on.”

They found the Elder within a few minutes. He was crumpled against a wall on the next deck down, his coat torn open, his skin desiccated and stretched like dusty paper over his bones. Sheppard gazed at Dughan’s eyeless ruin of a face and tried not to feel sorry for the old man, but a meal for Wraith was no way for anyone to end their days.

There was something lying next to the corpse; a hand-sized slab of glossy carapace, its screen glowing faintly. Sheppard picked it up. “Tracker.”

“Yeah, must be what I spotted from the jumper.” McKay took it from him. “Looks like it’s homed in on some kind of beacon — probably how they navigate here through the fog.”

“There’s a beacon running on this ship?”

McKay shrugged. “Automatic distress call from the crash? Whenever that was. Too weak to pick up unless you know what you’re looking for, especially with the particle layer.” He tossed the thing aside. “You know what bugs me, though?”

“Being right all the time?”

“No, I’m perfectly fine with that.” McKay gestured upwards. “All those hibernation chambers, the empty ones. You think Dughan’s people woke them up?”

“Sure looks that way.”

“So where are they all?”

Sheppard opened his mouth to answer, realized he didn’t have anything to say, and closed it again. The ship, however, chose that moment to speak for him. No sooner had his jaw snapped shut than a high, piercing scream began to echo through the vessel, a liquid shrieking, painfully loud. Sheppard grimaced, resisting the urge to clamp his hands over his ears. “Now what?”

“Alert siren.” McKay was looking around wildly. “Our buddy from upstairs is trying to warn the rest of the ship.”

The Wraith had only just woken, Sheppard thought. It might not even know that the vessel was on the ground, let alone broken and deserted. “Could he open the other hibernation chambers?”

McKay was striding across the deck. He had spotted a panel set into one wall, a dull lens of glassy, corroded chitin. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Sheppard watched him tapping at the lens, saw icons swim and shift under its surface. “I guess stopping him might be a good idea.”

“What do think I’m trying to — Oh.”

“Oh?”

“As in ‘Oh crap.’” McKay was staring at the lens. “You know what I was saying about the beacon being too weak to get through the particle layer? Well, Buddy’s just increased the signal strength by a factor of about ten thousand.”

Sheppard was almost impressed. “That’s smart, for warrior caste.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard people say the same thing about you.” McKay began stabbing at the control surface again. “Seriously, it’s broadcasting clear out of the atmosphere. If there are any other Wraith nearby…”

“Oh, today just keeps getting better.” Sheppard peered into the lens, saw strange shapes moving there, like plankton under a microscope. “You can shut it down, right?”

“Not from here. I can’t access emergency systems on this.” McKay stepped back. “We need a major control link. Which is probably where Buddy is right now, if he’s not already out waking every other Wraith he can find. In either case we —” His eyes widened. “No! Wait, I’ve got it!”

“Never doubted you for a second.” Sheppard watched McKay’s fingers dancing rapidly over the lens. “While you’re at it, can you shut that damn racket off?”

“Nope. Emergency system. But what I can do is access the power plant Buddy’s using. Route it away from the beacon.” The panel chirruped thickly and changed color. “There.”

“What about the signal?”

“Well, a few seconds’ worth is still propagating outwards, so there’s a chance more Wraith could arrive. Basically, the sooner we get everybody off this planet the better.”

The alarm slowed, deepened to a grinding bellow, then went silent.

“Oh no,” said McKay quietly.

“What?” Sheppard frowned. “Alarm bad, no alarm good. Isn’t that right?”

“Usually, yes.” McKay prodded at the panel, this time with no obvious effect. “But not today. Like I said, the emergency systems should still have power. If they haven’t, that means…”

Far off, in the distance, thunder rolled.

“Energy feedback. The ship’s too damaged to contain the bypass.”

“How long?”

“Until it goes reactor-critical?” McKay spread his hands. “I’d guess slightly less time than it’ll take us to get out of here.”

Sheppard grabbed his shoulder, turned him and began to propel him down the passageway. “Still okay with being right all the time?”

“I’ll let you know.”

Thankfully, McKay’s calculations were off by some degree. Sheppard was able to get McKay all the way back to the entrance wound before the first explosions began to tear their way through the ship, and was clambering in through the puddle jumper’s rear hatch when the Wraith vessel finally succumbed to its own internal energies.

He looked back, saw the south edge of the ship vanish in a billowing cloud of fire, a rippling detonation that tore along its length in no more than a second. He felt its heat wash over him, the fizzing hammer of its shockwave, and dived forwards, hitting the door panel as he flung himself, headlong, at the controls.

He had seen stone rising in the explosion; at a distance, no more than fragments of shadow, but Sheppard knew that untold thousands of tons of rock were in the air. He wanted to be away before any of it came back down again.

He dropped into the control seat, swept his hands over the board. “Everybody hang on!”

The jumper surged to life. He took the drives to full power, felt the ship whirl up into the sky, heard the startled cries of the other occupants. This was no time to be gentle, though. Boulders were already slamming into the ocean below.

And then they were out over open sea. He looked back. McKay and Keller were gaping at him, Wright and the other marines clutching at every handhold they could find.

“Now, that wasn’t so bad,” he grinned. “Was it?”

Light flooded through the forward port. Outside the ship, night had turned into a brief, blinding day.

There was just enough time for every alarm on the jumper to start howling at once before the second, and infinitely more powerful blast wave picked the vessel up, spun it around a few times, and then hurled it mercilessly down at the dark and boiling sea.

Much later, Keller tapped Sheppard on the shoulder. “Marchal’s regaining consciousness,” she whispered.

“Great.” He unfolded himself from under the control board, and stood up. “How is he?”

She shook her head sadly. “Go easy on him. I don’t think we’ve got long.”

“Thanks, doc.” He glanced down at McKay. “Okay to take a break?”

“Sure.” McKay had a selection of the jumper’s control crystals spread out on the deck in front of him. “I’m gonna be a while with these anyway.”

Sheppard stepped carefully past him, then followed Keller to the aft section, rolling his head around on his shoulders to straighten out the kinks. He had been contorting himself into various access panels almost from the moment the jumper had come to rest, stripping out crystals so that McKay could realign them before carefully slotting them back into place. Together they had managed to restart life support, but the engines and sensors were still offline.

The explosion had lashed the jumper with a huge electromagnetic pulse, knocking out almost every system instantly and dumping the vessel onto the seabed. Sheppard was trying very hard to forget that there were a couple of hundred feet of water above him.

Marchal was on a bench in the jumper’s aft section, draped in a silvery thermal blanket. His face was slack, gray-white, but his eyes were open and focused on Sheppard. “Where’s Ceana?”

Sheppard crouched next to him. “She’s right here.”

The villager couldn’t turn his head. The Wraith’s blow had smashed his spine. “Is she well?”

“Yes,” snapped Wright, from the sensor board. “No thanks to you.”

Sheppard glared at her, but Marchal just chuckled weakly. “She drank the draught. She was safe. As soon as the monster sipped from her he’d be out like a candle.”

“You mean you can drug Wraith during feeding?” Keller glanced back at Ceana, still curled unconscious on the opposite bench. “How long does it last?”

“Long enough for the journey.” He coughed. Crimson threaded his chin. “To the cave of bones…”

Sheppard frowned. While a sedative that could knock out a feeding Wraith might be useful in the future, Keller’s medical curiosity was getting in the way of more important issues. “Look, hold up. You were using Ceana as
bait?
”

The man’s reply was little more than a whisper. “Can’t bring in a catch without bait, two-wrist.”

There was a faint whining sound from the front of the cabin, a flutter of light. Sheppard saw McKay and Wright leaning over the sensor board. He touched Marchal’s shoulder, a moment of reassurance that the man probably couldn’t feel, and leaned around the bulkhead door. “Anything?”

McKay was tapping nervously at the board. “Sensors are online. Um…”

“Problem?”

“I don’t think so. Just picking up a lot of movement.” His eyebrows went up. “Whoah. Something’s going over us.”

“A big something?”

“Either one big something or a lot of little somethings.”

“The explosion must have stirred up all the sea life for miles,” said Wright. “Probably just squid.”

As she spoke, something slithered past the forward viewport. Sheppard looked up, and for a horrible instant thought he saw something peering in at him. Then it was gone, a ragged shadow darting away into the gloom.

It could only have been a fish, but the half-glimpse he had of it left him profoundly unnerved. “Nice work, people. But just in case there’s anything out there big enough to think we’re food…”

Behind him, Keller whispered his name.

He turned back to her. She was dabbing at Marchal’s lips with gauze, and it was coming away red. At her touch, the man moaned softly. “The Mainlanders.”

“Try not to talk,” Sheppard told him.

Marchal’s jaw worked. “We warned them, but they sailed out too far, fished too deep. Woke something…”