"Still alive," Vekken seemed surprised. "Your commander has more resilience than I would have credited him with." The adjutant threw a glance over his shoulder at the Lord Magnate, who was in heated discussion with the late Kelfer's subordinates.
"Behind you! Behind you!" snapped Rodney at the monitor display. A second optical feed from an area further down the same corridor showed a lone Wraith creeping toward the colonel, who seemed oblivious of the alien's stealthy approach. "This is like watching one of those idiotic slasher movies!" He slapped at the control console. "Sheppard! It's behind you!"
"Perhaps if you call out a little louder, he might hear," said Vekken archly.
McKay spun around, galvanized into action. "He might hear this!" The scientist snatched at the bag of equipment that the Halcyons had taken from him at the dolmen and tore it open, grabbing at the radio inside. He hesitated for a second, twisting the dials on the top of the walkie-talkie. He couldn't remember the frequency! That was the stupid bloody military for you, changing the channel setting for every bloody mission, and Rodney could never remember which was which. "Sheppard!" he barked into the pickup. Nothing. He fiddled with the dial again. "Sheppard, watch your back-"
Vekken plucked the radio from his grip. "You will desist, Dr. McKay." He handed the device to one of his soldiers. "If he attempts to use this communicator again, wound him."
"Yes sir."
"He'll be killed!" blurted McKay.
"Possibly," agreed Vekken, "but you should be more concerned about your own safety. The Magnate has given you an order. Fulfill it."
eppard, watch…ack
The sound from the radio was so quick and so distorted that for a moment it sounded like some random squawk of static and not actually a human voice at all. "Rodney?" Sheppard froze, straining to hear; and in that second he caught the sound of something else entirely. A bare footstep, claws ticking over chitinous deck plates.
John swung the P90 around and thumbed the switch. The compact torch blinked on and caught the newly awakened Wraith in a halo of harsh white light. The alien's skin was still wet with processing fluids from the hibernation process, and its skin was tight over gaunt muscle and bone. More than anything, the ghoulish creature looked ravenous.
It moved fast; Sheppard's first three-round burst went wide, the tongue of yellow fire from the P90's muzzle cutting the air where it had crouched a heartbeat earlier. He swept the gun back and forth, working the trigger, eschewing the method of short and controlled bursts for something closer to the spray-and-pray technique. The Wraith was almost on him when John's attack connected and the bullets marched across the killer's torso in a line of black impacts. It didn't go down straight away; the Wraith were tough like that. Before it could recover, Sheppard advanced a step and fired twice more, aiming for the collection of organs in the chest cavity that approximated a human heart. With a rattling gasp, the Wraith collapsed and John realized he'd been holding his breath the whole time. He puffed and checked the machinegun's clear plastic magazine. Third of a clip gone and he'd only taken out a single Wraith. He was going to have to find a solution to this situation that didn't involve bullets.
Sheppard moved forward down the tunnel, continuing on. He got ten steps before the vibration coming up through his boots changed tempo, becoming a resonating howl of motion and sound. The deck shifted beneath him in pulsed, shuddering tremors.
"We cannot land!" called the pilot from the cockpit compartment. "Your Highness, the ground is unstable!"
Ronon pushed Linnian aside and pressed his face to the glass oval of the gyro-flyer's porthole. Beneath them he could see low buildings, the green cylinder of a parked Puddle Jumper. As he watched the surrounding trees wafted back and forth as if a stiff wind was blowing. One of the watchtowers crumpled abruptly at the midpoint and fell away, collapsing in a heap. "It's an earthquake."
"This region is geologically inactive," Erony countered. "It's the vessel."
The doctor crowded in beside the Satedan. "Oh my. Do you see there?" He pointed to the hillside. "Landslide."
Dex followed his direction and saw great clods of earth falling away from the shallow hill, uprooting trees as they disin tegrated. Pale, bluish-white rock was revealed underneath; but no, not rock. It glittered dully in the daylight, the color of oiled, beaten metal. "They're raising the ship," he said it aloud, unable to believe the evidence of his own eyes. Ronon shouted out a command down the length of the cabin. "Back us off, now! Get us away from the hill!"
The gyro-flyer's rotors buzzed and the aircraft retreated into a hover, just as coils of dust and earth boiled up from around the perimeter of the concealed craft. The ground cracked apart with a hoarse roar, and the Hive Ship's drives swelled to optimal power. Ronon watched the hill rise from its setting and tremble, shaking off the accumulated camouflage of countless years. Stone and wood, earth and grass fell away and flocks of birds were unseated from their roosts.
Erony's pilot kept them level with the craft as it slowly rose above the tops of the trees, a deluge of rendered soil raining down across the landscape. Torn free from its hiding place, the Wraith Hive Ship cast a monstrous arachnid shadow, the ponderous and deadly mass drifting upward into the sky in defiance of gravity.
"We are too late," breathed the woman.
Chapter Twelve
Beckett blinked. "Well. It's not every day of your life that you get to see a hill take off and fly away."
"How long must've that ship been down here to get grown over like that?" demanded Mason. "Two hundred years? Five hundred? More?" He fixed Lady Erony with a hard, angry stare, daring her to answer him.
"The vessel has been here on our lands since before the Wars of Unification. I was never permitted to visit it." Her words caught in her throat. The noblewoman was like everyone else on the gyro-flyer, dwarfed by the horror of the reborn Hive Ship.
Ronon gave the Wraith vessel one last look and then ran his hands over his tunic, checking his gear. The drifting alien hulk hung like a storm front, moving against the wind, the throbbing hum of the gravity drives gradually increasing in pitch. The craft was elderly and still shaking off the throes of sleep, he reasoned, but it would not take long for the Hive Ship's systems to return to full capacity. Once that happened, it would outpace this flying machine in seconds, rise to orbit and be free to do whatever Scar commanded. Contact other Hive Fleets, launch bombardments or flights of Darts. The prospect chilled him, even if on some level Dex's sense of justice told him the Haleyons were fully deserving of such a fate.
There wasn't time to touch down and get to the Puddle Jumper; and even if he did, he only had the doctor to fly the craft for him. No. It was up to him to stop this.
Ronon pulled his way up the cabin to the cockpit hatch and summoned the flyer pilot's attention. "You. Get us closer."
The aviator's jaw dropped open. "Closer? Are you mad?"
The Satedan made a show of checking the power cell on his particle magnum. "Take us over the dorsal hull, close to the spinal ridge. Hurry, before the autonomic cannons wake up and start shooting."
The pilot nodded woodenly and pushed the steering yoke forward. The flyer pitched and the leviathan starship loomed to fill the glass canopy.