Ronon met Mason at the main hatch. "What do you think you're up to, son?" snapped the soldier. "I'm the ranking-"
"Get out of my way." Dex yanked on a control lever and the steel hatch yawned open, letting wind and the unearthly drone of the Hive Ship's engines fill the cabin. He pulled two keen battle daggers from a concealed holster.
"You're gonna kill yourself," Mason told him.
"There's plenty of Wraith who will do that for me." Outside of the hatch, he saw the bony hull of the Wraith ship come into view as the flyer drifted into near-collision distance. He threw a quick look at Beckett. "Keep your distance from the ship. I'm going inside."
"And just how are you going to do that?"
Ronon felt the kick of adrenaline rush into him and he couldn't stop the flicker of a grin as he stepped up. "Watch."
The knives raised, Dex threw himself out of the gyro-flyer and into the bitter air, the tree tops fluttering a thousand feet below.
"We are airborne." At first Teyla had thought the tremors passing through the Hive Ship were something else, perhaps an attack of some kind. She half-hoped that were the case, wishing that the Halcyons had seen sense and brought their air-battleships to smash the dormant vessel into wreckage; but the shift in gravity told her otherwise, as the decking seemed to become softer beneath her feet, the g-force lessening as the mammoth vessel discarded its cover. The corridors of the Wraith craft were taking on a different hue, the dead and ashen white of fleshy processing conduits along the walls changing to a cold blue-green. They pulsed like veins as life returned to the alien ship.
Scar's retinue of Wraiths had become muted ever since they boarded the hive. Teyla saw some of them sniffing at the walls or licking at scent-traces that only they could detect. The anxiety the aliens had demonstrated before the dolmen and inside the Jumper was completely gone. These beings were in their own element now, moment by moment regaining the poise that their leader demonstrated. She had no doubt that in days, perhaps even hours, the Wraith once tormented and made feral by the Ancient device would become their former selves; and when that happened she pitied the people of Halcyon. The Wraith were frightening enough when they preyed upon you just to fulfill their needs for sustenance; Teyla shuddered beneath her choke collar as she contemplated of the depths of cruelty they would show to a people who had made them slaves. She swallowed, trying to soothe her bruised throat. Breathing was difficult, even with the heavy Hound collar's cogs in a relaxed mode. "Ali," she gasped. "Gods protect me…"
Scar heard her whisper and cocked his head. "Your deities will not hear you in this place, Tey-lah. Of that, you must have no doubt." He sniffed the air. "Only my wishes will be answered today."
Teyla had never considered that Wraiths might have gods of their own. What kind of creator would they worship? she wondered; but it was more likely that Scar was simply mocking her. She was reduced to this, a pet for her most hated foe's amusement. Teyla caught the spark of revulsion that thought kindled inside her and held on to it, letting it warm her.
A warning yowl from one of the other Wraith brought them all to a halt. The alien dropped to a crouch and lapped at the chilly air, glancing back over its shoulder with a wary grimace. Scar became very still, and his cohorts followed suit. "Listen," he murmured, "can you hear them? Can you feel them, Teylah?"
She didn't want to. She did not want to acknowledge the swarming presence in the corners of her mind, the insect crawl of alien thought scratching at the insides of her skull; but they were there, the fierce colors of other Wraith psyches pushing in on her, tight and constricting. They were so very close now, in the walls, the floor, crowding out the sound of her heartbeat.
Man-shapes moved at the far end of the corridor, things that loped and hissed shifting away from bone alcoves in the walls. Some wore scraps of armor, some even carried weapons aglow with lethal power.
Scar made cracking, spitting sounds that were returned by the newcomers. Her heart pounding against the inside of her ribs, Teyla shrank back against a skeletal pillar as the newly awakened Wraiths came to walk among their brethren. Scar moved close to a female with blood-red hair that came to her knees. In the sallow glow of the corridor's bioluminescence, she could pick out black curves and loops of tribal tattoos on the female's bare shoulders. Scar had the same patterns about his neck and cheeks.
The female caught sight of Teyla and her nostrils flared. She jerked and spat, angry and hungry at the sight of a live human. The Athosian woman tensed, ready to fight off the Wraith, but Scar made a grumbling sound and the female demurred, backing off. One of the female's group presented its weapon to Scar, cementing his place as the alpha in the newly enlarged pack. Teyla recognized the shape of a Wraith stunner rifle, the long gun fat and rounded like a huge silver maggot, the emerald glow of energy cells along its flanks and the wicked barb at the end. Scar accepted it and tugged on the cable leash connected to her collar. Teyla moved with them as the pack pressed deeper into the ship.
It was difficult to do anything other than put one foot in front of the other, hard for her to keep herself held strongly in the grip of her own will. From all sides, the boiling invisible hate of the Wraiths pressed down on her. Teyla knew that with one single moment of weakness from her, the pressure would overwhelm her mind with raw, inchoate fear.
There was a moment when Ronon thought he was going to miss it; but then the wind caught him and the Satedan saw the glistening flank of the Hive Ship there in front of him. He struck hard and found no purchase on the slippery fuselage. The curved hull plates were broad and interlocked, lapping over one another in the same fashion as the carapace of an armored beetle. Instantly he was sliding away, down toward the lip of the fuselage and the sheer drop into the Halcyon woodlands. Ronon lashed out with the battle daggers with all his might and felt the blade tips bite into the hull. Bone squealed at the impact points and threatened to tear the knives from his hands, but he hung on grimly, snarling with effort. The wind pulled at him, whipping his hair about his face. His slide slowed and he felt air beneath his feet; Dex was almost off the edge of the drifting Hive Ship.
With a savage grunt of effort, Ronon used the daggers as pitons, advancing up and away from the brink in a march of cutting wounds across the organic hull. He knew from past experience that Wraith craft were sheathed not with rigid and inflexible matter, but with fleshy material that could bend and deform under impacts from micrometeorites or ballistic weapons. He found a shallow duct and scrambled into it, breathing hard. The wind was rushing over the hull now, as the Hive Ship began to pick up speed. Ronon cast around and saw the gyro-flyer, below and to the starboard side, the rotor blades chopping through the air as it raced to keep up.
Sheathing the daggers, Dex swallowed down his tense adrenalin aftershock and fired his pistol point-blank into the skeletal duct. Bone and cartilage shattered around the intake, and almost as quickly a thick gel began to ooze over the new wound, hardening to scab it closed. Ronon drew his short sword, took a deep breath, and plunged himself into the cut, forcing his way through the exterior hull.
Sheppard found himself wishing for a ball of string or a piece of chalk. "A bag of bread crumbs, even," he said to the air, "or better yet, a deck plan." He had a pack of chemical glow-sticks, but nowhere near enough that he would have been able to mark the path. At what seemed like the hundredth T-junction he'd passed in the past ten minutes, the colonel halted and flashed the P90's torch down the branching corridors. He found himself thinking of the adventure games he used to play as a kid on his cousin's computer. "You are in a maze of tunnels, all alike," he grimaced. "Huh. I always liked first-person shooters better, anyhow."