"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."
"Yeah, I guess you wouldn't want to appear sickly when your buddies arrive, right? They might get the pick of the cull, and that would make you look a little stupid."
"Indeed." Ice formed on the word.
"Sorry. Sorry," McKay gulped. "Sometimes I babble when I'm nervous. Like now."
Scar eyed Rodney's laptop and the crude splice into the Hive Ship's systems. "What were you doing to my vessel, prey? Answer me."
"We… Wanted to…" McKay blinked, trying to think of a convincing lie and failing miserably. "Phone home?"
The Wraith commander snarled and came at him; but in the next second a wall of sound blasted out across the chamber and knocked all of them off their feet.
The charge did its work. The petals of the iris hatchway were either blown completely away or bent back in burnt, tattered shreds. Ronon leapt into the coiling smoke instants after the blast occurred, hurling the flash-bangs through the ruined doorway.
Inside, Rodney saw the familiar black cylinders arc through the hazy air and clatter across the deck. He spun away and covered his face with his arms just as the stun grenades blew. Brilliant magnesium-white flashes of light strobed inside the nexus chamber, throwing stark, sharp-edged shadows across the walls.
Ronon came in first, red bolts of energy issuing from the barrel of his gun. Sheppard took the right, laying down bursts of machinegun fire, and Teyla moved left, firing the steam-rifle from the hip in blaring chugs of discharge.
The ex-Hounds at Scar's sides were downed by the first broadside of shots, but the rest of the aliens reacted faster than the Atlantis team expected, shooting back with stunner rifles and blasters liberated from the Hive Ship's weapons pods. The flash-bangs had done the trick, however, and all the human sur vivors were flat to the floor or behind cover as the firefight raged across the control deck.
All except Rodney McKay, pressed up against a bone pillar that was barely wide enough to hide him. He glimpsed Scar, a blaster pistol in each hand, fanning stunner bolts back and forth, trying to catch the Atlantis team with a glancing hit. His mind raced. John and the others were turning the tide, but if that was another Wraith ship inbound, it wouldn't matter if they did win the day here. He could make out the sensor console from where he crouched; the mystery contact was coming closer, on a direct intercept course.
And if he could complete the reactor overload sequence Kelfer had started, by the time the other Hive Ship knew what was happening, it would be too late. The blast would engulf the other vessel. Two birds with one big thermonuclear stone.