“It’s just… You’re leaving these people twisting in the wind,” Rodney went on. “They need medical attention, and someone to stand up to that blowhard Takkol.”
“And that has to be us? When we moved into Atlantis, I don’t recall signing up to put out every fire in the Pegasus galaxy! We have enough problems of our own, dealing with the Wraith and the Replicators and everyone else who wants us dead, without taking on the troubles of every planet we visit!” He shook his head. “I knew this mission was a bad idea from the get-go.”
McKay folded his arms. “That’s it, is it? You’re just going to stick around until we find Ronon and Teyla, and then leave? What about those Wraith ships that imploded, what about this Aegis thing and the sickness?” He leaned forward. “What would Elizabeth have said about that, John?”
The thought of Elizabeth Weir brought Sheppard up short. “She would have agreed with me,” he replied, with less conviction than he would have liked.
“That’s not true, and you know it.”
The colonel grimaced. “You think I want to make this call, Rodney? But if the local government here doesn’t want our help with the sickness, we can’t force it on them. And I sure as hell am not getting suckered into doing Aaren’s strong-arm work for him, not again.”
“Well, maybe it’s time for a regime change…”
Sheppard eyed him. “You know that for sure, huh? You’ve been on Heruun less than two days and you’re ready to make that judgment? We can’t get that sort of thing right on our own planet, what makes you think we can do it right here?” He looked away; his tone had risen as he spoke, and the colonel had to admit a good amount of his annoyance was directed inward as well as at his friend.
“And of course there’s the whole reason we came here in the first place. Hive Ship in the ’hood, remember?”
“I haven’t forgotten that,” Sheppard replied.
“Maybe now we should tell the locals about it?”
“Wait.” On the upper range of the detection grid, something glittered and then vanished just as quickly. “What was that?”
McKay was immediately tapping at his computer. “Extending the scan envelope…” The target returned. “There! Refined metals, plastics, some organic matter…” He paused, frowning. “But it’s not on the ground. It’s above us.”
“In orbit?”
Sheppard got a nod in return. “Seems that way. I think it could be part of a vessel…”
“Let’s take a look-see.” He worked the Jumper’s controls and peeled off from the low-level flight pattern, into a steep climb, pouring power to the thrusters.
McKay shot him a look. “By the way, that conversation we were having? It’s not over.”
“It is for now,” said the colonel. Outside the canopy, the dusty blue of Heruun’s sky became the black of space.
The darkness went away for a while, and in pieces Teyla felt herself awaken; but not all at once. The moments faded in and out, falling from her grip like sand between her fingers.
The face of one of the humanoids loomed over her. Two more stood behind it, all of them wearing the same blank expression. The lipless mouth opened and she heard words, a rough, unfinished voice with a quizzical edge to it. “Why did you attempt to terminate yourselves?”
She forced air through her lungs, ignoring the pain. “You… Can speak…”
One of the other aliens blinked. “I have many methods of communication.”
“We… Wanted to escape.” She coughed, and it hurt like fire.
The closest of the creatures moved one of the glass eggs over her. Teyla flinched, tried to shy away from it, but the faint yellow ray it cast left no paralysis in its wake, only a warmth. A warmth and the absence of the pain.
“Your choice was foolish,” said the first alien. Its powdery, pale skin seemed ashen and pallid, like the flesh of a drowned thing. “You acted without consideration. You did not understand where you are.”
Teyla remembered the snarling words of the Wraith warrior in the cells. You can’t escape this place! The Wraith had known exactly where they were. “A base…? On a moon… A moon of Herrun.”
“A ship,” corrected the third humanoid. Each of them spoke with identical tone and inflection, the words pitched strangely as if verbal speech was uncommon to them. “On the surface of the primary satellite.”
“Where is my friend?” she demanded, gasping in air as the chill in her bones began to recede.
“Unhurt. The other with you who ventured outside could not be recovered.” It bowed its head. “Unfortunate.”
Abruptly, Teyla realized she was in motion, being carried along one of the metallic corridors on some sort of platform. She tried to rise, but her body was too weak. “Where are…you taking me?”
“Do not be afraid,” came the reply. “This is necessary.”
The exertion was too much, and Teyla felt the effort of everything pulling her back towards the darkness. “What are you?”
The alien touched its chest in an all-too human gesture. “This is a Risar,” it explained.
The strange name followed her into unconsciousness.
Tiny particles of dust peppered the Jumper, with the occasional larger, fist-sized lumps thudding off the hull as Sheppard guided the ship toward the object they had detected. McKay leaned over the monitor of his laptop. As they climbed into low orbit, he began to see more sensor returns, a whole stream of them lying across the scanner range in a diffuse strip.
“It’s a debris field,” he realized. “The gravity from the planet has a hold on it, it’s dragging it apart.” Rodney moved his hands to illustrate, as if he were pulling on a string between them.
“Debris from what?”
The Jumper’s sensor grid obediently opened another window in on the holographic HUD and text spooled down it. Rodney nodded slowly, the data confirming what he was already certain of. “A Wraith ship.”
“A Hive?”
He shook his head. “No, there’s not enough mass. But too much to just be a dart. It has to be one of those scouts we detected back on Atlantis.
The Jumper slowed as it approached the chunk of wreckage. It turned slowly, catching reflected sunlight from the planet below. McKay couldn’t recognize the form or function of the fragment, but it was undoubtedly Wraith in origin. It looked like a broken tooth from some monstrous beast’s mouth, jagged and ragged along the bony white edges, in other places blackened by carbon scoring.
“I’m not gonna cry a river over one less Wraith warship,” Sheppard noted, “but it begs the question… What did that to them?” Both men knew that the hard bio-matter hulls of Wraith craft could take a pounding before they collapsed; anything capable of crushing one into pieces was not to be taken lightly.
Rodney gave an involuntary shiver. “And is it still around?” He shook off the worrying thought and worked the computer through a spectrographic scan sequence. Spikes immediately began to appear on the electrochemical analysis display. “Energy weapons…”
“That would explain the burn marks,” noted Sheppard, craning his neck to get a better look at the wreckage. “Asuran tech, maybe?”
McKay gave a slow shake of the head. “No, actually.” He pointed at the readout on the screen. “The radiation pattern doesn’t match any known beam weapon used by the Replicators, or the Wraith and the Travelers, not even the Ancients… In fact, it’s not like anything we’ve encountered in the Pegasus galaxy.”
“Great,” Sheppard made a face. “We have a new player, then. That’s all we need.”
He was still poring over the data. “Decay rate indicates this happened years ago… Maybe even decades.” McKay looked up at Sheppard. “The Aegis did this. There’s no other explanation.”