“The… The Queen will wish to know what we have learned.”
“And she will. But not yet.” He gave a nod in return. “Not yet.”
Sheppard did what he’d been taught to do in desert navigation training, and chose a landmark to act as his waypoint — the two tall mesas where the alien ships had headed. He walked so that McKay was always in his peripheral vision, and he in Rodney’s, in case one of them put a foot in the lunar equivalent of a rabbit hole and took a tumble. With no radio, there was no way to cry out for help. He blinked away sweat from his eyes and grimaced. If they got back to Atlantis after this little sojourn, he decided he would make a point of sending the technicians back at Vandenberg his precise opinions about the shortcomings of the low duration spacesuits.
But the closer they got to the twin towers of rock, the more Sheppard felt a crawling sensation in the pit of his gut, a feel for the not-quite-rightness of what he saw before him. Shaped like the ends of blunt blades, the two peaks were wrong. They were too uniform, too evenly cut to be natural formations. If he didn’t know better, the colonel would have imagined they’d been carved by the action of wind, a pair of colossal vertical fins extending up from the pale sea of regolith.
They crested a low hill, trudging rather than walking, and Sheppard flicked a glance at McKay, who gave him a listless nod of the head. Both men stopped and took stock of where they were. A wall of grey rose up in front of them, something that at first glance would have looked like moon rock; but like the towers, it seemed out of place, too regular to be true. Sheppard had the sudden impression of something beneath the sand, his eyes picking out hard, curved lines. A wall was ranged out in front of them, camouflaged to match the terrain.
The only thing that broke the illusion of uniformity was the body lying face down in the powdery dust.
Sheppard knelt next to the corpse and a shadow fell over him, cast by McKay. The body wore the distinctive earth-toned robes of the Heruuni locals, but they sparkled where starlight caught a thin patina of ice across the sun-bleached cloth. There was no visible protection of any kind, no suit, no breather gear, nothing. The colonel turned the figure over and the bloated, flash-frozen face of the man stared back up at him, his eyes a dark mass of color where his blood vessels had ruptured. There were tiny, pea-sized crystals littering the moon dust all around him, and with a tic of disgust Sheppard realized that they had to be frozen droplets of blood, expelled from the dead man’s lungs when he stumbled out into the hard vacuum.
McKay’s shadow moved and Sheppard looked up as the other man crossed to the stone wall, laying his palms flat on it, feeling left and right. Doubtless the same thought had occurred to Rodney as it had to John; this poor fool had to have come through a doorway nearby, and that meant a way in… Into whatever this place was.
Sheppard glanced at his wrist and his eyes narrowed. His air meter was barely showing green anymore, almost all of the indicator band a livid red-for-empty. McKay had to be in the same boat, if not worse; and if they couldn’t find a way in… Then we’ll end up like the moonwalker here.
Rodney was down on one knee, frantically pawing at a piece of wall. Sheppard bounced over to him and saw he was digging white dust from an alcove. Inside he glimpsed an oval depression covered in symbols. A hatch control. He stepped aside to give the scientist all the light he needed, and found himself panting. In flight school, Sheppard had experienced the horrible sensation of oxygen deprivation during pilot training, and he felt the first twinges of it now. If this didn’t work…
He forced the thought away. “Be positive, John,” he said aloud inside the clammy helmet.
A train of lights appeared in the alcove and Rodney silently pumped his fist. When the hatch dropped away, it was the best sight he’d seen in days, and he propelled McKay through the low entrance, following him in.
It was only as the airlock door rose back again that it occurred to him he had no idea if the Aegis breathed the same kind of air as human beings.
She wasn’t certain about the moment when she fell asleep; it just came upon her before she could be aware of it. One moment, Teyla was in the cell, resting her back against the steel wall, watching Ronon, and the next…
She was here. There was no sense of transition for her. She stood in a new chamber, the design little different from all the others she had come across inside the Risar complex, a hard-edged pool of light cast around her. In the shadows, a number of the aliens moved around, some carrying devices the function of which she couldn’t guess at. A single creature hovered close by, curling one of the strange glass eggs in its clawed hand.
Had they waited for her to succumb to fatigue before they brought her here, let her sleepwalk to them? It was a troubling thought. From what she had heard from the Heruuni, it seemed the Risar — and the Aegis, if they were not one and the same — could take control of a human’s flesh as easily as Teyla could leaf through the pages of a book.
The alien studied her openly, not with a predatory manner but with an odd mix of confusion and intrigue. They seemed fascinated by her.
She faced it head-on. “Why have you brought me here?” A sudden, chilling thought occurred to her. “Where is Ronon Dex?”
Another Risar, this one moving slowly and awkwardly, came into the halo of light. “Your companion is uninjured.”
She grimaced. “Not so. Whatever you did to him, his body is rejecting it! Just like the others on Heruun!”
The aliens paused, as if they were considering this information. The first spoke again, moving around her. “Who are you?” it asked. “What are you?”
“I am Teyla Emmagan of Athos,” she snapped, “and I have powerful friends. They are searching for me!”
“Athos,” repeated the sickly Risar. “I do not know that designation. Filed for storage and later cross-reference.”
A holographic pane hazed into being in the shadows, casting patterns of light across the floor. Teyla saw the blurred image of a Puddle Jumper there, as if captured in the middle of a high-speed turn. “Are you familiar with the design of this craft?” The Risar cocked its head. “Do you understand its operating principles?”
“I have never seen that before in my life,” she retorted. The image dissipated; if the Risar was aware of her lie, it made no comment about it.
“You have hybrid bio-matter within you, sub-group racial ident ‘Wraith’,” continued the other alien. “I have never seen this before. You are of interest. How was this done? Will it affect your progeny?” It pointed at Teyla’s belly with the elliptical device.
She shook her head, part of her wanting to push away the question the Risar asked, the very question that kept Teyla awake at night back on Atlantis. “Who are you?” she barked, taking the offensive. “What gives you the right to come to this world and abduct innocent people from their homes? What are you doing to them?” Her voice rose to a shout.
“I am not here to cause harm,” said the second Risar. It turned its dark eyes to face her. “But it is important. Because of the work. It is necessary.”
The inner hatch sighed open and Sheppard was out first, a Wraith stunner in one hand, panning it left and right down the shadowed corridor. Neither he nor Rodney had been able to grab anything more than the most basic kit before they had exited the Puddle Jumper — and that meant no P90s, no radios, just a pistol each and little else. McKay still had a handheld Ancient scanner, but that was it. He felt practically naked without his laptop.