“Risars?” Sheppard and McKay exchanged looks.
“Come on,” he growled, and stumbled forward.
“Easy there, cowboy,” said the colonel, reaching out to help steady him. “You look a wreck, pal. Maybe you ought to sit this out.”
Ronon didn’t bother to grace that with a reply; instead, he fixed Sheppard with a hooded, baleful glare that could have cut steel.
“Or not,” amended the colonel.
It happened very fast; as if they both heard a voice inside their heads at once, the two aliens froze for a heartbeat, then turned toward the chamber’s entranceway. Teyla heard the shriek of stunner bolts, then there was a concussive blare of noise and a flash of intense light. In the next second the door was filled with white smoke and through it came Ronon, John and Rodney.
Sheppard called her name and crossed to her, keeping the creatures covered with his weapon. “You okay?”
“All the better for seeing you,” she admitted.
“You cannot do this,” said the sickly Risar, shifting in place. “You will disrupt my work.”
“You must submit,” said the other. “Drop your weapons.”
“And if we don’t?” Sheppard stepped closer to them, unafraid. “You might be able to scare the locals down on Heruun with the lightshows and all the flying saucer stuff, but let me tell you, on my planet that Close Encounters of the Third Kind garbage doesn’t cut it any more.”
“We know what you are,” said McKay. “The Aegis is a front.” He nodded at the walls. “This is an interstellar starship. And more than that, it’s an Asgard starship.”
Teyla frowned. Asgard; they were a powerful race of beings that the people of Earth had encountered more than a decade ago, during their battles with the parasitic Goa’uld. They had a fearsome reputation, and yet…
She had met one of them, the acerbic engineer Hermiod, who served for short time aboard the Earth ship Daedalus; and while the Risar had a passing resemblance to the slight, grey-skinned humanoids, they were only similar as much as a Wraith was similar to an Athosian. She shot a look at the creature. “But you do not look like them.”
“This is a Risar,” said the alien, in a matter-of-fact tone. “It is not me.”
“I told you this,” said the other, “the Risar are my tools.”
“I’m guessing they’re modified Asgard clone-stock,” said McKay. “Hybrids, with more muscle mass than their normal bodies.” He sniffed. “Y’know, to do all the heavy lifting, that kinda thing.”
“How do you know my kind?” demanded the weaker Risar. It seemed agitated by the sudden turn of events.
“We know a lot of stuff,” replied Sheppard. “But before we go any further, I’m not going to do any more talking to the monkeys. I want to speak to the organ grinder.”
“Show us your true face,” said Teyla.
There was a long silence; and then the holographic screen reappeared. On it was a delicate, slender being with an oval head and eyes that had no whites, only inky black pupils. A small slit of a mouth opened, and when the being spoke, the Risar echoed every word in the same hollow tone. “You are not mistaken. I am Asgard, and this craft is my vessel. My name is Fenrir.”
Chapter Eight
The pop-up on the screen read ‘download complete’, and Carter paused to double-check the contents of the laptop’s memory; in hyper-compressed and encrypted form, every gigabyte of her work and personal research database relating to the Asgard had been ported over, ready to accompany her through the Stargate. She moved around the room, gathering up the last few items she would need to take with her to Heruun.
She glanced up at McKay, who stood in the doorway, his fingers knitting together. “Go ahead, Rodney, I’m listening.” The scientist was conducting an on-the-hoof debriefing; he had only been back on Atlantis for a few hours and would soon be returning to M9K-153 with her.
“He’s the real deal,” said McKay. “At first, I thought we might be dealing with another situation like Angelus —”
Despite herself, Carter gave a shudder. “Let’s not go there again.”
“— But no. He’s Asgard, all right. From head to toe. If they have toes.”
Sam recalled the first time she had met a member of the Asgard species, the warrior-scientist Thor. His kindred had turned out to be one of Earth’s greatest allies, and they had given so much of themselves in the struggles to keep threats like the Replicators, the System Lords and the Ori at bay. And after what had become of them…
She frowned. Now is not the time to dwell on that.
First things first, she had to focus on the problems in front of her. Carter had no doubt that the International Oversight Advisory would be contacting her in short order with tersely-worded commands to ‘secure’ the Asgard ship and its valuable technology, and that was part of the reason she was going off-world. Partly to avoid the IOA long enough to make her own evaluation, and partly because she just had to see it for herself.
There was one other reason, of course, and it amused her a little to have McKay admit to it; of all the people on Atlantis, Samantha Carter had the most first-hand experience with the Asgard and their incredible hardware, thanks to her time in SG-1. Rodney never found it easy to confess to knowing less than anybody about anything.
“He knew what we were,” McKay went on. “Humans from Earth, I mean. He knew our planet.”
She nodded. The Asgard had originated in another part of the intergalactic neighborhood that included the Milky Way and Pegasus galaxies, and they were well-traveled. Like the Goa’uld, they had visited a lot of human worlds in the guise of godlike beings, but where the System Lords had come to conquer and subjugate, the Asgard had brought protection and enlightenment. Earth, Cimmeria, K’Tau and many other planets had been touched by them in the deep past, millennia later the legacy of their visitations cemented into local myth and legend.
“I think he was as surprised to see us here as we were to see him,” said Rodney. “Even more so when I showed him I could work one of his computers,” he added with a smug sniff.
Sam glanced at him. “I’ve never heard of the Asgard visiting Pegasus, but it’s not beyond the realms of possibility. After all, they had colony worlds in our stellar community, as well as the Othala and Ida galaxies.” She closed the laptop and placed it in her gear pack. “How were things when you left the planet?”
“Hectic,” he noted. “Sheppard convinced our new friend to release all the Heruuni people he had aboard his ship and return them to the surface, in return for having us promise to fix the damage to his vessel. When all the Taken were returned at once, in the middle of the day… It was a pretty big deal.”
“No doubt,” said Carter. “And the Asgard just agreed to it? That’s a lot of trust to put in a stranger.”
“Well, I have to take some credit,” he noted. “As a goodwill gesture, I cannibalized some of the cloaking circuits from the Jumper One to patch the long-range matter transporter on the ship. I figured that would score us some brownie points, but to be honest, it wasn’t me or Sheppard who convinced him, in the end.”
Carter pulled the pack on to her shoulder and left the office, McKay walking with her. “Really?”
“No. It was Teyla. The Risar seemed to pay more attention to her than any of the rest of us.”
Carter didn’t comment on the point, but put it aside for later consideration. “Risar. You used that word before.” She threw a nod to the gate technician as they crossed through the control tier.
“It’s the name he gave to the… I’m not sure what to call them, his remotes, his organic drones…” McKay shrugged. “Like most Asgard stuff, it’s a Norse mythology thing. Apparently the Risar were servants of the gods, or something. Giants.”
As they descended the stairs to the gate room proper, the blue symbols around the edge of the Stargate began to illuminate as M9K-153’s dialing address locked in, chevron by chevron.