“After all that’s gone on here, we’re not taking any chances with anyone moving around unescorted.” Lorne beckoned her to him. “If you’ll come with me?”
Keller glanced at Kullid. “This may take a while.”
“I understand.”
Lorne spoke to a female Marine officer at his side. “Allan, make sure this building is secure.”
“Sir!” The lieutenant saluted and pushed past Keller on her way out.
“What’s this about?” said the doctor quietly.
Lorne shot a look up at the sky. “Take a wild guess.”
“He doesn’t know,” said Sheppard, peering out through the slats of the window. The mingled scents of a cook fire and night-blooming flowers reached Teyla’s nostrils as she waited for one of the others to speak.
At the doorway, Major Lorne seemed to take this a cue to answer. “If anyone is worried about talking openly, don’t. I swept the house earlier today.”
“I’m sure the only bugs in this place are the six- or eight-legged kind,” noted McKay.
“How did Jaaya take that?” asked Keller, cradling a cup of water.
“We came to an understanding,” Lorne noted. “A few MREs go a long way.”
“Thank you, Major,” said Carter, casting around to look at all of them in turn. “I’m sure I don’t have to underline to everyone here the seriousness of the situation.”
Sheppard turned to face the assembled group. “He doesn’t know, Colonel. Fenrir…” He stopped, trying to frame the enormity of it. “His people… The entire Asgard race are dead, and he doesn’t know it.”
“We can’t be certain of that,” said McKay.
“C’mon, Rodney,” Sheppard shot the scientist a look. “He said he wanted to go home to Hala. If I remember rightly, that whole planet was destroyed in the war with the Replicators.” He stepped into the middle of the room. “Look, the Asgard committed mass suicide over a year ago to stop their technology from falling into the hands of the Ori —”
“They did give us a copy first,” McKay added.
“They blew up their second home planet in the process. They wiped themselves out.”
“Orilla.” Teyla saw a distant look in Carter’s eyes as she remembered that moment. “I was there when it happened.”
“So why doesn’t Fenrir know anything about that? Why wasn’t he called back to the home planet before the end, like all the rest of his kind?”
“There could be a hundred reasons,” said Teyla. She felt the urge to defend the alien, although she couldn’t fathom where the sudden impulse had come from. “The damage from the battle with the Wraith may have destroyed his communications system. He may have been out of range…”
Carter shook her head. “This is the Asgard we’re talking about here. They don’t make mistakes like that.”
“Maybe they thought he was already dead,” offered Keller.
“The fact is, as far as we know, Fenrir is the only living member of his species. The last Asgard.” Sheppard shook his head at the thought.
“We cannot keep this from him,” said Teyla. “He has a right to know.”
“That might not be a good idea,” said McKay. “We can’t be sure how he’s going to react.”
Teyla gave Rodney an appalled look. “Are you suggesting we lie to Fenrir, after everything it took to make an ally of him? You are all correct that this is a terrible, terrible truth, but he must not remain ignorant of it!”
“McKay is right,” said Carter. “We have to chose the right moment. We can’t just drop it on him.”
“Hey Fenrir, great to meet you, oh, sorry about your whole species being dead and all,” Rodney mimicked. “He’s going to love hearing that.”
Keller stared into her cup. “Shock can make people do strange things. And I’m not even sure how to begin to gauge the mental stability of an Asgard.”
“So if not now, then when do we tell him?” demanded Teyla. “When his ship is ready to travel, when he sets a course home, when he reaches Hala and finds nothing there but dead space?”
“Teyla —”
“What if it were your world, your people, Colonel Carter? Would you not wish to know?”
“This isn’t just about the extinction thing,” McKay broke in. “This is about trust.”
Carter nodded. “I have to admit, I don’t get the same feeling with Fenrir I did with Thor and the others. He’s different somehow.”
“Yeah, he abducts people and the unlucky ones get a dose of nanites,” noted Lorne.
“And then there’s that name,” said McKay. “I took the liberty of chatting to Professor Gudrunsdottir in the xenobotany lab on Atlantis. Turns out, she’s a bit of a Norse mythology expert on the side. And let me tell you, Fenrir is a name to conjure with.” He drew out his data pad and Keller took it from him.
“Fenrir, also known as Fenris or Fenrisulfr,” she read aloud. “The son of the trickster god Loki.”
“Loki…” Carter repeated. “He was a troublemaker.”
Keller continued. “According to Viking legends, Fenrir is a gigantic wolf that will continually grow until it gets so big that it will break the chains the other gods used to bind it.”
Sheppard’s lip curled. “Those little grey guys never go for the low-key, do they?”
“Oh, it gets better,” said McKay. “Gudrunsdottir told me that our pal Fenrir the wolf ushers in the end of world by eating the sun. The Norse people called it Ragnarok, the darkness and the eternal winter that destroys everything.”
“The Nightfall.” Teyla’s breath caught in her throat. “On Athos… Some of the tribes there tell a similar story, of a monster who swallows up the stars.” She gave an involuntary shiver; she hadn’t heard those tales since she was a small girl, but they still held a primal power over her.
Lorne folded his arms. “At the risk of thinking above my pay grade, aren’t we just talking about a bunch of stories written by crazy Norwegians, a thousand years ago, on a planet in a completely different galaxy?”
Carter smiled dryly. “Yeah, I used to think like that, Major. But I learned the hard way that myth is built on truth, at least to some degree.” Her smile faded. “I contacted the SGC and had a message relayed out to the Odyssey, where the Asgard Core is located.”
“What is that?” asked Teyla. The term was unfamiliar to her.
“Before the Asgard died, they loaded the sum total of their knowledge into a computer system that was installed aboard the starship Odyssey,” said the colonel. “I asked them to run a search through it for anything about Fenrir.”
“What did they find?” said Keller.
“Nothing.”
McKay shook his head. “That’s impossible. They must have screwed up the search routine.”
“Maybe the Asgard forgot to upload that disc,” said Lorne.
“No,” Carter tapped the data screen. “That information is there. My guess is, it’s buried deep, possibly encrypted.”
Teyla looked away. “Why would it be hidden?”
“Why indeed…” murmured Sheppard.
“We need to get someone out to the Odyssey to take a look-see,” McKay went on, addressing Carter. “What about your buddy, Jackson? He’s good.”
“He’s also busy, on a covert operation chasing down one of the last renegade System Lords.” She fixed Rodney with a hard look. “That’s why I’m sending you back via the Midway gate bridge to rendezvous with Odyssey and recover those files.”
“Oh. Right.” McKay seemed a little nonplussed at the sudden orders. “Okay.” A slow smile formed on his face as he realized what he would be granted access to. “Okay…”
“Colonel?” Keller leaned forward. “I’d like to add something to that. These nanites I’m dealing with, I need all the help I can get, so if Rodney can bring back everything you can find on Asgard nanotechnology…”
McKay nodded. “I’ll do what I can.”
“All right.” Carter stood up, signaling that the meeting was over. The group began to file out, but Teyla hesitated, unsure of how she should feel about what she had heard. Her thoughts about Fenrir were conflicted; strangely, she felt a pang of sympathy for the alien. Ever since the disappearance of her people from New Athos, Teyla had harbored a secret fear that they might be lost to her, that she might be all that remained. For a moment, she saw her own darkest dread reflected in Fenrir’s circumstances.