“I did only what I thought was right! I did what was needed to forge a way to defend us against the threat of the Replicators!”
“By building an unstable weapon of unmatched lethality?” said Freyr. “Perhaps, if you had remained within your original field of expertise —”
“The losses inflicted on all of us by the Replicators are open wounds,” said Penegal, bringing silence once again. “The worlds they have destroyed, the numbers of our kindred killed…” He gave Fenrir a meaningful look. “We have all suffered great losses.”
“Revenge…” muttered Sheppard, seeing the moment between the two aliens. “Is that what it was about? Fenrir lost someone he cared about to the Replicators, so he went gung ho?”
“But that forgives nothing,” noted Thor. “A terrible error has been made. It cannot be undone. There must be consequences.”
“Here it comes,” said McKay. “They’re going to throw the book at him.”
“I reject the authority of this assembly,” Fenrir sneered. “I reject any edicts you may make!”
Jarnsaxa nodded. “That right is yours, if you wish to be avowed as a renegade. If you wish to follow in the footsteps of Loki and all the others who renounced our ways. But if you make that choice, you will be declared lost. You will no longer be one of us.”
The room was silent for a moment, before Thor spoke again. “I move we declare a punishment for Fenrir.”
“Did the Asgard have the death penalty?” said Sheppard. “Did they even have prisons?”
“I don’t know,” McKay admitted. “I didn’t think they’d ever had need of that kind of thing. They were a highly evolved and intelligent species.”
Sheppard folded his arms. “Those two things don’t automatically make you a saint,” he replied. “Look at the Ancients. Hell, look at the Ori.”
The other aliens spoke again, each one saying the same single word. “Exile.”
“Fenrir,” Thor was solemn, “it is our judgment that you will be banished from the worlds of the Asgard for five hundred seasons.”
“Your body will be placed in stasis aboard your ship,” said Penegal, “and it will roam the galactic clusters, on a course set to return you to Hala when your sentence is complete.”
“Your mind will remain in a wakeful state,” added Thor. “On your journey, you will have time to reflect on the mistakes your haste and belligerence have led to.”
“A penal cruise,” murmured McKay. “That’s why his ship was in the Pegasus galaxy. It would have had to drop out of hyperspace every so often to make course corrections.”
Sheppard gave a slow nod. “And he just happened to find himself in the middle of a Wraith hunting party. There’s a battle, his ship is damaged, he crash-lands on the moon… And the rest we know.”
If anything, the pale flesh of Fenrir’s face was even more pallid than usual. “And if I choose not to agree to your decree?” he demanded.
“Then your exile will be permanent,” said Freyr, with finality. “You will die alone, lost to the Asgard for all time.”
Fenrir looked down. “It seems that I have no choice.” The Asgard’s head snapped up abruptly, and he glared at Thor. “But you will not banish the Replicators so easily! They will destroy us… Or we will destroy ourselves in the fight with them.”
The image froze and disintegrated, becoming grainy clusters of holographic pixels that melted away; once more McKay and Sheppard stood in the middle of the dull grey compartment, the bubble of illusion broken.
“He was right, in a way,” said Rodney. “The Asgard did destroy themselves trying to endure long enough to wipe out the threat of the Replicators. It’s ironic, really. Thor and the others actually used Fenrir’s collapsar technology to destroy Hala’s sun when the Replicators finally overran the planet.”
Sheppard picked up McKay’s data pad and handed it to him. The colonel’s expression was bleak. “We’ve got the whole story now,” he said. “We have to warn the others. Until we know otherwise, we have to consider Fenrir a threat.”
Teyla ducked as the combat knives slashed through air. She felt the wind of the blades passing on her face and pivoted, sending a hard sweep kick out at the legs of the Wraith warrior. He dodged and gave a guttural chuckle, rebounding off a bouncing motion to come at her again. This time he stabbed and slashed, aiming at the centre of her body mass, her abdomen.
The Athosian’s fighting sticks slipped from the sleeves on her thighs and into her hands. She blocked and parried, aware that the bigger, more muscular alien was pushing her back toward the Asgard cryogenic capsule. He stabbed out again, trying to draw blood.
“I know you are with child,” it snarled, “I smell it inside you. It makes you hesitant! The fear makes you slow. Too afraid to exert, to fight!” The warrior laughed again.
“If that comment was meant to intimidate me,” she said between grunts of breath, “then all you have proven is how little you know of Athos’s daughters!” Teyla flicked the sticks around and hit the Wraith in the face with the blunt ends; the blows caught the sensitive sensory pits on the cheekbones and drew a reedy yowl of agony from the alien as it rocked backward.
“I will cut your spawn from you!” Fresh with anger, the warrior went for her once again.
Lorne used the oddly-shaped hand-holds on the plastic ladder to propel himself up to the drive room’s second tier. He led with the P90 and fired off a burst; his target, the Wraith that had used one of his men as a shield, spat at him and threw itself off the balcony, somersaulting to land on its feet across from Carter. “Colonel!” he shouted.
She took aim without looking his way. “I got this,” she replied, and opened fire.
Satisfied Carter was in control down there, Lorne vaulted up the rest of the way to the upper tier. A few feet away, an airman fought face-to-face with a snarling Wraith, the two of them going tug-of-war over the assault rifle trapped diagonally between them. The airman was bleeding from scratch wounds across the face, one eye bloody and gummed shut; the Wraith was attacking in a frenzy and the fight wouldn’t last much longer.
Lorne had emptied half a clip of ammo into the freakish alien and still it wasn’t lying down to die. He dimly remembered something Doctor Beckett had once said about the Wraith, how they regenerated faster than anything, how their bodies appeared to secrete some kind of enzyme that made them ignore pain, set themselves into a berserker rage or something…
The two combatants were too close for Lorne to chance taking a shot; he was good marksman but he wasn’t going to risk it. If in doubt, fall back on traditional methods, he told himself.
The major turned around the very hi-tech, state-of-art submachine gun in his hands and proceeded to use it in the manner of a weapon that his species had been employing since before they walked upright. Lorne clubbed the Wraith hard in the spine with the butt of the SMG and heard a nasty crunch of breaking cartilage. The alien howled and spun about to attack him, slamming the injured airman to the floor. The major hit it again and knocked the Wraith off balance; then before it could shake off the pain, he put the P90 back the way it was supposed to be and squeezed the trigger.
Teyla saw the two Risar that had been stunned by the flash bang grenades shake off the effects and as one, rush the Wraith. The alien heard their heavy footfalls across the steely deck and spun the combat knives about, bringing the pommels to his thumbs. With a sudden, hard strike, the warrior stabbed backward and buried the blades to the hilt in the chests of the Risar drones. Fenrir’s clone-proxies spat grey foam and fell to their knees with airy moans; of the Asgard’s holographic projection, there was no sign.
She took the opening presented to her and slammed the sticks toward the bruises she had made on the Wraith’s face; it blocked her with bone-armored wrist guards. Teyla pressed the attack, regaining some of the ground she had lost.
But something seemed wrong. Many times she had fought the Wraith, many times in hand-to-hand combat just as she did now, and she knew their ways. Wraith warriors did not play the tactical game, they did not wait for opportunity or moment, most certainly not when fighting a single, lightly armed opponent. Teyla kept waiting for the creature to claw at her, to make a pass with the fanged maw in the meat of its hand; but he did none of those things, instead defending, not attacking. Marking time. Waiting for something.