“Stay back!” he threw the words at Keller, waving her away as he staggered out of the sick lodge and on to the settlement’s wide wooden boulevard. His gaze found Laaro, the boy huddled in the shadow of a tree bough, eyes fixed on the sky. White shapes with needle prows and bladed wings shrieked past overhead.
“The Wraith…” said the youth in disbelief, his trembling lips almost unable to form the words. “The Aegis has forsaken us. The Wraith have returned!”
“Get inside,” he growled, and then shouted at the top of his lungs to all the Heruuni who stumbled and panicked in the street. “Get inside your homes! Don’t let them catch you in the open!” He grabbed Laaro’s arm and pulled him back toward the sick lodge.
Above, the Darts wheeled and turned, sweeping back and forth in patterns that cross-hatched the sky.
The healer Kullid pushed his way to the door to stand by Keller’s side. “They have come back, after all this time…” He spoke in hushed, awed tones, fascination in his eyes.
Ronon shoved the boy toward Keller and hesitated on the steps of the lodge, kneading the grip of his pistol. Something was wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was something missing… Annoyed with himself and cursing the Asgard for making him sick, Dex shook his head, as if the gesture would force away the fog in his thoughts.
The realization struck him like a slow bullet. “They’re not… Culling.” None of the Darts weaving above them were streaming the capture beams from beneath their hulls, sweeping the settlement for prey. None of them scooped up the frightened and the terror-struck, they only moved in lines and circles.
“What are they doing?” said Keller
Ronon nodded to himself. He had seen this behavior before, on wilderness hunt-worlds when he had been a Runner. “They’re searching for something.”
The Puddle Jumper blew through the open Stargate and into the middle of chaos. Rodney ducked instinctively as a white streak of energy slammed into the canopy of the ship, and he saw the sparks of automatic weapons fire flash by as they swept up and away from the valley where the portal was located.
“Did you see that?”
Sheppard didn’t reply; instead he turned the barrel-shaped ship around in a tight stall-turn and swept back the way they had come.
McKay saw more clearly now. The valley was being swarmed by Wraith warriors, a cluster of the steel-armored, blank-faced creatures storming forward with weapons blazing.
The colonel spoke quickly into his headset. “Jumper Three to all units, this is Sheppard, respond!”
Rodney’s stomach tightened as he heard Sergeant Rush’s voice over the radio. Gunfire was thick and noisy in the background. “Colonel! They came out of nowhere, sir, we’re being overrun! We’re gonna lose the gate!”
“But, the Asgard ship…” began Rodney. He picked out the figures of men in Atlantis uniforms lying sprawled out on the ruddy dirt below them.
“Rush, disengage and retreat through the wormhole! Get back to Atlantis, double-time!”
The sergeant’s voice wavered. “No can do, sir. They’ll take us down before we make it ten feet! You have to shut it down! We can’t let them get to the city… Tell Atlantis to shut it down!” The hiss of Wraith blasters crackled through the air and suddenly the channel went dead.
“Sergeant? Sergeant, do you read me?” Sheppard cursed the static that answered him.
Energy pulses reached up from the ground toward the Jumper as the Wraith took aim at a new target. McKay saw alien figures break from the group and run towards the glittering vertical pool. He spoke into his headset, shouting down the base channel with frantic urgency. “Atlantis, McKay! Condition Black! Condition Black!”
The Wraith were almost at the Stargate when the wormhole evaporated, the connection cut. The code-phrase had done its job; the gate technicians back on Atlantis had severed the wormhole, and until a set of pre-determined security protocols were cleared, it would remain locked out of the dialing computer.
“Good call,” said Sheppard grimly. He reached forward and toggled a control. “I’m cloaking the Jumper.” A glassy shimmer hazed the exterior of the craft and rendered it invisible; the Wraith continued to fire, shooting wild in hopes of clipping the Ancient ship as it sped away.
“Rush,” said Rodney, his breath tight in his chest. “And the others… Oh god, what did I just do?”
“The right thing,” said Sheppard. “Atlantis has to come first. We lose that, we’re all dead. Those men know that.”
Rodney nodded stiffly. He knew John was right but that didn’t make him feel any better. “We… We have to find the others, Sam and Jennifer, Ronon…”
The Jumper was rising high into the air. “Already on it. I’m gonna get some altitude, run a sensor sweep.” Sheppard brought up the HUD overlay and swore for the second time. “Oh, that’s not good.”
McKay glanced up and choked on the other man’s understatement. Toward the settlement, the display showed multiple glyphs moving and swooping around the tree-city. “Darts…”
Sheppard pointed at another glyph, a lone object out in low orbit. “And there’s home base. A Hive Ship. Seems like they got tired of waiting.”
“Long-range interstellar jump,” said the scientist, “if they entered hyperspace in the shadow of a planet and then dropped out again close to Heruun, the galactic sensors on Atlantis might have missed it.” He shook his head. “But to do that, they’d have needed to know exactly, precisely where they were going to emerge.”
“A scout. They must have had a scoutship out here, scoping the whole damned planet.” The colonel frowned. “And we never even knew it.”
“Uh, Sheppard?” said McKay, scrutinizing the tactical display. “There’s only one starship up there. Where’s the Aegis?”
The Darts had been joined by more of their kindred. Ronon could see them coming, the impassive, eyeless masks of Wraith warriors marching up the ramped concourse catching the dull sunlight. Stunner bolts flared, striking any Heruuni who ran in the back and laying them down hard.
Those who tried to fight — men in the robes of the guards he’d seen with Takkol and Aaren — did little to slow the advance. Ronon saw the spark of rounds from the primitive rodguns as they ricocheted harmlessly off Wraith body amour; he heard the howl of mai cats as the aliens cut down the guardian animals.
At his side, Lieutenant Allan gave him a hard look. “We can’t take them all on.” Her face was still pale from the effect of the serpent venom in her system, but Dex didn’t comment on it. He knew he had to look just as bad, if not worse. Every moment he stood still, the sickness pulled at him, threatening to drown him in fatigue.
“We’ll see,” he replied, through gritted teeth. Ronon turned and pressed a Beretta pistol into Doctor Keller’s trembling hands. “You know how to use this, right?”
The woman blanched. “It’s not really my thing —”
“It is now,” Ronon cut her off. Without waiting for a reply, he pushed off from the sick lodge doorway and came out firing, shooting over the heads of the guards who fired from cover or bended knee. The lieutenant moved with him, her P90 at her shoulder, marking off three-round bursts into the advancing line of the enemy.
The particle magnum spat red energy, knocking every Wraith they touched into a heap; but Ronon was hissing with annoyance as he missed with one shot for every two that hit home; the creeping malaise was affecting his aim.
The Wraith squads scattered, realizing that this new enemy was a more serious threat to them. He saw them make for cover, regrouping. A larger troop of them held back in a tight cordon. Protecting something? he wondered.
A stun blast shrieked past him and threw a Heruuni guard off his perch on a support rail, his rodgun firing wild. Allan dodged and emptied the rest of her clip at the assailant. “Reloading —”
She never finished the sentence. Ronon saw it coming, but something in him was just too slow to react. He saw a Wraith officer point a pistol her way and even as a warning cry was forming on his lips, the white flash crossed the distance from the muzzle of the alien weapon to the woman’s chest. She didn’t even have time to cry out; instead she fell silently to the boardwalk.