“Teyla?” Carter saw her distress. “Are you okay?”
“The Queen…” she grated. “She is…searching.”
“Searching,” repeated the Wraith warrior. “Speaking.”
Fenrir pointed at the Risar. “Terminate it, now!”
“I have a message!” shouted the Wraith. “Hear me out! The Queen speaks… Speaks… Through me!”
The Asgard hesitated, a questioning cast to its face. “Then speak,” he said finally.
“This is a mistake,” said Carter.
“My Queen wishes to speak to you, Fenrir… Under a banner of truce.”
“Truce?” echoed Teyla, her head pounding from the psychic undertow. “The Wraith do not understand the meaning of the word!”
The warrior gave a shudder, and his body language changed as the pressure inside Teyla’s skull lessened until it was a distant background throb. The alien moved jerkily, like a puppet worked by a hesitant master. “Hear me,” it said, in a breathy murmur. “I speak through this instrument… I ask for truce… With the Asgard Fenrir.”
“To what end?”
“The disclosure of information… To mutual benefit… Do you accept?”
“You can’t trust the Wraith,” Carter told him.
The warrior turned blank eyes toward the colonel. “No, human, it is… Your kind that he should not trust. The… Atlanteans are the ones who… Keep secrets… Not us.”
“What secrets?” demanded Fenrir. “Explain yourself.”
“Not yet, Asgard,” gasped the warrior. “When… We meet.” The puppet’s telepathic strings were abruptly severed, and the Wraith collapsed to the deck, shuddering and panting.
Teyla shot Carter a worried look, the memory of the conversation in the lodge coming back to her with grave force. When she turned back the holographic avatar was staring at her.
“What did she mean?” asked the Asgard.
“I do not know,” Teyla lied.
The two ships met in the void, Heruun a distant sphere beneath them lit dull brown by the reflected glow of the far sun.
They came together, closing the distance, prow to prow; they were a study in contrasts, two vessels built by races galaxies apart from one another, from philosophies that were utterly unlike.
The Asgard cruiser Aegis, heavy and armored in appearance but more agile than anything so large had the right to be, drifted to a halt, the maws of weapons tubes and the lenses of beam weapons open wide in apparent ready threat; although the reality was very different. The Aegis was many centuries old by human standards, and yet the enduring steel and iron of its hull was still sturdy; the marks that aged it were a handful of half-patched wounds from plasma fire.
The Wraith Hive Ship moved to mimic the motion of the other craft, the wide spear tip profile of the bony fuselage broken by the spider-leg spars of great antennae extending out behind its hull. It did not have a name, for Wraith did not give their craft appellations as other species did; Wraith simply knew their ships by the trace and the texture of them, as an animal would know its lair by the scent it had laid there. Grown from bone-seeds in vast pools of sluggish blood media and liquid cartilage, the Hive Ship was almost a living thing, made of meat and bone, nerve and sinew.
Asgard and Wraith turned slowly around one another, each taking the measure of their opposite.
“I’m warning you,” said Sam, “these creatures are the most dangerous predators in Pegasus.”
Fenrir’s avatar did not look up from its console. “I have faced the Goa’uld, the Replicators and a dozen other threats from five different galaxies, Colonel Carter. I am fully capable of meeting the Wraith face-to-face.”
“Hive Ship has come to a full stop,” reported one of the Risar. “Scanning.”
The oval screen on the wall became a graphic of the alien craft. Carter studied it; the display showed an even power distribution throughout the Hive Ship; there was no sign of any of the telltale energy spikes that might signal weapons being charged or Dart bays about to launch their deadly payloads.
“Target vessel remains in quiescent mode,” said another of the clones.
“You see?” said the Wraith warrior. His voice was still hoarse from before, when his mistress had used him as a telepathic conduit. Dried streaks of black blood marked his face about his flared nostrils. “We come in peace.”
“I doubt it,” noted Teyla. She gave Carter a look. “Fenrir,” she began, maintaining eye contact with the colonel but addressing the Asgard. “Before you go any further, there is something you must know.”
“Teyla…” Carter warned.
“Transport system ready,” said a Risar.
Fenrir didn’t wait for Teyla to continue, “Engage transport.”
There was a flash of white light and columns of energy fell from the air, a curtain of lightning that flared and faded to reveal a disparate group of figures. Carter felt a moment of relief at the sight of Sheppard and McKay among them, but that quickly evaporated when she saw the look on their faces. The rest of the group were mostly Wraith warrior-drones, stood in a tight circle around a male in the garb of a scientist and a stately, angular female; the Queen. Almost out of sight at the rear of the group was a lone figure wearing manacles, face hidden in the folds of a hooded robe.
The Queen inclined her head and gave Fenrir a level look. “So you are an Asgard, then.” She smiled, showing teeth. “Your kind is known to me. I have been learning so much about you recently, I feel as if I already know your species intimately.”
“I am Fenrir,” he replied bluntly. “Understand immediately that I will react to any assault against my vessel or my person with utmost severity.” To underline his words, the Asgard’s Risar disengaged from their consoles and turned to face the Wraith party, each one raising an orb device.
The Queen studied the Asgard for a moment, considering. “Real and yet not real,” she remarked. “If I could smell blood or hear heartbeat I would think you a living being. Will you not show yourself to us, Fenrir? Do you fear us?”
“I show you all of myself that I am willing to. And I have no reason to fear you,” he replied, “as the number of Wraith ships I have obliterated will attest.”
Carter heard the scientist give a low growl, but the Queen shot him a hard look and he fell silent. “Just so. Clearly you have great power. I respect strength. As a gesture of that, and to show my peaceful intent, I have brought two of the Atlanteans with me as my guests, unharmed.”
“Oh yeah,” said Rodney, sarcasm dripping from every word, “she’s really been the hostess with the mostess.”
The Wraith honor guard stood away, allowing Sheppard and McKay to move across to where Carter was standing. “Colonel?” she said, in a low voice.
“We have a very big problem,” Sheppard didn’t wait for her to question him further. “Be ready. Things are going to go south very fast.”
“And then some,” added McKay. “They cut through the encryption like it was made of tissue paper.”
“Encryption on what?” But Carter’s question was answered when she laid eyes on the device in the hands of the Wraith scientist; an Atlantis-issue data pad. “Oh.”
Sheppard leaned closer. “Trust me, however bad you think it is, it’s worse than that.”
Fenrir was speaking again. “You have made claims about your peaceful nature, and yet it was your vessels that attacked me on my arrival in the Pegasus galaxy.”
The Queen shook her head. “Those were craft of another cadre, Fenrir. We Wraith are a clannish culture with many factions. I represent one of those with a less… Reactionary mindset.”