“Indeed? Then tell me what it is you and your clan want with me.”
The alien female threw back her head in a basso chuckle. “I want to help you, Asgard. I know much about you. I know many things you should know.”
Carter watched the Wraith scientist tap at the data pad. “They took it,” she said. It was a statement, not a question. “They broke the coding.”
“Kullid betrayed us,” said McKay bitterly. “He’s a Wraith worshipper, near as we can tell.”
Sam cursed silently, her mind racing. They had lost control of the situation here, and soon it would be too far gone for the Atlanteans to regain it.
“I know about your long and brutal war,” continued the Queen. “For, you see, in a very real way we share the same enemy.”
“What are you doing?” demanded Teyla, but the Wraith ignored her, instead bringing the hooded figure forward.
“Who is this?” snapped Carter.
“No idea,” McKay admitted, “they just dragged this guy up from the holding decks and brought him along with us.”
With a flourish, the Wraith scientist tore the hood away to reveal a human male in a bland, sand-colored tunic and trousers. He stumbled forward, his face furious.
“Do you know what this is?” grinned the Queen. “No? Let me enlighten you?”
Sam and the rest of the Atlanteans knew exactly what the prisoner was, however; a captured Asuran, doubtless one of many the Wraith clan had taken during their recent ongoing battles with the artificial beings.
The holographic avatar looked on, Fenrir’s alien face caught in peculiar moment of wonderment and distress. The Queen nodded at her warriors and as one they turned and gunned down the Asuran, pouring a huge salvo of energy bolts into the prisoners body. Overloaded, the Asuran screamed and disintegrated, becoming a heap of metallic powder.
“A Replicator…” whispered the Asgard. “A humanoid-form Replicator.” He shook his tiny head, blinking. “We had always suspected they might evolve toward this level of sophistication, but never…” He halted, gathering himself. “How did they come to this galaxy?”
“They’re called Asurans,” Carter called out. “They’re not the Replicators that you know of. They evolved separately, here in Pegasus. Similar, but different.”
“Different, yes,” said the Wraith scientist, “but still the same in their programming. Destroying organic life, spreading like a virus.”
“You speak of yourself,” said Teyla. “The Asurans were made to fight the Wraith!”
The Queen snarled at her. “But now they kill everything, so what does it matter?” She took a step toward the silent avatar. “Our war is your war, Fenrir. Do you not see that simple truth?”
Fenrir nodded once, still staring at the Asuran’s ashen remains. “I … See it.” Suddenly he turned to glare at the humans, a new hardness in his dark eyes. “You knew of the existence of these… Asurans, and yet you said nothing of it. You know of the Asgard’s conflict with the Replicators and yet you kept silent!” Fenrir’s voice rose in pitch. “You concealed the presence of my most hated enemy from me. Why?” He turned to face the Athosian woman, almost pleading. “Why, Teyla? Why would you do this?”
The Queen’s expression grew grave. “That is not all the humans have kept from you,” she intoned.
“Here we go,” McKay muttered.
“Explain!” barked Fenrir, the word echoing from the lips of every one of the Risar; his anger spilled over into the body language of the clones, turning their stances aggressive and threatening.
“That’s enough, right there!” snapped Sheppard, coming forward. “Okay, we admit it, we were a little economical with the truth, but so were you!”
“The Asgard High Council didn’t send you out here on any research trip,” noted McKay.
The Risar crowded toward them, raising their orb-weapons. “Silence!” Fenrir’s voice thundered around the chamber. “No more lies, no more secrets! Tell me!” His avatar shimmered and trembled, moving toward the Queen. “Tell me!”
Carter saw the Wraith female smother a faint smile with a carefully constructed look of sadness. She glanced at her scientist and the other Wraith produced a compact storage module from a pocket; Sam knew the type, the Wraith equivalent of a portable ultra-high density hard drive. Teams from Atlantis had recovered them from Hive Ships and alien bases on several occasions. “See for yourself,” said the scientist.
A Risar took the device and slotted it into the console beneath the oval screen.
“Fenrir,” said Teyla. “Don’t look at it. This isn’t the way, not like this.”
The hologram ignored her and gestured in the air; the data module glowed blue and information transfer began.
“It gives me no pleasure to be the one to bring this news to you,” said the Wraith Queen. “But I must.”
On the screen, a wave of flash-frame images raced past; Carter registered views of the planets Hala and Orilla, a swarm of beetle-like Replicators, genetic schematics of an Asgard, a complex octo-helix of alien DNA, a dying star, and more.
“My people…Are dead,” said the Asgard. His synthetic voice crackled and wavered as if something were breaking up the projection.
The contents of the module sank into the memory core of the Aegis itself, and with his mind connected directly to the starship, into the conscious mind of Fenrir’s physical body. Sam felt a sense of great empathy for the alien; the Asgard did not even have the luxury of processing and assimilating the great loss in his own time. One moment he did not know, the next he knew it all, in complete and total detail.
The diminutive, child-like body of the avatar flickered, frozen for long seconds. Then he was moving again. The narrow, sharp edges of the Asgard’s face were rigid and taut with an emotion Carter had never thought his kind capable of displaying. He stared at her with real hatred in his eyes.
“You were there,” he husked. “You saw my species perish.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Sam. She could find no other words to say.
The Queen gave a derisive snort. “Now she admits it. You see, Fenrir? The humans cannot be trusted. Only you and I, Asgard and Wraith have spoken in truth. Even when my kind attacked your ship, it was not subterfuge, but an honest reaction to an intrusion…” When Fenrir didn’t answer, she came closer to him. “Don’t you see? We have a common foe in the Replicators, no matter what their origin. We have a foundation of truth between us…” She shot a look at Carter. “Not lies.”
“Leave me…” The words were so quiet that Sam almost missed them.
“Asgard, you must listen to —”
Fenrir turned about and the Risar surged forward. “I told you to leave me!”
From nowhere came a brilliant surge of white rising from the deck around them. Carter jerked as the power of the transporter took her, dragging her away from the Aegis along with every other human and Wraith who stood there.
All but one.
Chapter Thirteen
From the smell of it, the cages had actually been built as animal enclosures of some kind, a long line of them radiating off an enclosed corridor that ran the length of one of the tree-settlement’s vast boughs. There were other people in other cages ranged around them, most of them the airmen from the squads brought through the Stargate by Major Lorne and left behind to act as security. They had been overwhelmed by Wraith shock troops; the diminishment of their numbers made it clear how many of them had fought until they fell. The doctor caught the eye of Lieutenant Allan and the woman nodded grimly back at her.
“I have really had it with being locked up,” said Jennifer, testing the heavy knurled branches that formed the bars of the wide enclosure where they had been confined. Through knotholes in the planks that made up the floor, Keller glimpsed green leaves waving in the wind and far below the brown earth at the foot of the massive tree complex. They were below the main tier of the settlement, down in the underlevels beneath the lodges and the main square.