“Where did you send them?” she demanded, her voice echoing. “Fenrir? Answer me!”
The Asgard’s holographic image was gone.
“I know you can hear me!” She moved to the capsule and beat a fist on the thick crystalline glass, beneath which slumbered the flesh of the alien being. “Where are my friends?” Her voice became a shout.
The eyes of the sleeping Asgard snapped open for one brief moment, then closed again just as swiftly. Suddenly there was a Risar at her side, firmly taking her arm and pulling her away. She spun about, ready to attack, and came face to face with a second of the creatures brandishing an orb.
“Why did you lie to me?” The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. “I… Had begun to believe that I could trust you, Teyla Emmagan. I believed we had developed a rapport.”
“If you have injured Sheppard and the others —”
“They are unhurt,” came the sharp reply. “I sent them to the Hive Ship.”
Teyla gasped. “Then my friends are as good as dead! The Wraith Queen will destroy them!”
“No,” said the voice. “External sensors register the presence of locating tracer devices similar to the one I detect upon you. Sheppard, Carter, McKay and the others… They live still.”
“You must bring them back!”
A flash of color and light signaled the formation of Fenrir’s avatar. The Asgard’s face was pinched and his eyes clouded with anger. “Do not presume to tell me what I must do. I have only to form a command in my thoughts and you will be sent to join them, human.”
Teyla spread her hands. “Then do it. Send me to the Wraith, send me and my unborn child to our deaths!”
“You will not leave until I have my answer!” raged the Asgard, fury and dejection warring in his words. “Why did you lie?” The question resonated in the cold air of the chamber like distant thunder.
The Athosian let out a long breath. “Because I felt sorry for you. I have lost all of my people in recent months, and unlike you I do not even have the mercy of knowing what fate befell them. The pain and loss I feel… I did not want to inflict it on another living being, even as I knew that we were wrong to keep this from you.” She was unable to meet the alien’s unwavering gaze. “There is no excuse, Fenrir. I am sorry that we kept this secret.”
The avatar paced the room. “My people, gone forever… The Replicators dead but a new breed of their kind running wild here in Pegasus… It is all so much to comprehend. And all the work, everything I did was all for nothing.”
“The work,” repeated Teyla. “When I asked you about that before, you would not speak of it to me. What do you mean by that?”
Fenrir halted, his thin fingers knotting together. “I have created such horror, Teyla Emmagan. In the pursuit of war, such great darkness. But all I wanted was a chance to find redemption… And now that has been denied to me.”
Teyla’s blood ran cold. “What horror?”
Lorne picked at the matted, fibrous webbing across the entrance of the cell, but the pliant material refused to budge. He stared out into the corridor beyond, where four Wraith warriors stood silently on guard, stunner rifles cradled in their grips. “So,” he said, turning back to face McKay, Sheppard and Carter, “forgive me for saying so, but if I understand it correctly, we have gone from our normal kind of being in serious trouble to a whole new level of how screwed we are.”
“Yeah,” sighed McKay. “That’s about it.”
Sheppard gave Lorne a hard look. “Show a little optimism, will ya? We’ve been in worse situations.”
Carter raised her eyebrows. “Have you? Really?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Like what?”
“Uh…” Sheppard hesitated. “Well, there was this one time —”
McKay made a loud, wordless sound that was half annoyance and half exasperation. “What do you two want, a scorecard? Can we concentrate on the problem at hand?”
“Which one, Doc?” Lorne said in a deceptively light tone. “We’ve sure got plenty to choose from.” Things had moved quickly when the Asgard had done his beaming thing; one second all the Atlantis team members were on the Aegis, the next they were on the Hive Ship. The Wraith Queen had been ready for them — maybe she used her telepathy to raise the alarm the second before they appeared on her ship, or something — and Evan Lorne and his colleagues found themselves disarmed and languishing in Wraith Jail. Again.
Still, at least they weren’t strapped up and glued into one of those feeding chambers along with a bunch of desiccated corpses. Not yet, anyway. He sighed; hopefully Ronon Dex, Doc Keller and the rest of the squad down on Heruun were having better luck.
“I am so sick of seeing the inside of these places,” grumbled McKay. After the Wraith had thrown them in the cells and left them to rot, it was the scientist who sheepishly added the new and alarming pieces to the jigsaw puzzle of what was happening around here. It was bad enough the Wraith had taken the upper hand, tactically speaking, but all this stuff about the little grey guy being some kind of mad scientist convict was not a welcome revelation.
Colonel Carter had not said much since McKay mentioned the word ‘collapsar’. The look of abject shock on her face had been more than enough to worry Lorne, and Sheppard had helpfully cemented that by explaining still further.
“Fenrir made a black hole bomb,” he said bluntly. As much as Lorne thought about that string of words, the scope of something so destructive was just out of his comprehension. He’d seen naquadria-laced super-nukes detonate and those were incredible enough to behold; what Sheppard was talking about dwarfed that by an entire order of magnitude.
Not for the first time, the major found himself wondering whatever happened to the Air Force that he had joined out of high school, the nicely earthbound military with jet planes and that kinda stuff. Just when did serving my country turn into a science fiction movie?
McKay held his chin in his hands. “I’m not sure how much she gave him of the files I recovered from the Asgard core aboard Odyssey,” he noted, “but there was a lot of content on that Wraith data module.”
“I saw tactical plots of Asuran forces in Pegasus flash up on that big screen,” said Carter. “We have similar information back at Atlantis.”
“Showing him where the enemy is,” added Sheppard. “You saw how Fenrir reacted when the Queen did that little show-and-tell with a captive Replicator. I’ve never seen that look on an Asgard’s face before.”
Carter nodded “I have. Thor had the same expression when the bug-form Replicators took down the Beliskner. They may seem alien, but they have the same emotions as we do. Fear and terror, hate and anger.”
“Enough to want revenge?” said Lorne. The tech stuff was out of his league, but understanding the simple need to take some payback… He knew that all too well.
The colonel nodded again.
Much of what Fenrir said ranged far beyond her ability to grasp, but among the terms and complex sciences he spoke of, Teyla swiftly found a route to understanding; and with it, an icy dread deep in her chest.
She asked the Asgard to speak of his ‘work’ and he told her, unfettered and without concession. The old Athosian myth-tale of the Nightfall gained new power as Fenrir spoke of the weapon he had created in the war against the other strain of Replicators, this ‘collapsar’ device. Teyla had seen and experienced much that had challenged her view of the universe since joining John Sheppard’s team; but there was little she could bring to mind that so frightened her as Fenrir’s clinical, metered description of a weapon that could put out a sun and turn whole worlds to ashen ruin.