The Asgard’s head turned, revealing a half-coronet made of hair-like wires and smooth crystal spheres about the back of his skull. Snaking cables that pulsed with light extended away, doubtless toward the interface that married Fenrir to the systems of the Aegis.
“Teyla,” he repeated. “I am sorry I deceived you. Perhaps now I have done my penance…” The Asgard gasped as pain lanced through him. “We should…have been open with each other… Perhaps this is fitting. I will go to be with my kindred…and be forgiven.” He blinked, his heavy lids closing slowly.
“Fenrir, no!” cried Teyla. “Please, you must hold on! If you perish, there will be no-one to control this ship, it will be lost! The Wraith are already on board…”
He gave a pained nod. “I sense them. Yes. Moving. I cannot stop them.”
She squeezed his frail fingers. “Then help me stop them! Hold on!”
“You…cannot do that alone.” He sucked in a shuddering breath. “I will…bring you the help you require.”
The crystal spheres clustered around the interface crown began to glow.
McKay followed the others to their feet as the webbing across the cell door vibrated and reeled back into the chitinous walls. The four Wraith warriors on guard had been joined by the scientist-type he remembered encountering down on Heruun. The alien glanced at them all in turn with sly, open avarice.
“My Queen has opened the way. The Asgard ship will soon be under the control of my clan. If you wish to live, you will help us understand its mechanisms.”
Sheppard shrugged. “Hey, I can barely change a light bulb. Can’t help you with any space doohickeys, pal.”
This seemed to amuse the alien. “Not you.” He nodded at Lorne. “Nor you. You are warrior drones, without the intellect required for such tasks.”
“I’ll have you know I’m an ace at sudoku,” Lorne sniffed, moving to join Sheppard where he blocked the path toward Carter and McKay.
The Wraith scientist pointed at the others. “These two, the female and the inferior male.”
“Inferior?” echoed McKay. “I resent that!”
“We won’t help you,” Carter said firmly. “We’ll resist you every inch of the way.”
The Wraith grunted. “And how will you do that?”
Carter was about to say something more, but from nowhere a white nimbus of light surrounded her and vanished with a humming crackle.
“Huh,” said Sheppard, a grin forming on his lips. “That way, maybe?”
The alien shouted out a command, but it was too late; the transport effect flared again, and when it faded he was alone inside the cell.
The Wraith commander advanced, the corridor’s floorboards creaking as he came ever closer. His head turned, lips peeling back to show wet fangs. “Surrender. It will pass quicker if you do not fight us.”
Ronon Dex was aware of his heart hammering in his chest, his pulse rushing in his ears; the sickness in his blood was sapping his strength, draining his will even as he stood here and did nothing. He shook his head to dispel the miasma in his thoughts; he rejected the fatigue in his bones, the desperate need to slump to the wall and let the blackness take him.
No. He was Satedan. He would die on his feet, meeting death as he had life, head-on and without compromise.
A strange calm came over him, and he felt a smile pull at the corner of his lips. In the rare moments of introspection spared him by the world, Ronon had always suspected that his end would come in battle, and at the hands of the Wraith. No simple, quiet ending for Specialist Dex, no soft and restful deathbed. From the moment they had smashed his world and made him a Runner, Ronon had known he would die with blood in his teeth, his hands around the neck of his enemy. He nodded to himself. There was something right about it.
He glanced at Keller, her pretty face pale with fear. His only regret was the others would share his fate; they deserved better, not to die out here, thousands of light years from their homeworld.
“Surrender!” hissed the Wraith again.
“Come and make me,” he snarled, spreading his arms.
But without warning Keller’s hand was on his arm, pulling back. “Ronon!” she cried. “The floor!”
He had a moment to register what she said before the slats below them shattered, as stone hammers crashed into the wood from beneath, sending storms of splinters flying.
Sam gasped in surprise as the Wraith holding chamber shifted and reformed into the command deck of the Aegis. “Huh,” she managed “Well, that was unexpected.”
The acrid tang of melted plastic and stale smoke wreathed the air around her and she coughed.
“Colonel!” shouted Teyla, from across the room. “You’re safe!”
“Thanks to you, I imagine.” She glanced around. “What happened in here?”
“The Wraith Queen destroyed herself, with an explosive device implanted in her body. She was trying to kill Fenrir.”
“She…succeeded.”
Carter was startled by the second voice; she immediately recognized the thin, reedy accent of the Asgard. “But the cryo pod…” She pointed at the wrecked device, still spewing icy foam.
Teyla’s expression was grim. “He does not have very long.”
Sam nodded and picked her way around a fallen stanchion to one of the consoles that was still operable. “You brought me back… What about Colonel Sheppard and the others on the Hive Ship?”
“There was a power fluctuation…” Fenrir managed. “They are aboard, on the lower decks…”
She moved her hands over the bowed control panel, shifting the oblate key-spheres back and forth. “The Wraith sent over boarding parties,” she began.
“I am…aware,” said the Asgard. “They slipped in…undetected. Pierced the hull…” He coughed, as if he felt the wounds to his ship as much as if they were injuries to his flesh.
Carter frowned as she tried to navigate the complexities of the Asgard system; parts of it were familiar to her, but others were labyrinthine, layered puzzles that she had never encountered before. She could sense Fenrir was trying to open the Aegis to her, but he was faltering with every breath. On a tertiary hologram screen, she saw a cluster of dots indicating the trackers belonging to Sheppard and the others, in a corridor close to the main engineering decks; the Asgard had been as good as his word. But she could also see other dots clustered nearby — Wraith. The alien trace was fuzzy and indistinct, wavering between a ghost-image and solidity. Something about the aliens was making it hard for the ship’s already-damaged internal sensors to read them.
She automatically reached for her radio, only to remember that it had been taken along with all the equipment they had on them when they appeared on the Hive Ship. Without any weapons to defend themselves, Sheppard and his team would be easy prey for the Wraith invaders.
A thought suddenly occurred to her. “Fenrir! This ship has a data-matter converter, right? You can construct objects from stored information patterns…”
The alien nodded jerkily. “I will provide you with… That facility.”
“And access to the transporter system records,” she added, thinking aloud. “When you beamed us off the ship, the matter patterns of everything we had on us would have been recorded…” Carter gave a quick grin as she found what she was looking for.
A few quick commands and an object shimmered into being on the panel before her; an Atlantis-issue walkie-talkie, synthesized from the ground up, molecule by molecule. She picked it up and turned it over in her hands. “Just like the real thing. Let’s see if this works.” Carter ran the converter again, this time sending a newly-formed device elsewhere.
Sheppard gingerly picked up the radio from where it had appeared on the floor before them, holding it by the antenna as if it were the tail of a poisonous snake. “Okay, that’s odd,” he admitted.