“You look like I feel,” she told him.
“I’m fine,” he snapped back angrily. “If you can’t cut it, then stay here.” He ducked as pulses of stun-fire shrieked past them, answered seconds later by the rattle of a returning rodgun salvo.
Something caught his eye and he glanced up. High above, way beyond the clouds and into the deep reaches of Heruun’s sky, there were streaks of dark color and fire, crossing from horizon toward horizon. He’d seen the like before; wreckage from low orbit, burning up as it plunged through the atmosphere on re-entry. There was no way to know if they were pieces of Wraith or Asgard starship; but whatever they were, it was a grim signal that battle had been joined out in space.
Allan was looking up as well. “You think —?”
“I think Sheppard and Carter won’t go down without a fight,” he rumbled. “And neither will we.”
Keller pressed closer to them. She had a gun in her hand, but Ronon knew she wouldn’t fire it unless circumstances were at their very worst. The doctor fixed him with a measuring stare. “Maybe we should let the locals handle this,” she said, and nodded in the direction of the sick lodge just up ahead along the wooden boardwalk.
Ronon peered through a gap in the wagon’s slats. “They’ll get cut to pieces,” he growled. From his vantage point he could see the shapes of a handful of Wraith warriors moving behind the open windows of the lodge. The odds were bad, but he’d faced worse; and inside that building were dozens of civilians who, out of foolish choice or coercion, had become prisoners — and therefore prey — of his old enemy. He couldn’t let that stand.
Keller spoke so only he could hear her. “Ronon. On your neck there, the skin.” She touched her throat to indicate the place she meant. “There are lesions… I saw them before, on the Returned. It’s an indicator, a sign of the last stage of the sickness.”
Ronon blinked hard. His head felt leaden and heavy, and each breath he took tasted strange, tainted. The Satedan had said nothing of this to anyone else, not of that or the shooting pains in his joints that were growing worse with every passing hour. “I can deal with it,” he grated.
“Ronon —” she began.
“I said I can handle it, Teyla!” he snapped.
Keller frowned. “Ronon, it’s Jennifer. Teyla’s not here, remember?”
He hesitated, his head swimming. For a moment, the face of the woman before him became shadowy and indistinct. Angry with himself, he shook off the instant of confusion and gripped his particle magnum tightly, enough so the tremors in his hands were not evident. Ronon eyed Keller. “Whatever is wrong with me, I’m not going to lie down and wait for it to take me. That’s not my way.”
Without waiting for an answer, he grabbed the side of the wagon and vaulted up over it with a howl of effort, leading with his pistol. Ronon landed hard on the wooden deck on the other side and fired as he ran, some shots going wide, but enough of them hitting their marks to knock down the Wraith guarding the doorway.
“Follow the voyager!” shouted Soonir. “Advance! Advance!”
The pain blazed through Ronon, stinging like poison, but he cursed it and kept on going, driven on by pure fury. He kept expecting the next stun bolt that crackled through the air to be the one that struck him down; but the numbing cold of the energy discharge never came, and suddenly he was at the sick lodge’s entrance, cracking the faceplate of a Wraith warrior with a slamming blow from the butt of his gun. Even as the alien fell, there came a ragged battle cry from behind him as the men and women of Heruun took the fight to their invaders.
Another wave of fatigue swept over him and he gritted his teeth. I just need to hold on, he told himself, just until the fight is over.
Teyla had nowhere to go; the Risar had backed her into a corner formed from a fallen cargo module and the canted fuselage of another shuttlecraft. She dodged, bracing herself off the saucer-ship’s wing and kicking away. Teyla spun and put all her effort into a sweeping blow from her foot, connecting with the Risar’s arm. Bone snapped and the clone gurgled again, ignoring the hit and slashing at the air with its good arm. The very tips of razor-sharp claws caught the front of her tunic and tore through leather and cloth, a scant hair’s breadth from the flesh of her throat. She bobbed and shifted on the balls of her feet, but the Risar kept on coming, waving those gangly arms. Teyla could see no escape route that would not have her clawed and torn should she take it.
In that moment there was movement. More shapes in the half-light, behind the Risar and coming closer. For one fearful second, she thought the creature would be joined by more of its kind; but then a familiar and welcome voice cried out her name.
“Teyla!” called Sheppard. “Hit the deck!”
The Risar turned angrily, irritated that it had been disturbed. The Athosian woman did not question the colonel’s command; she dropped and struck out again at the Risar’s legs, this time hitting the mark.
Momentarily caught between two targets, the clone-creature snarled and hesitated, raising it’s uninjured hand. With Teyla clear of the line of fire, Sheppard brought the stunners he held in either hand to bear and fired twin bursts of white fire into the Risar’s torso. Incredibly, it took the first two hits without pause and staggered toward the colonel, lowing and hooting.
Teyla pivoted into a crescent kick that went up and connected hard with the clone’s head. The stunning impacts finally registered in the Risar’s maddened mind and it toppled, falling toward a snarl of wreckage on the deck. The creature collapsed against a broken stanchion and coughed out a final gasp of air, the metallic support beam impaling it like a spear.
Lorne extended a hand to help Teyla to her feet, but she waved him away with a thin smile. “It did not injure me.”
“Glad to see you’re still in once piece,” said Sheppard. He sounded tired and crack-throated. “And that was a good call about these UFOs. Never woulda thought of that.”
She blinked “You-eff-oh? I do not understand the term?”
“Never mind,” he told her, pointing back the way they had come. “I’ll dig out a copy of Independence Day when we get back to Atlantis, that’ll explain everything. Come on, I think I found us a ride.”
Sheppard led them toward the lone craft she had spotted earlier, and Teyla nodded. “I confess I have only a basic grasp of Asgard technology. I hope we will be able to operate this vessel.”
“The colonel once told me he could fly anything,” said Lorne. “Time to see if he was just bragging, I guess.”
Another threatening rumble resonated through the decking and a segment of the steel ceiling broke away and collapsed with a ringing concussion.
“I said anything with wings,” Sheppard retorted, stepping up to the hull of the ship, feeling across the surface with the flat of his hand. “This doesn’t count.” He frowned. “No seams. Where’s the damn hatch?”
“There will be a touch point,” Teyla noted.
“I got it.” Sheppard moved his fingers over a shallow oval indent in the hull metal and part of the steel fuselage folded in on itself. “There —”
Whatever he was going to say next was lost as the Risar inside the shuttle came through the hatch and slammed Sheppard into the deck.
“Let me through!” Keller shouted, and shoved her way past the men collecting at the sick lodge’s door. She felt a hand on her shoulder — Lieutenant Allan — and heard her call out a warning, but Jennifer shrugged the other woman away and kept going. Allan cursed and coughed; the USAF officer was still weak with spent effort and the aftershock of losing decades of her life to a hungry Wraith.
The bodies of a dozen dead warriors littered the floor, and a dozen more aliens were being held on their knees by rebels from Soonir’s forces; the renegade leader himself and his opposite number in the elders stood close by. No-one was moving; the air was heavy with tension, laced with the smell of ozone and sweat.