“Are you certain of that?” The injured Wraith spoke for the first time.
“Are you?” Ronon retorted.
The doctor sucked in a shaky breath. “So if you want to get off this planet alive, you better listen to me.”
Takkol bristled. “You have no right to offer these monsters any amnesty!”
Allan waved her weapon at the elder. “Hush up, now. Let her finish.”
Ronon crossed to her, walking with difficulty. “What do you think you are doing?” he said quietly.
“My job,” she told him, then gave the Wraith a level look. “We’ll let you gate off this planet.”
The Wraith cocked its head. “In return for what?”
She nodded at Ronon and the others. “Make them well. Give them your ‘gift of life’.”
The Satedan looked at her for a long moment, and Keller thought he would explode with rage at such a suggestion. He hated the Wraith more than anyone else in the room; but Ronon Dex wasn’t a fool. Beneath his pride, he had a soldier’s pragmatism — and like the Wraith, he had to know it was his only shot at survival.
A slow, cold smile appeared on Ronon’s face as he made his peace with the idea, and with care he took aim with his pistol, pointing it at the Wraith’s head. “Of course,” he husked. “There is the other option. To be honest, part of me is hoping you turn her down.” Ronon’s smile became a wolfish grin. “What’s it gonna be?”
Rodney McKay held on to the console before him for dear life as the computer chamber shook, every loose piece of broken paneling or shattered crystal-glass rattling against the metallic decking. He tried very hard not to think about what was going on outside, about the twisted wrecks of this ship and its Wraith adversary, locked together like a pair of doomed dancers spinning their way into the inferno of re-entry. He kept his eyes glued to the holographic screen, pouring his entire focus into the single task of making the hyperdrive activation program work.
Normally, the staggeringly complex task of collating the trillions of data points needed to make a faster-than-light transition were done by computers, and outside involvement was hardly required. It was all ‘point and click’; want to jump from Sol to Barnard’s Star? Sure, no problem. Just tap the big red button marked ‘Go’. Someone else will do the math for you.
But here and now that someone was McKay, and working in tandem with him several decks above, Sam Carter. The whole thing would have been a hell of a lot easier if they weren’t in the middle of crashing to their deaths on an alien starship riddled with catastrophic damage.
Together they had failed three times in a row to correctly compile and initiate the tunneling dimensional reaction, which would soften the barrier between real space and the warped sub-reality of hyperspace. There was simply too much data to handle at once; even with two people as smart at they were in the equation, it was impossible. It just couldn’t be done.
“It’s done,” said Sam, blowing out a breath.
Rodney blinked in surprise. She wasn’t wrong. Even while part of him was ticking off the seconds left before his fiery death, something deeper — call it his mathematical subconscious — was on the job. “Wow. I’m even smarter than I thought I was.”
The jumble of Asgard text and symbology on the holograph shifted and changed, becoming smooth and even. A countdown rune blinked down toward zero, and the activation of the hyperdrive. Even with the damage the Aegis had sustained, it would be enough to throw it through the subspace portal and across light years. Carter had programmed the vessel to get as far away as it could in the shortest possible time; the de-fold location was in the middle of deep space, nowhere near anything that could possibly sustain life or feed the ravenous reaction of the isa device’s detonation.
He released a shuddering breath. Together, they had just saved the lives of everyone on Heruun. And the cost was their own.
Rodney listened to the moaning of the Aegis as it inched toward its own ending, and when he spoke into his radio, his throat was dry. “Uh, Sam?”
“I’m here,” said Carter. “Sixty seconds to jump.”
“Sam, I’m sorry.” The words gushed out of him. “I’m sorry you had to be here for this.”
“It’s not your fault, Rodney. It’s mine. I played this mission wrong from the start. Too many secrets. And look where it took us.” Regret clouded her words.
McKay blinked and looked at the destruction and the dead around him. He felt more alone than he ever had in his life; but suddenly, not afraid. Not afraid at all. “I–I’m glad I got the chance to know you,” he went on. “I know we had our differences early on —”
He heard her smile. “What, that you thought I was an idiot and I thought you were an arrogant ass?”
“Yeah, that,” he nodded. “I’m glad I got to prove myself wrong. I’m glad I got to know you better.”
There was a moment’s pause. “Thanks, Rodney. I was always a little worried you thought I had come to Atlantis to steal your thunder. But I never wanted that. I just wanted to be a part of… All this.” She sighed. “Thirty seconds. The truth is, I liked working with you. You’re the smartest person I know. I feel like I need to run to keep up and that’s exhilarating. It reminds me of why I love science.”
He swallowed, touched by the her honesty. “Funny,” Rodney replied. “I was just going to say the same thing about you.” The rumbling was growing louder by the moment and he blinked as rains of dust cascaded down around him. McKay went to add something more but Carter spoke again.
“Twenty —” Her voice abruptly disintegrated into a humming crackle of static.
Rodney’s stomach tightened in shock. “Sam? Sam? Can you hear me? Sam!” An answer did not come. “Oh no.”
He gripped the radio in his hands as the dying starship’s death throes grew deafening; then there was a deep, droning buzz and his senses were smothered with white.
The hyperspace portal formed so close to Heruun’s outer atmosphere that it triggered the instantaneous creation of a high-altitude storm cell, the mighty thunderhead sweeping down to bring precipitation to a savannah wilderness that had not known a rainy season for decades.
The ragged-edged rip in space-time yawned open, spilling glowing radiation into the darkness; and together, the Aegis and the Hive Ship fell screaming into the shimmering maw, which snapped shut behind them in a shower of spent photons.
The displacement shockwave rode out beyond the collapsed portal, batting away trailing fragments of hull metal and wreckage from the two mighty starships, sending them into new orbits that would decay and immolate them against the planetary atmosphere.
All except one shining sliver of alien steel, a curved shape something like a saucer, or perhaps a manta ray. Swift but unsteady, the object described a wide arc away and down toward the planet’s surface.
Chapter Seventeen
In the space between stars, in a place where only the light of far distant suns fell, where there were no worlds, nothing but the merest scattering of cosmic dust, there was a brief storm of energy.
From the nothingness came a tear in the fabric of reality, as engines of alien technology sliced open a hole in the black and let glowing streamers of blue-white luminosity issue forth. A jagged collision of metal and bone exploded from the newly-formed portal and tumbled back into normal space, illuminated for a brief instant by the strange fires of hyperspace; then the portal vanished and the battle-scared hulks of the Asgard warship Aegis and its Wraith adversary were alone, adrift in the interstellar void, hundreds of light years from the Heruun star system.