The shock of the transition was felt through both craft; each of the ships were mortally wounded and dying by degrees, the few remaining beings that formed their crews mad with rage, or pain, or simple animal panic.
In the command nexus of the Hive Ship, the Wraith scientist who had for so long dreamed of taking the Aegis for his clan staggered to his feet. He ignored the burning agony from the bone shard lodged in his shoulder, a fragment that had blown from a nerve conduit behind him in a concussion that had killed a dozen of his cadre’s best drone-warriors. Most of the lens-screens before him were dead eyes leaking watery processor fluid, no longer operable. The control surfaces were twitching and writhing as the Hive Ship’s crude brain suffered agony from every spot of damage throughout the vessel, the pure sympathetic hurt leaching into the blood-warm air.
The Wraith made it to the panel and hissed through his teeth. His vessel was eating itself alive, reservoirs of acidic bile flooding the lower decks, plasmatic reactors stalled or worse, cycling toward a burning overload; and in the places where the Hive Ship had been violated by the deliberate impact of the Asgard vessel, gelatinous matter gurgled and bubbled as the craft’s autonomic antibodies ran wild and uncontrolled. Like an animal that had caught itself in a snare, the Hive Ship was gnawing on its own extremities in a vain attempt to free itself.
Only one set of systems appeared to be working correctly; the external sensors. The Wraith clung to the console, blinking through the caked blood gumming its eyelids and read the stuttering chain of text spilling over the lens-screen. Out there aboard the alien ship, a sphere of radiation was stirring, growing by the second in power and potency. With dawning horror, the Wraith scientist realized what it was he was seeing. Like the others of his caste, the late queen had made him aware of the data she had taken from the humans, and with it the full possibilities of the technology that belonged to these ‘Asgard’.
The Wraith watched the energy trace grow and cursed its fate, knowing that his clan’s greed was about to kill them all.
Lying amid the wreckage of the computer core, the spinning rings of color around the circumference of the isa device reached a pitch of such speed that they became a solid band of glowing red; and at that moment the countdown ended.
Fenrir’s lethal creation reached inside itself and drilled down, through the layers of normal space into unknown, extradimensional realms of energy. Drawing on levels of cosmic power strong enough to cut through the barriers of quantum reality, it twisted gravitation into a lens and blew it outward, forming a sphere of fast-time. In nanoseconds, the orb of altered space ballooned into a perfect globe a dozen kilometers across.
Outside the shimmering edge of the isa effect, time passed normally, second to second, moment to moment; but within the clock ran a million, a billion, a trillion times faster. Monumental ages, lengths of time so vast they could encompass the birthing and dying of entire civilizations, flashed past inside the sphere. Caught at the very epicenter, the Aegis and the Hive Ship experienced it at full force.
Every living thing aboard the wrecked vessels became wisps of ash and dust, organic matter, even bone and teeth and claws turning to powder. Unhatched in the Hive Ship’s birthing crèche, the cadre’s nascent newly-quickened Queen died before she was fully formed, perishing along with her warriors and her scientists. Aboard the Aegis, the Risar stopped their mad rampage and died in silence, swept away by the hand of their creator.
Then the ships themselves were ended, as eons passed in milliseconds. Metals and plastics designed to withstand the punishing forces of the stellar void wore thin and became like paper, splitting, breaking, ultimately disintegrating beneath their own weight.
A full ten seconds elapsed before the isa effect dissipated. Without the mass required to create a singularity, it spent itself and faded to nothing. The sphere melted away into the background radiation of the sky and left nothing but a drift of free atoms to mark its passing.
Sheppard pressed down the hemisphere in the middle of the podium with the heel of his hand and behind him the Stargate roared open, sending a plume of energy rushing out and back across the shallow valley.
The unkempt cluster of Wraith standing on the steps to the portal hove closer together, some of them throwing up hands to shield themselves from the sudden wash of silvery light. Many of them averted their faces, the brightness hurting their eyes.
Nearby, Ronon made a snorting noise and folded his arms, the pistol in his hand dangling toward the ground in a deceptively casual grip. He stood squarely, clear-eyed and straight-backed, enjoying the feel of Heruun’s hard sunlight on his face. Any lasting trace of the Asgard-inflicted nanite ‘sickness’ had been banished from him, neutralized by the life-giving effects of an energy transfer from their Wraith captives. It was hard to believe that when all other attempts at a cure had failed, in the end it had been an enemy that had been able to save Dex and all the others. The irony wasn’t lost on the colonel. Sheppard caught his friend’s gaze and the Satedan raised an eyebrow.
“What?” he asked.
“You feel any… Different?”
In spite of himself, Ronon’s free hand wandered to his chest, to a spot over his heart, to scratch at some imaginary itch. The big man didn’t seem aware that he was doing it. “No,” he said tersely, “Did you?”
Sheppard shook his head quickly. “’Course not. I was just, y’know, checking.” In truth, for several days after gaining his freedom from being imprisoned by the militant Genii along with a Wraith he’d nicknamed ‘Todd’, Sheppard had felt a little strange. The Wraith had made an uneasy ally — one that had crossed the path of the Atlanteans a number of times since — and John had been both surprised and shocked when the alien had healed him after all the times he had preyed on Sheppard during their captivity. It wasn’t anything physical, nothing like the strange addiction that Wraith worshippers craved from the touch of their alien masters; it was a sense of invasion, almost a mark on the soul, if you wanted to get metaphysical about it. Even though he had been certified well, it took him a long time to wash off the stain, so to speak.
Sheppard didn’t doubt that Ronon felt the same way; but getting the Satedan to admit it would not be likely. He kept his own counsel over that sort of thing. The colonel’s gaze drifted over to Lieutenant Allan; along with Ronon and all the rest of the Heruuni infected with the sickness, she had also taken the unusual ‘cure’, but in her case it had been to reverse the effects of a feeding. She gave Sheppard a respectful nod; there was a look on her face that he had seen in the mirror once or twice, a kind of confused-but-pleased surprise at the fact you were still alive.
He crossed towards the group of Wraith, who stood under the watchful eye of Major Lorne, and a few of the rebels under the orders of Soonir’s former second-in-command, Gaarin. A pair of growling lion-cats on thick leashes held them in check, stalking back and forth with paws flexing and claws bare.
The pale-skinned aliens were the sorriest-looking bunch of their kind Sheppard had ever seen. The usual arrogance and swagger he associated with the Wraith was nowhere in sight. Instead, they stood in a scowling, morose knot, some of them clenching and unclenching their clawed fingers, others moving with difficulty, hobbling. Their weapons and gear had been taken from them, down to the smallest blade; that had been a job that Ronon had taken on with obvious relish.
Every one of the Wraith looked sickly and emaciated, even more so than their typical air of perpetual hunger allowed. They looked, for want of a better word, as if they had been starved, and with good reason. The spur-of-the-moment bargain Doctor Keller had struck with them in Sheppard’s absence had been both radical and clever. In return for letting the handful of survivors from the Hive Ship leave with their lives, they had been forced to use their alien physiology to give back what they had stolen — the raw energy of life — and in the process counteract the infection that crippled the abductees taken by Fenrir. Of course, giving it up to so many people had taken its toll. Now it was the turn of the Wraith to understand what it was like to have the flesh go limp on your bones, to have the breath practically stolen out of your lungs. As object lessons went, it was a pretty good one.