Teyla had her radio raised to her lips. “John, do you read me? Colonel Sheppard, I think —” She stopped and stared at the device. “It’s not working. The radio has gone dead.” The woman paused. “Perhaps they would have heard the cry.” She glanced around, but there was no-one about.
“Not from out here.” Ronon felt a sudden, strange chill on the skin of his bare arms, and for a moment there was a metallic scent in the air like ozone. It seemed harsh and out of place among the warm odors of the trees. Then there was the scream again; a pure, animal sound of primal fear. “I’m going out there,” he snapped.
“Not alone,” she began, but he had already kicked off and was dropping toward the ground in a swift, controlled fall.
Ronon hit the dirt ready, his gun hand coming up with the brutal shape of the particle magnum. Teyla was a heartbeat behind him, and the defiant look she gave him dared the Satedan to suggest that she remain behind. He nodded. “Don’t slow me down,” he offered. It was as close to an assent as she would ever get.
They moved in quick, loping bursts of motion, staying to the edges of the farming tracks, dodging around low-lying huts and the stubby pillars of grain silos. The light flashed again, and Dex hissed in annoyance as the actinic blaze of color robbed him of his night vision. In the moment of brilliance, he saw the sharp-sided shadow of a barn and figures moving around it. He wondered if the light cast some kind of optical illusion; the man-shapes he saw were out of scale, too big to be humans.
Teyla kept pace with him, panting in the silence. “It could be raiders, perhaps from another village…”
“Or not,” Ronon said in a low voice.
And then the scream came a third time, chilling his blood as it suddenly ceased in mid-cry.
He broke from cover, leading with the pistol, and sprinted the rest of the distance toward the barn. The warrior’s battle-honed combat sense took in a dozen impressions at once; he saw a dozen stumpy herd beasts all fallen on their sides, as if they had been knocked down by a stun beam; he tasted the bitter ozone stink again, strong and acrid on his tongue; and out beyond the curved roof of the barn, lying in the long grass on a halo of muted green light, the shadow he had glimpsed from the balcony.
It was a craft of some kind, triangular, featureless and matt black. It hovered silently, drifting slightly from side to side like a boat at anchor.
“Not Wraith…” he said aloud. In fact, it was like nothing he had ever seen before, not in his service to Sateda, not in his time with the people of Atlantis.
“Ronon!” Teyla’s warning cry snapped him back to battle-ready and he spun in place as gangly humanoid shapes emerged from inside the barn. The first of them had a woman cradled gently in its arms, in the manner an adult would use for a small child. The Heruuni female was slack like a rag doll, and her sightless eyes stared into the distance.
The next two walked in military lockstep, heads turning as one to stare at the Satedan and the Athosian. They were giants; a full head taller than Dex, they were dense with planes of muscle that shifted beneath grey-green flesh. Long, whipcord arms raised from their sides, each ending in fingers with too many joints; and their features were strange parodies of human faces, less than sketches really, with inky, dark eyes that he could not read. They studied them while the one carrying the woman walked carefully toward the grounded flyer.
Then they came at them, and they were fast. Ronon saw something in their hands, a glassy egg that had to be some kind of weapon. His gun came up in an arc and he squeezed the trigger; but to no effect. The energy pistol was inert, the glowing power cell behind the beam chamber suddenly dark. Dex had a moment of shock; he had fully charged the weapon before leaving Atlantis, and not fired a single shot since they exited the Stargate.
One of the hulking figures threw a blow at him that he almost didn’t escape; the creatures moved too rapidly for something of their size and mass. Ronon spun, ducking low, and landed a punch on the meat of his attacker’s torso. His knuckles scraped dry, powdery skin, but the force of the impact had no obvious effect. No moan of pain, no reaction, nothing.
He was aware of Teyla sparring with the second creature, her fighting sticks in her hands, each one a blur as they spun in the light from the craft. She too landed blows, and like Ronon’s, any effect they had was invisible.
His adversary turned the egg-device on him and it glowed within. The Satedan felt a strange chill wash over him and without warning his muscles bunched and locked in paralysis. It became hard to breathe, as even his chest refused to move to push new air into his lungs. Something dropped from his fingers into the grass at his feet; his useless pistol.
Teyla! He wanted to cry out, wanted to warn her, but his body would not obey him. He stood there, trembling, a statue of meat and bone.
Ronon could not turn his head to look in her direction; so it was that he only saw her again when one of the giants carried her past him, following in the footsteps of its predecessor. He saw her face, her eyes blank and empty just as those of Heruuni woman; then his foe came closer, filling his sight with its strangely unfinished features. The glassine ellipse came up and he heard a whining from inside it move through the bones of his skull. The sound grew and grew, blotting out everything, every thought he could form, washing away every last trace of awareness.
Ronon Dex tried to bellow his defiance; he tried and failed.
Chapter Three
“Get out of my damned way,” snarled Sheppard, barely keeping his temper in check.
The guard was a thickset man, his head shaven except for a queue of black hair extending down from the back of his scalp, and the light robes he wore rustled as he turned to block the colonel’s way, one hand dipping into the folds, reaching for a weapon. “You cannot enter here, voyager,” he grunted.
“Colonel —” Behind him, Keller started to speak but McKay silenced her with a shake of the head.
John stabbed a finger at the great lodge in front of him; it was the largest collection of woven pod-huts they’d seen so far in the settlement, something like a cross between a village hall and a townhouse. “This is Takkol’s place, right?” he demanded. “I want to see him, right now.”
“You cannot enter here,” repeated the guard, eyes darting around, looking for assistance. It was the early hours of morning and the walkways were deserted, the people all retired to their beds after the celebration.
Sheppard glowered at him, for one moment his hand wandering toward the grip of his P90; but then he shook his head. “You know something? I don’t have time for this. I apologise.”
The guard asked the question before he had even thought about it. “For what?”
The colonel’s free hand shot out and hit the man in a nerve point just above the clavicle; the guard howled in pain and clutched at himself, his arm suddenly going dead. “For that,” he replied, and shoved the man out of the way, taking the steps to the lodge door in two quick strides.
“Where’d you learn to do that?” said McKay.
“You spar with Ronon long enough, you pick up some things.” Sheppard shouldered open the wooden doors and advanced into the entrance hall. Other guards — the same ones who had been their ‘escorts’ earlier — appeared from side doors, each of them hoisting a short, spindly rifle, drawn by the yell from their comrade.
McKay clutched the butt plate his P90 to his shoulder, blinking, and at his side Keller moved nervously from foot to foot, not quite ready to draw the Beretta pistol that Sheppard had ordered her to strap to her leg.