Nightfall Page 4

  “So what happens?” he asked, glancing at Teyla. “Do you think they bring out a big ‘Happy Returned Day’ cake with candles and frosting?”

  She shot him a look. “I think everyone here is just happy their loved ones are back with them.”

  “Oh. Yes.” He immediately felt like a heel. Way to go, McKay. Why don’t you remind her again about her people still being missing?

  Aaren approached them, and with him came an imposing bald man in a long toga-like robe flanked by two more well-muscled flunkies. Like Aaren, this new arrival had an impressive number of metal bangles up his arm, but unlike him there were more hanging from a leather necklace about his throat. He was a few years Aaren’s senior and he had enough decorations on him to snap a Christmas tree. This had to be the guy in charge.

  “Voyagers,” began Aaren. “Let me introduced Elder Takkol, our community leader.”

  Takkol gave a shallow bow and he studied each of them in turn. The man had a square face with deep-set, searching eyes and a thin mouth. He smiled a little, but it seemed perfunctory, as if he had something better to do than to be talking to them. When he spoke, it was like he was giving a lecture. “Aaren has told me much about you and your friends, Colonel Sheppard. I welcome you to Heruun on this special day. I hope you will enjoy our hospitality.”

  “I’m sure we will,” Sheppard replied. “And I hope you and I could speak later.”

  Takkol hesitated; Rodney could see the man was already mentally moving on, about to dismiss them, and John’s comment caught him off-guard. “I’m sure Aaren can deal with any questions you might have.”

  McKay sensed Keller shifting impatiently, her hands knitting together. She hadn’t been the same since they had returned from the sick lodge, withdrawn and quiet. Once or twice, Rodney had spotted her working on her laptop, paging through the medical database stored on the computer’s hard drive, frowning as she looked for answers that weren’t there.

  Sheppard must have noticed as well. “We’d like to offer the help of Atlantis,” he continued. “With your medical problems? Consider it a gesture of goodwill from us.”

  “Really?” Takkol gave Aaren a sideways look. “That is a most generous offer. I will certainly take it under consideration.” Keller opened her mouth to speak, but Takkol cut her off. “But if you will excuse me... I must circulate. It is expected of me.” The elder drifted away, giving Aaren another glance. In turn, his subordinate put on that same fake smile he’d worn before.

  “There is a meal for everyone tonight, including our visitors,” he explained. “Please partake. It is our way of thanking the Aegis for its protection.”

  “And for letting you have your people back?” Ronon asked, an edge of sarcasm in his words.

  Aaren gave no sign of noticing. “Of course.” He wandered away, leaving the Atlanteans to their own devices.

  “That was productive,” Keller deadpanned.

  Ronon folded his arms. “Can we eat now?”

  Sheppard nodded. “Yeah, go ahead. But mind your manners.”

  “I’m the picture of politeness,” replied the Satedan.

  McKay drifted after Ronon toward the food trays and watched the other man hunt and gather his way though a spread of different dishes. Rodney was more careful; after all, the ex-Runner could stomach just about anything even remotely edible, while McKay had the whole citrus thing to think about and a marked aversion toward even mildly spicy food. He could never understand the appeal of eating something that actually hurt. He got some rough flatbreads and what appeared to be cheese, and found himself at the end of the troughs where warm and savory meat-smells filled the air. A large pot caught his eye.

  “That’s whole roast mai,” said Jaaya, walking up to his side. “Would you like to try one?” She opened the lid and Rodney spied a hairless animal torso bobbing in some thin soup. It looked like…

  The woman continued. “Laaro was in the party that caught them. These are the young of the hunter cats, so it’s very tender.”

  He thought of the big lion-things that had stalked around them out in the grasslands and swallowed hard. “You’re saying that’s a roasted…kitten?”

  Jaaya nodded, and McKay blanched. He had no doubt one of the feline beasts would have little qualms about eating him, but doing the reverse suddenly seemed unpalatable. “Uh… Could I just get a green salad instead?”

  He left Jaaya at the server and found Ronan and the others in the shadow of a leafy branch. Keller studied her food with a similar look of doubt to Rodney, while Sheppard and Dex ate like they hadn’t had breakfast. Teyla sipped water and pushed her food around its bowl, looking distracted.

  “You see Errian?” said the Satedan, around a mouthful of something. “Over there.”

  McKay glanced over and followed Jaaya back to her table. Laaro was with his father, talking intently to the older man, but he seemed unaware of the distant look on Errian’s face. “He looks a bit… I don’t know, spaced out.”

  “He’s not the only one. See the others? The Returned?” Sheppard indicated with the jut of his chin.

  Chewing on a bit of rind, Rodney let his gaze wander across the whole distance of the oval, and one by one he picked out the people who didn’t quite fit. Here and there, men and women, some younger, some older. He thought back to what Jaaya had said. Twenty are taken, twenty are returned. All of the Returned had the same look about them, a weariness that seemed bone-deep, like each one of them had just come off a fifty-mile hike. Suddenly McKay became aware of something in the mood of the celebration. He hadn’t noticed it at first, but the more he looked the more he saw it; for all the smiles and jocularity, there was something strained about it all. Like the parties of his youth, it all seemed like a big show. For us? he wondered. Or are they just trying to convince themselves that everything’s okay?

  Teyla sighed and drew back. “Colonel, if I may, I would like to turn in early.”

  “Sure,” said Sheppard. “You okay?”

  Rodney saw Keller pause in mid-bite, watching the Athosian. Teyla gave a wan smile. “It’s the heat. It’s quite tiring. And the food, it’s not to my tastes.”

  “There’s ration packs in the gear back at Jaaya’s lodge,” began the doctor.

  Teyla nodded. “If you’ll excuse me.” She gathered up her tunic and left them behind.

  After a moment, Ronon leaned over and pointed at her unfinished meal. “Any of you going to eat this?” He didn’t wait for an answer, and helped himself.

  When McKay turned to Sheppard, he found him looking directly at Keller. Jennifer broke off and went back to her food.

  Ronon licked some gravy off the second bowl and set it down, missing the moment entirely. “So do we just get one helping, or what?”

  Teyla walked back through the winding avenues of the settlement, having memorized the route on the way to the celebration. The lanterns were lit on every intersection, and warm glows spilled from homes on either side of the street; but there were few people around, and as she moved further away from the central oval, the sounds of life grew fainter until all she could hear was a distant murmur of voices and the chorus of some sort of insect life. The little nightflyer bugs haloed the street lights, settling now and then to make a chit-chit-chit drone before humming away again. The noise added to the drowsy feeling brought on by the close, humid air of the evening.

  She frowned as she walked, the expression marring the pleasant lines of her face. Teyla did not deal well with weakness in herself, as much as she strived to, but in all truth she had been feeling her energy drop far faster than was usual for her. She did her best to make no issue of it, but privately she wondered how much longer she would be able to keep her secrets. Soon she would begin to show, and then… Then they would all change in the way they treated her. Teyla knew what would happen; John, Samantha, Rodney and all the others, they would mean well but they would treat her as if she were made from spun glass. And above all, Teyla Emmagan despised the idea of being treated like a i
nvalid.

  While at once she was elated by the prospect of a new life growing inside her, she could not help but be afraid of what changes a pregnancy — and indeed, a child — would wreak on her life. She remembered the compassionate expression on Jennifer Keller’s face when she broke the news, and for a moment experienced again the strange mingling of joy and sadness she had felt. Joy at such great news, sadness that she could not share it with the father of her unborn. Kanaan’s face rose to the front of her thoughts as it did so often these days, and for a moment Teyla wished that she could have him return to her so easily as Laaro’s father had come back to him.

  The apprehension in the young boy’s eyes found its mirror in Teyla. He feared for his parent, for his father’s health, just as she was so afraid of what unkind fate had befallen her people on New Athos. Teyla paused and gripped the careworn rail of a balcony, staring out into the night, looking up at a sky of alien stars. Somewhere out there, her people waited for her to rescue them, and she vowed she would, even if it meant going into battle with a weapon in one hand and her newborn in the other —

  A dash of light in among the thin clouds caught her eye and Teyla turned to study it; but no sooner had she looked than it was gone. A flash of lightning, perhaps? But there was no thunder, no distant stormhead on the horizon.

  “Hey.”

  She turned to see Ronon Dex walking purposefully toward her. Teyla’s eyes narrowed. “Colonel Sheppard sent you after me.” It wasn’t a question. “I can take care of myself,” she began, her tone more defensive than she would have liked.

  The big man shrugged, apparently unconcerned. “Ah, I was getting bored anyway. Food was good but the portions were small. Then that Takkol guy started making a speech and all of a sudden I felt restless.” He smirked slightly.

  “You would prefer a less pleasant evening?” She raised an eyebrow.

  Ronon nodded; he had no artifice about him. “We’re not here to play nice with people, Carter said as much. If there’s something going on here, Wraith or otherwise, we need to find out, drag it into the light…” He hesitated, looking over Teyla’s shoulder, out across the balcony.

  She instinctively turned to follow his gaze. “Did you see something?”

  The Satedan came to the edge of the balcony and looked down. Arranged in radiating rings beyond the canopy of the massive tree were curved plots of cultivated land turned over to crops and herd animals. He pointed. “Something moving down there. Like a… A shadow dropping out of the sky, black against black.”

  Teyla opened her mouth to speak again when she saw the flicker of light again; but this time it was low to the ground, a quick-blue white flash out by the edges of one of the farm sectors. The light was strobe-bright and it faded just as fast as it came, leaving a purple after-image on her retina. A triangular shape, hovering slightly above the ruddy brown earth.

  “I saw that,” Ronon growled.

  Then a woman’s scream reached them, thin and faint but still distinct.

  Dex moved quickly. There was a rope ladder-pulley affair close to the balcony, extending down through a square hole cut in the decking. He gave it a hard tug to check it, and then looped the guide cord around his hand. It was rigged for a fast-decent, maybe for use as some kind of fire escape or emergency egress; it would get him down to the ground in seconds.

  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.

&nbs
p; 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.