Nightfall Read online

  All they had to show for a day of searching was an inert Satedan beam pistol and lines of blackened, dead grass. Something about this whole situation was setting off every alarm bell in his trained soldier’s mind. John Sheppard wasn’t someone with much tolerance for being played, and he couldn’t escape the feeling that was exactly what was going on here. It made him feel powerless, and that frustrated the hell out of him. Every moment they wandered around in the scrub turning up nothing but dirt was a moment more some enemy force had two of his team — two of his friends! — as their prisoners. He glared up at the suns, squinting behind his sunglasses, looking for somewhere to focus his annoyance.

  “Colonel?” He turned as Lorne called out. The major approached him, his t-shirt dark with patches of sweat. “We got a visitor. Says he’s ‘a friend of the voyagers’…” The other man gestured at a young boy trailing at his heels.

  “Laaro,” said Sheppard, his eyes narrowing. “Look, I’m sorry buddy, but I’m real busy right now.”

  The kid nodded, ignoring the brush-off. “Searching for your friends, yes.” He was panting, as if he’d been running. “But there is news. I had to bring it to you as soon as possible.”

  Lorne raised an eyebrow. “This is your local contact, sir?”

  “Something like that,” Sheppard replied, keeping his eyes on the boy. “What news?”

  “You won’t like it.” Laaro said sagely.

  Sheppard’s face twisted in a grimace. “McKay.” He said the other man’s name with a growl of annoyance. “What did he do?”

  Laaro shook his head. “Rodney was quite brave, actually. But he had little choice. They had already threatened my parents.”

  “Are they all right?” demanded Lorne.

  “I’m sorry,” the boy went on, “but Rodney and Jennifer have gone.”

  Lorne immediately toggled his radio. “Doctor McKay, Doctor Keller? Respond please.” He got nothing but static hiss in return.

  “Gone where?” Sheppard crouched and took off the sunglasses, so he could look Laaro in the eye. “Gone as in taken gone?”

  He got a head-shake in reply. “The Aegis only come after second sunset. These were the men who work for Soonir. He used to be an elder, until Takkol took away his status.” Laaro nodded solemnly. “My uncle says Soonir is a bad person.”

  Sheppard straightened up and made a face. “I told McKay to sit tight.”

  “So now we’re four people down?” Lorne shook his head. “Is kidnapping a national sport on this planet?”

  “I’m starting to wonder.” He grimaced. Was this all part of some greater plan, whittling down their numbers, picking off the stragglers? “New standing orders. From now on, no teams of less than four people. I’m damned if we’re going to lose anyone else around here!”

  A crackle from their radios hissed out into the air. “Colonel Sheppard? This is Rush, sir. We may have a situation here.”

  Sheppard irritably snatched the walkie-talkie from his vest. “Go ahead, Sergeant. I could use some more good news.” He turned to the west; Rush and his team of marines were sweeping the edge of the search zone closest to the farm where Teyla and Ronon were last seen. He could just about make out a knot of figures over there, men in indigenous dress among the dark-clothed soldiers from Atlantis.

  Over the radio, he heard raised voices in the background. “We intercepted a group of armed men and, uh, lions, I think.” Rush’s voice was wary. “There’s a local guy throwing his weight around, calls himself Aaren.”

  “Is that so?” Sheppard put the glasses back on. “Keep him there. I’ll be right over.” He nodded to Lorne. “I think its time we moved to a more proactive form of intelligence gathering, don’t you?”

  Lorne gave a cold smile in return. “Oh, yes sir.”

  “These corridors seem to go on for miles,” said Teyla quietly, “and I have yet to see a single window.”

  Ronon nodded, hesitating at an intersection. “We could be in some kind of bunker complex, maybe deep underground.” He glanced at her. “You saw the landscape when we arrived. All that scrubland, the hills in the distance. Plenty of space to hide all this and more. For all we know, we could be right underneath that tree-settlement.”

  She considered that for a moment. “You believe these people are like the Genii?”

  “A high-tech culture hiding underneath a low-tech one? It’s good camouflage. But I haven’t seen any locals around here yet.”

  Teyla had to agree. “Those humanoids bare little resemblance to the natives. I find it hard to believe they are a related species.” The aliens were nightmarish things, with bodies like corpse flesh and expressionless faces with the eyes of some deep-ocean predator. There was something unnatural, something unnerving about them that the Athosian couldn’t quite define.

  Ronon paused at an open panel in the wall. “Look. Another one,” he noted. “How many does that make?”

  As they moved through the corridors, here and there the two of them had come across places where the featureless metal had been peeled back or cut away, revealing incredibly complex layers of mesh, a weave of strange glowing filaments that formed a dense lattice pulsing with energy. In some places, the lattice appeared to be damaged, parts of it removed or in the process of being patched. Repair work, she guessed, but left unfinished. Down some of the corridors that radiated off this one, they saw areas where the overhead lighting was inactive, and some that were sealed off behind the faint blue glimmer of a force-field.

  “Perhaps the complex is still under construction,” Teyla wondered aloud.

  Ronon’s more martial instincts led him to a different conclusion. “No. This place has seen combat.” He ran a finger along a torn edge. “This is battle damage.”

  But from a battle with what? she wondered.

  “Company!” hissed the Satedan. He beckoned her sharply, into the shadow of an archway.

  Teyla and Ronon pressed into the pool of darkness beyond the reach of the corridor’s illumination and waited. A pair of aliens passed by them, intent on some mission that they could only guess at. It was the fourth time they had hidden from the creatures; so far their luck was holding.

  She watched them go, disappearing around a corner. “Strange…” Teyla mused. “You see that they do not communicate with each other. There is no…” She struggled to find the right word. “No informality between them.” There was no evidence of connectivity between the creatures at all; even a species that had evolved beyond the need for vocal speech, telepaths perhaps, even they would exhibit some form of outward awareness.

  Ronon nodded. “They’re like machines. Even the most tightly-drilled combat soldiers will speak among themselves. The Wraith are more talkative than these things.”

  The mention of the word Wraith made something in Teyla’s thoughts twist; she grimaced and pushed the sensation away.

  The Satedan was rolling the glass egg in his hand. “And this thing. I’m not even sure what it does.” He held it up between his thumb and forefinger. “No buttons, no dials, nothing to manipulate. What good’s a weapon you can’t fire?”

  He tossed it and Teyla caught it with a flick of her wrist. “This object seems to share more in common with the devices created by the Ancients than it does with human or Wraith technology.”

  “Those creatures can’t be Ancients, not unless the stories McKay told me about them are way off.”

  “No,” she shook her head. “They are something else…” Her voice trailed away. There was a tingling sensation along the nerves of her arm, reaching up toward her shoulders, the back of her neck. It was getting worse by the moment.

  “Teyla?” Ronon stepped closer, seeing the look on her face. “Talk to me.”

  An unpleasant and horribly familiar awareness gathered in her thoughts, a sickening feeling like spiders crawling inside her skull. She was moving before she realized it, drawn toward one of the dozens of featureless metal doors that appeared at regular intervals along the corridors. “Over here�
�”

  “A way out?” he asked.

  Teyla wasn’t listening to him; she was caught, part of her wanting to stretch out and hear, another part desperately wanting nothing but silence. “Those creatures,” she said, giving voice to her thoughts, “they are not Wraith…”

  “Yeah, got that already.”

  She moved closer, gesturing with the device. The door whispered open, revealing another corridor beyond, this one rising upwards in a gentle slope. A chilling certainty settled on her, and she suppressed a shiver.

  Teyla hesitated on the threshold, and sucked in a breath. “But I can sense them now. Yes. Close by.”

  Ronon’s manner hardened. “There are Wraith down here with us?” He grabbed her arm, his jaw set “You’re certain?”

  Teyla’s mouth was suddenly dry. She nodded once. “This way.”

  “I’ll take it from here, Sergeant,” said Sheppard, not waiting for Rush to give him an explanation. The marines from Atlantis stood in a wary line, their P90s and G36 assault rifles off the straps and ready, pointing at the ground but ready to snap up to firing position at a moment’s notice. For their part, the Heruuni men milled around, kneading the grips of their spindly weapons. The guns they carried didn’t look too impressive — tubular things like a collection of plumbing supplies connected to floppy bandoliers of ammunition — but Sheppard wasn’t going to take any chances. The last thing he wanted was someone with an itchy trigger finger on either side.

  Elder Aaren stood among them, squinting out from under a sun parasol held by one of his flunkies. He had a resentful glower on his face, maybe from having to come all the way out here in the heat of the day. Sheppard’s lip curled. The colonel was feeling very short on sympathy right now.

  Aaren didn’t waste time with any lengthy preamble. “Elder Takkol sent me to express his most grave concerns, Colonel Sheppard.” He gestured at Lorne and Rush and the other men. “We understand your concern for your friends, but you have brought an army on to our soil and —”

  Sheppard cut him off with a shake of the head. “This isn’t an army, Aaren. Believe me, if we’d brought an army, you’d know about it. What we have here is a rather pissed-off search party.” Maybe it was the heat, but his tolerance was already wearing thin. He found himself wondering how the Heruuni would have reacted to a Puddle Jumper buzzing their tree-top village. Maybe that’s what we need to get some co-operation, show a little ‘shock and awe’. Sheppard frowned and dismissed the thought.

  “With respect, colonel, Takkol asks that you send your soldiers back through the Gateway.”

  “Not gonna happen. Two more of my people have been taken, Keller and McKay. I’m going to do what I have to do to get them back.”

  A look of genuine shock flashed across Aaren’s face. “That cannot be… The Aegis does not come in the daylight.”

  “The voyagers were taken away by Soonir’s men,” Laaro offered, hovering by Lorne’s side. “They came to my mother’s lodge and forced them to go with them.”

  Aaren’s expression went from surprise to annoyance and back again. Sheppard saw the moment and took it. “So who is this Soonir guy, then? And what is he doing with my team?” The colonel aimed a finger at the elder. “You say Teyla and Ronon were taken by this Aegis thing, and you had nothing to do with it. Maybe that’s so, but McKay and Keller were captured by one of your people, and that makes it Takkol’s responsibility.”

  “Soonir…” Aaren hesitated, clearly unwilling to speak in front of the Atlanteans. “He is a criminal, a man who has broken many taboos, ignored our laws. But he is our concern.” The elder nodded to himself. “Takkol has decreed it so. We shall deal with him.”

  “And how long is that going to take?” demanded Lorne. “What reason does this man have to take our team-mates in the first place?”

  Aaren’s aide, the one with the parasol in his hand, leaned closer to his master. “Elder, Takkol would not wish you to speak of this.”

  “Takkol is not here,” Aaren retorted. “He sent me in his stead, Dayyid!”

  “I’m going to ask you this one more time,” Sheppard began, his tone firm. “Who is Soonir and what does he want with Keller and McKay?”

  Aaren’s glower deepened. “There… Is a militant group among our people, Colonel. Men and women who oppose the old ways that have kept our world free of the Wraith and living in harmony. They keep themselves secret from us, but they take every opportunity they can to oppose the veneration of the Aegis. Soonir leads them.” The local called Dayyid shook his head, looking away.

  “The kid said he used to be one of your top guys,” said Lorne.

  The elder nodded. “He was one of our leaders, until his views brought him into conflict with Takkol. Soonir was banished from our settlement, but he still has many sympathizers there. He remains a constant impediment to our society.” Aaren paused, thinking. “He may have seen your fellow voyagers as an opportunity… To take them would embarrass Takkol and ensure your enmity.”

  “Will he hurt them?” said Sheppard.

  “I do not know. It is more likely that he will ransom them in return for some demand.”

  “A demand he knows Takkol will never meet!” Dayyid added.

  “My people aren’t part of your disagreements,” said the colonel, “and I’m sure as hell not letting McKay and Keller become someone’s bargaining chips. Where does this Soonir hang out?”

  “You cannot approach Soonir without sanction from Takkol!” snapped Dayyid. “The great elder will never allow it!”

  Lorne shot Dayyid a look. “You know where he is, don’t you?”

  “We…suspect,” Aaren admitted. “Soonir has several bolt-holes, but there is a disused river-farm in the lake shallows he favors. But he has many men at his command.” The elder sighed. “Takkol has, to date, been unwilling to draw our guards from their duties in the settlement so that we may mount a sortie against the militants and arrest Soonir. Takkol fears it will leave the lodges unprotected.”

  “Not to mention him,” Rush said quietly.

  “How many?” said Sheppard. “How many men has this guy got?”

  “At least twenty militants,” said the elder. “But they are all armed, and we could not take them without significant bloodshed.”

  The colonel glanced at the major. “Lorne, how many stunners does your squad have?”

  “Six, maybe eight at the most.” He nodded, seeing Sheppard’s plan as it formed in the other man’s eyes. “Also some noisemakers and stun grenades.”

  Sheppard turned back to Aaren. “Here’s the thing. I want to rescue my people and frankly, given your attitude to security around here, I don’t trust Takkol or you to get it done. So you’re going to show me where this farm is and I’m going to get Keller and McKay back myself.”

  “That will not —” Dayyid was silenced by a sharp gesture from Aaren.

  The elder gave a slow nod. Sheppard could guess what the guy was thinking; even from the first moment he’d seen him, John had pegged Aaren as an opportunist, as someone unhappy in his role as second-string lackey. He had no doubt that Aaren wanted Takkol’s job, and certainly arresting a major criminal — if that’s what Soonir really was — would help that agenda along. Finally Aaren looked up at him. “This shall be done. A temporary partnership with the voyagers, to ensure that their missing friends are safely returned to them.”

  “Takkol should be informed of this,” Dayyid grated.

  “Then go and inform him,” Aaren replied, newly emboldened by his decision. “Inform him that Colonel Sheppard and I are about to do what he has been afraid to.”

  Dayyid grudgingly thrust the parasol into the hands of one of the other Heruuni and set off back toward the settlement.

  Sheppard found Lorne watching him and crossed to where the major stood, lowering his voice so that it didn’t carry. “I know that look. If you’ve got something to say, let’s hear it.”

  The other officer was silent for a moment. “I’m not sure about thi
s, sir. A reconnaissance-in-force, that’s one thing, but putting together a joint military operation on the fly?”

  “Technically, it’s a police action,” Sheppard noted.

  “Whatever you want to call it, Colonel, it’s a direct intervention in a local disagreement.”

  “You’re gonna start quoting the IOA rulebook at me? You, of all people?”

  Lorne frowned. “Nope. But it’s got to be said. This is an escalation.”

  “That’s why I’m ordering non-lethal weapons only.”

  The major nodded. “Roger that. But with respect, I still don’t like it.”

  Sheppard’s eyes narrowed. “What, and you think I do? You think I want to get in the middle of some religious or tribal argument? I wish I had the option, Major, but this Soonir has cut down all our choices to one. We leave this to the locals and we got no guarantee of seeing Keller or McKay alive again. Like it or not, we’re involved.”

  “Colonel Sheppard!” Aaren’s voice cut through the air. “Are you ready to proceed?”

  He looked toward the elder and his men. “Lead the way.”

  “Takkol is a threat to the lives of every man, woman and child on Heruun,” said Soonir, leaning forward on the wide cushion. “The matter is no less grave than that.”