Nightfall Read online

  “Why do I get the feeling that he’d probably say exactly the same thing about you?” Keller sat to the right of McKay, on another low cushion. The room was sparsely furnished, and it smelled faintly of damp and boiled vegetables. Rodney shifted and tried to make it look casual; in fact he was doing the best he could to figure out where they had been taken to. Hooded, after a hour of bumpy riding on the back of some kind of covered wagon, they’d been marched into this building and sat down. When the hoods came off, Soonir was there along with the muscle guys from Laaro’s house. It was about that time he’d belatedly noticed that their radios were gone. The bald man had kept his word about the weapons and the rest of the kit, though, but that didn’t make McKay feel any better. He got the sense that any one of these bruisers would be on him the moment he made a move toward his P90 or his pistol.

  Soonir was nodding. “I imagine Takkol tells terrible stories about me, Doctor Keller.” He spread his hands. “I’ve learned to live with it. My reputation matters little in the scheme of things.”

  “Yeah, the thing is…” McKay drew himself up and eyed the rebel leader. “Takkol was just a bit snobbish towards us. He didn’t kidnap us and drag us out to who-knows-where for a chit-chat.”

  “You have not been kidnapped,” growled one of Soonir’s men. “That is what the Aegis does.”

  “Gaarin is correct. Think of it as accepting a forceful invitation,” Soonir added, throwing the man a sideways look.

  “What was with the hoods, then?” Keller replied. “If you wanted to speak to us, there are nicer ways.”

  “The hoods were necessary. For your safety as well as mine.” Soonir got up and gestured around the room. “You have no idea where you are, and so when I release you, you cannot tell Takkol where you were taken to.”

  “You’re going to release us?” McKay immediately regretted the half-surprised, near-pleading words as soon as they left his mouth.

  The other man, Gaarin, eyed him without warmth. Rodney noticed that, like Soonir, he too had thin lines of inky tattoos about his temples. “Of course. If you had come here without the hoods, we would have had to kill you.”

  “Lucky us,” Keller added, in a weak voice.

  Gaarin’s temper, which until now had been silently boiling away, came rushing to the surface. He turned to Soonir, his eyes flashing. “Why are we wasting time with these voyagers? We do not even know who they are. They could be agents of the Aegis, like those cursed Giants, or worshippers of the Wraith!”

  “We’re none of those things,” McKay added swiftly. “We’re just explorers. Most of the time.”

  Soonir glared at Gaarin until he stepped back. After a moment, the rebel leader returned to his seat. “You will excuse my friend. His mother was among the Taken and Returned many, many times. She fell to the sickness.”

  “Her passing was not an easy one.” Gaarin spoke quietly, almost to himself.

  “I’m sorry,” Keller said gently. “We saw some of the…the victims of the sickness in the settlement. I wanted to learn more about it, but Aaren made us leave…”

  Soonir sneered. “Of course he did. He is no better than Takkol, hiding the problem inside the sick lodge and waiting for it to go away. For the afflicted to die silently and be forgotten.”

  “The Aegis is the source of the sickness,” noted McKay. “If that’s true, then why don’t your people do something about the abductions?”

  “Stop them, you mean?” Soonir shook his head. “And how would we do that, Doctor McKay?” He nodded at Rodney’s gun. “Even if we had weapons like yours, we could do nothing. Two of your own people were taken by the Aegis, were they not? Both of them warrior-kin, yet still unable to resist the Giants?”

  Keller nodded and McKay echoed her motion. “Do you know where the Aegis takes people? Is it somewhere nearby, on the planet?”

  “The Aegis allows no memories to be retained,” said Gaarin. “That is how it protects itself.” The younger man’s hands knitted, his angry energy seeking release and not finding it. “At least the Wraith are honest about what they are. They take and kill outright, but they do not skulk in shadows. At least they are an enemy you can grip in your hands, fight with your fists!”

  “The refusal of Takkol and the other elders to admit the evidence in front of their eyes is destroying us,” said Soonir, a bleak cast to his features. “They banished me for daring to oppose them, named me traitor and militant. But without a dissenting voice, they are leading the Heruuni along a path to ruin.” He met Rodney’s gaze, and McKay saw a cold intensity glittering there. “The elders are allowing my world to become the plaything of something alien. The malaise grows worse in the wake of every new Returning, more fall to it with each repeated Taking.”

  Gaarin nodded. “They eventually lose themselves in the halls of their own minds.”

  “The Aegis will destroy our people unless we stop it.” Soonir leaned forward. “Help us, voyagers. Help us shake off the yoke upon our necks, and in return we will help you rescue your warrior friends.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Ronon kept close to Teyla, following her intently as she moved down the steely corridor. She held out one hand, now and then brushing her fingertips over the walls. There was no sound in the chamber other than their footsteps and the faint hum of hidden systems, but the Athosian woman walked with her head cocked, as if she were listening to something that only she could hear.

  Ronon’s hands flexed, and he fought the urge to let them contract into fists. It was hard for him to resist the churning anger inside him at the thought of the Wraith; the directionless, all-consuming hate he had for the alien predator race surged up from deep inside him, a ready and all-too-familiar heat that sang in his blood. The hate he had for the creatures that had destroyed his precious Sateda was as potent and pure now as it had been on the day they had made him a Runner.

  “Not far,” Teyla said quietly. “Yes, several of them. Quite close.” She slowed to a halt outside a metallic door. “Here.”

  He pushed her out of the way and took the glass egg from her hand. “Let’s take a look.” Ronon waved it at the wall and the door obediently retracted.

  The smell of them hit his nostrils; the coppery scent of alien sweat and the stench of rotting meat. Four of them sat clustered around a fifth on the floor at the back of the cell; aside from an extra sleeping pallet, the holding chamber was the duplicate of the one Ronon and Teyla had escaped from. Each of the Wraiths turned as one toward the intruders, eyes dull with hunger and hate.

  One of them, a warrior by the look of his clan sigils, sprang up and came at them. Ronon stepped forward with the ellipse in his hand, brandishing it like a weapon. “Back off!” he snapped, but part of him was daring the alien to keep coming, willing it to give him an excuse to fight.

  The Wraith warrior halted, snarling at the device; clearly he knew the power of the paralysis field it could emit, unaware that Ronon couldn’t use it. One of the other Wraith spat something in their hissing language, drawing the warrior’s attention for a moment.

  “They’ve been here for some time,” Teyla said thickly, her brow furrowing. “Several months. They’re starving.”

  The Wraith that lay on the deck, that the others crowded around, was if anything even more sallow and skeletal than the rest of them. It’s greenish-white flesh hung off its bones, and it blinked slowly, breathing hard. With a grimace, Ronon realized that the aliens had been feeding off one of their own, perhaps off of each other in small amounts to keep themselves alive. “My heart bleeds,” he growled.

  “That…” replied the warrior, “could be arranged.” It flexed its hand, showing the feeding maw in its palm.

  “Go ahead,” Dex snapped back. “Try it.” His fingers tightened around the glassy egg and for a moment all he could think about was using it to beat the alien’s skull in.

  The Wraith turned it’s baleful gaze toward Teyla. “You.” He cocked his head, mimicking her manner out in the corridor. “You are touche
d by us. Yes.” It made a gurgling sound that might have been a chuckle. “A rare thing in this part of space.” His eyes flicked to Ronon. “But not here to free us, no?”

  “We’re not those fools who worship you, if that’s what you’re hoping for,” Ronon told him. “We’re a long, long way from that.”

  “A pity.”

  Teyla shuddered visibly. The taint of Wraith DNA in her body, the strange x-factor that gave her insight into the psychic bonds of the alien hives, was a two-way street. Ronon realized that the warrior was pushing at her mind, trying to coerce her. She gasped and shot the creature a lethal glare. “Get out of my thoughts.”

  “As you wish.” The alien opened its hands and stepped back. “I only wished to know you.”

  “I saw a moment of his memories.” She glanced at Ronon. “Those humanoids took them captive,” she explained. “They were recovered from a sealed section of wreckage, from one of the scoutships destroyed by the Aegis.”

  “We are prisoners, just as you are,” said the Wraith.

  “We’re not prisoners,” Ronon retorted.

  “We have attempted escape just as you do now, and we failed as you will fail…” The alien chuckled again, and the sound was echoed by his comrades. “You are from the city of the Ancients, yes? Atlantis? Our clan knows of you. And if you are here, then the Aegis has taken you as it took us. Any freedom you think you have is an illusion!”

  “Where are we?” Teyla demanded, glaring at the Wraith. “Where is this place?”

  “I will tell you if you let us free.”

  Ronon snorted. “Just open the door for a pack of hungry Wraiths? I don’t think so.”

  The warrior gave an exaggerated nod. “Just me, then. I will help you escape if you free me.”

  “Didn’t you say your escape attempt failed?” noted Teyla.

  “I’m sure with humans as resourceful as you, that would not happen again.” The Wraith’s words were oily and condescending.

  Teyla’s head snapped up and she shot a look out the open hatch, into the corridor beyond. “I hear something…”

  Ronon heard it too; the metallic whisper of another door opening.

  “The giants…” whispered Teyla. A group of the towering, silent humanoids were swarming up the corridor toward them.

  “They come,” spat the Wraith. “Our captors.” It came forward again. “Quickly. You must release me!” There was an edge of desperation and terror in the warrior’s voice that Ronon had rarely heard in their kind. He had only a moment to register it before the Wraith dived clumsily at him, clawed fingers grabbing for the glass device.

  The Satedan reacted with a short, sharp punch that caught the alien square in the face. He felt bone and cartilage fracture beneath his knuckles and the Wraith rocked backwards, a fan of dark, greasy blood issuing from its nostrils. “I don’t think so,” he grunted. “We’re out of here.”

  Before the other prisoners could come after them, Ronon and Teyla were stepping through the hatchway, closing it behind them. The other Wraith scrambled toward the moving door, falling over each other in their wild struggle to reach it.

  Teyla broke into a sprint and Ronon gave chase, angry at running from a fight, but just as angry at himself for the cold certainty of defeat that would come if he didn’t flee.

  There was a clatter of claws on metal as the cell door slammed shut, and a final shout from within. “You fools,” spat the Wraith warrior, “you can’t escape this place!”

  The building was an odd collection of wood-framed huts with packed earth walls, and oval woven pods similar to the ones Sheppard had seen in the settlement. The whole thing was raised up slightly on shallow stilts from the mud plain where it sat. A low-lying lake of dirty brown water spilled away from it toward the grasslands, thin and spindly trees issuing up from the shore toward the blazing sky. On the far side of the disused farm, a long covered porch ended in a jetty where tall A-frames creaked in the hot breeze; old, neglected sheets of netting hung from them like twists of blackened lace.

  “Looks like a fishing hut, or something, only bigger.” The colonel peered though a monocular, slowly scanning the area. Flat against the side of a low gulley, he lay so only the top of his head was exposed.

  “Once it was a place for the lake hunters to come in the colder season,” he heard Laaro say. “The mudgrakes they catch are good to eat.”

  “Mudgrakes,” Lorne repeated, giving the word a sour tone. “That doesn’t sound appetizing.”

  Sheppard glanced down. Along the gulley to the right and the left, Lorne’s men were spreading out, securing their weapons. Like him, the major had swapped his P90 submachine gun for a Wraith stunner pistol. The silvery alien guns had drawn some unpleasant looks from the locals when they were deployed — anything Wraith was to be distrusted, and Sheppard had to admit he couldn’t fault them on that. He checked the glowing green power cell and holstered it once more.

  Lorne looked up at him. “Evaluation, sir?”

  The colonel jerked a thumb in the direction of the lake. “This could be a bear, depending on the range of those ‘rodguns’ they’ve got. The building looks like it’s abandoned, but it’s not. Aaren’s people were right, the place is occupied. I spotted two guys, one on an upper level balcony, another one on the ground doing a circuit in the shade.”

  Sergeant Rush stood nearby, studying a handheld scanner of Ancient design. “Sir, you should see this. I set it to a thermographic readout.”

  Sheppard took the unit and peered at the screen. A collection of green lines showed the walls and internal spaces of the sprawling farm complex, and there were orange-red dots scattered everywhere. Human life-signs. He swore under his breath. “If this thing is reading right, there’s gotta be eighty, maybe a hundred people in there.” He scrolled the display around until he found two specific indicators, each blinking slowly. “Found ’em. McKay and Keller’s tracers are still active, so that’s something.”

  He passed the scanner to Lorne, who frowned at it. “They have a lot of company in there,” said the major.

  “Yeah . And it won’t be easy getting to them. This Soonir guy? He’s no fool. There’s no single good approach to the building, and anything that could be cover is gone. Brush has been cut away, no trees… It’s open, all the way to the front door.”

  “If they’ve got sharpshooters, they’ll cut us down the moment we come over the ridgeline.”

  “Soonir’s men are skilled,” noted Laaro, a hitch of fear in his voice. “Takkol says they are all killers.”

  Sheppard turned to Rush. “Sergeant, take team three and follow the gulley around to the southwest, get an angle on the far side of the main building. And stay low. They may have spotters. When you’re in position, give me the word.”

  Rush nodded. “Will do, Colonel.” He hesitated for a moment. “Sir, what about the locals?” He indicated Aaren, who crouched some distance away, busy in an intense, hushed conversation with his guards.

  “I’ll handle them,” Sheppard replied. “You have your orders.”

  The sergeant saluted and moved off. Lorne moved closer to his commanding officer and spoke quietly. “Sir, I don’t like this. We could be walking into a meat grinder up there.”

  The colonel nodded. “The only way we can make a stealth approach is to wait for the suns to set, go in under cover of darkness.”

  “That’s hours away. You think Aaren’s going to wait that long?” Lorne glanced at the elder. “He’s twitchy enough as it is.”

  “It’s that or we hit the place with smoke and hope the wind doesn’t carry it away.” Sheppard sighed.

  “Sure could use the Apollo right now,” the major noted. “We could grab the doctors without firing a shot.”

  “While you’re at it, wish for some lemonade too. My throat’s dryer than the blacktop at Groom Lake.” He turned as he heard Aaren approaching. The elder’s eyes were darting everywhere, as if he expected Soonir’s men to descend on them at any moment. One of the traine
d mai cats slinked along at his heels, panting.

  “Colonel, we are prepared. You will support my guards as they launch the attack, and —”

  Sheppard held up a hand. “Whoa, stop right there. A couple of things you have to understand, right away. One, this is a rescue mission, it’s not an attack. Two, we go when I give the word and not before.”

  Aaren rocked back, as if the colonel had slapped him. “When I agreed to allow you to assist us —”

  Suddenly Sheppard realized that the men standing in a nervous circle behind the elder was a lot smaller than it had been when they arrived at the lakeside. “Where’s the rest of your guards?” he demanded, speaking over the other man.

  Aaren folded his arms. “They are following my commands.”

  The colonel opened his mouth to speak, but Lorne broke in, holding up the scanner. “Sir? McKay and Keller… They’re moving.”

  Gaarin shifted aside a door made of woven branches and Soonir lead Jennifer and Rodney into a larger room, something that might have been a barn before the rebels had re-purposed it. There were beds in close-packed lines, most of them filled with people who seemed asleep or motionless. Something inside Keller went tense, a strange kind of anger, a sudden compulsion to do something, to help; but she didn’t know what she could do, or where to begin.

  Light entered through high windows that had been hastily reinforced with bars and the only other entrance was a wide wooden door at the far end. A thickset man, cradling a rifle and carrying a machete-like weapon on his belt, sat in a wicker chair. Keller saw the guard and wondered why he was looking into the room, instead of outward for any potential threats.

  “He is here for the peace-of-mind of the sick,” Soonir said quietly, picking up on her questioning look. “They see him and believe they will not be Taken again, that he will protect them.” He shook his head slightly. “A pleasant fiction, though, to help them sleep a little better at night. If the Aegis came, he could not stop it.”

  “We saw people at the sick lodge,” began McKay, “these are victims of the same thing?”