Stargate SG-1 & Atlantis - Far Horizons (6 page)

Marchal gazed at him for several seconds, then nodded jerkily and stumbled off. Dughan stood where he was, as if watching him go. Then, without warning, he glanced back over his shoulder.

Sheppard resisted the urge to move. He knew exactly how well he was hidden. He stood, his borrowed coat making him one with the shadows, until the Elder had turned back towards the lodge and hurried away.

He stayed there for quite some time afterwards, too.

Night fell swiftly on M3T-211. The particle layer robbed the sky of reflected light, rendering the sunset an ugly, pallid thing that lasted minutes at best. By the time Sheppard and Keller made their way to the village gates it was almost entirely dark.

A small crowd had gathered to see them off. Keller said her goodbyes to the village healers: she had left them medical supplies, along with instructions for follow-up care. While she spoke, Sheppard stood quietly and searched the crowd for Ceana and Marchal.

He didn’t see them.

Finally Sul Dughan stepped forwards and took their hands in his. He thanked them for their efforts, expressed a hope that they would return soon, and bade them farewell.

After that, with no further ceremony, the gates were closed and barred against them.

They walked away in silence, Sheppard picking their way with a tactical flashlight. Only when he was certain that they could neither be seen nor heard from the village did he find a place to stop.

“You buying any of this, doc?”

“Not a damn word. I don’t know about you, but I am getting a serious
Wicker Man
vibe from that place.” Keller folded her arms, bouncing a little on her toes. They had been allowed to keep the coats, but with the meager sun hidden the wind had turned even more bitterly cold. “Seriously, John, there’s something sick happening here, and that little girl’s life is in danger.”

Sheppard nodded upwards. “You see any moons?”

“Through that crap? Not a chance.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Lunar alignment my ass.” He reached up to his headset. “Wright? How are you doing up there?”

“
It’s a little fresh, sir. Are you on your way?
”

“There’s still things to do down here, but we need some wheels. Dial home, brief Colonel Carter, and then gate back here with a jumper ASAP. Fly it through cloaked and home in on our position.”

“
Affirmative, Colonel. Anything else you need?
”

“A couple more marines couldn’t hurt. Oh, and night vision goggles. How’s McKay holding up?”

There was a slight pause. Then: “
Doctor McKay went back to Atlantis two hours ago, sir
.”

“Huh.” Sheppard rolled his eyes. “Figures.”

“You could at least have invited me.”

Sheppard gave his binoculars a tweak. Far below him a shapeless blur sharpened into a staggering bundle of dark clothing, lurching haphazardly from wall to wall. Another drunken villager making his solitary way home. “You wouldn’t have enjoyed it.”

“That’s not the point,” McKay snapped. “Anyway, how do you know I wouldn’t? I can party hard.”

“Seriously?” Sheppard lowered the binoculars to stare at him. “Did you actually just say that?”

“Yes, but if you try to tell anyone I’ll deny it forever.”

Sheppard returned his attention to the village. He had been watching the streets for an hour, while Keller remained in the jumper with Wright and the two marines she’d brought. “Have a little patience, okay? Trust me, there’s something nasty going on down there and I want to know what it is. What’s your hurry?”

“My hurry?” McKay stuffed his hands under his armpits, somewhat theatrically. “One, I’m cold.
I
didn’t go to a party and get a funky new coat. Two, did you realize that stray particles are constantly filtering down from that mesospheric boundary? All the time we’re hanging around here we’re breathing about eight parts per million of the stuff.”

Sheppard blinked. “Is it dangerous?”

“Probably not. In the short term.”

“What about the not so short?”

“Put it this way; I’d be really surprised if anyone down in that village has the right number of toes. Are you seeing anything?”

“No, I think everyone’s sleeping it off by now. We should be able to get back down there without being —” He froze. “Damn it. Hold on.”

A light had appeared on the beach. It was a small thing, a bobbing, fluttering spark, pale yellow in the darkness. As Sheppard watched, another approached it. Lanterns, carried along the edge of the cove towards the jetty.

One spark lifted high enough to illuminate the face of the man carrying it. “Dughan. What a surprise.”

Marchal and Ceana held the other two sparks, of course. Sheppard twitched the binoculars left and right, but saw no-one else. Just the two men, bending to untie the ropes of a small fishing boat, and the child watching them in what must have been stark, mute terror.

Sheppard folded the binoculars. “We’re leaving.”

The villagers might have lied about many things, but the approaching fog was not one of them. A bank of vapor had been heading towards the cove before the fishing boat had set sail. Now the stuff was so dense that Sheppard was in danger of losing visual contact altogether.

Luckily, he didn’t need to see Dughan’s boat in order to follow it. McKay was at the sensor board, keeping a careful track of the vessel’s position, while Sheppard kept the cloaked jumper in level flight about two hundred feet up. It took all his skill: the particle layer was having a strange effect on the machine. It was jittery and unstable, twitching like an animal in the crosswinds.

Beneath him, the sea leapt and writhed. Sheppard thought about Ceana, already frightened at the prospect of some unknown ordeal, now being flung about in that tiny, fragile vessel. The fact that Dughan set sail on such a night proved that the man was dangerously insane. Still, he and Marchal must have been sailors of considerable skill. The boat had been travelling straight and true across that furious sea for an hour.

“Son of a…” That was McKay, suddenly sitting bolt upright at the sensor board. “Guys? I’m picking up a power signature from that boat.”

Keller’s face was dead white, and she was holding onto her seat arms very tightly indeed. “That’s impossible.”

“Well, I’m looking right at it, so clearly not.” Sheppard heard blipping sounds as McKay worked the board. “It’s small, something hand-held. If it wasn’t the only energy source down there I’d never have seen it, but I’d swear it’s Wraith tech.”

“Worshippers?” asked Wright quietly.

McKay raised a hand. “Ah, on that subject, has it occurred to anyone that we might be following them into something dangerous? Like a really big bunch of Wraith?”

“Sir,” Wright was behind Sheppard now, one hand clamped hard onto the back of his control seat. “Doctor McKay’s right. There could be anything ahead of us, a whole city of Wraith worshippers. We should get ahead of them, scope the place out.”

“Not a good idea.” Keller shook her head. “We could lose the boat altogether.”

“We can home back in on the energy source.”

McKay made a noncommittal sound. “I don’t know, it’s pretty weak. I might not be able to find it again if we veer off.”

“But we’ve already extrapolated their mooring point. Why not land there, wait for them and then grab them as soon as they arrive?”

“Because they could change course. Or sink.” Despite her obvious discomfort, Keller’s face was set hard. “We still need to find out what they’re doing. They were talking about the whole village being in danger. If we jump in too early lives could be at risk.”

Wright threw her hands up. “Doctor, if there are Wraith down there
our
lives could be at risk!”

Sheppard didn’t speak. Keeping the jumper in the air was requiring too much of his attention. Besides, he had nothing to tell them, no answers to their concerns. Just the ugly feeling that, whatever he feared was ahead of them, the truth was going to be far worse.

When the boat’s voyage finally ended, it was in a place more bleak and unlovely than anything Sheppard had seen on Ceana’s island.

There was no beach below him, no sheltered cove, just a jagged tangle of wave-beaten rock tumbling randomly down into ferocious, foaming waves. The only artificial structure in sight was a tiny, battered stone jetty, barely long enough for Dughan’s boat.

Just before the jumper set down, McKay picked up another set of energy readings. Weak and diffuse, riddled with artefacts from the particle layer. All he could tell for certain was they were probably emanating from a hill some distance inland. So when Sheppard spotted the three lanterns held by Ceana and her escort, he was less than surprised to see them heading directly for the same spot.

There was a narrow path leading up from the jetty, but it was steep, its surface treacherous. The three villagers could not have been aware that they were being followed, and with only the pale light of oil flames to guide them, they made their way slowly. Before Ceana had reached the base of the hill Sheppard had the girl clearly in sight.

He put up a hand, fist clenched, dropped to one knee as the rest of the team halted. He heard scuffling as McKay edged closer. “Are you liking the look of that place any more I am?”

“Not really.” Through his image intensifiers the hill was a looming silhouette. At its base, heaped rock rose into a low escarpment, but above that the surface became oddly regular. Sheppard turned his head slowly, following the shape it cast against the flat green-black of the sky, and found himself picking out features that had little to do with natural terrain.

What he had taken to be a sloping cliff to the south was starting to look very much like a drive nacelle. Caves dotted along the top ridge could have been intakes, weapons ports. Broken trees, twisted and sagging from the hill’s northern point reminded him of sensor spines.

Eventually, he could deny it no longer. There was no hill on this island. “It’s a goddamn Wraith ship.”

McKay nodded, his goggles bobbing. “Small,” he breathed. “Five hundred meters, maybe less. Supply ship?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not any more,” whispered Wright. “It’s not going anywhere. Look at that thing, it’s a wreck.”

The marine was right. Not only was the downed starship utterly dark and silent, but Sheppard could see now that its back was broken. The forward hull lay flat against the ground, but the stern was tilted over at almost thirty degrees. The midsection was a tangle of shattered carapace and broken rock, a ghastly, eviscerating wound that laid the vessel’s innards bare.

As he watched, the first of the three lanterns vanished into the starship’s torn belly. “Damn it.”

“Come on!” Keller was already starting forwards. “We can’t lose them!”

Sheppard didn’t like the idea of barreling straight into a Wraith warship, even one so obviously crippled, but Keller was right. The interior of the ship would be a maze. If he lost sight of Ceana now, he might never find her again.

“Doc, hold up!” He surged forward, began running after Keller. “We need a plan!”

“No we don’t!”

He growled in frustration, but the others were already on his heels. “Okay… Wright, shadow Keller. Rodney, stick with me. Lewis, Mexter, you stay at the entrance and make sure nothing follows us. And if things get noisy, come in hot.”

By the time he had received acknowledgements from the others he was already at the base of the escarpment. Around him, great shards of stone reared skywards, deep rock torn up by the vessel’s catastrophic impact to spear the hull in a thousand locations, but an amplified flicker of lantern light led him between two boulders, under a broken spar of granite bigger than the puddle jumper.

Beyond this, the ship’s carapace was rent open, a gaping tear easily big enough to walk through. Sheppard could see, as he clambered through, that it had been crudely widened.

From the outside in, he wondered, or the inside out?

He scampered forwards, into a narrow, vaulted passageway. There was light ahead of him, a sickly yellow glow, and he switched off the goggles, tugged them free to dangle from their strap.

The walls around him were gnarled, ridged and pocked like the inside of a diseased bone. He glanced across the passageway and saw Wright move in front of Keller, her P90 aimed into the gloom ahead.

There was no sound, other than the drip and patter of water from the walls and, behind him and far more distant, the sea’s muted roar. Sheppard moved quickly towards the nearest corner, peered around it to see the black hem of a villager’s coat vanish around an intersection. “This way.”

Ceana was being taken directly towards that queasy glow.

Sheppard followed, silent now, communicating with the others only by hand signal. They moved with him, in teams of two, one pair covering the other in case of ambush, but no threat arose. Had it not been for that increasing light, Sheppard might have believed the ship entirely dead.

As they moved to the next corner, McKay drew his breath in sharply. They were passing a series of deep sockets in the walls; vaguely leaf-shaped, taller than a man, filled with a dry, rotted tangle of tubes. Gaping like gray, bisected wombs.

Wraith hibernation chambers. All empty.

On the far side of the passage, Keller put a finger to her lips, then pointed to the next intersection.
There
, she mouthed.

Sheppard stepped over to her, leaned around the corner.

Past the intersection, the passageway opened out into a high chamber. Half the space had collapsed long ago, walls and ceiling crumpled together, the deck gouged brutally apart. What remained was dotted with dozens of hibernation chambers.

Some were empty and dark, like those in the passage. Ceana, Dughan and Marchal stood before one that was not. A Wraith soldier, masked and armored, stood behind the glassy shell of its womb, wrapped in pulsing umbilicals and bathed in that vile light.

The light shone on Ceana, too. She had already taken off her coat; without it, dressed in a plain wool shirt and britches, she looked heartbreakingly thin and small. But she was standing close to the chamber, unbowed, gazing up on its occupant with undisguised loathing.

“I’m ready,” she whispered. “Give me the draught.”

“You’re sure?” That was Marchal. His voice shook as he spoke. “You know I’ll take your place if you —”

“Don’t make it harder on her, lad.” Dughan stepped past him. The Elder had a bottle in one hand, and was holding it out to Ceana. “It’s sour,” he told her gently. “But drink every drop.”

“I know.” She took the bottle from him and put it to her lips.

Sheppard saw her grimace, her white face creasing in disgust as she gulped the stuff down. He almost hurled himself at her to rip the bottle away, but he had hesitated too long. If the draught was poison, Ceana’s small body was already rife with it.