Secrets

Chapter One Lifepod

Ronon struggled to consciousness, aware at first only of the overwhelming need to run. He caught his breath with a gasp, fought to keep from flailing in the darkness. His limbs were free — that was good, meant he wasn’t trussed for feeding, wasn’t pinned waiting for some Wraith to insert another tracker. He shifted cautiously, feeling a body against his own. Two bodies, one with a spill of long hair — Jennifer, he thought, with renewed fear, and McKay. Faint lights were coming on, as though his movements had triggered them, glowing pinpoints that outlined Wraith controls, and in the dim light he recoiled from the Wraith who lay tangled beneath them. Not a Wraith, not really — it had McKay’s face, McKay’s sharp nose and thinning hair, but Ronon’s skin still crawled at its touch. He pressed himself back against the walls of the lifepod, trying to get himself under control.

OK, yes, they were in a lifepod, a Wraith lifepod, because they’d been cut off from the others and there was no other way off the hiveship: the plan had been to steal aboard Death’s hive, rescue McKay, or kidnap him, depending on whether or not he was cooperative, but Jennifer had collapsed before they could rejoin Sheppard’s group or contact the Hammond.

He shifted awkwardly, trying to fit himself into space designed for a single Wraith, worked himself free of McKay until he could reach Jennifer and drag her into a less crumpled position. The convulsions had stopped — if he didn’t know better, he’d think she was asleep. But then nobody slept through something like this. He touched her cheek, brushing loosened strands of hair back from eyes and mouth, but she didn’t stir. He could feel her breath on his hand, felt for a neck pulse anyway. Her skin was cool, her heartbeat steady. Whatever had happened, she wasn’t in any immediate danger, or at least not from whatever had caused her to collapse.

The situation, however, was another matter. He settled her as safely as he could into the protective niche, wormed his way around McKay’s unconscious body to study the controls. Unfortunately, nothing looked familiar. A few lines of data trickled down the small central screen. To the left of that, he saw a button with a symbol he did recognize: tracker. He swallowed old, irrational fear, his back twitching where the scars no longer were, and kept his hands well away from the console. The button wasn’t lit, so presumably it wasn’t working: they were safe from that, at least. He took a deep breath and scanned the symbols again. All right, that one — the glowing blue shape like a child’s image of lightning — that one, he was pretty sure was visuals, and he pressed it before he could change his mind. The falling data stopped abruptly, was replaced by an image of a starscape. It was rotating slowly around a point that seemed to be a hiveship, drifting disabled. Or not disabled: a hyperspace window opened, and the ship vanished through it.

Ronon blinked. Not exactly a good thing, unless the Hammond was still lurking somewhere nearby, and he didn’t really see any signs of that. There was a schematic in the corner of the screen and, if he was reading it right, there was a planet nearby, along with an awful lot of debris…

McKay chose that moment to stir, and Ronon jumped, reaching for his gun. He had it out and the barrel against McKay’s skull before McKay opened his eyes and bared sharp Wraith teeth at him.

“Get that away from me,” he said. “What the hell did you do to me?”

His voice was so much the old McKay that Ronon blinked, though he didn’t lower the gun. “Stunned you,” he said. “And drugged you.”

“What? Why would you do that?” McKay’s glare deepened. “And wasn’t that redundant?”

“Because the last time we tried to rescue you, you tried to kill us,” Ronon said.

“I sent you a message,” McKay snapped. “I’ve been waiting for ages — and why is Jennifer here?” His face sharpened. “And what’s wrong with her?”

“She’s out cold,” Ronon said. “I don’t know why. And she’s here to get you back in one piece.”

“By drugging me?”

“The IOA wanted to shoot you.”

“Oh, that’s very helpful,” McKay said. “Where are we?”

“In a lifepod.”

“What?”

“We blew up the hive,” Ronon said. “That was part of the plan. Only we couldn’t get back to the jumper because Jennifer passed out. So I put us all in a lifepod.”

“You blew up the hive,” McKay said. “What about the ZPM?”

“The one you stole?” Ronon glared. “When you led a bunch of Wraith into Atlantis?”

McKay had the grace to look abashed, but rallied quickly. “And you couldn’t get it back? We need that!”

“I don’t know,” Ronon said. “That was Sheppard’s job. I was supposed to be capturing you.”

“They couldn’t have destroyed it,” McKay said. “I mean, how hard could it be to unhook it?”

He sounded less certain than his words, and Ronon shook his head. “McKay.” McKay turned on him with a Wraith’s speed, and it took all his willpower not to press the firing stud. “Do you know how to work this thing?”

“Of course,” McKay said. He wriggled around until he was facing the controls, peered thoughtfully at them for a long moment, then touched a button. The viewer disappeared, and was replaced by another cascade of data. McKay reached under the screen and folded out a small keyboard, typed something.

“Well, that’s not good,” he said.

“What?”

“We’ve got about seventeen hours of air left, with three of us on board. And I’m not picking up any ships in the area, Wraith or human.”

That wasn’t good, Ronon thought. “What about the planet?”

“That’s not good either,” McKay said. “In fact… Oh, no. No, no, that’s definitely not good.” He typed frantically for a moment, but got only a few pained beeps from the console. “We’re caught in the planet’s gravity well, and we don’t have enough power to break free.”

“These things are designed for reentry, aren’t they?” Ronon asked. “They must be.”

“Yes, of course they are.” McKay punched more keys. “And it looks as though the planet — yes, it’s perfectly habitable and it has a Stargate. No signs of people, though, no settlements, no wreckage. It was either abandoned or Culled a long time ago.”

The hairs on Ronon’s neck stood up, hearing this Wraith who was McKay talk so casually about Cullings.

“I should be able to get the guidance computer on line,” McKay said. His hands were busy as he talked, bringing new systems into play, eliciting soft noises from the console. “Yes, there. And track for the Stargate. We’ve got inertial dampeners, and thrusters, we should be able to make reentry.”

“Couldn’t we just signal the Hammond?” Ronon asked.

“We have seventeen hours of air,” McKay said. “And it won’t be very nice air toward the end. No, we need to get this thing down onto the planet, and then we can worry about signaling the Hammond. In fact, if we land it right, we could dial Atlantis and go home.”

Which presented another problem, Ronon thought. Could he trust McKay? Yeah, it sounded like him, he sounded normal, as far as that went, but he was still clearly Wraith. Could they risk going straight to Atlantis? He shook his head. First things first. He couldn’t land the lifepod himself, but McKay seemed to think he could. Let McKay get them down safe, where he could take a good look at Jennifer, and then they could worry about getting to Atlantis.

“I wish Sheppard was here,” he said.

Rodney studied the tracking display, touched keys to study the course the autopilot had laid for them. It was a good thing there was an autopilot, because he wasn’t exactly checked out in Wraith lifepods, or any other kind of Wraith craft, and while he could handle a puddle jumper, flying still wasn’t one of his major talents. The system was homing in on the planet’s Stargate, which was good, but the engines seemed to be having trouble following the autopilot’s instructions. Already there were datapoints blinking white amid the gold, warning him that they’d missed course corrections. Probably because the lifepod was overloaded; it was designed to carry a single Wraith, not three humans. He frowned at the screen, toggled to the power supply and back to the navigation screen, trying to decide whether or not to intervene.

Something cold and hard jabbed the base of his neck: Ronon’s blaster. In the same moment, Ronon said, “What’s wrong, McKay?”

“Would you put that thing away?” Rodney toggled back to the power supply. OK, they had some room to maneuver if he had to go to manual control, but not much. Not much at all.

“No.” Ronon’s voice was cold. “Tell me what’s going wrong.”

“Besides being stuck in a Wraith lifepod?”

“With a Wraith?” Ronon said. “Yeah. Besides that.”

“I’m not —” Rodney began, but of course he was. And that was something he couldn’t afford to think about, not right now. “You want to know what’s wrong? Fine. The autopilot is having trouble getting us onto a proper course for reentry, probably because this lifepod isn’t meant to carry this much mass. I mean, presumably there’s some margin for overload, but we’ve clearly exceeded that. And that means our course is starting to shallow out, which means we’ll hit the atmosphere and bounce off it — like skipping a stone on a pond, if you ever did anything that benign. And then we just drift off into a random orbit — well, not really random, but cometary, a nice long orbit that gives us plenty of time to suffocate, so that if anyone ever bothers to look for us —”

“McKay,” Ronon said. “Shut up.”

Rodney blinked. All right, maybe that had been a little over the top. Unfortunately, though, the physics of the situation wasn’t improving.

“Can you fly this thing?” Ronon asked.

“You don’t fly a lifepod,” Rodney said. “They’re meant to land on autopilot —”

“McKay!”

There was something perversely comforting about that shout of exasperation. Rodney said, “Maybe. Just — give me a minute.”

The pressure of the blaster against his neck eased slightly, and he bent forward to study the screen. The thrusters fired again and the numbers shifted, but the key data continued to flash white. The programmed course was still too shallow. He touched keys, toggling to the screen that showed the power cells for the thrusters. It took him a minute to work out the system — not a direct burn of fuel, that would create too much of a risk of explosion in a hard landing, but a pressurized fluid that worked much the same way — and he closed his eyes for a moment, working out the numbers.

“McKay,” Ronon said again, his voice urgent.

Rodney opened his eyes to see the screen flashing white. A whistling alarm began to sound, but he slapped it to silence.

“What’s going on?” Ronon asked.

“We’ve slipped out of the safe corridor for reentry,” Rodney said. “I’m taking control.” He touched keys as he spoke, switching off the autopilot. The screen faded to a normal display, though half a dozen readings still flashed white. The calculation wasn’t complicated, just a simple matter of force applied along the lifepod’s long axis. He switched screens again, entered the parameters, and set his hand on the thruster controls. The lifepod’s computer counted down the seconds; at zero he pressed down hard on the plate. He felt the rumble as the fluid was vented, saw Ronon look uneasily at the walls around them. The second countdown was running, timing the maneuver; it reached zero, and he released the key. The images on the screen swam and reformed: they were back in the corridor, and he reengaged the autopilot.

“OK,” he said. “OK, that’s got it. We’re back in the corridor.”

“How long till we land?” Ronon asked.

Rodney glanced at the screen, the numbers rearranging themselves in his mind. “Forty — no, thirty-seven minutes to atmosphere. Then — well, it depends.”

“Depends on what?”

“On the exact angle of reentry, on the ability of the autopilot field generators and the internal dampeners to compensate for the increased mass, and — you know what?” Rodney glared up at the Satedan. “Why don’t we figure out a safe way to ride out that reentry instead of wasting time on pointless calculations?”

Improbably, Ronon’s mouth twitched into a grin. “You don’t know.”

“Of course I —” Rodney stopped. “No. I don’t. So we might as well get Jennifer someplace safe. Unless she’s waking up?”

“No,” Ronon said. He shifted awkwardly, trying to find a way to brace himself that didn’t brush up against any of the controls twining the lifepod’s walls.

Jennifer was slumped in the niche that was intended for the lifepod’s single occupant, her eyes closed, a few strands of hair falling across her face. Rodney reached out to brush them away, ignoring the twitch of muscles as Ronon controlled the impulse to stop him.

“What’s wrong with her?” Rodney asked.

“I don’t know,” Ronon said. He shifted his weight again, crowding Rodney back, and lifted Jennifer’s slack body, settling her more solidly into the niche. The padding shifted under her, cradling her body — protecting it, Rodney hoped. “I told you, she just collapsed.”

For a moment, Rodney wished he’d paid more attention in the mandatory SGC field rescue classes, particularly to the sections on bizarre and unlikely first aid situations. For all he knew, this could be something really simple, something that could be fixed with a slap on the back or an injection of Vitamin B — But, no, he wouldn’t be that lucky.

“McKay,” Ronon said. “The screen’s flashing again.”

Rodney turned, putting Jennifer out of his mind. The numbers were flickering white, the course line rising again even as the autopilot tried to compensate. “Oh, no.” He touched keys, the numbers shifting in his head, set up another course correction. The thrusters rumbled, releasing fluid, and then cut out. “No, no, no, that’s not —”

“McKay,” Ronon said again.

Rodney stared at the screen. “OK, this is not good. That wasn’t enough — we’re still too shallow, and we’re not going to make it into the atmosphere. And that was the last of the propellant, unless…” He was touching keys as he spoke, releasing a tiny bit of fluid from the opposite thrusters. “If I can turn us, I can use the forward thrusters — as long as I leave enough to get us back into the optimum angle for reentry, or the whole thing’s going to just burn up —”

The numbers shifted in his screen, proof that the lifepod was turning, even though the inertial dampeners kept him from feeling the motion. The bow thrusters spoke — a different rumble, shivering through the lifepod’s hull — and he cut them off as soon as he thought they’d reached the corridor. He waited then, counting precious seconds, while the computers checked and confirmed that they were back inside the corridor. Not far, not as far as he would have liked, and he hesitated. One last release? A literal second, just to be sure? No, the screen was starting to flash again, warning that they were out of position. All he could do was let the autopilot right them, angle them against the atmosphere, and hope for the best.

“OK,” he said. “OK, that’s it. That’s all I can do.”

An alarm began to sound, a slow, steady pulse.

“Maybe you should do something more,” Ronon said.

Rodney bared teeth at him, and Ronon lifted his blaster.

“There is nothing more,” Rodney said. “Right now, we’re good, and if that changes, well, it’s too late for me to fix it. Even Sheppard can’t fly something that isn’t meant to be flown.” That wasn’t strictly true, but he waved it away. “We’re in the atmosphere, that’s what the alarm is for. We’re just along for the ride now.”

Ronon took a breath, tipped his blaster up and away. “OK,” he said. He pressed himself back into the niche next to Jennifer. The padding shifted slightly, trying to accommodate his bulk. “Brace yourself.”

Like that’s going to help if we’ve missed the corridor, Rodney thought. All the padding in the world isn’t going to do one bit of good if the angle’s bad and we burn up before we’ve slowed enough for the gravitics to compensate — He wedged himself into the niche on Jennifer’s other side, the padding stiff and unyielding now.

“Keep your hand where I can see it,” Ronon said.

“What?”

“Your — hand. The feeding hand.” Ronon gestured with his blaster. “Keep it away from her.”

“I can’t believe you’re saying this,” Rodney said, but he lifted his feeding hand, held it out. “If I break my arm, I’m going to hold you responsible.”

“Fine.” Ronon’s teeth were clenched.

“And it’s not like I can’t control myself,” Rodney said. The alarm was louder now, drowning his words. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the screen flashing white data, the hull temperature flaring, the autopilot flickering, the gravitics pegged at maximum. “I mean, this is Jennifer we’re talking about — my girlfriend, though I don’t think that’s really a very dignified word? Except I can’t think of anything more appropriate under the circumstances. Anyway, popular fiction notwithstanding, I really don’t see anything particularly appealing about feeding on somebody you care about —”

Ronon’s face was set in a pained grimace, his body braced against the edge of the niche. Jennifer lay between them, still and silent, peaceful as if she slept. They were coming down, the alarm pulsing, indicators going from gold to white, systems failing under the strain. And then they hit and tumbled, the inertial dampeners flickering in and out, flinging them against the sides of the pod. Ronon braced himself against the edges of the niche, held himself in position by main force, pinning Jennifer beneath him. Rodney grabbed for the nearest handholds, head and hands and hip banging hard against objects that seemed too hard and sharp to belong in a lifepod. Then the movement stopped, the alarms cutting out, and there was nothing but silence.