The Lost

Chapter Thirty-four: Endgame

The George Hammond swept wide, rail guns blazing as she burned a streak down the hive ship’s lateral surface, rotating on her own axis as she spun off the end, flipping around to come about for a dorsal pass. A cloud of Darts parted before her, reforming behind her and peppering her aft shields with flowers of fire.

Sam knew better than to direct her helmsman. The reason Lt. Chandler was a helmsman was because he was a hot pilot, hotter than she’d ever been. And so, other than the imperceptible tightening of her hands on the arms of the chair, she did not react as they rolled through a flashing waterfall of fire, diving behind the hive ship’s bulk.

Depressurization alarms must be hooting all over the hive ship, inner compartments sealing. Their sensors read massive damage. If they could just refrain from depressurizing sections where they had people aboard…

“Sheppard?” she said into her radio. “Status report, please.” There was no answer.

“Ma’am, aft shield at 40 per cent,” Major Franklin said from the station behind her. “We are rerouting power, but it appears that the starboard ventral emitter has taken physical damage.”

Trouble, but by far not a mortal wound.

“Sheppard? Status report.”

The Hammond dove, rotating 280 degrees as she evaded another flight of Darts.

“The hive ship is powering up!” Franklin said, his voice cracking as he bent over his display. “All systems are coming online!”

That was their cue. Once the hive ship’s defenses were active, their team would be trapped.

The Hammond shook, shuddering from bow to stern.

Sam snapped about as a shower of sparks flew behind her. “What was that?”

“The damaged starboard ventral emitter blew, ma’am,” Franklin called. “We’ve lost the entire rear shield!”

For a moment Sam wished she were the type who swore under pressure. Power reroutes they could do. External physical damage was beyond their repair capability in the middle of a battle, and depending on the damage possibly more than they could do without significant down time at a base.

“Cut the power to the damaged sections,” Sam directed. “So we don’t have anymore surprises back there.” She cupped her headset. “Sheppard? We’re out of time.”

Ronon’s voice came through loud and clear, blasts and the sound of gunfire behind him. “Sheppard’s down.”

Ronon fired and fired again, and Wraith after Wraith fell, but they kept coming, their stunner fire spitting down the corridor toward him. He flattened himself against the wall as best he could. No way to get past so many of them, and they would be pouring down the corridor from the other direction now, cutting off their escape.

“I can’t give you any more time,” Carter said over the radio. “We’re about to open a hyperspace window. I can beam you out now, or you’re going to have to find your own way home.”

No more holding them off. He crouched and dived in the door of the room, rolling as he came up, taking in a series of images — Sheppard down, unmoving, Teyla swiveling her P90 toward him, startled by the sudden movement — and then he saw Rodney, firing off blast after blast from the Wraith stunner in his hand.

It was Rodney, and at the same time he had the ridged markings of a Wraith’s face beneath bone-white hair, and the hand clenched around the stunner had claws. It was Rodney, firing again and again at Teyla as if he was afraid to stop. The table she was sheltering behind crawled with stunner fire.

For a moment Ronon froze. It was like something out of a nightmare, and for a moment he thought this can’t be real. Then he knew it was, and even as he rolled to one knee, raising his pistol, he remembered watching a Wraith writhe in restraints in the isolation room, watching its face become human as their engineered virus worked its destruction through its body.

“Our hyperspace window is open,” Carter said in his ear, her voice level like the seasoned soldier she was. “You’ve got about ten seconds before we jump to hyperspace.”

“Rodney!” Teyla cried. “It is us, we are here to help you — ”

Rodney threw himself behind a piece of equipment, and Ronon’s shot stung harmlessly against the metal. He was crouching to dive over the tables, preparing to roll wildly out of the way of the stunner blasts when he got close enough.

“Ronon!” Teyla called, and he heard the thunder of her P90, spraying the doorway behind him with bullets. He fired once, twice, and readied himself to spring.

“We’re leaving now,” Carter said. “Ronon, make the call.”

With Sheppard down, they didn’t have a pilot, but it didn’t matter. They’d never make it out of this room. He wanted to stay, to keep fighting to get to Rodney, even if all he could do was die with his teammate. It was the right thing for a soldier to do.

It wasn’t the right thing for the team leader to do. Teyla was still firing, pausing only to jam another clip home. Sheppard lay unmoving, one hand outflung as if in sleep. He couldn’t throw away the lives of his team. He had to keep them safe.

“Pull us out,” he said, his voice rough in his own ears. “Carter, do it now!”

He felt the pull of the transport beam, his stomach twisting as the world changed around him. They were on the bridge of the Hammond, Sheppard sprawling across the deck, Teyla dropping to her knees next to him. His face was pale and streaked with blood.

“Get a medical team up here,” Carter said. “Franklin, punch it!”

There was a slight jolt, and the view outside the forward window changed, stars elongating into the azure of the hyperspace field as the Hammond passed through the window, leaving the battle behind.

“He was hit by a stunner many times,” Teyla said urgently, her hands on Sheppard’s neck, checking the pulse at his throat. “I think he is not breathing as he should.”

“They’re on their way,” Carter said. “What happened?”

Ronon didn’t think either of them wanted to say it. It was Teyla who finally answered.

“He is Wraith,” she said flatly. “Rodney is a Wraith.”

The blue shifted stars of hyperspace slid past the George Hammond, while within the thin envelope of the hyperspace field a spacesuited repair crew swarmed over her surface, conducting a visual inspection of the damaged shield array.

Master Sergeant Luciano, the Hammond’s chief structural engineer, frowned at his captain through the video link to the station beside her command chair. “It’s not good, ma’am. The shield emitter is basically blown away. There’s nothing left but the twisted backing plate attached to the brackets. We’ve got replacement internal electronic components for repair purposes aboard, but we’re going to need a full machine shop to rebuild the titanium alloy casing.”

“And until then we’ve got no rear shields,” Sam said, her fingers drumming on the chair arms. “I read you loud and clear, Sergeant. Bring your crew in. We’ll see what we can rig up in Atlantis. They’ve probably got what we’ll need for the casing.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

It wouldn’t be that simple, of course. Rebuilding a major external system was not going to take a few hours. It might — might — take a few days at best. More likely a week or more. Still, it was something well within their capabilities to do. The Hammond carried titanium alloy hull plates for repairing breaches. The problem would be machining the spare hull plates into the proper structure for all the fiddly little parts that made up Asgard shielding. It was a week’s work for skilled people with Atlantis’ facilities to use.

“Major Franklin, you have the bridge.” Sam stood up, making her way to the infirmary.

Her people were in pretty good shape. A medical corpsman was treating three or four people for mild electrical burns from the shield control panels shorting, and Sam stopped to say an encouraging word to each of them. If the worst to show for her ship’s first battle was a damaged shield array and some second degree burns that wouldn’t keep people off their feet a full day, you had to call that a win.

Only it wasn’t, of course. They didn’t have McKay back, and they hadn’t destroyed Queen Death’s hive ship, though Sam thought they’d fairly well crippled it. She thought they’d taken out the hyperdrive and all of the forward weapons systems and done some major structural damage. That wouldn’t be easy to fix either. It would be months before that ship was flyable again. But Death was queen of a big alliance. She’d probably shift her flag to another ship.

And then there was Sheppard. Sam looked around the screen in the infirmary, where Sheppard was hooked up to monitors and drips. Teyla sat on the metal stool at the beside, her feet up on the rung and her arms crossed over her stomach. Ronon leaned against the wall behind her, his head back against the bulkhead and his eyes closed.

The doctor came over as Sam approached. “How’s he doing?” Sam asked quietly.

The doctor glanced back at him. “Not too bad for someone stunned that many times. He’s still out cold. I’ve got him on a drip to replace electrolytes, and a heart monitor because we detected arrhythmia as a result of the amount of electrical current his body absorbed. It’s pretty much the equivalent of being struck by lightning.”

“Lovely,” Sam said. She looked over at Ronon and Teyla. She’d spent a lot of hours waiting like that.

“He’ll be ok,” the doctor said. “I think it’s unlikely he’ll suffer any permanent effects. But even a stun beam can be dangerous if you do it over and over. The Wraith don’t usually fire more than necessary to incapacitate a human being.”

“It was Rodney,” Teyla said harshly, and Sam came over to stand on the other side of the bed. “Rodney did not know us. He resisted. John…” She shook her head, her eyes falling to Sheppard’s face. “I do not think he ever realized what had happened. That Rodney was…not himself.”

“It’s some kind of medical thing,” Ronon said. “Like Michael. I don’t know. I don’t know what it was. But he was a Wraith.”

“A retrovirus?”

“I don’t know,” Ronon said again, shaking his head, anger plain in his voice. Not anger at her, Sam thought. Anger at himself, that he had not somehow parsed the impossible.

“We couldn’t have known,” Sam said. “Todd may not have known.”

“Or he was playing some game of his own,” Teyla said, and there was a bitter edge in her voice. “I do not think he serves Queen Death. I do not think he truly serves anyone’s interests besides his own.”

Sam nodded. “We’ll be back in Atlantis in nine hours and a bit. Sheppard may be up and awake by then, and we can all sit down and debrief. But until then you might want to get a meal and some rest.”

“I think we would prefer to stay here,” Teyla said. Unsurprisingly. Sam had sat that watch herself way too many times.

“I’ll have somebody bring you up something,” she said, and turned to go.

Night had come, and the towers of Atlantis glittered through the falling snow. The debriefing was over, and Teyla left the conference room, Woolsey and Carson still talking behind her. Yet everything that could be said had been said and said a thousand times while she and Ronon and Sam and Mr. Woolsey and Radek and Carson and Jennifer had deconstructed everything over and over. There was nothing more to be said. There was no more information to share. There were only empty, gaping questions.

Through the glass doors of the control room balcony Teyla thought she saw a familiar figure outside despite the cold and darkness. She hugged her jacket about her as the doors opened before her, but the wind hit her like a punch in the chest as she stepped out of the shelter.

“John? I thought you were in the infirmary.”

He didn’t turn around, just stood at the rail, his shoulders hunched against the cold. “Keller let me out. I’m not sure she wanted to see me any more than I wanted to see her.”

Teyla drew a deep breath and came and stood beside him. “How are you feeling?”

He shrugged. “I still can’t feel my toes. How many times did I get stunned, anyway?”

“Six,” Teyla said matter of factly. She shook her head. “At least we know so much of Rodney remains. He has always been overkill!”

John snorted mirthlessly. “That’s true. I suppose I should just be glad he had a Wraith stunner, not a P90. You wouldn’t be bringing much home if he’d shot me six times with that.” He shook his head, looking out into the night. “I don’t know what happened, Teyla.”

“It all happened very fast,” she said. “I did not have any way to incapacitate Rodney except to shoot him, and if I had tried that I probably would have killed him.” Teyla shook her head. “I could not risk it.”

“You did the right thing,” John said, and she knew he was thinking of Ford, of the time he had not taken the shot when he might have.

Teyla took a step closer, her shoulder against his arm, side by side at the rail. “We will get him back.”

“You know that’s not very likely, don’t you?” John looked at her sideways.

“In that other reality, Rodney spent twenty five years trying to find a way to change the past and save me. Do you think I will give up on him?” He was silent, so she continued, lacing her hands together in the cold. “You looked for a long time before you found me when I was Michael’s prisoner, and you nearly succeeded once before you at last did. We did not know what we were up against this time. We did not know that Rodney would not come with us willingly. We had no reason to expect what happened. Next time we will know.”

“And how are we going to take him down without killing him?”

“Ronon’s stun pistol.” She shook her head. “We will get a zat gun from the SGC. Something else. We will figure it out. But we are not going to give up. We will get Rodney home.” She nudged him with her shoulder. “You may be sure of that.”

John looked away. Whirling snowflakes landed on his dark hair, sticking whole and complete. “Teyla, is there something we need to talk about?”

He sounded so strained, so uncertain. “No,” she said quietly. “There is nothing you need to say. There is nothing you could say to me that your actions have not said a thousand times.”

His eyes closed, and she thought the faintest hint of a smile played around the corner of his mouth. Or perhaps he was laughing at himself, inarticulate always in the face of so much to say. “Ok,” he said. He lifted his arm and she slid under it, warm against his side as the cold wind swirled around them, his chin resting on the top of her head.

Beyond, the snow fell soundlessly into the sea.