STARGATE ATLANTIS: Dead End Page 9

  With a cry, he hurled himself into the air, straight at the charging beast. The spear-tip plunged deep into the side of the buffalo. With a sickening lurch, Ronon was torn from his feet. The jar’hram broke free, swaying in the air, and he staggered and fell back into the snow. Hurled to the earth again, he had a confused impression of movement. The musk was almost overpowering. Barely knowing what he was doing, he scrambled backwards through the trodden mire frantically, expecting at any moment to feel the crushing weight of the buffalo come down on him. The sound of the animal’s death throes was deafening, snow falling in heavy gouts around him, thrown up by the frantic wallowing of the buffalo.

  He wiped the slush from his eyes, still scrambling clear. The vast animal had fallen on its side, writhing in agony. Jar’hram protruded from its hide in every direction and the snow was dark and thick with blood. Ronon’s own spear stuck from its stricken flank, buried deep into the flesh.

  Several yards away, Orand regained his feet. His face had the pallor of a man who had stared death in the face too closely. Without saying a word, he pulled a long dagger from his furs. The buffalo seemed no longer capable of gaining its feet. Its bellows sank into long, rumbling cries of distress.

  Orand waited for a few moments while the rest of the hunters approached the wounded animal. With effort, Ronon pulled himself to his feet. His vision still swam, but he kept upright, determined not to show weakness in front of the others. Orand walked forward, holding the knife aloft as the rest of the hunting party watched in silence. The only sound was the moan of the endless wind and the increasingly shallow suffering of the buffalo.

  Orand approached the huge head of the animal. It had sunk to the ground and was now moving only listlessly. The creature was having trouble breathing, and its flanks shivered as it attempted to suck in the frigid air. Orand positioned himself over its thick neck, and held the knife motionless for a moment. The hunters all bowed their heads. Orand himself seemed to be mouthing a few words under his breath. It looked like he was praying.

  Then, in an instant, the knife came down. There was no sound, no cry of distress. The animal died quickly. There was a momentary twitching along its flank, and then it lay still. Orand pulled the knife clear, and withdrew. He wiped the blade carefully in the snow and re-sheathed it.

  Ronon felt his body begin to recover. His breathing returned to normal and his vision cleared. He walked over to the Forgotten hunter and Orand came to meet him, smiling broadly. He seized the Satedan in a sudden bear hug, and held him long before releasing him.

  “Well fought!” laughed Orand. “That was a mighty blow. I would have died, had you not intervened when you did. You have my thanks.”

  “No problem,” Ronon said, embarrassed by the hunter’s effusive praise. “You did the same for me.”

  Orand turned to look over the huge carcass.

  “It fought well,” he said, quietly. “We honor the buffalo after death. It sustains us. In its death is our life, and we do not forget it.”

  The rest of the hunters were gathering together. Each had taken out a long knife.

  “There is no time to lose,” he said, in a more matter-of-fact voice. “We’ll butcher the carcass now. If we leave it too long then the meat will freeze solid. There is a cache nearby which we often use. We’ll store the cuts of meat there, and others will come and collect it for storage in the settlement.”

  “You leave the meat out here?” asked Ronon. “How come it doesn’t — ”

  Then he realized what he was saying. Orand laughed.

  “Who would take it?” he said. “No animals but the buffalo can survive out here. And we share everything we have. That is our way.”

  “Then we’d better get to work,” Ronon said, looking at the massive carcass. “Got a spare knife?”

  Orand drew a second blade from his furs, gave it to him and walked over to the carcass. Ronon paused before following him, checking his equipment. His sidearm was unharmed by the experience of being thrown against the ice by an enraged buffalo. He reached for his radio.

  It was gone. At some point in the excitement it must have fallen loose. His stomach suddenly tight, Ronon jogged back the way he’d been chased, feeling the muscles in his legs tighten against the cold.

  The snow behind the carcass was a bloody mess of slush and ice-crystals. Broken jar’hram shafts littered its path. And there, sitting in the middle of them, was his radio. The buffalo’s hooves had made short work of it.

  Ronon stopped to pick up what was left. The casing fell apart in his hands, spilling fragments of circuit board. Not even McKay could have fixed that.

  “Hey, big man!” Orand beckoned him over to the buffalo. “You’re wasting that knife.”

  Ronon dropped the remnants of his radio back into the snow, and trudged toward the butchery. It was a waste of a functioning radio, but that was nothing to get too upset about. They’d be back at the settlement before long. No problem.

  As he walked, he looked up at the skies. There were heavy black clouds banked up against the horizon. They looked pretty big.

  Nothing to worry about.

  Chapter Seven

  Weir strode down the corridor toward the Operations Center. When she arrived she saw Zelenka and his coterie of scientists hunched over flickering screens. He looked even more disheveled than usual. Weir wondered how much sleep he’d gotten over the past forty-eight hours.

  “So what have we got, people?” she said, with deliberate brightness. Zelenka and the others couldn’t be allowed to see how much this was affecting her.

  Zelenka looked up from his panel. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his face gray. Had he even gone to bed since the Jumper left?

  “We’re in a better place than we were,” he yawned. “But not much.”

  Stretching in his chair, he managed to pull a little of his crumpled uniform into shape as he climbed to his feet. “We’ve succeeded in salvaging some equipment from the chamber McKay stumbled into,” he said. “That’s been a help. These things have been the most interesting of all.”

  He gestured to a series of objects, each about two feet tall and surrounded by complicated-looking electronics. They looked for all the world like one of McKay’s half-baked engineering projects. None of them seemed finished, or even capable of powering-up.

  “They’re not complete, as you can see,” said Zelenka, looking at them with ill-disguised irritation. “But we’ve learned quite a lot about them. They’re remote power-relays — and there are similar mechanisms in the Stargate here.”

  Weir regarded the semi-complete devices carefully.

  “OK, so the Ancients were working on the Stargate tech,” she said, trying to sound encouraging. “How does that help us?”

  “We’ve run some simulations of their potential function.” Zelenka ran his hand through his hair. “We’ve made some guesses, cut some corners, and I’m reasonably sure these were designed to be used on the Jumpers themselves.”

  He pressed a button on the console before him, and a graphical simulation appeared on the monitors. “Here,” he said, motioning towards a rolling series of power bars. “When a Jumper enters the Stargate network, the storage and transmission of the energy produces a drain on the system power levels.”

  As he spoke, the bars dipped a little.

  “Normally, the connected Stargates would compensate almost immediately,” he went on. “There should never, never, be a case of a Jumper materializing within an event horizon. Under normal conditions, it wouldn’t even be physically possible — a transiting object is just a stream of mass converted into pure energy.”

  He pressed a second button, and the display changed again. “In this case, the gates were so far apart that the system wasn’t able to adjust. But it seems to me that there was a deliberate partial materialization on this jump. My speculation is that the distance was too great for a standard Stargate node to use, so the system scheduled a ‘drop’ out of the wormhole, ready for a second leg.”

&n
bsp; The lines on the computer screen shrank, glowed red, and died. Whether or not Zelenka was right, obviously the numbers on his simulation didn’t add up. Beyond that, the readings were opaque. Weir was no one’s fool, but wormhole physics had never made much sense to her.

  “So it didn’t work?” she said.

  Zelenka shook his head.

  “I believe the Stargate at the other end has not been used for a long time. Possibly hundreds of years. It may have been damaged from other source — perhaps the extreme cold. In any case, our attempt to create the wormhole placed a strain on the fragile system. Even the MALP, which has much less mass and complexity than a loaded Jumper, might have been enough to cause a failure at the other end. It seems likely that this Ancient booster mechanism was needed. Frankly, I’m surprised they got out the other end at all.”

  A chill passed through her body. “But they did, right? They got out?”

  “From what we can tell from the buffer records, yes. We’re working with fragments of information here, but something got them out. How…? That I don’t know.”

  Questions bubbled up inside, but she kept a lid on them for now.

  “When they dropped back into real space,” continued Zelenka, “there was no power left in the loop to complete the transit. We know they got through, so Rodney must have found some means of generating a little extra zip.”

  “Where from?”

  Zelenka shrugged. “The only source he had available was within the Jumper itself,” he said. “Propulsion systems, life support, etc. The point is, if he used those to get them out of the other end, the ship will be in bad shape. My guess is, it’s as dead as the gate.”

  Weir sighed, and rolled her shoulders slightly to ease their tension. The longer this conversation continued, the worse things seemed to get.

  “Right, I’m gonna need some good news now,” she said. “Give it your best shot.”

  Zelenka gave a tired smile, and ran some new figures through the computer simulation.

  “The best I can do is this,” he said. “We think that these Ancient devices are a means of bolstering the power to maintain wormhole integrity from within a Jumper, without risking a catastrophic drain on resources. Think of them as an extra battery, but one with a specific function. In a normal transit, the process might take fragments of milliseconds.”

  This time, the bar chart on the computer monitor didn’t shrink when the sequence was run. As the power levels fell, there was a boost just when it was needed.

  “If this was wired into the Jumper’s power systems,” said Zelenka, watching the dancing figures on his screen carefully, “there would have been enough energy to enable safe passage. That must have been what the Ancients were working on. A method of extending the range of gate travel from within the system. The implications of the research are impressive. Imagine, the intergalactic route could be opened-up without the use of ZPMs — ”

  “I get it. Does it help us?”

  “My hope is yes,” said Zelenka. “There might be some way of using the modules we have here to restore the link to Dead End.”

  Weir frowned. “But I thought we couldn’t send anything through the gate? You told me we couldn’t re-establish a connection.”

  “That’s right,” Zelenka admitted. “At the moment.”

  Anxiety had already worn her patience thin, and Weir felt it beginning to fray. “Then perhaps we should be working on a way to do that first, rather than — ”

  “Please!” Zelenka snapped. “What do you think I’m doing here? Or perhaps you have some solutions I’ve not considered. Do you?”

  A shocked silence fell across the operations center. The scientists clustered around Zelenka looked away, awkward and embarrassed; no one spoke to the mission commander like that. For a moment, Weir thought about giving as good back.

  She shelved that idea. The man was exhausted. “I’m sorry, Radek,” she said, placing a hand on his shoulder. “This situation is affecting all of us, and you’ve been working hard. Forgive me, I didn’t mean to interfere.”

  Zelenka drew a deep breath. “No, no, I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s been a tough puzzle to crack.” He looked over at the Ancient devices. “But I feel sure there’s something important here. If Rodney were here, he’d agree.”

  Weir gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “I’m sure he would. And after you’ve gotten some sleep, you can get back to work on it.”

  Zelenka looked at her, briefly rebellious. But then the fight left his eyes. He was on his last legs, and he knew it. “Very well,” he mumbled. “Just a couple of hours. Then I’m back on it.”

  “Good,” said Weir, looking at him with approval. “I know I can count on you.”

  Teyla sprang up beside Miruva, instantly alert. She had seen this terror all across the galaxy. The faces of the people around her said one thing: cull. Had the Wraith followed them somehow? She had thought Khost was free of them.

  “What is happening?” The hall had dissolved into a mass of fleeing people. The children were screaming, some of their guardians had pushed themselves up against the walls, staring wildly into space as if unseen enemies were in the air in front of them.

  “There are Banshees coming!” cried Miruva, ghost-white. “We have to escape!” But she seemed paralyzed by fear and did not move.

  Teyla looked around, trying to see what was causing the panic. There was nothing visible in the chamber, but the swishing sound was getting louder. Some of the Forgotten had rushed out into the corridors beyond, others stood still, awaiting their fate.

  “This is no good,” muttered Teyla. “If there are Wraith here, we at least have to fight. Come with me.”

  She pulled Miruva close to her, and half-jostled, half-dragged her to the chamber entrance. The girl recovered slightly and started to run alongside her.

  “Where are we going?” she said, her voice clipped with anxiety.

  “Back to my quarters,” said Teyla. “My weapon is there. Whatever these Banshees are, they will regret attacking this place while I was in it.”

  Miruva looked doubtful, but said nothing. The two of them pushed their way back to Teyla’s quarters. The corridors were full of people running in all directions, bereft of a plan. In their fright, they were charging into each other or down dead ends. The swishing rose in volume. It was impossible to tell where it was coming from; it sounded as if it was all around them.

  They reached Teyla’s room and she grabbed her P90 from under the bed. The cool weight of the submachine gun reassured her, but Miruva looked at the weapon with a horrified expression.

  “What’s that?”

  “Insurance,” snapped Teyla. “Tell me what you can. What are the Banshees?”

  Miruva whirled around quickly. The swishing had now become painfully loud and cries of distress echoed along the corridors of the settlement. The Forgotten seemed to have lost their sense entirely.

  “You can’t fight them!” cried Miruva, scampering over to the chamber entrance. “It’s no good! They just keep coming!”

  Teyla gave up on Miruva and snatched her radio from her shoulder. “John, can you read me?”

  Nothing. Just a hiss of static.

  “John?”

  Whatever else they could do, the Banshees could clearly jam her communication.

  Teyla ran to catch Miruva up, her mind racing. Her Wraith-sense remained dead, which was a relief. But the panic sweeping through the Forgotten was infectious. She had to make a conscious effort to control herself. Hefting her P90 purposefully, she followed Miruva into the corridor and scoured the dim recesses of the tunnels for any sign of movement.

  “What do they look like?” Teyla hissed. “What are we fighting?”

  Miruva turned to face her, eyes wide and staring. “Don’t you understand?” she cried. “They look like nothing! You can’t fight them! They’re Banshees!”

  Suddenly, the swishing vanished with a echoing snap. The fires in the hearths flickered and dimmed. Teyla thought sh
e caught sight of an ephemeral shape flitting across her field of vision. She raised her gun, but it was gone. Despite herself, she felt a cold grip of fear around her stomach. How could you fight something you couldn’t see?

  She spun around, trying to catch a glimpse of what was terrifying the people. There was movement, but it was impossible to see. She had an almost overwhelming urge to spray bullets indiscriminately at the shadows. Only her training and discipline prevented her. Why was she so scared? Screams echoed down the narrow tunnels, heightening the febrile atmosphere. Miruva had fallen to her knees and had her hands over her ears.

  “Miruva!” shouted Teyla. “Stand up! I need your — ”

  But then a shuddering wave of nausea reared up inside her. She felt her vision dim and her head throbbed. Teyla reeled, and felt the P90 slip from her fingers. She fought to retain consciousness, but something was pulling the life out of her.

  For a brief moment she thought she saw something. A face: metallic, cold, severe. It seemed to be leaning over her. There was something familiar about it, something very familiar…

  But then the darkness took her. The screams and wails of the Forgotten echoed away and Teyla collapsed. Her last awareness was of Miruva calling her name, but then she fell heavily and knew nothing more.

  McKay pushed a series of panels back into place. One of them fizzed and popped back out again. The others stayed where they were and a propulsion sub-system came back online. A bank of lights illuminated, went red, and flashed out again. The system shut down and a sigh shuddered through the engine chamber below.

  Rodney scowled. He felt like he was trying to reconstruct the Jumper more or less from scratch. Using novelty tools out of a kindergarten. As soon as one thing went right, another would go wrong. Even for someone with as much faith in his own abilities as he, there were moments when he wondered if he was attempting the impossible. At least the heating was still working. He’d just about managed to take off a top layer of furs.

  Sheppard stomped back into the Jumper after a quick recon around the vessel, stamping snow from his boots. “Rodney, I need an sitrep.”