Dex eyed her. "Bad dream? Is that all it was?"
"It was vivid. I felt something."
"Felt something as in a nightmare something, or…" Sheppard made a winding-up motion near his temple. "Or a Wraith kinda something?"
"I cannot make sense of it," she said, her brow furrowing in concentration. "The recall fades. It is like trying to catch smoke in my hands." She licked dry lips. "Before, when the Wraith touched my mind, my dreams, it was different. There was intelligence there, malicious but with clear intent. This was not like that."
"Go on," said John. He was the first to admit he didn't fully understand the workings of Teyla's Wraith-altered physiology, but what he did know was that she could touch the edges of the telepathic network the aliens used to communicate. If that was bleeding into her dreams, then he had to give it his complete attention.
"They were more…" Sheppard could see Teyla was struggling to hold on to the dream images, trying hard to articulate them. "Vicious. Primitive. Like wild animals."
"The Wraith have always been animals," said Ronon, with feeling.
"But not like this. Not literally." She sipped more water. "Colonel, I am certain of one thing. This dream was not just the creation of my mind. There are many Wraith here, on Halcyon."
"How many?" Sheppard felt ice forming in the pit of his stomach.
"Hundreds. Perhaps more."
Ronon and John exchanged a loaded glance. "Are you okay now?" Sheppard asked.
Teyla gave him a shaky smile. "Yes, thank you. If I could have a moment alone to gather myself."
The two men left the room. "We'll be right outside if you need us," added Dex. "Sorry about the door."
Mason and the other SAS soldiers straightened as they walked back into the antechamber. Sheppard saw right away that they had a wary look about them, as if they'd been caught discussing something they shouldn't have. Mason returned a level gaze, but the question was clear in Corporal Clarke's eyes.
"Let's hear it," said the colonel. "Who's going to say what you're all thinking?"
Private Hill found an interesting piece of carpet to occupy his attention. After a moment, Clarke gave a slight frown. "Lieutenant Colonel, sir," he began, pronouncing the rank as Left-tenant in the way the Brits always did. "Your lass there, Tina…"
"Teyla,"
"Yeah. There was talk back in the city about her. Some of your Marine Corps lads said the bozos did something to her, when she was a nipper, like."
Sheppard noticed that Mason wasn't doing anything to stop Clarke from speaking his mind; clearly the senior non-com wanted to know the same thing as his subordinate. "She's not a danger to the unit, if that's where you're going with this," he broke in, steel in his tone. "Teyla Emmagan is a vital part of this team and you will respect that, Corporal."
"I don't doubt it, sir. It's just that… Well, are we going to have to jump every time she talks in her sleep?"
Sheppard gave Clarke a penetrating look. "Just so we're clear on this. Teyla's `gift' may be the very thing that keeps us alive when the Wraith come calling. If she has something to say, you listen. Get me?"
Clarke stiffened. "Sir, yes sir. Didn't mean to cast aspersions, sir."
John sighed. "Look, I know it's not conventional intel, but nothing out here is conventional." He smiled a little. "That ought to be the motto of Stargate Command."
"You're telling us," said Hill in a low voice.
Mason threw a nod at the door that led out of the guest quarters. "I've set up a two-point watch rotation, sir. If anything else… unconventional happens, we'll be ready."
Sheppard nodded. "I'll take the first shift, Staff Sergeant. Now I'm awake, might as well make the most of it."
"I'll join you," said Ronon. "Can't sleep on beds that soft anyhow."
John shrugged as they walked away. "If we ask the Magnate nicely, I'm sure he'd find a big rock for you, or something."
Dex was silent for a moment. "Clarke had a point. About Teyla."
"Yeah," agreed the colonel, "but I trust her. We know the locals planned to bring the Wraith they captured on M3Y-465 back through the Gate. Could be them she's sensing."
"What if there's more to it?"
"Now that…" Sheppard frowned. "That's a different question."
McKay leaned back from the eyepiece of the massive telescope and a glimmer of amazement crossed his expression. "I apologize," he said, half-turning to look at Kelfer and Lady Erony. "Obviously, it was impolite of me to suggest that you didn't know how to take the lens cap off your own telescope. I see that now…" Down below on the lower level, McKay could see Private Bishop, nibbling from a ration bar and generally looking a bit bored. Sheppard had, of course, insisted he take an escort with him; not that he thought he couldn't handle someone so clearly as stolid as the Magnate's chief scientist.
"It was an honest mistake," said Kelfer, wearing a forced smile. "An error that any new visitor to our planet could have made."
"Yes…" Rodney looked along the length of the device, out through the oval portal in the observatory's dome to the night sky beyond. The firmament up there was black as coal, and of course, naturally he had just assumed that it was due to light pollution from the city masking out all of the weaker stars. But when he peered through the optics and saw the same flat black ness, McKay's first reaction was to suggest the telescope was broken. I mean, no stars at all? How likely was that?
In fact there were some faint suns out there, but hardly any. The sights that hove into view as they swung the observatory dome around were mostly the planets in the stellar shallows orbiting Halcyon's yellow star, gas giants and lifeless balls of ice and rock.
"In the southern hemisphere," Erony was saying, "the sky looks very different. There is a band of stars crossing the sky from horizon to horizon. Our forefathers called the constellation the White River."
McKay stepped down from the observation chair and worked at the portable computer he had brought with him. "We must be right out on the edge," he said, thinking aloud. Before visiting the observatory, Erony had taken him on a walk through a library in the heart of the palace, past racks of scrolls veiled in cobwebs. He'd only had time to look over a few of them, a handful of historical tracts and yellowed charts of the skies. "If those stellar maps you showed me were accurate, then we can deduce the location of Halcyon in physical space and its relative distance from Atlantis…"
"To what end?" said Kelfer.
McKay hesitated. "To, uh, gain an idea of how the Pegasus Galaxy is structured…" The device beeped and presented a wire frame graphic of the galactic disc. "Do you see here?" He pointed as the image zoomed in toward the very tip of a feathery limb of star-stuff. "This solar system is on the end of a spiral arm. You're in the interstellar equivalent of the boondocks!" Rodney smirked at his own joke.
"Boohn-dox?" repeated the scientist. "I don't know this term."
McKay's gag fell flat and he moved on. "Halcyon is on the very edge of the Stargate network built by the Ancients… The, ah, Precursors. That place where you keep the Gate? When someone named it the Terminal, they weren't far wrong. If you think of the Stargates in the same terms as your monorails, then this planet is at the end of the line!"
"Are you making light of us?" said Erony gently. "I assure you, Dr. McKay, Halcyon is anything but a parochial outpost."
"No, no," Rodney insisted, back-pedaling a little. "I was just using a metaphor. Bad choice. Sorry." He tapped a finger on his lips. "This opens up a lot of possibilities about Gate travel here, the pattern of the network. A portal this far out from the main concentration of inhabited worlds could mean we'd see a similar spread of Stargates to those in our own galaxy… I mean, my galaxy, Earth's galaxy…"