The Wraith gave the soldier a sideways look but didn't respond to him. "They want to feed," he told Teyla, jerking his head at the rest of his kindred. "Soon I will let them."
"I do not fear you, creature." The words came up of their own accord.
Scar made the clicking noise again. "Lie."
"If I perish, it will be knowing that a hundred thousand Wraith corpses line my way to the afterlife, all of them dead by my hand!"
He cocked his head. "Oh. A warrior, then, Tey-lah? Proud and strong." He sniffed. "Still prey, at the end."
She watched the glitter of intelligence in Scar's eyes. Daus had been right when he said this Wraith was not like the others on Halcyon. Where his pack mates loped and snapped at each other like primitive simians, Scar was cogent and clever. But there was something else in there, a peculiar need that went beyond his desire to feed off them. The fragmented psionic connection Teyla shared with the Wraith was a two-way street, and she could feel a churn of conflict in the alien's mind. Something akin to loneliness, a sad little streak of arrogance that boiled away just below the surface. She saw broken pieces of thought, there and gone like reflections in shards of a shattered mirror, and an abrupt realization came to her. Scar was concealing something, an old and dark hatred buried deep in his psyche. He was nursing it, cupping the flame of a rage that had been burning for countless years. He had a plan.
The Wraith sniffed at the air and toyed with the pistol. "Brutal and direct," he said, considering the gun. "The simplicity of it amuses me." Scar leaned closer and she caught a whiff of his alien odor. "You are not of the Enemy, but you have their devices. Tell me now. Are they dead? Are the Gatebuilders dead?" When Teyla did not answer, he gave a guttural chug and one of the other Wraiths scrambled over to Bishop, brandishing its feeding maw. The pack mate hovered over the soldier, raw desire bright in its dead eyes. "Answer, or the male is ash."
"Don't tell him nothing," spat the soldier.
Teyla licked dry lips. There was no doubt in her mind that Scar would have Bishop killed if she did not answer him. "The Ancients are gone. We don't know where. They abandoned their cities, vanished."
"Gone." Scar considered this for a moment. "It is fitting. The Enemy died while I slept…"
There was another blink of his memory there in her brain, hard and brittle, of a cold sleep in the chambers of a Hive Ship. The aftermath of a battle, many lives lost and great destruction wrought. She was seeing into him.
Scar glanced at her. "Yes," His words were a gentle hiss. "We came to cull these worlds and found the Enemy here, lying in wait for us. They poisoned the air with their device. Shielded the prey with it. We could not land, could not feed."
"The dolmen," Teyla spoke without meaning to. "The Ancients placed it on Halcyon to protect the natives from you."
The Wraith's head bobbed. "At the height of its power, it drove us mad to be near it. So we remained in space."
Teyla heard noises, half-whispers that came across an impossible distance, across thousands of years. Weapons fire, the roars of combatants and the screams of the dying. Scar was showing her flashes of his past, of a great conflict.
"Our hive, our home, was crippled," he husked, looking inward, "the interstellar translation drives were damaged beyond repair. The Enemy fared little better, fleeing. They vowed to return with reinforcements to finish us. But they never came back."
And then it was all there in her mind, as if she had lived through it herself. Teyla retched, bringing up thin, watery bile, her body rebelling as the shape of the alien memories tried to impose themselves on her recall. "You… Went into hibernation, where the dolmen's power could not affect your minds. Waiting." The woman shook her head, trying to rid herself of the cascade of horrific sensations.
Scar showed all his serrated teeth in a malicious smile. "Ah. You understand. But with each passing year the Enemy's defense wanes in strength. Enough that we can rise against it. Enough."
"Teyla…" called Bishop, a warning in his tone. He'd seen the flare of anger in her eyes.
"You will fail," she spat. "A handful of mindless beasts are all you have! The Halcyons will gun you down the instant you show your ruined face to them!"
The Wraith growled and ran a finger over the scar on his cheek.
"The Ancients beat you ten thousand years ago!" Teyla snarled. "You ran like wounded quarry! You will fare no better today!"
Scar chuckled. "Mistake. We were not beaten, Tey-lah. We merely took our rest." He rose, tucking the gun into his tunic. "That time has passed." At his gesture, one of the other Wraiths came out of the shadows with a metallic ring in its hands. Scar turned the hoop of discolored silver and with a click it split open. He brought it back to Teyla and offered it to her, like a suitor giving a gift.
She saw the intricate cogs and metal spars on the inner face of the ring and understood at once what it was. Teyla tried to back away, but there was nowhere she could go. Scar fastened the metal collar around her neck and it made a clicking sound as the mechanism inside constricted to fit her. The woman coughed as it tightened, settling to a diameter that lay uncomfortably on her throat.
"Ah," Scar said, amusement in his tone. "Now you can be my Hound, human."
Bishop barked out a string of invective that would have earned him a week in the glasshouse if he had said it in earshot of an officer. Scar turned indolently toward him and gave a hollow yowl to the other Wraith in his pack. All of them sprang at the bound soldier with sudden, appalling speed, falling on the man and ripping into him.
"No!" Teyla screamed, but she was powerless to save him. The trooper shuddered and wailed as the Wraiths fed, each of them fighting to draw his living energy from him. She found she could not look away from the horrific display as Bishop's hand snatched at the air, with each second the skin becoming papery, the muscles losing definition, the color draining from him.
After a moment, Scar made another sound and the Wraith pack reluctantly withdrew. Tears spiked Teyla's eyes as she realized that Bishop was still alive, his face sunken and skeletal, each breath a rattling gasp of air. He looked like an old man, decrepit and feeble. Scar bent across the soldier and carefully placed his palm over Bishop's heart. Then, with his tongue flicking out between his pallid lips, the Wraith fed greedily on the last moments of the man's life, taking the sweetest and most succulent nourishment for himself.
"I am not going to die on a Wraith Hive Ship," Rodney managed, trying very hard to keep his voice from turning into a whimper. "I am going to die of old age surrounded by… by… nubile graduate students. Nobel Prizes!" His skin crawled and he bunched his fists, hugging himself in a desperate attempt to stave off panic-induced shivers. "I am not going to die," he insisted to the empty cell. "I am going to die on a Wraith Hive Ship-" McKay halted and shouted out loud, abruptly angry with himself. "Not! Not! Not going to die! I am not going to die on a Wraith Hive Ship, you can't make me, I don't want to, so there! So there-"
He heard the ringing clatter of footsteps approaching along the corridor beyond the webbed doorway of his confinement, and Rodney shrank back into the corner of the cramped space, frantically trying to fight down the rising wave of abject terror building inside him. He wanted so much to hold on the rational and intelligent part of himself, the piece of Rodney McKay that was smart and clinical, capable of cutting through scientific conundrums like a laser; but that bit of him had gone bye-bye and all that was left was the panicking idiot portion who hit like a girl and barely knew one end of a gun from the other. Not that he had a gun, anyway.