The cell wall hit him in the back and McKay stiffened. He was staring death in the face again, any moment now. Why was he still terrified? This had happened to him so many times, surely by now he should have been used to it?
Two Wraiths halted outside the doorway and one of them did something to a control surface. The spider web of cords blocking him in twitched and retracted into the walls. The other came into the cell and grabbed Rodney, dragging him out into the corridor.
"Please don't suck the life out of me," he managed, and the denial sounded totally pathetic in his ears. As if they were suddenly going to say `Oh, okay then, 'and shove Inc back in there.
The aliens didn't acknowledge his words, and simply propelled him forward, pushing McKay away and down the twisting tunnels of bone. The Wraith guards marched him quickly through open spaces and atriums, some lit with dim bioluminescence, others black and dead. Rodney's mind was running at full tilt, his thoughts racing thanks to the surge of terror-induced adrenaline in his bloodstream. Something felt different about this ship. He tried to put his finger on it.
The usual sense of motion, the slight giddiness of acceleration, wasn't there. Perhaps they were in orbit, or drifting in space? But as he stumbled onward, he felt strangely heavier than he expected to. Every other time McKay had been inside a Wraith vessel, the gravity had been just a shade less than the Earth-equivalent of habitable, Stargated worlds. He remembered that Zelenka had posited that the Wraith liked a lowgee environment. If he felt heavy-that was to say, normal weight-here, maybe this ship wasn't actually in space but grounded on a planet? What the hell did that imply? Why was he even here? The men who had attacked the dolmen, who shot him, they wore gray battledress and they certainly hadn't been Wraiths. Had they?
However, that train of thought went totally off the rails as the guards shoved him through another doorway and along a narrow catwalk over a vast open space in the alien craft's interior. Ranged up above and down below him along the curved inner surface of the chamber there were hundreds, if not thousands of individual cells. Not the same kind of cell as the holding area where he'd been confined, but roughly hexagonal compartments that looked like something from inside of a hornet's nest. Many of them were dark, but a lot-an awful lot-were aglow with pale light, and through the thick matter of their translucent walls McKay could see the humanoid forms of quiescent Wraith. Now and then, the occasional one would twitch in its hibernative sleep. But what caught Rodney's attention was where the cells were marked, where they had been cut open with what must have been blowtorches. Good grief why would anyone actually want to deliberately decant a dormant Wraith?
He turned to look at the alien guards and saw a glitter of light at their necks. Each of the Wraiths had dull, lifeless eyes, and heavy steel torcs that were the twin to those worn by Daus's indentured servants. "Hounds?" The word tumbled from McKay's lips.
Another hatch dilated before them and with one final shove, Rodney's Wraith chaperones pushed him through it. He recovered from a near stumble and came to a halt, his jaw hanging open in shocked surprise.
McKay had never seen the interior of a Wraith Hive Ship's control nexus before, but based on the experience of several Atlantean off world teams, he'd built up a picture of what they had to look like. He was pleased on some level that he'd been so close to the mark, but unhappy on another that he had to make that judgment in person. Standing in the chamber was like being inside a hollowed-out skull, a large bone enclosure with two open orbits that peered out from the dorsal surface of the vessel like eye sockets. As he had surmised, the view from the ports wasn't the black void of space or the shimmering blue of a hyperspatial tunnel, but a pale sky and a lightly forested hillside. The now-familiar yellow-white sun visible in the clouds told him that he was still on Halcyon. And if that's the closest thing I've had to good news all day, then I really am in trouble.
There were multiple levels inside the nexus with steep ramps leading up and down to them. Skeletal formations here and there had grown around the glossy shapes of control consoles and the quivering organic lenses of monitor screens. It was all seamless and quite unpleasant in its design, like the folds of natural armor on a scorpion's thorax or the shiny bones of some dead deep-ocean predator. But what shocked him more than the alien lines of the Hive Ship's command center were the chunks of brazen, blocky metal retrofitted into the walls. Festoons of fat, sparking cables trailed back and forth across the deck, and there were puddles of yellowy organic fluid collecting where arrays of glass valves and other primitive electronics had been surgically inserted into the consoles. Hardware better suited to the laboratory of Dr. Frankenstein had been rammed brutally into the slick, inhuman forms of the Wraith consoles.
Men in work tunics were busy at the controls, or in tight groups at wooden benches set up in the avenues between the alien hardware. They all wore the black flash on their tabards marking them as standing in the service of the Lord Magnate.
A familiar and utterly unwelcome face emerged from one of the groups, beaming a supercilious grin. "Kelfer," sneered Rodney, turning the man's name into an insult. "What. Are. You. Doing?"
"Dr. McKay. Welcome." The chief scientist clapped his hands. "Firstly, I must apologize for your mode of arrival here. I trust you did not find it too… Dramatic?"
Rodney waggled a finger at him. "You kidnapped me!" It came to him in a rush. "That's why you left Erony and me inside the dolmen! You went outside to, what, send a signal to your goon squad? Where is she? Did you hurt her?"
Kelfer rolled his eyes. "As if I would dare to leave a mark upon the daughter of the most powerful man on the planet. The Lady Erony is uninjured."
"Scumbag!" It was the first insult that came to mind, and although it wasn't as nasty as he would have liked, McKay put plenty of venom behind it.
"Doctor, please calm yourself. You were struck by a Wraith Stunner. The effects can be quite troubling."
"Don't patronize me!" he barked. "When your lordship finds out that you're working with the Wraith-"
It was Kelfer's turn to butt in. "Working with the Wraith?" he laughed harshly. "Great blades, man, have you learned nothing while you have been on Halcyon? We despise those beasts!" He nodded at the two Hounds. "They serve us! Never the reverse! That is the whole point of this endeavor." He opened his hands, taking in the ship around them. "And be certain that the Lord Magnate would hardly be uninformed about what transpires here, on land that has been a part of his ancestral holdings since the Age of Unification!"
Rodney took that nugget of information in, his fingers fluttering at the air. "I return to my original point, then. What are you doing here, you moron?"
Kelfer's face hardened at the insult, but he answered nonetheless. "We are learning the secrets of the Wraith," he bit out, "decoding their language, turning their technology to our own ends, examining their physiology to find new ways to condition them and kill them." He puffed out his chest. "It is the single most important undertaking of our race."
But McKay wasn't listening to him preen. The Atlantean scientist's analytical mind was racing ten steps ahead of what Kelfer was telling him, putting together everything he had seen and heard, and following it toward the inevitable conclusion. "Wait. Wait wait. Linnian told Teyla that Daus's rule of Halcyon was unchallenged."
"Lord Daus!" snapped Kelfer.
McKay's thoughts spilled out, raw and unfiltered. "His rule was unchallenged because he had the biggest army of tame Wraith in his doghouse, and no one would ever dare to go up against someone who could send in so many Hounds, right? And I couldn't help wondering where he got his fresh recruits from, and now you show me this-" Rodney's brain finally caught up with his mouth and stumbled over the words. "Oh no. No, no, no-no." He took a warning step toward Keifer, indignation and anger building as he realized the depths of trouble they were in. "Please tell me that you were not so completely, so unreservedly, entirely downright mind-bogglingly dim-witted, that you have actually been waking up those Wraith on purpose?"