Ronon chose a house at random and pulled open the door, peering inside. He saw a bed and a stove, desk and chairs. The bed was rumbled, slept in. A book was open on the table. A thin rime of frost covered everything, making it twinkle in the torchlight.
Sheppard glanced at McKay. "Anything on the scanner?"
Rodney shook his head. "Eight thermal blooms inside the settlement boundary and nothing else. I'm not reading anything further out, just static. Might be something in the local rock strata interfering with the scanner."
They drew slowly into the middle of the township, and at the foot of the watchtower lay the largest building they had yet encountered. "Is it a town hall, maybe?" suggested Private Hill.
"Could be," agreed the colonel. "Let's take a look-see."
Mason spoke up. "Sir, we should form a perimeter around the hall, just in case." Off Sheppard's nod of agreement, he snapped out orders to the rest of his unit and they fanned out. "Hill, go with them."
Teyla entered first, holding her weapon close to her chest, the fire select set to three-round bursts. The inside of the hall was open, studded with thick wooden pillars to hold up the roof. There were dead oil lanterns dangling from beams, but faint illumination came from a long, low counter set along one of the walls. "What is that?"
McKay pointed at a series of dull yellow-green bowls made of glass fitted to the walls. Liquid was visible inside, glowing faintly. "It looks like bioluminescence. Probably extracted from plants or insects. Cheap lighting, if a little gloomy-looking."
They spread out through the room, their eyes adjusting to the dimness, and abruptly Teyla realized the function of the building. "This is a tavern." On a round table before her there were a couple of flagons and a discarded clay pipe. The faint whiff of stale beer was still detectable in the air.
Sheppard swept his P90 around the hall. "No bodies anywhere."
Ronon fingered a fan of oval playing cards on a long bench. There were other hands here and there, and a pile of stamped metal rings in a clay bowl before them. "Someone left their win pings behind."
Hill crouched by a larger table. "Look here, sir. These chairs are knocked over, like maybe the person sitting there got up quickly."
"Whatever happened, they had little or no warning," ventured Teyla, "there are no signs they had time to prepare an adequate defense."
The soldier frowned. "But there's no indications of any weapons fire, ma'am, no burns or bullet holes. Did the blokes who lived here just put down their pints and give up without a fight?"
"Okay," said Rodney, folding down his hood. "I'm going to put this out there, just say what we're all thinking. Culled. The people here were culled by the Wraith."
Sheppard glanced at the ceiling. "They must have swept in with Darts and just beamed them straight up," he said, turning to Hill.
Teyla suppressed a shudder, thinking back to of the awful screeches of Wraith Dart-ships buzzing through the air of her own village, trawling for human lives.
"No doors are locked," noted Dex. "Must have been panic in the streets."
"Blimey," whispered the Private.
"Question is, how long ago?" Sheppard studied the floor. "There's a little snow in here. It couldn't have been more than a few days."
Ronon sniffed at a discarded tankard. "Maybe less."
"And so we come to the big questions," said McKay, crossing the room. "Are they still here? And why don't we discuss this in greater depth back on Atlantis?"
"This is not the only settlement on the planet, Doctor," said Teyla, "there are several others within a few day's riding."
"The Wraith would have taken this one first," noted Ronon. "It's closest to the Gate. Then moved out in a spiral, looking for any more."
Sheppard frowned. "All right. I'm just about ready to call this one. As much as I hate to admit that Rodney might be right about something, we're gonna head back to Atlantis and come back here after sun-up in a Jumper. We can scope out the other villages and look for survivors."
"There won't be any," said Ronon, with grim finality. "I've seen this before, on dozens of worlds. They don't leave people behind. The Wraith don't waste anything."
McKay was leaning close to a support pillar, shining a penlight at a bony disc halfway up the length. "This doesn't look right…"
"What is it?"
"The design looks different from the other manufactured items here-" Without warning, the disc let out a whirring sound and unfolded like a skeletal flower.
Teyla saw a shock of recognition on Ronon's face; in the next second Dex had his particle magnum in his hand. "Get away!" he snapped.
McKay barely had time to duck before Ronon's pistol barked and a flare of bright energy blew the pillar and the disc into burning fragments.
"You could've killed me!" wailed the scientist.
Dex turned on Sheppard. "That was a Wraith sensor pod. They leave them in places they've harvested in case they miss anyone the first time around."
Hill nodded, getting it. "So any poor sods who came home thinking they'd gone would set it off, and back they come."
"Okay, that's it," said Sheppard. "We're not waiting around here to see if the Wraith want us for a dessert course." He toggled his radio. "Mason,"
"Sir," came the reply. "Heard gunfire, do we have enemy contact, over?"
"Could be. Get back to the Gate on the double, I'm scrubbing this mission."
"Roger that,"
Sheppard looked up. "Let's move."
Teyla heard his order, but it seemed as if the words were coming from a very great distance. She felt dislocated, suddenly unconnected to the cold and ill-lit tavern. She could feel something, out in the ice and the snow, out there in the howling winds. A predatory sensation in the back of her mind, the pale shadow of something cunning and hungry. It wasn't the same glimmer of threat she had felt at the Stargate, there and gone, the very barest touch on her senses. This was different, strong and horribly familiar.
"Teyla!"
She found herself again and turned on Sheppard. "Wraith. They're already here."
The clatter of assault rifles met them as they raced from the tavern. The wind carried the sound from the direction of the Stargate, gunshots joined by the shrieking cracks of Wraith stunner blasts.
"Mason, report!" demanded Sheppard.
"Heavy contact," grated the Staff Sergeant, "they must have flanked us, come back around past the Gate. We got no cover up here!"
"Fall back to the village and regroup," ordered the colonel. He turned to the others. "Hill, you're with me. Ronon, Teyla, McKay, find something defensible, something with thick walls, and hole up there. If they got Darts and they catch us in the open…" John let the sentence trail off. He didn't need to spell it out.
"If we could just make a run for the Stargate-" began Rodney.
"And let them know Atlantis isn't a pile of radioactive rubble?" Sheppard shook his head. "Nope. We gotta deal with this here. Go!"
He sprinted off with Hill at his flank, moving quickly from cover to cover in the lee of deep shadows. McKay's escape plan, while crude and direct-and not without a certain appeal, John had to admit-was out of the question. The Wraith siege of Atlantis, months ago now although it still seemed fresh in his mind, had ended with a magic trick that David Copperfield would have been proud of. The city's defensive shield had been turned into a cloaking device to fool the aliens into thinking Atlantis had been obliterated, but now each time an off world team ran afoul of a Wraith raiding party they were effectively on their own. They had to operate as if they were isolated survivors who had escaped the city's destruction, lest they tip off the aliens that Atlantis was still intact.