"No." No one who had been taken ever returned.
Sumner nodded toward Toran. "Your friend was the one who said the Wraith would come if we went down into the ruins."
"You should have heeded his warning," Halling growled.
"How do I know he's not the one who told them?"
Halling's retort died on his lips. The sound of footsteps echoed down the shadowy corridor and three dark figures approached. Her heart thundering, Teyla rose and came to stand before her frightened people. To her surprise, she found Sumner at her side. He was breathing fast, but his face was bold, and he did not flinch as the Wraith emerged from the shadows.
The Wraith was pale as a corpse, his eyes black and lifeless. His breath stank of decay. At a silent command the door to the pen opened. Behind her, Teyla could hear the whimpers of fear from her people and felt her own blood run cold as winter ice.
Abruptly, Sumner stepped forward. "My name is Colonel Marshall Sum-"
The Wraith fired its weapon, blasting Sumner across the room. He crumpled against the far wall and fell to the floor in a heap as two of his men darted to his aid. Ignoring him, the Wraith turned his eyes on Teyla, his gaze sweeping across her body like a frozen wind before it came to rest on Toran.
He shrank back, terrified, eyes wide and filling with tears. With no command given, the two Wraith standing behind the first stepped into the pen and seized Toran. "No, please…" he hissed, so frightened he could barely speak. And then he looked right at her. "Help me!"
Jolted from her own sense of horror, Teyla pushed herself forward. "Take me in his place!"
"No." It was Sumner, shakily back on his feet. "Take me." The Wraith turned to him, the expression in its dead eyes unreadable. "We're the ones you're after, right? I'm the leader."
For a moment longer the Wraith regarded Sumner, then it turned away and stepped out of the pen. Locked in the iron grip of the other Wraith, Toran was dragged out after it, whimpering in terror. She couldn't catch his eye, couldn't bid him farewell; his mind was lost to fear, and as they pulled him from the cell he began to scream. Sick with rage and guilt, Teyla trembled as his wails echoed the length of the corridor. There was nothing she could do to save him — he was one of her people and she couldn't save him.
Shaken, Sumner stared at her. She did not know what he had expected from the Wraith, but their brutal inhumanity seemed to have shocked this hardened warrior. Perhaps he had expected to be treated as a worthy opponent, as an equal. She shook her head, "They have no need to explain themselves."
"Yeah," he said quietly, his voice mingling with Toran's fading screams. "I got that."
It had actually taken less time than Rodney McKay had anticipated to work through all seven hundred and twenty combinations to find the one that locked and opened. In truth, he was feeling pretty pleased with himself. Not that anyone had offered a 'congratulations' or a `good job, Rodney'. But when did they ever? It had been the fate of many a genius, he supposed, to go unrecognized during their own lifetime.
Nevertheless, he'd done what had to be done and now stood ready to launch a MALP to assess the possibility of mounting a rescue mission for Colonel Sumner and the others. Frankly — and he wouldn't say this out loud — he thought it was an incredibly bad idea. Whatever these Wraith were, they'd been powerful enough to defeat an entire galaxy of Ancients. He couldn't begin to imagine what Sheppard and a couple of his gung-ho friends expected to be able to do against them. But, conversely, he had a pretty graphic image of what the Wraith would do once they discovered that Atlantis was open for business again.
Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die. Sighing, McKay started the MALP moving and, with Weir and Sheppard at his side, watched it crawl through the open wormhole and disappear. He turned immediately to the visual telemetry screen. It switched from digital noise to black — which was odd.
"We're receiving visual telemetry," the technician reported, sounding confused.
"I can't see anything," Weir pointed out, presumably just in case the rest of them had failed to notice the fact that the screen was entirely blank.
Impatiently, McKay bent closer. "There are no atmospheric readings at all." Which made no sense unless- A flare of light passed across the screen.
"What was that?" Sheppard asked.
"Rotate the camera," McKay told the technician. If he was right about this… The camera slowly revolved, and suddenly the black screen was full of light; a planet floated majestically below it. The Stargate was in orbit. "Well," McKay sighed irritably, "that MALP is gone."
A long silence followed as the implications of what they were seeing sank in. Sheppard was the first to speak. "It's in space."
Ten points for stating the blindingly obvious! "In high orbit over a planet on the far side of the galaxy," McKay added, just so they knew all the facts.
Weir glanced at him, her head cocked. "How can you be sure that's the right address?"
He shrugged. "It's the only one that we got a lock on.
"Very well," she said, and he wasn't sure if she was relieved or disappointed. "Shut it down." The look she cast at Sheppard might have been an apology or regret, then she walked out of the control room.
Stewing in frustration, the Major just stared as the Stargate shut down. Crazy as it was — as he was, in all probability — the man actually wanted to go out there and get his friends back. Sheppard was admi rable, McKay supposed. Insane, but admirable. For a moment Rodney deliberated what to do next. He couldn't help thinking that keeping their collective head down was definitely the wisest strategy in regard to the Wraith, but in the end it wasn't his decision. Praying he wasn't going to regret it, he said, "Come with me, Major."
It didn't take them long to get there, and McKay adamantly refused to answer any of Sheppard's irritating questions on the way down. Part of him enjoyed the sense of power and part of him enjoyed the chance to say `Ta da!' When they got to their destination McKay stopped outside the doors and grinned before waving Sheppard ahead of him.
With one last, skeptical look, the Major walked past him and through a set of double doors that hissed open as they approached. "McKay," he growled, "I swear, if this is-" He stopped, eyes going wide and a smile of pure delight cracking his face.
They stood in an enormous room that stretched up and up so high you almost couldn't see the ceiling. All around them, like locomotives stored in a giant roundhouse, were six shuttle-sized space ships. Sheppard looked like a kid on Christmas morning, and McKay practically had to tug on his sleeve to get him moving. "Come on, we can go inside one."
The cockpit was small, allowing just enough room for pilot and co-pilot. McKay had been inside a couple of times before everything had gone to hell, but of course he hadn't been able to make the damn thing work. So he watched with interest — and not a little jealousy — as Sheppard slid into the pilot's chair as if he'd been born to sit there. After a moment he reached forward and touched the controls; the cockpit responded instantly. The lights flicked on and, with a low hum, the whole ship came to life.
"Think you can fly it?" McKay asked.
Sheppard threw him a grin. "What say we find out?"
The truth was, and Elizabeth Weir was slightly ashamed of the fact, but the truth was that she had been relieved when they'd discovered it was impossible to mount a rescue. It had taken the decision out of her hands and, as much as she understood and shared Major Sheppard's desire to bring their people home, she still had grave doubts about the wisdom of launching an attack against an enemy capable of defeating the Ancients.
But for now the point was moot; there was no way they could reach the Wraith planet. She was afraid that Sheppard had sensed her relief, that she'd seen a tinge of recrimination in his eyes before she'd left the control room, and perhaps she needed to talk with him about that. She needed him on her side, and if he doubted that she was one hundred percent behind him and his men, then the trust they needed to develop wouldn't flourish. And without trust… Well, out here they had no one but each other to rely on. She'd talk to him later, she decided, perhaps over dinner in the makeshift mess. Informally. At the moment, however, she had other matters to deal with — the most press ing of which being a call from Dr. Carson Beckett regarding the Wraith body-part Sheppard had recovered from the downed ship earlier in the day.